[Dog Gone]

I believe that the Holy Spirit reliably guides the Church in the big stuff, and consequently I think the decisions made on such things like which writings to include in the official documents were reliable.

I guess I believe that to be true, too. I'm not positive about that, which obviously indicates to most that my faith is too weak.

I believe Noah's Flood was a catastrophic, but local, event and I think the world is billions of years older than 6,000 years.

That's what makes me believe in God, but not believe that the Bible was a fax from heaven, even sent by the Holy Ghost.

[Skooz]

The Bible does not state that the earth is 6000 years old. There are many valid ways to read the first few chapters of Genesis.

IMHO, any god who could not manage to get his only written message to us in the form he intends would not be worthy of worship.

[Mad Dawg]

I would have thought faith had not to do with being positive, but being committed. (Of course, my wife, child and friends think should be committed, but I THINK that's diferent.) In other words, come at me with a dentist's drill and my certainty about God's providential protection may waver, but now and when the hooting and hollering's done it still seems to be to be the case that God brings good out of evil.

To put it another way, I would venture to say that you are like a person looking at the racing form and newsletters, but you haven't quite gone up to the window and made your bet. Would that be fair?

As to Noah's flood and things of that kind, I guess people of a literalist persuasion would say that my faith is misplaced. (And I would say theirs is.)

But wasn't the original topic about whether the Table of Contents, so to speak, of the Bible was faxed from above, or, more precisely, what it meant that it wasn't faxed from above. The article is about books that were (cue dramatic music) "banned" from the Bible. This raises the question, "Who do those people think they are to say this book is in and that book is out? What gives THEM the right, huh?"

And that, I think, just shows that questions about the nature and authority of Scripture sooner or later lead to questions about the nature and the authority of the Church and then about the activity of the Holy Spirit. In the word's of Cher, from Clueless,"It's a big old mess!"

[Wonder Warthog]

"I believe Noah's Flood was a catastrophic, but local, event and I think the world is billions of years older than 6,000 years. That's what makes me believe in God, but not believe that the Bible was a fax from heaven, even sent by the Holy Ghost."

With all due respect, you should investigate the Roman Catholic Church, which is simultaneously the most hard-headedly realistic AND the most mystical of the Christian Churches. I did, converted, and don't regret it for a second.