AW! Epistles
The Bible is not Perfect, nor Did it ever Claim to Be! From TT (Mr Answer Man)
Abstract
Thursday, 15 June 2006
Mike, I have the following comments on: The Bible-Absurdities and Contradictions. I ran across this site as I was looking for all sides of Modern religious thought! I’m not sure what the whole jist of your site is about, or who you are, but let me do some important work here…
You have searched through the Bible for a long period of time in order to come up with what you have written. This tells me that your heart and soul had been searching for peace and understanding.
Why peace? I am perfectly peaceful. Why aren’t Christians? Why doesn’t it tell you that I am seeking understanding and that is what is important?
Yet out of the frustration of The Bible not being what you wanted or needed it to be, you decided to retaliate by trying to make it a mockery (I forgive).
Mainly, I mock the people who believe in it, but ancient books taken to be God’s truth in an utterly different world can only be mocked. Originally, religion had a value. It no longer has.
The Bible is not perfect, nor did it ever claim to be!
Look, TT, I know that. You should be telling the Christian people who think it is perfect that it is not, and then they would be a little humbler when they take sentences from it and use them to justify burning witches or homosexuals, while wilfully cheating and robbing via their con-trickery TV shows.
It hasn’t even always been in one book. It was put together over the years by the choice of certain men. Know that the Bible is a guide—A guide that only a heart seeking salvation from a wicked world would be able to fair chance of understanding correctly. It is not something that jumps out and forces you to accept it. For example, you may read a passage literally and think, “That literally says that God ordered killings, yet He said thou shalt not kill!” But at the same time you would miss the fact that Ecclesiates says there is a time for everything—Even killing (Ecclessiates was written for you!)!
Now, correct me if I am wrong, but God sent down from a mountain commandments written on tablets of stone, one of which said “Thou shalt not kill”. That leads me to think that God himself wrote these words in no uncertain manner, so, if I believed in God, they carried some weight. On the other hand, some Greek scribe decides to make a collection of wise sayings he has heard all over the place, and rather late in the collection of the Jewish scriptures it is added to them, and thereafter it has equal weight with the words God inscribed with his own thunderbolts, or whatever. You, Mr Answer Man, find it useful to deny God’s own word inscribed in flame, and you and those like you who want not to be confined by any laws of God, find the way out. If I were convinced that God revealed himself in the world, and he is indeed, almighty, then I should expect Him to be able to impress me, and not just send along a wheedled-worded apologist who is probably a crook. It is precisely because the bible is so contradictory that it could not be considered as the Word of God at all, because as soon as any of it is not, but no one knows which bits, all of it is in doubt.
What’s my point? Well, if you were seeking true understanding, you would know that some men were not completely speaking on God’s behalf (Unfortunately for those who look to literally critique every word in the Bible)! 1. Some men (Just like Today’s men) were speaking based on the education level they had obtained. 2. Some were fanatical and were trying to get their point across to people by backing it with God’s name. 3. Some men were writing in hind site. 4. Some men were writing to coincide with myths and traditions that were passed on to them in respect to decendents. 5. Some men (just like you!) were writing and not knowing the effects of their writings and how they would be literally interpreted in future coming years. Ecetera!
And all of these men have their writings now included with God’s words, but you cannot tell me which is which. You are effectively demolishing the bible.
But does any of the contradictions, myths, lies, misunderstandings, etc. change the fact that we are living in a confused and troubled world, and that we need to have our hearts comforted? Your heart is uneasy and your blood races at a mad man’s pace regularly, I know this! You put on a outward smile of contentment in your life, but on the inside you are a lonely and just as confused as little child. Why? Because you won’t let the true knowledge of God find you! You want God to be who you want him to be. You don’t want to follow God’s plan to happiness as a human.
My dear Answer Man, I would like to know how you know all this. A point I have to make so often that it becomes boring, is that all of you believers actually think you have the powers of God. You think you know by some supernatural means all of this pseudo-psychological twaddle about me. I will tell you that you have lost. You are the weakest link and you can depart. It is all false. If my blood boils occasionally, it is when madmen like Bush and Blair bomb innocent people into mincemeat to save them for democracy. That is evil! And they are not Christian unless “Christian” means Devil’s Child. My reading of Christian history is that it does mean that. Precisely. Christianity is monstrous, and if it has the backing of any god, he is not the good one. You people are blind to reality mainly because you refuse to read the truth. That is what I offer on these pages, for those who want to read it, not Christians in general who cannot, but any Christians who are able to.
Listen, no matter what is passed on to Man or what we do with our understanding of God—God is already who he as and nothing can affect that! God is not a man, nor does he think like a man. In order to understand God, you first have to know you need him! (read that sentence again!)
I know I do not need that god. Offer me a Good God, and I’ll consider it.
God is not a toy, nor is written words concerning him! You can’t dibble and dabble in the Bible and expect to get the real message. Contradictions appear when you are looking for them. And contradictions are obvious when you have no background for understanding.
You are a bit incoherent are you not. You assume the understanding that you are seeking. That rather illustrates my point, because if it is true, no one can read the bible with understanding when understanding is what it is supposed to offer. Is it you who is irrational or your god? Others have said to me that I must have faith to understand the bible. It is the same confidence trick. You have to abandon all reason, believe and therefore have faith, and Lo! the bible makes sense. Well, that is what I am not prepared to do. If God is almighty as you all tell us all the time, then He is well able to create a book that is not full of dribble and drabble, but actually makes sense, and, if His aim is really to save people, He would have no trouble in doing that too. What I suggest is that God might have been trying to persuade you people that you have been tricked by the Devil for centuries, but the Devil has been so clever in wrapping you in theological netting that you are all throughly ensnared. He has you, and even God, the good one, cannot persuade you otherwise. If that is so, then even I could be an agent of the Holy Ghost, though I can confirm that I have no inkling of it, if it is true. What you cannot know, and this is my point, is that it is not so. I have the evidence on my side, and you have to deny it. You Christians are forced to believe lies, and have the gall to call it the “Truth” with a capital “T”.
The Bible was written for the simple-minded to interpret God as being merciful, and willing to forgive and save us from this wicked planet, yet a stern avenger to wrong-doing towards our neighbor and our selves.
This is incoherent. We are told God judges us post-mortem. He has no need to judge us separately and beforehand in life. He has foresight, and, if He were good, He could prevent wickeness from even happening. If He has to allow it out of allowing free will then He cannot stop it. That is another contradiction. You talk nonsense. What is merciful about taking an innocent girl as a sacrificial victim, as a result of a foolish vow by her father? This is more like a Greek tragedy, with Greek gods who are sticklers for promises, and mercy is not in their vocabulary. If the father made an error, then why did the daughter have to die? Where is the mercy? What about killing 185,000 soldiers when the war was already settled by diplomacy and tribute. Your God is the Devil, my friend.
Also the Bible gives us examples of Man’s thoughts, actions, and ideas relating to the understanding of a higher spiritual being such as God! So the simple-minded can take a lot of what is written to mean just what it says. But the smarter, more-educated person has to be careful to not over analyze this written word for literal exactness. The simple words of the Bible can be troubling to a person who expects a literal answer to questions that are thousands of years old. The message in the Bible is: Look to do good things for others and know that there will always be a reward on the earthly and universal level. A content heart comes from knowing you do your best on a daily level to help and not hurt!— Knowing you do your best to clarify and not confuse. You must know that sometimes it’s best to hold opinions for those who want to listen to them and think like you do!
Now you are beginning to describe me. First, though, again you should be telling biblical fundamentalists that ancient words cannot be taken literally in a different world. I know it. The trouble is, and the reason the fundamentalists prefer their simple direct interpretations, is what I have already noted—once you start to pick and chose, the bible has no authority at all. Of course, that is exactly what all Christians do, fundamentalists among them, but they pretend otherwise. There are 30,000 Christian sects because there are at least 30,000 ways of interpreting the Christian bible. Now, I cannot see that an almighty God meant there to be 30,000 ways of reading His Word. What is a serious misunderstanding of it, and what is a trivial one? It is of some importance to Christians because, if they get it seriously wrong, they will be entering the broad gate and will completely miss the narrow one. Or have I read it too narrowly? Second, I do indeed want to do good things for others, and try to. What though of Christians? The present devoutly, some would say meretriciously, Christian leader of the world’s biggest and most powerful country thinks it proper to kill 100,000 Arabs to get rid of a monstrous leader that American leaders have supported and funded for years. They create a desert and they call it peace, as Tacitus wrote about the Romans. Christian American leaders can do nothing in the world but kill people they do not like. That is typically Christian. For centuries, these same Christians who you say are supposed to do good things, burnt people who were tied to a pillar or a tree and could not escape, and that was only after they had tortured them mercilessly to make them confess to crimes that they denied. Now the brave Christian leader, safe in his Washington bunker has people indiscriminately tortured in various parts of the world because it is illegal in his own country, adding dishonesty to savagery, and I am supposed to think this is all the doings of a good God. As for doing my best to clarify and not confuse, that is precisely what I am doing whereas you Christian liars refuse to call a spade a spade and admit that you are obfuscators as well as cold blooded murderers and torturers, just as you always have been. It took the Enlightenment to get rid of the Christian shadow over Europe, and now the Americans are aiming to bring it back. Sad.
Hey, this is God speaking through my words to you, but unlike some of the people of the past, I am careful to make sure that I convey the message that he would have me give you!
You all have the same delusion. You all think you are God. that is why Christianity is so dangerous.
My sentences or words may not be precise, but the message is clear!… You must go back and rethink what you are doing, and realize that you are not helping the hopeless; You are hurting them.
Hey, dude, nobody makes you or anyone else read what I have to say, if it hurts you. You can always switch off the TV when the God channel ends. What worries you is that what I have to say might be true, and what is worse, might be seen to be true by those who choose to read it.
You are doing what you are doing because you don’t feel the Bible has the answers that you need.
I am doing it because the bible is full of awful examples and lies. No good God could have been the biblical god. If you think that is what a good god can do, then you prove yourself to be Satanic. You think you speak for God, so you are just as capable as medieval bishops were of burning someone as a witch, or killing a daughter for the sins of her father.
Well, do this: Go back and focus on the New Testament, because like Jesus said, “If the old was perfect, there would have been no need for a new one!”
Where did he say this? You make it up as you go along, Devilish one. He actually said not a jot or tittle of the law would pass away. I hope you have been ritually circumcised. You cannot be saved without it, according to the bible.
Try to focus on why we as humans may have needed a saviour or messiah. Then try to understand the message that Jesus was trying to give, which by the way was contradictory to the Old Testament. Yet even Jesus said he didn’t come to destroy the old, but to fulfill the prophecies in it! Then try to understand for sure that Jesus’s mission was on a much larger scale. It was bigger than this planet! God’s real truth and mission is larger than Earth, but because we as humans don’t quite get that yet, we still are trying to make sense of his word literally. Now I’m alluding that the truth is way bigger than me and you. Yeah, I’m alluding to the fact that you are not as smart as you think you are, and that the key to understanding God’s bigger plan is to decipher in the Bible as to why a bigger plan is even needed! It all starts in understanding the Bible as a child would, and not as a stiff-necked adult would interpret a newspaper article.
Indeed, I am a modest man, but you think you are God. Which of us is deluded? The bible should be understood as a child would because it is a book of fairy tales.
I wish you blessings for tolerating this long-winded speech. And know that I have much more information about the real answers to your so-called contradictions. I have ideas that are just as strong, but opposite to yours. Any question has a real universal answer. It just depends on where you seek or who you ask! Just ask a question and get a real answer, which will be surprisingly different than the norm, nevertheless, truly from a Godly, Universal standpoint! (I really tried to make sense on the fly) Feel free to write back and get into my message deeper! I am no preacher; I am just like you! I did just like you, but ended up with a better understanding of why it seems that those contradictions matter, but while with God they don’t!
Why is it that, while you all think you are God, you treat Him like an idiot? Oh! Of course! Anyway, you say contradictions do not matter to God, so He is an idiot, because contradictions do matter, and they must matter even more to a God, and especially to one who is supposed to have visited earth as a human being to see what it was really like to live and die as one. It suits you to imagine that God is as stupid as you are. That way you can truly speak for Him. Let me suggest to you that you start to think. That you read something critical about your beliefs just to see whether they could really stand up as the will of an almighty being. And in particular you read some of the ghastly history of Christianity, and work out how it could have anything to do with a good God. A God of love. For anyone who is not already insane, it cannot.
Sorry partner, I didn’t know that you were even more lost than your statements on your site! You seem to be angry at Christianity with no alternative suggestions (That can’t make you happy I’m sure).
You say so, but it simply shows you have not read what I have to say. Or perhaps you have but will accept nothing except Christianity, in which case you are not criticizing me, you are simply highlighting your own closed-mindedness.
You will go to your grave without understanding why you don’t understand! And on some day you will open your eyes and sadly see that it was simple, but you made it complicated!
Well, this might be coherent to you but it is not to me. When I am dead, never having understood whatever you are talking about, I do not anticipate my eyes opening for me to see anything at all. So I will not see that it was all so simple. Fortunately for you, you will not open your eyes to find yourself burning perpetually in a lake of molten sulphur, having thought your salvation was all so easy, when your own God says otherwise, as even I can read, but evidently you cannot. It is a strange understanding you have.
The Bible is not God and God is not the Bible. The Bible only tries (with the fallible help of man) to give you an idea of who God is and where he would have us go. The Book itself, in it’s present state, was never claimed as perfect. Christians want it to be perfect, and anti-Christians want to use the imperfections in it against Christianity. The path to God is within you (Jesus said it all the time).
In that case why do I have to read a book that you admit is imperfect, but in what respects I do not know, and you will not say, when almighty God has imprinted the map of salvation somewhere inside me and could make me fully aware of it at any time at all, if He wanted to. You say the bible is not God and is not perfect, but you are telling it to me when you ought surely to be telling the ones who think it is both. They are Christians.
And if you have doubt, fear, anger, disdain, etc. within you, you will never find out the true power of what God can do for men.
Are you claiming that you have no doubt, fear, anger etc? If you do not have these things, then you are a robot. Even your own God had them. Maybe you ought to read the gospels without some pastor telling you what it “means”.
If YOU need a man or a book to lead you to God, then YOU will never get there! Take responsibility for finding God yourself through prayer and meditation. Just be still and listen to your heart yearning and not your mind burning!
Why should I take responsibility for finding God when so far as I can see, there is no evidence for a god at all? If God wanted me and anyone else to believe He existed, then we are told He is mighty enough to let us know in no uncertain terms. He certainly would not just make up a book of far fetched stories that are the very things that any rogues could invent to gull people’s savings out of them. What is more, He warned people not to be gulled in that way. He repeats in Isaiah that He only is the saviour. If He was not trying to persuade men from thinking that imposters were God, then what was His point?
I won’t bother you any further…
You conclude saying you will not bother me any further. It is because you have nothing to say in argument. I answered your longish email fully, and you have not the courtesy to reply to what I said. All you can do is spout more of the same incoherent inanities, with no indication that you have even read what I wrote in reply.
…but I hope you don’t think that you have excuse if you do not gain bliss in the end, because it was you that spent more time disecting than absorbing and truly trying to understand the truth!
You mean I used the brain that God gave me, according to the bible, whereas you refused to use yours, even to reply to the brief points I made last time, which evidently proved too much for you. How do you keep yourself amused in an infinite time of bliss? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you were just dead. That is bliss.
And there is a price for what you are doing, believe me! This is not about YOU nor ME! This is about the wrong in creating more confusion where it already exists! (He’s watching you and will reap what you sow!) I leave you in your own hands. Peace!
You really should think about your own words. You are doing the confusing, not least by pretending to simple uncritical people that you have some source of absolute knowledge that you do not have. If there is, indeed, a God, then you had better start to think a bit more deeply. It seems quite plain to me that no God would want to build a faith among His flocks of sheep based on lies. A God has no need of them. They are, however, the characteristic of the Devil.
