Class of '87!

Wow - you and I are the same age. My twenty-year HS reunion is this weekend - when's yours? Crazy how time flies, isn't it?

I can see your point about science and how, sometimes, it might come down to an educated guess. It is a good point. I don't know if I would call that "faith", though. Science is totally grounded in what can be proven by studying the parts and pieces of the real world. Religion and faith mostly deal with the fantastical. For instance it's a MUCH bigger leap to convince yourself that an angel brought Joseph Smith several golden tablets that he could ony read when he put on magic spectacles and then said angel took the tablets back to heaven and nobody else ever saw them, than to believe in the properties of molecules and atoms. (I use the Jospeh Smith example but Christians of all denominations must convince themselves that any number of fantastic stories are Truth in order for their faith to live.)

The two identical chapters don't disprove the existence of God, no - but they do severly damage the probablility of the Christian god, especially when combined with all the other contradictions, antiquated dogma and downright mistakes in the Bible - because if the Bible wasn't written by God, then Christianity crumbles. Why would God write a faulty book? The answer is most likely that he didn't. Most likely, a bunch of men that passed away long ago did. Most likely, those men had ulterior motives. Power, money, respect - the same motives that drive men to write books and start religions today.

And yes, another motive may have been to teach good morals. Aesop had the same motive when he wrote his fables, and they contain many of the same valuable and good lessons that are contained in the Bible. I'd like to say the general message of the Bible is a good one. The problem is, it's so easily interpreted in so many different ways that it's hard to say there is an "overall message". Why would God write a book that's so easy to interpret in so many wildly different ways? Unless, like one of the other posters on this board claims, God's simply bored and screwing around with us for fun. It that's so, then I say screw Him.

I don't dismiss the possibility that there is a God. I just think it's veeeery unlikely any of the world's organized religions know as much about Him as they think they do.