wenbur84

This is my first post on this website, and I decided to start with a question to be offered up for different opinions. I attend a "Christian" school but do not consider mysellf to be Christian. I have read the Bible all the way through as well as several criticisms and have simply found too many contradictions and too many lies to believe in the Bible. Once the kids in my school found out that I was not a Christian they went crazy, of course, and demanded to know why not. When I gave them my answers they came back with the classic "well, the Bible is absolute truth" or "sometimes we cannot understand God's will." So here is my question: What is the best way to refute the accuracy of the Bible and posit reasonable questions about Christianity and its truthfullness??? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Philosoft

I'd say the first thing is to send this topic over to BC&A...

Asha'man

Welcome, wenbur84!

Stay here and learn as much as you can. Watch the debates, pay attention to the apologetics, and learn how to spot good logical arguments. Learn to spot all of the thousands of evasions that xians use, and be ready to call them on it. (If God didn’t mean for us to understand it, why did he put it in his book?) Learn to debate without getting flustered or angry or ruffled, just laugh every time your opponent says something stupid.

Personally, I like to pick a few key atrocities in the Bible and use them to make the point. Take a careful look at Genesis and the garden of eden, where God makes a test that Adam and Eve cannot pass, and then condemns the rest of humanity for that mistake. Use the great flood as an example of God’s genocidal tendencies. Use Moses’ terrorist attacks against the innocent children of Egypt, with God actually preventing the Pharaoh from giving in.

Then, pick a few absolute contradictions, like the name of Joseph’s father in the genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, or the contradictory accounts of who was in the empty(?) tomb when the rock was rolled aside. Learn them well, as well as all the apologetics that people have applied to them. If the Bible has such obvious mistakes, how can it possibly be trusted?

I like to stick to strictly biblical arguments, the Bible is clearly the most vulnerable point in their theology.

Kosh

And keep your emotions in check. Otherwise, the arguments just become "religious".

Family Man

Remember, also, if they wish to claim that it is absolute truth, it is their burden to establish that.

I'd also recommend reading some mainstream biblical scholarship: authors like E.P. Sanders, Raymond Brown, Dominick Crossan, John Meier among others. Your local library is likely to have them. You'll learn that modern scholars believe that many of the stories in the bible -- such as the birth narratives -- were simply made up. The more you learn about how even fairly conservative Christian scholars in the mainstream view the bible, you'll have a handful of arguments against the simplistic view that the bible is "absolute truth."

Family Man

Let's not forgot our very own library:
II Library

braces_for_impact

Also let's not forget that people when confronted with fundamental truths held dear, do not take kindly to being told they are wrong. Especially when they have based their lives and personal identity on the ideas you "debunk".

The key is research, do your own on the topics that interest you. Learn the common apologetics to your arguments and never appear to attack, lest people become defensive. Always remember the burden of proof is on the one making the claim.

Someone earlier said something about being able to construct a logical argument, and spotting illogical mistakes in other's arguments. Not only does this allow you to organize your own thoughts much more efficiently, but even when sometimes ignorant of particular subject matter you will be able to find weaknesses in your opponents' claims.

By far to me the best idea is to be prepared. If you wish to explain how you arrived at your beliefs (or lack of them) and you have researched it thoroughly, you appear much more confident in you premises. It (9 times out of 10) will turn out you have put forth much more effort and thought into your argument, and it shows. Many times a theist has not put that much thought into their ideals, and has been spoon fed the arguments they regurgitate much like a parrot.

One last point, STAY ON TOPIC if the debate is serious in nature. Opponents debating from a weak position love to squirm from topic to topic.

malookiemaloo

Don't be put off my cynics and sceptics. I cannot answer all the difficult parts of the Bible, or apparant contradictions but over the years it has always amazed me when you 'dig deep' how much you uncover which can explain problem areas.

Personally I find the resurrection accounts fascinating although they have their own difficulties. When I understand then all BC & A will hear from me big time!

malookiemaloo

GreggLD1

Among hardcore fans of many weekly television dramas (particularly those in the science fiction and fantasy categories, like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" or "Enterprise,") this practice is known as "fanwanking"--making up convoluted explanations for obvious plot holes, inconsistencies, contradictions, and continuity breaks.

It's understandable that screenplays for fictional TV series, written by fallible human beings whose primary goal is to entertain and who are working under serious time constraints, will contain mistakes. However, the bible was supposedly written through the inspiration of a perfect, omnipotent God over a period of 3 or 4 thousand years and, according to Christians, it contains our Creator's plan for our eternal salvation--very serious business, to be sure. Therefore, we have every right to expect that it should be simple, direct, straightforward, and mistake-free, and we shouldn't have to "dig deep" to make sense of the "problem areas." After all, our salvation is supposed to be a free gift--we aren't supposed to have to work for it (and spending long hours digging into the Bible in order to relieve one's concerns about its reliability qualifies as work in my book), nor should we have to rely on priests and others who spend a lot of time studying the Bible to tell us what it means.

If you want to argue that the Bible makes sense if you just dig deep enough or look at it in a certain way, that's fine. But then you need to revise your claims about the God who supposedly inspired its writing. A perfect, loving, omnipotent God would have done a much better job of getting his salvation message across.

Gregg

Tercel

Hold on a moment, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater here...

As Family Man has pointed out, even many Conservative scholars reject Inerrancy. They do however accept that the Bible was inspired by God - see Vinnie's article on the subject for an explanation. (personally I am happy with either Natural Inpiration, Qualitative Inspiration - as described via the teacher/child/painting analogy, or as described by "Scripture serves the purpose for which God intended it")

Inerrancy does not equal Christianity, and the failure of the bad joke that is Inerrancy does not mean Christianity is wrong. If, Wenbur, that is your reason for not being a Christian, then it is not a good one.

Gregg's explanation is rather dubious and makes a number of core assumptions that the vast majority of Christians would not share.
"Inspiration" can have a number of different meanings as the article above explains. Inpiration need not mean "Verbal Plenary Inspiration" (The Fundamentalist interpretation that God decided every word). God may be omnipotent yes, but Christians assert that God freely limits himself in order that we might have free will so that our actions have true moral significance. If you assert that the writers of the Bible were incapable of recording a falsity you deny their nature as free and fallible human beings. The teacher could have shoved the students aside and painted the picture himself, but he didn't - nobody asserts the Bible magically descended from heaven: The books were written by humans and selected by humans.

Why? Virtually no Christians today would assert that knowledge of the Bible, Jesus, or the plan described therein is necessary for salvation. Very few, for example, would comdemn babies who die to eternal suffering, or those who faithfully followed God in the Old-Testament before Jesus or the NT to it either. If the Bible is not necessary (but presumably is sufficent when acted upon) to salvation, why is that then "serious business"?

A reasonable expectation if the Bible was supposed to be directly composed by an omnipotent God who wanted you to be saved and your salvation depended utterly upon that Bible. Christianity however, does not teach these things (only the 2nd one of the above 3), only the extremists do. As it is you have no "right" to expect anything.

It is only supposed to be "a free gift" by comparison to a certain other point of view. To simply call it "a free gift" is not the whole story (unless one is a Calvinist of course) - God does not just hand out free gifts of salvation as fancy takes him, it is dependent upon us. It is only "a free gift" by comparision to the position of salvation by obedience to the law which would have us obey every single one of a set of arbitrary statutes for salvation.

Only if you hold the strange position that knowledge of that salvation message in this life is necessary for salvation. (as opposed to knowledge after death, or no knowledge at all)