And yet, there are contradictions in the Bible, and there's no getting around that, except by pretending you don't remember them.
There are no contradictions that alter any teaching of Jesus or of the Bible's own laws and principles.
Minor scribal errors are of no consequence in the big picture except for nit pickers. Gross misinterpretation is more likely to contradict the Bible than the Bible contradicting itself.
But I don't think that's the most important thing. My own feeling is this: if religion (any religion), is in contradiction with the reality of the world in which we find ourselves, then I think that religion must be suspect...and very probably wrong.
Can I have an example(s) of this please....
For me, as a battered child, it was being told, "Jesus loves and protects you," when clearly that was not true in the slightest. I remember in Sunday school being told "God sees the little sparrow fall," and I thought to myself, "so what? If He doesn't do anything to stop it, He's nothing but a voyeur getting His jollies from suffering."
If you were raised in one of Christendom's institutions then little wonder that you suffered as a child. Where was Jesus when you needed him? I assure you he was not in those institutions. The only 'voyeurs getting their jollies' were the perpetrators of the injustices you experienced with every lie that came out of their mouths, and every harm they inflicted on you. If they had been real Christians, then they would have treated you as Jesus himself would have.....they would have cared for you and protected you. It proves what Jesus said in Matthew 7:21-23. He 'never knew them'.
And we have to remember, all Christians once believed that the Parousia was immanent. It is related that Christ even said, "some of you here" will still be alive when it comes. That is in obvious contradiction to the facts, since lo these 2,000 years later, not a single person living then is still with us -- and we're still waiting.
I have explained this scripture so many times....please....it has nothing to do with how soon the kingdom would come. It is a gross misinterpretation, like so many other misinterpretations. Read the whole passage and you will see that Jesus was speaking about his transfiguration, where Peter, James and John saw Jesus in his glorious spiritual body as a foregleam of what was to come. That was Jesus portrayed as King of God's Kingdom. (Matthew 16:28; Matthew 17:1-8) It was a vision and Jesus fulfilled his promise to those apostles.
The prophesies in Daniel were sealed up until "the time of the end" (Daniel 12:4; 9-10) because God was not going to reveal things too ahead of time. Revelation of truth has always been progressive. Those prophesies (written 500 years before Jesus was even born) were not understood until our day. How do we know? Daniel detailed all the world powers down through history who had dealings with God's people....starting with Babylon...he foretold the rise of Medo-Persia....then Greece....then Rome...then out of the ashes of Rome, emerged Britannia who later allied with the USA in these last days (the feet of clay). According to Daniel, God's Kingdom "comes" in the days of those last world rulers. (Daniel 2:44) And according to my study of the scriptures, we are witnessing the beginning of the end right now.
Most 'Christians' do not even understand what Christ's "parousia" is, or what God's Kingdom is, or how it "comes" so that God's will can be "done on earth as it is in heaven". This is why we need to study the Bible for ourselves to see what it means for us personally.
