***Note: This post transferred to here at the end of the thread from a congested area, just in case Jo may have missed it in the clutter.***

@Jo Re: "It is not nearly as easy to know exactly what is meant, as some make it out to be. There are literary devises that are used, it is a poem, and it designed to be easily memorized and repeated. The original audience were mostly illiterate. What is literal, figurative, literary devices, common understandings of the time, and other questions, are all hard to say for sure."

(Hmmm.... Hold on to your hats, boys and girls, because as tempting as it may be to totally cut loose on this one, this will be one of those rare moments where I refrain from being my usual smart-ass sarcastic self.... *mumbling to self*... I must have a fever or something.) Anyway...

Jo, for the time being, please put aside all the science and evidence claims and all that other crap. I'm not the least bit concerned with that at the moment. Now, do me a favor and carefully read over again that paragraph you wrote. And as you read that paragraph, please think very carefully about how that would sound to anybody who has grown up being told that the god who was supposedly responsible for the writings in the bible was an absolutely perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful entity. In other words, this god that supposedly had the ability and knowledge to create EVERYTHING in the known universe could have very easily delivered his vitally important message to Mankind by simply "programming" it into their brains at the moment he created them. But, no. That did not happen. Instead, this reportedly PERFECT god decided the best way to spread his precious message to the ILLITERATE masses HE CREATED was to use a BOOK. And this particular book was written by numerous different authors (many of them anonymous) over a period of several centuries, and then pieced together, re-translated across multiple languages, and then edited countless times primarily by individuals and/or groups who held high places of power with personal and/or national agendas. And this same "PERFECT" book has spurred thousands of different sects/denominations, all of which claim to know the TRUE meaning(s) of that book based on how THEY interpret it. Honestly, how can anybody, anywhere, in any way, shape. or form declare this book to be perfect??? Because, as you just now claimed yourself, "It is not nearly as easy to know exactly what is meant, as some make it out to be." And you are seriously trying to tell us that THIS is a PERFECT book inspired by a PERFECT god that somehow deserves to be followed and worshiped??? C'mon, man... I'm not even a great writer, MUCH LESS all-knowing and all-powerful. Nevertheless, given a few days, I am rather confident I could come up with a better instruction manual for humanity, regardless of the time period or culture. Again, though, WHY would a being/entity capable of creating the ENTIRE UNIVERSE not be able to devise a better method of delivering such an incredibly important message to the humans it created???

Brother, whether you believe me or not, this is actually something I figured out when I was just a little kid, no more than eight or nine years old. The problem at the time, however, was that I was a respectful and obedient child and I did not have the education nor experience to fully understand what I knew. Therefore, I trusted my elders, and the concepts of heaven and hell got deeply embedded into my psyche long before I had the mental tools to combat it. As a result, I spent a vast majority of my life struggling almost daily with doubt and regularly second-guessing myself due to the conflict between what my logical/rational mind was telling me, and what I was taught to believe as a kid. To put it mildly, it was miserable. Even worse, I look back sometimes and realize how badly I ended up treating a few people over the years due to that conflict in my brain. Thankfully, now that I have finally put the ridiculous concepts of heaven and hell behind me, it is as if a smothering blanket has been lifted from my face. My life is better now than it has ever been. But I digress...

As I said, you can take all the science and stuff like that and throw it out the window, as far as I am concerned. About the only thing they provide for me is to simply reinforce something I figured out as a very young child long before I ever knew anything about modern scientific advancements. So, if a child can figure out that the whole concept of the Christian religion is a hot steaming pile of excrement, why is it so difficult for a grown and educated adult to determine this?

God's message is transmitted in an impefect way so as to keep rationalist atheists away from the believers' community.
Hermeneutics? Theology? I never gave a damn about that. It is just wasting time trying to get the rationalist atheists to believe and join the community.
Rationalist atheists? Let them continue to be immersed in the ever-changing, ever-conflicting, ever- more contorted scientific theories, desperately looking for that just one piece of hard evidence (that they will never get) that there is no God.
We have enough problems in the believers community. We don't need any more.

Matthew 11

25 At that time Jesus said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. 26 Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do."

The Curate of Ars, my favourite Saint, is the Patron Saint of all Parish priests.
He was not rational at all and had a lot of trouble trying to become a priest because he was very weak in theology and Latin.
When eventually he managed he was told that "with the theology you know, you should never set foot in a confessional" and was sent to the small village of Ars up on the mountains to get him out of the way.
Yet he was so good at confessiong, people would come by the trainload from all over France just to be confessed by him.

I could not care less what any Bishop says. The Church is in disarray.
I am even wary of what the Pope says. Many prelates in the Vatican are against him.
I have my Bible and my Catechism of the Catholic Church and that is enough for me.
Religion has to be simple.

Ok, let's take a look at this shall we? JDAMs are now loaded, and all systems are green ...

I will try to answer your question - "WHY would a being/entity capable of creating the ENTIRE UNIVERSE not be able to devise a better method of delivering such an incredibly important message to the humans it created???"

Strange that you chose to answer Tim-Man asking this, and not me about two months earlier. Thought he might be easier to fool, did you? Well we all saw how that one panned out.

One reason is because you start your evaluation of the Bible with myths surrounding the Bible - "grown up being told that the god who was supposedly responsible for the writings in the bible was an absolutely perfect, all-knowing, all-powerful entity."

Except that, oh wait, this happens to be a part of the canon of numerous Christian denominations. In particular, this is a part of the canon of every American evangelical sect that espouses Biblical inerrantism. Can I therefore assume you're not a member of one of these denominations, on the basis of your above statement? Because if you are, you've just exposed yourself as a heretic in the eyes of your congregation. Not something a sensible person would do, given the propensity of these people to react violently to non-conformity ...

You have to look at what it actually says, the message contained in the text, so you can understand the authors intent.

Except that whenever we've accepted supernaturalist assertions on this matter, and addressed those assertions as stated by the requisite supernaturalists, your response has been, all too frequently, the tiresome "wrong interpretation" apologetics. But the problem with that is, as I've already noted, that since supernaturalists cannot agree among themselves what this mythology is supposed to be telling us, how the fuck are we supposed to know which supernaturalists are right, and which are wrong on this? Given that all of them have the same amount of supporting evidence for their assertions - i.e., zero?

It's a bit much asking us to plough your quicksand for you.

This is not easy.

No kidding? Apparently it's so difficult, that even adherents of the mythology in question cannot agree what it's supposed to be telling us. Yet we're supposed to genuflect before the assertions of this mythology, despite the gigantic level of anti-consilience surrounding its assertions. Hmm ...

But also not so hard that we cannot reach a level of comprehension and comfort, that answers the questions we ask.

Here's a clue for you. We're not interested in "comfort", we're interested in conceptual rigour. Thus far, none is visible in the world of supernaturalism.

Often people summarize or characterize the Bible in ways that are simple answers, but are not completely accurate. Such as "THIS is a PERFECT book inspired by a PERFECT god that somehow deserves to be followed and worshiped?"

And, once again, I have to remind you that a large number of supernaturalists adhere to this view, and we're simply taking their adherence thereto at face value. Which one again brings us back to the anti-consilience problem endemic to supernaturalism. If none of you can agree what this mythology is purportedly telling us, what makes you think we're obliged to do your fucking homework for you?

We would tell a small child when he asked who wrote the Bible, we would say God wrote it.
The child grows up and sees imperfection in the Bible and cannot reconcile how a perfect God could write an imperfect text.
The answer he was given as a child is and [sic] oversimplification that later can engender doubt.

Well once again, we're back to that anti-consilience problem, aren't we? An anti-consilience problem that arises from one incurable defect endemic to the entire supernaturalist enterprise, namely, it's ALL blind assertions and NO data. And as a corollary, it's become increasingly a home for made up shit. We're back to that paragraph from that essay you foolishly linked to, in an attempt to hand-wave away my awkward objections, viz:

Theologians and religious philosophers may have their champions in the quest to understand values and "spiritual meaning" (whatever that may mean!), but they will never have any champions who displace former champions because they have no way of falsifying each other's claims. Scientific theories and beliefs about the empirical constitution of the universe can be tested and the false ones removed from contention. Theological or philosophical theories about values and "spiritual meaning" can't be tested (beyond the obvious tests of being free from conceptual contradiction and being consistent with known facts).

Which of course brings us back to all those cans of worms about observability and the ramifications thereof, but I'll leave those aside.

Moving on ...

God has to use the language of the original audience, and the knowledge of the original audience, to communicate his message to us.

Funny how I, possessing far fewer abilities than this entity is asserted to, can do a better job in many cases. For example, I would have no difficulty whatsoever, informing a small child that most freshwater fish can't live in salt water, and vice versa, but that there are a modest number of fish species that can move from one to the other. I can simply present this as a brute fact to begin with, until the child has learned enough basic biology to understand osmoregulation. If necessary, I can back up that brute fact with experiment, though it would be hideously cruel to the fish involved to perform some of those experiments. I'm aware, for example, that even as little as 5% marine strength salt water will be enough to kill certain species with specialised requirements, such as Sphaerichthys osphronemoides, and many scaleless freshwater fishes such as loaches and the hillstream-dwelling Corydoras catfishes such as Corydoras panda, a species, incidentally, I've bred in the aquarium successfully. Later on, I can start explaining the details of osmoregulation, and the fact that stenohaline fishes are restricted to either fresh or salt water, because of the nature of their osmoregulatory machinery. The euryhaline species, on the other hand, have greater flexibility in this regard. By the time the child reaches undergraduate studies, it's then time to start looking at the fine detail of sodium channels and ion pump proteins, and their interactions in environments of differing osmotic pressures, along with the minutiae of renal function in these environments, which is a lifetime's study in its own right.

Likewise, I would probably have relatively little problem explaining calculus or even differential geometry to any offspring of mine, and I'd probably have them happily writing JavaScript code by the time they were six.

But, I don't have to dumb down to the point of being misleading, in order to do this.

So if I can do this, why can't your fantastically gifted magic entity?

God is perfect, but the people, the language, and the mode of transmission are far from perfect.

Ah, the inevitable "blame the humans who were made that way, not the entity responsible for making them that way" apologetic excuse.

Wondered when this one would rear its ugly head.

But then the entire mythology is one grand exercise in blaming the manufactured stool pigeons for the failings of the manufacturer.

Why does God not use a better venue than us imperfect people and our flawed methods to convey his message?
I cannot comprehensively answer that question, but here is what I know.

Know, or merely assert? Why do I suspect the latter?

God works through people. He entrusts us with his message as a partnership.

Oh, you mean the stool pigeons being blamed for the manufacturer's defects? But which are still trusted enough to do the manufacturer's fucking homework for him?

Yes, you can hear a chorus of laughter echoing in the distance at this point ...

He makes a covenant with us that we can reject and gives us power we an misuse.

And we're back to blaming the manufactured stool pigeons for the failings of the manufacturer ... quelle fucking surprise ...

If he did what you think he should do it would diminish and ultimately invalidate the enterprise.

In short, it's "I rule around here, do as you're fucking told and shut up" with your magic man. Which was asserted to throw some gargantuan fucking hissy fits the moment the first stool pigeons exhibited the defects it built into them.

Look at Jesus and imagine for a moment everything in the Bible is true.

What, including that hideous episode of mass extermination known as the "global flood"? Only a psychopath would wish for that to be true. Oh wait, perhaps I've just figured out what drives creationists ...

Why didn't he have chroniclers following him and recording his every word.

Heh, your mythology contains assertions about conversations your magic man had with one of his split personalities when they were purportedly alone with each other. Wonder how that was turned into faithful reportage?

Why didn't he commission some coins and stones to be engraved with his message?

Er, I thought he did at one point? Those stone tablets handed to Moses? Ten Commandments and all that?

Why didn't he come as a King instead of a pauper in an occupied country?

Perhaps he needed to find out for real what it's like to live as one of the plebs? Which might have been a tad difficult if he'd turned up Sultan of Brunei style? Though it doesn't appear to have detracted from the essential thread of blaming the manufactured stool pigeons for the failings of the manufacturer ...

I like you, could think of many ways I would do it different.

Weeding out those absurd errors being one?

It is a testimony to the validity of the message that it worked in spite of everything.

Er, no. What happened was that adherents of the requisite collection of mythologies, brought to the table ruthless enforcement of conformity to doctrine. The mythologies in question didn't achieve socio-political hegemony on the basis of their merits, they did so because adherents thereof were willing to engage in large scale torture and murder to exterminate opposing ideas and the people who held them.

Here we are 2,000 years later discussing it.

Only because of the previous 1,500 years of internecine warfare.

God is playing the long game.

Which appears to consist of "keep the rubes confused and squabbling among each other, while I make up my mind whether I'm going to answer their questions once and for all" ...

Mushroom theory of personnel management again?

His will is being accomplished when you look at the macro level.

How? Does any supernaturalist have anything other than yet more blind assertions, with respect to what this "will" actually IS?

As to "why is it so difficult for a grown and educated adult to determine this?" Here is an oversimplification of my story.

Ah, the subsitution of anecdote for data ... here we go ...

Because I did not just go with what my elders told me, get conflicted and reject it all and not look back
I did get conflicted and did reject at one point. I worked through my inner conflicts and reconciled them.
I looked past the imperfect people and the imperfect understanding we all have.
As I cleared away all the mess and confusion I was left with a profound insight and connection to the messenger.

Did this "reconciliation" involve, perchance, the business of "Let's fabricate something to deal with A, then fabricate something to deal with B, without worrying if it's directly contradictory to whatever I fabricated to deal with A earlier?" I've seen this happen on numerous occasions with supernaturalists. Namely, the fun process of making up apologetic shit on a per-convenience basis, without worrying if what is being made up today flatly contradicts the shit that was made up yesterday. I can point to some exquisite examples elsewhere courtesy of a specimen called Robert Byers, who acquired a singular reputation on several rationalist forums with his semi-literate excrement. Some of the regulars here may already have heard of this individual, who may single-handedly be Canada's biggest embarrassment right now. His handiwork can be found al over the place - The Panda's Thumb, Rational Skepticism, the now-defunct Richard Dawkins Forums, oh he was prolific if nothing else. But he was also a purveyor of weapons grade tard.

Trust me, you do NOT want to go down the same route as this individual.