Well said, especially what I've bolded!

Well said. I dig. post here more pls

whoa there! as someone who is obviously well spoken, you should know that is a pretty empty statement, especially to a non-christian.

when i say "word of god," "divinely inspired," etc, i mean the creator of the universe directly influencing a human being into writing a book containing god's thoughts/statements.


couldn't a person say this about any book?


i am not sure what you mean. how do human nature and history help explain why most christians believe that god has not come out with a new book?


phrased slightly differently, don't you think that any divinely inspired book would propagate naturally based only on the weight of it's words? shouldn't a divinely inspired book be something that couldn't have been written by a mere human alone?

sorry augie I didn't know you were a non-christian. I don't mean to be too nitty with words it was just confusing because the term is sort of a term of art (for lack of a better word?) in Christian theology

You are correct, a person could say that about any book. I understand there is again an epistemological question that underlies the question but I may have to try to answer it in detail later. But I'm not thinking of Inspiration as something that's an objective property of a thing that holds universally in that sense. Individuals may be inspired differently, although I do think there are certain universal ideas and virtues which are hallmarks of the best religious writing. That may just be my particular bias, of course.

What I mean about history, roughly, is that if you consider the process by which we actually arrived at what Christians consider as the "Bible", it involved a group of the leaders of the churches at the time getting together and making a decision about which of the many books that were in use should be included. Christianity has grown tremendously and fragmented tremendously since those times, and people being people (Christians aren't immune from all the normal faults people have) it's much harder for there to be a consensus on anything, much less something that people see as being as fundamental as the Bible. I also think it's a mistake to take the fact that there's not something "new" in terms of Scripture to mean that there's no new insights or understanding, or no development or growth. That's why I said I think there's a difference between a text being inspired and a text being considered canonical within a religion.

Fundamentally, Christianity teaches a path that is intended to lead to union with God by a process of self-denial, humility, obedience, sacrifice, and selfless love. Those values are so difficult to embody that even the vast majority of people who claim to believe in them (including me) routinely fail to live up to them. It's not at all clear to me that a divinely inspired work along those lines would propogate naturally. Humans are naturally egocentric.

I'm interpreting "Inspired" more in the sense of having an ability to convey the presence of the Holy Spirit, and to create a real experience of the Divine and a desire for transformation within the person who reads it. Or at least that's how I was thinking of it in terms of my response. I'm not sure I'd be able to evaluate the difference between a text that could be created by human effort alone, and one that requires the writer to be in special communion with God. There is a principle in Christianity that says to evaluate things by their fruits, or the outcomes that come out of them. So from that standpoint it's less about evaluating what is hypothetically possible?

great posts well named. i am going to check out one/some of the books you listed