THE BIBLE CONTRADICTS ITSELF AND SO IS NOT THE INFALLIBLE WORD OF GOD

http://www.religioustolerance.org/inerran6.htm

FOREWORD

The Bible shows the full extent of the how far people can wander from decency over dogma and religion. There have been more inspiring and enlightening books and yet this one is the one that everybody promotes and has in the house. We would not want the Bible to be the word of God. Who would listen to it? It gives plenty of orders and no convincing reasons to follow them. It implants a totally unacceptable attitude towards right and wrong for it obviously identifies right with what some authority says and that is the might is right philosophy. Grown people should decide for themselves instead of being treated like children by this book.

And it has even its most devoted followers lying for it. God said in Deuteronomy 18 that if a prophet makes so much as one error in predicting the future despite being right all the time in other predictions he is a fake for God cannot err. Christians say when they are shown a contradiction in the Bible that it cannot be a contradiction because the Bible never contradicts itself which is the very logic implicitly rejected in Deuteronomy 18.

God does not want people rationalizing contradictions and errors. You can reconcile any contradiction if you assume there is no contradiction and if you try hard enough which is why it is so important to keep things simple and prefer simple explanations to hard ones. The solutions to Bible contradictions are shown to be contrived by their very complexity and improbability. What solution is selected depends on what presuppositions and interpretations the self-appointed solver wants to impose on the text. But interpretations are just interpretations and nobody can be obligated to accept the interpretation of another. To do that is not to believe in the Bible but in what you want to see in it. Contradictions being “solved” does nothing to quieten those who accept sceptical interpretations of the Bible. If a sceptical interpretation that sees lots of contradictions is possible then nobody has the right to insist on an inerrant Bible. And it is more than possible – it is warranted.

Two seemingly contradictory accounts could still be contradictory if you think you can reconcile them. It depends on what the authors meant. A possible reconciliation does not amount to an intended one.

The Bible is spiritual pornography and should be detested.

INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY DOES NOT APPLY TO TEXTS

No matter what theory Christians have about the Bible being inspired they agree that the most important thing is God protecting the Bible from contradictions. Christians come with an innocent until proven guilty attitude to the Bible text that seems to command evil or which contradicts something else in the Bible. They take the same approach to anything that allegedly backs that text up as true. But innocent until proven guilty is fundamentally and unchangeably an unfair approach to take to texts. The rule is for societal relations not for scriptures or any writings. It is a fact that a text has to be assumed to contain at least some fictions. That is the way the world works. To go to the Bible without admitting this means you will lose touch with reality and not see the contradictions of they are there. This is a bad immature attitude even if the contradictions are not there and the Bible really is a divinely inspired unity devoid of contradiction.

BIBLE CONTRADICTIONS

Some Bible contradictions.

Deuteronomy 10:1-3,5 relates that the ark of the covenant existed before Moses went up the mountain with the two new stone tablets he wanted God to write on contradicting Exodus 34-37 where Moses acquires the articles required for the making of the ark after he comes down from the mountain from God.

Jesus said that whoever puts faith in him has more belief in God than in him (John 12:44). So you believe Jesus because of God. But when he claimed to be giving evidence for what he claimed about God and for the existence of God – evidence that can’t be got any other way - that cannot be. You would need to trust Jesus more than God. Jesus is not making sense here.

In Exodus 9:6 all the cows in Egypt were killed by the sixth plague. But shortly after in verse 25 there were cows left to be killed by hail and fire. Even worse they had their firstborns to die in the tenth plague. The Christian answer is that all was the colloquial word for most. That is not believable for the plagues are miracles meaning we are not talking about normal conditions. So all means all. The evidence that the first books of the Bible have been altered and worked over by editors is overwhelming and some of the contradictions are down to poor editing.

Luke 3:35, 36 says that Arphaxad was Selah’s grandfather with Cainan as the father. Genesis 11:12 says he was his father. Christians say the latter means ancestor not literal father. While it could it does not in this case for Genesis is very careful to give details which means it would not skip a generation. Plus how good is a genealogy if it skips a generation? It could be trying to hide something by not mentioning the natural father for children of suspect paternity were always around.

FINALLY

You cannot make sense of a Bible or religion full of contradictions. If the Bible appeared today we would not accept it even if the contradictions were merely on science or history but not faith. The only reason it gets away with it is that past generations "accepted" it without knowing much about it and superstition gets solidified and ends being part of the cultural fabric. A Bible that thinks the sky is a dish is hardly an authority on the evidence that God raised a man from the dead. Doctrine and history overlap.

Contradictions no matter how small are important for they are human handprints and show the Bible is not the word of God. It is a form of bigotry and totalitarianism to proclaim man's work infallible. The contradictions then if minor in themselves are still serious and affect the main core teaching that God has given us his word and God does not err. There are huge contradictions where in the gospel of John says if he speaks in his own favour

Believers who claim that critics will not consider that the one God wrote the Bible accuse them of holding a naturalistic bias. What they mean is that they fail to hold the belief that God wrote the Bible and made no mistakes. But that is a very big ask. The matter is complicated. They are the biased ones. It is easier to assume a book is normal than that it is somehow inspired and especially when other books claim to be inspired too by some higher power.

All attempts to prove that the Bible is the word of God fail because the Bible contradicts itself and attempts to hide this are stupid, irresponsible and are fabricated. If you assume that two contradictory books are true in all they say and try to make them fit you will manage it but the result will be contrived. You are really still assuming they are true and have no proof for it. This observation should be a warning to the fundamentalist Christians who say there are no contradictions in the Bible. They have no faith in the Bible at all for they are only assuming it is right. If they really believed, they would not need to work out and produce laughable far-fetched ways of reconciling Bible contradictions. They wouldn’t do that with anything else but the Bible.

Contradictory beliefs are really not beliefs at all. They are just fighting each other. They are proof that one only imagines one believes.