For some reason I have been really analyzing my religious beliefs and have had some conversations on the subject with others. So I’m going to have this as a sub unit on my blog while I organize myself.
I do believe in God. I was recently watching a Discovery channel show that talked about some of the things our bodies will do to survive in a crisis. It amazes me the complexity of what our bodies are capable of and we don’t even know it. That design wasn’t by accident. It convinces me of a greater intelliegence and I believe that is God. However I believe that He is way beyond our comprehension and so various mythologies have developed to explain Him. So I believe no matter if it is through Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or Wicca we are all acknowledging the same Supreme Being. Mankind has always used mythologies to explain His existence, no matter the times or the culture. I believe it is in our nature to express what He is by making him like us. If you take the Christian element out of the equation and view the stories like we now view Roman or Greek mythologies, you will see so many similarities. But many people cannot do that, because it is their religion. To call it a mythology is a sin all to itself.
The Bible is a collection of oral histories put to written word. Those are legends that are passed down by generations and as with any oral history, it changes over time, becomes more exciting. This is especially true when a people are using these histories to keep their culture intact. Much of the Old Testament miracles have been “explained” by science. That doesn’t take away from God’s greatness. If anything when you study the science of the universe, it overwhelms me how great God’s design really is, how intricant it is woven together. That is the greatest miracle of all, the tight balance of how life is organized and held together.
The New Testament was written after the fact, not in the time of Jesus’s life. Again, the tales are needed to be more than the story of a good man to develope this new religion, to set them apart. Also when you begin to examine the way the Catholic Church had to carve its way in the beginning, it is easy to see the potential for manipulation. There were of course other early Christian works that were rejected for inclusion in the Bible. It wasn’t enough that the early Church denied them inclusion, but it was ordered all copies had to be destroyed. Some of those have been discovered in the 1900’s and I’m reading those to see what they share that the Church didn’t want. I know that some of them reference what sounds like Jesus’s relationship with Mary Magdelena, because the Church wanted Jesus to be celibate, like their priests were to be. Also control of the female gender could easier managed through manipulation of what was to be continued.
After listening to a great book on CD series, it is interesting to delve into the overturning of the Christian faith by the Pauline Christians. In reading the gospels and then reading the letters of Paul, you see that this man who never heard Jesus speak, turned the fledging religion into something quite different. The book of James is probably more informative as a post-Jesus communication since James knew Jesus first hand.
Any religion is apt to be changed to meet the agenda of those who continue it. To go by the declarations of the early Catholic Church as fact is quite hysterical in light of how many of those Popes were politicians more theologians.
More to come…
Note to self, look into getting these books mentioned here
More recently, arguments for non-historicity have been discussed by George Albert Wells in The Jesus Legend and The Jesus Myth, by Earl Doherty (The Jesus Puzzle), and by biblical scholar Robert M. Price in Deconstructing Jesus and The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition?. Non-historicity has also been put forward in popular literature by authors such as Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy in their books The Jesus Mysteries and Jesus and the Lost Goddess.
I see god as Ultimate Reality.
(reality includes all, even dreams are real, if only limited to the person who is experiencing that dream, that dream is real an alive in that person at the instant in time.)
Can anyone pull the wool over gods eyes.?
I see myself as part of that reality, but much like a baby kitten with its eyes still shut.
I look forward to learning and experiencing more. The smarter I get, the less I seem to know.
Religion I see as applied philosophy.
The bible is a old old old book. No one even understands it anymore. For example, to be cast into the fire, today would mean the same as throwing something into the garbage.
I agree about the bible too, that it was assembled by vote. But the bible is Just more literature to me.
Great post and thank you for writing it.