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Originally Posted by Lestat
It's not just about god wanting to prove he exists. What about him being a kind loving god and helping his creation just a titch? I'm not suggesting he should have wrote a manual on electricity or biochemistry, but it would have been nice if he could have at least said something about how diseases spread, etc. That would have saved a lot of suffering and misery for human kind. He spent pages and pages on things like who we should have sex with, when it's okay to stone your teenager or bride to be, and how to treat slaves... You'd think he could have at least mentioned penicillin.
Doesn't it bother you in the least that there is nothing in the bible that could not have been written by someone living in the 1st century? It doesn't strike you as a clue that maybe it was written by mortal bronze age men and not an all-powerful, all-knowing being?
There were a lot of rules in the OT dealing with heath and diet issues which were far in advance of their time. There is a wealth of wisdom literature dealing with many issues of economics and other important matters. There were laws that were meant to benefit debtors, the poor, orphans, servants and foreigners. Most of the laws were systematically ignored by the Hebrews to their detriment.
Of course, God could have laid out an enormous plan for exactly how everyone should live. No doubt he would have done so. Adam was told not to eat of the tree of knowledge - when he did so, he chose man's knowledge over God's, for which there are serious consequences. Man has taken thousands of years to learn things I think God would have revealed to Adam. It was man who chose to separate himself from God and his word. So he has let man follow the path he chose to demonstrate the real life results of self-centeredness and rebellion. The main issue now is how to solve the fundamental problem of man's rebellion. God has graciously done so through the incarnation and atonement. All else is secondary.
BTW, something that has impressed me lately, mainly because I've been reading a lot of Christian history and the early theologians. It's truly amazing how there is virtually nothing in the Bible that adopts the incredibly pervasive superstition and bad science of those times. Even the most intelligent of men, people like Aristotle for instance, got an enormous amount wrong about the real world. I don't even want to comment on the incredibly bad medicine of those days. Astrology was considered a hard science even as late as the Renaissance - most astronomers were also astrologers - and Newton was an alchemist. Yet there is exactly none of that in the Bible. How in the world did untaught, ignorant, lower class shepherds and fisherman avoid including anything embracing the almost total ignorance of their day? Even Christian theologians made serious factual errors, such as believing in the Phoenix. Why isn't any of that in the Bible?