milk_manEarlier you said you haven't read it in it's entirety. I don't mean that you can't have an opinion on it unless you read it in the original language(s), that would be absurd. I am surprised that you can't see the beauty even just in the way it's written.
You should try reading the whole thing, genesis to revelation, and form an opinion on it as a whole. Consider the prophesies and how truly impossible they should have been. It was prophesied that Jesus would be crucified before the romans even started using crucifiction. .. In genesis it says "he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel." (About the serpent and mankind). Jesus was was crucified on Golgotha, which means place of the skull. Absolutely beautiful. Even if you don't accept it as truth I hope you can see the beauty and impossible connections within it.
What you call a prophecy, I call a simple coincidence that lacks sufficient evidence and fits your narrative. It doesn't convince me at all. But, as a work of literature, yes it is an amazing piece- I would not doubt it's contributions to literature or literary theory or to art in general.
But I do take issue with a great deal of claims made in the Bible, many of which are self-standing and crucial to the Christian ideology on their own. I have studied enough religion, metaphysics, ontology, and existentialism to know that many claims in the Bible are incompatible with one another. Claiming that God is all-perfect, all-knowing, all powerful, all-benevolent is incredibly inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible. Moreover, that Christians believe the Bible is divinely inspired and contains the inerrant words of God only proves just how insufficiently people understand just how good a perfect book should be. Or how perfect a truly all-perfect God should be.
I am born sick with sin and I am commanded to get well or I will be punished for all of eternity. This is a fact of the Bible and it does not require a complete reading of the Bible to know if it is a fact of the Bible or not. Such a claim is utterly and completely inconsistent with a being that is claimed to be all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent, and all-perfect.
God is so "perfectly benevolent" that if I do not unconditionally love him, praise him every single day, and beg for his mercy (even though he created me this exact way!) that I will be punished for all of eternity. Again, ridiculous and inconsistent with God's supposed nature.
That God only spoke to a small group of people in the Middle-East, instead of the entirety of his creation, is not the mark of an all-perfect, all-knowing, all-capable God. It is the mark of a man-made story, of men who didn't understand what they were talking about and didn't have the faintest clue about the world around them.
Please.. there are so many of these ridiculous claims I could go on and on and on. Ultimately, this is a childish and absolutely selfish God, hardly all-perfect and only 1 step removed from the Greeks. At least the Greeks didn't try to guise their Gods in the cloaks of absolute perfection. Those Gods had their faults and as such they easily coincided with and reflected how the world worked. Claiming that God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent and all-perfect is simply inconsistent with the teachings of the Bible and the world around us. It doesn't add up and I am completely unconvinced of the argument that Christianity has it right and moreover, that all others are wrong.
