"... knocks out a tooth [of his slave]..."


"...(i.e., indentured servants)..."

Gotta love the irony.

Amen-Moses

Yeah, we noticed. But that is the topic
of discussion in this thread....

A few seconds? That, unfortunately, is how
most people read the Bible. By the time
you get to the contradiction, and don't think
about it, it's easy to ignore. However,
there are people who have given quite a
bit more than a few seconds of thought,
and have found the contradictions to be quite
blatant. I could type them all out here
for you, but I don't have time, so you
go do some reading in the sec web lib. Just
follow the links to biblical errancy....

What do you mean "No matter what the Bible says...".
How can you have an understanding of God if
it's not based on the Bible? Does he talk
to you? Are ya buddies? 'Cause everybody
else gets their understanding of God from
the Bible (actually, most of them from just
accepting what the preachers say). So you
can't very well have an understanding of
God which is independent of what the Bible
says, right?

Tercel, if you're talking straight to God,
you'd better pipe up and let everyone know,
'cause we're all wondering where he went!
(When the FBI gets done with Condit, we may
have to send them to you on a missing diety case!)

But just what is it you think that would change that would affect the edicts of
a supreme, omniscient, omnipotent being?

If the Bible is the "word of God", and his
way of revealing himself to us, then he should be (and we can't seem to get this
through to you) consistent throughout. What
we see in the Bible is simply human characteristics mapped by an ancient peoples
onto a ficticious diety.

And here is the typical apologetic escape hatch. "If you don't agree with me, you must
not be capable of understanding..." We understand you're explanations, we're just
not buying them. They are illogical.

The irony of this statement is incredible.. Maybe what we got here is a failure to
communicate. Maybe we gots a problem with
definitions. I don't want to speak for
Diana, but in my case at least,"inerrant" is a binary switch. The book is
either "errant", or it is "inerrant". If the
the book is shown to contain an error, then
it must be ruled as "errant". It cannot be
"mostly inerrant".

Miracle Max: "He's only MOSTLY dead. And as
we all know, that's a lot better than
COMPLETELY dead!"

I'm just gonna let this one fly and chalk it
up to a poor choice of words....

Strawman! Strawman! Somebody get me a match!
This one is all MINE!

Now you're telling me what *I* believe?

I never said I believed the newspapers are
inerrant, or true. In fact, I tend to be
very skeptical of anything I see or read
in the media.

And so we come full circle. How do you decide
which parts you're going to believe? I don't think any of us have a problem with "believing" some parts of it. "Do unto others..." and we go "hmmm, OK, that makes sense". But the Bible does not claim (or
Christianity, that is) that it just a book
of good ideas. It claims to be the word of
God. The Church has always treated it as such. The Bible makes people say 'If you don't do exactly as it says, you're going
to burn in hell!'. So it does become important at that point to understand the
authority that it claims to speak from.

And then....

So then why are you following it? WHy are
you here preaching it to others?

No, trust me. I think we all know exactly
where you're coming from now.

So Tercel, does your God change his mind?

diana

I concur, Kosh.

I see "belief" as the same thing. You don't "kinda believe" or "mostly believe." You either believe or you don't. If you don't know how you feel, you don't believe.

But errant and inerrant is far clearer. It's either one or the other.

Mostly dead. That's funny.

By the way Amen-Moses, you're doing an outstanding job on Pun Watch. Keep up the good work.

d

Tercel

And I occasionally amuse myself my reading those links when I've got nothing else to do. Occasionally they do actually find a real contradiction, but their average example gives a rather good laugh at them. But I'm not trying to say the Bible is Inerrant, so why refer me to errancy links?

Are you just trying to annoy me or are you silly enough that you don't actually understand what I'm saying? If I found one verse in the Bible that specifically says that God is indecisive, I would not believe it because the whole understanding that is implied from the rest of the Bible about God is that He is not.

In the book of Jonah God says that He's going to punish Ninevah because it is evil. But the city of Ninevah repents and God says He will no longer punish it. This is an example of God "changing His mind" due to changing circumstances. It is not an example of God being indecisive. eg If once Jonah got to Ninevah God had said "Sorry Jonah, but I changed my mind - I don't think I want to destory Ninevah after all. So you can go on home now". Human's do this all the time and we call it "changing our minds" - we are going to do something and then we think again and decide to do something else. My understanding of God as obtained from the overall message in the Bible is that God doesn't do this.
Back to the real story of Jonah. The people repent and God says that since they have repented He will not bring punishment on them. This change of will in the changing circumstances is quite different from indecision, yet it still seems to fall under the idea of God "changing His mind". I see no reason why God shouldn't be allowed to react to our decisions. Why isn't he allowed to punish when we do evil and reward when we do good if he wants? Why should he be forced to always treat us the same throughout our lives? Sounds pretty silly to me. God "changing his mind" to changing circumstances seems to be completely necessary.

Well perhaps then the Bible is NOT the "word of God" (in the way you mean) and is NOT his way of revealing himself to us (again in the way you mean) and therefore there is no reason it should be consistent throughout. This is something I'm trying to get through to you.
Frankly you seem as closed minded as a Fundamentalist, and the only thing that makes you better is that you at least believe the obvious thing that the Bible isn't inerrant.

~sigh~
What we see in the Bible is the writings of very human people with various understandings of the ways of God with differing experiences of His works. What we see in the Bible is a lot of different peoples thoughts and opinions and insights into the workings and the nature of God.
In general the understanding they present of God and His ways is amazingly coherent and without significant difficultly may be understood by the reader and combined into one religious philosophy which is the result of the distilled experiences, insights and wisdom of a thousand years or more or Godly men, and it is called Christianity.
We refer to the collective writing as "inspired" because we recognise behind many of the ideas and experiences expressed in the writings the hand of God and we see Him and His ways through the writings and the ideas and experiences they express.
Any philosophy which says that God himself personally dictated every letter of the original must surely be rejected in its entirity as it is not only entirely incompatible with the above position but it attributes to God something which clearly has some flaws and is just as clearly of human origin and thus the idea is all but blasphemous.

The whole idea that the Bible must either be entirely right or all but entirely wrong is simply without any sort of remotely sound logical basis. It is a product of human work, therefore it will almost certainly be flawed in at least some ways. But it is also a product of the wisdom and experiences of dedicated godly men who had experienced the power of God, therefore we would do very well to take great note of what it has to say.

It is true that "inerrant" is a binary switch: the Bible is "errant". What I dispute is the idea that I see so often in these forums that "errant" means <STRONG>ERRANT</STRONG> and that if it is not "inerrant" then not a single word can be trusted and that it is all wrong except coincidentally.


What exactly do you mean?
I believe the majority of ideas presented in the Bible because they logically follow from my experience of the world.
Why am I preaching it in this thread? A question got asked and I thought I was capable of explaing the answer.
Why am I preaching it on this website? Because this website provides many people of opposing religious views to me and I would like to make sure that I have knowledge of all the important questions pertinient to the truth or otherwise of Christianity. ie I want to get boths sides of the story. So far I have been impressed by the large number of posters here who say they think Christianity is stupid and then go on to demonstrate that they have no real understanding of it whatsoever. There have been a few cases where intelligent atheist posters have caused me to rethink exactly what my beliefs are - Diana did one such thing earlier in this thread. The second reason I am here is that I hope to learn something factual about Biblical criticism and archeology. I am disappointed at the lack of archeological discussion and where there has been discussion I seem to be the only one that knows anything - and I don't know very much. However from the Biblical Criticism side of this forum and I am learning a lot especially from Nomad and Layman. And when Rodahi can't go two seconds without saying something which I take serious issue with, it simply confirms that I'm on the right side of the fence.
Thirdly I'm here to improve my ability at explaining my beliefs and why I believe them. As I said earlier, explaing things is not something I've ever been very good at, and I hope to improve.
Does that answer your question? -Or did you mean something else?

-Tercel