Young Australian Skeptics

Why? Is one question that inevitably turns into many, and one I pose to all those who believe in an inspired Bible as infallible, why? Special pleading occurs often when one tries to cite something as an exemption, without justification or evidence, to what would normally be a generally accepted rule or principle.

Scholars who study the ancient Homeric poems no longer believe they were composed by Homer; this is a universal agreement or consensus among scholars. Instead they agree that the poems were simply attributed to him. The techniques used to determine such facets of an ancient text comprise of well tested and documented forms of literary criticism; such as source criticism, redaction criticism and form criticism. They are used to demonstrate, as with many ancient texts, the idea that texts went through a process of culmination, standardisation and refinement out of older material. In the case of the Homeric poems, they began as oral tradition and only later penned for us to read. So when scholarship shows that one man, Moses, could not have written the Torah using the same techniques applied to the Homeric poems, why would this not be true? It is a case of special pleading; ‘if it is in the infallible word of God then it must be true!’ Instead Biblical scholarship shows us that the Torah is a patchwork of various sources and texts which inevitably explains oh so many of the contradictions, discrepancies, inconsistencies and quirks found in the Torah. Many Christian organizations already conceded that the description of the death of Moses was tact onto the end of Deuteronomy, so they must also concede what scholarship finds as at the very least plausible. When one reads the scripture it is understandable why many Christians concede this. I would like to specifically draw your attention to the beginning of verse 10;

Deuteronomy 34

10 But there has never yet risen up a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom Jehovah knew face to face, 11 as respects all the signs and the miracles that Jehovah sent him to do in the land of Egypt to Phar’aoh and all his servants and all his land, 12 and as regards all the strong hand and all the great awesomeness that Moses exercised before the eyes of all Israel.”

So where does the evidence lead us? For those who are interested, it suggests that it was the Levites who propagated the myth that Moses wrote the Torah and that he brought the Levitical laws down from Mount Sinai on the orders of God as they had the most to gain. Here it gets very political but in short, it allowed the Levites to enforce their own burdens upon the people by attributing it to the highest authority, the great Moses.

When ancient literature shows us that miraculous conceptions and dying/​rising savior gods are not original to Christianity, I get this argument ‘’well obviously Satan planted this stuff to lead us astray,’’ so this stuff definitely happened to Jesus but did not happen to the plethora of other gods several centuries before and after Jesus? There it rears its ugly head again, special pleading. This is just one reason, off the tip of the ice-​​burg, why I choose to remain skeptical. I do not have a problem with those who wish to believe Jesus died and rose three days later; I do have a problem with special pleaders however. Can someone explain to me why I should not apply proper criticism to the stories found in the Bible, but here’s the twist, try not to use the ‘f’ word? (faith!) Saying you need to have faith that Jonah lived three days in a fish is much the same as saying ‘don’t confuse me with the facts.’ Which is a position one could take I guess, but here’s the question I pose, can you defend your faith?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 10:56 am and is filed under Atheist, Firefly, Politics, Religion, Skeptic. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.