lpetrich

There has been a lot of haggling here over details of Bible translations and the meanings of obscure words and passages.

I think that such haggling is strong counterevidence to the divine-inspiration hypothesis; an omnipotent being who wanted to convey a message to all of humanity would choose a more convenient medium than a text that is full of ambiguities and contradictions, let alone put up with numerous mistranslations and misinterpretations.

Such a medium could be implanting a revelation into the mind of every human being who has ever lived; that would get around all the transmission and translation problems. And interpretation problems would be solved by making the message as unambiguous as possible, which ought not to be impossible for an omnipotent being.

emotional

Get ready for a Free Will Defence ("God didn't make automatons!") lobbed on you...

The argument against revelation in human language forms a goodly part of Thomas Paine's objections to the Bible in his Age of Reason. He says there, for reasons you mention, that human language is unsuitable to be the vehicle of divine revelation; the only divine revelation is the creation (nature), says Paine, because it needs no translation (observed the same to everyone) and is unchanging (oh, let's forgive old Paine for that, he was writing in the 18th century, before Darwin...)

-DM-

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that a perfect, omnipotent, omniscient, and loving "God" could not have perfectly inspired the authors, copyists, translators, Bible study teachers, and readers of the Bible to get it right so that there is no question as to what is intended. In fact, I believe that such a "God" could have, should have, and would have done so had "He" anything to do with the writing of that book and were the so-called Holy Spirit (allegedly acting in the lives of believers) a fact.

That such is not the case seems obvious to me. To me this is strong evidence either that:
1) the Bible is not inspired by "God," or
2) "God" is a trickster, or
3) "God" is incompetent (i.e., not perfect and omnipotent)
4) the Holy Spirit does not help believers to understand the Bible, or
4) some combination of the above.

--Don--