Red Tory/ Blue Tory?

[Leader Circle]

Blah blah blah blah.

Is any of this useful? NO! Another Bible hater who wants to find the meaning of life from tea leaves!

I do not agree with people who will use the Bible for their convenience or people who will use the translation argument for anything that does not suit their cause. Homosexuality is wrong according to the Bible and Sodom & Gommmorah is a fine example of that, I am sorry to be the one to tell you that and it really hangs a cloud over what you believe, but I believe the Bible not you.

I'm not using the Bible for any cause. I'm just pointing out that it has been proven that the Bible was continuously changed by humans to suit their purposes for hundreds of years. Since it is simply a flawed human text it would be foolish to use as the grounds to condemn any other religion, gender, race or sexual orientation.

This is true, but the King James version seems to be the undisputed version that most of the world follows. You are right that is has been changed to a certain extent, but the message seems to be the same. A few misspelled words or sentence structure is not enough to destroy a complete doctrine I am sure.

If you are going by the "Da Vinci Code", Dan Brown's book, it has been picked apart quite effectively and though he brought up some good points, he was writing a fiction novel.

It is a futile attempt to justify smearing the Bible to save some face, by saying the translation has changed over time. The true translation from Hebrew probably has some serious differences, but the message stays relatively the same.

"Forever oh Lord, thy word is settled in Heaven" Psalm 119:89 KJV

[MightyAC]

This is true, but the King James version seems to be the undisputed version that most of the world follows. You are right that is has been changed to a certain extent, but the message seems to be the same. A few misspelled words or sentence structure is not enough to destroy a complete doctrine I am sure.

If you are going by the "Da Vinci Code", Dan Brown's book, it has been picked apart quite effectively and though he brought up some good points, he was writing a fiction novel.

It is a futile attempt to justify smearing the Bible to save some face, by saying the translation has changed over time. The true translation from Hebrew probably has some serious differences, but the message stays relatively the same.

"Forever oh Lord, thy word is settled in Heaven" Psalm 119:89 KJV

There are far more than a few misspelled words and I'm not going by the DaVinci Code. A great book on this topic is "Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why" by Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is chairman of the department of religious studies at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He is one of the most respected religious historians in the world and he has proven that some very significant changes have been made. As a result of his findings Ehrman, formerly are very religious man, has lost his faith entirely. I have posted two links. The top one is a newspaper article about the book and the second is a link to the publisher’s page. The book may be available at your local library, I urge you to read it and investigate your faith. In the end you may decide to believe that the changes, omissions and added stories are not enough to alter your faith but you should always keep it in mind when you use the Bible to defend hatred of any kind.

http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/arti.../601280384/1007

http://www.harpercollins.com/global_script...isbn=0060738170

[MightyAC]

Oops.. It looks link to the newspaper site is no longer active. The publisher link still works though.

Here is the text of the newspaper article if anyone is interested.

Scholar doubts Bible's inerrancy

Researcher says changes occurred to the Good Book throughout history

By Yonat Shimron

Raleigh News & Observer

RALEIGH, N.C. -- For more than 30 years, Bart Ehrman has been driven by a quest to explore the origins of the New Testament -- a quest that has made him one of the most distinguished scholars on the history of the biblical text and the early church.

Now he has written a new book outlining his research, which has led him to lose his faith and others to re-evaluate their relationship to the Scriptures.

"Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" is Ehrman's attempt to explain to non-scholars some of the findings of New Testament historians and translators during the past 300 years. For those who believe the Bible emerged more or less intact, his research may be eye-opening. Ehrman, who is chairman of the department of religious studies at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, hopes the findings challenge readers to see the Bible in a new way.

"For most people, the Bible is a non-problematic book," Ehrman said. "What people don't realize is that they're reading translations of texts, and we don't have the originals."

The premise of "Misquoting Jesus" is that the New Testament has evolved over time. In the first few centuries after Jesus' crucifixion, scribes manually copied the books that would ultimately compose it. In the course of reproducing the manuscripts, they accidentally or intentionally made thousands of changes to the texts. Although most of those changes were insignificant, Ehrman argues some were theologically driven and intended to settle disputes that raged in the early church over doctrine and belief.

Among the many examples he cites is the story of the adulterous woman who is brought before Jesus. The story, which appears in the Gospel of John, includes one of the most familiar verses in the New Testament, in which Jesus tells the group who brought her, "Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her," John 8:7.

This story, however, is not found in any of the oldest manuscripts of John's Gospel. Until the fourth century when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, scribes were not professionals but simply educated people who knew how to write. They took liberties with the text in ways unimaginable in today's world of standard practices and copyright laws.

In the case of the passage in John, scholars think scribes added the story in the margins of the manuscript and eventually other scribes inserted it into the text itself.

Then there are the more theological changes made to the text with the intention of silencing alternative theologians who denied the full divinity of Christ.

When scribes translated the Greek manuscripts into Latin, for example, they embellished on a passage explaining the Trinity, which is the Christian belief that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The oldest versions of the epistle of 1 John, read: "There are three that bear witness: the Spirit, the water and the blood and these three are one."

Scribes later added "the Father, the Word and the Spirit," and it remained in the epistle when it was translated into English for the King James Version.

Daniel Akin, the president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said he continues to view the Bible as the inerrant, inspired word of God, even as he accepts that changes were made in the text, including the embellishment on the Trinity formula.

"Inerrancy of Scripture pertains to the original documents," Akin said. He concedes that there are no original documents, only copies. But through studying the ancient text, scholars have been able to recover 98 percent to 99 percent of the original words, he said.

"I don't know any reputable scholar who would say that the changes bear significantly on doctrine," Akin said.

Others disagree. More liberal interpreters say the changes made by the scribes are nothing if not troubling. They say the centuries of edits lead to one conclusion -- that the Bible, rather than being a divine document is, in fact, a very human one.

"The mechanism by which the Holy Scriptures came into contemporary form is much more messy than most Christians like to admit," said the Rev. Jack McKinney, the pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh.

Indeed, for Ehrman the changes were so messy they caused him to lose his faith entirely.

"Given the circumstance that (God) didn't preserve the words, the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn't gone to the trouble of inspiring them," Ehrman writes.

[Black Dog]

If I seem pissed off, it's because I am. I am so tired of hearing about another cause or protest, trying to disrupt other people's lives to get what you want. There are lots of people in Canada who don't get their way, yet not all of them feel the need for a protest, screaming human rights and the Bible is a hate book!!

Most of this shit is caused by left wing homosexuals with no ambition but to cause havok on the rest of the country, because they don't want to work and want the government to pay their way.

Please explain how the change in the legal definition of marriage has affected your life. Seriously.

[Slavik44]

You talk about hatred, yet your post is chock full of hatred and distain for me and people like me.

Your post is also quite full of contradictions and I don't know where to begin.

I have never called myself a christian and don't represent the church the way it deserves it. As I told Oddman, I was raised on the Bible and was taught about the wrongs of homosexuality and I believe it. The fact that you HATE the Bible & people who support it, shows your intolerance and distain for Godly things. It seems you have more issues to deal with than my ignorance to things pertaining to homosexuality. If you misunderstood where I was headed when bantering with oddman, I am sorry if I offended you in the process.

You and I will disagree on this part and it is okay, because in the end, you have the upper hand. Same sex marriage is legal in Canada...you won!! Good luck to you, sorting out your hatred for traditional marriage.

I hate you???

Now hold on a second I think maybe you are putting words in my mouth and taking things a bit to far. It would be very tough for me to get through a day if I walked around hating everyone who believed int eh bible, because ahtred by definition is such an intense feeling that it requires action to be taken. If I hated people who believed the bible I would probabley be in jail by now.

I simply have a problem, when people attempt to use the bible to justify discrimination, especially considering this discrimination is downright hipocritical according to the very book you are using as your defense to make these claims.

Yes I am opposed to that, but you are strongly sensationalising things when you suggest I hate over a billion people.