This was cute.

     I saw one christian claiming the bible to be infallible say that the genealogy in Luke was actually traced through Mary. Okay, that's nothing new (even though it says "son of Joseph, son of....") The interesting part was that this person tried to justify the idea with a claim that people in those times used the same word for "father-in-law" (socer) as they did for "father" (pater.) Now, my readers may notice that I used two very different words. That's because the Latin words are very different. (The Latin words are derived from the corresponding Greek words; so those are also very different.) I am left to wonder. Did this person bother to check whether his claim was true? (It's not like it was hard to check.) Did he somehow think that I would not bother to check? And even if it had been true that the same word was used for both, it was not conventional at the time to list father-in-laws in genealogies. So it looks like an excuse.
     Seriously, the bible has mistakes and contradictions in it, much like we would expect if it was written by men who had aggreed on a main theme but who hadn't gotten together to hammer out the details. Why do people try to present it as a work of perfection? Why do they jump through such ridiculous hoops to try to maintain the illusion when it has already been discovered?