I guess we are still on bible inconsistencies. I am definitely no bible scholar and I’m sure there are many of you that have read more of it than me. I just read what others say about it and then go look to see if they are BS-ing. So here are just a few examples of what I read.
Is the bible right in both cases? Can God deceive people?
Proverbs 30:5 (King James Version)
5Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.
Ezekiel 14:9 (King James Version)
9And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the LORD have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him from the midst of my people Israel.
Is he giving out bad laws meant to deceive?
Ezekiel 20
24Because they had not executed my judgments, but had despised my statutes, and had polluted my sabbaths, and their eyes were after their fathers' idols.
25Wherefore I gave them also statutes that were not good, and judgments whereby they should not live;
Promises not kept?
John: Jesus says that whatever you ask either him or his father for you will receive. (if you don’t get what you asked for it God’s will?) 14:13-14, 15:7, 15:16, 16:23
Multiple marriages (apparently there are quite a few cases)
Genesis 4 19 Lamech married two women, one named Adah and the other Zillah. 20 Adah gave birth to Jabal; he was the father of those who live in tents and raise livestock. 21 His brother's name was Jubal; he was the father of all who play the harp and flute. 22 Zillah also had a son, Tubal-Cain, who forged all kinds of tools out of [g] bronze and iron. Tubal-Cain's sister was Naamah.
the polygamous household of Jacob, Leah and Rachel.
Not to forget - The surrogate motherhood of the handmaid.
Incest not allowed Leviticus 18:6-18, but …
Genesis 20:11-12 (New International Version)
11 Abraham replied, "I said to myself, 'There is surely no fear of God in this place, and they will kill me because of my wife.' 12 Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not of my mother; and she became my wife.
"And Cain knew his wife." That's nice, but where did she come from? The Bible doesn't mention any of Cain's sisters. Well, maybe he married his mom. In any case, Cain and the mysterious Mrs. Cain have a son (another blue cigar!). His name is Enoch and he builds a city (population 3?). 4:17
Rape suggested: Genesis, Chapter 19, Verse 8.
8. Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes: only unto these men do nothing; for therefore came they under the shadow of my roof.
More rape: Genesis, Chapter 34, Verses 1-2.
And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.
2. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.
New Testament too:
Matthew: There are 29 generations listed from David to Jesus in Matthew's genealogy, while Luke's (3:23-31) has 43. Except for David at one end and Jesus at the other, there are only three names in the two lists that are the same. 1:6-16
"Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven." According to the gospels (Mt.26:69-75, Mk.14:66-72, Lk.22:55-62, Jn.15:18-27), Peter denied Jesus three times before men. Therefore Jesus must have denied Peter before God. 10:33
Jesus lists the "ten commandments," but his list has only six, and the sixth is not one of the ten. The commandments given by Jesus are secular, not religious, in nature. 19:18
Jesus curses a fig tree and the tree dies immediately (showing the world how much God Hates Figs). But in Mark's gospel (11:14, 20-21) the cursed fig tree doesn't die until the next morning. 21:19-20 And was it fig season?
Science:
Mark: "In those days ... the moon shall not give her light, and the stars of heaven shall fall." Of course this is nonsense. The billions of stars will never fall to earth and the moon does not produce its own light. 13:24-25
Epilepsy is caused by devils. 9:39-42 (not according to modern medicine)
Genesis: God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn't make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). 1:3-5
Gen: God makes the animals and parades them before Adam to see if any would strike his fancy. But none seem to have what it takes to please him. After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-20
2 different creation accounts ?
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/accounts.html
All knowing:
Luke: How could an omniscient being "increase in wisdom"? And how could God increase "in favor with God."? 2:52
And why would an all knowing god have all these questions about “where is Adam?” and other times God had to question man for info.
All right, I guess that’s enough. You can read or search the internet and find all kinds of these kinds of citations, some better than others. I’m sure it is all explainable as miracles, bad translations, etc., or further interpretations of the text. Same as you can search and find all kinds of preachers explaining why it is all literally true. Back to “it’s a matter of faith”.
I don’t expect people who follow the bible to throw it aside based on this, but the point is there are problems here when read assuming the plain meaning of the words presented. I realize it has been translated, but no book has been so carefully checked out as the bible and it still has many problems.
The point is, it may be a great teaching book for some, but in light of modern knowledge seems that it can’t be literally true any more than we believe the mythology of old was true. But the Romans did! Children’s books are good teaching tools, too.
Mary: Are you saying God created the world a few thousand years ago pretty much as it is today?
Or are you thinking he created the matter and processes billions of years ago that would lead to today’s world?
Ben, thanks for your comments.
I’ll have to respond another time. Getting too late.
Love to you all, Michael
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2 comments:
Well... I have a little time before the craziness of TG starts so I will make an attempt to explane what I believe the bible teaches about many things in life. First, it is not at all inconsistent with itself. When you go to the original greek it will never be in conflict with itself. It will however conflick with human oppinion or interpretation.
It starts with "in the beginning God created..." It does not say how many years ago that was but it was God who did the creating. Things have changed since then just like they have in the last 30 years or so with the changing of lifestyle and health. People used to live longer... than shorter than today. Land have worn away and erroded in many places. In a matter of speaking it has evolved but I do not believe something created has now evolved into another thing. For example, I was always a human. My ancestors are not monkeys... especially since they are still here on this earth. I see that to mean only some of them evoloved if that were true. Man was created to inhabit the earth and be ruler over the earth, but was to be obedient and not eat from 1 designated tree. Having free will he chose to disobey. God was not searching for him in the garden, but using a "parenting tactic" if you will to get him to come out from hiding and admitt what he did and face judgument. (by the way, I do not intend to fix typos....please excuse me). The perfect garden was not longer a place Adam and Eve were welcome and sin had now entered the world. Free willed people continued to live generation after generation getting more defiant and evil until God had had enough and sent the flood to destroy the evil perverting the societies. He promised to never do that again. But as time went on life got more perverted again and God tried to give comandments and rules to try to help humanity have a standard to follow and stay protected from sickness and disease. He instituted sacrifice to atone for sin. (The first one being the animal that had to die for the need to cover Adam and Eve). All through the old testament God tried to guide his people through appointed leaders (imperfect tho they were) to obey Him. Being stiff necked and oppinionated (just like people today) they were obedient one day and in rebellion the next. He continued to promise a messiah (starting from ch 3 in genisis) and even gave details as to how to recognize him when he came. (tons in Isiah) Basically, people would never be able to live a perfect life, which is what is required by God (there is no such thing as good enough) and it was time for the promised Messiah. After 400 years of silence from the prophets, John the Baptist was sent to proclaim preparation for Jesus. Now starts the new testament. Through the OT we can see time again how far short people fell to the high mark of perfect, and even the best animal sacrifice was still imperfect.... we now could see the need for a perfect sacrifice to be provided for us. The structure was in place with the institution of sacrifice and seeing people always comming up short. Jesus came, taught and set the stage for a new commandment. He ultimately fulfilled the need for a perfect sacrifice for mankinds sin and through his obedience to His father in death on the cross, I am covered with his blood (like the animal sacrifice demonstrated) so as to appear white as snow before God and His righteous. I cannot do this for myself, only God can. Upon Jesus death, his disciples continued to spread the good news lead by Peter in the Jewish camps in particular and Paul in the Gentile camps. They were all teaching the good news of the new commandment to follow Christ... ie becomming christ-ians. Paul teaches in Romans how we are not created as robots and in our free will we can choose to follow Christ but in our desire to do it on our own... God will not interfere. We are given over to our selfish choices if that is what we choose. He is waiting and available to all who desire to follow Him, but He will not force himself on us. God desires a relationship with each of us (no particular religion is required) He will come again to judge us all as to the believers belonging to Him (through choice to follow) and those who lived in rejection of him for living for self. The world we know of will end at His appointed time.
This.... is not cherry picking. It is a VERY slim picture of the bible in a nutshell. It is not flawed... but full of flawed people. God never condones sin and never has. If you read the entire stories from the OT that have incest etc in them in their evtirety you will see consequences and penalties.
Is my writing flawed? Yep, but not the content. Michael, if you really want to see each thing you mentioned as questionable addressed, let me know. I am currently out of time.... so for now.. God Bless!! I love you big brother. For the record... the more I study the bible, the more consistent it all becomes. The only things I believe to be blind faith is what God looks like and what heaven will be like. Faith is the confidence that what we hope for will actually happen, giving assurance about things we cannot see. (heb 11:1) This belief saved me from suicide and ultimately the fires of hell. Now I live with a purpose and know I will spend eternity with God in heaven. Not because I am good enough, but because He is sufficient enough in his payment for my sin with His death on the cross.
Until later...
In Christ, Mary
Dakota Bill here...
HAPPY THANKSGIVING to the whole Keenan clan, far and wide
I am worried about Michael (SF Kid) not getting into heaven. He says the way he lives his life is enough to get him there. Some say works don't count; you have to get there on faith alone. Do I think he'll make it? I'll reveal my decision later, but I hope he makes it. I'd like to see him there someday. He's a nice guy. I've always liked him.
Here's my take on his situation:
Having been raised a Catholic, I have not studied the Bible. When I was in Catholic school, they mostly just told us what was in it, and we studied something called "Bible History." And then there were the Gospel and Epistle readings at Mass. But if we did read the Bible, we were told not to read the King James version, but to read the approved Catholic model, known as the Douay-Rheims Catholic Bible. We were led to believe that while the King James had pretty language, it did not nail the truth as accurately as Douay-Rheims, or something like that. Anyway, we were not allowed to read it.
To underscore the point, let me tell a story I heard many times from my Dad. When he and my Uncle Joe were in Catholic grade school in Council Bluffs, Iowa, they were told to bring Bibles to class. They were so poor they couldn't afford to own a Bible of their own. So they stopped in at the YMCA on their way to school and "lifted" a couple of Gideon Bibles from the rooms. I don't regard this as stealing. The Gideons were and are an evangelical Christian organization created for the purpose of spreading The Word by putting free Bibles into hotel and motel rooms. They wanted their Bibles to be there as a comfort to people, and it certainly comforted Dad and Joe to have their own copies to show the nun. And they were good boys, who obeyed not only the Seventh Commandment about not stealing, but the Fourth Commandment, about honoring your father and mother, and nuns. Wouldn't it be ironic if the only thing they ever stole in their lives was a Bible!? But there was a hitch. The Gideons gave away only the King James version, the Catholic no-no. When the boys got to school, the nun asked Joe to read a Bible passage. He started reading from his purloined Gideon Bible, and out came the King James poetic language. The horrified nun shouted, "What kind of Bible are you READING there?"
As I say, I am not a student of the Bible, but saying a particular version is the one true version requires its own leap of faith. The efforts of translating the Bible from its original languages into more than 2,000 others have spanned more than two millennia. Partial translations of the Bible into languages of the English people can be traced back to the end of the 7th century. More than 450 versions have been created over time (Wikipedia, "English translations of the Bible").
The existence of so many differences between translations can be confusing. In an on-line article, "Bible Translations, Why are there so many differences?" translator David Robert Palmer puts it this way: "On the one hand, we believe that all scripture is God-breathed, and that holy men of God wrote them as they were moved by the Spirit of God (2 Timothy 3:16, 2 Peter l:20-21), and 'For truly I say to you: until the sky and the earth pass away, not one iota, not one serif, will by any means pass away from the Law until everything is accomplished (Matthew 5:18, DRP)'. But on the other hand, we know that there are roughly 5,000 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament, and not one of them is identical to any of the others; they are all different."
Palmer continues:
"We believe that the books Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, in their original state as those men first wrote them, were inspired by God...But we today cannot read those original documents (called autographs), because they were written on papyrus (pressed reed plant) or on animal skins, with non-permanent inscription methods, and so they disintegrated soon after they were produced. Morever, the thousands of Geek manuscripts of the four gospels which we do have available to us today all differ from one another. Consequently there is need not only for translation, but also need to decide from which of the thousands of Greek text variants to translate (But this should not shake your faith; the manuscripts of such works as Homer's Iliad, the ancient Hindu scriptures in Sanskrit, and even the relatively young scriptures of Islam, the Quran, have a MUCH greater percentage of variants and corruptions than the Greek New Testament)."
So there is no need to be overwhelmed, or confused, by the countless translations, as long as one keeps the faith.
Palmer makes an interesting point about the belief cherished by many that the King James Version is the one error-free, preserved word of God for the English language.
"But for that to be true," Palmer says, "the men who translated it would have to be inspired like the prophets and authors themselves, and workers of miracles, to some degree. Because it is humanly impossible for them not to have made any mistakes. And they did make mistakes. The Bible says that the original authors were inspired, not subsequent translators."
This is not to denigrate the Bible. If one has faith that it was inspired by God, then it is true, even though translations differ.
But there is further confusion regarding the translation issue. Within Biblical translations, two methods are used to render the sacred text into English: literal equivalence (also called formal or complete equivalence) and dynamic equivalance. According to James Akin, a contributing editor to the Catholic magazine, This Rock, literal equivalence translations try to give as literal a translation of the original text as possible. The disadvanage of literal translations, according to Akin, is that they are harder to read because Hebrew and Greek style intrudes into the English text.
"Since literal translations can be difficult to read, translators have produced more readable Bibles by employing the dynamic equivalence method," says Akin. "According to this method, it does not matter whether the grammar and word order of the original are preserved in English, so long as the meaning of the text is preserved. This frees up the translator to use modern English style and diction."
He goes on to say there is a price to pay for readability. Dynamic translations can lack precision because they sometimes omit subtle cues to the meaning of a passage; these clues may be preserved in literal translations. Dynamic translations also run a greater risk of having the translators' doctrinal views read into the text through the greater liberty of the translating method.
And here's the part that should perk up Michael's ears, if he isn't too deep in sleep by now; Akin addresses the "faith alone" versus works issue:
"Dynamic Protestant translations such as the New International Version (NIV) tend to translate the Greek word ergon and its derivatives as 'work' when 'work' reinforces Protestant doctrine, but as something else (such as 'deeds' or 'doing') when 'work' would serve Catholic doctrine.
"The NIV renders Romans 4:2, 'If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works [ergon], he had something to boast about--but not before God.' This passage is used to support the Protestant doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But the NIV translates the erg-derivatives in Romans 2:6-7 differently: 'God "will give to each person according to what he has done [erga]." To those who by persistence in doing [ergou] good seek glory, honor, and immortality, he will give eternal life.'
"If the erg-derivatives were translated consistently as 'work-' then it would be clear that the passage says God will judge 'every person according to his works' and will give eternal life to those who seek immortality 'by persistence in working good'--statements which support the Catholic view of salvation." (See: "Choosing a Bible Translation" By James Akin, http://www.catholic.com/thisrock/1994/9404fea1.asp).
Which is a long way of saying Michael has an odds-on chance of making it to heaven by being a good boy.
But what if he's not a good boy? It seems like he has chosen the harder way to get to heaven. Being good is not easy. It seems like faith would be a much easier choice than trying to be good all the time, but of course, if you don't have it, you have to get it from God. And poor Michael has already ruled out using Pasqual's Wager, which says believing in God rather than risking hell, but God would see through the ruse.
So that brings up the subject of Hell. From Wikipedia: Most modern Christians see Hell as the eternal punishment for unrepentant sinners, as well as for the Devil and his demons. Unbelievers are said to deserve Hell on account of original sin, according to many, especially the conservative denominatons. Sometimes exceptions are understood for those who have had extenuating circumstances (youth, mental illness, blameless ignorance ["invincible error"], etc.). The foundation of the Christian faith is that it is the death of Jesus Christ, and acceptance of his love for humanity, that allows repentant sinners to avoid the torments of Hell and enjoy eternity with God.
The Catholic Catechism defines Hell as follows:
"We cannot be united with God unless we freely choose to love him. But we cannot love God if we sin gravely against him, against our neighbor or against ourselves: 'He who does not love remains in death. Anyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him'...Our Lord warns us that we shall be separated from him if we fail to meet the serious needs of the poor and the little ones who are his brethren. To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God's merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called 'hell.'"
In the words of Pope John Paul II, "The images of Hell that Sacred Scripture presents to us must be correctly interpreted. They show the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God. Rather than a place, Hell indicates the state of those who freely and definitively separate themselves from God, the source of all life and joy." An earlier catechism, however, describes the suffering of those in Hell in more traditional terms, as fiery "punishment" rather than as "self-exclusion" from God (Wikipedia).
The idea of Hell as a place, in traditional Catholic circles, has been promoted in recent years by the publication of the purported visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917. Mary is supposed to have revealed a vision of Hell as a "great sea of fire." Many Catholics point out that the Magisterium of the Catholic Church does not require Catholics to give credence to any private revelation, though the vision has been declared worthy of belief. It is also suggested that these visions (if true) are using imagery that uneducated people might understand (the seers of Fatima were peasant children).
The Wikipedia article, "Hell in Christian Beliefs," discusses Catholic Church teaching on going to Hell:
"As the Catholic Church teaches that Christians must believe in the existence of Hell, it has been the standard belief of Catholics that certain people go to Hell. However, Catholics are not required to believe that anyone will actually be condemned to Hell, a point which Westminster, England, Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor (suspected of being Irish) has reiterated in recent years: It is non-standard, but not heretical, for Catholics to believe that all souls ultimately reach heaven (if necessary after purgatory). From this viewpoint, the suffering described in Biblical passages of those condemned for their sins is interpreted as purgatory."
I like that idea. It is hard for me to believe that a loving God, the one that we are told about in the New Testament, would sentence anyone to eternal life in a fiery version of Abu ghraib, where even waterboarding would provide cooling relief. I guess I was influenced as much as anything by my mother, a convert to Catholicism when she married my Dad. She used to tell me that the priest who gave her instructions said he believed in Hell, but didn't think anyone was there. My Dad came from a traditional Irish Catholic family, who believed in and followed the letter of the law. My Mother, with Protestant roots, never quite bought into everything and gave me a healthy dose of "Cafeteria Catholicism."
So that's why I think Michael can breathe a huge sigh of relief. Michael, as the theme song for the Mary Tyler Moore Show goes, "You're gonna make it after all."
Thanks for letting me join the lively discussion. I am moved by all the deeply religious people in the Keenan clan. Ya gotta love 'em.
Dakota Bill
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