Search This Blog

Wednesday, November 4, 2015

A Day Late and a Dollar Short

I think it's too late to rewrite the Bible, it's been around too long and some people are pretty attached to it. What you could do is write a sequel, which is kind of what Joseph Smith did. He was the founder of the Mormon Church and was shot to death in his jail cell by an angry mob, but they say an artist must suffer for his work. Then there was Mohamed. Some people swear by him and some people swear at him, but everybody knows his name. I am no expert but, if your Bible writing skills are anything like your movie writing skills, I would advise you to stick to painting.

Some parts of the Bible are more interesting than others. I always preferred the story telling parts to the rants of the prophets and the poetry of King Solomon, but that's just me. One thing you need to keep in mind is that the stories are not always in chronological order. Genesis and Exodus start out that way, but the story line is interrupted by Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, which generally repeats the Exodus story, but with more detail than most people want to know. Joshua picks up where Exodus left off, and then you get into some more stories that are not all in sequential order. Solomon's stuff is right in the middle, then comes the prophets. The New Testament starts out by telling the story of Jesus four times by four different authors, each having a slightly different perspective. The Acts of the Apostles tells about what happened after Jesus left the scene. Then you get into some letters, mostly by Paul, and then its winds up with Revelation, which reads like a surrealistic nightmare. There is another part, called The Apocrypha, which only the Catholics have. I have never read it directly, but I have a book that summarizes it quite well. It's about how the Jews overthrew their Greek overlords and restored the Kingdom of Israel for about one generation, whereupon it fell apart due to internal squabbling like it had done the first time, making it vulnerable to the Roman conquest.

You asked about the "Reconstruction", but I think you meant to say "Resurrection". Like I said before, Jesus and Paul talked about it, but they never explained the whole concept as one would when teaching it to someone who has never heard of it before. I think Revelation was supposed to do that but, you know.....
I don't think that people just make up religions because they have nothing else to do. I was going to say that religions don't just fall from the sky but, many of them claim to have done just that. Some of them likely evolved over time, but many of them have a founding father who may or may not have been a real historical person. Hinduism seems to have been formed by numerous religions assimilating each other, and Christianity itself has done some of that. If, by "morality". you mean intuitive altruism and are excluding all the specific rules and regulations, I tend to agree that probably came first. I am not done with those Canaanites yet, there is more I want to know about them, and will look into it when I get some time.

Yes, it was the trashing of our cherished misconceptions about Heaven and Hell that so upset our MYFers. Like I said, I left town shortly after that, and I don't know if the other people were as affected by it as I was. I don't remember voting on the board of directors at Elsdon, but I do remember voting on a couple other issues. One was to buy the house next door for a parsonage, and the other was to demolish the church building and construct a new one on the site. I voted "yes" on both of them, but I don't remember if I ever was inside either the parsonage or the new church. I think I became eligible to vote when I went through the confirmation procedure.

No comments:

Post a Comment