BIBLE, WRITTEN WORD OF GOD?

The Bible is a violent and spiritually pornographic collection of books regarded by Christians as the word of God. It claims to have God’s actual words.
 
Christians when confronted with proof that the book has errors will start saying that the parts that err are in fact symbolic so there are no errors. That is how they get around the errors. It is a totally dishonest approach. As silly as the Garden of Eden story is now, it made sense to the silly people of thousands of years ago. The story was meant to be taken as literally true. It says nothing that demands a metaphorical interpretation.
 
Christians habitually twist the Bible to make it tell them what they want to hear. For example, Nebuchadnezzar and his men were predicted to do things to the city of Tyre. However, some of it happened and the rest didn’t happen until the time of Alexander the Great. Because Neb and Co didn’t do all the prophecy said, the Christians pretended the prophecy was not just about them but also about Alexander the Great and his armies. And this despite the fact that there is no indication in the prophecy or from its context that they are right. The prophecy mentions Neb and his men and then describes them as they or them without any hint that they and them ever refer to anybody else. Words mean nothing to Christians. The Bible Unearthed, Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, Touchstone Books, New York, 2002 proves from archaeology that many of the Bible stories are untrue and that its main characters may have been made up too.
 
The gospels say that Jesus told Peter how many times Peter would betray him and this prophecy came true. Nobody denies the prophecy and its fulfilment was written after the event. This is absolute proof that the gospels are not as truthful as Christians would like us to believe. If a man wrote a book of prophecies after the event you would say he was a fraud. No God would inspire books like that. If we agree with the Christians that the gospels are right to expect us to believe they are truthful despite the problem with those prophecies, then we lose any right to complain that fortune-tellers are fakes if they write that they made prophecies that came true without recording the prophecies before the event. Jesus making such unimportant prophecies makes it all look like magic and superstition.
 
Liberals say that the Bible is God's word only because he influenced the writers. He did not tell them what words to write or put ideas in their heads but influenced them without using direct supernatural power on them. This view denies that the Bible is unique for it can't then be the only book that God influenced. Also it denies that God is the author of the Bible. If DH Lawrence was influenced by a lady he knew when he was writing Lady Chatterley's Lover that does not make her the author. Roman Catholic teaching says that God authored the Bible. So we must hold that God put the ideas in the minds of the writers if we are to be Christians.
 
Some Christians like Keith Ward argue that the vindictive and evil laws of the Bible are overridden by later laws which are kinder. They say this shows that God was influencing his people to progress in understanding. God commanding Israel to murder homosexuals by stoning is inexcusable. If God had to help the stubborn world to progress then giving it violent scriptures was totally unnecessary. You would need to be insane to believe the lies of people like Ward.
 
Some say that Israel thought incorrectly that God wanted them to liquidate other nations and then later understood that God wanted them to live in peace with those nations. But that is the take of those Christians. It is just their interpretation. By saying what they say, they are making their own guesses the word of God.

The word canon means rule. The canon of the Bible is the list of the books that belong in the Bible. The Catholic Bible is longer than the Protestant one for it contains extra books such as Tobit and Sirach. The Council of Trent infallibly decreed that these books belonged in the Bible. And this despite the fact that Tobit has an Angel of God lying unnecessarily and Sirach commands the abuse of women under the pretext of making them behave.
 
According to Sirach 42, a man has the right to lock up his wife to keep her from committing adultery.

Daughters are not to be allowed to be friends with married women or to be trusted with men. The author thinks that women think of nothing only sex.

Sirach commands that servants be beaten up for disobedience. Then, by implication, wife beating is allowed.
 
Such books by no means can really be the word of God.

The ten commandments of the Jewish Law. Two of the commandments are, “Remember that you keep the Sabbath day holy” and “You shall not commit adultery”. Christians and Muslims accept these commandments as true. They were reportedly dictated to Moses by God on Mount Sinai. A real God of love would enlighten your thinking instead of giving you commands as if you were dirt. Unnecessary commanding is evil and an act of intolerant violence. Revelation from God in the sense of a Bible that you have to believe in is immoral and so are miracles. The commandments show that God claims the right to be domineering and so religion that represents him should be like that too. The commandments are spiritual pornography. God has no need to command us to do right for it commands itself. Therefore he has no right to.
 
Command means to force a person to do whether they want to or not and if they refuse they are punished. So either way commanding is anti-freedom. It forces you to obey and imposes penalties on you if you still firmly resist. To command is to claim the right to force. Jesus said his command to us was to love one another. God commanding you to care for others is ridiculous. If you have free will, only you can decide to care and there is no point in anybody commanding it. The master by command compels the slave to scrub the floor but he can’t make the slave do it of her own free will. People only want God because they want to bind society to certain rules and commands from God but at the root of all this is suspicion, fear, anger and hatred. Only people who like violence like violent bullying beliefs. That these beliefs are sugar-coated as in Christianity only makes them sly as well. Belief in God is evil. We resent anybody commanding us what to feel. It makes us bristle and so those who believe in God who want others to believe will do so because they want others to feel this horrible resentment too. God commanding us to love is a very serious error and shows that he does not want us to understand what love really is. You cannot command love - and what good is love unless it is spontaneous and is not carried out because of a command or fear of retribution?
 
Jesus redefined love in a toxic way - if you want to do evil, set people up so that evil will take root in them in a subtle way. Satan never was as vile as he was. And we have seen the hypocrisy and lies and bloodletting that resulted.
 
Inspiration is the doctrine that though men wrote the Bible the way they wanted it is as much God’s word as theirs and so it is both fully human in authorship and fully divine. This is obviously contradictory nonsense. The Church says it is not and that it is a mystery. Then why could I not be God the Father? Maybe that is a mystery too! Only a book that was mechanically dictated by God could be his word. Not even fundamentalists believe that the Bible was dictated with the human writers being little more than typewriters. The Bible does show marks of humanity such as bad sentence structure in places and bad descriptions and vague teachings. When the Bible is not the word that means the Koran isn’t his word either for it sees the Bible as its predecessor. So though the Koran claims to have been dictated by an angel speaking for God it is not God’s word.
 
The claim that there is no error in the Bible and that its contradictions can be solved is called inerrancy. Muslims say the same thing about the Koran and Mormons about their scriptures. It is easier to believe there are contradictions than to swallow the many improbable and bizarre solutions they offer for the contradictions and the errors. All the so-called solutions are human assumptions. God could arrange things so that it could be CLEARLY proved there was a remarkable agreement that could only be explained by divine inspiration. God failed to: meaning the books are not inspired at all. To believe in inerrancy is to believe more in scholars and theologians who pretend to explain away the errors than in the purported word of God.
 
The doctrine of Jesus - taught in the Bible - that people who will not repent and believe in the word of God when they have the word of Moses and the Prophets will not be convinced if anybody goes back to them from the dead in a miracle implies that these books are more convincing than any miracle. This is total madness. The books are not that convincing. (Obviously Jesus takes it for granted that anybody with commonsense will agree with putting homosexuals and adulterers to death as the Bible commands.) The books are not a miracle themselves so a miracle would be more convincing. If Jesus is right then the miracles the books testify to do not verify the books. It is absurd to consider the books to be the word of God then.
 
The Bible in 2 Peter 1:16-21 says that the Old Testament is more sure even than seeing Jesus transfigure and glow before your very eyes – that means total infallibility for the Old Testament was taught by Jesus and the early Church. Paul wrote that all of scripture is breathed out from the mouth of God (2 Timothy 3:16-17) and able to be complete for all who want to do the will of God. The true Christian then will be a Fundamentalist. The view that the ideas not the words of the Bible are inspired is rubbish. The ideas are inseparable from the words. The view that the main truths is inspired is dishonest for that leaves you free to pick and choose what you like. While it is true that for Christians only Jesus Christ is the word of God and infallible, he is supposed to be the supernatural author of the Bible so it is his voice. Jesus alone being the word doesn’t mean the Bible can be treated as containing error.   It means that something has to be treated as error free and invested with God's truth.

Jesus then leads to notions about infallible Bibles and we all know what happens when people think they have the truth and others do not.