On 7/13/2012 1:27 AM, anorton wrote:

"RogerN" wrote in message
m...
"Hawke" wrote in message ...

On 7/11/2012 2:45 PM, George Plimpton wrote:

snip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_...hinking_skills

Whatever the truth may be you can't blame a rational person for
thinking that in Texas they are opposed to teaching children to think
critically. That sounds just like something they would do in Texas.
They wouldn't teach the kids to think but they would teach them
scripture. Sounds like Texas to me.

Hawke

The problem is what you/they are calling it, it's not thinking
critically, it's better described as "liberal fantasy insanity". So
the subject should really read "Texas Republicans are opposed to
liberal fantasy insanity". Other suitable names for what liberals
consider "critical thinking" include stupidity, stinking thinking,
lies, distortion, spin, BS, etc......

Like I explained to you about the book of Isaiah, liberals using their
"critical thinking" decided about half of Isaiah was written by a
different author at a much later date. They figured the fulfilled
prophecies in Isaiah must have been written after the fact because
they couldn't handle the truth, so they choose to make up their lie
and believe it. But then the book of Isaiah from the Dead Sea Scrolls
was dated before the time the liberals said part of Isaiah was
written. So it ends up the conservatives that didn't fall for the
so-called "critical thinking" were right, and the liberals and their
revision were found out to be wrong.

But for you "critical thinkers": How is it that "critical thinkers"
think they know more about something that happened in history than the
first hand eye witnesses that were there? You claim the stories
handed down through the ages are wrong, how did those stories get
believed by the people of the day? In the future you will be right,
many things that are taught today in the liberal education system will
be known to be wrong, if fact people are already writing about the lies:



RogerN



So, assuming you are correct in your summary, does pushing back the
date of authorship completely disprove the theory that the book was
written by several people at different times? Or is more likely that the
original estimate of when various sections were written was incorrect?

I am not a biblical scholar and I do not ever intend to be one. But I
just googled this issue and it seems many (if not most) biblical
scholars believe it was written by many people at different times. They
must have their reasons. A critical thinker who was interested in the
subject would evaluate those reasons trying to see if they are valid or
flawed, and whether they are stronger or weaker than the evidence
pointing in the opposite direction. Your diatribe against those scholars
makes me think that is not the approach you took. I suspect you instead
latch onto one shred of evidence that points to what you want to
believe. One of your lines above is very telling. You say, "How is it
that "critical thinkers" think they know more about something that
happened in history than the first hand eye witnesses that were there?"
That argument assumes the conclusion as its premise. Hopefully, that is
the kind of fallacy they would teach you to watch for in a class on
logic or critical thinking.


As usual, Roger got things mixed up. As you said, exactly who wrote the
text that are in the old testament are completely unknown. How many
different writers contributed to what was in each book is anyone's
guess. The Dead Sea Scrolls don't prove anything except that someone
wrote what was in them a very long time ago. The veracity of any of it
is something that is pretty much unknown because it's about all there is
in writing from that time. All it does is confirm that what is in the
old testament is pretty much the same in the modern Jewish old testament
as was written in the Dead Sea Scrolls. It doesn't prove any of what is
in the scrolls is true or not.

It's in the new testament that the writers were known to be Greek
clerics that were written more than 100 years after the death of Jesus,
and little is known about how many or who they were. Anyone who looks
carefully into any of the religious texts finds the same thing. They
prove nothing and they make all kinds of wild claims and assertions. You
either have to accept them as true on faith or you don't. I've looked at
a lot of them and my conclusion is they were all written by men and no
supernatural being had anything to do with any of them.

Hawke