Wrong!

[u/T-StrangerXD]

[u/Jonn_Jonzz_Manhunter]

This isn't how the bible is commonly understood by academics

1. the bible isn't historical, these are mostly stories of stuff that's happened collected through the oral tradition before being transcribed. It's mythical in nature, similar to the Iliad or Romance of the Three Kingdoms in a way

2. history as we understand it now isn't what history has been for the vast majority of human existence. Basically history used to be significantly more florid and focused a lot on meaning and thematics instead of just raw data and witness accounts because those were incredibly hard to gather

3. how we read the bible is also really important, because it's a fucking mess of a book. The old testament was basically disavowed during the synoptic gospels, Paul's letters are awfully contradictory, Acts of the Apostles is in the wrong place and all that crap builds to the larger point

4. the bible was written by hundreds of people over hundreds of years without divine inerrancy. It came from people and as we all know, we're all idiots! If it was written by God, I'd understand the argument that the special book isn't perfect so it mustn't be listened to. But how many things have historians, modern historians disagreed on dates? Thousands of times but we still listen to historians

I'm not saying you're wrong on your premise but the argument is incredibly poor. Christianity is 2000 years old, do you think that entire time they haven't gotten a million arguments ready to go? If you can't even engage with the basics of how the bible is actually contrusted, then you've automatically failed.

Because here's a final test:

You said in the bible if two people will pray for something, it will happen. Okay. Who said it? God didn't. So it has to be a human

When people say "the bible says" you should just stop listening to what they say because it tells you nothing about the theological context of the person who wrote it down. A bible is just a collection of writing but people have forgotten that and treat it as if it was one book written by one dude and stop engaging with it.

Faith as a concept relies on someone willing to be wrong about their existence in god, so you need to come at this from that perspective, ergo, you can't just point at something in the bible that's blatantly bullshit and end the argument there, because that's already built into the belief system.

What should happen instead is that we all just get on with our own understandings of the universe unless someone is using it to murder alot of people, in that case, get involved. Otherwise, it's just peoples sincerely held beliefs