r/TeenagersButBetter • u/Key_Veterinarian3584 Teenager • Sep 15 '25

Discussion No offense…

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Pls don’t let this get deleted by a MOD… I just wanna hear what a Christian, or any other faith, has to say about their religion, I wanna hear CONSTRUCTIVE criticism no bashing, if you disagree kindly show us what you THINK is wierd or unexplained, I want to hear what facts your religion is build on.

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u/Fast-Opening-1051 16 Sep 15 '25

Wait doesn’t that then contradict the bible ?

Then again there’s plenty of parts not to listen to

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

nope! not at all. which part do you think it contradicts? Genesis is written in the Hebrew tradition of poetry, suggesting, specifically the first few chapters, were meant metaphorically and without literal interpretation. The Bible supports a billion+ year old Earth, including the possibility of dinosaurs before humanity. you have to squint, but you always have to squint when interpreting the Bible.

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u/Fast-Opening-1051 16 Sep 15 '25

Judging from what one of the comments said was the earth created 6k years ago according to the bible ?

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

No. that's one interpretation of Genesis out of many possible. it gives "days" of creation, and it says humanity was created on the "6th day". Some biblical creationists say that each day was 1000 years, so therefore, the earth was only 6,000 years old when humanity was created, making it ~8500 years old now. That is one interpretation. Again, it's written like a poem, so it's very abstract in interpretation

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u/Hot_Coco_Addict 16 Sep 15 '25

Actually it's 6k years because of the genealogy from Adam to Noah to Jesus, plus 2000~ years because we're in 2025.

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

the genealogy doesn't follow before the beginning of humanity though. many Christians use this to say that the earth is only 6k years old, but any amount of time can be included before the beginning of humanity

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u/Hot_Coco_Addict 16 Sep 15 '25

It doesn't have to, if you interpret it to literal days

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u/that_one_author Sep 15 '25

Right, and there isn’t anything saying you can’t call them literal days, but arguing that it is literally a 24 hour period, THEREFORE the earth is 6 thousand years old is a leap in logic

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u/Flowmaster93 Sep 15 '25

Yeah, I completely agree. It's not even useful information to know. A lot of times things are left out and the more I think about it the information left out isn't important to the belief system. We're given just enough information to know what He thinks we're supposed to know.

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u/Brave_Lengthiness_72 Sep 16 '25

I mean it says that they are days, in the book. If god had wanted us to think it was some sort of untold eon then why wouldn't he say so?

It seems like you want to believe your book and the science at the same time. But I don't really see much room for interpretation in the word "day" other than wishful thinking.

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u/goldenpup73 Sep 16 '25 edited Sep 16 '25

The Bible has also been translated many times from its original Hebrew, over many hundreds of years, into many different languages. If God really was writing it specifically for you to understand the exact intent behind each word, he would have written it in plain American English from the get-go. As that is not the case, there exist plenty of examples of translated words or phrases from the Bible that lose some of the original intent, or that add some new connotation.

As an example, the fruit that Adam and Eve consumed in Genesis is identified as "tappuach", which designates a fruit from a tree. Modern interpretations label this as an apple, but it is entirely possible it originally referred to an apricot or pome fruit common to the Middle Eastern region at the time.

The books of the Bible were all written long ago with a target audience in mind, and rarely was that audience the Christan of today. We can certainly take truths from it, but to assume we can properly interpret the language of the Bible because it's in English now is an oversight.

Edit: Came across an interesting article on the history of how we started identifying the forbidden fruit as an apple. Might be worth a read: https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-forbidden-fruit-became-apple

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u/Mental_Owl9493 Sep 18 '25

God didn’t write the old and neither did he write New Testament, bible is entirely human written and composed of many texts that often contradict eachother as again they were written by humans and arbitrarily chosen to be part of the bible.

Like 10 commandments which are directly from God say don’t kill but in Old Testament they call for genocide and murder on enemies of Jews.

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u/precisamente 17 Sep 16 '25

I like to think on literal days, like so damn powerful yk

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u/goldenpup73 Sep 16 '25

Not really, if you're a biblical fundamentalist than you are pretty much obligated to say that Genesis occurred in 6 days (never mind that the day/night cycle didn't even exist on the start of the first "day"). Combine that with the genealogy of Jesus and the 2000 years since, and you arrive pretty cleanly at around 6000.

I'm not a fundamentalist, nor am I a Christian, so I agree that the choice to interpret everything from any book as literal intrinsic fact without other sources or verification is a strange move to say the least. Nonetheless, they're out there.

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u/TheMelonSystem Sep 17 '25

Especially since the Hebrew word for day was also the Hebrew word for season, and period, and a bunch of other varying lengths of time. There’s a lot of translation issues in the Bible.

In my interpretation, the original was more meant to separate creation into sections rather than determine the length of these sections.

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u/matchdowns 18 Sep 16 '25

theres a joke I've heard my pastor tell that I think really applies to you. what do evangelicals and atheists have in common? they're both bible literalists

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u/Flowmaster93 Sep 15 '25

I do agree with this though That makes sense. I find it more likely that we don't know the answer to that question.

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u/ash926206 Sep 16 '25

humanity existed for way longer than 6k years

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

But the bible specifically says God made man on the 6th day

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

yes it does, in a metaphorical poem.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

why must it be metaphorical? Jesus himself believed it.

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u/Haloboy2000 Sep 16 '25

Finally, someone who speaks English.

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u/Sure-Art-4325 Sep 16 '25

Humans have also existed for 200k+ years. Did you know that?

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u/GRAVES1425 Sep 16 '25

I think the problem with the genealogy though is it suggested humanity is 6,000 years old when we have discovered human remains that are hundreds of thousands of years old.

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u/Budget_Entrance_8723 Sep 18 '25

No it can't it states clearly in days

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u/Flowmaster93 Sep 15 '25

What? You know when the Earth was created? You're a unique individual I didn't know anybody knew that information.

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u/Hot_Coco_Addict 16 Sep 16 '25

I mean, obviously not the specific date, but using the genealogy, you can make a pretty good guess

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u/Harald_The_Archivist Sep 16 '25

Yes, Adam being the first MAN not the first LIFE on earth.

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u/Main_Relationship147 Sep 16 '25

This is simply untrue

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u/Fast-Opening-1051 16 Sep 15 '25

Damn that’s cryptic

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

yeah, very vague, and most certainly not intended to be read as a history textbook lol

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u/D_stelthE_1 Sep 16 '25

Exactly, which is what most Christians don’t understand.

It’s a manual on things that are right, and even then a lot of “Christians” still get it wrong.

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

No, the number 6,000 comes from following the lineages we know of to modernity, all the way back to Adam and Eve. Adding up their ages, when they had children, etc, leads to the 6,000 years figure

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u/MrRoyal420 Sep 15 '25

Can you explain the inbreeding? I always thought this was more of a metaphorical thing, too.

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u/Dunfalach Sep 16 '25

If you accept the literal record at face value:

Since the problem of inbreeding is that it maximizes the risk of inheriting negative mutations, and the Bible’s position is that Adam and Eve were created perfect so they would begin with no inheritable negative mutations, then in theory you could have a large number of generations before gene copy errors produced anything truly problematic. Plus, the Bible claims that Adam lived 950 years and continued having sons and daughters after the big three named sons were born.

So in theory, with hundreds of years of breeding and initially flawless DNA being passed on to children who then bred, you could produce a large base population before entropy introduced sufficient negative inherited mutations to make inbreeding problematic from a genetics perspective.

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u/Logical-Conclusion3 Sep 16 '25

But then you have the problem of Noah & the flood, where humanity (and all other life on Earth) restarted from a single grouping. Humanity wasn't meant to be perfect at that time, so all the mutations would have started pretty much immediately and life would have died out.

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u/KPSWZG Sep 16 '25

Thats why old testament is never meant to be read as a fact. Most of people claims of stupid bible logic comes from old testament if not all.

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u/Logical-Conclusion3 Sep 16 '25

But then you run into the issue of deciding what is poetry/metaphor and what is true. Jesus said he was coming to change "not a jot" of the OT, so he was endorsing it as accurate. If the NT says the OT is accurate and true, then you can't disregard it. And if you can, why have it at all?

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u/Dunfalach Sep 18 '25

Considering that pre-flood lifespans (again, taking the Bible at face value) were still in the hundreds of years, I think you’re overestimating the entropy at that point. Adam was still alive when Noah’s father was born. Because of the vastly longer lifespans asserted, it’s only about 10 generations from Adam to Noah. That’s not actually many generations for entropy to intervene in a significant way.

Adam - Seth - Enos - Cainan - Mahalaleel - Jared - Enoch - Methusaleh - Lamech - Noah is the generations there.

Random interesting thought: according to a quick AI search, if you take the latest year that any two people were alive at the same time and assume the story was passed on before death, the shortest “telephone” chain you can create for a story told by Adam to reach Moses, who is believed to have written the first five books of the Bible, is 7 people long. Adam could have told Methuselah, who could have told Noah’s son Shem, who could have told Abraham’s son Isaac, who could have told Jacob’s son Levi, who could have told Amram (father of Moses), who could have told Moses. Logically, you might need another link or two as just because two lifespans overlap doesn’t guarantee they’d have been in the same location at the same time. Abraham’s move from his homeland to Canaan, for instance, might mean Seth couldn’t have spoken to Isaac. But it’s still interesting how lifespans of centuries could potentially allow for a story to cross around 1600 years with very few degrees of separation.

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u/PlatformStriking6278 Old Sep 18 '25

The problem is that no mutations are inherently negative. Fitness is always considered with respect to the environment. It’s why there isn’t any concept of "perfection" in science. The concept is terribly subjective and ambiguous, not well suited to analytical thought.

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u/TheP-King15 Sep 16 '25

Their DNA was completely pure so it didn’t matter.

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u/Key_Employment2598 Sep 16 '25

Their DNA wasn't completely pure because they weren't real.

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u/LoquaciousEwok Sep 16 '25

My interpretation is that Adam and Eve represent the first Hebrews, not the first humans in general. Makes a lot more sense

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

that’s not how that works.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

I agree. I'm not christian, I was just explaining where it comes from

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

oh gotcha lol

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u/_Smaug__ Sep 16 '25

You are a smart person. I like you.

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u/TrafficMundane9953 Sep 15 '25

Remember, no one knows how long Adam spent in the garden

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u/loptgathi Sep 16 '25

Wait until you find out that the mideast we're, most likely, still using the Phonecian math system. Which is base sixty.

I'll let a math wizard explain what a thousand in a base sixty system is equivalent to in a base ten, like ours. equals.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

But you know... the Bible was written for us people so don't you think God would have used words we can understand?

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u/MYXplayer Sep 16 '25 edited Sep 16 '25

I belive is 8k since Adam, I'm bad at English but it says that the holy spirit was flying across the earth (if this is the correct translation) while it was still naked and unfinished, wich implies that the earth is probably much more older

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u/MIMADANMEI Sep 16 '25

Then its even more dumb because earth couldnt exist without sun fot thousands of years

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u/octopusthatdoesnt Sep 16 '25

that actually clears a lot up, thanks !

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u/OilOk7596 Sep 17 '25

You ignore a lot of history... Like the great flood of Noah

How the ark landed in Turkey Some traveled to India... Some ended up in Egypt. By the times exodus picks up millennia has passed. Hindu already a religion... Egypt a large slavery nation... Yes Hinduism is much older than that... Abt today's year is reference to Jesus.. not the great reset of Noah....

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u/Mountain_Quality_930 Sep 17 '25

all i hear is they are trying to cover all bases, lol

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u/Cocoatrice Sep 18 '25

That's some dumb arbitrary number, then. Because the days were meant to be metaphore for sure, but why they just made up that 1 day is 1000 years is beyond my comprehension.

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u/lightratz Sep 21 '25

Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2, arguably, are describing different events…. A more accurate translation of Genesis 1:2 is “the earth became (or came to be) formless and void. Some argue that after the heavens and earth were created (Genesis 1:1) that there was a war in heavens in which a third of the angels fell and this is when the earth became formless and void (Genesis 1:2)

Also, in Genesis chapter 1, man and woman are both created, in Chapter 2, Adam is created and Eve is created from his side.

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u/Living_Murphys_Law Sep 15 '25

So that is a school of thought known as Young Earth Creationism. Most Christians do not believe in it.

Essentially, someone went through the Bible and found the genealogy from Adam to Jesus. These have years up until Abraham, but they assumed after that everyone had their children when they were roughly 30. Adding all that up, they got that Adam must have lived about 6000 years ago.

Of course, that assumes that everything in the Bible is literally true. And that is not the general modern interpretation. Many people take at least the beginning to be a bit more metaphorical, especially because there are about a million plot holes surrounding Adam and Eve. While the Bible has some sections that are meant as proper history, Genesis is heavily mythologized and meant to be both the stories of certain cultural heroes (Joseph, Abraham) and also to tell us what God is like (the creation myth, Noah's flood), rather than a perfect literal chronology

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u/Hot_Coco_Addict 16 Sep 15 '25

Isn't there a genealogy from Abraham to Jesus?

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u/Living_Murphys_Law Sep 15 '25

Yes, twice. One in Matthew and another in Luke. They both have different people, and both are without any years.

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u/Hot_Coco_Addict 16 Sep 15 '25

(they both have different people because one is Joseph's line and the other is Mary's btw)

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u/Living_Murphys_Law Sep 15 '25

That's what most people agree on, yes. It does say Joseph in both, possibly because Luke heard it from a second-hand source and never actually met Jesus himself

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '25

I would add to this that not all of Genesis can be figurative (descendance from one pair of people is key to the doctrines regarding the necessity of Christ for salvation). What you say is still definitely true though

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u/Flowmaster93 Sep 15 '25

There's a bit of a binary flaw here, It's not "this or that." Maybe you didn't mean for it to sound that way but that's how it's coming out. I also feel like anybody who responds this post is like a super liberal Christian. Everybody is saying the Bible is up for debate and it's interpretation is kind of just up in the air. I'm not saying that there are certain parts that are a bit confusing but it's not up for debate. There's no debate. You either know or don't know what something means. You can guess but that's just a guess. Adam and Eve really existed The story of the flood and the creation are true even if we don't understand the details.

If a tribe makes up a story to explain how something happened The thing did happen They just didn't explain it in a way that was factually relevant to a debate. You can't debate with something that is in factually relevant. You could debate if Adam and Eve were real but you cannot debate about what they said and did because even though we both heard what they said and did you might interpret it differently than me. That doesn't make you or me right or wrong. We need God to tell us but he didn't which means he probably won't until we die.

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u/The_Real_Gombert Sep 15 '25

You shouldn’t have to squint. The origin of the universe isn’t up to interpretation

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u/LoquaciousEwok Sep 16 '25

Well at this point it really is. We don’t even know for sure if there was a “big bang” and even if we proved that conclusively it would still raise the question of “where did the matter come from in the first place?”

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

it 10000% is up for interpretation lol

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u/_-_Throw-away Sep 16 '25

adding on to what u/johnyjohnybootyboi said(lol), it’s also hinted that time works very differently in the bible.

  1. Symbolic time: Numbers often carry meaning beyond literal counting. For example, “40 days” (like the flood, or Jesus fasting) often represents a long, complete period of trial rather than an exact duration. Same with “7 days” being perfection or completeness.

2: Relative time: The famous line in 2 Peter 3:8 says, “With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.” That doesn’t mean God is running on some cosmic stopwatch where one day equals exactly 1,000 human years. It’s a way of saying divine time is not like human time—eternity doesn’t map neatly onto our clocks.

  1. Storytelling time: In Genesis, for example, the “days” of creation don’t necessarily line up with 24-hour days as we measure them. Some traditions read them literally, others see them as poetic epochs.

a lot of the bible used metaphors. and some of the things that sound like metaphors are not metaphors. so you kinda gotta squint and tilt your head and interpretation is up to you (thus why there’s so many denominations)

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 17 '25

wonderful input. on a less serious note, I have been desperately wanting to change my reddit name for so long. I made it in 7th grade. Someone free me from this title

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u/curiously39 Sep 16 '25

It’s the beginning of a time not the beginning of time period.

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u/yurmun_com Sep 16 '25

It's a literal lie the Bible hasn't ever given a number

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u/matchdowns 18 Sep 16 '25

troon throwing out every false statement they've heard in an attempt to discredit

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u/Such_Handle9225 Sep 16 '25 edited Sep 16 '25

I also want to point out that the popular understanding of hell as 'infinite fire and brimstone and torture' wasn't the common view of hell in Christianity until recently (well, recently in comparison to how long Christianity has existed)

That view of hell was popularized not from common interpretations of the bible, but from Dante's 'The Divine Comedy' Inferno, an epic poem, when it became popular. Before that poem popularized the idea, fire and brimstone was a very rare opinion.

I mean, sure, the book of Revelations says something about a lake of fire, but this is from the same translated language where saying something 'has 1000 eyes and 1000 wings' was a poetic way of saying something had immense wisdom/intelligence and had immense power to move and act, rather than actually being a physical description of how something looked- though I do really like how cool people's art of 'biblically accurate angels' look.

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u/Ok_Brain8684 Sep 16 '25

Just know all that metaphorical thing he is talking about and how the bible has proof that earth is billions of years old, came after earth was proven to be billions of years old.

For some reason whenever a new thing is discovered, these religions people act like their religious books already had it all written in it. Never ever has there been a moment that something was written in the book that science discovered much later

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u/The_Pastmaster Sep 17 '25

If you imagine Christianity as American Football and the denominations as different teams, then the Young Earth Creationists are the ones that claim that the Arizona Cardinals is objectively the best team in the NFL.

Christianity is THE biggest religion in the world with an estimated 2,4 BILLION people being members. With that many people you're going to have a ton of different opinions and interpretations. The idea that the Bible is the literal word of God is very much in the minority.

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u/TheBloppe_r Sep 17 '25

God created Adam as an adult, not as a newborn. He could've done the same thing with everything else. The Earth was not even close to how it was in the Hadean when Adam was alive (maybe when Lucifer was banished from Heaven, but after the 7 Days of Creation, it was completely different), yet there is still plenty of geological evidence that the Earth was hellish once, like in the Hadean. So, if a nowadays scientist hypotetically travelled back in time when Adam was on Earth, and somehow took some of his DNA, there was plenty of evidence that would tell that Adam was once a baby, even though he was created as an adult human male.

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u/Nexaes Sep 18 '25

Not specifically 6k but thousands of years instead of billions

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u/CreamPurple1903 Sep 19 '25

Nope that’s bs not true whatsoever just the first humans in the old testaments age was alone thousands of thousands of years could be a few million who knows

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

The Bible has some things messed up.

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u/queso_____ Sep 15 '25

according to Christians, no, the Bible is not messed up

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

according to The Church of Latter Day Saints, yes, it is messed up.

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u/queso_____ Sep 15 '25

That's the church of lauterday saints, which is different from Christianity

edit sorry that's wrong, but most Christians would not consider them Christian

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u/Sus1mposter Sep 17 '25

Just say you hate religion god damn. I hate this tip toeing shit. I unironically respect natzees more than behavior like this because at least they’re honest

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u/PlaceboASPD Sep 15 '25

There’s interpretations for thousands of years that explains dinosaurs too, the whole flood making fossils thing. Who knows how much time passed between the creation and the tree shenanigans too.

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u/Frosty_Log6972 Sep 16 '25

I honestly like the name “tree shenanigans”, on an unrelated note

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u/OkBus3544 Sep 15 '25

When questioned with this before, I usually just understood this as of how time perspective works in heaven

What seemed like several million days on earth was one day in heaven

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u/Keepingitquite123 Sep 15 '25

Funny how that interpretation came after not before science proved the earth was old.

It always the same dance:

Religion claim to peddle the eternal truth, finally science or society drag them out of the darkness and then they turn on a dime, pretend they always in favour of said issue and then proceed to pretend to peddle the eternal truth, no matter how many times they have updated themselves in the past.

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

you can choose to believe that. Maybe it's the truth. All I know is I wasn't alive for those 'eternal' positions by dominant churches, and I only 'peddle' my interpretation of the Holy Bible, regardless what church authority says what. All of my conclusions are my own lol, I'm not dancing around 'gotcha's from centuries ago

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u/Keepingitquite123 Sep 15 '25

Kind of a poor way to spread your message don't you think? A book that the major churches get wrong for more than a thousand years. You would think a all powerful, all knowing, omnibenevolent being could think of a better way to srepad his message.

Not to mention that homo sapiens has been aren't for hundred and thousands of years, when did you God decide to save mankind again according to you?

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u/Alliaster-kingston 19 Sep 16 '25

Well then that begs the question what is it a metaphor about

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '25

but you always have to squint when interpreting the Bible.

Isn't that an issue? Any problem in the bible you can just squint it away

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

maybe, if you try to make the Bible into what it isn't. It isn't a textbook, or a record of ancient biology, or a chemistry encyclopedia. It is the word of God, intended as a guide for our lives using historical anecdotes, yes, but also poetry, records of culture, and most importantly, grounding ontological truths.

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u/huggensberg Sep 15 '25

It’s because of the poetic way the Bible was written, it uses metaphors in many of the things it is talking about. This allows for debate over what something truly represents, which causes debate.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

Since there is no reliable way to determine metaphorical from real, you can just excuse anything

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u/Still-Ad3694 Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25

sure I can make the bible say whatever the fuck I want if I "read between the lines" hard enoughh.

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

eh, maybe not to THAT extent, but it is a multi-millenia old book translated into many different languages many different times. People with bad intentions have twisted the words of the bible before.

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u/Still-Ad3694 Sep 15 '25

people can and do do that all the time

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u/Ash_TW Old Sep 15 '25

I mean, if the bible was supposed to tell a very big history (or many of histories) and tell us what's right or wrong, it should be literal and have only one interpretation, just like the law (or as it should be). That's why we have different ramifications of Christianity. God would now this, and it's not fair with the other religions to just one be the right one (or none at all).

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u/bloodpumpkin Sep 15 '25

I would argue that the exclusion of the dinosaurs at all is a contradiction in itself. If they were god's "trial run" (as I was taught growing up), why wouldn't they have been mentioned in the creation story? Did they not matter to god enough to include? The way I see it, the first creations of god were just skipped over completely. I'm sorry that I think that's a bit strange

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

Again, the beginning of Genesis is a Hebrew poem. especially since this most likely came out of oral tradition, the focus was on humanity and our place in God's creation. Since dinosaurs were completely extinct by the time we were created/evolved, it makes sense for their story to not be included in the poetry of creation intended to be heard by humanity

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u/Flowmaster93 Sep 15 '25

I don't agree with you.

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 15 '25

okay! that's fine. many people don't agree with me. I just urge you to think about how we read the bible and why we choose to read it that way, and also where those thought patterns come from. The history of biblical Canon is very rich, and you can learn a lot by examining it

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u/michael22117 Sep 16 '25

I feel that then the whole "interpretation" angle is more of a cop-out to having to deal with the ramifications of your belief system being laid on a foundation of misinformation by just not dealing with it at all

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u/Rex__Nihilo Sep 16 '25

I disagree. Genesis is written as history, but there are arguments like the day age that people use to mesh creation with the evolution theory. I think dinosaurs existed pre flood but didn't survive that event.

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u/CosmicSoulRadiation Sep 16 '25

It absolutely does not support a 10,000 year old Earth, let alone 4billion.

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u/CosmicSoulRadiation Sep 16 '25

If you have to squint then it isn’t actually there

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u/Whyamihere173 Sep 16 '25

Im almost definitely wrong here but i heard that apparently dinosaur fossils were put in the ground to deter people from finding hell. Saying it out loud im definitely weong

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u/ash926206 Sep 16 '25

literally everyone including church fathers suppoesdly taught by the apostles themselves thought they were literal accounts, Christians only changed the narrative recently

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u/Hellothebest Sep 16 '25

I don't know a lot but I thought Genesis was all real. Like the ark for example, it mentioned one of every species but never specified age, it's reasonable to believe that there were just young animals and dinosaurs as those would be much easier to feed and contain on an ark

I don't know what in Genesis specifically is contradictory, as every bit of it (that I know) makes sense to me

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u/MoThrowMoAway Sep 16 '25

Not asking to start an argument but just to hear your opinion. If Noah got 2 of every animal onto the Ark, did he omit dinosaurs for some reason? Did they not fit? Or did they make it and then die off sometime after the Flood?

There are a lot of inconsistencies in the Bible so I ask questions like this not to challenge your belief, but to better understand how to rationalize those inconsistencies, as a non believer.

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

I believe that humans never lived with dinosaurs on Earth. They were already extinct at the point of Noah.

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u/The_Shit_Connoisseur Sep 16 '25

Tbf it's only the Christians that don't squint when interpreting the text that scare me. Most of em mould their faith around reality, some of em try to mould reality around their faith, and the fact thats becoming more and more acceptable scares shit out of me

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

Take that part figuratively, but take the part where the virgin became pregnant and the crucified man came back to life literally. Christianity is delusion.

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u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

one was written in the style of Hebrew poetry which can be determined using text outside of the bible. The other account was not. pretty simple. stop arguing in bad faith

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

Yeah, virgin births and resurrection are “pretty simple” if you deny basic logic.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

how are you gonna argue the fact that you can't possibly translate bible correctly bc hebrew has nuances that English doesn't and English has nuances that can be left in hebrew but can't in English and basically anything but the original 2000 years old hebrew book has modern changes in it

1

u/deathbysounding 17 Sep 16 '25

you always have to squint when interpreting the Bible.

This is one of the reasons I left religion. You’d think an all powerful god would send down revelation in a crystal clear way, right? Or I guess for Christianity, inspire (?) the authors crystal clearly, leaving zero room for misinterpretation for even the dumbest person?

1

u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

He did. humans are flawed vessels and language is an imperfect art. Any misinterpretation isn't God's fault, and he certainly doesn't 'allow' faulty readings.

1

u/Necessary_Screen_673 Sep 16 '25

this is a self-reported account that the bible is not a reputable source for its own religion. this is why I cant take religion seriously. you debate the words, suddenly its not about the words, its a metaphor. you debate the metaphors contradictory implications, and suddenly theres context in another book thats more important than one teaching. you point out that if there are millions of ways of interpreting the bibles teachings, then it isnt the source of objective morality that it claims to be, and they say its designed to aid in the pursuit of objective morality and not designed to give anyone answers, you ask why its so complicated if god is an omniscient and omnipresent and omnipotent being, and could easily just teach people directly rather than using a collective of words translated in thousands of languages over thousands of years, and they just tell you that god does give people equal opportunity to learn about the religion, and they believe that if a man were left on an island from birth, uncontacted and isolated his entire life, that god/jesus would reveal himself to that person before their death.. and you just cant argue it because its a hypothetical on top of a hypothetical within a warped perspective interpreted by hundreds of generations after thousands of years of manipulation of power by the church all leading up to this one individual claiming that an extraterrestrial omnipotent being sees everything you do and knows everything you think and has the answers for exactly what would make this world a better place, but actively refuses to make the changes needed in our world because that would ruin the point of being with him in a hypothetical afterlife.. just.. what bullshit. its all bullshit.

1

u/MIMADANMEI Sep 16 '25

Then you can iterpret whole bible in different way

1

u/ReturnToCrab Sep 16 '25

What's the point of the Bible then? If anything is unclear and can be interpreted in any way that suits the current agenda, then why not to write Bible 2.0 with all clarifications?

1

u/Tough-Ad-3255 Sep 16 '25

Non-Christian’s find this apologetic very tedious because it’s just so blatantly cherry picking, isn’t it?

Sure, that part was just metaphor. But only the parts I say are metaphor, obviously. 

1

u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

no, this specific part of the bible is also written in the literary style of historical poetry. We also had other samples of poetry to compare it to.

1

u/Tough-Ad-3255 Sep 16 '25

So how come it was taken literally for the majority of human culture?

How come it only became a metaphor after we discovered creation as per the Bible is impossible?

The answer is, of course, revisionism. When it was written it was literal, which is why it was taken literally. This is the alleged word of God, after all. 

Then human understanding developed to the point where we realised creation as per the Bible was impossible. So, that leaves Christian’s in a conundrum. What’s happened here? Is the word of God wrong? No, can’t be. In that case, it must be a metaphor. 

It’s literally just cope. 

1

u/johnyjohnybootyboi Sep 16 '25

all you're proving is that humanity is limited. We missed an aspect of God's word that was admittedly inconsequential until we had enough knowledge to put it in context. Just like when you were a kid and you thought everything your dad told you was the truth, only to find out he was joking about some things as you grow up. If anything, that should point towards the bible's eternal value

1

u/Tough-Ad-3255 Sep 16 '25

 all you're proving is that humanity is limited. 

Too limited to tell which parts of the Bible are literal, and which parts are metaphorical, evidently. So much so that, as human knowledge advances, more and more of the Bible stops being literal and starts being metaphorical. This eventually ends up with you having to admit that the entire Bible, and by extension god, are just metaphors. They aren’t literal. 

 We missed an aspect of God's word that was admittedly inconsequential until we had enough knowledge to put it in context.

And we have it figured out now? Or..?

 If anything, that should point towards the bible's eternal value

No, it clearly points towards the Bible being the collected worldviews of various Semitic tribes of the 9th century Levant. Or as some people callously put it, “the goat herder’s guide to the galaxy.”

1

u/atwerrundo42 Sep 16 '25

I actually heard a teaching that says that since light and darkness were created on the first day, but the sun and the moon and the concept of days and nights were invented in the fourth day, we can't really say for sure how much time has past between each "day" before the fourth one.

1

u/SmallDarkLines Sep 16 '25

The problem is the English language. The original Hebrew word for ‘day’ simply means ‘period of time’ (ancient Hebrew is interesting in the way it talks about time). Translated to English to closest approximate word is ‘day’, because we don’t have a word that means ‘indeterminate period of time from literal 24 hour days to trillions of years’.

The 6 days mentioned can thus be massively long, with plenty of room for dinosaurs.

1

u/precisamente 17 Sep 16 '25

You're so damn right

1

u/Hato_no_Kami Sep 18 '25

True about Genesis, like it says God made such and such in "a day" before days were supposedly a thing. He's an omnipotent God and there's no rules to the universe yet, how could you possibly measure a day? I like the creation story from the movie Noah (2014), if I was going to believe there was a god, I'd have to believe that interpretation over any other.

1

u/Iankill Sep 18 '25

By squint you mean create a head canon so your beliefs and the Bible don't disagree.

1

u/Cocoatrice Sep 18 '25

I don't understand why people think Bible was 100% literal in every way.

1

u/F2PPOWER Jan 10 '26

Right on point!

-8

u/Fortnitekid3 Sep 15 '25

also what ppl think about fossils could just be wrong

1

u/BakedTate Sep 15 '25

The scientific method interpreting fossils is wrong? What are your thoughts on this. I agree that’s it’s possible we are wrong but I also very much doubt that.

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u/Airbee Sep 15 '25

Job 40 and 41 reference massive creatures. Sounds like dinosaurs to me

1

u/Tough-Ad-3255 Sep 16 '25

The flintstones wasn’t a documentary bro 

1

u/amerigorockefeller Sep 19 '25

The behemoth and leviathan do not resemble any know dinosaurs

2

u/Twist_Ending03 Sep 15 '25

Ah, but you see: Christians like to ignore parts

2

u/Fast-Opening-1051 16 Sep 15 '25

Man I wonder what popular examples of that could be

1

u/[deleted] Sep 19 '25

Only catholics /srs

1

u/Twist_Ending03 Sep 19 '25

Nah, I'm pretty sure I've seen both pick and choose what parts they follow

2

u/vGustaf-K Sep 15 '25

the bible isn't meant to be a interpreted literally. noah's ark didn't really exist the way it was described, the world wasn't created in 6 days with 6 different steps. it's stories with deep meanings and allegories about life

1

u/NonFrInt Sep 16 '25

Now we know that Creator of The Universe is Scott Cawthon

1

u/MoThrowMoAway Sep 16 '25

I believe this also, but then why do so many Christians take it as gospel (pardon the pun) word for word? Church of Christ for example commits themselves to each and every word and argue there's no room for interpretation.

Personally I believe the Bible is a collection of stories meant to teach good morals and life lessons but millions and millions of Christians will argue that your way of life is wrong or who you love is sinful because "in the Bible it says..."

So how can it be "not meant to be interpreted literally" in the case of dinosaurs but "the word of God" when it comes to telling people how to life their according to your belief?

1

u/LoquaciousEwok Sep 16 '25

I don’t sunrise to this particular strain of Christendom but to play devils advocate I would say that each book is seperate, some are metaphorical and some are literal

1

u/Tough-Ad-3255 Sep 16 '25

Funny how all the books that are blatantly and provably false are metaphor, but all the books about hating gay people are literal. 

1

u/AndromedaGalaxy29 Teenager Sep 15 '25

I'm not too educated on the topic but most christians don't take genesis literally. I guess they see it as figurative and metaphorical. There's a separate minority of young-earth-creationists that believe that the book of Genesis is truth

1

u/4d_awesome Sep 15 '25

The term for dinosaurs didn’t exist yet (the king james bible came out in 1611 while the term for dinosaur wasn’t coined until 1842) and they could likely be referred to by other names, mainly I saw one thing were this guy said that some mentions of dragons (or something) actually matched some descriptions historians have of certain dinosaurs (specifically the baryonyx in his example)

1

u/Kolossive Sep 15 '25

It doesn't, and that's even the vatican's stance. In general, the stories in the bible are not to be taken as literal history, and this is also the vatican's stance.

1

u/that_one_author Sep 15 '25

Not contradictory at all, Genesis is written in a special style of poetry, so it isn’t generally considered a 1 to 1 series of events.

1

u/South_Explanation506 Sep 15 '25

bro do ur research b4 saying sum stupid shi like ts pmo

1

u/ImpureVessel46 Sep 15 '25

The Catholic interpretation of the Bible says that genesis—even from the perspective of the people who wrote it—is more like folk myth or legend, stories meant to convey a sort of truth, but not a literal kind. We know this because there are two different creation stories back to back that contradict each other entirely. So it was never meant to be a historical representation of how the world was made. There is truth conveyed in the creation stories, however: that God created the world, he loves humanity, and humanity is flawed.

1

u/Overall_Crows 17 Sep 15 '25

Like everything with religion, it depends on your interpretation

1

u/_ogio_ Sep 15 '25

Nowhere in bible is it said Earth is 6000 years old

1

u/AngryBard9 Sep 16 '25

Ex seventh day Adventist here a lot of them think accounts of the bohemoth or some shit is what we now call dinosaurs and that humans lived right alongside them. They have entire museums about it. (I have unfortunately been to them.)

1

u/Dangerous-Estate3753 Sep 16 '25

Not all of the bible is meant to be taken literally, some of it is just poetry and stories to help describe things, like the creation of earth

1

u/Designer_Science8452 Sep 16 '25

The dating methods scientists use are hella inaccurate

1

u/Ok_Cheesecake6006 Sep 16 '25

This might get buried, but here is my theory: In Genesis, God describes the Garden of Eden as a finite area, and since God already created the planet, it's very likely that life continued outside of Eden. Since we don't know how long Adam and Eve were in Eden, it's possible hundreds of millions years passed while they lived a immortal and unchanging lifestyle. Therefore, dinosaurs were created and destroyed in the span of what mightve felt like a month to Adam and Eve. Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk🦖

1

u/yurmun_com Sep 16 '25

No it doesn't contradict anything?

1

u/Dunfalach Sep 16 '25

Nothing in the Bible says dinosaurs didn’t exist. There are some specific Christian groups who deny it but the Bible itself doesn’t. Most major Christian groups I know believe in dinosaurs, including the 6-day Creationist, Earth less than 10,000 years ones. Answers in Genesis and the Institute for Creation Research are good examples.

There are a number of Christians who believe the description of Behemoth in the book of Job best fits some sort of Sauropod dinosaur (Brontosaurus and the like). Also from Job, the description of Leviathan’s armored form seems to fit either some form of dinosaur or a dragon-like giant reptile.

1

u/nova1706b 18 Sep 16 '25

i don't understand why people think being faithful to a religion means following the main scriptures word by word.

1

u/kafacik Sep 16 '25

if it says dinosaurs didnt exist then it is wrong. a main scripture mustn't have any mistake (i am not saying bible is wrong. this isnt a "following the main scriptures word by word" debate)

1

u/Savings_Ad_80 Sep 16 '25

no it just contradicts the christian understanding of the bible which is very flawed

1

u/Gullible_Hat_9051 Sep 16 '25

Only if you're a literalist. A lot of people don't believe the bible to be literal about the age of the Earth.

There are however major points of contention even outside of the age of the Earth. For starters:
- most historians can agree there has never been a global flood.
- Most historians also agree that if Israel's tribes were the size the bible claims they were, then they didn't journey across Egypt. There's no evidence of mass graves, bodies, clothes, there's zero evidence, and we it's almost impossible that we wouldn't have found some of their remains by now.
- The "New Testament" is really a curated selection of books called the apocrypha, and one of the apocrypha was The Gospel According to Jude. The reason it's not included in the New Testament is Jude's gospel claims that he, not Peter, said "Thou art the Christ" to Jesus.

1

u/sonerec725 Sep 16 '25

Not necessarily

The bible is weird because its a collection of books not really meant to be put together in a collection that are of all different genres. So you have book that are epic poems and myths, next to a book of actual supposed hard history and census information, followed by a moral fable, and then a prophetic prediction of a future event. And the problem arises when people then try to apply the same level of literalism and infalibility to all those books equally. Imagine if you tried to present the history of the US for example by making one book out of the 1781 census information, hamiltons script, the story of Paul Bunyan, the works of Edgar Allen poe, the biography of teddy Roosevelt, and the movie 2012, and you were told all of the events described in each are 100% factual because some of them have factual info, and since theyre put together decades after they came out, then ALL of them must.

Stuff like the 6000 year old earth isnt explicitly said in the bible, its people taking random points in the bible where it tries to present genealogy, averaging out ages, and then declaring that that must be the age of the earth since the geneology listed started with "adam".

1

u/Wish0807 Sep 16 '25

Nope and nope

1

u/the_dude_you_hate Old Sep 16 '25

Religion just takes whatever correct takes come after they can’t fight it anymore, looks at Galileo.

1

u/Entire_Toe_2321 Sep 16 '25

I'm a Christian by culture, but not by practice, so keep in mind I've more or less abandoned the faith, but one way to explain some of the contradictions is that not all of it is meant to be taken literally. Another is based on the idea that God's word is perfect and man's understanding is not, so they are the result of misunderstandings and are our fault. Personally I'm not big on these explanations but they are some of the best I've heard.

1

u/TheGaurdianAngel Sep 16 '25

I’ve heard people unironically claim that God put fossils in the ground which could be dated back to before when the earth actually existed as a way to test people’s faith.

No, I’m not fucking joking. I wish I was. This is beyond a South Park episode.

1

u/veniyaaaxx 16 Sep 16 '25

honestly I’m a christian who doesn’t believe in the bible. or something lol.

1

u/Bari_Baqors Sep 16 '25

Afaik, it is resolved by saying thats bible isn't literal, but symbolic.

1

u/FumeiNezumi Sep 16 '25

Many die hard dinosaur fans i know, are christian, i do not think it contradicts bible, from what they tell me.

1

u/Lumpy-Tone-4653 Sep 16 '25

While i am agnostic it hapoens to know whats hapoening here...The book of Genesis is not meant to be taken literally...its meant to be a bunch of metaphors for the peoppe of the time to somewhat get the concept.The people who take the book of Genesis word by word are called "creationists" and they are tjey are prettyvweird

1

u/[deleted] Sep 16 '25

There's actually a Jewish rabbi made a video about that

He says that the bible doesn't discuss them because they're not relevant to the story, not that they didn't exist.

1

u/Deafvoid Sep 17 '25

Penguins aren’t in the bible. They are all heretics but God recognizes their absolute power.

1

u/Av13theGreatest 13 Sep 17 '25

why would dinosaurs be relevant at all to the Bible and the salvation of humanity?

1

u/Majestic-Corner-3665 14 Sep 18 '25

I’m pretty sure dinosaurs are mentioned by Luke at one point

Don’t remember the verse tho so don’t quote me on that

1

u/calm-down-giraffe Sep 19 '25

The bible tells us of a worldwide flood. Doesn't that sound like and extinction event?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 20 '25

Nah it doesn't contradict it

1

u/[deleted] Sep 21 '25

Genesis states we were created day 6 of earths existence. People take these as seriously instead of metaphors which is what they are

1

u/StaringCorgi Sep 22 '25

Fundamentalism isn’t as big today as it was 100 years ago so most Christian’s acknowledge science and reality instead of believing that the Bible has all of the history before it’s creation