So if a secular source is quoted it is still suspect because the author is a Christian? That's a bit like saying that if someone believes what they experience they can't be trusted.
In a day of PC and ultra-sensitivity to other people groups, this seems like profiling to a extreme degree. I don't mind it. Information may be correct, but the reliability of its accuracy is only as good as its source.
I guess it's fair to question sources you deem unreliable. I just wonder if there is any news the messenger can deliver, that won't just be scrutinized but immediately rejected.
I think a major issue of not having secular sources corroborating information in the bible is that most Christians will not admit the bible is wrong, under any circumstances. If you can validate the information from someone that is not a part of your religious group, especially for things related to the resurrection of your savior, it makes that information much stronger to others.
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They're not meant to shatter people's faith, they are simply meant to show that if the bible is truly God's word as Christians believe and that all scripture is inspired by God, why don't things match up?
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First off, "inspired by God" is not the same as "God wrote every line with his own hand". God uses people, He works through people and He allows their character and personality to influence the work. The result has the signature of both God and the person through whom it is done.
I would disagree, as Matthew 5:17-18 states, "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished." Jesus is trying to reinforce the validity and accuracy of scripture down the smallest details, which I don't see as being accurate.
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They're not meant to shatter people's faith, they are simply meant to show that if the bible is truly God's word as Christians believe and that all scripture is inspired by God, why don't things match up?
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BUT... It doesn't really matter. All the Gospels are written by different people who either experienced the events first hand, gathered the information from those who experienced it, or gathered it from the various extant written accounts. Inevitably there will be differences in the telling as there are from any group of people who witness an event, and the further from the even they are, the more scattered the account. This speaks to me more about the truth of the matters than their falsehood. If it were all a conspiracy, there'd be effort made to make them all align. As it is, they come across as honest. Each is written in a different character, by very different people and they will naturally put more focus (and try to be more accurate) on different parts, the parts they consider most profound or important. In any case, the most important parts align and the core message remains the same in all of them.
This circles back to the belief among some Christians that the Gospels being different is actually proof that they are true, which has never made any sense to me. If ten people are taping something, say a musical performance, then while their positioning would be different they would still be taping the same show. One video wouldn't have the singer singing something different than the other nine and another one wouldn't have different songs played than the other nine, and while they may be taped at a different portion of the show, they should still show the same progression of events. This is how I view how the Gospels should read if they are to be taken seriously, and even taking into account the possibility of different accounts and the fact that they were written, on the low side, 40 years after the events happened, there shouldn't be too many major differences.
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They're not meant to shatter people's faith, they are simply meant to show that if the bible is truly God's word as Christians believe and that all scripture is inspired by God, why don't things match up?
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If you're looking for accuracy (and the account most satisfying to a scientific mind) then Luke is the one to look at, particularly in the King James Version since most modern versions were translated using Westcott and Hort's Greek text and they based it on less reliable (in my opinion) manuscripts. He gathered much of his information through interviews, rather like a detective piecing together what really happened from each individual interviewed. This tends to filter out the differences and can lead to the most accurate picture. He was a physician and wrote in such a manner as to make things testable. In fact, he mentions hundreds of "important" people, places and events to place the events he describes accurately in time and location.
For the emotional and deeper, meaningful version choose John. Some amazing stuff right at the beginning. The first chapters of John and Genesis are my favourites.
Matthew comes across as rather excitable and passionate, perhaps with a little less attention to detail.
Mark is a bit of a hotch-potch. It's gathered from a variety of sources and more "compiled" than the others. All the core components are there as they should be, though, but it's not my favourite, revealing little of the personality of the author / compiler and thus I find it rather "dry".
When I was reading the bible when I was younger, Luke's Gospel was definitely my favorite. I found it to feel like it was the most authentic and most accurate, while the rest I felt were too emotional and passionate, as you have pointed out! Either way, Luke-Acts still would be what I consider the most valid of the Gospels, but we run into problems as even biblical scholars don't agree that Luke-Acts was written by Luke the Evangelist, it is the youngest Gospel in terms of composition date, and there are no original manuscripts of Luke-Acts, just copies of copies that aren't even identical. As we know from most written history, the further we get from the date of something happening the higher than chance that the information has been remembered incorrectly or written down incorrectly, as is evidenced by the fact the witness testimonies in court cases are considered the least reliable form of evidence.
Of course, this can easily be remedied by saying that God has a hand in making sure this information is recorded and/or remembered correctly, but if this is the case why is this not consistent? Why is scripture taken literally when convenient for personal beliefs but then taken contextually or figuratively when not convenient?
Is there actually any definition of science that states it exists to prove or disprove the existence of a good?
Of course not, science simply exists to offer us a better understanding of the workings of the universe. Historically, science and the church worked hand in hand, with a lot of scientific breakthroughs coming from priests and clergy members. This seems to have changed somewhat recently, where people have started taking the bible much more literally, which was not done often prior to the last 100 years, which has resulted in people trying to force science into their religious mold. If they find science that backs up their religious beliefs, great, but if science is found contrary to their religious beliefs it is a sham and obviously wrong because their faith/their pastor/their bible says so.
This is not reserved for religious folks either, as some non-religious/atheists/agnostics have taken the other side and automatically dismiss anything religious or biblical as untrue. This is a misuse of science, as the scientific method should be applied evenly and without bias to information across the board, and if something in the bible holds up to that I have no issue with it.
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You can also take a look at the site below (I don't know how to imbed links yet 
) where you have a truly massive info-graphic comprising over 60,000 cross references in the bible that consists of contradictions and other things.
http://bibviz.com/
Nice anti-theist site. They make absolutely no effort in trying to understand or make clear the context of what they quote.
There is no way I would consider that website anti-theist, I mean it doesn't even offer a commentary to go along with the verses. It gives you information and simply matches up verses of the bible that state one thing and then state something contrary, even if some of them are admittedly pedantic. So even if you can rationalize away 3/4 of those (a very high percentage) that still leaves hundreds of things in the bible that do not line up with one another.
We of course have the contextual argument pop up at this point, as it usually does. I certainly agree with reading things in the context, but the text of the bible is constantly being updated by its followers, again when convenient, to apply different contexts to its scripture. Take for example slavery, where the New Testament Epistle of Philemon has been taken "in context" by both pro-slavery supporters to support their cause as well as abolitionists to support their cause, however, the Old Testament is also largely seen as contextually supporting slavery, whereas the New Testament has usually been seen contextually as not supporting slavery even though the gap between them is only ~600 years. What happened in those 600 years that caused God to, in a sense, change his mind about slavery and to allow the context of the subject change so much from the Old Testament to the New Testament?
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You can also take a look at the site below (I don't know how to imbed links yet ) where you have a truly massive info-graphic comprising over 60,000 cross references in the bible that consists of contradictions and other things.
http://bibviz.com/
As an example I watched the Sam Harris video. It's from a debate with Dr. William Lane Craig on morality.
In debates, atheists are most often the first to throw reason to the wind and resort to "name-calling", emotional appeals and cliches, just as Sam did there. Listen to the whole debate to get context. Craig stuck to the topic, presented well-reasoned arguments and absolutely demolished Sam's arguments. The point is not "What is the character of God?" which should be another whole debate, but the origins of morality, and on that point Harris failed miserably.
Harris did propose some points worth considering, but he threw them out as red herrings to take things in a different direction, while appealing to emotions, adding cliches and name-calling at the same time. He was clearly losing, so he threw a red herring and tried to escape. He sets up a straw man.
His claim that God is evil because He doesn't intervene when there is suffering (if He has the power to do so) is an emotional appeal without reason. Allow me to reverse the question to gain a perspective on the absurdity of his statement. What would happen if God did intervene in every situation where there is suffering? And should He? What would the world be like if he did perform "miracles" in every case? Would that leave space for people to exercise their own free will and morality? In the majority of cases, people suffer and die through situations created by other people. Is God to blame for those people's actions? Or the lack of action on behalf of others that should be intervening? People should be doing what they can to alleviate the suffering. Why? Because we have an objective morality that has its origins in a good God. Not only that, but God chooses to work through people. We are the "body of Christ", his agents in the world. It's our own immorality and inaction that should be taking the blame here, not an "evil" God.
Moving on to natural disasters. That's a difficult one, but you could (if you didn't want to expend effort) say it's the result of man's disobedience. The world itself became "broken" with the fall of man. But that's a bit of a cop-out. So I'll add some "meat" to the discussion. It's very relevant to the concept of intelligibility of the universe and the reliability of the natural laws. If someone someone jumps off a cliff and expects God to save Him, is that rational? If someone build their house on a fault line, knowing there are regular quakes that happen there every year, is God to blame when the house falls down? Natural disasters are the consequence of the laws of nature functioning unimpeded. It's very likely that God has in fact prevented many such disasters from happening through direct influence, but then there's no way of knowing this, is there? And where do you draw the line of "interacting"? You want the laws of nature to be consistent so you can understand and make sense of the universe (and do SCIENCE!), then you want God to jump in and intervene whenever it's convenient to you?
That's just one of the items on the site, the one that drew my attention most clearly. I certainly don't have the time to go through all of them.
For the Harris and WLC debate, I will be honest and admit that even though I have watched quite a few of Harris' other debates as well as WLC's debates, I have not watched this one. I will need to either find 2 free hours (probably not happening over Thanksgiving weekend) or find a text version of the debate that I can pick through. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if Harris strayed quite a bit, as he does that sometimes, but I will still try to address your points.
While I will agree that most harm, death, and disease perpetuated in the world is due to an individual's own actions or someone else's actions towards that individual, that still doesn't absolve a supposedly almighty God of the others. If a 2 year child develops a brain tumor, wouldn't a loving God want to save that child, especially if this tumor developed 1000 years ago when it wasn't possible for God to "work though" modern medicine and surgeons? It certainly is not impeding that child's free will nor is it an amoral decision, because I am pretty sure that Muslims, Christians, atheists, or Buddhists would agree that it would be the "right" thing to do.
You could say the same about natural disasters, as there are very few areas of the globe that are not subject to deadly natural disasters of some kind, which from your response seems to be your reasoning behind the loss of life from them. If God instructs his people to be fruitful and multiply, but supposedly doesn't want them to settle in places where they could be subject to death from natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes/monsoons, tornadoes, and volcanic eruptions, where were they supposed to go? Even disregarding that, your statement that the earth "broke" with the fall of man is inconsistent with the fossil record, the archaeological record, and the sedimentary record. The earth has had these disasters as far back as we can go, which would mean that the fall of man would've happened billions of years ago, which is simply not possible. I honestly am intrigued and wonder how you reconcile what we are able to find in the fossil record as well as the sedimentary record with your belief that these things only happened because a woman ate a fruit she wasn't supposed to because a talking snake told her to and then lied about it.
