Please, you posted not long ago saying that you lost your faith after your mother died and asked for help to find it. I responded to your request and pointed out the problem probably was that you did not have a faith, but had been living off your mother’s faith.
O advised you not to make that mistake again, that is, to depend on secondhand faith, but to find your own faith to enable you to live the best you can live. You seem to ignore that advice, although you did acknowledge that you did depend on secondhand faith.
Reading the Bible, esp. the NT, to find out what it says for yourself with the help of others is looking for your own faith. Reading an article, the sole purpose of which is to cast doubt on the character of God, is a not.
I hope that you are mature enough to think for yourself. But you must read the NT for yourself, or if you do not find that worthwhile, read the Quran, etc. Think for yourself instead of allowing others to think for you. God made you a free human being, not a robot.
Certain versions of the Parable of the Wedding Banquet are extremely violent. The food was prepared and the servants were sent to call the invited guests.The guests didn’t want to come, and some turned violent against the servants. So the king sent his army to kill the perps and burned down the city. Meanwhile the food was getting cold.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
24
A cautionary tale is in a different category to God actually murdering Ananias, Sapphira and Herod Agrippa. Although in a culture where the former were inevitable and necessary hyperbole, the latter attribution shows why.
The rationale of modern educated people is to lump all knowledge together and then to try to reconcile everything. Such thinking only works at the elementary levels of science. Theology is the study of deity rather than the study of the sciences. The two are not in the same category of knowledge and are not meant to be reconciled.
Traditional religious texts, like the Bible, were composed by ancient people with a perspective of an ancient worldview or culture. Accordingly, when the ancient composers of religious texts address questions about origins or being they are thinking within the context of their worldview – not a modern scientific or moral one.
Understanding the worldview of the writers of the Old Testament texts is necessary to separate what the process of canonization affirms as revelation from the human component of the biblical texts. Not every word or passage from the biblical texts meet the criteria for inspiration. Within the biblical texts divine revelation is developing across chronological time by progressive increments until the composition of the gospels. The understanding of God has continued to grow ever since. This includes ideas about the divine nature, justice, and values. Believers must understand abhorrent biblical passages as described in “The Ten Worse Verses In the Old Testament” in their context of ancient Israel as a theocracy operating against other nations whose gods resisted Israel and Israel’s God. Divine revelation is sometimes to be found between the lines rather than in the literal meaning.
The idea that the inspiration is equivalent to inerrancy is very deeply rooted in many churches today and even in the minds of non-Christians. There is a remarkable, albeit silly tendency, to think that if any part of the Bible is in error, it is all in error or none of it is trustworthy. Christians will often ask, if it has errors, how do we know what is true? If it has historical or scientific errors, how do we know it is not wrong when it comes to salvation? While this question seems forceful upon first hearing it, I’m not convinced people seriously consider this objection before raising it. Where in life do we have inerrant sources? What book, magazine, historical document, doctor, mechanic, school teacher, pastor or church is inerrant? We use erroneous sources all the time and are quite adept at doing so. A work does not need to be inerrant to be useful. It just needs to be reliable for its intended purpose. Clearly, the Bible was not written to be a scientific text or strict historical biography in the modern sense. Its purpose is to preach the good news so that we might be saved by it. Its purpose is bringing salvation to people. Its record speaks for itself in that regard so we can deem it reliable and useful for its intended purpose . Historical, scientific or normal human errors do not impugn upon this belief in anyway. Orthodox Christians generally believe Jesus is the key hermeneutic to understanding scripture and that the broad strokes of salvation history, particularly in the life and death of Jesus, are beyond dispute. Couple that with the Holy Spirit guiding believers and I am not sure why it is thought the Bible has to be inerrant to be useful? It is a non sequitur.
This is a fairly typical atheist “gotcha” piece. In the thousands of years since those texts were written have they not been noticed by theologians and sound Biblical answers given? Of course they have.
So the author either does know about those answers and is deliberately not mentioning them in the hope you don’t know them, or he is ignorant of them himself, which shows a lack of research and theological depth.
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
28
It shows that he is fully aware of how cognitive bias works. How the God of the Heresy of Peor is perverted to Love.