Does the Bible Have Errors?

One of the dangers in indicating that the bible has a low percentage of error is that it is like saying that the Bible has a low percentage of sin. If we assume that the Bible has any sin, then we are assuming a measure for righteousness that is greater than the Bible that we are using to judge the Bible with to determine that it has sin. Overall, at the church that I attended in childhood people must have assumed at one point that the Bible has a low percentage of errors until they collectively decided over many decades that the Bible was full of errors.

What happened is that people developed their own rules of righteousness apart from the Bible that they used to judge the Bible, and eventually people learned to rely upon these rules instead of upon the scripture itself. Eventually the righteous rules became the principles for living, and the scripture became nothing more than a Readers Digest full of mistakes that could not be trusted for anything. The worst part is that since the church catered to many traditional cultural beliefs, thus all of the priesthood would discuss and develop a theological understanding upon these beliefs, and the church had a tremendous influence as a result on others in the community and was seen to be a positive Christian influence (many saw these people as being super righteous, world peace with all religions, races, and peoples was their ultimate objective).

Many of the main teachings that the priesthood often taught are as follows.

1) Running with the wrong crowd is a danger, so separation from bad people is always necessary.

2) Hard work brings prosperity and is a praiseworthy thing.

3) No one ever gets a free ride to heaven, people earn their salvation by during what Jesus did.

4) Jesus is just a man, the law of Moses says that you shall have no other Gods.

5) When Jesus returns he will establish his Kingdom in Independence, Missouri at the sight of the temple.

6) Children are not born with sin, but they are blameless at birth and all sins are learned from elsewhere.

7) If an adult is baptized in the church and sins after baptism, then he or she has lost his or her salvation.

8) A person can easily loose their salvation, and it cannot be gained again because a person cannot be baptized twice in the church.

9) The church is the only true and correct church, other Christians are false and need to be baptized again in the church to receive communion (my father got passed by with the communion elements for more than twenty years under this rule and now he is a deacon and was ordained a deacon shortly after being baptized in the church).

10) The prophet of the church makes new scripture for the church to follow, so little need exists to be concerned with historical scripture as it is less relevant to our day than new scripture.

All ten statements that the church believed above are obviously wrong (they did not limit themselves to only ten - all the other beliefs the church had are wrong too), and these types of rules got developed in the name of Christianity and got shared with other churches when pastors of various churches would get together and talk. The point is that to assume that the scripture has little error gives much room for people to capitalize on that assumption. Assuming that the scripture is with little error often brings a person down a slippery slope that often only leads to the same place as the world's false religions.