Happy 2011!

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Just wanted to wish everyone a healthy and prosperous new year. Hope you had a lovely holiday season, however you chose to celebrate.

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Discrepancies and Contradictions in the Bible

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One of the primary doctrines of the church of Christ is that the Bible is perfect, with no contradictions or discrepancies, and that every word of the Bible is literally true and able to be proven scientifically. I believed this when I was young. But when I started reading the Bible for myself, word for word and not just the passages I needed to read to fill out the workbook for my Bible class, I saw that there are indeed discrepancies in the Bible. Here are a few examples. 1. Job 26:7 says that the earth hangs upon nothing. Psalm 104:5 says that the earth sits on a foundation (some translations say "pillar") that can't be moved. If we must view these verses literally, instead of poetically or metaphorically, then one of them must be wrong because their assertions contradict each other. 2. There are a few discrepancies in the accounts of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. Acts 9:7 says that Paul's companions could hear the voice that was talking to him bu...
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The COC is obsessed with heterosexual marriage. In all my years in the COC, I lost count of all the sermons and classes we had on "the family." Typically, such classes and sermons were just a rehashing and reinforcement of the strict gender roles described by Paul's letters: the husband is the head of the wife, and she's supposed to be obedient to him, and the kids in turn are supposed to obey the parents. If it was a ladies only class, you can bet we studied the "godly woman" described in Proverbs chapter 31 , ad nauseum. The COC's doctrine about the family isn't complicated, but we had to go over it again and again and again. I wondered why at the time, but now I realize that the church and its patriarchal structure were threatened by the rise of feminism in the 1970s. Thus, they felt compelled to harp on this one subject endlessly, to prop up their gender hierarchy. This emphasis on strict gender roles means that the ideal in the COC is that e...
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