TALL STORIES.

Have you ever wondered about a God who could allow so much evil in the world and yet do nothing to stop it? There are many people who have struggled with this question many times.

Buddha once said " If God permits such misery to exist He cannot be good, and if He is powerless to prevent it then He cannot be God."

The Christian scholar will tell you this evilness is the result of original sin. This concept of original sin was initiated and spread by Christianity.

Do you know that original sin (and the trinity) can be found nowhere in the bible, these are tall stories. This concept of original sin comes from the ancient myth about Adam and Eve. When I was a child being taught firstly by Nuns and later at a Christian brothers school, I was lead to believe that Eve tempted Adam into sexual misconduct (hanky panky), as a result of this God punished man and all of his offspring thereafter with mortality.(loss of life) Have you ever thought what may have happened if Eve had not seduced Adam? There would have been no human race, just Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden forever. Do you think that this is what God would have planned?

It appears that Eve was set up to be framed, and men have used this myth ever since to allege that women are inferior to man and therefore cast disrespect on the female gender. What does the New Testament writings say about women.

1 Corinthians. 11:3-15, verse 3, Man is head over women. Verse 7, and it is only man who is made in God's image, [not woman.]

Verse 9, woman was created for man.

1 Corinthians. 14:34-35. Women to keep silent, and learn only from their husband.

Ephesians. 5:22-33. Wives are to submit to their husbands.

Collossians. 3:18. Wives to submit to their own husband.

1 Timothy. 2:9, 11, 12, 14, Women adorn themselves with shamefacedness. "Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Eve was Sinful, Adam was blameless".

From this myth of apple biting, forbidden fruit, seduction, serpents, we are all ‘born sinners’. Now evil exists due to this so called original sin, and we now need a redeemer to atone for our inbuilt sinfulness and so a saviour became necessary, some 4000 years after the seduction of forbidden fruit.

The belief at the time of Jesus was that disease was caused by demons (some Churches still believe this and practice exorcism) and that they could be driven out by a blood sacrifice. Jesus cast a legion of demons out of a man and the demons asked Jesus if they could enter the pigs and when they did the pigs raced over a cliff. The story goes that Jesus himself became a blood sacrifice to cure us of our inborn sin. Does God approve of human sacrifice?

All of this is based on a myth, which is usually passed on to our young children, as it was passed on to me. Without this myth there is no need for a Saviour, and the whole Christian foundation falls apart.

Jim Lee. 20/7/00