Bible Reading Leading to More Doubt Than Faith... :(

by jeanniebeanz 32 Replies latest watchtower bible

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  jeanniebeanz

  Ok, it?s taken me longer to get my thoughts together on this than I expected, but here is the reason that I have come to have doubts in the divine nature of the Bible; its failure to show that the God it describes is abiding by "His" own standards.

  For example, according to 2 Peter 1:20, the entire Bible is inspired of God. The main attributes of "God" are that "He" is love (1 John 4:8), "He" is just (Deuteronomy 32:4), and "He" has all of the power (Revelation 7:12).

  With that in mind, my first problem with the Bibles authenticity is that this ?loving God? has;

  Murdered the entire world of men at one point in history by drowning them

  Punished billions of people because "His" first human son ate a piece of fruit

  Ordered "His" people to butcher the entire inhabitants (save a very few) of Canaan

  And wrought havoc and destruction whenever anyone crossed "Him" in spite of creating man with free will.

  Number two, that God is just. For millennia mankind has tried to figure out what "His" word has instructed us to do in order to please "His" well. Great atrocities have been committed in "His" name when a few zealots who claim to have figured out what "He" wants of us have forced their interpretation on the many. I look at the massacres of the Arab peoples in the middle age crusades, which were fought at the behest of ?the church?. Look also at the role of "Gods followers" in the brutally enforced conversions of the Native American peoples. More recently, I look at the role that "the church" played in ignoring the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the Jews not only in Germany but also in Poland and Russia as well as in other countries. These were all countries where "the church" had a lot of power and could have made a big difference by actively speaking out against what was going on. No thinking person could say that a just God who was full of love and had the power to make a difference would stand by and do nothing. The just thing to do is to clearly spell out what you want from your children in the beginning so that these religious zealots cannot come along and claim to be a sole channel of understanding because everyone would understand for themselves and not be led astray.

  Number three is the all-powerful nature of the God of the Bible. Being all-powerful, God would have had the power to put things right in the garden right off the bat. If "He" were all-powerful "He" would have done so. The fact that "He" didn?t says to me that the Bible is lying about "His" ability to handle problems that come up, or that the original creation was flawed from the get-go. If the original creation was flawed then it is unspeakably unjust to punish the creation for the mistake of the Creator.

  These are the thoughts that are emerging as I read the Bible and frankly, they disturb me. This is my first real attempt at reading the Bible itself and having it stand alone without the bible study aids and I am pretty demoralized.

  What are your thoughts?

  Jeannie
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  missy04

  I am feeling the same way lately Jeannie...it really bothers me because my whole life I tried my hardest to try and please God and now I don't know if it would be a waste or not.

  I don't know whether it's right or wrong but I feel that way also.

  ((((((((((hugs)))))))))))) to you

  ~Sarah
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  Pistoff

  My first response is that the OT is the account of a group of people who were searching for God and spirituality, and viewed all of their history from this prism.

  When something bad happened, God was punishing them; when things went well, He was blessing them.

  Look at last week's WT lesson: Lot offers his daughters, a repulsive thing to do. The WT spin, and possibly the ancient Jews too, was that it was not wrong and that God blessed the effort by the angels saving everyone involved. Peter called Lot a righteous man, so he must not have been wrong; that is the WT line.

  The reality is that it was a mistake Lot made, albeit one that came from their culture of valuing men more than women. It did not end well in another instance, though; in Judges another example of offering women to abuse instead of the man resulted in the concubine being raped to death. (God evidently chose not to save her, by the reasoning of the WT and maybe the ancient Jews.)

  When I read accounts in the OT now, I can recognize the lens that is being used by the writer to frame all events as being somehow God's blessing or punishment.

  At first this depressed me; now it is a relief. I believe God is love, but that vengeful God of the OT is inconsistent with the life and teachings of Jesus; he after said that if we see him, we also see God. So I am pretty sure that Jesus' teachings reflect God's thinking too.

  And it is helpful to view all of the old accounts when I realize that the Jews were just trying to believe, like some today, that God intervenes in all of our affairs.
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  Satanus

  My sympathies to you, jeannie. I passed down this road at one time as well.

  Yhwh is a conflicted god created by barbaric jews in their own image. The bible is put together from stories and philosophies which the jews collected from their nieghbors: the egyptians, the zerostrians, the babylonians, the caananites, and they had some of their own ancestral stories as well. It has been fairly well redacted to remove most of the conflicts, but, as you noted, there are still quite a few.

  Most people who accept the bible as of divine origin, use the large blindfold of faith in order to overlook the problems. Others like achristian create a whole extra universe in order to harmonise the bible. Others divide the bible into literal for the more sensible parts, and push the nonsense into a class that they call allegory.

  S
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  Qcmbr

  I can understand why you feel the way you do I have some things from my viewpoint that may or may not help: 1/ We are children of God and he wants us to be like him. (Be ye perfect) 2/ This earth was made for us to have experiences we couldn't have anywhere else - ie mortality and complete free will (free will limited in Heaven - rebel and end up cast out ie little margin for learning from mistakes) 3/ For this plan to work death (spiritual - seperation from God and physical - death of a perfect body) must be introduced into the world - (God cannot do it himself because the choice must be made to leave God and choose complete free will.) 4/ One man introduces death into the world so one man, Jesus, can make an atonement. 5/ To make the plan work God must not step in every time otherwise free will just went out the window. 6/ Everyone who comes to earth chooses to come here and accept the challenges and trials - anyone who doesn't want it can leave before they arrive and not bother with the body and death and destruction thing. 7/ We must be tempted in order to allow us to make choices. 8/ Bad decisions hurt people and often kill people ( so crusades where never sanctioned by God or the Bible.) 9/ Bad decisions must be allowed even if they hurt the innocent so that justice can be answered. Those who suffer are recompensed (how I don't know) in the next life. Those who do the hurting must pay the price and in most cases can recieve forgiveness from God via atonement. 10/ The Flood destroyed the wicked which means that children were not being born into wickedness (ie an unfair chance for the little ones) - we have no real idea of what they were doing pre flood. 11/ Destructions in the bible are rarely done without warning (like the Egyptians) - it is possible (absolute speculation) that prophets warned the peoples of the land of Palestine / Israel to leave ,join the Israelites etc.. the destruction of those peoples is not our story we don't know all the details and why it might have been a merciful thing for them (I can't defend what I don't have facts on!) 12/ Jesus went through everything and descended below all men , suffered for the sins of the world so that we wouldn't have to pay the spiritual price for our sins (so painful that he bled at every pore) 13 In the eternities we will look back on this life as a learning experience of unimaginable depth and we will guard those memories and experiences as we paid the price for them they define us and give us our comparision between good and evil. Just as the Garden of Eden couldn't teach us much as there was no comparison so living in Paradise will be just that since we know the alternative.
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  El blanko

  These are the thoughts that are emerging as I read the Bible and frankly, they disturb me. This is my first real attempt at reading the Bible itself and having it stand alone without the bible study aids and I am pretty demoralized.

  It's tough isn't it and personally, I know where you are coming from.

  I haven't dismissed the Bible entirely and really hope that Jesus is as the Bible writers describe, and will come back and sort out the mess I believe we are collectively in as a planet.

  But, I am in a similar situation myself at the moment.

  I'm not too bothered though, it's all part of my journey and I'm happy(ish) to sit within the chaos of my thoughts and see what transpires.
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  gaiagirl

  The Bible makes a lot more sense if you read it with the idea that it is NOT inspired, but rather the writings of people who were trying to justify what they had already done. Every nation needs their own cultural mythology (think about the U.S., Pilgrims and Thanksgiving, George Washington and the cherry tree, Paul Bunyan and his blue ox, Pecos Bill, etc. These are all legends, stories which have changed and grown over time. The Bible writers collected some stories from existing middle eastern mythology (the creation account and the flood), modified them to suit their specific audience, (the young nation of Israel), and added a lot of new material regarding origins in Egypt, conquest of Canaan, (which may have some kernel of truth surrounded by lots of myhological details), which kept growing over several hundred years, eventually becoming a large body of literature. Much later, in the 4th century A.D., selection was made regarding which books to include as part of the official Bible canon. As such, the Bible is no more "inspired" than, say, Hamiltons "Mythology", which collects the myths of the Greek and Roman cultures.
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  jula71

  The Bible makes a lot more sense if you read it with the idea that it is NOT inspired, but rather the writings of people who were trying to justify what they had already done.

  Excellent point, that the same feeling I have when I read certain verse in the Hebrew scriptures. It is much easier to kill when the people believe you have been ordered to by God.
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  rebel8

  You are right; the Bible does not support the theory that there is one diety who is all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing. My concept of the Bible is as other posters have said; it is an historical book, but not inspired by the Christian concept of a diety. If you ever get a chance to take a college course on basic philosophy, it will expand upon this concept.

  Even if we think some of the Bible is inspired by God, how do we know we're seeing it as it was intended? What about the 100s of books removed from the Bible (not included in the Bible) at the Council of Trent and never replaced? The New Testament was largely written by people who didn't witness the events first hand--what does that say for accuracy? If these events really took place, wouldn't it make sense that at least some people who saw them would take the time to write about them?

  When you think about it, IMO, all we're left with is a universe that suggests intelligent design. The rest we really don't know about at all.
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  bikerchic

  jeanniebeanz said:

  These are the thoughts that are emerging as I read the Bible and frankly, they disturb me. This is my first real attempt at reading the Bible itself and having it stand alone without the bible study aids and I am pretty demoralized.

  What are your thoughts?

  Jeannie

  I too had these unsettling thoughts until I started examining the Bible from the angle of who, what, why and when it was written. Something that helped me was looking at this material:

  

  http://lightworksav.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2315

  After viewing these tapes I was finally able to put aside the Bible as being inspired from God. Widen your search about the Bible there is a lot of material out there and it will help you more if you look outside the Bible to find out about the Bible. Hope this helps you as much as it helped me.