|  G-MO | Apr 29, 7:14am | Hello, i used to argue a lot for creationism and such, but over time I've started thinking more, and it didn't make much sense. So here i am now.
Yesterday i told my parents that i consider myself agnostic, and the first thing he asked me to do was come up with discrepancies in the bible, "you can't because there aren't any."
So if anybody could give some direction on where to look to find discrepancies in the first 5 books of the bible, thanks. |
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Sponsor |  Vortexfugue | Apr 29, 8:04am | | Start here. The first five books are just littered with discrepancies, as is the entire bible. |
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|  LuridHope | Apr 29, 12:28pm | | 2 ...I don't like the skeptic's Bible, because it is not convincing from a believer's point of view. Better to focus on the irrefutable than that which is open to interpretation. It's not as easily approachable as it could be. |
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Sponsor | | rivalarrival | Apr 29, 2:41pm | 1. Personally, I would start out with the Dragon in my garage.
You might as well forget disproving any part of the bible. You won't be able to convince someone that the bible is wrong because the bible says "The Bible is right, and anyone who disagrees with the Bible is wrong." (well, not in so many words) Besides, your parents have a couple irrefutable arguments on their side: "God works in mysterious ways" - Without being omnipotent yourself, who are you to judge the actions of an omnipotent being? "That's just parable" - depending on who is reading the bible, any passage can be literal or parable, and whichever one hurts the religious viewpoint less is the correct interpretation.
Both are logically invalid arguments - in the first case, an appeal to authority. Your parents simply stop arguing their point and say something along the lines of "Ask God, he can tell you. But he won't answer you unless you believe in him"
"That's just parable" is pretty easy to deflect - how are we, as non-omniscient beings, supposed to know how to interpret the bible correctly? You can point out that everyone doing the interpretation is non-omniscient, and they could all be wrong.
You might point out that for several centuries BC, dozens of "messiahs" were allegedly born on December 25, to virgins, wandered the land with 12 other men, were killed and resurrected 3 days later. Jesus is just one of the later ones. Look into Mithra, Horus, Krishna... There are many others.
Remind them of the assumptions they make in their arguments. One cannot prove the validity of the bible without relying, heavily, on the bible itself. This is called a Circular Argument. |
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| | InadvertentlyMe | Apr 29, 2:56pm | 1 - It might be hard to get this point across to them but it's my easiest explanation...
God wants fellowship so he creates man.
To do so He makes the Earth, everything therein, and outside.
He makes man out of clay and breathes life into his lungs.
Why did he make Earth in such a way that we find fossils that indicate we evolved? No. Really. Is He trying to keep people out of fellowship? Why? Does He have to create a crisis of faith? No. But it's there.
And it's there for a reason.
No God.
Just a few really good stories that kept things humming until we had better - and provable - explanations for things.
If my post sounds mad... it's really not. It's just bulleted. And maybe a bit too blunt. |
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Sponsor | | Karolinger | Apr 29, 3:00pm | | "But he's wrong, we do have evidence of dragons, a holy book" |
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| | eat | Apr 29, 7:51pm | 1. Consider the different order of creation described between chapters 1 and 2 of Genesis. Chapter 1 has vegetation created (day 3) before man (day 6), while chapter 2 has man created before vegetation as outlined below:
2:4 This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the LORD God made the earth and the heavens- 5 and no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, 6 but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground- the LORD God formed the man".
Also, the concept of "day" would have been invalid until day 4, when the sun, moon and stars were supposedly created. Add to this the idea of plants existing before the sun being wildly outside any scientific model of cosmological history, and a seed of doubt should take root in anyone's mind.
Another good subject to show the Bible's factually tenuous status is the genealogies of Genesis and Matthew. These lists of "x begat y when x was z years old" are unequivocally literal, and date the time between Adam and Jesus as being around 6500 years (i.e., they mandate young earth creationism). A good amount of Christians find that unpalatable, and demonstrating that such an interpretation is what the Bible requires should make the rest of the Bible that much harder to swallow. |
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| | eat | Apr 29, 8:18pm | | For convenience, my full argument for how the genealogies of Genesis and Matthew require young earth creationism can be found at the SU Apologetics group in the thread 'Young or Old Earth?', starting around post 214. Post 231 and post 254 are also significant. |
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