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Re: Interpretation
Posted By: Dave, on host 156.153.255.126
Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2002, at 13:55:59
In Reply To: Re: Interpretation posted by Sam on Wednesday, May 22, 2002, at 09:53:22:

> I think I've not been expressing myself well,
>and maybe that accounts for a lot of my
>frustration. I agree that something accepted on
>faith without any kind of substantiation is not
>something worth basing one's life on. But I was
>also not preaching: my purpose wasn't to try to
>dispense "evidence recognizable to both parties"
>but to try to illustrate how one can have faith
>without simultaneously abandoning reason and
>logic. I don't think it worked out so well. I
>think I'd have done better using actual
>communicatable evidence to illustrate this point.

Yeah, consindering that's exactly what I was *asking* for. ;-P

> One thing that one can observe is simply the
>current existence of the nation of Israel.

This is all very interesting and certainly worthy of further study. However, my main question then becomes, doesn't this point more to the veracity of the Old Testement and not necessarily the New? Wouldn't this evidence (which I'm assuming, perhaps incorrectly, and I'm sure you'll correct me if I'm wrong, comes mainly from the Old Testement) point me more towards converting to Judaism than Christianity?

One time we had a debate about the King James Bible and its claim to be the one true "inspired" version of the Bible in English (a debate, I should point out, I'm not interested in having again with anybody right now, so please let's not get into that). One of the arguments you used was to point out how there was a "New" King James version, and yet the "Old" King James version had not gone away. So to me this argument would apply just as well to the question I just raised--the fact that Christianity exists and "builds" upon Judaism, and yet Judaism hasn't gone away and has, in fact, continued to thrive.

> (I wish I could remember where I heard that, in
>studying historical wars for lessons on military
>strategy, wars with Israel are often thrown out,
>because Israel's military strategies and their
>outcomes don't fit in with other wars of the
>world: their military strategies would appear to
>be losing ones, yet they survive anyhow,
>baffling military strategists. But I don't
>remember where I heard that, so I can't
>substantiate it, so take that with a grain of
>salt unless someone else can unearth this
>factoid as well.)

I think I've heard this too. I think Nyperold brought it up. I think the claim was about an anecdotal story about somebody at one of the US Military Academies asking why they never studied any of the military campaigns of the Israelis. The answer was much what you say, that it's because you can't learn anything from studying Israeli tactics because they have God on their side and that's just not a resource that's available to everyone.

I have no idea how true this is. Just looking at the recent history of Arab-Israeli conflicts, I think the reason the Israelis always come out on top is because the US props them up with weapons and technology far superior to anything in the Arab world.

>--
> Fulfilled prophecy, to my mind, is both the
>most and least convincing evidence for pre-
>knowledge of events. It is least compelling
>when an ambiguous prophecy is made and only
>understood after the fact. This is the case
>with Nostradamus, whose writings are vague,
>unclear, and often unspecific: I do not believe,
>although I could be wrong, that any prophecy of
>Nostradamus was understood until *after* its
>supposed fulfillment. It is well understood how
>easy it is to retrofit past events with earlier
>prophecies that were not understood beforehand.

Here I agree with you 100%.

> However, when an unambiguous, unfixable, and
>against-all-odds prophecy is made and fulfilled,
>that is supremely compelling. I believe that
>this is the case with what the Bible has to say
>about Israel.

If true, I'd be forced to agree with you, or at least agree that it was compeling. But again, I'd have to question whether that upheld Judaism more than Christianity.

-- Dave

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