I'm struggling to make sense of this paragraph.
I don't mean omissions or things that make no sense but would if put in a better context. I'm talking about literal contradiction, i.e. one part of the bible state fact A and the other states B and those are in no way reconcilable. It must follow that either A or B, i.e. one part of the bible, must be wrong, which means the bible isn't right on everything.
My problem is that it is often cherry-picked what is literal and what is figurative. The same paragraphs that are defended with "don't take it literal" on one occasion are used as a moral imperative on another.
Exactly, and this is where the fallacy kicks in. Of course there are accounts of the resurrection, but only by those who believed in it in the first place, while the others didn't care to write down "during Passover 33 AD nobody was resurrected."
To bring it into perspective: OBL may or may not be dead. Maybe 10 people at the most know what really happened. Only two were alowed to write about it 30 years later. Thanks to the newly discovered hard drives a thousand years from now historians sift through millions of "contemporary" post and see that there are a lot of opinions. The government did release 100 years after the fact the "biblical" account that was more the truth than even thousands of reports that may have been etched together over the first 100 years.
We do not have the benefit of the one's in the know keeping the truths unrevealed and intack like the government of today. Most people may look at them skeptically any way to bias. We do have accounts of the witnesses, even if scholars today think otherwise. We do have 20,000 manuscripts that were passed around and were not like todays internet opinions, but writings of those who did believe the truth. You had skeptics also that argued against doctrine, but never wrote the disciples were lying about the resurrection. For 100 years at least there were too many people who saw Him afterwards and/or were told that to deny the fact. Later we had people who being removed from eyewitness who started to proclaim it was just figurative.
No one wrote down (at the time it did happen) those claims. They would have been refuted. Now getting the stories to align properly may have been the editors decission to not do so, or they were not that "off" to be of concern. I lean toward the latter. 2000 years later, to some people they do matter, but since we do not have "inside" information like they did 2000 years ago, we just have to agree that they do not make sense to us, but we cannot say that the Bible is not infallible because of them. IMO God would not leave us with an infallible logos. From a historical opinion, I just have to admit, I do not know what happened when the Bible was canonized.
To differentiate between literal and figurative, you have to take everything into the context of when it was said. A parable is a parable, not necessarily an actual event. If a person is anti-God and tries to read the Bible, I am sure that a lot of it will not make sense. If someone is looking for God, then more of the Bible will make sense. If a person allows God to open their eye and try not to prejudge anything, then even more will start to make sense. There are very few if any 1st graders who can grasp calculus but as they add to their knowledge of the basics, calculus will eventually make sense to them. If any one is taught a lie, they may question it at first, but the more they embellish it, the more they start to accept it and it becomes the "gospel truth". It is up to each individual to figure out what is Calculus and what is a lie.
What circular logic
As a Protestant, the logic that keeps people bound to tradition instead of seeing the light in a new perspective every so often?
They seemed to have lasted longer than the tower of Babel.
