The Bible Makes Perfect Sense...

[Towlie]

10. My favorite Bible verse is John 18:37-38...

 
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That's the exchange between Pilate and Jesus where Jesus says "I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth hears my voice," and Pilate cleverly responds with the rhetorical question, "What is truth?"

It was almost like a Zen koan, and may have prompted Jesus to skeptically reconsider his own dubious claim. If he did and it was observed and recorded, that could explain why the record of the exchange is mysteriously truncated after Pilate's question.

But as far as the Bible making sense goes, yes, it does, if you read it as the imaginings of very primitive people who knew nothing of science. Their entire world was one big mystery, but if one wanted to be regarded as a wise man then one needed to come up with answers, and honestly answering questions with "I don't know" would not win one respect as a wise man, it would only prompt the questioner to walk away and look for someone who does have answers.

So even today when we have the Scientific Method of experiment, observation, evidence, peer review, and willingness to abandon or revise in light of new evidence; there remains in strong competition the Religious Method of making shit up. If it weren't for that then we might have been a millennium farther ahead than we are today.

So the only path to finding perfect sense in the Bible is to read it with a "what were they thinking" view. That will definitely lead to a more realistic understanding than if you read it with an irrational bias that it's somehow all true and that the parts that are undeniably false are really mere poetic metaphors.