Chapter III Verse X - The Greatest Story Never Told

I like to talk about God. I like to talk about religion. I don’t so much like to talk about the Bible. I should like to talk about it because I like talking about things that people can relate to. But while many people have heard of the Bible and will shout from the top of a mountain that it is the holy word of God, I have met few people that have read it. That leaves me a little. . . confused.

If someone tells you that they believe God wrote a book and that they live their life according to the rules and guidelines of that book I think it’s reasonable to expect them to have read the thing. Apparently I’m alone in this opinion.

If I believed that God wrote a book with all the information I would ever need I would read the thing cover to cover. At least twice. But I don’t think God wrote the Bible. I’m not sure he got a copy of the rough draft. I do believe the Bible includes many philosophies and concepts which one could call divine, holy and/or Godly. But to me, these are swallowed up by the ignorance it promotes.

I don’t want to focus on the historical reasons that make me uncomfortable with the Bible because there is too much to cover and I don’t get enough feedback to justify that kind of research yet. What I want to do is make you think.

If I told you that I had a book that proved aliens had landed what are some of the first questions you might ask? Let me guess a few:

1. Who wrote it?
2. Where did you get it?
3. How do you know it’s real?
4. What does it say?

I think that’s a good start. So how about asking those questions about that most sacred of books?

1. Who wrote it? And since the Bible is a collection of books, who wrote those books and who did the collecting?
2. Where did you get it from? Did it appear on the floor after Jesus rose up on his cloud? If not, who wrote the first version?
3. How do you know it’s real? If I told you I knew my alien book was real because my priest/mother/uncle/friend said so you would tell me that me and my priest/mother/uncle/friend are C/R/A/Z/Y.
4. What does it say? Seems like the easy one, huh? Of course since most people have never read it they don’t know. They know what their pastor tells them though.

I think the reason many of us love the Bible is because it’s easier to love a book than it is to love God. God is such a big concept, either we envision him as some Santa-Claus-on-a-cloud figure or an invisible spirit in the universe. But a book is different. We can see a book. We can touch a book. Hell, maybe we can even read it. We can say we love that book and someone else will know exactly what we are talking about.

Maybe it's because it’s just so much easier to say, “I believe in the Bible” than it is to say, “I believe that God is bigger than I will ever understand so I’m going to spend my whole life asking questions and exploring this beautiful universe; never assuming I know it all, never stopping my quest for the truth, never being afraid to hear new ideas that might expand my knowledge and my capacity to live as God intended”.

- Dsus Pays