The Deceiving Scriptures

By Mario Jaramillo

Most of the people who proclaim to be Christians havent really read the Bible, at least not in its totality. The few sections that most ordinary people have actually thumbed through are those passages that are pointed out to them by priests and preachers during the deliberation of their sermons at Mass time. Even then, most people just read a smaller section and prefer just to listen to it as its read out loud to them. They listen in fascination as the priest reads passages of the Bible, adding intonation to highlight certain events, demonstrating great knowledge of its content and an impressive storytelling ability. This ability developed over the years and harnessed even further with every sermon given. Some people like to close their eyes and listen in amazement, transporting themselves in their minds back in time some thousand years and more. They imagine the Roman soldiers with their swords and spears and the Jews and Egyptians with their robes and leather sandals. They envision Adam and Eve in paradise or the great Solomon as he commanded his army or Moses as he led his people across the Red Sea into the Promised Land. They have done this throughout the years as they submissively attend Sunday Mass. So submissive has been peoples attendance that it appears as if they were mentally wired to do so, and they keep on doing it with discipline, listening over and over to the priests as they read out loud the same stories, the same passages, and most importantly, as he gives them the same interpretation. And many of them, after so many years of listening, still remain uninterested to read the Bible from start to finish. Many Sunday attendees do not even bother to read the same passage addressed during Mass just to verify that what was presented is correct within the content of the entire biblical section. The question thus remains, Why is it that so many so-called Christians do not read the Bible? After solemnly attending Mass week after week, year after year? Arent they interested at least one flyspeck in reading a complete chapter? Read it from beginning to end and to reason and arrive at their own interpretation? Particularly given the fact that the Bible was supposedly dictated to those who wrote it by God himself?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493163656

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II. THE OLD TESTAMENT

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According to astrophysicists, the universe was initiated with a big explosion of concentrated hydrogen some 15 billion years ago. Since then, billions of galaxies have been formed; some of them have already been detected by humans through the use of modern optic and electronic telescopes located in the terrestrial surface and those placed in orbit. Each galaxy contains billions of stars, nebulae, and other celestial bodies separated by distances that can only be described in terms of light-years, that is, the distance that light travels in a year at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometers per second. In order to have an idea of what distance one year represents, consider that light takes only eight minutes in reaching Earth coming from the sun, traveling a span of 150 million kilometers. Given such unimaginable size of the universe, it is not very intelligent to believe that the sun is the only star with a planetary system. From the mathematical and probabilistic point of view, the possibility that the sun is the only star that has planets, between quadrillions of stars, is practically null. So is the belief that our sun is the center of the universe. The great astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the year sixteen hundred for challenging this belief. There are, without doubt, many planets like ours some place in the universe, and it is also probable that many may be inhabited by intelligent beings, perhaps more intelligent than humans. If such communication has not been achieved until now, it is due to the colossal distances that separate the stars, where the nearest one to the earth is four light-years away.

The earth began to form around 5 billion years after the big explosion that created the universe, and some 20 million years ago, a branch of apes, related to the gorilla and the chimpanzee, evolved very slowly toward what is today the human species. A series of intermediate species, the hominids or humanoids, walked leaning on their hands like the big apes, but less and less, until two million years ago, they became the Homo erectus, the erect man, who was able to walk and run using only two legs. Such was the beginning of the human species. However, still this one needed a million and eight hundred thousand years more of evolution to become the cavemen who two hundred thousand years ago colonized all of Africa and the neighboring continents.

All this has been perfectly established and proven by astronomy, astrophysics, chemistry, geology, biology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, and all the sciences, along centuries of study and discipline, in spite of the obstacles and the racket of protests and sought rebuttals posed by religions in vain attempts to stop the advance of science and to perpetuate their ridiculous myths and legends. According to the Bible, God is infinitely wise and knows everything about the past and the future; thus, a synthesis like this one, in little more than one page, is what a goat shepherd of the Sinai desert should have written four thousand years ago if indeed a god called Jehovah had dictated it to him instead of coming up with the ridiculous and infantile story that is the fable of Creation in just six days.

III. GENESIS

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The first book of the Bible relates the Jewish myth of the creation of the world, the disobedience of the first couple in paradise, the sentence that God pronounced for their sin, and the feats of the first patriarchs up until Judah, the son of Jacob. In the process of relating these important events of great magnitude, God is described as being immature, insecure, aggressive, commanding, and having fits of bad temper and real tantrums all the time. This book represents a very poor attempt by a tribe of goat shepherds who roamed the desert some four thousand years ago to explain the origin of all things, just as it was done many years before them within much older religions.

Not only are the passages included in Genesis quite infantile, as it would be expected from an illiterate tribe of shepherds, but they are also quite incongruent. It says that in first place, during the first three days, God created the sky, the earth and light, then the seas and plants. But not until the fourth day did he come to create the sun, the moon, and the stars, and with the sun, the day and the night. Then how is it possible that the morning and the evening were defined in the first three days if the sun didn’t exist yet?

In addition, Genesis states that the moon is larger than the stars. We all know by now that this is completely wrong. But obviously, it is because the author didn’t know that the stars are bigger than the moon, and if they look smaller, it is only because of the greater distance that separates them from the earth in comparison to the moon.

How is it possible that a god who knows everything could have dictated, or inspired, such a ridiculously simplistic story to the man who wrote Genesis? One might say that it was an appropriate story for the minute and primitive knowledge that the Jewish people had then. But did God not preview the development of science so that he could dictate to Moses something a little bit closer to the truth even though at the time no one could understand it? This way, for the past few centuries, the Almighty, as well as Moses, could have spared the embarrassment in which they find themselves at the present time.

But he certainly didn’t know it, because the so-called Jehovah is as mythological and nonexistent as Jupiter, Ammon, Vishnu, Osiris, Quetzalcoatl, Bochica, or any of thousands of gods that in all the countries, times, and cultures were invented by the sorcerers and priests who created religions.

A comparison between the main myths of other religions and those in the Bible (origin of the world, creation of living beings and man, commandments, and initial laws and rites), and still the supposedly legendary characters with their own names and the adventures of the same, reveals that they were taken from the writings, traditions, and history of older cultures and religions prior to the formation of the first Jewish tribes. They were copied either with very little modification or verbatim from Hindustani, Persian, Chaldean, Egyptian, and Greek scriptures.

In Genesis 2:21 and 2:22, the book describes how God caused a deep sleep on Adam, and while he was asleep, he took out one rib to build it up into a woman. This story has been one enjoyed by many as children, and perhaps, some still find it amusing as grown-ups. Yet when you come to think about it, it does sound kind of silly that the very same person that created all the animals and Adam a few days earlier applied such a strange technique to create a partner for Adam. Could one then deduct that God used the similar approach to create the cow? From a rib removed from the bull? Or the she-ass from the donkey’s rib? Because then, how did he solve the problem of the female crab if the male crab has no ribs? It is also a wonder if the Lord knew that phanerogamous plants have male and female genders. Because the truth is that none of this is mentioned in the Bible, and it probably should have been included. It is hard to believe that God, the creator of the vast interstellar space, will go around removing ribs from millions of male species in order to create a female version of them.

But perhaps, one of the most ridiculous, if not humorous, accounts included in Genesis is that of God’s wrath against the snake who talked Eve into eating fruits from the forbidden apple tree. In Genesis 3:14, God curses the snake above all cattle and beasts of the field and sentences it to crawl on its chest and to eat dirt all the days of its life. God must have been very angry to bestow such a curse. But why have such a tantrum if he was the one who chose the poor snake among all the creatures in paradise to reel Eve into trying an apple? But supposing that the snake deserved to be punished, why did the All-Wise sentence it to crawl on its chest as if that were a great misfortune for a snake? One wonders then how the snakes were moving around before the curse. And what kind of justice is that if he also applied that penalty to the crocodiles and turtles, which had done nothing wrong? And why is it so important for an animal to walk one way or another?

To top it all, the snake is sentenced to eat soil forever. It appears that the snakes have been laughing at that part of the sentence through time since they feed themselves from