It seems you do not quite understand innominate.
Judges 1:19
The point here wasnt whether the translation was he or they. The point was that they had lost their trust in God again, and so because of their lack of faith (due to the Iron Chariots), God did not allow them to conquer them.
Every translation there uses a phrase meaning "could not", as opposed to "decided not to allow". If the pronoun is "he" and not "they", then the verse is quite explicitly saying that God was unable to conquer the people of the valley because they had chariots of iron. If the pronoun is "they", then it is simply a failure of the people of Judah.
Isaiah 20:2-4
Arguments like these show true hatred for the bible, and are not meant to be intellectual. Right here, as much as I hate to say it, you are sounding like iampostal.
There are 146 verses that use a word relating to circumcision (some of these are even being used as a metaphor for purity), and it was a requirement to get into heaven before Jesus. Heaven was even denied to men who had crushed genitalia, and couldn't offer bread to god. Women were unclean after birth (interestingly only 7 days for a male child but two weeks for a girl) and during and after menstruation (so presumably half the time that they're not pregant; they also make anybody who has sex with them unclean). Men on the other hand were unclean if they had a "running issue out of his flesh" (i.e. a sexually transmitted disease) or ejaculated (making their partner unclean in the process). All these different things have very specific instructions and take up a fair chunk of Leviticus.
There are 218 separate references to sex or genitalia (dealt with over many more verses), including extensive, specific restrictions on what you can or cannot have sex with. By comparison, there are 100 references to Hell; perhaps less if certain phrases like "the outer darkness" are taken not to mean Hell. There are far more references to heaven, over 551 (which is how many verses in the KJV use that word). So if we were to take the occurrence of these themes as indications of God's priorities, we would have to conclude that sex and genitalia are more important than Hell but less so than heaven.
The references to sex are not single verses but verse chunks, so the actual span is greater than that at 608 verses (I used a nifty program to sum up the number of verses on the Skeptic's Annotated Bible page about sex (
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/sex/long.htm)). This would put it past the post of heaven, except the treatment would be unfair, since the heaven references (which I can't be bothered to count) were single verses not chunks; heaven still beats sex.
Malachi 2:3
You know what is interesting? Out of the three bibles I have with me right now, all of different types, The first one has an OT that is 1252 pages long, the second has an OT that is 1186 pages long, and the third has an OT that is 1368 pages long. How does 10 references even 20 or 30, that hardly take up an entire sentence, show that God is obsessed with the things you mentioned?seems like it isnt even 1% of what is talked about.
However, I just wanted to quickly point that out, as it relates to your response to the above verse as well. However this seems to be another argument born out or resentment, and not out of intellect, so I am leaving it alone as well.
It was indeed hyperbole. The point I was trying to make was that dung, semen, menstrual fluid and urine make much more of an appearance in the Bible than we would expect from a book written by a god, but pretty much the same amount we would expect from a book written by iron age nomads (later, when there are fewer references to those emissions, happens to coincide with the Israelites settling down and hence not having to worry about dealing with filth in a campsite - the circumstances of the Israelites drove what they wrote, not any god).
Numbers 22:20-22
No the point is that you have to actually look at the entire scripture instead of just one verse to truly understand ANYTHING in the bible.
So how do you decide which verses are kosher and which aren't? When the Bible says "God is Love" nobody raises any objections that verses are being taken out of context or anything. It's only when a verse says "God killed him because he did what God told him to do" that we find that apparently you need to read the entire scripture. Well God killed over 2,391,421 people in the Bible (and that's just the ones where explicit numbers are given; he probably killed more than that just with the flood), drowned the entire planet's population, ordered genocide against the Amalekites, let Satan destroy a man's life and kill his entire family for a bet and destroyed entire cities. So when the Bible says "God is Love", do they mean "God Loves to kill things"?
Hosea 8:4
It seems many bibles consider the proper wording here to be acknowledged and not a lack of truth. When you can't look at the hebrew, and yet see discrepancies in the different versions, a good practice is to compare it to the rest of the bible, and see which translation appears to be more accurate.
Thats all from me for now, I like reading long posts, but I hate sorting through my own long ones.
The word translated as "knew" is יָדַע, transliterated as "yada". It's translated as "acknowledge" 6 times in the KJV, out of 947 appearances in total. נָכַר, "nakar", is the only other Hebrew word ever translated as "acknowledge" in the KJV, translated so 7 times out of 50 appearances. Now it's certainly possible that "acknowledge" is the intended meaning - it would fit with the common Hebrew poetic technique of repetition (from the NIV: "They set up kings without my consent; they choose princes without my approval." and the only other Bible to translate it differently from knowledge is the World English Bible), and without a more detailed knowledge of how Hebrew words connote different things I'll have to let this one go.
The parable is on the right track, but it misses something in the scale. All religion is guesswork, and the guessing covers a much broader scale than an elephant's different parts; for one thing, not all possible religions have been formulated. The sheer number of possible theologies is staggering, and every religion has a diametric opposite. In other words not only is it possible to be wrong by not guessing correctly, it's possible to be 100% wrong by guessing the opposite of the truth. There are so many different areas in which a religion could differ that the chances of getting even a small fraction of them correct is infinitesimal.
The underlined statement is an assumption, and one that can only be reached by discarding all almost all testimony coming from religious persons, only for the reason that it came from a religious person.
It's not that it came from a religious person. It could come from 200 ft high writing on cliffs that appeared overnight and it wouldn't change the central problem: whether it is true or not is impossible to prove. There is no way to differentiate between genuine and false divine inspiration, so it comes down to guesswork. It's like which interpretation of quantum mechanics you favour: they're all identical in their predictions, so nothing we could do would provide evidence for one that wasn't applicable to all of them. Thus the interpretation you choose is guesswork.
It sounds ridiculous
This is really starting to look more like flinging insults then a serious examination of the argument.
My argument is that the Bible is preoccupied with earthly details, particularly the Old Testament. Rather than holding special knowledge, the Bible is exactly what we would expect if it was written by the people who were alive then, and very little like we would expect a book written by a god to be. God in the Old Testament is war-like, much like the Israelites were. Later on when the Israelites have established themselves and no longer need to fight every tribe in the area, God stops telling them to fight other tribes. Where was the New Testament message of peace and love when the Israelites were fighting to survive? About 2,000 years away, that's where. Only when the authors of the Bible no longer needed to fight did God stop telling them to fight.
God didn't lead the Israelites; the Israelites led God. There's some interesting research which suggests humans endow God with the beliefs we already hold (here (
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18216-dear-god-please-confirm-what-i-already-believe.html)), and the Bible fits well with that notion.
Invisible Pink Unicorn
We can also trace hunger back to specific nerve impulses and areas of the brain. That does not mean food does not exist.
If we can simulate the effects of a religious experience by modifying the brain then it means that religious experience is no longer a valid argument for religion. It doesn't prove that religion is false, just as hunger being rooted in the brain doesn't prove food doesn't exist, but it does mean that a genuine religious experience isn't the only explanation.
Can I ask for a source on how you can trigger a UFO sighting or enlightenment by running current through someone's brain? I can't think of anyway someone could run that experiment without severely violating some human rights.
Triggering out of body experiences and "shadow presences" by stimulating the angular gyrus (
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/health/psychology/03shad.html?_r=1)
The Neuropsychiatry of Paranormal Experiences, Michael Persinger (
http://neuro.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/13/4/515#SEC5)
The website of the "God Helmet", called the Shakti (
http://www.shaktitechnology.com/neurotheology.htm)
UFO sightings are an "attribution error", where a visual hallucination is attributed to an alien craft rather than the brain 'misfiring'. UFO abduction stories are more often confabulation, or the rewriting of a memory to explain things that the brain doesn't accurately remember - everybody does it, because the brain can't hold all memories perfectly accurately. Sometimes it just kind of stores the big parts and then fills in the gaps. Sleep paralysis is sometimes interpreted as a UFO abduction as well; you can't move and the brain is still in a dream state (and so you see weird images), but you feel like you're awake. Some people get the problem all the time, while most never do. It has been researched quite a bit in laboratories.
You're still taking statements of "I saw that for myself" as "I think that happened"
Because ultimately that's what all such statements are. Optical illusions show how easily we can be misled about reality.
Dead Sea Scrolls
It seems you have two different arguments here, and they directly contradict one another.
One states Gospels don't match each other, and the other says they match each other too closely and are therefore plagiarized.
Sections of the gospels, not the gospels as a whole. If three people who concocted a story together are asked about it, they will use extremely similar phrasing, detail and an identical order of events. On the other hand if you ask these same three people, separately, to make up a story about the same thing on the spot then they will disagree on major details. These are the two different types of miracle account in the Bible: some are copied from each other while others are concocted about the same event separately. I don't know why some events are copied while others are concocted, but it's most likely because the authors wanted to inject their own message into some events and not others.
The disciples state that the writers of each Gospel checked with the other disciples to confirm he wasn't misrepresenting the story. This can answer both arguments quite handily, since a) it isn't plagiarism if you cite your source and b) if there were such condemning differences between the narratives as you suppose, why would they have left them in? An event may be missing from one of the Gospels because the author wasn't there, or there are several places where the authors state that there were more signs & wonders performed, but not all of them were recorded in that book.
Even when people check with others the phrasing is bound to differ. The same person writing two accounts of the same event a few months apart will differ more in their summary than the Gospels do, as will the same person telling two different people the same story. The only place the near-verbatim copies could have come from is the actual text itself. The Gospels were not written independently but with full knowledge of the preceding Gospels (except for John's, which does appear to have been written independently, and Mark's, which was the first). There is little evidence to suggest that the Gospels were actually authored by any of the discisples. Mark's gospel was most likely written after 65 AD, and John's after 90 AD.
The reason the differences were left in was probably because the gospel authors didn't intend for them to be read together: Matthew's gospel was most likely intended to be read by Jews, Mark's by Romans and Luke's by Greeks, while John probably didn't have a specific audience in mind but wrote long after the others. Further, they probably disagreed with each other over what was more important.
Also, if an "event may be missing from one of the Gospels because the author wasn't there", why do we have the story of Jesus in the desert and his prayer in the garden of Gethsemane? Which of the authors was there when Jesus was alone in the desert, or alone when praying the night before his death? It's hard to see how those could be sourced from an eye-witness when the text itself says there was none.
