And the truth shall make you free?
I believe Jim Green”s letter of Jan. 9 is a fine example of how limiting one”s frame of reference can distort the truth and make anything seem relevent, liberating us from our mundane lives, allowing us to hang up our brains at the church door. Let”s examine three ideas from Jim”s letter.
First, our nation”s founders. It is always interesting when we find Europeans believing that the New World was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492, completely ignoring that immigrants from Asia came to the Americas over 10,000 years earlier, founding an egalitarian, peaceful and reverential society in North and South America. The goal of the Europeans was to serve God, give light to those who are in darkness and grow rich, which they proceeded to do by shooting, stabbing, starving, diseaseing and eviscerating nearly 95 percent of the populations of two continents into enlightenment, and as Jim”s letter points out, our founders, in all they did and said continually had the phrase “Praise be to God” on their lips, turning an abomination into something noble by manifest destiny; destiny by God.
Second, the Old Testament. Over the past 25 years the tale of ancient Israel has been found to contain little if any anthropological basis; Israeli foundational stories being in the same genre as mythical Greek foundational stories. To understand the Jewish traditions, it is necessary to go back to the Mesopotamian flood story of Gilgamesh; the Zoarastrian concepts from Iraq and Cyrus the Great, and Ahura Mazdz with the concept of good and evil, salvation, afterlife, and the messiah in the time of the frashokereti; and Egyptian tales of resurrection, wisdom literature and body mutilations. And could someone point out where the Ten Commandments are in the second set of tables produced after the original ones were shattered by Moses? All I seem to get is something about not seething a lamb in its mother”s milk.
Third, the New Testament. There was a time when the Bible was considered as the entire truth one needed in life, as people believed the stale tale of the nearness of the last days, that always learning and never gaining knowledge was anti-Christian; producing 1,000 years of the Dark Ages, where burning books, banning books, censoring books and burning scientists was the way to truth. We also see the persecution of the Crusades where we find Christians” response to Christians, who were not Christian enough, was to kill them; a fine example of mankind”s humanity to man.
If Christ ever gets around to coming back, I wonder, will he come back as a Christian?
Still seeking the truth, but man am I free!
Greg Blinn
Kelseyville
