Minor Thoughts from me to you

The Bible is not the "Word of God"; it is not "inerrant" nor "divinely-inspired", except in the same sense that any book can be said to be inspired by its subject.

That's a statement you've probably heard in some form or other fairly often, at least if you live in a Western or Western-ized country; one of the unique traits of this latest century is that it does not lack for atheists and agnostics. But you've certainly never heard it from me, because at least until three years ago I took the supernatural accuracy of the "Good Book" to be a given, indeed as one of the unassailable axioms at the foundation of my world view.

Now I don't. Can't, really - and the irony of my new inability to agree with the churches assuring us of a flawless text is that I developed it through my obedience to those same "spiritual authorities". A parade of pastors, professors, missionaries, and friends enjoined me to study the Word for myself, so I did - and my resulting growth in understanding quite naturally produced disbelief.

This is not to say that I blame (credit?) any of my teachers, amateur or professional, for my decision to renounce the misconception of the Bible as "perfect" - I have never been told anything by them but that unvarnished truth lies between the leather covers. My conclusions are my own and anyway, obviously other people in possession of far more detailed information about the life and times of the Testaments have remained believers (the apologist Dr. Norman L. Geisler, for instance). I merely tip my hat to them all for pointing the way to the evidence.

For evidence for disbelief it is, to any who are willing to interpret it without undue bias in its favor - and even to some who interpret with it. I was in fact a member of that latter camp back when I first began my concerted effort to be Biblically literate (for that matter, I still think I am). If ever I ran across a charge of inconsistency against the Bible, I took care to absorb the best arguments I could find from both the prosecution and defense (considering Geisler's defense, for instance, on one hand and prominent anti-christs such as Dan Barker on the other). When I judged that a reasonable doubt existed, I acquited.

Far too often that reasonable doubt just doesn't exist, though - and worse, some of the Christian arguments employed on the part of the Bible's defense are on their very face so absurd I want to remonstrate their proponents for either their dishonesty or stupidity. The very same Christians who put forward the ideas of which I speak (but which I shall not at the moment detail, as point-by-point refutation is not the point of this particular missive) would sneer or laugh if the same arguments were suggested to them by members of other religions.

Incidentally, those same arguments would be suggested, too, if those Christians actually took time to read what other religions are saying, which brings to my mind a tangential issue I nevertheless feel the urge to herein mention: the seemingly near-complete lack of authentic investigation of other beliefs and counter-claims by Christians. By "authentic investigation", I mean the consideration of primary sources of information: actually reading what Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris have to say, for instance, instead of only reading what Lee Strobel, Josh McDowell, and Timothy Keller have to say about what atheists say. Allowing the defenders of your faith to cherry-pick quotations from your enemies to feed you - and relying mainly on that information to inform your world view - is dishonest, not to mention ineffective, since surprisingly often the people you assume to be honest (because hey, they're Christians, right?) aren't nearly as trustworthy as you'd like. Exhibits A, B, and C: the supposedly famous archaelogist Dr. Ron Charles (the provided link leads to an earlier Minorthoughts.com post about him), "Dr." Jason Gastrich, and the makers of the film Speechless: Silencing the Christians.

Now that I've gotten that off my shoulders, back to the Bible. A Christian might reasonably ask: "You say that reasonable doubt doesn't exist. Yet clearly many disagree with you, including people with doctorates. How can you think the Bible's mistakes are _so _evident when people who know more than you don't see what you see?"

That's not necessarily a question I can wholly answer. I do have my theories. One is that some who claim inerrancy secretly don't believe it and others - this I know for a fact - consider some of the Bible's "problems"to be signs of God actually influencing events by making people suddenly forget things, etc. Another theory is that there's an important difference between many of them and us skeptics: whereas they bring their full attention to the Bible as an act of worship, we considered it important to approach it from a neutral perspective and did so. Finally and certainly, the fact is that most people who want to believe something will, regardless of how obviously incorrect or totally ridiculous; modern cults and political parties (which aren't much different from cults, really) prove it on a daily basis. To the extent people feel it necessary to justify their beliefs, they have demonstrated that their justifications can be invented with little to no pricking of their consciences. I see no reason why those who claim to be Christians or religious Jews should be any different, whether they are laypeople or deans of Christian colleges.

I'll conclude this statement of disbelief with a few words on what I still do believe and what I don't. At least for now, I remain willing to believe in God, as well as a version of Jesus the Son of God somewhat less fanciful than the so-called "Four Witnesses" would recommend. I confess that I'm holding onto that conviction with my fingernails at the moment and feeling my grip lessen with each subsequent discovery; it's possible I still believe only because of my previously-mentioned bias to do so. I was raised to love God and to love Jesus. And I do. To let them go entirely would be emotionaly devastating, many times as difficult as letting go of the Bible (what my professor once referred to as the "fourth member of the Christian Quadrinity") has been. Also the implications of a godless multiverse utterly terrify me, for very good and well-known reasons. I don't want to die. I don't want my soon-to-be wife to die. Nor her grandfather, recently diagnosed with inoperable cancer, or my grandmother, nearing 90 and afflicted with Alzheimer's...

Those are the negative reasons for wanting there to exist a god. Positive ones exist, too. The gift of life is so precious and rewarding that I often feel infused with gratefulness for it, as though the emotion were pumping itself out of my heart and distributing through all my circulatory system. I would very much like this gratefulness to have an object that comprehends it.

I digress. Some items within the Bible I find unsupported and unconvincing include: its inerrancy and incorruptibility, most of the supposed 600+ messianic prophecies, Mary's miraculous pregnancy, stories of Jesus' childhood, Hell as presented, the historicity of the Book of Job, the historicity of the Book of Jonah, the assertion that the Book of Ruth is historical or even of a religious character, the historicity of Genesis's first several chapters, the doctrine of "original sin", the idea that all of the Bible's books combine to present one unified and convincing theology, the Biblical assertion that all who have not believed are "without excuse", the theological assertion that the Bible should be treated as one work by one author instead of as an anthology of works by multiple authors, and the complete reliability of each of the four Gospels' accounts.

Everything else I'm still thinking about.

Maybe you should start thinking about it, too.

Future posts, when they are forthcoming, will concern themselves with specific questions within and about the Scriptures I'm currently investigating.