Author: drewpeters

From the lecture, the biggest thing I took away were how there are differences and contradictions in the two creation stories and contradicting facts in the flood stories. In the first creation story, it is very structured and has a pretty distinct timeline, where the second creation story is not as structured. This is evidence that these two stories were most likely not written by the same author, and the importance in that is how, even as these two different stories are within the same couple chapters of the same book and the flood story is woven all into one, there still are multiple authors within the stories and different ways that the stories have been interpreted.

Something I took away from the reading is how human’s individuality brings us closer to God and how that is portrayed in different stories of the Bible, like the tower of Babel and the story of the midwives. When the people are trying to get closer to God by working as a unit, this upsets God and splits them farther apart by confusing everyone’s languages. By doing this, not only does it show how they should not attempt to reign at the same level of God, but it also shows how they need to grow closer to God by embracing individuality and choosing to fear like the midwives did when they disobeyed the Pharaoh. This shows individuality because they individually chose to save the baby boys because it was God’s will. Although our individuality has the potential to push people farther from God by rebelling, it also gives us the ability to choose God instead of corruption or rebellion.

One of the biggest things that I gained from this lesson was finally being able to wrap my head around what the biblical canon really is. It is basically a list or catalogue of scriptures that reign authority, or the list of scriptures itself is authoritative. Another meaning it has is a ‘guide’ for living.

Something else that this lesson brought me to doing is making a Wikipedia account. When I first saw that we needed to make one for this class and that we will be making edits and changes on accounts throughout the semester, it really intimidated me, and I was definitely not expecting to do this in this course. When I ended up creating the account and was able to access and edit these different Wikipedia articles, I became really interested because I never knew how easy it was to edit these articles, but it also scared me because of how easy it was to do so. Just by creating an account and having the experience and power of making edits, it opened my eyes to how careful we have to be when finding sources that are reliable, not just on Wikipedia, but anywhere we’re looking.

As I was reading through this lesson, it showed me that it will be a lot more difficult to find reliable sources than just looking freely for information without thinking that it may be wrong or biased. Although this may be difficult, at least I now understand the importance of it based on my experience I had while making a Wikipedia account.

Hello, I am Drew Peters and I am a sophomore, majoring in Biochemistry. I am taking this course because of two main reasons: I am a Christian and am very interested in all the different viewpoints and angles that people see the Bible as compared to my viewpoint, and it fulfills my required TI credit for Core Curriculum.

How I would describe a Bible from my own viewpoint would be as multiple books written and influenced by God telling one big story. Many people don’t know what to think of the Bible because of all the stories in it that seem quite unrealistic, and they wonder if it is filled of fictional stories or historical documents. Although it is God’s Word to me as a Christian, I think that it is a lot more to other people, whether it be a historical document or whether it tells people good life lessons. Whatever it may be, I am looking forward to learning more about it.

I believe, like I said earlier, that God was the ultimate influencer and author of the Bible, even though God used many different people to write it out. Some main authors that God used are Moses, David, Paul, and many others. The Old Testament was written before the birth of Jesus, and the New Testament was written after the death of Jesus. There are definitely a ton of other pieces I am missing, and I hope to find those soon.

When I search, “what is a Bible?” it brings up a lot of different answers, and the main ones seemed to be that it is the holy scripture of Christianity, a collection of ideas about God, or even a guide to living life to the full and a road map for the journey of life. One would know if these sources offer reliable and credible information by first looking at the URL. Most of these sites end in “.com” or “.org,” so this shows that they are not academic or scholarly articles, which would be ideal to find reliable information. You would then find information of the author and see the type and the amount of education he or she has had.