All you need to do is accept it

Something that I am now fascinated with since leaving Christianity is looking back and reading things that I used to believe - hook, line and sinker. It's kind of entertaining in hindsight to realize how naive I was all those years. Today I was reading some Christian apologetic material on Carm.org and came across this page on a possible contradiction in the Bible. Actually it is a contradiction if you're willing to be honest with yourself. The Bible clearly says that no one can see God and live. The Bible also clearly says that both Abraham and Moses saw God and they did not die. This is a pretty clear contradiction, right? Well, there is still a way to wiggle out of this:

"The solution is simple. All you need to do is accept what the Bible says. If the people of the OT were seeing God, the Almighty God, and Jesus said that no one has ever seen the Father, then they were seeing God Almighty, but not the Father. It was someone else in the Godhead. I suggest that they were seeing the Word before He became incarnate. In other words, they were seeing Jesus." - [excerpt from Carm.org]

All you need to do is accept what the Bible says. Close your eyes. Turn off your brain. Open wide. Simple solution, right? So it was really Jesus that appeared to Abraham and Moses, o.k?

In the book I'm reading by Thom Stark (The Human Faces of God), I've learned the different ways that inerrantists will interpret a Bible passage. They usually will try to take the plain meaning first while looking at the context of the passage. This seems reasonable, but the problem is that they are not consistent with it. Whenever using that method leads them into a Biblical contradiction, they will abandon that method and jump to other methods. They will continue looking for alternative meanings until they find something that "explains away" the contradiction. No matter how many hoops they have to jump through to explain a passage - if the explanation can solve the contradiction - then that MUST be the right explanation! This kind of thinking is mind-boggling.

So how did I handle this sort of thing when I was a Christian? Easy. I never went looking for contradictions. There is a trust system within Christianity that is based on relying on others more qualified than yourself. If you are a lay-person then you trust in your pastor. If you are a pastor then you trust in the scholars. As long as someone has done their homework then everything is o.k. I remember once in a Sunday School class the question was asked, "What should we say (when we are witnessing) when someone protests that there are contradictions in the Bible?" The answer: You hand them the Bible and arrogantly look down your nose at them (o.k, I added that part) and say, "Show me one." Then everyone in the class laughed and we moved on to the next question. So basically you take the chance that the person making the claim does not actually know of any off hand. When in doubt, brush past it and start showing them Bible verses. They are sinners, they need a Sav...... You get the idea.