PhilosopherJay

Hi sotto voce,

I guess I am still not making myself clear.
We use the word "logical" informally to refer to any kind of organized reasoning. However, it is also a specific academic discipline started by Aristotle about 2350 years ago.

In the discipline, a logical contradiction has a much higher standard than an ordinary contradiction or error. It is so high that you don't ordinarily find them in ordinary texts. Thus if you pick out a group of 50 or 60 texts at random, you will probably not come across any logical contradictions.

In philosophical works one often comes across logical contradictions. For example, Parmenides argues that the universe must be the perfect shape of a sphere at one point and at another point argues that it must have no form at all. This would qualify as a logical contradiction.

Perhaps a good analogy to the Bible mistakes would be the Star Trek Universe mistakes. The six television series, eleven feature films, hundreds of books and dozens of games contain numerous errors small and large. This is understandable as hundreds of different writers, editors and directors were involved their production.

Here's a list of 11 errors in the most recent, 2009, Star Trek movie as compiled by sci-fi film historian Richard S. Meyers in an article entitled "Most Illogical! 11 Mistakes In The New Star Trek Movie":

All of these are mistakes, but none of these involve logical contradictions. All may be explained away with ad hoc excuses.

The mistakes in the Bible (e.g. Jesus born in 4 C.E. just before Herod the Great's death and Jesus born in 6 C.E. during the time of Quirinus' governorship) are likewise not logical contradictions, but simply natural authorial errors inherent in the construction process.

There is nothing unusual or notable about them that I have found.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

sotto voce

After reading the last post, things seem to be getting increasingly confused.

Alleged mistakes, anyway.

Mistakes? Who cares?

Why is the Bible not a logical book?

It is alleged that the Bible arose from 'very different viewpoints'. If that is true, mistakes are completely beside the point. Where in the Bible are the logical contradictions akin to that of Parmenides?

Diogenes the Cynic

Does the Bible say God has ever tempted anybody?

Does the Bible say anybody has ever seen God's face?

stephan huller

Moses and the elders saw God with the first covenant

Diogenes the Cynic

So John is a liar then (1:18).

sotto voce

Reference?

Diogenes the Cynic

Genesis 32:30 has Jacob say he saw God face to face.

Exodus 33:23 says Moses saw God's ass.

aa5874

Well, both of them SAW his CHEEKS.:rolling:

mountainman

This question 'why is the Bible driven by pathos' can only be answered by a study of the history of the christian bible between the date of its very first widespread publication (c.325 CE) and the present day. We need to examine over sixteen centuries of the activities of the centalised state monotheistic christian cult.

The "Historia Augusta" and the "Historia Ecclesiastica" are equivalent 4th century novelistic mockumentaries. Each of these works is surrounded by suspicion of fabricated sources and forged documents.

We have been conditioned to accept the bible as an authority on ancient history whereas a study of ancient history has shown the bible to be blatantly false on many issues of history.

We have been conditioned to accept the bible as an authority on ethics, despite the barbaric ethics it mentions and despite the fact that it's authors essentially redeployed Greek wisdom literature as they found it when the NT was assembled.

We have been conditioned to respond to the PATHOS of a dying god and his persecuted followers as if the novel was history. Its pathetic.

sotto voce

So it's not to be the pejorative sense. Of course, the Bible has stimulated emotion since it was written. There is emotion in almost every relationship in those 66 books. Even the genealogies are predicated on the importance of human feeling; which is of paramount importance throughout, in the view of every author. It's actually the pathos of atonement that lies at the heart of the Bible, in its own view, providing the motivation to change behaviour to that of 'doing as you would be done by'. Of course, pathos, like all emotions, is based on rationality, based on man's biological relationship to matter and energy. It is the very rationality of the biblical revelation that is claimed to be a powerful catalyst in producing a concern for, even a love of both justice and mercy in human relations; and towards animals, too.

Aristotle got it wrong. It is Logos that stimulates Pathos, and Pathos that generates Ethos. An irrationality causes a theft, that causes pain, hunger or even death, and those events produce the morality of property.

It's been a long time since early Genesis was taught as history. (Except in some strange regions of the world, of course. )

That's not the case. The biblical message assumes moral sense, sense that existed in human society perhaps a million years ago; and the Bible is actually relevant only to those whose moral sense gives them a sense of inadequacy. One does not need a Bible, or any book at all, to be fully aware that violence and theft are 'wrong'. We learn this at an early age, because those are what one does not want to happen to oneself, especially as one is most vulnerable then. Most morality, and civil and criminal law, is based on the sanctity of persons and property, and government legislatures don't found law on the Bible.

It is more than possible that the Bible has had a shaming and civilising effect on most of the world. It was Constantine, for instance, obviously afraid of the Bible, who brought crucifixion to an end. It is more than possible that many monarchs have been forced to lay similar claim to Christian belief, because to do otherwise looked bad, and have been forced to limit or refrain from brutalities and atrocities that went untrammelled, BC. It is the perceived authority of the artisan from Galilee that makes the difference.