So far you're doing okay. You've come a long way for 19 years.
The Bible is a great book and you really need to read it through several times.
But the Bible is not Christianity. The Bible is simply a map, a guide. It was written by a whole host of people. Much of it, in fact nearly all of it, is simply parable. It is a collection of short stories meant to provide lessons for how best to live a good life.
You bring up several very good points. For example...
Do you all have faith in any book you have ever read in school. ie. history books and the like. If so how do you know them to be true?
Many, many of those books are simply wrong. I remember one instance clearly from the little education that I do have. It said that the Savages were rounded up in Georgia and moved out west to Oklahoma. The reason was to make western Georgia safe for the settlers moving in.
Well, the Master (yeah, we actually called the teachers Masters in that school) spent some time going over that. He said it would be the single most important history lesson we would learn that year, maybe the single most important lesson we would learn, period.
Since it was a boarding school, he grabbed a bus the next Saturday and sent us off to the Library of Congress with a list of documents we were to lookup. They included letters from the period, the Supreme Court Decision
Cherokee Nation vs State of Georgia and some of the photographs that were part of the Library's collection.
What we found was that far from being savages, the Cherokees were successful farmers and land owners, the best educated and most prosperous people in the area. We found that the photos of the Cherokees homes showed not tepees or squaled huts but two and three story mansions filled with furniture from France and England, from Boston and New York. We found that there was no threat from savages, that it was a simply land grab and pogrom.
When we next met in History Class, we were all furious that the History Book was simply lying, that the information was incorrect. I remember to this day, him sitting on the edge of his desk, nodding at each of us as we went over what we had learned. At the end of class he asked us what we had learned? "After this," he said, "will you ever take anything in a History Book at face value?"
He was right. It was the single most important thing he ever taught us about history books.
And the like.
edited to added mandatory spelling errors.
This message has been edited by jar, 05-23-2004 10:43 AM
Aslan is not a Tame Lion
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