Sovereign Spirit
..One Woman's Path from Shameful Sheep to Spiritual Sovereignty
Chapter Six, Part Five
I began with the history of the Bible itself. I felt like I should start at the root of it all. I quickly learned that the original Bible had eighty books, not the sixty-six books it holds today. I knew that God’s Word, the Bible, was supposed to be infallible and inspired directly by God. I wondered if it was infallible and inspired with the original eighty books or the modern sixty-six books. Which version was correct? Which version was complete? Which version was God’s intended message to his creation? Did God need to edit his original message? Shouldn’t he have gotten it right the first time? Who decided fourteen books needed to be removed, God or man?
It turns out the books that made it into our modern canon were decided not by God, but by a vote taken by the religious and wealthy men of the time. A vote. We know how voting and politics go in our modern world; I can’t imagine things being far more moral when you have the most influential people of a society making decisions on what set of beliefs their people would be given to base their lives on. There were hundreds of Christian writings floating around at the time the Bible was being put together. Only a handful made it in. I began to understand that the Bible was not God’s Word given to man, but rather, man deciding for an entire culture what God should say.
Jesus was my next topic for research. In comparison with other savior characters from other religions around the world, Jesus had some intriguing similarities. To name a few, Jesus had many intricate details of his life in common with Horus, an Egyptian god, Attis, a Grecian god, Krishna, an Indian god, Dionysus, another Grecian god, and Mithra, a Persian god. The stories and myths from these gods compared similarly with Jesus in that they also: were born of a virgin, were given a birth announcement by an angel, were born on or around December 25th, were attempted to be killed as a child, were baptized, endured temptation on a mountain, calmed the sea, healed the sick, and walked on water just to name a few.
This forced the question: Was the Jesus story simply stolen from older belief systems and tweaked in certain places to form a new religion? The coincidences and similarities were just too much to turn my eye from.
There was also the question of the historicity of the Jesus story as a whole. As it turns out, there are many theories and opinions out there, but the question of whether or not Jesus was an actual man who walked the earth or just a character in an allegorical story has never truly reached a solid conclusion.
I also remembered what I had learned as a new Jehovah’s Witness about the pagan practices within Christianity, and still found myself bothered by them Easter, Christmas, and others were supposedly Christian holidays, celebrating Jesus Christ, but these celebrations had existed long before Christ was ever even heard of. It didn’t sit well with me that Christians would intertwine pagan practices with their new belief system just to gain popularity with the people if these pagan beliefs were really so wrong.
In further reading, I came upon Christianity’s bloody history. I read about The Crusades and all the many other wars that took place in the name of Christianity. I learned about the witch hunts, and the fact that people were burned at the stake for refusing to believe in Jesus. How could I possibly want to lay claim to a belief system which forced its way into our modern world through cries of fear, the spilled blood of the innocent, torture, and fiery massacre?
I also learned these kinds of fear tactics were not only a thing of the past. In our modern day, Christians have been responsible for the murder of abortionists, most support war, which can only mean they support killing Christians and non-Christians in other countries, and have camps where LGBT kids are sent to essentially be tortured straight, though I’m sure that isn’t mentioned on the pamphlet.
The more I researched, the more my mind opened, percolating with new questions and ideas all the time. I found myself wondering why I had never asked these kinds of questions before; they seemed so obvious to me now. What determines the one, true religion, and does one even exist or is it based purely on an individual basis? If God already decided what would happen before the world was created, how can we have free will? How can God say that he desires none to perish if he has already decided beforehand those who will and will not be saved? Why would God choose to save me and not someone else? Do our prayers for each other make any difference if everything is already known beforehand? Is God cool with all of the pagan traditions practiced in Christianity? Why are there so many similarities between Jesus and the savior gods of other religions? Why are there so many stories in other religions that match so closely with stories in the Bible? Can Jesus’ own existence be legitimately proven?
Even more disturbing that I had never been able to form questions like these in my mind before, when they seemed so basic to me now, was the idea that these questions had no straight answer from the Bible or the church. They could not be explained with doctrine or apologetics, and I wasn’t sure how to place them in my mind.
In time, my attention turned to Jehovah himself. I was taught that Jehovah was my loving, Father God. He was all-powerful, all-knowing, and sent either his son or himself in human form, depending on how you view Jesus, in order to save us from our sinful state. I saw, according to what I ascertained from my study and meditation on the Bible that it portrayed Jehovah as a god who:
-Created imperfect humans and gifted them with curiosity and free will.
-Gave them silly rules to follow, like not eating a certain fruit, even though he knew beforehand what they would choose.
-Put severe punishment for not following his rules in place, punishment that would last for eternity and would cost the human its soul, even though he knew beforehand the humans would fail his test and disobey his silly rules simply because of the curiosity and free will which he created them to possess.
-Sentenced the humans, who he knew all along would fail the test, to everlasting condemnation.
-Gave even more rules, even rules which conflicted one another, just for an added measure of loyalty testing, while the humans continued to fail Him.
-Wiped his creation from the face of the earth, with the exception of one man and his family.
-Decided as God, he couldn’t change his own rules, and continued to watch his creation fail his erroneous tests.
-Came in human form, lived a short, sinless life, and sacrificed himself to himself so that he wouldn’t have to send the whole of his creation to Hell.
-Provided a way out of everlasting condemnation, but only for the humans who were capable of turning off the mental capabilities they were born with and simply chose to believe a set of unprovable stories which have no historical or scientific backing. Oh, and if they happened to be born into a culture or family who weren’t already believing these stories, they were kind of screwed because they’d never hear the story about God sacrificing himself to himself and would never have the chance to believe it was true.
-Expected the humans to believe he came as a man to save them centuries later, even though he couldn’t make sure to leave any evidence behind to prove he’d ever even come.
-Decided that if the humans didn’t believe he came in human form to save them, they could rightly go to hell and be tortured forever, along with the millions of people who would never even hear of the God-Man story due to the simple fact that they were born in an area with different culture or belief structures. Oh, and he already knew about those people because he created them too, and knew beforehand that they would never hear about his sacrifice.
Ah, the supposed god of Love. No wonder our world is so confused about what true, unconditional love looks like.
Jehovah is the exact opposite of Love. He is petty and jealous, and throws fits when things don’t go his way. He’s a narcissist. He is like the bully on the playground, only he claims to be the creator of the playground and everything in it, and feels justified in allowing his rage to destroy everything when people don’t listen or don’t buy his stories. Simply put, he’s a fraud. He isn’t the loving god he claims to be. And after many months of thinking and debating in my own mind, I decided that even if the Bible were true, even if it were inspired by God himself, the God therein was not one I would ever give my worship to again.