9. The Bible undergoes revisions, improvements, etc. An infallible
book cannot be improved.
10. The Bible has no plan or system, and hence has no definite
object. Millions upon millions of Christians have differed regarding
its teachings.
11. The Bible is a fetich. Millions of people have a slavish regard
for the Holy Bible who have little or no respect for Humanity, Truth,
or Justice.
God's Ways are Not Our Ways.
"Now this God either did or he did not believe in and command murder
and rapine in the days when he used to sit around evenings and chat
with Abraham and Moses and the rest of them. His especial plans and
desires were 'revealed' or they were not. The ideas of justice and
right were higher in those days than they are now, or else we are
wiser and better than God, or else the Bible is not his revealed
will. You can take your choice. My choice is to keep my respect for
divine justice and honor, and let the Bible bear the burden of its
own mistakes.
"If religion is a revelation, then it is not a growth, and it would
have been most perfect in design and plan when it was nearest its
birth. Now accepting the Bible theory of Jehovah, we find that when the
communications of God were immediate and personal there could have been
no mistake as to his will. To deal with it as a growth or evolution
toward better things is to abandon the whole tenet of a revealed law
of God. But to deal with it as a revelation is to make God a being
too repulsive and brutal to contemplate for one moment with respect.
"He either did or did not tell those men those things. Which will
you accept?" (Helen Gardener's "Men, Women, and Gods.")
"Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated
immediately from God to man. No one will deny or dispute the power
of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But
admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed
to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is
revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person,
a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be
a revelation to all those persons. It is a revelation to the first
person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are
not obliged to believe it.
"It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything
a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally
or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first
communication--after this, it is only an account of something which
that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may
find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent upon me to
believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me,
and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.
"When I am told that the Koran was written in heaven, and brought
to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of
hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former. [1] I did not
see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it.
"When also I am told that a woman called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave
out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and
that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so,
I have a right to believe them or not; such a circumstance required
a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it; but we have
not even this--for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter
themselves; it is only reported by others that they said so--it is
hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not choose to rest my belief upon
such evidence.
"It is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given
to the story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when
the heathen mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world,
and that mythology had prepared the people for the belief of such a
story. Almost all the extraordinary men that lived under the heathen
mythology were reputed to be the sons of some of their gods. It was not
a new thing at that time, to believe a man to have been celestially
begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of
familiar opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had
cohabited with hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either
new, wonderful, or obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that
then prevailed among the people called Gentiles, or Mythologists,
and it was those people only that believed it. The Jews who had kept
strictly to the belief of one God, and no more, and who had always
rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the story.
"It is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the
Christian church, sprung out of the tail of heathen mythology. A
direct incorporation took place in the first instance, by making the
reputed founder to be celestially begotten. The trinity of gods that
then followed was no other than a reduction of the former plurality,
which was about twenty or thirty thousand; the statue of Mary succeeded
the statue of Diana of Ephesus, the deification of heroes changed into
the canonization of saints; the mythologists had gods for everything;
the Christian mythologists had saints for everything; the church
became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon had been with the
other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory is little
else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to
the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and
philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.
"Nothing that is here said can apply even with the most distant
disrespect, to the real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous
and an amiable man. The morality that he preached and practiced was
of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality
had been preached by Confucius, and by some of the Greek philosophers,
many years before; by the Quakers since; and by many good men in all
ages, it has not been exceeded by any.
"Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or
anything else; not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his
own writing. The history of him is altogether the work of other people;
and as to the account given of his resurrection and ascension, it was
the necessary counterpart to the story of his birth. His historians,
having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were
obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part
of the story must have fallen to the ground.
"The first part, that of the miraculous conception, was not a thing
that admitted of publicity; and therefore the tellers of this part of
the story had this advantage, that though they might not be credited,
they could not be detected." (Thomas Paine's "Age of Reason.")