Literal Interpretation of the Bible.
 

In response to comments on the Bible in the Iraq War Thread, I have recieved permission from Crowquill to start a thread on the religion-oriented comments made there. For the record, I'm a heavily reformed Jew who doesn't really believe in "God" as an all-powerful being(My belief's are not the topic of the thread by the way). On to the topic at hand.

The Bible is not God's word. That is a fact. Why? Because it has been translated, and changed for political purposes so many times that it has very little to do with what God(Assuming it exists and that it wrote the Bible) originally intended it to be. Discuss, and keep it friendly or Crow will shut the thread down.

How is it a fact? We have no evidence that God came down and rejected the Bible, therefore it is not a fact.

Second of all this may not amount much in a debate, but I must mention it. God has been very active in my life, and I am not talking about where I pray for something to happen and it comes to be real. I am talking about the fact that when I worship, I feel I aura that is almost unreal. Now you can make the argument, "Well it could just be your mind playing games with you," but that is where my personal faith comes in because me having that experience, alone, makes the decision up to me whether I think it is real or not.

Now you may be saying, "Well what does this have to do with a debate on the Bible being real?" Well this is how I will explain it. The New Testament has shown itself to me and what I mean is that when I was at a retreat with my youth group they did sort of a skit thing. Now after my youth pastor was done giving his sermon (whatever you want to call it) the skit began and it ended with a big cross above us. Now when that happened I felt like I was way back watching him die and it felt so real that I broke down on my knees and began to cry. Now you can call me a wimp or whatever, but the experience I had that night felt too real to be fake. I mean since most of you don't care much about Jesus you may not understand how I felt, but to get a glimpse you can just picture the person you love most in your life, hanging up there. It was more painful then anything I have ever watched. That is why I despise people making those movies like The Passion because it was too fake. Pretty much his insides were exposed do to the severe whipping from the "Cat of nine tails" or whatever those things were. I got a bit carried away there so I am going to stop.

So like I said, it won't do much for anyone else except me because it was a personal experience, but I felt that I should mention where I divulged my opinion from.

God didn't come down and reject anything else, did he?

Through what I believe to be his word he has rejected many things. Christianity can be a very personal religion in some areas and faith is one of them. After all if God was backed up with 100% fact and no faith then how would we truly love him when our human nature will basically make us take the easy way out by saying we love him just so we can avoid hell, which in the end we wouldn't because we wouldn't be loving him with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Hell was made up by the Catholic Church. Anyway, you're essentially saying you can't prove you're point. To me God is like String Theory. We can't prove he exists and we can't prove he doesn't.

And the Bible says that like I stated above. It would not be true faith if we had a definite reason he was real.


OOT: Man this conversation is reminding me of the Matrix and its epic allegoricalness.

Well that was kind of redundant...Anyway you still haven't talked about my original point about the Bible being warped beyond recognition by human interpretation.

Yes I did. It is impossible to consider it a fact because we do not have 100% proof that humans tainted the Bible.


It is really all about personal choice, which is what it comes down to.

We have 99.999% proof though. Honestly, are you saying the Bible was never changed in one the milllions of translations it been through?

I can't believe I am about to say this, but it is the best explanation I can give atm so bear with me lol.

Remember in the first Matrix where I think Neo asks Morpheus if the Oracle knows everything and Morpheus replies, "She would say she knows enough." Well it is kind of the same way here. There may have been some mistranslated parts, but the things that really matter are not going to be mistranslated.

I honestly don't know why people only talk about the Bible this way though. We have more manuscripts of the Bible then any other document in the history of the world, and nothing doesn't even come close. Not to mention the fact that no one ever says anything about Plato's writings who could have been mistranslated or even the Koran. Isn't there a double standard somewhere?