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No

Only Judeism

Only Islam

Yes to both Judeism and Islam

[tahujdt]

When they say Herod, they could be referring to Herod Antipas, Herod's son, and if this was after Herod had died, they might not have mentioned his title, as there was only one.

 I dunno for sure, don't take my word for it, and I really don't feel like doing some research tonight. I don't have any homework, and I want to use tonight for slacking off.

[penguinofhonor]

Matthew and Luke both refer to Herod as the King of Judea.

[Lord Shonus]

Herod in the time of Jesus's birth was almost certainly referring to the elder Herod, who was so infamously cruel that many Biblical scholars think that the Slaughter of The Innocent heralding Jesus's birth isn't recorded by historians because it was nothing unusual for him. The discrepancies between the Gospels, and between the Gospels and the calendar, are neither unknown nor controversial. They've only been definitively traced to within ten or fifteen years after the Crucifixion, and were passed down in oral form for a very long time (I don't believe that history records when or by who they were first compiled and written down).

[Orange Wizard]

That would be by whom.

...

Sorry. Pet peeve of mine.

[Descan]

Personally, I'd be a lot more open to believing in a religion, if it's deity managed to ~miraculously~ preserve and maintain the records of it's supposed interventions in the world, especially records of his words and his one-and-only method non-damnation.

Doesn't even require breaking free-will, just do the whole "God spoke to me!" properly i.e. make it always say the same damn thing...? And even if he can't speak in our minds directly because ~free will~, then just fix up the damn errors. Proof-reading, man!

[Orange Wizard]

Isn't the whole point of faith supposed to be something that isn't easily believable? Faith wouldn't mean anything if I could prove to you that the Bible is true and accurate and God is exactly who I say he is.

[freeformschooler]

Isn't the whole point of faith supposed to be something that isn't easily believable? Faith wouldn't mean anything if I could prove to you that the Bible is true and accurate and God is exactly who I say he is.

He's not saying he wants easy proof God exists and is who you say He is. He's saying (and I'm expanding) that the Christian religion - and, if Jesus is right, your average Joe's chance to get into Heaven -  relies heavily on the exact historicity of its original prophets and their words, and you can see this in any debate about the nature of Jesus' teachings where everyone starts nitpicking the words and "you just need context." Therefore, if we do not have even semi-accurate records of God's supposed word then all that nitpicking, and quite possible Joe Sixpack's chance at eternal life, is completely worthless, as it's equally possible Jesus meant something else in the original Greek as it is Jesus never said this or that, and it was simply "misremembered" through oral tradition. How can you take something on faith if you can't even be sure what and which parts you're supposed to be taking on faith in the first place?

If you're looking for a new religion, my theory of the universe being ruled by a Asshole Chaos God is compatible with unreliable religious texts, as that would waste thousands of collective years of everyone's time. Xom thinks this is hilarious! We don't have a church as it keeps getting eaten by invisible termites seemingly out of nowhere.

[Descan]

What does that even mean, that it doesn't "mean something"? What doesn't it mean? What's it missing?

Like, if you say something that makes sense given what I know of the world, and if you are already a pretty trustworthy dude, I'm willing to "take it on faith" that you're correct, and I don't need to go out and verify.

Yahweh, the God of the Bible and Jesus, doesn't exactly fulfill either of those... at all.

Also what he said ^

[Orange Wizard]

The core message of the Bible (we are sinners and deserve God's judgement, but faith in Christ will spare us from said judgement) is pretty clear. I very much doubt you could chalk it up to typos or mistranslation.
It's possible (but I doubt) that any one thing Jesus said was misremembered or whatever, but the entire Bible is chock full of people screwing up, God punishing them for said screwups, and God helping people he chooses. It paints a picture of mortal failings that adds up to the final message of "you need Jesus".

Admittedly, many other things are not clear (see the gambling/drinking discussion we just had) and disagreements on those are to be expected.

What does that even mean, that it doesn't "mean something"? What doesn't it mean? What's it missing?

I don't have a clue.

[Descan]

Perhaps that part is pretty clear, but it goes a bit deeper than that, because it's a claim about the world and has real world consequences both on the behavior of people (esp. voting behavior) as well as how we understand the world.

Underlying problems are "How do we know this Jesus fellow even existed, and that he claimed to be the only path to Heaven?"

And "How do we know God even exists, and that heaven exists, and that our behavior and thoughts here determine if we get there, if we even want to?"

[freeformschooler]

InsanityIncarnate, have you read the bible? Or at least the really big ones like the Gospels, Ecclesiastes, and who could forget Genesis. I am not trying to discredit you, just get a sense of relatively how much both of us have powered our way through at this point. (I have finished several books in no specific order and am working on the rest. Also the Gospel of Thomas which is great.)

[Orange Wizard]

I've read Most^TM of it, and I'm currently finishing up a course studying various third-party documents like the Canons of Dort and the Westminster Confession.
I know (mostly) what I'm talking about, but I sometimes get details wrong because my memory is horrible.

[Frumple]

How people approach faith... varies a lot, II. A lot. I'd personally disagree strongly that the point of faith is to be difficult to believe. Faith is just belief in a not-yet-justified or unjustifiable proposition, t'me, with different ways to approach each sort.* Difficulty of belief -- due to lack of reason, ferex -- is tangential at best to the "point" of faith (which is mostly just to defeat solipsism, in the case of the not-yet-justified, and fill in metaphysical holes, for the other sort)... and often outright interfering.

Even with faith, there is an ethics to belief, and believing without sufficient (what counts as sufficient varies, of course) justification is something that can get very close to, if not outright become, immoral.

I would hold pretty staunchly that proper faith is not difficult to believe in at all, but instead flows directly from justified belief (mostly because faith picks up where justification leaves off, heh). When faith becomes difficult, the problem is considerably more likely to be in the belief than in the believer -- which is why faith only grows stronger by being challenged and changing appropriately... though what is appropriate is incredibly contingent, of course.

*You get similar propositions regarding faith straight from the mouths of christian theologians (which isn't terribly surprising, because I more or less stole the the definition from one, whose name I've forgotten for like the sixteenth time). You also get entirely different ones of a good handful of sources. Faith is a ridiculously huge topic, even without the religious trappings.

[Orange Wizard]

Indeed.

I think my point is that if the Bible were justifiable, then everyone would believe it.

Which in retrospect sounds really silly, but there you go.

[tahujdt]

As far as reading the Bible goes, I've read pretty much all of it. I tend to get the Minor Prophets (everything from Hosea to Malachi) mixed up, though.