Why is the Bible so vague ambiguous
 

wouldn't it be easier if it was in greater detail of how life was created, instead of having people to interpret things like whether the 6 days of creation were really 24 hour 'days' or what

Look, nobody sat down and wrote the Bible. It is collection of stories, accounts documents, letters and records that accumulated over hundreds of years. Some of these pieces existed verbally for many years before they were written down. They were translated and re-translated. And there are different versions of every book in the Bible.

In fact, what you see in the Bible is basically a “best guess” at what Christianity’s principle documents should be.

When Constantine and friends decided what version of Genesis to use, they were looking at hundreds of creation stories. Each was accepted by a group of Christians (and/or Jews) already. They couldn’t ALL be right. So they did the best they could.

Genesis Ch 1 and Gen Ch2 contradict each other, making a literal translation difficult at best.

Christianity is a philosophically messy religion. If you want something more black and white, turn to the Book of Mormon. It was originally written in English, and there aren’t too many different versions of it.

Probably been posted a million times before but:
http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...adictions.html

Anyway.
The bible is just a bunch of stories strung loosely together. If you ask me, most of it's myth..but..whatever.

The Bible is vague and ambiguous because it is not an instruction book nor was it ever intended to be. The concept of history DIDN'T exist when most of the Biblical stories were first passed down from generation to generation, and it BARELY existed when the New Testament stories were written. Literature had little to no focus on history or literal acuracy and almost complete focus on general messages.

The Bible is not a book that tells you "how to get into Heaven" and it is not a book that gives clear cut ways to live your life. It is a collection of (mostly mythological - i.e. not historically accurate) stories which represent humanity's relationship to God in one way or another. The minute one starts to look at it as more than that is when you start running into trouble.

Has anyone mentioned yet that the Bible is just a collection of stories that were written down from oral history? :D

The vagueness doesn't bother me. I just take the part where Jesus said "Do unto others ..." and "Love thy neighbor ..." and completely ignore whether or not it's divine word or just the preaching of a guy who was way ahead of his time, and ignore the other few thousand pages. If the way I was taught/indoctrinated as a child is right, doing good sohuld be enough for me anyway, so even if I'm wrong, I'm still on the right path.

I don't know but did you guys know that the bible is just a collection of stories that were written down from oral history?

Why does this forum keep coming back to discussions on Christian religious doctrine? Shouldn't we get a Tilted Theology forum going and get this sort of stuff moved over there? Either you believe, or you don't. If you do, then you do and if not then you don't. Or how about, just to make it moderately interesting, we try and post viewpoints that are as different from what we believe as possible, and try and justify those? It might be more exciting that way.

Anyway, my take on the question is that if it wasn't so vague, it wouldn't have survived for so long - it is its very ambiguity that makes it flexible enough to withstand critisism.

I wouldn't get worked up into a lather over it. The Bible is replete with inaccuracies and contradictions. It is, after all, just a collection of stories that were written down from oral history. :rolleyes:

Oh yes, I forgot ;)

On a serious note, I am often presented with this problem by those on both ends of the belief spectrum, since it seems that as a moderate Episcopalian, I 'pick and choose' what I believe.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

While I acknowledge how the Bible was assembled over the centuries, there ARE truths to be found in it.

Central to these truths is the teachings of Jesus.

But even these are written down stories from oral history ;)

Still, I believe that there is a central tenet that He very likely said: Love God with your whole heart and love your neighbors as yourselves. From these the rest of the Law derives.

And thus has been the test I use when looking at Bible and deciding what to follow.

(For example, it is why I am in support of Gay marriage even when the old testament and Paul speak out against homosexuality.)

honestly, i don't think humans function well with rule books. we either let them replace our thinking and mindlessly insist on the rules, or we spend all our time trying to outthink them and find loopholes. Or, a combination of the two. When applied to theology, that behavior is heresy, a combination of legalism or biblicism.

The bible is a recorded story of a faith community over generations...and there's a lot there. It's not supposed to be neat or easy. It's supposed to give you enough room to argue with it, agree with it, be comforted, be enraged, be assured, and be provoked. THe zen tradition has a line i think works:

"...a monk has what he believes is a breakthrough: a glimpse of nirvana, the Buddhamind, the big pay-off. Reporting the experience to his master, however, he is informed that what has happened is par for the course, nothing special, maybe even damaging to his pursuit. And then the master gives the student dismaying advice: If you meet the Buddha, he says, kill him.

Why kill the Buddha? Because the Buddha you meet is not the true Buddha, but an expression of your longing. If this Buddha is not killed he will only stand in your way. "

If you find yourself agreeing with the whole of scripture, you're reading it wrong.

While I dont agree that the bible is the all encompassing answer to everything, there are 'good' values to be learned from it.. just like most any other relgion.

As for http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...adictions.html .. seems like some random anal guy has enough time to read through the bible without any prior knowledge and pick out details written by different people that were contradictory. ( Laws and tones changed from old to new testament incomparably - he made a few arguments comparing them )

you've all got to understand that the bible is a collection of stories written down from oral history.

/irresistible overkill

yes, some of the bible is myth... my understanding of biblical context leads me to believe that it wasn't intended to be anything else. for instance, the genesis myth doesn't really seem to speak to the actual mechanics of how the universe was created... but it does address it's purpose and creator.

for those who have read C.S. Lewis, you may have run across his "true myth" arguments. i'm unsure if he made that argument first or even best, but i found the idea compelling.

For the interested, I went through a list of these cowman's 'contradictions' here .

Believe it or not the idea of reading Genesis literally was an Enlightenment era problem tied predominately with the linking of the biblical story to a the foreign element of Aristotilian scientific method.

The Bible is a spiritual book, not a history (as has been mentioned). That doesn't mean there's no history in it, but rather than each book has to be understood on its own terms. The Bible is fundamentally a library. As any good speech about any real point contains events anecdotal, parabolic, and literal, so does the bible.

Believe it or not early Christians dwelled very infrequently on apologizing for the "historicity" of their religion. Origen, a very significant Alexandria Christian thinker in the 3rd century, had a very low opinion of people who insisted on literal versions of many biblical stories. He considered them crazy and out of touch with the oldest Christian traditions.

by the by: "Constantine and his buddies" didn't "evaluate hundreds of creation stories" and pick one. They accepted the Hebrew Scriptures from the Septuagint as scriptural. The problem with many people is that they know just enough to be hot headed and opinionated and just not enough to have their facts straight.

btw: Just to head off the postmodernists complaints, Gnostic gospels were never a widespread phenomenon in the early Church, much less were their alternate creation myths holding any real weight by the time of the First Ecumenical Council.

In my opinion, the vague nature is due to the stories coming from a collection of messages....passed down as oral history.

You do not and should not take all The Bible's stories literally. They are there to teach lessons and morality. The vagueness allows for it to be more universal and teach general lessons to more people than a very specific story. By being vague it has a more universal application for teaching and entertaining. What clavus said, too.