next you can get into the geneology of jeebus, and then in the end go..."Oh, but it doesn't really matter b/c all the lineages are traced through joseph and joseph wasn't his actuall father so it doesn't matter."

I got these contradictions from one of Rook's blogs. You can use it for your game.

Here are some MAJOR problems with Galatians and Acts:

1. Galatians states that Paul didn't talk to anybody about his conversion for THREE YEARS during his time in Damascus and outlining regions. (Galatians 1:17). Yet in Acts, Ananias and the other disciples of Jesus were AT Damascus, healed Paul's sight, and baptized him. A few days later, he was PREACHING about the Lord. (Acts 9:17-20)

2. In Galatians Paul didn't SEE a Disciple/Apostle for THREE YEARS – until he saw Peter and James (That's the ONLY TWO) in Jerusalem after those three years. (Gal. 1:18-19) In Acts, however, Paul spent a few days with many disciples in Jerusalem and Damascus (The Bible states "ALL the Apostles" – Acts 9:19)

3. Paul fled at once (RSV) to Arabia and THEN to Damascus in Galatians (Gal. 1:17), where in Acts, Paul had been on his way TO Damascus (Acts 9:3) then started to preach there at long accord (Acts 9:19-26) until the Jews there threatened to kill him and then he fled to Jerusalem after many days (Acts 9:25-26).

4. In Paul's out words, none but Peter who stayed with him, and James were in Jerusalem. Yet in Acts, ALL the Apostles were there – and were not just there but were afraid of him. This was not the case in Galatians.

5. Paul says after 15 days he left for the regions of Syria and Cilicia (Gal. 1:21) where in Acts, by somebody else's accord, upon the attempts to kill him by the Greeks, Paul was smuggled out to Caesarea – and from there Tarsus.

6. After 14 YEARS in the regions of Syria and Cilicia, Paul returned to Jerusalem with Barnabas and Titus. (Gal. 2:1) but in Acts, Barnabas leaves from Antioch to Tarsus to find Paul, brought him back to Antioch for a whole YEAR. (Acts 11:25-16)

7. In Galatians, Paul took TITUS to Jerusalem (Gal. 2:1), where in Acts, Paul took Mark, whose surname was John. (Acts 12:25)

 

There was an online test like this.

The responces were less then intelegent. 

I want a theist to respond to the contradictions I posted, too.

scottmax,

Congratulations, you have managed to come up with a game that proves its very point, that you will find exactly what you look for.. .

Unfortunately as far as a "game" is concerned it fails.. Your first question alone is flawed, I will give an answer, you won't believe it, it won't matter.. but here I go anyway, where did Judas die? In a place called the Potters Field/The field of Blood the same place mentioned in both Acts and Matthew, the 30 pieces of silver buy the land in both cases, one goes in to more detail than the other, same outcome... if you purchase a piece of property today in most cases you use an escrow company, did you actually give the owner the money? No, did you still buy the property? Yes.. neither story tells exactly how Judas purchased the property, but is clear the 30 pieces of silver buys the property, and it is where Judas dies. 

You can mention discrepancies all day long, theists can say their side, and you can dispute what they say, doesn't mean you win, or they win, still doesn't prove/disprove Gods existence.  

You still can't really prove evolution in the same way I can't prove Gods existence except through my knowledge of Him. There is actually more proof than you can ACTUALLY provide to prove evolution. Without written proof going back any more than (give or take) 4000 years ago, and no, hieroglyphics don't count because you can't ACTUALLY prove their dating, American Indians were providing similar cave/animal skin writings only 400 years ago... 

You will say carbon dating..I say is it ACTUALLY 100% accurate? You don't know, we don't have any records going back that far, it is based upon carbon content, what if carbon content has varied over the last few thousand years even, could it throw it out as accurate? Possibly.. ANY theory put out that has anything dated outside a period of actual documentation is only that a theory, and CANNOT be proved, one can ONLY GUESS as to what actually happened, NOBODY was there to record it, so we are only guessing. You can call things made up by other people as fact, but can anything made up be actual fact? I read an article a while back, (not sure when/were so I paraphrase a lot) a person had come up with a new theory on how universes or something may have come into existence, he himself even said he was waiting for others to blow it out of the water because he wasn’t sure, but then everybody believed it.. What? Are you kidding? He makes something up, and everybody believes it, and now I guess it’s fact?? This is how theories are born.. and you think believing a book written by a lot of authors with a central theme, who wrote down what they saw  is not believable?

Another thing, how you ever gone to a movie, or football or baseball game with somebody and afterwards you run into somebody and they ask what happened, and the other person says what he saw, and you think, interesting, I forgot that, or I wouldn’t say it that way. What about jokes being told, somebody tells a joke, and screws it all up, so you help them out, and either retell the joke, or help them finish it? These  were things that happened only recently, is it not possible that authors of the Bible, even those writing on the same subject, writing at different places, and different times, even having seen the same thing (but obviously from not the same vantage point) may have a different version of the same story? Even possible come up with different numbers? Maybe even different people at the same event? Does this actually make either representation wrong? No.. They are just that person’s view.

I would actually tend to more believe a person’s account of something that was actually at an event, than something somebody has made up to fit their story.

Don’t forget Evolution was actually worked backwards, they had an answer, then formulated the information to fit the answer, and the information they fitted to the answer is not actually something that can be actually proved.

I can't remember, sadly. I mentioned it here in the hopes that someone else would know. 

Scottmax,

If the theory of evolution is only a little over 100 years old, anything written on it cannot exceed that date being written, so basically EVERYTHING written about evolution is post fact, they came up with a theory, and then filled in the information. Does this make the information flawed? No, they found what they wanted to fit the theory, isn't that a little like saying, I have 5, 2+3 must be the answer?

Also there are huge gaps in all the skeletal remains, to say I have examples A, B, C, D, and E, and also M, N, O, P then F-L must be there, what if they weren't? Huge assumptions do not make a theory fact, one does not need to read books to know that, I know I am not as well read, or educated as most of you seem to be, but I am intelligent enough to be able to see flawed information when it is presented, and even when I was in High School, the holes in the theory of evolution were obvious to me. The jumps were to too large, yes science uses certain assumptions based upon known things, to get from A to C but the leap from F-L is way too far.. you can make that leap if you want, I can't see it.

I also notice you seem to take the easiest parts of my arguments to dissect, I still am waiting for an answer to the one that I have heard nobody on this site address yet, (or have not found yet in my reading of posts):

Explain the eye, it is a piece of our body that does not evolve, it would never work except as it is, there are too many parts that have to work together in unison, exactly as they are, or no sight. Even if it is slightly off, any one of the main parts, no sight.

The theory of evolution is flawed, you can argue all day long that it isn't but that doesn't make it so.

Jabwocky, I can no more take your "proofs" against evolution seriously than I can take you seriously talking about quantum physics if you have not read about it. Read actual books that explain the overwhelming evidence for evolution, then report back so we can have an informed conversation. But please post your newly informed evolution debate to a more appropriate forum.

Now if you would like to talk address the inconsistencies in the Bible...

OK, back to the topic on hand..

I already gave an answer that I have not heard your answer to, so I will reiterate, different people telling different stories from different points of views (or from what they have heard or been told) easily covers any discrepancies in the Bible, you scoff, but if at the same time, everything was exactly the same, you would scream collusion, the all together and made it up. The very fact that they aren't the same makes them true, written by human beings based upon what they saw or heard. As I said before you can't get two people to come up with the same story having seen the same thing just prior to asking them what happened.

There was an experiment once where they took a line of people (you can try this, it works) and gave the first person in line a story, and had them pass it on down the line, by the time it got to the end, it barely was distinguishable as the original story.

This alone could explain any differences in the Bible, especially since most of your inaccuracies are so small.

Did Mary come to the empty tomb when it was dark or after it was light? It can only be one or the other. Which is it?

If you are arguing that the Bible is not inerrant and that, being written by men, conflicting accounts do exist, then we agree. My parents are Catholic and they have no problem with the idea that not every story in the Bible is 100% reliable. So is that your position or do you believe that the Bible is the perfect, inerrant word of God?

You mean read both books. These are two accounts in two different books by two different authors.

Acts says Judas bought the field, then fell headlong and his bowels burst. That is it. The order is 1. buy field, 2. fall headlong.

Matthew says that Judas threw the money away and hanged himself. The priests then took the money and bought a field. That's it. No bowels, no mention of Judas being in the field. The order is: 1. hanging, 2. priests buy field.

The only overlap is that the money ultimately resulted in the purchase of the field and that Judas ended up dead. You can provide no logical basis for combining these two very different accounts. Why would each author tell only half of the story and conveniently neglect to mention all of the details that the other author thought important?

False analogy. When I put money in escrow, it is my intention to purchase the property. Judas had no intention since he was dead.

If you throw money into your church and they buy a field with it, did you buy the field? Of course not.

Judas hung himself before the priests bought the field. How did he know what field they would buy? Why does Matthew not mention that the priests bought the field in which Judas had already hanged himself?

Please be honest with yourself. If you saw two accounts like this about Ali in two different books of the Koran, would you see them as being one story?

Right. And there is a good reason that both stories refer to the amount of money and the "potter'. This is a reference to Zechariah 11:12-13:

And I said unto them, If ye think good, give me my price; and if not, forbear. So they weighed for my price thirty pieces of silver.

And the LORD said unto me, Cast it unto the potter: a goodly price that I was prised at of them. And I took the thirty pieces of silver, and cast them to the potter in the house of the LORD.

This seems to make for another error since Matthew attributed the verse to Jeremiah, not Zechariah.

the reason why we deny the bible is because the only accounts of anything related to a mythical jesus figure is in the bible. there is nothing outside of it that backs the bible up.

of course we don't have eyewitnesses for evolution, if we did then it wouldn't have happened.

the difference between creationism and evolution is that we actually dwelve down into things like facts that you theists tend to ignore.

the reason why we did not like the evolution arguments here is because this is a forum discussing the bible. if you want to argue evolution go to atheist vs. theist or something like that.

the fact that there are contradictions in the bible shows that man is not entirely sure what happened. if the bible is the word of god it should be inerrant. and as i said, the bible is backed up by ZERO outside sources and there is no historical evidence of anything in it taking place. that is why u phail.

From Wikipedia:

Although the Library of Alexandria is referred to in numerous contemporary sources, there is not a great deal of material directly describing the Library itself. By the modern era the Library had come to symbolize the entirety of knowledge in the ancient world. Important to this symbolism are claims about the size of the Library; the comprehensiveness of its collection, especially regarding books that no longer exist; and the circumstances of its destruction. Various authors explicitly blame certain individuals or groups for having destroyed the Library, and this has given rise to complex accusations of bias. It is quite possible that the Library suffered numerous complete or partial destructions in its long history.

The library of Alexandria had a lot of documents/writings that were destroyed, some may very well have pertained to historical accounts of not only Jesus, but other things that happened around that time. There are many books referred to in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, even referring to other cultures/civilizations at the time that are longer with us, they were destroyed at some time in history, that does not mean they never existed, as I said before you can always get/fabricate the answer you want, does it make it true? Not always... there are a lot of written documents out there that have less basis than the Bible that people attribute to being true and no have no backup documentation, do I make the leap to them not being valid? No, but you have an agenda, and will always find the argument true to your side, only because you have already made your bed, and climbed into it, you have burned your bridge, your only future for your soul (if there is one) is eternal damnation, you have made that choice ( I guess I am assuming you have taken the blasphemy challenge, whatever it is) so to admit to being wrong is a pretty big step for anybody on this site. I guess would fight pretty hard to invalidate the Bible if I was in the same boat.

Judas hung himself before the priests bought the field. How did he know what field they would buy?

One Gospel.  One book, different authors.  But, no matter.

They were writing for different audiences.  Matthew, writing early on for a Jewish audience, wants to underscore the "unclean" manner of Judas' death.  Both hanging and suicide were considered defiling under the Mosaic Law.  Judas commited suicide by hanging, you couldn't get much more defiled than that. 

Luke, writing later and for Gentiles, based his Gospel on Matthew's and knew that the hanging story had already been told, but that Matthew had not related (because he was not aware of) what had happened to Judas' body. Luke, who had travelled widely with Paul, and who had probably met and interviewed John in Ephesus related the rest of the story in Acts to underscore the fate (spiritually) of those who turn away from Christ once having had knowledge of the good news.

Because Matthew knew only that a field had been purchased somehow with the money and didn't know the details. Luke, having used multiple sources, and after talking to John, the only Apostle who had the guts to be out and about during that dark week couple of days following the Crucifixion had the whole skinny on the story.

He didn't.  I didn't mean to say that he did, but it's my fault.  I can see how my wording led you to believe that's what I meant.  Sorry.

Indeed not.  But I do provide the occassion for the purchase.  The money couldn't be put back into the treasury because it was tainted by blood.  They had to do something with it and Judas had been the actor who caused the money to be pulled out of the treasury.  the filed wouldn't have been purchased had Judas not brought the money back.

Oh boy, that dumb video? Do you consider hallucination to be evidence?

Are you familiar with night terrors? This is well established psychology and it happens all over the world. Amazingly, the terrors usually conform to the beliefs of the local region. In the past 50 years an amazing number of these terrors have been aliens instead of demons. Do you consider night terrors to be evidence of demons?

What next? Benny Hinn? 

Maybe that was extreme

Ok, but there are a number of near death experiences that are documented that show possible life after death, http://www.near-death.com/ they COULD be true, you can scoff them off, and call them whatever you want, but that does not mean they are not true, I would be more willing to accept a story from somebody that is alive today that can be questioned than accepting a theory that is not truly provable...

So either there is life after death or not, (and a lot of experiences not Bible related to back that up) which backs the possibility of ID, God, Jesus, the Bible being true, for if your only reason for them not to be true is your belief in evolution, then if there is an afterlife, then evolution fails ??

Hey Ghost. Let's go with a simple one. Was it still dark or already light when Mary arrived at the empty tomb? You've got a 50/50 chance of getting this one right (unless the game is rigged

"WarGames" is a poorly made movie from the early '80s. Why would you paraphrase a source that is an obvious contradiction, you silly monkey?

I'm fairly certain in saying that the authors of the Gospels never really intended for each of their verisons of the same story to match up in every literal detail. The Bible really isn't taken in such simple terms that one can lead a religious believer into some kind of snare by pointing out apparent inconsistancies. If I remember correctly, I believe it was the Sadducees who, according to the Gospel records, tried to entrapped Jesus in contradictions with elaborate thought out questions that didn't have real answers. Don't be a Sadducee, man. It's obnoxious and mean to attempt to make someone appear afool like that, for whatever reason.

This "game" is aimed at one group of people. The ones who claim that the Bible is the perfect inerrant word of God. Inerrant means "without error". That is used as one of the proofs of its divine origin and of its perfect morality.

So the purpose is to show that this is a collection of books written by men. It contains different opinions and different details of events. If the Gospels cannot even agree about whether it was dark or light, or whether the stone was already missing or if an angel removed it in front of the women, then it is not an eyewitness account. It is not perfect and may contain ideas that we should not follow.

If the 4 accounts of the empty tomb story cannot agree on:

1. whether it was already light or still dark
2. who went to the tomb
3. if there was one man or angel or two men or angels
4. if the stone was already removed or if it was still in place and the women saw it removed
5. if the man/men/angel/angels were outside the tomb or inside
6. what the man/men/angel/angels said

then you haven't got much of an eyewitness account, do you?

These are not minor details. The empty tomb myth is foundational in Christianity.

But you can call me names if you like.

If they were written in modern times, I would say that three of the Gospel writeres copied from a few sources and tried to tweak them just enough to avoid plagiarism charges.

Then again, I'm of the opinion that the Gospels were written so that Paul's Christ concept could have a back story that humans could hook onto. 

Hey Scottmax, we have had some pretty good conversations.  I wrote responding to you on the "RSS wins on Nightline" (something like that) about exactly how we got the Bible.  I think it certainly answers some issues that the Catholic Church did not have ultimate power over the creation of the Bible.

Secondly, concerning some differences in scripture.  It was not too long ago, as a youth minister, we had a worship service on Wednesday night.  I put one student on one side of the auditorium and had him write down everything that he saw as important that happened during the worship time.  I had another student do the same thing from the other side of the auditorium.  I did not tell them about one another and I did not tell the other students what they were doing.  At the end of the worship, I compared their notes.  There was very little that they had in common.  They saw things from different perspectives and they had two different personalities.  My question to you is - Which one of them was false?  Which one of them was incorrect in what they saw?  I can't remember everything they wrote but one of them listed all the band members and the other did not even name one of them.  One of them wrote about the bright lights (looking at the stage) - while the other one talked about the dimly lit room (The lights were out in the congregation space and it was night so no lights through the windows).

Let's put things into perspective - these two students wrote within the same time frame (20 minutes or so).  The Bible was written over a time span of 1500 years.  How is it that some many things are so common?  It is absolutely incredible.  I agree with another post - if they were word for word - one would claim they all copied from a single source.  You are exactly right - we cannot win because it seems that an atheist will call foul no matter what.

Give me your thoughts man.

A couple of questions:

1.  If an eyewitness account is notoriously unreliable, what accounts were reliable for that time period?  Would we then say that all history books are unreliable?  Why is an eye witness account the one thing that is desired in a court system to seal the deal when it comes to guilt or innocence - even today?

2.  Would you define what you mean by inerrant?  I simply want to make sure we are on the same wave length when it comes to this term.  Are you talking theological or are you defining it as every single comma.  We know by finding the dead sea scrolls that there were punctuation problems and minor errors within the Bible but there were no errors in regard to major issues or in regard to theology.

3.  What about the camp that believes in the inerrancy of the original text?  One could immediately say - "Well see, then your Bible is wrong and you make that comment knowing that we cannot test it against anything."  But I would immediately counter with the fact that even when the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, the "experts" were amazed at how ACCURATE the Bible was.  That is what WOWED them.  Not the missed punctuation and the few spelling errors.  When you look at the persecution that Christians have gone through and the fact that the Bible still made it to where it is today  - and according to what we have - with very few errors - it is pretty incredible.

4.  I am sure you know where I stand when it comes to homosexuality, so I will not try to hide it.  BUT, let me ask - why does you father believe that to lie, steal, committing adultery is a sin (I realize I am making some assumptions) and this one sin, isn't.  Where does he draw the crooked line to include some and exclude others.  I realize that we must look at genre of writing, culture, and translation to interpret what the Bible states - but I guess I struggle to see where the Bible is unclear on this issue. 

Lastly, I want to point out that there were more differences than similarities when it came to these eyewitnesses at church.  How does an atheist resolve the incredible continuity and amount of repeated information in the Bible.  I think you are too intelligent to simply give the "conspiracy theory" because that is just nuts.

Again, just asking?  I really want to hear your point of view.