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I believe scripture was divinely inspired, because it claims it was.
I've seen it argued -- I believe by someone on this board -- that the Bible claims to be inspired only in a few spots. Wish I could remember how that went.
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This doesn't discredit the document as a whole.
No, it doesn't. Translation errors are the least troublesome bits.
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Many of the historical texts we base history on have errors in them - but we don't discredit them.
But we do cross reference them with other sources and try to verify the account or construct an accurate account. This type of analysis of the Bible, for most Christians, is sacrilegious. I think this is where the analogy with our treatment of other historical documents breaks down.
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Whenever we uncover a historical text, we assume it is truthful, and I treat the Bible in the same way.
It would be more accurate to say that we assume the document reflects the author's, perhaps a culture's, convictions, beliefs, and possibly ulterior motives. If this is what you mean, then I treat the Bible that way as well.
The real problem is in extrapolating from those things that can be verified-- and really, the Bible scores very low here-- to those things that can't, such as the various miracles, angels, God, and whatnot. Because these things cannot be verified, an argument is usually bootstrapped from the "fact" that the Bible is miraculously non-contradictory and from the "fact" that every attempt at verification has been successful. Basically, this argument depends upon the Bible containing no errors. A single error and the whole construct crashes down.
A second problem is that none of the major events described have been verified-- the creation, the Flood, the exodus-- though all, in fact, should have left mountains of evidence. This isn't really a problem for a historical document. We realize that people included myth, legend, and such into their histories. This is a problem for a religion, though.
Please note that I don't know what your take on any of this is-- you haven't been posting long enough here-- so I don't mean to imply that anything I've said reflects your personal beliefs.
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