de-conversion

58 Comments Add your own

• 1. MTran  |  April 19, 2007 at 2:18 am

  Roopster,

  You are criticizing what is known as “bibliolatry.” It is one of the major criticisms of Roman Catholic teachings regarding the use of the Bible as the sole source of information about god.

  When a sect looks only to the Bible for their understanding of God, their faith is one that is based in sola scriptura. It was one of the major breaks that the Protestant churches made with Catholicism. In turn, Protestants accuse Catholics of “Mariolatry.”

  As far as the “unity” or “harmony” that the Bible is claimed (falsely) to possess, that’s a standard editing technique.

  Much of my work is editing and writing for professional publications and texts. I can tell you that that any decent editor could have made the Bible much more coherent and consistent than it now is. It’s got a lot of pages so it could easily take a few months of effort. But it could be done with minimal effort.

  (My publisher would probably hand it to me as a rush job and ask me to do it by the end of next week. )

• 2. escapedmentalpatient  |  April 19, 2007 at 2:53 am

  Religion is inherently bad for society, Just look at the Virginia Tech massacre. No one but a believer could actually go out kill 30+ people and blame everyone else for it.

  Religious texts are fiction and should be interpreted as such, once you start using a moral code from a peasant civilization from 2000 years ago as a template or guide for todays society things are bound to go horribly wrong.

• 3. poppies  |  April 19, 2007 at 2:58 am

  With all due respect, while I can tell you make a concious effort to attempt to be objective (which I applaud), it’s clear from your posts that you have much hostility towards Christianity which makes it likely that you would have trouble removing your own “glasses”. This makes me wary of even broaching the following due to the high probability of it just being uncritically tossed aside, but, nonetheless…

  You accuse God of atrocities. By what moral standard do you judge Him to be guilty? If you say that of the Bible, doesn’t the giver of the law have the right to do as He pleases, and mightn’t your perspective on His aims and the possibility of better actions be limited?

  I remember reading a folk tale about an African diety who manifested as a visitor at a house where the family patriach had just died and left his family alone and penniless. The diety burned the house down, and when this was discovered, people were horrified. Then they found that the patriach had hidden a terribly large amount of gold beneath the house in such a way that it had to be burned to be found.

  If you’re using some other standard by which to judge God, I’d love to hear about it, because I’ve had trouble finding anyone who could produce a non-arbitrary non-theistically-based way to judge moral action. I’m honestly interested; I thought evolutionary altruism might have been it, but then I discovered too many holes in that theory.

• 4. MTran  |  April 19, 2007 at 3:12 am

  If you say that of the Bible, doesn’t the giver of the law have the right to do as He pleasesI

  No.

  Your approach boils down to this: What god does or says is good or right because it is god that is doing or saying it. In other words, might makes right. I reject that as a basis for morality.

  Nixon thought he was above the law, too, since he was president. Didn’t work for him, doesn’t work for god.

  Hate is hate. Cruelty is cruelty. Petty vindictiveness is petty vindictiveness.

  The God of the old testament seems to demonstrate those characteristics regularly and remorselessly. I cannot accept such a creature as an authority on moral or benevolent behavior.

• 5. brad  |  April 19, 2007 at 4:10 am

  “If you’re a Christian reading this blog, I’d like to encourage you to take a step back, remove the glasses with which you’ve read the Bible, and look at it critically.”

  I am unsure how your own personal transition from fundamentalism to agnosticism was developed, but I find that this above sentence is 99.9% impossible. Our world leaders know that if they want something from the people (i.e. power, money, our souls), it has to appear to be our idea. I have been in a great many debates with atheists when I was a fundamentalist and with fundamentalists since. The one thing I have learned is that a debate, no matter the logic, that no one switches their mind. I found this personally to be true in my journey - it had to be “my” idea.

  Escapementalpatient said “Religion is inherently bad for society”

  Please define religion. What is religion to you? Do you really believe religion has essence or are you simply throwing out such comments to make your point?

  poppies said “it likely that you would have trouble removing your own “glasses””

  I can’t believe I am even touching this - but does this actually make sense to you? These kind of comments are no different than an atheist thinking that the argument that asks “Can God create a rock that he cannot lift” is a clever paradox.

  furthermore: “You accuse God of atrocities. By what moral standard do you judge Him to be guilty? If you say that of the Bible, doesn’t the giver of the law have the right to do as He pleases”

  No, “he” doesn’t. Really. You are now entering the realm of the gods of olympus. I am not sure whether the agnosticatheist ever accused God of atrocties, I am pretty sure he was simply saying that the Bible presents God committing atrocities - wasn’t that kind of the point? The Bible is ultimately a failed human perspective to understand God (aA would probably say to understand nature or humankind’s consciousness - I am not opposed to this either)…

  “thought evolutionary altruism might have been it, but then I discovered too many holes in that theory.”

  true, but for one, the Bible doesn’t offer a whole lot of moral support either. second, moral theory, be it Christian or not, is hardly concrete (talk about flip-flopping with scripture: slavery, patriarchy, racism, and genocide have all been justified through scripture) and I would laugh if anyone dared to say Christians are more moral than non-Christians.

• 6. nullifidian  |  April 19, 2007 at 4:18 am

  I’ve had trouble finding anyone who could produce a non-arbitrary non-theistically-based way to judge moral action.

  I would posit, then, that you haven’t looked hard enough.

• 7. Heather  |  April 19, 2007 at 5:56 am

  **If you say that of the Bible, doesn’t the giver of the law have the right to do as He pleases, and mightn’t your perspective on His aims and the possibility of better actions be limited?**

  I agree with MTran on this — this response comes across as whatever God does is good because God does it, and in that case, there’s no ’standard’ morality. Good has simply become whatever action God decides to do, which includes slavery, genocide, and rape. And if going that route, then there’s no way of judging whether God is good, period.

• 8. agnosticatheist  |  April 19, 2007 at 7:05 am

  MTran,

  Great comments as usual.

  I’ve always wondered why there were discrepancies within single books of the Gospels and the Book of Acts. I can understand the O.T. since those were compilations of books probably written by several authors over time and the contradicts between different books.

  However, a single author probably wrote Acts yet it says:

  Acts 9:7 And the men which journeyed with him stood speechless, hearing a voice, but seeing no man.

  Acts.22:9 And they that were with me saw indeed the light, and were afraid; but they heard not the voice of him that spake to me.

  And you’re right about the bad editing job. For example, whoever compiled Genesis, whey didn’t they fix the issues with Gen 1 & 2 immediately? I guess they already revered the text they were using.

  aA

• 9. radec  |  April 19, 2007 at 9:24 am

  In the church I attend, there seems to be a trend in not taking every word of the bible literally and using the human authors and their culture to explain some of the “holes”. Without going into much detail, one example of this would be Paul’s restrictions on women in the church in Corinth. I have heard the argument that Paul didn’t mean every church had to keep their women silent, but in Corinth that was the culture of the time so letting their women speak in the assembly would hinder them from teaching their beliefs to non-believers. Thus in our culture saying women have to be silent is doing exactly opposite of what Paul was trying to accomplish. It is a different twist, but I don’t think it can’t fix all the issues with the book. It does make some of the older traditions and commandments easier to swallow for someone in 2007 though.

• 10. Karen  |  April 19, 2007 at 12:52 pm

  As I stated earlier, I consider myself a somewhat intelligent person and I am amazed that I overlooked and ignored so many glaring issues.

  Aa, I feel exactly the same way and I’ve seen that many other former fundamentalists come to the same realization once they get out. And it’s not like I didn’t study the bible! I studied the heck out of that book for 30 years!

  The only conclusion I’ve reached is that I was very, very good at subconscious compartmentalization, and very, very obedient in terms of accepting without question the “explanations” and interpretations that were offered by authority figures.

  Have you put any thought into how/why you were able to ignore or overlook so many glaring problems with the scriptures?

• 11. Jason  |  April 19, 2007 at 4:09 pm

  On second thought, I’m not going to write anything here. I’ll just jump on the train with Brad above. You’ve had a long comment from me before on dealing with difficult texts in scripture . . . so no need to belabor my points again.

  Only one other comment for the person above who noted that the Bible gives us the moral teachings of a peasant society 2000 years ago . . . I suppose our growth and improvement as a culture to something more knowledgeable and civil than a mere peasant culture of 2000 years ago can explain the Holocaust, two World Wars, the killing fields of Cambodia, and the 30 million people massacred by Joseph Stalin? The passage of time does not necessarily improve humanity or make us more intelligent. We might have more knowledge, but we certainly have not improved at being able to use it for better ends.

• 12. Mike C  |  April 19, 2007 at 6:52 pm

  Here’s the Godhead of many fundamentalist Christians as I see it:
  God the Father
  God the Son
  God the Holy Spirit
  God the Bible?

  Believe it or not, but I actually had one fundamentalist pastor tell me that he believed in “God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Bible.”

  Great points AA. Rethinking my own views of the Bible was a major component of the transformation in my own faith that eventually led me to the emerging church. It seems like such a simple insight, but it was truly revolutionary for me to realize that “The Word of God” does not always equal “the Bible”.

  You asked for links to moderate Christian sites that critically evaluate the Bible. I think my blog might qualify. You might these posts of mine interesting:
  What Good is the Bible?
  Three Approaches to Scripture
  How to Read the Bible

  Peace,
  -Mike

• 13. Ryan  |  April 19, 2007 at 6:59 pm

  Roopster and anyone else who wants to learn something,

  I think I need to share with you the some information about the New Testament:
  It has the most MSS (manuscript) backing of any literary work with 5366 copies.The earliest fragment copy is dated c.114ad and the earliest complete NT copy is from c.325. The earliest time gap between the death of Jesus and the first fragment is 50 yrs. The New testament its-self is given a date of A.D. 50-100. The book with the second most MSS support is Homer’s Iliad with only a mere 643 copies and a date of 800B.C., with the earliest copies being dated around 400 B.C. and a huge time gap of about 400 yrs.. Furthermore the Bible was written by 40 different people, over 1500 years in different places, at different times i.e times of war, times of peace, in different moods (joy, sorrow etc.)on three different continents, in three different languages and in spite of all these differences one central theme stands, Jesus Christ. yet people still doubt its validity as a historically accurate book even though it is the most documented book ever written.Why do you think that is?? The Bible is a history of Gods love for His people and no other book in existance has been under the scutiny that it has for as long as it has been. (All the dates I used are from a book called Evidence for Christianity by Josh McDowell)

• 14. Heather  |  April 19, 2007 at 7:15 pm

  **in three different languages and in spite of all these differences one central theme stands, Jesus Christ.** That is only if one looks at both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and overlooks the reasons why the Jews say Jesus wasn’t the Messiah. The Virgin Birth prophecy is an example of a descrepency, in terms of the Hebrew word meaning ‘young woman’ and the Greek word meaning ‘virgin.’ Plus, even in reading Isaiah 7 completely makes it very, very difficult to apply that to predicting a virgin birth in the future.

  People doubt because there are elements to doubt — much of the mainline scholarship on Christianity is by people who used to be fundamentalists, and their research convinced them otherwise.

• 15. frenchtoast  |  April 19, 2007 at 7:35 pm

  Do you think a young woman in that day and age would be a virgin or not? The hebrew word occurs only 7 times in the OT I think that is of segnificance dont you? The word wasn’t haphazerdousally thrown around. The Septuagint(greek translation of the OT) was the first to translate it to the more specific word “Virgin” and that was made c.150B.C..
  Tell me more on why the Jews didn’t and dont accept Jesus as the messiah I am kinda weak on that point. All I know is that they weren’t looking for a person like Jesus they were looking for someone or something with more pride i guess. thanks

• 16. frenchtoast  |  April 19, 2007 at 7:37 pm

  oh and I havent been a believer all my life. my unbiased study and my reason has led me to Jesus.Not to mention the Grace of God.

• 17. MTran  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:16 pm

  yet people still doubt its validity as a historically accurate book even though it is the most documented book ever written.

  I have no idea what you mean by this. “Most documented?”

  Much copied, okay. When governments and church institutions make endless copies of things, so what? Numbers of copies is unrelated to truthfulness or accuracy. It is related to political or commercial power.

  Under this reasoning, the publishers of pulp fiction romance novels are documenting like crazy, but it’s still fiction.

  And no matter how many copies of the Bible there are, there is still no evidence of any supernatural entity or force let alone the specific one peculiar to the Judeo-Christian notions of god.

  And don’t even step into that “historically accurate” swamp, the contradictions and anachronisms alone are enough to sink a mastodon.

• 18. Heather  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:35 pm

  **Do you think a young woman in that day and age would be a virgin or not?** The problem is that there was a another word that tended to refer more to virginity, and that word was used more in Isaiah — and again, it’s very hard to make that match up to the New Testament when all of Isaiah is taken in context.

  See here for why they don’t accept him as the Messiah:
  http://www.aish.com/spirituality/philosophy/Why_Dont_Jews_Believe_In_Jesus.asp

  Or here: http://www.messiahtruth.com/response.html

• 19. HeIsSailing  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:42 pm

  Thus saith Roopster:
  “If you could, for one week, remove those glasses and be open to seeing the contradictions, you will be so surprised by what you find. The “perfect unity” is a lie used to brainwash you.”

  Whole-heartedly concur. I am shocked at how I, as a Christian, claimed I read the Bible and interpreted it honestly. However Christians as a whole interpret the Bible to fit their preconcieved Church Doctrine or Creed. When an ‘apparant’ contradiction arises, the intent is not to find the meaning behind the contradiction, no the intent becomes figuring out a way to harmonize it. When polytheism is mentioned in the old testament, we must immediately interpret that to mean the Trinity - a 3rd century doctrine!!

• 20. HeIsSailing  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:47 pm

  Karen sez:
  “Aa, I feel exactly the same way and I’ve seen that many other former fundamentalists come to the same realization once they get out. And it’s not like I didn’t study the bible! I studied the heck out of that book for 30 years!

  The only conclusion I’ve reached is that I was very, very good at subconscious compartmentalization, and very, very obedient in terms of accepting without question the “explanations” and interpretations that were offered by authority figures”

  Wow Karen, you really hit the nail on the head with this one. As a Christian, I read the Bible pretty well, but read it and interpreted it as a monolithic whole. An obscure verse in 2Samuel could interpret a tricky passage in 1Peter for instance. With 66 books to work through, harmonizations can be very creative, and endless.

  I just ask that people try interpreting the Bible, not as a whole, but as 66 different books by different men who all had different theologies, ideas, backgrounds, educations and ideas. Just this insight alone reveals how profound, fascinating, and very human the Bible really is.

• 21. ryan  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:47 pm

  The point is that all of the fragments found in treasures like the Dead Sea scrolls are identical to the matching passages that we have now in our Bible. If a fragment from 114AD is found and it matches word for word what we have now dont you think that proves that the Bible was the most kept book ever. That proves that in 114 ad people were saying the same things about Christ that they are now isnt it?? You dont think that that is important. You dont think that that validates the writings. It remains unchanged since 114ad and the New testament remains unchanged since 325(earliestcomplete NT). you dont think that that counts for anything?? No other book in history has this kind of proof that the same thing was being said so long ago. This MSS method is what “scholars” use on secular writings as well (such as Josephus’s writings of the 1st century)not just the bible. I am not making this stuff up, some times I wish I were because we all wouldn’t be accountable for what we do and do not do. As far as the supernatural entity thingy you speak of I have to say your right. And there will never be any evidence of that. Read the story of The Rich man and Lazarus it starts on Luke 16:19 it explains why God doesn’t give signs.

• 22. ryan  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:53 pm

  heissailing,
  what do you mean by “interpreted” the bible i am confused.

• 23. HeIsSailing  |  April 19, 2007 at 8:58 pm

  Ryan sez:
  “(All the dates I used are from a book called Evidence for Christianity by Josh McDowell)”

  Hi Ryan, yeah I recognized where you were getting that from immediately. McDowell will tell you that the differences in the earliest manuscripts are trivial. I recommend you pick up a copy of Ehrman’s ‘Orthodox Corruption of Scripture’ to see just how many changes were made to the earliest new Testament manuscripts, and what effect those changes had on New Testamanet Orthodoxy and Heresy. It is pretty mindblowing.

  As for all those copies of the New testament cited by McDowell, the vast majority of those were copied between the Council of Nicea and the invention of the Printing Press (forget the exact number of manuscripts, or years). In other words, yeah they are identical because by then the Scripture had become more or less ‘Standardized as Canon’.

  And the scrap of papyrus that is claimed as the oldest is called P^53, and it contains portions of 4 verses from John’s Gospel. Dating it is notoriously difficult, because it is done mainly by handwriting analysis, of which there is scant little on this scrap. McDowell never mentions any of that - the way McDowell sites this Papyrus, you would think we have the entire Gospel that old. nope. Here is a site with more information on P^52 - McDowell’s earliest “manuscript”.
  http://www.kchanson.com/ANCDOCS/greek/johnpap.html

• 24. HeIsSailing  |  April 19, 2007 at 9:08 pm

  Ryan sez:
  “It remains unchanged since 114ad and the New testament remains unchanged since 325(earliestcomplete NT). you dont think that that counts for anything?? ”

  Ryan trust me, McDowell has this all wrong. Does he site any sources when he says this? No, he just interviews other friends of his who agree with him.

  Ryan continues:
  “The point is that all of the fragments found in treasures like the Dead Sea scrolls are identical to the matching passages that we have now in our Bible. If a fragment from 114AD is found and it matches word for word what we have now dont you think that proves that the Bible was the most kept book ever. That proves that in 114 ad people were saying the same things about Christ that they are now isnt it?? ”

  That fragment is only portions of 4 verses from The Gospel of John. It is pretty easy to match that thing ‘word for word’. While it probably is one of the most copied, and yes most accurate of our ancient writtings, its transcription and transmission were far from perfect or ‘inerrant’.

• 25. MTran  |  April 20, 2007 at 4:34 am

  For example, whoever compiled Genesis, whey didn’t they fix the issues with Gen 1 & 2 immediately? I guess they already revered the text they were using.

  From what I’ve seen of ancient literature, especially myth / religious literature, people way back then looked very differently at the need for editorial consistency and accurate content than we do today. They often had different purposes, too .

  It appears that the Genesis authors, for example, likely represent fiercely competing factions among the early Hebrew tribes. When these tribes (Israel and Judea) were united, neither tribe would be willing to give up their own version of any story that was well known amongst the people.

  So you end up with contending versions of stories that some very industrious redactor fused together. What is interesting is that in the competing versions, there is a nice, personable god who represents one side’s view and a nasty SOB who represents the other side.

  The nasty faction was primarily interested in dissing the other guys and imposing lots of rules and limits while giving themselves accolades and rights, including income.

  In other words: politics.

  The authors known today as E, J, P, and D were steeped in the politics as well as the religion of their day.

  There’s a very readable book — Who Wrote The Bible?– by a reputable Bible scholar and believer, Prof. Rabbi Richard Elliott Friedman. It’s been around for 20 years or so but he updated it some time in the 90s.

  He thoroughly reviews the Pentateuch and early histories in the Bible, providing good synopses of the major opinions on textual issues. He also proposes the real identity of two of the editors/writers. Cool stuff.

• 26. Jason  |  April 20, 2007 at 7:46 am

  MTran, that’s one way of looking at Genesis. But it could also be that the authors who compiled the text believed that both stories bore out truths about God and humanity that were so important they had to be placed side by side to capture as complete a picture as possible.

  Here’s the bottom line: the Bible is a book of “faith”. One either believes that it is the dynamically inspired word of God as a matter of faith OR one does not believe that. Thus, the argument really should not be is the Bible rational, but is faith rational. Faith is the issue; not the Bible. As I posted in a comment in an earlier string on a similar topic, the Bible CANNOT be used as a document to enforce rules upon those who do not believe it to be an inspired book. The Bible is a book written for the communities that choose to be shaped by its writings. Obviously, this opinion is not shared by many fundamentalist Christians; nor is it shared by a number of evangelical Christians.

  What most interests me here is that most who seem to be disturbed by the Bible and the faith that so many have in it. have come from fundamentalist backgrounds. So, I can understand why you dislike the Bible. You grew up in environments where the Bible was used as a tool for parents, pastors and others to beat you over the head and into submission to their own predelictions and fears. This saddens me because this means that the Bible was never given enough “breathing space” to speak on its own; a part from the misguided teachings of those churches. The Bible can only be more for people of faith who wrestle with what you have termed the Bible’s inconsistencies, who wrestle with its socio-political/socio-cultural context, and who wrestle to figure out what it means for the life of faith today.

  I regret that the baby has been thrown out with the bath water and that the Bible was taught to so many people with so little respect for what it really is. This is not to say that the Bible is not hard. Sometimes the teachings are very hard and, as Paul writes later in Corinthians, the wisdom of God is often the foolishness of man.

  Finally, for the next 4 Sundays I will be preaching from the closing chapters of John. We won’t be worshiping the Bible but it will be a starting point for our worship of Jesus.

  By the way, any good and thorough reading of the Gospels will point out that over and over and over again the people that Jesus is challenging are the highly religious and fundamentalist sorts of that day. But that should make sense. The Bible was written to challenge and guide the life of communities of faith. Obviously, then, it speaks with exacting precision to the religious and the faithful who will allow it to speak on its own terms and not in the terms of their own contexts and political convictions.

• 27. Heather  |  April 20, 2007 at 10:05 am

  **Here’s the bottom line: the Bible is a book of “faith”. One either believes that it is the dynamically inspired word of God as a matter of faith OR one does not believe that. Thus, the argument really should not be is the Bible rational, but is faith rational. **

  When you say that it’s the inspired word of God, are you saying that in such a way that everything that the Bible says happened is literally true and without error? I do believe the Bible was inspired by how/when people encountered God, but the writing was also limited by the cultural norms of the time, which is why some of the OT stories about God are so troubling.

  I think both the Bible and faith are the issue, because the faith comes in a large part from what the Bible says.

• 28. MTran  |  April 20, 2007 at 11:19 am

  Jason,

  I would suggest that you stay away from attempts at psychology because you are not very good at it.

  The churches I attended when young were very positive places and were not in any way of the fundamentalist type. I reject the teachings of the Bible because I do not see it as morally beneficial. It has no moral weight to me because of its own rather abundant flaws.

  The hypothesis I outlined above is not something that I dreamed up on my own but has been around in academic studies of the Bible for a very long time. I happen to think that it is the most meritorious explanation of the wacky inconsistency of the text, but the ideas were not invented or discovered by me.

  I reject the notion that there is any supernatural force or entity, thus there is no question for me that the Bible is the work of a bunch of humans, all of them pushing an agenda, otherwise there would be no point to their writings.

  The Bible is a lot of things. Consistency, accuracy, factuality, morality and wisdom, though, are not its strong points. The same thing is true of many ancient texts.

• 29. Karen  |  April 20, 2007 at 11:50 am

  Wow Karen, you really hit the nail on the head with this one.

  Thank you. I have actually put a lot of thought into it, because not only am I a reasonably bright person (I think!), I’m a writer and an English major. Critical analysis of text is what I do!

  So it rather boggles my mind that I never turned my critiquing eye on the bible for so many years; I just gave it “a pass” pretty much unconsciously. That goes back to being heavily indoctrinated (yes, I will use the word “brainwashed” as a child.

  When I was a freshman in college and first learning literary criticism, I began to have serious doubts about the bible and Christianity. Simultaneously, I was attending Calvary Chapel with a group of friends and undergoing something of a “radicalization” of my faith, which was becoming much more central to my life.

  The two factions battled it out in my head and Christianity won. For the next 17 or 18 years, I had enough self-control to wall-off my religious thoughts from my natural skepticism and critical thinking training. That’s a stressful thing to do, however, so when I had a fairly serious midlife crisis, it all came back up again in my life, with the ultimate result of my becoming an (agnostic) atheist.

  As a Christian, I read the Bible pretty well, but read it and interpreted it as a monolithic whole. An obscure verse in 2Samuel could interpret a tricky passage in 1Peter for instance. With 66 books to work through, harmonizations can be very creative, and endless.

  Oh, sure. And that’s another thing I’ve realized: It’s not that fundamentalists don’t think about the contradictions. In fact, they obsess over them, in the sense of interpreting them, and rationalizing them, and reconciling them, and re-interpreting them based on some new Christian book, or new preacher’s ideas, every few years.

  It goes on and on ad nauseum, which pretty much keeps the brain busy with all that hard work. So just plain old reading of what’s right in front of you with a critical eye never gets done - you’re too busy with all the stuff and nonsense of interpretation!

• 30. tobeme  |  April 20, 2007 at 1:46 pm

  I enjoyed your writing on this subject. I agree the Bible is a circular reference. Very well put! There are some great secrets in the Bible as well as some very horrible things. There is love and hate in the Bible. As with many ancient texts the Bible has much to offer us. What we get out of it, does depend on what filter we use to read it.

• 31. ryan  |  April 20, 2007 at 2:25 pm

  he is sailing,

  “Orthodox Corruption of Scripture’ ”

  Is this a secular or non secular source. If it is secular why would I want to read it. I dont go looking for information about the Bible in sources that are trying to undermine it. Hence why I am asking you guys and girls for your input. If I want an athiest or agnostic oint of view I am not going to ask a Christian for it am I. Same goes for my christian information, I wont ask for Biblical proof or truth from anything outside the Christian bias. I think that it would just be counterproductive dont you?

• 32. Jason  |  April 20, 2007 at 2:53 pm

  MTran,

  Funny that you tell me to stay away from psychology. I spent a lot of money getting a degree in counseling pysch

  At any rate, this may not describe your experience, but it certainly describes the experience of others who have written various replies in this thread.

  I hope you don’t hear me trying to convince you of anything other than what you have stated. I don’t do apologetics. Like I said, they usually don’t result in much movement on either side. except to drive people deeper into their already stated positions.

  I will maintain that the Bible only has value for the communities that have faith in it as the dynamically inspired word of God. By the way, someone earlier also posed a question to me about the inspiration of scripture. The theory of dynamic inspiration is called dynamic because it understands that the words are not only shaped by God, but also by writers of different backgrounds, in different places at different times.

  What I am basically saying is that asking anyone outside of a Jewish or Christian faith tradition to “uphold the teachings of the Bible” could be likened to asking a duck to moo. The standards of scripture can only be applied within the communities of faith that claim them to be the inspired word of God.

• 33. MTran  |  April 20, 2007 at 3:50 pm

  Funny that you tell me to stay away from psychology. I spent a lot of money getting a degree in counseling pysch

  Hey, what can I say? I’m sure it was money well spent, especially if it is a field you continue to enjoy. I’m just not one to accept long distance psychoanalysis as having much basis for reliability. (Doubtless, there may be exceptions.)

  Perhaps, though, with your background, you could answer a question.

  Could you tell me why it is that so many believers (especially fundie types) assume that atheists are simply angry at god, disappointed with god, unfamiliar with scripture or simply spiritually lacking?

  These sorts of assumptions are puzzling to me.

• 34. Jason  |  April 20, 2007 at 4:12 pm

  MT,

  I’m not sure where it comes from. I’m not a fundamentalist. An evangelical, yes, but not a fundie. My initial thought is that it has something to do with a need to protect God without realizing that he doesn’t need to be protected. Secondly I think it is a one way to rationalize someone’s disbelief in something they feel so passionate about. I find that this is something that many (not all) atheists and fundamentalists share in common: an overwhelming need to explain why someone else does not also passionately believe in what they feel so zealous about. How’s that for long-distance psychoanalysis. Most likely, however, I think it is because they are too busy trying to “believe” the right things rather than trying to follow Jesus. Those are very different things.

• 35. MTran  |  April 20, 2007 at 4:55 pm

  I think it is because they are too busy trying to “believe” the right things rather than trying to follow Jesus. Those are very different things.

  That may well be true (the part about wanting to believe the right things). I think it is unfortunate when anyone gets more tied up with the “Thou shall nots” than with the “love thy neighbor” message.

  From what I have seen, it seems that the literalists are the ones most likely to go for the rule-based notions of the Old Testament rather than the examples of benevolence that can be found in the New Testament.

  Most of my friends and colleagues are atheists and most of them were raised Roman Catholic. I have a hard time convincing them that the main-line Protestanism that I grew up with is not at all like the hate-filled venom that people like Pat Robertson spit out.

• 36. HeIsSailing  |  April 20, 2007 at 6:11 pm

  Ryan asks:
  ““Orthodox Corruption of Scripture’ ”

  Is this a secular or non secular source. If it is secular why would I want to read it. I dont go looking for information about the Bible in sources that are trying to undermine it. ”

  Why oh why do Christians insist on placing everything into either ‘Christian’ or ‘Secular’ categories??
  Ryan, it is just a book. Ehrman is an agnostic, if that helps, but the book is not some screaming polemic against Christianity. He just carefully lays out the facts that, yes there were numerous changes to Scripture during its transmission, and while most were harmless, there were still many that affected Christian theology. He lays them out carefully, fully documented, referenced and footnoted. It is neither Pro, nor Anti Christianity.
  You will get none of this with folks like Josh McDowell. McDowell would be the first to admit that he is not a Biblical scholar, rather he is a propagandist. He intentionally takes arguments, and twists them to fit his agenda. You will rarely win any arguments by referrencing McDowell as your source.

  If you are leery of reading scholarly work by an agnostic, there *are* legitmate conservative and Christian scholars out there. Go to the library and check out anything by Ramond Brown for instance. Top notch scholarly work, and highly respected - and he was still a Christian (actually Catholic) without being a propagandist. I have only read two of his books, but he has many to choose from.

• 37. Heather  |  April 20, 2007 at 6:26 pm

  Karen,

  ** I’m a writer and an English major. Critical analysis of text is what I do! ** Me, too. I’m an English major, a History minor, and I write as a hobby. So reading the Bible sometimes can be fascinating. It’s also a response I give to evangelicals when they ask why I haven’t accept their belief system: because I read the Bible.

  Have you ever heard of the book ‘God: A biography’ by Jack Miles? He analyzes the Bible as a literary text with God as the protagonist. It was fascinating, and I highly recommend it.

• 38. ryan  |  April 20, 2007 at 7:40 pm

  Heissailing

  my point still is that if I want a christian point of view on a subject i am not going to ask someone who isn’t a Christian. For what reason would someone who considers themself an atheist or agnostic write a book about the Bible?? Only one reason comes to mind. I know that if I were to write a book about an atheist and his/her beliefs it would be riddled with incorrect assumptions based on what I believe. I want to get onto the question that started this all. “do christians worship the bible as God” (incorrect assumption)because I think that it falls into our current debate. From my point of view as a christian I would say no. but I can see why the question would be posed by people on the outside looking in and only people on the outside. That is my point if you ask this question to the author of this page he would and has said yes. (copied from above: “because, in my opinion, many Christians literally worship the Bible as a part of their “Godhead.” There are even many “worship” songs about the Word.” In my experience as a follower of Christ I have never fallen down and worshiped the Bible and never will. I dont see where the author is coming from and doubt his admission of being a fundamental christian in the past. The Bible is a history of Gods people and what He has and is doing for us/them.
  I do have a question for you though that I have been thinking about…
  Why is it ok for an atheist to use scripture to try and disprove the bible but when a Christian tries to use it we are told we have to use an outside source, and that it is bias? I find that this happens quite often and I dont know if you do it but I am just wondering.
  thanks for your patience

• 39. Heather  |  April 20, 2007 at 8:24 pm

  Ryan,

  **my point still is that if I want a christian point of view on a subject i am not going to ask someone who isn’t a Christian. ** Don’t you find it telling, though, that Josh McDowell didn’t mention the fragment was only 4 verses long? And did he mention the sources he spoke with? Or the fact that most of the copies referred to are between the Council of Nicea and the creation of the printing press? Because even the latter affects the claim of no discprencies, since there’d be very few during that time — the matter of canon was settled. If those types of facts were left out for any other matter, wouldn’t it make you question the source, given that it’s coming across that McDowell’s book seems to obscure certain facts.

  **In my experience as a follower of Christ I have never fallen down and worshiped the Bible and never will. I dont see where the author is coming from and doubt his admission of being a fundamental christian in the past.** It’s not a matter of worshipping the Bible. It’s more along the lines of those who take a literal 6,000 year creation, because to do otherwise literally contradicts the Bible. Or archeological claims questioning Exodus, yet that can’t be possible, because the Exodus account is in the Bible. That’s the type of ‘worship’ the author’s referring to. I see this from fundamentalists a lot.

  **Why is it ok for an atheist to use scripture to try and disprove the bible but when a Christian tries to use it we are told we have to use an outside source, and that it is bias? ** It depends what’s being proved/disproved. If talking about historical accuracy, especially in regards to spectacular events, people like to have backup sources, from different books and accounts, preferably from those for and against the accounts. So when disproving the bible historically, people do use outside accounts. When doing so in terms of God’s character, then the Bible is used as the only source.

• 40. ryan  |  April 20, 2007 at 9:05 pm

  heissailing,

  i need to say something on this statement “the vast majority of those were copied between the Council of Nicea and the invention of the Printing Press (forget the exact number of manuscripts, or years).” The first complete NT is dated 325ad. I dont think the printing press was invented untill about 1440 rtight?I am speaking of fragments that pre date the printing press.(and a fair amount even predate the liberal 250ad dating of the council.) the +5000 mss i speak of are hand written documents.other things are included in the dating of the mss such as what the paper is made of and what kind of ink they used. and the fact that the oldest fragment is only 4 versus long has no bearing. remember in school when the teacher wispered something into the ear of one kid and they had to pass it around the room? and when the last kid got the message he told the teacher what he heard and it wasnt even close to the meaning of the original. the meaning of these messages hasent changed over the time span of 2000yrs. how can this be. sorry to digress but i just noticed that you wrote this.

• 41. ryan  |  April 20, 2007 at 9:19 pm

  Heather,

  I just had a conversation with my wife on this very subject. the fact the the letters of the NT were addressed to various groups and to take them out of their context would be an atrocity. but that desnt mean that the scriptures are any less helpful to everyone.hence why we quote them and that is why they are included in the book. not to mention divine inspiration. I wholeheartedly believe that you should question the bible (its not like we are muslims) but just remember you can’t ask any questions that haven’t already been addressed.

• 42. HeIsSailing  |  April 20, 2007 at 9:31 pm

  ryan:
  “i need to say something on this statement “the vast majority of those were copied between the Council of Nicea and the invention of the Printing Press (forget the exact number of manuscripts, or years).” The first complete NT is dated 325ad. ”

  Yeah, The oldest complete (or mostly complete) copies of the NT are the Codex Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, both about 350AD. Everything before this we have only in scraps and fragments. I am going off memory here, but I think there are something like 5500 handwriten NT manuscripts between here and Gutenburg’s Bible in about .. what 1460 or so?

  The earliest manuscripts do have variations in them, whether you get that information from an athiest, agnostic or Christian - that fact remains. Ehrman claims that there are more variations then there are words in the NT, but admits that most are just copiest or spelling errors. However there are systematic errors that change the theology of the NT significantly.

  You will get that information from any honest scholar, no matter their religious persuasion.

  Why do agnostics and athiests study the Bible intensely? Some have an axe to grind sure. I try to stay away from those characters. But I suspect most study the Bible because they are historians like any other, or they love to study classical literature like some classicists study Greek literature, mythology and plays. They are not trying to debunk anything, they just enjoy studying it from an academic standpoint.

  I enjoy Erham, Raymond Brown and a host of other scholars. Their research is eye-opening, even though they all have religious differneces. The religious persuasion of the authors are beside the point in their books - they are not trying to convert you to any doctrine, just take the information and do with it what you will. Those are the best kinds of books to read.

  You will learn nothing by reading hacks like Josh McDowell. McDowell is on a mission, and that is to convert as many people as he can to Christianity. I am not arguing against that, but that is not scholarship, that is evangelism. Again, he will be the first to tell you that. I have read two of his books, and I think his presentation is just blatently dishonest and deceitful. Do you really want to trust people who have such an overt agenda as he does?

• 43. HeIsSailing  |  April 20, 2007 at 9:59 pm

  Karen sez:
  “When I was a freshman in college and first learning literary criticism, I began to have serious doubts about the bible and Christianity. Simultaneously, I was attending Calvary Chapel with a group of friends and undergoing something of a “radicalization” of my faith, which was becoming much more central to my life.”

  I never studied literature while in college, my critical thinking skills come from studying mathematics. I also attended Calvary Chapel for about 10 years. They have a way of intellecutalizing the Bible unlike any other church I ever attended - they did stress verse by verse Bible Study, and I was very drawn to that. But what they really specialized in was harmonization. Their interpretations were literal, and everything had to fit into that mold. So despite the intellectual veneer, we really never learned much new. We just learned lots of creative harmonization arguments and tons of apologetics.

  Karen continues:
  “It’s not that fundamentalists don’t think about the contradictions. In fact, they obsess over them, in the sense of interpreting them, and rationalizing them, and reconciling them, and re-interpreting them based on some new Christian book, or new preacher’s ideas, every few years. ”

  You got that right - truly obsessive over the contradictions. I really struggled over some of the tactics used to harmonize the contradictions, they were sometimes just twisting the text like a pretzel!! If I ever write a book, it would be how The Bible is continually reinterpreted with each new Scientific Discovery. Our old Calvary Chapel paster claimed that Genesis 1 forsaw every advance in science, whether we were talking particle physics or general relativity, he could twist those theories out of Genesis 1. The Bible must be continually be reinterpreted since we now know, for instance, that heaven is not above the vault of the sky, and Jesus ascension to heaven makes no physical sense in our modern world.
  I have neve seen a competent treatment of that subject in book form, and I think I would like to give it a go someday.

• 44. brad  |  April 20, 2007 at 10:14 pm

  Ryan said: “Is this a secular or non secular source. If it is secular why would I want to read it.”

  Well doesn’t this officially end any debate? Seriously. Ryan, why are you here? To re-convert a bunch of ex-Christians? If you want to proselytize why don’t you join your missionary friends in a tropical locale or some continent where Jesus is either a new fad or the people a regularly taken advantage of by every white person they ever meet (ie. Africa).
  You obviously do not care about anything anybody is saying because you are not even willing to read scholarly work on the Bible (who, strangely enough, actually has access to these manuscripts). You quote Josh McDowell who has based his entire life’s work on heavily biased and outdated sources - and you yourself don’t quote where he gets any of his information.

• 45. MTran  |  April 21, 2007 at 12:19 am

  In my experience as a follower of Christ I have never fallen down and worshiped the Bible and never will. I dont see where the author is coming from and doubt his admission of being a fundamental christian in the past.

  Understandably, those who are accused of bibliolatry do not feel that they are worshiping the Bible. Just as those accused of Mariolatry do not feel that they are worshipping Mary. Both groups understand their veneration of the Bible or Mary as being different from worship. But when viewed dispassionately, they give convincing evidence of being worship to anyone outside of those specific faiths.

  Accusations of bibliolatry and Mariolatry are key to many of the doctrinal disputes between Roman Catholic and many Protestant sects.

  Similarly, believers who are Unitarians, Jewish, or of any other faith, often look at Trinitarian beliefs as polytheism because any other religion exhibiting those characteristiscs would be deemed polytheism.

  Same thing with “idol” worship.Those people who use a physical object to focus their prayers upon do not view their faith to be one of worshiping idols, the image is only a tool of faith. But those outside of such a faith have a different understanding and consider this habit or style of prayer to be “worshipping” idols.

• 46. ryan  |  April 21, 2007 at 11:31 am

  i assure you Brad I am not trying to change anyones mind. I gave the information about the bible to start my answer on the questin at hand. I believe in the Bible and what is written and I wanted to tell you people why based on what I have learned and I finally got to that after about the 4th post or so as you can see. anything between then and my last post are more or less side comments between me and a couple other people. I didnt come to start a debate I just wanted to answer the question the best I could and I felt that a little dating and historical background would help me get to my answer. I also listed Mcdowells book as a source and I felt that a detailed list of names was a little far but if you want that I am sure I can abblige. if I have upset anyone with my comments (Brad) i apologize because that wasn’t my intention.

• 47. Karen  |  April 21, 2007 at 6:33 pm

  Ryan:
  my point still is that if I want a christian point of view on a subject i am not going to ask someone who isn’t a Christian.

  Ryan, do you demand objective information when it comes to other important things in your life: i.e., finances, career, politics, etc? If you’re the kind of person who relies on reason and logic in your daily decision-making - and it works well for you - why not extend that same paradigm to religion also?

  What you’re doing is compartmentalizing Christianity - much as I and many others here used to do - so as to wall it off from critical thinking. That’s undoubtedly what you’ve been taught to do, but if you think about it, that’s like saying, ‘I only want to hear stock market news from bullish investment advisors” or “I only want to hear about political issues from liberal pundits.”

  That kind of one-side-only information doesn’t result in good decision-making, just like only reading what evangelists and Bible apologists say about Christianity doesn’t result in good religious thinking. If your Christian beliefs are really accurate, don’t you think they will hold up to scrutiny - or are you afraid to scrutinize them too closely for fear they will fall apart?

  In terms of your comment about the “historical accuracy” of the bible, that’s just untrue. There’s very little - if any - archeological evidence that backs up the Old Testatment as historically accurate. In fact just this month there was a NY Times article printed (April 3) entitled, “Did the Red Sea Part? No Evidence, Archeologists Say”:

  On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt’s chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency’s latest discovery.

  It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.

  That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the Israelites’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.

  ”Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.

  Egypt is one of the world’s primary warehouses of ancient history. People here joke that wherever you stick a shovel in the ground you find antiquities. When workers built a sewage system in the downtown Cairo neighborhood of Dokki, they accidentally scattered shards of Roman pottery. In the middle-class neighborhood of Heliopolis, tombs have been discovered beneath homes.

  But Egypt is also a spiritual center, where for centuries men have searched for the meaning of life. Sometimes the two converge, and sometimes the archaeological record confirms the history of the faithful. Often it does not, however, as Dr. Hawass said with detached certainty.

  ”If they get upset, I don’t care,” Dr. Hawass said. ”This is my career as an archaeologist. I should tell them the truth. If the people are upset, that is not my problem.”

  The story of the Exodus is celebrated as the pivotal moment in the creation of the Jewish people. As the Bible tells it, Moses was born the son of a Jewish slave, who cast him into the Nile in a basket so the baby could escape being killed by the pharaoh. He was saved by the pharaoh’s daughter, raised in the royal court, discovered his Jewish roots and, with divine help, led the Jewish people to freedom. Moses is said to have ascended Mt. Sinai, where God appeared in a burning bush and Moses received the Ten Commandments.

  In Egypt today, visitors to Mount Sinai are sometimes shown a bush by tour guides and told it is the actual bush that burned before Moses.

  But archaeologists who have worked here have never turned up evidence to support the account in the Bible, and there is only one archaeological find that even suggests the Jews were ever in Egypt. Books have been written on the topic, but the discussion has, for the most part, remained low-key as the empirically minded have tried not to incite the spiritually minded.

  ”Sometimes as archaeologists we have to say that never happened because there is no historical evidence,” Dr. Hawass said, as he led the journalists across a rutted field of stiff and rocky sand.
  ….
  Recently, diggers found evidence of lava from a volcano in the Mediterranean Sea that erupted in 1500 B.C. and is believed to have killed 35,000 people and wiped out villages in Egypt, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula, officials here said. The same diggers found evidence of a military fort with four rectangular towers, now considered the oldest fort on the Horus military road.

  But nothing was showing up that might help prove the Old Testament story of Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt, or wandering in the desert. Dr. Hawass said he was not surprised, given the lack of archaeological evidence to date.

• 48. Karen  |  April 21, 2007 at 6:36 pm

  Heather:
  Have you ever heard of the book ‘God: A biography’ by Jack Miles? He analyzes the Bible as a literary text with God as the protagonist. It was fascinating, and I highly recommend it.

  No, I haven’t heard of it, but it sounds great. I’ll definitely put it on my reading list- thanks!

• 49. Karen  |  April 21, 2007 at 6:47 pm

  HeIsSailing:
  I also attended Calvary Chapel for about 10 years. They have a way of intellecutalizing the Bible unlike any other church I ever attended - they did stress verse by verse Bible Study, and I was very drawn to that. But what they really specialized in was harmonization. Their interpretations were literal, and everything had to fit into that mold. So despite the intellectual veneer, we really never learned much new. We just learned lots of creative harmonization arguments and tons of apologetics.

  Exactly. Lots and lots of busy work, but no real intellectual insights. In that sense, it was like running on a hamster wheel, with everything circular and no ‘outside thought’ or scholarship allowed. Indeed, biblical scholarship was totally ridiculed and denied - from the pulpit, of course.

  And of course most of the frenetic harmonization efforts were centered around End Times theology, so that threw an even wackier cast about the whole exercise.

  Were you at “Big Calvary” - i.e., Calvary Costa Mesa? Have you heard about Lonnie Frisbee?

  I really struggled over some of the tactics used to harmonize the contradictions, they were sometimes just twisting the text like a pretzel!! If I ever write a book, it would be how The Bible is continually reinterpreted with each new Scientific Discovery. Our old Calvary Chapel paster claimed that Genesis 1 forsaw every advance in science, whether we were talking particle physics or general relativity, he could twist those theories out of Genesis 1. The Bible must be continually be reinterpreted since we now know, for instance, that heaven is not above the vault of the sky, and Jesus ascension to heaven makes no physical sense in our modern world.
  I have neve seen a competent treatment of that subject in book form, and I think I would like to give it a go someday.

  That would be a terrific book, particularly the historical documentation of various discoveries and reinterpretations. I’d certainly read it!

• 50. HeIsSailing  |  April 21, 2007 at 10:43 pm

  Karen asks:
  “Were you at “Big Calvary” - i.e., Calvary Costa Mesa? Have you heard about Lonnie Frisbee?”

  No, I never went to Costa Mesa. I attended Calvary Chapel in Albuquerque, New Mexico between about 1984 and 1993. Around 1990 or so it was billed as the fastest growing church in the United States - and I believe it. It just got too huge too fast, and I left for another Church.
  Yes, I remember Lonnie Frisbee, but I don’t think I ever met him. He was from the Jesus Hippie movement of the early 1970s when Chuck Smith was rounding up young hippie outcasts. Maybe he did come to town, I remember seeing Kathryn Kulhman several times when she came to town on a miracle crusade, and she always seemed to have a hippie entourage with her. That’s the crowd I was wrapped up in, but I was nowhere near California at the time. I met Chuck Smith … I think maybe 3 or 4 times. Is he still around? He has got to be in his 80s by now.

• 51. Dan Barnett  |  April 21, 2007 at 11:11 pm

  Ok, I got to comment 26 and couldnt read anymore. First, on John 1. Jesus is the Word. It isn;t referring to the Bible. If your “logic” holds then I, as a Christian, should be worshipping lambs too. Since He is the Lamb of God. Nice job twisting words for yourself.
  Second, on McDowell, you all seem to think the majority of Christians who step back and examine their faith abandon it. This is totally false, and you are in the minority that has, as you say Christians do, twistd it to suppoet your side. Sorry for the spelling, by the way. You seem to bunch Josh in with your group, yet he didn’tleave his faith. He wasn’t a Christian until after he collected this evidence, He set out as one of you and found the truth.
  Third, you say the Bible contradicts itself all over. The things that God has done that seem to contradict his nature actually support it. He is a jealous god and with every right. He will stop at nothing to be glorified. So the deaths and all the other things, not to mention his chosen nation being handed to its enemies and his owndeath on the cross, were done for his perfect will. The gospeld don’tcontradict themselves. They are each written by different men to reach different cultures. One for the Jews, one for Rome, One for the Greeks, and one for the Gentiles. Each is a personal account told in the most effective way to reach that intended culture. You think Christians have glasses, but yours are your defiance of truth, and all you look for now is anything that looks wrong and you take it and say it in a way to fit. Hmm, sounds familiar.

• 52. Dan Barnett  |  April 21, 2007 at 11:16 pm

  On a further note, you say Christians practice exckusivity. That’s because it is exclusive! The Bible teaches there is only one way. That doesn’t mean we choose who we want to see in heaven. It means there’s only one way to get there. I would recommend, along with “Case For Faith”(Stroebel), Desiring God by John Piper. That’s all I’ll write. May God show himself to you before it’s too late. And may you see him when he does.

• 53. MTran  |  April 22, 2007 at 12:13 am

  He is a jealous god and with every right. He will stop at nothing to be glorified. So the deaths and all the other things, not to mention his chosen nation being handed to its enemies and his owndeath on the cross, were done for his perfect will.

  Wow, now I see! God is not simply a petty vindictive crybaby but a sociopathic, narcissistic, completely horrific beast as Dan Barnett has so clearly explained.

  Sorry, I will never accept moral instructions from beasts or from their supporters.

  Sheesh! I have true pity for any child who is abused by being subjected to the disgraceful beliefs of those like Dan Barnett.

  What is it about these hyper”religious” whack jobs that they completely ignore the messages of peace and brotherhood in their own New Testament?

  And how do they manage to steal all the media attention and political support from the many rational and benevolent believers?

• 54. Heather  |  April 22, 2007 at 12:15 am

  Dan,

  **First, on John 1. Jesus is the Word. It isn;t referring to the Bible. If your “logic” holds then I, as a Christian, should be worshipping lambs too** Everyone here would agree that John 1 isn’t referring to the Bible. Or at least most. But take the Christians who say that Genesis 1-3 is literal truth, or that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Those are the Christians that come across as worshiping the Bible. These are the same people who are horrified if you question one word in the Bible, because it’s ‘The Word of God.’

  **Second, on McDowell, you all seem to think the majority of Christians who step back and examine their faith abandon it.** The reaction to McDowell is a reaction to fundamentalists. I know many Christians who do not hold the Bible as inerrent, yet are very firm in their faith. Based on what I’ve read by him, and what others have said, his books are written for those who already believe.

  ** He is a jealous god and with every right. He will stop at nothing to be glorified** Apply that description to a human, and the person comes across as narcisstic.

  **May God show himself to you before it’s too late. ** And can you understand that this attitude is exactly why most do reject Christianity? Because that’s saying accept God to avoid hell, and then it’s all about avoiding punishment.

  In those two paragraphs alone, look at how you’ve described God: Jealous, His glory above all else, and punishing those who don’t accept Him. How is that supposed to appeal to most people?

• 55. Dan Barnett  |  April 22, 2007 at 7:46 am

  Mtran, your attacks don’t merit a response.

  Heather, an honest and learned Christian does not know the age of the earth. Many try to go through geneology and find the 6ooo years. In all honesty, it could be millions of years old.

  I agree that McDowell’s books are geared toward believers. They are a tool to understand and uphold our faith.

  To apply my statements to a human would indeed label them as you’ve said. However, God is not human. God was before all, and holds all in his hands. I understand the view of who would want to follow this creep(I’m paraphrasing of course). But if you really take an honest look at his own nature and character, he is well within who he is to do what he does. 2Peter says he desires none to persish. But in Ephesians we see that he has a perfect will to be done. In this will he has made decisions to do things against his immediate desire(i.e. Israel’s constant defeat((when they turn from him)), Jesus’ crucifixion, present day persecution, etc.). It is all one big “story” in a sense. But in the end it should turn us back to him.
  Appealing? Sure, a lot of times Christianity seems quite the opposite. Why would anyone join a group where molestations seem to be normal(false)? Why would anyone follow a being who allows them to experience suffering? I’m sure there are even more questions as well. Jesus made it clear that the Christian life would not be all fun and games. “Asthe world hated me, so it wil hate you.” Paul talks about a Christian training like an athlete who buffits his body and makes it his slave. Unfortunately most evangelism is geared to make it look like an easy ticket through life. And to avoid punishment, uh yeah partly. Most people come to Christ for that reason. They realize they can do nothing to save themselves, and therefore trust in him to be their savior. This should lead to the right reasons for following him as their lord. This is not to avoid suffering or punishment. It is a response to what he has called us to do, and an act of worship for who he is and what he has done. So to answer your ending question, it doesn’t appeal to most people by our nature. We are naturally selfish and prideful. Naturally, I don’t want to submit to any authority, let alone one who I’ve never visibly seen. Really take time to study who God is and his Character and where he has the right and authority to do what he does, and it will be clearer. “Desiring God” really helps with this. You cam read it and accept it or reject it, but it’s a tool that’s out there.

• 56. Heather  |  April 22, 2007 at 10:44 am

  Dan,

  **However, God is not human. God was before all, and holds all in his hands. I understand the view of who would want to follow this creep(I’m paraphrasing of course). But if you really take an honest look at his own nature and character, he is well within who he is to do what he does. ** If God is not human, and thus that far above us, it would be near impossible to look at His character. My sense of justice and morality tell me that it is wrong to make people eternally suffer, and if God finds both moral and just, then I have no grounds on which to understand Him.

  ** So to answer your ending question, it doesn’t appeal to most people by our nature.** That doesn’t answer my question at all, given my question’s context. Again, how is a jealous, narcisstic deity who punishes those who don’t believe in Him supposed to appeal to anyone? That comes too close to an abusive relationship (especially if you’re going to say most come to God to avoid punishment), and of course it doesn’t appeal to anyone’s nature. It has nothing to do with selfishness and pride. I wouldn’t follow a human who displayed those characteristics.

• 57. Karen  |  April 22, 2007 at 12:34 pm

  Yes, I remember Lonnie Frisbee, but I don’t think I ever met him. He was from the Jesus Hippie movement of the early 1970s when Chuck Smith was rounding up young hippie outcasts. Maybe he did come to town, I remember seeing Kathryn Kulhman several times when she came to town on a miracle crusade, and she always seemed to have a hippie entourage with her. That’s the crowd I was wrapped up in, but I was nowhere near California at the time.

  Just a couple weeks ago there was a documentary on TV about Kathryn Kuhlman, it was really fascinating. My aunt used to listen to her radio broadcasts, and I’ve seen the Angelus Temple but I’ve never been inside.

  Check out the documentary on Lonnie that I linked to, above. He was at Calvary Costa Mesa just before my time there - mid-70s to mid-80s. Turns out that despite all the “miracles” he performed, and his devoutness, he was a deeply closeted gay man and died of AIDS. He was instrumental in birthing both the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard movements, but in the official histories of those churches/denominations, his name has been totally erased. At his funeral at the Crystal Cathedral, Chuck Smith got up and disrespected him, saying how he’d wasted his potential for god because of disobedience.

  I went to see the documentary a few years ago at a Newport Beach film festival, and pretty much the whole audience were current or former hard-core Calvary attendees. By the end of the production, there was hardly a dry eye in the house. It was kind of amazing.

  I met Chuck Smith … I think maybe 3 or 4 times. Is he still around? He has got to be in his 80s by now.

  He is and last I heard (six months ago) he was still preaching and refusing to step down as head pastor, despite some feelings that it was long past time (this is what I got from a friend who still attends there). He was so totally certain that he and his congregation would be raptured 15 or 20 years ago, he may be hanging on, stubbornly refusing to believe he was wrong about the End Times occurring during his tenure in the pulpit.

  His son, Chuck Jr., was being groomed to take over Big Calvary but he got involved in the postmodern movement many years ago and took his church (south Orange County Calvary) into some areas that Chuck Sr. firmly believes are apostasy. They finally took the church away from Chuck Jr., who has long struggled with serious depression. So, I guess there’s no “logical” successor to Chuck Sr.

• 58. Dan Barnett  |  April 24, 2007 at 4:14 pm

  Heather,
  First, topic between us of God being moral and just:
  God can be jealous and selfish, wanting all for himself. He created us all for one reason: for us to glorify him. Not only did he hand Israel’s enemies over to them through war to display his glory, he also planned his own son’s death as a payment for our sins. Only God can display jealousy(when we worship something other than him), selfishness(desiring us all to be his), and unconditional love at the same time and not contradict himself in doing so.
  How is he supposed to appeal to us with these characteristics?
  Well when we look at killing etc. we say it is unfair. What is unfair is that God extends his grace to us at all. When we realize that apart from him our eternity will be in Hell, we know we need him. This brings the response of ‘accepting Jesus as our savior’. We are destined for hell without him, which is eternal seperation from him.(we can argue all day whether it is a physical place or not. I believe it is, but the point is that we are seperated as we have been since Adam and Eve’s sin.). Throughout history he has been bringing us back to him, and when we begin that relationship with Christ that seperation has been bridged by his death and resurrection. Our eternity will be spent united with him as he intended from day one. That is what is appealing. When we have responded in this way, we realize how great he is and what he has done for us. Now we respond with serving him however he asks.
  I hope this clarifies what I said. Let me know

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