Are You Religious?

[geodave]

All religious belief systems have some inconsistencies or unknowns (the unknowns are, in fact, required in any logical system.) I'll give you four from Christianity just for example:

1. The law (somewhere in Leviticus or Dueteronomy) says you should not marry your sister. However Sarah was Abraham's sister (probably half-sister.)

2. The law says you should not marry a woman and then marry her sister as a rival wife, yet that's what Jacob did.

Now, those two can be explained away since they happened BEFORE the law was given, but what about:

3. The law says that if a Moabite marries a Jew, their offspring are not Jewish for four generations. But David's great-grandmother Ruth was a Moabite -- so was David, or Jesse, not Jewish? How does that impact Jesus' heritage as king of the Jews.

and of course the old stand-by:

4. The book of Acts and the gospels disagree on how exactly Judas died.



These questions (and many others) DO NOT make me question my faith, but they do keep me from being a Biblical literalist.