Is there anything OBJECTIVELY wrong with the Bible?

Question

I've asked for challenges from those willing to go a round, and the only things that I get are miracles, the existence of God, and sciences not mentioned in the Bible.

My challenge was that I could prove most of the passages IN THE BIBLE based on current scholarship.

Am I to assume that all of you, down to the last man, woman and child, firmly believes every event mentioned in the Bible, and you don't want to challenge a single one?

Nicholas H: There are only about 7 million species in the world today, and more than half of them are single-cells, plants and insects!

(Doh!)

Tylerism: if you're going to concede that the writers of the Bible were telling the truth about all OBJECTIVE events, on what grounds will you try to sugggest that they were ONLY lying about the miracles?

Answer 1

Backing away from the challenges much?

Answer 2

I have studied. The more I study, the more I am convinced that it is the truth, in every important fact. If you want to dicker over semantics, even those are paper thin. And, please, don't start with the numbers. Is it too inconceivable that the numbers are different reckonings, seeing as they generally agree with each other anyways? It doesn't make a tinkers damn whether it was 700 or 7000 chariots for instance. It is just a trivial detail. people even challenge it saying in Revelation: "how can stars fall?" They can if you realize the stars are angels??? i think the number of animalls thing can be safely explained by saying that all known and useful animals were taken, not all, the rest were in the flood, but not destroyed. The usage is therefore metaphorical, meaning a great number. The actual number is never reckoned.
And as far as the Gospels (injeel) being corrupted, independant copies of the entire NT, dating from 300+ years before Mohammed which agree with each other, are in existance,(the British Museum and the Vatican) and that Mohammed himself called the Injeel, "guidance and light" (surah 5:46). In fact, so much has been written about it, that any attempt to change it in any way would be quickly and easily discovered. The gospels are not the possesion of any ONE group. They are the possession of humanity. You cannot change them.
No change has been made to the Gospel. It still agrees, and always will. It is a unmutable word of God.

Answer 3

I was required to take a theology class in college and this is what I remember. Believing the bible is not a totally black and white thing. More conservative views take the bible literally. Others say the stories are just moral lessons. If you believe God had a hand in the bible's creation, then your opinion depends on whether you think God made sure that when the bible was written that it was perfect and divinely inspired or that there can be errors in the bible since humans wrote it. Many people take the viewpoint that the bible may not be scientifically correct, but was still inspired by God and that what's most important is that the bible is theologically correct.

Answer 4

I have to say, being a christian, and very well studied in many biblical teachings, that that's a very arrogant statement.

1 Kings 4:26 - Solomon had 40,000 stalls of horses
2 Chr. 9:25 - Solomon had 4,000 stalls of horses

2 Ki. 24:8 - Jehoichin reigned 18 yrs. & 3 mo.
3 Chr. 36:9 - Jehoichin reigned 8 yrs. 3 mo. 10 days

2 Sa. 23:8 - Jashobeam slew 800 enemies
1 Chr. 11:11 - Jashobeam slew 300 enemies

1 Chr. 18:4 - David took from Hadadezzer 7,000 horsemen
2 Sa. 8:4 - 17,000 horsemen

2 Sa. 10:18 - Syrians slew 700 charioteers
1 Chr. 19:18 - Syrians slew 7000 charioteers

There are about 18 similar discrepancies between Chronicles and Samuel/Kings. Some have been fixed in more modern translations, but some still exist.

Answer 5

Well... yeah, if you take away miracles, etc., there's not much to complain about, is there?

I mean... it's not like people are routinely debating whether or not Jericho had walls or not.

But that doesn't mean that I, say, believe "every event mentioned in the Bible" happened, exactly as described in the Bible.

I think the Bible is probably like most books written during those times: grains of truth encapsulated in narrative license and cultural mythology.

To put it another way, archaeologists have discovered the ancient city of Troy. There was likely a war there, and, who knows, maybe even some form of the 'Trojan Horse.' That doesn't mean that Achilles was taken down by his heel, or that there was even a great warrior named Achilles.

Dig?

Answer 6

One cannot look at the face of god and live yet Moses had a face to face chat with god

God is the same today tommorow and so forth God repented of what he planned to do to israel in the desert

Repent means to change -

Was the sabbath a perpetual sign between him and his people or just a good idea until hesus showed up or does that apply to only the tribes of israel and not the gentiles ?

Was the earth really created in 4004 bc ?

Who was the father of jesus the holy spirit overcame her and inpregnated her - if the holy spirit is a personality in a triune god please explain the apparent contridiction?

Why is there 2 different liniages offered for jesus in the New testament ? If one is Joesphs why ? He was the boys adopted father

Why is it that the 2 liniages do not trace Jesus back to David through the right King - One King offered up to David is cursed by God and the other is said to be a cast off and could bare no prohets yet these are the 2 liniages offered in the contridictory storys

Job is said to be perfect and rightoues in all his ways and yet we are told Jesus is the only one without sin

How is it that Enoch and Elijah did not die yet we are told thats impossible in Romans 6 -23 and 3-23 ?

Answer 7

I believe that religion has to be objective and appeal to human reason and logic. Religion and science need to be in perfect harmony.
Forgive me if i sound skeptical about the objectivity of the bible, but there was this incident about whether the earth was flat or not. A scientist was WRONGLY condemned for trying to ascertain that the earth was spherical as opposed to what the adherents of christianity and the bible believed(That the earth was Flat).
In a nutshell, faith/religion should never be blind, but rather it should be logical to the human mind.

Answer 8

Yes. The moral behaviour of the principal god, Yahweh, who is by any reasonable estimation a psychopath.

While it is philosophically problematic to claim absolute moral values, if they do exist then those of Yahweh are OBJECTIVELY evil.

Biblical literalists try to explain away Yahweh's self evident congenital anger management problem, his indifference to suffering, his approval of genocides and his psychotic jealous rages as being beyond human comprehension and judgement. This is morally infantile. Objectively.

The failures of literal understanding of history and science by the Bible's bronze age authors are trivial by comparison.

Answer 9

Of course. It has hundreds of errors. The creation story agrees with facts only by coincidence. The Adam and Eve tale is entirely fictitious. The most obvious bit of baloney is the tale of the flood, which can be proved bogus by at least six different and completely independent lines of evidence. I could go on, but I won't; see references.
Postscript: The Qur'an has errors also, although not so many as the bible: it has far fewer historical tales which could be shown to be false, and its errors lie elsewhere.
Post-postscript: I note that some idiot has given this a thumbs down already. Which simply shows an inability to deal with facts.

Answer 10

I tend to go with Mark Twain...
“It’s not the parts of the Bible I don’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts I do understand.”

OK, I'll take your thinking, please (not just your conclusion), on what the correct ending to Mark's gospel is. That definitely impinges on the "perfection" of the bible

If you want something slightly more theological, perhaps your thinking on in what sense Satan and God "chat" in the opening to the book of Job, and the moral rectitude of wiping out Job's sons and daughters to run an experiment or make a point.

Answer 11

Why must the bible be proven? It isn't a history book. Its a book about religion. Its about Truth with a capitol t. I personally love many passages of the book, and really have little negative to say about it.

I just don't believe that there is a god. If someone is trying to prove the bible based on facts they are confused about what religion is about.