Another Religious Rant

I’m getting really really sick of strict fundamentalist religious views. Actually, they’re getting me overexcited and pumping me full of adrenaline so that I want to scream and hit something. I cannot believe that this day and age, there are still people who believe in the twelfth century way of looking at the world, namely, scholasticism, which states that ‘God revealed Truth to Man through religion (Christianity was the only proper religion to them), and religion can be proved by reason. However, if religion and reason contradict each other, then reason is obsolete.’ I’d thought that we had progressed beyond that. Apparently, I was very very wrong, and much too optimistic. Just a note to people who believe this way of looking at the world; if you are arguing with people who don’t believe it, quoting the Bible is not going to change their mind, so just don’t bother unless you can come up with concrete factual scientific evidence to go with it. Vague paintings in caves which look like they can be vertebrates and which some claim are depictions of dinosaurs do not count.

Extremist Christian views have even infiltrated into the atheist literature forum which I frequent. Of course I couldn’t help myself and had to defend every other religion which the extreme Christian was attacking. Islam is not wrong; merely different. Hinduism might range from polytheistic to monotheistic, but it still has some very applicable and legitimate philosophies. Atheism, while it promotes godlessness, also promotes rational thinking which is not confined by some guy’s interpretation of God. And face it; it’s always some guy’s interpretation of God, and not some girl’s.

There is a strange belief that the Bible has been passed down, unchanged, for six thousand years. Surely there must be a few human errors in there by now, through all the translations, Hebrew propaganda (admit it; every culture has its own brand of propaganda to justify their bad deeds and to make it look better than everyone else’s.), Roman propaganda, and everything else the Bible has gone through. I mentioned that to a Christian who took the Bible word for word, and s/he replied, “Show me the proof. The manuscripts don’t say so.”

So I said, “You do know that the first manuscripts of the Bible would have disintegrated into dust by now, don’t you?” There was another point I forgot to mention: early Hebrews had an oral culture.

I also told them that I believe the Bible is a book of symbols, and used the example about forgiving people seventy seven times, and they said, “You’re not a Christian! You’re an atheist!”

To which I replied, “I’d be a pretty odd atheist; I believe in God.” Some people need to learn the true meaning of words.

There were several other points in my argument: The Bible cannot be taken literally because it was written by men. Even Moses and St. Paul were men, and therefore, fallible. Therefore, I cannot take their word as the word of God.

World created in seven days: True or False?

Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a video of the interior of the infamous Creation Museum, which promotes the idea that the world was created in seven days, and that the earth is only six thousand years old. As a Christian, I found it absurd, as their arguments are full of holes. I see the Bible as a book of symbols which should not be taken literally. For me, the seven days of creation simply mean a very long time. There are those who dispute that, saying that the Bible is God’s Word and there is no symbolism in it.

Okay, let’s say that the world was created in seven days. Jesus said to forgive your enemies ‘not seven times, but seventy-seven times’. Does that mean I keep a tally, and stop forgiving people after I’ve done it seventy-seven times? Of course it doesn’t. What Jesus meant was that we had to keep on forgiving people over and over again. We have to forgive an infinite number of times. So if seventy-seven stands for ‘infinity’, then by logic, the seven days of creation, while they are shorter than infinity, actually means ‘a great number of days; too great to count.’

I’ve got other points along the same line, and will post them later.

Here’s the video I was talking about at the beginning of the post.