A 14 year old boy had his eyeball plucked out of his head by a fundamentalist Protestant minister in an exorcism ceremony.

National Center on Child Abuse and Neglect (1994)

The Bible, Absurdities and Contradictions 2

14 Contradictions in the Bible

Abstract

The absurdities of the bible are used to indoctrinate children still. It all began with Adam and Eve who led the human race into sin! When God made woman in the Yehouistic creation story, he cut out one of Adam’s ribs and made it into a woman. So, women are inferior beings, only made as an afterthought. Few preachers would say it was a myth, but the truth is the exact opposite. Males are the afterthought—the first sex was the female. Everyone begins life as a female but by birth about half develop features of maleness. Here a few biblical absurdities and contradictions are considered.

14 Contradictions in the Bible

1—God condemns Adam to a sure death if he were to eat the fruit of the tree of life:

But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.
Genesis 2:17

Instead Adam lived to produce all the people on earth, and they have to suffer for Adam’s defiance. The bible even makes a point of telling us how long Adam lived:

And all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.
Genesis 5:5

2—God is pleased with his work:

And God saw every thing that he had made, and behold it was very good.
Genesis 1:31

Furthermore, He declares that He does not lie or repent:

God is not a man that he should lie, neither the son of man that he should repent.
Numbers 23:19

Despite these assertions, we find:

And it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.
Genesis 6:6

He repents in other places such as:

And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil that he had said that he would do unto them.
Jonah 3:10

3—God reserves the right to change His mind:

The Lord God of Israel saith, I said indeed that thy house, and the house of thy father, should walk before me for ever, but now the Lord saith, Be it far from me, for them that honour me I will honour, and they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed. Behold, the days come, that I will cut off thine arm, and the arm of thy father’s house, that there shall not be an old man in thine house.
1 Samuel 2:30

But elsewhere, once He has made up His mind, He is immovable:

For I am the Lord. I change not.
Malachi 3:6

4—The chief apostle of Christianity tells us:

God is not the author of confusion, but of peace.
1 Corinthians 14:33

But that is not what Moses thought when he sings in joy that the Egyptian chariots had been drowned:

The Lord is a man of war.
Exodus 15:3

And Matthew has God himself, in His aspect of the Son of God, saying:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace but a sword.
Matthew 10:34

5—In Psalms, God is merciful:

The Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his work.
Psalms 145:8

Elsewhere, He will always be merciful:

For his mercy endureth for ever.
1 Chronicles 16:34

And the brother of Jesus, James, confirms it for Christians:

The lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.
James 5:11

But Joshua believed that God told him not to be merciful:

And Joshua did unto them as the Lord bade him. He houghed their horses, and burnt their chariots with fire ... and smote all the souls that were therein, with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them.
Joshua 11:9

The prophet, Jeremiah, is certain that God is not merciful:

I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them. For ye have kindled a fire in mine anger that shall burn for ever.
Jeremiah 13:14; 17:4

Numbers proves that Joshua probably had the right idea because God can be pretty gruesome when he gets angry:

And the Lord said unto Moses, take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the Sun, that the fierce anger of the Lord may be turned away from Israel.
Numbers 25:4

6—According to many Christian clergy, John is the truly authoritative gospel of the four. But what did John know? Supposedly recording a speech of John the Baptist, he tells us:

No man hath seen God at any time.
John 1:18

Well God did say to Moses:

Thou canst not see my face, for there shall no man see me, and live.
Exodus 33:20

It is a bit odd since earlier Moses is supposed to have written:

And the Lord spake to Moses face to face, as a man speaketh to his friend.
Exodus 23:11

Furthermore Jacob who God met and renamed Israel thus giving the tribe their name also claimed:

I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.
Genesis 32:30

7—In case we had not noticed it, in the justification of the sabbath day in the creation story in Genesis, Exodus explains:

For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed.
Exodus 31:17

Nevertheless, such a famous man as Isaiah had evidently not read his Torah because he says:

Hast thou not heard that the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary.
Isaiah 40:28

8—A characteristic of the earlier stories in the bible is that God is not omnipresent. For example, in God has to go out to check Sodom and Gomorrah:

And the Lord said, because of the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous, I will go down now and see whether they have done altogether according to the cry of it which is come unto me, and if not, I will know.
Genesis 18:20

By the time the Psalmist was writing Psalms, however, God’s ability to spread himself about had vastly improved:

Whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.
Psalms 109:7

9—The same evolution occurs with God’s omniscience, Adam and Eve finding it easy to hide from their creator:

And Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God, among the trees of the garden.
Genesis 3:8

Again though, God was improving with practice because by the time Job was experiencing his miseries, there was nowhere to hide:

For his eyes are upon the ways of man and he seeth all his goings, there is no darkness nor shadow of death, where the workers of iniquity may hide themselves.
Job 34:21

10—Evidently it all had to do with technology, God managing to stay one step ahead of mankind usually but, in Judges, God had not yet entered the iron age:

And the Lord was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley, because they had chariots of iron.
Judges 1:19

It is remarkable what advances can be made in a thousand years and by the start of the Christian era we are told in Matthew:

With God all things are possible.
Matthew 19:26

11—In the writings of Paul we find:

There is no respect of persons with God.
Romans 2:11

But, in Malachi, God says:

Saith the Lord: I loved Jacob, And I hated Esau.
Malachi 1:2-3

And Paul quotes this in his argument in Romans 9:13. So far from being impartial, God makes a point of being partial.

12—Frequently the Jewish scriptures are keen to depict God as the God of truth, whence the Christian use of “Amen” as an affirmation of a prayer—it supposedly means “truly”, or today people might say “right on”. In Deuteronomy 32:4, we read:

A God of truth he is, and without iniquity.
Deuteronomy 32:4

Yet, in 1 Kings, God deliberately sends out a lying spirit:

And there came forth a spirit and stood before the Lord and said… I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And be said… go forth and do so.
1 Kings 22:21

13—The Christian idea of the Almighty is that he is a god of love and compassion:

The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger, and of great mercy.
Psalms 145:8

In the Christian part of the bible, it is explicit:

And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love.
1 John 4:16

What are we to make then of a large number of citations from the Jewish part of the bible, the Old Testament, which give quite a different picture? Deuteronomy states:

For the Lord thy God is a consuming fire, even a jealous God.
Deuteronomy 4:24

Nahum has:

God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth, and is furious the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries.
Nahum 1:2

The Israelites are struggling through the deserts of Sinai starving except for the manna provided by God, then apparently there is a blessing. A storm blows in a load of quails and the grateful Israelites tuck into a feast at last. But watch out, you Israelites! This boon was sent only as a temptation and He is vengeful:

A wind from the Lord brought forth quails from the sea, and let them fall by the camp… and while the flesh was between their teeth, the wrath of the Lord was kindled against them, and he smote them with a great plague.
Numbers 11:31

Incidentally, should a good god be tempting people? In the US today people should not be tempted according to the legal code—it is the crime of entrapment—though in the UK it is legal. According to James, the brother of Jesus, in his epistle, God does not agree with entrapment:

Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted of evil, neither tempteth he any man.
James 1:13

Well the passage cited above doesn’t actually say that the quails were sent as a temptation, though they were sent by God and they plainly were a temptation. Nevertheless, in Genesis, we read: