No, I do not believe the Bible is a lie or a conspiracy. This sort of reasoning only stands up if you believe that everything in the Bible was meant to be taken literally, every single story, the Old Testament, Jesus' parables, everything. I think people are sadly missing something if they feel threatened by the idea that something may be a myth rather than literal truth. In my book, the word "myth" is not synonymous with "lie." Myths teach us about the nature of life and they teach us wisdom. Within each myth are kernels of universal truth. This is lost if you get lost in the words themselves, and therefore anything that doesn't fit with them has to be rejected as wrong. Plenty of Christians are deeply religious, believe in the Bible, and accommodate the idea of evolution without feeling any conflict between the two.
Well said. Doubtless the bible is brimming with noteworthy parables and anecdotes which demonstrate how to live a moraly sound life. However, trying to convince me that some dude carted around the globe in a boat large enough to accomodate two of every single animal and then inbreed all the species back to life with those remaining two is like trying to convince me that the Easter Bunny really exists. Not all lessons to be learned need to be literal, and that's the tragic flaw in the scripture-obsessed western half of the Christian faith. If it says in the bible that snails are supernatural angels sent from heaven to watch over us then by god (no pun intended), the literalists will find a way to prove it.
Yet if these people are so devoted to uncovering truths, it stands to reason that they should be interested in uncovering the "miracles" and "supernatural phenomenon" outside the Christian doctrine as well as inside, right? Why not work at uncovering the PROVABLE wonders of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, etc.? I mean if these things are true and you know beyond any reasonable doubt and you're just uncovering the proof out of the goodness of your heart with no emotional interest or hope that your religion is the one religion, why not get to work on the non-Christian parables and show to us how they actually happened as well? Or at least be so kind as to disprove that they happened since Christianity, as some of you seem to say, is the one "true" faith and all the other thousands upon thousands of religions are ficticious hogwash right down to the very last one.
Let me take a wild stab in the dark here. Actually, no. Let me demonstrate my powers of divination, of foretelling the posts to come.
You're not going to prove the miracles of other religions because, uhm.. <insert cop-out excuse here>.
