, I discovered that Solomon had 1000 sexual partners. I learned that God created evil, that God lives in darkness, that David paid for his first wife with the foreskins of 200 Philistines, that God destroyed Job simply because Satan dared him to do it, that handicapped people are not allowed in church.
I found the character of God rather alarming. People worship and praise God and say he is compassionate, benevolent and loving. Yet, as a nonbeliever, I am doomed to spend all eternity suffering in hell, no matter how good I am. I couldn’t accept such a mean-spirited being.
Then of course, when my family read the New Testament, I learned that Jesus didn’t come to send peace on earth, but came with a sword to set men against their fathers and daughters against their mothers.... and of course this contradicted the Commandments.
My family read the Christmas and Easter stories in one Gospel. A few weeks later, we read accounts in other Gospels which were somewhat different. In a home where I was expected to believe the Bible, these accounts were different enough to seem more like the stories coming from different eyewitnesses on Perry Mason than God’s truth.
And the immaculate conception ----well, I could imagine if I turned up pregnant and unmarried some day, trying to pull that excuse on my parents. Soon I learned that Greek gods were always sleeping with mortals and that Christians probably stole their stories from the Greeks or earlier pagan civilizations.
(See comment & my response regarding the immaculate conception.) As a preteen and a teenager, I was smart and inquisitive. I asked questions of my parents, ministers, and Sunday School teachers.
• Why are there no dinosaurs in the
Bible?
• Why would a loving God order women and children to be slaughtered? How was that following the Commandment ‘The shalt not kill’?
• How could Noah fit 2 of every species on his ark ---and wouldn’t he have to take more than 2 gazelles to feed the 2 lions? And why wouldn’t Noah have left a few creatures behind, like mosquitos or cobras? And why does a different part of the
Bible say he took 7 of some animals?
• Why would God order us to circumcise babies? Wouldn’t that be terribly painful, let alone unnatural? Why would God create foreskin, then want us to cut it off?
• Why can’t God prevent an earthquake, hurricane, or airplane accident from hurting/killing people?
• Why do bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people?
• Why, despite hundreds of people praying for a sick parishioner at the church, did the person die anyway?
• If God can do anything, why can’t he stop suffering? And if he can’t why is he worthy of worship?
• Why do we have to wait to die to reach heaven? Doesn’t God have the power to make heaven on earth?
• Why would God order a man to sacrifice his own son or daughter?
• Why are some things that the
Bible says are abominations (eating lobster , pork, or rabbit for example) no longer considered to be forbidden, but being gay is still thought, by many, to be an abomination? Lots of these rules are clearly set forth in Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus, yet we ignore some and accept others. (According to the
Bible, it’s OK eat locusts.)
• Why did God allow his only son to die to forgive our sins? If God can do anything, why not just forgive our sins and be done with it?
• What about
Bible passages that contradict each other? How can those be the word of God?
• If only Christians could go to Heaven and everyone else went to Hell, that wasn’t exactly fair to someone who was indoctrinated into Islam from a young age, or someone who had never even heard of Christianity, was it?
Although some of these questions were from a naive youth, I would ask most of these same questions today. I still don’t have the answers.
I don’t remember even one answer any more enlightening than “God works in mysterious ways.” My father told me to pray and God would answer my questions, but He didn’t.
After several years of doubt, I couldn’t take the
Bible seriously. Soon everything else about religion sounded absurd to me. By the time I graduated from high school I was an atheist, but I didn’t quite know it yet.
Now, I believe that the
Bible is a book of fiction. I happen to love fiction and I think fiction can teach truths about life. However, I could learn most of what I need to know about life from many other books of fiction ---and without the guilt.
Most of the
Bible was recorded years or even centuries after the supposed events, so I do not believe it is the word of God, but the words of men either trying to interpret what they thought was the word of God, or attempting to convince readers that they knew what God wanted.
Susan B. Anthony:
“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” Writing the
Bible, decades after the events (if they actually happened) would be like my attempting to write an account of the Kennedy presidency with no written records, no TV, no audio or video tape. I lived through those years, but little of what I remember is from actual memory. Most of it is from books or film that I have read or seen many times in the years since 1963. Taking everything I can remember, I might be able to write two or three pages. Of course, like men who wrote the
Bible, I might misremember or, without written, audio, or video proof, I could make up the rest.
The men who wrote the
Bible had no special powers. They were humans like you and me. God didn’t guide their hands when they wrote the
Bible any more than he guided my hand in writing this blog post.
Why do people believe that 2000 years ago, magical things happened that don’t happen today? But then I remind myself that many people believe in astrology, ghosts, and miracles. They think they see images of the Virgin Mary in their toast and are sure their dead parents are watching over them. I call it wishful thinking.
People think God talks to them or to religious leaders. If God talked directly to anyone, then everyone in the world who prayed for guidance would receive the exact same message and there would not be multiple religions and denominations.
Despite my having read the
Bible through my teen years, I haven’t read it much since, although I do use internet
Bibles to find passages on occasion. Most of the atheists I know, know the
Bible much better than I do, and I know it better than most Christians.
Many Christians are taught a few nice
Bible stories in Sunday school and they might listen to Biblical verses at church services, but most know little about what the
Bible really says.
In a recent survey by the Pew Forum, 45% of U.S. adults seldom or never read the
Bible. Surprisingly only 39% believe it is the literal word of God. A full 18% believe it was written by men and is not the word of God at all. Only 1% said living life in accordance with the
Bible was necessary to be admitted to heaven.
A Gallup survey found that less than half of Americans can name the first book of the
Bible (Genesis), only a third know who delivered the Sermon on the Mount (Billy Graham is a popular answer) and a quarter do not know what is celebrated at Easter (the resurrection, the foundational event of Christianity.) Sixty percent cannot name half the ten commandments; 12% think Noah was married to Joan of Arc. George Gallup, a leading Evangelical as well as a premier pollster, describes America as “a nation of biblical illiterates”.
Mark Twain:
[The Bible] “is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.” (
Letters From the Earth)
.
