Just one, one randomly picked bible contradiction

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You're saying there is absolutely no incentive for people to delude themselves? WOW. There are tons of incentives, a lot of which involve protecting something whether it is one's ego, sense of uncertainty, sense of security, sense of belonging, overall worldview, etc.

Anyways to be fair, the list of contradictions was as big as the entire page and I literally had to scroll from top to bottom to get to the end of it. You can't seriously expect anyone to address that truckload of information and give them s**t for it. Seriously, tl;dr is an understatement since it took up the entire freaking page.

I'm just saying that making a logical argument against faith - faith being a belief beyond evidence - is a pointless exercise.

I am looking for mentions of faith in my post.

If the christians apologists had faith, they wouldn't need to argue about it, nor to convince anyone else nor it would bug them to have people that don't buy it. All these years, I've seen many things in the internet, but faith isn't one of them. Consider keet, the guy actually has to convince himself that YEC is scientific truth, he lives such a contradiction appearing to like science and space travel and being a YEC, of course if he had faith, he wouldn't mind to know that everything at science points against his belief. As you yourself said, if that was faith, logic or science wouldn't be seen as a threat to it. They wouldn't need to get defensive about people posting mountains of contradictions. The mere image of seeing the whole thread be full of dismissals rather than trying to deal with the contradiction brings me so much joy. First of all, it shows that the first instance of the dismissive attitude was not caused by the list being too large, but rather by an active effort to ignore it.

Is the premise true, though? I've always rejected that one cannot arrive at faith through logic.


Well, for someone to accept any religion, whether it's Christianity or something else, it has to somehow MAKE SENSE to that person. The gospels are not about 4 simple points of view. What we keep coming back to is that hundreds and thousands of people were witness to what Jesus said and did. Even if I conceded that eyewitness testimony is unreliable, it IS more reliable if the experience is a shared one, and it makes it difficult to deny flat-out that those events happened. It's like we have, in a bound volume, the testimony of a large body of witnesses, rather than just 4 or 12, and Hebrew law only required 2. It would be like denying the 9/11 attacks because the only remaining evidence of it is millions of people were either present in the surrounding area or they watched it on the news as it happened--and then going on to deny it on the basis that the buildings that fell are no longer there, and then saying a terrorist attack and subsequent cleanup is merely an ad hoc explanation and we need Occam's razor to determine what REALLY happened, IF anything happened at all. But no, that isn't how it works, and it's unjust to somehow hold Biblical accounts to some unreasonable higher standard, the apparent real reason being you don't like it or don't wish to believe it.



Well, sure. The sensible thing to do if the Bible really is wrong is to abandon it. But then you have to evidence how you can make that assertion. It's much simpler to accept the events themselves as fact and then decide what you want to do with those facts. Are they acts of God/Holy Spirit or not? Did Jesus accomplish what He set out to accomplish? Can you handle a change in life based on an affirmation of any of those facts?


Depends on what is being taken "too" literally and what "too literally" means. The only real problem with taking anything "too" literally has more to do with translation than interpretation. One of the reasons I find the KJV difficult might be that it's too "word-for-word," so some of the colorful language features (literally) of the original Hebrew is lost on me. More contemporary scholars might have a better way of conveying the meaning in English by only mildly paraphrasing, retaining the original MEANING without messing up the literal translation so much. One reason I like the Holman so much is that it preserves the literal translation in footnote, and I'm pretty sure other translations do the same. So, yeah, in interpreting contemporary Bible translations, I do tend to stick with literally what is written. But I also understand that, for example, if Jesus is speaking in hyperbole, He is literally exaggerating; or if the meaning of something Jesus said makes the most sense as being sarcasm, then Jesus was literally being sarcastic. Metaphors are literally metaphors. Psalms are literally psalms. Proverbs are literally proverbs. Prophecies are literally prophecies. Make sense? My "definition," if you will, of literalism is exactly that.

Give credit where it is due. At least two people here DID deal with the supposed contradictions and showed that they are not contradictions at all.

No ... those two people rationalized excuses as to why they want us to believe that the contradictions aren't there.

The contradictions exist. Go ahead and examine them for yourself. Don't worry; no lightning will smite you into vapor, and the Earth will not swallow you whole if you do. You have nothing to be afraid of by seeing and acknowledging the truth.

Already did that. Already explained that. NOW who is getting dismissed?

OK, sure, I'll give you that. The reason I think Christianity is the exception, though, is that if you actually know and understand Jesus' teachings, you know how much is at stake for being delusional--especially if one is intentionally delusional, if there even is such a thing. It doesn't really make much sense to buy into something as inconvenient as Christianity if a person doesn't actually believe in it. And for someone to put their life on the line by professing in something like Christianity, there would have to be some compelling evidence that there is something real there. "Faith" in the context of Christianity isn't devoid of any need for evidence. Either the evidence documented in the Biblical text is compelling or it isn't. Jesus isn't here in the same physical sense He once was, but that's really the extent to which we "believe with no evidence." But not having Jesus in the flesh doesn't mean there's no foundational element to the religion. Ultimately, this is something probably most religions have in common: A text, an oral tradition, etc.


My point exactly.

The ignorance of an atheist is no more informed than that of the blind believer. I prefer the view of Chesterton that arrogance is actually a sign of insanity:

“So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvelous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!”

Some more biblical cognitive dissionance, this time in the area of morality:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSS-88ShJfo&feature=player_embedded#at=239[/youtube]

How is an atheist worse off? He is not burdened with vain hopes and he does not cleave to absurdities. Is the real reality so bad that we should not be part of it?

ruveyn

More from Chesterton,

For we must remember that the materialist philosophy (whether true or not) is certainly much more limiting than any religion. In one sense, of course, all intelligent ideas are narrow. They cannot be broader than themselves. A Christian is only restricted in the same sense that an atheist is restricted. He cannot think Christianity false and continue to be a Christian; and the atheist cannot think atheism false and continue to be an atheist. But as it happens, there is a very special sense in which materialism has more restrictions than spiritualism. Mr. McCabe thinks me a slave because I am not allowed to believe in determinism.

I think Mr. McCabe a slave because he is not allowed to believe in fairies. But if we examine the two vetoes we shall see that his is really much more of a pure veto than mine. The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or miracle. Poor Mr. McCabe is not allowed to retain even the tiniest imp, though it might be hiding in a pimpernel. The Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen.

Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the materialist’s world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts.

Nay, nay. A true scientific materialist knows that the Universe is not only stranger than he knows, but stranger than he can know. The real reality is abiding Wonders. Part of being scientific is realizing there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in any current philosophy or theory. Reality is quite open-ended. The Biblical Cosmos was small and pinched. God was out there and the Earth is His footstool and there is nothing else. A scientific materialist has 11 or even 25 dimensions to explore. And the Cosmos is perhaps part of a much large multiverse.

ruveyn

Po po pooh.

A. The atheist has no vain hopes? Say rather he lacks a specific set of hopes you consider vain. But the human who has no vain hopes has not been born or is dead. What - you never even ran to the bus stop arriving just in time to see it driving away?

B. The atheist does not cleave to absurdities? Say rather he does not hold a specific set of beliefs you consider absurd. But again, we all hold absurd beliefs. List the things you believe, then check with the authorities 100 years from now. Look how many people had the absurd belief Obama would make a great president. Were all of them theists? I don't THINK so.

C. The reality we see here is pretty bad, but most of us can stand it for a little while. I am as much a part of it now as I was as an atheist. It is just that I can see through the cracks a little way into the outer reality.