Word of God? No, Thank You!

Word of God? No, thank you!

By Hans-Armin Ohlmann

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction

I

In the Beginning (Genesis, chapters 1 & 2)

II

Noah’s Curse (Genesis 9:18–27)

III

Lot and his Daughters (Genesis 19, 1 – 38)

IV

Hagar and Ishmael (Genesis 16:1–16 and 21:9–21)

V

The Bloodbath at Shechem (Genesis 34)

VI

Judah’s sin and Tamar’s misery (Genesis 38:1–27)

VII

Moses and Pharaoh, the departure from Egypt (Exodus, chapters 2-11)

VIII

Mary and Jesus (Koran surah 3:33-60; surah 19:1-31)

IX

A Chosen People (Deuteronomy 7:1-3, 6)

X

Sun, stand still over Gibeon (Josh 10:12)

XI

Yahweh has second thoughts (Deuteronomy 21:15–17)

XII

Yahweh maintains His Flexibility (Judges 1-3)

xIII

David the King (Both Books of Samuel)

XiV

Queen Esther (The Book of Esther)

XV

The Idea of Suffering (The Book of Job)

XVI

The Sex Life of a King (Song of Solomon)

XVII

The Prophets (et al)

XVIII

Deliberate Deceptions (New Testament)

XiX

Jesus and Mary Magdalene

XX

Between the Lines (New Testament)

XXI

Judas Iscariot (Texts from the four gospels)

XXII

The Concept of Reincarnation

Conclusion

Appendix

PEACE

PROPOSAL

for the

MIDDLE EAST

Prologue

The Plan

Security

Justice

Satisfaction

Copyrights

Dedication

This book is dedicated to all the poor souls who have a hard time to believe in the Bible as word by word inspired by God and feel guilty about their rightful doubts. May the selected texts and my comments help them shed this guilt and think for themselves. Our intelligent mind is a gift of God and He certainly does not want us to switch it off whenever we start to think of Him. And that is exactly what the fundamentalists demand from us; humility is required not arrogant contemplation as they call it.

I wish all of you the very best in finding God on your own.

(Of course, this text is open to critical discussion)

Introduction

Early in Life, at the tender age of about four years I was fascinated with biblical mythology and started to mull it over. Thus I asked sister Frieda, a deaconess of the Augsburg Convent, who was operating our local Kindergarten, how Cain could have found a wife abroad, having been the first child of the first human couple Adam and Eve. Sister Frieda had read to us the story of Cain and Abel, the first murder in the biblical history of mankind, from the Gottbüchlein, a kind of children´s bible, which narrates selected biblical texts in kid’s language, and is illustrated with impressive prints from wood engravings. To this day I can vividly recall the picture: Cain and Abel kneeling on the ground and, in front of them their sacrificial offerings are burning, the smoke from Abel´s fire is vertically ascending to heaven, whereas the smoke from Cain´s flames is directed towards the ground. The interpretation of this conspicuously visible difference was, that God gracefully accepted Abel´s sacrifice but rejected the one from Cain, which in turn made him very jealous and he slew his brother Abel in a spontaneous fit of wrath. Sister Frieda was very much astonished at my question and unable to answer it suggesting, you better wait until you attend grade school, the pastor there will have an explanation for you. For the first time I was disappointed by the otherwise highly regarded Sister Frieda. About two years later, I posed the question to our instructor in religion, the good Reverend Preu, who explained it this way: You should know that Adam and Eve grew to more than 900 years of age and had many children and grandchildren and so on. So, Cain married a distant cousin or niece. That was quite plausible, and I was satisfied. - This story of the first murder reported in the Bible can be found in the fourth chapter of Genesis. -

My fascination with the Bible never vanished; but with the years, knowledge and criticism have unavoidably grown. Bible studies with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Mormons, the Seventh-day Adventists and members of the New Apostolic Church contributed a lot to this. As a kind of by-product, I learnt how to start a religion with modified doctrines, support the new faith by quoting biblical texts taken out of context and compiled differently. For some arguments, it suffices to change the punctuation, add on or omit a seemingly insignificant word. A shining example springs to my mind: in the narrative about Jesus’ crucifixion, he said to one of the two criminals, who had been crucified with Him: Assuredly, I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise (Luke 23, 43), which at any rate means, that immediately upon having died, they both went to paradise. However, the Jehovah’s Witnesses write in their New World translation: Truly I tell you today, You will be with me in Paradise. That leaves their arrival time in Paradise undefined. In this case, logic is on the side of Jehovah’s Witnesses because according to Martin Luther’s version of the Apostles’ Creed Jesus, right after having died on the cross, descended down into the realm of death before he resurrected the third day. We have to take notice of the fact, that this episode is mentioned in none of the four gospels. Even more important for the Witnesses is their doctrine that says that man has no immortal soul, which continues to live on and could immediately enter Paradise right after death. For them, the Old Testament’s expression living soul simply means, living being. When man dies and the body rots, there is absolutely nothing left behind. On resurrection day, Jehovah God will call all of us from His memory vaults for the final judgment.

The possibility to manipulate and abuse biblical texts, enabling the founding of disparate doctrines and even new religions, shows us that the Bible cannot be the inspired Word of God. In no way can it have emanated from the loving Heavenly Father, whom Jesus proclaimed and preached to us, He who knows and loves his creation and us humans, He who has mercy and forgiveness and is, over and above the God of Justice and Peace. Furthermore He is omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. All that considered, our reality should look very different. Why does it not? All these human like anthropomorphic attributes do not apply to God; it is all wishful thinking. In other words, God is beyond any human perception and description. How else could we have fought all these religious wars in His name? Most of our wars have been religious wars, plain and simple, up to our modern days. Only think about Bosnia, and even now, in the year 2014, about the atrocities in the Middle East. Shiites against Sunnis, they together against Christians and Jews, Jews contra Palestinians, etc. Apart from the incomparably more horrible weapons, they are no different from those in our Christian past, from the Crusades to the Thirty Years War, the Inquisition, the pogroms up to the Holocaust, to name the most important ones. God could have and should have averted all that, almighty and all-merciful as he allegedly is.

I know there are countless people who honestly and seriously contemplate their faith and cannot come to terms with it and themselves for a host of reasons. The gravest is the reverence for the Holy Writ, imbued and even indoctrinated in early childhood, prohibiting us forming our own ideas, thus committing sacrileges. This almost automatically generates a conflict which hurts, and can escalate and even lead to suicide.

With this humble book I intend to help these people and myself to overcome the fear of thinking for ourselves by showing that the Bible is made by man, and therefore open to critique by human reason.

The following selected texts from the Bible and my very subjective remarks are intended to contribute towards a way of liberation and liberating contemplation.

The German texts I take from a translation by D. Martin Luther, published by Die Britische und Ausländische Bibelgesellschaft Berlin, in the year 1912.

The English quotations are taken from the The Holy Bible New King James version, published by Thomas Nelson, Nashville, Dallas, Mexico City, Rio De Janeiro. Edition of 1982.

The Koran is quoted from a copy of the publisher Penguin Books Ltd. London England, latest revision 2006.

I

In the Beginning (Genesis, chapters 1 & 2)

I will only briefly refer to the first two chapters of Genesis just to show, that these texts cannot represent the revealed word of God: God knows as nobody else the history of mankind and the correct sequence of his creative actions. Therefore, if He had intended for us to accurately learn about these events and things up front and without our own toil, i.e. scientific research, He would have enlightened those early scribes accordingly. After all we know now, from the very beginning up to our present existence, there is nothing correct in the biblical report on creation. Even if we are willing to accept the six days of creation as a period of time, that is not defined further, i.e. wide open to generous interpretation, at least the sequence of creational events should agree with what we consider as proven facts in our times. Nevertheless, even in this regard, the flaws are glaring. Thus the elements earth, water and light appear on the first day of the creation, but the source of light, the sun, the moon and the stars debut