My own scepticism about taking the O.T. narratives at face value came from Jesus comdemnation of the Book keepers of his time. My reasoning was simple, if they weren't afraid to kill God's son so they could inherit God's property, why would they have kept God's revealed words in it's integrity? Why not distort a phrase here so the meaning would be that "the high priest is always infaillible" and replace a couple of words there so the meaning would be that "the gold of the temple is more valuable then the temple".

Geek, funny you should say this....

But Christ told them: "It is given unto you (His disciples) to know the mysteries of the Kingdom of heaven, but to them it is not given ... therefore I speak unto them in parables (puzzles): because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand.

"And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive:

"For this people's heart is waxed gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them! " (Matthew 3:10-16).

Christ was telling them He was making a conscious decision to speak in puzzling terms, lest those people should understand, and become converted! Jesus Christ was referring to the O.T. many times....to me this indicates that it must be a valid.source of information....

 

15:8 �?B>This people honors me with their lips, but their heart13 is far from me,

15:9 and they worship me in vain, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.�?14

If this was so with their teachings, what about the Book that was the basis of their doctrines?

He said: "Think NOT that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets:

I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill" (Matt. 5:17). Christ lifted the law to a spiritual plateau, applied God's Ten Commandments in a spiritual sense, showing that the law was broken even by "thoughts of the human heart", and not by the breaking of the letter of the law only.

The basis of their doctrines were their own teachings, their own interests.

This polarisation is rapidly becoming an issue of 'blind faith' versus 'scientific scepticism' with little room for compromise. How can an academic then reconcile the two opposing sides?

Well, you are right Geek...

Evolution directly contradicts the Bible, which says "In the beginning God created..." Evolution says, instead, "In the beginning was the hydrogen atom."

Hmm, whichever way you look at it, it takes faith, except in the latter case, also a miracle.

So which came first...?

cath,

 

The commandment of God is Love. It is somewhere inside us all, we are build with it. We Love God, therefore we Love God's creation, therefore we Love God's creature, therefore we Love Humanity, therefore we Love our self.

 

 

The commandments of men are in books. Like anything men do, they should pass. When Jesus talks in parables he does not talk for our mind to understand, he talks for our hearts to understand. When our hearts are too harden by the laws of men, we don't understand.

 

When a tribe wanted to justify their temporal superiority over another one, they invented an origin myth or transform another creation myth to put themselves on top of the god(s) favored children so to pretend that it was so from the begining and would stay so to the end of time. But this is from what is called anthropomorphic deism. We put our will and vision of the world as the will and vision of god. There is were I trace the line between mythology and true faith. When I read that god was angry at this person, it's mythology. When I read that God is "like" a father or the kingdom of God is "like" a wineyard, this sounds to me the true way to talk about it. Jesus parables speak more truth to me than any story about God writing magically his 10 commandments on a stone with an hebraic alphabet that wasn't invented yet.