God Is So Not Pro-Life

[Caliman73]

11. The Bible says a lot of things that most Christians don't know about or understand.

The problem with the Bible is that it was created out of supposedly several thousand years of oral tradition, passed down and most likely interpreted and added to over generations based on the cultural norms of the time and place, when it was written down, it was done so based on the interpretations of the scribes who penned it, THEN it was formalized in the 5th century after several councils. THEN when the various churches broke up, each of them decided what to include. That took place in the 16th and 17th centuries. Of course there are the translations, and whatever King James did to it.

Catholics have always held that the Bible contained the story of "God's intervention in human affairs" but that it served as an allegorical account and that the spirit of the word was important not the literal words, unless assigned specifically to the Father or Christ (the Our Father, the Beatitudes, etc...). Catholics have been maligned for centuries by Protestants because of that as Protestants became "followers of the book" and took on the mantra of "solo scriptura".

I was raised Catholic and am fully initiated, though I am not practicing the doctrine of the Church and have excommunicated myself. I could certainly go back, receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation and go back to Mass, but I do not have that desire.

My problem is that for institutions said to be "inspired by God" or whatever, they are extremely influenced by the folly of men (and I literally mean Men). My question has always been to those who are still in thrall to their churches, "If the Bible is the true/infallible word, why are they thousands of different denominations of Protestantism, why Catholicism, Eastern, and Russian Orthodoxy?

Obviously their answer would be, because those churches have misinterpreted the Word, then I would ask, "What if it is you who have misinterpreted the Word". That would usually end the conversation or they would get really pissed off that a teenager would say such a disrespectful thing.

I think that if you need religion to put order into your life, to help you to be a better person, to be kinder, more compassionate to those less fortunate, to help guide you through your own struggles, and to fulfill a need to belong, that is good. It is okay. The problem is when you start trying to tell other people how to live their lives based on your narrow interpretation of a Book that has already been interpreted and translated hundreds of times, that people have disagreed on throughout centuries, which has created divisions among thousands of little fiefdoms called denominations. When that makes you think you have the right to impose laws on me based on that, that is where we have major problems.