Why believe the bible?

[robvalue]

The bible sure is evidence of something! The character Yahweh is a vicious cunt. I would not want to spend much time around someone who thinks that character is a “good guy”, whether they think it’s also magically real or not.

[Fake Messiah]

Why do some people take stories from the Bible to be true and not just some made up stories? *DUH* it's because:

1. everything that is mentioned in the Bible really happened
2. if you put the Bible in the crashing car everybody will die and burn except the Bible
3. same with the burning building: everything inside will burn including people who will fry to death in horrible pain but the Bible will be intact
4. Bible heals cancer and other diseases if you put it on the sick person
5. Bible gives detailed explanations of the whole universe. It's basically map of the universe inside it
6. in some parts of the Bible there are detailed descriptions of how to build an actual working spaceship
7. Bible is so profound on scientific level that many scientists won Nobel prizes by plagiarizing the Bible, like Einstein and his E=mc2
8. Bible predicted future so good that lottery firms had to invent atheism in order to people not believe in it so much that they would not look up upcoming lottery numbers
9. if you throw a Bible from a top of a building it will turn into a pigeon and land safely on the surface
10. by listening and looking how pages in the Bible vibrate you can detect if somebody is lying and that's why it's used in courts
11. medical doctors use Bible every day because it gives detailed descriptions not just how to heal numerous diseases but also how to perform numerous surgeries

[SteveII]

[I_am_not_mafia]

-- We are wired to believe in the supernatural

[CITATION REQUIRED]

-- To most people, a miracle, a story, listening to people's experiences with the supernatural is not considered impossible. 

[CITATION REQUIRED]

Also which location are you referring to? Highly educated countries? Countries with a poor education system or home schooling like in America?

This is also an irrelevant point because whether or not people commonly believe something to be possible does not actually determine reality.

[Mister Agenda]

If we're talking about a one hundred percent literal reading combined with a viewpoint of complete and utter literal innerancy of the Bible, then the investigating reader will run into problems very quickly. The first contradiction is in Genesis 2. It contradicts a passage in Genesis 1, if both are read literally.

I sometimes wonder if I might have stayed a Christian after reading the Bible if I had been raised Catholic or Episcopalian instead of Pentecostal. Rigid beliefs may be more brittle.

[I_am_not_mafia]

We are talking about a specific set of miracles chronicled in the NT. They can be substantiated by people who saw them. These people later wrote things down, told other people and had them write them down.

And how can we be sure that what they witnessed was properly recorded? Even in modern society witness testimonial is quite unreliable, yet alone scientific ignorant people living in the bronze age. Or it might have been completely fabricated and packaged along with the claim in order to make it more believable. Fact is, we just don't know. What do we know though is nowhere else outside of the Bible are any of the magic that is claimed to have happened actually recorded.

I'll point you in the direction of a website selling expensive miracle creams that cure all forms of illness along with witness testimonials from people you have never heard of just as soon as I've finished uploading them.

[Angrboda]

There's a fire breathing dragon in my garage.

That's a claim. But according to xtians it is also the evidence so I don't have to back it up with anything else. You should all believe now me.

Problem is that there are many different contradictory claims so we need some way of differentiating between them.

I could provide further evidence if you like though. There's smoke coming from my garage. I could provide a picture or some third party report on it.

That's a claim and now that's actual evidence.

Thing is that we need to evaluate the claim and the evidence separately. This is what Huggy didn't understand in the thread about moral behaviour in animals. I used the evidence provided by Frans De Waal but disagreed with his interpretation of that evidence. In other words, the claim.

In the same way you may accept the evidence of there being smoke in my garage but disagree about the claim of the smoke breathing dragon. You might instead want to point out that it's more likely that my garage is on fire (Occam's razor and all that).

This is why we need to know what the evidence is and what the claim is. But all xtians can do is equivocate, bluster and insult when faced with this problem. But what else can they do? There is no evidence outside of the Bible to support it, but plenty of evidence to tell us that it's claims are incorrect.

I think the point is that if people report something as having happened, then those reports constitute evidence of that thing happening. Perhaps not good evidence, but evidence all the same. I think the problem with getting to that point is in presuming that the reports in the bible are the same kind as a report of a man in the street as to what they saw on September 11. If you could get to that point, then perhaps you could count the reports in the bible as some kind of evidence. It's not at all clear that any Christian is successful in getting the biblical testimony to that point, for a variety of reasons, which apologetic arguments are intended to get around. The Christian wants to claim that the report of a biblical miracle should have the same standing, as say, a historical event that Tacitus reports on. I don't believe that's true, so the evidence of the bible is tainted from that perspective.

[JairCrawford]

If we're talking about a one hundred percent literal reading combined with a viewpoint of complete and utter literal innerancy of the Bible, then the investigating reader will run into problems very quickly. The first contradiction is in Genesis 2. It contradicts a passage in Genesis 1, if both are read literally.

I sometimes wonder if I might have stayed a Christian after reading the Bible if I had been raised Catholic or Episcopalian instead of Pentecostal. Rigid beliefs may be more brittle.

Ironically I am more Pentecostal now than I was when I was younger. But I am learning that in some denominations, the Bible has just about taken over God. It's become an idol.

[Drich]

[Angrboda]

so my reasons 
1 it is a map to all the 'proof of God you will ever need for the rest of your life.
2 It is a standard to measure what you found against the knowable aspects of God. it is a proofing text for those who seek to worship the God of the bible.
3 it is check to help one keep his balance. Because when you have God it is far too easy to let that accessibility corrupt you. allow you to become lukewarm or even self righteous. when you fall into those sins God ceases giving you direction, but that does not mean direction stops comming... Eg mohammad and joseph Smith
4 the bible is direction when God is silent. If you learn to only trust God when He is known to you'd never make it through the night.
5The bible is vetted through finding the Holy Spirit and all of the thing it tells you that will be headed your way as a believer. which is like saying it is a map, but I felt like i needed 5 things.

Items 1-4 are based upon believing the bible, so they don't count. I'll leave #5 to others to discuss, as that subject has already been raised. Generally speaking, people only accept such anecdotal evidence if it is consistent with their beliefs, making it of dubious value in settling any question, much less the original one. Moreover, anticipating your typical defense, the majority of Christians consider prosperity theology to be heretical. If you wish to argue for it, I suggest creating a thread for that discussion.

(As counterpoint, one can observe the same effects of the Baghavad Gita upon Hindu followers as that which is claimed for the bible, that it is a good guide, is life changing, etc.)