But if you are hung up on how much smarter you are than traditional people, you will never get over how apparently dumb they were for contradicting each other.
Fascinating. Can you provide one single example from the Bible where a contradiction is intentionally employed to unveil a deeper concept or connection that is not immediately clear?
> Also, the Synoptic Gospels were written first, and intended to be used to catechize new Christians and teach them the basics of the life of Jesus Christ. The Gospel According to John was intended to be used to teach newly baptized Christians what it means to be a Christian and what it means to have a mystical relationship with Christ.
The author of John's Gospel sourced from a "signs" gospel, possibly the Gospel of Thomas, and seems to have known about Gospels Mark and Luke, but not Matthew, as well as Jewish scripture and non-Jewish sources, such as Greek philosophy. The Johannine community were messianic Jews excommunicated from the Jewish community on account of their belief that Jesus was the Jewish messiah.
> To say "they don't agree so they're all wrong" is a very simplistic and dismissive take.
Unless such a claim was made, this is a straw man.
I disagreed with OP's claim that the Bible is coherent, because it could not possibly be coherent, and I explained why. Is it necessary that the Bible be coherent? I'd like to know why, because it isn't, and it can not be, because it literally is not possible for it to have been intended to be coherent, mostly due to it being a collection of works from multiple ancient authors that lived in different centuries.
> But if you are hung up on how much smarter you are than traditional people, you will never get over how apparently dumb they were for contradicting each other.
Another straw man and an ad hominem. Your argument is twice fallacious.
Is your name Doctor, Father, General, Mr., George, or Maursault?
People can have more than one title which is used as a name. It's the same with God, the different names denote different aspects.
I don't know if Christianity does this, but Judaism associates each name with a different attribute. For example: mercy, justice, creation, compassion, etc.
By knowing which name is used, i.e. which attribute is being expressed, you gain a whole new insight when reading the stories on what's going on.
It's a real shame that most English translations do not preserve this information.
They don't. I'm not really sure where you get that idea from.
I read the original in Hebrew routinely and I don't get that sense at all that they conflict.
I mean just look at Exodus 6:3, were God explicitly says that he has more than one name.
There's not a lot of independent records from back then, so archeologists try to create stories from whatever they have, starting from the assumption that the religious text is wrong, and then creating a narrative from there.
If you don't use "religious text inaccurate" as your initial assumption then there's basically no evidence for this theory.
It doesn't help that they conflate Canaanites and Israelites so what one does is attributed to the other. However if you assume the Bible is correct and they are different people, with the Israelites railing against the practices of the Canaanites then the entire pantheism argument evaporates.
The themes, arcs, symbolism, prophecies, moral structures, deeper messages, all of that stuff.
God, by definition, defies human understanding. In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas, the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.
There's plenty of history in there too, of course. Often seen from different perspectives.
Though your argument is unconvincing, I still disagree, because now you are employing syllogism. The Bible is an anthological compilation of sacred literature of radically different genres, connected only by belief that they are revelations of God.
> God, by definition, defies human understanding.
Stop me when I get to anything that defies your understanding: by God, you mean the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority, the supreme being who is omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent. Or perhaps you are referring to Jesus of Nazareth, the notorious Cynic philosopher, poet and rebel Jew that dared to suggest loving one's enemy, who knocked over tables and caused a commotion at the Temple in Jerusalem, passed bread while saying, "do this in memory of me," and was crucified. I think I know what you're getting at, but, in fact, most ordinary people defy human understanding.
> In the same way that the Zen people use apparently self-contradictory statements or questions to try to get across ideas,
I think you must mean Buddhists.
> the Bible works with more than just literal historical statements.
Is there any other written work that does not work with more than just literal interpretation? Isn't that true of everything that has ever been written?
No, I mean Zen people. This includes Zen Buddhists.
> Is there any other written work that does not work with more than just literal interpretation? Isn't that true of everything that has ever been written?
https://www.stroustrup.com/JSF-AV-rules.pdf
> Stop me when I get to anything that defies your understanding...most ordinary people defy human understanding
Quite true. Another argument in favour of religion, at least as a starting point. I don't think we're going to make much progress here. Perhaps a long conversation over several glasses of wine, but not on the Internet.
There are many statements in the Bible that God is "beyond understanding" but when God shows up he seems cut from similar cloth as every other ancient sky-father deity, which is to say mercurial, violent and authoritarian (as expected of authority figures of the time) but still comprehensibly human.
But the universe is absurd, isn't it? I mean, look at yourself, where you're sat, what's going on. It's crazy, and yet it has meaning. And if you spend a while contemplating the fact that the source of the universe must be beyond the confines of space and time, I think that's ample material to get started with.
The Bible is an remarkable book, but the more amazing thing is that the whole shebang is immediately accessible to you right now, just by virtue of the fact that you exist and you're reading this.
You or others may read the Bible and find some sense of a God beyond those confines in its pages, but I find that God to be depressingly limited in that regard. The God of the Bible is the God of tribesmen who hadn't even smelted iron, a God that demands blood sacrifice and plunder, not the being who crafted the meticulous balance of universal constants, relativity or quantum mechanics. The God of the Bible is small compared to what we now understand of the universe.
Seven days of Genesis isn't crazy. Evolution is crazy. Hundreds of thousands of years of struggle from small, scared primates to sentient apex predators that invent language, civilization and technology and discuss the nature of divinity over the internet is crazy. A fish with its own windshield[0] is crazy. The vast majority of the universe being void and most of the rest being something we can only call "dark matter" because we don't really understand it is crazy. Black holes and pulsars and the Great Attractor are crazy. The Higgs field is crazy.
>The Bible is an remarkable book, but the more amazing thing is that the whole shebang is immediately accessible to you right now, just by virtue of the fact that you exist and you're reading this.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist family with Pentecostal friends and relatives in the Bible Belt. Trust me, I've read the Bible. But to metaquote Douglas Adams, it's enough for me to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe faeries dwell at the bottom of it.
I like the Bible as a work of literature, poetry, philosophy and even moral teaching (disregarding the Apostle Paul's misogyny, and the OT in its entirety, and see George Carlin's bit for my opinion of the Ten Commandments[1].) but as far as its depiction of God goes, it's just one culture's set of evolving opinions, out of hundreds if not thousands or more. It has its value from an anthropological and cultural perspective, but no more or less so than any other.
[0]https://www.mbari.org/barreleye-fish-with-tubular-eyes-and-t...
I think when perhaps in isolation, some of the individual books may be coherent, but as a whole, there is no logical consistency, but instead there are a myriad of contradictions, such as those between the synoptic gospels and John. For example, on what day was Jesus crucified? John does not agree with the synoptic gospels regarding this. Or in the Old Testament, in Exodus, we have two entirely different sets of Ten Commandments, the first we find familiar, but were destroyed, and the second set that few would recognize that Exodus specifically refers to as the Ten Commandments, including a prohibition on boiling a young goat in it's mother's milk. Is God El, or Yahweh? Is God a perfect being, or subject to all too human emotions like jealousy?
I am nearly certain the Bible was never intended to be coherent. It's authors span nearly a millennia, and it is doubtful they expected or intended their writings to be translated and compiled together by St. Jerome or the First Council of Nicaea. Joseph Campbell, a Jungian, stated "a mythic dream is a personal experience of that deep dark ground which is the support of our conscious lives, and the myth is the society's dream," that a dream is a private mythology, and mythology is the public dream, and as easy it is to understand what he means, not even that is coherent.