JehovahsWitness wrote:
DO YOU believe that the Bible is from God? Or do you think that it is a book that contains purely thoughts from men?
What is your opinion?
There is lots of middle ground instead of the all-or-nothing mentality.
As in some parts of the Bible are tried and true, and some other parts of the Bible are not.
One prime example is the book of Jonah who was swallowed by a big fish and lived inside that fish for three (3) days until the fish spit him out.
So Jonah is not a true story and it was just like telling the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk" or the story of "King Arthur and the Round Table" as such stories are intended to teach a lesson but they are not true stories.
The Jonah story is an example of a Jewish fable, see here
Titus 1:14, and that is not calling it as a Jewish lie because fables and metaphors and such are not lies.
The book of Jonah can still have value as scripture but it is not a true story, and nobody lives for 3 days inside of a big fish just as a person can not even live for 3 short minutes inside of a fish without death and dying.
A second example is the book of Daniel which claims to be a much older text from Babylon about 540 BCE, but scholars have proven that this book was written about 164 BCE, and as such it is not a true prophesy about Jesus nor about the "last days" and it was basically a Maccabees' fraud with an ulterior motive.
The central part of the book of Revelation from Revelation 4:1 through 22:5 was written by John the Baptist or followers of John the Baptist, and it was not written by the Apostle John.
Other parts of the Bible are much better, as like this collection here is quit stunning =
The US & Britain in Prophesy
The Bible itself tells us to search the Bible for truth as a little here-and-there, but not every where,
Isaiah 28:9-14
As such I still see the Bible as coming from God or inspiration from God, but that does not make it as some literal correspondence from the hand of God to humanity which it is not.
The Bible is like God gave us a puzzle to unravel, and so it needs to be interpreted and translated and scrutinized as one seeks the truth.
"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this." -- Albert Einstein -- Written in 1954 to Jewish philosopher Erik Gutkind.
