World News Korner

Creationist ken Hamm upset that Atheists are reading the Bible and using something called "reading comprehension."

Courtesy of Answers in Genesis:

It seems like atheists will go to pretty extreme lengths to combat the words of a God they don’t even believe exists. A recent article from the Religion News Service reports, “Atheists use a popular Bible app to evangelize about unbelief.” The article contains interviews with a number of young atheists who have chosen to use YouVersion, one of the most popular apps around, as a way of trying to shake the faith of Christians.

Now, YouVersion offers over 700 translations of the Bible for free in its app, in an effort to encourage biblical literacy worldwide. The article states, “But Lauren, a 22-year-old chemistry major from Colorado, is not interested in the app’s mission to deepen faith and biblical literacy. A newly minted atheist, she uses her YouVersion Bible app to try to persuade people away from the Christianity she grew up in.”

And, unsurprisingly, these atheists are focusing on supposed contradictions in the Bible to make their points. Lauren, the atheist quoted above, states, “Reading the full story with all its contradictions and violence and sexism, it should make you think, ‘Is this really what I believe in?’”

Sadly, atheists like Lauren haven’t approached Scripture with the desire to have these problems resolved by believers who are equipped to answer such claims. No, instead they have come with a bias against God and His Word, and they desire to damage the faith that others have in God. These skeptics are intentionally searching for supposed problems in Scripture—so they can spread more disbelief. (So to be clear, what Hamm is saying is that Lauren is simply not intelligent enough to understand the complexities of a book that was written to spread the word of God to a less educated population over two thousand years ago.)

For example, Lauren explains that marriage is a “pet issue,” so she intentionally targets people who post on social media sites that marriage is between one man and one woman. Lauren attempts to use instances of polygamy in the Bible to somehow prove that the Bible is contradictory on the issue of marriage. But she can only do this by taking Scripture out of context. (And in this case "taking it out of context" means "reading the words" instead of having them explained to her by a priest or minister.)

Other atheists try to use the many translations on YouVersion to show that there are supposedly many variations of the biblical text: “The biggest thing for me is seeing how much the version will change the meaning of passage [sic]. It can make a pretty big difference in how you interpret it.” While it’s true that there are many different translations of the Bible, there’s a big difference between a literal translation and a paraphrase of Scripture. A literal translation provides the same meaning today that people would have understood when the Bible was written, whereas a paraphrase is someone else’s rewording of Scripture into everyday English. Bible scholars typically look for literal translations, not paraphrases.

But are these atheists interested in the answers to their objections? I would submit that many of them aren’t. One well-known atheist was quoted as saying that one of the “beautiful side effects” of free Bible apps is that “nothing makes you an atheist faster than reading the Bible.” (That "well know Atheist," by the way is Hemant Mehta,the "Friendly Atheist.")

So let me get this straight the problem that Hamm has with this comparative analysis of Bible translations is that there are some translations which do not line up with the version that HE thinks we should be reading?

And that they are "paraphrased" rather than "literal" translations.

So using that logic then the oldest known Bible on earth would be the one that ALL Christians should look to for guidance, right?

Well that version of the Bible is known as the Sanai Bible. And this is what IT says about the life of Jesus Christ:

Hand-written on animal skins in a dead Greek language, the Sinai Bible was purchased by the British Museum from the Soviet Government in 1933 and is now displayed in the British Library in London. Sometime after its purchase, English-language translations were published (Manuscript No. 43725 in the British Library) and extraordinary new information about the earliest story of Jesus Christ became available to the world. The great comparative value of the Sinai Bible as the world’s oldest available Bible is today universally accepted, and its discovery provided great embarrassment for the Church’s modern-day presentation of Jesus Christ, for it revealed that newer Gospels are the depositories of large amounts of fabricated narratives and intentional perversions of the truth.

The Vatican concedes that Mark was the first Gospel written (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Farley Ed., Vol. vi, p. 657), and that it later became the prototype of the gospels of Matthew and Luke. In the Sinai Bible’s version of the Gospel of Mark, we see dramatic variations from its modern-day counterpart with an extraordinary omission that later became the central doctrine of the Christian faith … the resurrection appearances of the Gospel Jesus Christ and his subsequent ascension into heaven.

The Sinai Bible’s version of the Gospel of Mark starts its story of Jesus Christ when he was ‘at about the age of thirty’. No reference is made to Mary, a virgin birth, Joseph of Arimathea, a Star of Bethlehem, or the 51 now-called Old Testament ‘messianic prophecies’. Words describing Christ as ‘the son of God’ do not appear in the opening narrative of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 1:1) as they do in today’s Bibles, and the modern-day family tree tracing a ‘messianic bloodline’ back to King David is non-existent in the Sinai Bible.

The Sinai Bible’s version of the Gospel of Mark ends its story with Mary Magdalene arriving at the tomb and finding it empty. Yet, in modern-day versions of the Gospel of Mark, resurrection narratives now appear (16: 9-20), and the Vatican universally acknowledges that they are forgeries;

‘The conclusion of Mark is admittedly not genuine … almost the entire section is a later compilation’. (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Vol., iii, p. 274, published under the Imprimatur of Archbishop Farley; also, ‘Encyclopedia Biblica’, ii, 1880; 1767, n. 3; 1781, and n. 1, on ‘The Evidence of its Spuriousness’)

The Vatican claims that ‘the resurrection is the fundamental argument for our Christian belief’ (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Farley Ed., Vol., xii, p. 792), adding that a resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ is the ‘sine qua non’ of Christianity, ‘without which, nothing’ (‘Catholic Encyclopedia’, Farley Ed., Vol., xii, p. 792). St. Paul agreed, saying; ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is in vain’ (1 Cor. 15:17). Yet no appearance of a resurrected Jesus Christ is recorded in the oldest Gospel in the oldest Bible in the world. Nor are there resurrection narratives in any other old Bibles, for a comparison shows they are non-existent in the Alexandrian Bible, the Vatican Bible, the Bezae Bible and an ancient Latin manuscript of Mark code-named ‘K’ by analysts.

Well alrighty then, I guess that these earliest versions of the "Word of God" are the ones that we can all put our faith in. Right?

Besides how can we really take any argument put forth by a Creationist seriously?

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