IN ONE OF THE STUPIDER COMMENTS sent to my spam file the claim that since The Bible is not the infallible, literal historical or scientific record of the whole truth it is "usless" in total, which is a useful claim only in so far as if that's you're standard nothing stands, including history, science, mathematics, etc. Nothing is an infallible, literal, historical, scientific record of the whole truth, such a thing is not held by human beings, it is certainly not told by human beings - the sole source of all of our articulated record of everything. Not in total.
Considering the guy who rendered that judgement on The Bible is addicted to the, in total, lies as told by the entertainment industry, an angry defender of Broadway period-costumed bullshit and pseudo-history as told in the shallowed sound stages and editing rooms of Hollywood from my criticism, his demand placed on that one collection of writings, The Bible, shows that it is held to a standard which nothing else is required to follow, one of the most commonly found ersatz principles of the college credentialed class, from the stupidest Freshman up to the highest reaches of elite faculty - perhaps excluding those whose actual professional expertise is in the actual subject matter, taking denominational denial of reality in some cases into account. Fundamentalists being as dishonest about that as Darwinist fundamentalists are on the topic of natural selection being the total explanation of everything up to and including everything. really, everything (Daniel Dennett being one of the hardest cases in that regard).
One thing is clear from the accusation that I claimed that all of the "old testament and new testament" were historically accurate, that the person making the accusation knows nothing about the Book itself, which contains not only internal disagreements but also direct contradictions. For example, in Mark 10, Jesus noted that due to the "hardness of heart" among people, Moses wrote a law that was in contradiction to what the Law of God is in allowing divorce and remarriage, that what Moses, himself, taught was wrong. And that's not one of the minor prophets but the greatest of all the Hebrew prophets, the Bible, itself says that. The Hebrew Scriptures contain a large amount of internal disagreement and criticism. It isn't possible to read the texts carefully and not notice such things in it, certainly written originally and certainly retained through the centuries of copying and transmission by people who were intimately aware of those disagreements and discrepancies.
It is remarkable how that kind of thing, taken as a virtue when it is claimed as part of the scientific method or the practice of the historian is used as a weapon against The Bible and religion in general. It is remarkable because, as pointed out here yesterday and before by, among others quoted here, the eminent Biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann have pointed out that The Bible, itself, makes no claims of the sort the accusation carries. It never claims that it's going to make things crystal clear, it never claims it's going to be internally consistent in the text, it never claims that it is going to get everything right, it never claims that it's going to make things easy and tidy. It never claims it's going to be any of those things the naive view of science or history claim for those no matter how unwelcomed those claims should be by any scientist or historian of any discernment. It's the kind of claim that an ass in the scribbling industry, the entertainment industry habitually makes believing they are showing how clever they are. It is a mainstay of the bizarre modern college-credentialed audience-pleasing innovation in which a comedy act can consist of a shallow, nasty, derisive atheist sermon preached to those who love to believe they're in the know but who could probably not carry out a multiplication of two digit numbers without a calculator. I'm talkin' to you kew-el kids sitting on the school house steps for going on fifty-years or more.
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