God is Dead

1) Please clarify what parts of the Bible you think are myths. You say you believe Genesis to be true, but only talk about Creation. A lot more mythical stuff happens in Genesis after Creation. Do you believe a snake spoke to the first humans? Biology tells us that there was never a "first" human. What about the Flood? Is there any geological evidence that the world was underwater for a full year? Do you believe two of every animal on earth fit on a boat that was 450 ft long? Do you believe Methuselah lived to be 969 years old? Do you believe demons married human women, who then gave birth to giants? Or that mankind only had one language before the Tower of Babel? If you say: "no, of course I don't believe all that," I would ask you how you can believe anything else the Bible says. Jesus and everyone he lived with thought the Flood, the Fall, and all the rest of it was real. They also thought the world was flat. Doesn't that call into question everything you believe? If not, why not? 2) Please provide an example of a non-fundamentalist Bible scholar who thinks the Gospels were written as first person accounts. I couldn't find one. The theology department at Boston College says: "the vast majority of researchers believe that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, sometime around the year 70." That's forty or so years after Jesus died. National Geographic says: "The New Testament Gospels were written between AD 65 and 95." I provided an analysis of the languages used at the time and drew on the works of two respected religious scholars, one of whom is a professor who lost his faith in God after studying the Bible. Where are your sources? 3) Why do Christians dislike paganism so much when we know for a fact that Yahweh was one of several gods worshipped by the ancient Israelites? (In Genesis, God says "Let us make mankind in our image" because the Hebrew word used here is "elohim", which literally means "many gods". They stole this myth, and others, from the pagan Babylonians. In many ways Yahweh is just a rehashed form of the god Marduk; much like Zeus and Jupiter.) If you don't believe me, google a goddess named "Asherah", who was worshipped as Yahweh's wife for several hundred years. You know, like mythology. 4) How can the Gospels be inerrant when they were thrown together so haphazardly? National Geographic says: "Their prominence is due in part to St. Irenaeus, a second-century bishop of Lyon in Roman Gaul and an aggressive enemy of texts and beliefs considered to be heretical. In an attempt to unify the church he declared Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John the only Gospels that Christians should read." If someone else were in charge at that time, we"d have a totally different canon. If they wanted Jesus to have a wife, they would have included the Gospel of Thomas. If they disliked Jews they would have included the Gnostic Gospels. Doesn't that call their authority into question? 5) You say that the despicable things in the Old Testament do not represent the high moral standards of God as if that somehow justifies them. What about Numbers 31, where God's chosen prophet Moses commands the murder of thousands of boys and rape of thousands of girls? Or Exodus 12, where God smites all firstborn children in Egypt? Aren't passages like these fundamentally at odds with the definition of God agreed to in this debate? If a human thought this was okay, we'd call them a psychopath, but because this person is invisible, that makes it a matter of "national law"? 6) With our advances in science, we are expected to discover the source of life and the Big Bang within the next century. As we learn more, isn't the Christian God more like a God of the Gaps? Christians say: "yes, science has covered everything after the Big Bang, but it hasn't covered the Big Bang!" Isn't this an argument from ignorance? We don't know, therefore magic did it? I will provide all sources for my arguments in the closing round. Thank you.