Attention: Pastor Robert Lee

                                       

Mr. Lee, my goal is to help bring as many to salvation as possible and encourage them to maintain their Christian Walk. Perhaps you claim likewise.  Now the conditions of salvation (maintaining God's Grace) throughout Christian history, no more/less:  The Holy Spirit's prompting belief in the Trinitarian God and Faith that Jesus was God incarnate, atoned for everyone's sins, and resurrected to conquer death as perfect Savior. Repentance, confession/baptism into Christ, and always living faithfully there-after. 

But you add a condition: We must see the Bible as a perfect God-authored book and/or not believing such is lack of faith. Those who cannot accept that yet would happily accept the other terms are turned away. That is because they are taught it is an all or nothing package. So, people like you are digging chasms in the road to the sheep's pasture and tying boulders to the sheep. 

Though most historical believers viewed the Bible as God-authored and/or perfectly true, they lived before the era of modern science. It became a problem as early as 1630, when the Catholic church prosecuted and imprisoned astronomer Galileo for heliocentrism since instead, Joshua 10:12-14 has the Sun revolving around Earth. 

{1) Noah's Ark/Great Flood: Then dinosaurs were discovered in the 1870s. By the 1990s, much bigger dinosaurs were found; individuals that were 110 feet long, or 60 feet tall, or weighing 200,000 pounds (Argentinosaurus, Sauroposeidon, Supersaurus, etc.).  The number of known bird species have doubled every fifty years for the last three hundred years. The number of known mammal species have doubled every hundred years. So now, knowledgeable people realize they could never all fit on the Ark. In fact, it would take over a hundred arks. .............

You Fundamentalists have countered with: "They took baby animals!" This actually makes it worse, since not only would they have a year and ten days to grow into adulthood on the ark, but they would lack parents, who are needed to teach offspring how to survive: how to hunt, forage, find water, shelter, etc. And then be escorted onto a freezing barren mountaintop lacking oxygen. Your stronger counter is speciation: That is, only taking aboard original archetypes (kinds). And it was said that afterward, every single kind, in a hyper-accelerated diversification process, branched out into every species alive today.  Experts in the fields of animal domestication, archeology, history, paleontology, and zoology said it never happened. Even if these things happened..............  

they would be completely undone by the following: Every animal consumes ten times its bodyweight in food per year and expels four times its bodyweight in waste per year. Then lack of oxygen before long. Unless they took enough plants aboard to replenish it and remove carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Besides zero mention of doing that in the text, calculations show that approximately 10,000 leaves are required to supply one person with oxygen. So, plants alone would take up almost half the ark.  And the air would still be polluted from the methane from the animal waste.  And since plants die from being overwatered, you could postulate that they brought seeds of every plant instead and drilled many big holes into the ark for ventilation. But the problem with that should be obvious!.......

Also, the area where the ark supposedly landed (mountains of Ararat) would logically have the greatest diversity of fossils and other animal remains.  It does not. In fact, it is sometimes the exact opposite, as many regions have animals and plants that exist only there and nowhere else. These are called endemic species. Examples are cobra lilies (western United States), golden lion tamarins (forests of Brazil), Hawaiian honeycreepers (Hawaii), kiwis (New Zealand), Komodo dragons (Indonesian islands), lemurs (Madagascar), marine iguanas (Galapagos islands), polar bears (the Arctic), Tasmanian devils (Tasman-ia), and western lilies (California & Oregon USA). Then the dozen or so ancient civilizations document-ed to have lived through the dates ascribed to the Great Flood instead of being destroyed by it.} 

2) Contradictions? The New Testament canon was not agreed upon until around AD 400.  After, early church leaders still lacked access to the entirety of accepted texts and had only a few scrolls or codices. The average churchgoer had none. Not until around AD 1200 did a bound Bible or chapter divisions exist. Not until the 1500s were Bibles mass produced or have verse divisions. Not until the 1890s were concordances well-known. MY POINT IS, the greater the increase in knowledge, the more the contradictions became evident.  Afterward, highly educated people knew that they must obey the rules of language.  So, they could not pawn one passage off as figurative and the other literal when they contradict, unless the context warrants it. 

{3) Interpretation:  It may have required God's spirit to understand some OLD Testament texts, as it was couched in nebulous types and shadows. But New Testament scripture explained all that. So now Scripture should be interpreted by grammar like every book on Earth, no more/less. That is, language is governed by idiosyncratic, morphological, phonological, pragmatic, prosodic, semantic, and syntactic rules, which dictate the way it is rightly interpreted.  If not, it would make God the author of confusion.  Somewhere this was scrapped in favor of supposedly needing the Holy Spirit's guidance to understand Scripture. This is not the preternatural workings of the Spirit as in apostolic times. Rather, like your buddy Joel Osteen said: "You will hear things in your spirit that don't make sense to your mind." ...........

In other words, nonsense; private interpretation masked as Holy Spirit guidance. Under this theory of yours, some might pray to understand what a Stop light means, then conclude that God revealed that it means Go. This turns away the more intellectual who have higher reading comprehension in favor of those ruled by their emotions.  This idea might be for church leaders to maintain control over their congregants.  It certainly is for people who want to sin, like a man I knew who said that God told him to marry this woman, although Scripture plainly taught that it would be an adulterous relationship.  Then your stances on other issues contradict the interpretations of the original earliest Christians on numerous points, who undoubtedly had the Holy Spirit's guidance.} 

{4) You fail to follow your own rule, since the Canon originally contained the books of Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, and 1-2 Maccabees, as earliest churchmen quoted these as Scripture. And when Jesus and the New Testament writers quoted the Old Testament, they quoted the Septuagint (LXX), a Greek translation of the Hebrew, which had those books. Note the book names such as Gen-esis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, and Ecclesiastes. They are Greek words not Hebrew. .......... 

Psalms got its name from the LXX (the Hebrew title was Tehillim). And the Greek LXX gave us our 1st & 2nd Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles, as they were three bigger books in the Hebrew, not six. Matthew 1:22-23 fulfills Isaiah 7:14's great prophecy: "A virgin shall conceive and bear a son." But only from the Greek LXX. The Hebrew just had "A young woman shall conceive." Deuterocanonical books were in the codices and earliest Bibles, on up until today.  Hypocrisy much?}  

So, no I'm not *trying* to refute the Bible's divine authorship. It IS categorically refuted via science, logic, history, mathematics, and advanced knowledge. That is, in a very clear and definite way, without any doubt or possibility otherwise. And this information is disseminated throughout the worldwide web. So, your idea is DANGEROUS since those who would embrace Jesus yet cannot accept what you say about the Bible could be turned away. In fact, they have stated that other believers having made belief in a God-authored book synonymous with salvation (especially the Noah's ark story) has caused them to abandon their faith. So, swallow your pride and stop encasing the Gospel message in an unpalatable load of crap. 

                                                          K C Sunbeam