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Category:
Inspirational
Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing
ISBN-10: 1645154378
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 242
Copyright: April 23, 2019
ISBN-13: 9781645154372
Price: $9.99 (eBook)
This book continues the debate about Jesus between the author and his father that spanned thirty years. Both perspectives (against by his father and supporting by the author) are presented on a wide range of topics.
Was Jesus a Zealot? Has the tomb of Jesus been discovered? Was Christianity an outgrowth of Mystery Religions? What is the relationship between Christianity and the Essenes or Gnostics? Did the Catholic Church create a Bible that is different from apostolic writings? These are some of the questions that have surfaced in recent years and that are discussed in this book. Warren's father was a deep thinker, a voracious reader and seeker after historical truths. He adopted many ideas that challenged traditional Christian views. He believed that religious and political institutions have altered history to reflect their views. While this is true to an extent, there are many solid facts upon which Christianity is founded that support the divinity of Jesus and his redemptive work on the cross. This book continues a dialogue between Warren and his father that spanned more than thirty years and began with Warren's book: "Truth Seeker: Objections to the Bible." This book is for those who have questions and problems with aspects of the Bible. It also debunks the ancient alien theory for the creation of mankind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qmvm-XyTv9U
Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
My father was a free thinker and voracious reader his whole life. In 1979, I informed him that I had become a born again Christian. My father received this pronouncement with skepticism. He said, “Come back in ten years and then I will believe there has been a genuine change in your life.” Over the next thirty-three years, I returned many times to my dad trying to convince him of my faith in Jesus and the changes that this had caused in me. While he liked to talk about religion and politics, my father typically would quickly become emotional which would end the discussion. In his later years, he gathered weekly with other retired men to discuss religion and politics despite the fact that frequently he became physically ill afterwards due to the strong emotions that such discussions aroused in him. While we remained close, we were never able to reconcile our different views about the Bible and the reality of my spiritual birth.
In 2009, my dad became very ill and almost died. After his recovery, I decided to have copies of an autobiography he wrote bound into a soft cover book. I gave him enough copies to distribute to the family. He enjoyed this so much that he decided to write more books. For several years he wrote fiction and non-fiction books reflecting his critical thinking about the Bible and Christianity. He believed that “God was within him” and that, when he died, his spirit would go back to God. He also believed that the books of the Bible reflected the interpretations of the early church theologian Jerome who compiled a multitude of fragmentary and variable copies of the books of the Bible to form the Latin Vulgate. This became the basis for the modern Bible and reflects the views of the Roman Catholic Church about Jesus. He said that he did not know who Jesus was. He believed Jesus was involved in a zealot plot against Rome and the Jewish religious leaders for which he was crucified.
My father claimed to be a Deist believing in one, incomprehensible God who made the universe. He believed that God set into motion a plan that involves life, development, death, gravity, matter, energy and wisdom. God, in his view, is a spirit that is all encompassing, invisible and possesses all intelligence. Humans, as his creatures, are called to be submissive and accept God’s plan. He believed that freedom of choice was a man-made concept advocated by the Church to keep from blaming evil on God. Based on this view, evil is a man-made concept! My father’s belief about free will is contradictory. If humans are called to be submissive to God, there must be freedom to make choices that are not aligned with God’s will. Experience teaches us that human choices result in different outcomes some of which can be evil. Without freedom of choice, man must follow God’s plan so no submission to God is necessary.
Since his death in 2012, I have wondered why God gave my father several more years of life. In his final days, he spoke of being in church and so I do not know if he had a change of heart and thinking prior to his death. However, I am grateful for his writings which have helped me to better understand his thinking. In his last years, he tried to convince me to “think beyond what the Bible says.” On a few occasions he would raise some problems he perceived with Bible verses. After we discussed them, he would conclude that I knew quite a lot about the Bible and soon he did not continue this line of criticism. However, he did write down many of his ideas related to criticisms that he perceived with various Bible verses which he gave me shortly before his death. These writings have inspired me to author an “imaginary” dialogue between us that might have occurred if my father was still alive.
I believe there may be others who have similar criticisms, misunderstandings and concerns about the Bible. The thought has occurred to me since my father’s death that God gave him several more years of life so that we could finish our conversation about the Bible. Thus, this book is structured as a dialogue between my father and me reflecting his thoughts and my responses to problems he perceived with the Bible. Each chapter represents a topic that my father selected and summarized his views. This is followed by my views and research into the criticisms and ideas he presents.
The Creation of Man
Father's Perspective
Before the Big Bang, there was a time of darkness that can’t be understood. However, intuitively there must have been something in the nothingness which was the motive force, intelligence, spirit or being everywhere yet invisible. Plato said that “In the beginning was the Word.” He reasoned that the uttered word is the starting point of further actions. Plato implied that Zeus spoke the Word that created the universe. Christians later adopted Plato’s proclamation that “In the beginning was the Word.”
For thousands of years, Jews and Christians have held that the book of Genesis describes creation. Before the first day, God dwelt in darkness as that is when he created light. However, this light is not daylight but a something that lights up God’s darkness! On the second day, God separates the waters above and below the sky. The water below is gathered and dry land appears. On the fourth day, God creates the sun, moon and stars as lights in the sky. On the sixth day, God creates man and woman in his image.
In the 1920s, the great archeological digs were not in Egypt or Israel but in Mesopotamia which was the home of an advanced civilization that pre-dates the flood. Before Adam and Eve, a race called the Nefilim lived in a land called Sumaria located between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Thousands of clay tablets and stelas (carved stone slabs or columns) were found in this region dating from this civilization. An Israeli named Zaharia Sitchin claimed he could read the cuniform writings of these people who lived up to 450,000 years ago! Mr Sitchin wrote eight books about the Nefilim. In these books, he describes a planet called Nibiru that revolves around the sun with an elliptical orbit of 3600 years. A ship carrying Nefilim, who inhabit this planet, landed in Mesopotamia 450,000 years ago with the purpose of mining gold from the floor of the Mediterranean. Eventually, six hundred Nefilim arrived and the gold mining expanded to the area of Victoria Falls in Africa. For thousands of years, the Nefilim labored in the mines until there was a revolt. Enki was a scientist/engineer and half-brother of Enlil, who was the leader of the Nefilim on Earth. Enki suggested that they make a primitive worker using creatures that we know as Homo-Erectus. Enki took the sperm of a male Nefilim and fertilized an egg from a female Homo-Erectus and placed it into the womb of a female Nefilim. Months later, a male child was born who was named Adam. This was repeated producing man male workers. Around 270,000 BC, the first female named Eve was produced. In time, the humans discovered they could reproduce and multiplied. The male Nefilim found women attractive and they inter-married and their offspring lived an average of 1000 years. The Nefilim lived many thousands of years and were thought of as gods because they seemed to never die.
Author Perspective
While any attempt to describe the creation of man and the universe will remain largely unknown, it is apparent that there is a creator. The laws of matter and energy are balanced to enable our bodies, planets, stars and universe to exist. The distribution of matter in the universe is such that it allows some clumping. If it was too homogeneous, it would remain as disorganized gas. Conversely, if the matter of the universe was too consolidated, it might disappear into black holes.# Most of the matter of the universe is hydrogen which is the building block of the elemental table through fusion. Hydrogen fusion powers the stars and counteracts gravity which enables our sun and others to burn for billions of years. Cooling following the big bang (or the initiating event of creation) lasted just long enough to produce primarily hydrogen rather than helium or some other primary form of matter. The expansion of the universe depends upon the right amount of matter and strength of gravity. If the amount of matter were much greater or the force of gravity was greater, the universe would collapse before carbon and elements needed for life would have been formed from the fusion of hydrogen. If gravitation force was much less, the universe would remain in a gaseous state and dissipate without structure.
Dr. Paul Davies, who is a professor of physics and cosmology, said that “If life is to exist, the density of the universe must be high enough to trap matter locally into stars, but not so high that the whole cosmos collapses.” Dr. Davies says that our universe is extremely unlikely to have occurred by chance. He calculates that the age of the universe must be 1080 years old in order to allow for the probability that our universe occurred by chance. This is such an unimaginably large number that it qualifies as a virtually impossible outcome.
The Bible says that God is light and in him there is no darkness (1 Jn 1:5). Therefore, God did not dwell in darkness before light was created. Also, the big bang postulates that there was a tremendous release of energy that became the matter of our universe. This burst of energy may have been expressed as light. Scientists have demonstrated that light and matter are inter-changeable so it appears that light (the big bang) produced the matter of the universe. This would be consistent with the statement that God said “Let there be light.“# The existence of light in our universe at the time of the big bang does not mean that light did not exist prior to this event somewhere else. Indeed studies that examine the smallest building blocks of matter have led cosmologists and physicists to believe that there are eleven dimensions#. Since we exist in just four dimensions, there are still seven more dimensions beyond our experience. Prominent astrophysicists like Brian Greene believe that matter is fundamentally made up of vibrating strings of energy.# Therefore, matter appears to be a form of condensed energy.
The Bible says that God created everything. I find no support for evolution in the Bible. In fact, not only did God create everything, but it was created in an orderly fashion: first, physical/chemical elements of air, light, water, and earth as described in Genesis 1:3-10; then plant life (verse 11); animals (verse 20-21, 24); and man last (verse 26-27). Throughout the first chapter of Genesis, there is a repetitious statement that God created each type of creature “according to their kinds.” In fact, the Hebrew word for kind means to portion out, separate or differentiate. Therefore, God created different creatures that were distinct from each other (i.e. species) and could only propagate as separate species.
Although man is learning to “re-engineer” species through new genetic knowledge and techniques, there is no evidence that species have intermingled or gradually changed to form new species through natural processes. The genetic barriers that God established when he created life have been validated through thousands of years of human history in observing and manipulating the propagation of existing species. Abundant diversity exists within each species (as is evident with dogs and cats). Natural selection or human breeding can produce many variations but each species remains distinct.
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