Ramble On

Today's thought is based upon some scratchings I recently uncovered on a loose leaf sheet of paper. It looks like it might come from some my my old college work.

We often base religious arguments on deductions from scripture. We arge that
1. God inspired the Bible.
2. God does not lie.
3. Therefore, the Bible is without error.

The conclusion, however, is not necessarily sound, for it falsely equivocates errors with lies. Consider also that the first premise of the argument is that God inspired the Bible. That means that God Himself did not write it, but that the Holy Spirit directed his prophets to do so. This means that the Bible was written by men, and men are not immune to error--even when they are being truthful to the best of their abilities.

Take the situation at the Battle of Jericho. The Biblical author writes that the Sun stood still in the sky while Joshua's army "avenged themselves upon their enemies" (Joshua 10:13). A strict interpretation of the Bible (and it was this interpretation that led Copernicus to fear releasing his heliocentric theory, and the one that was used to threaten Galileo's life) suggests that the Sun must revolve around the Earth, for if it says in Joshua that "the sun stood still" then it must normally move.

However, a more rational approach to the issue reveals that the Biblical writer simply recorded what he observed. To us humans, it appears that the Sun revolves around the Earth from east to west. When the miracle occurred, it therefore seemed that the Sun stood still. If anything stood still, it was the Earth on its axis because the Sun doesn't move.

In Joshua 10:13, the Bible is therefore innaccurate--to a degree. But it's not a degree worth getting excited about. Too many Christians (and believers of other religions) assume some kind of slippery-slope worst-case scenario when something in their holy scriptures is criticized. Just because the author of Joshua erred minorly does not mean that everything in the Bible is false. All it means is that Joshua's author did not know that it's the Earth that moves. He wrote what he saw, and what he wrote was as truthful as we can expect.

Ironically, many Christian fundamentalists who interpret everything in the Bible literally still cut and paste to their whims. Many denominations preach against the consumption of alchohol, even though Jesus's first recorded miracle was at a wedding, during which he turned water into wine. In Ecclesiastes 8:15, Solomon writes that "there is nothing good under the sun except to eat, to drink and to be merry." And let us not forget that when the booze ran out, Jesus's first miracle, at the wedding in Cana, was to turn water into wine (John 2:1-11). Furthermore, most fundamentalists do not believe in transubstantiation--that, during Communion, wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ--even though Jesus minced no words when he said, "This is my body. . . This is my blood. . . Do this in remembrance of me." Some churches, on the rare occasions when they celebrate the eucharist, even substitute the wine with mere grape juice. What kind of arrogance is this, to assume that drinking wine would be wrong, even though that's what Jesus did and said to do?


On a completely different note, the current diagnosis of my computer problem is that it's the motherboard. I can think of a word to put right in the middle of that...