Verbal Spark!

So we all know by now that Jesus has not returned and chances never will since the legendary Jesus was NEVER here in the first place (maybe some smelly first century itinerant preacher, yes, but not THE SON OF GOD). Anyway, the apologist will tell you, “Oh Jesus has not returned yet because God is not willing that any should perish.” Um…have they checked the stats lately based on their own belief system. Zillions upon zillions of people have gone to hell (if they answer you in light of their beliefs) since those words were written by some dude calling himself II Peter.

So God still has the leash on Jesus because he is not willing that any should perish yet buttloads of people are persishing daily “without Jesus in their hearts.”

Like I said before in the past, the writer of II Peter was the first Christian spin doctor. Folks were obviously already asking “where is this promised return you Christians have been speaking about. (II Peter 3:4) After all, in your first book, Mr. II Peter, you said that we were living in the “last times.” Yes, don’t act stupid. You said it right here in I Peter 1:20. So where’s this white blue eyed guy in the white dress?” Well like a good Christian, good ole Pete decided to come up with an ingenuous answer. “Well folks, one day is really like a thousand years to God and a thousand years is like one day, and besides, God is not willing that any of you schmuks should perish so he is delaying Jesus’ return. Yeah I know a bunch of folks died in the Vesuvius eruption and another million or more in the Roman invasion and the Romans are busy walking all over the Mediterranean killing people, but who’s counting?”

I have been placed under pressure to explain why I do not believe in God. The people who ask this  question are most often people who have the biblical god in mind. For kicks I usually ask them, “which god?”  Of course they mean the god they believe in or at least respect as an existing entity and he is, the god mentioned in the Bible. They are not terribly concerned with the idea that history has thousands of gods, even millions, running about the place in people’s imaginations. All they know is that they don’t believe in those gods, but are curious why I don’t believe in theirs. I can just imagine a Hindu asking them why they don’t believe in Brahma or  an ancient Egyptian asking them why they do not worship Ptah. Their reply would most likely be the same one I give to them - I don’t believe they exist.

Anyway, like many people from my end of the world, the Caribbean, I grew up with the belief that God existed and the Bible in one fashion or another is related to him. In addition, I grew up believing he had a son by the name of Jesus and this Jesus came to earth to die for the sins of mankind AND resurrected to heaven and will someday return to exile unbelievers to hell or some everlasting separation and promote the righteous believers to eternal bliss. My impressionable mind did not come with a belief system in place. All that I came to know about a deity came from being taught about one. I just happened to be born into a region where the Christian god held sway in the popular belief.

Growing up, I did not have any doubts such a god existed. My grandmother (in St. Kitts) took me to church, a Catholic church. In the evenings she sent me with neighbors to a local Pentecostal style church. The idea of God was drilled into my head, a constant reinforcement. I also grew up during a time when the Christian influence on the society around me was very strong. People did not dare play any secular music on Sunday and it was important to be in church. In my grandmother’s house, the radio stayed on Gospel programming 24 hours a day. We had no television at that time so ALL information I knew about the world was filtered through a Christian belief. I knew nothing else. As early as age 4 I was already reading the Bible and grew to know the stories it contained very well. I had a mind for adventure and the Bible contained more than enough for it to excite me to read it.

I moved to New  York City at age 8 to live with my dad and while my father held Christian beliefs, he did not go to church, but he sent me and my brother to church with some neighbors. Again, the whole Christian concept continued to be reinforced in my mind. There was something a little different though. Unlike living a little small Caribbean town where everybody practically believed the same thing, I now lived in a large metropolitan city where all kinds of people had all kinds of different beliefs. The god I believed in was just another god amongst many others that other people believed in. Naturally I believed my god was the true god and all the others were false, but I was too young to understand that to the fullest.

Ont thing in school that interested me was Greek and Roman mythology, stories from well over 2,000 years ago, stories that preceded the Christian era. I took a very deep interest on these stories and I could not help but notice how some of them seemed to resemble stories I had read in the Bible. I did not put too much thought into it at the time, but it would come back to play a role later in my life.

I moved to my birthplace of St. Thomas, Virgin Islands when I was 12. Two years later I was invited to church and as they would say, “gave my life to Jesus.” Being that for the first 11 years of my life I was already groomed in the Christian faith, I went into this new life running. I was already a voracious reader so I read my Bible religiously. I would win all and any bible contest. I memorized whole passages. I actually read all the boring chapters, memorized the names of even the most remote Bible names. By the time I was 17 I had read through the Bible two times already.

The church I was going to, however, was a rather strict church. Women were not allowed to wear pants (even at home), wear makeup or jewelry. We were not allowed to listen to secular music as it was not edifying. It made most of us very judgmental and hypocritical. We even looked at other Christians who wore jewelry and makeup and questioned their faith.

At 17 I moved back to New York to further my education after graduating High School. Now having a job, I was able to buy even more books. I invested in study bibles, bible concordances, bible dictionaries and lexicons. I bought all kinds of books on biblical apologetics, books on how to defend the Christian faith. I bought books that answered all critics. I was constantly reading and constantly studying. I even taught myself some Greek and Hebrew to understand the Bible better.

During my studies, I would come across some disturbing things in the Bible, however, I just brushed them aside figuring God knew what he was doing or that there was some explanation which God would explain someday. I would read through the mid early Old Testament and read about all kinds of atrocities committed in the name of God. I would read where God [allegedly] endorsing slavery and murder and the invasion of other people’s property, even ordering his people (Israel) to take slaves and/or make slaves of other people. My explanation was that such people were evil and God was simply punishing them by having them killed or enslaved. I reasoned that because God created all life, he could do whatever he wanted with anyone even if it seemed evil or unfair to me. End of story.

By this time I was attending a different church. This church was not legalistic. The folks were more genuine and in a big city like New York, rather accommodating to people I would once thought should not even be in church. I found my happy place. I was serving God and feeling comfortable in church.

Moved to Florida after 4 years. Eventually found a church similar to the one I left in New York City. At this point I was at the height of my Christian experience. Had the whole thing down to a science. Was very happy. Then the wheels started to come off.

I received word from New York that my best friends lost their mother. While contemplating something to send for them to express my condolences, I began to re-read the book of Job because that book deals with the suffering of the righteous. As I started to read it, I noticed something rather troubling that I never noticed before. All my life I was told the book of Job was a book that held up Job as a blazing example of faithfulness to God in the midst of tremendous suffering and one that showed how good God was. What I never paid attention to was how the whole saga began. Satan appeared before God and actually was having a conversation with him. That alone bothered me because I always thought that Satan had no place in the presence of God, yet, there he was. The next thing was that God was the one who drew Satan’s attention to Job and when Satan made the claim he could turn Job away from God, God, his ego getting the best of him,  gave Satan permission to go torment Job in every and any way but not kill him in the process. Satan then goes off and abuses Job, even killed Job’s children and reduced Job to sores, boils and bad body odor and took away everything he had. Job stays faithful to God, God rebukes him when he questions him and in the end allows him to recover an blesses him as a result.

Now, despite the happy ending, the start of the story just would not leave me. What I got from it was that God and Satan essentially made a bet with their egos on the line. Job was used as the hopeless bum to prove a point. If I or any other father did such a thing with our children, we would be tossed in jail and reviled by society as sick bastards, but God is praised ad Job is seen as an example of strong faith. It made absolutely no sense to me, still I hung on despite these doubts.

I began to re-read the Bible again, but by now I had a pretty good understanding of world religions and religious history. I realized the Old Testament was not put together until at least thousands of years AFTER the early events it described. In other words, it was later Jews who complied and edited it. Why is this important to know? A story told days, weeks, months or centuries later allows later editors to retell it which means they can add or delete to suit their bias at the time. This is precisely what happened in the Old Testament. I also noticed that some of the things I read in the Bible, I read similar stories in cultures that came before the people who actually gave us the Bible. Long before the Jews had a story about Noah or a creation story, the Sumerians and Babylonians did and the Jewish version appeared to have borrowed from those earlier peoples to pattern their own story.

Then I read about the Persians (modern Iranians) who ruled over the Jews 600 years before the time of Christ. I realized they had a complex religion and that the Jews borrowed heavily from them to form the basis for some of their own religious concepts.  Those Jews then passed them down through the centuries until we get to the time of Christ. His followers, Jews, then passed it on to the large Gentile community around the Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt to Rome. In other words, the “Christian” story nor the God of the Bible was nothing more than a rehashed, regurgitated old story passed down through the ages from one people to another. With a stroke of luck, Christianity met good fortune when the Roman Emperor, Constantine, adopted it as the official religion of the greatest empire of the time. From as far east as modern day Iraq, to as far south as Egypt and as far west as modern day England and France, Christianity became the religion of the vast Roman Empire of which all of those regions and points between were a part of.

1,000 years later, other empires rose up within the remnants of the old Roman Empire,  empires like  England, Portugal, France and Spain. These Empires then sent conquerors and settlers over the high seas to conquer and spread the Christian story. They eventually made it to Africa and taught it there as well as rape that continent and kidnap it inhabitants. Many of those people are our ancestors who were taught the Christian faith by the very people using it to oppress them. After 400 years we are still a people enslaved to the religion of those oppressors.

This testimony was a very condensed version to try to keep it within a readable format. If you look around the blog you will find topics I discuss on their own that will help to prove why I do not and cannot believe in the Bible and its god. Please feel free to read them.

There has been quite a bit of times I have heard in the wake of some school killing or in light of rising school violence that the reason kids on our end of the world (North America) are so violent nowadays is because prayer (god) has been taken out of schools and so on. To people who espouse this type of logic, their line of reasoning goes along the lines that with the removal of god from the schools there has been a direct upswing in school troubles. If this is true, why is it that in countries like Sweden and other northwestern European countries where church and god have been basically placed in a trash bin like yesterday’s trash do we find relatively low crimes rates, prosperity and stability?

While we’re at it, another thing I find interesting is this. Many of us of the black race have grown up in or under the influence of Christianity, a religion that became part of our legacy in great part through slavery and colonialism that was thrust upon our forefathers by former European colonial powers like France, England, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands and Denmark. Well statistics continue to show that those nations are straying further and further away from taking Christianity seriously, treating it and the church more as a relic even in Italy the seat of the once universally powerful Roman Church. So the former slave masters have practically cut loose of their ties to one of their most powerful tools that helped to justify and reinforce their past crimes on Africans (as well as others) and their descendants yet those they inflicted it upon still cling to it.

For example, in Mexico, a largely Catholic country, colonized by Catholic Spain, only 2-3% of Mexicans do not believe in God (from a 2004 BBC survey) yet in Spain today, 24% of Spaniards consider themselves “atheist” of “agnostic.” It is also not surprising either that you are likely to find more (serious) believers and churchgoers amongst black people in the U.S than white people in the U.S relative to their individual populations.

Food for thought.

I was revisiting the biblical book of Numbers chapter 31 and began to wonder about something. I mean we all know the writers of the Bible were “inspired” and because of this cannot be considered primitive in their thinking and on target with all their facts and all that good stuff (anyone wants to buy the Eiffel Tower?). Well, if anyone had any doubts the Bible was written by men and solely by men without any so-called inspiration of a “good and loving” God,  you need look no further than here.

The chapter opens with the “Lord” speaking to Moses (conveniently so, of course) to go and massacre the Midianites to avenge the Lord. Later on in the chapter (verse 16), Moses explains that the reason for this was because the Midianite women caused the Israelite people to trespass which led to a plague (sickness). Please note that the “inspired” writer attributed all devastations to God so if a plague broke out, justification had to be found as to what pissed this good and loving god off. After all, he couldn’t be that petty. Interestingly though, while Moses wanted everybody from Midian dead, he did not mind sparing the virgin girls for the men. Hmm…

So in order to find out what this was all about, we have to go back to the equally wonderful chapter of Numbers 25 where the offense allegedly took place. Seems like the women of Moab/Midian were too irresistible to the Israelite men and they got their whoring on. In addition, the writer had to toss in the usual idol worship to justify what was to come which played out wen a certain Eleazar in a frenzy of fanatical zeal started impaling folks. This “holy” act supposedly stayed the plague.

Now when one REALLY takes a good look at the story, the orgyfest, the subsequent plague and how Moses was adamant on killing all Midianites except the virgin girls, do you think it is plausible that the plague that broke out may have been some kind of sexually transmitted disease, maybe even an ancient version of AIDS (from God as punishment of course)? Think about it. The plague came upon the Israelites after they involved themselves in what appeared to have been a sexfest and the writer highlights the contact with these women as the cause and also as the cause for the vengeance taken upon the Midianites. In addition, Moses spares only the virgin Midianite girls. There seems to have been a connection made in the mind of the writer with sexual experienced Midianite women and the subsequent outbreak of a plague so it made sense that only the virgin Midianite girls were to be spared. So Moses…er, God was not upset that Israelite men had sex with Midiante women, just that they had sex with the infected ones, those who were not virgins.

It is rather clear that this was all about vengeance, a vengeance to wipe out a people who  infected the people of Israel with some disease.  Later in the chapter we also read how the Israelites also plundered the Midianite land and divided it up amongst their tribes. Old fashioned plunder, loot and steal in God’s name. What is also rather mysterious about all of this is the fact that Moses’ wife, Zipporah, and his father-in-law, Jethro, were Midianites. Where were they in all of this?

By the way, how did these soldiers determine who were virgins and who were not? Not sure I even want to think about it. You just have to love this. After all, God’s ways are higher than our ways and his ways is beyond our understanding. I sure don’t care to know what they are about either. Seems quite bloody.

The writer of the biblical Book of Matthew was a brave man. He wrote some things, that when looked at more closely, were rather audacious. With this being said, I want to ask a question on one of the Bible’s greatest mysteries.

In Matthew 27:52-53, we read that when Jesus died and also when he was resurrected, the bodies of ‘the saints which slept arose.’ Now not only is this little bit of revelation not in any other of the Gospels, but in the book of Mark (the oldest of the Gospels), the same surrounding account is told, but without any mention of what Matthew claims happened. In fact, if you read the account in Mark 15:38-39, Mark has the same verses preceding and after Matthew’s startling revelation, but does not say anything about dead people rising up.

This is Mark’s account compared to Matthew’s:

And Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and breathed His last.Then the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. So when the centurion, who stood opposite Him, saw that He cried out like this and breathed His last, he said, “Truly this Man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:37-39)

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:50-54)

Luke tells the same account, but fails to mention what Matthew said about these dead people.

Here’s Luke’s account compared to Matthew’s:

“Then the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was torn in two. And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, “into Your hands I commit My spirit.”‘ Having said this, He breathed His last. So when the centurion saw what had happened, he glorified God, saying, “Certainly this was a righteous Man!” (Luke 23:46-47)

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit. Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God!” (Matthew 27:50-54)

The Gospel of John doesn’t even find any of this important to mention.

Now my question is, where did these dead people go? Matthew says they went into the ‘holy city’ (Jerusalem) and appeared to many, but we read nothing else about it anywhere else in the Bible. Did they die again? Did they eventually rise to heaven? Did they go back to their graves? What was the response of the people who saw them? To make the matter even more baffling, a few days later Peter preached his famous sermon on Pentecost and in all of his talking, trying to prove Jesus was the son of God and risen lord, he never once referenced the mircale of these dead people rising from their graves to bolster his argument and really bring home the point.

While we can find a few examples of the audacious liberties of the writer of Matthew, considering it is the Christmas season, the supposed time of or at least time of reflection of the birth of the one called Jesus, taking a look Matthew 2:5-6 will suffice for now. There it is written:

“So they said to him, “In Bethlehem of Judea, for thus it is written by the prophet:
‘But you, Bethlehem, in the land of Judah,
Are not the least among the rulers of Judah;
For out of you shall come a Ruler
Who will shepherd My people Israel.’”

Many Christians are fond of telling the critic to take context (of their scriptures) into consideration, but as we will see, they need to realize that within their own “inspired” scripture the writer of Matthew paid little attention to context. He clearly had an agenda and it was to prove to his Jewish audience that Jesus was the anointed messiah of the Jews. He sought to prove this at all costs even if it meant making up stories (Matthew 27:52 and 53) r in this case, picking out pieces of scriptures to push his agenda.

To the Christian, the writer of the book of Matthew is quoting what is supposed to be a prophecy predicting the birth of Jesus. Fact is, he isn’t. This is what he wants the gullible to believe, that is, that Micah chapter 5 (where the quote is derived) is a prophecy predicting the birth and birthplace of Jesus. Upon closer observation, taking context into consideration and a little history, Micah chapter 5 was not looking 700 years into the future.

First of all, Micah was an Israelite prophet who lived during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah, 700 years before the time of Christ. Hezekiah’s reign was marked by a serious threat from the Assyrians under the leadership of king Sennacharib who even went as far as beseiging the city of Jerusalem in an attempt to starve the inhabitants before taking the city. Somewhere in all of this or more like prior to this with the apparent news of the Assyrian advance on Jerusalem, Micah in the role of prophet, there to give moral support gives his famous prediction. His prediction was CLEARLY meant for the immediate future.

After making a clarion call for Judah’s troops to amass and then babbling off some vague open ended renderings common to “prophets,” he gets to the point. He foresaw a messiah arising from the family of Ephrathah, one who has ties to an ancient legacy. That he is NOT speaking of Jesus is clear from the fact that this hero would arise ‘…When the Assyrian comes into our land…’ (Micah 5:5) and He shall deliver us from the Assyrian,
When he comes into our land
And when he treads within our borders (Micah 5:6).