Investigations

Last night while reading Jesus the Christ by Thalmage, my scepticism and criticism of the Bible began to increase and I was becoming even more convinced that there was no actual proof, no exceptable validation, no real way to verify the veracity of the scriptures. The Bible could be just as easily a work of fiction as it is the Word of God.

 As I contemplated my thoughts and entered my ideas, in my wife's kindle, I had a thought come to me about the purpose of the Torah and its relationship to the Bible.

I grabbed my wife's i-pod, got on line, and referenced wikipedia because it is a great place to find concise explanations for practically everything.  It may not be the final word on anything but for my purposes it was easy and convenient. What I found really surprised me. The Torah is actually the same thing as the first five books of the Christian Bible.  The more interesting thing was that the process for copying the Torah has been so precise and safe guarded by religious fervor that no error, alteration, or interpretation has been allowed for 2600 years.  Specially trained scribes have used the same type of parchment scrolls, the same exact letters and figures with the same writing instruments to, supposedly, make exact copies of the original since Moses' words were written down originally.

Accept for the LDS Book of Mormon and its claimed miraculous inception I was not aware of any way to physically verify that God really exists because there are no, commonly experienced spiritual manifestations, supernatural occurrences, or interventions of the divine that can be proved and accepted as real.

As I read the wikipedia entry it dawned on me that the purpose of the Jew for 2600 years has been to provide the only, and the first, temporal evidence of God.  For 2600 years the Jews have been the sole keeper of the faith and the caretakers of the actual word of God.

Conversely the Bible traces it beginnings and owes its content to the Jewish people and the christian faithful but because of its checkered history, evidence of wanton manipulation, systematic generalization through creeds, the existence of multiple interpretations, misinterpretations and subjective revisions its authenticity is discounted if not completely repudiated.

Because the Bible is practically nothing more than a collection of hearsay and poetry that can not be verified or validated, the Bible and the stories about Christ are just as easily a divinely, or not, inspired metaphor as they are recollection of actual events written sometime centuries after the event.

As a consequence the whole notion of God and Jesus Christ is subject to skepticism and criticism. Because religion relies entirely upon faith for its acceptance and because there are no spiritual manifestations, supernatural occurrences, or divine interventions that don't require the observer to exercise his or her faith the concept of God is suspect in today's world of scientific scrutiny and narcissistic personality disorders.

The Torah and the Book of Mormon are still relics of faith. They are however the greatest actual evidence of God's existence.  In a temporal and mortal world where everything even science eventually requires faith as a basis for belief, 2600 years of proof and a second witness a with miraculous inception justify the faithful embrace of God and the acceptance of Jesus Christ as our savior.

Add to that the millennial recurrence and world wide belief in a God based on personal testimony gained, by the individual, through reading, studying, pondering, praying and practicing the concepts of religion and through daily inspirations one receives when their minds are receptive and their lives are in tune with the spirit of God.  The critics will continue and the nonbelievers will protest but their efforts are nothing more than what they protest against and that is faith. " Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen (Hebrews 11:1)