For some reason, god does not seem to like written history or reliable historic accounts.
As soon as writing is introduced in a culture, all the fantastic miracles and revelations stop, or become much more moderate.
Somehow you go from gigantic columns of fire descending from the sky, to simple healing miracles that can be faked and are faked routinely in modern times as well. A magician trick could qualify as a miracle in biblical times.
No more prophets either. Before, prophets appeared every few generations. But now, it has been thousands of years since the last prophet appeared.
Some of the more cryptic stuff can also be explained: hallucinations. There were no people in ancient times to diagnose disorders like schizophrenia and drug use was not punishable by law. And even if they decided to punish drug use they did not have the means to identify illicit substances.
All that, plus contradictions with science, makes me think these scriptures are simply a collection of folkloric legends.
> I mean miracles like reviving a person that was dead for days, curing blind people, extremely ill people
I would consider those miracles to have the most plausible explanations. There's any number of medical conditions that can make a person appear to be dead for days and that's the reason that coffins were sometimes fitted with a bell that could be operated by the "dead body" in case they'd been buried alive after being mistaken for dead.
Blindness can be caused by neurological conditions and presumably be cured by a person encountering someone that they believe to be a representation of their god. The problem is that medical knowledge at that time was limited to say the least, so even assuming that the reports are 100% accurate, there's still a lot of uncertainty as to the conditions that were cured and indeed if they were permanent cures.
Personally, I don't think it likely that we have accurate representations of the miracles described in the bible, so it's somewhat meaningless to dissect the stories that were transmitted orally for centuries before being written down (biblical scholars may be able to show that modern bible descriptions have been changed from the original source documents during translation etc. as well).
Now that we have kind of clarified what you mean, what is your evidence that any of those things actually happend besides that someone wrote a couple of paragraphs about them in the Bible? I would also be interested in knowing why those miracles no longer occur or, if they still occur, why do we not have any credible high quality videos of them?
How can you say that the authors of the bible made up 99 miracles but were honest about a few of them? If you don't think miracles are real then men have fathers even in hypothetical laboratory scenarios and nobody comes back from the dead. If you do think someone can ascend into heaven, what are some fish and a few loaves of bread? How is the biggest objection to the plausibility of Jesus making bread and fish out of nothing that he did it twice?!
I feel like you are simultaneously violating the scientific perspective (where a small numbers of impossibilities is just as bad as a large number although it feels more plausible - fake psychics exploit this discrepancy by only moving light objects short distances as if that was any easier) and the religious one (where you're making the accusation that all of the early church fathers were pathological liars, and that Jesus was at best misinformed when he referred to bronze age myths in his sermons) in an attempt to sit on the fence and appease the mental habits taught by two deeply conflicting cultures.
There is even a bible verse about this: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." (Revelation 3:16)
To me, the feeding of the 5000 and the resurrection are no less spectacular than the column of fire.
If you look at the whole Bible there is a spike in spectacular miracles around the Exodus but before and after that, there aren't many spectacular miracles at all --- until Jesus. A tailing-off trend over time doesn't fit the data.
Even better, well, take everything literally except for the parts that are provably wrong. If one part is not true, then any or all parts may not be true. And since there's almost no evidence for anything miraculous in the Bible then AFAIK it's all untrue until proven otherwise. I should mention I was a deacon when I was in my 20s, so it's not like I was raised atheist.
That is what happens when you see reality instead of carefully selected cheery lies.
You didn't see the mentally disabled in the basement, the arrest of wounded veterans under "ugly" laws justified by maternal impression theory an utterly moronic misreading of biblical miracles as implying what the mother sees influnces form of the child. Except there is a major derth of livestock how to's in the bible and a lot more focus on miracles.
Oh yeah. It's really just totally insane. As someone born into the faith you are taught it's just another miracle like Jesus/Peter walking on water or coming back from the dead. Even though those events were recorded (according to most biblical scholars) around 100 years after they supposedly took place.
Quiet literally the same as if I wrote about how George Washington felled a cherry tree with a magic axe that granted him the ability to see through time.
When your parents believe it, and their parents believed it, etc all the way back to the founding of the church when your (rubes) of ancestors fell for a con... yeah, hard to see the lie for what it is. Even if, from the outside, it's beyond obvious.
Though if the evidence presented for this event is persuasive, then all they achieve by making the connection is to speculate on a natural cause for a biblical "miracle". I mean it can strengthen a view of the Bible as source of historical information, but not as the word of God.
If this event happened, I would expect it to leave long lasting trace in oral tradition.
Interesting! Pretty obviously some sloppy science but I'm not sure that's a debunk. For something in the Bible to turn out to be based on real events with religious overtones added. Religions are always poaching from history, to find some truth to a story in a religious work is not surprising, nor is it a confirmation of the religious aspects of it.
That would seem to raise serious questions about the veracity of anything biblical, then. So if you discounted any evidence in the bible, based on the supposed dubiousness of other things there, what's left to build a case on.
LOL, Genesis had enough bullshit in it that I was questioning things immediately. Somewhere in there it says that the stars were created after earth. And then there's Noah and the flood with the completely impossible repopulating the earth with a single family and a single pair of each animal. Exactly how did 2 buffalo's get to the middle east? Of course, the answer would be that god magicked them there - but then I thought - where's the magic now? Why hasn't anyone recorded actual evidence of a miracle?
That theory doesn't have any ground, but I am more interested what makes people believe that there is such theory. Nobody today claims, that everything that is written in a Bible is true, why would there such belief without any doubt to something that someone claimed just 100 years ago?
> "Theologians" never invent or bring anything to the table, which God has not already made clear.
That is a religious viewpoint, a leap of faith. From a rational perspective, there is no reason to think God put anything special in the Bible. The Bible is a collection of texts about things people have believed, but there is no reason to think God had a hand in it anymore than in say the Quran or the Edda.
Not sure how this would strengthen the biblical story. This makes it an accidental destruction by a purely physical phenomenon, not an act of God based on the behaviour of the residents.
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