The following is a guest post by OpenDiary blogger Atheist Under Ur Bed. This is part of an ongoing series that will be posted each Monday. You can read the introduction to this series by clicking here.

Hi! And welcome to another session of Monday School.

Our continuing motto: “A Rational Corrective To All That Nonsense You Learned Yesterday!”

Picking up once again where we left off last week -

The Bible and its message are often alleged to be flawless. But the very nature of writing, language, and communication makes that impossible.

All words are imperfect vehicles for meaning. There is always some degree of mismatch between our thoughts, experiences, and feelings and the words we use to record and convey them.

Consider:

1) It is a truism that some things can’t be put into words at all.

2) Even when we can find the words to summarize what is in our minds, our attempt to communicate can be sabotaged by the fact that word usage and meaning often varies between regions and changes over time.

3) Spoken words inevitably lose some of their meaning when they are written down stripped of the tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language which accompanied their original formulation.

4) Translated words always lose something in the translation.

5) The state of mind of the reader is as important as that of the writer. In a sense, every word has as many meanings as it has readers. Noted author Richard Restak, M.D., put it this way in his book, The Brain Has A Mind Of Its Own (p. 159):

“On the basis of the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle impact of certain words, each person literally lives in his or her own reality…. The word love, for example, can arouse feelings of claustrophobia in one listener. In another, the word love triggers feelings of affection, commitment, or solace. Because the same word has different associations, people respond to it differently.”

Even if God somehow managed to inspire a piece of writing, He would have left the job half finished unless He also inspired the reader to read that work in the proper frame of mind. But if He were going to do that, why bother with writing at all? Why not just put the message in each recipient’s brain directly and skip the unnecessary, error-prone medium of writing altogether?

Clearly, no matter how perfect the writer may be, the limitations of writing and of readers will forever come between the writer and reader to prevent perfect communication.

6) When it comes to the Bible, things are actually far, far worse than is usually the case. Although few Bible believers ever mention or even seem to know the following facts, objective observers would do well to never forget them:

“The early text left by the Sopherim [Hebrews dedicated to the care of the Old Testament from about 500 B.C. to 500 A.D.] was for the most part a purely consonantal text with no pointing for vocalization or accentuation, no punctuation in our sense, and with little more to help the reader than some breaking up of the text into paragraphs.” J. Philip Hyatt, “Textual Criticism of the Old Testament,” Encyclopedia Americana

“In these early New Testament manuscripts, there were no spaces between either letters or words, rarely an indication that a word was hyphenated, no chapter or verse divisions, no punctuation, and no accents or breathing marks [which may make a difference in the meaning of some words] on the Greek words. There was only a continuous flow of letters.” Stendahl/Sander, “Biblical Literature – VIII. New Testament Literature,” The Encyclopedia Britannica

How strange that nearly everyone can accept the sublime plays of Shakespeare as the work of a single man while at the very same time so many point to the abject mess which is the Bible and claim that such “perfection” could only have been inspired by God….