Donny

I posted this in another thread where someone is talking about their beliefs in the Bible, but it really deserves it's own thread. As I mentioned before, I've recently begun studying Kabbalah because I find it fascinating. The part I like most about it is where it points out that several areas of the Bible were incorrectly translated. The original text the Bible came from was mostly Hebrew and Aramaic. There are so many words that don't translate to English, as well as idioms that can't be correctly translated.

When some of the mistakes from the Bible were pointed out to me I lost most of my anger towards Christians. They are basically reading a "dumbed down" version of the original and trying their best to figure out what it means. By "dumbed down" I mean they don't have the full story. The authors of the Bible did not really believe God punished (nor blessed) anyone. They actually believe that man excercises true free will on earth.

Let's take Electricity as an example of the no punishment or blessing thing: If you stick your finger in a light socket and get shocked, would you say the light socket is punishing you? Likewise, if you plug in a lamp to the light socket and it lights up a room, would you say the electricity is blessing you? Of course not. In the first case you did not know how to properly use the power of the electricity. In the latter case, you harnessed the power of the electricity by using a machine (the lamp) that was built to use the electricity's power in a proper way.

The authors of the Bible, when reading what they actually wrote, felt the same way. They felt God is not an actual being (it's just easier to describe this power as a being) but that he is the creative force and power that formed the world and is still the energy that holds everything together. He doesn't punish, nor reward. Humans just suffer because they do not know how to properly use the power available to them. The bad (and good) that happens is a result of cause and effect. Just like in physics: "For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction". Some cause and effect is seperated by time so we don't always see the "cause" for things. Sometimes something bad happens in your life that seems to come from nowhere, but if you were to step back and look at your life and could remove the time barriers you might see what the cause was for the bad situation (or good situation) you are currently facing.

And the original authors of the Bible didn't believe in a literal hell either. They were just trying to use examples that people of the time could understand to prove their points. You have to remember that most people were not educated at that time. Those who take the Bible to be completely literal are fools.