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I have read a lot of your Skeptical Review, and I find that you make a lot of good points. As a Christian in a Bible Church, I have found that the issues that you raise are questions that I have often had but was just too scared to ask about. Lately, I have been rethinking what I believe.
I can see now, for example, that Matthew definitely intended his narrative of the birth of Jesus to explain how he got to be a Nazarene (because it must have been believed that the Christ would be a Nazarene), but Luke had a different theory about this. According to Luke, Joseph and Mary already lived in Nazareth, and so it was only natural that they would return there after all things according to the law were accomplished.
In many respects I have found your material to be a breath of fresh air to allow me to think for myself again. Now, I have to wonder why God would have given us a brain if He wanted us not to really use it, but just to trust Him blindly. Of course, I know that the Christian response to this is that God knows what's best for us and wants to keep us from bad influences.
Although I did enjoy fellowship and the singing of songs, it actually was tearing me apart inside to think of many of my friends and family as being lost because they were not born-again. I was teaching as a graduate assistant in the computer science department at Western Michigan University, and I had immense difficulty keeping my mind on teaching computers. Many of my students were from foreign countries, and many of them were Muslims. I had the horrifying thought that they were all lost. I never did preach anything to them, but I often felt like it just because the thought of others being lost made me feel this way. I eventually had to drop out of teaching because I couldn't take the thought of it any more. I had a lot of Muslims in my own classes that I was taking there too, and when I should have been listening to the lecture, I would find myself drifting off into wondering how it could be true that all of them were lost. Instead of having a peace with my faith, which many Christians seem to have, I was miserable thinking that about 80% of all the world was lost because they didn't believe (or just had never had the Gospel presented to them). I find that reading some of the material in TSR actually helps me to feel free from this thought which I had so much trouble dealing with.
I don't think that I could ever become an atheist like you though, Farrell. I see in you the same kind of rigid desire to believe that there is no God as I see in the fundamentalist dogmatic opinion that there is a God and that the Bible is His inerrant word and that those who don't believe it are doomed to hell.
I don't see atheism as the only other option to turn to when leaving a fundamentalist Christian belief. I still have a conviction (which you would call a superstition) that there is a God, even though I can accept that there are definitely discrepancies in the Bible. There are false prophecies, but I can't dismiss all of them as being false. In some of your articles, you have stated that Christ taught that He would come again in the same generation. But I haven't seen you address the Christian defense that by saying "this" generation, Jesus was talking about the same generation that sees the fig tree put forth its leaves (and not the current generation of His time). The fig tree is symbolic of Israel, which was reborn as a nation in 1948. This could be significant when looking at many of the prophecies made concerning Israel in the Old Testament, that the Jews would wander through the nations without losing their identity as being Jews and that in the latter days God would bring them back to their land. The fall of communism in the former Soviet Union has now allowed many Jews to return to Israel. And many have returned from other areas also. Is this likely just a coincidence? See Isaiah 43:6; Nehemiah 1: 8,9; Deuteronomy 4:27 and 28:64; Jeremiah 30:11 and 31:8,10; Ezekiel 20:33-38; 34:11,13, 28, 30; and 36:10-11; Isaiah 11:11-12; and Amos 9:14,15.
In many ways it now looks as if prophecies concerning the last days could easily become true. Someone could step forward in the middle east with a seven-year peace plan which he would break after 3 and a half years and all hell would break loose on earth (as mentioned by Daniel and repeated in Revelation). When I stop to think of how a person who lived back in Jesus's day might have described a vision of a nuclear war, it comes pretty close to some of the things described in parts of Revelation. There are also many prophecies in the old testament that sound like they are talking about the effects of a nuclear bomb. When it is said that flesh will rot while people stand on their feet (Zechariah 14:12), doesn't it sound like what the effects of a neutron bomb would be? And isn't it believed that Israel currently has many of those at its disposal? In Revelation, nuclear bombs could be thought of as stars falling from the sky. They may look like that in a vision. An attack chopper that fires nerve gas may be described as a locust from hell by someone who hadn't ever seen a chopper shooting people (Rev. 9:3-13). The blades of the chopper could have been described as the wings of this strange locust (Rev. 9:9). Revelation 9:17 could be talking about tanks of some kind being described as horses that shot fire from their mouths.
What are your thoughts on some of these things--and on these verses? You may just laugh at all this, but I can still see much of this as very potential future prophecy (although often very figurative). Your points about false prophecy like against Tyre are good, but I did note that Ezekiel has God saying that He would bring many nations against them as the waves of the sea, i.e., one after the other (Ezek. 26:3). How would this be possible if we were to understand that Tyre was never to be rebuilt after Nebuchadnezzar besieged it? Could it be that after all the nations that would come upon Tyre like sea waves, then God would scrape her debris from her and make her a bare rock? This would still allow for her to become a bare rock in the future. I would still agree though that Ezekiel 26:12 contradicts Ezekiel 29:18.
I do have to agree with many of your points that you make in The Skeptical Review, and it grieves my heart to think of people as being lost, but I don't think I would ever be able to just throw off the entire Bible as you have done. I agree that it is not an inerrant collection of books, but that doesn't mean that it's testimony should not be considered at all. Men will always add their own ideas to stories to juice them up a bit, but my personal stance is that I don't really want to take away the faith of believers. For many people that I know, their belief in Christ means everything to them. If they are wrong and there is no God, then none of us will ever know it, but if they are right and God is a righteous terror who is often hard to understand but who also has provided free salvation through Christ then.... The end result of rejecting Christ still seems to be much worse than the end result of rejecting most any of the other religions of the world (if they were right).
I do agree though that many of the methods used by Christians to discredit other religions and groups that they consider cults (if applied to Christianity) would discredit it in a short amount of time. Sometimes in matters of faith, though, simple mathematical logic just doesn't apply. There seems to be such things as religious truths where even though two stories contradict they can both be considered true. This seems true, for example, in the two conflicting stories of Jesus's birth as told in Matthew and also in Luke, but it isn't strictly necessary to believe in an inerrant Bible to believe that Jesus could have risen from the dead. The apostle Paul was sure of the resurrection of Christ long before the gospels were written. This is possible just as it is also possible to believe that stories of the creation account are spiritually true without demanding a literal 6-day creation. For example, It is hard for me to believe in outright evolution. Even if gradual changes occurred to species over many years, I would still have to see design in this. Perhaps in some way it could be compared to a complicated computer program, (but still somebody had to write it). I can't answer why humans have wisdom teeth (that need to be removed often) or why men have nipples, but at the same time what happened to the humans with the upside down noses? Did they just drown when it rained and therefore die out? It is still hard for me not to see the work of a designer when I look at the world, even though I don't believe in a literal six day creation per se. I don't think I could ever just write God off completely and be an atheist like you, Farrell.
(Bruce Weston, 1802 Fulford, Kalamazoo, MI 49001; 49001; e-mail; BruceWston@aol.com)
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Last updated: Wednesday, 30-Nov-2005 17:06:30 CST
