I'm bored, so I'm going to try to answer these. My answers will be in color.

mindspread wrote:

"Why did God not like Cain's vegetable sacrifice but loved Abel's cooked meat?" Answer...Vegetarians are weak Christians. Cain made the sacrifice because he had to, while Abel did it because he wanted to. It is also possible that Cain brought his worse crops, while Abel brought his best meat. The other possibility is that you have to sacrifice animals, not vegetables (I disagree as to this being the reason, but it is presented as a possibility)  According to historians, one likely reason is the fact that at the time this document was written, the Hebrews were pastoral people who lived by herding goats.  They lived nomadically near a lot of agricultural people who lived by growing crops.  Because one of the reasons why Judeo-Christian religion held together so long is due to its intolerance and resistance to assimilation by other religions, the story of Cain and Abel is a cautionary tale designed to reassure the pastoral Hebrews that Yaweh is really keen on goats and sheep, but not so much on turnips.

"Who was Cain afraid would kill him when God put him out of the Garden for killing Abel? There were mom, dad, bro and himself on the whole planet at the time." Answer...He must have known his sisters were going to have kids with dad, no not that. He was speculating. Cain wasn't thinking very clearly that day. It appears there were a lot more people then the bible mentions. I think the mark was more to keep Adam from killing Cain for kiliing Abel. The whole presence of all those other people who are already there after the Cain and Abel story comes from the fact that the creation story and the Cain-Abel and after stories actually come from different source documents, so they don't share the same premises.  Tradition says that Moses supposedly wrote the whole book of Genesis.  But that doesn't explain why he calls god "Yaweh" in some places and "Elohim" in other places and changes his vocabulary abruptly for long spans.

Snipping a few questions here where the alternate answer is obviously "Because the story is made up."

"Why does neither Mark nor John know anything about Jesus birth, while Matthew and Luke do but tell contradictory stories?" Answer...Because the Gospels are like four people who see a car wreck...The events are not contradictory. John cares more about Jesus being God then Jesus being born and perhaps Mark didn't see a reason why his auidence would care how Jesus was born, or perhaps they already knew the birth story. Mark is the orginal gospel.  The authors of Matthew and Luke/Acts used the gospel of Mark as their source.  The most likely reason why their accounts differ is because they both separately felt the need to supply the story of Jesus's birth (maybe to fit the prophecy?), but didn't consult with each other about what the details of the story should be.  The gospel of John is a later work that was written by Greek Gnostic Christians, so they didn't really care much about the Jewish prophecies.    

"Why does Paul only say Jesus was born of a woman like everyone else?" Answer...Paul was concerned about the risen Jesus, not the earthly one. He was too busy to check up on the details. Because Jesus was born of a woman only. This is essential to Christian belief for Jesus to be the Messiah. Paul was already struggling against versions of Christianity that differed in dogma from the version he was inventing.  The Galatians to whom Paul was writing must have had some Greek Christians who believed, as many did at the time, that Jesus created himself.

"Did Paul ever spend five minutes with the real human Jesus?" Answer..well no, but Paul's Jesus is the risen Jesus, it doesn't matter. Probably not. Paul recieved his knowledge by revelation from Jesus himself. So Paul did have some time wth Jesus, just not while Jesus was on Earth. Paul may have actually believed that he was getting the message from Jesus; there's no particular reason to suspect that he was trying to deceive anybody.  But the content of his dogma is clearly not consistent in many key places with what Jesus is supposed to have said.

"Isn't it strange the man who writes most of the New Testament and tells us all how to live, think and believe about Jesus, never met him, while the Twelve who did, vanish into thin air and write nothing/" Answer...You ain't from around these parts are you boy. Paul's mission in life was to go to the gentiles. The other apostles were to go to the Jewish people. Hence we the gentiles have Paul's writtings and few of the others writings. Also education wasn't exactly top notch in those days, so perhaps the others didn't know how to write or couldn't afford paper. It's also possible their writings were lost or hidden away in a church somewhere.  As far as anybody knows, the original apostles expected Jesus to return before they themselves died.  When that didn't happen, they had to go to plan B.  Paul's great innovation (because Jesus in his recorded life never told anybody to do this) was to make Christianity a non-Jewish religion by writing very clearly that Christians didn't have to be circumcised or follow the Law.  If he hadn't come up with that notion, Christianity would have been just another extinct Jewish cult like the Essenes.

"How come Jesus never wrote anything himself while alive, but then writes perfect Greek after he is dead in the form of the Book of Revelation?" Answer....He finished his PHD in Heaven. John wrote the book of Revelation, not Jesus. Also Jesus' mission on earth was to go to the Jews and not the Gentiles. He had no reason to write anything since he was to only teach to the Jews.  Revelations is no longer attributed by any serious scholar to the apostle John--the book itself just says it was written by somebody named John.  References to the blood atonement and the seven churches of Asia suggest that it was written a couple of generations after Jesus died--to long for John the Apostle to have lived. The Revelation of John is just one of hundreds and hundreds of known Apocalypses that describe the end time, written in Greek about the same time and in the same style.  It was a whole genre of writing that this is only one relatively unremarkable example of.

"If Herod killed all the little children under two to get at Jesus, who escaped, can we not say the little children had to die for Jesus before he died for them?" Answer...No we can't, sheesh. No we can't. God did not choose for the children to die, Herod did. Inconsistencies between actual historical records of the Roman rule in Palestine and the account given in the gospel reveal that this incident cannot have happened the way it was described.

Snipping some questions here that suffer from the same chronological prolems and where the alternate answer is, similarly,"Because the author of Matthew made it up."

"How come in Mark 3 Mary and his brothers came to get Jesus and take him home because they thought he was "mad" which I assume means insane. Did Mary forget who he was and how he got here?" Answer...shut up. Mark mentions Jesus' brothers and Mother, but I don't get where you go they thought he was mad from. They thought he had a (literally) "unclean spirit," which is the usual way of characterizing mental illness.  But I also don't see where Mary is not recognizing J.

"How come Matthew uses the Old Testament to weave a story of Jesus, where every quote he uses has absolutely nothing to do with the point he is making about Jesus birth?" Answer...While we might flunk you for such methods, we give Matthew an A, because, well, he's Matthew. Bible guys get to do and say things you're not allowed to. Jesus' interpretation of scripture is greater then ours. Also they have something to do with what he is quoting. The author of Matthew's linking of the story from Mark with the OT made sense to his readers--Jewish people--in the context of their constructed traditions about the prophecies.  It would take a serious OT/Hebrew scholar to be able to backtrack and reconstruct what that author was talking about.  But probably one of them has done it.

"If Jesus was asked 'who sinned, this man or his parents that he was born blind?', would that not imply the man had sinned before his birth, perhaps in a previous life, if his blindness at birth was some kind of punishment? I mean, the blindness was from birth, so the sin had to be before that." Answer...Ummm.., no. Whatever the answer, it's definately not that one. The answer Jesus was looking for was neither of them sinned. Right, this is part of Jesus's Jewish religious reform program--challenging the traditional assumption that congenital defects are a punishment from God.  It's just one of the innumerable examples of things Jesus said and did that substantiate the fact that he was trying to fix the Jewish religion, not found a new, non-Jewish religion.

...The other possibility is that you have to sacrifice animals, not vegetables (I disagree as to this being the reason, but it is presented as a possibility)

It appears ...I think...

I think there are reasons we don't know about. (Yea not the best answer)

Maybe some were outside of Egypt. Maybe some of the hourses survived the plagues.

"If Herod killed all the little children under two to get at Jesus, who escaped, can we not say the little children had to die for Jesus before he died for them?" Answer...No we can't, sheesh. No we can't. God did not choose for the children to die, Herod did.

"How could Jesus family flee to Egypt sometime during the first two years in one story but go home to Narareth quietly after 40 days in the other?" Answer...It's a miracle. Egypt and Israel aren't that far apart. I think about a two week journey. Its also possible they made one trip on foot and the other on camel.