2 Timothy 3:16 is not referring to "The Holy Bible"

If the Holy Bible, as we know it today, formed by counsels of men (no women), with agenda of their own, with simple majority votes for what to include and what to discard, were the Scriptures referred to in 2 Timothy 3:16, we would expect that those said Scriptures would make sense.  After all, if the Bible is God-breathed, wouldn't we expect that nothing in those pages would ever contradict itself?

In simple terms, we can declare that a contradiction proves a fallacy.  If a statement about something is true and yet another statement about that something contradicts the first statement, one of those statements must be false.  It doesn't necessarily disprove the something being statemented, but it does prove that the two statements are both false until one of them can be proven true, rejecting the other.

Unfortunately, the Bible cannot, as a single organism, be declared to be contradiction free.  Those who claim it is, are doing themselves a disservice when the time comes to defend their belief system, being that they have to use pretzelified explanations to spelunk through many of their holy book's premises.  If the Bible contradicts itself, then we must reject the Bible as the sole source of truth.  We cannot view it as God's word (I'll explain why, in a bit). 

Does that mean we reject everything from the ancient pages of this book?  Absolutely not!  But it does mean that you can decide for yourself what is right and what is wrong.  You do not have to take the Bible as one organism, but can take away anything you desire from it or nothing at all.  But again, you simply cannot treat it as holy words from an all knowing, all powerful being.  This cannot be true.

Let me explain in six verses:

Malachi 3:6 - For I am the Lord, I do not change...

Hebrews 13:8 - Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.

We can use Jesus Christ in this example because, according to John (yes, using the full Bible as a single organism), Jesus was God as God was Jesus.  They both, together, whether they were one or two, transcended all of history, past, present, and future, as God.  Thus, if God does not change and Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever, God simply cannot change.  If God cannot change, then nothing in what is considered his word can say one thing about God and then, somewhere else in that same "Word" say the opposite.  If he cannot change, he cannot change.  Now that we have established the iron-man status of God, let's move on.

Deuteronomy 6:16 - You shall not put the Lord your God to the test...

Luke 4:12 - And Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Matthew 4:7 - "Jesus said to him, "Again, it is written, 'You shall not put the Lord your God to the test'."

We have now established that testing God is forbidden.  But what about Malachi?

Malachi 3:10 - "Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need."

Here, we see God telling the Israelites to test him.  Now, it has been argued that God was really just telling them to test him with something good and in Deuteronomy, he was referring to testing him with something evil.  In saying this, the person making the argument misses a key point of logic.

After all, when God tells the Israelites to test him, what exactly is he saying?  Simple.  He is saying, if you give me the tithes you are supposed to give me, as I decreed in my law to you, nothing but good will come of it.  But then, he also tells his people to test him with evil, rob him, don't give him his due tithes, and what will he do?  Curse them.  Not just the individual who isn't tithing, but the whole nation of Israel.

As you can see, God clearly contradicts himself in the Bible, provided you are treating the Bible as an infallible, inerrant, singular organism - the holy and final words of God.

This begs many questions.  What is 2 Timothy 3:16 really referring to?  I have illuminated just one of the many contradictions in the book we know as the Holy Bible.  Is the Holy Bible the Scriptures?  It doesn't appear so.  Then, if not, what of the Bible is true, and what of the Bible is simply fiction, a work of men's minds, attempting to make the best word picture of things not able to be explained by the limited knowledge of their day?  If the Bible is not God's word, can we really stand on any of it as unadulterated truth?  Can we simply use logic and reason and take from the Holy Bible what we desire to live by and nothing more, nothing less?

The Golden Rule is a great example of what I would harvest from the pages of the Bible.  What about loving your enemies?  What about not killing and really not killing.  Take it as common sense, not as an absolute truth from a god who has broken every one of his laws - especially the killing one.  How about giving to others and being sacrificial when people are in need.  Turning the other cheek comes to mind.  What about working your rear end off to be successful?  Many awesome ideas about life can be gleaned from this book's pages.  And yet, many other ideas about life can be discovered in other books, from other people, from culture, from your own brilliant mind.

Think!  Think for yourself.  Grab wisdom and knowledge from every source available to you.  The Bible is an excellent resource for many things.  It is also a miserable failure in many other areas.  Feel free to reject any or all of it.  It isn't infallible.  It's not inerrant.  It isn't God's word.  It can't be. 

Satan and the Problem of Deceit

I was a Christian once - someone who believed in Jesus Christ.  My transformation into a sort of deist has been forming over a period of ten years and has increased in pace in the last eighteen months.  What brought me to my current theological understanding of life was the slogging through millions of questions where there was no good answer and then moving forward to the next question where I discovered something of the same conclusion.

The fact that there was no good answer is not a conclusion in itself.  It just displays the nature of philosophy and theology in general.  We cannot see what we are wont to believe in and thus must take a bite out of a thing called "faith".  I am convinced this "faith" is decidedly personal.

It didn't used to be that way.

Growing up in an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church that leaned heavily on Bill Gothard's ultra-legalistic Institute in Basic Life Principles, I was taught that there was only one correct way to think and believe.  Faith was clearly established in the inerrant and infallible text of the Holy Bible.  The fact that hundreds, even thousands of other factions and groups used that exact same holy book, coming to different conclusions - at times, diametrically opposed - did not matter in the least. 

They were wrong.  Everyone else was wrong.  We held the keys to true righteousness.  After all, the way was narrow and tough, unlike the easy, wide way that led to ultimate destruction.

Faith was not personal at all.  It was supposed to be and was preached from many a pulpit as such.  But it was a cookie cutter faith.  You were expected to adhere to exact principles and formulas in order to have the kind of faith that provided you with guaranteed eternal security.  Any slight deviation from this faith was cause for concern for everyone who caught wind of the manifestations of your backsliding.

The worst offense of all was questioning.

It wasn't the questioning that was the problem.  Questioning was simply the symptom of a much deeper issue.  Just the fact that you were curious about the "maybe this isn't all it is cracked up to be" caused those around you to issue the warning:

"Satan is a master deceiver and you are allowing him to deceive you by questioning".

There is a simple problem with this factual statement.

First, we cannot see Satan.  There is no proof that he exists.  We cannot see God.  There is no proof that he exists either.  We have no possibility of establishing that every single word in the Holy Bible was written through the hands of men by God himself.  Even if this were the case, the contradictions and paradoxical natures of much of the theology within its pages would steer any logically thinking individual to a conclusion that seems quite obvious - we just don't know about what we should know.

Since we don't know what we should know, being that there are many interpretations for each of the thousands of verses in the Bible, there is no foundation from which to be deceived.  To say otherwise is to claim that it is possible to have the correct interpretation of all questions that can be answered from Christianity's holy book.  This is a tall task for any reasonable person to conclude as fact.

So, if we have no clue, but only the best ideas of God from the hands of mere men and women, like you and me, faith is decidedly personal and there is absolutely no possibility that we can be deceived.