Christians, Please don’t downvote comment if you upvoted post.
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I am both, it's complicated.
I believe in a Creator, and that Christ probably existed, and in the morals and SOME lessons provided by the Bible as as way to live a fulfilling, and moral life.
I do not believe in the BIBLE. I think it was written by Men, not God. Some is a practical JEWISH history (I'm not Jewish-don't care), but mostly it's metaphors, fictional stories, and myths created to entertain, explain the unexplainable or, like Aesops Fables, moral lessons. Man wrote the Bible for his own reasons. IMO, it would be like Humans 2500 years from now believing Silmarillion (Tolkien) is a factual account of history. Like Jefferson, I believe 99.% of the Bible should be tossed, or treated like any ancient fictional saga--with a great deal of study and inquiry but also a Great Deal of skepticism. God Told Me is nothing new. Jerry Falwell used it in modern times. If you look at Abraham from a modern, critical POV, he was definitely suffering from Schizophrenia. I could go on and on for a whole book on why the Bible is suspect simply from a reasoning, logical POV, including a whole book on why I, and many Biblical scholars, believe Paul (the founder of the Church) was a false prophet, liar, and con-artist. Everything he wrote should be burned in entirety, with prejudice.
If you want to read it, cool. But for me, I can't take the Bible seriously. It tweaks my nipples when Atheists use the Bible as an argument for why God doesn't exist, or you shouldn't believe in God. To me the two have nothing to do with one another. God (creator) Exists. The Bible is fiction written by Man to explain God.
I'll even go one further and state I believe, without doubt, God didn't create Man in His image. Man Created God in His image to explain what he couldn't explain. God, IMO, is not who any of you think IT is. It is inexplicable, beyond your human comprehension, so vast, so powerful, so Beyond Human you could not even See IT much less ever explain IT's existence. To believe your meager human mind Could explain God or what IT is --or God Forbid, Speak for GOD?---is the height of human arrogance and pride.
Very well articulated and put here. I resonate with most of everything you have layed out and is a breath of fresh air to see, although, obvious minority on "this" forum, a fellow introspective unconstrained and humble approach to thought belief and speaking to human arrogance displayed enabling the tool of Man made scripture and word of a higher power written by-----Man.
You're doing your last sentence. The Bible is supernatural and from outside of our time domain. It's impossible for men to have created it. Most people don't like the Bible because they love drinking, porn, and being their own gods in their minds for a few decades until, despite their intellect, they die like everyone else.
"The Masoretic Text is a traditional Hebrew text finalized by Jewish scholars around 1000 C.E. The Septuagint is a Greek translation of the Torah created by the Jews of Alexandria in the third century B.C.E. (The other books of the Hebrew Bible were translated over the course of the following century.) According to Septuagint tradition, at least 70 isolated ancient scholars came up with identical Greek translations of the Torah.
Which is the “original” Bible? How do we decide which of these two ancient texts is more authoritative? In “Searching for the ‘Original’ Bible” in the July/August 2014 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, Hebrew University of Jerusalem scholar and long-time editor-in-chief of the Dead Sea Scrolls publication team Emanuel Tov suggests we turn to the Dead Sea Scrolls to help us compare the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint."
Mostly copied from other texts by men to new texts in new languages that Men use. Written on paper men created, in ink (or whatever people used back then) Then Men decided which text would go in the Bible and which would be declared Apocrypha.
Do you hear yourself? This is like me saying, I don't understand how baths worked in Roman times. Must be Magic.
The basis of anyone who believes in God has to come from this point to start. You use a point of humility which most do not.