Ok, inspired by a post in a thread, that was inspired by a post in another thread, here is my question. And please believe me when I say it is a truly genuine question.
If I refuse to believe parts of the bible, why should I believe any of it?
Seriously, I would like to know what makes some people to take some of this book as complete and full rules, and just pass the rest of as misinterpretation? The parts I refuse to believe and know are completely wrong are the ones that pretty much led me away from believing any of it. So if someone can give me a logical reason to believe parts of it, but not all of it, I’d appreciate it.
Is there a logical reason to insist that we should not believe parts of it, but rather all or none of it?
Is it so out of the question that part of a document has been forged or is not the direct words of an entity, but the rest of it is? There are millions of counter-examples of writings by people that were added to or deleted or changed later.
Why do you think that a deity is any exception: after all it’s pretty certain that people were copying and translating the texts long after any dictation from a deity, if any.
See, that’s my point, how are we ever to know what, if ANY was ever the word of god. Some parts I disagree with said to be DIRECTLY the word of god. Where do we draw the line? How are you supposed to believe any of a document, that was written thousands of years ago, and is just peppered with evil and just plain mean things?
It’s like any documentary. Most of it can be completely true, then it has ONE false thing in it, and peole just wash the whole thing off as lies. What makes people believe one part of this book, and not the rest? Who are WE to judge what is and isn’t the direct word of god? And if we incorrectly live by these things, well…you’re screwed.
The “Bible” is not just one book. The ancient Sadducees accepted the Torah as God’s Word, but not the Prophets or the Writings. The vast majority of religious Jews accept the Torah, Prophets & Writings, but reject the Christian Testament.
Early Judaizing Jesus-followers accepted the entire Hebrew Bible, a variation of Matthew, James & Revelation but rejected John & the writings of Paul. The Marcionites accepted Paul’s writings & a variation of Luke but rejected everything else including the Hebrew Bible. Historic Christians accept all of them but place greater weight on some rather than others.
Okay, set to one side that there is a minority of believers who hold the Bible to be inerrant and verbatim inspired by God. For them the OP would be relevant, because any error would serve to invalidate their position.
But for everyone else, Christian, pagan, theosophist, agnostic, atheist, or Reformed Orthodox Perkunian*, the Bible is a collection of writings from numerous sources in and around the ancient Middle East. That some nimblewit in 960 BC made a factual error in reporting the size of some accouterment of Solomon’s Temple does not invalidate the homely rabbinic advice of James Justus just over a thousand years later.
I like Wikipedia – it’s an extremely thorough source of summarized-but-detailed factual information on almost anything you might care to look up. I’m well aware that its open editing policies have both pros and cons, and that something I might look up is the erroneous belief of some clown who also believes that the Moon Landings were faked by a team led by Lee Harvey Oswald, working out of the secret back room of a car repair shop in Yeehaw Junction, FL. But in general, and with awareness that I sometimes need to fact-check, I feel I can rely on Wikipedia for a good first cut on a topic.
I trust the parallel to the Bible, understood as a collection of writings, is relatively obvious.
Worships the Lithuanian thunder god Perkunas, of course!
The idea of the Bible as a single entity that is the “Word Of God,” in the sense that God directly caused it to be written to tell human beings what they should believe and obey, is not the only way of looking at it. To say, “You have to believe all of it, or else that casts doubt on all of it and you can’t trust any of it” is the approach taken by the more conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists, but not by all Christians.
Note that the Bible is a collection of different writings in different genres. What it would even mean to “believe” it isn’t always clear and might well vary from part to part. What does it mean to “believe” a poem, for example? Or a proverb? Or one of Jesus’s parables? Does it mean to believe that the story he told actually happened somewhere, or that Jesus actually told it, or that the point it makes is a valid and trustworthy one?
I’m not sure if it really is a minority in the US. I don’t know how many times I have heard people refer to the Bible as “The Word of God”. People pull out the 2 or 3 passages that refer to homosexuality as absolute proof that gaydom is evil and should be illegal. It’s not like we hear “it’s possible those passages were mis-transcribed, let’s look at the deeper meaning of the Bible”.
You might be right about that. The appeal of the “Bible is the Literal Word of God” position is that it doesn’t require much thinking for oneself. If you want to claim that the majority of people don’t like thinking much, I’d be hard-pressed to disagree.
Assume every bit of it has something good to say, but also assume I myself have a fairly decent sense of right and wrong, and so conclude that when the bible seems to be saying something I judge “morally wrong,” I am understanding correctly that what I take the bible to be saying is morally wrong, but also that what I take the bible to be saying is not the same as what it really means. In such cases, do not obey what I take it to be saying but also do not give up on searching for the real meaning.
This is not my philosophy, I think, it’s just one I’m putting out for consideration.
You could apply that to any book from Lord of the Rings to Archie comics. It would be cool to have Bettie as the Virgin Mary and Veronica as Mary Magdalene.
Ok, I’m actually getting some very good responses here. And I thank everyone who has put in their two cents. This is turning into a fairly decent debate.
But here’s something to think about. If you do go through the bible and pick and choose what you do and don’t find morally wrong, and just ignore those things you do not accept, what’s the point of having the book? Why not just trust on your own moral judgement with everything and live with that?
And I realize that the bible is a collection of several different scriptures, and that at one point there were a lot more than they have now. What with the recent finding of the gospel of Judas and everything, which plainly counters a some of what Mathew, Mark, Luke, and John said. I’m just wondering how many others there are out there waiting to be found and translated that will contradict a lot of the other stuff. You have to think about all of that too.
It’s like a giant game of telephone, you repeat the story several different times through many different people, and after a while, it’s no longer even close to what the first person said.
That is a bit reversed. Lots of works were written, but “the bible” includes only those works that the believing community felt expressed the faith that they shared. The Gospel of Judas, (and lots more) were all known by the various believers and, ultimately, not selected for inclusion in scripture because they did not comport with the faith of the largest numbers of believers. Irenaeus discussed the Gospel of Judas in the middle of the second century. It was not a new discovery to Chriostianity, only the discovery of a text believed to be lost.
From this linked page you can go to additional pages and find over 20 books of “Acts of”, 12 gospels, 11 books of revelation (or apocalypses), and numerous other works.
The books that were selected as scripture were each (often for different reasons) selected because they presented some aspect of the belief of the community.
Similar decisions went into the selection of the works that are now called, by Christians, the Old Testament. (Some of them also appear on the linked page.)
I guess your point is that somehow this fails to make the bible special?
But its not supposed to be a rule for determining which books are special. Its a rule for deciding what to do with the special books, once you’ve decided which ones those are.
My point, if I have one, is that if you are going to pick and choose those parts of the bible that you think have personal moral significance and those that don’t, you may as well use any book that has significance to you. There is a book called the Tao of Pooh that looks at lessons on Buddhism you can learn from the Pooh series. Other people have used the movie Groundhog Day to teach philosophy.
Suppose that you discovered an error in the writings of, say, Tacitus. Or Plutarch. Or Michael Moore. Does this logically mean that you should reject everything they said?