[quote]yorik wrote:
So let me jump in the fray too and have my flesh rendered by flames…
Let me ask…Does God make use of quill and ink? Does God own a printing press? God might have inspired the works, but once they were placed into man’s hearts, and hands, the works fell victim to the fallibility of mankind. And after 2000 and more years, that’s a lot of fallibility to pile up.
To consider the Bible to be the word of God is, at best, naive. The Bible is a work of man.
Sacrilege!
Man heard the words, wrote them down, translated them, again, and again, and again. Errors upon errors. Biases and personal agendas piled on top of one another.
And to top it all off, at the Council of Nicea in the 4th Century, a group of men got together and decided not just what to put into the Bible, but what to throw away! Over 300 years after Jesus the Annointed One walked the earth, they decided what was official doctrine and what wasn’t. Today we don’t even have very good records from the 1700’s. What could they have had on the 300’s from the 00’s?
Think about it.
Now let’s suppose that you’re watching TV and you see a commercial that says Brand X toothpaste is a formula handed down from God, blessed by God himself and you will be damned for all eternity if you use any other brand. You’d call that a crock of shit, right?
Now some guy comes along and says he’s got a set of writings that are handed down from God, are blessed by God himself and you will be damned for all eternity if you read any other writings. What do you think of that? Personally, I think he’s selling some toothpaste.
Come on people. Use that great big brain God gave you as a gift. Thre’s nothing special about the Bible. It’s not history, it has a dubious literary heritage. It’s just a collection of stories to illustrate points of morality.
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i agree with you and disagree with you. I agree that the Bible is not the word of God… some of the Old Testament was the word of God, but has changed a lot during the years, things being added and removed and changed, and it did not stop changing until AFTER christ (according to modern scholarship).
The New Testament was written by different men, saying what they heard about Jesus, etc. There is clearly no divine inspiration, as they sometimes contradict each other, and some scholars believed Matthew and Luke based their gospels on an older gospel they copied from, which the scholars have named Q (but there are still problems with this theory).
However, the toothpaste analogy is ridiculous. You can’t compare the two. Plus, with commercial products you have meterial gains to make. He struggled through the persecution and was patient until the end, which at least shows the sincerity of his intentions.
Then came Paul, the Antichrist, and told them “I am the only toothpaste, if you buy any other toothpaste you go to Hell”, and in his case it was clearly for material gain and power. The religion brought down by Jesus is true, but it was corrupted partially by Paul.
See the diaologue between James and Paul, James defending the doctrines of Jesus and Paul reversing them:
http://www.hashlamah.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=29
However Paul was not the only one to corrupt the new religion. Let me quote a third-year university New Testament studies textbook:
Similarly the thought of Jesus’ deity seems to be a relatively late arrival on the first-century stage. Paul does not yet understand the risen Christ as the object of worship: he is the theme of worship, the one for whom praise is given, the one whose risen presence in and through the Spirit constitutes the worshipping community, the one through whom the prayer prays to God (Romans 1.8; 7.25; II Corinthians 1.20; Colossians 3.17) but not the object of worship or prayer. So too his reticence about calling Jesus “God”. Even the title “Lord” becomes a way of distinguishing Jesus from God rather than identifying him with # God (Romans 15.6; I Corinthians 8.6; 15.24-28; II Corinthians 1.3; 11.31; Ephesians 1.3, 17; Philippians 2.11; Colossians 1.3). Paul was and remained a monotheist. That reticence in calling Jesus “God” is only really overcome towards the end of the first century with the Pastorals (Titus 2.13) and again with Fourth Gospel (John 1.1, 18; 20.28). (Unity and Diversity in the New Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity. London and Philadelphia: SCM Press and Trinity Press International, 1990, 226).
as you can see Paul began changing the religion, claiming that God spoke through him and that you should follow him. In later generations, with the authoror of the Gospel of John, Jesus was given God-status.
The fact that the message was corrupted does not detract from the original message or the messenger who brought it.