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I am posting my interpretation of the bible and you keep coming up with verses. That's like saying the bible must be right because the bible says it is. That is not proof! That IS circular reasoning which gets nowhere. You seem to enjoy spewing forth bible quotes that you have been trained to believe. I, on the other have arrived at my own conclusions. A lot of thinking went into my arriving at my own beliefs. It took a long time and much work in searching and self-introspection to arrive at this point in my life.

The difference between you and I is that I continue to explore and you continue to mouth memorized versus - without ever doubting.

I see a different story in the book of Job. For me, my interpretation is true. You can believe anything you wish but please don't assume you can change my mind by quoting verses I've already analyzed.

I don't receive my lessons from someone with a rigid mind who could teach me nothing more than the interpretation he learned from his elders. Perhaps you have discussed these verses with others but, I'll bet the conversation consisted of agreeing with each other. If one doesn't question, there can be no insights. That's why I side with science. Their discoveries are not "carved in stone" - no pun intended.

Just take an inventory of all the different bibles. The religious decide on which interpretation they like best. But, in every case, meaning has changed as in translations. How do you know what you're reading is even close to the original in Aramaic? Language changes from one generation to the next. Just take a look at what texting is doing to the English language. Even the Big Three in the bible tell different stories. Ex.: How many people were present when it is said that Jesus rose from the dead? Just the women? Communities? Thousands?

My initial questioning came about when I actually began to listen to the priest in his pulpit and realized that just five minutes earlier he said the opposite. Why do you think C. Darrow won the case over Bryan in the Monkey Trial? Different interpretation! ! ! ! One a thinker and the other a quoter. I choose to remain a critical thinker.

Recently, a skeptic posted the following comment, in italics, on the ABR website about Gordon Franz's article, Bloodline.

""but rather, believe the truth of the Word of God, the Bible"

You must be joking! The BIBLE ?

A book that has been rewritten and changed a thousand times throughout the centurys (sic) by various people including the church is more credible than this movie. I don't think so. I'm not trying to say the movie is telling the truth and even the producers of this movie say that they don't have absolute proof for anything. It's a movie and I think we will all find out if the whole thing is a hoax or not, when the tomb will be excavated."

Scott Lanser responds.

Dear Sir,

In responding to your comment I must confess some incredulity in believing that your rather curt remarks reflect a serious attempt to understand or interact with a discussion on the transmission of the Bible (and specifically, the issue of whether or not the Bible was “changed” over the course of its transmission.) You approach the subject with such sheer dogmatism and self-assurance that it’s as if anybody with a brain would agree with your assertion. The fact is that the historical and textual evidence does not support your assertion.

Now, it is quite another matter altogether for one to believe that the Bible is the word of God (or not). You may have valid doubts and sincerely believe the Bible is not trustworthy. To conclude, however, that the Bible is nothing more than a document that has been continuously and arbitrarily changed or continuously and intentionally changed cannot be seriously supported.

If we consider the Old Testament, we discover that the Hebrew scribes copying the text took extraordinary steps to copy the text letter by letter and word for word. Keep in mind that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew, and its copyists believed they were copying the very word of God. They went to extraordinary lengths to produce a copy that was without error. Now, this does not mean that errors in copying did not occur, but it does mean that we should expect the copies, when compared over the centuries, to be almost exact. Indeed this is what the historical and textual record bears out. The Masoretic text of the Old Testament (written around 1,000 A.D.) would become the standard Hebrew text for another millennia (indeed, down to our current day.). This Hebrew text was based on earlier Hebrew texts, but up until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls, scholars were limited in comparisons with other more ancient Hebrew texts. With the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls that predate the Masoretic text by 1,000 years (they were compiled around the time of Christ) the whole story changed dramatically. With their discovery, scholars could confirm their staggering uniformity with the Masoretic text. A thousand years had passed without any significant change of the text.

When we consider the New Testament, we have approximately 6,000 early manuscripts that are over 99.5% textually pure. (There are many more manuscripts than this, but 6,000 that were actually composed close to the date of the writings of the autographs, the originals). In saying that the texts are over 99.5% pure, I am asserting that there was only one-half of one percent where discrepancies were encountered. Most of these discrepancies are made up of simple deletions of words, or misspellings, not whole-sale textual changes.

Lastly, keep in mind that when you suggest that changes have been made, it suggests a fairly common misconception that the Bible has been copied over thousands of years from one language, to another, to another…and so on. This is false. When a particular translation is prepared (at least in the case of an English translation), it is being translated from the parent languages that the Bible was written in. That is, from the original Hebrew in the case of the Old Testament, and from the original Greek in the case of the New Testament. It is simply untrue that the Bible has been rewritten and changed over the course of its history. In saying this, I am not asserting that there has never been any translation work that fell short of accuracy, or that the text of the Bible has always, in every case, been transmitted faithfully. Indeed, because we have such an amazing textual record, we can identify those manuscripts, or manuscript families that veered off the path of accuracy.

To conclude then, the task of textual study is enormous, and tracing out the process of copying and translation is extraordinary; however, when we look at both the broad lines of the subject, and at the specific processes involved, we can and should have confidence that we have an accurate translation of the Bible. Of equal importance, and of eternal consequence is whether or not you believe the Bible is the very word of God. We at ABR stand on the belief that God has spoken and has put His word in writing. Reading the Bible as a divine communication is life-transforming; alternatively, reading the Bible as a book full of errors, and a product of unaided, uninspired men, leaves a person empty and without hope. May God open our minds so that we will receive the Bible as His love-letter to us all.

“The fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as the ‘opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

—Albert Einstein

“The more I study science, the more I believe in God.”

–Albert Einstein

“I want to know how God created this world. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know his thoughts; the rest are details.”

–Albert Einstein

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

–Albert Einstein

“You accept the historical Jesus?”

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

–Albert Einstein, from an interview with the Saturday Evening Post

“Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations… To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.”

“There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.”

—Max Planck, the Nobel Prize winning physicist considered to be the founder of quantum theory, and one of the most important physicists of the 20th century, indeed of all time.

“Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly.”

“Something which is against natural laws seems to me rather out of the question because it would be a depressive idea about God. It would make God smaller than he must be assumed. When he stated that these laws hold, then they hold, and he wouldn’t make exceptions. This is too human an idea. Humans do such things, but not God.”

–Nobel Prize winning physicist Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics.

“…Those laws are within the grasp of the human mind. God wanted us to recognize them by creating us after his own image so that we could share in his own thoughts… and if piety allow us to say so, our understanding is in this respect of the same kind as the divine, at least as far as we are able to grasp something of it in our mortal life.”

–Johannes Kepler, the German mathematician and astronomer who discovered the laws of planetary motion which later served as one of the foundations for Issac Newton’s theory of universal gravitation. Kepler is considered to be one of the founders of the field of astronomy.

“Another source of conviction in the existence of God, connected with the reason and not with the feelings, impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.”

—Charles Darwin, the founder of evolutionary biology, as quoted in his autobiography

Here is more facts!

"It was a lie you read about my religious convictions. I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this." Einstein, 1954 the Human Side

"A mans ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, social ties and needs, no religious basis is necessary." Einstein "Religion and Science" 1930

"I believe in Spinoza's god who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a god who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings." Einstein replying to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein

Want more?

http://spaceandmotion.com/albert-einstein-god-religion-theology.htm

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When I see god, I'll believe it. I truly don't think he's possible, at least in my life as I firmly believe the bible was written by many people, none of whom lived at that time.

You know, it's like the telephone game. It begins with one story and by the time it gets to the last person, the story has changed appreciably and gets expanded with each one. This is what the bible has resulted in.

Just watched the Scopes trial. Not the famous movie with Spencer Tracy. You might find it interesting as well as some of the others in the side bar.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVD4TjxnJ0M