Ignore The Evidence at Your Own Peril

Once upon a time, a human looking for a source of food discovered that she could eat beans. Especially if they were boiled.

However, when she served them to the family, some acute gastrointestinal distress followed.

Eventually someone had experimented enough to discover that cooking for a long time eliminated that problem and beans became a staple food source for huge areas of the world.

Until recently when humans said, “We don’t have time to cook these things for a long time.” And acute gastrointestinal distress followed. And someone said, don’t eat beans.

We modern humans are so smart.

Actually, that’s a small part of the scientific method. We see a problem, think about it, come up with an idea to solve the problem, and then we experiment. Other people can perform the same experiment, and then you have knowledge.

And then someone discovered throwing in a bay leaf and some ham….

Notice the problem. We modify the idea and force things to fit in with what we think. We don’t have time, oh, well, let’s just speed it up and not cook so long. We make the hypothesis match what we want to happen not what actually happens.

The same thing applies to religious studies.

We get an idea of the way things should be. This is human psychology or anatomy that we don’t like. Or this is behavior we don’t like. Or we explain the end of times such that we can separate ourselves and our friends from the riff raff.

We go to the Bible and find ways to make its facts fit our new idea. Sometimes we even go back to New Testament Greek and subtly modify some meanings or grammar. Voila, what we believe is now in the Bible.

The best response is to stick to the things that have been proven over time and replicated by thousands. When we strike out on our own, we are headed for a pool of quicksand in the swamp.

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