IRRATIONAL BELIEF

According to some Christians, our existence is not to reason but to obey. If you doubt the bible and question its authenticity, you fear that you would be offending God. This wrong perception creeps into the mind of many believers that they would rather choose to stay ignorant and believe as it is written than to offend God for being curious and seeking the truth. I do not imagined God to be that much inward looking and parochial. Perhaps, I do not believe human curiosity would kill His patience and turn against us.

 

Faith is antithetical to reason somehow, but that does not mean reasoning is the enemy of God. Faith is absolute believe into something without evidence whereas reasoning is seeking knowledge, searching for the unknown- the ultimate reality. There is one innate quality in man that separates him from all other creatures and that is the ability to reason, a gift from God. Should this gift be suppressed in the name of upholding faith?

 

Religion should break its orthodox codes and obstinate rules to be a little more liberal in view of the changing world, giving space for man to think. It should orient itself into seeking the truth as its goal instead of working for attaining blind faith. The search for the ultimate reality must not end; religion must keep seeking the truth. To draw a conclusion about the nature of God basing on the wrong assumptions that the bible is flawless and without distortion is a fatal error. One must remember that they are written by men. Ancient religious texts are ought to be re-examined and we ought to reason ourselves if each word is a revelation from God indeed.

 

In every battle that has taken place in the Old Testament, it was always God who led and commanded his people and often displayed ruthless figure of a merciless dictator. We are constraints to question whether the prophets took the Lord's name in a misleading way or the Lord Himself was such a dreadful killer. God was supposed to be loving, merciful, compassionate and forgiving even though people fails to appreciate his works at times. Yet, the very God, mentioned in the bible, is full of hates, anger, ill tempered, malicious, vindictive and equally destructive. Could this be the one who controls the whole universe? There is only a faint chance because his character outlined in the bible is that of regionalistic, specifically concerned with the Israelite people only. He opposes all other gods and endorsed his people to destroy everyone who does not worship him. This god is over fed with jealousy, drenched in blood and vengeance is his pride. The first of the ten commandment says, you shall worship no other gods besides me; if he in fact is the only true God why not declared that he is the one and only universal God and there exist no other gods. In that way, people understand it appropriately. But his commandment indicates there are parallel gods but everyone should worship him.

1 kings 8:62 Then the king and all Israel with him offered sacrifices before the LORD. 63 Solomon offered a sacrifice of fellowship offerings to the LORD: twenty-two thousand cattle and a hundred and twenty thousand sheep and goats. So the king and all the Israelites dedicated the temple of the LORD.

Slaughtering animals, offering blood sacrifices to God; these pagan cultures have no relevant in the Christian world today, however it finds its way into the bible. Yet many Christian preachers continue to teach their congregations about these ritual cults with great fervor and excitement. We are all appalled by the satanic rituals of sacrificing human beings or animals on the altar as a form of worshipping their deity. But are not all these sacrificing rituals belong to the same category? Or if modern churches think these offering sacrifices mentioned in the bible are in fact inspired and directed by God and did served its purpose once upon a time, then converts your pulpits into an altar, for God is the same yesterday, today or tomorrow. Cut down the first born of your flock and children and burn them to appease your god. I could not understand those people who misinterpret this type of stories as though they are relevant to Christianity and try to connect them with modern society with full of embellishment in their sermons. It is an indirect way of saying ' Hail Satan'.

Some modern Biblical Scholars, Hollywood preachers, evangelist celebrities, well educated, fully loaded with almost all bible verses and passages in their memory cleverly mislead their audience sermon after sermon. It is a matter of grave concern for Christian people; and when someone bring out a contradictory verse, which in itself is as simple as self explanatory, they think those are the ones misunderstanding the passage due to shallow bible knowledge. But I can honestly state that the writings in the  bible are simple and brief which any legible person can understand perfectly without the help of a preacher's interpretation because that was the primary focus of the bible language- easy access to all. However, even today the legacy of papal state still exists here and there. They think it is a complex jigsaw puzzle and they even think without having a scholarly mind, it is impossible to understand wholly. As for me, you do not need a PhD to understand them.

There is one thing fanatics from any religious community will never learnt from the past mistakes because they attribute all tragedies to God as a form of punishment although in reality God never cares what they think or what they do. Still some believes world war two holocausts was the product of sinful choices made by sinful men in rebellion against a holy God. We all know it was the deliberate policy of Nazi German to completely exterminate the ethnic Jews yet these religious zealots believe things happened according to God's plan. They even stated that had the holocaust not taken place, Israel nation would not have once again established.  As planned by God, the Jews were able to come together as one-nation restoring national identity and thus fulfilling bible prophecies of Ezekiel 37 and Matthew 24. God supposedly predetermined everything as per the prophecy.

By agreeing with the above statement, God surely incites Hitler to persecute the Jews so that, prophesy spoken in the past may be fulfilled. For that matter, Hitler was not to be blamed for the holocaust of six million Jews because everything occurred simply to fulfill prophesy.

How weird was that? The consequences for misinterpretation of history by some religious zealots can be devastating. These people forgot that Israel nation was created after the Second World War by the western nations upon the insistence of United Kingdom much against the wishes of the Muslim world especially the Middle East. I am bewildered by the idea that ethnic cleansing of the Jews was simply to fulfill Gods prophesy.

 

The bible is one book, which can be interpreted into different ways to suit the needs of a person according to the changing circumstances if you know what is written there. It is like a multipurpose weapon, which can be used dexterously to ward off the so-called evils in the society. Let us examine some example.

Deuteronomy 5.9 thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them.

The lord is a jealous god who hates any person worshipping other gods than him and therefore, you should not bow down or worship such gods under any circumstances. If you do so, this jealous god shall punish not only you but also your whole descendants up to fourth generation. In other words, your generation will suffer because of your sins for worshipping other gods. It is very clear; your sin is transferable like a genetic disease. The only difference is that your sin shall disappear after fourth generation as a form of full repayment to God for not worshipping him.

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children; neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. Deuteronomy 24:16

Now in the same book, it is given fathers shall not be put to death because of the children's sin or vice versa. Whatever sin the father is committed, he alone is responsible and therefore his children are not liable to be punished because of his sin. If a son has committed a sin before the lord he should be punished and not anyone else. Your sins are non-transferable, others are totally immune to your sins; they cannot be punished because of your sins.

How does one draws conclusion from such contradictory laws allegedly given by God? They are rather flexible just like Naga customary laws.

And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:12

Tamar was the daughter in law of Judah whose husband Er was killed by God. One day she disguised herself as a prostitute sitting down at the entrance of Enaim, which is the road to Timnah. Not realizing that she was his daughter in law, Judah slept with her and she became pregnant. When Judah heard the news, he ordered her to be brought out and burn to death. However, Tamar brought out the staff, seal and cord saying the man who impregnated her own those stuff. Judah realized that it was none other than himself who impregnated his daughter in law. Judah admitted that she was more righteous than him since he refused to let her marry his son Shelah after Er and Onan died. It is said after this incident, Judah never slept with her again.

2 king 20: 11 Then the prophet Isaiah called on the LORD, and the LORD made the shadow go back the ten steps it had gone down on the stairway of Ahaz.

To prove to Hezekiah that the lord will heal him, God made the shadow went ten steps backward. Well this time, the earth's rotation must have been reversed causing the shadow to move backward by ten steps.  This lord of Israel can entertain his believers in any way they wish to see, like a magician.

1 kings 7. 14 For this is what the LORD, the God of Israel, says: ‘The jar of flour will not be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry until the day the LORD sends rain on the land.’ ” 15 She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. 16 For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the LORD spoken by Elijah.

To receive anything in the form of material objects directly from God miraculously is a hard thing to believe. Here it claims there was food (flour) everyday and the oil in the jug never run dry because Elijah said so; this miracle is akin to the miraculous work of Sai Baba, a Hindu spiritual leader who claimed to have the power to materialize gold from his mouth. God's miracle should be to provide means and ways of attaining your needs, not giving you directly what you wanted in materialistic manifestation. Any miraculous claim of converting one object into another by God is sheer absurdity, which arose due to people's ignorance and uneducated mind.

Genesis 2:19-20 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals and all the birds in the sky. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds in the sky and all the wild animals. But for Adam^f no suitable helper was found.

   

There are over 8.7 million species of animals on earth. To name all these animals by an individual would be the craziest story ever made. If we are to write down the name of each species, the book will be thicker than the Holy Bible by eleven times, because the New International Version of the Bible has a word count of either 727,969 words or 726,109 words. Who would be so foolish enough to entrust someone to name all these animals other than the crazy god of the Old Testament?

For over three centuries, biological scientists have been relentlessly working, identifying and naming animal species yet so far no definitive figure could be brought out. It is impossible either to name all or to collect all these animals in pairs to be brought under Noah's ark for future reproduction.