God's Word

A tribe of chosen people or everyone?

We are to believe that God first had only his chosen people (the Israelites), but later decided that all people should come under his umbrella.

For the purpose of this page I'll take seriously the idea that there is a God, he is omnipotent (knows everything) and omniscient (able to do anything) and that he "loves the World" and mankind. Why would such a God just give his rules, a bit at a time, to a group of prophets spread over several hundred years in one small part of the world, and then a bit more to Jesus, (and if you are Muslim, more again to Mohammed) – and allow all these people to use their own words? And some of these people wrote in Hebrew; Jesus spoke Aramaic, but apparently didn't write anything down; and the words of Mohammed were, generations later, written in Arabic.

Wouldn't a God who loved the World and all the people give his rules to everyone, in their own languages?

If one is to believe the Bible, God wrote the Ten Commandments and then put down his pen (chisel?) and left the job of writing the remainder to men.

Why didn't he do the whole job himself? Why leave such an important job to unreliable and very fallible underlings? Consider how much killing and torturing has been done, by groups who believed themselves to be following God's will to other groups who believed the same thing, over the last couple of millennia. All this could have been avoided if God had written the holy books himself and made sure there was no ambiguity.

The real Ten Commandments?
There are three versions of the Ten Commandments in the Bible, two of them are very similar, Exodus 20:2-17 and Deuteronomy 5:6-21, the third version, in Exodus 34:12-26, is radically different.

Perhaps he didn't have the literary ability (after all he didn't do a good job of the Ten Commandments; see the box on the right), or the language ability, or the publishing/printing facilities?

Consider how much better the world would be if all peoples had the advantage of a faultless holy book in their own language. And God could bring out new editions periodically as new moral questions come up; things like cloning and the birth control pill.

Discussion

I put the question posed at the top of this page to Yahoo Answers. One of the replies I received was that "the men of the bible times were there to serve God, not the other way around". But surely an omniscient God could have done a far better job of writing his holy books than men could! And after creating the Universe I can't believe it would be too much trouble to an omnipotent God to write some rule books for us; after all, we are expected to believe that "he so loved the World that he gave his only begotten Son". Wouldn't it be worth his trouble to avoid all the misunderstanding and wars that were fought between groups who all believed that they were the only true believers?

Related pages
I have written on religions and other superstitions on a number of other pages on this site; there is a listing on my Home page.
There is also a page of jottings on many subjects.

Another replied that "Everything we can understand about God is contained in Jesus' teachings which have been passed down from generation to generation". But all the experts agree (historians and theologians) that the Gospels were not written until many decades after Jesus was crucified; all from peoples' memories, and we know how fallible they are. And, correct me if I am wrong, but I don't think that there is anything in the record of what Jesus taught that said that slavery or torture was wrong, nor that women should have equal rights to men and should not be raped? God, or Jesus, could have done better if they had done the writing themselves, surely?

The few who said that the Bible is actually the word of God seem to be deluded to such a degree as to probably be beyond help, but I would point out that many of the Psalms were reputedly written by King David, and then who do they think wrote the Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John; the Epistles of Saint Paul; who were the Revelations revealed to? Even the word 'testament' (as in Old and New Testaments) is defined as a 'profession of belief', which requires a believer to record his belief.

No, the Torah, the Bible and the Koran, are not the word of God. They were written by men who believed they were writing for God. Did God did not care enough to write the rules himself?