Philosophical Meanderings

Our existence has been on my mind lately.  I was watching a show on the History Channel about "Battles of the Bible".  The program focused on battle descriptions and the history behind them as presented in the bible.  One portion really caught my attention as it described the battle of Jericho.
 According to the bible, Joshua circled the city with the Ark of the Covenant and then his army made a lot of noise and the walls of Jericho fell.  Afterwards Joshua ordered the army into the city to kill every living thing.  The commentator was amazed at this because it is supposedly sanctioned by God.  The commentator supposed that we were to take away that history was wrong (which he didn't think so) or that God was a mean spirited bully.  It was about this time that my best friend showed up at my house and stated that he couldn't stay long because he had choir practice.  Bad timing for him, because it set me off.  I won't bore you with a script of our conversation but I will expound on what thoughts it inspired.

        Man has always looked for explanations for the unexplainable.  We look back on history and label much of the old beliefs as "Mythology".  There were many Gods attributed to various roles such as keeping the dead, raising the sun, gods of love, gods of war and so on.  There was usually one God put in charge of all the others.  Everything that ancient man could not explain was attributed to a God.  I am not a historian and do not assume, nor present, that I am an authority on any of the references that I use to illustrate my points.  Anyone can therefore argue that some of my presentations are flawed by picking apart the minutiae.  I bring this up now because I want the reader to not get locked in on any of my obvious mistakes and allow me some literary license in exploring my thoughts.  At some point religion started to gravitate towards one supreme being.  The mythology of multiple gods falling into disfavor as science proved how things really worked.  I have grown up as a Southern Baptist.  Many of my points focus on Christianity for this reason.  So I look back, perhaps with flawed preconceptions, at how this religion started.

      From here on is my thoughts on how the bible came about and what I think it has evolved into.  Again you have to live with my knowledge that is perhaps spotty on certain points.  The Jewish nation came to be enslaved in Egypt.  The Egyptians at some point started to pull away from a multi-god belief system and began to adopt a single god philosophy.  I believe that this one god religion was coming into practice while the Jews were in captivity and influenced the beginnings of the beliefs we see in the bible.  After many years of being enslaved, the Jews broke captivity and headed to "The Promised Land."  They get there only to find that it's inhabited and set about to reclaim it.  Of course the people that lived there didn't want to simply leave and let the Jews have their land, so they had to fight to take it.  Now to me this is just another example of using religion or a "Divine Mandate" to justify killing people to take what you believe is yours.  Almost the entire Old Testament is devoted to this war and the history of the Jewish people.  To me this is making up or creating God for selfish purposes.  Their are plenty of occurrences and stories in the Old Testament used by modern day preachers and pontiffs to make their points.  One of these old stories is the Ten Commandments. The main problem I have with this, from a Christian standpoint, is that the original list of rules was over 600 items long!  The Catholic church decided a long time ago that only 10 were really important and dropped the rest!  The Jewish religion still holds to the whole list as far as I know.  There are tons of examples of this censoring by the Catholic church throughout the entire bible including the New Testament.  The Catholic church has decided for our benefit (hahahahahaha) what was acceptable for our mental consumption and what was not.  They still have the audacity to claim that the bible is a "divinely inspired manuscript" even though they edited the contents themselves.  Maybe at some point I'll pick apart certain exclusions but for now it is enough to know they exist.

       At some point it occurs to me that the rules as set forth by God in the Old Testament became to hard to follow.  People were despondent and disheartened to find that they could live a good life and follow most of the rules but still be in jeopardy of eternal damnation because they didn't follow them all.  Religious leaders now start to look for an easy way out.  A prophesied savior could be brought forth and simply stating a belief in him as the son of God you would be allowed entry into the kingdom of heaven.  Now the followers of God could fail now and again but still have access to the promised reward.  How convenient!  The simplicity of the reward and the goal of a good life almost certainly contributed to Christianity becoming one of the largest religions on the planet.  So it follows that if the original God was created as a matter of convenience to prosecute a war then it follows that the Son was created to further the goal of spreading the religion.  I leave it to the reader to decide if this is some grand conspiracy perpetrated by some very few astute folks or if it came about with the best of intentions and flowered all by itself.  Religion, in my opinion, is the single greatest contributor to world unrest and inhibiting the potential growth of mankind.  A belief in a "God" or higher power is not the problem but the ideologies set forth by a specific set of practices to worship this "God".

        I confess that I do not know what I am philosophically.  I don't know if I'm an athiest, agnostic, Christian or whatever label can be applied to this situation.  I do think on occasion to what it means to live in an Infinite space.  But that is a topic to be explored in another posting.