Category Archives: The Bible

                                                      Backward Thinking and Divisiveness “But apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?” (Reg, leader of the People’s Front of Judea, from the film “Life of Brian”) Jewish priests badgered their fellows into a fanatical reverence for scripture. Most Jews looked backward by trying to rigidly conform to the last jot and tittle of the … More…

The Bible is very ambiguous. Every verse is a product of people in particular times and places; always to assert authority, maybe to restate tradition, upstage a rival story, assimilate a popular myth, or create a new one. As a consequence, different authors had quite varied ideas about God and his relationship with humankind. In the Old Testament, god was an anti-gentile racist. He was judgmental, sexist, homophobic and punitive. He told the Jews they alone were really special and that he had a never-ending covenant with them. Paul came along and claimed a new covenant overrode the old. He … More…

The Biblical texts reveal a bigoted attitude about homosexuality. Yahweh orders the killing of homosexuals; “The man who has intercourse with a man in the same way as with a woman: they have done a hateful thing together; they will be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads” (Leviticus 20:13 NJB). No other significant cultures at the time anywhere in the world had a problem with gays. Other cultures had an attitude very similar to that of Greece and Rome; they simply accepted it between consenting adults. This is probably the original source of the discrimination … More…

Paul, the author of much of the New Testament, describes the loathing he felt about his own sexuality. “The fact is, I know of nothing good living in me—living, that is, in my unspiritual self—for though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing good the things I want to do, I carry out the sinful things I do not want. When I act against my will, then, it is not my true self doing it, but sin which lives in me…I can see my body follows … More…

  The men who compiled the canon wrote volumes attacking their opposition and arguing with their critics, so would have recorded basic facts to bolster the credibility of their books if they had them. They didn’t. There are no such facts in the New Testament or in their own writings. The criteria used choosing the canon were unscholarly and never strictly applied. There was much argument and confusion about what was and wasn’t the word of God, and it took 350 years after Jesus’ death for a definitive decree to be decided. Nowhere in the New Testament is there a … More…