Wednesday, January 24, 2007

Since MM does not read my blog anymore, I guess I can say anything without hurting or offending his feelings. It seems to me that MM's knowledge of historical events as they are related to the Bible are bias; I guess I just thought that MM would be more of a scholarly nature since he has been in college and not so closed minded and that he would say what he thought about stuff, not what other people told him to say. Anyways, I have always been interested in "the truth" as the truth related to the world, universe, and the Church since I was brought up in that environment. As far as I was concerned the Bible was fact, and I just assumed that there was empirical evidence to back up everything that I had learned in Sunday School, and evidence for all the different sermons that I had heard over the years.

I read my first ancient history book a number of years ago, the book was about the Greek civilization, Alexander the Great, and there was detailed account of the Egyptian civilization, and the book stated that there was no evidence that Joseph( coat of many colors) never existed, and book also said that the Egyptian civilization was well documented. I remember that the statement really disturbed me. How could that be? Joseph was second to the Pharaoh, plus there was a great famine of 7 years. How could that not be in the Egyptian history records? Since then I have been on a sort of a quest to understand history, and how the Bible was written, and to understand the world.

Now, do not get me wrong I do not think that the Bible is invalid; I just think that the Bible is man's attempt to explain the world but it fails in that aspect. A person needs a philosophy to live by, and Jesus had a good answer to how to live your life. Jesus said," Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Lily and I may not always live up to those words, but we try our best with what we know about ourselves, and the people that cross our paths that we try to help. Back to history.

I read the Epic of Gilgamesh and there is a flood story in the tale. It is then I realized that this story was before the Bible and it was written by about 500 years before the Bible was written, so the only conclusion that I could conclude was that it was copied by the Jews when they were writing the Old Testament, not God. The last few books that I have read have explain how different myths from that time period have been incorporated into the Old Testament. The last book that I read stated the what the Israelites wrote was not necessary a fib, or tale, lie, but that what they were writing was their understanding of life, and how they as a people were coming to terms of life in that time period of which they were living in. The Old Testament also served another purpose; it gave the Israelites an identity, separate from the people from which they came from.

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