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I meant to point that out. I think I did mention it in one of my replies unless I accidentally edited it out. Anyway good point.
He rules it out twice. He rules it out once when he makes that statement and a second time when he says "You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts." (2 Cor 3:2). The blood is the new testament (or covenant) in Christianity, and the Christians are themselves the seal of Paul and Barnabas apostleship. They do not claim any other derived justification of their authority, especially not from writings. How can the New Testament canon really be the 'New Testament' if the blood and the people are the actual New Testament? How can these letters be authoritative when Paul says "...able ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life..." and when he says "Where is the wise? where is the scribe? where is the disputer of this world? hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" (I Cor 1:20) If there is any canon of new Christian scriptures at the time he tramples on any claim to its having infallibility. He does not need to know about our modern canon to have denounced its infallibility in principle.
So the punishment for sin is death and the punishment for not committing any sin is being tortured to death?
That would be your burden since you hold that a book can be infallible, but the standard of infallibility should be first of all clear transmission of information. I recall it was Paul who writes "God is not the author of confusion" and "Everything we know about God can be seen in his creation." That should rule out the infallibility of any book that is confusing to read and the necessity of using a book to understand God. After that why is there any need for an infallible book?
James 'The Just' writes "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures." (KJV James 1:18) So each person is given birth specifically by the will of the Father, and that birth is good and perfect. I cannot give spiritual birth to you or you to me. That is beyond us. A person could baptize you in water but not in the 'Holy Spirit'. Infallible books are extra to any such process even if one exists. The Word does not need them and continues with or without them, just like the wind comes and goes or the glory moves regardless of where the tabernacle happens to be sitting. If it moves you must chase it with the tabernacle. Similarly its not the spirit that needs books but books that need the spirit. My pointing out truths to you in such a book does not generate the spirit of God in you, but anything you receive comes directly from God. That seems to be what James is saying here, and I tend to agree with him. I think that is Catholic doctrine, too.
I know that figurative and metaphorical language is a human device that attempts to say more than words can express, but Paul writes that the spirit within us makes prayers that cannot be expressed in words. Therefore they cannot be written in the Bible, either. Figures of speech can also hide the deficiency of words, so don't let them become walls. There just are not words for some things, and if there are not words for some things than no set of words can be completely infallible when it comes to the human condition, since they must always be deficient in some way.
If they were only alive so that we could warn them to remove the splinters from their eyes, that they might see; except its not our place to do that. Well nobody is an expert on everything. Its indeed very sad, but I was only talking about the fact that they had no children due to this wording in this particular book.
I think my head is pretty deep up my own ***. Maybe it can come out only by prayer and fasting? (I am actually not serious about my head. Its a joke.)
True, but in my reply to Outhouse I pointed out that he ruled out infallible books.
Its good to agree, even though sometimes its just because we don't understand each other.
Darn it. I thought I had you in my tweezers, but then you went and agreed.
The partial quotations are getting a little bit confusing, because there are two conversations going. You realize that I'm in a conversation with an unusual Catholic who insists, contrary to many Catholics, that the Bible is infallible? I am aware the Christian canon did not exist in Paul's time and that Paul may be several people, that there could be later edits to Pauline letters etc. Lots of things are up in the air about Paul's letters, and the Ebionites decried Paul as a heretic. There are a lot of things to keep track of.
Well then, instead of creating the earth and populating it with people who this god knows are all inevitably going to sin, why not just create heaven right from the start and fill it up with a bunch of souls who can live with him forever in eternal life? (If that's really all this god wants). Why waste all the time and resources creating the earth and letting it go on for billions of years?
Does that not include the human error involved in reading and interpreting the Bible? Regardless of whether or not the Bible is infallible, human beings are fallible. And we're the only ones here to read and interpret the Bible. The fact that there are thousands of different sects of Christianity who all think they've got it right demonstrates that, I think. So where does that leave us?
Of course it is, because the bible is a product of humanity.
Or the LXX, which predates it.
False. That translation does not take advantage of important scholarship that came later.
He allows evil to exist on earth, but only within limits. These limits become very obvious and easy to appreciate by souls in hell, where God is absent and evil is unrestrained. On the other hand, there is no evil whatever in heaven because nothing unclean can enter it.
The LXX Bible is the Septuagint, which was the bible (in Greek) that Jesus and the Apostles used, and which was preserved in Catholicism as the Old Testament, so yes, it's older, but it's still part of the Latin Vulgate Bible.
Like what?
Which ones?
Seriously??? You don't think there have been older manuscripts discovered and more advances made in scholarship since the 1500s???
Yes.
Yep.
There are somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 Christian denominations, depending on how you count all the subdivisions. That leaves us with the one Church that the infallible Christ established among the many thousands of spin-offs established by fallible humans from around the year 1500 onward to this very day. They all claim to be right, but only one of them can be. So would it be the one that Jesus called "my Church," or would it be one of those that rejects it?
Is a translation of a copy shouldn't be to difficult ) imho Christianity is as good as any other path to God.
I've never heard of any challenge to the validity of either the Latin Vulgate Bible or the Douay-Rheims translation. If there are such things, tell me about them.