Almost every conversation I have ever had with my friends regarding faith has come up sharply on two points of belief: The Bible is the infallible Word Of God, like it or not, and we must stick with it; and/or God works in mysterious ways, so we must just accept things that don't make sense as Him being smarter and in more control than we can understand.
When it has come to the point of saying The Bible is infallible, there are plenty of sound arguments for why it is not infallible, even if we can stretch and say it is the story of God, and therefore we can say it may be the word of God.
Suffice it to say that much of what is in the Bible's Old Testament is historical, even though it is a shaded or tinted history based on a people's belief in an all-powerful God. We can look at the Old Testament and see that it is really just a mythology written down. If we strip all the supernatural parts, it's a beautifully collected history of the Israelite peoples.
The New Testament, also a history, is rather more slanted toward the story of Jesus and is more intent, in the first four books, on getting us to believe in the divinity of Jesus than anything else.
In the epistles, where Paul begins his evangelical mission to the Gentiles, we begin to see a change in the reality of the Jesus story and the beginning of a new religion. Several other apostles do the same and finally, it is all capped on the end with a revelation about how the world will end.
The Bible as it is today is a study in translation. Imagine if we could read The Bible in its original renderings or we could place ourselves with the many writers. I think that we would see many things differently. But my point here is simply to say we do not have any proof that the Bible is infallible except that the Bible says so itself.
The other reason sets us up with an excuse why we believe things that fall outside of the workings of The Bible: it's a mystery.
Both of these dependencies are often and should be subject to questioning. Usually the questioners are outside the faith. Even if they are from inside the faith, the questions are all answered with the same ontological argument.
But it is not enough to question these two positions. We have to know how to bring down the foundations. First and foremost we need to be willing to ask the questions.
I cannot think of a more difficult thing as a former believer, than facing a person with a logical and rational argument against my position. It is considered to be right on the edge of sinfulness to ask too many questions yourself. The whole point of faith is to believe in things without direct evidence. And while believing is powerful, belief without evidence is unusually precarious.
Secondly, we need to be willing to challenge claims made about the Word of God based on the same scrutiny that we would challenge any other book making similar claims.
The history of the Bible as we know it is fascinating. It does contain commands and decrees but so do many books. What we must decide and what many believers fail to do is whether we want to allow those commands and decrees to outweigh what we know about the history of the book itself.
If we decide that we want to believe, for example, that it is okay to stone adulteresses or homosexuals, then we need to follow all of the commands and decrees. We cannot "cherry pick". If the Bible is the infallible word of God then we must obey every command and decree. Otherwise we fall into a terrible logical problem. If we actively choose not to believe one command because we cannot, say, legally stone people, then we are failing God and any other attempt to prove infallibility is without purpose.
If, on the other hand, we can strip away the Holy Author's power and see that it is really just a book, then perhaps we can see it for what it really is: a stumbling block to freedom.
As we move forward the goal will be to unlearn things we've held onto, and to learn how to ask the kinds of questions which challenge the ontological arguments used by believers to stay in chains.
As you go into the day, remember that you alone have the ability to decide. Focus on those around you. Don't fear to feel exactly what you're feeling. It's okay to be you.
And it is the province of no other person to tell you what you can or cannot believe.
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