BTW, JThunder, if you’re still in this debate I’m still waiting for an answer to the question I posed about a page or two ago: Does God want everybody to be Christian?
If yes, God seems to have screwed up the process somewhere, seeing as there are several billion people who don’t claim Christianity as their religion. Not very impressive for an omnipotent being.
If no, God didn’t want everybody to be Christian…well that would avoid any contradictions, but I await any kind of Biblical evidence of this. The part about prostelytizing in particular, as I mentioned earlier, seems to contradict this.
(You could also take the Unitarian veiw, that everybody is already Christian, they just don’t know it yet. Just be warned that if you do, you have to be comfortable with me saying the same thing about any other religion.)
Er… what Unitarians claim the above? It’s not in any of the material I’ve gathered from or about the Unitarian-Universalist Association. Several of the Unitarians I’ve met don’t even claim to be Christians themselves; I seriously doubt that they think, say, yonder Buddhist is really a Christian-without-knowing-it.
Please correct me if I’m mistaken.
yeah, you’re probably right, after I posted that I realized I don’t really know that much about Unitarianism, other than the fact that they put all religions on an equal footing. I was just trying to account for all the possibilities.
By the way, I don’t want to limit responses to JThunder, I know there are several people here who agree with him/her.
I just posted a thread and now it seems to be gone for some reason. Anyways, I know of one possible contradiction in the Bible. Magic and witchcraft are supposedly greatly frowned upon by God–punishable by death in fact (as was adultery, sodomy, uncovering your parents’ nakedness, etc.). But when Jesus is born he is visited by three Magi. The word “magic” comes from Magi.
No one seems to mind them being there. Later, God tells them in a dream to avoid the wicked pharaoh by taking an alternate route home. Of course, if your like me, you just doubt the idea of magic and witchcraft altogether. But I digress…
The slaying of the first born was a ‘pagan’ ritual of submitting this energy as a sacrifice to the ‘pagan’ deities. God came and cannibalized this energy … it is symbolic of Gods power over the egyptian deities. This was basically taunting propoganda … “my God is better than your God, neener, neener, neener”
Biblical inversions are much more damaging to the sanctity of the Bible than contradictions. Jesus says to “love your brother” and “hate your brother”; both in a context that leaves these to be complete contradictions. Or God saying that he never lies, and then saying that he does lie.
The contradictions in and of themselves are pretty meaningless in light of Biblical inversions like the devil writing the Bible, or the highest morality is slaughtring as many children as possible before you die.
There are also mistakes, many mistakes in the Bible … mistakes as simple as the sum at the end of an addition column, which seem sloppy and careless.
There are many hypocrisies in the bible, both on the end of God and the savior motif. Jesus’ lack of faith when being tested by the devil on the cliff; or his public prayers when he explains the fruitlessness of prayer. God himself, by hiding the fruit of life when he realized people became like him…
There are many axioms in the Bible that don’t have their prerequisites fulfulled, like Ezekial’s prophesy for Jesus’ godhood, and John the Baptists recantation of Jesus’ divinity (whom the Baptist was symbolically charged with judging).
just to name a few …
There are thousands and thousands of these ideas… I recall hearing about encyclopedia’s of various fallicies catalogueing somewhere in the range of 50,000. Get your hands on one of these if the subject interests you that much.