Catholic Apologetics Guidebook

Yes Paul, you are correct...I don't have a problem with Christianity at all, in fact...I consider myself a Christian. What I object to are certain modes of Christian thinking that I believe to be regressive, extremist and therefore dangerous.

Yes, and I apologize for my choice of terms in my previous post. I didn't mean to imply that you weren't a Christian. I probably should have used a term meaning "Christianity as practiced by those who hold to the inerrancy of the Bible" instead of just "Christianity".

This is why I object to those who suggest that only those born again in Christ will be awarded salvation.

Under such conditions and pretexts, any person who lived unaware of Jesus Christ would be punished through no fault of their own and that conflicts greatly with the idea of a truly loving and forgiving God.

The one way that I would disagree with you is that I think that you are establishing a false dichotomy here. I believe that only those born again in Christ will be granted salvation. But I also believe that a person who is unaware of Jesus Christ could possibly be born again in Christ without explicitly realizing that that is what is happening.

Would a truly loving, forgiving, vastly superior and infinitely powerful God really care if everyone personally worshipped Him?

I mean, if salvation through grace has already been accompolished then why is everyone's personal acknowledgement of it so vital?

Does God really need the individual endorsement of billions upon billions of people, down through the ages?

I would say that God doesn't need for us to worship him, but rather we need for us to worship him, even if we don't always realize it.

So yes...even the Biblical authors were flawed human beings, whose environments and past experiences shaped their perceptions, created biases and carried their emotions.

Nothing inerrant can come from that.

Why not? The inerrancy does not come from the human authors, but from God's divine guidance of those authors. To say that God can not guide imperfect humans in this way seems to be saying that God is imperfect and limited in his abilities. (And to clarify, I'm arguing here that God could guide humans in this way, not necessarily that he did -- though I do believe that he did.)

If God wanted His word to appear to us in an inerrant form, it is my contention that He would have chosen an inerrant vessel for His word and not relied upon His deeply flawed creations.

Haven't you been critical elsewhere of people thinking that they know what God wants, or what he would or wouldn't do in a given situation? ;-) Certainly, there are other ways that God could have given us an inerrant Bible. He also could have created us with eight arms, or with X-ray vision, or whatever. :-)

My personal opinion on one reason why God brought the Bible about through the assistance of mere humans is to show that he can and does work through men, through nature, and through everyday events. In other words, he is not just a distant God up in heaven, but he is also right here, right now, working in and through various people, things, events, etc. here in our mundane, imperfect world. Just my two cents, but I'm not trying to claim that I have the inside track on God's motivations (nor do I think that you are claiming the same).

[At this point, the discussion somehow shifted to the topic of the role of religion in politics, thus bringing the discussion on Biblical inerrancy to a close.]

Dialogue on the Reliability, Inspiration, and Inerrancy of Scripture – Page 6