What is the point of Hell?

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And the only person lying, is you.

@moonbus said
Let me give you an example of what I mean by a truth which is not obviously true. It is not obviously true that the Earth goes round the sun. Indeed it is counter-intuitive that it does, since, if you look in the sky and see the moon going round the Earth and the sun going round the Earth, it is easy to suppose that they are both orbiting the Earth. That's exactly what it loo ...[text shortened]... e Upanishads or Hesiod or any other sacred writing, every one of which claims to be the Word of God.

There are many truth claims in the universe; many religions and those that reject the supernatural have some in common. You can look at Sir Isaac Newton's book Principia where he wrote out his laws of motion and said that they only explained what they did, not why they did it. Calculating the movement of a planet in space doesn't tell you how it got there; seeing what is in the here and now doesn't address the why. Knowing how a motor works don't address the motor's origin; Henry Ford might when looking at a Ford engine.

We can error without all the necessary information and have competing views on any topic; we need to look at what answers the questions without disagreeing with itself and reality as we know it. Ignoring a fundamental need-to-know question will never solve anything; if my computer starts acting up, is it due to design issues, something outside of it cause it to break? Maybe one of the components of my computer suffered from an ESD event sometime while it was being built and had a shorter life span because of it, or do I have a computer virus that is screwing with me? The why things are happening gets us to the root cause of our problems.

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"Try taking this thread off topic" could be the topic of a new thread. Any attempt to take the thread off topic will fail, because taking the thread off topic is the challenge.
It's bullet proof.

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Just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they aren't out to get you.

🙈 🙉 🙊

@kellyjay said
There are many truth claims in the universe; many religions and those that reject the supernatural have some in common. You can look at Sir Isaac Newton's book Principia where he wrote out his laws of motion and said that they only explained what they did, not why they did it. Calculating the movement of a planet in space doesn't tell you how it got there; seeing what is in ...[text shortened]... us that is screwing with me? The why things are happening gets us to the root cause of our problems.

You make a valid point here, that how explanations and why elucidations are fundamentally different. This is the point I repeatedly try to make about the Book of Genesis, but it does not seem to register with literalists. Genesis does not explain how the universe got started; it elucidates mankind's why and wherefore. This means that the universe was not created in 6 days and that all life forms did not appear at the same time and that no world-wide flood destroyed all life save what Noah and his family rescued on a boat; all the available evidence is against a literal interpretation that this is how things happened. What Genesis 'explains' it explains very poorly and is contradicted by empirically verifiable facts. There was no talking snake; the Garden of Eden story is an allegory, not history.

What Genesis purports to elucidate is that man is dependent upon a power over which he has no control and which makes ethical demands of him. That is mankind's wherefore. Just keep your categories straight, and I have no objections.

@moonbus said
You make a valid point here, that how explanations and why elucidations are fundamentally different. This is the point I repeatedly try to make about the Book of Genesis, but it does not seem to register with literalists. Genesis does not explain how the universe got started; it elucidates mankind's why and wherefore. This means that the universe was not ...[text shortened]... s of him. That is mankind's wherefore. Just keep your categories straight, and I have no objections.

Okay, you claim Genesis isn't a literal truth story, so what is? How did the beginning occur? The snake is but one event in a list of supernatural things that occur in the text, besides the text itself being remarkedly put together; the creation of the universe by something unseen that transcends the universe opens up the possibility of just those types of events from actually occurring.

I understand the typical day entirely to day life experiences of us all to suggest that people don't get raised from the dead, and a host of other things from snakes to donkeys, from armies getting killed, fire being called down on a sacrifice, those are not everyday things, but the point of them is they are not everyday occurrences. This is why when God setups the universe, He does so that the universe is intelligently understandable, so that tweak here and there to get our attention to let us know this is not a specific event caused by normal circumstances makes us get there is a reality behind the normal reality we think we are in.

What facts contradict Genesis?
Many of our so-called facts are belief statements, and many of them, if not all, talk about them as if we know the beginning from the end; we do not.

@moonbus

I don't know all the discussion that went before. So excuse me if my contribution is abrupt.

Genesis does not explain how the universe got started;

The very first sentence of the Bible explains how the universe got started.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." (Gen. 1:1)

I think you also should remember that Genesis does not contain the oinly explanation of creation. I take into account WITH Genesis several other equally inmportant utterances about the creation.

What follows after verse 1 is a stagee in the process of creation, but an unspecified (as at that point) disaster which befell what was created [I]n the beginning.

The next sentence is is one describing disorder, ruination, a state of desolation into which what was created earth in the beginnning subsequently fell. Verses 1:3 = 31 is a story of restoraction, recovery, making of a lost order by the command of God.

Strictly speaking no verse in the Bible says God created heaven and earth in seven six days. But Exodus does say God made it in six.

"For in six days Jehovah MADE heaven and earth, the sea and all that us ub them, . . . " (Exodus 20:11a)

Made and created are not always exactly synonomous in the Bible.
Some overlap may occur. There is no reason to insist made and created each and every time always are synonomous.

The word translated made is also used for trimming finger nails, preparing a loaf of bread, trimming a beard. It does not mean the finger nails, or cake or beard was created at that moment. What was in existence was rather worked with and upon.

Anyway the first verse alone in the Bible does not say He MADE the heavens and the earth but He created them in the beginning of time. There is explanation of the how of the existence of time, space, matter, energy, mass, motion, and the whole universe.

it elucidates mankind's why and wherefore.

Yes, that it does also. However, verse 1 gives the explanation for the existence of the universe.

This means that the universe was not created in 6 days and that all life forms did not appear at the same time and that no world-wide flood destroyed all life save what Noah and his family rescued on a boat;

I think it does go on to explain six days of God MAKING and ORDERING the world as we know it. I see no reason why that worldcould not be judged in the account of the flood of Noah.

Over the years since I was very young I have obesrved more and more theories as to extinction events which cataclysmically occured on this planet in the disrtant past. If one doubts from the Bible that "the earth became without form and void" (Gen. 1:2) the testimony of natural science comes closer to telling us the same thing.

Extinction events whether by comet, asteroid, gas bubbling up from the ocean, volcanic or otherwise has been proposed. "What killed the dinosaurs?" is a encreasingly discussed topic among scientists.

Recently, I watched a purely scientific lecture on YouTube about the sheer miraculous like nature of the existence of the moon. By all accounts our moon should not exist. Theories as to its origin are all very problematic.
It probably was not a captured object by earth's gravity.
It probably did not come out of the earth.
It probably did not form along with the formation of earth from early solar system.
Its orbit is too perfect compared to other circling satillite objects around the other planets.
Its proportional overlap of the sun in a eclipse is of a nature which occurs no where else in the solar system with ANY other moon eclipsing sunlight on any other planet.

Many other perculiarities about the nature of the moon have some people surmising that it is a hollow object intentional brought into contact with earth as a traveling vessel of some intelligent super beings in the distant past.

The moon simply SHOULD not be according to any theory of natural science understood today.

I once knew an MIT (Mass. Institute of Technology) student who joked about a long cosmological lecture a professor gave on the Moon. At the conclusion he derived a chuckle from the audience when he concluded with saying something like "Therefore, according to all we know the Moon does not exist."

Anyway Genesis 1 - 31 doers explain the origin of creation and the subsequent making of our world in believable albeit pre-scientific language.