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Christianity Explained Information Find Christian Unity in Biblical Explanations of the Doctrines That Count! |
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You
have a choice to make: You
can either believe the opinions of theologians, atheists, or agnostics,
or you can determine for yourself what the Bible says by studying it.
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Topics What Is Christianity Explained Information?What Is Religion and Where Did It Originate? What Is the Bible, and How Relative Is It to My Life? What Are Messianic Prophecies? Who Was Jesus of Nazareth, Really? Why Are There So Many World Religions? Why Are There So Many Christian Denominations? What Is the Law and How Does It Apply to Me? What's All This About the End of the World and End-time Prophecies? Isn't the Book of Daniel a Closed Book? Revelation: How can anyone understand all that symbolism? Who or What Was Jesus' Mother, Mary? Didn't Darwin Disprove Creation? What's the Truth About Faith and Works? Christian E-mails: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Complete Directory of Articles/Studies
Title Abbreviations for Books of the Bible Genesis
- Ge |
Bible CriticsThere are many who attempt to discredit the Bible as the Word of God. Some are the enemies of God and are out to discredit Him any way they can. They include those who don't want God to exist because they have their own opinions of how they should be allowed to live their lives and do not want to live by anyone else's rules. There are also those who are just deceived by the disunity within Christianity and Judaism as to what the Bible means in several areas, and even as to "missing books of the Bible" or which books should be in the Bible. Either way, they have formed the hypothesis that the Bible is fiction and a reflection of someone's political agenda. They then have attempted to prove their hypotheses using manmade methods . . . not exactly surprising, but still disconcerting to those who want to believe in God and the Bible. For those who wish not to believe in "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob", the argument has been advanced that the Hammurabi Code, and the laws of other civilizations that pre-date the writing of the Scriptures, proves that the Jewish Scriptures owe their laws and practices to other civilizations, not to God. However, I believe they only prove that certain laws came from the God of creation and, when the language was confounded at the Tower of Babel and each family went its own way, the laws of God went through generations of mutations within each new "civilization" or nation, but similarities remain that prove they all came from the same place. For example in Eden, before sin entered the world, the seventh day was set aside as God's day--the Sabbath day, ordained to commemorate God's great creative power--and many of the nations of this world to this day call the seventh day of the week some form of "Sabbath". The reality is that the Israelites were simply chosen by God to restore his original desire for mankind to treat each other fairly and compassionately and for each individual to return to the true worship of their Creator God. For many of us, our moral compass is God's word. If we would but use the brains God gave us, we would recognize, for instance, the Ten Commandments as a logical list of the ways we love our families, friends, and neighbors, as well as God. But those whose moral compasses tell them to disobey those explanations and laws laid out in Scripture need to find a way to disprove Scripture so their consciences won't be pricked by those of us who see the logic and follow. If they can convince the world that the Bible is hogwash--or at least not inspired by a Holy, Righteous, All-powerful, Awesome, Creator God--they can set their own rules and bully the rest of us into going along with them. This is the agenda of several "movements" that have, for my generation at least (the baby boomers), been leading the United States in a headlong downward spiral of amorality. Pride versus Humility For instance, the wisdom of the world refuses to believe that there might be a God to whom they owe their allegience simply because his knowledge and powers are so far beyond our understanding that he could have spoken the universe into existence using the laws of physics and physical matter that he, himself, decreed so that they would continue into eternity. If he decreed the laws, then he would know what (by those laws) must have preceeded the point of population of the earth, and he would have formed the universe to reflect what would have been the past "evolution" of the universe in order for it to continue forever. Humans are incapable of seeing how something should have come about in order to reach a certain stage and then making the item at that certain stage so that it appears to have evolved and can continue it's evolution from that point. Therefore, they believe God can't do it either. Their God is too small, too human. Circular Reasoning vs Ignorance One argument advanced against Chriatianity and the Bible is that to attempt to prove the truth in a book using the book itself is "circular thinking". That is, if I write an autobiography and then try to prove from my autobiography that I lived the life I say I did from that book, it's a waste of time. They theorize that you must prove the accuracy of one book by comparing what other writers have to say on the same subject. All I have to say to these people when they apply this "law" to the Bible is, "I'm sorry for your ignorance." The Bible is actually 66 literary pieces composed between 1500 B.C. and 100 A.D. by approximately 40 different authors. Scientific Inquiry versus Deliberate Disregard Scientists like to cite billions of years of volcanic activity, earthquakes, sedimentation, breakdown, compression, erosion, etc., as the reasons for the current makeup of the Earth's "crust". They dismiss other explanations as impossible. But who, really, is to say that a massive catastrophe--like a flood that covered the entire earth--didn't create such pressure on the earth that it caused layers to compress and overlap or separate in earthquakes and burgeon up into mountains and volcanoes, mesas, and spires, and to crack deeply into canyons bringing forth rivers from underground . . . Though Christian geologists believe that this is exactly what happened, there's no way to prove it, but there's no way to disprove it either! Medical Realities versus Darwinism Another problem some unlearned and unsophisticated critics have with scripture is the misunderstanding that, if God created woman from one of man's ribs, why do men and women have the same, even number of ribs? Well, duh! If you lose a leg in an operation, are all your children born without a leg? People have been having their appendixes and gallbladders, not to mention teeth, removed for centuries, yet nearly everyone is born with these things, and those who aren't suffer from birth defects, not evolution. Sorry; that was petty. Natural selection (evolution) says creatures evolved because "birth defects" appeared spontaneously and they made the creature superior to--more able to survive than--others who didn't have that feature. Yet which part of the complex organs, like the liver or the eyeball, evolved that worked without the other parts of the liver or the eyeball? How could only a part of a complex organ be passed on if it didn't help? Did these complex organs spontaneously appear--a whole eyeball or liver? If so, who designed them? It takes more faith to believe in the bit-by-bit evolution of anything that complex than it takes to believe in a creator! But here's another one for evolutionists who claim that natural selection is based on what's necessary to survive. If the gallbladder and the appendix aren't necessary for our survival, why haven't they devolved out of the human race? According to them, we "no longer have" fins or gills, though supposedly everything evolved from single-cell creatures of the water. I could go on for days, but what a waste of your precious time! Surely you "get it" by now. Myth versus History Other critics of the Bible accuse it of being mythology. They belittle it as just a compilation of fictional stories intended to help the leaders of the Jews keep them in line. The latest of these is The DaVinci Code, wherein author Dan Brown has attacked scripture under the guise of "A Novel". Knowing that people will say, "I know The DaVinci Code is fiction, but there must be some truth in it . . .", and that others will take it as fact, ignoring the "novel" label completely. In actuality, Mr. Brown makes statements in his book that are straight-faced lies, as I explain in part here and in part in "What is the Bible and How Relative Is It to My Life?". Fact versus Fiction Now I have to say, the criticism that The Bible is fiction cannot be so easily dismissed as some other criticisms because it is a half-truth. There are parts of the Bible that are fictional stories; however, they were made up to help worldly people (especially Jews who were more steeped in the morals and philosophies of the gentiles around them than in their own religion) relate to spiritual concepts, not to fulfill some human political agenda. While it cannot be proven that these stories were inspired by the Holy Spirit, this also cannot be disproven. The claims of scripture, however, are that if it uplifts God, it is spirit-breathed because the Holy Spirit is part of God. Scientific Methods The creation story is cited as a myth by those who cannot, in their own minds, reconcile the "scientific" findings of mankind to the literal translation of the power of God in the creation story. So, these people construct their own tools to help them arrive at their own conclusions concerning their preconceived hypotheses. That is how science is conducted. You start with a hypothesis and then set out to "prove" it. As much as "scientists" or researchers would like you to believe that what they do produces exact results, the truth is that there are many methods used to prove or disprove theories and different methods produce different results. I recall that, when I was a teenager, "scientific studies proved" that Excedrin was better than aspirin alone. Of course, the same study proved that for a percentage of respondents Excedrin was better than Excedrin. Now don't get me wrong, I love Excedrin and use the store brand equivalent (and recommend it) for migraine headaches. I'm just reminding myself that any hypothesis can be "proved" to one's own satisfaction if one trys hard enough. These days, it's called "putting the right spin on" something. Back to The Bible critics. Astronomy versus Genesis I find it difficult to dismiss the literal 7-day creation as a myth for several reasons, but the most compelling is the 7-day week itself. See my article The Seven-day Week: Has the Calendar Been Changed? The short answer is that the 7-day week has never changed. While different cultures have named the days differently for various reasons, each culture has had a 7-day week from antiquity, and the Jews, in particular, have been very careful to track, if not always observe, the seventh-day Sabbath as it was commanded at the Exodus. And God demonstrated the Sabbath to them by the falling of manna 6 days a week but not on the 7th. The Cannon of Scripture Among other fallacies, The DaVinci Code states that there has never been a definitive collection of accepted scripture. This is dealt with in my article "What is the Bible and How Relative Is It to My Life?". Dan Brown's "spin" may be that not every word of every book is represented in the Dead Sea Scrolls, so the Bible as it is now published is "fiction". However, the religious world's spin is that with the exception of a few spelling inconsistencies, there is enough present of each book from antiquity, with the exception of Esther--which may have been fiction, but who cares, it's a good story, the moral of which lines up with the rest of Scripture--to state that the Bible as recorded in the King James (or "the Accepted") version is an accurate rendition of ancient scripture that was in use from the second century before Christ's birth until now. It proves archaeologically and using some of the tools of the very scientists who try to disprove the Bible, that there was, indeed, an accepted code of sacred scripture and that Mr. Brown's The DaVinci Code, A Novel is, indeed, fiction.
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