Booking on Down Life's Road
How much of our belief
is based on the contents of a book? Torah, Bible or Koran... How
much of what most humans believe or practice comes from a
book? How of much are OUR lives based on the experiences, real or
imagined of OTHERS? How old are these books? How long ago were the
ideas,perceptions, views and beliefs of others written down? For
the most part, we'd have to admit that the religious views of how it all is,
what life is all about, who and what a God is and what on earth it is doing,
comes from the ideas of now long dead men, mostly, who simply filtered their
world and experiences through the filter of their own times and
perceptions. By writing Books, we can adopt their Bronze Age ideas as our
own and address our own fears, guilt and shame just as they did. Whether we
should do that or not is another question.
How quickly, when we
read in a religious book, "and God said to Moses," or "And
God said to Abraham" or "Allah, praise be his name
spoke..." or "And Jesus said," depending on our
orientation, think, "well, that's what God/He said to the man,"
as if it is an absolute fact. Then we adopt the view as our own, if it is
the Book we were born into, because it was in a book and written
down. It's like magic. We'd not learn and quote the Iliad or
the Tibetan Book of the Dead the same way of course. Those are not our
experiences and we know that Greek gods were just made up or Tibetan ideas of
death are just wrong. Ours are real and right. We'd not take
seriously a genealogy that instead of having Rahab the Harlot in it had
Rapunzel who let down her long hair as one of Jesus ancestors.
Let's consider...
Who knew what God said
to the Council of the lesser gods, when it said, "Let us make man in our
image," or "Now, lest they eat of the tree of life and live
forever...let us..."? Just who recorded that heavenly scene?
Who taped that? Is it not really just a story that is not only told, but
borrowed from others , by men who want to tell a story that defines
themselves?
Who was it that just
knew what Adam said to Eve or Eve to Adam in the Garden of Eden? Who was
there to write it down? Did God take notes and pass them on to
Moses? Some would simply say, "yeah...that's how it
happened," and would not have to think about it again.
Who knew what
Abraham said to Isaac just before he didn't cut his throat? Who knew the
words of Jesus as he prayed alone, all distant and all disciples asleep,
just before his arrest and being spirited away to a private hearing?
Did Jesus shout back as he was led away..."Hey guys!!! Write this
prayer down!" Who knew the contents of Pilot's wife's dream about
letting Jesus go? That was a conversation just between them
evidently. (Actually it's a theatric gimmick used by the story teller.)
Who knew what a serpent
(NOT, by the way, ever considered Satan until many centuries later when someone
needed to formulate a good story about how we all got in such bad shape and
write it down in a book), said to one person alone? Or a Jackass for that
matter? Who knew what God said to Cain alone or Cain to
God? Who told Moses all this stuff and, in fact, who wrote down all
Moses private stuff? (Hint: the same guys who wrote about
Moses body being taken by God and buried where it would never be found. Moses
could not have written the account of his own death and burial.)
I think we can play the
"who knew" or "who heard and wrote down" these many one on
one conversations or even private thoughts thousands of times from scriptures
of all religions. And it is with simple faith or trust that we tell
ourselves that it is not really just a story but rather a revelation or an
inspiration, or really a God saying what they wanted to say or a prophet seeing
and saying what he really wanted to share. We say that because it's in a
Book.
I'm sure in the future
someone will say, "Well, it's in The Kindle."
Now we don't take books
like Hansel and Grettle or Little Red Riding Hood quite as seriously. We
know that stuff didn't happen but we like the story. Those are not
The Books, they are just books.
Christians are pretty
sure that no Allah really spoke to the Prophet and Muslims are pretty sure no
Jesus really died for all the Christians. Christians are very sure
the Torah is toast because their man in the NT, Paul, said it was. Of
course others think those Christians are wrong because they can take the same
book and man and make it say other things that says it ain't necessarily
so.
Stories in books can be
debated and argued with to one's delight and utter insanity. Proof
texting can lead you in a thousand directions and they do in ALL religions that
depend on ancient books. It simply depends on who you read and in what
order you read them. Wanna obey the law? Read Paul and Jesus.
Wanna do away with the law? Read Paul only and only certain books.
Did Jesus family flee to
Egypt after his birth or did they go home to Nazareth a mere 40 days
later? It depends who you read. Did Mary know who Jesus was
before his birth or did she forget and come get him with her sons to take
him away because he was nuts? Depends who you read. Did Jesus ride
into Jerusalem on one or two animals? It depends who you read and it
really depends on how the one you read, read the original text in the Old
Testament. Did Jesus ascend to heaven after the dinner or did he ascend
weeks later? Depends who you read. Did Paul really meet Jesus
on the Damascus Road or was he called from the womb with no such meeting?
Depends who you read. And so it goes.
Another problem with
getting stuck with the truths or ideas of truths found is books is that we can
never really know what the book said originally. Remember, with the
Bible, we have copies of copies of copies of copies.................and they
weren't Xeroxed. Did Jesus say "it is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle," or did he say, "it is easier for
a rope to go through the eye of a needle." ? You
guess... Did Jesus really say anything at all about that
topic? Who knows? Being a book doesn't make it so. Maybe
someone just didn't like rich people along the way.
The facts are that no
Moses really wrote the Pentateuch. Priests did that and did so much later
in time than the time presented in the Book. In fact, it was competing
priests who wrote and it all got mixed up into one. There were a few
Isaiah's all cobbled into one. In Ezekiel it is a battle royal
between Priests and Scribes for who did and didn't make true prophecies.
Isaiah is full of prophecies gone wrong. That made the scribes laugh at
the priests and the really ticked the priests off. If you could inject a
failed prophecy into a book, you could make the writer look like a fool worthy
of death.
The names of the authors
of the Gospels were affixed decades after the originally anonymous books were
written to give them credibility. Peter was not written by any Peter and
no Paul actually wrote the letters to Timothy or the Ephesians and probably not
Colosians either. Those books were written much later in the "how do
you run a church" times rather than about issues that would arise in
Paul's lifetime a mere ten to 30 years after Jesus. They are Second
Century concepts, not First.
No Paul wrote Hebrews
for sure as whoever did rarely talks about themselves if at all. Paul
often talks nothing but about himself using "I" very often.
James doesn't have to be Jesus brother James and the John of John, I John and
Revelation can never be proved to be the same person or disciple of
Jesus. These are all assumptions most are comfortable making to keep the
story coherent. You can never know for sure and is the stuff of faith I
suppose. Faith is what we plaster up our walls with until we get the
facts.
And lastly, for now, we
get so offended thinking that someone like Herbert Armstrong, GTA, Gerald
Flurry, Dave Pack, Rod Meredith, Joel Olsteen, or thousands of other Christian
Lone Rangers seem to know it all and speak on all things as if they knew.
But that's how the Bible, the Torah and the Koran function too. It is
just that it is easier to believe the one lone man's view if it is in a book
thousands of years old than it is to believe someone who we know or are
contemporary at least.
The entire Christian
truth of life , death, God, Jesus, Satan and the Wonderful World Tomorrow are
the product of maybe seven to ten men mostly unknown and mostly Paul in the New
Testament. Strangely, Jesus wrote nothing. Jesus is simply written
about and others tell us who he was and what he did and said. Hearsay
mainly when you think of it.
Moses could have been a
sociopath for all we know but we can't know. Isaiah and Ezekiel just may
have had Schizophrenia or Jeremiah Bi Polar Disorder or melancholy, but we'd
not know that. They'd not know that nor would the people who were
intrigued by their behaviors know that!!! Paul may have had
temporal lobe epilepsy for that matter hearing voices and seeing lights in his
head, according to Luke, or not, according to Paul. Paul may have had out
of body experiences and visions that being in an old book seem ok but if Dave
Pack said he had one, we'd laugh our asses off, and call for medications
not congregations.
The character in Gospel
Jesus may have had issues with not knowing who his real father was. Maybe
when pressed as a youth Mary just said "God is your father," and the
rest of the story stems from a genuinely human being struggling with
abandonment issues. We can't know from a Book. We weren't there and
saw none of this or knew anyone who did.
Remember, no one goes to
the hospital to see the birth of a later famous person. Fabulous Birth
Stories are made up AFTER the adult becomes famous and bear no resemblance to
the truth. All Caesars and gods are born of virgins, get visits
from Wise Men and are found under a "star." Even Yassir
Arafat claimed to be born in Jerusalem for credibility when , in fact, he was
born in Cairo. It's how we tell our stories.
But some books are magic
and evoke powerful emotions. Just this week in Georgia a woman hung the
dog of a neighbor that chewed up her Bible. No joke..she hung the dog who
chewed up her Bible. Had the dog chewed up her copy of "How to Win
Friends and Influence People," the dog would have lived. I
think we know where burning a Koran can get you. Burning "Ali
Babah and the 40 Thieves" not so much.
The bottom line is that
all major world religious views about the who, what, where, when and why of God
and life is left in the hands of a very few men who are said to have lived
lives thousands of years ago, had experiences with the gods and written them
down as truth which led to copies of copies of copies of copies of it
all. On top of that, at times we can deduce that the writings are not
actually those of just one man or of the man whose name is affixed to the book.
The Book also has
contradictions, mistakes and boo boos.
What would it be like if
every time someone wanted to know what life was all about , or what may happen
after death, we didn't feel the compulsion to go back to a Bronze Age Book
filled with people somewhat like us but somewhat not like us at all? What
if every time you had a spiritual thought or scientific fascination you did not
have to filter it through the Bible, Koran or Torah for verification? How
nice not to have all of earth's geology and formation not filtered through
Noah's Flood or the craters on the moon through Satan's rebellion.
Would it be so bad if we
could get away from "The Bible says...", "The Koran
says..." and "The Torah says..."?
It's kinda like hot
dogs. If you really could see and understand just where they come from
and how they are made, you'd not feel so compelled to serve them as if that was
all there was to eat. You'd probably feel better and not feel so limited
in your allowed tastes and perspectives.
