I need some ideas as I am discussing them with someone.

Thanks

It's not a history of the rest of the world. There were other peoples doing just as significant and important works as a tribe in the Middle East.

Age of Reason by Thomas Paine.

He goes through the Bible pointing out the obvious.

It's in every library. Easy to read.

This is a book published a few years ago by two authors, one of which is the head of archeology at University of Tel Aviv. He argues that archeology supports:
- the exodus never happened
- David and Solomon were war lords over a small tribe instead of a mighty king over an empire (still some controversy on this).

A PBS NOVA program does a good job discussing who wrote the bible, when and why.

I see absolutely no reason why one should consider it as anything more than a collection of the myths, legends and beliefs of a very primitive and superstitious people. The fear of death is something that the priests have drilled into us in order to allow them to have power over us. They are simply insurance salesmen, and they have to make you afraid of something before you will buy their insurance against it.

I have not only read the Bible very carefully, but I have also spent considerable time studying it. It was my reading of the Bible that first convinced me that there was nothing holy or inspired about it, since it so full of contradictions, errors, absurdities and even condonation of evil. The mere fact that there are so many thousands of Jewish and Christian sects, all with differing doctrines, all claiming the Bible as the basis of their doctrines, proves how unreliable it is.

My extensive notes are on my website at http://packham.n4m.org/bible.htm

The Bible is a wonderful source of inspiration for those who do not understand it.
- George Santayana

[The Bible] is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. - Mark Twain, Letters From The Earth

Like the Book of Mormon, you can give example after example of absurdities and contradictory statements. The same word being translated differently as withdrew, ran away, left, fled, depending on the agenda of the writer. They don't care because they trust the Biblical experts from their religion.

Just the statement that two opposing statements cannot be simultaneously true. Self evident? Not to Bible buffs. Just one example:

John 3:16 God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son...

John 2:2-15 Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father[d] is not in them.

We have seen how a book in the NT was copied word for word from another book and then there is pasted in a whole section with completely foreign concepts like "a bishop should be the wife of one woman" and other church instructions. Clearly added much later when there actually was a Christian church.

Anagrammy

A Ricky Gervais bible reading:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjI6D84ExvU

It's very funny. :-)


...adding...

Oh and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9YzOkxB-Gc



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/29/2011 11:48PM by spaghetti oh.

The word bible originally meant a collection of "books." Modern Christians see it simply as one book that has always existed. There were MANY books which were considered scripture back in the first several centuries after Jesus died. However, only SOME of them ended up in the bible we have today. One of my issues with "the Bible" is that there was no one point in time where the original "inspired" authors (i.e the apostles) put together the different books that currently make up the Bible. This was done several hundred years LATER, How do we know they picked the right ones? There was no general consensus among the Christians about which ones were scripture and which ones were not. Not even all Christian today use the same Bible. Essentially it was the Catholic church leaders that put together most of the Bible. Are we saying the Catholic church was inspired to do this? Why should we trust them? Not only that but protestants took OUT some of the books in the bible. There are different versions of the bible with a different number of books in each one. There are actually many different Bibles containing different books of scripture in each one used by different churches. Wikipedia explains:

"A number of books which are part of the Peshitta or Greek Septuagint but are not found in the Hebrew (Rabbinic) Bible are often referred to as deuterocanonical books by Roman Catholics referring to a later secondary (i.e. deutero) canon. Most Protestants term these books as apocrypha. Evangelicals and those of the Modern Protestant traditions do not accept the deuterocanonical books as canonical, although Protestant Bibles included them in Apocrypha sections until around the 1820s. However, the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches include these books as part of their Old Testament.
The Roman Catholic Church recognizes:
Tobit
Judith
1 Maccabees
2 Maccabees
Wisdom
Sirach (or Ecclesiasticus)
Baruch
The Letter of Jeremiah (Baruch Chapter 6)
Greek Additions to Esther (Book of Esther, chapters 10:4—12:6)
The Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Holy Children verses 1-68 (Book of Daniel, chapter 3, verses 24-90)
Susanna (Book of Daniel, chapter 13)
Bel and the Dragon (Book of Daniel, chapter 14)
In addition to those, the Greek and Russian Orthodox Churches recognize the following:
3 Maccabees
1 Esdras
Prayer of Manasseh
Psalm 151
Russian and Georgian Orthodox Churches include:
2 Esdras i.e., Latin Esdras in the Russian and Georgian Bibles
There is also 4 Maccabees which is only accepted as canonical in the Georgian Church, but was included by St. Jerome in an appendix to the Vulgate, and is an appendix to the Greek Orthodox Bible, and it therefore sometimes included in collections of the Apocrypha.
The Syriac Orthodox tradition includes:
Psalms 151-155
The Apocalypse of Baruch
The Letter of Baruch
The Ethiopian Orthodox tradition includes:
Jubilees
Enoch
1-3 Meqabyan
and some other books.
The Anglican Churches uses some of the Apocryphal books liturgically. Therefore, editions of the Bible intended for use in the Anglican Church include the Deuterocanonical books accepted by the Catholic Church, plus 1 Esdras, 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, which were in the Vulgate appendix."

And to add to that, there were other scriptures such as the Nag Hammadi which were discovered until only recently.

Which ones are we supposed accept as the "correct" Bible? Are all of these books scripture? If not, then how do we know which ones are actually scripture.

In addition, how do we know ANY of them are translated correctly since we have NONE of the original manuscripts (at least we have the original manuscripts of the Book of Mormon LOL). We don't even know if the books were written by the authors who they are named after.

There is no clean history of the Bible. There was no single point in time where all Christians got together and agreed on ALL the books that were to be considered scripture. It evolved over time by different groups of Christians.

Dehlin linked to a list of the contradictions contained in the bible - that's always a good starting place b/c so many claim the bible is the word of gawd and is to be taken literally.

A gawd that makes approx 1700 mistakes in it's book of rules should not be taken very seriously.

within the bible, there are some glaring errors.
It is:
self contradictory
immoral
scientifically wrong
historically wrong

Throughout the bible you can see the evolution of the god myth from a local deity, competing for attention to the 'one true god'

Hopefully you didn't mean just one.

1. The Bible is scientifically wrong, just plain wrong.

2. Historically incorrect. IOW, lies and more damn lies!

3. If God had a very important message to his intelligent creatures (presumably humans), why does he rely on text to impart it? Why rely on sending psychic messages to fallible humans for them to write this all down on crumbly paper? And the people he chose to write are not the literate, cultured people of China, India, or the Middle East. He chose superstitious, uneducated, tribal, warlike bronze age desert dwelling nomads.

4. The alleged author contradicts himself, there are internal contradictions in the narrative and huge, implausible events.

5. It heavily promoted slavery, misogyny, war, revenge, deceit, heinous acts, rape, pillage, and other dark, malevolent crimes. As Apostle George Carlin would say "these do not belong on the resume of a supreme divine being. I am not impressed!"