THE RECENT FINDINGS by the scientists that a jawbone was discovered that dates back over four million years bears no relationship to the Genesis version of the beginning of mankind.
The four-feet-long lobster that scientists date 480 million years ago was before “He made all living creatures”.
We were taught from the time some of us have been going to Sunday school that for six days, God laboured to make the firmament, including heaven and earth. However, the Jewish conception of the beginning of mankind is symbolic and in keeping with the many concepts that account for how we are here.
The account is but allegorical, as I have often told my friend Corey. The Bible is a collection of rules like that of other societies fashioned in their own times. That there was a Garden of Eden some eight or ten thousand years ago, and that Adam, Eve and a snake had some tiff over an apple is allegorical, although the part about Eve seducing Adam into eating the apple for whatever reason seems plausible. Those things happen even today.
Despite all of this, I believe that there must be a God. Some being must have been responsible for this firmament however it developed subsequently. Conceivably that being can be interested in us, in the way we live and deal with
one another. My feeble mind cannot answer the question of what if there was no God?. They say that faith makes this short stint on earth bearable.
There is no doubt about the feeling we get when we allow ourselves to assess our well-being and that of people around us; our feeling of thankfulness at the comparatively comfortable way we live, whether it is with or without wealth. Man tries to express it in hymns, in music, in prose and in poetry.
Consider the hymn Great Is Thy Faithfulness, from the Anglican hymnal. You can take comfort in the words of the hymn. The feeling of a supreme being in your life seems to confirm that we are part of a universal order. No wonder the Jews’ conception of an order of life. However, a famous saying attributed to Einstein, “Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind”, comes to mind.
The religious belief that there is a heavenly reward, be it a beverage or many couplings, is a confirmation that good thing will follow us if we abide by the Bible – the book of rules.
To say that we must stick religiously to the precepts expressed in the early teaching of the Bible does not make allowance for the development of mankind having the allegorical fig leaves exchange for modern natty clothing. The rules develop and change.
In some societies we have developed from an eye for an eye to rehabilitation, while in others we still shoot people for weed infraction or cut off their right hand for “tiefing”, of course unless you are a politician. Poor Sir Allen getting beat up in prison.
I would like to see my mother again. I would like to see my father again, my brother and many of my friends, men, women, boys and girls whom I have loved. I never had time with my little brother who died at 22 months.
For me to believe that I would see them again, according to a plethora of preachers, I would have to live a “Christian” life. If I do not, fire and brimstone awaits me as I stand beseechingly on the other side of the great divide.
Many people are caught in this manufactured dilemma perhaps by sellers of snake oil, like that millionaire fellow who is beseeching the congregation to foot the bill for a new airplane. So persuasive is this pervasion that for some people it consumes most of their lives and perhaps inhibits their creativity.
The preachers demand faith for the reward of heavenly bliss. However, no one has as yet described what form it will take and outside of coupling, quaffing and meditating, what other activities are in store?
Wild Coot, why are you thinking about these things now in your old age? If you play with people’s faith, what else do you have to offer?
Today we have to measure with salt words emanating from the mouths of some politicians, those who put untruth before their duty. Just look at the Clico issue and you see for yourself. Perhaps because it is sub judice one is constrained to quote prominent lawyer Ralph Thorne who said: “Sentencing is a sacred judicial function, and Parliament ought not to trespass on those functions.”
*Harry Russell is a banker. Emai quijote70@gmail.com
