Why Should We Take the Bible Seriously? | Andrew - Twinsburg | Atheist Experience 22.25

[Music] well I'm a Christian and I don't know where to start I'm just glad I got on the air sounds like you started wrapped up Congrats on your thousands episode thank you that's gotta be good well I wanted to start with something Jesus said in John 14:26 he says the Holy Spirit whom the father will send in my name he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you I think what he's making a reference to is that the 4 Gospels will be written this way ok when we look and we look at John 16:13 he's making a reference to the epistles and the Book of Revelations when he says but when he the Spirit of Truth come he will guide you into all truth so you've found some verses and you have an interpretation that suggests that they're pointing to the Gospels and the revelation of John yes ok I I don't understand what value that is because if somebody else could come up with another interpretation that they're pointing to something else but even if you're correct for somebody to say I mean somebody could have loaded Jesus could have literally said by the way after I'm gone there'll be some letters written about me there's nothing remarkable about that there's nothing it points to the divine and you know so I have no reason and tell somebody gives me a reason to believe that that the Bible is authoritative that is something that I should pay attention to I have no reason to pay attention to it I mean I do because I'm constantly talking to the people who believe it but I don't know maybe I just don't understand what point you're trying to get to well there's gotta be well there's a reason for the four Gospels the way they're written yes people believe something and they wrote it down well Matthew was written specifically for the Jews because when you look at the first miracle he did leprosy he he cleansed the leper in that in ancient Israel it was viewed as a punishment for sin yeah Matthew is over the top for for the Jews so Luke was most likely written first and Matthew and Mark generally are viewed as adopting things from our sorry Mark was written first in Matthew and Luke are generally viewed as adopting things from Mark as well as potentially a cue document however depending on which model you want but Matthew made everything Jewish Matthew is sought out to make make it appear that jesus answered all sorts of prophecy and goes back and even references things in the Old Testament that's the tour on the talk that aren't even there or aren't in the versions that we have so if we're in agreement that Matthew is constructed specifically to spin this story so that it would be appealing for the Jews what conclusion can we reach from that well I'm not saying you each gospel has a specific purpose I think do you think it's important the Gospels be congruous do you think the Gulf's Gospels should line up and agree with each other well John doesn't line up with the other three my question is do you think that the four Gospels should line up with each other and agree well some of them have not all of them have the same stories all right this story is covered by each of the four Gospels would you expect those stories in God's perfect word to agree um depends because we have four different authors Matthew Matthew and John where eyewitnesses know and go ahead we have no idea who any of the authors of any of the Gospels were but the bulk of scholarship doesn't identify any gospel author as an eyewitness and it looks like Mark had two if not three authors I believe and in fact mark I think has two if not three endings well yeah and there's secret ending and then there's the one that ends at 69 and then come back to the beginning of the call you said something interesting when you and you made two points and you said I think this verse says this and then you said well I think this verse says that do you find it odd do you think it's it's if you were listening to somebody who was speaking about the career and they were reciting a verse that was supposed to be absolutely true a hundred percents divinely inspired and authored as a in accord with God's will and you started the sentence about that verse with I think what do you say I mean does that sound right do you think we as human beings are should be interpreting or do you think the message should be clear and you don't have to say I think you can say I know the verse means this well I guess I should have said I know this so you know without a shadow of it in your mind that these verses have a specific intent and meaning yes question okay how do you know that and because a minute ago I think if I instead of correcting I think if I'd have asked you probably would have said that you know that Matthew and John were written by eyewitnesses correct and yet they weren't or they there's no reason to think they are because we don't know who wrote them well we know we know yeah well there are other I don't know where to go with this the mark marks getting it from Peter and Luke is getting it from Paul okay I'd ask how you know that but the thing is if you go look at the bulk of scholarship related to the authorship even just within the New Testament Matthew Mark and Luke are anonymous Gospels there's no mention of within them of who wrote them there and they're written in the third person John just says John a disciple of Jesus said that the only reason it gets that name is because it's self referential but you have no idea which John that is and the best scholarly dating of these things put them decades even as much as a century after the events that they're talking about so if you look at those and we don't know who wrote them I don't know how you could say that they were eyewitnesses when the best dating puts it in a position where they're not by witnesses and they're not written as if their eye witnesses and if Matthew and Luke are eyewitnesses or Matthew and if Matthews and I witness he doesn't have to borrow anything from another gospel you know what you Seth and I go see the same show I don't have to read Seth's review of it and it out clips from Seth's review and then add my own embellishments on top of it I can just tell you what I saw well we found the Pool of Bethesda in John 5 - we found the pool of Siloam in John 9 seven and we found the ostrogothic Isis which was in Matthew 26 57 and John 18 13 so we're finding archaeological evidence every day our key archaeological evidence of what the stories in the Bible know okay so the the position here is not the Bible is a fiction and nothing in there is real or mentioned I mean they talk about Jesus going in Jerusalem we know Jerusalem is real we don't even need archaeology for that you can't how do you find archaeological evidence for the first of all that would confirm authorship and and your your view that these were eyewitnesses but how do you find archaeological evidence that supports miracle claims or anything that would get to whether or not Jesus is divine I mean I rush it Russell you know years ago what's that don't yet I was just saying Russell years ago in the show came up with an example that all of us have used which is you know in a thousand years of archaeologists dig up new york city that doesn't tell us whether or not spider-man was real I guess that makes sense but when you look at all the books of the Bible we got 66 books in the Protestant Bible yeah yeah written by 40 authors and over 1,500 years written by an unknown number of authors but it's probably around that over many many years yeah but the main theme is paradise created Paradise Lost and paradise the story okay so why don't we just read Milton throw the Bible out read basics storytelling 101 yeah let's go through and read Joseph Campbell's series on myth stuff I mean what the fact that the Bible has a narrative that is common to humanity that shows up all over the place to me would seem to be evidenced that there's absolutely nothing remarkable about it that this is the sort of thing that we find well when you look at what he said in John 3:12 she said if I told you earthly things and you don't believe them how how can you believe heavenly things well first of all Jesus has not shown me anything earthly or otherwise well when you just look at the book of Job all the science in that all the Sun okay now we're tap-dancing on something like how do we get Jesus into the book of Job that was a that was a little bit of a leap for me yeah and and the sigh yeah well I can understand that but I want to come back if I if I may all right if we're when we have the Gospels and if the Gospels are divinely inspired God's perfect word instruction manual for all of humanity and the Gospels disagree and on I'm guessing on this show you must have covered it a thousand times I don't want to cover too much old ground but I mean the basics disagree with each other how Jesus lived where he went what he said what he didn't say how he died his resurrection there are four different conflicting versions of the empty tomb story in the gospel and the Gospels the four Gospels so if we know the Gospels disagree with each other and can't be trusted to agree with each other on something that is supposedly a perfect truth do you think we have good cause then to have real doubt about anything else that the Gospels or any other biblical book might say or state or claim well we found the Nazareth inscription which right after Jesus died they made it basically a capital offense to steal from attune so that's a good piece of evidence right there a good piece of evidence for what that they did not have an explanation for why the chin was empty okay so I I haven't looked up this story I have no idea about the veracity of it but I can tell you that a report that a law changed about grave-robbing isn't confirmation of an empty tomb or a missing body or somebody rising from the dead that is specific to any of these stories and what Jesus have subjected himself to the natural law in place when he was bending the laws of the natural world to to be the savior he would have done it his way anyway I mean the thing the thing is I always try to like remove yourself from and I'm not saying well you can do this but it's difficult remove yourself from saying I believe this and then looking at all the things that seem to support what you believe and instead look at it you know John Loftus is outsider test for faith if you didn't believe what would it take to convince you and if the claim is that there was an a tenor a Jewish rabbi that said things okay that's a completely mundane claim I'm fine with the fact that there were probably a bunch of those probably a lot of them named Yeshua even but if the claim is that there was an individual who raised the dead turned water to wine and healed the sick and the blind gave these passionate messages was killed as a heretic and then rose from the dead and ascended to heaven those are extraordinary claims and they require more than the story especially when you have multiple stories with different accounts even if even if the all of them lined up perfectly and said in roughly different words exactly the same thing that's still not sufficient evidence for this and if it were if that was the standard by which you felt that you could be reasonably convinced of something then you would have to believe every alien abduction scenario that comes along there's that some of those are far more similar than other things you would have to to believe you would have to accept multiple different religions because your standard doesn't get you to which one of these is right if any it's just this is the one I'm convinced of and now it just becomes nothing more than a well I believe it in blah blah blah it's an opinion well when we look at the Gospel of Luke he was a physician and he's the only one that mentions haematite grossest which is blood sweating which is very rare the most like rare condition on earth I found that fascinating that he mentioned that in the gospel well you know I think it's fascinating too because he described a condition an event that happened if people were being crucified and bled out don't you think that that would be happening to all of them or a good many of them no well this was before when he was praying in the gun right before he's crucified then he oh these are my sweating blood not bleeding water okay yeah so you the sweating blood and it's actually a rare condition it's like there's a couple people on earth that have it but it's a rare condition of the most rare conditions okay so a rather rare condition gets reported what does that have to do with whether or not the individual is divine well it mostly happens in death row inmates and this was the night before he was crucified I think that's pretty cool okay so other other people on the planet who are on death row have sweated blood so it's yeah an entirely mundane occurrence it may be rare but the death row inmates that sweated blood they're not God incarnate are they no but they're going to be uh they're going to be killed just like Jesus so what the point is there's nothing about that that leads that should lead anyone to believe that they're divine I have no problem with the notion that somebody got killed I have no problem well I'm gonna object to the killing I say I don't have any problem but you know I could grant that Jesus existed that he said things that he was killed and that gets us nowhere near whether or not he was raised from the dead and ascended to heaven because he's God I hear you and I wanted to explain you break what I've been told about Abraham and Isaac what you've been told by whom by a preacher okay that Abraham is God the Father Isaac is God the Son and the RAM that is sacrificed is the crown of thorns that Jesus wore in Matthew Mark and John cool story you believe it because somebody told you well yeah the Bible all right the preacher told you or then you went and read it in the Bible or both that's a a theist objection to the Bible yeah I I have a whole diatribe on the Abraham and Isaac thing but you know preachers apologists can do whatever they like to try to spin stories so that they're meaningful to people but in this one first of all I think his analogy fails miserably because it wasn't a crown of thorns that was actually sacrificed so if the RAM is analogous to the crown of thorns it's not like he put the RAM on Isaac and then killed him so this thing falls apart at every turn and he's trying to draw a connection between two stories and my point is we have no reason to believe that either of those stories are true so there's a there's a black out as one of my favorite shows and there's a moment where Lord Percy is describing the eyes of the Infanta and he's saying that they're bluer than the got a great stone of Galveston or whatever it was and it turns out he's never seen either and so Blackadder calls him out by saying that so what you're saying is something you've never seen is slightly less blue than something else you've never seen and that's what you're doing here with the Abraham Isaac story something that is not true and whose meaning may be questionable is barely comparable to something else that we don't have any reason to believe is true alright thanks for the talk sure thanks for calling thank out there let me throw this out look we've mentioned this before as an example but if you believe in a literal hell if you hold to D a diverse depart from me all you who are cursed into a lake of fire and everlasting damnation whatever the idea then is is that I'm God's child and I'm in a burning house and instead of God showing up and communicating exactly who he is what his nature is what he wants what I should do personally irrefutably he writes a letter and then he gives it to somebody else who gives it to somebody else and he has it translated and transcribed and passed around and then someone will eventually go and hand it to my child who's on the second floor of the burning house and I always thought you know this to me makes no sense how why would a personal God not want to make a personal connection that's irrefutable why in the world are we stuck with this this book that is such a mystery and such a mess and when people you know draw from the Bible it's it's hugely problematic so I don't know I just threw that out there is that what's that wash with you it's a bad example no no no it's funny and Ray Comfort is I mean he used to use that example you know they're basically we're not going to the door telling you that your house is on fire and I'm like okay but if you're knocking my door tell me my house on fire and we go for a tour on my house and you can't point to any fire you're just a nuisance you woke me up because you're convinced my house is on fire and I appreciate the fact that you care enough to get me out and out of my house if my house is on fire but when we investigate we find no fire we find no indication of fire we find no smoke wait and we we bring in five or six different people and you're sitting you're telling me my house is on fire when there's no evidence for it this person's telling me my house is flooding and these people are going like no that that's not right your house is fine so the key is to rely on the evidence to reach conclusions that's that's what skepticism is saying I'm not going to accept this until there's good reason for it

Channel: The Atheist Experience

Views: 509,832

Rating: 4.8695846 out of 5

Keywords: atheist experience, the atheist experience, theatheistexperience, atheist, atheism, atheist vs christian, atheist debate, religion debate, atheism debate, Matt Dillahunty (Broadcast Artist), belief, faith, reason, rational, proof, evidence, logic, fallacy, religion, religious, science, secular, Skepticism, skeptic, questioning god, doubt, is god real, agnostic, agnosticism, evidence for god, Christianity, Islam, morality, evidence for jesus, Jesus, Jesus Christ, debate, Bible, Bible contradictions

Id: Lvqmka8LYQ4

Length: 19min 59sec (1199 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018