You have far better things to worry about

Dear Editor,

Re: Pastor cautions against claim 

If Yahweh/Jesus wanted to send a warning - why not just write it clearly and unmistakably in the sky so that all can see, rather than hide it in so-called miracles that are always open to dispute, given that they violate the space/time laws of our physical matter reality? 

Why does Yahweh/Jesus only communicate with us through the fallible voices of humans who always disagree about these things because there is never compelling objective evidence to support a so-called miracle?  Why does Yahweh/Jesus intentionally create conflict among humans in this way? Surely he knows that Pentecostalists and Catholics, for example, are not going to agree!

Yahweh/Jesus failed to preserve any original copies of any of his texts in the new or old testaments, so that even if they are inspired - who cares? We don’t have the originals, and we don’t know what they said. Yahweh/Jesus couldn’t protect the originals - and we know the Catholic Church edited the heck out of them. 

The scraps we have, which are copies of copies of copies of copies -often translated in the middle of that process, contain all sorts of errors and contradictions. (Bart Ehrman - “Misquoting Jesus,” “Forged,” etc.) You’d think an all-powerful being could do a better job of preserving his holy, sacred and inspired word; but apparently not. It seems that He prefers that we be at each other’s throats arguing about things we have no evidence for in the first place.

Our scientists fully understand particle physics, and making hands bleed requires particles , and we know there are no forces acting on particles that we have not discovered, or that remain to be discovered. 

Quantum field theory tells us with a high degree of accuracy, that we’ve found all there is to find regarding ways to affect particles, and there is no place for some spiritual force to act on those particles - or we would know about it. (See Sean Carroll’s “The Big Picture”).

Catholics love this stuff because the miracle of transubstantiation is too subtle to be appreciated. Deep down, how many people really believe a cracker turns into the body and blood of a divine being that we then eat in a cannibalistic ritual? As a child indoctrinated to believe in this ritual, I still couldn’t help but feel a little “icky” when supposedly eating a body!

Christianity has some serious issues facing it. We know beyond reasonable doubt today that there was no six-day creation, no two-person DNA bottleneck (Adam and Eve), no global flood, no mass Exodus from Egypt and no conquest of Canaan. All but religious scholars are pretty much in universal agreement over these points. Without this foundation, what remains to support the idea of Yahweh in the first place? Without Yahweh, what need do we have to be saved from him?

As for bleeding hands - that wouldn’t work unless someone was tied to the cross and the nails were just for show and torture. If you nail someone through the palms and hang them from a cross, the hand will rip apart and the person will fall off - you have to go through the wrists, or tightly tie the arms to the cross. 

In the old days, the Romans left them up there till the bodies rotted and the birds and rats finished them off. What was left was thrown into “Gehenna” the Jerusalem town dump (later translated to the pagan word “Hell).  That was part of the punishment. The ultimate insult to a Jew was to be thrown in the dump, rather than be afforded a decent burial. If there was a Jesus, and he was crucified, there is almost no chance that he was taken down from the cross. Most likely, a couple followers had some visions of him, as do many people under emotional duress when loved ones die, and that may have led to a resurrected Jesus story.... or if you go with Paul’s version, the crucifixion was a celestial event that didn’t happen here on earth in the first place. You people are on a beautiful tropical island arguing about imaginary, invisible beings that live in the sky, and meanwhile global climate change is going to start to swallow your islands. 

You have much more important things to be concerned about than which fallible human knows more than any other fallible human about a god for whom no objective evidence exists. Priorities, people. 

Priorities... You are at the mercy of the industrial nations polluting your waters and changing your climate, killing your reefs, depleting your fish supplies, and you’re worried about who has the correct understanding of some invisible god.

 

Patrick Gannon 

Samoa Observer

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