Eye for an Aye -- aAnother One They Mangle

Jesus said that was the old law and He was giving His followers a new commandment: not to retaliate at all. But I get very tired of hearing the old law made into something it isn't, people saying how if that were followed we'd be up to your eyeballs in violence.

Do they think at all? Any of them? Isn't it obvious on the fac e of it that to require an eye for an eye is nothing but perfect justice? Yes Christians are now not to retaliate at all but that doens't change the fact that as law that earlier law was perfect justice.

Many of the Old Testament laws were aimed at toning down the vigilante justice that people so often exacted in retaliation for wrongs against them. Cities of Refuge were established for instance because even someon who had accidentally killed someone would have been murdered by the family of the person killed. Same with eye for an eye. If someone's eye was put out in a fight, he was likely to retaliate by killing the person who wronged him. The law of eye for an eye restricted him to retaliating only to the level of thje offense. You lost an eye you may only take an eye in retaliation. You lost a tooth, you may only take a tooth in retaliation. ,br>
An example of the kind of overkill such laws were designed to mitigate would be the incident when a young man from a neighboring tribe raped Dinah, Jacob's daughter and the sister of his twelve sons. The youhjng man was in love with Dianah and wanted to marry her so it wasnt even your standard violent rape, though of course Dinah had no say in any of it in the culture of that day. Anyway her brothers murdered the young man and his family for the violation of their sister. Jacob was worried about what that would do to his family's standing in the neighborhood, but the point is that there was a tendency in those days to exact far more in retaliation than the crime warranted. Hence, boiling it down to "eye for an eye."

In general the Old Testament is attacked by antireligionists for things it actually represents a liberal humanizing influence on the wild culture of the day. That is also true of its dealings with slavery which was a universal practice that nobody would have given up in that context, but better treatment of slaves and requirement that they be released after a certain term of service were humanizing effects of the OT laws. Yes including the call on Abraham to sacrrifice his son Isaac. Today's self-rightesou judges hae no sense of perspective whatever.

The Virgin Birth and Its Enemies

No, the Hebrew word in Isaiah that is translated "virgin" in the Christian context, is not mistralslated. That's a common Jewish claim, and that claim goes back to the time of Jesus when the slander was floated among the unbelieving Jews that Mary's child was simply illegitimate, that she'd cheated on Joseph. That slander ended up in the Talmud too as I understand it, and was part of the reason that Luther had his conniption fit at the Jews.

However, that Hebrew word if translated "young woman" instead of "virgin" would imply that an UNMARRIED young woman had a baby and that just doesn't work in the Old Testament context. You just don't have an unmarried mother. Adultery was severelyu punished. No, the word is properly translated "virgin."
And of course the New Testament accounts of Mary's being visited by the angel Gabriel to announce her pregnancy are all lies according to this slander. God formed jesus in her womb. She was a virgin.

And Jesus had to be born of a virgin because if he'd had a human father he would not have been sinless and would ot have qualified to be our Savior.

But of course those with a vested interest in discrediting Christianity are going to go on promoting the lies.

Another Case of Misappropriating What is Not Evolution to Evolutionary Theory

Another one from Bret and Heather. They are talking about a discovery he made some years earlier about the length of mouse telmomeres, which were understood to be longer than in other animals but whicvh he determined were really only longer in laboratory mice, that is, mice bred for use in laboratories. The way they are selected and bred caused them to develop long temomeres. That is, these long telomeres are not found in mice in the wild, only in oaboratory mice, a consequence of the way they are bred for that role.

And this is important because the long telomeres confer a resistance to toxity and other things that means they aren't good models for laboratory experiments where the toxicity of say drugs is being tested on them. They would have resistance to toxic drugs that would give a false judgment of their toxicity for use in humans. Which of course could be very dangers.

This sounds like an important discovery with very important ramifications.

But of course that's not the point of my post. I have one little point to make. It odes NOT take "evolutionary thinking" to recognize such a problem. I have to make an issue of this because it's a mjor way evolution keeps getting validated based on a false idea of whart is really going on. They are al=ways coop coopting normal variation to evolution, microevolution as they think of it. It is not evolution at all. Variation is built into the genome of each Species orf Kind and it's as obvious to all of us as the fact that the offspring of sexually reproducing craetures, such as humjann beings, differ from their parents and from eacfh other. That's the result of sexual recombination, not evolution. It has nothing to do with evolution, it has nothing to do with mutation. It does not take evolutionary thinking to recognize this obvious ordinary simple fact.

Selection works on normal variation. If you isolate a part of a population of any sexually reproducing animal, each separated part witll develop new characteristics. By isolating a small number of individuals you create a new population with a new set of gene frequ3encies which is going to bring about a new set of observative traits within some number of generations. This is not evolution at all, although I've used it to demonstrate that this process in producing new phenotypes requires the reduction of genetic diversity which spells death to evolution through its own processes. But that's another discussion.