[[WARNING: This post is not meant to diss anyone's religions convictions. Please forgive me if you feel I have touched upon a sensitive spot on your particular beliefs. It is not the intention of this post.]]
Ever since I was a child I’ve been fascinated by world religions and beliefs. I was brought up in a Christian environment and had to withstand biblical classes throughout high school even when I no longer believed these things. All this made me question religions and people’s motivations to believe in something greater than themselves that kept “order” between what they categorized as “good” and “evil”. Of course, the main religion I decided to explore further was Christianity (along with a bit of Judaism and Islam) because it was the one that hit closest to home and information was widely available to me as a child and teenager.
I started to notice a lot of inconsistencies with it and started to think the Bible had either serious errors or missing information. I believed (and still do) that the Bible is not the literal word of God (and that’s if ‘God’ even exists) as people claimed it was. I knew that information changes as it is passed generation to generation via the memorization and oral transmission because this is evidenced in a multitude of old literature and the different copies of it from different times. Also, every text loses something in translation. Now, if you take that into consideration and add the fact that writing had not yet been invented at the start of the events of the Bible/Torah, it is enough to convince me to take anything I read from this book as it is said “with a grain of salt”.
For example, a lot of people claim the first man and woman on Earth were Adam and Eve. I have two major problems with this: (1) How to account for the different ethnicities in the world?; and (2) Genesis, the first book of the Bible that gives the account of creation, has what one could either call a “flaw” or a conflicting view with this claim. Let’s take this second problem further into examination: Genesis 1:27 tell us that God made man “in his image; male and female he created them” (from dust). Genesis 2:18 states that God saw that Adam was alone and in Genesis 2:21-22 he creates a woman from Adam’s rib. Now, if this does not mean that God created 2 different women, it certainly poses the question of which of the two ways was she actually created.
And that’s just the first of many things I could find wrong with this book, with the Bible. I’m not saying you cannot find good advice and real bits of wisdom. No, not at all. I just think of the Bible as a sort of history book that combines poetry and prophecies in it.
