Bret writes:
Percy, If you look at the verses that include the bat with the insect that fly that are unclean to eat it becomes clear the issue is not about the bat being a bird or a butterfly.
That's interesting, but I didn't make any arguments about bats, birds or butterflies.
I wasn't attempting to raise any specific objections to your arguments about the passage about clean and unclean animals. I was objecting to your approach. You seem to believe that if you simply deny that errors in the Bible are errors, that the Bible is therefore inerrant. You implement this approach by inventing contexts and interpretations for which the passage could be correct, no matter how strained.
Using your approach I could show any text errant. If I had a book that said, "The sky is green," I could just say, "There was probably a volcanic eruption nearby on the day this happened." This kind of exercise proves nothing.
In the same way, you postulate that the clean/unclean passage only considered legs that weren't used for jumping, despite that the Bible says no such thing. You say this because this is an interpretation under which the passage could be correct, and not because there's any indication that this is what the passage actually meant. And by the way, there are plenty of species of beetles that don't jump, probably most of them.
It's almost as if you and 36Christians are approaching this as some kind of test of religious faith, dutifully contriving some sort of rationalization for every Biblical error raised. It's an interesting exercise, I suppose, but it doesn't actually accomplish anything.
--Percy