The Bible is the most important book of all time

>>When you insult me. you have lost the argument So you're conceding the argument? - mr atheist - AVID atheists - you ACLU types - if you have the guts to debate a real scholar - ardent atheist boy - smearing the good Christians - scum liberal socialist media - kill? rape? steal? Lie? cheat? (Admittedly you may just be ignorant here) Frankly, you've been insulting since the start of this "debate" which has consisted of apparently bizarre rants on your part and corrections on my part. The Chinese ban plenty of books, heck Alice in Wonderland is banned in China (on the grounds that animals shouldn't talk) but the Bible isn't. There have been grumblings here and there but outright banning is a myth. It really takes a lot of ignorance in this regard to make such a comment. "2) You're a bigot" I note that you clipped off the justification. That statement was entirely justified. "2) You're a bigot. Keith Ellison swore into office on Jefferson's Koran. The Koran also, directly makes for pretty much the entire situation in the middle east (pretty important if you ask me)." To your comments: (except for the first time keith Ellison (D- Mn) who swore in on a Qu-ran- a horrid work of Satan , in my opinion- and he should be thrown out of office for that! ) -- I sorry but this Islamophobic hate speech is indicative of bigotry. I have plenty of good arguments against Islam most on the grounds that it is highly anti-enlightenment abusing free speech where they are but refusing to allow it themselves. They need a good dose of enlightenment thinking. The "most important book" wasn't actually my original point. Though, I'm happy to debate on the issue. I simply pointed out that the Bible isn't wisdom on every page. I do wonder why you are a Buddhist who believes the Bible to be filled with wisdom and the Koran to be a book of the "Satan" -- Buddhist who believes the Koran is the work of Satan... Satan of Christian tradition? ------------------------------------------------------------- My apologies to the readers for straying a bit from the debate. My arguments are in there, though replying to nutty theory ofter odd rant... makes my them look a little haphazard. To be clear, the topic of the debate is the topic of the debate. Solarman was making a straw man of comments I made in the comments of another debate, I was pointing that out. We shouldn't lose the point. "The Bible is the most important book of all time." Con. ---------------------------------------------------------- Principia, The Koran, Origin of Species, Dictionary, Alice in Wonderland, Common Sense, Immediate not Gradual Abolition, The Torah, etc. My main point is that the Bible is important as a concept in western Christianity. Most western Christians don't know what is in the Bible, and previously weren't allowed or able to read it for much of history. There's a saying that the Bible is the most direct path to atheism, because, when one actually looks at the words... the concept crumbles. It is hard to view the Bible as filled with important wisdom when one has read the words within it. You have not addressed my argument, rather you responded to them with "This is preposterous on the face of it" -- Why? If it is, show that it is... don't go on some kind of odd rant in every direction. From attacks on congressmen for being Muslim to odd completely absurd theories about Jesus running over to India to steal sayings from the Buddha. My central argument has been that the Bible is important as a symbol, not as a book. How much biblical knowledge does your average Christian have? Not very much. How much of the story of Alice in Wonderland do they know? Pretty much all of it. In Islam everybody has to read the Koran and are all pretty consistent with it's application. If you for example, name a teddy bear Muhammad that's clearly idolatry and you are to be killed. Whereas in Christianity drawing a picture of a fish violates the second commandment and nobody cares. That's been ignored since the 8th century after the iconoclastic controversy. Whereas in Saudi Arabia they *ACTUALLY* would punish you for drawing a fish. Which book do I think is really the most important book of all time: Principia. Enlightenment thinking in the west has tamed our law codes and made them consist of reasonable punishments and reasonable crimes. Enlightenment thinking and moreover the generate-and-test origins for our law codes and for all of modern science arise from Newton. Certainly, one needs to take into account that the foundation of science and the scientific method may, in fact, be a little bit more important than a book nobody seems to read, previously could read or were allowed to read. Without modern science, I wouldn't be here. I would be dead. That makes such things a wee bit more important I'd say. Finally, let me make another quick point. You never actually said why the Bible was important. You justified that it consisted of multiple books and that it tends to sell very well. However, by that metric the Da Vinci Code is important rather than a steaming pile of trash. It contains some wisdom, which you readily admit is found elsewhere, in sources which predate the Bible? Your entire argument has been based on the assumption we were here to debate, that the Bible is the most important book of all time. You didn't even attempt to credit western culture (which is by and large shaped by enlightenment principles). This is your argument: -- The Bible is actually a library of 66 books, written by 44 authors over a period of about 1500 years. The 39 books of the Old Testament were composed between 1400 and 400 B.C., the 27 books of the New Testament between A.D. 50 and 100. The Bible was divided into chapters by Stephen Langton about A.D. 1228. The Old Testament was divided into verses by R. Nathan in A.D. 1448 and the New Testament by Robert Stephanus in A.D. 1551. The entire Bible divided into chapters and verses first appeared in the Geneva Bible of 1560. -- Nothing you have said establishes one shred toward the premise you were to prove. That the Bible is the most important book of all time. I spent my time refuting your odd rants because you had no argument! Most important book, Principia. Give me modern science, western culture, epistemological foundations for modern laws and reasonable methods for determining who is right and who is wrong. Certainly there aren't groups of people putting copies of Principia in hotel rooms, but there are people curing diseases by using the scientific method laid out by Newton. With the Bible, the book is the idea... it is a concept and symbol and highly important as such, though the actual text of the work is fairly moot. However, with Principia the book is almost unheard of, but ideas have shaped and molded our modern society in extremely important ways. I wouldn't be here without these ideas, the Bible... probably could say anything else and our civilization would largely be identical.