(March 12, 2014 at 4:37 pm)Deidre32 Wrote:(March 12, 2014 at 4:16 pm)discipulus Wrote: No.
I am going to provide you a list of websites that I have found to be indispensable to my understanding of "bible difficulties".
http://www.str.org
http://www.bethinking.org (Deidre, in your spare time check this site out, it is awesome)
http://www.reasonablefaith.org
http://www.gotquestions.org
http://www.tektonics.org
http://www.apologetics315.com
http://www.apologeticspress.org
http://www.garyhabermas.com (considered to be The authority on the resurrection)
http://www.carm.org
Most if not all of the questions you have asked here have been answered by men and women who are experts in their related fields pertinent to the questions you are asking.
I have a wonderful book entitled: Is God a Moral Monster? by Paul Copan.
He has, in my opinion, done the most research into the difficult passages found in the OT.
No fight. Just trying to help is all.
While I appreciate this, discipulus, I don't need to turn to an interpreter to decipher the Bible. You believe in Jesus, well...remember he told his followers "let your yes mean yes and your no mean no?" Isn't it odd then that we need "Bible scholars" to translate the Bible for us mere laymen and women?
Or is it that we don't like what the Bible REALLY states, so we turn to a softer reflection of it so we can go on with our day?
discipulus, it is possible to believe, and then not believe. All it means is I choose to live my life based in reality and not on fables and folklore, convincing myself (and others) that it's so much more.
Anything that requires apologetics is fundamentally flawed.
Playing Cluedo with my mum while I was at Uni:
"You did WHAT? With WHO? WHERE???"