My Christian father doesn’t want to accept that the Bible asserts that unicorns are real, but accepts all the other crazy things.

After posting a Facebook video about rebutting atheists which included some line about “no I don’t believe in crazy stuff like Santa and unicorns just Bc I believe in the Bible”, I pointed out that if he believes the Bible he surely believes in unicorns. This really hit him the wrong way and a day later he sent me a link to an apologist’s article “explaining” the idea of unicorns. Here is my reply to him about it: There are a lot of problems with this guy’s backwards logic, starting with the fact that he’s trying to work backwards. If you want to know what the original word in the original text meant, you don’t start with modern versions that are several translations separated from the older one. You start at the beginning. The Bible was first written in Greek, and the Greek word for unicorn (which he touched on for a second but ascribed it to Latin) is Monoceros which just means “one horn” and the word for rhino is rhinokeros which means “horned nose”. When you translate from Greek to Latin and then Latin to English nobody who speaks those languages is going to think a unicorn should have been called a horn nose and nobody who has ever seen even a picture of a rhino with its TWO horns will think it should be called a “one horn”. That’s someone trying to make up for something they don’t like, after the fact. And the Siberian rhino that he talks about died out almost 30,000 years ago. Which means the very last one died about 5 times longer ago than the Bible says the earth has existed. To say we coexisted with that animal by the Bible’s standards and timelines you have to account for a minimum 500% margin of error in its account of how long people have existed just to get the very first people to be alive at the same time as the very last one of these. And if it was THAT wrong about that, what else isn’t accurate? Also as the name says it lived in Siberia which is notably not in the Middle East. The real way to test this, and it’s the real nail in the coffin for the “it’s not unicorns in the Bible” argument, is to look up medieval art. People in the Middle Ages were THE MOST religious Christians who’ve ever lived. Religious laws ruled their lives and there was absolutely no art made that wasn’t made in a religious context in Europe at that time. They were reading the Bible in its most un-retranslated form. Do a google search for “medieval Christian art rhino”, and naturally disregard the results that are from modern art or renaissance art, and you’ll find almost nothing. Then replace the word rhino with unicorn and do the same search. There are SO many results.

Submitted July 22, 2018 at 10:16PM by DeadlyUseOfHorse https://ift.tt/2JJI6wt