The Antichristian Phenomenon

The Holy Bible. It is without question the work of God himself. Every word, every sentence, every story is the exact word of God. Christianity uses the Bible as the sole foundation on which the philosophy is constructed. The only way to live a good and moral life is to live by the guidelines set out in the Bible. Don’t even think about questioning it’s infinite wisdom, by doing so you’ll be questioning the infinite wisdom of the heavenly father himself. You don’t want to suffer the vengeful wrath of God now do you?

Entire countries, cultures even, have been converted to comply with the exact law of God. God fearing citizens have done their job well, protecting their fellow countrymen from a one-way trip to Hell. By making sure everybody has to comply by law people will be saved, whether they want to or not. Abortion and same sex marriages are evil, women should stay at home and science, oh my, stop those fools from questioning the Lord’s work.

There’s one big problem with this blindly following of a piece of literature. This book is written by dozens of people over a period of approximately one thousand six hundred years! There’s no way to ask the original authors about their intentions with it. Maybe the Bible as we know today is just a collection of fairy tales and folklore with a common topic. It’s not illogical for a librarian in ancient Greece to have combined some of the similar works into one, just like we combine the contemporary Grimm fairy tales into a single book. There’s no way of knowing for sure (some of) the original authors were actually serious about this guy-in-the-sky concept. A mighty and totalitarian god sending down his only son to earth, just to be sacrificed by his own creation, which is in turn mislead by the devil, an ex-employee of his, sounds like one hell of a concept for a Hollywood block buster. Maybe it’s intended that way, too. The moral guidelines found in the Bible are maybe just a byproduct. You’ll find plenty of examples of modern morality in contemporary novels. That does not necessarily mean the novelist’s goal is to teach about morality. Often references like those spice up the story, make it more lively. Imagine writing a romantic novel about the ER at a local hospital. The doctor has a steamy relationship with the head nurse, who in turn regularly exchanges bodily fluids with the football stud cancer patient. The doctor is his former coach and finds his nurse in the stud’s room in a natural but unwanted position, after speeding to his room because of a mysterious spike in his heart rhythm. Now imagine having to write this novel without using any reference to morality. It’s impossible, right? You’ll probably end up writing this using the morals you encounter in your daily life. Why wouldn’t the original authors of the Bible have done the same thing? And if so, why would you copy those ancient morals and apply them to your own life in the modern world, while the author was just writing for your amusement?

What if. What if The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were written two thousand years ago. What if the Greek librarian decided to put this combined work on display. We couldn’t ask Tolkien about the intentions of his work, neither could we know for sure his books were purely fictional. With the current course of events in mind it’s quite plausible our world would have looked quite a bit different.

Every boy from the age of twelve or so would have served in the military. We would have accused our adversaries of alliance with the forces of Mordor. Old men with staffs and beards would be screaming their lungs out on the tops of their own towers. We would march out with the full might of combined armies to meet the forces of Mordor at every volcanic eruption. Everybody would have been talking about Smaug without actually ever having seen it. We would have eye witnesses claiming to have heard dwarves singing while exploring caves in eastern France. Without boring you with endless hilarious possibilities, the message should be clear by now. Blindly following a moral extract from a work of fiction as your only guide in life isn’t just foolish, it’s dangerous too.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 1st, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Culture, Religion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.