PART III
The BIGGEST Lie
Have we ALL been duped?
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The BIGGEST Lie
The United States of America was established as a bastion of freedom in part by those wishing to exercise freely their religious faith. Those seeking religious freedom had come here based on a belief in their god, and worked to secure a new nation free from the religious oversight of any king. After winning that freedom from one such king, they wrote a constitution to govern their own new nation.
But as they wrote that new constitution, they ignored the promises they had made to the people about certain “unalienable rights” they had said were granted to all men by their god, and instead wrote a document that never mentioned his name.
In other words, they ignored the god that most of the people believed in. While they had written a grand plan, they left out the One who the people believed had guided them to this continent and carried them through the Revolution. While many of the Founders actually believed in this same god, they wrote their new constitution in a way that would keep Him out of their government.
They wrote it as if God didn’t exist.
What if that god himself didn’t exist? What if the Bible — the foundation of the Jewish and Christian faiths, and a leading factor in the creation of the United States — was simply a series of fictional stories told over time, and used to control others?
What if there is no god to believe in? What if it was all a lie that we built our nation, and in fact, our very lives on?
Thesis
America was founded on this god and his book, the Bible, by white Europeans who came here, at least in part, to practice their faith freely. They held close their book of faith — the Bible — known to the followers of this faith as the inerrant word of God.
Is the Bible perfect as it is suggested by the followers of this faith? Are there flaws and contradictions in this collection of holy books? Or is the Bible something entirely different than what we think it is?
My thesis is direct: the Bible is not the inerrant word of God, but is a collection of stories and myths the founders of both the Jewish and Christian faiths recycled from earlier, mystery religions to capture the minds and hearts of their followers, and to provide a strong foundation for the establishment of their religions under the headship of Roman emperors. By bringing all the gods of the past together under the authority of one god, it was their goal to align their church — specifically the new faith of Christianity — with the power of Rome, providing not only protection for their faith, but also permitting for its vast expansion along with the empire. To support Rome, church leaders sought to hide or destroy all evidence that would connect their faith to past religions, through harassment, pressure, excommunication, murder, and even war.
Nothing says love your God quite like silencing all His enemies.
Let us examine this book, its god, and the stories that lie within it.
The God, the Garden, and the Man
After the story of creation, the Bible tells the story of Man: how he was brought into being; how he was given a partner; and how he sinned — the Fall — and how he was cast out of the presence of God.
But is this story to be believed?
Who can believe that a God who is all knowing would plant a forbidden tree in the middle of his garden, then tell his followers to not eat from it — knowing that they would?
Who can believe that an always present God wasn’t aware that his followers were in danger, and were being tempted by a serpent? Who can believe this omnipresent God had to ask the man, “Where are you?”
Who can believe that a God that is all powerful couldn’t provide the most basic security for his followers in that garden, allowing a forbidden serpent to slither in and then tempt his people? Yet, as soon as he banished his own followers from the garden he failed to protect, this God posted an armed guard outside the garden to prevent anyone from entering.
For all the mistakes in this “Garden Series,” it is women who have paid the ultimate price. Eve — and all women after her — have been punished by this God with great pains in childbirth. But what’s more disturbing from this incident is that all women were subjected forever to Man: for Eve’s error, she would be forever ruled over by her husband — a man, a rule that was then applied to all women throughout biblical history.
Was Eve responsible for all that? Did Eve put the tree there? Did Eve let the serpent in? In a word, no.
What we see, upon further reflection, is that it was God who failed his Man and his Woman, failing miserably to protect them from evil — much the same way we see followers today without any protection from evil.
The man in this story and God himself somehow walk away unscathed, neither taking responsibility for their actions.
Adam, representing all men, ate the fruit Eve offered of his own free will, but even after being cast out of the Garden would find himself still ruling over her.
God, who built the Garden and placed the couple there along with the untouchable tree, made numerous fatal mistakes.
The first was the location of the garden: it was placed on the same planet where God had cast down Satan — the fallen angel who had tried to overthrow God in heaven. Does an all-knowing god build a garden for his new creation — Man — on the same planet where he has just cast down the same devil who tried to overthrow him?
The second mistake was leaving a gaping hole in the security system used to protect the Garden, one that allowed that same Satan to walk right in. Who doesn’t make a modest effort to keep this guy out? God knew of Satan’s treachery: didn’t he also know the devil was right outside, just waiting to come in?
Finally, God placed the man and woman in his garden along with this special untouchable tree, telling them not to touch it or they would die. Didn’t he know the serpent would slither in and tempt his people with touching that tree? Does it makes sense to do that? Who puts an untouchable object next to someone, then expects them not to touch it the moment you look away?
One of three answers is possible:
- God knew all these things and let them happen
- God knew nothing, which implies he is not all-knowing or all-powerful
- Or the more believable possibility — that this whole story was made up
It was a myth.
The questions about the legitimacy of Bible stories are plentiful, but for the purpose of this work, only one question is posed:
Is it possible that the Bible itself is nothing more than a collection of stories, taken from various other religions, assembled over time by different men, to provide a moralistic argument for control over others?
It was a Myth
If you have ever read the Bible, you may be familiar with the stories that it tells, like the story of creation, the flood, the exodus from Egypt, and of course the gospels of Jesus Christ. These stories, when read or heard for the first time by young ears can have a mesmerizing effect: they stimulate the mind and capture the imagination of the heart. As many parents share these stories with their children, they plant the seeds of a lifelong belief in the mystery of God and his son Jesus, and how — through their love for us — saved us from eternal damnation at the hands of the devil known as Satan.
myth: specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience.
When children are taught in this way — epic tales told by a loving, trusted parent or teacher — they grab ahold of the stories and plant them deep in their minds as core beliefs.
Children, it turns out, are quite gullible, in that they will believe anything their parent or older sibling tells them. Things like “Santa Claus is coming to town,” or “the Easter Bunny left candy for us,” are traditional tales we tell our children, never recognizing that we hold the key to a life of enlightenment or ignorance. Influencers, like parents, teachers, preachers, siblings, grandparents, and friends have a profound ability to mold the minds of the young.
The messages shared by a parent to a child often are re-telling of tales that that parent was told themselves as a child: this is known in ancient cultures as oral traditions.
“In First Peoples’ cultures, knowledge was traditionally kept in oral tradition. The oral tradition, still highly valued today, includes oral narratives (or stories) that are used to teach skills, transmit cultural values, convey news, record family and community histories, and explain the natural world. In addition to expressing spiritual and emotional truths (through symbol and metaphor), specific stories also provide a record of literal truths (regarding events and/or situations) as narratives were passed unchanged from generation to generation.”
Oral Traditions, Indigenous Education
As stories are passed down from one generation to the next, the narratives are “passed unchanged from generation to generation.” Along with these narratives, the beliefs they endear also get passed down through generations, “unchanged from generation to generation” in the same manner, never being questioned, but simply accepted as truth.
These narratives are known as myths, and there are a number of types of myth used in Western literature:
“fables, fairy tales, folktales, sagas, epics, legends, and another form of tale, the parable…”
A myth is a way of passing from generation to generation those epic tales that a culture chooses to embrace and to hold as sacred. They are protected, shared, and trusted, and become a part of the culture through the people who learn the myth and act in accordance with them.
In the Christian culture, one myth that is most familiar is that Jesus was born on December 25th, and was laid in a manger by his Virgin Mother, Mary. The Bible shares this story more than once, and in spite of the two differing stories concerning three visiting kings, the birth of Jesus is celebrated each year on this day.
Which we know is not true.
All religions use myth to tell stories, and the story of Christ’s birth was greatly mythologized, or as some might say exaggerated, from the virgin birth to his birth on December 25, the same day of the pagan celebration for the birth of Mithra, as well as other pagan holidays.
Never heard of Mithra? Let me introduce you.
Jesus before Jesus
In 1799, as French forces invaded Egypt, then a part of the Ottoman Empire they were fighting, a large stone fragment with writing on it was discovered by a French soldier named Pierre François Xavier Bouchard. Bouchard believed the stone, which was about 2 and a half feet wide by four feet high, had one message written in three different languages. While he was no scholar on this, he immediately turned the stone over to the French army who had brought archaeological scholars to Egypt to look for treasure.
It would take until 1822, when “The Father of Egyptology,” Jean-François Champollion, would unlock the mystery hidden away on the stone. The message was about an ancient Egyptian king, Ptolemy V Epiphanes, from around 196 B.C. As Bouchard had suspected, the stone was a singular message written in three languages: greek, demotic, and hieroglyphics — the language of ancient Egypt no scholar had been able to decipher.
Champollion unlocked the secret of hieroglyphics by using the stone, which came to be known for where it was discovered — the Rosetta Stone — and the great mysteries of ancient Egypt became accessible to the world for the first time in centuries.
Locked away, behind the cryptic images of hieroglyphics were untold stories, tales of great heroes and gods, and yes — myths. These myths were now able to be studied for the first time in thousands of years, but what also became obvious was that these messages had been deliberately and intentionally hidden away to guard the secrets long kept by those in the Christian church.
First, the oldest of the Egyptian myths: Horus.
Horus, the “Jesus” of Ancient Egypt
Ancient Egypt was an advanced civilization thousands of years before Jesus walked the Earth. Known for their pyramids, of which they built as many as 130, they also developed mummification; writing — to include language, paper and ink; and surgery and medicine. Egyptians also invented toothpaste and used make-up.
They also “believed in a god who was self-created, self-existent, immortal, invisible, eternal, omniscient, almighty and inscrutable…the maker of the heavens and the earth…” and all in it. “The whole of Egyptian religion and theology was based on this belief.”
Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ, p. 68.
The most prominent god of ancient Egypt was named Horus, who — like the God of the Bible — had three different phases: Horus Ra, the Sun god; Horus Teti, the avenger; and Horus Nets, the Deliverer.
Horus had all the makings of a modern-day Jesus, with characteristics strikingly similar to that of the God of the Bible:
- God is One and alone and none other is existent with him
- God is the One Creator who has made all things
- God is a Spirit, a hidden Spirit, the Spirit of Spirits, the divine Spirit
- God is from the beginning…He was when nothing else had being…He shall endure to all eternity
- God is truth…God is life…He liveth life to humanity and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils
- God is father and mother…the father of fathers…He is creator of the heavens and the earth
- He is the primeval potter who turned men and gods into being out of his hands
Harpur, The Pagan Christ, p. 69, 70.
But Horus was thousands of years before Christ.
W.R. Cooper, like a handful of scholars, now had access to ancient writings and manuscripts, and was able to decipher their meaning. One he found of great value was The Ritual of the Dead, the oldest known book of spiritual mythology, written at least two millennia before Christ:
Compare that to text found in the Book of John in the New Testament:
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”
John 1:1–5
Not only are the characteristics of God and his son Jesus similar to Horus, but before Christ ever spoke of his “return” to Earth to judge its souls, Egyptian priests had long established that Horus would return to Earth:
Osiris, the great King and father of Horus, was killed by his own brother Typhon — who represented evil. Horus then gathered a great army to defeat Typhon. Osiris was seen as the holder of re-creation —and had the ability to resurrect life, while Typhon became the embodiment of evil, and Horus was once and for always the “Deliverer.” Once victorious, Osiris “glorified” his son, just as God glorified Christ, and seated him at his side.
The similarities between the Egyptian mythology of Osiris and Horus to the God and Jesus of the Bible — their fight with Satan and Jesus becoming the “Deliverer” of mankind — cannot be disputed.
Horus has long been forgotten by men; washed away by the sands of time, and aided by the intentional acts of those who would deceive to control.
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9–11
There have been as many as ten-thousand gods throughout recorded history; perhaps there have been another ten-thousand that were never recorded or written about, or were simply personal gods, created by an individual or group for their own purposes. When one religion speaks to a wider audience, however, its following can grow, eventually covering an entire culture.
Mithraism, the worship of Mithra, is a religion that — like the worship of Horus — has mysteriously vanished from our history books, yet it is closer to the story of Christianity, and existed in the same era.
Mithraism, the forerunner of Christianity
Mithraism was a rival religion in the time of Christ, albeit its origins go back perhaps as far as the 14th century B.C. Some have even suggested that Mithraism may have become the popular religion of the world had Christianity not survived.
In “A Study of Mithraism,” a young religion student wrote a fascinating paper that provided great insight into the similarities of Christianity and Mithraism. Since he has already done such scholarly work, I will let his words enlighten you as they did me.
From “A Study of Mithraism” by Martin Luther King, Jr., 1949.
King points out the similarities between Christianity and Mithraism:
“Mithraism insisted that the soul was immortal and its temporary sojourn in a body was a period of trial.”
“Mithra stood by his side as a divine helper.”
“After death there was judgment of the soul.”
“Mithra, the protector of the truth, presided over the judgment court.”
“It was believed that the long struggle between the principles of good and evil would one day end. At this time … Mithra would redescend (rapture?) and reawaken men to life, at which time the god of truth would separate the good from the bad.”
“The doctrine of dualism … accounted for the problem of evil by supposing that the world was a battleground between … [t]he powers of good [who] were identified with Light or Day, and the powers of evil [who] were identified with Darkness or Night.”
King clearly sees the similarities between the two “cults” as he calls them, never shying away from the truth that Christianity “borrowed” many of its rituals from Mithraism.
“We know that there was a form of baptism designed to wash away the sins, probably carried out by sprinkling holy water, or in an actual immersion.”
“Another important Mithraic ceremony was the celebration of a communion service which was in memory of the last meal which Helios and Mithra partook together upon earth.”
King is not the only scholar to have studied the similarities between Christianity and Mithraism. Franz Cumont was the most respected expert on pagan religions like Mithraism, and is the first expert King references. Here is Cumont’s take:
The faithful referred to Mithra as “the Light of the World”, symbol of truth, justice, and loyalty. He was mediator between heaven and earth and was a member of a Holy Trinity. According to Persian mythology, Mithras was born of a virgin given the title ‘Mother of God’. The god remained celibate throughout his life, and valued self-control, renunciation and resistance to sensuality among his worshippers. Mithras represented a system of ethics in which brotherhood was encouraged in order to unify against the forces of evil. The worshippers of Mithras held strong beliefs in a celestial heaven and an infernal hell. They believed that the benevolent powers of the god would sympathize with their suffering and grant them the final justice of immortality and eternal salvation in the world to come. They looked forward to a final day of Judgment in which the dead would resurrect, and to a final conflict that would destroy the existing order of all things to bring about the triumph of light over darkness.
Here King makes a critical point about the importance of Mithraism, as it contributed to Christianity:
“Mithraism prepared the people mentally and emotionally to understand the type of religion which Christianity represented. It was itself in varying degrees, an imperfect example of the Galilean cult which was to replace it. It encouraged the movement away from the state religions and the philosophical systems and toward the desire for personal salvation and promise of immortality.”
King’s commentary notes the effects of other cults on early Christianity: “This is not to say that a Saint Paul or a Saint John sat down and copied these views verbatim. But after being in contact with these surrounding religions and hearing certain doctrines expressed, it was only natural for some of these views to become a part of their subconscious minds. When they sat down to write they were expressing consciously that which had dwelled in their subconscious minds. It is also significant to know that Roman tolerance had favored this great syncretism of religious ideas. Borrowing was not only natural but inevitable.”
What King recognizes here is that Mithraism — and as we’ve already seen, other, older religions in the same geographical area — had many ideas that were repeated in Christianity, not as a deliberate effort to “steal” the concepts of the other religions, but more as a natural evolution to build out the rest of the new faith.
The Influence of Eastern (Oriental) Religions
Over centuries of turmoil in the Greek and Roman cultures, the people grew weary of the near-constant change in their gods, changing as rapidly as music might change on the radio. The old city-state versions of religion were so unpredictable, so incapable of supporting the people that change was gladly welcomed.
Paul, the author of two-thirds of the New Testament, noticed the abundance of gods when he visited Greece, and the story is told in the Book of Acts:
“Paul stood in the middle of the Areopagus, and said, “You men of Athens, I perceive that you are very religious in all things. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription: ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ What therefore you worship in ignorance, this I announce to you. The God who made the world and all things in it, he, being Lord of heaven and earth, doesn’t dwell in temples made with hands, neither is he served by men’s hands, as though he needed anything, seeing he himself gives to all life and breath, and all things. He made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the surface of the earth, having determined appointed seasons, and the boundaries of their dwellings, that they should seek the Lord, if perhaps they might reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ‘For in him we live, and move, and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ Being then the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold, or silver, or stone, engraved by art and design of man. The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked. But now he commands that all people everywhere should repent, because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by the man whom he has ordained; of which he has given assurance to all men, in that he has raised him from the dead.”
Paul recognized the revolving door of religion in Greece, and would later take the same message to Rome, where many of the same gods were worshipped, but by different names.
What appears to have happened slowly over time was that the city-state religions were being replaced by religions that provided more than esthetics: Eastern religions became the foundation for the Western religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which provided for a personal relationship with the deity.
William R. Halliday, a religious scholar of the early Twentieth century, wrote in his classic The Pagan Background of Early Christianity this glimpse into the background behind the change:
Unlike the cults of the city-state, the oriental religions were at once cosmopolitan and individualistic. Their message was not restricted to any particular political, racial, or social group, and their concern was with the relation of the individual soul to its God. Their ritual, too, differed essentially from the glad, sociable feasts presided over by a secular, civic magistrate, which, upon the whole, are typical of the older worship of the Olympian gods. From their Eastern homes the new cults had brought with them the appeal of sensuous pageantry and of solemn emotional ritual performed by, or under the direction of an official and consecrated, professional priesthood.
From Egyptian, Greek, and Roman mythologies, is it any wonder that people demanded a god that was more like them — more human?
The development of Christianity was surely an outgrowth of centuries of religions that felt as distant as the God Jupiter. Humanity clamored for a more human god, and Jesus Christ provided the “perfect” figure to fit that bill.
The history of Judaism and its overarching companion Christianity is much better documented than I could serve them here. Suffice it to say, Judeo-Christian worship has always had a godhead centered on humanity, with a deep history connecting the two through its own mythology.
What the God of Abraham and Jesus Christ provided was a complete set of rules for man to live by: a well-documented, whilst overly burdensome set of God-Man rules, laid out neatly in manuscripts, the faithful came to know as scripture.
Scripture provided the foundation for men who declared their desire to no longer be ruled by mythical gods, or those made up by Kings, or even the King’s own version of scripture, but a practical guide that men took to heart wherever they were.
Jewish scripture also provided a forerunner for the concept of God in human form. In the Book of Samuel from the Old Testament, the elders of Israel call on Samuel to give them a king in place of having the God of Abraham as their Head of State. God tells Samuel that they will regret that decision, and has Samuel tell the elders that they will cry out to God for relief from their king, but that God will not answer. In spite of this warning, the elders still choose to demand a king: they demand to be like other nations, with a physical king to lead them.
As man moved further away from the city-state religions, from the mystery religions of Egypt, and from religions like Mithraism, he moved closer to a religion he could identify with personally, a religion that offered a personal, and singular god: Christianity.
Through Christ, scripture would be shared throughout the world in fulfillment of “The Great Commission,” Christ’s command to take the gospel to the four corners of the Earth.
Christ himself had cleared the way for this global expansion in his conversation with the woman at the well, when he told her:
“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth…”
John 4:23
In this, Jesus declared that the faithful no longer needed to rely solely on the Temple as a place of worship, but that true followers worshipped in spirit, and it mattered not where they met with God: God would meet them where they were.
The new religion, Christianity, gave men the ability to make a personal connection with their god; provided them with a clear set of rules to follow; a moral compass to live by; and the proclamation that the followers of God should spread his message throughout the world.
But was this ‘new’ religion anything new at all?
“The nature of God is one, though the names of God are many, just as there is only one sea, though we call different parts of it by different names.”
W.R. Halladay, The Pagan Background of Early Christianity, p. 245
Historically, people who followed the ancient religions of Horus or Mithra never believed that the stories about them were literally true: they knew the tales were myth, created to enlighten, to provide guidance, hope, and spiritual truth but were never considered fact.
“The only difference — and it was quite radical — between the Jesus story…and the many ancient myths…is that nobody among the ancients…believed for one moment that any of the events in their dramas were in any way historical…in Christianity, however, the myth was eventually literalized. Jesus was historicized.”
Harpur, The Pagan Christ, p. 38, 39.
What ancients knew was that their religions told great tales to enlarge their gods, but the tales themselves were so greatly exaggerated, they knew the stories were not factual, but allegorical.
The Bible, and its stories however, are told as though they are facts, literal stories of how this God is god. The early Christian church worked hard to structure the Bible that way; protected its legacy by eliminating, destroying, or hiding any reference material to anything different; and harrassed, tortured, excommunicated, or outright killed anyone who tried to tell the truth — that the Bible is full of recycled myths.
Myths become lies when we tell them as facts.
The new god is the same as the old god
Jesus Christ is a significant and historical figure, of that there is little doubt. The records of Josephus, a first century historian, make clear that Jesus was in fact a man who lived in that time.
But the record of Josephus is not one of the gospel stories told in the Bible; his record, while espousing Jesus as the Christ — or the Savior — provides no evidence of any miracles or in fact any stories of Jesus’ life. It is simply one historical record that mentions Jesus. However, what was written and credited to Josephus has been challenged as being too Christian. Clearly there are issues with the full text, but it appears that a man named Jesus did exist. There are no Roman or Jewish records from that time period that mention a crucified man named Jesus.
Long after Jesus left his life here, some of his disciples began to write various stories of his life and work, which came to be known as the gospels, greek for “Good News.” The gospel according to Mark was written first, and the others — Luke, Matthew, and John — all followed, written to different audiences.
The gospels clearly were written long after the crucifixion of Jesus, and no evidence exists that these documents were actually written by the four men that they are assigned to. The Gospel of Mark, the oldest work, has been ascribed to Mark the Evangelist who left the service of Paul, and went instead with Barnabas. Mark also spent a good deal of time with Peter, and his book may have been influenced by their time together. But while Mark knew Paul, Peter, and other leaders of the early church, the one person he never met was Jesus. His gospel was written from oral and other written traditions, just like those stories written about Horus and Mithras.
The importance of that fact is that the gospel of Mark was a foundational document for the gospels of Luke and Matthew.
“There is no miraculous birth or doctrine of divine pre-existence, nor, in the original ending (Mark 16:1–8), any post-resurrection appearances of Jesus.”
To be clear, the gospel of Mark was the first book written, by whom it’s not clear. Mark is credited with the work, but he never met Jesus. His work cites no birth of Jesus from a virgin, never states that Jesus existed with God at the beginning of all things, and makes no mention of Jesus spending forty days with his disciples after his crucifixion and resurrection. And while all this is missing from his text, two other gospels — those of Matthew and Luke — use Mark’s work as a major source for their books.
Mark’s gospel ends with the death and burial of Jesus, and on the third day, when the women went to his tomb, he was gone.
“As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said. “You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you.’ ” Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.”
Mark: 16: 5–8
If you have a Bible, you will find verses 9 through 20 however, which do not appear in the earliest manuscripts regarding this gospel account. In those verses, Jesus is seen, and even speaks to his disciples. Interestingly, Jesus gives his disciples a command here that contradicts other accounts about salvation.
“He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.”
Mark 16: 15, 16
One of the precepts of this faith is to accept the Bible as the inerrant word of God, but this verse, whoever believes and is baptised, contradicts other New Testament verses.
“That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved. ”
Romans 10:9–10
As noted earlier, verses 9–20 are not in the earliest manuscripts, but they are included in published copies of the Bible which exist everywhere today. If baptism is not required for salvation in the Christian faith — as stated in Romans, chapter 10, why then does it appear in Mark, chapter 16? Why is Mark 16:16 there if it contradicts Romans 10? Believe it or not, some scholars explain this as “some textual problems with Mark.”
Textual problems in the Inerrant Word of God?
Suffice it to say, the Bible is chocked full of contradictions, mistakes, textual problems, and some of the strangest verses you will not believe — even though, as a believer, you are required to believe.
The Bible is not flawed: it was designed this way. It took the myths from earlier religions, reran the stories with a new set of names, added some spectacular new work, and voila! created a new product they used to guide the followers of their faith. There is no evidence that any of the men who assembled the Bible did this to trick anyone or to deliberately deceive followers: this is how religious texts were assembled. Various sources, both oral and written, were brought together to provide a sound foundation for creating literature the faithful could use to learn. The Bible simply followed the same pattern used to create religious texts of other religions.
But it does have many issues, and by reviewing some of them, the reader may begin to see that the Bible is not inerrant: it is a book of books, put together by men who had very little accurate information. God wasn’t whispering in anyone’s ear, or guiding their quill as they wrote: the words they produced were their own, based on their own understanding of the events they shared.
The early church recognized this was a problem. As early as the second century CE, Christian leaders began to recognize the stories of Jesus that were being told needed to be brought together, and that there were false teachers of Christ already working amongst them. Here, Paul is writing to Timothy, to warn him against those who would teach false doctrine; part of Paul’s problem was that clear church doctrine concerning Jesus had not yet been written down or unified.
“As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God’s work — which is by faith.
1 Timothy 1:3,4
“Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales; rather, train yourself to be godly.”
1 Timothy 4:7
“The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron.”
1 Timothy 4:1,2
Paul, Peter, and other early church leaders spent their lives teaching and preaching, and many died for the sake of the faith. In the early days of the Christian church — as it came to be known in the second century — followers of Jesus were persecuted, and many — like both Paul and Peter — were executed for teaching the faith.
It became ever more important to create written accounts of the stories and teachings they passed on to others, and therein lies the groundwork of what became the New Testament — a collection of the gospels of Christ, the Acts of the Apostles, and various letters of instruction, mostly written by Paul. It would be until the mid-third century until these documents would be combined with Jewish scripture (known to us as the Old Testament) in one unified Bible.
Well, almost unified — see Protestant Reformation.
As already mentioned, much of the true-life story of Jesus had been lost before it ever was written down. As John notes at the end of his gospel:
“Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written.”
John 21:25
The Bible is not the inerrant word of any god: it has numerous imperfections and contradictions. The original authors cannot be proven because the original manuscripts do not exist. Numerous hands wrote the words written down as holy scripture, and numerous translations have failed to ensure the precise meaning of every word. In today’s Christian church, Protestants reject a number of the books used by Catholics, and there are wide variations of the sacraments followed by the more than 45,000 different denominations worldwide.
“It is generally recognized today that myths and mythological concepts figure prominently in the Bible. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) in particular can be set in the context of ancient Near Eastern religion, in which mythical thinking played an important part. The bible contains myths in the strict sense: sacred stories set in an indeterminate “time of beginnings,” in which the actors are divine or superhuman beings.”
J.R. Porter, The New Illustrated Companion to the Bible, p. 16.
Myth is an important way to tell stories, but the myths that are used in the Bible make it clear the work is not unique.
“There are parallels between Genesis 1 and the Babylonian creation epic, and between Genesis and the theology of the ancient Egyptian cult center of Memphis [of which Horus was but one god]. There are similarities between some themes in the narrative of the Garden of Eden…the tree of life….and the serpent [with] the Mesopotamian epics of Atrahasis and Gilgamesh.”
Porter, p. 16
Myth: The Bible is Full of it
When people are taught about God — any god — from their earliest age, they learn who that God is, or do they?
Instead of learning who God truly is, the young learn who Mom and Dad and big brother and sis believe God is. They learn who the neighbor kids and classmates believe God is. And they learn who those in Sunday school believe God is.
But do we learn about the God written about in the Bible? Are they learning the full story of God, or are they being given a sanitized, homogenized, Americanized version to learn — much the same way we do with American history?
Core values and beliefs are borne out of our socialization education: they are taught to us by those around us. Baptists learn about a God quite different from Catholics. Even their Bibles are different.
The myths written into the Bible have been borrowed from older religions, religions that had created god long before there was God — the God of the Bible. They used myths to tell their stories to followers in the same way other cultures and religions had used myths throughout time.
Myths are the stories themselves: individual verses are used regularly to share common concepts and ideas. Often is the habit, however, of either cherry-picking a verse out of context to meet one’s needs, or using only a part of a verse, ignoring the rest out of convenience. Beyond all that, there are verses that simply cannot be believed: these are the verses most American Christians have not heard.
One of the more unique verses is this one from 2 Kings, and the graphic suggests these boys must have done something terrible to incite this type of curse being called down on them by the prophet Elisha. Here is the verse prior to this verse:
“From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!”
2 Kings 2:23
Yes, surely those 42 boys needed to be mauled for calling Elisha “Baldy.”
Deuteronomy is another Old Testament book with many verses like that which are unbelievable. Here are the verses that describe what happens to a young woman if she is found to not be a virgin on her wedding night.
“If a man takes a wife and, after sleeping with her, dislikes her and slanders her and gives her a bad name, saying, “I married this woman, but when I approached her, I did not find proof of her virginity,” then the young woman’s father and mother shall bring to the town elders at the gate proof that she was a virgin. Her father will say to the elders, “I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. Now he has slandered her and said, ‘I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.’ But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.” Then her parents shall display the cloth before the elders of the town, and the elders shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the young woman’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the young woman’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done an outrageous thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.”
Deuteronomy 22:13–21
A few points: The Father gives the daughter in marriage, then he speaks for her when she is accused — she obviously has no right to speak. She must be a virgin, but no proof is required of her husband. If the husband is wrong, he is simply fined, and must remain married to her — as if she would want anything to do with him after that. If she is ‘guilty’ of not being a virgin, she is put to death — stoned — without ever being able to defend herself. And do the faithful of this religion have to act this scene out literally — word for word — as prescribed in the Bible? Must the parents use the exact words, and what happens if they can’t produce this cloth? Is their daughter simply killed due to sloppy housekeeping?
Any god that treats a man better than a woman is a god not worth having.
Here’s more from Deuteronomy.
However, in the cities of the nations the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them — the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites — as the LORD your God has commanded you. Deuteronomy 20:16–18
Who can believe that a God who is love would order the deaths of every man, woman and child simply because they didn’t believe in him?
This does not sound like a god to me.
The Book of Numbers has some curious verses also.
If you’re not familiar with the Bible, or Moses, let me give you this small side story. Moses was a prince in Egypt who killed a man; when he escaped, he went to Midian, where he met his wife, Zipporah, and stayed for forty years.
But in these verses, Moses sends his army of God out to fight the Midianites. When the army returns — after killing all the men — Moses is outraged that they let the women live.
“Moses was angry with the officers of the army — the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds — who returned from the battle. “Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the LORD in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the LORD’s people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”
Numbers 31:11–18
Moses ordered the murder of all the women and boys from a land where he spent forty years as a fugitive from the law. He did let the army keep the virgin girls for themselves. Then he tells his troops to purify themselves after they are finished with the murders.
Is it any wonder why we have lunatics today who think they should kill people who have different beliefs, or follow different religions? All of this savagery was ordained by the God of the Bible.
Need more Numbers insanity?
Donkeys talking: probably enough said.
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ ” 1 Samuel 15:3
This does not sound like love to me.
If it defies logic, you can bet it will be in the Bible. A preacher might tell you this requires faith, but I see no faith in the butchery of babies.
“When men fight with one another and the wife of the one draws near to rescue her husband from the hand of him who is beating him and puts out her hand and seizes him by the private parts, then you shall cut off her hand. Your eye shall have no pity.”
Deuteronomy 25:11,12
Have you never read?
“Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock!”
Ps. 137:9
I could list verses like this for days, but suffice it to say, the Bible has a lot of controversial verses, stories, myths…oh right? What if these are all myths?
It is certainly possible that these stories are simply more myths to draw in the audience the Bible was written for — first the Jews, then the Christians. And like the story of the Garden, or the Flood, or the Immaculate Conception, these stories might just be enlarged versions of recycled myths from older religions.
The Bible has been twisted and turned by those who wrote it, and by those who read it, each using its language, its tales for their own ends. Here is how modern-day white Christian nationalists like to remake Jesus.
The Bible can either be fact — all fact — or it can be myth, but it cannot be both. It cannot be the inerrant word of God if there is one word in it that is not true, and if it is true— if these verses are any indication of who the God of the Bible is — one should tread lightly.
Whether Jesus was the son of the one true God is not for me to define, but after reading the Bible, I know this much is what was written about him:
The Ugly Side of God
America has always been a sick nation: it was built on the twin lies of ‘religious liberty’ and ‘freedom,’ which sound an awful lot like the twin lies told by Ananias and Sapphira.
Europeans came to America in pursuit of religious liberty, only to strip that liberty away from the millions of indigenous people already living here. The natives wanted nothing to do with the European’s ‘Jesus’: they were content in their own worship, and did not accept the God of the White Man.
But these “Christians” believed their Bible justified taking the land away from the native people. And they had the full support of the Catholic Church in Rome, and of their European Kings and Queens.
The Doctrine of Discovery
One of the more offensive things that many American believers hold to be true is that the God of the Bible ordained the actions of the White Man who declared the right to take any land he wants, and to take possession of it as if it were his own.
Throughout the last millennia, the Catholic Church, having great influence over the kingdoms of Europe, used that influence to write Papal Bulls — or edicts of the Pope — granting those kings certain rights over discovered lands. These edicts came with the blessings of the church and presumably of God.
The Doctrine of Discovery “established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians.”
Here is part of the papal bull issued in 1493 by Pope Alexander VI to the King and Queen of Spain, after Columbus landed in Hispaniola:
We have indeed learned that you, who for a long time had intended to seek out and discover certain islands and main lands remote and unknown … chose our beloved son, Christopher Columbus … whom you furnished with ships and men equipped for like designs, not without the greatest hardships, dangers, and expenses, to make diligent quest … and they at length, with divine aid and with the utmost diligence … discovered certain very remote islands and even main lands that hitherto had not been discovered by others; wherein dwell very many peoples living in peace, and, as reported, going unclothed, and not eating flesh. Moreover … these very peoples … seem sufficiently disposed to embrace the Catholic faith and be trained in good morals.
And, in order that you may enter upon so great an undertaking with greater readiness and heartiness endowed with the benefit of our apostolic favor, we … give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors … all their [Native peoples’] dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and main lands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered.
We trust in Him from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed, that, should you, with the Lord’s guidance, pursue this holy and praiseworthy undertaking, in a short while your hardships and endeavors will attain the most felicitous result, to the happiness and glory of all Christendom…. Given at Rome, at St. Peter’s, in the year of the incarnation of our Lord one thousand four hundred and ninety-three, the fourth of May, and the first year of our pontificate.
Gratis by order of our most holy lord, the pope. Alexander VI
If this sounds unseemly — that Europeans could simply go anywhere in the world and claim the land, taking what belongs to others, as long as it is “claimed in the name of God” — there is something of a Biblical precedent.
In the final chapter of Matthew, in the New Testament, Jesus gives his disciples one final command before he ascends to heaven:
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Mt. 28:19, 20
Jesus clearly never told anyone they could strip people of their land; never told anyone they could murder in the name of God; and would never have permitted any of these things that were done in his name.
But Christ wasn’t the one who authorized these actions; those were the orders of the head of the Catholic church, who in large part was playing political games with people’s lives. The Papacy — the congruent heads of the Catholic Church — had become nothing but heads of a corrupt religious state handing out “the blessings of God” for their own financial reward. These “Vicars of Christ” have a long sordid history of abusing their position of privilege for personal gain.
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money, have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.”
1 Timothy 6:10
Christ commanded his followers to go forth and share his message of faith, but Jesus spread that message through love. Jesus never forced anyone to listen to him, nor to adhere to his message, nor did he demand anyone follow him. What Christ offered was “the gift of eternal life”; what these Popes offered were blessings for a fee. What those blessings provided for became the legal justification for European explorers to take possession of “undiscovered” lands in America.
The papal bulls also became the legal foundation for American Federal Indian Law, which has granted the United States government the “legal” right to take the land from millions of indigenous people who lived here pre-Columbus. As Peter d’Errico wrote in the Foreword to Pagans in the Promised Land, “[the] American empire at its inception … shows that the Bible story of the family of Abraham is, in its own terms, a colonizing adventure.”
The Doctrine of Discovery was the inspiration in the 1800s for the Monroe Doctrine, which declared U.S. hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, and Manifest Destiny, which justified American expansion westward by propagating the belief that the U.S. was destined to control all land from the Atlantic to the Pacific and beyond.
In an 1823 Supreme Court case, Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. federal law and was used to dispossess Native peoples of their land. In a unanimous decision, Chief Justice John Marshall writes, “that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to New World lands”[1] and Native peoples certain rights of occupancy.
The Doctrine of Discovery was provided by Pope Alexander VI, and gave European nations — and their descendants — the God-given right to lay claim to any and all land in the Americas by simply planting a flag and claiming the land for God. It further provided for either the assimilation or the enslavement and eventual extermination of the people living in those lands. Here is Columbus’ own description of the events on Hispaniola:
The Indians, Columbus reported, “are so naïve and so free with their possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it. When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the contrary, they offer to share with anyone….” He concluded his report by asking for a little help from their Majesties, and in return he would bring them from his next voyage “as much gold as they need … and as many slaves as they ask.” He was full of religious talk: “Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities.”
And later, after Columbus had shipped the natives back to Spain as slaves:
“Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
The actions of Columbus ended in genocide for the Arawaks:
When it became clear that there was no gold left, the Indians were taken as slave labor on huge estates, known later as encomiendas. They were worked at a ferocious pace, and died by the thousands. By the year 1515, there were perhaps fifty thousand Indians left. By 1550, there were five hundred. A report of the year 1650 shows none of the original Arawaks or their descendants left on the island.
What God granted, through the Papal Bull of Alexander VI, was death for the natives at the hands of the invaders, claiming God had given them the right to take the land, and then the lives, of the native inhabitants.
In other words, this papal bull suggested God granted the White Man the power to kill anyone living on any land, and to secure that land for himself and his progeny.
This is the foundation of the United States: land, stolen through hateful papal edicts, was claimed by White Europeans who believed they had the right — granted by the God of the Bible — to take any land they wanted and kill anyone who tried to stop them.
The Pope used his edicts: the White Europeans — who would travel here, seize the land, murder the people, and form this nation — used their Bible. The White Europeans believed in their Bible, for it had provided precedents for their acts.
This all was done in the name of God, and was directed by God.
God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Gen 1:28
Descendants of these White Europeans believed God blessed them as they declared their independence from a tyrannical king. This new nation, “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal” moved to establish a nation that would guarantee the people of that nation God’s “unalienable rights,” among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And then those who wrote the constitution for that new nation denied granting those “unalienable rights” to its citizens, and made no mention of this God. The same people who claimed that a Creator had carried them through the Revolution gave that God no authority or power in their government.
The UnCivil War
The greatest issue facing this nation has always been racism: it was brought here by Columbus, promoted by slave owners, permitted by Christian church leaders, and legalized in the Constitution of the United States.
Those writing the new constitution faced numerous issues concerning the holding of slaves, including how to actually count the slaves. If the slaves were counted as freemen, the southern states would have larger populations than their northern counterparts, thus giving them more representation in the House of Representatives. The population count of each state would also affect how the Electoral College would select the President, because the number of electors for each state depended on their representation in the House also.
The one argument the Founders were unwilling to debate was the actual termination of slavery itself.
While ten of the states wanted to end slavery with the Constitution, three states — Georgia, and the two Carolinas — threatened to leave the convention if that vote was taken.
Many of the delegates had slaves — including Washington and Jefferson — and expressed a strong desire to rid the nation of this “moral plague.”
Unfortunately, the Founders recognized that without those three states, the Constitution — and thus, the union of states — would not come to fruition. As a compromise, the Founders wrote into the Constitution the rarest of breeds: a self-terminating clause. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 was written to permit Congress to pass legislation after 1808 that would outlaw the importation of slaves. And Congress did just that, passing the Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves in 1807.
If it seems the Founders had dodged the slavery bullet, in truth all they did was kick the can down the road. Within two years of the passing of the Constitution in 1791, Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, dramatically increasing the speed at which cotton could be processed, causing plantation owners to grow larger crops, and increasing the demand for slave labor.
“To be sure, the value of cotton as a cash crop grew astronomically in the decades following Whitney’s patent went into effect. By some estimates, the United States supplied three-quarters of the global cotton supply by the start of the Civil War.”
The cotton gin: A game-changing social and economic invention
National Constitution Center
What slavery meant to the Southern economy can not be understated: the wealth of Southern states grew considerably, and along with that wealth came an unwillingness to give up on the issue of slavery altogether. Whereas the government had already agreed to stop the importation of slaves, there was no limit on the use of existing slaves, born in the South.
And this is where God and the Government clashed.
In the North, the Government demanded a finality to the abuse of humans as slaves. In the South, due in part to the enormous economic growth and vast wealth accumulated through cotton, those who supported slavery found solace in God-provided verses for the continued justification of slavery.
While numerous arguments and theories have been espoused over the causes of the Civil War, there is great merit to the concept that this was a battle between the forces of good, represented by the Union — fighting to abolish the abhorrent act of slavery; and the forces of evil , represented by the Confederacy — supporting the ongoing subjugation of human beings.
The North took the side of the Government as the Founders had in writing the Constitution: they left God out of the equation for reasons just like this. The Founders knew the nature of man, how man could act with selfish motive, or religious hypocrisy, and wanted to provide no means for members of the government to invoke God through law. The Constitution is the law of the land — not the Bible, and the North wanted to use the Constitution to end slavery, without permitting a “God-says it’s in the Bible” argument from Southern states, prolonging the curse of slavery.
We see similar actions in American society still today, with Republican lawmakers trying to invoke God and the Bible into law even over the objections of a public majority. Connected to this is the Republican desire to remove the right to vote from millions of American citizens — primarily those who are Black or female — placing full control of all legislation regarding important social issues in their own hands.
When a god rules a nation, that is called theocracy.
When one person or group rules a nation, that is called autocracy.
When violence becomes a means to justify the takeover of a nation, that is called fascism.
Understanding the driving forces behind these movements is a key to stopping them.
We the people
We the people believed the nation’s founding had been a blessing of God, while in truth it was nothing less than murder ordained by the Catholic Church and the Kings and Queens of Europe who used the Doctrine of Discovery to take anything we wanted.
We the people believed that the Constitution had been “inspired by God,” because no one showed us the truth: that there was no mention of the people’s God in the law, and that the new government answered neither to God nor to the people, but was the dominion of the wealthy white man alone.
We the people believed that God and the Government had granted us the right to march across the continent, terrorizing the native people and taking their land. We believed we had the right to own slaves, and we believed that all we did had been ordained by God.
Ironically, extremist right wing groups are willing to fight today in God’s name to overthrow the same government they believe was “inspired by God.”
This is the profound impact of deep, distorted beliefs: when we believe we are entitled to rule, to govern, to dominate — because we are white, Christian, or male — and we believe God endorses that rule, we will be willing to wage war against our own nation if called upon by one whose authority we regard as sacred.
When White Christian nationalists can’t force others to agree with them, they fight: they have a 500-year history on this continent of waging war to force their religion on others. Columbus started it; the KKK and other white nationalists groups like the Christian Front have continued it, and today it is embraced by groups known as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, evangelicals, and fundamentalists.
These groups do not embrace the love Jesus Christ taught his followers: these groups force their own sick, hate-filled form of religiosity onto anyone who gets in their way. In the political world, this group of white Christian nationalists is represented by the Republican Party, a party that adores its leader, the narcissistic pathological liar, Donald Trump.
Distorted beliefs have led us to this moment.
I dare say, if there is a God, His people don’t know Him because they do not know His Word. Here is what Jesus — the head of the Christian church — told his disciples (that is all who follow Him):
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
John 13:34, 35
Love one another. You must love one another. That is how everyone will know you belong to Christ…by your love for your fellow man. There seems little evidence of this love in the way those on the right treat their fellow man today.
You do not love one another by denying someone food.
You do not love one another by denying someone shelter.
You do not love one another by denying to provide healing, as Christ himself did — for free.
Thoughts and prayers have become a catchphrase of the right every time there is another mass shooting. Well here’s another catchphrase:
“…faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.”
James 2:17
All the thoughts and prayers in the world won’t change a thing without followers acting in faith. And that action does not include forcing your god on others, but simply living within your own faith.
If God exists at all, He is not witnessed in American life much today, especially by those on the right who claim to want him back in our schools, at our public meetings, or forcing him on others. That’s not where God belongs.
He belongs in our hearts, and in our minds, and in our souls. He belongs in our closets, where we meet Him when we pray.
Jesus never pushed faith on anyone, but American Christians do just that. Jesus knew some would accept him, yet others would reject him. He came not to judge, but to save — through his message of love.
Americans have taken the god right out of God, and have manipulated His Word to please themselves, and have used Him like a battering ram to get others to comply to their own godless definition of God.
What has made America a godless nation isn’t the pagans: it is those who claim to know God, but do not.
Alex Jones and the Tribunal of Lies
If you have never heard of Alex Jones, let me introduce you. This man is a radio personality, who has spent the better part of ten years building an enormous fortune through the telling of lies. Jones’ lies, and the money he made from telling those lies, were primarily focused on the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, where twenty school children and six adults were murdered by a madman with an AR15. Jones, through his radio program, portrayed this massacre as a False Flag — an incident that was staged by different parties including the U.S. government — in an attempt to justify legislation that would limit or restrict gun ownership.
Jones’ voracious lies repeatedly hurt the families of Sandy Hook to the point where those families brought various lawsuits against him: the harm he caused them through his lies is clear, and the profit he has made off that pain will now be impacted. In a recent court decision, Jones was found to have lied and profited off those lies, and the court awarded the families of the Sandy Hook victims compensatory damages of $965 million: yes, that is nearly 1 billion dollars awarded to the families of those hurt by the incessant, flagrant lies of one man. This is only one of the many legal cases brought against Jones for his lies, and it doesn’t include punitive damages which will undoubtedly be in the billions of dollars.
Alex Jones’ lies have finally met up with justice.
In the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, the Founders wrote that one of the primary directives of the law governing the new nation was to “establish justice.”
Establish justice. Think about that for a moment.
The Founders wrote a constitution that required this nation would be built on the establishment of justice, and Alex Jones has just met that justice.
But has America?
Throughout this series, I have documented the ways in which the United States government has treated the native people who lived here when Columbus landed. Through the Doctrine of Discovery the land the natives lived on was claimed for God and King: through the Declaration of Independence, our Founders literally called the native people “merciless Indian savages.” Nearly four-hundred treaties were signed between the U.S. government and native tribes, and then broken — all by the U.S. government.
To wit, the U.S. government used its own Supreme Court to drive home the final spike in the proverbial indigenous coffin: in the case of Johnson & Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, a decision written for a unanimous Court by Chief Justice John Marshall in 1823, the court declared that native people had no right to transfer land to others as they had no ownership of the land. The case made clear that under U.S. law, native people had no rights to the land they had lived on for centuries, and that land now belonged to “We the people.”
What Marshall did, in fact, was to strip the native people of their rights to ownership of the land and gave that ownership over to the people of the United States. Marshall used elements of the Doctrine of Discovery in his opinion, which provided that this case was between “Christian people” and “natives, who were heathens.”
In essence, Marshall used the American justice system to strip away land ownership from its rightful owners — the native peoples — and give it to those who had seized it through vicious lies — the United States. The case declared that the savages had no right or title to the land, and that those who had seized it from them, those who had stolen it from them — primarily the British and French governments prior to the Revolution — had every right to do so. The American government protracted that argument by denouncing the native peoples and lying incessantly about them even in official, historical documents like the Declaration of Independence.
Incessant, damaging lies. Wealth built off those lies. These themes are now fresh and familiar to us once again directly from the case of Alex Jones, and there is a familiarity to his tactics: both parties — Jones and the United States — lied to achieve their goals: building their own wealth. Both Jones and the government of the United States benefited from telling protracted lies repeatedly about another party. But only one — Jones — has been held to justice for the harm caused by those lies.
The government of the United States has yet to face justice for the lies told repeatedly that harmed the native people, permitting that government to seize the land and build the wealthiest nation in the history of civilization.
The danger of new lies stacked on old lies
It was not long ago that our nation’s Legislative branch was attacked by a terroristic mob led by the head of the Executive branch — Donald Trump — who also has yet to be held accountable for the incessant lies he told that led to the attack.
Donald Trump lied, not to build wealth per se, but to hold on to power — which would help him build his wealth.
Donald Trump lied, and his lies preyed on the beliefs of those who hold America as a nation that was a blessing from God, and that the Constitution itself was “inspired by God.” They believed those things because they had been told those tales since birth: and they believed Trump’s lies, his stories with the same vigor. Those who foolishly believe tall tales when all evidence points to the contrary do so because the ideas have been planted deep in their minds, and they are unwilling to search for the truth.
The truth: that the Bible they have read, and the God they have believed in — who they believe blessed America and provided it to white Europeans— used myths recycled from other religions that are thousands of years old — older than their god. The god they believe in never granted this land to anyone, never gave them the right to take it from the native people, never “inspired” their Constitution, and never chose Donald Trump.
Trump’s lies became new myths, and when combined with long held, deeply-rooted and distorted core beliefs, wielded great power.
What Donald Trump and the Republican Party have done in telling lies for 7 years is that they have now told their followers new myths, created out of whole cloth by Trump.
Trump’s lies weren’t just lies, but became myths to his followers, myths like “the election was stolen.” Combine that fairy tale with his call to “fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore,” and you are generating a deadly combination of fabrications too powerful for his followers to ignore. When we see Americans storming our nation’s capital, surely something has gone wrong with their mental state.
Trump told his lies and those lies have now been planted deep in the minds of his followers as new myths. It is not enough that they follow him out of rote effort mandated by the existing belief to listen to those in charge, but now they have been significantly impacted by assigning what he says to their minds as something new, something more they must believe: to save the nation from the ‘evil Democrats,’ Trump has convinced millions of Americans that they must believe him as he lies with every breath.
If that is not the work of the devil, nothing is.
We end with a beginning
Years ago, back in my U.S. Air Force days, I attended the NCO Leadership Academy, a military school where the Air Force tried to teach new Non-Commissioned Officers (NCOs) how to be leaders. It was a thirty day school, and at the end of it all, one person would be named the Top Graduate.
We were down to the last day of the school, and there were only two people left in the running to be the top graduate: this guy I’ll call ‘Jim’ and myself. We had one final class, then the staff would add up all the points to determine who the top graduate was, which would be announced at our graduation ceremony the next evening.
For the final class, we were all gathered together in the auditorium, when suddenly the back door came smashing open, and in walked this large man dressed in a Soviet Army uniform. This man started spouting off about how awful Americans were and how great his Russians were. It was quite a spectacle.
He walked up and jumped on the stage, where he ranted further. He went on about how corrupt America was, and how it used its power throughout the world to commit evil and do whatever it wanted, never respecting human rights and all, and many in the room laughed. But the Soviet kept ranting, and eventually ‘Jim’ spoke up.
I don’t remember Jim’s exact words, but he was really pissed off at that Russian, and started arguing with him about how Russians had done this, and how they had done that, and none of that was very nice either. Jim and the Russian really got into it, and before long, we all could tell that this was Jim’s moment: his leadership was showing itself all over the auditorium.
As I sat back and listened, I realized that Jim was barking up the wrong tree: the Russian believed what he believed because that was all he ever knew. He was born and raised and taught those things as truth. We, on the other hand, believed what we were taught was truth. We could bash each other over the head all day, but we would never get the other side to change their thinking because their thoughts and feelings were borne out of their core beliefs — what they had been taught since birth. No amount of screaming, fighting, or anything else could bring agreement between these two diametrically opposed forces.
By this time, I figured it was my turn to speak, and I said just that: no amount of squabbling, badmouthing, or even war could get either side to change. What we all needed was to try to understand that truth first — that we believe different things. Only after we learned to respect the other side would we be willing to listen to each other.
The Russian turned out to be the Commandant of the NCO Academy. He knew in an instant who the Top Graduate would be, and Jim — well, I guess he got schooled that day.
At the heart of everything we think and feel are those core beliefs. When those beliefs are packed full of religious myth and a false sense of glorified nationalism, they block critical thinking that can help us find the truth. Too often, those with heavily distorted core beliefs choose instead to believe today’s “conspiracy theory,” otherwise known as a myth. Their pattern of believing in these wild theories leads to negative thinking and ugly emotional reactions, similar to what occured on January 6th at the U.S. Capitol.
The core beliefs of those on the right — distorted and twisted by myths — have become landfills of nationalistic hatred, rooted in racism, misogyny, greed, and a compulsive desire for power and control, all in a quest to keep what they have stolen from others.
Those on the right believe the myth that God granted this nation to white Christian men, and that it is their purpose in life to hold onto control of America at all costs. They see every group fighting to secure their own American rights — through the Constitution — as a violation of God’s purpose for this nation, and they are compelled to fight to “restore” this nation to the standard of 1787, where wealthy white men rule — alone.
They prefer to believe the myths over the facts.
For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.
2 Thessalonians 2:11, 12
God is not the God we thought he was: the Bible is full of myth. The stories told there are not factual, and while good for sharing and teaching, they should not be considered as the inerrant word of any god.
The Constitution was not inspired by the God of the Bible, or any god for that matter. All mention of God was intentionally left out of the Constitution by the Founders, who didn’t want to follow their own Bible. The concept of the Constitution being inspired by God is a myth.
The Presidential Election of 2020 was not stolen: that too, is a myth, created by the myth-maker, Donald Trump. His tall-tales have been told so many times that they have taken on mythical proportions, just like God and the Founders. Trump told his fabrications on such a grand scale — like that of the Bible — that millions actually believed him, just as they believe the Bible is fact — which it is not. Trump has been mythologized by his followers, but the truth is harsh:
Trump lied.
The Founders were not inspired by God.
The Bible is not inerrant.
The BIG Lie was a myth: lies passed off as truth by a president.
The BIGGER Lie was a myth: the Constitution was not “inspired by God.”
The BIGGEST Lie was a myth: whether there is a god in heaven, or anywhere else, is for you to decide. You have the right to believe as you’d like or nothing at all. The Bible is full of great stories, but they are not facts. The Bible, and the religious beliefs it may generate, should never be used to force its version of faith on anyone.
Myths will not help us find the truth: they are great for Hollywood movies, but far too often provide a launching pad for irrational thinking, emotional upheaval, and bad behavior.
The danger we face today in this nation is that those who hold these deeply-rooted, distorted set of core beliefs (on the right) are running head-long into those (on the left) who have tired of being denied their constitutional rights, who are demanding justice, equality, and the liberty they were promised long ago, but have been forced to watch as only white men enjoyed those God-given “unalienable rights”.
The war to control America is one that must be fought ultimately over core beliefs, over what values we truly hold as a people. There has always been a deep rift between the people of this nation, perhaps rooted in the manner in which we were founded — on stolen land and stolen lives.
He who controls the government controls the laws, controls who sits on the bench, and controls how America’s social issues get decided. There are those who want freedom for all, and those who want to control all.
Just as all the great battles throughout history, this battle is one of good versus evil.
May we work endlessly so that good will prevail.
This ends Part III, The BIGGEST Lie.
Click this link to go to Epilogue, The BIG, BIGGER, and BIGGEST Lies of All Time.
© Timothy J. Sabo 2022 All Rights Reserved
