From another thread:
You know I will say for someone who isn't a God fearing guy, you have a lot of knowledge about it. I know many like to be knowledgeable on the Bible. It is an interesting read regardless of your beliefs. I'd like to ask you your thoughts on the Bible. I obviously believe it to be true (some literally, not all though). But really, you've said before you aren't a total believer or a believer at all. But you post a lot in this forum. I respect your posts too. I think you know of what you talk about. It does make me wonder though. You have all of this knowledge about the history of the Bible, you like to discuss it, yet you don't necessarily believe.
Were you raised in any religion? I can totally see being turned off by some religions. I won't say which religion, but I have definitely been turned off by some (or really one in particular). It made me become anti-religion, and in a sense it turned me away from all religions for just a bit. That doesn't bother me because religion is totally man made, and my relationship with God never suffered. However, I've known some who turned away from God altogether because of certain religious experiences. But I feel like you are too smart for that, so my question is why don't you believe, if you can even answer that? And if you don't want to, that is ok too!!!
I am not opposed to the idea of God and I'm not opposed to the idea of religion but I do tend to find many sorts of religious people to be unbearable. Pantheists leave me bland because they make me wonder what all the fuss is about. Muslims strike me as a bunch of pirates and even worse Christians strike me as telemarketers. At least you can shoot pirates!
I like Jews but I know this thing about lox is totally a dodge to get past the proscriptions against bacon.
Satanists--I mean REAL Satanists and not the angst-ridden teen desperate for attention--can be an interesting crowd. They are more a matter of being independence minded and rejecting authority including the authority of their namesake and they certainly do know how to party.
Agnostics are misguided mostly because they mistake WON'T know for CAN'T know. Honest inquiry says, "Yes, but what if..."
I have studied a considerable deal. At one time I could pick my way through the Hebrew and Greek. I developed my penchant for reading subtexts under undercurrents from reading the Bible. I've read Aquinas, Pascal, Augustine, Chesterton, Lewis and a host of others. I prefer older texts because modern theology is crap. People like Joel "Purpose Driven Life" Osteen should be purposely driven off of a cliff.
I am not a Christian because I do not live a Christian life. You won't hear me say, "Sorry, I don't go to church" because I'm not sorry I don't go to church. I have nothing against church, I just don't go and I'm not sorry. I've broken 7 of the 10 commandments and if my weekend goes the way I hope it does I should be able to polish off the last 3 and maybe earn some extra credit for stuff that hasn't been forbidden...yet. That's not to spite God or thumb my nose but I should at least be bunny enough to admit what is mine and accept it as such.
Still, I like the idea of God, and its generally the atheists that make it so. Atheists, like everyone else, spend a great deal of time whining about what is right. Now, if atheism is true the universe accidently, haphazardly and mindlessly vomited life from some pool of slime. Life clawed and gnashed its way into the strife strewn shit slinging festival that it is today and in a universal time scale that life will flash away like summer lightning with no one to know, care, mourn, judge, console or heal its passing.
And yet they cry becasue their unemployment checks are running a bit late.
Such people make me long for the days when slavery was the accepted norm (Roman style, not US). These weaklings should be beaten and sold off to the highest bidder where men better than they can manage their affairs for them with the compensation of a fair day's labor.
But if God is true then the strife strewn shit slinging fest suddenly makes sense. It isn't any more palatable but it certainly makes sense. The notion of billions of imperfect wills having enough freedom to overtake the perfect will of a perfect Creator and cast the entire world into chaos does much to explain humanity. The story of
Gan Eden is astounding because it explains all too well what sort of person Man really has made himself to become.
It isn't the fruit that hooks him it is "you shall be as gods yourself." Then God walks--WALKS--through the cool of the morning calling to Adam, not because the omnipotent suddenly cannot sense Adam but calling him to admit his folly. Instead Adam say, "it was the woman...that YOU gave me."
Adam was quite happy with Even when she was his frisky little sex bunny but as soon as Adam finds himself in his own mess he not only blames the woman he blames God for giving her to him.
Does that story not scream that it knows the human soul far better than any other text? It describes the arrogance, conceit, self-delusion and mewling blame-shifting that is humanity. The Greeks tried to blame Pandora, the Muslims don't even see themselves as fallen, and pantheists wants you to believe you are a fragment of God playing with Himself just to see what it feels like. The Bible throws all that right back in your face.
Has any text ever written as a biography of man ever treated its subjects with such self-condemnation? Abram's polygamy is one headache after another. The Hebrews are ungrateful, idolators. Peter is a moral coward. The churches are riddled with pettiness and petty sinfulness. Usually when people write about themselves in an effort to prop up their religion they tend to cast a forgiving eye on their own deeds. Not the Bible. It's authors are self-excoriating first and foremost.
And yet in the midst of all this THE Creator is supposed to have walked amongst His creatures as one of them. I read that and wonder, "Do you suppose he knew any good jokes?" After all, He invented the joke and gave us minds to have a "sense" of humor. Could a random collision of sub-atomic particles account for the presence of humor?
And yet true to form, His own creatures, whom He came to rescue from themselves brutally tortured Him to death.
But still, because He simply did not invent life (small L) but because He is Life (capital L) he *cannot* be dead.
So He resumes His place where He has always been until the day He decides it is time to heal all wounds and on that day He will walk through a garden in the cool of the morning once again but this time when He calls out to His creature the creature will answer back and God will say to that creature...
"Did you hear the one about the priest and the rabbi?"
Anyway, that's how *I* read the Bible. I may be loose on a few points but whatevs. It's a helluva story. Almost too good to be true. I don't know if its true but if it is I'm cool with that. Dunno if that can get me to change my ways but I still like the story.
