Joel,
You wrote: Can anyone who wishes to continue, please carry on about the
historicity of Genesis, scholasticism, biblical estimates of the number of
years between Adam and Jesus, and other such discussions on off-line? ...
Jan's statement that Mike's reading of the bible is strange speaks for many
of us ... The fact is that we live in two (or more) different intellectual
universes ... that makes the prospect of useful dialogue so unlikely that we
do not wish to attempt it, and we wince when someone else does. ... Jan,
George, David, and others: Would you please resist the temptation to respond
to these sorts of discussions. Your words will not be heard. It only fans the
flames of fruitless discussions when you do.
I found your words to be quite demeaning and insulting. If you are not
interested in discussing some subject matters, for whatever reason, then
don't. Read the topic line and move on. If you do not respect the intellect
of some posters then do not read their posts. Read the byline and move on.
Your lobbying others here against reading and/or responding to my posts was,
to put it politely, quite crass. Simply because you may not agree with
everything I write or understand everything in the way that I do is no reason
to tell me to discuss certain topics off this list. I and many other
Christians believe that subjects such as the historicity of Genesis, Bible
chronology and the Bible's use of symbolic numbers are important for us to
understand if we are to successfully defend the Bible and the Christian faith
against those who say that the Bible cannot be trusted because it is filled
with fables, scientific inaccuracies and superstitions.
Understanding Bible chronology is also quite useful for other purposes. I am
now writing an article, which I had intended to post to this list for peer
review, containing information which confirms, in a most fascinating and
scholarly way, the 5 BC date for Christ's birth, which Colin Humphreys
article on The Star of Bethlehem, published at the ASA web site, has helped
to establish. If I do post it here you may want to avoid it, since you not
only see no value in discussing such matters but also feel that I occupy a
different "intellectual universe" than yourself. That would, I believe,
disqualify us as "peers."
Mike
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