the so fallible Bible

[Waratah]

I know what I believe and it has not changed since I have been posting on this board.

Holy shit the above is a true statement, not a lie from a liar. Too bad you cannot honestly defend your belief. Anytime you are ready to try to defend your beliefs honestly go HERE. I will understand if you are not prepared to defend your bullshit honestly because then you would have to admit that your beliefs are based on lies.

Perhaps you simply do not fully understand my beliefs because you are trying to reconsile what I have stated with your personal understanding of what 'christianity' is supposed to be.

I do not know about anyone else but I do not understand your basis for your 'ministry and belief ' because they are based on bullshit. The bullshit is your poor comprehension skills and lies. I still cannot believe that you have a ministry. Do the people in your ministry know that you are a liar?

[Drich]

Oh boy Drich - you have so gone off into the deep end on this one its just impossible to know where to start.

Now the story of creation is not the story of creation but the account as it would have been seen from the garden.

I have not gone anywhere this has been my position from the beginning.. and here we go again. Because what I say does not fit your idea of theology you say I am the crazy one, rather than even considering questioning your own understandings. If the roles where reversed and you knew the God of the bible, and you said something like this to me, and it that totally altered my understanding of a foundational belief of what I thought Christianity was based on (whether I was a believer or not) I would ask you why you thought this.

Then you would reply: Read Genesis 2 starting at verse 4 'blessed one.'

Then I would ask why not start from verse 1?

You would reply: Because Genesis 2 1-3 is still speaking from the initial seven day account started in verse one. Verse 4 starts back over and then branches creation off into a Garden account, meaning everything written from that point on refers to what happens in the Garden.

Then I'd be like; you so stupid, because when I went to sunday school they didn't teach me this.

Then you: Again that is the difference between biblical Christianity and religious christianity. READ Chapter 2 starting at verse 4:
4 This is the story about the creation of the sky and the earth. This is what happened when the Lord God made the earth and the sky. 5 This was before there were plants on the earth. Nothing was growing in the fields because the Lord God had not yet made it rain on the earth, and there was no one to care for the plants.

(What is about to follow is a detailed account of when the Lord made the Earth and sky, but before He made plants. so some time on Day two.)

6 So water[a] came up from the earth and spread over the ground. 7 Then the Lord God took dust from the ground and made a man.[b] He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nose, and the man became a living thing. 8 Then the Lord God planted a garden in the East,[c] in a place named Eden. He put the man he made in that garden. 9 Then the Lord God caused all the beautiful trees that were good for food to grow in the garden. In the middle of the garden, he put the tree of life and the tree that gives knowledge about good and evil.

So before God made plants on the earth He created the Garden. Which means everything that happened in the Garden was separate and apart from what happened on the rest of the planet.)

Now continue reading, everything else described is from a garden perspective.

Then me, but I though you said everything (including chapter 1) was written from a Garden perspective.

Then you, I misspoke, please forgive me.
What I meant was, all that was recorded in chapter one was still from a single man's perspective. In otherwords it was what the writer of Genesis saw, as it happened during the creation of the world. And then the Garden perspective is underscored in Chapter 2.

Aside from this meaning that the garden would have to have existed prior to the creation of anything else its just not supported in the text.

Again chapter 2

I know this doesn't bother you - we've been down this road before

Actually we haven't. To prove it seriously take a look at what you thought/represented what I said, verses my actual explaination of what I said. You have created a strawman of everything we have discussed inorder to 'walk down this road.'

(Mary's examination,

Mary's examination was based in deu 22 and the law concerning the verification of her virginity, or the persecution of joseph, and of her (Which did not happen which means her virginity was verified.)

special bricks used for Babel,

Not special bricks. I simply said we do not know what the bricks were made of.
Then I provided proof that until this year we did not know what 2000 year old roman cement was made of, so how could we possiably know what was in the bricks of a tower that was never built?

billions of years for the garden to run alongside evolution...)

Not billions of years. Simply that there is no time line between Genesis 2 and 3. Which again could have been a day or a trillion years.

but I'd say its pretty obvious you are leaving the Bible behind in your belief.

Again everything I have said is backed by the bible and by history. You have recreated my arguments in your own mind and changed them ever so slightly to invalidate me without having to question anything. This is pride my friend. To simply assume that I am wrong because what you believe must be correct.

Well all power to you in that but it does kinda remove you from Christianity, not just as I know it, but as it presents itself to the outside world.

Other than that.

You do know that everyone of your examples that supposedly 'removes me from Christanity is actually based in Judaism right?

OK - show me where you got Mary's examination from.

We've done this already. it starts with establishing the the fact that having sex with a girl before marriage is a terriable sin in that time, with very severe consenquences per deu 22:18-30.

Then we established that they were not married. This is done for us in
Mat 1:18

Then we establish they went before the proper authority to be married (Some priest had to sign off that the marriage was legal)
Mat 1:24 says He married her as the angel to him to do.

Which again means they went before someone to validate their marriage. At which time this priest would have seen her baby bump.
"But before they married, he learned that she was expecting a baby."
is what I am calling her baby bump.

This would have lead to a question of who the father was. Why? Because one or both would have been in serious violation of the OT law at this point. To which we can rightly assume that Mary would have told her story of virginity to the priest, as She told everyone else. This escaliates things. Why? because they went from public disgrace to open blaspheme. Which makes her a candidate for stoning as virgin conception was a well known precursor to the Messiah.
Isa 7:14

This forces someone to check her story.
Mary knew full well what this all meant when she told her story, and she knew that because of the seriousness of her claim she would have to stand behind what was said.
She lived in a time where men looked to persecute and oppress one another and anything that challenged the authority they had to do this through the law would have been carfully scrutinized and examined, as per how Christ was treated.

Nice dodge on telling me what nice stories I tell - but Ireland is an example of people going to war over Christian interpretation - which was the point.

Which was lost on me because I had no idea what you were talking about.

Pride has nothing to do with thinking you are in error, and error doesn't necessarily mean you haven't tied up all the lose ends - which you are very good at, but more and more I see pride in you that has seen you append to your own religion things that are your own inventions.

It is not pride that has you question me. What makes you proud is the assumption that you are right and I am wrong simply because our understanding of the bible does not match. The fact that you are not willing to question and research, but just jump to the conclusion I am wrong makes it a matter of pride.

Questions in of themselves are why I am here. It is when the questions stop because you can not defend your personal version of Christianity, and start name calling is what make this a discussion of your pride.

Again - no skin off my nose, but as we exchange messages your personal religion appears to get more personal by the minute. In other words - from what you have described so far you must be the only person that believes exactly like you do.

Which is what? what do I believe? and again to further the point I was making about your pride, why do you assume I must be the only person on the planet that believes this??? It is simply based on the fact that if you were a Christian you would not think this way?

Again there is a huge difference between Christianity as the bible describes it and the traditional stuff based off of catholisim. about the 13th century the pope at that time made a sharp left turn from the bible and every pope since then never looked back.

That, my friend, is ego, you even now regard yourself as an expert....and I'm the proud one?

Again, where have I made myself an expert? I have underscored a critical flaw in your logic. In that when I make a statement that you can not readily defend with traditional atheist properganda, you default to a personal attack to try and dismiss me without having to address content.

That is what this whole last post is about. You are moving to dismiss everything I have said, because you are trying to not have to address the content of my message.

I have defeated enough arguments over the last 8 years to know the easiest way and the most effective/complete way of doing so. The easy way is to call the messengers intergrity into question that way the whole message can also be dismiss without having to address what he or she says. However this only works when the persons are so radical and so basless that nothing can ever hope to be verified, OR the audience you are pandering to is also looking for a reason to condemn said person with out having to produce any evidence as to why you/they are defaulting to pride.

The most effective way to defeat someone is to disprove everything stated line by line with proof and or reason. This is how most of you start out, but when the goto atheist arguments end, the personal attacks begin...

Now if I were some crazy person then why not just focous on content. would that be the easiest way to show a person crazy? that their content does not follow any logical or realistic patterns? Then why skip that and move to discrediting a person with nothing to back anything up?
Or better yet why is a crazy person able to take the vast majority of the arguments presented and disprove them with proof or reason?

Take an honest survey of who actually engages in discussion, the content they use, and how long they stay in the conversation before hitting the panic stop button and makes a personal accusation.

Most people here are afraid to try, until a dog pile starts then members I though were no longer on this forum anymore, come out of the wood work to get their pound of flesh.

[Cyberman]

Take an honest survey of who actually engages in discussion, the content they use, and how long they stay in the conversation before hitting the panic stop button and makes a personal accusation.

Most people here are afraid to try, until a dog pile starts then members I though were no longer on this forum anymore, come out of the wood work to get their pound of flesh.

[Minimalist]

Stop whining, Drippy.

[ThomM]

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SavedByGrace has been teasing me with promises to start a thread on biblical inerrancy, my very favorite topic. However, he just keeps pumping out this crap on evolution which makes it plain that he has never read a book on the subject by a real scientist. Guess I'll have to do it myself. It's a rainy day in Central Ontario, and I have nothing to do except occasionally take out our six-month old puppy.

In truth, when I write on this subject, I am castigating my younger self for extreme intellectual carelessness. I explained what happened in my introduction to the forum. To elaborate a bit, when I first became a Christian in university, I was heavily influenced by C.S. Lewis and others of that ilk. Which is to say, my theology was conservative (God can do miracles) but not fundamentalist (the Bible may contain errors and legendary accounts). Back then there were lots of weird views being put forth by liberal Christians, and I began to feel that there must be a rule of faith, and what else would qualify but the Bible? So I slid into an acceptance of inerrancy without ever having read it in its entirety. However, before I went to seminary at age 36, I had read it twice—sort of.

I explain why I never picked up on all the garbage with a metaphor: I read with my mind on cruise control. The Bible really makes no sense on its own when you read it cover to cover. It may seem to make sense when an apologist or a Bible study leader cherry picks from the whole thing to come up with his brand of theology. I already knew the theology, so I skimmed through the boring shit with little or no attention to detail, just stopping when something resonated with me. More battle stories, and not nearly as well done as in Lord of the Rings. Ten pages down in two minutes as my eye flickered over the text. Ditto for boring details about the Israelite sacrificial system.

I went to seminary, 3 years of academic work plus an intern year. I was getting vaguely uncomfortable about some things by the end of my first year. However, I had quit my job and uprooted my family, and it seemed inconceivable that my faith would weaken after 15 years, so I soldiered on and was ordained.

There were social aspects of being a minister that bothered me, but on the theological side, here was the big problem. When I read the Bible, I could no longer cruise through it. My mind lingered over the meanings. Often I checked out the text in the original language. It wasn't so much the contradictions and historical problems in the Bible which bothered me. It was the sheer evil. I kept coming back to 1 Samuel 15:3 where God—the loving God!—commanded King Saul to kill all the Amalekites, men and women, children and nursing infants, and just for good measure, their oxen and sheep and donkeys and camels, and then got thoroughly pissed off with Saul when he didn't follow orders to the letter. Only one genocide of many, supposedly commanded by God.

My case is probably atypical of those who accepted biblical inerrancy. I see two groups.

The first and largest don't even know the word inerrancy, but they have a notion that the Bible is perfect. They may not even go to church any more, but when they were in Sunday School 30 years ago, all questions were settled by reference to the Bible. And if they were in a liturgical church (Anglican or Lutheran) the Bible was surrounded with a lot of pomp. After the gospel reading the priest would intone, "This is the Word of the Lord" and the congregation would chant back "Praise be to Thee, O Christ." Besides which, the Bible contains the Ten Commandments, and everyone knows they are the foundation of western civilization, the basis of all morality.

The second group really scare me, fundamentalists who have made biblical inerrancy the center of their theology. So they are dataphobic about evidence against the historicity of the Bible, will do intellectual headstands to avoid admitting to an evident self-contradiction, and worst of all will do moral somersaults to justify the most evil narratives, killing babies is commendable for the ancient Israelites but of course a teenage girl who gets an abortion is a murderer.

This is a big topic. When I deal with something like that, I prefer to divide it up into several posts, so that is what I plan to do here.

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Fundamentalists seem to assume that THE BIBLE™ descended from heaven in its leather covers clearly identified as the Word of God, in fact the only source of the Word of God.

My first question for them is which Bible do you mean? They of course assume it is the Protestant Bible with its 66 books. However, the Wikipedia article on the Biblical Canon lists 10 different Christian churches with different collections of books: Protestant, Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Slavonic Orthodox, Georgian Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syriac Orthodox, Coptic Orthodox, Orthodox Tewahedo (Ethiopian), Assyrian Church of the East.

I won't go into all the details. Just one example from the Western tradition. The Roman Catholic Bible contains 8 "apocryphal" books not in the Protestant canon, plus substantial additions to the Old Testament books of Esther and Daniel.

I would be interested to hear any rationalizations from the bibliolaters as to why the One True Inspired Version should be the canon favored by the most recently formed of all the church traditions.

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[Ryantology]

What makes you proud is the assumption that you are right and I am wrong simply because our understanding of the bible does not match. The fact that you are not willing to question and research, but just jump to the conclusion I am wrong makes it a matter of pride.

Close the ballots, the winner of the most ironic fucking post of the year has already declared himself.

[Drich]

What makes you proud is the assumption that you are right and I am wrong simply because our understanding of the bible does not match. The fact that you are not willing to question and research, but just jump to the conclusion I am wrong makes it a matter of pride.

Close the ballots, the winner of the most ironic fucking post of the year has already declared himself.

.... Indeed, so explain or you will be a perfect example of what I've said here.

[Doubting Thomas]

It is the spiritual needs God's concerned about, the world has made the problem of starving children and it's our responsibility to do something about it. There is enough money in the richer counties in this world to end all hunger, what are you doing to help?

What are churches doing to help when they tend to raise millions of dollars to add a new wing or build a youth center while millions of people remain needy? What about TV preachers who beg for money and then fly around in private jets? What about all the Christian Republicans who bitch and moan about having to pay their fair share in taxes because it goes to single mothers on welfare?

If I could afford to send aid to everyone in the world I'd definitely do it, but right now I have bills to pay and not a lot of extra cash.

[Minimalist]

Before I start this Drich please avail yourself of a spell-checker. The mistakes are very distracting sometimes

The misspellings are the best part of Drippy's posts. On occasion they can be amusing unlike the rest of his dreary drivel.

[Godscreated]

It is the spiritual needs God's concerned about, the world has made the problem of starving children and it's our responsibility to do something about it. There is enough money in the richer counties in this world to end all hunger, what are you doing to help?

What are churches doing to help when they tend to raise millions of dollars to add a new wing or build a youth center while millions of people remain needy? What about TV preachers who beg for money and then fly around in private jets? What about all the Christian Republicans who bitch and moan about having to pay their fair share in taxes because it goes to single mothers on welfare?

If I could afford to send aid to everyone in the world I'd definitely do it, but right now I have bills to pay and not a lot of extra cash.

Deflecting the responsibility of non believers aren't you. TV preachers for the most part need to examine their beliefs and standing with God, most local TV preachers are trying to reach the lost or supply encouragement to the home bound Christians. I've known rich Christians that give a great deal to those who are hungry or in need of medical supplies and attention, even to work in AIDS hospitals. The Christian democrats complain about paying taxes, just like you and I do. The Protestant Churches in this country spend a tremendous amount of money for food aid to those in need, we understand that those who are hungry care only about being fed, an empty stomach does not listen to others.

GC