Rick O'Sheikh On the Problem of Holy Scriptures

By Rick O'Sheikh:

I have said it before, the problem with the Bible and the Koran is that they do not just contain some problematic parts, they contain nothing but problematic parts. Every page, almost every paragraph, has to be justified and explained away with some contorted and very flexible logic. There is no systematic way for the apologist to account for all the problems. The apologist has to resort to a different sort of "rationale" to explain away every little and every big problem. One problem is explained as a parable, for another one they say God reveals his truths as he judges the people ready to receive them, and or another part they try to blame bad translation, etc. So they have hundreds of inconsistent and illogical ways of "explaining" things.

The non-believer on the other hand has a systematic and logical way to debunk these books: They are the product of particular people at particular points in time and space, things written by themselves and for themselves at different times and by different people, then later compiled into books. These people wrote things the way their particular culture saw them at the time, and those cultures were very different from today's cultures. What looks bad to us in those books today looks bad because it is bad to us today, not because we are not understanding something, whereas it was not bad to those people back then and they understood it very well the way it was written. These book are obsolete now to say the least. Period.