Mageth

It puzzles me as to why a book that is supposedly "inspired" by God would require so much study to understand.

Couldn't God have been, you know, a bit more clear and concise about what he meant and what we needed to know when he "inspired" the damn thing?

Amaleq13

What is this standard you believe you are uniquely required to meet?

No, one gets funny comments because one's efforts to reconcile these two clearly different accounts of his death are simply laughable.

Actually, it means head first with no implications regarding one's face.

While one can argue that both could have happened to the same man, one cannot argue that the same man could die both ways. One either dies by hanging or one dies by falling and having one's guts fall out.

Mageth

A correction is needed. You say "both COULD have happened very easily". Even if that were so (if both could have happened easily, which I find quite questionable), the contradiction would still exist - you would simply have provided a plausible explanation for the contradiction. (As it stands, however, you have simply provided an inplausible explanation in an attempt to wiggle out of the quite obviously contradictory accounts).

If the contradiction did not exist, you would not have to come up with a "could have" explanation for it".

chapka

If I had been the only witness to Saddam Hussein's death, and you asked me how he died, and I told you that "he died as a result of a fall," would you consider that an honest answer? Or would you think it was misleading? If the Bible is that misleading in this aspect, what else might it be misleading about?

M, I think you'd benefit from looking into the argument of the temperance activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They came up with extensive treatises (Bible Wines is the most famous) explaining away, in great detail, why every time the Bible appears to be endorsing the drinking of wine, it actually is talking about non-alcoholic grape juice, whereas negative references are to alcoholic wine, thereby "proving" that the Bible supported temperance. This has never been read into any translation of the Bible except by people who already supported temperance for other reasons, and the silly idea disappeared as soon as the silly social movement did.

Of course, the temperance advocates' arguments are pretty silly on their face. All you have to do is read the Cana story to realize that unless the party guests are getting drunk, it doesn't make any sense. Nobody reading the story without an agenda would ever consider the temperance explanation--it's only true if you really want it to be.

My point is that if you twist the Bible hard enough--if you're willing to assume that the commonsense explanation that 99 out of 100 readers would walk away with is completely wrong if it doesn't support a particular theory--then you can make the Bible say just about anything you want. This is why so many fundamentalists disagree with each other about what the single obvious meaning of Scripture is--because while fundamentalism aims to create a single stable meaning, in fact, like any preconceived notion, it just acts as a license to distort whatever literal meaning might otherwise be extracted from a given text. If their preconcieved idea that the Bible couldn't possibly include drinking led them so far astray, how do you know that your preconceived idea that the Bible couldn't possibly contain contradictions isn't leading you down the same garden path?

And for the record, I studied the Bible seriously for many years and have read it cover to cover multiple times.

pharoah

The real contradiction in the stories is not how he died, but who purchased the field. Was it Judas or the priests?

I'm afraid that you've erected and destroyed a straw man here. No one that I'm aware of has such a working definition of inerrancy. Everyone is well aware of the difference between a story recording someone as telling a lie and a story itself being a lie. They aren't mutually exclusive BTW. Give us a little credit here, we all graduated from elementary school.

RexT

When I said "NO ONE KNOWS", I meant that god cannot be empirically verified. Of course, god may yet exist, but without empirical verification, we do a disservice to ourselves and to others when we insist that we know god exists. No one here is opposed to anyone claiming to believe god exists, but to claim to know god in the fact of sincere and intelligent people who have not known god, is an insult to their intelligence and to their dignity. In this regard, the bible is among the greatest offenders of human dignity, along with other religious texts.

All that you and I or anyone can know is our own hearts and minds. Yet, even these are a great mystery of which we know very little. I personally have experienced moments of awakening to levels within my self that I would consider to be divine. Hence, I have a difficult time rejecting the possibility of god. Nevertheless, I would not claim that god exists, even if I did know god existed, unless I could give some evidence that others could relate to and understand. Since I cannot do that, I must fall back on the default position that NO ONE KNOWS. The bible does not rise to the level of such evidence, as many here have carefully explained.

Even if you did know god exists and even if the bible did present some type of evidence, you should at least be mindful of the confusion it also presents. By ignoring that confusion and placing the blame of misunderstanding on everyone that sees this confusion, you only convince others of your own unwillingness to confront what they see so clearly. So not only does the bible present conflicting views to their eyes, you deal with that by telling them that the problem stems from them and not the bible. That is not the truth. If I see contradiction in a book, any book, and you tell me that there is something wrong with my eyes, who am I going to trust?

Also, I have noticed you often lean on logic and reason, but there is not a separate branch of logic that only applies to religion. If one is going to trust logic in one case it must be trusted in every case. I would not suggest that logic is the only means of knowing something about the world, but if logic is going to be used to support the inerrancy of a text, then logic is appropriate to attack it as well.

Your position seems to be that one cannot analyze the bible, that it must be treated as a unified whole. The problem with this is that to determine if the bible is a unified whole, one must analyze it to see if its parts are consistent. There are many ways to analyze a text, but perhaps the easiest is to see if its narritive is consistent. Thereby, we can overlook certain individual words or phrases that might appear on the surface to conflict, as long as the overall narritive remains consistent. Unfortunately, the bible fails even this simple test, and others have pointed out several examples of such failure.

Finally, I have noticed that you are completely unwilling to take a critical look at the text, to study it in as unbiased a way as you possibly can. Your approach, which you have declared openly, is that the bible is the inerrant word of god. Others have pointed out to you that if you begin with the conclusion of an argument and work back toward justification of the conclusion you have failed on account of committing a common fallacy. That is a sort of, the-ends-justifies-the-means approach to logic, and will not work. So, if you are williing to trample logic, you have not really harmed logic per se, instead, you have denied yourself the right to use logic to support your argument.

Rex

mdd344

Rex,
The fact is no one can remove him or herself from their presuppositions. The Atheist comes to the Bible disbelieving in it. The Agnostic doesn't know and doesn't think anyone can know--and so comes to the Bible with that in mind. The Christian believes God wrote the Bible and it is perfect from cover to cover, so they read it that way.

Now perhaps you can explain to me how any of the three above can actually step outside themselves and actually (in an unbiased way, apart from any and all presuppositions) "study" anything, particularly the Bible?

Regarding the text, my simple point is this: if there is a problem in an interpretation, who am I going to blame? Me, or God? If I believe (and I do) that the Bible teaches that God is perfect, then the blame must lie with me, and never with God. To blame God would be to contradict the very thing I believe.

The Bible can be analyzed, logically. But in order to do so rationally one (on either the Atheistic side, Christian side, or Agnostic side) must analyze it properly.

I know some religious people who use what they call 'proof texts' for a belief they hold. When that issue arises, they will point to a verse, and say 'there it is, that proves it.' Well it is possible that it might, but it is equally as possible (and more probable) that it does not.

They believe it does, but the Bible evidence as a whole might discredit them (but they'll not admit it!). Proof testing is okay WHEN the text is used on context.

A text used out of context and used in a way where its teaching is made to contradict other parts of the Bible teaching on that subject (all in their proper contexts too as used, btw) represents a false and incorrect interpretation. The 'proof text' has become a 'pretext' which is worthless as far as truth is concerned.

How about an example? There is a passage in the Bible which explicitly states (actually, there are two) that one must do something to have his sins removed. I am being general, so as not to get bogged down in details, as this is only an illustration. 3/4 of the evangelical world take those two passages and (I kid you not) actually teach exactly the opposite of what is explicitly stated (in context, used correctly, in keeping with the subject Biblically btw).

Now where is the fault? What is the problem? It is not merely interpretation styles that are the problem, though that is part of it. It is not sincerity that is the problem, although in some cases it probably is a problem. It is a combination of people's presuppositions, hermeneutics, and the like, that combine into a force which an individual seems to be unwilling to leave behind.

The Bible is like any other book in that the writers expected one to handle it properly. I dislike math a great deal. But I know that when I took math I had to use my math text book properly. I could not start at chapter 16, nor could I mix up the formula's etc. I like English. I know in my English text book there are rules that must be followed--there are also exceptions to the rules. The writers of it insist that I handle the whole of the book correctly IF I want to learn English properly.

My point is how can we seek to find the truth when we perhaps aren't willing to do what it takes to find it? And to be fair, I ask that of myself as well.

JCS

How about a Christian with his presuppositions that studies the Bible but then comes to the conclusion no Omni being could have wrote or inspired the book? Just asking.

Amaleq13

Actually, many (if not most) of the atheists here originally came to the Bible believing it as Christians. Some are even former fundamentalist ministers!

You assertion, therefore, that one cannot "remove him or herself from their presuppositions" is demonstrably false as is the implication that no one can ever consider the text except through those presuppositions.

And, before your knickers get knotted, I am well aware that this works both ways. There are certainly examples of hard-core atheists experiencing some sort of epiphany as they read the Bible and embracing it with faith as a result.

In my experience, however, there is a significant difference between the two. The former group tends to change their beliefs subsequent to a rational consideration of the text (ie treating it like any other collection of ancient texts) while the latter tends to change subsequent to an emotionally personal response to something in the text.

The bottom line is that "we" don't reject your claims and arguments because of our presuppositions but because "we" find those claims and arguments to be false and/or fundamentally flawed.

Jack the Bodiless

Furthermore, it is not true that "The Christian believes God wrote the Bible and it is perfect from cover to cover, so they read it that way". Inerrancy is not a core Christian doctrine.