OK, there are a few points I'd like to bring up in brief. If I were to go into this in any great detail then this would be a book rather than a posting and it's been a while since I read up on this so forgive me in advance for any slight inaccuracies in my data. On the other hand I probably still have all the reference material available so if anyone insists then I am only too happy to dig into my library and find my sources.
The story of Christ.
In the third or fourth century BC, there was a meeting called the Council of Nicosia of the major authorities of the Christian religion. They met to decide which of the four hundred or so books written about the life of Jesus would become canon. They chose just four of those books while the rest were denounced as "heretical" and banned, and are probably since irretreviably lost. Therefore when we read the New Testament we are only reading that version of Jesus's life that those members of the Council of Nicosia wanted us to read, there are hundreds of accounts of His life that were banned by them. Why? And what do they contain? Frankly we will probably never know.
God, loving or vengeful?
This arguement I have come across many times, and have heard various explanations as to why the christian God comes across as positively schizophrenic sometimes. The only arguement that works for me is as follows. Just about every major religion that has existed with a very few exceptions has been polythestic, worshipping many gods. The modern christian faith would have us beieve that there is only One True God as depicted in the Bible and that all the rest are "false gods" that should not be followed, however lets consider that a Pratchett-like world exists where there are lots of gods to choose from, not just one. Then we can read the Old Testament not as story of The One True God but rather an account of the struggle of a particular god, just one of the many that existed then, to gain power over the other, very real, "gods." I don't have the benefit of a photographic memory of the Bible but I do recall reading some parts of it that would at least support this arguement. For example why did God look after only the Israelites and treat other races like scum sometimes. Perhaps they were merely rivals in some sort of global power struggle. If this is so then we can maybe look at the idea, to which I hold at least some sympathy, that rather than there being a God, that there was actually two, if not more, rival gods who were fighting amongnst themselves for control of the Israelites, one being a god of anger and wrath and vengeance, the other being a god of peace and forgiveness. Which one won in the end is questionable. Note this is just one possible explanation, it may also simply be that God was schizophrenic and moody.
Further to that idea consider this, just how much of a relationship is there between the New Testament Jesus and the Old Testement Jehovah. The stories of the Old and New Testament are quite different. Jehovah was the One True God who brought down fire and brimstone on anyone who tried to harm His people or who worshipped false Gods, Jesus was part of a trinity of gods that taught peace and forgiveness and who was willing to die on the cross for our sins. When Jesus said he was the Son of God, which god did he have in mind?
God is all-knowing.
Perhaps, but my question is this, what exactly qualifies someone as a God? Some primitive cultures have known to see aeroplanes for the first time and believe that they came from the Gods, why? Because they didn't understand what they were are to a degree feard them. In fact any culture, especially illiterate, low-tech ones, when coming into contact with a culture that is much further advanced then them can be easily led to believe that the advanced culture is a god. So was God actually a god or merely a member of an advanced race that for whatever reason decided to take a part of the human race, the Israelites under His care? Anyone who has read my first posting would perhaps know by now that I subscribe to the latter. Again, were I to try to argue this point any further then I would be writing a book but I will take one story and look at it with this viewpoint: the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
First of all we are told that two angels came to Lot and urged him to leave ina hurry, why the haste, why was God in a hurry? Then we read that Lot's wife looked back and became a pillar of salt (note that this is the wording from the King James version, not the popular myth that Lot's wife looked back and turned into a pillar of salt which is slightly different). This story even has historical evidence in that a Roman historian, generally considered reliable otherwise claimed to have actually seen this pillar of salt. This salt theme also occurs in other sources that describes the mountains around Sodom and Gomorrah as being covered with salt. OK, what does that mean? Well go to Hisoshima or Nagasaki and look for yourself, you will find that the area around the atomic blasts are also covered with a sort of salt that an educated society calls atomic fallout. It is therefore not inconsistent with Biblical writings to suggest that Sodom and Gomorrah were nuked, which would explain the haste that the angels were taking to get out of the city before the scheduled attack, and also explains why Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt for looking back - she was blinded by the blast, lost her way and was caught in the fallout. Note that this is a possible explanation, not the only one, but one that neither the creationists nor the evolutionsts would generally be even willing to look at. Also were this an isolated incident then there would be little point in bringing it up but the amount of evidence that advanced cultures with nuclear capability existed on this planet thousands of years ago is quite extensive. Similiar, and clearer, examples exist in ancient Indian texts while no sensible explanation has ever been put foward os to why excavations found large sheets of green glass, similiar to those found in the Nevada desert after the atomic testing there, underneath what they had identified as a many thousands of years old hunter-gatherer civilisation.
Note that this is just a theory, it does not necessarily represent my own "beliefs", which are merely that both the Creationists and the Evolutionists have got it wrong and are looking in the wrong places, but it does represent my idea that if either member of these two faiths, and yes the Evolutionism is more of a religion than a science, were to actually look at the evidence in front of them they would perhaps see things very differently to how they do now. Mainstream science is every bit as dogmatic and intolerant as the Christian faith has been. Sure, so perhaps there have been no crusades or holocausts committed by this new religion (but even that is questionable) but many lives and careers have been destroyed merely because someone held opposing views to the establishment. Neither arguement holds up well under even the line that it itself holds, there is a lot of stuff in the Bible that radically differs from the popular myths and has ignored rather than explained, while the evidence contrary to the Evolutionary myth is pretty extensive, were its adherents willing to look.
