Bible and Authority

I've done a lot of thinking lately about the Bible, since I am in a class called "Biblical Foundations of Literature," and have come to reinforce a previous conclusion I made.

Protestants always make a big issue out of who wrote the Bible, when it was written, etc. in order to show its infallibility and absolute inerrency, given that it is the foundation of their faith. But to a Catholic, the who doesn't really matter (in a few cases it does, but for the most part it can play second fiddle).

Why? Because we have an authority telling us this is the Bible as we know it. The men who wrote the Bible may have written in completely differently, but they way it has come to the Church is the way God wants it. Now, I'm not suggesting that we should even consider the Bible to have undergone changes before the Church, but even if someone could conclusively prove the Bible is completely different than what it was, the Authority of the Church still tells us what we have is the Bible God wanted us to have.

Irony

So has anyone else realized the Muslims (at least the more radical ones) lack a sense of irony?

Papa Ratzi: "Any violence and terror in the name of Mohommad is evil and against true religion."

Radical Muslims: "What! We will commit violence and terror to show you that Muslim's aren't evil."

So I'm paraphrasing a little, but you get the gist. If Muslim's wanted to show us there isn't any evil in Islam they might try actually not burning things and killing people. I'm not sure I can really contribute anything particularly special to this incident, as every last blogger has been talking about it over and over again, but I couldn't just ignore it.

Genesis 1-11

So Genesis 1-11. These chapters get a lot of flack, particularly from scientist who say they prove the Bible wrong since they give the world such a short creation (of course, one may be forgetting that God can do whatever he darn well pleases, being God and all). There is also a lot of complaining by Traditional Catholics and Fundamentalists of any sort who say since the Bible is infallible the world cannot be over 6,000 years old.

What does the Church say? Not much of anything. One is allowed to believe the young world or the old world hypothosis. There are, however, certain fundamental truths that all Catholics are required to believe: that God created one man and one woman (whether by the dust of the ground or through evolution) and at one moment installed them with a soul. They were perfect and then fell through some means (most likely sexual temptation).

Jimmy Akin talks about this some here, specifically speaking on the flood narrative.