Nah. The Old Testament doesn't ever refer to itself as such. At best, you get commentary regarding "the law" but that only refers to a subset of the Old Testament.

The Dynasties?

Hammurabi?

Jacob?

I mean, it's circuitous and unnecessary. Might as well kick them in the ankles. Does the OT have any morally legal relevancy today? Yes and no?

Is it the absolute last word? Well, ****, no, it's a collation of work from the early centuries.

It isn't a self-referential work. At best, it is a necessary reflection of a vital era in history. Do remember that physically this was the first cultural diaspora and all else falls into place slowly. And quite painfully. (:

See, the thing is, Mightyboosh's potential much surpasses your ineffectual certainty. It's about reach, not absolutism. One of you will evolve.

What does this OT verse mean to you?

2 Timothy 3:16
All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness

That's not an OT verse.

Decartes has a good one in Meditations on First Philosophy.

tl;dr - God as a perfect moral agent and having being actually proven to exist beyond a shadow of a doubt is not a deceiver by nature. (Deceit is not in the nature of God.)

I know it sounds a little child-like, but it sounds very compelling when you actually read the whole essay; I don't know how to convey it any better..

True. But it is officially part of the "holy bible", and now has been admitted into evidence here.

So can you at least admit its utter irrelevance to my statement:

And that your statement admits that your challenge is completely misguided:

----

You are free to offer it as evidence for something that's not relevant to the immediate conversation, sure.

My take on it is to read it in the context in which it was written, not a context that was created a couple hundred years later. In context, Paul is referring to the Jewish canon. But there's a gap between "God breathed" and "divine" because the concepts are not immediately identical.

God-breathed is much more closely related to inspiration than divinity.

Here it is in broader perspective:

He was writing a letter to Timothy, and commenting about part of what we now call the “Old Testament”, but which was not called the “Old Testament” then, because the “New Testament” had not been assembled and named by humans yet, but which would eventually contain his letters to Timothy (among other things). So he called the earlier “scriptures” breathed by God, and now people call the “New Testament” scriptures, including the stuff he wrote, breathed by God.

(playing the devil's advocate here)

Not only is this not an OT verse, the OT didn't exist as a canon when this verse was written. Most of what is now considered the OT existed as "Scripture" at that time, but scholars argue over when these were canonized: Ruth, Esther, Song of Solomon, Ecclesiastes

Some people also call other types writings to be "scriptures." Do we need to include those in this statement as well?

Also, you've still yet to raise anything meaningful regarding the inspiration of scripture. What is your actual point and how is it relevant to anything that I've said?

Here is a self-guided tour of god-breathed scripture. There is something here for everyone. I know you don't believe all of them. Just one or two.

The Jews have a story that they were given stone tablets directly from God to Moses. Moses had anger-management issues and broke the tablets. And of course the pieces of this important item were not preserved by anyone. They are no where to be seen. God told Moses to make a new set, and he (God) would write on them again. But they have disappeared also. The Jews wrote the contents on paper or skins or whatever, and that survived but the stone did not.

The Muslims got their god-breathed scripture by Mohammed. He was visited by the angel Gabriel in a cave and received his first revelation from God. Three years passed, and then he received more revelations. The revelations were then written down.

The Mormons got their god-breathed scripture from Joseph Smith. The story is that the Book of Mormon was originally written in otherwise unknown characters referred to as "reformed Egyptian" engraved on golden plates. Smith said that the last prophet to contribute to the book, a man named Moroni, buried it in a hill in present-day New York, then returned to earth in 1827 as an angel, revealing the location of the book to Smith, and instructing him to translate it into English for use in the restoration of Christ's true church in the latter days. Smith said he returned the plates to the angel Moroni.

Scientology teaches that people are immortal beings who have forgotten their true nature. A typical Scientologist must spend several years and $100,000 before learning the story of Galactic Dictator Xenu.

Christians have assembled a collection of “gospels” and letters that they consider “holy”.

We all recognize some of these god-breathed scriptures as false. We do no agree on which ones.

So the point is irrelevant to anything I've said? Okay. Just checking.

Only if you consider the truth to be irrelevant.

Oh. You do.

I consider relevant truths to be relevant. But random other statements that may or may not be true depending on how you understand the words... meh.

Your concept of truth seems rather flaky for obvious reasons. But hey, if it's good enough for you, welcome back.

(False implies true is logically valid all day long. You can conclude anything you want if you start off with false statements, as you've done here. But "truth"? That's something quite different.)

Do you think my concept of the truth is more flaky than this?



Her name was ***** Semple McPherson, and she founded her church based on an Old Testament story (Ezekiel's vision). We know you are familiar with it.

Zany antics rapidly ensued.

relevant?

I wonder why that was censored...

My original comment was that MB claiming that the Old Testament claims that the Old Testament is divine is false. Just like you trying to get me to comment on a OT verse that's clearly not OT. I'm not really sure how you make that mistake unless you really just don't know that much about document you're trying to criticize

This calls to question how much you actually know about these other things you're bringing up, especially since you seem to think they're relevant to the conversation. Because they're not. And I have no idea why anyone would think they would be, and you have yet to articulate a meaningful answer to the question of why it is relevant.

I think you know that it's not relevant, but don't want to admit it. But feel free to continue parading out all sorts of things unrelated to anything I'm saying and pretending like I need to defend them for no apparent reason.

The orthodoxy is the primordial religion of this planet. This is the true religion . Old and new testament prooves it and spit on islam, catholicism and other sects of this kind. The catholics warshiping the pope @_@ they are completely mad. They think that he is the messenger of god. For god sake the church is the messenger not a human being he is just a mediator let's say between the church and god. bleahhhh you'll see after you die till then believe in whatever you want. For me the orthodoxy is the only true religion the one that mighty god left us. Believe in him, otherwise you won't find the way to redemption.

https://youtu.be/V6s5Jo3Je5Q

I was wondering too.

There are aspects about the alleged divinity of the OT (and the NT, and the other tales of divine revelation) that I find interesting and you do not. There appear to be some interesting examples of gullibility, that illuminate inherent weaknesses of humans that are exploited by others. I understand why you don't want that illustrated here. Take comfort in believing that God appreciates your obstructionism, and will eventually reward you with everlasting life (but significantly only after you die, like everyone else, and like all the animals do).

You're free to claim that, but that seems to be completely the opposite of anything I've said.

I mean, if I've given you an open door to do exactly that and you can't even admit I've given you an open door, I just don't really know what level of mental process is going on in your head right now.

Mostly, I think it just means that you're making irrelevant statements, rendering your contributions irrelevant.

Alleged by whom? I don't think it is a standard view of Christians that the Bible is divine (don't know about Muslims or Jews). It is a standard view that it is in some way inspired by God, but what exactly that means is a matter of long disagreement.

Mightyboosh implied that the Old Testament itself claims that it is divine, to which Aaron rightly challenged him to provide evidence of such a claim. The verse you cited as evidence is not, as it is not itself part of the Old Testament. If you think it is evidence of some other claim that you want to discuss, such as that the Bible is inspired by God, fine, but as Aaron said, that is a different issue.

There is a motion and a second to limit the scope of the debate. Here is the way it looks to me.

OK
Back to basics

The short answer is "nothing".

As I understand it (and feel free to correct me if I am wrong) The Old Testament was a creation of some of the later sponsors of the New Testament. There was no Old Testament until later Christians saw the need to create a new body of texts (they did not have as much material as the Jews had, so they included four gospels with much material directly copied from the others, and a large quantity of letters written to each other, aka epistles) and named them the New Testament. When they did that, they simultaneously named the previous writings the OT (which included the Torah, but also included things like the strange tale of Jonah being swallowed by a fish, which came in handy for helping to "prove" the awesomeness of the resurrection). The entire package was named "the holy bible", and authorship of gospels (which previously had no claims of authorship) was added. And as I quoted, the NT contains this (commenting perhaps on the scriptures which were eventually included in the OT) "All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness". Which prompted someone to point out that "God-breathed" is not the same as "divine". One term obviously has many more letters, and not everything that god breathed was divine. He was off-duty sometimes.

But the NT has even less hypothetical divine origin than the OT (if you can imagine such a thing). Portions of the Torah were claimed to be the actual written words of god, while the NT is claimed to be written entirely by primates.

And ***** Semple McPherson (who also had a first name, but it must be unspeakable, like Jehovah) took Ezekiel's (not divine) vision as the basis of her religion.

Yes it is a mess. We are in complete agreement on that point.

I didn't literally mean that it says it in the OT, I was being a bit flippant. I meant that since the OT is 'of god', by it's nature it is divine, so it establishes it's own claim to being divine simply by existing and being of god.

If this argument were valid, then humans would be considered divine. But they're not. So it's not. (Horray for contrapositives.)

Are the ten commandments, and the various OT verses that start or end with "thus sayeth the lord" divine?

This is simply 100% incorrect. Jewish historian Josephus (37-100AD) wrote about a canon used by the first century Jews.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Develo...estament_canon