Southeastern Seminary’s blog alerts us there is a new guide to understanding Genesis.
The first eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis provoke some of the most difficult interpretive questions in the entire Bible. What language did humans speak before Babel? How could the Nephilim have survived the flood (Numbers 13:33)? Who was Cain’s wife (Genesis 4:17)?
Answering these questions is not easy.
No, they are not easy, because they rise out of stories that anybody of ordinary intelligence and education knows perfectly well are nonsense and untrue.
But you get here a nice sense of how Christianity’s premises — in this case, Biblical inerrancy — corrupts clear thought and intelligent discussion. As Ayn Rand used to say:
Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong.
And, most pertinently:
To arrive at a contradiction is to confess an error in one’s thinking; to maintain a contradiction is to abdicate one’s mind and to evict oneself from the realm of reality.
I will spell it out for those poor trusting souls who just don’t get it: Practically nobody, not even the most vociferous Bible-thumper, has ever read the Bible — or is willing to admit that. When the clergy, who are the self-appointed experts on the Bible, assert inerrancy, they are setting-up a shibboleth that exploits both their listener’s ignorance of the Bible and their reluctance to admit their ignorance of their Bible; it puts the clergy in control.
That is all inerrancy has ever been about — control.