God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

Other than the Bible, of course. A friend recently recommended a book called Making Sense of the Bible, by Adam Hamilton. It sounded intriguing, so I ordered it, read it, and was amazed. The author is a United Methodist pastor, a founder of Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City. The jacket blurb states, “The church is well known for connecting with agnostics, skeptics, and spiritual seekers. In 2012, it was recognized as the most influential mainline church in America, and Hamilton was asked by the White House to deliver the sermon at the inaugural Obama prayer service.” His church has 18,000 members, and no wonder! The book is divided into two parts, but at the end of Part 1 there is a hermeneutic section that I intend to present here in detail. Part 1 is the stuff one learns in seminary: who wrote the Old and New Testaments? When were they written? Which books made it into the Bible, and why were other books rejected? He writes extensively about the Bible authors, Paul, ...

(See Dec. 15, 2012 for other random stories of the paranormal that I've heard firsthand.) At a recent Sacramento MUFON meeting a gentleman sitting next to me named Steve shared the fact that he is sure he is an abductee because he awakes in the morning with scratches and marks on his body. He spent many years in a fundamentalist Christian church and still considers himself to be born again. Whenever he has doubts about his faith, he reminds himself that he has often blocked paranormal manifestations by using the name of Jesus. The homes of abductees are often ‘haunted’ by random poltergeist manifestations. He was once using a Ouija Board with a friend. He thought she was pushing the pointer, she thought he was. When they asked a question, there was no hesitation; the pointer went straight to the answer. He finally asked, “Are you malevolent?” It shot over to “Yes.” That was the last time he used a Ouija. As I listened to his many stories, I kept wondering why, if he is a Christi...

What was the Hebrew author trying to accomplish? Having looked at the Genesis account and compared it to the Ziusudra Epic, what are we to do with it who live by the Bible and acknowledge its inspiration? I suggest we try to walk in the shoes of the earthly author and try to understand what his motivations may have been. He lived in the era of the kings of Israel. No, Moses did not write the book of Genesis. The phrase, …such and such happened when there were no kings in Israel is oft repeated. That is a clue that the book was written when there were kings in Israel. He lived in a polytheistic world with goddesses, ghosts, snakes, sacred gardens, and sacred trees [beneath which blasphemy and unholy arts were practiced]. Our author knew beyond all shadow of a doubt that participating in those customs brought spiritual death to the worshiper. Many of his own people followed those very gods. The Canaanites legends of Baal and the monstrous world of Mesopotamian deities were well-kn...

Where did the ark land? In two recent posts I discussed Robert Best’s self-published book Noah’s Ark and the Ziusudra Epic, 1999, distributed by Eisenbrauns. This post follows on those and it is recommended that the reader refer to them before reading this one. For this post I also referred to Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ANET). In the original Sumerian epic, Ziusudra is a king in Mesopotamia (ANET, 42; Best, 256), but most of the narrative has been destroyed. According to one of the Sumerian King Lists, (ANET, 265) the king in Sumer at the time of the Flood was Ubar-Tutu, King of Shuruppak. In another, it’s Ziusudra (Best, 125). He probably lived sometime in the third millennium BCE (Best offers a flood near Shuruppak in 2900 BCE.) In the assembly of the gods, Anu and Enlil commanded that the kingship and rule of mankind should come to an end. Other deities lament, and Enki warns Ziusudra to build a boat to save himself and the seed of an...

Consideration of ancient texts is not abandoning faith This post is a continuation on the topic of Robert Best’s book, Noah’s Ark and the Ziusudra Epic. He has accomplished 3 important tasks in his book. One of them is the study below in which phrases from the six Flood recensions are shown beyond all doubt to be connected to one another. The original story was most likely the Sumerian epic in the Sumerian language, written in cuneiform on clay tablets. As the story moved from there to Assyria and Babylon, written in Akkadian, then to the Hebrew Genesis account, the name of the hero changes to reflect current national names of the day. The gods change, and other details are added and dropped out. One thing becomes clear…the Genesis author knew of the other stories. He Hebraized the story to convey Israelite monotheistic theology. The Genesis account is not literal inerrant history dictated by God. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a fabulous story with a great message. I still consider it...