The answer is simple, I only believe about half of what I read. I question everything! Including the Bible.
Political motives(whether you amit them or not) were at work then, as they are now.
Some would call me foolish. I prefer to be practical. Don't ask me what I accept and what I donot, because I cannot state it that directly. Suffice it to say, This is why I listen not, to most interpreters and preachers. Everyone has a agenda.
Have you ever witnessed the method by which the books which make up the Bible were copied throughout the centuries? It's quite amazing. People spent their entire lives doing nothing but copying scrolls, intricately and meticulously verifying that not a single letter was transcribed incorrectly (Hebrew, for example, can be represented as mathematical numerics as well as characters. Based on this, an extensive checksumming system was devised by which any scroll could be quickly compared with any other scroll to determine whether or not they are identical. We have similar technology using computers and the MD5 algorithm, for example..). Upon the discovery of a mistake, the scroll was generally destroyed and work was begun again, to ensure that the copy exactly matched the original.
I fail to see the political motives in this. The original texts are exactly the same today as they were when they were written (if you don't think so, learn Greek and study the texts themselves, instead of their english translations). Even if you don't approve of the process by which the Bible was compiled from the original texts, finds such as the Dead Sea Scrolls have proven to us that the methods used to copy the texts kept them unchanged for centuries.
Some would call me foolish. I prefer to be practical. Don't ask me what I accept and what I donot, because I cannot state it that directly. Suffice it to say, This is why I listen not, to most interpreters and preachers. Everyone has a agenda.
I will not go so far to call you foolish, unless you have not bothered to do any requisite research into your beliefs. I think you'll find lots of fascinating things out, regardless of whether or not you agree with me.
(And csn is still an excellent source for this type of background information, if you don't mind hearing it secondhand - just keep in mind that you can always go back to the texts referred to and check to see if the message matches up with the writings, which is what is important in validating ANY teaching you hear from someone else.)
After all, how do you know if what you're hearing is true, if you're unwilling to take the effort to investigate it? There's nothing wrong with suspecting everything. It's only when you suspect everything without investigating it that a problem begins to arise.
FReegards, friend. Don't let the Methodists' idiocy convince you that the core tenets of Christianity are false. Do your own legwork to come to or disprove THAT position.
:D ttt