I find it curious that many Bible believing Christians, instead of discussing something like the linguistics of translation, or interpretation based on cultural context, or the metaphysical ontology of the nature of God, or any other legitimate form of religious or philosophical inquiry, only discuss the very simple, and objectively verifiable, issue of the modern Bible's contents.
How many of the comments regarding this issue include statements such as, " . . .if you read the Bible . . ." or, " . . .what the Bible says, is . . .?"
These "debates," that often conclude only with an insistence that one read this or that passage,(because one could not possibly have completed the unthinkably difficult task of simply reading the book, ALL of it) are completely and utterly meaningless, and amount to nothing more than pointing out the blatantly obvious. It's like trying to debate what the actual color of the sky is in an attempt to explain the causation of its color, and might sound something like this:
"Why is it blue? How did it get there? What does it taste like?"
"Well, if you actually go outside and look, you will see that the sky is blue. It is not yellow or red. It's blue. Yeah, maybe idiots like you should just go outside and actually look up."
There seems to be a basic assumption that no one has actually read the Bible in its entirety, and that there will always be parts of it that one is not familiar with. Hogwash and projection, I say. It's easy to assume that no one's read the whole thing if one has not, and has no real intention of, reading the whole thing.
These "debates," that often conclude only with an insistence that one read this or that passage,(because one could not possibly have completed the unthinkably difficult task of simply reading the book, ALL of it) are completely and utterly meaningless, and amount to nothing more than pointing out the blatantly obvious. It's like trying to debate what the actual color of the sky is in an attempt to explain the causation of its color, and might sound something like this:
"Why is it blue? How did it get there? What does it taste like?"
"Well, if you actually go outside and look, you will see that the sky is blue. It is not yellow or red. It's blue. Yeah, maybe idiots like you should just go outside and actually look up."