How do you know the Bible isn't God's Word?

[Poison Tree]

then when he created Eden he and all that populated it, he knowingly created the serpent and the evil it would introduce because of the flawed nature of the humans he created.  The serpent is not to blame, god is, for the serpent did not create evil, god did and the serpent was only doing what it had to do. 

If I may be so presumptuous, let me preempt a reply: nothing in Genesis indicates that the serpent is anything but a serpent; nothing to support the claim that it is actually Satan/The Devil. It is only ever refereed to as a serpent, it is called livestock and all wild animals and its punishment (crawl on belly, eat dust, crush head/strike heel) only makes sense if the serpent is a serpent.

[Hydra009]

However, if the impact is very high then the risk can’t be dismissed unless you’re sure that the likelihood is sufficiently low.

The starting point for me is likelihood.  I dunno about you, but I don't start with WWIII in anticipating my pizza store's potential threats.  I start with more hum-drum stuff like theft and fire.  I'm weird like that.

As far as religious doomsday and hell and all that stuff goes, what's the likelihood of that?  All we really have to go on are (some offense intended) nutbags preaching doom and gloom.  The perpetual "end is nigh".

And then there's threats of hell by people from many religions who seem as sure of their own claims as they are that the others are false. (Coincidentally, they were indoctrinated as children into this stuff)

What's the likelihood that they're correct?  Probably less than you think.

P.S. - How'd you fare during the latest rapture prediction?  That's some seriously dire stuff right there, so surely it must be a smart idea to take it seriously and sell all your stuff.  Or did you continue on with your life without skipping a beat like I did?  You might actually hold my position without realizing it.  I just apply it more consistently, that's all.

[trdsf]

You have ignored the far bigger problem I pointed out: there is absolutely no reason to even consider your bible to be the words of any god until you have first demonstrated that your god actually exists.  You can't get around that one.  Without that, your bible is just stone age fairy tales and campfire stories.

But, if you insist...

@trdsf â€" I know it’s popular to claim that the Bible isn’t consistent with the archaeological record, but those claims have been found to be false over and over again (e.g., the Hittite people, the Roman census, etc).  I would be interested to hear about an archaeological finding that truly contradicts the biblical record.  Lack of findings isn’t a reason to dismiss something.  I’m sure you’d argue this as well if I said that bats were specially created because there isn’t any evidence in the fossil record of them evolving (which there isn’t, BTW).
As for the Bible calling bats birds, it doesn’t actually do so.  Translations of the Bible do this, but the Hebrew word being translated is owph, which means “fowl/winged creature,” so it includes birds, bats, and yes, even locusts, as you mentioned. 
As for the Bible claiming that pi is exactly 3 it does no such thing.  The claim you’re referring to is in reference to 2 Chronicles 4:2, which says in the ESV: “Then he made the sea of cast metal. It was round, ten cubits from brim to brim, and five cubits high, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference.”  You may not be familiar with the concept of significant figures, but they indicate the measurement resolution (i.e., accuracy).  In this passage we’re dealing with 1 significant digit and therefore the circumference of 30 is perfectly consistent with the diameter of 10.  It would actually be wrong to say 31.4, since that would imply a more accurate measurement of the diameter was taken. 
The Bible says there’s nothing wrong with slavery?  The Bible actually commands that people should be put to death for enslaving people against their will: “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:16).
You were wrong about all 3 of those.  But I suspect you never really thought about them too much and just happily accepted them as true because it fit your desires.  But as I’ve been asking, if you were worng about those things is it possible that you’re also wrong about God’s existence and kindness? 

@trdsf â€" As I’ve mentioned, the reason I reject other religions is that the god(s) they present are not good and can’t be trusted.  They lie, act contrary to the truth, and reward evil.  If any of those gods exist then there’s no hope in trusting in them anyway.

Wow, I'm not sure if this is more horrifying for it's sheer arrogance, or its sheer ignorance.

As for the archeological record: Eden didn't happen.  The flood didn't happen, and the version in Genesis was a part copy of the earlier Gilgamesh epic.  The slavery in Egypt and the Exodus didn't happen.  The Babylonian captivity didn't happen in the way it was described in the Old Testamentâ€"and that it happened in any form says nothing about the veracity of the rest of your bible: that would be like inferring that because London exists, the Harry Potter books must all be true since they mention London.  The historicity of Jeshua bar-Joseph is deeply ambiguous at best, there being zero contemporaneous accountsâ€"and again, even if it were demonstrated there was a historical figure two millennia ago, that would have no bearing on whether or not he was actually divine: the analogy here would be inferring that since Troy existed historically, all the gods in the Iliad are real.  The four gospels which are alleged to be contemporaneous accounts (or at least copies of reported contemporaneous accounts) are all in deep conflict with each other as to not only the sequence of events, but as to which events even happened.

Bats and birds?  Well, let's go to the source:

¹³And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls ; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, ¹⁴And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; ¹⁵Every raven after his kind; ¹⁶And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, ¹⁷And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, ¹⁸And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, ¹⁹And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.  ²⁰All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.

Seems pretty clear.  Also, fowl creep on all fours.  Factually incorrect.  Period, end of statement.

As for pi -- clearly you have no idea how either significant digits or basic engineering work, and/or your god is too stupid to know that specifying either the diameter or the circumference is sufficient and it's never necessary to specify both.  "A line of thirty cubits specifies its circumference" automatically gives its diameterâ€"9.55 cubitsâ€"and "ten cubits brim to brim" automatically specifies its circumferenceâ€"31.4 cubits.  You will note, of course, that 30 and 31.4 are not equivalent, even to your sloppy "one significant digit".

And as for slavery, that's a pretty sorry excuse for a cherry-pick since the rest of Exodus 21 is all about who to enslave and how to enslave them, and some rules about what you can and cannot do with your propertyâ€"not your employees, your property.  Exodus 22 declares that being sold into slavery is the punishment for a thief who cannot make restitution.  The New Testament is no better, with Jesus and Paul both admonishing slaves to be good servants to even cruel masters.  All I can do here is point you at what your book actually says.  Which I expect you will simply dismiss out of hand because you've made up your mind already, but your willful ignorance won't be on my hands.

In any case, if you believe in a god who can order us not to kill and not to lie and not to covet, why was he unable to order us not to own people?  That's a slam-dunk, morally.  There's no way you can spin, interpret, cherry-pick that.  If you want to argue that morality is morality, then either slavery has always been wrong and your bible gets it wrong, or that your bible gets it right and there's nothing morally wrong with slavery.  If you go down the path of 'it was okay then but it's not now' then you have just endorsed both moral relativism, and admitted to believing in a non-omnipotent, non-omnibenevolent god.

So.  Now that it's (further) demonstrated you're wrong, what does that do your faith?

[Mike Cl]

If I may be so presumptuous, let me preempt a reply: nothing in Genesis indicates that the serpent is anything but a serpent; nothing to support the claim that it is actually Satan/The Devil. It is only ever refereed to as a serpent, it is called livestock and all wild animals and its punishment (crawl on belly, eat dust, crush head/strike heel) only makes sense if the serpent is a serpent.

Okay--what the bible says and what people believe it says are often quite different.  Whatever the role of the serpent was, it was created for that purpose by the bibical god.  BTW, Satan/The Devil was a creation of the bibical god.  So, if evil is supposed to flow from that source, it was a source created by god and god must be happy with that part of his creation since he allows it to exist.  God is either all knowing, all powerful or not.  Can't have it both ways.

[Baruch]

Okay--what the bible says and what people believe it says are often quite different.  Whatever the role of the serpent was, it was created for that purpose by the bibical god.  BTW, Satan/The Devil was a creation of the bibical god.  So, if evil is supposed to flow from that source, it was a source created by god and god must be happy with that part of his creation since he allows it to exist.  God is either all knowing, all powerful or not.  Can't have it both ways.

Read Job ... G-d can have it both ways, and make you rot in Hell for it was well ;-)

Yes, people have a mythic view of a mythic book.  Not too well informed.  Also, in Hebrew, the word for snake and serpent are different, it only sounds similar in English.  Technically, serpent means dragon.  Not necessarily a big dragon, but definitely one that helps virgin girls go bad ... that is why we have the Medieval iconography of St George rescuing the maiden from the dragon.  This is also the myth (probably from Canaan as well) of Perseus saving Andromeda from the Kraken.

St George and the Dragon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon

Perseus vs the Kraken

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQpgIJUh9D4

And before that, it is the Canaanite myth of Ba'al vs Yam

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal_Cycle

And of course this figures into the Medieval Christian view of Jesus vs Satan ... since Jesus is Ba'al of Canaanite myth.

And then it shows up in King Kong ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVeF_E6M12A

Artists recycle old material, and this is a canonical example lasting 4000 years.

[Baruch]

Okay--what the bible says and what people believe it says are often quite different.  Whatever the role of the serpent was, it was created for that purpose by the bibical god.  BTW, Satan/The Devil was a creation of the bibical god.  So, if evil is supposed to flow from that source, it was a source created by god and god must be happy with that part of his creation since he allows it to exist.  God is either all knowing, all powerful or not.  Can't have it both ways.

That is a straw man argument.  Are you the Scarecrow?

[Mike Cl]

That is a straw man argument.  Are you the Scarecrow?

Could be.  Have to talk to Oz to see.   Since you are a demi-god you aught to know.  Oh, let me check my Bugs Bunny Oracle................

[Unbeliever]

That is a straw man argument.

Is that really a straw man argument, given the definition of that fallacy?

Straw man occurs when someone argues that a person holds a view that is actually not what the other person believes. Instead, it is a distorted version of what the person believes.

[Blackleaf]

Okay. Time for the full reply.

@Blackleaf â€" Even if I was raised as a Christian, I don’t see how this is a valid argument.  Surely, you know people (or at least are aware of people) who believe differently than they were raised.  I would guess that a lot of people in this forum were raised Christian, so then why aren’t they Christians?  Why are there many people who were raised Muslims, but are now Christians?

It's relevant because it shows how you are biased in your thinking. Or do you deny that people's beliefs are influenced by their parents and their social environments, especially during childhood? Yes, many of us grew up Christian, and we changed our minds for various reasons. Many of us, no doubt, know more about the Bible than you do. And I have no doubts that if you had grown up in a Muslim majority country, raised by Muslim parents, growing up with Muslim friends and family, you would be a Muslim. That kind of brainwashing affects the way you think. When I was a Christian, I thought I was open minded. And for a Christian fundamentalist, I was. But it wasn't until after I lost my faith that I realized just how restricted handicapped my thinking really was. If you ever have a deconversion experience, you'll know what I'm talking about.

The God of the Bible most certainly rewards good and punishes evil.  The God of the Bible doesn’t ignore any evil.  As it says about God, He: “…will by no means clear the guilty…” (Exodus 34:7, ESV).  Every evil act will be punished by God.  However, because He is kind, merciful, and loving, He transfers the guilt of His people to His Son, the only One who can pay the price for it, so that His people are seen as blameless in His sight.  God is so kind, in fact, that He commands everyone to repent and receive this forgiveness and have immeasurable joy forever.

Saying something doesn't mean jack shit if your actions say the opposite. The Bible claims that the God of the Bible is just, but it also says, "He causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust" (Matthew 5:45). In other words, when bad stuff happens to you, it's not because he is punishing you. So he doesn't punish evil or reward good in this life, so what about the afterlife? Well, as I had already pointed out, good works do not matter when it comes to which afterlife you get. Either you believe in God without any evidence (because if you had evidence, it wouldn't be belief), and you go to Heaven, or you don't believe in the right god (or any of the countless gods available to choose from) and you go to Hell. That isn't rewarding good and punishing evil. That's rewarding a lucky guess and punishing unlucky guesses and nonparticipation.

And yes, I know that there are verses in the Bible that contradict all of this stuff. That is because the Bible is full of inconsistencies. One book in the New Testament will say that works don't matter, only faith, while another book says that faith is useless without works. Contradictions like these are why apologists have jobs. It's up to them to make sense of the unintelligible by making shit up and twisting verses in knots to make them say what they obviously don't actually say.

Your claims that the Bible is inconsistent with science is only a statement that the Bible is currently inconsistent with something that is inconsistent.  The Bible was inconsistent with science when it said that spontaneous generation occurred.  If the people believed the Bible (like Louis Pasteur did) then they would’ve known they were missing some important information and that maggots only come from flies, not meat.

Evolution is not the only subject of science that discredits the Bible. But yes, it absolutely proves the Bible wrong. Thanks to the fossil record, we now know that the species that currently exist on earth make up only a tiny fraction of one percent of every species that has ever existed. A common tactic that creationists use is to point to the Cambrian Explosion and say, "How is it that life suddenly diversified that quickly?" And they dismiss the whole of evolution based on that. But to be a Creationist, you must believe that Moses carried every single species on the earth on a single boat, and that after those living things got off the boat, they diversified into countless species (several time more than occured in the Cambrian Explosion), and then 99.9% of those species died, all within the span of a few thousand years. Now which sounds more likely, that speciation took hundreds of millions of years to produce all the countless creatures found in the fossil record as well as all the estimated 8.7 million species alive today species (which again don't even account for 0.1% of every species that ever existed), or that all of that happened within the span of 6000 years? The latter is utterly ridiculous, and I sincerely hope you have enough brain power to see that.

If you're interested in educating yourself, and you want to know what the evidence of evolution actually says, here's a good video series for you:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXJ4dsU0oGMLnubJLPuw0dzD0AvAHAotW

Your superhero analogy fails because we aren’t innocent victims.  Unfortunately, I think many churches have done a really poor job (i.e., unbiblical) of presenting the true condition of people along with what God is like.  They have done this because they’ve wanted to tell people what they want to hear and this has reinforced the problem, which is that you believe you’re a good person…as the Bible says, “All the ways of a man are pure in his own eyes…” (Proverbs 16:2, ESV).  Your analogy fails for this reason.  An accurate analogy would be to say that a bunch of criminals broke into a house and were trashing the place while stealing everything valuable and when the cops entered to arrest them you ask this superhero of yours why he isn’t doing anything to save the criminals.

No. My analogy is just fine. It's yours that is absolutely stupid. And yes, what you're describing is exactly what my church taught me to believe at a young age, unfortunately. You seem to have this typical Christian idea that we unbelievers don't understand it right. If only we knew the Bible better, like you do, if only we were taught "accurate" theology... No. We know exactly what you're talking about, and we've heard it before. God says that we are deserving of Hell just by existing. We are criminals regardless of whether or not we have committed any crimes. In my analogy, Superman sees evil taking place, and despite having both the knowledge and the power to stop it, he chooses to do nothing. In the same way, God watches as people are murdered, raped, abused, cheated, robbed, and otherwise victimized, and he chooses to do nothing about it. Now for your "correction" of my analogy to work, every single person in that bank would have had to have been someone who had committed a crime before. Crimes which Superman also ignored beforehand. And you're telling me that the criminal record of those people means that Superman is justified in watching them be victimized? So for the sake of your argument, maybe the hostage who was shot to death was a sex offender. Does that make it okay for Superman to allow him to be shot to death? Does his life no longer have value because of his previous transgression?

This is another way your experience as a Christian has warped your view of reality. You've been programmed to see every human being as deserving of eternal torture. You think that every human being is vile and unworthy. Imagine looking at a newborn baby and saying, "You deserve to burn in Hell forever and ever because you're not perfect." What a sickening worldview that is.

And one more thing, who the hell's house is being robbed in your analogy? If it's another human, then the victim must still be a criminal because all have fallen short of the glory of God. So that can't be the case, or else your analogy wouldn't make any sense. Does the house belong to God? Is God so weak and vulnerable that people can do actual harm to him? Talk about ridiculous.

[Baruch]

Is that really a straw man argument, given the definition of that fallacy?

A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument that was not presented by that opponent. One who engages in this fallacy is said to be "attacking a straw man".

Did anyone say that G-d is omnipotent or omniscient or omni-anything in this string?  Other than the OP of course at some point (but not in the first post, I checked).  Yes, atheists imagine an impossible G-d, then claim logic makes that G-d impossible.  Theists make similar mistakes.  Why can we not have an option for a G-d who isn't omniscient or omnipotent or omni-anything?  The theologians imagine such a G-d, but I would rejoinder that theologians are idiots.

Why would you accept the definition of any term (in any language) by idiots?  Of course that will lead us to etymological nihilism, that language in fact has no meaning.  How can I tell if someone (including myself) is an idiot, if I am one?  People assume that people are intelligent, I see no reason to accept that assumption.

I can define a Russian as a 12 ft tall person ... and then claim that no Russians exist, because nobody can show me any person that tall.  i may or may not actually believe that Russians are 12 ft tall ... I could just be rhetorical.  If I believe that proposition, then I am an idiot.  If I am rhetorical, then I am just being an argumentative asshole.

Similarly if we accept logic (but there is no reason other than prejudice to do so), I could define something that is logically inconsistent as another straw man ... so that I can ride to the rescue and destroy my own Golum (Jewish version).  The only logically true statement I know, is the Liar's Paradox.  Any statement by any human, is the equivalent of saying "What I am now saying is false".

[Unbeliever]

This is another way your experience as a Christian has warped your view of reality. You've been programmed to see every human being as deserving of eternal torture. You think that every human being is vile and unworthy. Imagine looking at a newborn baby and saying, "You deserve to burn in Hell forever and ever because you're not perfect." What a sickening worldview that is.

The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathesome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; His wrath towards you burns like fire; He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire; He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in His sight; you are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.

And yet, in the book of Job, even Satan was allowed into the presence of God (twice!), so God could make a bet with him!

[Unbeliever]

  Why can we not have an option for a G-d who isn't omniscient or omnipotent or omni-anything?

Then why call it God?

[Unbeliever]

so that I can ride to the rescue and destroy my own Golum (Jewish version).

If it's the Jewish golum you're referencing, should the word be capitalized? I wonder if Adam would have been a golum?

[Unbeliever]

Did anyone say that G-d is omnipotent or omniscient or omni-anything in this string?  Other than the OP of course at some point (but not in the first post, I checked).

If the OP (bfiddy100) stated this opinion, then I don't see how the mention of it could be considered a straw man, since the OP obviously holds that belief.

[Baruch]

And yet, in the book of Job, even Satan was allowed into the presence of God (twice!), so God could make a bet with him!

Last time I checked, Jonathan Edwards wasn't G-d, or even Paul.  But Paul as a Jew of his time, would have believed in the Devil.  Jews weren't exactly monotheist, and for most of history, neither have been Christians.