Hijacking God's Word

Dear Editors,

I keep hearing from earnest Christians defending the Bible and the “true” Word of God. Something about their tone makes me want to ask them to step back a moment and consider the fact of God.

I can agree with the most zealous fundamentalist: “The Bible is based upon the divinely inspired Word of God,” as revealed to select humans who then communicated their revelations. Be that as it may, after that point the Word was entrusted to humans with all their frailties, greedy impulses and dishonesties. Today, after a couple millennia, there are a hundred and more versions of “The Bible.” So, to speak of the immutable letter of the Bible seems, at best, silly.

More importantly, the omnipresent God who spoke to Moses and Jesus had earlier spoken to Abraham and later to Mohammed. The reality is that Judaism, Christianity and Islam are sibling religions worshiping one and the same almighty God. Claiming that either the Bible, the Torah or the Koran is more holy than the others spits in the eye of the God who passed down the Word to begin with.

What’s most disheartening is that fundamentalists of these three religions, people who claim a deeper understanding of God, turn out to be the most self obsessed, myopic and destructive people on God’s good earth. What’s that all about?

God’s child isn’t directly you, me, this faith or that conviction. God has spent thousands of millions of years creating this wonder called our Earth. It is an absolutely unique, infinitely faceted blue emerald rotating all alone in the universal void. Out of this miraculous jewel, God conceived life and then humanity. Given this, don’t you believe God’s beyond our foibles? I’ll bet God’s appalled at people’s pathetic articles of faith and justifications for hatred.

When will we wake up and admit it’s we ourselves who hijack “God’s Word,” bending it to our own self-serving desires? Isn’t it time we discover another way of showing our devotion to God? One that doesn’t entail hatred and the destruction of people and irreplaceable resources.

– Peter Miesler,

Durango