(October 9, 2014 at 9:31 am)RobbyPants Wrote: I wonder why Christians trust the Bible as a valid source of information for what happened. I'm not talking about the obviousness of all the unsubstantiated accounts of magic happening. I don't mean how their apologetics show YHWH is untrustworthy (I already touched on that). I just mean the overall account of things:The first two bullet points show how the story is written by people with no accountability for their fantastic claims. Hell, people have analyzed the texts and know for sure that Paul didn't write all the epistles. The exact number of them is in dispute, but we know that people claiming to be someone who had a divine revelation from God got their books inserted into biblical canon, and that doesn't even speak to whether or not Paul actually did have any revelation. How do people know this? How would they even be able to check to see if he's telling the truth? They are warned about false teacher and prophets and to not listen to them, but they have no way to be able to check the veracity of the author's claims. They could be false teacher poisoning the well against dissenting points of view.
- Stories being told by authors who had no witnesses to the events.
- Books being written by people who had "divine revelations".
- Satan as "the Deceiver".
And on the topic of poisoning the well, what about poor Satan? We are told flat-out that he is wrong, he is a liar, and to never trust him. This is a one-sided story where we are told to never talk to the other side to try and figure out what really happened. In any other situation, this would be highly suspicious and it would look like someone is trying to hide something. Put it in the context of religion, and suddenly everything is fine and it gets a free pass.
Shouldn't this alone be enough to put doubt into any adherent? Ignoring the absurdity of all the claims, the total lack of evidence, and the demonstrable wrongness of parts of the Bible, the book itself looks sketchy as hell.
Well I'm not reading all 19 pages of replies but I will try to answer your question.
We do not think the bible is entirely true. (Atleast us non- protestants) Far from it. We believe that it just narrates through mythology and real events how man came to understand god and how mankinds behaviour evolved. First the behavior was perfect, then it degraded to a level where telling humans the importance of loving your neighbour just wasn't understandable. (This was before Romans gathered to see lions eat prisoners)
In a world where Child sacrifice and the likes were prevalent, man had no sense to treat everyone with respect. The world was barbaric, and to keep a country (Israel) pure and alive till the messiah arrived, it was necessary for rules to be set up so that they wouldn't do anything wrong.
When the world's morality improved and people were able to understand Jesus' teachings of love and compassion (still note that this was while Romans gathered to see lions eat prisoners) god sent Jesus to explain it all to them.
Apart from that there are numerous prophecies in the bible which foretell the coming of Jesus. The fall of Tyre is one. The exile of the 10 tribes is another (It happened over 200 years) Read Isaiah and Eziekel
We don't believe in the Adam and eve thing and the talking donkey and all. They are just stories to explain the situation of man at that particular point of time.
It's sad how such rigid beliefs tend to alienate people from Christianity
