Last One... I Swear

I know I've been on a big biblical kick in the last few posts, and I'm sure whoever is reading this is getting tired of it. So go ahead and let out your collective groans now, because here's one more. But it's the last one, and then I'm going to move onto other things.

Really, I just want to explain why I've been putting so much focus on this topic. As I said in an earlier post, I'm pagan, so you'd think that I would just let the christians do their thing and leave it at that. But when I see how so many of them take what is, in reality, a very good book with some very good lessons and pervert it, I can't just sit by and watch. And that's precisely what's happened. Over the centuries since the bible was first written, it has been translated, re-translated, interpreted and re-interpreted like crazy. Many of those efforts were simply done to allow people who couldn't read the original to be able to study it. Others were done at the behest of corrupt men, mainly religious figures or monarchs in order to ensure that it said what they wanted it to say. Sadly, much of what was tweaked and manipulated stuck around.

Why would someone do that you ask? Control. They recognize that people respect the bible and its teachings, and take its lessons to heart. So if you can control what those people read, you can control how they live. Especially in societies where most people didn't know how to read, you could get away with saying anything. Look at the Catholic church. To this day it still does everything in Latin. How many of us actually know or understand old Latin?

The thing that makes it so much worse though, is you have people today, people who are intelligent and can read and write who still look through the bible for the sole purpose of finding ways to control the people around them. They look for specific rules to guilt people into doing what they say, or they twist the meanings of what's written into something completely opposite the teachings that they're supposed to be basing a good life on. I won't blame the followers, except to say that maybe they should do their own reading for a while. Who I blame are the manipulators. The misrepresentors. The outright liars. The folks who intentionally twist the hearts and minds of people who are simply looking for a better existence than the one they have. Whether they do it for personal wealth, to legitimize their own hate and bigotry, or worst still, because they truly believe that the bible is as hateful as they make out to be, it saddens me to see something that was written to be inherently good twisted into a device for deriving personal power.