Thread: The Three Days of Darkness - November 24-26, 2016 A.D.

I'm not aware of the context, but "'One of her family line will replace him. He'll come against the army and enter the fortress of the northern king, conquering them and becoming victorious" means very little to me (there are several variations of this depending on the version of the Bible you read, but they all say basically this same thing). I don't see how it has anything to do with the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Honestly though, Daniel 11:7 means nothing more to me than any of the rest of the Bible. It's merely a religious text, many of which have existed over time; equally many of which are considered nonsense, even to religious folk. Everybody disbelieves all religions--except in the case of the religious, who simply disbelieve all but one. To me, there is no more merit to the Bible than a Christian attributes to the Quran or any other religion's holy text. If you can believe all but yours is wrong, then it doesn't seem likely that any of them would be right to me. I grew up Protestant, and the first thing that got me going on the path of agnostic atheism was the history surrounding the concept of hell. Not long after, the more I learned about the history of the Bible and the rather manipulative ways it forces believers to keep believing, the more clearly I saw it as a means of control/government. It was an effective way of raising money, and keeping the populace in check. The fact so many of a single religion's believers either have completely different ideas about how strictly you have to adhere to the religion's tenants and that there are so many sects of an otherwise overarching branch of a certain religion really made no sense to me. Some sects would even go so far as to claim that the other sects aren't part of the religion, like I've seen many Protestants do by saying Catholics aren't even Christian (like my mom), despite pretty much being the original Christians. The same thing goes on in the Middle East with different brands of Islam, many Muslims like to claim certain other Muslims aren't actually Muslim, based on their slightly different beliefs (Sunnis and Shiites are a good example of this).

I didn't mean to go too far off on a tangent there, but Daniel 11:7 and the rest of the Bible aren't much more than fiction to me, with maybe small bits of non-fiction mixed in. Perhaps it isn't quite right to label that way, fiction is a title given to literature that is presented as and knows it's fiction. I don't know if that is actually a requirement for distinguishing that genre, but a large majority of the Bible is flat out made up, in my opinion.