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Permalink Reply by jen o on February 21, 2010 at 12:19am

ok but do they really believe that they actually lived that long?? I mean I used to go to a christian private school when I was young and there wasn't a good explanation for it. I think the best answer they could give me was that God didn't see time the way we did and that 7 days to create the world was more like 7,000 yrs or some bullshit, I can't remember..

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Permalink Reply by jen o on February 21, 2010 at 12:23am

ok i just found the answer on that link you gave me lol...they measured time in Sumerian numerical units known as sars (units of 3600), ners (units of 600), and sosses (units of 60)....thank you doone!

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Permalink Reply by Dan on February 21, 2010 at 12:31am

Most fundamentalists believe they really lived that long. It's one of the elements that factors into their belief that the earth is only about about 5,000 years old. I think the more Liberal Christians believe it's misunderstanding between what constituted a year back when Genesis was written. So they didn't actually live for a literal 900+ years.

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Permalink Reply by Nate on February 21, 2010 at 9:11am

I've read that these ages they come up with are the story tellers' way of describing how wise these guys were considered to be. Noah started building his boat when he was 500, and finished when he was 600. He was considered 500 years wise, not necessarily 500 years old. I can accept that explanation as rational, given the times. But yes, most "Christians" believe this shit is literal.

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Permalink Reply by jen o on February 21, 2010 at 11:00am

oh wow that's interesting!

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Permalink Reply by Kirk Holden on February 21, 2010 at 4:28pm

Moderate Xtians are mute (it's just too goofy) but our peers on the lunatic fringe love to double down on the crazy [please note the "back of the napkin" background texture]:

Seems that as we got more sinful, god kept shortening our lives to punish us by sending us to heaven quicker. Please note that this explains all those neanderthal skeletons -- they are really, really old people.

Hope this clears things up for you. Please ignore the fact that lifespans have been getting longer in the modern period due to better infant mortality and the germ theory of disease - the scientists are in a loosing battle with god on longevity according to this data filled graph.

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Permalink Reply by Shine on February 22, 2010 at 2:02am

Those graphs are amazing. Were they lifted from a copy of next year's Texas high school history book? I mean, Biblical history is to incorporated into public school curriculum, right?

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Permalink Reply by Topsoil on April 15, 2010 at 7:09pm

I don't believe most have a considered reason.

This puts me in mind of an argument I had with my sister recently. I was saying how I was a little annoyed that as a Christian growing up, I'd been informed reliably that there was historical evidence for Jesus from historians who lived there and saw him (Josephus and some Roman guy who's name I forget - Cicero I think.). And then this turned out to be untrue and it really irritates me that because they have faith in something, they don't bother to actually check sources etc. Just believe anything that suits them.

So it got to me claiming that the writers of the gospels would have been unlikely to be mature adults at the time Jesus died since they'd have to be fairly old when they wrote the gospels if that were the case.

And my sister said "em, what about Methuselah??".

At this point I apparently looked so flabbergasted that she said she wasn't going to discuss it further.

So yeah, she proved my point that there is a trend to not check things out or be skeptical enough to look for reasons. You can just skip all that because it's in the Bible, which is true because it's in the Bible, which is true because...

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