Logical Errors in the Bible? Show me!

[Doc_Nickel]

*Originally posted by Polycarp *
**There’s not a one of us believers who doesn’t agree with you about the utter improbability if not total impossibility of such a creature. Rather, we believe in a Creator.
**

Mere semantics. Trekkies believe in Warp Drive, fanboys believe in Hyperdrive. Does either exist?

And that’s not just a play on your choice of words; the idea of a God with that sort of cosmic consciousness is significantly less than the reality of Him, we believe. J.B. Phillips wrote a book whose total message is in the title: Your God Is Too Small. And his point was this: no matter what your concept of God: Magical Sky Pixie, Magistrate in the Sky, Uncle Cuddly, Universal Mind, the Brahman which is not Maya, That Which Unconditionally IS – they all fall short of the reality.

And this, to me, is simply further proof against. The God of Biblical times was small and nearby. The belief was he simply lived just above the clouds- heck, if you just build a tower tall enough, you’ll reach him.

Flyers of early airplanes were said to be able to “nearly touch the face of God”. There was some consternation over the first orbital spaceflights- would not God be angry for having his home violated? Would the astronauts see Angels and seraphim?

As our view of and undestanding of the Universe has expanded, so has our concept of God: First, God made the skies and the Earth. Pretty big undertaking, but hey, we can get down with that. Later we find other entire planets mind-boggling distances away. Then we find out how incalculably distant the stars are, and later we discover that some of those pinpricks in the sky are not single stars but entire galaxies composed of a hundred billion suns like ours.

But still no God, no trace, no trail, no minor hiccup in the path of energized photons that could be interpreted as a sign of God, or a Creator, or other creature.

So we simply change, again, our idea of God. he who once simply lived above the clouds is now… yes, transdimensional. That’s it- He doesn’t exist in this time/space continuum, which is why we can’t detect him. Yeah, that oughta work.

Which is, of course, simply the next step in the millenia-long “my god is bigger than your god” game we’ve been playing since Noah.

It seems one must have a God so badly that any explanation, rationalization or convolution of the facts must be made to correlate belief with knowledge.

And, as I’ve said, just because we can imagine it, doesn’t make it so.

I completely agree. One must keep in mind the human author, his preconceptions and limitations, the culture in which he wrote, etc. This does not preclude a measure of divine inspiration. Parallel: Felix Frankfurter, before being named to the Supreme Cort, was a senior professor at Havard Law who trained a large proportion of Federal judges and constitutional scholars, the so-called “Hot Dogs.” Their opinions and law review articles are unmistakeably their own work, yet carry a flavor of Frankfurter’s philosophy and world view, sometimes from his verbatim suggestions but more often by his views having shaped theirs.

And Asimov was writing of “flying saucers” decades before Stephen King wrote Tommyknockers. Doyle all but invented the idea of a murder mystery a hundred years before Murder, she Wrote.

We know the Egyptians had been writing about various Gods a thousand years before Noah, the Mayans a thousand years before that. As another poster noted recently, the Chinese have a form of written history going back eight thousand years- they too believed in gods and the afterlife.

In other words, again, just because it’s been written down, that the concept can be imagined, doesn’t mean it exists. Ask George Lucas.

Bingo. So liberal Christians do not buy into this BS. "Jesus came to take away your sins – not your mind."

“Sins”, of course, thrust upon us by the Bible.

The Bible giveth and the Bible taketh away. Convenient, is it not?

**I for one don’t. I base my life on the clear and simple, though amazingly difficult to perfectly do, treachings of Jesus which happen to be contained in it. He teaches an idealistic and challenging individual ethical code which implies humanistic social morals – contrary to what the inerrantists believe and practice. **

So you’re saying that, had you not read the book and interpreted it your way, you’d be a worse person? Not as moral, more likely to lie, cheat or steal, on some level?

[Polycarp]

Thank you – about that much – for interpreting my opinions through the perspective of someone out to disprove a fundamentalist’s notions. I’m afraid my ability to verbalize is not up to drawing the disconnect that I clearly see. In my view, I didn’t “move God away” at all – He’s both transcendent, and immanent in all things. Some earlier conceptualizations of Him were amazingly naive.

The comments about the orbital flights and particularly the last two sentences of your post, strike me at present as cheap shots. Where in all that I’ve said here have I ever given you the idea that I might buy into a “Heaven just above the atmosphere”? And where have I given the idea that I think the only reason to do right is because the Bible (in your reading of my post) or Jesus (in what I actually wrote, explicitly denying dependence on “the Bible” taken as an internally coherent set of rules) says so?

I’ll come back to this thread, and try to answer what you say with more patience and hopefully greater clarity than I have to this point. But I did want to make it clear that I feel like you shuffled my post together with one of His4Ever’s and read into mine something that she might have said, and responded to the mix of views.

[John_Zahn]

Hopefully, Fuel isn’t out of gas since the OP. If one does go on vacation they generally let us know this before starting a thread. But I imagine he’ll be back, so back to his OP:

Me first: 2 Kings 24:8 says Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he became king and 2 Chronicles 36:9 says he was eight. This seems like an error, but the Hebrew word for eight and eighteen are the same, believe it or not, IIRC. (I can’t find my Hebrew Bible right now, but this is true. I will definately get back here with the proper word and translation ASAP.)

That hardly seems likely that the Hebrew used the same word for eight and eighteen. Imagine a numbering system that couldn’t distinguish from the two. It would be worthless. And if this is the case, how did it get interpreted in our Bibles as “eight” and “eighteen” if they truly used the same word? Who decided to use “eight” for one verse, and go with “eighteen” with the other? And if a difference of ten isn’t an error, then what would constitute an error to you?

JZ

[RTFirefly]

With all due respect, Doc Nickel, it really is a bit of a hijack to come in here and say, in effect, “not only is it unreasonable to expect the Bible to be inerrant, but it’s just a collection of ridiculous fables and fairytales anyway.” Surely you can criticize the notion of Biblical inerrancy without gratuitously slamming the idea of religious belief as well.

If we accept your basic point that no godlike creature exists, then of course the Bible isn’t inerrant. The debate only has meaning within the context of the belief in the existence of the Judaeo-Christian God.

[Thrasymachus]

I suppose the most striking contradictions would be to compare the nature of God in the first testament as compared to the second, and either to the central beliefs and writings of the modern day.

Rather odd fellow, that god guy that slowly changes to mirror the attitudes of the cultures that believe in him!

Since that’s off topic for this thread, however, I’ll just pull out my personal favorite:

2 Samuel 24:1-15: God orders David to take a census of Israel, and then promptly kills 70 thousand Israelites for doing so.

1 Chronicles 21:1-14. Now it was Satan that moved David to do it. Same result though, with God swooping in for the kill once more.

For a census!

[Doc_Nickel]

*Originally posted by RTFirefly *
With all due respect, Doc Nickel, it really is a bit of a hijack to come in here and say, in effect, “not only is it unreasonable to expect the Bible to be inerrant, but it’s just a collection of ridiculous fables and fairytales anyway.” Surely you can criticize the notion of Biblical inerrancy without gratuitously slamming the idea of religious belief as well.

My apologies then, for the hijack.

You’ll note, however, I distinctly mentioned that the “inerrancy” or supposed contradictions are by no means “unreasonable”. In fact, they’re to be expected- it would only be truly surprising if there were indeed NO errors or contradictions.

The book is the work of more than a dozen authors, altered by countless editors and redactors, and retranslated innumerable times, all over literally thousands of years.

How many of the “contradictions” or “errors” we see today, would have, in fact, been edited out or “corrected” had the Book not been thought of as Holy Writ?

More to the point, how many have been ‘corrected’ over the years?

**If we accept your basic point that no godlike creature exists, then of course the Bible isn’t inerrant. The debate only has meaning within the context of the belief in the existence of the Judaeo-Christian God. **

To me, the two are very much interrelated.

The only proof anyone has for the existence of God, Jesus (as the Messiah-figure, not as some loon preaching yet another religion in an area already saturated with them) or the supposed miracles is, of course, the Bible itself.

Which leads to the ubiquitous circular logic: God exists because the Bible says so. The Bible says God exists because it was written by God. The Bible is True because it was written by God, God is true and perfect and incapable of error so therefore the Bible is true and perfect and incapable of error.

Which in turn leads the debators to argue irrelevancies such as the placement of commas, whether Jesus was given water, wine, vinegar or opium, the meaning of a Hebrew word that could be either eight or eighteen, or what his last words were.

[John_Zahn]

Annie-Xmas–How can Lot be considered a righteous man, when he offered his virgin daughters up for rape?

Waenara–** I read a novel recently - Sarah by Orson Scott Card - that explains the Lot situation in a different way. He says that although it seems that Lot was offering his daughters up to be raped, Lot did so in the belief that it wouldn’t actually happen (because the men were homosexual) - so he felt secure that they wouldn’t actually be raped. So supposedly Lot offered them up as a way to placate the angry men, but without actually putting his daughters in danger.

But I don’t know if any of this version is actually supported by the Bible - I have heard that Orson Scott Card is a Mormon, and that their interpretation is “different.” But I’ve never heard anyone explain how it’s different.**

Card’s assertion that Lot knew his daughters wouldn’t be raped because the men were homosexual doesn’t hold. Reading Genesis 19 shows he doesn’t have a care in the world for his daughters, so long as he can save his male guests. For further biblical proof the men being homosexual wouldn’t have prevented his daughters from being raped, you can read a very similar story told in Judges 19, in which men asking for sex from a male guest have a virgin daughter and concubine offered to do as they wish. To get right to it start with the 22nd verse to find out what they do with the concubine. Also keep in mind this is the same Lot who sleeps with both of his daughters and gets both of them pregnant (Gen 19: 33). And yes the NT refers to him as righteous Lot. Now the morals to these stories is what? Incidentally, if my memory serves me right, those two “angels” are referred to as “gods” in other older texts. Just more translators over the years wanting to change much of the polytheistic texts that was originally there.

JZ

[RTFirefly]

*Originally posted by Doc Nickel *
The only proof anyone has for the existence of God, Jesus (as the Messiah-figure, not as some loon preaching yet another religion in an area already saturated with them) or the supposed miracles is, of course, the Bible itself.

Was anyone claiming evidence of God’s existence in this thread? I don’t believe so.

Which leads to the ubiquitous circular logic: God exists because the Bible says so. The Bible says God exists because it was written by God. The Bible is True because it was written by God, God is true and perfect and incapable of error so therefore the Bible is true and perfect and incapable of error.

A straw man like this is unworthy of you.

Which in turn leads the debators to argue irrelevancies such as the placement of commas, whether Jesus was given water, wine, vinegar or opium, the meaning of a Hebrew word that could be either eight or eighteen, or what his last words were.

OK, so by your assumptions, the whole debate is stupid and a waste of time. There’s nothing wrong with that. But nobody held a gun to your head and made you participate.

[furt]

*Originally posted by Doc Nickel *
I’ve never made any secret of my nontheism.

Nontheism wasn’t my point; my point was that you are/were making a priori assumptions which suggest a mind closed to new data.

That’s like saying Terminator is “the inspired Word of John Connor” or Carrie is “the inspired Word of Carrie White”. People have utterly forgotten who is the character and who is the author.

Polycarp is more eloquent and thoughtful than I. My response would have been simply to ask if you’ve ever read an autobiography.

For that matter, if you acknowledge that it is, in fact, “* incomplete, unclear, improbable and occasionally contradictory*”, why base your life, activities and actions around it?

Oh, heck, that’s all the more reason to, as I am all of those things. I would differ with Polycarp here: if all we had were the moral teachings of Jesus, I would give up. What give me comfort is that I can be a complete jerk, as David and Jacob and Paul, etc. were at times and still find my way home.

I’d reckon that as much of our humanity is found in our screwups, our failings and our inconsistiencies as in our successes. My life would be boring if it was one big syllogism. YMMV.

Simple. The Bible is without error, because it is The Word Of God. If the Word of God is found to be in error, then that would imply that God is not, as we’re so often told, perfect and infallible, therefore the Bible must be wholly without error. Any flaw or contradiction must therefore be our silly, weak, human misinterpretation of the thing (and not, of course, a flaw of the very basis of the work itself.)

You aren’t following me. Of course “inerrant” means “without error;” the question is what qualifies as an error: Are metaphors errors (such as “He’s as strong as a bull”)? Is “the sun rose,” in the context of telling a story, an error? Is a poet, writing about his feelings, expected to be factually correct at all times (“my love is a million miles away”)? Are myth and parable, told and understood as such by the original audience (“Once upon a time…”), errors? If a history says that “Xerxes was encamped with an army of 6,000 men,” is it error if the actual number was 5,987?

These are not rhetorical questions: these are all cases where you have to define what you mean by “error,” or else the entire debate is a misunderstanding about words. The vast majority of inerrantists – even the Falwell types – would say that all of these things are in the Bible, but are not “errors.” As used by theologians, “inerrant” is not equal to “factually correct in all details,” any more than a logician saying “this is a valid argument” means he thinks it’s true and correct.

[Ben]

*Originally posted by John Zahn *
** Also keep in mind this is the same Lot who sleeps with both of his daughters and gets both of them pregnant (Gen 19: 33). And yes the NT refers to him as righteous Lot. **

Let’s look at Genesis 19:33, shall we?

“That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and lay with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.”

:rolleyes:

[Ben]

It seems to me that if the Bible is inerrant, then it has to be obviously so, beyond any dispute. Think about the premises here:

1. God exists.

2. God has an important message.

3. God wants to communicate that message through an inerrant Bible.

4. Being all-powerful, God is a literary master who can write the Bible any way he likes.

Why write a Bible that so frequently leads with its chin? Why make a Bible which looks like it’s full of blatant errors, such that people can only see that it’s inerrant if they wade through a tangle of conflicting and highly contentious scholarship? It’s as if I were to start a thread with a really contentious claim (such as the Catholic child slaves thread) and provide cites only from blatantly anti-Catholic hate sites, and leave it up to other people to dig up cites from the BBC and ABC News.

If you want to claim that the Bible is inerrant, sure, you can provide all kinds of explanations to dismiss apparent contradictions. But what you get is the Gospel According to Terl. For those of you who are blessed with not having seen Battlefield Earth, John Travolta, the villain of the movie, plays a character named Terl, who, by an odd coincidence, is also a villain. Terl is a master of the snarky logic of the playground bully. Time and time again we see exchanges like this:

BARTENDER: “But we agreed we wouldn’t spy on each other!”

TERL: “Exactly! We agreed that we would not spy on each other. And since you are not spying on me, then we have not been spying on each other. But I never said I would not spy on you! A-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

And that’s basically what inerrantism turns God into. To wit:

*Originally posted by RedNaxela *
**A number of the Jewish commentaries on both verses suggest that Jehoiachin was co-regent with his father Jehoiakim for the last ten (out of eleven) years of Jehoiakim’s reign, so that the verse in Kings states how old he was at his independent accession, while Chronicles is referring to his age when he was made co-regent. **

“In Kings I said he was eighteen when he became king. In Chronicles I said he was eight. But I never said I meant the same thing by ‘became king’ in both verses, did I? A-HAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Originally posted by Polycarp**
I’ve seen both of these, but the one that I find actually reasonable (as opposed to the idea that one or both Evangelists made up the genealogy out of whole cloth, the most “rasonable” explanation of the discrepancy) – is that Matthew is using the old Semitic custom of recording the heirship in the “son of” usage (which was very common throughout the ancient Near East – compare the Assyrian records referring to Kings of Israel as “son of Omri” even though his descendants had been extinguished a century before).

**

“In Matthew, I said he was son of Jacob. In Luke, I said he was son of Heli. But I never said I meant the same thing by ‘son of’ in both verses! A-HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! If only you had a) studied the genealogical customs of the ancient Near East, and b) realized which custom was being used by which author, you would have been able to understand my critically important message to you.”

The same goes for the way the fundies explain Jeremiah’s failed prophecy that Babylon would be destroyed and never rebuilt. Typically, they argue that ‘Babylon’ in that verse is a reference to the Antichrist, even though it’s clearly used to refer to the country of ancient Babylon throughout the rest of the book.

“I said Babylon would be destroyed and never rebuilt- but I never said which Babylon! O HOHOHOHO!”

[John_Zahn]

*Originally posted by Ben *
**Let’s look at Genesis 19:33, shall we?

“That night they got their father to drink wine, and the older daughter went in and lay with him. He was not aware of it when she lay down or when she got up.”

:rolleyes: **

The Bible mostly having a misogynist point of view makes sure it states that it was the daughters that got their father to drink from the wine. It doesn’t blame Lot for being overly indulgent. And assuming he really didn’t know he had sex with his daughters, does anyone think he sort of had a clue when he later realized both of his daughters were pregnant, since as the story is told there were no males around in those parts?

JZ

[John_Zahn]

Genesis 19:36 instead of 33 would have probably clarrified it better if one didn’t read all of chapter 19. The New International reads: “So both of Lot’s daughters became pregnant by their father.”

JZ

[Ben]

*Originally posted by John Zahn *
**The Bible mostly having a misogynist point of view makes sure it states that it was the daughters that got their father to drink from the wine. It doesn’t blame Lot for being overly indulgent.

**

Nor did you. If you’re going to change your argument, at least admit you were wrong the first time around.

**And assuming he really didn’t know he had sex with his daughters, does anyone think he sort of had a clue when he later realized both of his daughters were pregnant, since as the story is told there were no males around in those parts? **

So?

[furt]

*Originally posted by Ben *
**4. Being all-powerful, God is a literary master who can write the Bible any way he likes.

This is exactly the premise you are not taking into account. If I were God, I would indeed write a book that was able to speak with complete cogency to all people at all times and places, as you seem to request (and which I also would like).

[good-natured sarcasm]
Sadly, I wasn’t consulted by the Almighty, and (Christians believe) God chose to write a book that is timeless in some ways, but is also very closely linked to specific times and places and is shaped by those times and places, including the prejudices and mores of the culture. The Ancient of Days seems to be under the impression that the hard work of puzzling over texts, or wrestling with ambiguity, or the exercise of imagining yourself in another person’s shoes who is altogether different in time and place, are all good for us or something. Whatever.

The gist of it, really is that we’d like The Alpha and Omega to speak clearly to us in terms that we understand so that we may chose as individuals whether or not we want to throw in with The Deity or not. After all, this is a democracy, and the constitution says we have rights, and if The Prime Mover doesn’t want to put it in plain English it’s his problem, not ours.

Believe, me, I am inclined to agree that I AM WHO I AM is full of crap on this; but whenever you say it, the next thing you know you’re listening to a Voice from a Whirlwind lecture you about who is created and who the Creator (“where were you when I formed the Earth,” yadda yadda and on and on like your grandmother). After awhile you just give up.

[Ben]

shrug. Well, thinking for myself and all, I’ve come to the conclusion that Christianity is utterly and obviously incorrect. Hope God’s happy with that. He had his chance.

[badchad]

Polycarp

I for one don’t. I base my life on the clear and simple, though amazingly difficult to perfectly do, treachings of Jesus which happen to be contained in it. He teaches an idealistic and challenging individual ethical code which implies humanistic social morals – contrary to what the inerrantists believe and practice.

You might try to chill on the hypocricy a little bit Polycarp. It was only a couple weeks ago that we established that Jesus teaches an ethical code that you don’t believe or practice. Short memory?

[Ben]

Cite?

[John_Zahn]

*Originally posted by Ben *
Nor did you. If you’re going to change your argument, at least admit you were wrong the first time around.

I haven’t changed my argument. Give me specific quotes of where I changed my argument if you want to make accusations. My main argument was addressing Card’s assertion that Lot really didn’t feel like his daughters would be raped since he would have been sending them out to homosexuals.

JZ

[Polycarp]

Badchad: One word of warning. You will not address yourself to my ethical shortcomings in your eyes outside the Pit again. That’s what it’s there for. Your sniping is turning into personal attacks, which are limited to one forum by the rules you agreed to when you joined this board.

Thank you.