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Why no divine revelation about microscopic life?

Halfcentaur said:
We're only beginning to glimpse the world of bacteria and how it interacts with our physiology. One day we may no longer sterilize as a practice, rather we may use "good' and "bad" bacteria in a biological relationship similar to the stuff we eat in yogurt for our guts only with everything from surgery to mood setting, shaping massive networks of microbial systems spanning the globe in a bacterial based technological biosphere. This is all hinted at in the bible but we are not advanced enough yet in our microbial expertise to make up the proper biblical interpretations.
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I don't follow this line of reasoning. What hints?

And if you can tell people to wash their feet and not eat pork, why can't you tell them to wash their hands and cook their meat thoroughly?
 
Skeptic Ginger said:
Thanks for the data dump. A verse would be nice not a page of verses.

As I read that, the Pharisees washed hands and dishes out of tradition and Jesus said it was less important than being clean inside by following God rather than tradition.

Am I reading it correctly?
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Well, as a general gist, yes. Not exactly though.

Jesus does rail against them disobeying the Law too (e.g., they even don't execute kids who give their parents lip any more!) as a stupid, "yeah, well, you're even worse so shut up your stupid face" kind of ad-hominem argument, but that's not really the same thing as being clean on the inside.

What he literally says is: it's not the things that go into your mouth that make you unclean. It's what comes OUT of your mouth -- i.e., the things you say -- that make you unclean. (E.g., you know, those kids giving lip to their parents.)

The latter half isn't a bad idea, as biblical platitudes go. It's just the unfortunate inclusion of the first half for contrast that makes it awful: eating with dirty hands or from dirty dishes doesn't matter. Which is pretty awful, I think you'll agree.

Even more awful is the pretty explicit rationalization that what you stuff in your face is destroyed anyway and doesn't matter. Jesus there isn't leaving it at being some unfortunate first half of an awful parable, he even goes into detail for why it doesn't matter. You eat, it's digested, you crap it out, see, it didn't stay in to make you unclean. I.e., it becomes a message in its own right.
 
If the Christians in my area are any indication, they will not hesitate to claim that God had it covered the fourth and fifth days: Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures... blah blah... great sea monsters and every living creature that moves....blah blah... and everything that creeps upon the earth...

God apparently didn't see a need to go into detail.
 
Excerpt from H.G. Wells' book Certain Personal Matters

"Speaking of the name of Cyclops reminds me that these scientific people
have been playing a scurvy trick upon the classics behind our backs. It
reminds one of Epistemon's visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a
patcher of clouts and Xerxes a crier of mustard. Aphrodite, the dabbler
tells me, is a kind of dirty mud-worm, and much dissected by spectacled
pretenders to the London B.Sc.; every candidate, says the syllabus, must
be able to dissect, to the examiner's satisfaction, and demonstrate upon
Aphrodite, Nereis, Palæmon. Were the gods ever so insulted? Then the
snaky Medusa and Pandora, our mother, are jelly-fish; Astræa is still to
be found on coral reefs, a poor thing, and much browsed upon by parrot
fish; and Doris and Tethys and Cydippe are sea slugs. It's worse than
Heine's vision of the gods grown old. They can't be content with the
departed gods merely. Evadne is a water flea--they'll make something out
of Mrs. Sarah Grand next; and Autolycus, my Autolycus! is a polymorphic
worm, whatever subtlety of insult "polymorphic worm" may convey."
 
Another excerpt from H.G. Wells' book Certain Personal Matters

"And all the time these creatures are living their vigorous, fussy little
lives; in this drop of water they are being watched by a creature of
whose presence they do not dream, who can wipe them all out of existence
with a stroke of his thumb, and who is withal as finite, and sometimes
as fussy and unreasonably energetic, as themselves. He sees them, and
they do not see him, because he has senses they do not possess, because
he is too incredibly vast and strange to come, save as an overwhelming
catastrophe, into their lives. Even so, it may be, the dabbler himself
is being curiously observed.... The dabbler is good enough to say that
the suggestion is inconceivable. I can imagine a decent amoeba saying
the same thing."
 
Halfcentaur said:
We're only beginning to glimpse the world of bacteria and how it interacts with our physiology. One day we may no longer sterilize as a practice, rather we may use "good' and "bad" bacteria in a biological relationship similar to the stuff we eat in yogurt for our guts only with everything from surgery to mood setting, shaping massive networks of microbial systems spanning the globe in a bacterial based technological biosphere.
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In fact doctors are currently using MAGGOT THERAPY in a very difficult type of infected wounds that cannot be cured by normal antibiotics. They put these specially bred maggots in the wound and bandage it. The maggots go to work eating the infected flesh but leaving the healthy flesh intact. Thus curing the wound......:eek:


Halfcentaur said:
This is all hinted at in the bible but we are not advanced enough yet in our microbial expertise to make up the proper biblical interpretations.
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Verses please.....show us the "hinting"....
 
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Leumas said:
In fact doctors are currently using MAGGOT THERAPY in a very difficult type of infected wounds that cannot be cured by normal antibiotics. They put these specially bred maggots in the wound and bandage it. The maggots go to work eating the infected flesh but leaving the healthy flesh intact. Thus curing the wound......:eek:





Verses please.....show us the "hinting"....
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I'm guessing that was a joke. He seems to be saying that if scientists ever work out such a system the religious types will claim that it was in the bible all along...
 
Brainache said:
I'm guessing that was a joke. He seems to be saying that if scientists ever work out such a system the religious types will claim that it was in the bible all along...
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They have always done that...and they will continue to do that.... it is their way of alleviating their cognitive dissonance by contorting their god into a Usurping God Of Hindsight and gaps.
 
Think about it for one second
If God/Jesus would have given the recipe for antibiotics to Jews/christains would'nt that population have out survived the rest of the of the world?
 
Isn't that kinda the point of both beliefs, though?

I mean, Jews believed that they are God's chosen, and they have a divine mandate -- nay, commandment -- to conquer everyone near them, take slaves, etc. It's right in the bible, you know? So if you want a people to conquer in your name, wouldn't you want them to do a better job at it and not lose half the army to dysentery and half the manpower to the occasional plague?

Christians at the very least believed that they must make everyone else Christian, and that everyone who isn't baptized and isn't believing in Jesus, isn't saved. Again, it's right in the Bible. Depending on time and place, they occasionally got a lot more violent forms of that thought, but basically the gist remains: more christians and less pagans is a good thing. So wouldn't antibiotics help there? If even by attrition it means that Christians push everyone else out of the way faster, over 2000 years, it means less people going to hell. It has to be good, right?

But, mind you, I wouldn't even go as far as ask god to tell people about antibiotics. I'd be ok even with telling them to frikken wash their hands. Or to not poop near their water source. Or at least not going the extra mile of telling them to NOT wash their hands and dishes, really.

There was a whole age where the Church viewed any kind of hygiene or presonal grooming as the deadly sin of vanity. We have early apocalypses where basically the author fantasizes about women being tormented in hell for as little as combing and braiding their hair. (You just know that women only do that to tempt men to sin;)) We have the same church be against the bathhouses remaining from the Romans, because OMG, seeing other guys naked could produce lust. And we have the punitive taxes on soap that I have mentioned before. And why? Because Jesus said that such things as washing don't matter.

The "Son Of Man" didn't even need to tell anyone about antibiotics. He just needed to keep his stupid pie-hole shut, to save millions of lives.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
Their all-knowing deity never bothered to reveal anything about bacteria, for example, or dust mites.
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Well, the ENTIRE book is nothing but what people knew (or made up, such as exodux) in that day. No mention of anything "prophetic" at all. Bacteria, extra-solar planets, moons of Jupiter, atomic structure, etc. etc. etc. Even if people are too primitive or uneducated to have the tools to understand divinely revealed information, it should still be there as a "mystery", yet not one jot exists. It's like the weak justification of slavery for instance. Thier gawd had to condone it because it was the tradition of the times. :confused:
 
LarianLeQuella said:
Well, the ENTIRE book is nothing but what people knew (or made up, such as exodux) in that day. No mention of anything "prophetic" at all. Bacteria, extra-solar planets, moons of Jupiter, atomic structure, etc. etc. etc. Even if people are too primitive or uneducated to have the tools to understand divinely revealed information, it should still be there as a "mystery", yet not one jot exists. It's like the weak justification of slavery for instance. Thier gawd had to condone it because it was the tradition of the times. :confused:
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It was ORDAINED not just condoned.

There are DETAILED and numerous laws and commandments as part of the purportedly Mosaic 613 Mitzvot on who, how, and when to enslave and what to do with them and when to sell daughters and sons and even oneself and what to do with the battle booty of little virgin girls after you have just finished slaughtering their whole city.

You would think people who have just escaped from generations of slavery would not even consider to do to other people what they detested being done to them.... I guess history repeats itself all the time.
 
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HansMustermann said:
There was a whole age where the Church viewed any kind of hygiene or presonal grooming as the deadly sin of vanity. We have early apocalypses where basically the author fantasizes about women being tormented in hell for as little as combing and braiding their hair. (You just know that women only do that to tempt men to sin;)) We have the same church be against the bathhouses remaining from the Romans, because OMG, seeing other guys naked could produce lust. And we have the punitive taxes on soap that I have mentioned before. And why? Because Jesus said that such things as washing don't matter.
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Don’t forget poor Ezekiel who was commanded to eat bread baked with cow dung which was originally supposed to be human dung.


HansMustermann said:
The "Son Of Man" didn't even need to tell anyone about antibiotics. He just needed to keep his stupid pie-hole shut, to save millions of lives.
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Or stop mixing spittle with dirt and rubbing it in people's eyes and ears with ostentatious fanfare while PRETENDING to cure the deaf and blind.
 
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Now I know this one because I asked some nice Jehovah's Witnesses this same question when they popped by for a chat the other day. First answer provided; the bible does mention hygiene in a roundabout way and thus alludes to 'germs'. Now I wasn't too happy with this allusive answer but fortunately they had a follow up. God apparently only wanted to tell us things we could understand. As we hadn't discovered microbes yet he didn't want to freak us out by telling us about them cos we probably just wouldn't have coped with the info. So there you have it. God was less ambitious in his descriptions than Louis Pasteur et al. I was convinced. No lifesaving blood transfusions for me from now on. The JWs also backed away from the house quite quickly after this one - worth considering should you be visited yourself any time soon.
 
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