ksskidude

This is great stuff!!! I will do my reading.

Clivedurdle

Try Terry Jones Barbarians! (yup I am boring and I am not getting royalties!)

Malachi151

I'm not going to o into details with mountains of links here, espeically since much comes from books anyway, but, here is a starter for you, my article on evolution:

http://www.rationalrevolution.net/ar..._evolution.htm

You'll have to pick through it.

Johnny Skeptic

It in not at all difficult to find a rational basis for rejecting the God of the Bible. One good example is that the Bible says that killing people is wrong, but yet God frequently kills people, including babies and innocent animals. Another good example is that the God endorses punishing people for what that their grandparents did. Exodus 20:5 says “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.” Now is that fair? Well of course it isn’t.

hatsoff

Well, there are a lot of problems with the Bible, to be sure, but that doesn't mean you have to reject your faith. In fact, forget the Bible for a second and ask yourself if you can go on being Christian without it. Can you? After all, the earliest Christians believed based on word of mouth testimony alone. Even today, there are Christians around the world without access to Bibles. For the first thousand years AD many Christians had only the vaguest conception of the Bible or its contents.

The problem is many people equate the Bible to Christianity. They are certainly closely related, but they are not interchangable. You can reject the Bible as infallible without rejecting God, Christ or any Christian doctrine. Or you can reject certain books of the Bible without rejecting them all. It's really up to you.

If you can't fathom remaining Christian after doubting Scripture, there are ways around that, too. After all, if God does exist, and sent Jesus to die on the cross to pay the price for our sins, who's to say he didn't guide the Bible's authors to write things down truthfully? And if the Bible really is divinely inspired, does that mean it's absolutely perfect? For example, let's say the apparent contradictions in the Bible really are contradictions, born of the authors' errors. Does that negate the core message of repenting and trusting in God?

If you've grown up a Christian, odds are you've had a lot of misinformation hammered into your brain. Discovering that some of what you've been told in Church isn't true can be a faith-shaking experience. But you will do well to remember that any such falsehoods you may have been taught needn't cast into doubt the heart of your Christian faith.

Good luck figuring all this out.

Toto

This is a little misleading. Even if most Christians had only the vaguest idea of the Bible or its contents for 1000 years, the church leaders certainly read the Bible and had knock-down drag-out fights to the death over its content.

Yes, you can be a cafeteria Christian like most of the country. But this is not very satisfying for a lot of people, and it sounds like you are one of them.

It's bad enough when people claim that the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true. But when you claim that the Bible is true in spite of the fact that it has errors, one has to stop and wonder what's going on.

Is the "core" message of the Bible repenting and trusting in God? You could have fooled me. Why should someone who is doing the best they can repent? Why trust in God? What about feeding the hungry or loving your fellow man? You can pick your favorite "core" message out of the Bible and say it's true. But is it true because it's part of a fallible, flawed manuscript or because your reason and experience say it's true, in which case why drag the Bible into it?

Here's a hint: there is no Santa Claus. Sometimes people tell you lies to get you to behave. When you grow up, it is permissible to stop believing in those lies.

hatsoff

It's not misleading at all. The point is there were many folks who believed without access to the Bible. That there were many others who did have access is true, but irrelevant to what I was saying.

I'm not sure what you mean by "cafeteria Christian," but a Christian can be devoted without being a fundamentalist.

Lots of mostly true documents have errors. I don't see your problem, here.

From what I can tell, all the NT authors believed one should accept Christ and turn away from evil. This was a very important message, and probably the conceptual foundation of everything from GMatt onward.

That's a good question, and I don't think there's any definitive answer to it. I suppose it all depends on your own personal experiences.

Of course. It's also acceptable to seek the truth for yourself, and to believe in something in spite of detractors.

jayh

Some of the same things bothered me. Also the Jacob/Laban story with the sheep (maternal impression does not work, but the 'inspired' Bible talks as if it does, and in any case Jacob's actions seem extremely unethical-- hardly the behavior of an exemplar). Or that the children of Job were killed of to settle a bet (but it's "ok" because he got new children)... countless others.

Yeah, the Abrahm Isaac thing: A few years ago a woman in Texas killed her children because God told her to. What exactly is different about her actions compared to Abraham's? What determines whether God "really" spoke to the people in question?

kurosaki

Whoa, long. You wrote this article? Very nice. Looks to be very well researched.