Christian??? Only true church???

[I Have Questions]

Aren't you cherry picking scripture out of context, sock?

That's kind of like saying Harry Potter was an idiot because Hermione said so in Stone instead of reading the whole cannon. You wouldn't do that, would you?

What is scripture? Copies of reported first-century Christian literature, second- or third-hand information at best. This is why the Book of Mormon could have been so great with direct quotes from Jesus; instead, we get second- or third-hand information of reported first-century Christian literature, errors and all.

Yes. It’s the equivalent of people in two thousand years time using a collection of this century’s Twitter Posts as the basis for belief in something supernatural. “Let’s turn to Trump 3:16 for today’s lesson”. It’s an Iron Age collection of agenda-driven here say, rumour, supposition, conjecture, Chinese whispers, fantasy, fabrication etc.

[Physics Guy]

The Bible is a collection of Iron Age texts, all right; but comparing that to Twitter misses most of what has happened since the Iron Age. Texts of any kind were rarer back then, and preserving and spreading them was hard. The Bible is a millennial greatest hits compilation—from a tough millennium, when humans had it a lot harder than we do now. Even if we don’t call the Bible the Word of God, we should read it with the respect we’d give to a veteran‘s war stories.

A favorite Bible story of mine is the Tower of Babel. As a historical explanation of linguistic diversity, it is obviously ludicrous. It is interesting and important to realize, however, that even back then people knew that different people spoke different languages, that were nonetheless all working languages and not simply babble, even though the different people found their languages mutually unintelligible.

The ancient people who preserved this story felt that linguistic diversity was a remarkable thing whose existence needed explaining. The explanation that they found plausible enough to preserve was that the unintelligibility of foreign language was the curse of a frightened god. They thought it was that kind of bad.

The Babel myth is as ludicrous theologically as it is historically. No being who is worried that humans will build a brick tower to heaven can possibly be a real God. On the other hand, though: read the story again, from its setup to its conclusion.

Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”

So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

Our distant ancestors lived in a time so primitive that mud bricks seemed like a technology that would let us rival the gods. And those primitive ancient ancestors thought that what would limit us, in spite of our awesome technology, would be our inability to communicate with each other. That’s the hard-won Iron Age wisdom that they’ve passed on to us through the Bible. If there is a real God, making sure that this message was preserved and passed on through the ages actually is the kind of thing a real God might do, it seems to me.