Parenting God's Way

When I was a Christian I signed-up for an email news letter that I still receive from Ever Increasing Faith Ministries, a mega church in Los Angeles founded by Dr. Frederick K. C. Price, who is now an Apostle. The letter I received this week is titled "Parenting God's Way". It starts off "Dear EIF family, God's perfect plan for His children..." I thought about God (whatever this means) as a parent, the only idea presented to me as someone born in so-called Western Civilization, is Jehovah, a bronze age despot, who put his creation (i.e. his so-called children) in a garden to be tempted by a talking snake to eat fruit that caused mankind in a downward spiral that led to murder, war, crime, etc. He blamed them for falling to the temptation that cause hardship on Adam, Eve and their offspring. He confused mankind's language to divide them when they were united, tempted Abram to sacrifice his own son, only to do it himself 2,000 years later, and from this mankind sin was paid for, but nothing changed, there's still murder, war, crime, etc. I don't think I want to Parent God's way, he has not been an ideal parent in my book. Although I think this is a bronze age myth, if this god Jehovah really existed,then he is a bad role model. Think about it. The Skeptical African

Guess What, We're Still Here!

If I am writing this and if you're reading this, the world did not end on October 21, 2011. Harold Camping and Jesus had a lot in common, both of their prediction about the end of the world did not come true. Jesus supposedly said "Whosoever therefore shall be ashamed of me and of my words in "this" adulterous and sinful generation; of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he cometh in the glory of his Father with the holy angels. And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you, That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power." i.e. Jesus was supposedly talking about to the "adulterous and sinful generation" who were alive when these words were spoken. Jesus predicted that some of his audience would be alive when the "Kingdom of God or Heaven" came with power. Mark 13:30-33: Jesus is recorded as saying: "....This generation shall not pass away, until all these things be accomplished....But of that day or that hour knoweth no one, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father. Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is. I interpret this to mean he was not saying that it was not going to happen within the generation, but it was going to happen in "this generation" but no one knows the exact day or time but to be ready within this generation. A "generation" is normally a forty year period. If Jesus spoke those words circa 29 CE - 30 CE, then all of the events predicted in Mark 13:24-27 would have happened on or before 70 CE: "“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; 25 the stars of heaven will fall, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. 26 Then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory. 27 And then He will send His angels, and gather together His elect from the four winds, from the farthest part of earth to the farthest part of heaven." Sound a lot like Harold Camping prediction doesn't it, here's Mr. Camping words on May 24th, 2011 "The great earthquake and rapture and the universe melting in fervent heat will be happening on the last day – October 21 2011... It’s all going to happen on the last day...The great earthquake didn’t happen on May 21 because no-one will be able to survive it for more than a few days or let alone five months to suffer God’s wrath because everything will be leveled and destroyed after that earthquake and there will be no food or water to keep everyone alive." Yes Mr. Camping and Jesus have a lot in common they both are failed apocalyptic prophets. Think about it.

Existentialism Part 3

Jean-Paul Sartre the French Philosopher who was the primary proponent of existentialism, coined the phrase we are condemned to be free, by which he means you are forced one way or another to make a choice. Freedom is defined as not under the control of another; at liberty or autonomous. However, with this freedom comes responsibility, which means liable to be called to account (to a person (including me) or for a thing. I am afraid of being responsible, because all of my life I have believed that there was an invisible force responsible or who at least would come to rescue me. Carry all your cares to Jesus he will bare them for you, therefore you don’t need to bare responsibility for who you are, we are told to deny who we are and identify with Jesus. Apostle Paul said everyday I decrease that he (that is Jesus) might increase. I am afraid but I am condemned to be free. I must choose and therefore take ownership of my existence. I am responsible for my health, happiness, and for what I become or will be. As far as I am concern unless proven otherwise god is indeed dead.

Heaven must be boring

"Heaven must be really boring, if you think about it logically, all the angels must be snoring, who could stand perfection for eternity...not me... Heaven Must Be Boring by George Hrab.
According to Mark 12:18-25 18 "Then the Sadducees, who say there is no resurrection, came to him with a question. 19 "Teacher," they said, "Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife but no children, the man must marry the widow and have children for his brother. 20 Now there were seven brothers. The first one married and died without leaving any children. 21 The second one married the widow, but he also died, leaving no child. It was the same with the third. 22 In fact, none of the seven left any children. Last of all, the woman died too. 23 At the resurrection whose wife will she be, since the seven were married to her?" 24 Jesus replied, "Are you not in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God? 25 When the dead rise, they will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven." (This woman must have been like Blanche Taylor Moore a convicted serial killer who is on death row in North Carolina she was convicted of killing five men, this woman out lived seven husband, I would not want to eat her cooking.)
If we are going to be like the angels, which the passage does not clarify what angels are like, other than they cannot marry. However, can they have sex? If the sons of God in Genesis 6 are the same as angels it does seem they would be capable of having sex, because one can infer if they can impregnate the daughters of men. According to Baker's Evangelical Dictionary Angels "The Apocrypha In the late postexilic period angelology became a prominent feature of Jewish religion. The angel Michael was deemed to be Judaism's patron, and the apocryphal writings named three other archangels as leaders of the angelic hierarchy. Chief of these was Raphael, who was supposed to present the prayers of pious Jews to God ( 1 Tobit 2:15). Uriel explained to Enoch many of his visions (1 Enoch 21:5-10; 27:2-4), interpreted Ezra's vision of the celestial Jerusalem (2 Esdras 10:28-57), and explained the fate of the fallen angels who supposedly married human women (1 Enoch 19:1-9; cf. Gen 6:2). Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel (1 Enoch 40:3, 6) reported to God about the depraved state of humanity, and received appropriate instructions. According to contemporary thought, Gabriel sat on God's left, while Michael sat on the right side (2 Enoch 24:1). The primary concern of these two angels, however, was supposedly with missions on earth and affairs in heaven, respectively. In rabbinic Judaism they assumed a character which, while sometimes dramatic, had no factual basis in divine revelation" This is why Jude 6 and 2 Peter 2:4 say angels were held in dungeons in hell because they married human women. However, Jesus who is supposedly god incarnated says that angels are incapable of marriage or sexual intercourse. So what are humans going to do for eternity? If you read revelations you are going to be professional ass kissers for at least a thousand years, then another war, and finally you get to live in Jerusalem forever (wow, can you feel my sarcasm?). It is interesting after everything goes down it seems like for all your suffering you get to live a city, where you cannot have sex, and where you are a robot, so much for freewill...Think about it.

Soul Man? Part 2

I think the idea of a soul is not unusual, we don’t know what death is, and it is something we do not have control over. In the person of Jesus of Nazareth you have the story of a person who overcame death by his so-called resurrection. It does not bother the average believer in Jesus that he conveniently ascended to heaven to no longer be heard from or seen again; or at least until his "second" return. He symbolizes our desire to overcome our greatest enemy, death. Mankind have conquered almost everything on this planet except his death. I think it is our imagination and desire to be associated with something that is eternal and supreme. For example, If you listen to any contemporary gospel or "inspiration" station and if you listened to an average song that the words will be how god was worthy of worship because he is holy and if you asked yourself how do we know this is true, that there's a god who is holy and worthy of worship, to be honest we don't, I have yet seen a sea part or a talking snake. I cannot fault Christianity or Islam because they give the answers to one of our greatest fears, the fear of no longer existing. In Islam and Christianity you are given the promise of immortality, which I think is wishful thinking and nothing more. I hate to be the bearer of reality but this is it folks, there is no second chance, no reincarnation, no resurrection, yes your atoms will be absorbed into the natural ecosystem like other natural things but the you who you think you are, this egocentric identity will end when the brain dies. We need to get over the fear of death and live this life, as Epicurus allegedly stated "Death means nothing to us, for when we are, death isn't and when death is, we are not" and that's the way it is. Think about it...

To Hell with Hell

Yesterday I was reading one of my favorite blogs called Debunking Christianity which was founded by John Loftus a former minister who is now an atheists. The item on his blog that I want to blog about is a film I watched as a child called the Burning Hell by a Southern Baptist minister who died in 2005 named Estus Pirkle, the film was produced in 1974. I remember as a child my mother who is a minister would have the movie delivered to the house on a movie reel, and she would rent a projector and show it at the small Pentecostal church where she was the pastor. I remember the dread I felt when I would come home from school and see the reel in the house. I remember one year I happen to get home from school before my mother and the reel was waiting at our front door, I took and hid the reel. My mother called the film company and asked them if they sent it and I had to sneak it back to the front door. The scenario was two bikers stopped by a minister's (who they did not know was a minister) house to talk about bible prophecy, it is really not clear why they wanted to stop by a stranger's house to talk about Jesus and bible prophecy. Anyway it appears that both bikers where attending a new church that taught the hell wasn't real but here on earth and a message for the modern age. Then Estus gets up pick up his bible and tell them this bible teaches of a literal hell and that they were going there if they did not change their beliefs, and by the way he just happened to be preaching on the subject of hell for his Sunday sermon. One of the bikers got upset, which I would have too, if someone claimed that I was going to hell, like he knew, he just believed it was true, because he read it in a book. Anyway the biker tell the preacher if he goes to hell he was going to have a party because all of his friends would be there. The other biker apologizes to the minister and they leave. The biker, who got upset and made the partying in hell statement, was driving all erratic and reckless and he wound-up dying in an accident, while his friend just happened to have bike problems and had stopped. The biker leaves his dead friend at the accident site and goes to the minister church (which he never told him where the church was), leaving his dead decapitated friend on the side of the road like road kill. This is one of the worse written movies I have ever seen. This movie scared the heck out of me as a 8 to 10 year old child, you see these demons who looked like the Kiss rock band, people where screaming and all kinds of things where happening showing people who died in the bible stories and went to hell. As I reflected on this movie, I thought about the Christian or Muslim gods (both believe in god and hell), and if hell existed and if god would send people there, god is worst than any recorded despot or serial killer in the history of humanity, this would include Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Stalin, and Rwanda, Bosnia, or Darfur atrocities. If a god who send people to hell existed he is more worst than any of the genocide mass murderers, because when the genocide victims died, their suffering ended. However, god will allow his enemies, nonbelievers, and those who happen to believe in another god, to be tortured for eternity, I don't know how long eternity is, but it is claimed to be forever, with screaming and gnashing of teeth, were the worms does not die, they eat on you forever, just because you thought for yourself and was skeptical of the fall of man, Jesus, and thought the stories of the bible was just another mythology, or you believed in another god by accident of birth. The bottom line is none of the atrocities of known history could not even hold a candle to the biblical or Islamic god, the one who send infidels to hell. Oh but he loves you... Think about it.

Black Socates

Review of Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

I have just finished reading Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman, PhD. It is 218 pages long and has an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. Dr. Ehrman describes how he became a Christian as a teenager and how he went to Moody Bible Institute, the Wheaton College, and finally to Princeton. These universities are all Christian-founded universities. Chapter 1 discusses how Christianity was a literary religion (written not oral) like its ancestor Judaism even though the majority of its believers could not read or write (only 5 to 10 percent of 1 century people could read or write). Chapter 2. The Copyist of the Early Christian Writings: the claim by Dr. Ehrman in chapter two is that the oldest and existing manuscripts we have today are copies of a copies, which are copies of copies that were changed accidentally and sometimes intentionally in 1st and 2nd century during the time when there weren't any professional scribes, and it is difficult to know what the original author actually stated, and some scholars have concluded that we never know, however Dr. Ehrman feels we may not know in an absolute sense but we can have a reasonable idea of what is original by studying the words, styles of writing to figure out reasonably what text were additions examples are John 7:52-8:11 and Mark 16:9-16 are examples of known additions, the words used and the writing style give clues to these being additions. Some additions were used by Heretics and Orthodoxy to influence the message toward doctrines each were trying to push. Dr. Ehrman is an expert textual critic in New Testament. Textual criticism is a branch of literary criticism that is concern with the identification of and removal of transcriptional errors in the text of manuscripts. (Wikipedia.) Info backing the claim is John and Marks additions. We need to remember also that the first copyist (1st through the 4th century C.E.) were not professional scribes but amateurs who were wealthy Christian leaders or literate slaves who worked for wealthy Christians so it is probable that errors were made when copying the original authors. Chapter 3. Text of the New Testament: Rome, Palestine, and Alexandria (center of the early Christian movement) each had different documents that did not influence each other. Most scholars believe the Alexandrian manuscripts, Alexandria was a major intellectual center in the ancient world, were more of a reliable source and was more scrupulous, in other words a very pure form of early Christian writings was preserved decade after decade. Professional scribes did not exist until near the beginning of the fourth century, because Emperor Constantine was converted to Christianityin 312 C.E. . In 331 C.E. Constantine commissioned 50 copies of the Bible by Eusebius to be produced for major cities were he was having churches built. Where did the professional scribes (including Eusebius) get the texts they were going to copy (this was before the printing press)? They got them from the earliest amateurs copies, full of copyist errors. There were different regions where the copies were created Greek=Eastern, Latin=Western, Coptic=Egypt, and Syriac= Syria, each copy used local languages. Pope Damasus commissioned Jerome to produce an "official" Latin translation, called the Vulgate (Common). This lead to twice as many Latin manuscripts/text than Greek text also called Byzantine Text. The printing press revolutionized creating copies of text, the 1st book printed on the printing press was the Latin Vulgate Bible, it took six years. Erasmus produced the 1st printed (1516) text of the Greek manuscript, which was rifted with errors, this happen 1400 years after the originals. King James is based on Erasmus error ridden Greek Text, not the oldest and best manuscripts, for example in 1John 5:7-8, what is called the Johannine Comma, was not in the oldest and best Greek Manuscripts. The Textus Receptus or T. R. , a term used by textual critics to refer to that form of Greek text that is based on not, the oldest and best manuscripts, but on the form of text originally published by Erasmus, including the King James version who used this T. R. in its editions. Textual Criticism did not occur seriously until 1707, it was an edition of the Greek New Testament by John Mill, a fellow of Queens College, Oxford, were he found 30,000 variations or differences between the manuscripts he was using, and this was not exhaustive, but it opened the door to dispute what had been complacently accepted until that point, today there are more variations or differences in the know manuscripts than there are words in the New Testatment. His Greek New Testament alarmed Protestants that the Catholics would say that this is proof that Christians cannot be saved by faith alone (a key argument of Protestantism) but by Church Authority (a key argument of Catholicism) because these variations you need Apostolic authority to gain salvation. This book say something that is true( and I really never thought about it until he brought it out), that when we read something we automatically change it, so that we can understand what is being written in our own words, or in a way that includes our point of view (our past experiences, influences that affect our thoughts, etc.) He concluded that the bible is a human book written by humans and not inspired by God. As he concluded “For the only reason ( I came to think) for God to inspire the Bible would be so that his people would have his actual words; but if he really wanted people to have his actual words, surely he would have miraculously preserved those words, just as he had miraculously inspired them in the first place. Given the circumstance that he didn’t preserve the words; the conclusion seemed inescapable to me that he hadn’t gone to the trouble of inspiring them." The writers of the gospels had different messages, and different ways that they saw Jesus. Luke, who borrowed from Mark, changed how he saw Jesus crucifixion, he could have copied marks description but he saw Jesus death differently from Mark. He also discusses textual criticism, its history, and the people who influenced textual criticism. As Ehrman brings out so to the scribes who was copying the copies of copies accidentally and intentionally made changes based on their interpretation of the situation. We also need to remember we did not have a printing press until the fifteen century, therefore for 1500 centuries it was copied by hand. People made errors in copying, also for the first three hundred centuries before the Roman Catholic Church became the state religion and had professional scribes, the original copies was copied by those who happened to literate enough to copy and they made errors in copying, so when you change the original you change the intent, and often times they were sloppy, lazy, inept and made mistakes. During the 1400 years scribes added, deleted, misspelled, and changed text to emphasize a point, to dispel a dispute internally and externally (Jews, Pagans, etc.) or role of women, etc. The scribes were human and so when they were reading a text would like any other human change the text so they could put it into words which made senses to them, just like when we read the text of something written, we read from our human needs, beliefs, worldview, opinions, love, longings, likes, dislikes and so forth, all these things influence our perception of what is in the text and so the text changes whether we want it to or not. However, the scribes went further than just merely reading it; they physically changed it and so changed the original meaning, because it was not copied word for word. Some words were misspelled, or changed accidentally or intentionally and so even if we read the bible is not the original and if we read the original we would still change it in our mind to “other words” or contexts in which we could understand it and so change the originally meaning. And as Dr. Ehrman concluded " the bible was written by humans trying to make sense of their own lives and situations." I would recommend this book to anyone who is sincere in seeking the truth of how the New Testament as we have it, is totally different from what was originally written. It is not the word of God, but simply words of Humans.