The OP is a loaded question. I won’t say it’s typical of Curtis’s OPs but, if pressed for a cite, I’m sure I can find others. Yo, bra. Sounds like you’re mellowing.
Atheists/skeptics, if left to themselves, might read the Bible (which version, who knows?), see a number of internal/scientific inconsistencies in it, do some picking and choosing and move on.
But no. They get the “revealed Word” shoved up their collective noses by folks who call themselves fundamental Bible belting Christians who claim “literal interpretation” while ignoring or rationalizing the “difficult” passages.
To answer the OP, we’re merely trying to wake them up in their own bed of irrationality. If they’d shut up, I believe we’d quickly lose interest in the conversation.
HTF does a loving Creator make a hell? Even *od can’t do it.
What the hell else could they possibly mean if they say that they interpret the Bible literally?
No wonder it sounded familiar - I watched that movie with my 13-year-old just two weeks ago. Now that he’s of a certain age, I’m introducing him to the classics. So far we’ve hit Life of Brian, This is Spinal Tap, Airplane!, The Jerk, and The Gods Must Be Crazy, among others.
Or take the stereotypical Christian attitude toward abortion. It is sometimes in conflict with the Bible which has several passages that indicate pretty strongly that life begins with the first breath.
Uh oh, there I go taking the Bible literally again…
If you don’t take it literally, you can use it to support any view you want.
In my experience, persons who say they believe every word of the Bible to be literally true are flat-out lying, both to themselves and to their interrogator. My father and one of my sisters are fond of claiming to believe in Biblical inerrancy in one breath and in the next saying, “Oh, that part doesn’t really mean what you think it does. You have to know how to interpret.” An example is their position on drinking alcohol, which they’ll claim to be incredibly sinful; they’ll fanwank that Jesus turned the water at Cana to grape juice. :rolleyes:
It’s funny till they start rationalizing incidents of genocide.
Biblical literal inerrancy is an easy target; it is also a minority position, even among the deeply religious.
A very few Christians believe that the Bible is without error in every respect, but most believe that the Bible “does not err” and is “God’s word” merely in that it fulfils its function - delivering God’s vision and “the good news” to the world.
Thus, an attack that is premised on literal biblical inerrancy isn’t going to work on the vast majority of believers, who will view it as a “straw man” type argument.
On topic, I’d say that Biblical errors, contradictions, and non sequiturs easily open it up to a form of Bertrand Russell’s argument. If the Bible is inerrant, then you should take it literally, which means that pork, tattoos, mixed-material clothing, and fig trees are all right out, simply due to editorial whim. If the Bible must be interpreted according to your individual (or clergy’s) estimation of what is right and how you should act, then what the hell do you need it for?
In alt.atheism there used to be an annual Easter challenge, where the conflicting stories of the empty tomb were laid out. No theist ever responded that some of the versions were incorrect, they did respond that they might be incomplete, and even that their inconsistencies made them more true.
So I’ll ask the same question I asked Curtis - if you say that not all parts of the Bible are divinely inspired, how do you distinguish the divine parts from the human parts? What is your filter? Over history pieces have migrated from the inspired to the non-inspired categories with advances in science, history, and ethics. Are only the unfalsifiable parts inspired?
Well, yes. Haven’t you ever run into the sort who think that God wrote the Bible word for word, right down to it being in English and with red letters for the words of Jesus?
Except when they want to justify writing something in the Bible into law. Then suddenly it is the literal Word of God.
They could be using the second definition of the world “literally” that’s found in any dictionary, as already explained.
I mentioned that one YouTube user because, as far as I know, he’s the most popular Bible-basher on the site and his videos have millions of hits, as I said. Perhaps there’s some atheist who actually gets a larger audience and addresses what Christians actually believe rather than that sort of pablum; all I can say is that I’ve never encountered one.
That site says in the fourth paragraph that the Bible contains figures of speech, so it confirms what I explained earlier about what some Christians mean when using the word “literally”.
For my money, it’s a matter of … if you even take one impossible thing in the bible literally, you may as well take it all literally and be prepared to defend it.
What’s the point of saying, “oh Jesus really meant to educate yourself and not literally gouge out your own eye,” if the next sentence out of your mouth is, “When Jesus was resurrected on the third day …”
That is, if you’re going to talk to me about a parable regarding the spiritual reawakening of the yada yada yada, ok fine … let’s discuss. But don’t expect me to take Zombie Jesus at face value and give you a pass on all the other weird shit going on in that book.
Again, I’m not a believer myself, so I may not be the right person to answer your challenge.
But it does not appear to me to be all that difficult a challenge to answer.
A believer might well say that there is a divinity, who is attempting to influence humanity to the good - but who must work by inspiring human authors, who are situate in human cultures. Such authors are themselves fallible. Thus to extract the divine essence from the fallible dross requires the application of intelligent criticism of the text, based on attempting to find the spirit and not the merely letter of the laws.
Rabbi Hillel was, around 100 AD I believe, tasked with attempting to summarize the whole of the Torah (a non-Jew asked him to state what the Torah was “about” while standing on one foot):
Rabbi Shammai may be dismayed at having bits of the Torah proven scientifically incorrect; but would Rabbi Hillel?
In short, the details of the OT which are contrary to modern conceptions of science are details and commentary, appropriate perhaps to its Iron-age setting and audience, and lacking application today; the ‘whole of the Torah’ (or for Christians, the ‘whole of the Gospels’) does not lie in the fallible details, but in the message - the elaboration of the Golden Rule (in the case of the Torah), or the Goldejn Rule plus redemption (in the case of Christianity).
Well, heck, you can put a vomiting kitten on youtube and get 20 million hits. I’ll watch the linked video in total later, but I gather the gist is:
“If God exists and is as powerful as you claim, as concerned with human affairs as you claim and loves humans as much as you claim, why doesn’t he…?”
I’d consider it a mark of maturity to hear a six year-old ask a similar question, and the fact that adults can still ask it and not get a satisfactory answer suggests to me there is no satisfactory answer.