reject the melancholy cabbage

ourlightsinvain:

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ilovecharts:

Contradictions in the Bible

This is one of my favorite charts that I did not make.

Why does the Bible say one thing about infidelity in one place and another in another place? Why do some minor characters appear to die but then resurface? Because the Bible makes mistakes. Here they are, all of them. Skeptic Sam Harris furnished the data; Andy Marlow designed the chart (with inspiration from an earlier chart by Chris Harrison). It ends up looking like the mind of a very fallible god.

Ned Flanders would be proud, and appalled.

This is a fascinating visual aid to the results of trying to cobble together a coherent canon out of a lot of fragmented, contradictory literature.  Getting too much exact hard-line detail out of the Bible is like trying to make a single Marvel timeline.

It’s cool to check these out. Some are remnants of older myth or cross-contamination from different tribal versions of the same story (Genesis, Noah, Leviathan. Noah is particularly bad. How many animals again??), some are OT/NT contradictions (is the law of God perfect?), some are exceptions for particularly sacred individuals (is it okay to intermarry? IT IS IF YOU’RE MOSES!), some are misinterpretations of metaphor (“what is the earth set upon?” Well, in anguish it’s stretched over nothing, and when seeking or receiving comfort it has pillars and foundations, but either way this is pretty clearly poetic language), some are intentional paradoxes (the contradiction between Proverbs 26:4 and 26:5 is obviously, obviously intentional: “Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes.” Come on, this is exactly the paradox of how to talk to people doing the devil’s advocate thing) and a lot appear to be due to this guy using the King James Version (Lol at “Does God ever get furious?” Yes. Constantly. Isaiah is specifically talking about “is God so mad at Israel that she is beyond forgiveness” here. Artifact of KJV translation from “אֵ֣ין לִ֑י”.)