That is an odd plan. Care to elaborate?
I think there's a plan behind everything, and because I'm not God, I can't tell you absolutely every detail that that plan entails. That's about as far as I care to elaborate.
You are dangling yourself quite dangerously here. You are in fact not justified in believing in scripture, fallible or otherwise, because it has come nowhere near meeting the burden of proof. To spin this and place the burden back onto me is shenanigans. I have made no actual claims here other than that contradictions are present, a claim which I supported with proof. Aside from this I posed questions, and questions do not require any justification. [my emphasis]
Ummm... Excuse me, but I marvel in that it has somehow managed to escape your notice that in this very section of your post which I am presently addressing, you are claiming that I am “not justified in believing in scripture, fallible or otherwise” -- by which you apparently mean that I'm not justified in believing it in any sense whatsoever -- because, as you say, it “come(s) nowhere near meeting the burden of proof.”
Now, I have granted (if but for the sake of argument) that the Bible contains errors and contradictions, and by this point I think I have made that quite clear. So please support the assertion you have just made that I still am not justified in believing that there is some inspired meaning behind the Bible, even with its errors and contradictions. To press you to support a claim that you quite clearly have made is not shenanigans.
Once again, you lose the "because it's in the Bible" defense. You are not justified in believing anything that is in the Bible simply because it's in the Bible. That is a fact. [my emphasis]
Another claim... but one I happen to agree with, so you get a pass.
It is then quite inescapable that you must scrutinize the Bible with your own intellect and reason, a process which will be devastating. [my emphasis]
And yet another claim. Why will it be devastating?
(So much for the just-showing-contradictions-and-asking-questions canard.)
So someone incorrectly recorded the age of a king, or the number of horses in a stable, and you are saying there is meaning to that beyond what is in the text?
I believe that there is some reason or other for that information being there, and yet I do not believe it detracts from the inspirational nature of the Bible's compilation by the Church. But if you are prepared to utterly demolish that (as you seem to imply above), then let's have it.
I can find it reasonable to say that the errors do not destroy your faith.
I find this to be a rather curious statement, given some other statements you've made. What do you mean by it?
But you are unreasonable if you do not realize that you must chuck the Bible into the logic grinder to see what comes out the other side.
Sure, agreed.
And it is quite clear that many Christians, of which you may or may not be included, will not go through this process because they believe the Bible a priori, which is simply not reasonable.
No, it's not reasonable. I agree with that as well.
And what is there to imply that it does have authority?
Well, my all-too-short answer is that if God exists (which I believe there is sufficient reason to believe he does), then it seems to me that it would befit his character that he should express his love for humanity in such an event as the Christian Incarnation. I cannot see sufficient reason to doubt that this Incarnation did in fact occur in the area we today know as Israel/Palestine roughly two millennia ago in the man we know as Jesus Christ, and that his followers in the Church have faithfully preserved the authentic Christian Tradition to the present day, along the way compiling a select group of texts we know as the Bible. I see the Bible to be a product of the sacred Tradition of the Church, and its authority to derive from that of the Church, and one way we can test the authenticity of the Tradition we receive is by seeing if it has remained faithful to what we can determine the very earliest Christians believed, as per what is known as the Vincentian Canon. I cannot see sufficient reason to doubt that those who compiled the Bible were doing so in faithful accordance with the authentic received Tradition.
The Bible might not be perfect insofar as being logically consistent throughout its entirety or free from any sort of error, but it nevertheless serves its purpose as an instrument to reveal to us who Christ is and who we are to be as his followers.
Agreed, although it is rather slippery of you to suggest that these obviously literal passages about ages, dates, and numbers might not be entirely literal.
I don't believe the author of the “suffering servant” passage in Isaiah had the Christian Passion anywhere in mind when he wrote it, but nevertheless, that passage is pretty much universally recognized by Christians as a prophecy of Christ's Passion. My point is that the inspired meaning of a passage of Scripture can differ dramatically from the intended meaning of its author.
Do you have any actual reason for believing that God has reasons for these things? I fully admit that I cannot show God has no good reasons for allowing these errors to propagate; you, conversely, clearly cannot show that God does have good reasons for allowing these errors to propagate; what we are left with is a stalemate and a Bible that has been stained with contradictions.
See my above on how I go about grounding the Bible's authority.
I think you may be underestimating the acumen of the early Church Fathers who compiled the Bible. I highly doubt they were stupid, and they probably knew the Bible far better than you and I do. It seems to me highly unlikely that any but perhaps the very most subtle of errors and contradictions would have escaped their notice, and yet for some reason they chose to put them into the canon anyway. Rather odd for them to do that if they were especially concerned with avoiding errors and contradictions, wouldn't you say?
My chief grievance is that these errors are generally hidden as best as possible by churches, and never plainly discussed at the pulpits.
Well, in fairness, you must see that it might be kinda hard to write a practical and edifying sermon on some obscure royal genealogy.
Combined with the reckless indoctrination of hellfire into young minds and the complete lack of resources provided to those who need exit counseling from the faith, I was certainly set up for disillusionment when I was left to seek God on my own.
Yes, I would expect so. I disapprove of the whole you'd-better-get-“saved”-or-God's-gonna-torture-you-forever approach that Evangelicals often like to use. I actually have a significantly different view of what heaven and hell are than they typically do, but that there's a whole 'nother story...
Abandon rational belief in Christianity? How can you claim to have had rational belief to begin with?
To attempt an adequate explanation of precisely what I believe and why I believe it would require FAR more time and space than I presently can afford, I'm sorry to say. But since I can't write a book for you, perhaps you could answer a related question for me instead within a somewhat more reasonable space: Why do you doubt that I can have rational belief in Christianity?
I suspect that you start with the a priori belief in Jesus, the resurrection, and the forgiveness of sins... or am I wrong, and is it instead the case that these beliefs are conditional upon some other facts which you find to be more inseparable from reality?
You are wrong. I start with facts on the ground (completely apart from religion) and try to work my way to discovering truth from there. Perhaps most notably, I fundamentally reject nihilism and take it as a given that statements of value can be either true or false, depending on whether or not the objects being referred to objectively merit such evaluations, and one way I reason to the existence of God is that I take it that if there objectively exists, apart from ourselves, a hierarchy of goods, which we can either recognize or fail to recognize, then it would seem to make sense that there is a highest Good. This draws directly from the fourth of Thomas Aquinas's Five Ways.
So first you say one of your pillars is sacred tradition, which I have pointed out is more than tainted, and you fall back on "the church has done some good" and then promptly lean heavily on what Jesus said. If sacred tradition is a pillar, it's not supposed to lean on the pillar of scripture. That would mean it in fact is not a pillar.
The legs of the stool are supposed to represent the epistemic resources that we rely upon to try to determine truths about the authentic Christian faith. Thus, we rely upon extra-Biblical sources of information on the Christian Tradition going back to its very earliest days, upon our God-given faculties of reason, and also upon the Bible, which we believe to have been produced by the authentic Christian Tradition. That we rely upon the Bible to convey to us accurate information on the life of Jesus does not in any way imply that we don't also rely upon extra-Biblical resources as well as our God-given reasoning faculties.
In short, I think your preconceived conclusion is that Jesus is God and savior of mankind, and I do not think there is anything that can be shown to you that will make you change your mind.
Not true. If you could prove to me beyond reasonable doubt that Jesus never really existed, or that he did not physically rise from the dead, that would surely do it.
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