“...the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion...”

John Adams

The Bible 4

God and Man?
New Testament Mistranslation
Moral Lessons of Religious History

Abstract

The most important theme of the Old Testament is the fall of man. That of the New Testament is the career of the Christian saviour, Jesus. In the Old Testament, the first man, Adam, disobeyed God, who cursed him and his offspring, introducing sin—original sin—into the world. To lift the curse, that He Himself placed on mankind, God had to manifest Himself on earth as the Son and be sacrificed, thus propitiating the sin committed at the beginning of human history—though not everyone’s but only those who believe unquestioningly the fancies of the Christians. Christians need these Jewish legends to justify their God’s sacrifice, which otherwise is inexplicable. So they say the bible is the inspired or even infallible word of God.

God and Man?

Could this really have been God, and the Devil never noticed?

Imagine the mighty creator of the universe lying in a crib wailing to be fed or to have his bottom wiped. Now has this god really come to earth as an infant, or is he a god just giving the illusion of it? Does it really like being tickled with a straw or is he really looking on from another dimension, pretending. The idea of the creator of the universe experiencing the role of a human baby, genuinely, while still looking upon his works from beyond is manifestly impossible. If the god is a baby then he has left his heavenly throne for a tadge while he grows up as a human. Omnipotence shorn of all power but to breathe, and cry, and smile! Why then did the devil not use these few years of God’s weakness to take control of the universe? How do Christians know he didn’t? Or, if God is simultaneously looking after everything whilst being a human baby, how can he truly experience what it is to be human?

Then again if God (Ex 33:20) was not kidding that “no man can see me and live”, how could it be that God could live as a human on earth for some thirty years meeting many people plainly, all of whom did not immediately shrivel up. Knowing their scripture, could they be expected to believe this man to be God? And if Jesus’s companions could not be expected to believe it, why should God expect other people who never saw him in this spectacular incarnation to believe it on the say so of men who might be devils in disguise for all anyone knows?

Can an infinite being, absolutely and eternally unchangeable, hunger and thirst as did Jesus? Can an unceasingly watchful omnipotent God, whose eye “never slumbers”, sink into unconscious sleep night after night for thirty years, unconscious of the world around him? Truly? Anyone can play an arcade game and finish up being killed by the aliens. Is that what it is like for God pretending to be human? He can die on the machine but if he lost his temper he could take up an axe and smash it into smithereens. He could suffer a blow from an insulting priest but if he’d got annoyed could have squashed him like a greenfly.

Can anyone believe that God could have been really tempted by demons, devils and crawling serpents? When God who owns “the cattle upon a thousand hills” (Psalms 1:10) said he had not “where to lay his head”, was he just kidding? Why bother suffering as he supposedly had to when other, more effective, means must have been open to him? If he had “power to lay down his life, and take it up again” (John 10:17), how could he have suffered like a man on the cross knowing that his end was not final? Why could he not cause that all of these Chosen People of his should love him as the saviour, instead of hating him? It is all totally incomprehensible and the only way it can be accepted is by suspending the faculties that the Creator gave us.

We have a bleeding god, an infant god and a vengeful god appeased by murder and streams of blood.

Christians tell us that the human and the divine were united in Christ Jesus. Human foibles were mingled with divine perfection. Mortal weakness was wedded to omnipotent power. Impossible. The incarnation of an infinite god is a shocking absurdity, and an infinite impossibility.

The supposed omnipotence and omnipresence of God is based on the idea that he is everywhere and can act everywhere in the universe. His extent is infinite. If the description infinite means that every cranny of the universe, whatever its nature and throughout time, is taken up by an infinite being, it follows that there can be only one such being. The word infinite comprehends all; it covers the whole ground; it fills the immensity of the universe, and fills it to repletion, so that there is no room left for any other being to exist. And whoever and whatever does exist must constitute a part of this infinite whole.

For Christians the Father is God and is all we can conceive of as constituting God and was such from all eternity, before Jesus Christ was born into the world. Paul cuts through the sophistry of Christendom (1 Cor 8:6) by declaring: “To us there is but one God, the Father”.

The Father alone is God. But we saw above that only the father therefore can be God. All other beings in the universe are cut off from any participation in the Godhead with the Father. The moment you try to make Christ God, or any part of the Godhead, you declare God not to be infinite or you are dishonest in elevating another to join him in his place. You cannot introduce another being as God in the infinite sense until the first-named infinite God is dethroned and put out of existence. Otherwise we should have two Gods, both absolute and infinite.

If Christ was a mewling helpless infant with a dirty bottom, then how could he have been an infinite god? As an infinite being God must necessarily constitute the child, and not just the infant Jesus but every child, but God is not being a real human child because no human child has the powers of a god and God must be simultaneously retaining his powers. The omnipresence of the Father does and must exclude that of the Son, or any other being, and thus exclude the possibility of his apotheosis or incarnated deityship.

An axiom in philosophy is that the less cannot contain the greater. How then can a finite body contain an infinite body? If Jesus Christ is only a part of the infinite God, then it is evident that he is not God! No philosopher does or can believe in the absolute divinity of Jesus Christ.

If God has appeared on earth in the form of a man, how can He expect other men to be able to distinguish men from God? How is anyone to know that a certain man, who acts peculiarly, is not a God? If everyone knew that God never appeared as a man then there would be no confusion and one source of error would have been removed from human behaviour. Now we only know from professional Christians, all human, that God took the form of a man. Only professional Christians who get a living—often a substantial one—from persuading people of the truth of the story, tell people that God appeared on earth as a man. Common sense tells you that God was inviting trouble among his flocks by doing this. It is easier to believe that Christian ministers are frauds than to believe that God is a fool.

The New Testament itself illustrates the difficulties created by God appearing as a man. Twice, the author of Revelation, supposedly John the beloved disciple, (Rev 19:10; 22:9) fell down to worship a man whom he mistook for God.

If Christ’s own disciples could be betrayed into the sin of idolatry by the abolition of the distinction between the divine and the human, we surely have a strong argument against such a doctrine. Nothing could favour false worship better than to obliterate the demarcation between God and man. Isn’t this the origin of idolatry in pagan countries? They failed to maintain a distinction between a God of infinite attributes, and a being wrapped in human form.

Since they have accepted it, how can Christians condemn any people for worshipping a fellow human as a god? Anyone who could believe that God was Jesus, cannot criticise those who believe that the Emperor of Japan or the Grand Lama of Tibet is God. Only the name differs. Substitute the Grand Lama for that of Jesus Christ, and the thing is done.

Such is Christian logic.

New Testament Mistranslation

The current translations of the bible are marred by many faulty readings, and interpolations known by the translators are allowed to remain. An example is the whole of the end of Mark’s gospel from Mark 16:9 to the end. A few recent bibles have a note that it is a false ending but older ones and most modern ones do not. Since it contains the earliest gospel account of the appearances, its absence is more than slightly important. Christianity depends upon the appearances as historical evidence that Jesus rose from the dead, something that only a god could do. Another is the word “repent” which has been in the Douay version wrongly rendered through the Latin “do penance”, which suits the Catholic priesthood.

Let us look now at some of the many renderings of the Hebrew word “ruach”, and shall see how they illustrate ecclesiastical ingenuity in building up a system of ghosts, and even a theory of apostolic succession!

The word rendered Ghost, Holy Ghost, and Spirit in the New Testament is the Greek word “pneuma”, which is the equivalent of “ruach” in the Hebrew of the Old Testament. Both words mean “air in motion” or “breath”. “ruach” is rendered in Genesis 3:8 as “the cool” of the evening where “breeze” would be better and, in Genesis 8:1, appropriately as wind. In Genesis 1:2, “ruach Elohim” is translated “the spirit” of God, but it should be “the breath” of the gods. In the Latin Vulgate, “pneuma” is rendered “spiritus”, from “spiro” meaning “I breathe”. Translated into Anglo-Saxon, “spiritus” became “gast”, whence “ghost”. The Holy Spirit or Holy Ghost really means “the breath of God”.

“Jesus gave up the Ghost”, “the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee”, and “receive ye the Holy Ghost”, are all mistranslations. In Luke 4:1, the same word “pneuma” is translated in two different ways:

And Jesus being full of the Holy Ghost (“pneuma”) returned from Jordan, and was led by the Spirit (“pneuma”) into the wilderness.

In Luke 8:55, when Jair’s daughter is brought back to life, we read:

And her spirit (“pneuma”) came again, and she arose straightway: and he commanded to give her meat.

The translation implies that a supernatural spirit or soul re-entered the girl when it simply means she began to breathe after seeming to be dead.

These are only a few of the inaccuracies to be found. Translations of the bible maintain a disgraceful and dishonest bias to the views preferred by the theologians rather than the truth. It is known in the narrow circles of Christian and Jewish scholars, and some—a very small circle—are honest enough to reject all of this nonsense when they find it out. The rest realize that, if it were accepted by worshippers, they would be out of a comfortable job and probably out of the tied cottage as well. They keep it quiet.

Moral Lessons of Religious History

The fault with any religious or sacred text, as Paul Carus has pointed out, is that eventually it looks less and less divine, and more and more fallible. Sacred texts are fixed, but the world moves on leaving them behind. What do the faithful do then? They have to claim there is more to the sacred text than meets the eye. It has within it arcane mysteries, and these are said to be encoded in the text, present in it as allegories or otherwise present as enigmas. It then permits a whole industry among those with time to waste “deciphering” the mysteries, and selling worthless books about their endeavours. Actually to reveal the mystery is to put an end to the mystery business, but all the mystery floggers know that will never happen, and they will always be in business for the credulous types who pay for it. It never ends, just as the interpretation of prophecy goes on, undaunted, from failure to failure, always commanding an audience of those willing to ignore the long history of false prophets and readings in the certain knowledge that this latest one is right! Followers of the prophets always have to claim they have the extra hidden elements of the teaching, known only to an inner circle, but just those elements that make an obviously flawed teaching into a one of divine perfection. Ho hum!

Bibles are considered the words of God himself and therefore forever true, not the admirable but faulty attempts of primitive people to account for their world. As bibles represent only the morals and state of society in the age in which they are written, and are not allowed to be altered or transcended, they hold their disciples back in all coming time, and compel them to teach and practice the morals of the age found in their bibles. bibles prevent the moral growth of the people just as the growth of the feet of Chinese girls were prevented by their being permanently bound into wooden shoes. Morals can be taught without spiritual bindings on the mind.

No advancement has often been made in morals or civilization in any country by the introduction of the Christian bible or the Christian religion. India became corrupted and economically sunk in morals largely after the introduction of the Christian bible. Christian gentlemen tried to make the Chinese into a nation of opium eaters. It evolved from Confucianism into atheistic communism, as spotless Christians like to call it, and now is growing faster than the US ever did, all without the assistance of the bible. Nations without bibles advance faster than those well supplied with them. Japan has advanced into one of the most advanced civilisations in only a century without any Christian bible. Even now, imbued with the cultural imperialism of the USA, it is still a refined and orderly country, relatively free of the crimes and vulgarity that plague middle America.

Ethiopia is Christian, despite the recent interlude of communism. Bibles and churches are numerous. Preaching and praying are heard every day, and crimes of all kinds are commonplace. The people are abject and starving. The daily practice of reading their bible has not benefited these poor people. Where then are its practical and spiritual benefits in the instances of these quite different people? Christians claims to defend the world against excessive materialism and instead to be defending spiritual things. Yet modern Christians are thoroughly materialistic and reject every teaching of their god, especially those advocating the spiritual benefits of poverty. Christians are and have always been hypocrites.

All religious conceptions, whether doctrine, precept, prophecy, prayer, religious devotion, or a belief in miracles, are an outgrowth of the moral and religious elements of the human mind. They have no supernatural origin. Common features can be seen in all religious systems, explicable by the common features of human psychology. There is no basis in these hypotheses for any claim to a divine origin of anything in any religion.

Many stories regarded by Christians as miraculous were distortions of real events which could not be told by Christian converts within the Roman Empire. They are not supernatural violations of nature or feats of God in violation of his own laws. Other miraculous stories, easily identified, are the supernatural acts of pagan gods attached to the Jewish martyr to make him also into a god. Various heathen gods had, long before Christ’s advent, filled the same chapter in history reserved for saviours now granted to him in the Christian New Testament. This type of story related of Jesus Christ have no other foundation than that of heathen tradition.

The Christian bible does not approve of the words “science” and “arts”. Paul uses the word “science” only once, and then to condemn it, and Jesus omits any allusion to science, philosophy, or natural law. The early disciples of the Christian faith were so thoroughly convinced that the teachings of their bible were inimical to the arts and sciences that they destroyed works of art wherever they could find them, and regularly opposed every new discovery in social science and the sciences.

In the early days of the USA, reports were published of the judgement of God manifest as showers of blood. Subsequently science proved the blood was the ordure of butterflies migrating in vast swarms. Yet, Christian children continued to hear that these bloody showers came from God out of heaven to show his displeasure at the sins of the people. The Christian has always had a faith which was proof against science and reason and would not give up the story of falls of blood. How long will Christians continue to tell their children lies like this when the true explanation is known? Facts, proofs, demonstrations the reasoning of science can rarely eradicate dogma from the stubbornness of the religious mind once it is instilled in early life. Ignorance is the business of the bible, and the US creationists continue to prove it.

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Last uploaded: 19 April, 2008.