The Bible & Homosexuality

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President Obama & Haiti... Thanks for doing the right thing

The Religious Right has propagated for more than two years that President Obama is not “Christian” enough to be the leader of the free world. Their argument is deeply rooted in their belief that good Christians do superficial things like going to church, swearing on the Bible, and revering the obvious fallacies found in scripture. Fundamentalists have upheld these pharisaic arguments despite Christ’s obvious position that his true followers would be known by how they treat people and NOT how well they uphold superficial traditions.

In the wake of the most terrible natural disaster many of us have seen in our lifetimes, President Obama has stepped up to the plate to help those referred to by the Bible as “the least of these…” He has promised resources that will translate to food for the hungry, medical attention for the ailing, and shelter for the homeless. The character of our President touches my heart. Thank you, President Obama, for caring about the people of Haiti.

If you would like to give to the people of Haiti, please consider one of the following organizations:
American Red Cross International Response Fund
Clinton Foundation
International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Mercy Corps Haiti Earthquake Fund
Partners in Health
ShelterBox
UNICEF
UN World Food Programme


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ProfessorMTH and Bible Blunders

While YouTube sensation ProfessorMTH and I disagree about the existence of God, I have to say I can't get enough of his Bible Blunders series. Using his own unique brand of tongue-in-cheek humor, some pretty nifty software, and his extremely impressive grasp of scripture and Bible history, ProfessorMTH has developed a series of videos that shed a blinding light on the inconsistencies in our Bible. One such tidbit of thought-provoking (and hilarious) infotainment is Episode 2 of the Bible Blunders series.

In this video, ProfessorMTH points out that Exodus narrative has a very inconsistent account of what went down with the cattle. Yet another reason why we shouldn't be afraid to embrace that our Bible is NOT inerrant...

Be sure to hop over to YouTube to watch a few more of ProfessorMTH's masterpieces.

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Two Creation Stories in the Bible (With Video)

Several months ago, I found a website called Living the Questions (www.livingthequestions.com) that is devoted to people like myself who choose faith in the midst of spiritual uncertainty. Recently, LTQ posted several excerpts of its videos to Youtube, with one of those videos being a brilliant discussion of the two conflicting creation stories found in the book of Genesis.

I have written about our fear of admitting that the Bible is not inerrant, but did not expound on the inconsistencies that appear in the Bible. However, this video captures a fundamental inconsistency in a way that I could never capture in writing. (More analysis after video...)



For those of us who are "living out the questions," the commentators in this video hit on several extremely important things. First, as indicated by Dr. Amy-Jill Levine, such discrepancies are only a problem for those of us who are uncomfortable with the possibility that the Bible may NOT be inerrant. Many Christians feel that the Bible's inerrancy is central to the credibility of the faith and insist that the Genesis narrative is how it all happened. Most won't admit that such errors exist in scripture, even when they are this obvious.

However, reasonable Christians cannot ignore that in chapter 1 of Genesis, Adam is created after the animals and vegetation, but in Genesis 2, Adam is created first. More perplexing is that in Genesis 1, Adam and Eve are created together near the end of the story, while in Genesis 2, Adam existed for some time before Eve was taken from his rib.

I've known about these inconsistencies for some time now, and would submit to the unyielding fundamentalist (as postulated in the video and by various scholars) that the Bible story is more likely to be a metaphorical story of why than it is a literal story of how. That is, the story when read properly explains that God created man to commune with Him, that God intended for us to have relationships with one another, and that we are to take care of the planet because its resources are "good" and precious in God's sight. Such a concession won't undermine the existence of God or the beauty of the creator's love for us, even if it does challenge our existing dogma.

To read more about the two conflicting creation stories found in Genesis, visit ReligiousTolerance.org...
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