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I would have thought faith had not to do with being positive, but being committed. (Of course, my wife, child and friends think should be committed, but I THINK that's diferent.) In other words, come at me with a dentist's drill and my certainty about God's providential protection may waver, but now and when the hooting and hollering's done it still seems to be to be the case that God brings good out of evil.

To put it another way, I would venture to say that you are like a person looking at the racing form and newsletters, but you haven't quite gone up to the window and made your bet. Would that be fair?

As to Noah's flood and things of that kind, I guess people of a literalist persuasion would say that my faith is misplaced. (And I would say theirs is.)

But wasn't the original topic about whether the Table of Contents, so to speak, of the Bible was faxed from above, or, more precisely, what it meant that it wasn't faxed from above. The article is about books that were (cue dramatic music) "banned" from the Bible. This raises the question, "Who do those people think they are to say this book is in and that book is out? What gives THEM the right, huh?"

And that, I think, just shows that questions about the nature and authority of Scripture sooner or later lead to questions about the nature and the authority of the Church and then about the activity of the Holy Spirit. In the word's of Cher, from Clueless,"It's a big old mess!"

To put it another way, I would venture to say that you are like a person looking at the racing form and newsletters, but you haven't quite gone up to the window and made your bet. Would that be fair?

It probably looks that way to other people, but I don't see it that way.

Here's my perspective, and I'm not trying to persuade anyone else to adopt it:

The truth is the truth and it would be so whether or not the Bible ever existed. Reading the Bible can't be the entrance exam for heaven or all those who couldn't read in world history, or lived before the Bible was written, or never were given the opportunity to read it, would be automatically disqualified.

That would be unfair, and since I believe God is fair, something more basic is the criteria.

The alternative to that is that God is unfair, in which case there is no way to guess who will be the winners or losers will be.

Given that I have that perspective, I view the Bible as one tool to use to discover God's truths. But since it was compiled by men, there are errors. Those don't really bother me because in the overall scheme of things, it doesn't matter whether I believe in Noah's Flood 4,000 years ago, or whether I believe it never happened and that life, including human life, evolved on this planet over hundreds of millions of years.

Those are interesting side issues.

So, I'm not a biblical literalist and I don't have to jump through hoops to argue that everything in there is consistent with itself, with science, or with history and reality.

That approach works for me, and I know it doesn't work for others who need a more structured philosophy.