The Atheist Experience

So you wanted me to scroll down to the last sentence, which is this one. When you stick in a word like "really" you introduce so many different possible ways of understanding what you are asking it makes it rather hard to answer. But we are told in the New Testament that what God wants of us is to KNOW Him, and those who believe, and read the Bible and pray, in fact do know Him, though knowing Him will be a project for all eternity, not something easily accomplished.The more the debates go on here at EvC the more I find myself pulling back to my simple traditional belief passed down through the conservative Protestant lines. I trust those in the conservative traditions who have studied the history of the Bible manuscripts and concluded it is to be trusted. I'm convinced particularly of the trustworthiness of the KJV as I've understood the revision of 1881 to have been a terrible hoax on the Church, making use of corrupted manuscripts. Read the Bible and believe it, that's the wise thing to do, all the carrying on about languages and different authors is just a distraction. Trust it, read it, believe it. Period.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I do often have a hard time figuring out what on earth you are getting at, and this post is such an occasion. I'm going to respond to your last paragraph now though and possibly come back to the rest later: That is ridiculous. The religion of Jesus is Christianity and we get it from the biblical accounts. Even the RCC had the main outlines of it buried in their pagan superstitions and God made sure His own found the truth there. But the Protestant Reformation recovered the whole Bible and restored the whole religion of Jesus to us. The surrounding culture has no part in this, it all comes from reading and absorbing the Bible, and as a matter of fact it was the other way around: the Bible, the accounts of Jesus, transformed the culture of Europe. Why would I want to? The gospels were all written in Greek. Since they don't speak Hebrew in Chine what would be the benefit of having a "gospel" in Hebrew, whatever that is? Again, no reason I know of why they should. Well I strongly disagree. And if you look it up on Wikipedia you'll find that Christianity was established very early in England, only along with so many pagan religions it didn't emerge as dominant until later. There was no Roman Catholic church at that time, and when the church did get established it was indeed the Celtic Church. Do you consider St Patrick to be a myth too?. Because he was an English Christian in the early fifth century who became a missionary to Ireland, establishing a very strong Celtic Church there. He died in Ireland in 461 AD. Later "missionaries" from the Roman Church forced their version of Christianity on the British Isles at swordpoint, killing the whole early Celtic Church. Now we see St. Patrick depicted as a Catholic Bishop in that ridiculous pointy hat, but in reality he was a very rough guy who lived in extremely primitive conditions as a missionary, a missionary representing the CELTIC church, having no relation whatever to Roman Catholicism.Ten years ago I wrote a blog post based on a book I'd read about Patrick which presented a very tough and admirable man instead of the fancy-robed "bishop" image the RCC turned him into.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.Edited by Faith, : No reason given.

I think you are making this way too difficult. It's the Book of Revelation that reveals that the snake in the Garden of Eden was Satan, you don't need any apologetics to make the case. And that's the only place Satan is depicted as a snake, otherwise he appears throughout scripture as the fallen angel he is.

Hint: The Bible is to be read as a whole, and all its parts are to be read in the context of all the other parts of it. Standard rules there.

The contemporaries of any given part of the Bible would only have it up to that part but they would have known to read it all as one piece. Cuz it isn't any ordinary collection of writings, they all work together in amazing ways if you understand them as God's own revelation.