emotional

OK. Story time. May seem a little unrelated at first, but the point will be clear soon enough.

When I was a little kid, one of the TV programmes I enjoyed most was the Transformers. You know, Robots In Disguise, Good Autobots, Evil Decepticons, Optimus Prime, Megatron and all that. I was an avid fan of the Transformers, I watched nearly all the parts, and I remember many to this day.

Well, there was a group of Decepticons called the Constructicons - robots who assumed the shape of various construction machines (tractors, mixers etc). The first time the Constructicons came into the scene, Megatron took construction machine parts to a factory (if I recall correctly) and built new Decepticons out of them. That was the first instance of their origination. However, it is a mistery how Megatron gave them personalities. For I recall, in a later chapter, called "Dawn of War", taking place in Cybertron, that every Transformer had a personality given to him by a creature named Vector Sigma. Indeed, when Starscream (Megatron's second-in-command and double-crosser) later makes the Combaticons out of various army vehicles, he takes them to Cybertron to have Vector Sigma give them personalities. The Constructicons, it seems, had no need for this procedure.

It becomes worse. A yet later chapter depicts the Constructicons as already existing in Cybertron, as Autobots! And they were turned into Decepticons by a sort of robot (I don't remember its name) that made Decepticons out of Autobots. That is, they were created not on Earth by Megatron, but already on Cybertron, and were originally good Autobots, and only later became Evil Decepticons.

Thus far for my reminiscing. You might be tempted to call these accounts contradictions. But why must it be so? Let us treat them as mere difficulties. You say that they cannot be harmonized? Why so? I don't think the accounts contradict (after all, it's all one Transformers cartoon!), but complement each other. The Constructicons were originally created on Cybertron as Autobots, using Vector Sigma to give them personalities, and later, during the coming of the Transformers (through the Ark, which carried them from beleaguered Cybertron) to Earth, they were turned to evil Decepticons under Megatron's order, and were "born again" or "created anew" as Decepticons, with personality changed, not created, which explains why there was no need for Vector Sigma later on.

Right. What do you have to say? Sounds ridiculous, or not? Well, why not harmonize? Or, to be more exact, why harmonize? Really, why is it that people, when they find a difficulty in a film or cartoon, don't try to settle it, whereas in the Bible it merits harmonization? Oh, I reckon theists will be outraged for comparing the Holy Bible to Transformers, will they not? But in fact the comparison holds much water: both the Bible and the Transformers are a series of successive narratives collected one after the other and assembled in a more or less coherent order into one batch. Here and there the collectors of the individual parts had a slip and forgot to verify that one part should not contradict another. There is no reason to try to harmonize Biblical inconsistencies any more than there is reason to harmonize the contradictory chapters in the Transformers series.

Ultimately, the only cause for people's wish to harmonize Biblical inconsistencies is the "magic spell" of the Bible, the "holy promise": the Bible claims to be the Word of God, and many people wish it to be true (or believe so traditionally), hence the drive to harmonize the various contradictions. Note, however, that Muslim polemicists against the Bible are only too eager to point out the same contradictions which atheists show, and conversely, Muslims rush to harmonize the various inconsistencies which atheists and Christians point to them in the Qur'an. It all depends on which axe you have to grind.

(edited to fix typos)

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: devnet ]</p>

Toto

I predict that you won't get any theists answering this, and some of them will have my excuse of - "gee I wish I were young enough to understand this (still knowing what I know now, of course.)".

On a more serious note, no one needs to harmonize literary works, but every society based on laws has to harmonize the laws. If the Constitution contains a provision that guarantees freedom of religion, and the legislature passes a law outlawing Wiccan chaplains in prison, or Santeria animal sacrifice, or if animal cruelty laws are applied to animal sacrifice, someone has to decide what the law is. In the US, that person is a judge, and there are standards for harmonizing laws that lawyers learn, and spend their lives applying to the output of the legislatures.

(The origin of "apologist" is basically a lawyer in church law.)

The fundamentalists think that scripture is more like law than like a literary work. Obviously an aesthetic mistake. There's some old proverb about how people who love the law are like people who love sausage - neither one should watch how they are made. . .

-DM-

In my opinion, a book that had been inspired by a perfect and omnipotent "God" would not need the help of apologists working diligently for thousands of years to "harmonize" the "difficulties." Such a book should and would be obviously superior in any and every way, shape, and form to anything ever put together by mere mortals.

That such is not the case, however, seems obvious to me.

There are, nevertheless, several theistic "arguments" which can be offered to "explain" this need for harmonization. One of the popular offerings is that our perception of the Bible is off, that if we would just have "faith" and let the Holy Spirit into our lives, it would all make sense and we'd see that there are no difficulties.

The problem with THAT argument, however, is that it just doesn't accord with reality else we wouldn't have sincere Christians praying for the guidance of the Holy Spirit yet disagreeing on the meaning of different Bible verses. The fact that we have tens of thousands of different Christian denominations, each with their minor (and sometimes major) differences tends to provide evidence that the so-called Holy Spirit isn't any better than "God" the Father in inspiring correct understanding.

--Don--

Apikorus

There are different levels of harmonization. Indeed within the Hebrew Bible itself, the Chronicler, writing ca. 400 BCE, harmonized many problematic and contradictory elements in the Deuteronomistic History. (E.g. 1 Chr 20:5 "corrects" what is likely an authentic tradition in 2 Sam 21:19 wherein Elhanan (not David!) killed the Philistine champion Goliath, resolving the contradiction with 1 Sam 17. The Chronicler turns the Ephraimite Samuel into a Levite, presumably so his sacrifices are not aberrant. Etc.) In the New Testament, Matthew harmonizes some theologically inconvenient details in Mark, reworking the story of Jesus cursing the fig tree, for example.

There is great variation in the degree and quality of harmonization employed by those who view the Bible itself as a divine, coherent whole. Restricting attention to the Hebrew Bible, which is my main interest, rabbinic midrash is as varied and inventive as it is exhaustive. Even a committed pashtan such as myself must marvel at the creativity of the midrashim. The christological hermeneutic, on the other hand, strikes me as extremely boring. Whereas the rabbis take all the loose ends of the HB and interpolate and/or tie them together in interesting and often unexpected ways, the Christian reading invariably attempts to tie them all to the figure of Jesus, and the effect is to flatten the text.

The mindless knee-jerk harmonization employed by modern fundamentalist Christians is so artless, it is a waste of time pressing the point with such people. Suffice it to say that using the very same exegetical strategies, virtually any text can be defended as divine and perfect.

[ January 06, 2002: Message edited by: Apikorus ]</p>

Toto

Am I a prophet or what? No theists have shown up on this thread.

emotional

Nah, that couldn't quite be called prophecy, because the high probability makes it a cinch. Like when I "prophesy" (in my article <a href="http://www.geocities.com/stmetanat/templemount.html" target="_blank">Temple Mount Warnings</a>) that after a global eschatological war there'll be no Messiah or Divine Revelation, just a few survivors trying to build civilization anew.

To my main point: any proposal of harmonizing Bible inconsistencies, or reconciling between the Bible and science, is an underlying statement that the book has some special status. What about Iliad inconsistencies? How about reconciling between Beowulf and science?