I must admit I have been accused of being overly simplistic regarding my views on religion and religious beliefs. But I can't help it if I find that the use of archaeology, history, the sciences etc. is a little bit much to disprove what in my view pretty much disproves itself. I find that applying all of these fields of study to the bible is giving it a place that it does in of itself not deserve.
It is my view as the title of my blog states that the biblical God and in fact all gods are the creations of men and therefore are nothing more than myths. My Sage dictionary defines a myth as: 'A traditional story accepted as history; serves to explain the worldview of a people.' In the same vein the word folklore is defined as: 'The unwritten lore (stories and proverbs and riddles and songs) of a culture.'
The bible has been shown to be inconsistent with several disciplines of science, history, and many of its cast of characters have been shown to be nonexistent and invented. Based on these various evidences I have concluded that 1. man created the gods 2. stories were created to help explain what in those days were not understood 3. these stories are not based on facts and therefore they are classified as folklore and myths 4. since man created the gods that means that the biblical God is no exception and therefore God himself is a myth!
As you can see there is no need for ridiculous philosophical discussions on the attributes of God, or trying to fight faith with objective evidence to the contrary. In my view its a waste of time learning Hebrew, Aramaic, or Greek in order to learn the scriptures in their original languages, because in the end layman or scholar we all end up with the same conclusions if we are true to ourselves and follow the evidence to where it may lead us.
It is my personal experience and opinion that no one who reads the bible in its entirety no matter what language you read it in cannot help but come to the conclusion that its just not the word of God nor is it divinely inspired. I am also of the opinion that philosophy is an inappropriate means of analyzing religion because in all truth it makes the simple quite complicated.
Hello Chatpilot,
ReplyDeleteThought you might want to edit this sentence:
"It is my personal experience and opinion that no one who reads the bible in its entirety no matter what language you read it in cannot come to the conclusion that its just not the word of God nor is it divinely inspired."
I think your intended meaning needs the words 'help but' inserted after the word 'cannot'. See if you don't think so also.
Further, I have a different take on philosophy that I thought I would share with you, in a fashion that I hope you find friendly rather than argumentative. Philosophy broken down means 'love of knowledge'. From philosophy came logic. Logic applied to the physical world became science, which was originally called 'natural philosophy'. Now the child science is more respectable than the parent philosophy, because science demands evidence, whereas philosophers construct edifices of thought apart from real world grounding. Also philosophy gets mistakenly confounded with THEOLOGY, since theologians often argue philosophically (this is the part that smells to high Valhalla - here we fully agree).
Philosophy can be done very well, as witnessed by the magnificent thinking of Spinoza and Hume, for example. And it can be tortuously abused, as by Plantagina, et al. So it is a tool, and as such has been well used and misused. Where it degenerates to word games, truly it is despicable.
I hope you have enjoyed my thoughts on this matter. Keep up the good writing!
@Exrelayman, thanks for that grammatical error that was a great catch! As you can see I have made the suggested correction. I agree that philosophy is useful but like all things as you stated in your comment it can also be used incorrectly. I personally don't entirely disdain philosophy, I just don't think it is appropriate for discussions of a theological nature. When theologians use philosophy it turns into a game of circular reasoning that leads to no conclusions. Besides, how can one reason about something (God) that can't be proven to exist and whose attributes it is impossible to know anything about?
ReplyDelete