{"id":33419,"date":"2016-07-15T06:19:46","date_gmt":"2016-07-15T10:19:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=33419"},"modified":"2016-07-15T06:19:46","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T10:19:46","slug":"why-believe-the-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2016\/07\/why-believe-the-bible.html","title":{"rendered":"Why Believe the Bible?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>This post is not asking what arguments can be offered by those who advocate believing the Bible.<\/p>\n<p>Rather, I am here posing the question where the idea comes from\u00a0in the first place, that the appropriate thing to do with the Bible is to believe it. When precisely did\u00a0the\u00a0approach to religion arise that shifted trust\u00a0from being directly on God to being on a text that God is thought to have inspired?<\/p>\n<p>Of related interest, see <a href=\"http:\/\/itsinthetext.blogspot.com\/2016\/02\/for-i-tell-bible-so.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Shaun Rufener\u2019s recent post about believing the Bible<\/a>, in which he makes the important point that people who say they believe the Bible inevitably have to twist and distort parts of the Bible so as to\u00a0turn them into something they can believe.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This post is not asking what arguments can be offered by those who advocate believing the Bible. Rather, I am here posing the question where the idea comes from\u00a0in the first place, that the appropriate thing to do with the Bible is to believe it. When precisely did\u00a0the\u00a0approach to religion arise that shifted trust\u00a0from being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":33425,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1086,1089,1090,1140,1143],"class_list":["post-33419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","tag-belief","tag-believers","tag-believing","tag-bible","tag-bible-believing"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Why Believe the Bible?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"This post is not asking what arguments can be offered by those who advocate believing the Bible. Rather, I am here posing the question where the idea\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2016\/07\/why-believe-the-bible.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Believe the Bible?\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This post is not asking what arguments can be offered by those who advocate believing the Bible. Rather, I am here posing the question where the idea\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2016\/07\/why-believe-the-bible.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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