In my last post I made an assertion regarding the uselessness for supporting a religious faith of a bible that is only a collection of stories told by many writers over the course of centuries.  While I explained that holding this view is what gives us the opportunity to make up our own rules for living and invent whatever rights we think we want, I didn't really go into the problem with such a bible as the basis for any worthwhile faith.  So here goes.

Actually, I'm not going to talk about just any old Bible.  This discussion is about the Christian Bible, consisting of 66 books, divided into 39 Old Testament books and 27 New Testament ones.  The Bible, then, is more like a small library containing all the information a person needs to have a relationship with that being who created everything that has been created, namely God.  In addition to Christianity, portions of this Bible for a partial basis for Judaism.  That would be the Tenach - what Christians call the Old Testament.  Furthermore, there are numerous other religions which rely more or less upon the Bible for background for and understanding of their own additional scriptures.  Some of the major ones are Islam, in which Jesus the son of Mary is named Issa, and Ishmael is the son of Abraham who is of real importance, not Isaac; Mormonism (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), in which Jesus' death outside Jerusalem was a mistake necessitating his coming again to the New World as recounted in the Book of Mormon; and Jehovah's Witnesses, whose New World Translation of the Bible takes certain liberties in translation to bolster its deviation from Christianity.

I mention these other significant faiths to underscore the point that hundreds of millions of people think of the Bible as more than a mere collection of stories written by lots of men long ago.  Of course, we could be wrong.  But I don't believe we are.  In its depiction of human nature, the Bible rings true.  Various other explanations for the way things are and people act do not do the job that the Bible does.  Freud?  Obsessed with sex.  Eastern monism?  Try picnicking on a freeway to see if the world of appearances is illusory.  And what of existentialism, naturalism, nihilism?  They are nothing but a slippery slope to hopelessness, to pessimism and despair.

Contrast these unrealistic worldviews with that of the Bible, where we find Jesus who came to serve his creation by laying down his life so that we might live.  In the Bible we encounter God the Son who did not consider himself so high and mighty that he was unwilling to join the human race but humbled himself, living as a servant to all he met.  It is his love that is the model for our own efforts to love as we have been loved, to do to others as we would have them do to us.  It is his service that inspires our own, giving back a portion of what we have been given, without compulsion other than our own internal sense of gratitude.

There are many other reasons to trust the Bible, including the thousands of ancient copies that we have discovered over the years, the quotations from it in a multitude of other languages such that scholars have said that if every Bible were to vanish from the earth tomorrow, it would be possible to reconstruct it with great precision from the early Christian writings which quoted heavily from it.  Still, though, the most important reason to believe that the Bible is a message from God is its truthfulness.  We are the sort of people the Bible says we are.  We are motivated by just the motivations it describes.  And we think and speak and act and seek to avoid consequences today just as people did in Bible times.  Why is that, do you think?  Because the Bible is a word from God - a word for a long ago time, and a word for today and for tomorrow.

What do you say?