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Originally Posted by girlinterrupted364  and i know our history books tend to skip over our the native american brutality that occurred around the turn of the century. the point is, you cant really prove that the bible is any more historically accurrate than a history text which is considered non-fiction. |
Yes I can actually, and while your point is taken, it is also deeply flawed.
Your claiming that the bible is just as historically credible as the thousands of books written by professionals who have devoted their entire lives to studying the stuff they are writing about.
While bias is definitely an issue, we're all human after all, all textbooks that are recognized by their peers (that is, other
competing professionals) are not fabrications. They back up their claims. During the era of male dominance and racism, plenty of history was skipped over or downplayed, but I guarantee you none of it was made up. All the history you will find in a real history textbook is backed up by facts, research, and thousands of years worth of documented knowledge.
All this knowledge has been acquired through documents and ruins and accounts that have been preserved through history. Whenever there's a "dark age" its when no documents exist that tell us what happened, so we simply say, honestly, that we don't know - for example the Greek dark ages (the hundred years in between ages of Troy and Agamemnon and the golden age of Greek civilization - Athens and Troy) or even the Medieval period (which isn't even a real dark age- we know plenty about that era).
In the back of all history textbooks, usually a good 1/3 of the pages, you will see all the references used, the countless of essays and books and documents and <gasp!>
evidence used to write the history book. Why do they do this? Because their not afraid of having someone accuse them of plagerism and/or fabrication, which is what your doing, which I must say, is quite the insult. So go ahead, pick up any textbook and try to prove them wrong with EVIDENCE, because I guarantee you, no matter who you will pick they will have a library of reference that backs them up, which is likewise backed up by hundreds of other libraries. Meanwhile, look in the back of the bible and what do you see? A toll free number that accepts donations maybe?
Right...there's even EVIDENCE <other surviving documents from that era> that tells you the origins of the bible. It is just ONE piece of evidence in the history of the world, one document, one source, that when compared with all the thousands of competing evidence that contradict it, any historian worth his salt would quickly dismiss the Bible as nothing but ONE book...just one book with absolutely no sources listed.
Come on, don't you write essays? Haven't you ever heard of a "Works Cited Page" or a "Bibliography"?
And the beautiful thing is that none of those history books are claiming to be infallible, they are all works in progress (any college student trying to sell their books back would know - damn new editions) which are constantly changing and being revised. And guess what? When overwhelming evidence comes up which contradicts the history of a particular textbook, (ie. any textbook written by Iran claiming the Holocaust didn't happen) it is simply discarded, ignored and shelved away, branded with the words "irrelevant." The bible, on the other hand, is well, garbage (except for the good advice)