First of all, I remain a Christian. I am merely a Christian who asks many questions to which there are no known answers in this mortal life.
I was raised in the ultra-conservative Church of Christ (not the more tolerant United version mind you, but the intolerant version), which not only relied on scripture to brow-beat and intimidate its members, but took it even further by crafting entire dogmas from minuscule or obscure scriptural “interpretations” or simply out of whole cloth. A perfect initial example is the absolute ban on the utilization of musical instruments during worship service. As such, Ephesians 5:19 verse 6 is “interpreted” and taken to be an absolute mandate that musical instruments are anathema to worship. Here is the actual KJV version of the scripture:
Ephesians 5:19 verse 6 (KJV)
Speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord.
Ephesians 5:19 verse 6 (NIV)
Speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So we have a single piece of scripture, taken completely out of context, blown wholly out of proportion, and applied as biblical doctrine or dogma banning, by God Himself, the use of musical instruments during worship service. What is even more ironic is that this scripture is attributed to the Apostle Paul himself, even though most biblical scholars note that Ephesians’ authorship is considered by many respected scholars to be “deutero-Pauline,” that is, written in Paul’s name by a later author strongly influenced by Paul’s thought. Bible scholar Raymond E. Brown asserts that about 80% of critical scholarship judges that Paul did not write Ephesians, while Perrin and Duling say that of six authoritative scholarly references, “four of the six decide for pseudonymity, and the remainder recognize the difficulties in maintaining Pauline authorship. Indeed, the difficulties are insurmountable.” So we have the Church of Christ creating and enforcing a significant dogma about singing only acapella (a dogma that they are very proud of) based entirely on a single piece of scripture that was most likely written, not be the Apostle Paul himself, but by others utilizing Paul’s writing style and not based on a mandate from God. The irony of this example should not be lost on Christians of any faith.
I converted to Catholicism in 1989, my first year at Murray State University. I greatly enjoyed the pomp and circumstance and took comfort in the regularity of the weekly service. I also did not miss the brow-beating approach that the Church of Christ used to scare and intimidate their members into religious subjugation, to include adherence to all of the many man-crafted dogmas that had no real bearing in scripture, but were rather crafted by the Church of Christ founders, such as Alexander Campbell (son of Thomas Campbell) and others.
Church of Christ purists (read historical revisionists) proudly declare that their church was founded at Pentecost, and existed in caves thereafter, persecuted and passed along in this religious Underground Railroad. This claim is of course historical nonsense, but it allows Church of Christ leaders to excuse the embarrassing fact that their founder, Alexander Campbell, was a Baptist for seventeen years, and a Presbyterian prior to his Baptist conversion.
The creation of the Church of Christ sect came about during the American “Restoration Movement” that sought to re-establish Biblical practices among Protestant churches. Followers of Thomas Campbell and Barton W. Stone combined in 1832 to begin the Stone-Campbell movement. Scriptural and dogmatic disharmony within the movement eventually arose, with a major source of tension being the formation of the American Christian Mission Society, which Campbellites felt was un-Biblical. In 1906 the major religious factions split into two separate denominations. The ultra-conservative and dogmatically harsh “Churches of Christ” (or the non-capitalized “churches of Christ”) formed around those who followed Alexander Campbell’s original ideas. The more tolerant “Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)” formed around followers of Stone. Both denominations continue to hemorrhage members as enlightened Christians shun the holier than thou antics and twisted theology of the Church of Christ and participation in “organized religion” as a whole lessens with each passing decade.
Certainly Catholicism has its own crafted dogmas, such as purgatory, limbo, the adoration of Mother Mary and the Saints and the enforcement of religious intermediaries….priests. Catholicism has utilized more razzle-dazzle to ensnare its parishioners and to protect Papal authority. The abuse of the clergy and of biblical “interpretation” since day one is well noted. Catholicism is the Yin to the Church of Christ’s Yang. They are one in the same in making up rules and rites and dogmas and they are equally guilty in their enforcement approaches throughout the ages; fear of going to Hell, fear of being excommunicated (Catholicism), fear of having “fellowship withdrawn” (Church of Christ). You get the point. It is all about the fear, with which to control and manipulate the sheep.
This brings us to my primary point; the omnipotence of God. In Revelations 12:4, John sees Lucifer, the most beautiful angel in Heaven, and the protector of the very seat of God. Lucifer incites a rebellion against none other than God Himself, and Lucifer manages to entice and to recruit a third of all of the angels in Heaven. Now think about this logically. Lucifer must have known that he was created by God, in whatever process there was or is in creating angels. He was God’s right-hand Angel. What could have possibly motivated any angel in heaven, all of whom were daily in the presence of this all powerful, omnipotent and omnipresent God, to revolt or to do anything that would look badly upon them? Any rational entity would laugh at the very thought of rising up against this awesome and all-knowing Being.
Yet that is what the Bible would have us believe. Lucifer, for whatever reason(s), became disillusioned and revolted, and did so with a third of the other angels. My first question regarding this event is this. How did the all knowing, omnipotent, omnipresent God not know that there was such trouble afoot, that a revolution was being fomented against Him, and done so literally at the foot of His own majestic Seat? Is it unreasonable to question why an all-knowing God would not have (a) known what was going on as it was going on and (b) would not have taken Lucifer, his beloved angel, aside to discuss his issues in private? But that is simply to logical, and would have resulted in a coming together of minds between Lucifer and God. Certainly two reasonable and magical beings could have worked out their issues, right? But that would have been an extremely brief ending to the foundation of Hell itself, to the transformation of Lucifer, the beautiful Angel of the Lord, into Satan, the Demon Leader of Hell, and to the creation of this Good versus Evil mythology that became the basis for modern Christianity.
If one now jumps from the chronicle of the downfall of Lucifer and a third of all Angels and their banishment to Hell (which God apparently created, versus simply destroying all of the revolutionaries) to the Beginning fiction of the Genesis story, we now have a creation of yet another group of beings; humans. An immaculate, self-sustaining and perfect (read free of sin) Garden of Eden is created and made home for Adam and Eve. Yet God, who apparently did not know about the revolution of Lucifer and a third of all of the Angels in His court (or who ignored it for some illogical reason), now allows the banished Lucifer, now Satan (Spooky and Dangerous!), to manifest his Evil self in the form of a serpent within the safe grounds of the Garden of Eden. Really? God creates two innocent and uneducated humans, naked and unknowing of evil, frolicking throughout this Garden of Eden for a fairly brief amount of time, only to have them be accosted and manipulated by a former high ranking Angel of the Lord, bent on Universal domination. Again…really? Why would an omnipotent and all-loving God set up these two first humans for failure? Freedom of will! Of course! It was their choice! But can two uneducated, naked and innocent humans really be instilled with freedom of will if they are ignorant of so much? The logical answer is an unequivocal no.
Additionally, since God is omnipotent, He knew before he even created the Universe, the Earth, the Garden of Eden, and these two innocent humans, Adam and Eve, that they would fall from grace. He would have had prior knowledge that He was going to allow Satan to hang out in the Garden in the form of a serpent so as to tempt these two humans to eat some mythical fruit that would suddenly give them all of the insight that God failed to give them in the first place. It is logical to assume that had God created Adam and Eve with such a modicum of knowledge that their encounter with the Serpent would have been anti-climactic at best. Had they been instilled with such knowledge, and warned that Evil had been unleashed within the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve would no more have eaten the offered fruit and lose access to perfection and the enticements of the Garden of Eden than they would have spit in God’s eye. Instead, they may have hacked off Satan’s serpent head and grilled him up for dinner with a safe side of salad, or merely ignored the sinister speaking snake.
If one looks at both of these mythologies as book ends, then it is challenging at best to take seriously anything that occurred between the two stories. A talking, burning bush, a staff transformed into a serpent, walls of a massive fort crashing down as trumpets blared, a dead guy rising from the dead, walking on water, a guy being swalliowed by a giant fish and surviving after being regurgitated days later, a massive and all-consuming world-wide flood, a boat within that flood that carried two of all animals in the entire world, a magical golden chest that shoots out powerful beams that kill, speaking in foreign languages by some magical force, God becoming a mortal man through a virgin birth, but who still had all of God’s powers but only used them occasionally and not to save his own life or to help the vast majority in the world and a mystical Trinity whereby God is actually three beings, all with the same powers and consciousness.
This returns us to the initial premise of my article. If God, in any of His three incarnations, was fully omnipotent and omnipresent, then it was His choice to allow his angels to rise up, which is just weird and counterintuitive. It was then His choice to create the horrible world that apparently is Hell, versus calling the angels onto the proverbial carpet and then forgiving them. That is just simply sad. It was then His will to craft a perfect world with human beings in it only to then allow evil to settle in without giving the humans the means to truly deal with Satan and his musings, which is simply unfair and akin to burning ants with a magnifying glass. It is the setup of all setups. Again, sad. But it certainly makes for a great story.
I don’t pretend to have any answers. I merely ask questions that, to me, seem logically asked, but with answers that are so illogical as to defy any basis in reality. The motifs certainly make for a good read, but to put full faith and credit into these archetypes and to then build all manner of religions and dogmas around them in the name of God is just absurd when one strips them to their core. One may as well attempt to justify the Roman Gods as being real, or Atlantis or Aliens. We at least have a myriad of photographic and video evidence of Aliens, Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster and faces on Mars. In contrast, we have simply many versions of The Bible, and its phantasmagoria inspired stories. Happy reading.
