(November 13, 2013 at 7:13 pm)mattpaul42 Wrote: I agree, people in the Bible did awful things, people have used the Bible as justification to do even worse things. However, the Bible is about people. I think we need to take into account that people are not perfect, they make mistakes. Also, I would like to argue that deconstructionism is not a good thing, especially when applied to the Bible. The author of any book has a meaning in mind when they write it, and if you simply interpret what they wrote in your own way, it won't make sense and you may end up using it incorrectly.
But that makes it sound like any other book authored by humans, even the part where it inspires people to both great and horrifying action. A book provided to us by god should stand out from the rest, but the Bible only does so to those who have presupposed that it is god's work. And even many of them seem to agree with your explanation above, which doesn't mesh with the idea that it stands out as an extraordinary work.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
