The other day I posted Conversations with Craig the christian 2 – Biblical Interpretations and a Logical Fallacy. This is a continuation of that dialogue. I wasn’t sure how to refer back to the previous post, so I just copied it here where Craig refers to what I wrote the other day.

I wrote: Regarding the bible verses and their interpretation, I think that the word of god should be infallible and shouldn’t be ruined and easily misinterpreted by man. It should be the same in every language, and should be offered to every culture in their own tongue, by god himself, if it should even be necessary at all. Why can’t god make it so that we’re born with an inherent understanding of our creator? Why did this local god play a prominent role in the lives of the Israelites, who ordered the killing and maiming, the torture and deaths of women and children, as well as people who made the slightest error in their worship of that god says a lot to me. The sheer barbarity of the bible is telling. It certainly doesn’t read as a divinely inspired text of love and understanding. It is conflicting at almost every turn, it’s barbaric and cruel and unjust, just like the people of that time.

Why only preach to the men of the Middle East and make those few men tell the rest of the world? It is so easily warped and interpreted to suit anyone and everyone, whether for good or ill. It was written by men from many different walks of life, and many different political eras, over a huge range of time. The stories are all stolen from more ancient religions, and not much of it is original, which is quite telling as well. It all leads to a text that, in its original form, is relevant historically, but certainly doesn’t appear to be divinely inspired.

If god existed, and cared about humans, the bible wouldn’t be easily misinterpreted and would not contradict itself in any way. The message would be simple and clear and probably quite concise.

Craig replied: This is funny because I just had this conversation with my mother a few weeks ago. This is what I told her.
It’s not as if the Bible dropped out of the sky with a not from God attached. The Bible, while inspired by God, is written by human hands. Because humans are fallible creatures, the Bible cannot be 100% infallible.

I’m not denying the Bible has been used for ill. Christians have done a lot of bad things throughout history (one of my personal favorite is the Crusade where they attacked Constantinople, a Christian city). Christians will continue to do bad things because they are only human. Part of being human is doing the occasional bad thing. Emotions cloud judgment or sometimes judgment is impaired or misformed. But we’re not the only ones who have done bad things in history, we are no different than everyone else. I think the problem for Christians is we don’t confess our sins enough. What I mean is we try to justify things Biblically and overlook what we’ve done.

As far as Biblical stories being stolen, I think that there are a lot of similarities in the different creation accounts and flood accounts, but I think, for the most part, that is where the the similarities end. I might be wrong, I don’t know when parts of the Old Testament were written compared to the other stories from ancient religions and I don’t know the oral history of the stories.

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