I'm not sure what "subject" line to write so I'm just going with "The Bible"

[Jim Johnson]

Ask an unanswerable question?  Sit there with the 'I'm an incredible philosopher' look.

Posit an unfounded explanation and look for the people who like that answer.

Scorn everyone else as nonbelievers.

Or vice versa.

...as the need arises.

[Kat Kanning]

Rainey, I can tell you how I learned about the Bible.  I listened to John Macarthur sermons on the New Testament.  I just picked a book, John for example, and read thru it, and listened to the sermons teaching about that book....

http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/scripture/john

It helps....if you are interested in learning about it.  But I have a whole lot of time to listen to such things, being a truck driver.  All I do all day is listen to the radio or stuff I've downloaded off the internet.

[Raineyrocks]

I was wrong about King James wanting a divorce, that was Henry VIII.
Henry VIII separated the Church of England from the Pope in Rome and was excommunicate for it.
King James came later and rewrote the Bible to smooth things over in England.

Sure, confuse me more Jim, just what I need.   Thanks for clarifying though.  

[Raineyrocks]

I think the Bible is the devine word of God.  I don't think there are errors in it.

Which one?  There are hundreds of Bibles, which don't agree with each other.  So which one is correct?

God's creation was perfect, but when Adam and Eve sinned, death and all sorts of nasty things entered the world.  That is why we have disease.

Shouldn't a perfect creation be able to survive use in the real world?  I can design all sorts of "perfect" machinery on paper, which would fail if actually built and exposed to real-world conditions and use.  If God is all-knowing, then He knew exactly what Adam and Eve would do in Eden, and His work can hardly be called "perfect" if it was not designed to survive the use to which He knew it would be put.

Plus, what about the other peoples of the world, who existed in places other than Eden?  The "divine word of God" is absolutely explicit on Adam and Eve not being the only humans on the planet, but is rather vague on who created the other people, where they were distributed (other than that some of them had cities within easy travelling distance of Eden), or how they would fit in with the Fall.  Did the choices made by Adam and Eve somehow cause those other (presumably-innocent) people to suffer?  Did it cause their existing bodies to change, such that their pelvic bone structure became such that childbirth became difficult and painful?  That their cardivascular systems would wear out while their minds were still functional?  That their cells' ability to self-repair would sometimes go awry, leading to cancer?  That children would sometimes be born with horribly deformities which cause them agony until their early deaths?  Why do I see a memorial at DHMC to a little girl who died at age ten, with a note about how bravely she faced death?  How, precisely, does some stranger's actions, minimum (if we asume some Bibles to be verbatim) thousands of years in the past, result in an innocent child having to spend the last few years of her first decade on this planet, bravely facing her own death?

I think the human body is an absolutely amazing bit of engineering, even so.

So, when a toddler gets appendicitis and has to spend a month in a hospital due to complications (which happened to a neighbor's kid), that's because of "amazing engineering," and not because the appendix is a vestigial organ left over from an evolutionary process?  Why is it there, if not for evolution?

Yup, these are some of the things I wonder too.  Also, if one of my kids didn't listen would it be right to punish all of them?  If we all came from Adam and Eve wouldn't we be the same color and have very similar dna? Why are there Jews and Gentiles then?  It seems in the bible there is a clearly distinct difference in races or something.

If we were perfect until "they" ate the apple then God had to re-manipulate the entire body structure, right?   It just doesn't make sense to me.

Regarding skin color I know that certain regions where people live can affect this but what about chinese people?  Why are they yellowish?  Just wondering.....

I know I poised the questions and I'm not trying to be argumentative, (sp?) I'm just trying to find any logic that I could justify to live my life according to the bible. 

[Raineyrocks]

Rainey, I can tell you how I learned about the Bible.  I listened to John Macarthur sermons on the New Testament.  I just picked a book, John for example, and read thru it, and listened to the sermons teaching about that book....

http://www.gty.org/resources/sermons/scripture/john

It helps....if you are interested in learning about it.  But I have a whole lot of time to listen to such things, being a truck driver.  All I do all day is listen to the radio or stuff I've downloaded off the internet.

Thanks Kat and I will check out the link.     I'm not trying to be difficult.  I am trying to have an open mind but it's really hard for me to base an entire belief system off of a book that makes no sense to me.   MaineShark brings up some excellent points and a lot of questions I myself have too.  Especially the creation of good and evil and also how "free will" is already mapped out so to say, so is it really free will?  I'm pretty sure someone dying of an incurable disease didn't choose that path and didn't deserve it because Adam and Eve sinned.

I did start this thread however because I have personally seen people's lives change for the better because they either chose or somehow attained proof that the bible is the real deal but I don't want to just start believing it because they did.  I've also read about people's lives changing due to thier belief in Buddhism, so why are we told via the King James Bible that there is only one way?

[Kat Kanning]

The Bible didn't used to make sense to me.  It was only when I gave my life over to Christ I could start understanding it.  I don't know why it's this way, but that's also what the Bible says, that the eyes of unbelievers are blinded.

[Jim Johnson]

Believe as a child,

ignoring the things you know to be true...

only then will you be one with God.

[K neth]

Excellent, Jim.

I think the human body is an absolutely amazing bit of engineering, even so.

So, when a toddler gets appendicitis and has to spend a month in a hospital due to complications (which happened to a neighbor's kid), that's because of "amazing engineering," and not because the appendix is a vestigial organ left over from an evolutionary process?  Why is it there, if not for evolution?

The most amazingly engineered software is full of vestigial code that can occasionally cause problems.

But words suck.  Creator, Great Engineer, or Divine Clockmaker are maybe not the best of metaphors for God.  It might be better said that God grew the world. But words suck.

[Raineyrocks]

Believe as a child,

ignoring the things you know to be true...

only then will you be one with God.

How can you ignore the things you know to be true, though?  Sorry, I don't understand.   Believing as a child is a beautiful concept, it's so hard though after the bad stuff in this world gets into your brain.  I know we should look at the beauty but how do you drowned out the evil? 

I miss when I was a kid and was amazed by almost everything, the birds chirping in the trees, the blue sky, feeling a dirt road and grass under my bare feet, so very cool all of it.  Now I feel constant pressure in my head, worries, fears, etc. and it sucks.

[MaineShark]

The most amazingly engineered software is full of vestigial code that can occasionally cause problems.

But words suck.  Creator, Great Engineer, or Divine Clockmaker are maybe not the best of metaphors for God.  It might be better said that God grew the world. But words suck.

Indeed.  As I noted earlier, one can make logical arguments that there's some driving force (which one can call "God" if one wants) behind evolution.  They may or may not be true (the jury's still out), but at least they make sense.  The human body as a work in progress is a defensible position.

"God snapped His fingers and created this incredibly flawed mechanism" doesn't make sense.

[Kat Kanning]

hoaxes in theory of evolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hV-rqCDhew

[Jim Johnson]

hoaxes in theory of evolution
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hV-rqCDhew

If science were a religion the Piltdown Man would be doctrine and one would be compelled to hell for saying it was a hoax.

The guy that put that video together knew enough to not put quotation marks around the things he claims people have said.

[Russell Kanning]

http://m.ccel.org/ccel/edwards/sermons.sinners.html
Most powerful sermon in the last 300 years.:-)