Category Archives: Contradictions

Should people drink wine?

Contradictions,

No.

Going after wine is a foolish thing to do. It will only betray you, cloud your judgment, and cause all kinds of suffering. Wine makes you stupid, unhealthy, and defiled. Only wicked and indecent people get drunk on wine, and only godless people and detestable pagans drink wine all day. Anyone who doesn’t belong to the dark side must remain sober. So if anyone offers you wine, follow Jesus’s example and refuse it. God will not forgive people who enjoy wine, until the day they die.

That won’t be too long though, since the Bible says people who are accused of being drunkards must be executed. But people who get drunk, or even associate with drunkards, won’t be forgiven after they die, either. They won’t be allowed in the kingdom of God. People who are good at drinking wine will fall apart like they’re being consumed by fire. God will destroy those who shamefully get others drunk on wine, as they deserve.

Yes.

Paul advises people to drink wine to improve their health. Solomon also wisely advises people to enjoy wine, with God’s approval. Wisdom herself invites people to drink wine, so it can’t be a foolish thing to do. And drinking wine and getting drunk can’t be a bad thing to do if God makes people do it, right? Would God force people to sin?

God created grapes so people could make wine to gladden their hearts and make them thrive. Jacob, the father of God’s chosen people, was given an abundance of wine as a blessing. God gave his people wine as a blessing and a reward for following his laws and honoring him. Not getting to drink wine is a curse and a punishment for failing to do what God wants. For instance, God takes away people’s wine when they fail to recognize that wine is a gift from God.

God told Aaron and his priestly family they could have all the finest wine of the land. He tells people to invite others to drink wine. He said when you free your slaves, you should generously supply them with wine, as he generously supplies all people with wine. God clearly doesn’t see wine as a bad thing.

Noah was righteous and blameless, and he made wine and drank it till he passed out. Even Jesus drank wine and provided others with wine, and he never sinned. So drinking wine is not a sin. In fact, it’s a requirement. Some of the religious rituals that God and Jesus commanded people to engage in involved drinking wine.

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What are the Ten Commandments?

Contradictions,

The book of Exodus tells about God giving Moses the Ten Commandments. Moses also recounts this event later on in Deuteronomy, listing the same Ten Commandments. He says God gave him those laws, wrote them on two stone tablets, and added nothing more. He says after he broke those tablets and had to get new ones, the same list of laws was written on the new tablets. And he refers to the laws that were written on the tablets as the Ten Commandments. The list of laws goes something like this:

  1. Don’t worship other gods.
  2. Don’t make images.
  3. Don’t misuse God’s name.
  4. Don’t work on the Sabbath.
  5. Honor your parents.
  6. Don’t murder.
  7. Don’t commit adultery.
  8. Don’t steal.
  9. Don’t give false testimony.
  10. Don’t covet.

But in Exodus, when God gives Moses the laws to write on the new set of tablets, they’re not the same laws that were on the first ones, despite what Moses claims. God gives him an almost completely different set of laws, and these too are referred to as the Ten Commandments. The new list of laws goes something like this:

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When was Jesus born?

Contradictions,

According to Matthew, Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod.1 Herod’s death, and therefore Jesus’s birth, was in 1 BC or earlier.

According to Luke, Jesus was born while Quirinius was governor of Syria. Quirinius became governor in AD 6, which means Jesus wasn’t born till several years after Herod died. So if Luke is right, Herod wouldn’t have even been around to try to kill Jesus, as Matthew claims he did.

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Will the mountains and hills last forever?

Contradictions, ,

The Bible says at least one mountain can’t be shaken and will last forever. It has to, because Mount Zion is where God is always going to live. And the Bible describes the hills as everlasting.

But it also says mountains erode and crumble. Mountains can be shaken and fall into the sea. God makes them quake, and they melt like wax. And it’s not just God who can move mountains. Anyone can do it if they believe they can. God will enable his people to crush mountains. And hills can be removed or melt away, so no, they are not everlasting.

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Does God listen to humans?

Contradictions, ,

Yes, he does it all the time

The Bible is full of stories where God listens to humans and does what they ask.

More than once, when God was tempted to destroy all of Israel except Moses, Moses pointed out some reasons he shouldn’t do that. And God decided to let his people live. On the journey to the promised land, the Israelites said they wished they had meat, and God heard them and gave them meat.

When Moses, Aaron, and Samuel called on God’s name, he answered them. When Samuel cried out to God because the Philistines were attacking Israel, God answered him and scared the Philistines away.

When David asked God to stop killing innocent people instead of punishing the person who had displeased him, God answered his prayer and did as he asked. (But only after David made him a sacrifice.) God didn’t ignore David; he listened to his cries for help.

When Solomon expressed his desire for the temple he built to be God’s home forever, God heard him and agreed to what he said. And just as Solomon asked, he promised to listen whenever people prayed toward that temple.

When God made Jeroboam’s hand shrivel up and Jeroboam asked a prophet to ask God to fix it, God did so. When Asa asked God to help him defeat the vast Cushite army, God struck them down. When Manasseh the evil king of Judah was captured by the Assyrians, he repented and prayed, and God let him go home. Hezekiah had Isaiah pray for God to listen to the Assyrians mocking him, and God responded by sending an angel to kill a bunch of Assyrians and scare the rest away.

When the Arameans tried to kill Jehoshaphat of Judah because they mistook him for the evil king of Israel, he cried out and God rescued him. Later, Jehoshaphat told God that a hopelessly vast army of multiple nations was attacking Judah. He pointed out that it was God’s fault that those nations were there, and that God was expected to save his people from disaster when they cried out to him at his temple. So he did.

Elisha prayed for God to bring a boy back to life, and to manipulate what certain people could or couldn’t see, and God did everything he asked. When Jeremiah spoke to God on behalf of other people, he turned his wrath away from them. Jonah was eaten alive by a fish, but then he called to God for help, and God listened and answered his cry.

God listens and complies even when you might think he wouldn’t

In the days of the judges, whenever Israel was taken over by their enemies, God would hear the people lamenting their oppression and would send someone to save them. Even after he claimed he was never going to save them again, he couldn’t help sending someone to rescue them when they asked him to.

The Israelites asked for a human king, and even though God was displeased, he listened to them and gave them a king. And when Samuel called on God to send a storm out of season as a sign of his disapproval, God did just what Samuel said. Then when the king needed to know why God had stopped helping him, he asked God to communicate through various instruments of divination to indicate who had done wrong, and God complied.

Abraham repeatedly asked God to spare the city of Sodom if he could find enough righteous people there, and God wasn’t bothered; he agreed every time. And when Amos objected to the things God was planning to do to his own people, God canceled his plans.

When God heard how upset Hezekiah was that God had decided he would never recover from his illness, God changed his plan and let Hezekiah recover. When Ezekiel pointed out how abhorrent God’s orders were, God changed his command to make it a little less horrible. When Jesus told a Canaanite woman that helping her would be like throwing the children’s bread to the dogs, she pointed out that even if you accept that extremely questionable analogy, it doesn’t actually show that she shouldn’t get anything, and so Jesus agreed to help her.

When Gideon was skeptical and asked for miraculous proof that God was really speaking to him, God supplied the exact signs Gideon requested, twice. When Elijah wanted to show people that his God was a real God that would perform miracles on command in order to prove his existence, God cooperated and sent fire from heaven.

When Elijah wanted to murder a hundred men just because he could, God cooperated and sent more fire down from heaven. When some soldiers from Israel cried out to God to help them defeat their enemies, God helped them defeat their enemies. And then when some soldiers from Judah cried out to God to help them defeat Israel, God helped them do that, too. When Naaman asked to be allowed to bow down to an idol, God told him to go ahead.

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How many men were possessed by the Legion of demons?

Contradictions,

Three of the gospels tell this story: Jesus crosses a lake and meets a violent man who is being controlled by a group of demons, who call themselves Legion. The demons assume Jesus is there to banish them and torture them. But they convince him to just send them into a herd of pigs instead. The man regains his sanity, and the pigs kill themselves. The locals make Jesus go away so he’ll stop pointlessly destroying their livestock. And everybody forgets about the demons, who are now homeless and on the loose.

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Will there be death and curses in the new heaven and earth?

Contradictions, , , ,

The Bible says after the world ends, God will create a new heaven and a new earth. Things will be different then: There will be no more death, pain, sadness, etc. And there will no longer be any curse, such as the painful curses God inflicted on humanity when Adam and Eve sinned.

God will dwell among people, so they can see his face. But wait… No one can see God’s face and live! So I guess everyone who serves at God’s throne in the new Jerusalem is going to die.

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Why did God leave some nations among Israel?

Contradictions, , , ,

According to the Bible, when God brought the people of Israel into what would become the land of Israel, there were other nations already living there, so God had to get them out of the way. He thought those nations were terribly wicked, so he drove them out and destroyed them. Except he didn’t get rid of them completely. He let some nations survive and continue to live in the land among the Israelites. Why did he decide to do that? The Bible gives four reasons, but they can’t all be true…

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Should we follow God’s example?

Contradictions, , , ,

The Bible says we should follow God’s example. That makes sense, because God is perfect, and everything he does is right. God is love, and we should walk in the way of love. We should be holy as God is holy, and perfect as he is perfect. We should speak the way God would speak. We should think like Jesus and follow his ways.

Paul taught his followers to transform themselves and become like God, because God wants his people to become like him. Paul followed Jesus’s example, and we should follow Paul’s example, so that we end up following Jesus’s example too.

How can we follow God’s example, though? I mean, if we can’t see God, how can we know what kinds of things he does, so that we can do the same? We can find out what God does by reading stories about God in the Bible. That includes stories about Jesus, since according to the Bible, Jesus is God.

So, here are some things we should do in order to follow God’s example, according to the stories about God in the Bible:

…Wait a minute. Those are all things the Bible says we shouldn’t do!

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