These two contradictions are bad examples.

How so? If, as you claim, they’re contradictions, then the Bible is not inerrant — and this is the point those examples illustrate.

Speaking of which I think this post needs more cow bell. Srsly.

Oh, I dunno. Seems to me you’ve provided plenty.

Speaking of which I think this post needs more cow bell. Srsly.

Ben

For “*possible*”, read ‘plausible’.

As a former Catholic I gotta say – I get a big kick out of the whole idea of “sola scriptura”. I mean, yeah, for years I believed in “apostolic authority” so it’s not like Catholics have room to talk, but still. The idea that somehow a book can have “divine authority” has always struck me as a bit idolatrous (and in retrospect, the idea that a collection of men could claim divine authority by virtue of inheritance should have struck me as presumptuous – we all have our blinders I suppose). And that was before I started reading about how the canon was formed in the first place.

I would like your opinion. Obviously this topic is an example of biblical gray area. So for issues like this:

Why does god not grant prayers of biblical clarity? I mean why would god not grant full understanding of the entire bible upon such prayers by christians? Why would it be necessary to spend a lifetime studying the bible?

Furthermore, we’ve had many many generations of christians who have undoubtedly prayed for direction in their spiritual life, why have these people not gotten identical directions from god? Why would god tell one man to be a morman and one to be a catholic, and one to be a baptist? Doesn’t god really talk to them? Don’t all of these believers swear that god has spoken to them?

Of course, I believe it’s all just their imagination, but surely this question has come up in history, how have the ancient apologists answered this?

Actually, all you need to do to come up with a version of God that comports with empirical reality is to ditch the “all loving” nature of God.

No.

A being that is both omniscient and omnipotent is logically contradictory (how could this being falsify its knowledge? ).

Infinite mercy = eternal torment
Infinite love = total abandonment
Infinite power = inability to act at all

I have found over the years that every single argument that attempts to justify the all loving, all knowing, all powerful God in the face of the collection of empirical data we call “reality” falls into one of three camps:

1) Redefining the word “omnipotent” to mean something other than “all powerful”
2) Redefining the word “omniscient” to mean something other than “all knowing”
3) Outright denial that God is all loving and instead insisting that God only loves a subset of humanity and so is only willing to extend his omnipotence and omniscience to this group of Elect that he loves.

Of these only the folks in the third camp seem to be intellectually aware of what they’re doing. The folks in the first two camps never seem to actually realize that they’re limiting God’s power to explain why he doesn’t act in the way a loving parent actually would.

Until contraception became a widespread thing, the Catholic Church and most Christian denominations that I’m aware of taught that the soul didn’t enter a body until “Quickening” – i.e. when the mother first started feeling the baby move within the womb. IIRC this happens sometime around month 4 to month 6. When birth control and women’s suffrage started to become political issues supported by liberal Protestant churches, the Catholic Church decided that life began at conception and that birth control was interfering with God’s Will. There is no Scripture to back this up because the Catholic Church insists that authority can’t come from Scripture but only from Apostolic tradition so they don’t bother combing through Scripture performing textual exegesis to try to justify their doctrines – Jesus established the apostles as his heirs on Earth after all, not the New Testament. So by Catholic teachings what the Pope says has authority in Heaven as on Earth with no scouring of ancient texts to figure out what God wants required.

I find it somewhat hilarious that the evangelical Protestant community in the US has latched onto what is essentially a bit of Catholic doctrine that was created specifically to smack the Protestants across the face. Of course the doctrine is unbiblical – it’s a Papist doctrine. I’ll bet the current Pope gets a lot of giggles out of the whole thing too, because you know he understands what it really all means.

God is wise above all the imaginations of men, and if He did demonstrate a callous disregard for the value of a human life, it’s because it was ultimately destined to bring about the greater good (for values of “good” that are not incompatible with suffering, disease, death, sin, and the eternal damnation of most of God’s children).

I really hate that argument, because it shows that the person making it doesn’t believe that God is omnipotent, despite their own claims to the contrary.

If God can’t bring about the greater good without performing acts that seem evil right now, then He is not omnipotent, by definition. Omni-potent means (roughly) “capable of doing anything”; if He is not capable of doing this, then He is not omnipotent. I’m not sure how that escapes people.

Another one I hate is the argument from free will: namely, that God must let us choose to do evil, because He doesn’t want to stomp on our free will. And yet they don’t realize that saying an omnipotent being “must” do anything is a contradiction in terms.

Further, it also leads to the rather unfortunate implication that God doesn’t really care if we’re good people or not; you can choose to do bad, and the only repercussions will come from our society. Try to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum, though, and you’ll find it’s utterly impossible. Why shouldn’t this be the other way around? It would make our lives a lot better.

See? THAT’S why we keep reading you!
Your essays re a litte bright spot in the week, and I always look forward to them.
Keep up the good work, and thanks!

Of course this is still unbiblical

Heh. I first misread this as ‘umbilical’, and thought “yeah, so?”.

DD:

Well, that’s easy, we’ll just say that “life begins at conception.” Sperm + egg = human life and therefore it’s murder if you take that life.

Of course, gametes (both the egg and the spermatozoon) are already alive, so there’s merely a continuation, rather than a genesis of life.

But that’s what happens when you try to obey the voice of a God Who isn’t there, and is easily imitated. You become a pawn, a tool…

Maybe this isn’t such a big deal to people who believe that moral behavior means obeying the dictates of some outside source. I mean, they already believe that they’re someone’s pawn, unless I misunderstand.

Oh, that’s quite lovely. Well said. Excellent article.

Miracles as confirmation are quite useless once they quickly become hearsay. That was a big thing for me to realize.

For me, Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason help to unlock all of this. From CHAPTER XVII – OF THE MEANS EMPLOYED IN ALL TIME, AND ALMOST UNIVERSALLY, TO DECEIVE THE PEOPLES:

Since then appearances are so capable of deceiving, and things not real have a strong resemblance to things that are, nothing can be more inconsistent than to suppose that the Almighty would make use of means, such as are called miracles, that would subject the person who performed them to the suspicion of being an impostor, and the person who related them to be suspected of lying, and the doctrine intended to be supported thereby to be suspected as a fabulous invention.

In every point of view in which those things called miracles can be placed and considered, the reality of them is improbable, and their existence unnecessary. They would not, as before observed, answer any useful purpose, even if they were true; for it is more difficult to obtain belief to a miracle, than to a principle evidently moral, without any miracle. Moral principle speaks universally for itself. Miracle could be but a thing of the moment, and seen but by a few; after this it requires a transfer of faith from God to man to believe a miracle upon man’s report. Instead, therefore, of admitting the recitals of miracles as evidence of any system of religion being true, they ought to be considered as symptoms of its being fabulous. It is necessary to the full and upright character of truth that it rejects the crutch; and it is consistent with the character of fable to seek the aid that truth rejects.

Exemplary post, DD!

~David D.G.

Pointing out their inconsistencies and errors is a fun, but hopeless exercise. If those things bothered the religious reich, they would be atheists, too.

Children have yet to do the wrong thing. We’d better keep them from ever doing anything but the right thing. You could chain the child up in the basement so they can’t perform any sinful acts, and tear out their tongue so they can’t say any sinful things, but there’s no way to guarantee that they will never have sinful thoughts – unless you tear out their minds. It’s the only logical thing to do, if you truly believe in a Hell that is equivalent to infinite punishment.

Of course, you can get around this by believing in Heaven but not Hell – which is, for a great many people, believing in the wrong thing.

~David D.G.

Of course, (one of) the problem(s) that you touch on here is that it’s a trick you can pull equally well with anything. “Oh, I’d better make snow angels nude, because there’s a finite probability of an infinite reward if I do so.” There are an infinite number of possible infinite-reward scenarios meaning, once again, that evidence is the only good way to make a decision regarding any of them.

[great post, btw]

I think bringing up this kind of dual nature opens a whole different can of worms when it comes to the Trinity – trinitarian doctrine depends on Jesus being both fully human and fully divine simultaneously, not having different “halves” that operate independently of one another. If Jesus had a God “half” and a human “half” and it was the human half that died while the God “half” survived then it doesn’t make sense to say that God “gave his only begotten son” for the world – he didn’t give anything, just the human “half” he grafted his immortal progeny onto.

My understanding of Roman Catholic doctrine is that everything that was Jesus died and then he returned from the dead. By “death”, though, what is meant is that his immortal soul descended into the land of the dead, just as a mortal soul would. In fact, part of the apostle’s creed was that he “descended into Hell” for three days before returning from the dead on Easter. It’s an old descent into the Underworld theme – like Orpheus – and so he was dead and in Hell and then he returned to the world of the living. As a young Catholic I was taught that Jesus descended into Hell to save the souls of those who had already died – he basically dropped into Hell, kicked Satan’s ass, and threw open the gates to let the condemned souls out and into Heaven (have I mentioned that my catechism teachers were volunteers with shaky grasps on Catholic doctrine? I don’t think the Church actually teaches the “ass-kicking” part, but one of my catechism teachers taught it that way…)

The temporary nature of the sacrifice never made much sense to me – God makes no sacrifice here. He doesn’t “give his only begotten son” at all since he comes right back again three days later. The story makes more sense as part of a cosmic struggle between two equally matched powers of good and evil, where the evil power is tricked into killing the good power to release a can of whoop-ass on the evil power (a motif of Christianity that CS Lewis used in his Narnia books). But than that would be dualism, and that’s a heresy, so that explanation, even though it makes more sense, is disallowed from the start.

There is another benefit to the Jesus/Spirit exchange: the Holy Spirit has no required earthly form. True, it allegedly showed up as a dove to John, but most Christians think of it as a purely immaterial being. Because of this, anyone can say that they are in the presence of or are filled by the Holy Spirit simply because they “feel” it. They can whip themselves up into an emotional frenzy and that sensation is certainly very real, which is all the evidence they require. But even the most devoted Christian knows that people look at you funny if you claim that Jesus is literally talking to you or making physical visits. The exchange allows people to say, essentially, that God is directly interacting with them without needing to provide any proof beyond a strong physiological sensation. It is a marvelous way to help maintain faith in the face of absurdity.

It’s that “second death” that they’re often talking about. It’s not without problems of its own.

The same could be said of almost any good work of fiction or comic book. If the protagonist is too perfect, the story is boring and one dimensional, and without some sort of conflict or tension, what’s the point in writing it?

According to Jayman, Jesus himself explains to the Sadducees that when God speaks of death, he may mean physically dead but there is a large component of spiritual death, or unsavedness(is it?), in there too!

Apparently this is such a nuanced point of view, it gets even more confusing and confused when we try to discuss the death and reanimation of God, the Son, himself as it slams headlong into the confusing and confused idea OF God the man(Jesus), the three ‘persons’ of God and such.

What is a good Christian left to do but hold up their hands, admit failure of reason, then look wistfully off into ‘mind-space’ and say, “One truly cannot know the MIND of God.”

Much better than admitting that the whole shebang makes absolutely no sense at all, eh?

That’s a pattern that inevitably arises when men try to tell stories that are not true: whenever someone thinks of some way to reconcile the immediate inconsistencies, the “fix” introduces new inconsistencies. That’s the nature of untruth, because if it actually were consistent with reality, then it would not be untruth.

Note that I’m not saying that this is what early Christians would believe – not all of them seemed to believe that Jesus was actually God for one thing, so they would need to have some other explanation for why his sacrifice on the cross would lead to absolution of sin (if they actually believed that to be the significance of this death – early Christianity seemed to be full of various explanations for what the crucifixion meant and atonement wasn’t the only one).

Exactly. When liberal Christians stand up against their conservative counterparts I’m standing right there with them. I’m glad to work with them to curb the dangerous behavior of their fundamentalist co-religionists.

But they don’t. Instead they make excuses and say things like “not all Christians are like that – most of us are quite nice”. Well, that’s fine. But then why are you letting THEM set the agenda and letting THEM define what it means in most people’s eyes to be a Christian? They’re the ones who get the face time. They’re the ones who get the megaphones. And the liberal Christians seem content to let them spout their hatred and only occasionally step up and say “oh, they’ve gone too far. Not all Christians think like that, please don’t think we’re all so hateful.” Liberal Christians should be working to clean up the Christian brand – and make no mistake, the Christian brand is horribly tainted by their fundamentalist co-religionists – and remove the hate from it instead of complaining about “those mean old atheists”.

Regardless of how you define “fundamentalist,” though, or where you draw the line between those who are and those who are not, we Americans live in a nation where three-fifths of the states in the Union have, by the instigation and support of Christians, amended their Constitutions specifically to deny homosexuals the same rights as their fellow Americans. Sixty percent of the United States have passed a law—more than a law, a constitutional amendment—that has no practical purpose beyond denying happiness to a minority whose sole offense is that they fall in love with people Christians don’t like.

This kind of Christian-sponsored social injustice is why I blog against Christianity. When liberal Christians can become influential enough within their own religion to curb the outrageous and antisocial behavior of their more conservative peers, I will change my approach.

Cheers.