By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 18:52:26 +0000

Weird. You are clearly intelligent, but it also appears that you have a singular motive in publishing on the internet: Prove God, the Bible and your personal experience to be real. That is impossible, just as it is impossible for me to prove that God is not real. What is possible is for you and I to believe two completely different things, which happens to be the case. I do not believe the Bible to be the revealed word of God. I do not agree with the principles found in the text (i.e. original sin, treatment of women, extreme parenting, completely different approaches from one testament to the next, etc.). It seems that you are searching, or believe through a search you have found absolute truth. Is there a possibility of absolute truth actually being found in this arena of philosophy and religion? I don’t believe so. Certain topics carry with them an inherent absolution that can not be denied, unless a lack of reason is found in the one debating (i.e. math). Others, such as religion and philosophy, do not. They are full of opinions derived from experience and study. Your opinion is that Jesus was born to a virgin, lived a perfect life, died a terrible death on a cross, came back to life after visiting hell in a semi-human form, flew up to heaven in front of followers, and will one day return to rule and eventually destroy this earth. My belief is that this probably did not and will not happen. I can not prove my theory anymore than you can prove yours. What we can do is look around us in a scientific/observational type approach and see if there’s anything that supports our views. I have never seen an answered prayer that broke the “laws” of nature, although I’ve seen many sincere requests being offered up. In fact, I’ve never once witnessed a miracle of any sort. I have no reason to believe, based on this one fact, that miracles are happening as we speak. Although I can’t prove that they don’t, I have a solid reason for sticking to this stance. Given that lack of clear evidence, I can honestly say that there’s a great chance that no miracle has ever taken place (if we stick to the breaking the laws of nature definition). I can’t say that no miracle has ever happened, that would be supremely ignorant. All I can say is that through my existence I have never seen clear evidence. Given those facts, and the fact that the scriptures were written in a time that was ripe with a lack of knowledge that produced extreme superstition, it is honestly fair for me to believe that it’s not true. Again, this is without definitive proof one way or another, but it is obvious how I was able to arrive at this place. What’s not obvious is how a seemingly intelligent person as yourself has fallen in line with the faithful. How are you able to suspend your reason and believe that: 1) Morality is only derived from a terribly immoral book (stoning children, genocide/ethnic cleansing, complete dependence on blood sacrifices, obvious contradictions to “normal behavior”, unreasonable requests against human instinct); 2) I can not prove that I am right just by saying, “I am, therefore I am right.” anymore than you can. Yet you offer the bible this kind of allowance. Defining a word by using the word is incorrect, hopefully you can appreciate that, yet you use The Word to define the perfection of The Word. You seem smart, which is why I started this with “Weird”. Because it really is.

Comments on: The Inerrancy of Scripture

By: Jonathan