llergictoironing Mon 21-Jan-19 20:58:46
If they had been given to science and medicine we may have had genetic engineering and cures for arthritis and so on, sooner
''I really don't get this, WTF is in the bible that could lead to genetic engineering or the cure of arthritis? There is nothing to suggest that pre-Christian people had anything like the kind of scientific knowledge that could lead to this kind of medicine. In fact, there are some branches of Christianity today that think things like these are meddling with God's work and are therefore sinful - even things like blood transfusions for some. And in the past just about all types of science were condemned as un-natural so against God. Anyone who was a healer and happened to be female would be condemned as a witch (unless it was pure midwifery).
You can't use the "that was the Old Testament, times have changed since then" argument and not consider that times have also changed in the 2k odd years since the New testament was written, the status quo of the time as you put it.''
I think the Bible is a very important account of how people with nothing to counteract disease and lawlessness lived to correct that. People are obviously still inclined to say we can learn nothing from it despite it's value today. You do not have to take my word for it.
You can read it for yourself or listen to it on CD or DVD and decide for yourself how much value it is for children today as an historic record.
There are few written records from other ancient peoples, but what there are were found by archeologists who first read of them in the Bible. There are indeed many records of ancient Greece and Rome and Hieroglyphs of Egypt, but are they as comprehensive? Parents do not just take their children out of assembly so that they cannot socialise with the whole school; they actively also prevent them from RE or scripture as we used to call it. It is not 2 thousand years since the NT was written for the ordinary people. It was not until the Victorians made education compulsory for all children that children learned to read and write. Before that, only a few privileged landowners were allowed to educate their children, so it is actually less than 200 years, and we still experience infections to this day which are not dealt with properly. Again, the Ebola outbreak was a stark reminder that there are still people in the world who do not understand how to manage cross-infection.
There are many instances in the Bible referring to disease and many other things beside. It is a history of people descended from Adam and Eve who kept a full record of genealogy. At one time they had very little problem with diseases. By the time Moses led them out of Egypt they were battling with contagious diseases for which there were no cures, rather like the Ebola outbreak in Africa 4,000 years later. when hundreds were killed and there was a lack of prevention. In the first five books of the Bible there are detailed records of how they stopped cross infection. They had no medicines. We can actually recognise some of the diseases described nowadays and which we still cannot cure. The prophet says 'I may tell all my bones' and other references to arthritis which we still cannot cure now. We call it hindsight. What would we do today if suddenly all our medicines and treatments disappeared? We would have to go back to ways of preventing disease spreading, but just this week flu has struck schools which are now being 'deep cleaned' thousands of years later to stop it spreading. I suppose the nearest we come nowadays is the times when because people do not take enough care, infections are passed on rapidly as in schools this week with flu. In a way the 'mad max' is a sort of reverse, where the remnants of an apocalyptic happening to the earth found themselves with very little food and turned into a lawless angry mob with little chance of survival. The Israelites started out that way and the Old Testament tells the story of how they lived. Now what we call genetic engineering nowadays, was credited to God, but the fact is that when Jacob made an agreement with his father-in-law that for wages he would take all the spotted sheep and he had a spotted ram which he ran with the sheep and most of them turned out spotted. Why did it take us millenia to do the same? King David burned down a grain and threshing store and tools, killing the animals because he discovered the seat of a disease which was killing the people in that town. Because it was ascribed to God should not make it less applicable today.
Now that schadenfreudePersonifide has said that I shall be damned in hell for the rest of eternity no doubt others will agree with that. I am saying that the Bible, both old and new is as relevant today as it has ever been and since the ordinary people of this country has been able to learn to read since just the middle of the 19th century children should not be prevented from reading it now, and if they are not allowed to read it for religious reasons, let them read it for all the wealth of knowledge it contains today.