Everything You Know About God Is WRONG

[zengrifter]

..more - http://www.mindpollen.com/giw.htm

[zengrifter]

Looks like a good anthology. zg

[zengrifter]

The Real Jesus Of The Bible:
An 'Everything You Know About God Is Wrong' Excerpt

posted by alex
on Sep 17, 2007 - 09:36 AM

The following is a small portion of the late Ruth Hurmence Green's "The God From Galilee," one of 41 articles in Disinfo's new anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick. Other contributors include Richard Dawkins, Neil Gaiman, Douglas Rushkoff, and H.G. Wells. (More info and Disinfo blog discussion)

In this 25-page article, this archetypal gray-haired granny simply reads the New Testament - particularly the Gospels - and reports what she finds about Jesus: his insults and angry words, his deceptions, his impatience, his contradictions, his hellfire and damnation preaching, his braggadocio, his purposely confusing parables, his refusal to heal a little Gentile girl, his failure to condemn slavery, his horrible treatment of his own family, etc., etc. The results will be shocking to most Christians, and even non-Christians will be stunned to learn that everything they knew about Jesus is wrong. Here are some tasty bits from this epic article:

...more - http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle20475.html

[zengrifter]

Another excerpt -

Confession Is Good for the Pole
Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned
by Stephen Haliczer
Oxford University Press, 1996

One of the most common themes of pornography in the 1700s and 1800s featured male Catholic clergy getting it on with parishioners and nuns, sometimes in church, even in the confessional itself. To this day, this is looked upon as a blasphemous outrage, anti-Catholicism at its most scurrilous. But the cold truth is that sexual acts between confessors and their penitents - sometimes during the sacrament of confession - was far from an uncommon occurrence. The Catholic Church's own records prove this.

Despite the existence of this proof, scholars have studiously ignored or underplayed it. Henry Charles Lea's monumental A History of the Spanish Inquisition - four volumes long - has one brief chapter on the topic, and that was published over 100 years ago. That’s pretty much the best coverage the topic had received. That is, until Stephen Haliczer - a Distinguished Research Professor at Northern Illinois University and one of the world's leading Inquisition experts - broke the silence. His book on the subject, Sexuality in the Confessional, has escaped mainstream notice, and no wonder. It wasn't meant for the general public. Published by Oxford University Press only as a $75 hardcover (for 208 pages of text), you won't find it in your local bookstore, and it's not even likely to make an appearance at public libraries. It's aimed squarely at university libraries, where scholars and grad students are the most likely to read about these proceedings of the Inquisition.

You see, the Inquisition wasn't concerned solely with witches, Jews, and other heretics; it also went after priests who acted inappropriately with the people who came to them for the cleansing of their sins. Since confession is one of the bedrocks of the Church, the leaders rightly assumed that priests propositioning, groping, and even screwing their penitents would cause a loss of moral authority in the eyes of the people. The situation was sometimes so bad that husbands forbade their wives from going to confession in order to avoid lecherous men of the cloth.

MORE- http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle20497.html

[zengrifter]

And another -

-----------------
The Failure Of Jesus Of Nazareth

posted by alex
on Sep 21, 2007 - 04:21 AM

The following is a small portion of H.G. Wells' "The Failure of Jesus of Nazareth," one of 41 articles in Disinfo's new anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick.

Wells is best-known for his proto-science fiction works from the 1890s, including The Time Machine, War of the Worlds, and The Invisible Man, but his next-to-last book was partially about his dreams, including a dream he supposedly had about meeting Jesus. Here's the first bit of it:

-----------------

The companion I find most congenial in the Be¬yond is Jesus of Nazareth. Like everything in Dreamland he fluctuates, but beyond the Happy Turning his personality is at least as distinct as my own. His scorn and contempt for Christianity go beyond my extremest vocabulary. He was, I be¬lieve, the putative son of a certain carpenter, Joseph, but Josephus says his actual father was a Roman soldier named Pantherus. If so, Jesus did not know it.

He began his career as a good illiterate patriotic Jew in indignant revolt against the Roman rule and the Quisling priests who cringed to it. He took up his self-appointed mission under the influence of John the Baptist, who was making trouble for both the Tetrarch in Galilee and the Roman Procurator in Jerusalem. John was an uncompromising Puri¬tan, and the first thing his disciples had to do, was to get soundly baptised in Jordan. Then he seemed to run out of ideas. After their first encounter John and Jesus went their different ways. There was little discipleship in Jesus.

He played an inconspicuous role in the Salome affair, and he assures me he never baptized anybody. But he was brooding on the Jewish situation, which he felt needed more than moral denunciation and water. He decided to get together a band of followers and march on Jerusalem. Where, as the Gospel witnesses tell very convincingly, with such contradictions as are natural to men writing about it all many years later, the sacred Jewish priests did their best to obliterate him. He learnt much as he went on. He seems to have said some good things and had others imputed to him. He became a sort of Essene Joe Miller. He learnt and changed as he went on.

Gods! how he hated priests, and how he hates them now! And Paul! "Fathering all this nonsense about being 'The Christ' on me of all people! Christian! He started that at Antioch. I never had the chance of a straight talk to him. I wish I could come upon him some time. But he never seems to be here. . . . There are a few things I could say to him," said Jesus reflectively, and added, "Plain things. . . ."

XXX end of excerpt

[zengrifter]

And another -

----------------
Who Wrote The Gospels?
(Excerpt from 'Everything You Know About God Is Wrong')

posted @ disinfo.com by alex
on Sep 25, 2007 - 04:01 AM

The following is a small portion of Gary Greenberg's "Who Wrote the Gospels?: (Hint: It Wasn't Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John)," one of 41 articles in Disinfo’s new anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick.

In his article, Greenberg looks at each of the four canonical Gospels (which were all written anonymously), demonstrating that there is no evidence that they were written by the men whose names have become attached to them. Here is the beginning of the intro:

-----------

Asking "who wrote the Gospels?" may seem like a strange question. Pick up any New Testament and it will tell you at the beginning of each Gospel who the author was. There we find, in order of appearance, the attribution of these Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all of whom were elevated to sainthood. Church tradition also tells us that Matthew and John were two of the Twelve Apostles, Mark was a secretary to the Apostle Peter when he preached in Rome, and Luke was a companion of the Apostle Paul. (Paul was not one of the Twelve Apostles, nor was he a companion of Jesus during his lifetime.)

All in all, this Church tradition boasts quite a stellar cast of writers with a good claim to a reasonable amount of historical credibility, authors who were either eyewitnesses or intimate with eyewitnesses to the mission of Jesus and its aftermath. Unfortunately, all of this information is almost certainly wrong.

Each of the four Gospels was written anonymously. No author’s name appears on any of the earliest partial or full copies of these texts (through at least the fifth century), and none of the authors give any personal information about themselves. The Gospel of Matthew, for example, refers to the Apostle Matthew in the third person, giving no evidence that the author and the Apostle were the same person.

The Gospel of John, at 21:24, a passage that many scholars consider to be an addition to the Gospel added later by a different author, claims as a source for the Gospel someone known as the "Beloved Disciple" but does not say who this person was. Elsewhere in the text we find several references to the acts of the Beloved Disciple, but nowhere does the author of the Gospel of John give any hint that he and the Beloved Disciple were one and the same person. While the Gospel of John clearly distinguishes between Peter and the Beloved Disciple, and obviously rejects any connection between Judas Iscariot and the Beloved Disciple, it doesn’t give us any direct evidence as to which of the Apostles or other disciples of Jesus we can identify with this revered individual.

If any of the Twelve Apostles or one of their close associates had written a report about the activities of Jesus, one would expect such a work to have become an instant classic in Christian circles, widely copied, distributed, and cited, and the author frequently mentioned by name by other Christian writers (even if that disciple's name didn't appear in the text). Yet, on the basis of writings from the first four centuries of Christianity, it appears that until the last years of the second century, Christian scholars had no idea who wrote the New Testament Gospels. It is only at this later stage that some Christian scholars began to associate these four Gospels with the traditional identifications of the authors. But those who made these identifications either utilized unreliable sources or simply asserted that the identification was correct without any evidence to support the allegation.

Prior to that time, Christian writers appear to have thought of these four Gospels generically as the "memoirs" of the Apostles, without any specific attribution, and identified them by characteristics of the text, such as "the Gospels with the genealogies" (i.e., Matthew and Luke).

[NOTE: Greenberg's many footnotes are available in the printed version.]

[moo321]

The claims of that last article simply aren't true. We have abundant letters from the early church supporting apostolic authorship of the Gospels. We have manuscripts, some from the beginning of the second century.

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by moo321

The claims of that last article simply aren't true. We have abundant letters from the early church supporting apostolic authorship of the Gospels. We have manuscripts, some from the beginning of the second century.

How do you know or presume that these are reliable? What if everything you have been taught is wrong? zg

[moo321]

Originally Posted by zengrifter

How do you know or presume that these are reliable? What if everything you have been taught is wrong? zg

That's possible. However, I think it's highly unlikely. There are several different things that convinced me that the Bible was reliable.

First was the abundance of manuscript evidence. In comparison to any other ancient document, the Bible has several times as many copies as even well supported documents, and the copies begin to appear very early (within 2 generations), much earlier than any many other documents that are considered reliable. There is also a wealth of support in the form of quotations in the letters of the early church. We can reproduce 95% of the text of the New Testament just from quotations alone. It would have been very difficult to forge/ modify.

Second, the Bible agrees with what we know of ancient history, through both ancient writers and archaelogy. It allows itself to be falsified by placing the stories it tells at specific times, with specific people in specific cultures. Many religious treatises don't do this; they simply tell you things about God, or spirituality. If the Bible claimed a story took place before a city was built, or after a main character died, etc. it would be falsified. The book of Mormon is the only similar text I can think of, but it's clearly false. It's full of errors, and names cities and people that clearly never existed. Apologies to any Mormons I may offend.

Thirdly, the Bible predicted the future decades and even centuries before it occurred. The predictions are specific (unlike many of Nostradamus' predictions) and well outside of anything that a human could predict through simply looking at cause and effect. There are literally hundreds of prophecies about the Messiah, such as where he would be born, that he would be betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, that he would die by being pierced, etc. The book of Daniel predicts the rise and fall of major empires, and even the exact year the Messiah would be born. No man could do this by mortal means.

Lastly, I've seen God work in people today so many times, through the Bible, that it would be ridiculous for me to chalk it up to coincidence. I've known people who stopped severe alcohol, drug, and sex addictions. I've known people that were total jerks that learned to be loving and kind. The Bible has taught me how marriage really should be, and I've seen it save marriages of my friends. If you don't think the Bible is true, you should see the results it has produced in some of the people I know.

All of that said, I retain an open mind, and am open to falsification. If new evidence popped up showing that the Bible was completely unreliable, I would re-consider my decision. Are you open to the possibility that the Bible is true? Would you be willing to accept that Jesus died for your sins, and you need him, if it could be reliably shown that this was the truth?

[zengrifter]

Originally Posted by moo321

That's possible. However, I think it's highly unlikely. There are several different things that convinced me that the Bible was reliable. First was the abundance of manuscript evidence. In comparison to any other ancient document, the Bible has several times as many copies as even well supported documents, and the copies begin to appear very early (within 2 generations)....

This is EXACTLY what Greenberg (above) is addressing -

If any of the Twelve Apostles or one of their close associates had written a report about the activities of Jesus, one would expect such a work to have become an instant classic in Christian circles, widely copied, distributed, and cited, and the author frequently mentioned by name by other Christian writers (even if that disciple's name didn't appear in the text). Yet, on the basis of writings from the first four centuries of Christianity, it appears that until the last years of the second century, Christian scholars had no idea who wrote the New Testament Gospels. It is only at this later stage that some Christian scholars began to associate these four Gospels with the traditional identifications of the authors. But those who made these identifications either utilized unreliable sources or simply asserted that the identification was correct without any evidence to support the allegation. http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle20532.html

Lastly, I've seen God work in people today so many times, through the Bible, that it would be ridiculous for me to chalk it up to coincidence. I've known people who stopped severe alcohol, drug, and sex addictions. I've known people that were total jerks that learned to be loving and kind. The Bible has taught me how marriage really should be, and I've seen it save marriages of my friends. If you don't think the Bible is true, you should see the results it has produced in some of the people I know.

People's ability to change and grow validates the power of Spirit, Soul, or God and not that the Bible or Jesus story is true in a fundamentally meaningful sense. Notwithstanding, people who simply 'improve' without real understanding of themselves and Real God as being non-seperate are not really growing in Spirit - they may be growing only in myth and delusion.

Are you open to the possibility that the Bible is true? Would you be willing to accept that Jesus died for your sins, and you need him, if it could be reliably shown that this was the truth?

The IF part makes the entire question trick, so my answer is no. zg