www.RogerWendell.com
Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic Evolution^SM

Bible a different view...

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

"Religious moderates invariably claim to be more 'sophisticated' than religious fundamentalists (and atheists). But how does one become a sophisticated believer? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights - scientific ('You mean the world isn't 6,000 years old? Okay.'), medical ('I should take my daughter to a neurologist and not to an exorcist? Seems reasonable...'), and moral ('I can't beat my slaves? I can't even keep slaves? Hmm...'). There is a pattern here, and it is undeniable. Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit that the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings?"

"A knowledge of the true age of the earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do. And if some of the Bible is manifestly wrong, why should any of the rest of it be accepted automatically?"

"Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?" "Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is okay and that eating shellfish is an abomination. Or we could go with Deuteronomy which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith or should we just stick to the Sermon on the Mount."

Bible Outtakes It took me a long time to transcribe this outtake from Bill Maher's 2008 documentary, Religulous, but I'm glad I did. It's a good summary of what many believe the Bible is all about. I hope you'll take time to read Maher's words (although it's much more interesting to hear and watch him in the movie!) about the real history of the Bible...

"In the late 1940s, right around the time the state of Israel was being born, Jews here in the Judaean Desert made a startling discovery. The Arabs were really mad at them. But there was something else. Here, in the Qumran Caves, they found what the world has come to know as the Dead Sea Scrolls. "Written by an ancient Jewish sect called the Essenes, the Dead Sea Scrolls contain fragments from almost every book in the Old Testament plus prophesies by Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel that are not in the Bible. And psalms attributed to King David and Joshua that are not in the Bible. "We keep finding Bible outtakes the way we find new records by Elvis, and John Lennon, and Tupac. And I know my Christian and Jewish religious friends get their hair shirt in a bunch whenever you call the Bible a fairytale. And they have a point because it's actually an anthology of fairytales, a kind of Reader's Digest collection of books written in many languages over thousands of years and then assembled and translated into American - just as God planned. "The question is, who decided what got into the Bible and what go edited out and only made it into the outtakes, and the director's cut, and the DVD extras? I'll tell ya who, man. And when I say man I mean specifically people with penises because there's no religion I ever heard of that would let a woman make an important decision like that. "The Dead Sea Scrolls are a very alive reminder that religious books are very often as holy and sacred as Harry Potter. And by the way, if you buried Harry Potter here and dug it up a thousand years later, who knows? "The Bible was written by men and edited by men and based on some of the nonsense in it, edited pretty badly. It's no wonder that the Dead Sea Scrolls, even though they were found over 50 years ago, most of them still haven't been published. Which is a real drag because Yahweh has already burned through his advance..."

The Bible's Buried Secrets
PBS Premier - November 18, 2008 (Sorry, I don't have Television
reception so I haven't yet seen this program myself - Roger)

Archaeologist William Dever, who worked on the show, called it, "the first honest film that's been made" about the first books of the Bible. The two-hour show stirred up a backlash among some believers, due to archaeologists' assertions that:

• The Bible's first books have been traced back to multiple authors writing over a span of centuries.
• There's no evidence for the actual existence of patriarchs such as the biblical Abraham.
• Some ancient adherents of Yahweh also worshiped his "wife," a fertility goddess named Asherah.
• The Exodus appears to have involved just a small segment of the Jewish population rather than all Jews.
• The Land of Canaan was not taken over by conquest - rather, the Israelites actually might have been Canaanites who migrated into the highlands and created a new identity for themselves. "Joshua really didn't fight the Battle of Jericho," Dever said.

Did you know? The Bible is the most often shoplifted book worldwide. This, according to "1001 Surprising things you should know about the Bible" as reported in O The Oprah Magazine "O-Zone" section, p. 37 - July, 2006 [Note: The 8th Old Testament Commandment states; "Thou Shalt Not Steal"]

Ethics and the Bible

Michelle Martin:

"How would public discourse happen, I mean would you suggest people lie about the source of their beliefs and values? How would we proceed if people were to take you seriously and to follow your advice, other than to eliminate religion from their lives, or is that really the end goal?"

Sam Harris:

"Well, what I think we have to recognize is that this world already exists to a significant degree in Western Europe and in countries like Canada, and Australia, and Japan where you can not be a public figure professing absolute certainty about the divine origin of the Bible and be taken seriously. These are embarrassing convictions in much of the world, and, in fact, we are virtually alone, in the developed world, as a society that still conducts it's national discourse under the shadow of religious literalism."

"Morality is deeper than religious dogmatism. If you don't already know that cruelty is wrong, before you read the Bible, you're not going to discover it by reading the Bible. And, when you read the Bible and you encounter something like the Golden Rule and you recognize it to be a brilliant distillation of your ethical intuitions. You are recognizing it on the authority of your intellectual intuitions, your ethical insights, and a larger discourse about ethics.

"And when you read in the Bible that you're supposed to kill a girl for adultery, you reject that on the basis of a modern conversation about ethics and so this idea that we get our morality out of religious dogma, or religious faith, I think is an illusion, and is readily seen as an illusion if you just ask what would have to be true of the world if it were so. If faith was important for morality atheists should be terribly ill-behaved. "

- Sam Harris interviewed by Michelle Martin on NPR's Talk of the Nation
about his new book, Letter to a Christian and keeping religion out of public policy.
Broadcast on Monday, October 02, 2006 and transcribed by Roger J. Wendell

The Wisdom of the Bible

"It is true, of course, that Jesus said some profound things about love and charity and forgiveness. The Golden Rule really is a wonderful moral precept. But numerous teachers offered the same instruction centuries before Jesus (Zoroaster, Buddha, Confucius, Epictetus...), and countless scriptures discuss the importance of self-transcending love more articulately than the Bible does, while being unblemished by the obscene celebrations of violence that we find throughout the Old and New Testaments. If you think that Christianity is the most direct and undefiled expression of love and compassion the world has ever seen, you do not know much about the world's other religions."

"Take the religion of Jainism as on example. The Jains preach a doctrine of utter nonviolence. While the Jains believe many improbable things about the universe, they do not believe the sorts of things that lit the fires of the Inquisition. You probably think the Inquisition was a perversion of the 'true' spirit of Christianity. Perhaps it was. The problem, however, is that the teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. You are, of course, free to interpret the Bible differently - though isn't it amazing that you have succeeded in discerning the true teachings of Christianity, while the most influential thinkers in the history of your faith failed?"

- Sam Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation, pp. 10-12

The Power of Prophecy
- Sam Harris,
Letter to a Christian Nation

"It is often said that it is reasonable to believe that the Bible is the word of God because many of the events recounted in the New Testament confirm Old Testament profphecy. But ask yourself, how difficult would it have been for the Gospel writers to tell the story of Jesus' life so as to make it conform to Old Testament prophecy? Wouldn't it have been within the power of any mortal to write a book that confirms the predicitons of a previous book? In fact, we know on the basis of textual evidence that this is what the Gospel writers did." p. 57

"But just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy would be, if it were actually the product of omniscience. IF the Bible were such a gook, it ould make perfectly accurate predicitons about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage such as 'In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers - the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus - and this system shall be called the Internet.' The Bible contains nothing like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century. This should trouble you."

p. 60

"A book written by an omniscient being could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight humanity has ever known. Instead, the Bible contains no formal discussion of mathematics and some obvious mathematical errors."

"Why doesn't the Bible say anything about electricity, or about DNA, or about the actual age and size of the universe? What about a cure for cancer? When we fully understand the biology of cancer, this undertanding will be easily summarized in a few pages of text. Why aren't these pages, or anything remotely like them, found in the Bible? Good, pious people are dying horribly from cancer at this very moment, and many of them are children. The Bible is a very big book. God had room to instruct us in great detail about how to keep slaves and sacrifice a wide varietyof animals. To one who stands outside the Christian faith, it is utterly astonishing how ordinary a book can be and still be thought the product of omniscience."

pp. 60-61

Revising the Bible
The following is from the Harper Collins Study Bible, New Revised Standard Version, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America:

"The NRSV text may be quoted and/or reprinted up to and inclusive of five hundred (500) verses without express written permission of the publisher, provided the verses quoted do not amount to a complete book of the Bible nor account for 50 percent of the written text of the total work in which they are quoted. (p. iv)

"To summarize in a single sentence; the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is an authorized revision of the Revised Standard Version, published in 1952, which was a revision of the American Standard Version, published in 1901, which, in turn, embodied earlier revisions of the King James Version, published in 1611.

"In the course of time, the King James Version came to be regarded as 'the Authorized Version.' With good reason it has been termed 'the noblest monument of English prose,' and it has entered, as not other book has, into the making of the personal character and the public institutions of the English-speaking peoples. We owe to it an incalculable debt.

"Yet the King James Version has serious defects. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the development of biblical studies and the discovery of many biblical manuscripts more ancient than those on which the King James Version was based made it apparent that these defects were so many as to call for revision. The task was begun, by authority of the Church of England, in 1870. The (British) Revised Version of the Bible was published in 1881-1885; and the American Standard Version, its variant embodying the preferences of the American scholars associated with the work, was published, as was mentioned above, in 1901. In 1928 the copyright of the latter was acquired by the International Council of Religious Education and thus passed into the ownership of the churches of the United States and Canada that were associated in this Council through their board of education and publication." (p. xxv)

Click Here for info on proselytizing...

"In 1804, Thomas Jefferson used a razor to remove all passages of the King James version of the New Testament that had supernatural content such as the virgin birth, resurrection, or turning water into wine. About one-tenth of the Bible remained, which he pasted together and published as The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth. Apparently, Jefferson admired Jesus as a teacher and profit but was not always interested in the cloak of divinity. Thomas Jefferson wrote, 'Of all the systems of morality, ancient or modern, which have come under my observation, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus.'[The Jefferson Bible] is a paradigm of the doctrines of Jesus, made by cutting the texts out of the book and arranging them on the pages of a blank book, in a certain order of time or subject. A more beautiful or precious morsel of ethics I have never seen.'" - Clifford A. Pickover in his book, Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves, pp. 130-131

Women and the Bible Genesis 3:16 - "Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; Genesis 3:16 - "in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, Genesis 3:16 - "and he shall rule over thee."

Churchgoers in six states have held prayer sessions along the side of Interstate 35
CNN.com - December 19, 2007

" -- If you turn to the Bible -- Isaiah Chapter 35, Verse 8 -- you will see a passage that in part says, 'A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness.'"

"Now, is it possible that this 'highway' mentioned in Chapter 35 is actually Interstate 35 that runs through six U.S. states, from southern Texas to northern Minnesota? Some Christians have faith that is indeed the case."

"Some of the faithful believe that in order to fulfill the prophecy of I-35 being the 'holy' highway, it needs some intensive prayer first. So we watched as about 25 fervent and enthusiastic Christians prayed on the the interstate's shoulder in Dallas."

"They chanted loudly and vibrantly, making many people in the neighborhood wonder what was going on. They prayed that adult businesses along the corridor would 'see the light' and perhaps close down."

"They prayed for safety and freedom from crime for people who lived along the interstate. They prayed that all Americans would accept Jesus into their lives."

"The woman who came up with the concept of 'Light the Highway' is a Texas minister named Cindy Jacobs."

"She says she can't be sure Interstate 35 really is what is mentioned in the Bible but says she received a revelation to start this campaign after 'once again reading Isaiah, Chapter 35.'"

From the back cover of the DVD jacket fot the 2005 documentry, The God Who Wasn't There:

Jesus Christ is likely a fictional character, a legend never based on a real human The Jesus passed down to us in the gospels bears a striking resemblance to other ancient heroes and the figureheads of pagan savior cults Contemporary Christians are largely ignorant of the origins of their religion Christianity is as obsessed with blood and violence now as it was in the 1st century [the video, itself, illustrates this by quoting the $300,000,000 in box-office sales generated by Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ, ed.] Fundamentalism is as strong today as it ever has been, with an alarming 44% of Americans believing Jesus will return to Earth within the next 50 years

Suggested Reading:

• The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible by Ruth Hurmence Green
• Self-Contradicitons of the Bible by William Hnery Burr

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