The Most Extensive Breakdown of Biblical Contradictions, page 1

As usual, the atheists have compiled another list of "biblical contradictions" — yet they always pull statements out of context with seemingly no attempt to understand the body of the text.

That's like the old joke about the hillbilly preacher who would choose a single verse of scripture at random every morning to guide him throughout the day. One morning he opened the Bible and closed his eyes and placed his finger on the page, then read the verse he had chosen: Judas went out and hung himself. This wasn't very helpful to the preacher, so he closed his eyes, flipped a few pages, and selected another verse at random: Go thou and do likewise.

Again, when you take Bible verses out of context, you can arrive at any sort of contradiction or any sort of interpretation.

Another problem with the atheist interpretation of the Bible is that they seemingly take the writing as one continuous body of text, with no regard for the fact that the Bible as we know it is a compilation of many different writings from many different sources. Furthermore, this compilation has been heavily edited by Mankind over the millennia, and many contemporaneous ancient writings have been selectively omitted.

For example, there were other elaborations on the Genesis story that were simply discarded from the Old Testament — accounts that spoke of Adam's first wife, Lilith, who was making Adam's life a living hell before Eve ever came along.

Particularly in Genesis and the other early books of the Old Testament, it's obvious that the writing is a patchwork of various folkloric traditions from across the ancient Middle East. Anyone who has studied the Bible with an open mind knows this; beyond that, anthropologists have uncovered plenty of evidence that much of the Old and New Testaments are based on actual historical events that were simply misinterpreted or woven together with other folklore.

Of course you're going to find contradictions in a body of work based on the combined traditions of many different cultures, especially when the Catholic Church continued editing the thing for hundreds of years.

Of all the books of the Bible, atheists seem most transfixed on Genesis, which is arguably the least understood book of the Old Testament — atheists and theists alike stumble and falter in their attempts to reconcile Genesis with everything else they think they know about the Bible.

The fact is, Genesis is among the oldest of all the folklore chosen for inclusion in the Old Testament and in the Bible — the chronologically oldest book, as I recall, is the book of Job, yet Job is not the first book of the Old Testament. Again, selective editing and compilation.

There were many other Creation stories circulating concurrent with Genesis in the ancient Middle East; and, strangely enough, they all contain similar descriptions of Creation, the Great Flood, Noah's Ark, and so on. This would seem to indicate that they were all based on the same long-forgotten legend, and each story was altered — customized, if you will — for whichever culture was retelling the story.

One of the greatest "contradictions" of the Bible — one that most infuriates atheists and scientists — is the assertion that God created the world only about 6000 years ago. We've all heard this nonsense and argued about it at length.

As I've pointed out many times before, there is no place in the Bible that says the Earth is only 6,000 years old. The subject is just not addressed in the Bible. The misinformation regarding the biblical age of the Earth was first concocted by some fellow centuries ago, and he accomplished this by adding together the chronological appearances of various biblical characters and events. Using this method, he arrived at a very precise date for the first day of Creation, or so he thought.

But this guy made the same mistake that most atheists and many theists still make to this day — assuming that the King James version of the Bible is one continuous body of text in proper chronological order.

It is not. Never has been.

The Bible as we know it has been juggled and edited and scrambled in every manner you can imagine for nearly 2,000 years. You can't depend on its chronology, you can't match it to what we think is "proper" historical chronology, and you can't pick it apart to prove any given point because it's already been picked apart and reassembled many times over.

There is, however, some spiritually-uplifting value to the Bible — you can't tell me there isn't, because the thing is still the Number One Selling Book of all time. People seek it out for their own reasons, and everybody interprets it in his own way and comes away with his own nugget of spiritual value.

Atheists are never going to convert anyone away from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions by methodically searching for typos and "contradictions" in the Bible. It's an absurd and futile task.

See, people don't go to the Bible seeking the Truth of Man. If they wanted the Truth of Man, they could simply pick up a newspaper and see how horribly we've screwed everything up and how horribly we govern each other.

Rather, people go to the Bible seeking answers to the things that Mankind can NEVER answer.

You can't argue the accuracy of a Bible that was never intended to be factually or chronologically or philosophically "accurate" in any sense that we can comprehend.

— Doc Velocity