Welcome! Firstly, my apologies if I failed to notify you about this post – I always try to do so when I quote someone or reference their blog.

I’m propossing the Bible makes sense whether it’s true or not. If it’s not true it would almost be required to make more sense, in order to attract the billions of followers it has drawn from throughout history.

What you are suggesting would imply that other religions which (from what I’ve read) are equally as confused and self-contradictory as the Bible, must also be true. Surely if Hinduism was a lie, they’d have written a better lie, no?

If the Bible is a message from God, intended to communicate a message to all of humanity, then it is most surprising that it has failed to do that consistently. It seems that there are many Biblical matters, some important, some less so, on which Christians cannot agree. I think these people are sincerely trying to understand what they think God is telling them, but they come to very different conclusions. We may not be able to tell which (if any) of them are right, but we can tell that most of them must be wrong. A little under a 3rd of the world population self-identify as Christian, within which there are still widely differing beliefs. It’s safe to say that if God is trying to communicate a consistent message to humanity, He’s failing.

So why should a book so apparently nonsensical be so popular? Over on Daylight Atheism recently, commenter Scotlyn brilliantly suggests:

Perhaps unreadable, contradictory, infantile holy books work so well because they can function as a Rorschach test – what readers see on the page reflects whatever happens to be in their heads. If such books were more lucidly written, they might force the reader’s attention away from “what they want to see” towards “what is written there” and trigger a more critical approach.

“I think the assumption that the Bible makes sense is unwarranted.”

Either 1) the Bible is a message to us from the true God, so if he is indeed communicating with us it would have to make sense.
Or 2) the Bible was created to deceive people into believing a false religion. If you were making the Bible up, knowing that it wasn’t true, why would create something that didn’t make sense? Nobody would fall for that. If you’re telling a lie, wouldn’t you want to tell a good lie?

I’m propossing the Bible makes sense whether it’s true or not. If it’s not true it would almost be required to make more sense, in order to attract the billions of followers it has drawn from throughout history.

St Anthony preaching to fish.
St Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds and other creatures.

Matt M, I’m not so sure about that. It’s easy to say that reason should take precedence when the closest that exists to science is still called “natural philosophy,” before the use of reason can threaten some of the most integral concepts in the texts. Suppose Augustine were suddenly to spring into existence again, and see the divergence between the Genesis story and modern evolutionary theory. That’s quite a larger conflict than the ones Augustine probably dealt with, and I don’t think it’s safe to assume that someone who said reason should prevail, when the biggest conflicts were probably small textual quirks like the one addressed in this post, to carry over that principle in the later centuries, in much bigger issues.

Well, according to some of most famous Christian thinkers (Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) that’s what you’re supposed to do. Augustine – in the 4th century! – argued that if the Bible comes into conflict with reason it’s the latter that should win out. You can just imagine him slapping his forehead in despair at the Biblical literalists around nowadays.

the chaplain – Well I’d call that a success! Praise be! ;-)