Darth Dane

I’ve been thinking about the validity of the holy texts that we find around the world. Here's a seperate therad for that alone.

As I understand it, the bible was written by humans.
They were divinely inspired, and basicly God wrote through them.

The koran was also written by humans, Muhammad was inspired by God and spoke words from the heavens.

Now here’s the issue.

Some Christians say that the bible is the truth.

The bible cannot be perfect, because it was written by humans, and humans are by default not perfect, at least according to some. If the humans who wrote the bible weren’t perfect, how can the bible be truth with a capital T?
Yes God spoke to them, but what they wrote cannot be exactly what God said, because Humans are not perfect. If we are not perfect how can we expect anyone to understand what God says when he Talks to those he does talk to?

Could it be possible that something was misunderstood by the humans, as they wrote the bible and the Koran and what other holy texts you can mention.

So it is like this:

If humans aren’t perfect, all that humans does is imperfect, and this includes writing down what God tells you. This leads to a personal interpretation of the texts, and an understanding that cannot be dictated by priests or imams or whatever.

If humans aren’t perfect, but the bible is perfect, meaning written by God self, it means that God can ”inhabit” human bodies, taking away their freewill. This leads to the reasoning of how to establish who is in fatc infused wth Gods presence. Do we have a protocol to follow to pinpoint Gods presence in a man that writes for example.

If humans can achieve perfection, then Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and others had acheived this. This means that everyone can achieve perfection, and thus gain their own interpretation and understanding of Gods ”will”, again making the priests and imams and whatnot, obsolete (sp?)




DD - Valid Spliff

Shake

Even if it was written down 'perfectly', basically God dictating to humans, who's to say that the versions that we read today aren't full of interpretation type errors? The Bible alone has been translated over and over from the ancient languages to more modern languages and more recently adapted to be easier to read. Not to mention things like trying to instill gender-neutral language into the Bible.

I've read that not even all Bibles have the same number of books! Some versions (a disturbing word for a literalist) have fewer books than others. How can that be? Were some books deemed to be fake or somehow less inspired? Or do some sects not use them due to their content?

Being scientifically minded, one of my problems with these "divinely inspired" texts is the matter of not being able to confirm this so-called divine inspiration.

Further problems stem from the fact that much of the NT was written down centuries after Christ was supposed to have lived. There is still great debate over what the root causes of the US Civil War were - and that was just over a century ago - and we have lots of supporting documents to make cases for the many viewpoints. How are we expected to believe the validity of a text that was (finally) written down centuries after the events supposedly took place. Even if many specific events were remembered and documented correctly, I find it hard to believe that specific conversations (between Jesus and the disciples) were remembered verbatim. Yeah, yeah, God told the writers what was said ... sorry, I just don't buy that.

JerryM

The Bible was written by humans and is no more infallible than than any other ancient writing. I've always wondered why, if this is supposed to be God's divine and inerrant word, he would need to employ dozens of different writers. Why not just write it himself? He's done that before. The Book of Exodus states the the tablets of the law given to Moses at Sinai were written "with the finger of God" (see Exodus 31:18) If I were a God, and I wanted to impart my will to my creation, I would compose it myself, and deliver it directly with all the fanfare an omnipotent God could muster, so as to make its supernatural origin absolutely clear.