The Infalibility of The Bible FAQ

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

I'm just going to weigh in here. I'm not much of a Bible guy myself, though I have read it and know it fairly well. If you believe in God, you should believe that he is capable of overseeing the writing of the Bible to say exactly what he wants it to, in a literal sense. If you're going to believe in the Bible, I say you have to believe in it literally. If you open it to interpretation, you can interpret it to mean anything you want it to. Then you aren't a follower of God, you're a follower of yourself.

[Guest SP-1]

Thanks, RatsMilk. I've been trying to figure out how to say just that.

[Guest TheZsaszHorsemen]

I'm just going to weigh in here. I'm not much of a Bible guy myself, though I have read it and know it fairly well. If you believe in God, you should believe that he is capable of overseeing the writing of the Bible to say exactly what he wants it to, in a literal sense. If you're going to believe in the Bible, I say you have to believe in it literally. If you open it to interpretation, you can interpret it to mean anything you want it to. Then you aren't a follower of God, you're a follower of yourself.

Bull. God inspired Humans to do it. Those humans had their own input into it, they wern't slaves.

 

Plus with all the inconsistancies in the Gospels alone, you can't totally believe the Bible word-for-word.

[Guest SP-1]

Now, are these true inconsistensies from the original versions, or merely a slightly different wording from a translation?

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

Bull. God inspired Humans to do it. Those humans had their own input into it, they wern't slaves.

 

Plus with all the inconsistancies in the Gospels alone, you can't totally believe the Bible word-for-word.

You say they weren't slaves like God told you that himself. If God wanted them to be slaves, they were slaves. God, being omnipotent, should not be hindered by the interpretations and spin of a human, especially when it involves something as significant as the Bible.

There really are no concrete inconsistancies in the Bible, they only appear that way on the surface.

[Guest Samurai_Goat]

I think I found some website with a bunch of contradictions, but it'll take me a few to find it (I lost all my favorite places when the hard drive crashed)

[Guest Samurai_Goat]

Ok, that was quick. http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/contra.html

 

Now, I'm going to say right now that some of these are pretty darn nitpicky, but I thought it was interesting. But I'm not going to say this is 100% accurate, because I will admit right here I didn't research this, so, if it is in actuality the worst anti-bible site this side of...a really really bad bible site, feel free to say so, so that I may never again pollute the eyes of the smartmark crew.

[Guest SP-1]

I'll look over it and also go check some of my sources and see. Like IDRM mentioned, most contradictions are surface things that do indeed match up once you get into it.

[Guest Big Poppa Popick]

fellas...question

 

i asked sp about this awhile ago

 

we know about satan's fall from grace and banishment from heaven, and that some of revelation acts as a parallel to it.

 

but, is the fall covered in any of the testaments? i cant find it anywhere

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

The fall is talked about in Isaiah.

 

"How art thou fallen from heaven,

O Lucifer, son of the morning!

How art thou cut down to the ground,

which didst weaken the nations!

For thou hast said in thine heart,

I will ascend into heaven,

I will exalt my throne above the stars of God.

I will ascend above the heights of the clouds,

I will be like the most high."

Isaiah 14:12-14

 

That's one of a few Biblical passages I've committed to memory. I like to quote it to people before I cap them.

[Guest The Hamburglar]

Now, I usually piss about with this religion lark seeing as I tend to think its a little pointless, but I do have a few serious questions.

 

1. This is the principle one - how is there any meaning or justification behind the story of Abraham and his son. I don't care which way you spin it, that is a fucking sick story with a truly disturbing moral. To make a man try to kill his son and the man actually doing it is sadistic and truly unpleasant. I see no merit of any kind in it.

 

2. Why is the Bible so repressed when it comes to sex? As I recall, one of the principle sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was wanking. What's wrong with wanking? What harm does a good hearty wank do to anyone?

 

3. Why is the Old Testament God such a bastard in general? Love doesn't seem to enter it, just control and wrath. I honestly don't think some of that stuff is meant to be metaphorical and even if it is its hardly loving. The Passover anyone?

 

Do any of you religious folks read William Blake? Seems that New Testament God is the Lamb, but Old Testament God is the Tyger.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

1. Yes, it's a sick story. See your third point. What God did to Job was much worse. That's just how God was at the time.

 

2. Wanking was not an issue. The Bible says nothing against it. Truly the only rules God has about sex are: Don't be gay. Don't fuck unless you're married.

 

3. God's fucked up, no denying it.

 

I read Blake, but I'm not exactly religious.

[Guest RobJohnstone]

I'm just going to weigh in here. I'm not much of a Bible guy myself, though I have read it and know it fairly well. If you believe in God, you should believe that he is capable of overseeing the writing of the Bible to say exactly what he wants it to, in a literal sense. If you're going to believe in the Bible, I say you have to believe in it literally. If you open it to interpretation, you can interpret it to mean anything you want it to. Then you aren't a follower of God, you're a follower of yourself.

Bull. God inspired Humans to do it. Those humans had their own input into it, they wern't slaves.

 

Plus with all the inconsistancies in the Gospels alone, you can't totally believe the Bible word-for-word.

No, not slaves. Just servants to GOD. Slavery is forced upon people, you can choose to serve God or not to.

 

--Rob

[Guest Samurai_Goat]

Allrighty, SP. Have fun.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

I wouldn't mind addressing those discrepancies, but shit, there's a lot of them. I will make this very broad statement, which should cover a great deal of them.

 

Any inconsistency between the Old Testament and New Testament is moot. The New Testament rendered the Old Testament obsolete, and that is a Biblical doctrine.

[Guest godthedog]

2. Wanking was not an issue. The Bible says nothing against it. Truly the only rules God has about sex are: Don't be gay. Don't fuck unless you're married.

IIRC, god killed a man (whose name escapes me) in genesis for wasting his semen (i.e., pulling out). wanking is most certainly doing the same thing. wanking also involves lust, and jesus said that lusting after a woman in one's heart is as bad as sleeping with her (again, IIRC).

 

the story of abraham being told to sacrifice isaac is indeed a sick, twisted, disturbing story. when i was 12 or 13 i was legitimately scared to death that god would try to test my faith by telling me to rape and kill my own mother. the message i always got from it was not "god will never steer you wrong." his order goes against what he later told moses in the 10 commandments, so the message i got was "the direct word of god is to be taken over the rules he indirectly lays out for you." in other words, that god can overturn himself like the supreme court if he talks to you directly. this kind of thing seems extremely dangerous to me, because schizophrenics can hypothetically have god tell them to kill people & be biblically justified for it.

 

right now, i'm actually reading 'fear and trembling' by soren kierkegaard, which seems to be entirely a dissection of the abraham & isaac story and what it means for belief & faith & suffering. very interesting, very beautiful reading so far.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

IIRC, god killed a man (whose name escapes me) in genesis for wasting his semen (i.e., pulling out). wanking is most certainly doing the same thing. wanking also involves lust, and jesus said that lusting after a woman in one's heart is as bad as sleeping with her (again, IIRC).

That was Onan. Pulling out was not his sin, it was that God had ordered him to impregnate the widow of his late brother. He didn't want to, and so pulled out, therefore disobeying God.

As for lusting, that's all relative. Biblically, you should be able to wank while fantasizing about your wife, and that would not be sin.

[Guest SP-1]

Now, I usually piss about with this religion lark seeing as I tend to think its a little pointless, but I do have a few serious questions.

 

1. This is the principle one - how is there any meaning or justification behind the story of Abraham and his son. I don't care which way you spin it, that is a fucking sick story with a truly disturbing moral. To make a man try to kill his son and the man actually doing it is sadistic and truly unpleasant. I see no merit of any kind in it.

 

2. Why is the Bible so repressed when it comes to sex? As I recall, one of the principle sins of Sodom and Gomorrah was wanking. What's wrong with wanking? What harm does a good hearty wank do to anyone?

 

3. Why is the Old Testament God such a bastard in general? Love doesn't seem to enter it, just control and wrath. I honestly don't think some of that stuff is meant to be metaphorical and even if it is its hardly loving. The Passover anyone?

 

Do any of you religious folks read William Blake? Seems that New Testament God is the Lamb, but Old Testament God is the Tyger.

1. God was testing Abraham to see how far he would go. But if I recall the story correctly, and Angel appeared and revealed this to Abraham and told him not to do it.

 

2. The thing about sex, from a Christian standpoint, is that it is something to be shared between man and wife. Christians should actually have a loving, caring sex life if they're married, it's encouraged. Paul even wrote that it was good, but to take a break every now and then for prayer, but to come back together afterwards to avoid temptations to go looking elsewhere. But sex is a part of marriage. As I've said in other threads: I have little problem believing my wife and I will have a healthy, loving, fulfilling sex life. Just in the proper context (marriage).

 

Onan's sin was disobeying God by not finishing out the act and impregnating her. The problem of masturbation is lusting, which is something in the thought life that should be disciplined. It's an issue of purity.

 

3. That's something I need to find in some of the stuff I've come across. I'm sure I read something about it, I just don't remember. But one thing to keep in mind is that in the Old Testament, God was maneuvering things around politically and protecting a bloodline for the arrival of Christ. The OT is basically about God setting the stage for Jesus arriving in the world. Also, Jesus hadn't yet died to cover over sin, so whomever felt God's wrath were generally people that weren't in the business of sacrificing or whatever to follow him and seek forgiveness. The price of sin is death, and people God went up against were enemies of the people that followed Him, who sacrificed and whatknot to have their sins cleansed.

 

--SP

[Guest DrTom]

If you believe in God, you should believe that he is capable of overseeing the writing of the Bible to say exactly what he wants it to, in a literal sense.

I have a problem with that, IDRM: it goes against the Doctrine of Free Will. Granted, that's tenuous to begin with when you have a god like the Judeo-Christian one, but you seem to be saying God acted as some kind of editor, striking the humans' interpretations and making sure what He wanted was what made it to print. That's refusing to allow people to exercise their free will, which is supposed to be a gift from God anyway.

 

If you're going to believe in the Bible, I say you have to believe in it literally.

Then everyone should be a Fundamentalist? Do you really want people to raise their children according to things set forth in Leviticus? "Happy is he who dasheth thy little one's heads against stone." Obviously, this means that good Christian parents should cruelly beat their children, lest they be seen as unhappy in the eyes of God. According to the book of Joshua, doesn't the sun revolve around the earth? There are plenty more examples, all of them equally frightening and ridiculous, if you really want people to take everything in the Bible literally.

[Guest SP-1]

Joshua never says the sun revolves around the Earth. At least I don't remember it. Do provide the passage where it does if I am wrong.

 

God stopped the sun in the sky. AKA, God halted the passage of the day. There are a number of ways God could have done that, considering Time is a creation itself that can surely be manipulated by God.

 

And I don't believe that inspiring what the biblical writers wrote takes away their free will. If they were willingly in the service of God, then writing down what He wanted was certainly within the realm of fulfilling a choice that they themselves made. It's like speaking in tongues. The Spirit speaks the language through you, at the prompting of God, but you pursue the gifts to help in your relationship with Him. IMO

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

DrTom- No, I don't want everyone to be a Fundamentalist. My relationship with the Bible is a bit odd, as I don't believe it to be the unquestionable word of God myself, but I will often defend it as such, as there are several misinterpretations on both sides of the fence, in my view. I guess I just believe in fairness. Personally, I'm not sure what I am, but it's somewhere between agnosticism, atheism, and humanism.

And even being a Fundamentalist, the Levitical teaching shouldn't have much of an impact on our lives today. The new covenant cancels the old. Today's Fundamentalist shouldn't be beating their children any more than they should be making burnt offerings.

On the free will issue, I suppose that would bring up the issue of predestination again. God, being omniscient, would choose as his vessels, those who he knows will not distort his message. It's not really fair, but God is quite unfair in many ways. Why would he favor the Jews as his chosen people, for example, especially when they rejected him time after time after time.

[Guest Brian]

Well, I'll weigh in.

 

Despite being Christian, I can admit that some of the Bible is flawed. It results from a lot of bad translating over the years and the Chruch's non-acceptance of a lot of scriptures that have a lot of significance but aren't included in the Bible. Without better translation and inclusion of a lot of those passages, the Bible itself will be flawed. Plus the fact that much of the New Testament had to be written to fit accordingly with the Old Testament.

[Guest SP-1]

I have to disagree on the bad translating thing. I'll check on it again and retract this, but if I'm not mistaken the original texts have been remarkably preserved.

 

As for some boks not being included in the final version of the Bible that we have today, I chalk that up to God knowing what's in there and Him believing that that's His final word and what he wishes to be in there. If He wanted an Apocryphal book in there I think it would have wound up in there.

 

IMO, anyway.

[Guest The Hamburglar]

As regards the wanking, if I recall correctly, one of the sins committed by the people of Sodom and Gomorrah was "spilling their seed on the ground" - masturbation. As for Abraham, God was just testing him? That still makes it sick as hell. It places God as a totalitarian cult leader and Abraham as a brainwashed zombie. I can't see any merit in it. I don't believe in any of this stuff, but I respect the teachings of the New Testament because its really got a very humanitarian message. Its just that the Old Testament seems so incongruous when the two are put together in the Bible.

[Guest Brian]

A colleague of mine says that there were at least three generations of translations before the bible became it's current state (which I think is the King James version). Between those, parts of the New Testament were rewritten to specifically match parts of the Old Testament. When the new books were discovered, which were the infancy gospels and gospels of Thomas (original text, no less), the church disregarded them and even went as far to call Thomas' writings heresy. The infancy gospels are extremely important as in part, they give a history of what happened to Jesus during the nearly thirty years he seemed to have been in exile in the bible (as there's next to nothing written). The Thomas gospels supposedly refute some of the changes made earlier, which could be very damaging to the church. And the church fails to recognize them.

[Guest Agent of Oblivion]

If masturbation truly is sin, then I've got a very sticky plane of hell reserved for me and me alone.

[Guest SP-1]

A colleague of mine says that there were at least three generations of translations before the bible became it's current state (which I think is the King James version). Between those, parts of the New Testament were rewritten to specifically match parts of the Old Testament. When the new books were discovered, which were the infancy gospels and gospels of Thomas (original text, no less), the church disregarded them and even went as far to call Thomas' writings heresy. The infancy gospels are extremely important as in part, they give a history of what happened to Jesus during the nearly thirty years he seemed to have been in exile in the bible (as there's next to nothing written). The Thomas gospels supposedly refute some of the changes made earlier, which could be very damaging to the church. And the church fails to recognize them.

Well the NT books weren't "discovered". They're not even books, really. Most of them are letters on Christian living written by the Apostles, and perfectly copied to be preserved as time went on. If I'm not mistaken. And the King James Version is in now way the most recent incarnation. You also have the more recent New International Version, the New Living Translation, etc. which are more standard English versions.

 

As for the Church failing to recognize them, again I say that falls under God's provision. If He wanted it in biblical canon accepted by His people, it would be in there. There are many books that are out there that claim alot of things, the Apocraphyl ones. The first thirty years of Jesus's life were not spent in exile, he was living a normal, albeit sinless life. He was a son, I'm pretty sure he took up carpentry, etc. And again, God is a God of order. Jesus' cousin, John the Baptist, spent some of that time preaching that the Messiah was on the way and such and began baptising people. Before Jesus made his entrance to the larger audience, John was giving warning, letting people know that something big was on the way. Then Jesus crossed paths with him and was recognized for who He was and that was the signal of the beginning of His ministry, which is where the Gospels pick up. His early life isn't detailed because ultimately it had little to do with salvation and wasn't important. Also: The apostles didn't know Jesus until he rounded them up as He began His earthly ministry, which is also around when the four Gospels begin.

 

There are apparently some Apocryphal writings detailing Jesus as a child, turning birds into clay and jumping off of roofs with friends but never getting hurt, healing his friends up to resume playtime. There's also another Angle mentioned, Raphael I believe, who doesn't come up in the Bible if I'm not mistaken. I don't take the Apocrypha very seriously, personally. It seems to cover materials that try to fill in gaps about Jesus that aren't very important at all and that speaks of men trying to explain something to themselves at any cost.

 

As for God testing Abraham: If you're the owner of a company that is going to be handling some very sensitive materials that are going to change the face of the world in years to come, are you just going to throw a guy at the head of things without giving Him a sense of how important things are? Now I believe God knew what Abraham would end up doing, and that the test was more for Abraham than for God. Abraham wasn't just some guy, Abraham was the man that God had chosen to single-handedly begin the nation that would be God's people. Abraham had promises and a mission. And I think God knew that it wasn't going to be easy and that Abraham needed to know for Himself how far we would go for God. People seem to be ready to pin something maliciously petty on God but fail to take into account the very serious things God was doing. Abraham was the beginning of the nation that would eventually culminate in Jesus, and thus Salvation. God was setting up a bloodline. There's a bigger picture than some malicious all powerful entity seeing if he can push a guy's buttons to burder his son.

[Guest IDrinkRatsMilk]

Masturbation was not an issue at Sodom and Gomorrah, it was homosexuality mainly. Speaking of God being sick, the deal was that two angels in human form were there visiting Lot, the only righteous man in the city. The townsfolk all came to Lot's door and demanding he send the angels out so they could rape them. Lot said no, but he offered them his two virgin daughters instead. God had no problem with it. They refused the daughters, but later they ended getting Lot drunk and having sex with him themselves in order to get pregnant by their father.

[Guest Brian]

Read the infacy gospels. I wasn't saying he spent thirty years in exile, I was saying that's what the bible makes it look like. The infancy gospels are all really good. He was giving ministries back in the day, trying to tell people. Part of Thomas and Mary's writings.

 

"It seems to cover materials that try to fill in gaps about Jesus that..."

 

Ehh, most of the new testament is just the apostles and later translater's trying to bridge the gaps between what Jesus said and what the Old Testament said.

 

Anyways, God doesn't make those decisions. A lot of political and corrupt clergy do, and always have.

[Guest SP-1]

Saying that robs God of his Sovereignty, however. And that just isn't so. God is fully in control of what went into the Bible and what didn't. To say He isn't is to say he isn't God.