SOMETIMES MY QUESTIONS ARE JUST QUESTIONS | 2004-12-11
I have always looked in vain for someone to discuss the Bible with who actually knows the Bible.
People who know the Bible come in two flavors: fundamentalists and theologians. The theologians have heard it all and look down upon me from a lofty peak.
Another problem is that professional theologians are all psychopaths. They answer whatever they need to answer.
When I ask a basic question, fundamentalists go bananas.
Now that I have Hardison and some other rational people who know the Bible, I would like to discuss some stuff.
One thing that occurs to me is that the writers of the Old Testament are a lot more honest than modern Jehovists. Genesis does refer to "elohim," meaning "the gods," in one case, and modern Jehovists simply tossed that out of the translation.
One major oversight modern Jehovists made was replacing the Commandment, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" with the Moslem declaration, "There is one God, and He is God."
Is there a particular point in the Bible where monotheism began. I have a feeling it was from Zoroastrian influence when so many Jews were in Persia. They were very grateful to Persia and the Persian emperor Cyrus was, I believe, the only gentile inthe Old Testament who was said to be "doing the work of God."
Today we have a hard time believing in God at all. But in those days, I think they had a different problem. It was hard for any people to believe that the gods of Egypt or Sumeria or even the Greeks did not exist, and they had the only one.
Note that, in the Commandment, there are THREE words the modern Jehovists should have deleted. They are capitalized below:
"THOU shalt have no OTHER gods BEFORE me."
That could have been a commandment from the Egyptian god Amon to the Egyptians. That could have been a commandment from Zeus, the Father-God, to the Greeks.
At this point, the fundamentalist would be shrieking at me. I had to get a blog going to find some logical people to talk this over with.