C'mon Man, Read the Thing

I have lamented in these blogs the obvious fact that there are a host of people who claim to believe the Bible word for word, who apparently have not read it. If the Bible had everything that they believe is in it the book would be three times as big as it is now. It is already a pretty big book. There is lots of stuff in there that is hard to endure in reading. There are lots of stories and history that is like the history of the Lancasters and Yorks in England. But there is a lot of stuff that people claim that is in there that is just not in there. One of the most frequently quoted passages that does not exist in the Bible is the "God helps those who help themselves."

My current disappointment stems from the debate on a local blog about suicide. A man in our area shot his "significant other" and then shot himself. The debate on the blog has been what a nice man he was and yet how unfortunate for him that he will be going to Hell. He is definitely going to Hell, according to the religious experts in our community, because the Bible says that those who commit suicide go to Hell.

Now the Roman Catholic Church has a pretty strong position on suicide that concludes that since the person "kills" himself and does not get a chance to confess and repent of his sins, then the unrepentant sinner goes to Hell. It is a Catholic doctrine, as I understand it.

But a search of the Bible brings forth only about five or six texts that mention suicide. There is Samson who kills himself and many others as he pulled down the towers of the building and it collapsed on the crowd. There is Saul and his assistant killing themselves rather than being capture at the end of a losing battle. There are a couple of other Old Testament references. And then there is Judas who killed himself after betraying Jesus. The Judas event is mentioned in the Gospel and in Acts. But there is not blanket condemnation that all who commit suicide will go to Hell. The Bible just does not say that those who commit suicide go to Hell. As the Roman Catholic Church has done one may build an argument from the Commandments to the position that suicide is an ultimate insult to God as God is the giver of life, and to take your own is to really play God, and is a sin unconfessed and unforgiven and thus one goes to Hell, but that is not the same as it being in the Bible.

C'mon man, read the book. It is not a productive witness to the truth in Scripture to declare things in there that are not in there. When others discover you have lied to them by claiming something is in the Bible that is not in the Bible they will not be likely to believe you testimony again. Bert Erhman is a very vicious and angry critic of Christianity because he grew up in a fundamentalist congregation which swore to him that every word in the Bible was the literal truth. He went to college and seminary and then began to discover that the only possible infallible inerrant Bible was the original first writings and we do not have copies of that first writing. The whole textual history with all of the variants, mistakes and intentional corrections mean that the Bible we have is our best guess. Bert has become one of the best informed historians of the early church,but also one of Christianity's sharpest critics because his congregation lied to him and mislead him.

C'mon man, read the book and stick to what it says. It is amazing enough without having to supplement it with your own collection of ideas from other places.