Let’s imagine you want to buy two pounds of Golden Delicious apples. Unfortunately, you are too busy to go to the grocery store yourself, so you send your son to buy the apples. Now, suppose that instead of going to the grocery store and buying the apples, your son goes out and finds a dozen strangers, tells these dozen strangers several stories about the types of food you enjoy eating, and then tells the strangers to go out and buy you some food. Does it seem very likely that they will buy you two pounds of Golden Delicious apples?
Now, let’s imagine you are God. Imagine you have realized (in your infinite wisdom) that the laws of the Old Testament aren’t working very well, so you decide to make a new covenant with the people of earth. Unfortunately, you are too busy to go to earth and tell them this new covenant yourself, so you send your son, Jesus. Now, suppose that instead of just going to earth and telling the people of earth what you want written in this new covenant, your son goes out and finds a dozen strangers, tells these dozen strangers various stories about the type of new covenant you want, and then tells the strangers to go out and, in their own words, communicate your new covenant to the people of earth. Does it seem very likely that they will accurately communicate this new covenant?
Have you ever played the game of Telephone? The game of Telephone consists of making a line of people, whispering a story to the first person in line, having that person whisper the story to the second person in line, having that person whisper the story to the third person, etc., until the story reaches the last person in line. The last person in line then tells the story out loud so everyone can hear, and then the original story is read out loud so everyone can compare the original story to the story that reached the end of the line. There’s a good chance the story has changed a lot.
So, here’s my question: why did God play a game of Telephone by sending his son to earth, having his son find a dozen strangers to tell God’s new covenant to, and then having those dozen people go out and communicate God’s new covenant to the people of earth? Wouldn’t it have made a whole lot more sense for God to simply communicate his new covenant directly to the people of earth? Couldn’t God have…oh, I dunno…just broadcast his voice over the entire planet, so everyone could hear directly what God wanted in his new covenant? Why all the hassle and delay of conceiving a son, raising that son to be without sin, putting that son through all sorts of tribulations with pharoah, crucifying that son on a cross, raising that son from the dead, etc.? Why not just go straight to the people and tell them what you want? Indeed, wouldn’t that have made a much bigger impression on us earthlings — everyone on the planet suddenly hearing the same voice (in each person’s own language) with the same message? People would have been asking each other, “Hey, did you hear that voice? Yeah, I did, too. Wow, there’s no doubt about it now — God really exists, and now we know just what he wants!”
But even if God didn’t want to go that route, why didn’t he at least have Jesus write his own book of the Bible: the autobiographical gospel of Jesus? If God wanted a written record of the life of Jesus and of the new covenant that God wanted to create, then why not simply have Jesus write it? Wouldn’t that have made a lot more sense than playing an elaborate game of Telephone with a dozen strangers?
I can tell you one thing: if I were God, I’d have gone directly to the people with a nice speech…maybe some fireworks for entertainment…helium balloons for the kids…maybe even a fancy PowerPoint presentation highlighting the main features and benefits of my new and improved covenant. Sure would be easier than raising a son to do the job for me.
Why is God so roundabout, so convoluted, so vague and so self-contradictory? It sounds to me like God is a tinkerer. Oh, wait. That's the style of evolution!
How about this: If God just made everything clear, there might not be anything to fight wars over anymore. Here's the position on abortion. Here's the position on homosexuality. Here's whether capital punishment is OK. Oh, yeah . . . here's how to determine how much you are obligated to give to the poor. Then we'd just do it, right?
Your point is thus intriguing. Knowing in advance (because He is omnipotent) that people would be squabbling and killing each other for centuries over various interpretations of the current vague and self-contradictory version of the bible, why would God actually make his magnum opus so incredibly hard to decipher?
If there's really a God, I'd vote that He's a sadist, for the reason you mention and for many many others.
Interesting and entertaining. I have thought about religion quite a bit, finally pursuing it to a degree within philosophy. I have thought for some time though that religion is largely (if not entirely) a function of human incapacities to understand something so profound. Thus even if [G]od did project "his" voice conveying a single message that hearers of any language could comprehend, there would still be massive misunderstandings and differing inturpretations. Perhaps one group picks up on a perceived emphasis on one word and that influences their understanding while another group picks up on another emphasis and so on. In the end different groups will claim that their interpretation is correct and then things escalate from there. I am being rather simple here for the sake of clarity.
In general I think that our human conception of God is very much off from the truth. The more we confine ourselves to traditional inturpretations the more mired in our confusion and perhaps even our fundamentalism. Traditional conceptions such as God is male, that 'he' has a long flowing beard (basically Michelangelo's representation – very much like that of Zeus), that God is a being that sits around somewhere watching us, that God steps in from time to time even, and so on. (I am heavily influenced in my conception of God by Spinozan theory, FYI)
Something else I've often wondered about: why does the Bible so conspicuously omit Jesus' adolescent years? Why do we not hear about the Son of God wetting his bed, or dipping little girls' pigtails into ink wells, or storming around stores demanding candy and screaming, "But *I* am the SON OF GOD!?" Curious we never near about Jesus' 'terrible twos," or if Mary and Joseph had to teach him to share his toys, or about his struggles with sexual identity, or if he studied hard in school, or if he was any good as a carpenter (Were his customers happy with his work, or did he need to resort to the occasional miracle to meet a deadline?), or if he was a precocious child, etc. What kind of social life did Jesus have before he began ranting about the Pharisees and generally making a nuisance of himself? It's just a bit too convenient that the only times of Jesus' life that we find written about in the Bible are the most favorable (i.e., ideal) years of his life — when he was an innocent baby and when he was a full-fledged messiah. But what about the years in between? Was Jesus performing miracles as a child, or did this ability not develop until later?
People might think these are trivial details, but they would help answer some important questions, such as: when in his life did Jesus become the messiah; at what age did he develop the power to perform miracles; is Jesus equal in status with God or is God more powerful; exactly how many, and what kind, of human struggles did Jesus actually experience; etc.?
John makes a number of thought-provoking observations. I hadn't considered how confusion could arise even from God speaking directly to everyone: indeed, how many times have different people heard the same speech and each taken away something different?!
There is also the strange practice of portraying God as male, with a long flowing beard. The Bible never portrays God that way; indeed, I believe the Bible doesn't even portray God the same way twice: in one case, God walks with Adam in the Garden of Eden; in another, God is a burning bush; etc. Portraying God as a bearded old man — an image not found in the Bible — would mean we are creating God in our image rather than the reverse.
BTW, speaking of Christian art…something else I've always wondered about: why are angels portrayed with wings? If angels are incorporeal, then why would they need wings?
The first problem with this scenario, which is also the fatal problem with the argument, is that you indeed are not God. Nor can you think, act, or speak like the infinite, immortal, only wise God, grumpypilgrim.
And if all of your requests had or did happen – come on, would you really believe then. I think not.
You raised the question of the existence of God – can you prove that he does not exist? I submit that it is just a challenging, if not more so, to prove that our Creator does not exist.
Emily, the burden of proof is always on those who declare that something exists, not on those who declare that something invisible does not exist. Otherwise, arguments such as yours could be used to imagine all sorts of fictional things into existence — from unicorns, to leprechauns, to the Tooth Fairy, to the Flying Green Spaghetti Monster.
In the case of "God," the only point I am making is that the God described in the Bible appears to be a long, long way from being either wise or perfect, for the reasons I have provided (and many others). Furthermore, the God of the Bible appears to have more wildly different personalities than a teenager on LSD: the God of the OT is cruel, vengeful, jealous, etc., while the God of the NT is loving, forgiving, kind, etc. What sense does that make?
With the above in mind, there are many good reasons to believe that the God described in the Bible could not possibly exist. This does not prove that God is imaginary, just that the God of the Bible is likely imaginary — simply because the Bible contains so many self-contradictions.
Finally, I disgree with your assertion that my argument has a "fatal problem" because I am not God. That's like saying I am unqualified to argue against the existence of Santa Clause because I am not Santa Clause. The fact is, my argument is logical and reasonable: what sense does it make for God to play an elaborate game of Telephone instead of communicating more directly? And why is there no book of Jesus in the Bible when that, too, would have been more direct? I invite you to address either of these questions.
There are two standards of proof used in shell game fashion by most believers. Small gaps in scientific theories are very bad, of course, while HUGE gaps and contradictions in the Bible (e.g., 40 years of silence about Jesus of Galilea, see http://www.jesuspuzzle.com) are no big deal. That an agnostic fails to pay a parking ticket is a bad thing while it's no big deal that God flattens entire cities when He's pissed off by the acts of one or two people.
My point is that believers do not go around excusing incredibly dysfunctional communication skills, except when it's (allegedly) God talking.
Further to Erich's comment, people can prove virtually anything they wish if they begin with their desired conclusion and then search for evidence to support it, while discarding all contrary evidence. It is the mistake that Bush made when he told us Saddam had WMDs and it is the mistake creationists make when they declare their mythical creation stories to be literally true.
In the case of creationism, fanatics not only attack radiocarbon dating, but they also ignore the many diverse fields of science that corroborate radiocarbon dating. For example: tree ring sequences, ice core sequences and varve (river delta) sequences provide continuous records of the earth's age going back 7,000+, 150,000+ and 1 million+ years, respectively, and the only way creationists can address these findings is by completely ignoring them.
Especially inexplicable is how American creationists can ignore the glaring evidence against them that is provided by America's own state of Hawaii. The Hawaiian islands unambiguously demonstrate the results of millions of years of plate tectonic movement, volcanic mountain growth, erosion, etc., which, if God created them in just one day, can only prove that God is the ultimate deceiver; i.e., Satan.
I want to comment one more time here. To be frank, there is no authentic book of Jesus because Jesus, if he truly existed, was not devine. Nor is there a God (at least, that is where I put my chips). But assuming that there is a God and that Jesus is divine, Grumpy, I agree with you. Your point was illustrated tonight as I listened to Christian talk radio. One show after another struggles to come to grips with arcane Bible passages. Do they ever succeed? Never. There's always another show with someone else trying to teach the listeners the "obvious" meaning of these many confusing passages. And radio is only the tip of the iceberg. There are Bible study classes all over America all the time. There are zillions of Bible study websites, each of them struggling to teach "the Word" to the many who repeatedly struggle to learn it. And, of course, there are millions who attend church services where, week after week, they hear Bible lessons, only to return, again and again, for more help.
It is not easy to find a more obtuse and self-contradictory book than the Bible. Why would a omnipotent and omniscent God write so ineffectively? Because He likes to see people struggle and grope and come to different conclusions and then get frustrated and threaten each other? I don't know.
If God wanted to set us straight on the end of the world, He certainly could have done so clearly. He could have said "I'll return X years after the explosion of Krakatoa." Or he could have written, "Women should be allowed to be popes." Or "There's no need for priests to be celibate." Or "Don't get hung up over masturbation. It's harmless in moderation."
That "He" failed to write "His" Book clearly or persuasively is strong evidence that either A) He doesn't exist or B) He is not omnipotent and omniscient.
grumpypilgrim, forgive my lapsed response. and i just typed a bunch of excuses, but what's the point?
In answer to your questions about how the Lord communicates with us, the following is my answer. Also, Erich, I think that I mentioned this subject (of Jesus being an alternative to both conservative, legalistic religion as well as to secular liberalism) to you in an earlier conversation:
I'm struck by how God's way of communicating shows a lot about what he values. Sure, he could have had helium balloons and a big show. That's what we'd expect an arrogant man to do. The world lives for things like wealth, power, status, attention.
It's funny how the values of a secular culture are so similar to the values of traditional, conservative religious legalists. Both want power for themselves. Both look to gain status or significance for themselves. Both are self-righteous, judging those who are "wrong" — treating their respective moralities as weapons with which to attack others. It's odd how critics of religion and the religious people alike think they're better, smarter, and wiser than others–and feel they should also be more powerful, etc. It seems like both are all about power–all about getting what we want.
As one who wearies of endless arguments between liberals and conservatives, I find Jesus an attractive alternative to both.
When I read the gospels, I find Jesus presenting a third way, distinct from the world's will to power and distinct from religious self-righteousness. In Jesus, I see a forceful opposition to religious legalism and a reversal of the world's values. Only in Jesus do I find God saving the world through the loss of power. With Jesus, the way up is down. The way to power is through weakness. The way to riches is through giving things away. In Jesus, we find this strange reversal of values, a reversal that I find more satisfying to the soul.
I don't need wealth, status, recognition, power, vindication, control. I don't even need to be *right* if what Jesus said is true. He becomes my significance–I don't need to work and manipulate and control to give myself significance. He is pleased with me through his cross, so I don't have to try to earn people's favor. He pays my spiritual debt to God, so I can identify with the poor rather than thinking myself better than them. I see in this figure Jesus one who loved me when I was his enemy so that I'll be empowered to love my enemies.
Emily – you’ve suggested that “secular culture” is monolithic (by "secular" culture, I assume you mean the culture of those people who don’t believe in God). That is not my experience. I’ll address your adjectives for secular culture one by one.
You write that secular culture people “look to gain status or significance for themselves.” That would be true by definition, if I get your drift. If there’s no God, then “significance” has to come from somewhere other than God. This doesn’t mean that significance must be gained in an arrogant, self-centered, insensitive way. Many “secular” people I know are highly active in their community, doing lots of hard work to improve the plight of the poor while many Believers chant away in their fancy churches. By the way, those believers (even moderate believers) are often obsessed with endowing themselves with significance by cozying up to their God, announcing that they are “saved” and in many other ways, proclaiming themselves to be special. By writing this, I'm not suggesting that there aren't some non-believers who you've accurately described.
You’ve suggested that secular people are “self-righteous, judging those who are ‘wrong.’” Really? You must know more than a few “secular” people? Are they all really self-righteous and judgmental? I know many who are exceedingly open-minded. Their prime objective is to live and let live, the opposite of what you suggest.
Secular people treat “their respective moralities as weapons with which to attack others.” Again, this is not my experience. Certainly, I don’t know of any secular people who gather every Sunday to hawk their moral superiority over everyone else.
To the extent that some critics of religion think they’re better, smarter, and wiser than others, it is often because they publicly recognize the limits to human knowledge. They think they are smart because they recognize their own ignorance. They thus realize that believers often claim to know things that they can’t possibly know (e.g., believers often speak of heaven, though not a single believer has any idea of whether human sentience survives bodily death). I find it strange to consider this as arrogant.
I’m glad that you find meaning in your own personal religious beliefs. It’s not my job or my quest to damage your beliefs or take them from you. But there are other philosophies and religions (besides Christianity) that warn of the dangers of human cravings for wealth, status or power. These are important things to consider, yes, but Christianity is not the only path to recognizing these ideas. There are secular paths to these ideas too, as well as other types of religious paths.
I think that worthy ideas are worthy because they are good ideas, not because a person held in high esteem allegedly said them. And I certainly don’t evaluate any idea on unrelated supernatural claims (such as virgin birth or the story of the loaves and the fish). Even if Jesus really fed 50,000 with a basket of food (I don’t believe that this happened), such a miraculous event is irrelevant to whether his moral system is worthy. He might have been a legitimate miracle worker with a dysfunctional moral system. He might have been scamming people with faked miracles, yet had an incredibly good approach to morality. And then there is the hell thing . . . I just keep having a VERY difficult problem thinking of the inventor of hell as a great teacher of morality.
Human animals will need to work things out here on Earth for ourselves if we are ever going to have some semblance of harmony. That’s my view. You might consider this to be arrogant self-righteous power craving, but I consider it honesty. I will never say that I know what is beyond my ability to know. I will always strive to base any moral system on empathy. I consider this approach to be humble and power-sharing, even though no God whispered this idea in my ear and no God (that I believe in) wrote it down in any book.
Emily's description of non-believers as arrogant, self-righteous, power-craving, etc., sounds like the defamatory rhetoric that many evangelicals sweepingly apply to non-believers. While I agree that many non-believers are as Emily describes, many evangelicals are, too — and the more fervent they are in their evangelism, the more likely they are to display these traits on a regular basis. I attribute such evangelical rhetoric to the tendency for people to see in others what they desperately need to see in themselves — a topic that I have previously written about: http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=272.
In any case, such name-calling does nothing for the discussion….discussion that, by the way, is about why the God of the Bible — whom Christians tell us is perfect, omniscient, etc. — has been unable to reliably communicate his message to anyone in 2000 years. We're not talking about a secular issue here, we're talking about basic communication skills: the elaborate game of Telephone that God plays in the Bible is an *inherently defective* method of communication.
In response to this observation, Emily does what so many believers do: she sidesteps the issue and, instead, criticizes non-believers. This is not a surprise: it's what believers have been doing for the past two millennia. Whenever a challenge to Christian doctrine reveals an inherent defect in that doctrine, believers use one of two standard answers. In most cases, believers can reply with one of the many well-rehearsed answers that the church has developed during its two millennia of practice. When that fails, believers simply sidestep the question and change the subject.
well, this has become exactly what i feared…without trust and relationship among participants we have problems communicating. and the topic of God is not one that will ever be exhausted, much less explained concisely on a blog.
and i'm just a name on a computer screen, why should you trust me?
i bid you an enjoyed life…
Grumpy, in an article titled "Reply to a Christian," Sam Harris asks the question of how good a book the bible would have been if it had really been authored by the Creator of the Universe. For starters, the Creator would have gotten the value of pi right. Here's the link. Here's an excerpt of from the article:
Back to the original point, this True and Inerrant text has been transcribed and translated many times before it got to the first official version at the Council of Nicea in the 4th century.
Read "Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" by Bart D. Ehrman (2005). The author is an American Bible Church Fundamentalist who fell in with those scholars and believers trying to find the original message. Get the book practically free from QPB.com (in Sept 2006).
One of the well-known-to-scholars factoids about the inerrant text is that there are more differences between all the known early copies than there are words in the New Testament. By "early" he means before the current official Greek version translated (in part) from the official Latin version of the original Greek texts. This retranslation is the basis of all English versions. Why aren't the English versions taken solely form the original Greek? Too many well-known parts of the New Testament hadn't yet been added before it was Roman.
To Erich's comment: I was unaware of the Bible's error about pi. Who would have guessed that the Creator of the Universe would be bad at math?
Harris makes a great point. Indeed, if God wanted to impress us all with his prophesies, then why did he make them all so vague with respect to both what would happen and when? Why not just say E=mc^2 or f=ma (force=mass*acceleration) and be done with it? Christian dogma has become so absurd that preachers today claim that a prophesy is not a real prophesy unless it contains no date-certain. By that measure, anyone could predict a world-ending apocalypse, resulting from a great fire or flood, that is preceded by widespread political turmoil.
Grumpy. Just because He is math-challenged doesn't mean He can't correctly figure out who should be sent to hell for eternal damnation. Let's be careful not to over-generalize, then. We all have our weaknesses. That the Creator struggles with math actually humanizes Him in my eyes.
"That the Creator struggles with math actually humanizes Him in my eyes."
LOL! Remember, Erich, God made you in his image, not the other way around.
Your point about God's judgment is troubling, though: how can we be confident of God's perfect judgment if his math is so bad that he cannot even compute the girth of a circle? Surely the calculus of human salvation is far more complex.
Also, how was God able to create humans with "math brains" if he did not have such a brain himself? How can God — who is infinite in wisdom and power — create something that is greater than himself (at least in this dimension)?
And why do we never hear preachers mentioning this little problem of God's poor math skills?
Grumpy: The observation that man now has the ability to do math unimagined at the times that the various texts of the Bible were written would seem to indicate some sort of evolution. As if the complexity of the universe always increases (see the second law of thermodynamics), and man has to keep up.
The pre-Biblical Egyptians that built the great pyramids (completed about a century before the earliest date for the birth of Moses, who usually gets the credit by Christians for writing the whole of the old testament) used 22/7 for pi (off by about 0.001264 or 0.04%). The Von Danniken crowd points out that the ratio of the perimiter of the 3 famous pyramids to their heights is pi, to a couple of decimal places more accurate than the Egyptians knew! As if they rolled a wheel along to measure the sides, but used its diameter for heights.
But I digress, or regress, something.
Questions:
1. WHY did God give the law to the Jews? Because they said: "Everything the Lord says, we will do". OK, then here's 10 simple rules to start with. The law is designed for a purpose.
2. Do you know how far-reaching the concept of free will really is? We're not the sims you know…
Herbert: You're assuming lots of things I don't believe. Sorry, I don't believe in ethereal sentient beings. See http://dangerousintersection.org/?p=1220
This is a very interesting post, one which I would very much like to address even though it is over a year old.
Grumpy, you wanted someone to answer the question as to "why" God would be so confusing in his delivery of his law to mankind. I think many people, even "Christians" make one very fundamental error when speaking about the Bible, and that is that they often like to speak of it in parts. The Bible is a book, quite a profound one indeed, but written by humans nonetheless. Sure, many an evangelical preacher continue to assert that the Bible is inerrant because it is Divinely inspired, but that does not mean that it has not been changed throughout the centuries, nor does it mean that it is perfect.
I view the Bible as any other book written, as a whole. It begins with "the beginning" and ends, quite appropriated with The End. Well, Amen, but close enough, eh?
Anywhos, it is, essentially, one grand story. Whether one wishes to view it as a fictional story or a non-fiction is up to personal choice, fortunately. What is important to understand, I think, is that the Bible is a Spiritual story, and not primarily a historical one. The Old Testament provides the History of the Jewish people, and the New Testament provides the History of Jesus (only in the context of his 3 years as a prophet). Ultimately, however, the Story is one to be interpreted by an understanding of mankind's spiritual journey.
That is the reason why there are mathematical errors in the Bible. Math is not what the Bible teaches, it is not a Math textbook. It is a spirit textbook. Also, realize, that the Bible is not the Be-All, End-All of mankind's spiritual existence. That is the biggest problem I have had with religious dogmatists and their insistent need to validate their ideas with "what the Bible says." Chances are, they don't even really know what the Bible says, because they haven't read the whole thing, and therefore do not understand its true purpose.
On answering the questions about "no book of Jesus," one sees in the Bible that the Jews didn't really believe Jesus. Indeed, they still do not. So, simply writing a book saying: I am God and this is why, simply would not suffice. He needed proof, he needed some sort of validation. Thus: disciples and their "stories" used to explain his teachings and his miracles.
I think the other question about why God would not simply "tell everyone" was also answered. I think there is also the big issue of "Free Will" but that is a rather lengthy discussion that I am sure has been exhausted.
Responding to TheThinkingMan's suggestion that the god-of-the-Bible could not make a better case for himself with direct evidence, I would point out that: (a) direct evidence is a very effective means of persuasion and (b) nothing would prevent an omnipotent being from providing *frequent* direct evidence of its existence. Just as parents provide daily instructions and corrections to their children, so too the god-of-the-Bible could provide daily instructions and corrections to us. This would pose no threat to our free will, yet it would clearly be a more effective method of spreading The Word. So, why doesn't it happen? Why doesn't the god-of-the-Bible transform, say, the table I am sitting at into an animate object that speaks directly to me? Or, why doesn't the god-of-the-Bible take each of us on a brief field trip to heaven and hell to show us what awaits us after we die? Or, what about transporting us back in time, so we might experience, with our own senses, Jesus walking on water, or the chat that Moses had with the burning bush, or the resurrected Jesus walking around with a spear hole in his torso? Just think about the many, many ways in which the god-of-the-Bible could do a far better job of proving his case than the one that has been offered and I think anyone would have to admit that the god-of-the-Bible uses remarkably ineffective methods for a being who is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent.
In Erich's first comment, he observed, "If God just made everything clear, there might not be anything to fight wars over anymore. Here’s the position on abortion. Here’s the position on homosexuality. Here’s whether capital punishment is OK. Oh, yeah . . . here’s how to determine how much you are obligated to give to the poor. Then we’d just do it, right?"
Seems to me that is one of the most enormous problems with the Bible. People on *both* sides of nearly *any* moral debate can find support in the Bible for their argument. Abortion, homosexuality, capital punishment, contraception, sex education, slavery, wealth accumulation, corporal punishment, voting rights, capitalism, socialism, healthcare, technology, environmental protection, species extinction…the list is virtually endless. I think of this whenever someone declares the Bible to be *the* source of "absolute" morality. Even seemingly absolute commandments such as "thou shalt not kill" or "thou shalt not steal" turn out to have so many exceptions that they have virtually no practical value as moral guidelines. Is it OK to execute a murderer? Is it OK to kill an enemy? Is it OK to kill a madman who is holding a knife to your wife's throat? Indeed, one huge problem with the Bible's listing of its many Commandments is how to decide among opposing actions when the Commandments conflict; e.g., is it OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed your starving child? Is it OK to kill one person to save a hundred? Was it OK for President Truman to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese people with atomic bombs to bring and end to a war that would otherwise have killed millions of people (both American and Japanese)? Is it OK to support stem cell research that uses human embryos to potentially cure diseases that affect millions? The Bible, for all its 'literal truth', offers virtually no practical guidance.
A bit of a side question: exactly where did Jesus come from? I can think of four different places mentioned in the Bible: Galilea, Bethlehem, Nazarath, and the City of David (i.e., Jerusalem). Seems odd that the Bible is not even clear about this datum.