Discussion
People talk shit about Bishop Usher and his biblical timeline, dating creation to 4004BCE, but what they don't realize is that he was a serious scientist and a gifted historian.
You can jiggle his math here and there, tryna yabbit him into the 21st century, but that timeline is fucking *excellent*, and a triumph of scholarship.
Being a theist doesn't make you stupid.
@GeePawHill I like that the universe and I have the same birthdate (October 23), so I don’t hold with any criticism of Ussher.
@GeePawHill Stephen J Gould wrote a very generous essay on this very subject https://web.archive.org/web/20160303183052/http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_house-ussher.html
I am a strict materialist atheist.
But I'm also literate. I've read the arguments for and against theism, and I gotta tell you, the theists have a very strong case.
I hate it when people like Dawkins go all rabid on religion.
Sometimes, I characterize myself as a "faitheist". It is my faith that there is no God.
@GeePawHill I'm a "Christian" in the sense that Gospel Jesus is my role model, because he was woke AF. He was so leftist and antifa.
I am also an existentialist and a universalist.
Contradictory? Somewhat. But these are all key components of my personal faith.
Funny thing about faith: proof denies faith. Unlike science, which proof confirms.
IMO, faith should be shared, with mutual respect, but never preached or imposed.
I got arguments, of course I got arguments. Theodicy alone is a rather compelling one.
Buuuuuuuut. I don't fucking know. I don't think anyone fucking knows.
If you're not hatin', you're prolly okay with me.
@GeePawHill Nobody knows. I grew up fundamentalist. Now I'm an atheist and absurdist. My wife grew up Catholic. Now she's agnostic.
The thing we both have in common is that we chose, intentionally.
I wish more people would acknowledge that they are choosing to believe something.
@GeePawHill I'm fine with theists who value creation (aka reality) over scripture (aka the Bible).
I'm an atheist myself. But putting myself in the shoes of a theist, I would argue:
The real world we see around us is what God created himself. The Bible was written by fallible humans. Therefore, whenever there is a conflict between scripture and reality, we should accept reality and reinterpret scripture accordingly, not the other way around.
And for the record? Usher's timeline is valid to within an arbitrary error epsilon for three *fucking* *thousand* *years*.
@GeePawHill he tried his best to draw a reasonable conclusion from erroneous data.
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