How will U know the truth?

Is the Bible all there is? In a lot of Christian circles, the Bible is considered to be God's inerrant word. Yes, there are reams and reams of paper used on books discussing the Bible, parsing its words, writing about the lives and sayings of saints, and telling us how to apply the Bible to our daily lives. Any Christian bookstore carries tons of these books (on the shelves that aren't devoted to Testamints, wishy-washy Christian pop CDs and fancy Bible covers for good Christians to tote God's word in style). But no one would say that these books are greater than the Bible. Most of them derive their messages from the Bible, and their readers are likely to maintain that the Bible is all a person needs to live a good life.

Which brings us to the fork in the road at which many people stand during crises of faith. Most of my church-and-religion-eschewing friends grew up in strict Bible-believing churches. The two paths at their fork were "Suck it up and believe that the Bible is God's direct, factual word" and "Stop believing in the Bible." I have always been surprised that a third fork, "Stop seeing the Bible as inerrant and learn about interpretation" doesn't exist, but when you grow up hearing that the only options are to believe completely or not at all, it's not much of a shock that most people choose the latter option when they are no longer able to choose the former.

Many people who have moved past accepting the Bible as inerrant truth do so because of the contradictions in purportedly factual stories. Everything from the number of troops in a battle to the events of Creation has two tellings, and those tellings are rarely identical. We can call these multiple representations poorly-concealed lies or we can accept them as the consequence of compiling multiple versions of a culture's mythology in one place. And accepting that Biblical stories are mythology (and that they are based on even older mythology involving--gasp!--tons of foreign gods and goddesses) doesn't make them less truthful; it just means we are dealing with a different sort of truth.

There is scientific truth, which can be supported using stringent testing and repeated by any person with the right equipment; the slightly-less-easy-to-prove historical truth, which rests on eyewitnesses and the words of the winners but which is still rooted in an actual event that people agree happened; then there is religious truth. Religious truth rests on morals and lessons derived from myths and parables. It can be found in the emotional cry of poetry or derived from apocryphal stories speaking to universal human experiences. Even if the Bible lacks scientific or historical truth, it can still be religiously true. We can still use it and its lessons to guide our lives.

To tell the truth, I'm not entirely sure how a person justifies these discrepancies if they claim the Bible is 100% true in all senses of the word. Do you just ignore the parts that disagree? Insist that sources disputing the Bible's scientific and historical truth are wrong? It's probably unfair of me, but I can't help but think that some degree of self-deception is involved in such a worldview. Regardless, the point is that believing in the religious truth of the Bible doesn't mean you also have to accept that every single word possesses full scientific and historical accuracy, and it doesn't mean that you can't question it or accept some parts more readily than others. I think this is probably more along the lines of what God wants--for us to use our minds to discern what is meant by the writings of the Bible, to decide what is meant by different parts, to make sense of what is being offered in its pages. And if that isn't truth, what is?