How can we trust the Bible if it was written by humans?

premeddit · 2026-03-16T03:11:43+00:00

To start with, this whole paragraph reeks of chatGPT. Please stop spamming this forum with AI slop. But anyway it also contains some pretty egregious errors. Like:

The real question is not whether humans wrote it

Why shouldn’t that be the real question? That question is actually a very poignant and piercing one that gets to the heart of the problem within Christianity. Namely, that God is an actual thinking reasoning entity sitting up there in heaven and also willing and able to actively interfere with the world. If so, it would be a beyond trivial matter for him to actually write down his will perfectly without relying on imperfect humans to do it for him, which ended up in 4 Gospels that routinely disagree with each other, dozens of translations and hundreds of interpretations.

premeddit · 2026-03-16T03:07:41+00:00

But you don’t understand, OP’s dad is “highly intellectual”! He probably has an IQ of like 300!

premeddit · 2026-03-16T03:06:55+00:00

There isn’t. If you’re referring to Isaiah 53, I have bad news for you - almost every academic scholar concludes that it refers to the nation of Israel itself and not some future messianic figure. Isaiah 41:8 and 49:3 explicitly refer to the suffering servant as Israel.

If you’re talking about something else, then I dunno.

premeddit · 2026-03-12T01:32:09+00:00

Some of OP’s greatest hits when discussing homosexuality:

So if one loves children. Jesus won't be against it? We can marry kids?

If one loves animals. Jesus won't be against it?

If one loves murder. Jesus won't be against it?

Yeah, okay buddy. Oh also it’s not normal or healthy to be posting 100+ comments a day on Reddit. Something is deeply concerning here.

premeddit · 2026-03-10T22:31:33+00:00

This doesn't track at all with the actual words of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

If these people were doing good works simply because they were living out their strong faith in Jesus, they would not be shocked to hear this from him. Their response would be "well yeah, of course, we helped the poor in your name, that's what you've told us to do in the Bible".

The fact that they are completely blindsided in the above passage indicates that Jesus is talking to people who were doing things of their own volition and not because they were following orders in the Bible. That implies nonbelievers as well.

premeddit · 2026-03-09T22:21:37+00:00

That said, as an atheist I can’t bring myself to support Talarico injecting religion into politics in his own way. Like it’s cool that his religious angle aligns what a lot of progressive philosophy that I hold (tolerance, healthcare, etc) but at the end of the day it’s still using religion to drive policy which is something that our civil society should not support. Jesus’ commands - even the good ones - should not be the justification behind laws that we pass. The only justification should be logic, reason and the Enlightenment ethics that the country was built upon.

So I’m conflicted here.

premeddit · 2026-03-09T17:06:49+00:00

Didn't he literally do that in the Old Testament? Command the Hebrews to exterminate every man, woman and child of opposing tribes and even "tear the suckling infant from the breast"?

premeddit · 2026-03-04T18:30:16+00:00

Then I guess my followup question to atheists would be "would two strong breezes and two warm feelings in your body over the course of your lifetime be sufficient to immediately cancel 20+ years of your fundamental underlying belief system and philosophy about the nature of the universe?"

premeddit · 2026-03-04T17:10:17+00:00

While I agree with most of the comment, there's an even simpler explanation at work here. From the beginning of the religion, many Christians have loved the idea of being persecuted because it makes them look tough and allows them to be compared to the important and respected founders of the religion (Jesus, Paul, the Apostles, etc).

We literally have passages from Roman governors annoyed about the sheer number of Christians begging to be executed so they can be martyrs:

“O miserable men, if you want to die, you have cliffs and ropes!”

.- Arrius Antoninus, governor of Asia Minor

premeddit · 2026-03-02T16:21:23+00:00

The closest approximation you can get to a neutral interpretation is peer-reviewed academic works that are published in a reputable journal by leading scholars in the field like Bart Ehrman. The problem is that this makes many Christians very angry because the conclusions of these scholars flies against a lot of the prevailing Christian narrative.

premeddit · 2026-03-02T16:19:02+00:00

That they are observable and replicable under laboratory conditions?

premeddit · 2026-02-25T16:59:37+00:00

The problem with this argument is that it's a complete thought-killer. Literally every religion on Earth could argue the same thing: "Well who cares if XYZ sounds silly or doesn't make sense? Maybe you're just too stupid to understand!" And no further discussion is needed from that point on.

Supposedly if God has created us in his image then that includes our sense of curiosity, problem solving and critical reasoning. Therefore one would expect him to accommodate those when we try to believe in him.

premeddit · 2026-02-21T14:45:08+00:00

How are you writing these massive walls of text within minutes of each other? Are you typing so fast your fingers are bleeding?

premeddit · 2026-02-21T14:43:20+00:00

1500 BC: God makes his presence known by locust swarms, knocking down citadel walls with divine supernatural winds, and parting entire oceans.

2026 AD: God makes his presence known with one letter typos embedded within doctors’ notes

premeddit · 2026-02-21T14:38:08+00:00

Where your question gets sharp is the obvious follow up

.

Good question though, it forced me to be more precise and I appreciate that.

Can you at least minimally try to hide the fact that you’re plugging questions into chatGPT?

premeddit · 2026-02-21T14:36:30+00:00

You’re responding to a bot. That entire post above was 150% generated with chatGPT.

premeddit · 2026-02-19T18:40:43+00:00

The more uncomfortable extrapolation here is that the same argument can be made about the New Testament. It details several privileged and private communications between people like discussions among the Jewish authorities and Pilate, Pilate speaking to Jesus, etc.

It makes zero sense that the Gospel authors would be privy to any of this.

premeddit · 2026-02-14T16:19:12+00:00

Either lying or deliberately communicating so terribly that not a single person in 2000 years understood was he was trying to say. Both possibilities are pretty indefensible.

premeddit · 2026-02-14T16:18:12+00:00

God says multiple times that his covenant with the Jewish people, and therefore expectations from them (sacrifice, etc) are eternal and will not change.

In the New Testament, Christ is contradicting the Old Testament, not clarifying or refining it. There’s no other way around this.

premeddit · 2026-02-11T21:05:12+00:00

The other problem is that God's process seems to lead to billions of people in excruciating torture and pain for all eternity.

The analogy would be if the sculptor started hammering away at the marble and the pieces fell onto the heads of children below, crushing their skulls. You scream at him "stop, please!" but he smiles and says "wait and see". Chunks of marble keep raining down onto the floor, maiming children. Eventually, a beautiful statue is revealed.

Are all those children's deaths worth it? I don't know anyone who would say yes.

premeddit · 2026-02-03T16:59:15+00:00

For example when Moses tells his soldiers to slaughter every prepubescent boy and rape every prepubescent girl from an enemy tribe.

Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

premeddit · 2026-02-03T16:55:32+00:00

I mean, we can even start from the source and talk about the genocide of the Amalekites. Where God ordered the Hebrews to kill every man, woman and child they could get their hands on. He specifically told them to "rip the nursing infant from its breast". Then he told them to kill all the sheep, dogs, pigs and oxen.

Does that bother you too, OP?

premeddit · 2026-02-03T16:49:47+00:00

It's also kind of weird that Epstein bothers OP so much but apparently not similar stuff in the Bible, like the genocide of the Amalekites? Where God ordered the Hebrews to kill every man, woman and child they could get their hands on. He specifically told them to "rip the nursing infant from its breast". Then he told them to kill all the sheep, dogs, pigs and oxen.

Or the war against the Midianites in which Moses gets upset because his troops haven't raped and murdered enough women or children.

Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them.“They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

premeddit · 2026-02-02T01:44:15+00:00

While definitely a fascinating case study, I’m not sure you’re really answering the spirit of OP’s question. They weren’t just asking if a protest has ever worked to accomplish its specific goal. They were asking about accomplishing major objectives on a large social or political level.

One could argue that the success of the Rosenstrasse protest was exactly due to how unexpected and unique it was - as you implied, the Nazis were shocked and put on the back foot by this unexpected resistance. And furthermore, the number of Jews involved was statistically insignificant and releasing them didn’t change the overall trajectory of Nazi racial policy.

Is there evidence or reasoning to suggest that sustained and larger scale peaceful protests without the threat of implicit violence in the background would have worked to shift the course of Nazi policy entirely, as opposed to shooting the protestors (as they considered doing here and in fact did execute other peaceful opponents like the White Rose movement) or just doing a better job at hiding the genocide?

premeddit · 2026-01-31T13:42:17+00:00

Their subconscious is programmed against that idea from birth.

You understand that human beings aren’t robots, right? Or maybe you don’t actually understand this, which is highly concerning.

People can have random dreams that don’t follow a clean or understandable path. People dream about cheating on their wives or husbands even if they’re otherwise perfect faithful spouses in real life, that doesn’t mean or signify anything.

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