“The Roman did not, like the Greek, think of his gods as having human form; he called them simply numina, or spirits; sometimes they were abstractions like Health, Youth, Memory, Fortune, Honor, Hope, Fear, Virtue, Chastity, Concord, Victory, or Rome. Some of them, like the Lemures or Ghosts, were spirits of disease, hard to propitiate….Never had a religion so many divinities. Varro reckoned them at 30,000, and Petronius complained that in some towns of Italy there were more gods than men.”

Having gods in everything is not all that different from monotheistic belief that God, their single god, is in everything which is certainly a lot easier than having to remember the names of all the different gods. However, I rather like the notion of many gods. I thank the cedar shingle god who has placed the right size and number of shingles in my hand before climbing the ladder; I thank the stone god for missing my bare foot when I drop a stone unwisely; I thank the rain god for holding the rain back until I am through picking the beans and if I give thanks prematurely, I laugh at the joke being played on me.

I suppose those who believe that a loving god could be so self-centered as to make the first three of His Ten Commandments be all about himself will be sure that I am on a course for hell. It is my hope that their beliefs make them as happy as the playful relationship I have with my gods makes me.

The quote above is from The Story of Civilization: Part III Caesar and Christ by Will Durant which I am currently enjoying. I have read four of the eleven volumes and highly recommend them to anyone who enjoys reading history

OK folks, how did that first paragraph strike you? If you liked it, then you are all set for Armageddon. It’ll be coming along soon as you probably already realize though the bad news is that it won’t come in your lifetime. If you think I’m an arrogant jerk and that you wouldn’t follow me across the street, then I agree with you. I wouldn’t follow that jerk either. If you also happen to believe in the God of the Bible, the God who sent down the Ten Commandments, you ought to take another look at the first three commandments (Exodus 20:3-7) because that God and the person depicted in the first paragraph are peas in a pod.

Actually the God Moses quoted is worse than my fake god. He said “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Man, that’s harsh! If you so much as take his name in vain he will punish your children, your grandchildren and your great grandchildren. If that is the God you want to worship, good luck to you and to your children. If that is your God, you are probably already screwed. What are the odds that your father, your grandfather and your great grandfather never took the Lord’s name in vain?

There are many good thoughts in the Bible like not stealing and not killing (Commandments six and eight) and just because that ancient God is a jerk doesn’t mean one should abandon one’s religion. Most Jews, Christians and Muslims hold in their hearts a loving God. No reason to abandon that God but those who want to take the Bible as God’s word, should start using their mind. If you believe in a God as your creator, the one who gave you life, then use that life, the senses and mind that were given. You know that Satan did not, could not, give you life but that Satan could give you ideas passed on through others, others just like those who wrote the Bible.

One of the arguments creationists use to dismiss evolution goes “If we evolved from monkeys, how come there are still monkeys?” They ought to look at their own religion for the answer. Catholicism evolved from Judaism and yet there are still Jews. Islam evolved from Catholicism as did Protestantism yet there are still Catholics. There are divisions within Islam and numerous forms of Protestantism all leaving still intact their origins. For those who are confused about how evolution works, I hope this helps.

Understanding evolution doesn’t mean you have to abandon or even question your faith. I would hope this brings you a better understanding of your faith. Genesis is a myth. It is interesting to contemplate how that myth came into being. The majority of Christians, Jews and Muslims already understand it as a myth and yet they remain Christians, Jews and Muslims. Take the good messages on living that the Bible holds and use them. Enjoy the myths as part of your heritage

People who don’t eat broccoli are sinners and will go to Hell. Fortunately, if they eat broccoli on the last day of their life, they will be saved. If you don’t believe me, look it up in the Bible.

The 41^st president of the United States didn’t eat broccoli. He hated broccoli, in fact. There is still time for his redemption but the frightening thing is that by not eating broccoli while he was president we actually had a disciple of Satan running the most powerful nation on earth for four years. We should have read the Bible more carefully before voting.

You say you can’t find anything about broccoli in the Bible? You just aren’t looking hard enough because you can find anything you want to believe in the Bible. First, you have to believe it to be so then you look until you find what you were looking for. Tell a Jehovah’s Witness the next time one knocks on your door that Jesus and all the people who had a hand in writing the Bible thought the world was flat and they will turn to a passage in the Bible that proves to them that you are wrong, that Jesus did know the earth was round and that it was not the center of the universe. I made up the broccoli part but the Jehovah’s Witness part is true.

Wouldn’t life be interesting if everything were as open to interpretation as the Bible? Imagine: speed limit 50 unless you want to go faster or throw an apple into the air and it doesn’t come down if you don’t want it to.

Not only is the Bible not the word of God it is so inconsistent it would drive any editor nuts.

Question: Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative?

I asked my friend from college: “Work! I thought you retired?”

“Yes, I do work. I took a couple of years off and went back to work as an auditor-appraiser for the county assessor office. I put values on personal property (boats/airplanes) and business equipment and hand the values over to the tax collector department that translates my value into a property tax much like the real estate tax. I get very other Friday off, plus I needed health care coverage. If I work 5 years, I can retire from the county and get a monthly check based on my salary.”

Did you guess liberal Democrat. He is a bureaucrat, after all, and looking forward to being on the public dole with the retirement. I guess we can’t fault him wanting health care.

Actually, he hates bureaucrats, thinks pensions for labor are destroying the country, and doesn’t understand why people are whining about health care. He has never voted for a Democrat. He also hates taxes which takes all this irony over the top since he is working for the tax assessor. You already know I think there may be a link between fundamentalist republicans and fundamentalist Christians. My friend is a fundamentalist Lutheran.

This is a true story. The quote is an actual quote. Obviously he doesn’t see any disconnect between what he is doing and what he believes. There is way too much of this in our society: the people who bitch about taxes and scream at politicians for not fixing the pot-holes; the people who hate government but want morality laws—government in the bedroom. I have to accept that they don’t see the inconsistency so I watch the Daily Show on Comedy Central with Jon Stewart to get a laugh rather than an aneurism.

The following is from a posting on the Daily Kos. I urge you to use the link and read the whole posting.

We’ve seen a lot of comment about a new twist on the right, a whole campaign (t- shirts, bumper stickers,  e-mails and more) all built on the biblical passage in Psalms 109 which says in part:

May his days be few;
may another seize his position.
May his children be orphans,
and his wife a widow.

Many have pointed out that this campaign seems to imply the urgent need to eliminate President Barack Obama at the earliest opportunity by any means necessary, (you can figure out the rest).

But what is Psalms 109 really about?

Anyone who thinks God wrote the Bible should read Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why, by Bart D. Ehrman. A biblical scholar, he has studied the texts of the Bible in their original languages. “As I realized already in graduate school, even if God had inspired the original words, we don’t have the original words. So the doctrine of inspiration was in a sense irrelevant to the Bible as we have it, since the words God reputedly inspired had been changed and, in some cases, lost. Moreover, I came to think that my earlier views of inspiration were not only irrelevant, they were probably wrong. 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.” (p 211)

Anyone wishing to better understand who wrote the Bible (the New Testament at least) should read Ehrman’s book.

Christopher Hitchens in his book god is not Great addresses impossible tasks put forward in the Bible.

“The order to ‘love thy neighbor’ is mild and yet stern: a reminder of one’s duty to others. The order to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ is too extreme and too strenuous to be obeyed, as is the hard-to-interpret instruction to love others ‘as I have loved you.’ Humans are not so constituted as to care for others as much as themselves; the thing simply cannot be done.” [p 213]

The obvious answer to that is: just because a thing can’t be done shouldn’t mean it is not worth striving toward, however, taking it as a command and feeling like a failure when falling short would be a mistake.

My answer is a bit different. I agree with Hitchens that we are not constituted to care for others as much as we care for ourselves. I firmly believe we should care for ourselves above all others. Here is the step that makes self-love work for me. To care for myself, I need to know myself. To know myself I need to think about what makes me happy and what makes me sad. I have found that it makes me happy to make others happy and that if I make another sad, it makes me sad. So there you have it. If I make you smile, if I give you something nice to think about, if I give you a fond memory; it is purely selfish on my part.

PS: I recommend god is not Great for more evidence that Satan wrote the Bible, though, to be sure, Mr. Hitchens does not believe in Satan any more than I do.

No, we have enough religions. No need for more. The religions many have grown up with are imbedded in their psyche. Communism was the largest experiment in getting rid of religion and it clearly failed to do so. However, new religions have formed over the years; some of them, most notably the Mormons in recent times, have been quite successful in drawing people to them from other religions. It is apparent that many people need religion perhaps to help them stay on a moral path or to help them through difficult times or to give them comfort. Religious rituals are important to some; songs and sermons can be uplifting as well as doing good.

I would not for a minute suggest replacing established religions with a new religion. I shudder at the thought of anyone taking my writings (this is not the only place I write) as the basis for a new religion because historically all of the great religions have strayed from the words of the teachers on whom they were founded.

My philosophy is introspective. To follow my path one needs to use his or her brain to think about this life, his or her life. I hope that what you find when you look inside yourself is a conscience that guides you. Much of your conscience may be in step with a religion or, more nearly, with the teachings of the original figure in the religion but the ultimate guide should be totally within you. We are all different. If you want to call what you find within yourself a new religion, fine; but keep it to yourself.