Fundamentalists and the Bible 03

[Kill Quakers? Just for being different in their beliefs? That's what many of todays fundamentalists want, though not all of them say so quite as explicitely.]

"TheAnglicans [read: Puritans]retained full possession of the country about a century. Other opinions began then to creep in, and the great care of the government to support their own church, having begottenan equal degree of indolence in its clergy, two-thirds of the people had become dissenters at the commencement of the present revolution.

"At the common law,heresy was a capital offence, punishable by burning. Itsdefinition was left to the ecclesiastical judges, before whom the conviction was, till the statute of the 1 El. c. 1. circumscribed it, by declaring, that nothing should be deemed heresy, but what had been so determined by authority of the canonical scriptures, or by one of the four first general councils, or by some other council having for the grounds of their declaration the express and plain words of the scriptures."

[Punishable byburning? And that being left to ecclesiastical judges? Oh, boy, this is just as bad as the Inquisition.]

"This is a summary view of thatreligious slavery, under which a people have been willing to remain, who have lavished their lives and fortunes for the establishment of their civil freedom."

[Note well his words: "religious slavery." Isn't that what many of the women of polygamists have their women under—religious slavery?]

"...our rulers can have authority over such natural rights only as we have submitted to them. The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God.The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. Butit does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god.

"Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error. Give a loose to them, they will support the true religion, by bringing every false one to their tribunal, to the test of their investigation.They are the natural enemies of error, and of error only. Had not the Roman government permitted free enquiry, Christianity could never have been introduced.Had not free enquiry been indulged, at the aera of the reformation, the corruptions of Christianity could not have been purged away. If it be restrained now, the present corruptions will be protected, and new ones encouraged.

"Difference of opinion is advantageous in religion. The several sects perform the office of a Censor morum over each other. Is uniformity attainable?Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth.

[And thousands more in America would also be so treated as the Puritans, the Founding Fathers of present day fundamentalists, did in their day.]

Also by Thomas Jefferson:

From:Jefferson on Freedom, published by Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., 2011

From:Correspondence with the Danbury Baptist Association, Jan. 1, 1802

"Believing with you thatreligion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actins only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whle American people which declared that their legislature would 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,'thus building a wll of separation between Church and State."

[A wall of separation, he says, one that allows freedom to believe as one will. As he said in his other writings, belief is a matter between a person and that person's god, and not the purview of some religionists.]

Summation

Thomas Jefferson's words are for us to think about with regard to religion, and those who attempt to force, or coerce us into accepting the desires of fundamentalists, that of being a nation ruled not by our constitution, but by laws of the Old Testament set forth by authors of very dubious provenance. Remember, we have no idea who really wrote most of the books of the Old Testament, and also the New Testament.

Now I will continue with a summation of the words seen here from the book of Genesis.

In the chapters cited here there are twenty-two (22) major errors, and one (1) probable error. In the previous two (2) essays, there were eighty-five (85) major errors, and twenty (20) probable errors. With those from this essay, we have so far found one hundred and seven (107) major errors, and twenty-one (21) probable errors, and we aren't even half way through the book of Genesis.

These essays have one purpose, and that to prove that the bible is not error free, or inerrant as fundamentalists like to say, and the reason for that is to alleviate the trauma that many lesbians go through at the hands of preachers, family, and culture because they're told that being a lesbian is against God's law, and that law is without error as is all of the Bible, and is therefore to be believed and followed.

They, lesbians, are bombarded by their bodies and their minds which continually tell them to look at, and to desire, other girls, or women as the case may be.

I say as the case may be because many know at a very early age that they are extremely attracted to other girls, and for those, if they attend one of these hardcore fundamentalist churches, they hear over and over again how wicked they are for even thinking about another girl in that manner.

"You'll burn in hell's fires eternally," they're told. "You're an abomination in God's sight and you must repent and turn to God to save your eternal soul from the devil's grasp."

This, and more, they are told in the most horrible of voices: loud, strident, and very emphatically with face contorted to further express how dire their situation is if they don't repent and change their ways and thinking.

These girls have been dragged to church every Sunday morning, and possibly every Sunday evening, and every Wednesday night, as well as to revival meetings where the voices from the pulpit are even louder, more forceful, for what is a revival for but to sharply push one and all to repent of their sins and revive the spirit of God in their lives.

Traumatic? Humiliating? Destroying of self-esteem? Shaming? Confusing?

Absolutely! Very destructive of their psyche? Definitely! Leading to many mental problems later when they are of age to be on their own, if not sooner? You bet. Making for destructive behavior in their minds? Way too often.

Worse, it need never happen for what they are told, screamed at, bombarded with, are lies pure and simple!

Yes, lies.

To make it all worse, the lies are easily seen if one looks with an uncluttered mind.

How's that, you may ask, that people believe as they do if it's a lie? It's called, in great part, "willful blindness," a mental thing that we inherit from being so often told that the bible is the perfect, without error, word of God, and it's not to be questioned, just obeyed, and when we do look, our minds by-pass what our eyes tell us is there just as if it weren't there. Sometimes we even know it's there, but refuse to give it credence. That happens often.

Then again, there's pure ignorance.

It is pushed and shoved down the throats of all who venture into one of those churches where things like this are preached:

"It's a sin to be a lesbian. Shame on you." Or, "It's a sin to be one of those limp-wristed gays." Now it's also heaped on transgenders, transsexuals (those who have, or are in the process of changing their bodies from being one sex to the other sex), and doubtless to those born intersex. Do they also mention transvestites? Maybe, and maybe they consider it to be impolite to mention them openly as yet.

With all of the confusion put in their minds, and all the constant, incessant, clamoring of their bodies in opposition to what is being shoved down their throats, the war raged in them is as if genocidal, wholly destructive of the person all the while that person still breathes and tries to be a part of society.

What these preachers say though is wrong in just about every way. Why? Easy. When you do realize that you need not look at the bible as a holier than holy book, and realize that you need to pay attention to what is before your eyes, then you will notice the many, many errors in the bible. For instance, the first error is in the first book of the bible, Genesis, in the very first verse of the first chapter, and that is that on the supposed first day of creation when is said to have created the heavens and the earth. Earth created first? How ridiculous for our day, in light of our present knowledge.

Today, we know that the earth is held in place by gravity, most of if from the Sun itself which has a stronger gravitational pull than the earth does.

As we can see, some of these errors require a simple questioning such as the making of the earth before any stars are in place. A sort of willful blindness makes us not see that this is impossible, that they, the stars, of which our sun is one, must be there before the earth is in place. When something just doesn't seem right, we must allow our minds to acknowledge that, and to openly question it.

The people who wrote the bible didn't know what is today known, and honestly, they probably weren't trying to be exact in what they wrote, for modern research such as these churches hate, have been finding that the Old Testament was most likely written in much of it's present form by the scholarly captives taken to Babylon in the 500s BCE.

A careful look in the bible's Old Testament, as it is being presented here, will reveal, as in this essay, that someone knew about the Philistines and wrote them in as if already there when Abraham and Isaac, and others, were said to have lived.

History, though, cites the Philistines as one of about five Sea Peoples who tried to invade Egypt in the days of Pharaoh Rameses III's time well after his father, Rameses II was dead (he the one most often thought of as the Pharaoh unnamed at the time of the so-called Exodus). Those Philistines, with the other Sea People, invaded Egypt about 1183 BCE, and it is the first time they are spoken of in history long after Abraham was said to have lived.

Further, Rameses II was probably the second most powerful Pharaoh in Egypt's history, and held sway over all the land of Canaan when it was said in the bible that Moses, then Joshua, wandered, then fought for and defeated those in Canaan at the time of both Rameses the II and III.

This is known history, and as certain as anything in history can be with many proofs unrelated to anything biblically said or taught. In other words, they not only didn't know about the bible, they didn't care about it, or what it might be saying, for to them, it was non-existent, and it wasn't.

That information makes all of the so-called Laws of Leviticus, Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy fake, false, a fictive. If this is so, then the whole of the Old Testament as being God's word is a fiction.

What was done was to use known history such as the Philistines, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, Alexander, his successors, and the Romans to write their so-called history around.

In that sense, the bible is real and actual, but in the theology, it is creative fiction.

Do I say then that there is no God? No way. I have no way of knowing if there is a God, or if there isn't any God. I do wonder at life, our existence, our purpose, if any, and how we really came to be. Wondering is good, it is wonderful, frankly, and it opens the mind up to questioning, and to learning. If there is a god, it is not the one described in the Bible.

Back to these essays, is it right of any, intelligent as many of them are, to push for a fictitious writing to be a law we should all follow or be stoned outside of the community? How ridiculous!

Why don't these politicians and preachers see the falsity of the bible? For many reasons, I'd say, not the least of them is power and greed. If you don't believe the greed part, go on the Internet and search preachers plus finances and you'll find many of them are filthy rich, and that from "believers" in what they preach, the hellfire and salvation.

Many of these preachers have gone the way of the Popes of the Catholic Church. Many of them even adorn themselves similarly with fancy vestments that the Jesus of the bible would never have thought to wear. They have palaces where Jesus is said to have no place to lay his head and may likely have often slept on the ground if we are to believe the New Testament.

Go ahead; check out what I've just said. In fact, check out everything I've said, particularly the bible itself and known and proven history.

Quite frankly, Christian Fundamentalists are the same as the Taliban. Both seek to control people, especially women, with foolish doctrines that are supposedly of God, as well as control their sexuality.

We know from researchers that much of what is preached as from Mohammed isn't in the Quran, and women weren't enjoined to be veiled by him. How women are mistreated and controlled by them is much as Christian Fundamentalists seek to do. There isn't much difference between them when the actions are looked at.

One biblical quote that is worthy of being followed is one that is just about wholly ignored, and that is :"...ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." (Gospel of John, chapter 8, verse 32). Also worthy of being followed are words ascribed to the Apostle Paul, "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." (I Thessalonians, chapter 5, verse 21). Quotes are from the King James version, but other bibles are the same. Check them out.

These two verses are well worth following by everyone, and I encourage one and all to apply them to all that has been written here, and in my other two essays.

Thank you for reading this essay. Please feel free to leave a comment.

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This is an original essay copyright © by wistfall1. You may tell any lesbian in need of knowing the truth of the lies about this essay and where to find it for them to read, but no use in parts or snippets to discredit this work unless you have written permission from the author, wistfall1.