@ The Master Warrior You have yet to respond to any of the numerous posts responding to your question.

The hell it doesn't. Read this, you moron.

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/inconsistencies.html

It doesn't affect the spiritual truth of the Bible that there are narrative mistakes and inconsistency. Blindly saying there aren't any makes you a fucking retard.

spiritual truths r not logical ones

spiritually, i can belief in spaghetti monster or kepperian alliens

@ Invictus my sympathies. He cannot comprehend anything that is in conflict with his point of view. He is totaly out of touch with reality. You respond to his queries and they go over his head, he ignores them or comes back with such respondences as you have seen.

i'm curious about who r u talking about, warsprit

@ checkmate The Master Warrior

This is so bunk.

Lol. I like the one about Abram being 135 y/o and 75 y/o somehow at the same time.

@ Thucydides Do not tell TMW

Maybe TMW is not for real? I used to think the same thing about Diplomat1824 (I forget which number exactly). He believes the opposite of everything he says, but he just likes to stir people.

The_Master_Warrior is diplomat1824.

My favorite is the different tellings about how Judas died. In one he hanged himself after returning the thirty pieces of silver, in another he bought a field but fell down and his stomach burst open. You can reconcile these as Judas hanging himself in the field and then bursting open or something, but you can't deny the contradiction. How could you?

There's even a whole section of Biblical study called Gospel harmony which exists just to reconcile the inconsistencies and discrepancies. The Nativity is very different between the Gospels, the Star of Bethlehem and Magi are only mentioned in Matthew. Only Mark mentions a Roman honoring Jesus as the Son of God after the Crucifixion. Luke says one of the thieves defended Jesus while Matthew says both abused Him.

These inconsistencies can be overcome with Church tradition and an outlook that not every solitary sentence of the Bible is history. You can't deny that they exist. The real test of faith is not stupidly clinging to a ridiculous piece of nonsense like there are no contradictions in the Bible, but rather in accepting them as part of the tradition. Every detail need not be accurate for the spiritual truth to still be there.

"I understand that you don't deploy all good designs to all animals, that would be boring. But if you have a good ear design, why wouldn't you deploy that in some fish that could use it?"

actually i think there is some evidence of genetic material crossing the species barrier. I think they suggest that mitochondria eveloved outside the cell and somehow migrated into the nice warm enviroment of the cell... ( see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endosymbiotic_theory) that and loads of other cool stuff which are at the moment just theories (and may be inconsistant theories at that) but still i will be realy interesting to find out what is discovered in the future.

also we see all kinds of crazy symbotic relationships, like his plant-insect symbiosis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistling_Thorn - where the ants are living in the comfortable easy to find plant, and used by the plant to attack mammals who might try to eat it...

Orathaic: Mitochondria were originally bacteria which some cells that presumably couldn't break down energy on their own with the citric acid cycle. It's the general idea in the field (and really not as sketchy as you make it sound I think) that the ancestors of mitochondria and the ancestors of fungi and animals once upon a time were just living in very close proximity, living off of each others byproducts. Eventually one of our ancestors figured out how to swallow a mitochondrion without killing it, and over time its descendants who worked best with these little internal guest workers survived better than those who didn't like them, and here we are today. A similar thing happened with plants and chlorophyll-producing bacteria.

During studies of antibiotic resistance it was found bacteria do swap genetic materal, even between different species.

thanks UOS, I'm really not a biologist. I do think it's really cool. (kinda sketchy in the same way i think cosmology is kinda sketchy...)

The stuff about Whistling Thorn : using chemicals to control the ants which live on it is really cool. (and feels like the same thing except we're talking about an ant colony and a tree, rather than a bacteria and some cell - so it's a different scale) - but it is still the tree's cell poducing chemicals which the ants previously used to communicate with each other - to prevent them from eating the nectar while the tree needs bees to do the polinating - (whatever the standard retreat signal is for ants) and to attack mammals when that are eating the plant (whatever the attack signal is)

Really cool stuff.

"It doesn't affect the spiritual truth of the Bible that there are narrative mistakes and inconsistency. Blindly saying there aren't any makes you a fucking retard."

I resent that term, as blind faith is the basis of any belief. So, you just called everyone in the world a "fucking retard"

It's not faith to deny the truth. Your position that the Bible doesn't have any inconsistencies whatsoever is on the very fringe of Christian thought and is in direct opposition to the Bible itself.

Also, you didn't really address what I wrote in your reply.

"I resent that term, as blind faith is the basis of any belief." - i disagree, most of my beliefs about science are taken on the basis of looking, more of a educated faith - you might try it some time.

"It's not faith to deny the truth." - yeah, it's more like blindness - you believe the bible is perfect but you've never actually seen it.

(that last sentence was aimed at TMW not Invictus...)

So, maybe we are going about this the wrong way. There are people like TMW out there. What we should be doing is creating a new religion... I guess it has been done. Scientology is a good example. There can only be so many people that blindly believe whatever you tell them though, or can there?

Scientific beliefs are often the most blind. For example, evolution. The Bible is perfect, and God has never contradicted himself. And, I have read the Bible, cover to cover.

The how do you explain two radically different accounts of Judas' suicide? There are no mistakes in matters of faith, but even that radical atheist C. S. Lewis admitted that there are textual contradictions and inconsistencies in the Bible.

Invictus, dear TMW probably doesn't realize that there /were/ two different accounts of Judas' suicide. I think The Atheist Experience had a blog post about how fundamentalists sometimes do read the bible cover to cover, but not with an eye to textual criticism like one might with, say, The Odyssey. I seem to remember the author remarking about their eyes being opened when someone put the various accounts of the Nativity from the Gospels in front of him, side by side, just to show all the contradictions. He knew the stories, it's just that he only really thought about them one at a time, as separate self-contained narratives. He assumed they just fit together.

Having a preconcieved ideal can greatly influence what a person actualy perceives, or remembers. We know what his preconcieved ideals are.

@Invictus C. S. Lewis wasn't a radical athiest, he was a theist.

Interesting to hear of C.S. Lewis referred to as an atheist. He certainly was until he met Tolkien. He became quite the defender of Christianity after that though, eh?

It looks like Invictus made a simple typo. I mean, it's not like an atheist would not want to point out the inconsistencies of a holy text.

His Narnia is exactly like the Bible, except with different names for characters and different settings. Also, all writers of the Bible were human, and the original text has been lost long ago. The translation has been inevitably distorted. Judas' method of suicide is fairly irrelevant.

I was being facetious when I called C.S. Lewis an atheist. I was trying to say how even a very religious and very Christian person could admit there are contradictions in the Bible and that the Bible is not meant to be read as literal history. I assumed my little joke would be obvious.

I think you're completely right, UOSnu. The Gospels were written by people years after the fact. Even if it was the actual evangelists who wrote them or THEIR disciples writing from the evangelists' notes or the oral tradition of the evangelists' following, there would obviously be inconsistencies in the story. On faith I would say that the actual message is consistent and any differences are just different focuses on the same truth, but I would not say that narrative differences do not exist. That's just stupid.

The_Master_Warrior, Judas' suicide stories are irrelevant. It doesn't matter how he killed himself. But you can't seriously say that one Gospel saying he hanged himself and another saying he tripped and burst open isn't an inconsistency.

I think the whole time you've been thinking that we're saying the Bible is inconsistent in its spiritual message. We're not, at least I'm not. We're saying that there are times where the Bible says contradictory things in different places. I seem to recall one of Paul's letters or something saying circumcision isn't mandatory, while the Old Testament says it absolutely is. The spiritual truth (at least if you accept the New Covenant and stuff) is that Jesus undid that particular obligation, along with a lot of other things, through his dying on the Cross. That in itself creates a contradiction in the Bible, so much of one that PAUL FELT THE NEED TO ANSWER IT. Even St. Paul admits that there are contradictions in the Bible. A contradiction is not fatal to faith. You'll have to find the relevant lines yourself, I just remember this from a homily.

Narnia is not exactly like the Bible at all. It's a Christian allegory but not the Bible with lions and witches and wardrobes.