It has to be properly decoded, carefully reverse engineering various corruptions, misunderstanding, rewritings, misperceptions, etc. Virtually no one is up to that task.
Those that aren't, though, are completely unaware of that fact and talk loud and with certainty about the Bible anyway.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?
It has to be properly decoded, carefully reverse engineering various corruptions, misunderstanding, rewritings, misperceptions, etc. Virtually no one is up to that task.
Those that aren't, though, are completely unaware of that fact and talk loud and with certainty about the Bible anyway.
Oh, I don't at all think it's the inspired word of a divine being.
Nor is it what we might consider the opposite: pure fiction. It's filled with details and holes and bizarre oddities that no one writing a fairy story would ever include. Open it up to a random place, read a few sentences, and ask yourself why the proposed "fiction author" would have put those there.
The Bible--and many other such ancient works--are what they appear to be on the surface: collections of writings considered important enough to be passed down over centuries and millennia.
However, it all comes with the world's biggest asterisk. The narratives were subjected to all manner of forces which would distort them, and it is incredibly difficult to undo that distortion and reveal the information contained and transmitted down to us.
But when you do, I think of this analogy: On one side of town you find a complicated key, and on the other side of town you find a fancy box with an elaborate lock. You find that the key opens the lock. What kind of person says, "Well, this is mere happenstance," and throws away the key and the box without examining it's contents?