Scripture

 

rom here, I will categorize some verses from the Bible and discuss them. These are from the notes I took as I studied the Bible which helped shape my ideas and opinions. For the atheist, perhaps these verses can be used to encourage a humanistic Christianity out of the Christians they know. For the Christians, I hope they serve to be a greater “authoritative” argument than my words alone and direct those who wish to remain Christian into the humanistic version that Jesus preached.

As you read, keep in mind that verses can always be found to discredit the interpretation of any other verse but that does not resolve the interpretation. If I point out a verse indicating that God never desired sacrifice, for example, it does not help to find a verse that claims he did. This simply leaves a conundrum and does not resolve the meaning of the first verse. Since I argue that the Bible is neither perfect nor authoritative, it is not a problem to have conflicting verses from my point of view. The real trouble actually comes when one tries to make it all coherent. It can be done, of course, by adding all kinds of assumptions, but hopefully there will be enough evidence presented to indicate that it is not worth jumping through such hoops to create coherency. In the end, if something can be interpreted in a couple different ways, I would encourage one to remember all the possibilities and simply consider each as being more or less plausible than any other at any given point in time without outright denying anything.

In regard to scripture, my logic ultimately flows as follows: Jesus taught a message of love as opposed to sacrifice and rituals. He warned that his message would be corrupted. He taught us to listen to God directly and to consider no man to be one’s teacher or authority. So unless God spoke to each and every one of us directly to indicate we ought to whole-heartedly trust the Bible, then we go against the Bible by trusting the Bible whole-heartedly. Since it is likely that God did not personally tell us in particular that the Bible is his word, it should be entirely thought of as the words of man. Man’s words can indeed be correct, but that does not mean any person or book should be thought of as authoritative. Since the Bible itself foretells that the message would become corrupted and no God told us to believe the Bible whole-heartedly, it must be assumed that it is quite likely that the Bible is corrupted even if some portions are still true. An inability to determine which is which with 100% certainty is unnecessary and entirely foolish as an excuse to simply accept it all. With all that in mind, the following are the verses that spoke the most to me and directed me toward my heresy.