may overtake the Catholic church in popularity, if it hasn't already!

There's an entire new generation reading those now.

Kids waving wands and casting spells instead of listening to stories of heaven, hell, limbo and purgatory.

They're better off.

And the reference to Mother Mary is not the Virgin Mary.

The Beatles rock!

The second coming of Christ if and when, will be Christ Consciousness for everyone.

No more prophets. No more gurus are coming. No more teachers.

We have had MORE than enough time to figure things out and learn to work together.

As the great Mariah Carey once said:


Look inside you and be strong
And you'll finally see the truth
That a hero lies in you.

.. constantly, slyly, changed, ""twisted," metaphoricalized, the first, Old Testament.

To the point that I read the second coming, the heaven-shattering Apocalypse, as the moment a Christian realizes it was all a ruse. And decides to give it all up for Reason and science and logic. The second and truer appearance.

I'm pretty sure all of them were, actually. And then, they were badly translated, besides. God's not going to take up His divine time scribbling books, you know. He has people to do that for Him.

They were oral traditions that nobody bothered to write down until decades, if not centuries after those with whom they are attributed to were long gone. At best they are 4th or 5th hand accounts of Jesus and probably more than that. Matthew and Luke were based on the same source material.

Iron Age campfire tales. All of it.

Others were probably embellished from that. And even Mark was copied over and over by scribes, the originals being long lost.

He delegated a lot of that to people wandering the desert by themselves for years at a time. Not a great idea for a publisher. I'm guessing a few of those ghost writers were a couple cans short of a six pack when they came out of the desert.

No valid reason to assume that the revelation is complete, nor to assume that the now-century knows the final complete word.
Nor to assume any god-thoughts are more than wisps of the wind.

God is like an onion unpeeled by theology, where-in every layer is the same as the next, until the realization comes that there is no there there. No center. The peeler is more real than the peeled.

That could end badly.

stole all their work since he and his admin has been in office.

I was very interested in the cosmology and history of the Universe and the earth. Since he was there for all that.

But he only gave us about 30 sentences and most of it is wrong.

14 billion years in one page.

So there is that to consider.

The authors might have believed that was the source of inspiration, but there is zero evidence of it.

Noted.

Did you not know that? Books and everything.

You realize that the Onion is satire, right?

And what is this thing you call satire?

That's what I thought... people wrote their interpretation, not god. They heard a good story and wrote it down. Now play the telephone game for a few hundred years and "POOF" it's the word of god. To me it's really just a nice story concocted by man... It gives hope..
YMMV and that's just me
m

The liner notes to Coltrane's "Love Supreme".

Whether he believed he was inspired by gratitude to his Creator and whether there is evidence - I hear what I hear. I see what I see. I feel what I feel.

That's faith. (shrug emoji) What can you do?

is the constant refrain for those who choose to ignore the fact that we all believe in unprovable things.

... are far more improbable than other beliefs. Especially given flat disproofs of their more concrete claims. Like promises of all the miracles we ask for (John 14.13).

any of the other religiously inspired books written over the last two thousand years?

by the Mormon tooth fairy 150 years ago.

God, aka L Ron Hubbard, aka the Scientology tooth fairy, wrote the Dianetics gibberish not even 70 years ago.

If the story is true (which it isn't), Joe Smith just copied down a story that had been written down thousands of years earlier on the golden plates and then lost.