ATHEISTS, why do you still doubt the BIBLE??>>?

Question

Have you researched it thoroughly? If you have then you would know that 1/3 of the Bible is prophetic. You would also know that the bible is over 97% accurate, since we have many ancient manuscipts to prove its accuracy (dead sea scrolls for old testament and 20,000 ancient N.T. manuscripts, etc.) Many prophecies have come true, including the Jews returning to their land in 1948 after 2000 years in exile! Why Do you not want to believe with so much evidence?

Answer 1

I have studied it. That is why I am an Atheist.

Answer 2

Because it is full of stuff that makes no sense and contradictions and it's tainted by the ignorance of the men who wrote it. It's also not nearly as accurate as you say it is (and even if it was, why would "God's word" be only 97% accurate??).

The prophecies are very broad and open to interpretation. Have you ever read horoscopes? They are broad enough to be pretty accurate. On top of that, when you're expecting something to happen you are more likely to effect situations so that the prophecy comes true.

The Bible has also been translated so many times (and translated from translations that were translated from translations) that it's not the same as the original was and it has been edited a lot throughout history to suit the church/men in power at each time. There are so many different versions of the Bible by now and each one has been changed by men. Why should I accept any of them as God's word? And why should I believe the original was God's word in the first place? Because it says so?

I have read the Bible and learned about Christianity, but that only made me more convinced that it's all man-made.

Answer 3

Reading the Bible is what led me on my path to atheism. I know the Bible very well and I can assure you that it only has one prophecy that has came true and that is when Jesus said...

Matt 10:34 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

You can't say that something in the Bible predicts something else in the Bible. If you say that then the Superman comic book series would be prophetic. Anything else that you do mental and semantic gymnastics to convince yourself there is a prophecy there has came about by the hands of Christians...self-fulfilling prophecies.

And yes I have researched the Bible thoroughly. I know more than most herders do about it.

Answer 4

I was a religion major in college, and I spent a year in seminary. I have read parts of it in the original Greek and Hebrew. I think I know it better than you do.

For example, I know for a fact that your citations of corroborative evidence is entirely false. Most of the Old Testament is too vague to be considered specifically prophetic, and it takes loads of poetic license to find truth in the prophecies of modern days. The Jews taking over Palestine once again is a coincidence brought about because of the guilt over the holocaust.

You've swallowed hook line and sinker a pre-millenialist doctrine that spends little energy looking into what the Bible actually says and instead proof-texts the scriptures looking for some indication that events have been foretold somewhere and somehow.

Further reasons I don't believe the bible can be found at my blog, found at
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-t0BORtswfacdeOuprS2h8mE-?cq=1&p=1

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Answer 5

I'm not atheist (Deist), but the Bible is not as you describe it. My major in college was religion, and many of my classes concerned the Bible. Most of the prophecies you talk about were either written after the fact or have yet to occur.
Example: Daniel talking about the revival of Israel is talking about Israel during the Maccabeean Era, not the current Israel. Much of the gospels were written to portray Jesus as meeting the fulfillments of the gospels about the coming messiah. None of them have been justified elsewhere.
As for accuracy, have you checked the Revised Standard Version? There are numerous discrepancies throughout various Biblical text (all notated in the RSV and New RSV); in fact, approximately 100 verses of 2 Esdras (a book in the Deuterocanon) were, probably deliberately, removed from the book and do not appear in the King James Version.
I would suggest taking objective religious studies classes in college before making such claims.

Answer 6

This may surprise you, but prophetic writing is not written to tell the future. It is written to explain the present. If the prophetic writings, which were included into the bible by a committee, were decided to be "accurate," then it was done so as a matter of personal interpretation. If God was provable, then all of the faith he seems to value so much would be meaningless, because it would be unnecessary in the face of indisputable facts. For faith to matter, God must leave his own existence up to debate. Of course, atheists cannot prove God does not exist, because it is logically impossible to prove a negative. It puts both sides of the argument into something of a conundrum.

Answer 7

The bible predicting stuff that then comes true - in the bible - doesn't count for anything. That's like saying that Harry Potter is true because it predicts the rise of Voldemort - and then it happens!

97% accurate? Like what? How did you find all those people it mentioned? I know about 20 things off the top of my head that didn't happen, and some of them are absolutely necessary to the bible being true at all.

And even if the bible were 100% true, which it's not, what would that prove? It's still not evidence for god.

Answer 8

Rather than throw out numbers, let us pray for them.

No numbers will convince people, it takes the Holy Spirit.

By the way, where did this 97% number come from? I would say 100%.

Again, let's pray for them.

John 1:10-12:
"He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not.
He came unto his own, and his own received him not.
But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:"

I pray that you, Brother Patrone07, come to find a more meaningful relationship with the Lord. Please pray for me as well. In prophecy, it is made clear that the Lord will be returning very soon! Pray to the Lord, that He will make straight your paths. Send me a message on my profile page for more information about the Lord's soon return.

God bless you all!

Answer 9

Hmmm you think like me. I was curious how learning Greek would change my look at the New Testament, I didn't know if, when I read "for God gave his only begotten son" if the actual Greek said, "for God has no begotten son" or whatever, but the English Bibles, I found, are generally translated well, especially the NIV, and one person who posted an answer says a fundie Christian learned about the New Testament and found corruptions, alterations, etc............. That is simply not true, the Greek manuscripts are abundant in supply and collaborate each other. One does not say "Jesus was crucified" while another says "Jesus survived the crucifixion, got married and went to France". The ONLY real difference among manuscripts is that sometimes one says, "Jesus" and another says "Jesus Christ", or if one says Jesus Christ another may simply say "Christ" or "Christ Jesus" in English, but in the Greek the word order did not matter; Christ Jesus is the same as Jesus Christ.

Learning Greek has greatly increased the apparent truths of Scripture, all the controversial verses became very clear and to the point, and the New Testament is incredibly supported compared to other ancient documents. The New Testament holds up amazingly well, and people who think it is full of errors and contradictions must not have studied it with any sincerity.

Before I learned Greek, I read the article about the fundie Christian who turned away from faith, and all the reasons he gave for giving up his faith proved he truly did not know what he was talking about. He said that since the word order in Greek "doesn't matter" that you can translate "God is now here" exactly the same way as "God is no where", however "now here" and "no where" are totally different words in Greek, and by the word's ending you can tell if something is the subject, verb, direct object, noun, etc etc just by looking at the word. Greek is a logical language, meaning it was organized in the way the writer wanted to emphasize. English is a chronological language, meaning one word flows into the next.

English "Suzie [subject] walked [verb] up the hill"

Greek, however, is arranged according to what the author wanted to emphasize. For instance a lawyer might write, "The law, to know a man must" since the law is, in his eyes, the most important, followed by KNOWING the law, followed by WHO should know the law.

A teacher, whose primary interest is knowledge, may write, "To know the law, a man must"

Or a common person may say, "A man, the law he must know"

These things are not a contradiction. They are merely a point of view, and in fact they help us to know the character of the author. To read the writings of Paul is incredibly a different structure than reading any other author.

Another thing I found interesting, I thought the Gospel of John would be a fairly difficult book to translate because it is one of the most elegant books in the New Testament, particularly the prologue. However the beginning of the Gospel of John is VERY basic Greek. I heard "scholars" saying that, by the writing of the Gospel of John, the author is obviously some very educated philosopher from the third century, however, firstly, there is a fragment of the Gospel of John dating to about 100AD, possibly as old as 90AD, so that argument utterly collapses. Second, as I said, the Gospel of John IS basic Greek, the kind of Greek that you'd expect to read from a commercial fisherman. Thirdly, I heard another "scholar" say that the word "logos" ("the Word") in the Gospel of John was not created until the third century, but Logos first appears in Sumerian cunieform ----- the oldest written language known to mankind. So that argument UTTERLY collapses. "Logos" is so old that "logos" was used to describe God because the word "God" even came about. Thus when John said, "in the beginning was the Word" he truly does mean IN THE BEGINNING. Lastly, Logos was a Gentile thing, not a Jewish thing, so by starting his Gospel with a word the Greeks knew better than the Jews, John is obviously showing how Jesus is not important for just the Jews, but is universal and eternal.

Anyway, this post is much longer than I anticipated on making it. Simply put, people who try proving contradictions in the English Bibles CANNOT do it with the original Greek manuscripts.

Lastly, it is ironic that peole say the Bible has contraditions, but yet that it was edited and altered. If the Bible was edited by the early church, then the early church would have taken out any contradications! If the Bible was edited, it would read exactly the same from one book to another, but as it is, Matthew reads very different than Luke, Luke reads very different than Galatians. Obviously the New Testament is written by different people, different professions, who wanted to emphasize certain things. Still, though, one book does not say Jesus was crucified while another says he created an army and conquered Rome. One does not say Jesus died for our sins while another says Jesus killed sinners. The New Testament is simply based in fact. I don't view the New Testament as "the Word of God" as much as I look at it simply as historical truth. In other words, I don't believe it because "the Bible says so" or "God says so", I believe it because it is obviously historical and because of that, I have reason to believe in God. Sorry of any typos this is taking too long to do a spell check.

Answer 10

All of the hundreds of different religions created by human cultures have books like the bible that claim to be accurate. With so many pages and prophecies, it is by sheer CHANCE that at least SOME of them can come true. The Bible is hundreds of pages long and you can only write one paragraph about what actually came true from it? That's all the proof I need to be an Atheist! LOL

Answer 11

First of all, yes, I have researched it thoroughly.

The bible has a prophetic writing style. However the prophecies are either so vague, that almost anything can apply to them; or they were written after the fact...and its real easy to predict the past.

The documents that "prove" its accuracy are based on hearsay, rather than eyewitness accounts. Even the writings of Josephus are to be looked at skeptically, considering the bishop that commisioned his writting openly supported lies and half-truth, as well as lies of ommision in order to keep the church in power. There is absolutely NO evidence that is contemporary to the times portrayed in the bible to give it credibility.