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Date Posted: 23:18:52 10/07/03 Tue
Author: Chris
Subject: Re: Letter to Daily Sun News in Sun City
In reply to: Lawrence Clayton 's message, "Letter to Daily Sun News in Sun City" on 07:20:05 10/03/03 Fri

Seems to me the easiest explanation is that the Bible is no more complex or rich as earlier or concurrent religious systems -- one man's Snake in the Garden (note: it's not Satan who haunts the Adam and Eve story) is another's Quetzalcoatl, the Ruler of Life for the Aztecs. Or a symbol of positive feminism in Greek myth. We as a society have accepted this God as the most relevant to us in present day. It's sheer ignorance to think that Jesus, who lived life in a relatively small part of the world, could speak to all of humanity while never leaving the Middle East. (Even his followers knew they had no power in the East, China.) Jesus, to us, is merely a humanistic way of believing that God is indeed a person, and that we can have a direct, one-to-one connection with Divinity. That's the key: The God of the Old Testament wasn't enough to sustain the faith of a new people. They needed a physical embodiment to keep their faith intact, so they latched on to the Jesus myth. Every religion needs a tangible artifact to sustain its faithful constituency.

Even surface-level Biblical scholarship can point out flaws like you're quoting here -- and I'm sure you've just pulled your examples from another (probably Internet) source. Many of those examples are byproducts of improper transliteration -- or, what fundamentalist Christians are least willing to believe: political influence by authorities re-translating the Bible over the centuries. Perhaps the easiest reading on this topic are books by Harold Bloom and, if you want a little freakier interpretation on a lot of Christian flim-flammery, Dr. Hyam Maccoby.

(Try reading Bloom's "The J Writer" against the creation myth of Genesis.)

Here's one on for size. A simple one: If Jesus, as Paul would have us believe, is the one true path to God and heaven, then why did Jesus continue to practice Jewish orthodoxy until his crucifixion? And even after then, why did his desciples continue to practice such non-Christian acts as ritual sacrifice and orthodox Jewish dietary restrictions? In the view of Maccoby -- and you don't have to go for this at all, though it's pretty interesting -- Jesus was nothing more than a Jew who believed himself to be a messiah. Not *The* Messiah. Like other "messiahs" like King David, Moses and Noah, Jesus believed himself to possess supernatural predestination in that he would one day cause Roman occupation of Jerusalem to cease. He believed, Maccoby says, that he would end Roman occupation through a miracle on the Mount of Olives. When that didn't happen, defeated, he was persecuted by the High Priest -- not the Jews -- for anti-Roman activism, and was crucified. He did not rise again. That Jesus became the symbol for a new church is due to Paul (Saul), who wanted to establish a new church after his vision on the road to Demascus -- a mental breakdown -- that showed him a way to lead his own church. Maccoby makes compelling argument for this. It's debatable, yes, but very worth checking out.

(Evidence that Paul created Christianity: The act of sacrament is a pagan sacrifice rendered metaphorical. Regularly, Christians gather to EAT THE FLESH of Jesus and DRINK HIS BLOOD. This is pagan, something Paul/Saul of Tarses picked up as a youngster in his border Jewish/Pagan town of birth and incorporated into the mythology of Christ. We find different tellings of the Lord's Supper -- eat of my body, blah blah -- in assorted New Testament sources, though these were likely taken from Paul's account. Did you know that the New Test. stories of the Bible were written decades after Jesus' death? And that they relied on each other and companion texts to weave their stories together?)

As for the evolution/creationism thing, that's easily solveable, too. "With our complex genetic make-up, it seems unreasonable that the human race just 'evolved' out of a literal nothingness." Actually, it's very reasonable. It's the law of random creation. Put enough monkeys in a room with typewriters and one will eventually write Shakespeare, right? Well, put countless billions/trillions of planets in the universe and one, at least, will allow for the creation of human life -- its complexities and all. Humans aren't all that complex, really, compared to other living and inanimate organisms in our realm of knowledge. That we "evolved" into beings prescient enough to establish dieties for ourselves (not to mention create Velcro and computer chips) is just a successful end product of billions of failures buried in the past.

Should we blame Christians for having a blind faith when they don't read their Bibles for themselves? Maybe. Maybe not. In its sublime benignity, Christianity -- indeed, religion as a whole -- is a wonderful salve for life's randomness. Singing hymns to a God (a grand, knowing father figure) on Sunday mornings and then listening to scripture (*ahem,* bedtime stories) is one way of making us feel better about the fact that we're ultimately going to die. That humanity is finite.

Even I can go to Sunday service and consider the Bible as a wonderful collection of parables and guides for living and historical storyline, all wrapped up in an epic literary work. And you know what? That works for me. And if it makes a Christian feel less lost in the grand scheme of life, well, that's the best gift any piece of historical artifact or literature can offer. Hey, Jewish faith has greater tolerance for the myth-truth of the Bible as opposed to its literal truth. And liberal Christians are willing to bend on the metaphor of the Bible -- agreeing that, hey, maybe God's days of creation were spread across millions of years. But even if a Christian believes in a 6,000-year-old Earth (ludicrous, right?), so be it. Whatever works, works.

I consider myself a bit of an armchair Biblical scholar, and it's fascinating to compare the Bible with outside sources like Joseph Campbell's comparative (pop, Jungian) mythology, earlier myth, and contradictory non-Christian scholarship. I don't believe in Pascal's wager, that it's better to believe than to not believe in something. But I do believe that we should have a curious eye as to why the majority of people believe in supernatural divinity, and we -- even as athiests -- should be interested in how these desires of man manifest themselves into religions. It's not a matter of "knowing your enemy" or even dismissing the religious majority as mindless sheep. I hold possible the idea that we could be wrong, that there could be a God out there. But I also feel like He is not the God of the Bible, or if anything, He has done a foul job of presenting Himself to us.

Can't we appreciate the beauty of someone broadcasting his life's hopes, fears and dreams into the handset of a CB radio, even if no one's listening on the other end?

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