Truth or Analogy

And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.

1. Is marriage for everyone?

2. Is divorce a sin?

3. Must all go to church?

4. Was Jesus really born 25^th December?

5. Is Jesus a blue eyed, blond haired Caucasian man?

6. Is heaven an actual place to look forward to going?

7. Who, What and Where is God?

These and many more questions like these plague Christianity today and the religion does not seem to have any coherent response to them. The absence of a rounded response borne in the fact that the answers some give tend to contradict other sections of the Bible. What content of the Bible therefore can we take as truth?

Consider this example. It is an absolute truth that human beings need food and drinks as fuel to sustain themselves and to grow. It is not an absolute truth however, that a human being needs 3-square meals a day to survive, or needs to eat 5 different kinds of fruit and vegetable a day to be healthy. The idea of having 3-sqaure meals is what scientist call theories. Theories represent what is held as the prevailing knowledge on a subject at a point in time.

WHAT IS TRUE MUST BE SO REGARDLESS OF TIME OR GEOGRAPHY

Those who believe in the Bible must ascertain for themselves, the facts that are fundamental to the entire book as against the facts that are based on the analogy of other people at some point in time. There cannot be any document where any isolated phrase or sentence or passage can be relied upon as a truth on its own without a careful consideration of the entire book and its over-arching objective. This will not make sense in any discipline, whether in law or in medicine or in any field of study. It shouldn’t be for the Bible too.

For example, the idea of one true God is generally attributed to Abraham (personality). The idea was not so in the very beginning of the of the Bible. In the book of Genesis chapter 1, God was described as a spirit that was hovering above the waters. This means that the concept of one true God and the various iterations that can be found in the Bible are analogies on the subject. They do not represent fundamental truths or facts. This foundational way of thinking is really important because seeking the fundamental truth brings with itself, an anthropologic quality of reasoning and thinking, and it makes conflicts redundant and instead promotes a tolerance that is based on a humble admission that we only know in part. (From my up-coming book, Myths and Mysteries of the Bible Vol 1).