If the bible is the literal word of God, then why does God have so many writing styles?

The reverend at my hippie-dippie church: When we see God acting worse than the best of men in scripture, we see the fingerprints of men.

Furthermore, in some obvious forgeries like the Epistle to the Laodiceans and 3 Corinthians, a very brief amount of googling will get you modern scholarly consensus on on how the church fathers were duped.

Not only that but alternate texts such as The Gospel of Thomas has been suggested by scholars as a contemporary to the Pauline epistles, and The The Shepherd of Hermas was in many biblical codices even after Nicaea.

So yeah, the Bible is a human creation trying its best to transmit the word of God, and the path to the Kingdom by Jesus.

Actually. the bible is not literally the word of God himself. God inspired this people to write what he wanted, his porpuses and all of that. That's why. Because God didn't rite the bible himself, he's just the inspiration of it.

Well, "God" is a creation of man himself, so it ultimately comes down to man inspiring man.

You cracked the code user! Men have been working so hard throughout the centuries to know the truth, and you have found it!

> Bible is the literal word of God
You confused the Bible with the Koran, dipshit.

No the Koran is the literal word of Satan dipshit.

Also, since it was so successful, why hasn't he publish another sequel?

If God makes himself too apparent it takes faith and free will out of the equation.

He's such a tease.

It's kind of cool to see religious people in Veeky Forums.

You don't believe in God?

Something makes me think you stay away from /pol/. That board is full of believers.

It does have it's share of fedora wearing shitlords though.

God didn't write the bible, but it's his word.

How is that hard to understand?

There are some. A lot of people are trolls, or ironic believers, or simply contrarians.

/pol/ is a muslim board.

No, really?

>so many writing styles?
To show his power level. Like Joyce in Oxen of the Sun. He's almost as good, too.

I would also like the answer to this question. A guy I work with is a hardcore creationist and from what I gather they believe they believe that if the bible is to be taken as the ultimate moral and spiritual authority literally everything in the bible must be taken as truth. I'm not that familiar with scripture but that seems to be a really shaky premise on which to rest ones faith

Yes, I wonder if pornography has something to do with it.

I grew up in the church. my father is a pastor and my family are all young earth creationists. except me, I mean.

Anyways, yes your coworker has pretty accurate sentiments regarding modern American Christianity, but what's erroneous there is the modern American Christianity part.
Christianity is a branch of the tree of Judaism, but somewhere along the way some shit got really mistranslated (intentionally or otherwise) and stayed that way.
If you study Judaism and then Christianity, given the mindset that the latter was meant to transition from the former, you'll notice some whiplash inducing differences. Not just dissimilar sentiments, but fundamental differences: Jews don't believe in hell, Christians do. Christianity is join or die, Jews beleive you don't even have to be a Jew to go to heaven. Christians are focused on pleasing God, Jews more focused on living a good life HERE and NOW. Some jews even believe in reincarnation. Christians believe the Bible is the infallible word of God, Jews know they wrote it under divine inspiration and it is subject to historical inaccuracies, but the point is the moral aspect of the stories, not the exact factual evidence.
The reasons that those differences exist is because Christianity as a religion and Judaism as a culture do not get along. They don't communicate, they don't share, they don't like each other.
Just like islam/Christianity or islam/Judaism.
The tree of abrahamic religions is just one big clusterfuck of rivalry.
Anyways, Christianity today is nothing like it was at its inception. Things have changed. Fundamental things lost in translation (the Bible isn't a book, it's 66 books written over like 1500 years by over a dozen people in 3 or 4 different languages) I think some of the issues were going from the original Aramaic to Greek to Latin to English. Greeks fucked it up with the eternal damnation thing and Catholicism really cemented it as "truth".

Most Christians are the way your coworker is: spoon-fed by a modern pastor(like my dad) but you should at least understand that their perception of the religion is a bastardized version of the faith(young earth, objective word of God, eternal punishment etc.)

Try hitting on him and see what happens.

>Greeks fucked it up with the eternal damnation thing and Catholicism really cemented it as "truth".
Can you elaborate on this?

>I grew up in the church. my father is a pastor and my family are all young earth creationists. except me, I mean.

Are you an atheist or just a different kind of Christian? Has your family rejected you?

It isn't the word of God. Can we get over this meme. It's obviously man-made and I am getting tired of people debating this shit.

I'll elaborate, but honestly you're better off reading up on it. Pretty much the Greeks retrofitted a lot of their current beliefs with the new religion of Christianity, one of which being the land of eternal damnation Hades. When Catholicism took rise as the primary global denomination of Christianity they were very protective of the Bible. Only those in authority could translate it, let alone even read it. So now you have millions of people being taught eternal damnation from the few in power who could read, and obviously they didn't cross-reference any of it with the enemy Jews. They also introduced a ton of weird shit, like holy water and purgatory and praying to Mary and having a Pope. none of that is biblical. Now in English we were fucked right off the bat, got passed that torch and ran with it full speed in the wrong direction.
Hell is the weirdest thing imo. It's weird because you can just ask any Jew about it. They've never believed in eternal damnation, they believe in a year-long soul cleansing(another source of mistranslation) and everyone makes it to the same afterlife.

>Are you an atheist or just a different kind of Christian? Has your family rejected you?
Nah I think atheism is an odd sentiment. Im not interested in talking about my beliefs, but my family has probably picked up that I'm not like them. I go to my dad's church and all that, its not gonna kill me. They know I drink and I don't like people and I've told them I don't enjoy church but I just put up with it.

I say I'm Christian when people ask but I always feel like I'm lying

>Pretty much the Greeks retrofitted a lot of their current beliefs with the new religion of Christianity, one of which being the land of eternal damnation Hades.

Why is it called Hell then? Hel is the Goddess of the underworld in Norse Mythology and the daughter of Loki, how did Hades get switched for Hel?

>having a Pope
What about when Jesus said to Peter that he would be the rock of his church?

>Im not interested in talking about my beliefs
But you're so well, please do me the favor or describing your beliefs. Perhaps I may learn something.

>Well, "God" is a creation of man himself, so it ultimately comes down to man inspiring man.
That's not true.

meant to say well educated or read.

this thread is useless, and i'm an atheist

Yes. Yes it is.

>Why is it called Hell then? Hel is the Goddess of the underworld in Norse Mythology and the daughter of Loki, how did Hades get switched for Hel?
Idk, it has a lot of names in the Bible. Gehenna, hell, Hades (yes it's actually referred to as Hades a few times in the Bible), and a couple others that don't come to mind. I'm sure there's an answer, could be an interesting read.

Well he certainly didn't mean that he would be the flesh of God like Catholics say he is. They definitely over-stepped Jesus' intention.

In all honesty I don't have a whole lot to offer beyond straightening out some stereotypes about the Bible and such. I don't have what you could call "beliefs". I don't "believe". I just acknowledge certain things as true or untrue. I like the Bible, I think it's more interesting than atheists imply it is, but less so than Christians do.
It's really interesting that there are even young earth creationists when the Bible mentions that there was a developed world before this one. Like our current world is built on the ruins of another, Genesis is the beginning of OURS, so obviously the whole "young earth" thing doesn't hold water in its own playing field.
Same as the flat earth of the middle ages. The Bible says the earth is a sphere like twice, but the religious authority claimed it was flat.
Religion is just damaging that way, same goes for atheism.

I believe that the world and life are a product of intention, although not necessarily a homogenic intention. I think every living thing has some sort of soul. I don't believe in divine intervention, even though I've seen some shit. I just think humans are capable of some really incredible things, and that religion can be a vehicle of that "energy". I see myself as a Christian by definition (Christ-like) but I don't think most Christians would agree.

>Christianity is join or die,
No it's not.

Intellectually dishonest protestant.
>Well he certainly didn't mean that he would be the flesh of God like Catholics say he is. They definitely over-stepped Jesus' intention.
No one says this. The Pope is a medium and the Church is a spiritual conservatory, whereas the Vatican itself and lesser churches are physical conservatories for artifacts, art, and texts.

Christ is God in flesh.

If you're familiar with any denomination that claims that one can go to heaven without sharing their Christian beliefs I'd definitely like to hear it

And for your other point, yea you're right. I looked into it a bit and it seems that the "Pope is God" thing is a common misconception perpetuated by some fairly damning quotes from past popes better laid out here: catholicpoint.blogspot.com/2012/10/pope-claiming-as-god.html?m=1

Why would one be able to go to heaven if they've been in the devil's grasp for their whole lives? Only through faith can the Lord can free you from it.

If Faust is the word of Goethe then why does Goethe have so many writing styles?

Well I could ask you why God is punishing a man with divine and infinite retribution for a carnal and finite (not to mention inherent) short-coming but this topic feels like a huge step backwards for this discussion because first you have to convince me there's a hell beyond the Gehenna of Judaism

It's not His punishment.

If God worked through men, that means God engaged in a temporal action, which means God changed. God can't change. Ergo God couldn't have worked through men to write the Bible

It's His system that He established.
Everything that exists does so under His acknowledgement and His authority. If He meant for it to be any different it would be different.

But again, the existence of eternal Hell is of itself problematic because in the timeline of abrahamic religion it just pops up out of nowhere somewhere between Judaism and Catholicism

you might be interested in that study which supposedly proved that all humans brains are wired to believe in the metaphysical

is the logic of this sound? it seems sound.

google sheol and also annihilationism

No that's not how the razor works you moron

Not really, because it implies what is immanent is somehow outside of God's ontological jurisdiction while it's more an intrisic part of God's essence appearing in the horizon of being, becoming the totality of God (in time) that was/is already implicit in God's essence.

At least that's how I'd explain it.

Occam's razor was by William of Occam who was a Christian friar, and he's not wrong about it not being always correct, in fact that should be common sense.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor#Controversial_aspects_of_the_razor

More clearly, the fact a man wrote the Bible is a necessary consequence of that man's being-alive in the conditions he was, which were themselves necessary because etc etc, and in the end (which you can't reach but rationally (?)) everything follows necessarily from God's infinite attributes in infinity.

Fuck I'm drunk and Italian why am I even trying

so can God change

It's not changing, it's the sum of all possible iterations of itself and its attributes - which are congruent with the whole of reality in the perceived totality of time.

Hell is the result of an unholy grasp.

Wasn't when Jesus was talking about Gehenna or hell if you will he was talking about a physical place and not some realm you go to for eternal punishment, and that his talk of hell has been misappropriated by the Baptists into this notion of this place of eternal hellfire?

Some philosophers have tried to argue this. I would still point out that God having an essence and "appearing" in a horizon of being are spatio-temporal actions, which imply change. In order to save the argument I think you have to find some way to say that God can change and maintain his perfection. But that is outside of human logic. So I think any argument is going to end in a "we just can't understand Him" sort of way. Maybe this Chirst bro can save it a different way though

Well I'm not capable of explaining my argument as perfectly as I'd like, so I'll just advise you to read Spinoza, but that said:

It depends on how you consider time and space and infinity: God is the One Infinite Substance, possessing infinite attributes, and its realization in spatio-temporal reality is but the infinite movement of itself, each finite step necessary for it to effectively be infinite (for true infinity needs every finiteness), but there's no movement outside of God, since it's equivalent/congruent to Nature. That is to say, what you believe to be becoming as coming-in-and-out of being is really a progressive realization (as in, a progressive appearing) of God: "death", the apparent disappearing from being, is but a different form of being - as death and non-presence are positive qualities, since everything is defined both by what it is and by what it isn't - for a definite pile of ash to exist, the tree that burned down and disappeared is both necessary and present. Hope I kind of explained myself. There is no change, only infinite movement that carries within itself past, present and future in the same moment.

That's a good question. You're not about to pull the carpet out from under all religion as we know it, but it's interesting.

I argue all the time that God cannot want. To want is to lack and the infinite and absolute cannot lack.

I'm a panentheist. not those weird pantheists that worship trees and shit, it means everything is of God. The mechanism that created the cosmos and the mechanism that sparked life are not necessarily one and the same, and the two events are separated by billions of years but some imperceivable "coding" in the universe could create recurring patterns like life and energy, both subatomic and cosmic. I believe that everything is of God including that creative mechanism, both life and matter. God made the thing that made the thing. I don't think it's God that changes, it could just be the way we perceive it. Like how lenses refract light, if you could imagine the lens in constant flux and the light therefore shifting to match it. Bad metaphor but it works.

It isn't. Who told you that? Where were you educated? Are you 15? Have you ever learned anything about religion from a source besides the internet?

t. devout catholic

Bible sounds more like the Koran which was written 150 years after an illiterate sheep herder died.
Religion is another word for spoon feeding shit to hungry simple people .

>Questioning the Bible

Cause God is a versatile writer unlike you OP