March 17, 2025 – B

Reading through my old writings, I came across this gem of a dollarism:

"One of the 10,000 Spiritual Laws states, 'Our idea of God is not God.' the Bible can be seen as the history of the evolution of the idea of God. If we read the Bible carefully, noting inconsistencies, contradictions, incompatibilities discrepancies and divergent views, we will come across a number of different ways of thinking about God--many of which are mutually exclusive and can be squared with each other only after several rounds of single malt whiskey straight from the bottle."

There are, for instance two, at least versions of The Garden of Eden story, and five, at least, threads of the JEDP, or "Documentary Hypotheses," way of explaining the early differing views of God, but without squaring any of them, and are simply different ways people of biblical times thought about God.

Some compilers referred to God as "Yahweh," some referred to God as "Elohim," other writers were thought of as representing the "Deuteronomic" point of view, others the "Priestly" point of view, and then there are those representing the "Prophet" point of view, and the "Wisdom" writers had their way of thinking about God, all of which represent different gods or different ways of thinking about God.

For about sixty years after Jesus' death, the followers of Jesus and new converts to the Movement would have gathered regularly with worshipping Jews in the synagogues to worship (In addition to house gatherings for prayer and discussion) until it became unwise to associate with Jews because of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, and Christians begin to gravitate toward Christianity as a separate religion.

Jesus did not intend separation, or see himself as creating a new religion. His idea was to reform Judaism by modifying the institutional idea of God that was popular in his day.

The idea of God in the minds of the people continues to be modified through the centuries to our own time with the inclusion of female and gay clergy and God's position on war, slavery, alcohol, birth control, etc. Who God is and what God would have us do is still evolving, with no idea of where it is going or how it will end.

And we all debate the doctrines as though we know what we are talking about.