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The Bible has some good stuff

The story of creation is a great story. Probably invented over time by early people to answer the philosophical questions, “How did I get here? How did this come into being?” Three thousand years ago the answer that caught on in the Middle East was the notion that a single supreme being created the earth and all in it in six days. Back then people thought the earth was the center of the universe. Boy, were they wrong, but it took until the 1500s before Copernicus put forward his theory of the universe as we understand it today. One hundred years later Galileo was branded a heretic by the Catholic Church because he wouldn’t refute Copernicus’s theory.

 The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin was published in 1859. Nearly 150 years later there are still those who prefer to believe that the story in Genesis is fact rather than myth. They even believe that all the species on earth as we know them today were piled into Noah’s ark.

The sad thing is that they so focus on these myths that they loose sight of any value these early stories might have on our current life. I think a good lesson from Genesis might be that we should rest every seven days and from the ark story we might learn that all of the creatures on earth are of value and should be protected from extinction.

 When Christians become obsessed with believing that Jesus was God and that believing in him for salvation is more important than following his teachings, they have missed the point of his teachings. It is the “preachers” who told stories of virgin birth and walking on water to convince people to follow them that cause people to miss the true value of the Jesus’ teaching.

 The Bible is full of excellent advice, excellent philosophy for living, the greatest of which may be “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Oh, and for those who believe JC walked on water, I suppose I should point out that when Jesus talked of thy neighbor he was not talking about just those who live next door. When he said we should love our enemies, he was not talking just about enemies but about everyone.

Comments 1

  1. admin wrote:

    This reminds me of one of my favorite articles ever to appear in Harper’s Magazine, Jesus without the Miracles, by Erik Reese:

    Something similar was no doubt on the mind of another Virginian, Thomas Jefferson, when he took a pair of scissors to the King James Bible two hundred years ago. Jefferson cut out the virgin birth, all the miracles—including the most important one, the Resurrection—then pasted together what was left and called it The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth (fifteen years later, in retirement at Monticello, he expanded the text, added French, Latin, and Greek translations, and called it The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth). In an 1819 letter to William Short, Jefferson recollected that the cut-and-paste job was the work of two or three nights only, at Washington, after getting through the evening task of reading the letters and papers of the day.” Jefferson mentioned The Philosophy of Jesus in a few other personal letters, but for the most part he kept the whole matter private, probably guessing that the established Church would see the compilation as one more example of his “atheism.”

    Posted 14 Jan 2008 at 8:39 pm

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