Has God Appeared to YOU Lately ?

As far as the bible being reveled by God is concerned, Thomas Paine pointed out 200 years ago that it is a contradiction in terms to call anything a revelation that comes to us second-hand, either verbally or in writing.  Only the first person receiving a communication from God can be said to have "received a revelation from God".  Anybody else, who receives a communication from any other person, is not receiving a revelation from God, but a report of a revelation from God.  Unless you as the indirect recipient are told directly by God to believe that report, how can you determine which persons who claim to be speaking for God are authentic, and which are not?
        Christian fundamentalists are no more justified in believing that their bible is inerrant, than Jewish or Moslem fundamentalists are in believing that their bible is inerrant.  And the same is true of every other fundamentalist group that claims that they know for sure that their bible was revealed to their head-prophet and that it is therefore inerrant.

When it comes to the inspiration of the "Old Testament", it's fascinating how everything in the Old Testament that they can use to torture other people is the innerant word of God", while anything that they don't understand or don't want applied to themselves, is dismissed in an instant with the mantra, "Christians are not bound by the Law.  Jesus freed us from the ancient Law."
        There was no New Testament at all when Jesus said the following.  He was speaking strickly of the Old Testament when he said:
        "Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.  For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished.  Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and so teaches others, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven."
(NASB) Matthew 5:17-19

You don't have to accept everything in Shakespeare, or any other other, to benefit from some of what they have written.  Why is the Bible the only book where the only choices that you have is to accept all of it, or none of it?   Just because people are forced by the overwhelming evidence to accept the fact that the Bible is fallible doesn't mean that they can't be inspired by what is inspiring in it.  It would be so nice and comfortable to have the wheat separated from the chaff, maybe with red text vs. black, but life just isn't that easy.  If Christianity were a matter of black and white (or red), there wouldn't be thousands of versions of Christianity, now would there?
        Maybe Matthew 13:27-30 gives us a good way of looking at this situation;

Far from challenging one's faith in God, the recognition of the fallibility of the written word should cause the true Christian to have greater reverence for Jesus Christ, who is the one and only living word of God!   We "Liberals Like Christ" don't believe that the teaching of the Lord in the four gospels is enhanced by considering dozens of relatively insignificant books of the Bible the equals of the Gospels in inspiration. Nor do they allow Christ's teaching to be filtered through and modified by other lesser people, no matter what claims they make for themselves, whether they be living or dead, "canonical" or non-canonical.
        If Jesus thought the Bible (and the "New Testament" in particular) was going to be all important to "Christianity", don't you think he would have written at least some of those scriptures himself? Instead, the only words that we know him to have written were written in the dirt and never written for posterity.  And we don't know of a single instance of Jesus ever telling his disciples to write down and publish any of his words?  We don't even know for sure if "Matthew" and "John" were the apostles of those names.  The apostles were so little inclined to write down the gospels that those scriptures were not written until some 30 or 40 years after the fact (and after Paul of Tarsus had published his "Epistles").
        Although Fundamentalists claim to be followers of Christ, most of what they believe and teach most passionately comes - not from the Gospels of Jesus of Nazareth - but from the Epistles of Paul of Tarsus, or even less worthy sources.  While giving Jesus of Nazareth plenty of lip-service, what they believe most earnestly and quote most consistently is Paul's teaching that people are not rewarded by God with salvation by reason of what they do, but by reason of what they believe - which is exactly the opposite of what Jesus taugth. -  We dedicate several pages to this crucial issue at :

Trust in JESUS ,     Not PAUL     for Your Salvation !

Greg A. A.  did a wonderful job of expressing my beliefs about the Bible, when he wrote (to the "Liberals Like Christ" group on 9/12/2003 ) :
        " I do believe there is Truth.  However I do not believe any human is capable of mastering that Truth.  What we can have are truths, which point to the Truth, and stand related to It in a way we can't understand or appreciate.  I also believe that these truths change as the world changes, and even as a person changes, though the Truth that they point to does not change.
        I do not believe the Bible is the Word of God, though I do believe that it reveals the Word of God, but in a very imperfect manner.  And it must do so, since it is read by very flawed beings, after having been assembled, translated, edited and transcribed by other very flawed beings, and written originally by still other, very flawed, human beings."

The 'Bible Belt's" defense of slavery :

So-called "Christian Conservatives" who desperately need some of the Bible's least important verses to hound homosexuals these days, are the worthy descendants of their predecessors, who used the Bible in the very same way to promote and defend slavery for hundreds of years.  As Dr. Terrry Matthews explains so well in http://www.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/about/slavrelg.html, "The South felt it necessary to defend the Bible as inerrant truth, with no mixture of error because Southerners came to believe that anything that threatened to undermine the authority of scripture also undermined one of their best defenses of slavery.

One of the Southern "theologians", Robert Lewis Dabney, clearly described the deliberate nature of this strategy when he wrote in 1851: "Here is our policy then . . .  to push the Bible argument continually, to drive Abolitionism to the wall, to compel it to assume an anti-Christian position."  Like other Southerners, he felt that if the abolitionists could be made out to be attacking God's Word as well as slavery, their influence among the public could be limited.  Another leading Southerner, James Henley Thornwell, went so far as to say that calling Slavery sinful was to reject the Bible in favor of a rationalistic mode of thought.  And some Southern religious leaders who went so far as to attack the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Bill of Rights, as having sprung from the same infidel philosophy which bred abolitionism.
        While conservative Southern Christians used the worst parts of the bible to justify human slavery, liberal Northern Christians used the best parts of the bible to fight for the abolition of slavery.  They focused on the spirit and teachings of Jesus, and believed that the Golden Rule had superseded the ethic of the Old Testament.  They saw scripture as a progressive revelation, and therefore gave greater weight to the New Testament teaching concerning the law of love.
        On the other hand was the South, with its claim that slavery was divinely ordained.  Southern clergy cited scriptural texts to prove their point, and insisted that those who differed from them were denying the truthfulness of God's Word."

        The Alabama Conference of the Methodist Church proclaimed in January, 1861: "African slavery is a wise, humane and righteous institution approved by God. "
        The General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church boasted in 1864: "We have no hesitation in affirming that it is the peculiar mission of the southern church to conserve the institution of slavery and to make it a blessing to both master and slave."  In an 1862 sermon at Savannah, GA, Episcopalian Bishop Elliott actually condemned opposition to slavery as "presumptuous interference with the will and ways of God."

Regarding the conflict between Faith and Reason :

Hitler admired the blind faith of "Conservative" Christians

"I have followed [the Church] in giving our party program the character of unalterable finality, like the Creed. The Church has never allowed the Creed to be interfered with. It is fifteen hundred years since it was formulated, but every suggestion for its amendment, every logical criticism, or attack on it, has been rejected. The Church has realized that anything and everything can be built up on a document of that sort, no matter how contradictory or irreconcilable with it. The faithful will swallow it whole, so long as logical reasoning is never allowed to be brought to bear on it."
Adolf Hitler, from Rauschning, _The Voice of Destruction_, pp. 239-40