The Best of Hitchens

Worth watching again

Christopher Hitchens was very instrumental in my de-conversion. I couldn’t use apologetics to refute his claims.

Off to visit my roots

The background picture I have posted today is of a cemetery behind the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Zetel, Germany.  Located close to the North Sea, this little village is where my grandfather (my Mother’s Father) was born and was baptized in this 500 year old Church.

I have visited there twice but now my oldest sibling , my only sister wanted me to take here while she is still able to travel.  We are leaving Central Illinois, USA this evening for Germany.  I have been doing some extensive research lately on our ancestry so that I would know what to look for once we arrived.  It’s funny how I take very little of what the “Church” tells us theologically and yet I will be looking at their old record books to see what they reveal about my grandfather and will accept them at “Face Value”.

I belong to ancestry.com and have noticed much of the information available on this site comes from a vast record keeping system owned by the Morman Church.  Other than Census Records and Death and Birth Records, much of what I find is from other church records as well.  How ironic that much of what the church says we doubt or disbelieve totally and yet we take some of what they write (church records) quite literally.

I will be posting our experiences here in a few days.

 

 

The History of Christianity Part II

It’s been a long time since my post of Part I and I apologize.  I still have a day job and I also like to take trips.  🙂  So much of this topic has been discussed in other blogs by people better qualified than me.  Having said this, I’m going to touch on OT and NT stories which tend to fly below the radar especially in Evangelical Blogs.

This particular story came up in a bible study I sponsored at my home about 8 years ago.  There were 6 well educated men from my church who would meet at my home at 6:00 AM once a week for this bible study.  On this particular morning we were studying King David and how he was a man after god’s own heart.  The bible study we used happened to list a series of scriptures detailing how god had to punish David for having an affair with a married woman, Bathsheba.  When I read this passage aloud to these 6 other men, a light bulb came on in my head .  I audibly shared my displeasure for this passage and stated, “No loving God could have commanded this”  Of course some of the other men in my home cautioned me about “questioning God and his ways”

As a preface to the passage I am about to quote, keep in mind according to Mosaic Law , Deuteronomy 22:22 “If a man is found sleeping with another man’s wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die.“

However this is what happened in King David’s case.  God broke his own rule and decided to give King David a different punishment and not just one but multiple punishments for the same sin !

2 Samuel 12:7-18

New International Version (NIV)

^7″ Then Nathan said to David, “You are the man! This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you from the hand of Saul. ⁸ I gave your master’s house to you, and your master’s wives into your arms. I gave you all Israel and Judah. And if all this had been too little, I would have given you even more. ⁹ Why did you despise the word of the Lord by doing what is evil in his eyes? You struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and took his wife to be your own. You killed him with the sword of the Ammonites. ¹⁰ Now, therefore, the sword will never depart from your house, because you despised me and took the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your own.’

¹¹ “This is what the Lord says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity on you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight. ¹² You did it in secret, but I will do this thing in broad daylight before all Israel.’”

¹³ Then David said to Nathan, “I have sinned against the Lord.”

Nathan replied, “The Lord has taken away your sin. You are not going to die. ¹⁴ But because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for^[a] the Lord, the son born to you will die.”

¹⁵ After Nathan had gone home, the Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill. ¹⁶ David pleaded with God for the child. He fasted and spent the nights lying in sackcloth^[b] on the ground. ¹⁷ The elders of his household stood beside him to get him up from the ground, but he refused, and he would not eat any food with them.

¹⁸ On the seventh day the child died.”

So the bible god didn’t follow his own law which would have been to kill King David AND Bathsheba, but instead killed their “love child” and had one of King David’s best friends have sex with his wives in public.

When I hear christian apologists tell us what a loving deity god is and that the evil which happens on earth is caused by man not their god, I ask them about this story.  You can only guess what their responses are.

Any thoughts ?