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 Franciscan Monkey |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #1 | ||
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Posts: 172 10/21/05 16:57:34 |
The problem is, Waterrock, that the poppy seed is smaller than the mustard seed, is "upon" the earth/land/soil, and was present in the region at the time of Christ.
So, no, it is not scientifically accurate. Respectfully, Franciscan Monkey |
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Argy Lacedom |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #2 | ||
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Posts: 2277 10/21/05 17:25:16 |
Quote:Do you have a reference for this? If they're the poppy seeds I have on my bread then that's not true. ________________________________________________________________________
I can't imagine a higher being throwing anyone into eternal torment for not worshipping him, anymore than I can imagine a loving parent throwing their baby in the oven for not understanding complex physics. - Casandra Blake The Books says every verse in the Books is useful for our instruction. Nowhere does it indicate you should make up extra stories so that the instructions match what you think they should. -Keith & Co |
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Franciscan Monkey |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #3 | ||
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Posts: 172 10/21/05 17:43:38 |
If you follow the link provided by SAB in the Mark parallel account, you can see a picture comparing them.
For other links, a quick google search turned up: The Bead Site An interesting indirect example from NASA Respectfully, Franciscan Monkey |
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raphjd |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #4 | ||
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Posts: 2132 10/22/05 00:04:35 |
Quote: The poppy seeds on your are baked, thus "puffing" them up. They are quite small before baking. I'm not sure if they are smaller than mustard seeds in their unbaked state though. But FM's link says they are. "If Homosexuals went back into the closet, then there would be no more Homosexuality in this world" - Tom DeLay, US Congressman R-TX "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." - Anne Lamott When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. -- Emo Philips |
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gystex |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #5 | ||
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Posts: 265 10/25/05 10:53:03 |
There's a simple answer to this, but it probably won't satisfy.
God is all-knowing. If God had been speaking to the people directly, He would not have made this mistake. However, God likes to work through middlemen like Moses and Joseph and Christ, and they were human beings who sometimes make errors. Christ is simply not perfect. He is not always right and he doesn't know everything (he didn't know how to write, for instance). For that matter, I don't know that the Christian church has ever tried to make the claim that Christ was perfect. Even if Christ had gotten the "smallest seed" question right, there's a chance that Matthew might have thought to himself, "What the hell kind of seed is that? Everyone knows the mustard seed is the smallest; I'd better just write that down, or no one will buy this crap." A lot of these little nitpicky contradictions become irrelevant if one simply accepts that the Bible was written by fallible human beings who got some stuff wrong. It's simple logic that one cannot reasonably argue with: Human beings wrote the Bible. Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes. Therefore, the Bible can have errors. The argument I generally hear against this is, "Yes, but they were inspired by God, who is perfect, and therefore the Bible is perfect." Well, history is lousy with people who thought they were inspired by God (-cough- Heaven's Gate) and they were WRONG. So until God starts doing things for Himself and stops going through middle managers, we'll never really know what He wants from us. Of course, this is all just mincing words, because I don't believe God exists. |
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cyborg |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #6 | ||
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Posts: 1918 10/25/05 11:15:50 |
Quote: Which "the church" would this church be then? If Christian god = Jesus and Christian god = perfection then by implication Jesus = perfection. More than a couple of churches that could go along with that. |
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Yark Hutprancer |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #7 | ||
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Posts: 3749 10/25/05 11:40:05 |
Quote:EXCUSE ME!? Which "Christian church" are you talking about, and do you live in a cave?! How can you have missed the fact that every single one of the millions of fundamentalist Christians who have lived believed that Jesus was and continues to be God, perfect in every way?! Wow. By the way, you do understand that the point of listing these contradictions is to counter the claims of those who think that the bible does not have contradictions, don't you? "...the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be." - Lt. Scheisskopf's wife, from Catch 22 by Joseph Heller |
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gystex |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #8 | ||
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Posts: 265 10/25/05 13:01:36 |
Quote: I've never heard a priest or minister say it, and I've discussed this issue with some. I've heard them say that Christ attained perfection in his ressurection, but not that he was perfect when he walked on Earth. Many believers in Christ say that he was perfect, but they speak only for themselves, not for their church. The assumption among many Christians is that Christ was a perfect human being, but that is not necessarily the "official" position of the church. Any Christians want to comment on that? (I'll take this question to a Christian message board to see what they say about it, and report back.) Quote: Oh sure, but it's always seemed such an obvious fact to me that I don't generally bother arguing the details. One could go on forever about whether Noah's Ark was too damn small to hold all the animals, but why bother? It's ludicrous to think that anyone would even try to put two of every creature on Earth onto a boat. I prefer to argue to generalities instead of the specifics, because otherwise one gets into endless discussions about parables, metaphors, translation errors, and relative sizes of seeds. For instance, one could argue about whether Adam and Eve really wore fig leaves. Someone could say, "Of course not, because the fig tree didn't grow in that part of the world at that time." What I would say is, "Why waste time arguing about this when it's a story with talking snakes and people made out of mud and the entire universe being created in a week?" My problems with the Bible are bigger than the relative sizes of seeds, and that's what I was driving at. When arguing, the key thing to do is never accept your opponent's premise. Arguments over truth and falsehood in the Bible assume that the book is supposed to be inerrant. I begin with the assumption that the book is inherently flawed, and that these little contradictions are to be expected. I'd rather argue about the BIG contradictions and MAJOR flaws, like the idea that God routinuely murders his children whom He claims to love, or the idea that a person can come back from the dead and create fish by waving his hand. |
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Franciscan Monkey |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #9 | ||
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Posts: 172 10/25/05 13:19:24 |
Every church that I have attended as an adult taught and preached that Jesus was perfect his whole earthly life. These churches were independent Baptist, Southern Baptist, or Calvary Chapel.
Respectfully, Franciscan Monkey |
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gystex |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #10 | ||
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Posts: 265 10/25/05 14:42:42 |
Then I submit to your greater experience, and acknowledge my error.
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raphjd |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #11 | ||
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Posts: 2132 10/25/05 21:08:37 |
1st Baptists claim Jesus was perfect while on earth.
My "mother in-law" is a Methodist {in the UK} and they claim the same thing. "If Homosexuals went back into the closet, then there would be no more Homosexuality in this world" - Tom DeLay, US Congressman R-TX "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image, when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do." - Anne Lamott When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised that the Lord doesn't work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me. -- Emo Philips |
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Yark Hutprancer |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #12 | ||
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Posts: 3749 10/25/05 21:36:08 |
Quote:Oh for god's sake, read a Christian website or two! www.cpcweb.org/aboutCPC.html#Statement Quote: www.bellevue.org/templates/cusbellevue1103/details.asp?id=1360&PID=5129http://www.bellevue.org/templates/cusbellevue1103/details.asp?id=1360&PID=5129 Quote:www.christianlifechurch-tn.com/ourbeliefs.php Quote:www.dennisleonardministries.com/aboutus_statementoffaith.htm Quote: www.centralchristian.com/main.html Quote: www.clife-church.org/whatwebelieve.html Quote:www.ccctampa.com/ Quote: All bolding mine. A person cannot be a perfect sacrifice if he is not perfect. A person who IS god must be perfect. I don't know where you live, but in the US, especially in the southeastern states, you cannot throw a rock without hitting a person who believes that Jesus was perfect. (Talk about plagarism! I have never done a comparison of faith statements before!) "...the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be." - Lt. Scheisskopf's wife, from Catch 22 by Joseph Heller |
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gystex |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #13 | ||
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Posts: 265 10/26/05 07:57:58 |
All these statements make the claim that Christ never made a moral misjudgment or error; they say nothing about his never having made a factual error.
But I've already acknowledged my mistake. |
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Yark Hutprancer |
Re: Smallest of All Seeds Upon the Earth/Ground/Soil | #14 | ||
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Posts: 3749 10/25/05 21:45:31 |
Additional thought:
I understand your point. For many believers the size of the mustard seed isn't going to matter in an attempt to show them how silly their faith in the bible truly is. But for SOME it does. There are definitely people who fall away from Christianity due to these very simple errors. I think that SAB and our discussion on this board take the right appraoch. Expose EVERYTHING. Argue everything. That way, all believers' possible issues will be addressed. "...the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make him out to be." - Lt. Scheisskopf's wife, from Catch 22 by Joseph Heller |
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Waterrock |
In Other News: The Could-To-Did Fallacy | #15 | ||
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Posts: 1163 12/27/05 00:59:20 |
Gystex ~
G: "Christ is simply not perfect. He is not always right and he doesn't know everything (he didn't know how to write, for instance)." Clearly the Bible presents Jesus Christ as morally perfect. During His time on earth, He "emptied Himself" as Philippians 2 puts it, leaving a measure of His divine abilities and knowledge, but as we know (or ought to know) Him now, He is divine, perfect, impeccable, and so forth. (Also, Jesus read from Isaiah in Luke 4:17-20, and quoted from the Old Testament quite a bit on many other occasions. And in John 8:8, Jesus wrote something on the ground (though the text doesn't say what it was -- one copyist's guess was that He wrote down the sins of the people standing around Him at the time). So I think there's more evidence that Jesus was quite literate than that He wasn't.) G: "A lot of these little nitpicky contradictions become irrelevant if one simply accepts that the Bible was written by fallible human beings who got some stuff wrong." Well, I agree that quite a few of the SAB's objections are rather nitpicky, and the one about the size of the mustard-seed is one example. Jesus was speaking in a predominantly agrarian society, not to a botanists' conference. G: "It's simple logic that one cannot reasonably argue with:" Watch: G: "Human beings wrote the Bible. Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes. Therefore, the Bible can have errors. The argument I generally hear against this is, "Yes, but they were inspired by God, who is perfect, and therefore the Bible is perfect."" My argument is different (though I do believe that the human producers of the original Biblical text were specially inspired by God). It's simply that your premises -- (A) Human beings wrote the Bible, (B) Human beings are imperfect and make errors sometimes, and (C) Therefore the Bible can have errors -- do not actually imply the existence of any errors in the Bible. They only point out a scientific possibility. By the same approach, (A) Roger Bannister was a human being, and (B) human beings are rather slow and often, even at their best, run at a rate of less than a mile in four minutes, and (C) therefore, it was possible for Roger Bannister to run at a rate of less than a mile in four minutes on the day that he ran a mile in less than four minutes. Again: the syllogism only shows the way to one possibility without precluding the opposite possibility. Dictionaries, science textbooks, and mathematical primers also are produced by human beings, but that does mean that they necessarily contain errors. Yours in Christ, Waterrock |
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. In order to complete His earthly sacrificial mission, He became human by being born of a virgin, conceived by the Holy Spirit (Matt. 1:23; Luke 1:31, 35). He lived a perfect life, absolutely without sin. While on the earth He worked miracles through the anointing of the Holy Spirit (Acts 10:3
