I don't think that's a very good comparison. Self signed certificates can be very good. In fact, they can be more secure, depending on your threat model, because you don't have to trust the root.
Yeah, you're right. It isn't a comparison, just that action of signing something yourself is quite funny when you look at it from end user's perspective.
Self-affirming argumentation, without leaving room for critical dissection and openness to error, is always doomed to become ignorant of the critical thought and will find extremist followers within the naive.
"All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness"
2 Timothy 3:16 (NIV)
Here's the verse that was always given to me to support "the Bible is the word of God and 100% infallible." Not that it's not circular, but it does exist.
Remember, the Bible has a lot more in it than folk tales and cultural laws. There are a lot passages that are prophecy, poetry, or theology - sometimes all three at once. It's just that the stories are a lot easier to remember and internalize.
Fire, thank you for using NIV, I learned on King James and find that using King James quotes over NIV lead to so much extra confusion like it isn't a translation from the 1600s.
I'm not Christian anymore, but the modern bible never "disowns" the old testament. Maybe there were books written around Jesus' time that got eradicated with the gnostics. There was a real debate over whether or not Jesus was a rebirth of God or just a manifestation of God though. I mean OT God is kind of a bastard, dude literally drowned almost every living thing on the planet, would tell parents to get on the verge of killing their children as "faith tests". In comparison, NT God and Jesus are far more loving than pretty much anything we see in the OT.
This circular reasoning comes up a lot, I'm sure religious scholars are aware of it. They must have made some attempt to reason it out. Some kind of ontological rigormarole.
I'm pretty sure the bible says any Christian with faith of a mustard seed can do the same miracles Jesus did. So Christians can turn water into wine to demonstrate the veracity of the bible.
If they suggest that's metaphoric well the God breathed is also metaphoric for how all stuff on the world is made of star stuff, including ink on a page.
Also the rest of the bible is indecipherable surrealism. The real scripture is Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds by John Lennon.