God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

  Image of Bible open to 1 Sam. 15:22 by author and ChatGPT Listen to the whispers in the Hebrew Bible, to the shouts in the New Testament The challenge Change is hard for individuals, especially baked-in beliefs and traditions we have followed our entire lives … beliefs our pastors, rabbis, politicians, neighbors, grandparents, and ancestors obeyed. Major societal changes require a war, a famine, a plague, or a metaphorical earthquake of some kind to make them happen. Moses certainly wasn’t the first lawgiver. The museums of Europe display stelae (standing stones with engraved writing) with law codes that predate Moses. The introduction to the law code of Hammurabi claims that the gods chose him as king to keep the strong from oppressing the weak. Moses drew from those early traditions when he wrote his own. The most famous example is the concept of an eye for an eye. The idea was to match the punishment to the crime to forestall the kind of escalation that leads to generational ...

    Bible verses are NKJV from biblegateway.com. A brief history of the Old Testament eras I had already been a Christian for decades before I learned that Moses didn’t write Genesis. The book tells us clearly that it was written in an era  after  the Israelites took the land from the Canaanites and  after  Israel acquired its own monarchy. (Gen. 12:6; 13:7, 36:31, etc.) The same with Joshua and Judges. So, we shouldn’t be surprised to see Cain and Abel offering familiar animal and harvest sacrifices in the post-Garden narrative. The brothers’ sacrifices are echoes of offerings required in the Mosaic Law. The Cain and Abel story is not meant to be perfect history, but perfect theology. The lesson, in order to stand, must be recognizable to the Israelite people. For those who are not familiar with the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, here is a primer, a brief overview of the various important eras, but it's not your grandpa's Sunday School lesson. I add a few n...

This post is based on an article published here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38604.htm#.U4KPi7XJgb4.email Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. He also wrote, Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God. An ex-pat from his fundamentalist roots, Schaeffer is writing from frustration bordering on anger. I’m not an expert on his viewpoints, but he seems to be saying, “Why did you waste so much of my life with thoughtless, shallow, religious nonsense?” In the article above, sent to me by a friend, he lists the many instances in the life of Jesus where Jesus broke the rules, mostly ritual regulations elucidated in the Book of Leviticus. These imperatives involve the purity laws in the Torah/Pentateuch [the first 5 books of the Bible]. In the Law of Moses, one could be ‘defiled’ (temporarily disqualified from being able to appro...