NOT ONLY ATHEISTS, BUT BIBLE SCHOLARS...

For many years I’ve known that fundamentalists are people of little faith. If you take their paper and ink Bible from them and could prove to them that evolution is the fact it is to the more reasonable world, their faith would crumble like dry sand because it depends so much on the physical world conforming to their faith in the invisible world. It’s why they speak more about Christ than about their invisible god, and, in fact, have been forced to make god and Jesus the same person.

Jesus is at least mentioned in one other place than in the Bible and that’s in the history of Josephus, and some scholars charge that even that reference is a spurious insertion. Still, by pointing to the collections of writing called the Bible as proof of Jesus and then by calling Jesus, “god”, Christians hope to give some authenticity to the existence of god. But, more and more, Christians speak of Jesus as lord and ignore the concept of god itself which has no proof, and, paradoxically, without god, Jesus is no more than another death cult madman like David Koresh.

The fundamentalist’s literal interpretation of the Bible has been questioned by studious Christian scholars for a long time now; they realize that “the attempts by literalists to reconcile inconsistencies and contradictions in the Bible [are] little short of ridiculous.” Further, serious Bible scholars reported forty years back that “the excitement a few decades [1920s] ago over ‘the war’ between science and religion evaporated when it became apparent that the only conflict was between science and the doctrine of inerrancy.”

Someone should tell the fundamentalists they lost because they certainly don’t know it, and in fact, are back, like the Popes of old, claiming something like Papal infallibility when it comes to Bible truths. When Magellan circumnavigated the globe and gained a day, proving without the shadow of a doubt that the world is round, the Pope of his time declared that when Bible truth was contradicted by facts, the Bible truth was to be adhered to. A fundamentalist’s imperviousness to facts was as frightening then and is as frightening in the Moslem world now as it is in America’s supposedly modern culture.

Finally, a fundamentalist’s very literal mind makes them least likely to be people of deep faith. As another scholar points out: “One recent author, writing from a different angle, states that the language of religion, including most of the Bible, is necessarily figurative or symbolic and therefore the literalist, who by definition lacks imagination or poetic insights, is the least religious of men.”

The quoted passages in the paragraphs above are from the Dartmouth Bible (1961 edition), p. xl, which is a study Bible of great authenticity.


CRONY IS AS CRONY DOES

You can never separate cronies in the Bush administration even if it makes a mess for us in the world. Sticking up for your buddies in this case is putting your pride ahead of U.S. interests in the world.


TAKE A LITTLE FROM THE POOREST, GIVE TO THE RICHEST AND SEND THE REST TO IRAQ

HUD ain't a crony so it gets left out in the cold and so do lots of seniors, handicapped and anyone who isn''t rich enough to have a seat at the Royal House of Bush.


SPEAKING OF CRONYISM

"Ignorance is the mother of admiratiion." —George Chapman (1599?-1634)