What is the biggest bible contradiction?

I tend to agree that God's love-hate attitude toward His own creation is the biggest contradiction.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

And yet, many Christians are singularly uncomfortable with Jesus being completely and utterly human. They claim that He wasn't married, that He never had children, that He never sinned.... Then how could He be "completely and utterly human"?Not only is the idea of completely human and completely God a contradiction, the popular notions of Jesus' "humanity" are also self-contradictory.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

But there is plenty of reason to claim otherwise. A respected Jewish rabbi of the period would have been married with children - that is the default condition. If anybody wants to claim he wasn't, the onus is on them to prove it. Well... not fully understanding of the human condition? When somebody tells you you need to be like a little child, you want Him to have spent a few sleepless nights with a sick one. I agree. But it isn't just the desire to sin that makes one "completely and utterly human" - it's the knowledge that we have sinned and the ability to deal with that knowledge.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Yes. If you've never been sick, you're not "completely and utterly human". If you've never been drunk or had a hangover, you're not "completely and utterly human". If you've never been in love, never hated, never been angry, never been jealous, never been emarassed, never wished you were dead, you're not "completely and utterly human"."Completely and utterly human" is a contradiction in itself. Nobody human is complete. We're each a subset of what makes up humanity.My point was that some Christians want Jesus to be "completely and utterly human" without any of the traits that make us human.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Yes. No.As I said, an important part of being human is the guilt - the knowledge that we are flawed and the responsibility to try to undo the damage caused by our flaws. I'd say the opposite: Jesus was created to be like humanity - but this thread is about contradictions, not profundiites. Bingo. If He was God, that would certainly be cheating, yes. You misunderstand your own analogy. Claiming that Jesus was God and man is like claiming that a person is teacher and student at the same time. If a teacher enrolled in his own class pretending to be a student, that would certainly be "cheating". Should we expect our teacher to walk around in baggy pants with His hat on backwards, saying, "Yo, yo," and calling everybody "dog"? Me.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Since when do self-procalimed "christians" get to decide who is Christian and who is not? The very fact that they do so calls their understanding of the Bible into question.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

So you're using the Catholic definition of heresy to decide who is a Christian?

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Not at all. We can recognize a flaw by recognizing a way to improve it. There is no reason to assume that the sum total of possible improvements adds up to "perfection" or "correctness". We can look to Jesus as an example of "better", not necessarily an example of "best" or "perfect". Which makes Him more than human (or less than human).Which is where the contradiction lies.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Why do you feel obligated to "reconcile" it? Why not just say a contradiction is a contradiction? (Especially when the reconciliation requires making up a phoney-baloney extra-Biblical doctrine. All you're doing is piling contradiction on contradiction.)

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Relative to the status quo. Of course. Doesn't it make sense to use a standard that exists - however flawed - rather than a "correct" standard that doesn't exist? I'm not using any "absolute". (Please erase that word from your dictionary.)I'm using my current position as the jumping-off point for where I want to go. I never said anything about an "underlying trend of the natural universe". I said that we have flaws that can be fixed. Thanks for granting permission. I think I'll take you up on it. No. I only compare myself to myself. I try to be better than I was yesterday.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Then we're going to need a new thread for you to explain to us what that "Universal description" is.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Nonsense.Your definition of heresy is circular: anybody who doesn't agree with your definition of heresy is a heretic. Yet another contradiction.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Nobody said anything against "intention in the contradiction". The fact is that the contradictions are there, even if you try to deny some of them and give cutsey names to some of them.A contradiction is a contradiction, regardless of any intent behind it. Of course, but not in this thread.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

That's a pretty good analogy (and dogmatists are usually so appallingly bad at analogies ).The artist (God) may be a work of art in himself (Himself). On the other hand, a painting (man) is not an artist (God) - it can't produce another painting.A painting (man) is an "image" of the artist (God) - his (His) personality is reflected in it (him). But an image is just an image - it is forever separate from its creator.No painting can be an artist. No man can be a God.

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC

Sure, a painter can become a painting. And then he can wash the paint off and cease to be a painting.But can he be a painter and a painting at the same time, or is he a painter only while painting? (Puts me in mind of the "writer" whose hasn't written anything in twenty years. Wouldn't "former writer" be a more accurate term?)

---

Help scientific research in your spare time. No cost. No obligation.
Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC