How can you possibly know that? That they're obscure is beyond doubt, but it's just incomprehensible to me that an omnipotent, omniscient god who cares about us and wants us to know his love for us would deliberately give us messages we can't understand.
I didn't say 'we', I said parts of the OT that were being read 2,000 years ago pointed to Christ coming as King, that is what the Jews were expecting. There are a few verses in the OT that, in .hindsight, point to Gentiles being the ones addressed in some passages that deal with Christ coming as King. It went completely over their heads that Christ would first come as High Priest and He would define who He was Priest over. As it turns out everybody back to and including Adam and Eve are under His 'authority' as High Priest, rather than just the people associated with Israel. A few things were even held back from being openly discussed before the cross event. One being the vision observed by a few on the mountain that included Moses. There is at least one more and even demons were told to hold their tongue about who Jesus was. All those things were to make sure the cross happened just as God intended it to. It might be a sad thing but God can and has hardened some men's hearts so events unfold the way He prophecised they should or that they just occurred that way because they were a 'first example' of a later event. The plagues on Egypt are very similar to the vials in Revelation. Those take out all the wicked but spare the righteous.
One or two vials would not be a complete cleansing, that is why Pharaoh has his heart hardened, so he didn't give in after the 3rd or 4th plague. If God did that so more people could be saved in the end then it was a righteous thing to do for mankind even though it caused grief to a few back then. Does God compensate those people for that happening?
Nothing is hidden from us if we search for it.
I don't see that as a problem at all. If you think it's all mythology, as I do, that's really all the explanation that's necessary. Doesn't really matter. There are good reasons to think the reports about Christ were written deliberately to conform to OT prophecies, that's a common feature of mythology throughout human history. Prophecies are made, later events are described in terms that suggest the prophecy has come true.
Have you explored the few that Jesus said were fulfilled, one is about the slaughter of the innocents and the other is at the time of His arrest in the Garden.
I'm sure there are men today who would like to try and devise ways to make some prophecies appear to be fulfilled as long as they were credited as being with/close to God and that is the reason something was accomplished. Here's one that would get a lot of attention, heal the waters of the Dead Sea so it will support fresh water fish. You and I both know nobody is going to attempt to do that.
I can give you a list of over 40 prophecies of the end of the world arriving on a specific date based on Biblical exegesis, none of which have come true. There is in fact no corroborated evidence that any Biblical prophecy has ever come true, the evidence exists solely within the Bible itself, and that's self referential, it isn't good enough.
I don't mind going over stuff like that, some I would have a ready answer for, others would have me scurrying around the Bible for hours if not days in search for how the Bible covers that topic. That takes it out of being just my own opinion.
That's exactly my point. Without independent corroboration from other sources, Biblical claims can't be uncritically accepted as true, a single source just isn't good enough to justify such claims, especially when so many of them are so extraordinary, so strongly at variance with what we currently understand of now nature actually behaves.
Is this article true or not?
"Tacitus (c. A.D. 56-117) should be among the first of several hostile witnesses called to the stand. He was a member of the Roman provincial upper class with a formal education who held several high positions under different emperors such as Nerva and Trajan (see Tacitus, 1952, p. 7). His famous work, Annals, was a history of Rome written in approximately A.D. 115. In the Annals he told of the Great Fire of Rome, which occurred in A.D. 64. Nero, the Roman emperor in office at the time, was suspected by many of having ordered the city set on fire. Tacitus wrote:
Nero fabricated scapegoats—and punished with every refinement the notoriously depraved Christians (as they were popularly called). Their originator, Christ, had been executed in Tiberius’ reign by the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilatus. But in spite of this temporary setback the deadly superstition had broken out afresh, not only in Judea (where the mischief had started) but even in Rome (1952, 15.44, parenthetical comments in orig.).
Tacitus hated both Christians and their namesake, Christ. He therefore had nothing positive to say about what he referred to as a “deadly superstition.” He did, however, have something to say about it. His testimony establishes beyond any reasonable doubt that the Christian religion not only was relevant historically, but that Christ, as its originator, was a verifiable historical figure of such prominence that He even attracted the attention of the Roman emperor himself! "
Is that nature just trucking along like it is supposed to do or nature doing something that God has asked it to do that is quite different from the way it usually acts. Calling on an earthquake to 'swallow' only a select few would be one example of nature not acting naturally.
Scripture paints his activities as a pretty big deal to the civil authorities of the day, and the moment of his death in particular is described as being accompanied by pretty dramatic meteorological and geological events, yet apparently nobody noticed them at the time, there are no corroborating extra-Biblical accounts of it.. That strains credulity to the breaking point.
He wasn't a threat to Rome, He was a threat to the religeous leaders of Israel.
Darkness and an earthquake, if it is reported at the place the cross was then it could have been very local,(a very black thundercloud can make things very dim, same with the ground shaking, it doesn't say the whole city fell. Wasn't it a 'quake' that rolled the stone away? It certainly doesn't say it was like a quake mentioned in Revelation, the largest that has ever occurred, past or future. If you had the diaries of the soldiers who were there then you might have some point, as it is you have a reference to an event that was nor recorded, do you have any documents that cover those kinds of events in the whole of the Roman Empire about that time?
The simplest explanation is that it's all a later fabrication. People do that, we know people do that, it's easily and thoroughly documented , that's the way we are. We make up stories to explain things, we've always done it.
Coming from a 'scientist' that doesn't give me much assurance that you will say "I don't know' if in fact there is a subject where you don't know the reason or sequence or whatever the truthful answer requires.
It would appear that you don't live on the Canadian prairie. That never happens. Adequate amounts arrive most of the time in most places, so there's something to harvest, But the "right" amount, in the sense of producing the optimum crop everywhere, that just doesn't happen. I`m 59 years old, and in my lifetime there has not been a year when there isn`t a drought in some area of the province I live in, and a surfeit of water somewhere else.
If God can't deliver on a rather simple request then why is it expected that He should fulfill the more personal requests?
He would be breaking His word if He did those kind of requests today. That does not mean we are helpless, how much misery could be avoided if men were made to act decently towards one another. 26,000 children die each day from starvation or easily curable diseases. That is about 9 1/2 M/ year, should there be a tally on all the 'needless' deaths worldwide to get a clear picture just how 'unfair' this current world is?
Granted, but many of them died prematurely in great pain and misery that with a little knowledge could have been avoided. I am alive today because of modern scientific medicine, without it I would almost certainly have died of an infection at 3 years old, the way so many children in previous generations did. My parents` generation was the first in history that could routinely count on all of its children surviving to adulthood. That`s due to science. There`s no escaping death for any of us, but now we can at least postpone it for many and ease the passage when it becomes inevitable, in ways no religious or magical thinking ever did, or ever could. Scientific thinking demonstrably works, and makes a measurable, tangible positive difference in the quality of our lives. It remains the only reliable means we`ve ever found for testing the truth content of ideas Religious and magical thinking modes do not and can not ever match that. They don`t work. They`re wrong.
That would be some sort of answer about the morality of God if it were not for the fact that everybody who has suffered needlessly is compensated in some way even if God was not the actual cause of the suffering. When He is said to wipe away all tears it is not just the tears He has caused it is all tears from all sources. You can't justify not believing in Him because He will not do that for 'somebody' today. He doesn't do it for anybody, the righteous die just as prematurely as the not-so-righteous.
