Pioneers of Loophole Religion

Number 15 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:
The Israelite rationalization of a problem they had created shows that loophole religion is as old as the Bible.

by Farrell Till

Our last trip into the Twilight Zone left God's chosen people grappling with a terrible problem. They themselves had virtually wiped out the tribe of Benjamin in a battle described in Judges 20, only to realize that they were responsible for practically destroying a tribe of Yahweh's pet nation Israel. Six hundred had survived the Benjamite massacre, but these were all males, soldiers, who had retreated to the rock of Rimmon (20:47). Our last trip found the Israelites in the "house of God" pondering what they could do to rebuild the tribe of Benjamin. They couldn't give their own daughters to the Benjamite survivors, because they had sworn with an oath at Mizpah before the massacre that "(n)one of us shall give his daughter to Benjamin as a wife" (21:1,7), and neither could the Benjamite survivors violate Yahweh's holy law and marry foreign women (Dt. 7:3-4; Ex. 34:12-13).

The "Everything Problem"

From the Mailbag section of *The Skeptical Review* (sorry, I don't remember which issue):

Letter to Hatcher...

I read your articles in The Skeptical Review. I was raised a Christian and am now an unbeliever, and wanted to share with you what I believe to be the greatest problem with the Bible.

I used to be an attorney (I now work in high tech), and I once represented a young man who was accused of stealing a lot of money from his employer. There was a lot of accusatory evidence, and for what it's worth his wife and his attorney both believed him to be guilty. For every piece of incriminating evidence he had an answer. For example, he had forged someone's signature on a number of documents; he said that person had verbally authorized him to do so. (The person had since died and was not available to either corroborate or disprove my client's statements.) He claimed to have made a trip on company business but there was no record of the trip having actually been made; he claimed that company officials had instructed him to travel incognito because of the highly sensitive nature of ongoing negotiations. And on and on it went.

At some point, the problem with his case became no one piece of evidence, but the cumulative weight of everything. And at some point it really didn't matter that he had an answer for everything; people just stopped listening.

That's the problem I have with the Bible. It contains a whole lot of what on the surface appears to be contradictions, historical inaccuracies, scientific inaccuracies, absurdities and outrages. Inerrantists such as you have an answer for every blessed one of them, your current discussion with Farrell Till about the Book of Daniel being a case in point.

But the real problem with your case, as I see it, is not whether you can answer this skeptical argument or that one; it is that there is such a multitude of problems with the text that at some point it just doesn't matter any more. The cumulative weight of contradictions, inconsistencies, historical inaccuracies and the like are just too much. I call this the "Everything Problem," and, brother, you've got it bad.
(Mel Dahl)

A Lesson in Basic Hermeneutics

From *The Skeptical Review*, 2002/May-June:

by Farrell Till

Hermeneutics is the science of interpreting written texts, especially those that claim to be sacred, and it seems that our old friend Roger Hutchinson is in need of a lesson in the fundamentals of hermeneutic theory. That Hutchinson would try again to postulate some far-fetched "solution" to a biblical problem is not at all surprising, but I must say that I was surprised that even he would resort to the absurd explanation that he proposed above to one of the many New Testament passages that taught the second coming of Jesus was imminent.

Readers will probably remember that Hutchinson attempted unsuccessfully last year to explain away the prophecy failure in Matthew 24:34, where Jesus said that "this generation will not pass away till all these things be accomplished." One of "these things" that Jesus had just mentioned was a clear description of his second coming, which he said would be accompanied by various astronomical signs and that all the tribes of the earth would see. Clearly that didn't happen in the lifetime of those to whom Jesus was speaking, so Hutchinson tried some of his verbal legerdemain to make this mean that Jesus was really saying that the generation alive whenever Jesus did return would not pass away till it had seen all "these thing," which would include the return of Jesus. Yeah, right. Whenever I read Hutchinson's "explanations" of what disputed biblical texts really meant, I can't help wondering why God didn't providentially arrange for Hutchinson to have been born in biblical times so that God could have chosen him to write at least some books of the Bible. Why, if the omni-one had done that, he wouldn't even have needed to "inspire" Hutchinson, who undoubtedly would have known how to explain everything clearly without divine inspiration.

Any Loophole Will Do

From *The Skeptical Review*, 1993 / March-April:

by Farrell Till

The how-it-could-have-been scenario is a common tactic that fundamentalists use to "explain" passages in the Bible that pose serious problems for the inerrancy doctrine. They like to believe that as long as they can suggest an interpretation that removes the spectre of contradiction or discrepancy from a problem passage, then they have preserved the inerrancy doctrine, no matter how far-fetched or unlikely the interpretation may be. They insist that just as long as the interpretation is not absolutely impossible, they are justified in believing that it could have happened or could have been the way the interpretation explains away the problem.