In almost every instance of my hearing “the Bible tells me so”, what is meant is “it tells you so as well” and the basis is only someone telling me so; where the fact of the matter is demonstrably that this “teller of me sos” is ignorant, or functionally illiterate, of anything written of in the Bible.
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Yea, you right! (As we say in Nawlings) But you’ve only scratched the surface of the argument. Even if the speaker (as some can) quotes the ‘Bible’ from memory, the ‘problem’ persists: Which version? And, what is its provenance, i.e., from what original documents does ‘it’ spring? And how many times has ‘it’ been translated and transcribed? And how does ‘it’ differ from like ‘Bibles’? And how does one know which is the ‘true’ ‘Bible’? And can one entertain the notion that any of these ‘Bibles’ are literally ‘the Word of God’? Or may one ‘believe’ that God ‘merely’ ‘inspired’ the writer? And was this ‘inspiration’ materially different from God’s ‘inspiration’ of, say, Dante, Ignatius, or even Christopher Hitchens?
And after much learned discussion and accommodation of divergent opinions have resolved the various questions raised above, then the sages can engage the subject of the myriad contradictions to be found in the same-self ‘Bible’. “An eye for an eye” vs. “Turn the other cheek”. ‘Mine is a ‘jealous’ God, who sends me to kill non-believers and to seize their land (and women)’ vs. ‘God is my Father, who sends his OBS to redeem me’.
In the end, we might just arrive at the realization that the ‘Bible’ is as the ‘natural world’ of which it is a part: The closer one peers in, the more indistinct, diffuse and mysterious is its ‘image’.
Rod Solórzano