DLH was set on his life path by Yahweh when he was born to be on this forum to do battle with atheists in the name of god almighty. A man on a holy mission, a holy warrior in the service of a god.
Like the Jesuits and the Knights Templar, stamping out the irreligious infidels.
I realize you were talking about things we don't perceive, but I don't think we perceive the spiritual aspect of our universe the same. It's like kung fu. It's everything.
The Pharisees criticized Jesus and his disciples for not washing their hands before eating. The Hebrew idea of a hand was what we would call the hand and wrist. From the tips of the fingers to just above the wrist. The law of Moses instructed to wash the "hand" before eating, which Jesus and his disciples did, but the Pharisees, in self-righteousness which they had such a proclivity for, extended this up to past the elbows. That way, they reasoned, you were sure to do it right. A modern-day skeptic, not knowing any better, will say Jesus sinned.
Just as the modern-day believer will think that since Jesus said to turn the other cheek, he was teaching passivism. But what he was really commenting on was a custom among the Jews at that time, to slap the face of anyone who in the slightest manner, insulted them. He was really saying not to be provoked by trivial conflict.
There is a type of manuscript that was read in the temple. These are notoriously inaccurate manuscripts. The scholars used accurate scrolls but, in the temple, the inaccurate ones were kept and read. From a strictly academic sense these are useless, but in a cultural sense they are invaluable because they contain notes and addendums which give a great deal of insight into what the people did, as opposed to just thought.
I once saw a documentary on one of the world's leading ichthyologists who had been trained and practiced for years in his field. He went to the Amazon to live with the primitive people there. They were fishermen. He learned more in a year there than he ever had as a scientist. I learned more about the Bible, religion, God, myself and even people arguing with atheists than I did in years of intense Biblical and theological study.
Today the solar day is divided into two periods of 12 hours each. Anti and post meridian. The ancient Hebrews had a much different perspective. Though their day went from sunset to sunset they still referred to the morning as the beginning of the day, meaning daylight hours and night as the ending of that same period. They also broke up the day into more parts than we do. Day and night were only a fourth of a day to them. So, the word translated as day, like I said, is used various ways like ours is used meaning from a few hours to time indefinite. Including but not limited to the 24-hour period.
Skeptics have such a hard time with this, even though the English word day is used exactly in the same way, because tradition holds that the universe was created in six literal days. It wasn't. This can be established through several ways, including the comparison I used. In my day we worked the day shift 6 days a week. There day is used to describe a few hours (daylight) many years (my day) and the solar day of 24 hours. (See
Genesis Chapter 1)
It is also evident by the fact that the scripture (you so diligently neglected) says God created the universe in 6 days (periods of indeterminant time) but it also says 1 day (as a whole period) AND it also says that the 7th day began immediately after Adam and Eve were created and continues, according to David and hundreds of years later Paul, in their day. The seventh day of creation continues to this day. Add to this the fact that it also uses day in the manner I've suggested for various periods of time. If I say Adam's day, I don't mean Adam lived 24 hours.
God said in that day Adam would die. Sin equals death. Dying takes a long time.
Hollyweird's depiction of "
The Dark Ages" really isn't a very accurate one. The dark ages were really a criticism of the unavailability of literature. Under the influence of Hollyweird we see the dark ages more like Monty Python's Holy Grail. "Bring out your dead." If you lived in the dark ages, we reason, you probably didn't live past 40. No, if you lived to be 90 and had two siblings that died you had the life expectancy of 40. Even if you were 90.
The Europeans lived in filth. But like the hippies in the 1960s and the woke crowd of today it was only a small pocket of the world at large. A distraction. White noise. Normal life goes on all around it. The Europeans lived with domestic animals who shat in their water and slept in their homes. They eventually became immune. T and B - the memory cells. When they went to the Americas, they decimated the population who had a different culture. Not so many domestic animals. They were hunters. So, as I mentioned in another post, "science" thinks David was wrong when he wrote in Psalms that the life expectancy was 70 or 80 years. They assumed the dark ages were bad so David's time had to be worse.
But science really doesn't say that. People say that in the name of science. Science makes you smart, religion makes you dumb. Best side with science. Except science becomes just another ideology like religion.
So, your senses may be the only way you can examine but there are aspects of your surroundings that your senses can't detect and examine. Your senses could act as a blinder. That's how I look at believers and unbelievers. They, as Agent K said, think they have a good bead on things.
Professor F. F. Bruce:
“For Cæsar’s Gallic War (composed between 58 and 50 B.C.) there are several extant MSS, but only nine or ten are good, and the oldest is some 900 years later than Cæsar’s day.
“Of the 142 books of the Roman history of Livy (59 B.C.-A.D. 17), only 35 survive; these are known to us from not more than twenty MSS of any consequence, only one of which, and that containing fragments of Books III-VI, is as old as the fourth century.
“Of the fourteen books of the Histories of Tacitus (c. A.D. 100) only four and a half survive; of the sixteen books of his Annals, ten survive in full and two in part. The text of these extant portions of his two great historical works depends entirely on two MSS, one of the ninth century and one of the eleventh. . . .
“The History of Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.) is known to us from eight MSS, the earliest belonging to c. A.D. 900, and a few papyrus scraps, belonging to about the beginning of the Christian era.
“The same is true of the History of Herodotus (c. 488-428 B.C.). Yet no classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest MSS of their works which are of any use to us are over 1,300 years later than the originals.”—The Books and the Parchments, page 180.
