"Before I begin this discussion of the authority of the Bible (...) What is vital to understand from these passages is the attitude of the world toward God. The world is in rebellion against God, and worldly people under the influence of Satan seek to destroy your faith. "
All right, so before starting the discussion you flee the domain of truth and arguments to ground all the attitude to have in the debate on the basis of paranoia.
"there is no book that is criticized and attacked more than the Bible"
Would'nt it be natural to criticize and "attack" a book which claims that the Earth is flat ? And moreover if it requests people to give their life to it and threaten them of hell if they don't. And if so many people get fooled by it and it makes the world go so mad. Here it's the same. The Bible is attacked by truth and evidence and those who recognize it. But in fact it is not a matter of attack, it is a matter of truth and refutation. Nonsense is naturally "attacked" by common sense. But it is not the fault of common sense, it is the fault of nonsense to be indefensible.
Here you seem to describe things as supernatural and ununderstandable. But this supernatural character is just the expression of your ignorance. Those who know why the Bible is false, see why all this happen, and that there is indeed nothing supernatural here.
"The impact it has made is phenomenal"
Its impact is indeed undeniable but its virtue is not.
"Self-proclamation"
Well, it's clear that this paragraph is empty of argument, isn't it ?
"Holy Spirit"
How can we know ? You just want us to trust the testimonies of
people on word. But I consider that these people are fools - not in themselves or in the absolute, but just mistaken for this difficult question. I don't
make a mystery of it, I explain it easily.
First, it is not true that the Holy Spirit guides you to the truth, and
this sentence of the Bible is a lie. Indeed, as a Christian, you always
need to refer to the Bible to decide whether something is true or not.
So, the holy spirit alone is not enough to give you any information
here.
Christians may pretend to be enlightened to some understanding by the
Holy Spirit. This is false also. They are not enlightened to anything
except to accept passively more and more what they are reading, and
they accept it as a kind of poetry to learn by heart and let it as a
substitute of their capacities of thought. Their mental life is dying
and reducing itself to the blind repetition of these words. Since they
reduce their life to this death, they pretend that life is there and
that it makes them live. Everything becomes strange and
ununderstandable by them. It all looks like being miracles.
But, being outside all this, I testify that it is all explainable as a mechanical product of this deadly doctrine.
The Holy Spirit does not assure anything. The believer is not
looking for any insurance anymore, so he need not receive any, and does
not. Faith is a choice. So, he started all this Christian life by his
personal choice to beleive all this, and never questions it anymore. He
asks God to provide him some "supernatural" feeling. If he does not get
it, he gets despaired and thinks that he is a bad sinner and God is
angry against him, so he repents and takes God in hostage, wonder
whether God is cruel enough to let him down and send him to hell. When
this comedy takes a break, he is surprised of this peace and relief
because he thought that God was angry against him and is surprised to
not feel this anger. This way or any other way that God has pity and
makes him feel some comfort or anything special, he interprets all it
as a proof that all his beliefs are from God and a miracle of
revelation happened.
In all this, there is no need to ever change his belief system.
And never does the "holy spirit" change people's belief systems. If a
spirit says something someone does not already believe, this person
concludes that this spirit is not from God. This is the only way to
distinguish if a spirit is from God or not, as Paul said in his
epistles.
Finally, if Satan is able to inspire and deceive humans to miraculously disbelieve the Bible the degree mentioned here, what can make the difference with so-called revelations of the holy spirit that makes inspirations in favor of the Bible ? What indicates that one inspiration is more reliable than the other ?
But the difference I see is that Christians simply receive their inspiration while never trying to test its validity in anyway (because testing the validity of a revelation would be seen as a rebellion against God and a claim to produce the truth by oneself), whereas skeptics do not trust any inspiration of unkown origin but try to only say things that they know is true for they verified it themselves.
"The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit."
Self-proclamations have no value. They can be lies.
"The Bible has changed the lives of murderers, drug addicts, top government officials, business people, and students, to name just a few people from every walk of life who have been transformed by the Bible."
All people's lives always keep changing.
The Bible may sometimes have good effects on bad people that we don't
know how else to heal them.
It does not prove that its claims are true and that it will necessarily
be good for everybody, neither that it is from God, neither that
another method cannot have the same effect or a better one.
A bad person "miraculously" made better by the Bible will not
necessarily become better or more spiritual than some atheist that had
always been a good person. Some badness may go away, we don't know why.
It does not necessarily make man closer to God than in natural
situation.
Examples are not general cases. The Bible claims to be necessary for
the spiritual life of everybody. This is clearly not proven yet.
But despite the overwhelming majority of Christians in the US, there are still enough criminals to fill the US jails and make this country the one with the highest proportion of prisoners in the world. If men's life changed in a way to know how to educate people to never become criminals, thinks would be less spectacular but more worthy of God's kingdom.
"This is because the Bible is not a mere book on good living but is literally packed with power. It is the Word of God with the power to change lives"
Sometimes quite powerful words maybe but words are not God, and words'power are just words'power and words are just what men can write so by working a little more one could revise and improve those words to make a better effect. Indeed, in many aspects the Bible is poor, obscure and hazardous, and it should not be difficult to do something more more true, fascinating and illuminating. So, as "your life changed" why can't you see it and find a way to write a better book out of it ? But usually men are too lazy or stupid to write good words.
"Unity"
"yet it does not contradict itself" So your fascination of the Bible kept you in such an ignorance that you are still unaware of the contradictions of the Bible ! I once read on the web a good list of such contradictions. Please get informed !
"Second, it was written by more than forty men from every walk of life. For example, Moses was educated in Egypt "
There is no indication of who wrote any of the books of the Bible, except possibly some prophets. But as the Bible itself mentioned, there were many false prophets as well, and no way to make the difference. There is indication in the history of Egypt that the Jews were never slaves there so Moses was a myth and never existed. Therefore he cannot have been the author of books of the bible. So we can even less know how does God reveal himself and how to make the difference with "demons" who can very well inspire such books as well.
And whatever one can write, it will only be accepted by coreligioners if it is consistent with the rest of the writings. This is what forces people to produce texts that have a kind of unity.
"Take ten contemporary authors and ask them to write their viewpoints on one controversial subject. Would they all agree?"
No because nowadays there is a freedom of thought. Whereas in a uniform religious context ruled by deeply rooted religious institutions, people asked to write in the name of that religion will necessarily write things in accordance with it.
"no book has been attacked more than it"
Never the ridicule of following a book has been more spectacular than it.
"Skeptics have tried to destroy the authority of the Bible for the last eighteen hundred years (...) despite all these attacks, the Bible proves itself to be true again and again"
Many refutations of the Bible have been found and reported by skeptics again and again for the last eighteen hundred years. Despite all this evidence, they are continuously attacked (even without quotation) by no other reason than interest or blind faith by religious leaders in order to keep their followers blind and ignorant of them.
"Each time the skeptics have been wrong, and the Bible has proven itself true"
Who was the referee ?
Christians are so blind and with no attention to the truth that they
are the kind of people who can "prove" to themselves anything they
want, the question is to know what they want to prove.
Every one is free to stay blind to evidence after the Bible has been
refuted. God respects our freedom of thought in all circumstances.
Okay, skeptics may have been awkward and not have given the right
arguments, but the intention was right and based on the truthful
observation of the spiritual corruption that emanates from the Bible.
There can be many stories that correspond to real history. Writers of
these books of the Bible may have been there, so they make historical
record. So what ? Making a historical record is easy, and does not
prove any godly inspiration. It is not anyway an indication that the
religious interpretations that these texts make of these events are
true, and many details of anecdotes in biblical texts around main
verifiable facts can have been invented.
The story of Jericho : I read somewhere it was already empty when its walls fell, so the easiness to take it was no miracle.
And if a communist regime makes a book of its own history, it has chances to fit to the truth enough to face the kind of rough verification we now have of archeological events. This does not prove that the ideology taught by this book is true.
" In Ezekiel 26, which was written in 587 B.C., Ezekiel prophesies that the mighty city of Tyre would be destroyed(...)If we were to calculate the odds of this event happening by chance, the figures would be astronomical. No, it was not by coincidence.(7) "
What are the odds of such an event happening by chance: For every event, its chance may be very little, but whatever the number at Lotto falls, the winner had a very little chance to win so miracles constantly happen. What happened was different from what was prophetised as the destruction did not happen at once and the prophecy did not say when it should be completed. Along several centuries, come many chances that it happens. The city was weak and the world was full of invaders. But the prophecy was wrong as it pretended that the city would have many ennemies whereas in fact it will be destroyed by only one.
Maybe Alexander the Great was inspired in his actions by Ezekiel's book ? Maybe this book was revised after Tyre was destroyed ? Maybe these events were the reason why Ezekiel's book was considered inspired against many other candidate texts that were there in the last century BC by jewish leaders to end the development of a moving set of writings into a fixed holy book ?
But anyway, if God could predict the complete destruction of Tyre centuries in advance, it means that man is not free. But man is free so it is a contradiction. God cannot have predicted it for sure; by the butterfly effect, any action by God changes future history completely. But even if he did it, so what ? Everybody or spirit knowing it can as well change those events, spirits by a tiny influence and the butterfly effect. Especially the devil who is the master of the world according to the introducing remarks of this text. So the devil can have prophetised it and have it realised. This does not prove that his inspirations are all true.
"There are over three hundred prophecies made of Jesus in the Old Testament."
Jesus's story has been invented out of the Old Testament. Nothing in advance was written to be a prophecy, but the writers of the Gospels were inspired by it, and the gospels were arranged to let these excerpts of the Old Testament inspiring it appear as propheties.
However omniscient God may be, the butterfly effect and man's
freedom make it totally impossible that many propheties of so many
insignificant details about a single future event come true. So this
claim that Jesus's story had been prophetised is a ridiculous nonsense.
See also the Flat
Earth Bible initially at http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm then http://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/misc/misc/FlatEarth/FlatEarthAndBible.html ; more articles
in alternet - a Christian reply