The Wicked Bible

By Edwin R. Astin

Twenty-five hundred years ago, the ancient Greeks tended the glowing fires of human intellect and rational thought with all that this new order promised for future civilizations. Yet, not 500 miles away, careful plans were unfolding to wrench this fledgling group of enlightened thinkers back to the mire of fear and superstitious belief.

The plan was a success. A regime was established upon the dream of a perfect society from which all but the perfect would be excluded. It was to be controlled by priests whose livelihood depended upon taxation of the governed. Less than 500 years later, that regime produced a bastard organization neither Jewish nor Greek, but with the power to enslave the entire Western worldChristianity.

And we are not free from it, yet!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 15, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469767901

Edwin R. Astin

Edwin R. Astin was born in the North of England in 1918. He has made a life-long study of the origins of religious belief and their impact on contemporary culture. Mr. Astin has lived in the United States since 1951 and he and his wife, Lily, now make their home in Southern California.

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All Rights Reserved © 2001 by Edwin R. Astin

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For Merrilyn

Contents

A GENTLE WARNING

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CODA

FOR FURTHER READING

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

A GENTLE WARNING

Many of us depend upon some kind of belief in supernatural beings from which we draw what we call our faith to live. If you are such a person, and if your belief is rooted deeply in early childhood teachings, this book may not be for you.

It is not the intent of the writer to convert anyone from any form of religious belief. Such conversion, from a belief in ghosts and devils to an acceptance of reality, is best brought about by the individuals’ own efforts and desires.

This writing is intended for those, and there are millions of them, who based on their own experience and education, can no longer depend upon such beliefs but who would like some evidential assurance that the book which they may have been taught to accept as absolute truth is in fact somewhat less than that. And in many instances quite the opposite.

The book is not intended to be a scholarly tome. It is the result of many years of study and several rewrites to make certain that it is readable and readily understandable to the lay reader.

A list is included of several books that are available for the more serious inquirer.

E.R.A.

CHAPTER 1

THE WICKED BIBLE

In England in the eighteenth century a newly printed bible was published. It quickly became known as the wicked bible and the entire edition was destroyed.

It had one very small weakness; one word was missing. Just one three-letter word out of approximately three quarters of a million, but without correction the results would have been devastating. The word was not and the place from which it was missing was Exodus, Chapter 20, Verse 14. As a result the commandment, to all who would believe, was Thou shalt commit adultery.

Can you imagine what the result would be if that had been accepted as the word of god? Would the churches be more full as people regularly crowded in to hear the glad tidings? Would people find time to go to church or would it interfere with their efforts to obey god’s command? Divorce would disappear because marriage would be unnecessary as a means of satisfying sexual urges. One could go on and on about the changes in our society; some good, but mostly bad.

It might possibly have been an honest mistake, but more probably some printer’s apprentice was having fun when he pulled the type for those three letters. But when we consider the damage he might have done we should be aware of similar damage that has undoubtedly been done during the last twenty-five hundred years by clerks (clerics) who, in manually writing copies of what has become known as holy scripture interjected their own ideas of what the words should actually say.

Religious dogma has never been stable, it has changed with every generation and in every generation when hand-made copies of scripture were the only ones available what was written would reflect those changes. The bible is full of them, so much so that it is impossible to know what the original was, but not entirely impossible to find out when it was written, why, and, probably in some instances by whom.

This book is not about the wicked bible of the printer’s error, it is about the standard bible that has been inflicted upon the western world for over two thousand years. A book which sets the standards of right and wrong and consequently confuses the two but which, if we are to eliminate the evil that has been done, must be judged by the standards it has set.

It is indeed an evil book. Not because it describes actions and uses words which its adherents say are dirty, but because it is almost entirely devoid of any moral imperative. Its characters, particularly in the old testament, were according to the various writers who compiled the book, immoral rascals who used any means available to satisfy their ends and, in the process, massacred millions, all of whom are described as wicked and deserving of death. Apologists for the bible claim that its genuineness is proven by its exposure not only of the godliness of the characters involved but also their seamy sides.

Unfortunately, being godly involved murder, rape and plunder. The god they worshiped at that time was a god of war. He directed them in all their rampages so that to be faithful to their god meant doing those things that by the definitions of the book are evil.

That is one of the most remarkable things about this book. We accept its definitions of good and evil but when we apply these definitions to the book itself without the determination to interpret everything in it as holy we find it evil; almost completely devoid of redeeming features. The word holy should be suspect itself. It denotes something of great purity, something beyond the reaches of human minds, criticism or ridicule. Claimed holiness is the ultimate pomposity. Very ordinary people and things can be declared to be holy. It in no way changes their nature or molecular construction.

This is not a criticism of those who accept any being, real or fanciful, as holy and find in that acceptance an explanation of the human condition which satisfies and motivates them. In most instances they were conditioned in childhood to an acceptance of such a philosophy or religion. Nor is it intended to turn any of them from such mind-sets.

The purpose of this book is to hold a mirror to our present situation when, after approximately ten thousand years of attempted civilization, we are still struggling to solve our present day problems in a highly sophisticated milieu with the tools and ideas of primitive superstition.

If the book was used and read for its literary value there would be a great deal to commend it. As an historical document it is useless. There are numerous serious scholars who are convinced that the main characters’ involved are mythical and may or may not have existed. The stories wrapped around them, as we shall see were largely fictional.

That it is accepted by many millions as the word of god testifies to the fact that very few of them have ever read it. For the most part, they have accepted the stories about angels and devils with all their miraculous happenings that were told or read to them when they were very young. It was a time when their young minds were wide open to learn everything about this planet and what they thought was reality. It is one of the major crimes against humanity that so many millions of children had their minds so crippled by these stories that many of them have never been able to accept reality, and instead have judged all phenomena according to how it is explained in the book. Only to the degree that the western world has rejected these dogmas has it been able to make material progress.

But since millions of people in the western world still believe that this book is a deposit of absolute truths to which they must adhere completely the remainder were compelled to take this into account when making the framework of our society. And in a society claiming to be a nation of laws this means that we are still a long way from making laws based on reason rather than superstition.

For centuries the inhabitants of the western world were horribly oppressed by those who used bible teachings to control them.

We claim to be a free society, indeed we boast of it without ever defining what it is from which we are free. The truth is that our freedom is only comparative. From where we were a few centuries ago, we are remarkably free. Most notably in our ability to think and develop new ideas. It is not so long ago that a man was unable to change his employment, his location or even to do any one of the numerous daily tasks in any other than a prescribed way without permission from his local overseer who claimed to be, and had to be, regarded as being divine.

These conditions did not occur naturally or in the normal flow of social evolution. They occurred in two parts and the second grew out of the first.

We have seen in this last century how simple it is for men with power to exercise it in controlling millions of their countrymen, in stirring up their minds and focusing them on creating a new and better order. Karl Marx wrote a book and others pounced on it as their own foundation to use its contents as a new bible. Hitler wrote a book and though it may have been lacking in even pseudo-intellectualism it served as the bible for those who followed him. In both instances millions of people died or were slaughtered as a direct result of the power struggles that came from these books. The western world is not unique in this. There are others, but it is our part of the world with which we are presently concerned.

A book was compiled, partly written and partly collected about twenty-four hundred years ago in an attempt also to create a new social order. It was claimed that it contained the commands and instruction of a mythical god to a small emerging nation. It was to establish a new order; one in which the peoples’ lives were to be controlled completely by a new class of citizens who were not to engage in any form of productive labor or commerce but who were to live completely off the fines imposed upon the rest of the population for breaking (or even keeping) the laws imposed upon them. The book was to give evidence that this same god had been the benefactor of that nation since he had first created it and the rest of the world.

The man who sought successfully to establish the new order had the one prerequisite for any such undertaking. He had been given the power of life and death over every citizen in the country. Power given to him by the king who ruled the empire of which this country was a small part.

This is not fiction. The book was the earlier part of our bible, known as the old testament. It contain not merely horrendous stories of murder, plunder and rape but also savage laws with murderous punishments that can have no part in the government of a modern educated people. The man…we’ll come to that later, it’s all in the book.

After several hundred years of living under this new system a large part of the population quit and dispersed into various parts of the then known world, but before that happened another phenomenon occurred which had earth-shaking results and which eventually placed the whole western world in even greater jeopardy than that suffered under control of the old testament.

By that time the control of the nation had been changed several times and was presently under the suzerainty of the Romans who used them as they used other nations, as stock for their slave markets.

Small rebellions against the Romans were frequent and always punished by crucifixion, but the instigator of one of them left behind a fanatical group which formed the nucleus for a new communistic cult. Within a hundred years there was a new literature centered round the man. It was claimed for him that he not only had supernatural power, even over death, but that he was the son of the god of the nation.

His claimed teachings were at considerable variance from those in the older writings. Not merely different but completely opposed to them. Obviously the members of the new cult would have rejected the older archaic laws in favor of the new ones but unfortunately, in their attempts to prove that their dead leader was indeed the promised messiah who would save them all from their national problems, they had invoked evidence from the old writings to prove conclusively to those who would accept the evidence that he was not merely divine but that his coming had been foretold in the old book.

It must have been a dilemma. Rational men would have had no problem opting for the new laws, erratic as they may have been, but the men who compiled the new book were not concerned with rationality except as it served their purpose, which was to set up an international organization along the lines of the organization established in the time of the older laws.

Today we have both books in one binding and under one title, The Bible. The New Testament, filled with unrealistic dogma but testifying that the dead leader was indeed divine and the old testament which is supposed to give evidence of that divinity.

If the older book is rejected on the grounds of its outdated morals and laws then the newer book must stand alone and this is a very precarious position. Impossible in fact.

Even though scholarship has clearly established that not one of the several evidences from the old book is of any value, the cultists claim divinity for the whole book; and this is one of the greatest problems we have in this country.

Not one single law can be enacted without the consent, not of the people as a whole, but of the small, more superstitious part who are convinced that all laws must conform to those supposedly established by the god of another nation. If such a law should be established by the sheer weight of democratic consent then it will be fought vigorously by the fundamental cultists.

Acceptance of these ancient laws as divine, particularly when accompanied by the threats of torture or death are the factors which prevented western civilization from making any progress towards a free and just society. This was not a temporary restraint; it persisted for hundreds of years and progress has only been made as men risked their lives to dare to think; and to act upon those thoughts.

A new world was discovered not for the first time but at a time when its discovery was opportune for a variety of reasons. Men wanted to get away from the establishment. High on their priorities was the search for a place where they could be free. Not totally free but free from whatever it was that they viewed as restricting them. Religious freedom is claimed to be the motivation but in fact those who claimed to be searching for it were actually only searching for a place where they could practice their own form of religious tyranny.

Gradually the new environment allowed men to develop new economic and social ideas but only so far as they complied with the older standards. We have come a long way but somehow we are still morally behind some of those nations we left behind.

Our adherence to the Bible teachings has created tremendous social problems. There is no logical reason to cling to them. It may still be several hundred years before we are emerged completely from the caverns of superstition, but we can only do it by looking honestly at them and acting accordingly.

There are thousands of books published annually catering to the superstitious. Isn’t there room for one that examines those superstitions clinically?

CHAPTER 2

GOOD OR EVIL

Before going much further it might be a good idea to define the word we are using in the title—Evil. Almost everyone will tell you that what is printed in the bible is about what is good; even though they may never have read it and they know that many of the things they do in their personal lives are wicked if judged by its standards. So they accept the notion that they must be sinners. Hence they need, but may not want, the ministrations of those who, claiming authority or power from the bible, profess to be able to free them from the sufferings imposed upon those who err. We have churches, synagogues, temples, etc. regularly filled with people who think they need this unction. Some would say it is a very profitable business.

But it is all possible, as are scores of

Reviews for The Wicked Bible

[Ryan Hunter · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

There are no spaces between the words in the digital copy of this book which makes it impossible to read. disappointed.