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Comment by mightyham | Hacker News Reader

The Bible is a small library of different books written by different people at different times. I don't think it's all that surprising that there are contradictions. In fact, I would say that pretty much every faith tradition with a long literary history suffers from this problem. I don't think that undermines that idea we can glean meaningful wisdom from sacred texts.

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Flat contradiction undermines wisdom and empowers sophists. The most interesting aspect to sacred texts is the question of why some succeeded and some failed. What is the appeal? Within that context, the contradictions themselves serve a purpose, increasing the utility of the text particularly with those with a taste for power.

The problem is that sacred texts like the Bible (other examples might be the Pali Cannon in Buddhism or Vedas and Upanishads in Hinduism) do not contain "flat contradictions". If people hundreds of years apart write down conflicting ideas that later get complied together by another person/group who are using those texts for non-logical spiritual guidance, in what way is that a meaningful contradiction? Also, the idea that wisdom must be strictly rational is a modern, scientific standard that these texts fundamentally disagree with.

If you redefine words and ignore logic - you can salvage anything, sure.

I'm not sure what's the point tho. If you start with abandoning logic - you cannot later return back to using it. Starting with 0==1 you can prove anything.

If Bible gets away with contradictions - you can't then accept the conclusions and use logic on them. The moment you abandoned logic you are left without it forever. Full-blown postmodernism. Nothing is true and everything is true.

So by your standard, the works of Nietzsche are worthless because he was a strident anti-rationalist, and his works of literature contain many (mostly purposeful) contradictions?

Philosophy is only useful for generating questions anyway, so the harm is minimized - but yes, it's not something you should base your worldview on.

Rationalism, which you seem to be an ardent supporter of, is a strain of philosophy. We all have some epistemological system we live by, so discrediting philosophy on its whole is not an option.

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