[xwkd]

Produced by a Mormon whose dissertation was supervised by an atheist Professor of the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion. This may be a data point in favor of the trustworthiness of the podcast, or it may be an argument against, depending on your own personal point of view.

[stvltvs]

As long as the approach is rigorous scholarship in good faith (is it?), it shouldn't matter too much.

[o11c]

I can't speak for the particular material referenced, but ... good faith is a lot to ask for in religious meta-literature. So often I see arguments based on the following:

* Start by assuming all the weird stuff didn't actually happen. We all know that fiction is stranger than truth.

* Next, assume it's impossible to foretell the future (in particular, "people who hate each other will start a war" can obviously only have been written after the fact), so clearly the author lied about the date they wrote it. Also, assume that nobody ever updated the grammar (due to linguistic drift) while copying it, and that the oldest surviving copy.

* Finally, assume that all previous translations were made by utter imbeciles and reject the wording they used, even if that means picking words that mean something completely unrelated to the original. You can always just assume that the words were a typo or something, and not a blatant reference to other books on the same topic.

The most basic sign of rigorous scholarship is saying "well, maybe" a lot, with just an occasional "but definitely not that".

[NemoNobody]

I can say with certainty that it is not impossible to predict the future. We can scientifically do so - advertising is a form of future prediction.

All things that exist have a cause and a consequence - nothing is unknowable if we could simply see a the data, everything could be explained exactly.

The future without is easier bc ppl are almost exactly the same based regardless of culture, ethnicity, religion or class and collectively we have been simply repeating the same mistakes, in cyclical pattern, for our entire history.

Everything has done before and everything will be done again - different eras tho, same humanity broken in the identical ways living the sames lives leading to the same mistakes and then forgetting all that and doing it again.

[stvltvs]

I gave one episode a listen and can now say it's not what you described. They conveyed actual scholarship but kept it light-hearted. Religious fundamentalists might not like it because it doesn't start from the assumption that the canonical Bible is inerrant, but for anyone who wants to learn about the Bible from an open-minded viewpoint, I think it's worth a listen.