The Bible: The Beginning, Middle and End

by sabastious 9 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • sabastious
    sabastious

    For the past year or so I have been trying to understand the Bible as the complete work it is said to be. Instead of scouring its pages, which I have seen many drift off into madness doing, I have tried to take steps back and examine the whole. My Jehovah’s Witness background gives me a good understanding of the Biblical narrative in general, even though I have rejected their doctrines. So I felt comfortable taking those steps backward.

    Instead of the conventional 66 books I look at the Bible as a Beginning, Middle and End. The Beginning is Creation and the story of Adam and Eve; the Middle is the story of Jesus’ Ministry and Death; the End is the Apocalyptic Vision and the New Heavens and Earth.

    In my studies I have concluded that the Bible contains intricate and profound information about the Human Brain and human behavior in general. Modern science has broken down the human brain into lateral hemispheres of which have been concluded to be in control of different elements of human activities, moods and behaviors.

    The Beginning of the Bible depicts the first humans being deceived by a serpent described as “the most cunning of all the animals in the Garden of Eden.” It always struck me as odd that the culture I grew up in believed wholeheartedly that this was a literal communicative exchange between human and beast.

    I did not feel comfortable continuing on what I believed to be false logic. So, I started toying with the idea of this story being representative of something else. It helped to say simple statements about the story out loud such as, “an animal misled a human into believing something that was not.” It seemed to hit me like a ton of bricks. That’s exactly the way psychological denial works within the brain with the emotional brain being “animalistic” or survival-based. Seemingly logical contradictions go through a reconciliation process within the brain of which many times manifest in the form of simple contradictory language such as, “I am in the true religion, therefore this information that contradicts it is false.”

    All of humanity can relate with this process because at some point, in all our lives, we have denied truth in some fashion. We all have a fatal flaw because our will to survive sometimes takes us over for selfish purposes even after we have evolved into sentient life forms. This flaw manifests on a small and a large scale.

    The Middle of the Bible contains great wisdom and is full of things ahead of it’s time. The profound thing about this part of the Bible is that it is a slice of real history. Whether or not the stories have been embellished over time doesn’t change that they were written from a confirmed time in history. The direct decedents of that day still live. These provide imperative logical anchors.

    The Middle is directly connected to the Beginning in that it depicts God’s answer to the debacle in the Garden of Eden. Instead of destroying a tainted species his love impelled him to fix them. The Middle of the Bible is the beginning of the restoration process he foretold in the Beginning of the Bible.

    The position posed in Genesis, and in Job, is, simply put, that humans are a lost cause. I look at God coming to earth as kind of a “if you want something done right, you got to do it yourself” kind of thing. A lot of actual time passes between the Beginning and the Middle of the Bible and that, to me, is evidence of God’s hope for mankind to redeem itself. God’s prophecy regarding mankind’s restoration involves “Eve’s seed” which is the pool of humanity. After giving sufficient time for the humans to put something together themselves, God took action.

    The only way to accomplish redeeming mankind without “cheating”, as God, was to live as a human without the past experiences of the cosmos. He accomplished this by some form of artificial insemination of himself to what is now deified as the Virgin Mary. For 30 years a human “clone” of God lived among us and did not allow his emotional brain to override his logical brain (lie), or sin. At the point of the clone’s baptism humankind was at least partially redeemed (Job did a lot too as a side note) because the question was answered of whether we are capable of it. He then transferred his memories into the clone by use of water as a divine energy conductor. He then was fully God again and began a 3 year ministry.

    The words written about his ministry are universally accepted as valid in some form by all of humanity even today. He truly was a perfect man and now he was God too and he was here to help humanity. Unfortunately his creation that had been allowed to fester for so long hated him because they were liars in their hearts and he was a perfect man making them look bad. God knew that his physical form would only last a single human lifespan. He knew that this human would have to come to an end at some point. So, instead of ruling as a temporary human king, the evil he allowed to exist brutally killed him and didn’t even blame them for it. This was an ultimate act of sacrifice and not something that was required in any way. He gave one of the best examples we have in human history of what true love means.

    The Bible depicts God making good friends while on the earth. It is written that he regarded his Apostles with great respect and love. What he was starting then would not ever end and is still going on today. I am not speaking about religion I am speaking about love. It’s been so long since those times and the stories have likely become historically unreliable, but even through all that shines the love of what actually happened all those years ago. We wouldn’t have the love today if God had not done what he had done. We owe it all to Him.

    The Middle of the Bible also contains God’s requirement for humanity. He asks that we feel remorse when we do sinful things and to actively avoid doing them. Even though were are technically broken what has been presented before us should give us enough to say sorry for what we cannot control.

    I believe God used some sort of energy transfer involving total submersion within an ocean connected body of water to give his “clone” his experiences and memories. Likewise God wants us to baptize ourselves in water symbolizing our yearning for purity. He also wants us to always remember what he did for us by means of a ritual involving wine and bread.

    The Middle of the Bible ends with God leaving humanity behind, with some instructions, for an unknown amount of time. He tells humanity that all can avail themselves to His newly created Covenant of Love. He also tells humanity that when he returns there will be both Good and Evil in the world, but it will look like evil is winning. He promises that when he returns he will reward Good and punish Evil before evil prevails.

    The End of the Bible depicts God exacting his vengeance upon the part of humanity that has taken a stand against Him and saves the rest from their evil hands. In the Middle of the Bible God didn’t blame his brutal murderers because humans then existed without a model to go off of. They were justifiably lost. Today, we have not only Jesus’ model but many others that have followed in his ways. There are no excuses to be a liar in this day, but yet that’s what most people are.

    Instead of the imagery of a cunning serpent the End of the Bible has a fire breathing Dragon. Again, I argue that this is continued allegory for the human brain. It could be said that the serpent grows into a Dragon throughout the Bible and that’s how the human psychopathic mind works. When the brain believes its own lies it becomes a powerful force of destruction. I believe the fire breathing Dragon, the father of the lie as it is referred to, is the Collective Mind of Evil.

    Without a purge of the people who make up this collective evil, the one’s giving Evil it’s power, they would envelope all that is holy and good upon the earth. Eventually, without a stop to this, evil will come to even my doorstep with intent on murdering or enslaving my family and I for some immediate need of their own. This is not part of the plan and will not happen on God’s watch.

    God deeply loves each and every one of his people and wishes all to enter the Covenant of Love, but all who choose not to enter it will perish. The ones who are not interested give power to a force of evil, they don’t even really know exists, for their own perceived survival. Many humans today have chosen to do things that go beyond ethical comprehension. Some of the most profound evil exists today on earth and it cannot sustain itself for much longer. That is why the End of the Bible is so gruesome, because the end of the story is just that.

    However the End of the Bible also contains the most beautiful language found within the whole book. After evil goes down with a brutal fight the Bible depicts a reconciliation of all that has been wronged following with peace and life everlasting. The Bible ends with all evil vanquished leaving behind a true utopian society, hand picked by God himself, where no one has to deal with the problems of the past. It says that all of humanity basks in the splendor of God and regard the former things to have “passed away.”

    As a whole the Bible is the most beautiful thing I have ever read and it pains me that so many don’t give it the credit it deserves. Even I, at certain points in my life, had a very negative view on it, but that was because I was being lied to for a very long time.

    -Sab

  • cofty
    cofty
    As a whole the Bible is the most beautiful thing I have ever read and it pains me that so many don’t give it the credit it deserves.

    You are over complicating it. There are moments of beauty among its 66 individual books - its a collection of disparate writings its not a book - but the general content is tedious, contradictory, unhistorical and thoroughly unethical.

    I say this as somebody who used to love it as you do but once the rose coloured glasses come off it really is an unpleasant document.

    Some of the most profound evil exists today on earth and it cannot sustain itself for much longer.

    Total nonsense, that is the watchtower speaking. The world has never been less violent, there has never been more reason for hope and optimism.

  • TheUbermensch
    TheUbermensch

    The Bible is the most beautiful thing you have ever read? Longfellow? Keats? Yeats? Shakespeare? Yeats? YEATS? Honestly, the Bible's beauty is very lacking when it comes to human poets throughout time. Capote? I've read movie monologues that were more beautiful than the Bible. Breakfast At Tiffany's, Scent of a Woman, Braveheart, Henry V (Shakespeare, but the movie was quite good), Good Will Hunting.

    What beauty does the Bible have? Old Testament is basically God fighting on the side of ONE nation of human beings against all the others, waging wars, massacring children (did you look over those horrible occurrences?), rules for how to discipline and treat your slaves, how to treat your women and children (rape is allowed by the way), and how to kill homosexuals and rebellious children.... beautiful? Satan and God making a bet on Job? I mean come on "Hey put him through misery, he won't worship you". And New Testament is the story of Jesus' adventures, and then a bunch of letters by bigoted, proud people who felt that since they knew Jesus they had the right to tell everyone else how to live. And then someone took too many hallucinogens and told us how the world was going to end. Where is the beauty in that? I mean if you honestly ARE looking at it as a whole and not ignoring the parts that aren't nice (most of it).

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento

    The bible must be take for hwo it was written ( the genre) by whom and for who.

    That these books were put together doesn't mean that the author(s) and editors of them thought that they woudl be part of a "greater whole".

    They didn't.

    But what we do see in the bible, IMO, is a progressive revelation and understanding of God and how God interacts with humans and how humans viewed God over a long period of time, cumulating (for Christians) in God being revealed fully in Christ.

    The bible to me is "God's words through Human words".

    I suggest:

    God's Word in Human Words: An Evangelical Appropriation of Critical Biblical Scholarship by Kenton L. Sparks ( Paperback - Mar 1, 2008)

  • PSacramento
    PSacramento

    While I wouldn't say that the world is the WORSE it's even been, the 20th century was a pretty bad one.

    In terms of "man-made" deaths ( Wars, casualties of wars, man-made famines and so forth) there were over 200 million deaths.

    And that's just in regards to wars.

    We have gotten very good at killing each other in the last 100 years.

  • OnTheWayOut
    OnTheWayOut

    I am 100% with Cofty on this. Ditto that.

    Even people who have come out of a bad situation, like the Watchtower cult, might still try to view the Bible as the apologists have explained it. If enough people SAY there is harmony within the books of the Bible and a message for mankind, others go along.

    The creation account is not a better writing than many other creation accounts from other sources. People have just convinced themselves that it is. There is some wisdom in the writings, but I wouldn't elevate the entire Bible because of that.

  • sabastious
    sabastious

    The evil of today goes far beyond "total deaths." I cannot step onto any street without being in close proximity to profoundly long tenured lies. It could easily be said that there has never has there been so many lies on this planet at one time that there are right now.

    We live in a world of profound denial. The Bible doesn't speak of "Satan the Devil" being the father of the murderers or the father of the adulterers...

    -Sab

  • unshackled
    unshackled

    Seeing the world with 'doom and gloom' goggles is a byproduct of JW indoctrination. I'm with cofty on this one, things are not getting worse.

    As for the Bible, I still find it agonizing to try and read it. Proverbs is borderline bearable, but even at that, Dr. Phil could have written it.

  • EntirelyPossible
    EntirelyPossible

    The evil of today goes far beyond "total deaths."

    Agreed, a more accurate representation would be as a percentage of population. Using that metric, it's not too shabby.

    I cannot step onto any street without being in close proximity to profoundly long tenured lies.

    No different that it's always been.

    It could easily be said that there has never has there been so many lies on this planet at one time that there are right now.

    It's another thing to measure that so you know it's true. It's easy to say ANYTHING.

    We live in a world of profound denial.

    I know. People constantly want to deny the improvements in the last century and proclaim how much worse the world it. Denial, it ain't just a river in Egypt.

  • vientotz
    vientotz

    the end is near! -say JWs XD

    i believe in them! XDD jk.

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