The Bible is the inerrant ... word of the living God. It is absolutely infallible, without error in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as well as in areas such as geography, science, history, etc.
The god described in this inerrant text is omniscient, meaning all-knowing, not just of things that were but of things that will be. As our understanding of the universe's creation unfolds, Genesis, the bible's creation stories (there are actually two mutually exclusive ones in the same text) appear not just inerrant, but wildly off the mark. Claiming our planet is only a few thousand years old is as big an error as claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York City, for example.
Thanks to the poetic nature of the bible, it is sometimes possible for fundamentalists to wriggle out of embarrassing omissions. The absence of dinosaurs, for example, can be explained by a single reference to "giants" roaming the land, never mind that this interpretation would incorrectly make dinosaurs coexist with us rather than precede us by hundreds of millions of years.
Trying to force this deeply superstitious, misogynistic, scientifically- and geographically-challenged text to fit unfolding reality is increasingly difficult. This even side-steps why this book of all possible holy books was chosen (have fundamentalist Christians read the Rig Veda - in English or Sanskrit - considered holy to 900 million Hindus, for example, before rejecting it?).
Since it has become almost unsportsmanlike to continue to point out the gaping logical and scientific lapses in the bible, a work clearly not ready for prime time (or our time at least), why not instead work backwards? Using the same poetic license of the bible's authors and editors, imagine what a truly omniscient god might have told his scribes to scribble, particularly if he really wanted to wow them.
Mention of any of these natural wonders in a book meant to explain all things would have attracted converts and settled pointless internecine bloodshed and persecution. Yahweh speaks frequently and often of other, competing gods of whom he is jealous, indicating he was not so much denying their existence as competing with them.
So why would he not not mention quarks or protons or anti-matter, or the incredible depth of time? Why did he not let people know how small they were relative to their own planet, the population of cultures of which they were completely ignorant, to Jupiter, to the sun, or to their own galaxy, not to mention their expanding universe? Wouldn't this humble them more than telling an elaborate story of a great flood, a story that would make no sense to anyone who understands that 90% of biomass lives in water?
Had someone been able to foresee quantum mechanics, nuclear fusion, and evolution thousands of years before these things were understood, THAT would be impressive, even miraculous. It might have even settled the question of the existence of god.
And so ... were something like this in the Bible, I might just believe:
And in that time there appeared among them a great teacher who traveled from the east and spoke in a strange manner of an advanced civilization that had invented paper, the compass, and ships many times larger than Noah's ark.
This teacher spoke of a vision he had of a time to come that was even more amazing than this Kingdom of which he spoke, which he called the Middle Kingdom, but all suspected to be fantastic, since everyone then knew the World to only be as large as the One Great Empire of Rome which occupied the land inhabited by the monotheists who believed in One Great God they called Yahweh but who seemed powerless to help them against the Romans of many gods who regularly suppressed their uprisings with great bloodshed and many crucifixions. Yet the people were still restive and wanted the Romans to leave so they could go back to their ways, but this man spoke of a land even better than the land of milk and honey the One Great God had promised to Abraham. The teacher's vision caused multitudes to leave their tent to hear him, but this worried the religious elders greatly who gathered to ask what should be done with this Gentile from the East. A decision was made but before they could act, the great teacher gathered together his students and told them this story that was passed secretly by one who was there:
In the beginning there was a tremendous concentration of matter, of everything that now exists and much, much more. In a fraction of a fraction of a second everything expanded across an unimaginable expanse met with anti-matter and 99% of it was destroyed immediately. What was left expanded, stabilized, and electrons found protons and the first hydrogen atoms began to coalesce. Hydrogen gas collected under incredible pressure over vast periods of time and heated to a degree where the repulsion of the positively charged nuclei was overcome and a great unleashing of energy created entirely new matter. The light that reaches our face from the morning sun is nothing more or less wonderful than the energy emitted from this process, carried to us across a distance so vast it takes several minutes to reach us. We see and feel the sun not as it is but as it was several minutes ago. Wrap your minds around that.
And while you do, consider that our sun was not formed first; no my brothers and sisters, other stars collapsed, died, exploded, spewing the newly created heavy elements resulting from the fusion of all these nuclei that eventually ended up as the stuff that makes up our bodies and our world. For truly I say unto you that our bodies are made of star dust. We, my children, are what is left of that grand and mysterious process the evidence of which will be detected one day by future men and women (yes, I tell you my brothers, women will one day not be despised and shut in their tents and told to remain silent in the presence of their husbands - some will not even take husbands but live independent and happy lives, and will be able to time the number and frequency of their children) all these things will come to pass and so many more, for if I were powerless to predict these things, the things of men, how could I possibly be believed when I claim to speak of metaphysical things beyond the realm of men?
But I do not speak of these things for I have no way of knowing them one way or another. I can only know what I can see and sense and this vision that came to me was as real as any. Are you not tired of the old, small, jealous gods, always plotting and scheming and fighting over a world that is so small? I bring you the universe entire, expanding and so much larger and vaster than we could ever imagine it. I bring you pulsars and quarks and neutrons and protons and strong and weak forces. Let me tell you about the universality of gravity, that elegant force that always and everywhere seems to obey certain laws that can be reduced to the simplest of variables - tell me, my brothers, the weight of an object and its distance from another object, and I can tell you its gravitational attraction to that other object. And all objects, even the tiniest mustard seed, imperceptibly exert this universal force. And let me tell you that anywhere you stand on this planet, if you drop a stone it will be accelerated toward the center of the earth at 9.8 meters per second-squared, terms that may mean nothing to you since until the French Revolution which is a great upheaval in the Roman territory now called Gaul, there was no such thing as the meter, developed to liberate ourselves from measuring things by the feet of kings, and until a man named Galileo who will live not far from the center of the great empire now occupying our land and oppressing our people, but long after this empire has collapsed - yes, this too shall come to pass - developed a water chronometer, there was no accurate way of measuring time, certainly not in small units.
But if your scribes can tell you of lakes of fires and 700-year-old men and you take it on faith, can you not also open your minds to far more amazing ideas that happen to be true? It shall come to pass that this 9.8 meters per second-squared will be a constant gravitational force on the surface of the Earth, but that since mass and gravitational force are inversely proportional, the moon, which men will visit in great vessels propelled by fire and walk upon its surface, has only one-sixth the gravitational force of the Earth, so that those men can bounce upon it and lift heavy objects with ease. In space whose vastness and coldness will terrify future thinkers once it is understood, there is no gravity at all, and water floats in giant spheres as will your body when you travel there, as your greatest of great grandchildren someday will.
Oh, there are so many wonders to share with you, wonders far more mind-expanding than the silly stories of floods and houseboats and women created from ribs. Let me tell you about evolution and the vast expanse of time, and of our kinship with all living creatures, even the lowly earthworm which, brothers and sisters shares 40% of our genetic code as we do.
What is a genetic code? It is something even more amazing, a set of instructions handed down from parent to child, from generation to generation, present in every cell that has all of the information needed to make each of us. All of this information is stored in a pattern of 4 different chemicals, the order of which determines how every part of every cell is to be made, how much, and when it should be shut down or sped up.
Think of that, my children - each of you has half of your genes from your father and half from your mother - despite your persecution of women, they are as important to making you you as your fathers and your father's fathers. And in fact, all of us are conceived female but to become male a gene turns on which makes us insensitive to a chemical called testosterone and that tiny difference makes all the difference - all the wonderful and sensual differences - that distinguish men from women.
I call you my brothers and sisters and children even though I do not look exactly as you and my tongue stumbles on the sounds you use so freely because these differences are truly as of nothing. We are all brothers and sisters and share common ancestors who looked very little like us and might even consider as food if they met us today. But all tribes of Israel and all people everywhere belong to the same species and share almost all the same genes with very few differences, minor ones really, that make us appear to be a bit different than we really are.
And did you know, my children, that you need not fear or be repulsed by your bodies and its excretions anymore than you should be repulsed by the husks remaining after the grain has been harvested? Did you know that men have seeds not unlike the pollen of plants and like plants, many more seeds will be cast than can ever fertilize the ovum of women, and many more conceptions will occur than will ever survive to term, and that many more babies will be born than can ever survive to have children themselves, but that a time will come when people will find ways to keep babies alive, almost all babies, not fewer than half as is now the case, their first year of life, and that they will develop technologies that will allow a man or woman at birth to expect to live and reproduce with a success rate we cannot even begin to imagine. Wo unto him today who has fewer than a dozen children or his name and his genetic material will not be passed onto the next generation. But once these wonders of the new age come to pass, clean running water that you can drink without sickening, pipes to carry your waste into a central place so it does not contaminate your drinking water, vaccines to make illnesses that have plagued us for eternity bad memories, and wondrous medicines that really work, for those with or without faith, because in those times to come men and women will understand that your immune system made up of countless white cells floating in your blood stream are what fight infection, and that many illnesses thought to be demonic possession now because they frighten us and we are powerless to do anything so we make up stories to explain what we do not know will be understood to be nothing more than chemical imbalances that a pill taken once or twice a day can cure or treat forever.
No longer will those who hear voices telling them to murder their children be treated as prophets or allowed to carry out their plans. Instead, they will be treated with compassion and the voices will leave them and there will be peace in their families who will understand that diseases of the mind, like diseases of the kidney or the lungs, have nothing to do with the moral goodness or badness of the sufferer. Such knowledge may throw all religious experiences into question, especially by those who are doctors specializing in these illnesses and who see firsthand how the words of a sick man and the words of a charismatic would-be prophet are indistinguishable but both respond to treatment.
Our entire sense of reality will be threatened by this new awareness that so much of what we see and seem is a function of chemical reactions, understandable and in many cases changeable for better or worse. Other scientific fields will challenge our sense of stability and fill us with humility. We will learn the age of the earth is not in the thousands of years but in the thousands of thousands of thousands of thousands of years. Most of the earth's history did not involve us because people did not evolve until the last fraction of a second of earth's hour. We are close relatives of the chimpanzee and slightly less close relatives of the gorilla. The chimpanzees have 99.8% of the same genes as we do, my brothers and sisters, and at this awareness, some men will cringe and like the fable of Adam and Even want to seek refuge in their ignorant innocence, but once these things are learned, they cannot be un-learned.
There will be creatures discovered many, many times more massive than the greatest land animal, the elephant, living in the ocean right now, unknown to our scribes because they never bothered to travel to those great oceans. These enormous whales as they will be called (not the large fish in that silly story of Jonah) are mammals like us and actually dwelled on land for a time before deciding to return to the sea. But they did not evolve gills again so were forced to hold their breath under water and blow it out of a great hole in their heads when they surface.
And did you know that all life began in water and that even today most life remains in water. If all living creatures were piled up and weighed, it will be discovered that over 9 parts of every 10 of that mass will live in the water. This will make that silly story of Noah and his house boat doubly absurd since a flood that threatens land creatures will be welcome to the 90% of life that has not evolved to live on land.
I do not mean to shock you, my children, but look carefully at your bodies. Did you know that you are all of you farms, cultivating tiny forms of life that the men and women of future generations will call microbes? Some of these microbes make you ill, but most of them live in peace and are essential to digesting your food and eliminating your waste. You have more of these microbes than you have of cells. And each cell, remember, has a complete set of instructions to make you you. There will come a time where if a man struggles with another man or with a woman (for in those future times, women will be considered as people too, and slaves also, since slavery will be ended and all laborers paid for their wages and free to work for another master or not at all) and commits murder but no one witnesses the crime, did you know that people in that time will be able to use as little as a hair or a tiny piece of skin and find within it the set of genes that is unique to that one person (unless he has a monozygotic twin, but I digress)? The science of crime will surpass the science of the courts of that time, and juries will be swayed not to understand what this means, but many innocent men will be set free when it is clear that the hair or the skin or the blood at the scene of the great struggle was not theirs? One piece of hair!
Now look again at your hands and tell me if they are mostly space or of matter? I tell you this: most of the universe including most of you is empty space. Even the densest bone or rock or piece of metal is mostly space. The mass of everything is contained in the nucleus, which is as tiny relative to the electrons swirling around as the tiniest mouse is to the largest of our temples, but imagine if all the weight of the temple were in that mouse and the rest was empty space. Each atom is like this and your body is made up of billions and billions of atoms, all attracted to each other by a complex array of forces, but none actually touching.
And as the Greeks once knew but our scribes have forgotten, we stand not on a plane but a sphere and we revolve about the sun once every 365 and a quarter days and our sun is but one of billions upon billions of other suns that appear to us as stars not because they are smaller - many aren't - but because they are so distant. Wow unto him among us who does not understand the incredible scale of forces not known no but one day to be tapped by scientists in a country on a continent our people do not know exists, forces that exist in the tiniest center of an atom, where protons and neutrons are clustered together and can be unleashed by splitting that atom and destroying a city and all of its women and children and oxen and cats and dogs, dropped from a machine made not of wood but of metal, a light metal alloy yet to be developed, powered not by a sail but by a series of tiny explosions of a purified liquid extracted from the fossil remains of great creatures that our scribes do not even know died hundreds of millions of years before our species appeared. Yes, I tell you that men will untap these forces then regret the terrible destruction they have wrought, because in those days to come people will not accept the divinity of total war, of genocide of entire peoples, the way King David at the Battle of Jericho commanded his men to slaughter not just all women, children, and babies, but all animals too. In those days to come there will be great and prodigious slaughter but there will also be a great outcry against that slaughter and this outcry will come loudest from those who do not follow our Yahweh or any god at all. Yes, I tell you, that this and so much more will unfold.
These modern people will speak of rights and war crimes and trials not of religious authorities or kings but of men and women - for in those days there will be judges like Judy - common men and women like them. Even kings can be tried for trying to violate a housemaid but even in that day, the king will be able to afford a much better attorney so may go free.
They will introduce words alien to our ear but well known to our Greek predecessors such as democracy and republics. They will give all of their citizens, not only men of noble birth, the right to vote, although not all will use that right.
They will have amazing talking boxes that will transmit talking images of men and women talking 24 hours a day, not needing candles because electrons stripped from the nucleus of certain chemicals will give off an energy - created when an current of those electrons passes through a resistor - that causes a filament in a glass bulb to glow and turn night into day. These talking boxes will carry not just images of talking heads but also of ladies wrestling each other in enormous vats of mud and dogs balancing themselves on wheeled wood devices they will call Skateboards. This great talking box will amaze but also distract and even though children at that time can be amazed with the fact that a beam of electrons traveling at the speed of light is hurtling into space and then coming back down again to form those pictures, images, and sounds, they will find this less interesting than watching cats jumping into and out of a cesspool.
There is so much more, my children, but I see that the religious authorities are coming now and do not like the commotion I have created with my teachings. They are asking if I have been given a permit to speak and if I am of the right sect and I have traveled so far I honestly can't remember who is considered the right sect here - have I passed from the land of the Pharisees or am I still in the land of the Samaritans?
They are taking me away and perhaps will break my body on the rack or burn me alive as all are commanded to do who follow the jealous and angry Yahweh, but these visions I have of the future are true and I hope that one of you who has ears has heard and will write down the truth so that when false prophets come, theirs are not the only fables who are propagated through the ages.
Think for yourself my children. If you hear my screams from the Temple basement, it is only the elders doing what they feel they must do to maintain order and keep women and Gentiles and all of you in their place. Forgive them for they know not what they do. But explore, be truthful, and follow the truth wherever it takes you. Many are called to this path of painful exploration, but few will follow. It is a lonely path and expect to be mocked and derided by those who have not studied and do not know. No one is blinder than he who will not see. I cannot lie and say I have seen a god I have not, but I can imagine a future without this god and it is a good and prosperous future, free from the petty superstitions and prejudices of our people, divided like all agrarian people into warring tribes and factions that hate each other more than they hate the Romans.
But even the Romans are farther along the path than we are and do not fear scholarship and science as we have been taught to do. Yes, they have their augurs and their high priests but they also have so many gods they don't take any one of them too seriously and leave each other alone to make their own choice.
Well, I must go now because I live in a time and place where we have no choice; our god is chosen for us by who our father happens to be and what piece of dirt we happen to be born on, but I tell you that in the time to come, the universality of all things will make the pettiness and silliness of our world view shrink to insignificance.
Peace be with all of you. What need I fear if the world and the elders are against me as long as the truth is on my side?
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