From my Writing Room
Copyright © 2021 by Uwe Bahr
“We believe the entire Bible is the inspired word of God and that men were moved by the spirit of God to write the very words of the scripture. Therefore, we believe the Bible is without error.”
Creed of a contemporary Church
“Now after Noah was five hundred years old, Noah fathered Shem, Ham, and Japheth.”
New American Standard Bible
Religious quotations like these could be continued at will. The fantasts ascribe the dogma of infallibility to a concoction like the Bible – imagine that.
“Only a Christian person is a good person.”
This was what I heard from an American pastor after I had moved from Germany to Florida in 1998. I cannot remember the name of the church anymore. But my ears went ringing, because like a flash the following came back to my memory:
“Only a communist is a good person.”
The words of a teacher lecturing us in the former communist GDR (“East Germany”); it must have been in 1974. True, the GDR has perished, and the Churches are still there – but that doesn’t make the core of the matter any truer. For there certainly is not only “one good kind of person”, as well as there are true Christians living according to their religious perceptions.
That’s all for now with the quotes.
The Bible, in its essential parts, was written in the first century of our era by a clan of giggling charlatans on behalf of the authorities, with the aim of keeping the common people in line as docile servants. Thus, the Jesus story fits aptly into a time when superstition, witchcraft, and satanic cults were part of everyday life. Over the centuries, this culture has been refined and continued into our own day – from the Ku Klux Clan movement to the lateral thinkers (conspiracy theorists) with their pathological ideas.
Whoever doubts this thesis of the origin of the Bible would have to prove first the validity of the Christian theses, especially this one: How someone can come back from the dead to the living after three days, then walks around on earth for another 40 days and finally ascends to heaven, only not to have been seen again since then. Not even historical greats of the recent past believed in the miracles of resurrection and rebirth: The famous Prussian King Frederick the Great was a flawless atheist who allowed his subjects “to be blessed according to everybody’s own facon.” By which he meant: they could pray to whomever and as much as they wanted, only not neglecting their duties. America’s George Washington believed that Jesus was not dead after the crucifixion and buried alive by the Romans. Contrary to the history-falsifying nonsense circulating in American schoolbooks, in which angels lift the dying president, complete with bed, towards heaven, Washington himself believed that a dead person completely goes nowhere else but straight into the ground.
The easiest way to make people compliant and to use them for one’s own advantage is – then as now – through the tool of propaganda, of dumbing down the masses. From ancient times, religion served as an instrument of power for the rulers, which eventually led to the forcible Christianization of entire tribes since the early middle Ages. In truth, Christianization meant nothing more than a God-given justification for brutal wars of conquest, for the warriors of God came with the Christian cross in one hand and the sword in the other: Those who were not willing to accept the former, got to feel the latter.
In modern times, the churches, apart from minor and major scandals – such as the murder and disappearance of indigenous children in Canada, or the rape of altar boys around the world – limit themselves to political influence and self-preservation as a lucrative business: Although they often pretend to be charitable organizations, they do not forget lining their own pockets with billions while rarely have to pay taxes. On the side, they also tell the faithful who they should vote for – see USA and Donald Trump. All of this only works because enough people around the world are hoodwinked by the church and their Holy Joes. Just like the whoring business, the church business has always worked.
In all this nonsense, it is not at all surprising that people who pretend to be Christians vote for a pervert like Trump, a demagogue like DeSantis, support wars, guns and shooting, thereby arbitrarily interpreting the Bible as it suits their own desires. Of course, in many cases this also includes denying man-made climate change and the existence of the Corona Virus, or baseless allegations about allegedly forged elections. The serious problems of our time can hardly be resolved with people who have a pathologically disturbed relationship to reality.
This explains much, if not all, about the dangerous times we live in.
The Wind of Change 