Thanks Mark. Your post is very intersting and eductional.

GG,

Back to the contradictions in scripture thing...

Samuel Clemens said that many people are bothered by passages of scripture that they don't understand. He said, "I am more bothered by those passages that I DO understand."

I have found over the years that most skeptics bring up complex problems or point to things they don't understand not in an effort to understand or to more fully comprehend what the Bible says, but to find an excuse to not do what the Bible says to do.

In Genesis chapter 3, the serpent convinced Adam and Eve to eat from the tree that God had told them not to eat the fruit of. The "sin" wasn't merely disobedience but was rooted in the belief of the lie that the serpent told Eve. That is, you can know good and evil.

Now the word there for "know" comes to us through the KJV translation and to us it seems that it implies simply a knowledge of something. But in the Hebrew, the word implies more of an ability to decide for yourself. Thus the sin was taking upon oneself the right to decide what is right and what is wrong. The devil has had to tell no other lies because each of us buys his first one. We think that we can decide what is good and what is evil and that we have that right.

But if God is the creator of all, then it is His right to tell us what we should and should not do. Therefore, when we take it upon ourselves we are taking His authority and THAT is what sin is all about, not merely the act itself.

That is why the word repent comes to us as the way to have righteousness before God. It tells us that we not only have to change our actions, but our way of thinking as well.

IMO, this is the real difference between a WS and a FORMER WS. Merely stopping an affair does not make one a FWS, simply a WS not currently engaged in an affair of actions. A truly repentant person understands not only that what they did was wrong, but that they CHOSE to do the wrong thing and has made a change in the way they think that will mean they will choose differently going forward.

So when a person is really repentant, they change the way they think about sin. Sin is no longer the action itself, but the belief that they had the right to decide the matter for themselves rather than believing what God says about the issue.

So most often when people question the Bible or question God, they are really protecting themselves from having to do what God tells them to do. They want to hold onto the authority to decide for themselves what to do.

If God has the rightful authority to tell us how to live and how to treat others and if we accept that He has that authority, not doing what He says to do or doing what He says not to do is out of the question. It is only because we think that He will make us do something that we don't want to do or make us stop having fun that we fear surrendering our will to His will for us.

Now as to how all this applies to discrepancies in the Bible...

Those that take issue with the Bible over minutia are really ignoring the vast majority of what the Bible says because they claim they don't understand or can't believe some small thing the Bible says. Christian doctrine is not typically based on passages of scripture that can be questioned as to their clarity or contradiction to anything else the Bible says elsewhere. Rather, doctrine is based on things that the Bible makes very clear. It is only because one does not want to believe those things that they even bother to search for the things that might give trouble. It is because they want to decide for themselves what is right and what is wrong that they refuse to bow to God and turn authority over to Him not because they don't understand how many folks Jesus fed with 5 loaves and 2 small fish or think that the account was corrupted by the tellers. ( This is an easy one to answer BTW and I bring it up because it is one quite often offered as a discrepancy.)

When Adam and Eve sinned, they had been told that they would die as a result. I have nothing that I can point to that can support the assumption that they did in fact not die as a direct result of their sin and would not have died anyway. But considering that there was never anyone before them who lived, no one had ever died before.

Faith is not just believing God exists or is real or even that he is the God of the universe. The devil believes God exists as do the fallen angels who chose to follow him. Faith is about believing what God says and acting as if we do. And that kind of faith can be based not on just accepting those things we don't understand or taking the authority of the church as what is real but on believing God because we have seen what He has done in the past and believe that what He says is real and the truth for today and beyond. We can believe what God says that we have NOT seen because of what can be shown to be true in what else He has said.

That was what I meant about faith not being based on accepting in spite of the evidence but because of it...

Make any sense?

Mark

Mark...

Just wanted to let you know that I appreciate you...Those were awesome posts...

Thank you!

Mrs. W

Agreed, also supported by the Galatians.

Ergo: Refraining from Capital Punishment is a Sin.
There are no discrepancies re: Capital Punishment.
Nor is there anything definitive re: Abortion. If anything, it's relatively mute on the point.

MEDC - I wonder if the issue is not "capital punishment as a deterrent" as much as it is an issue with the way that is employed in America. For example, one could argue that it IS a "proven deterrant" for controlling the behavior of most people if one were to look at Sharia Law as the "governing authority." But then, a lot of other freedoms would also be "deterred" because the standard would be the Koran. From my perspective, I don't have any problem with capital punishment being imposed upon some people, say the perpetrators and planners of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, etc.

This misapplication of "our" notions of freedom, law, punishment, etc. are probably best seen today with the attempts to grant "habeus corpus" right to terrorists and enemy fighters in Guantanemo, to "reduce" acts of war to "criminal behavior" rather than what they really are.




Agreed. But I would add that "life without parole" should MEAN just that. Furthermore, all such prisoners should be placed in a maximum security prison in some area, say Antarctica, where any escape WOULD result in their removal from the ranks of the living by their own choice.




Granted.

Though a significant reason why there IS capital punishment is that the "authority" for revenge, or just punishment if you prefer, IS relinquished to the State, which is supposed to act on behalf of the people, rather than "taking matters into our own hands." God established government for just that purpose and endows government with the right and the responsibility to act on behalf of the governed.

SoulDragoN - Refraining from Capital Punishment would not seem to be a sin, as that authority has been given to the government.

IF your "ergo" was correct, then how might you explain God's forgiveness of David and God's decision to NOT impose the required death penalty upon David for his adultery with Bathsheba and his "contract murder" of Uriah?

Neither would killing someone in defense of your life or the life of others be a sin. To do nothing when it would be in your power to confront and stop evil would seem to be the "greater sin," for example.

Premeditated murder, on the other hand, REQUIRES acting solely from selfish, self-centered, motives and IS a sin, regardless of anyone's standing with the Lord.

David DID pay penalties for his sin, though the death penalty was not one of them.




As there are "discrepancies" concerning Capital Punishment from your "ergo" conclusion, the Scripture is also NOT "relatively moot" on the position of unborn babies. The Scriptures are remarkably clear about God's position regarding unborn babies, s it is also quite clear about many other things (i.e., as seen in the 10 Commandments). It is not clear what you are trying to say here.

Here's one of my main problem with the catholic church.

OM was catholic and after everything was over, all he had to do was go to a man, and that man "forgives" him of his sin, everything is okey-dokey and I was left in ruin and he is just fine and rosey.

The god of the catholics only deals with those in the club, no matter how much destruction they leave in their wake, they get off scott free.

He wasn't even required to ask my forgiveness and under my ex-denomination's beliefs, I must forgive him, suck up my loss and move on while he reaps a HUGE reward.

OT laws are ignored or circumvented for NT passages, and NT passages are completely ignored for convenience and income purposes.

I guess it would depend upon which laws and/or passages you are referring to.

But in general, it isn't God who ignores them, it is man for his own reasons who most often does things for his own benefit regardless of what God has said.

Exactly.