DIVINE INSPIRATION OF ANY BOOK (NEVER MIND THE BIBLE !) IS IMPOSSIBLE

 
The Church regards a book allegedly created by God through men as infallible on faith and morals.  That book is the Bible and its words though not dictated by God all the time (though there are many examples of dictation) are regarded as being the same as God's words.  Even those who deny verbal dictation hold that even if the Bible is not all the words of God its words in practice amount to the same thing as being God's actual words and that this is God's teaching. The inspiration of the Bible is best thought of as follows: The Bible is what God would write if he were holding the pen. This is not dictation but dictation or not, the Bible is as good as a dictated Bible would be.  God is the principle origin and author of holy writ.  Whatever you are to think about this the teaching is clear about one thing.  Even if not dictated by God the book still has the same authority as it would have if it were.

"Thus says the Lord" appears a lot in the Bible but especially in the first five books, the savage Torah where God gives one barbaric command after another.  That is significant.  The expression in the Bible is not the author reporting what God said as in hearsay. It is the author getting dictation from God about what was said.  It is idolatry, the evil of bibliolatry, to extol such a dreadful and cruel volume as the word of God or even as the top special book.  The religious use of such a book is gravely vile.  Believers should worry that there might be a God who will be furious at that.

Greek philosophy, particularly that of Socrates, Parmenides and Empedocles was allegedly given to these men by divine beings.  Plato argued that the gods guided Socrates in his thinking and his philosophy. The notion of information coming from a god is nothing new.

It is felt that if God dictated the Bible then there is no point in studying its context and its times or its text.  But there is nothing wrong with God speaking to a time within the context of the time!!  It does not matter who or what dictates anything - it still needs studying.

Divine inspiration was a popular concept in Bible times so it is no surprise if the Bible claims to be divinely inspired or perhaps the only divinely inspired scripture.

The Bible in the Old Testament often uses Thus Says the Lord and emphasises the importance of the words being God's.  God would not put his words in a book amid material that might not be divinely inspired at all.  That raises the question, are the words really God's or have they been basterdised and even invented?  Though believers say the Bible is all equally from God it is hard to deny that the most important bits would be the dictated bits.  God would have meant those to be taken with outmost seriousness.

THE THEORIES
 
Christians claim that the Bible has God for its ultimate author. Some Bible books say they are God's books. The apostle Paul wrote that all scripture is breathed out by God and enough for a thorough training in Christian life - in other words it is 100% from God. Christians say that somehow it is 100% from man too. But it is clear that the main thing being claimed is infallibility - the Bible does not err for God does not err.
 
If God wants to write a book but doesn’t write it himself but does it through men then theologians say he can do one or more of the following.
 
Control the men like robots - the dictation theory.
 
Inspire the men and let them write it down their way - the illumination theory.
 
Or he can work with them in such a way that they freely write without compulsion but still write with him so that he is the author as well - the verbal theory.
 
We will examine these options to see if any of them make sense. We will see that none of them do! Divine inspiration is a trick to get you to accept the ideas of men as the ideas of God. You obey the men under the illusion that it is really God you obey.
 
All of the theories imply that there must be no doctrinal or moral or factual error in the Bible. The notion that God used one or more of those methods but has suspended inspiration when the author writes about history or science is a cop-out. It is an excuse for trying to believe in a Bible that has historical and scientific errors. It is teaching that the Bible is partly inspired. If every religion did that, it would follow that we have all those rival scriptures and have no way of finding out which one is really from God.
 
Against this you have the theory of plenary inspiration. It asserts the Bible is entirely the word of God.
 
Karl Barth claimed that the Bible is not God's word but when you read it God inspires you to learn from it. This teaching contradicts the Bible assertion that it is the word of God. And it would follow that what you feel like believing is to be taken as the word of God! What a recipe for chaos in the psychiatric unit!
 

CLAIMS TO BE VERBALLY INSPIRED

The Bible claims to be verbally inspired in several places. Here is the main text. As scripture is entirely inspired it follows that the words are inspired.
 
2 Timothy 3:16-17, All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; so that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.  New American Standard Bible (NASB) - literally it says that all scripture is breathed out by God
 
The Bible claims that every word in it is a word from God.

The writings and writings are made of words claim to be the very breath of God.  Other texts show light on this subject.  In Exodus 4:12 we read, “Go, and I, even I will be with your mouth, and teach you what you are to say”.  Ezekiel is told “Son of man, go to the house of Israel. Take into your heart all my words which I shall speak to you, and listen closely . . . and speak to them” (Ezekiel 3:4, 10-11).

1 Thessalonians 2:13 says that the word of the apostles is really the word of God and is not to be accepted as a human message. This is pretty clear that liberal Christians who water down the Bible's teaching into something vague and open to too wide of an interpretation are frauds.

The Bible in several places gives Gods teaching and starts off with, "Thus says the Lord."  It is wrong to take the text as reporting what God says.  It is but it is more than that.  It is also claiming that God is choosing the words that the human author is putting down.
 
INSPIRED MEANS WHOLLY INERRANT

We can prove that if a book is really inspired it must be fully inerrant. God is the principal author of the Old and New Testaments and because of that they must be true which requires that they be without error or contradiction (page 19, Set My Exiles Free).

Three Theories about extent of infallibility
 
If you believe in Bible inspiration or infallibility then there are only three options.

1. You may believe that the Bible is right on all its religious teaching but may be wrong in reporting other things.
 
2. You may believe that the Bible teaches false religious doctrine and is infallible only in the doctrine that you need to know to enter Heaven.
 
3. You may hold that the Bible is free from religious and every other kind of error.

Finding out which one of these we have to accept if we believe in the Bible should prove interesting. 
  
Infallible on doctrine alone

If we are going to believe a book that errs when it reports miracles we ought to believe every miracle tale with flaws including the dubious miracles of the Hindu man-god Sai Baba. It would be the sin of irrationality and bigotry not to.

We should all be aware that it is the vice of credulity to believe in stories about miracles when the book that tells them errs. It would be credulous to believe in the doctrines of an erring Bible and it would be putting guesses in front of what God may really teach.

If I rewrote the Bible and expunged the errors and contradictions and added new bits I would have a bigger right to call my bastardised Bible the word of God.

If I wrote a book that seemed devoid of error it would have a stronger claim to be God’s word.

If the theory is right then we have no evidence that the Bible is reliable and so we will be agnostic in relation to it if we have any integrity. If it errs in non-religious matters then we cannot trust its doctrines either. Only a crank would believe in a book that errs when it speaks of miracles that are questionable. It would be the vice of gullibility. It would be blasphemous to proclaim a fallible book the word of God. Anyone who writes a better holy book would have more right to call his work the only word of God. If one should all should so God would want confusion. The Church of Rome and the other Churches that have abandoned Christianity in their biblical theology are just saying that the Bible is the word of God because they want it to be and that is not on.

We cannot claim that if the Bible withstands philosophical investigation it must be inspired for lots of books can do that. Wisdom only means that the writers were wise not that they were inspired. We would not need scripture if we could get by with philosophy.

For some Roman Catholics to argue as they do today that Moses did not write the Torah, that the story of the garden of Eden was a revision of an ancient Babylonian myth as was the flood and Jonah was not swallowed alive by a whale and lived to tell the tale all of which contradicts Jesus who swallowed each and every story hook, line and sinker according to the Bible (Matthew 12,24:37; Mark 10:3; John 6:49, 7;19) and then to say that the pope is infallible is really to make the pope more infallible than Jesus (page 8, The Church of Rome and the Word of God). It is ludicrous to suggest that Jesus could have been wrong about these things and still have been the plenary revelation of God because somebody like that would be unconvincing. Also, Jesus never said that he took the stories as myths and since everybody in his day took them literally he most probably did too so they have to accuse Jesus of error. And it would be doctrinal error as well because the Bible presents the stories that are universally rejected by critics now as miracles. If the flood never happened and was a myth so was the resurrection.

God would not inspire a Bible that errs for he can easily inspire the authors to make no errors at all. The theory is just nonsense by those who won’t admit that the Bible is unworthy of credence. 
 
Infallible only on essentials?

Christians agree that you don’t need to know every doctrine to enter Heaven. But you do need to know that you are a sinner, that repentance is necessary for salvation, that God is love and that Jesus is God and your merciful saviour. You can believe in all that God has revealed without knowing much about what he revealed. Only deliberate unbelief is a sin.

Some Christians and many Catholic theologians teach that Bible infallibility is limited only to those basic doctrines. They delight to prove that the Bible commands many immoral things.

This theory makes it impossible to disprove the inspiration of the scriptures of any other religion of a book for it could be said of them that they are only infallible when they preach the doctrines that need to be known for salvation too and when they make sense. It makes religion arbitrary. Religion would just be picking one inspired book or system out of many to obey just because it feels like it.

The theory takes away any hope you have of proving that you have evidence for your faith. It makes faith blind. And blind faith is certainly a grave evil.

Now God cannot be comprehended by human nature. His ethics often cannot be either. The theory takes away God's role as teacher and puts the opinions of men in his place. They have to pick the doctrines they imagine are required for salvation like tickets out of a hat.

The theory puts you at the mercy of theologians and popes. It has to endorse all kinds of slavery for it presupposes that enslaving and dominating are lawful.

This theory is the worst of the bunch. Who decides what the essentials are?
 
Is verbal inspiration the one?

We have in mind the view that God inspired all the words of the Bible here. This doctrine is sometimes called plenary inspiration.

God must have inspired the very words of the Bible if it is inspired because the alternative theories are hopelessly inadequate.

The Bible would need to be totally inerrant if miracles prove that God has spoken like it says for then its miraculous inerrancy shows it’s true.

The biblical view is that there is no error or deception in the Bible because it is wholly God’s word.

That this must be the true view if the Bible is God’s word is clear from the fact that the previous two, which deny full inerrancy, make no sense.

There are many books that pretend to prove that there isn’t a single contradiction in the Bible. They say all those authors writing over a long period of time and being so different from each other and without disagreeing with one another is a clear miracle. This miracle for such a complex book with such a complex history shows that it is God’s book. To merit belief the book must be a miracle for signs are necessary. Or so we are told. The compilers of the Bible had long enough to pick out what books and alleged prophecies matched what went before. They had a big enough selection. They weren’t always right but if they had been there is no need to suppose there was a miracle.
 
A miracle Bible is necessary – to expect us to believe in the miracles it speaks of it would have to be a miracle itself. The Bible is not a miracle for the believers engage in tactics of making contrived reconciliations of contradictions and ignore contradictions that they cannot refute.

If God has inspired the Bible then he has done so to prove that he cannot lie so that we can have rational confidence in him.
 
If you get confused and wrongly think that you have this faith without the Bible it is no good to God for you are not thinking straight so any prayers and requests for salvation you make are invalid because your consent is invalid. Belief in Bible infallibility is necessary for faith which is necessary for salvation.

The Bible claims to be God’s word which is a denial that it merely contains it (2 Timothy 3:16). It is infallible if it is for God cannot err for he knows and rules all creation.

ALL SCRIPTURES ERR

The wonderful thing about verbal inspiration is that all you have to do is prove one grammatical mistake, obscurity, historical or scientific error or contradiction in their printed idol and their entire religious construct collapses. Atheists must encourage religion to restore the theory, which will make their work of destroying faith a lot easier. Religions that abandoned it only did so because they were afraid of the critics and wanted to cover up the stupidity of their doctrines.

The gates of Hell have prevailed over the Vatican and her prostitute daughter Churches so they are not the true Church (Matthew 16:18).

They are antichrist for they deny faith in the Father and the Son by denying the Scriptures whether they realise it or not (1 John 2:22,23). The Catholic Church is not a Christian communion and neither is any other Church that shares her low opinion of scripture.

Remember the absurdity of any theory other than plenary verbal inspiration. Any book of so-called scripture, be it the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita or the Book of Mormon, is to be used to light the fire if it contains so much as a single mistake.

The doctrine of plenary inspiration forces Christianity to beg the question. “The Bible is always right”, they say, “because it is infallible and it is infallible because it is always right”. That is fanaticism. How do you know that when the gospels say Jesus was offered sour wine on the cross that they were right? Maybe somebody misremembered or misinterpreted what they saw? Only the Devil would call for faith based on such bad logic. Logically, the Christians can only say that most statements in the Bible are right and suspend judgment on the rest for they can’t verify everything. That is true even if they can verify that the authors of the Bible were sincere. But they arrogantly refuse to withhold judgement. It is not the Bible they are concerned about but themselves.
 
It is arrogance to claim your book is right when you cannot know it. It is okay to say you think it is right but to go further than that is bigoted arrogance.
 
RIGHT THEREFORE INSPIRED?

The Church says the Bible is inspired therefore all it says is right. Should we be saying instead that the Bible is right and therefore it is inspired? Then why the Bible only? Why not consider any book where it contains correct statements to be inspired? A statement being right does not mean its inspired.
 
And if a book is right does it need to be inspired? God could inspire Moses. Moses can write a book based on what he has learned. That book could be right though not inspired because it is based on what God taught Moses. And suppose Moses learned some mundane way? Again the book would not need to be divinely inspired.
 
Inspiration is just a scam to get you to accept a book as the truth BECAUSE its teachings are suspect.
 
CONCLUSION
 
Divine inspiration of prophets and scriptures is impossible. It is so absurd that it is plainly a scam by men to get you to believe that their writings or the writings they want you to submit in obedience to, to do what they want.  However the doctrine is the only way to distinguish between a religion that claims to be from God and one that is from man and doesn't seem to care.