Does the Bible make God stupid and insecure?

[8enotto]

Societies changed. The ancient society related to the original writing of each small section of the bible is gone. With them went the original intention. What we have now is a discombobulated mess of sacred stories now widely published and liberally edited to meet the needs of each new segment of modern society.

It cannot possibly really make any sense to anyone in whole form. So we have to cherry pick and re-edit every sermon and pamphlet to say what we need.

But if one were to chase each phrase back to original texts do we really believe a Sumerian phrase stuck onto a late Roman phrase edited into Latin in 1238 by s monk who had a limited vocabulary of Greek is the word of any god?

 

[arthwollipot]

How has the bible changed? It's still the same bible as (apparently) almost 2000 years ago. What facts are changing when it comes to the bible that lead to changes in ideas?

Surely you can't be unaware that the Bible has been retranslated and reinterpreted literally hundreds of times over the years. Even one of the most-used reproductions of the Bible on the web - biblegateway.com - provides 59 modern and traditional English translations and many more in other languages. Every one of them says things slightly differently, some of them dramatically differently.

 

[David Mo]

You can't be seriously making a comparison between views of science changing with changing in facts/data, and changing the interpretation of the bible, can you?

Yes, scientific views change as new facts and evidence arise.

How has the bible changed? It's still the same bible as (apparently) almost 2000 years ago. What facts are changing when it comes to the bible that lead to changes in ideas?

Sure, changes in the perspective of the society changes, but that is not (supposed to be) upon what the religion is based. Or is it? Are you saying that Christianity just changes with the whims of the age? If Christians decide that slavery is ok, then it is ok. But if they decide it isn't, then it is wrong? What use is the bible, then?

I'm not equating science with religion. I am saying that changing the interpretation of the Bible to adapt it to commonly accepted facts and beliefs don't make Christians dishonest. This is what Galileo recommended. Was Galileo a dishonest man?

The fundamental difference between science and religion lies in the weight of facts and the use of a method of knowledge. But science also changes. This is what matters for my argument.

By the way, there is no believer in anything that does not. Including defenders of the literal interpretation of the Bible, they do not follow it literally. Or do they hate their parents as Jesus recommended? Or have they sold their jacket to buy a sword? Literal interpretation of the Bible is simply impossible. What characterizes the sects that call themselves literalists is the stupidity of maintaining certain nonsensical beliefs. Intelligent Christians adapt their beliefs to the knowledge of their time, including science. And that doesn't make they hypocrites or dishonest. More metaphysical, if anything.

 

[David Mo]

Surely you can't be unaware that the Bible has been retranslated and reinterpreted literally hundreds of times over the years. Even one of the most-used reproductions of the Bible on the web - biblegateway.com - provides 59 modern and traditional English translations and many more in other languages. Every one of them says things slightly differently, some of them dramatically differently.

That's right. Rousseau said so. To know what the true gospels say one should be an expert in ancient Greek and Aramaic. Even so, one would stay with translation difficulties. Even if these could be solved, the reader would continue with the problem that the evangelists write in Greek words that were pronounced in Aramaic and clearly do not translate the same thing.

However, Rousseau was a Christian. What was his solution to this problem? There is a word of God that has passed through different hands before reaching you. There is a word of God that addresses you directly. The Bible and your "heart". When you see that they don't match, listen to your heart.

Nice, but quite naive. As if your heart didn't lie to you more than once!

 

[IanS]

Did Christians EVER really agree? The first bible only included the Gospel of Luke and 10 of Paul's epistles. The entire Old Testament was tossed.

In early 1st century writing, iirc (we discussed much of this at length in the various Historical Jesus threads here), there were critics of the Jesus stories. That is - various historians of the time wrote to say that people we now call "Christians" were spreading false "gospel", where "gospel" just meant the "news" about true belief in God and the correct religion etc.

However, that is not the same as saying that tens of thousands of Christians all disagreed with one-another over what parts of the OT and what parts of new gospel preaching from Jesus & Paul, should be acclaimed as the truth of God and God's creation of Earth, Universe, and Man.

Over the course of those early centuries when Christianity was forming from the earlier Jewish religion of the OT (and the religious beliefs were all very similar from OT to NT), the faithful were working-out amongst themselves all the details of what they must accept as the holy truth of God.

In any group of tens of thousands of people as it was then (say, circa 400AD), or in the 2.5 billion or so that we have today as "Christians", it's inevitable that you will always be able to find some people who disagree about certain points of a very wide ranging set of claims and beliefs that make up a religious faith. Even leaving religion aside, if you have just 20 people discussing anything at all, then some of them will always disagree on certain specific details.

So it's a total red-herring to criticise any comment or explanation here by saying "but did they all agree?".

The actual question has to be whether or not the leaders of the religious faith developed a set of core beliefs which they themselves professed to believe, and which they decreed to be the beliefs that all people within their faith (ie Christianity in this case), must adhere to in order to be a genuine member of that faith/Christianity.

By the time the early Christian leaders had decided which gospels should be included, and which ones excluded, and hence which claims of God and Jesus were to be accepted as absolute truth, then “yes”, by that time all genuine Christians were supposed to follow that agreed set of faith beliefs.

And those beliefs certainly included all of the claims that we find in the earliest existing copies of that bible. And that includes the belief that early prophets of the OT had actually received the words from God himself. The words of God had told the prophets how God created heaven & earth, how God had created Man etc. And from NT times that also included the words of Jesus and St Paul telling everyone what they must believe as the true words received from God.

That NT “gospel” really did not change much at all from what God himself had told the earlier prophets. It could not change it, because that was believed to be the actual words of God. And that could not be changed … you cannot change what God has said. The only thing that was different by the time of Jesus and Paul, was that all sorts of Jewish preachers had gradually come to believe that a promised day of apocalypse was due at any moment. That was apparently being preached by the group of religious Jews (the “Essenes”) who had written the Dead Sea Scrolls probably beginning as early as 200BC. And that's what Paul was preaching 250 years later by 30AD to 50AD.

But all of that preaching was claimed to have come directly from communication with God. That was the unarguable knowledge of everything given to the faithful by God himself. You cannot argue that God was wrong about the story of complete Creation … ie the creation of everything.

And you certainly cannot argue as a Christian today, that you have the ability to change the words of God or to reject that they ever were the actual words of God. Or more specifically – you cannot do that, and yet still claim that those early prophets received the word of God such that they then knew from direct personal contact with God, what truly was, and is & always will be, the absolutely certain explanation for the existence of the Universe, Earth, Man and all creatures on Earth etc etc. You cannot now change that, because that is the entire basis on which the Christian faith exists …

… if you try to change that, for example by saying that you will “re-interpret” it, then you destroy the basis of the religion … you reject the belief that God ever told any of the prophets any of these things.

So the answer is “Yes”, you cannot later change what was originally claimed as the basis of the faith truly given to the prophets by God himself.

That has to be a truth for all time. Otherwise the religion is shown to be false.

That is really why so little does change over the centuries in any religion, It's because changes like that, concerning the absolute words of God, really must be said to be fixed for all time as unarguable truth.

That's what makes religion very different from any other beliefs or ways that we have of studying and learning about things. That's what makes religion very different from science, or history, or geography or medicine, or any subject that attempts to discover and explain actual truths about the world around us … all those other “ways of knowing” are open to change according to new information that we continually strive to find and improve. But that's where religious belief is completely different – religion is claimed to be known from the word of God … the explanations given by God cannot be questioned or changed.

Nor can you really say that it's posssible either to disagree with the earliest prophets, or to “re-interpret” what they said. That is again disagreeing with God. If you say that the prophets words are ambiguous, then you are claiming that God did not want the prophets to clearly know what he (God) was saying … but in that case there can be no true basis for the religion, because in that case what the prophets told everyone would be wide open to doubt and confusion.

 

[HansMustermann]

What use is the bible, then?

Well, I suppose they have to read from SOMETHING on Sundays. You can't have the bishop addressing the congregation like, "And for today's sermon, the topic is Theresa May's Epistle To Brussels. So those of you who've brought the Daily Mail, we'll open it to the politics section, and we can begin."

 

[IanS]

Societies changed. The ancient society related to the original writing of each small section of the bible is gone. With them went the original intention. What we have now is a discombobulated mess of sacred stories now widely published and liberally edited to meet the needs of each new segment of modern society.

It cannot possibly really make any sense to anyone in whole form. So we have to cherry pick and re-edit every sermon and pamphlet to say what we need.

But if one were to chase each phrase back to original texts do we really believe a Sumerian phrase stuck onto a late Roman phrase edited into Latin in 1238 by s monk who had a limited vocabulary of Greek is the word of any god?

Yes, precisely. I agree. Except on the last sentence (highlighted) - indeed, we do not have any actual writing from Old Testament times, so even apart from the likelihood of things becoming changed over the ensuing centuries through translational errors and changing languages etc., we actually do not know what any original/early OT prophets ever said about receiving the words of God. But in that case, if we really do not know what any God might ever have said to any prophets, then Christians today cannot possibly claim any words from God as any part of any 21st century biblical beliefs at all! ...

... the claims of the religion today, which say all these things are known actually from God himself, would in that case be untrue. If we have no true word of God ever told to any of those OT prophets (or indeed any story of Jesus or Paul etc., where we also have no orginal writing), then the entire basis of Christianity & it's biblical preaching today is false.

 

[HansMustermann]

One problem _I_ have with changing Bible interpretations, as opposed to changing science interpretations or whatever, is that the two don't even work the same. So wondering why it's ok to change our minds about the latter and not the former, is just a cute but clueless case of missing the point.

1. The science views are based on actual hard data, while the Bible reinterpretations are increasingly disconnected from any actual source, including the Bible. It's just deciding that it would be nice if our sky daddy endorsed X and Y, which I really like, and condemned Y, which I dislike, out of thin air. It's not like anyone discovered an extra set of stone tablets that say, "oh, mixed fibers are only forbidden until jeans come in fashion, but the part about stoning the gays I really meant."

Science doesn't work that way. We don't just decide out of nowhere that the gravitational constant doesn't apply any more, just because it would be convenient and gave us more endorsement for the space program.

2. In science we're not afraid to say that theory X was wrong, and chuck it into the bin. We don't try to salvage the scriptures of prophet J. J. Thomson by pretending the plum pudding model of the atom is still spot on, you just need to... interpret it differently. Like, maybe it's just a metaphor. Like, if you just pretend that every other word really means something else, and J. J. Thomson was just simplifying it for our primitive minds, then he was totally talking about the quantum model.

Wake me up when any religion does the same with its scriptures.

Edit: to summarize, it's ok to change your mind when it's done honestly and based on real data. It's not ok when it's just a piss-poor case of wishful thinking and cognitive dissonance.

 

[IanS]

I expect all of us here know what the real answer is. And that is that the biblical claims about God are simply complete fiction – there never was any God who ever revealed anything to any OT prophets (and if it comes to that - there may never even have been any real Jesus who did any of things that were used to form a new religion from the NT bible).

In biblical times people believed those religious stories because they did not know any better. But over the last 100 to 200 years in particular, most educated people have come to realise that such stories are so very unlikely, and so much like countless other fictitious religious beliefs of that time, that today people really should not believe any of it.

But the problem is that there are apparently about 2.5 billion Christians around the world, plus 2 billion Muslims, who do still believe it's all actually literally true!

That would not matter much either if it was just confined to peoples mere beliefs. But it's not. Their beliefs inform all of their actions. And in the end their actions inevitably become harmful to everyone around them (often lethally harmful).

 

[acbytesla]

I expect all of us here know what the real answer is. And that is that the biblical claims about God are simply complete fiction – there never was any God who ever revealed anything to any OT prophets (and if it comes to that - there may never even have been any real Jesus who did any of things that were used to form a new religion from the NT bible).

In biblical times people believed those religious stories because they did not know any better. But over the last 100 to 200 years in particular, most educated people have come to realise that such stories are so very unlikely, and so much like countless other fictitious religious beliefs of that time, that today people really should not believe any of it.

But the problem is that there are apparently about 2.5 billion Christians around the world, plus 2 billion Muslims, who do still believe it's all actually literally true!

That would not matter much either if it was just confined to peoples mere beliefs. But it's not. Their beliefs inform all of their actions. And in the end their actions inevitably become harmful to everyone around them (often lethally harmful).

God is everyone's personal comic book superhero. He/She (afterall, gods must have penises)
And like Superman and Ironman, they have amazing special powers that no one else has, they are faster than a locomotive, they can leap tall buildings in a single bound and feed five thousand people with a loaf of bread and two cans of Starkist.

 

[David Mo]

But all of that preaching was claimed to have come directly from communication with God. That was the unarguable knowledge of everything given to the faithful by God himself. You cannot argue that God was wrong about the story of complete Creation … ie the creation of everything.

And you certainly cannot argue as a Christian today, that you have the ability to change the words of God or to reject that they ever were the actual words of God. Or more specifically – you cannot do that, and yet still claim that those early prophets received the word of God such that they then knew from direct personal contact with God, what truly was, and is & always will be, the absolutely certain explanation for the existence of the Universe, Earth, Man and all creatures on Earth etc etc. You cannot now change that, because that is the entire basis on which the Christian faith exists …

… if you try to change that, for example by saying that you will “re-interpret” it, then you destroy the basis of the religion … you reject the belief that God ever told any of the prophets any of these things.

But the problem is that there are apparently about 2.5 billion Christians around the world, plus 2 billion Muslims, who do still believe it's all actually literally true!

An intelligent Christian would tell you that you are wrong because you confuse being inspired by God with writing what God dictates. Prophets, apostles, evangelists and church fathers were inspired by God. This does not imply that their words were exactly God’s words, but the words with which they expressed their inspiration. Therefore, the words of the Bible need to be interpreted by holy men or by yourself to separate what comes from God and what comes from men. There are two visions of this interpretation: either the authority or personal reading decide. Catholic church in the first case and “liberal believers” in the second.

There are approximately 2,5 billions of Christians in the world. But not all Christians think that the Bible is literally written by God. For example, according to Gallup, only a 64% of church attendees in Western Europe believe that the Bible accurately describes God. And the rate drops to only 27% of non-regular attendees.

And according to Gallup again: "Fewer than one in four Americans (24%) now believe the Bible is "the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word," similar to the 26% who view it as "a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man."

Your concept of what is a Christian is stereotyped. You have created a straw man that is only useful in this forum where no one wants contradict you. You would be the laughingstock among educated Christians. Please, refine your concepts.

 

[IanS]

One problem _I_ have with changing Bible interpretations, as opposed to changing science interpretations or whatever, is that the two don't even work the same. So wondering why it's ok to change our minds about the latter and not the former, is just a cute but clueless case of missing the point.

1. The science views are based on actual hard data, while the Bible reinterpretations are increasingly disconnected from any actual source, including the Bible. It's just deciding that it would be nice if our sky daddy endorsed X and Y, which I really like, and condemned Y, which I dislike, out of thin air. It's not like anyone discovered an extra set of stone tablets that say, "oh, mixed fibers are only forbidden until jeans come in fashion, but the part about stoning the gays I really meant."

Science doesn't work that way. We don't just decide out of nowhere that the gravitational constant doesn't apply any more, just because it would be convenient and gave us more endorsement for the space program.

2. In science we're not afraid to say that theory X was wrong, and chuck it into the bin. We don't try to salvage the scriptures of prophet J. J. Thomson by pretending the plum pudding model of the atom is still spot on, you just need to... interpret it differently. Like, maybe it's just a metaphor. Like, if you just pretend that every other word really means something else, and J. J. Thomson was just simplifying it for our primitive minds, then he was totally talking about the quantum model.

Wake me up when any religion does the same with its scriptures.

Edit: to summarize, it's ok to change your mind when it's done honestly and based on real data. It's not ok when it's just a piss-poor case of wishful thinking and cognitive dissonance.

Just on a slightly different point here, because it's something almost everyone outside of working in core science research misunderstands - even in the very early steps of science, the major "Theories", and in fact even the main "hypotheses", have very rarely (if ever) been completely wrong. Even hypotheses such as "Phlogiston" and the "Luminiferous Aether", which are the most common examples claimed to show how science made major mistakes, were very far from being completely wrong.

The “theory” of phlogiston for example dates back as far as 1667, ie at time before the modern era of science and when science was still largely the domain of people who were really more strongly influenced by previous generations of pure philosophers rather than a new generation who thought in more objective scientific terms. But in that theory the idea was that substances which burned in the air, did so because they contained a combustible substance to which they gave the name “phlogiston”. That was thought to also explain why some substances burned strongly for a long time and which were therefore said to be rich in phlogiston (whilst other substances that burned only weakly for a short time, were thought to contain only a little phlogiston). The actual explanation for why those things burned was of course that the heated substance reacts with Oxygen from the air (an oxidation reaction), and the heat generated from that Oxidation-Reduction reaction often produces a flame (light). But that's really not so different from the first idea of phlogiston.

Similarly the idea of a luminiferous Aether was that space contained a substance called the Aether, which was thought to be necessary for light waves to propagate through space. That idea was commonly accepted from the 1600's up-to 1900, and really had it's roots in ideas even from philosophers in biblical times. And it was not really overturned until 1905-1915 when Einstein explained space and time in a very different & very complex way through Relativity theory (using a lot of mathematical work previously done by Maxwell, Laplace, Minkowski and others). But the final answer from relativity is not so totally different from the idea that some spacial component or medium (such as an “Aether”) was necessary for the transmission of waves such as light-waves.

So in relation to current day religious claims about science, I would just say that it's a common criticism from Christians and Muslims to say that science is not reliable because it's always changing what it tells us to believe as the truth about the world, and hence they try to say that the theories, hypotheses and models from science are little more than opinions, beliefs and guesswork. But that description/criticism of science is not valid or warranted at all, and not even in the most often cited examples of science getting things wrong.

 

[arthwollipot]

Yes, science improves based on increasingly detailed observations. It doesn't change willy-nilly.

 

[HansMustermann]

Just on a slightly different point here, because it's something almost everyone outside of working in core science research misunderstands - even in the very early steps of science, the major "Theories", and in fact even the main "hypotheses", have very rarely (if ever) been completely wrong. Even hypotheses such as "Phlogiston" and the "Luminiferous Aether", which are the most common examples claimed to show how science made major mistakes, were very far from being completely wrong.

Well, yes, but it's still the same point I was making: even those were based on good reasons to change our mind to that, from whatever the working theory was before.

Meanwhile changing one's mind within religion can be as unreasonable as you want.

E.g., take the Taiping rebellion, the deadliest revolt in all recorded human history. It started with a guy changing his mind from Confucianism to Xianity, to his being the son of the Xian God. Not the reincarnation of Jesus, mind you. He was more modest than that. He was Jesus's little BROTHER But he was divine enough to rewrite the gospels, anyway.

And of course he was going to bring supreme peace on Earth. 'Cause God told him to. And by "peace", I mean stuff like attacking a major city like Nanjing, executing all government employees, decreeing that all non-believers must leave the city, and then executing every single soul that didn't actually leave.

So I guess more like Jesus's evil twin

(Which, btw, seems to be something specifically Chinese. When you hear someone wanting to bring peace, run for the hills. Heads are about to roll. The Yellow Turbans rebellion was also caused by a sect called "The Way Of Supreme Peace." Which incidentally started preparing for war as soon as it was founded.)

So yeah, that's the kind of changing one's mind about what the Bible really means, that is apparently still ok within theology

 

[David Mo]

Yes, science improves based on increasingly detailed observations. It doesn't change willy-nilly.

I remind you once again that the question is not whether the evolution of science is always an improvement over previous versions, but whether the Christian has the right to change his or her interpretation of the Bible to accommodate it to the system of knowledge of our time.

Since we are off topic: the theory of phlogiston was invented by a doctor and chemist who was based on a concept of an alchemist. I don't know what philosophy has to do with this, apart from the visceral philosophoby of some. And if there was some indirect influence of philosophical concepts on Stahl, there was also philosophical influence on Lavoisier, who was the one who ruled out the existence of phlogiston.

 

[steenkh]

E.g., take the Taiping rebellion, the deadliest revolt in all recorded human history. It started with a guy changing his mind from Confucianism to Xianity, to his being the son of the Xian God. Not the reincarnation of Jesus, mind you. He was more modest than that. He was Jesus's little BROTHER But he was divine enough to rewrite the gospels, anyway.

I loved the part where his lieutenants took over power from him by channeling his parents: Mary and God the Father. Jesus little brother was forced to do his filial duty and do as he was told!

The Yellow Turbans rebellion was also caused by a sect called "The Way Of Supreme Peace." Which incidentally started preparing for war as soon as it was founded.)

Death does tend to result in supreme peace ...

 

[steenkh]

I remind you once again that the question is not whether the evolution of science is always an improvement over previous versions, but whether the Christian has the right to change his or her interpretation of the Bible to accommodate it to the system of knowledge of our time.

Why not? The rationale will always be that the previous interpretation was wrong, and it can hardly be wrong to insist on the right interpretation.

Besides, the reinterpretations often happen imperceptibly so that the believers are not aware that the interpretations have changed.

Some years ago a Muslim scholar, Nasr Abu Zayd^WP, had to flee Egypt because he had researched how the official interpretation of the Quran had changed over the last 100 years. To even think that the interpretation had changed was deemed a heresy, and his marriage was force to be annulled because a Muslim wife cannot be married to an apostate, and he received death threats.

 

[HansMustermann]

I remind you once again that the question is not whether the evolution of science is always an improvement over previous versions, but whether the Christian has the right to change his or her interpretation of the Bible to accommodate it to the system of knowledge of our time.

Well, having the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the sane thing to do.

I mean, the dude I just mentioned was also perfectly within his rights even in China to interpret the Bible as foretelling him to be God's youngest son. The part where he started having people executed, that wasn't within his rights, but the Bible reinterpretation was totally OK even in Qing dynasty China.

But was that whole thing rational?


Or, hell, watch me do my own bible interpretation. So, brothers and sisters, let us open the good book to the gospel of St Matthew, chapter 5, verse 37:

But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.​

Clearly Jesus endorses digital communications, and verily predicts the downfall of the analogue phone

There we go, I just interpreted the Bible in light of modern knowledge

Am I well within my rights to do so? Very much so. BUT... is it rational to do that?

 

[IanS]

Well, yes, but it's still the same point I was making: even those were based on good reasons to change our mind to that, from whatever the working theory was before.

Meanwhile changing one's mind within religion can be as unreasonable as you want.

E.g., take the Taiping rebellion, the deadliest revolt in all recorded human history. It started with a guy changing his mind from Confucianism to Xianity, to his being the son of the Xian God. Not the reincarnation of Jesus, mind you. He was more modest than that. He was Jesus's little BROTHER But he was divine enough to rewrite the gospels, anyway.

And of course he was going to bring supreme peace on Earth. 'Cause God told him to. And by "peace", I mean stuff like attacking a major city like Nanjing, executing all government employees, decreeing that all non-believers must leave the city, and then executing every single soul that didn't actually leave.

So I guess more like Jesus's evil twin

(Which, btw, seems to be something specifically Chinese. When you hear someone wanting to bring peace, run for the hills. Heads are about to roll. The Yellow Turbans rebellion was also caused by a sect called "The Way Of Supreme Peace." Which incidentally started preparing for war as soon as it was founded.)

So yeah, that's the kind of changing one's mind about what the Bible really means, that is apparently still ok within theology

Oh yes, sure, I was not disputing or criticising anything you had said. I was just picking up on that point about religious people trying to reject or dimmish science by saying that science is constantly changing it's mind and changing what it says is the correct answer.

I was just drawing attention to that because those Christians and Muslims are really quite wrong if they level that as a criticism to dismiss science.

Where of course the whole reason why they try to dismiss science in that way is because the huge mass of results we have from science has now become so highly damaging to religious beliefs.

 

[acbytesla]

An intelligent Christian would tell you that you are wrong because you confuse being inspired by God with writing what God dictates. Prophets, apostles, evangelists and church fathers were inspired by God. This does not imply that their words were exactly God’s words, but the words with which they expressed their inspiration. Therefore, the words of the Bible need to be interpreted by holy men or by yourself to separate what comes from God and what comes from men. There are two visions of this interpretation: either the authority or personal reading decide. Catholic church in the first case and “liberal believers” in the second.

There are approximately 2,5 billions of Christians in the world. But not all Christians think that the Bible is literally written by God. For example, according to Gallup, only a 64% of church attendees in Western Europe believe that the Bible accurately describes God. And the rate drops to only 27% of non-regular attendees.

And according to Gallup again: "Fewer than one in four Americans (24%) now believe the Bible is "the actual word of God, and is to be taken literally, word for word," similar to the 26% who view it as "a book of fables, legends, history and moral precepts recorded by man."

Your concept of what is a Christian is stereotyped. You have created a straw man that is only useful in this forum where no one wants contradict you. You would be the laughingstock among educated Christians. Please, refine your concepts.

"Intelligent Christian"? Is that something like a "good lawyer"?

Sure, there are as many different interpretations of the bible as there are people. But I have heard at least a thousand times about who is and who isn't a "true" Christian.

And what is the difference between "inspired" and the actual word of God? I get that different denominations have different ways of deciding. Did God rape Mary? Is that the actual word of god or merely inspired by God. But if God is responsible for everything, is there really a difference? Doesn't that mean that EVERYTHING ever written not just in the bible is the word of God? Should I also be worshipping Shakespeare? How about Stephen King?


Sadly the so called "Intelligent Christians" offer cover for the ass backward Christians. You know, the ones that justify saying that "homosexuality is an abortion" just after eating a barbecued pulled pork sandwich?

My problem is much of the book is hideous. How does one justify thinking that this is a book of wisdom and moral precepts when

God tells the Israelites to slaughter the Midianites and the Amalakites women and children except the girls that have not laid with a man?

or the story of Abraham where God specifically told him to gut his son Isaac and at the last moment said I was only kidding.

or Jepthah who did sacrifice his daughter to God?

Or slavery which is not only condoned but regulated?


Do I believe the story of Genesis or ignore it entirely?

And why should I care for one second what Paul said?

Or should I only care what Jesus said in the gospels?

Should I give away all my money to the poor?

I'm all for being my brother's keeper and being humble and learning to forgive. Its the rest of the damn book that makes me want to vomit and speak out against it.