Bible Contradictions

[mwtech]

I used to be a Christian and only recently become an atheist after studying the Bible enough to notice the flaws. I believe the Bible in itself to be contradictory enough to prove itself wrong, and I enjoy discussing it with other people, especially Christians who disagree. I would really like to have a one on one debate with any Christian who thinks that they have a logical answer for the contradictions in the Bible. The one rule I have is that you can't make a claim without evidence, whether from the Bible or any other source. I am interested in logical conversation, and I don't believe that any Christian can refute the contradictions I have found without making up some rationalization that has no evidence or logical base.

[edform]

And now we add your tortured apologetic to that offered by bluethread. I wonder when we'll see the one about neither Heli nor Jacob being Josephs father?
Cool

Oh I think you need to do better than that or you will simply look like an 'I won't accept it, no matter what the argument' kind of debater.

Show us how what I wrote is in error, or explain how it is tortured. The arguments are extremely simple and the conclusions perfectly sound. Others may have made a pigs ear of this matter but that does not entitle you to dismiss sound logic with a wave - unless that's the best you can do.

Ed Form

Your argument is weak because it just creates other insurmountable logical contradictions. Ignoring the fact that if we accept that we somehow have genealogies of Mary and Joseph it must be explained just how it's possible that Marys family took 44 generations to get back to David while Josephs family were apparently so long-lived that they only needed 28 generations....

First of all let me point out that you haven't taken up the challenge I made of showing how my arguments were wrong or tortured. You say my previous post has thrown up other insurmountable contradictions but the new points you raise are unconnected with the ideas in that post. I'll take that as strongly suggesting that you are unable to deal with those ideas and pass on to your supposedly insurmountable new cavils.

On your throwaways then - because, I'm afraid, that's all they are - first...

44 generations against 28 merely requires one line to produce the next person in the line when the father is, on average, let's say, 20 years old and the other line to generate the next member when the father is between 31 and 32 years old. How is that some kind of impossibility?

My father was 2 months short of 22 when I was born and I was 3 months short of 21 when my son was born - the interval was 2 generations between my father and my son in less than 43 years.

My granddaughter was born when I was 60 years old, my daughter when I was 23 - she had her daughter, my granddaughter, when she was 37. That's 2 generations between me and my granddaughter in 60 years.

Ratios of 44 generations to 28 in the same time interval are perfectly reasonable.

Second - you said...

You're left with the problem that Marys line states that Salathiel was the son of Neri, but Josephs line says his son was Jechonias. So, unless Jechonias and Neri were the homosexual parents of Salathiel (he and his son Zorobabel are on both lists) - this conflict cannot be resolved without simply admitting that Marys line to David was broken - which christians of course will not do since it blows the whole prophesy mojo.

Not sure what is in your mind in that last bit - the only prophecy - in the sense of a forecast - involved in this matter of family lines was that messiah would come out of Judah.

On the apparent conflict between the two candidates for Salathiel's father, you've missed the fact that Jeconiah, his natural father, was sentenced to be recorded as childless...

Jeremiah 22:30 Thus saith the LORD, Write ye this man childless, a man that shall not prosper in his days: for no man of his seed shall prosper, sitting upon the throne of David, and ruling any more in Judah.

This childlessness, as you can see from the verse, was specifically in connection with ruling in Judah, so he isn't allowed in the family tree of anyone who will be King of the Jews.

Matthew's genealogy is actually that of Joseph as I explained last time. It is a complete record of a perfectly normal human family: a type 1 list that descends from ancestor to ancestor till it reaches the subject of the list - each of the members being sexually responsible for the production of the next person in the line.

Luke's is a list of type 2, rising from the subject of the list to increasingly distant ancestors with no stated relationship between successive members. All we are told is that Jesus was the male descendant of each one of them. There is no evidence in the list, therefore, that Salathiel was Neri's son and no external evidence, of course, to support the assumption that he was. Because of God's ruling Jeconiah is not eligible for the list and is excluded but this does not break the line as you suggest because this is not a father to son, to grandson etc etc list.

If, however, Neri was Jeconiah's wife's father, and also Jeconiah's kinsman, and if he had no sons, then the relationship is probably a 'Daughters-of-Zelophehad' legal title through which Salathiel remained a member of Judah by inheritance from his maternal grandfather, when he would have lost that title because his father was excluded from the Judaic records. It's just another small miracle of God's oversight of history - the provision of an alternative route for his son to be a member of Judah as promised - the wicked king fathering an innocent son by a woman who was an heiress in Judah.

That's the inherent problem with trying to explain things away. You just get caught creating more conflicts.

I haven't tried to explain things away: I've simply given cogent and factually correct details of how these apparent contradictions can be resolved. I don't have to do any more than that. What I have said is perfectly possible and you have offered no inconvenient facts to render the explanations impossible. Unless you can produce such facts, your claim of contradictions is completely unproven.

Ed Form

[mwtech]

What do you say to the Christian who, when confronted with biblical contridictions, says 'yeah, so?"

The bible was not, after all, written by God. It was written by men who were attempting to explain God's teachings through their own culture, learning and filters.

Scripture was NEVER supposed to be a science text, or a primary source history text.

So, what do you say to me?

I have no problems at all acknowledging that the bible has contradictions; how could it not? It was written by men, who are imperfect. The idea is to get the teachings of God as they apply to us, from the teachings written that applied to the folks at the time each book was written.

In other words, you can't get me to change my mind and 'not believe' because bats are not, after all, birds, and because hares chew something...but not their cuds.

My response to you is...yeah, and so?

What is your next move?

What I would say to you is, why do you believe in God, and how do you apply that belief to your daily life if not with the Bible?

If a person were to never have been told that there is a God, there is no reason for them to believe that the God of Abraham exists. This is observable by the fact that civilizations on every continent other than the one the biblical authors lived on just made up their own Gods, who we have just as little reason to think exist. If a person today was never told there was a god, but was taught about science and knew why the world worked the way it did, they'd have no reason to assume there must be a God. I believe the only reason Christians believe in God is because other Christians believe in him. The only evidence they have for his existence is the bible.

People often say 'the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence'. I find this to be irrelevant to the existence of God because it is not the place of the non-believer to prove the non existence of something humans made up. It is the job of believers to present evidence of existence. Without it, there is no reason to believe a claim. If I said I believed in Zeus, and I gave you the same amount of evidence I've been given by Christians, you would still have no reason to believe he existed. In the case of any proposed God, the absence of evidence leaves you with just as little reason to believe in said God as there was before anybody mentioned him to begin with.

Also, what purpose do you have for the Bible if you know it to be so imperfect? There is no way to know what is true and what is false. Many liberal Christians say they just 'go with their gut,' but if you are just going to ignore some things and apply others, why involve the bible at all? You would arrive at the same conclusions without it anyway. Knowing what is right isn't a good enough way of knowing the truth anyway. Many people think the bible is right about homosexuality being wrong. That doesn't make it true.

So please, tell me, if you don't use the bible to support the existence of God or as a moral guidance, what in the world is it good for?

[mwtech]

I'll be happy to take a look at any, or all of them, but you'll have to list them for me. You began the thread without examples, perhaps looking for some general purpose apologetic? It doesn't work like that: it has to be a case by case study.

And I would be happy to have a one on one discussion about individual cases. I originally left out examples because I wanted someone to have the chance to accept the invitation for a one on one conversation about several different contradictions.

If you set out to find him in a pristine, immaculate text from his own mouth, obviously perfect and devoid of errors, you will get nowhere.

I would never expect to find such a thing because I think God is mythical.

If you sit down and work through the logic of that idea, you will find that it is unsound. What if the divine being, as part of his purpose, deliberately allows his word to become adulterated by human mistakes and human biases so that, at the end of the period he has allotted to his purpose, a humanist trend will have swept faith all but out of existence?

I understand that you are looking at my reasoning as a Christian so it seems unreasonable. Try to look at your reasoning from my position of an atheist and it might make more sense to you.
There is a God, but the fact that there is no evidence is no reason to dismiss him, because his plan involves humans non believing in him. There is still no reason for me to believe in him. It isn't as if I once had a reason to believe in God, and then found some evidence against him and renounced my faith. There was never any reason for me to believe. I just did because everybody else did. It seems very unreasonable for me to think, well there probably is a god and the reason I can't find a reason to believe in him is because he wanted it to be that way.

it's a complete alternative explanation for what you have observed so you cannot say your conclusion is proved and there is no God.

You are mistaken in thinking that I believe I have proof that there is no God. It is impossible to prove that there is no God, just as it impossible to prove that there is one. But, as I said in my previous post, it is not the non-believer's place to disprove a concept you invented. If you have no evidence to put forward, there is no reason for anyone to take your claim seriously. I have no reason to believe in a God whether or not I can prove his non-existence. However, that is an argument meant for another forum.

The absence of any answer to any prayer I have ever prayed, or the answer to any prayer of any number of religious people I know that wasn't the likely outcome to begin with furthers my doubt.

The same kind of alternative reason as I postulated above is available for such a course of events. On the basis of what I read in Scripture I do not think that God's purpose and what we want are in any kind of alignment.

And again, it seems unreasonable to me to believe in prayer even though it makes sense that God wouldn't actually answer a prayer for anything he didn't already intend to do. This makes prayer obsolete. There is no point praying if it will not change the outcome of an event. If Christians claim God exists and answers prayers, and there is no evidence to support that claim (even if you have a rationalization for the lack of evidence) there is still no reason for a non-believer to take that claim seriously.

The convenient fact that none of God's miracles ever left a shred of evidence furthers my doubt.

That's just not true. it is an ubiquitous stance on the part of most scholars, but it's simply nonsense.

What evidence do you have of a miracle of God?

The fact that there is no evidence at all for many of the events recorded in the bible furthers my doubt.

There is no evidence for many past events in the secular realm, but those who jump from that to the idea: 'therefore they did not happen' get their backsides burnt so frequently it's outrageously funny.

The difference in a secular claim for past events and a theological claim for past events is that a theist is trying to use that event to convert people to their religion. A secular claim that something historical happened has just as much reason to be doubted until there is any evidence to be shown for the claim.

I believe the expression is 'absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' Why would we have physical evidence for things that occurred thousands of years ago?

The evidence of absence may not prove there is a god, but it is all the reason you need to not believe. Just because I don't have definitive proof against the existence of the God Apollo does not serve as reason to worship him and base my morals around Greek mythology.

The simple, un-glamorous way they are recorded in Scripture, and the way they so often reflect unfavorably on the people who recorded them, is good evidence for their veracity.

So is the fact that there is recorded scripture good evidence for the veracity of every other religion? Is Greek mythology accurate just because we have record of the events claimed to happen? Or is the story of Little Red Riding Hood something I should believe to have happened because I can find the events recorded in a book in my bookshelf. The bible could have just as easily been written by humans as it was.

It would not be sufficient evidence for me either, unless it was supported by other threads of evidence.

If you're going to claim that there is evidence for the existence of God, you'll have to actually present it or I will continue to assume there isn't any real evidence.

[mwtech]

Ed Form,

If you would actually like to discuss contradictions, before I provide the first example, please let me know what version of the English bible you would like me to use. I will also be using the direct Hebrew translation at Bible hub if you don't have a better one you'd prefer me to use. (http://biblehub.com/text/genesis/1-1.htm)

[2ndpillar]

I used to be a Christian and only recently become an atheist after studying the Bible enough to notice the flaws. I believe the Bible in itself to be contradictory enough to prove itself wrong, and I enjoy discussing it with other people, especially Christians who disagree. I would really like to have a one on one debate with any Christian who thinks that they have a logical answer for the contradictions in the Bible. The one rule I have is that you can't make a claim without evidence, whether from the Bible or any other source. I am interested in logical conversation, and I don't believe that any Christian can refute the contradictions I have found without making up some rationalization that has no evidence or logical base.

Dear mw,
The reason for problems with the NT bible are simple. It is best explained in Mt 13 with respect to the seed (words) of the devil, which will be mixed with the good seeds of the "son of man" (Mt 13:37-38) A secondary problem is explained in Jeremiah 8:8, and the fault lies with the "lying pen of the scribes".

[mwtech]

Dear mw,
The reason for problems with the NT bible are simple. It is best explained in Mt 13 with respect to the seed (words) of the devil, which will be mixed with the good seeds of the "son of man" (Mt 13:37-38) A secondary problem is explained in Jeremiah 8:8, and the fault lies with the "lying pen of the scribes".

And what about the problems with the old testament? After thoroughly looking into your anti-Paul theory and finding it to be quite a stretch, I have to say I disagree with your view of religion in general even more than I do of the typical christian. I point this out not just be rude and shoot down your spiritual views, but to point out that I can't really debate scripture with you because you have a very different interpretation of the bible than I do.

[bluethread]

[Replying to post 65 by bluethread]

That line is where it effects how we should then live.

Which is a problem itself, being as 'how we should live' is as vague as vanilla UNLESS, of course, one subscribes to the christian god's said concept. Then it's clear, yes?

How should we live? Honestly? In contempt of others? Lying and cheating our fellow man?
You'd probably be able to find several 'how we should live's the more you travel around the planet and visit other countries.

Bats are not to be eaten. Is that vague? How about hares are not to be eaten. What is vague about that? Whether a bat is a flying thing or a beast of the field. That is vague, primarily because a requirement is being made that the account match genus and species designation. Does a hare "chew the cud", that is vague, but that is because it is presumed to refer to biological rumination and not by the way it appears. So, you see, the vagueness is due to the expectations of the reader and not the context of the passage. By the way, you never stated whether a dinosaur is a reptile or a bird.

[bluethread]

[Replying to post 66 by bluethread]

Again, none of this helps you to resolve the conflicts and contradictions. If we accept the latest excuse, we just see others spring up. One genealogy - again, there for no other purpose than to try and prove that Jesus was of the line of David - has Jechonias in it. The OT makes it clear that Jechonias line was severed - so none of his descendants can make any claim to David - and that includes both Mary and Joseph. So why is this obviously flawed genealogy even placed in the bible?

Please, provide a reference so this can be examined.

Sorry, but the parsimonious explanation is that this is yet another tortured attempt to hammer and paint Jesus into the Jewish Messiah by inventing genealogies. We might as well credit the 3rd genealogy from Chronicles. It conflicts further still from the first 2. Is it Marys, or Josephs??

Again, provide a reference so this can be examined.

It is no less facile than the NT references that pretend that the OT refers to Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus when the reference is clearly referring to a Tribe, not a Place. Or where it is said that Jesus must be the Messiah because he came from Nazareth - when the OT reference cited to 'prove' this speaks only of what a Nazarite is. Further, there is the easily proven falsehood that says Jesus must be the Messiah because.... the OT says 'he will be called Immanuel'. Only one problem - no where in the NT is Jesus called Immanuel.

Again, provide a reference so this can be examined. Piling on is not an argument, but sophistry. I am more than willing to look at each of these in due course. Regarding the reference to Is. 7:14, which I recognize, because you at least provided a quote, I have already explained how I believe Mattityahu uses the term "fulfilled". I do not agree with the proof texting evangelicals.

Thus is the desperate nature of christians to morph Jesus to fit prophecy. Frankly the attempts are laughable, especially as christians try to tell jews what the OT 'really' says. It's patently offensive to jews, and piss-poor apologetics to boot.

I agree, but I do not believe I have done that and since I can not control what Christians do, let's focus on what I say about the passages.

Again, sell this snake oil elsewhere. Pauls self-interested attempt to change OT history by creating Jesus as a previously unheard of Savior/Redeemer while pretending he is proven from the original judaic Leader/Messiah simply does not fly. Jesus does not fulfill messianic prophesy, any more than you or I can be said to.

Please, show me specifically, where I have attempted to "sell this snake oil" you refer to.

[connermt]

[Replying to post 77 by bluethread]

Bats are not to be eaten...How about hares are not to be eaten.

Who says they aren't to be eaten? That's the point I was making.

So, you see, the vagueness is due to the expectations of the reader and not the context of the passage.

That's not an absolute. "...how we should then live." is the umbrella needing more details and thus, too vague to be anything but grand fodder without meaning IMO.
"how we should then live." isn't the same as 'bats aren't to be eaten' The 'bats' statement is a part of 'how we should live', but not the whole. The 'how we should then live." is a general statement and too grand without more details and a qualifier as to the 'who said' and 'why is it'.
Following general statements like that tends to lead to divergence in cultures and soceities from what I've seen.

[Strider324]

[Replying to post 78 by bluethread]

Hell no! Lol!!

My point in bringing them up was that they are the same kind of tired, long-refuted apologetics as the genealogy example. I have no interest in re-hashing contradictions and errors that were resolved for me some 40 years ago. If you are unfamiliar with any of those citings, someone else will have to enlighten you. They are quite common and the exposition of the fallacies they entail are quite comprehensible to the reasoning mind. I grow weary of battling obstinance and answering the same questions over and over again, just as I would grow weary over explaining why 2+2 does not equal 13. Vita brevis.

I refer you to my original prediction at the beginning of this thread, where I advised the OP that he would be given all sort of apologetics, and you have and others have complied. I stated there would be those who simply don't care that there are contradictions, and here comes dianaiad with the expected 'So What?'.

Personally, I should not have enabled this thread. That's my bad. Others are more than welcome to it. For myself, I value this site for the new ground I see covered from time to time, not for the endless loop of 'that's not what it says!' - 'yes it is!'

Jesus does not fulfill messianic prophesy. The facts of the OT speak for themselves on this. It's resolved, and has been for centuries. Christians embarass themselves when they pretend to know more about the OT Messiah and his attributes and evidences than the actual people that wrote the book. I don't tell Tongans what the origin and attributes of the Haka are. Christians would do well to consider that intellectual courtesy. Just sayin'.