Bible preaches multitude of conflicting ideas

Bourne is a fourth-year geography student.

By Russell Bourne

In last Friday’s paper, Connie Choe attacked Jennifer
Shane’s views on Christianity by saying that she has no
concept of the religion she claims to follow (“Submission
misinterprets Christianity,” Daily Bruin, Nov. 30).

Choe, like a typical Christian, justifies calling homosexuality
a sin because it says so in the Bible. There are a couple
things wrong with that. First, who says the Bible is
right? God? Okay, then. Who says God is right? The
Bible! That’s about the shortest circular argument you can
find.

Second, if a person is going to be so literal about the Bible as
to call homosexuality a sin, they might also want to include these
sins as well: eating shellfish (Leviticus 11:10); approaching the
altar of God with a defect in your sight (bad news for all you who
wear vision correction!, Lev. 21:20); coming in contact with any
woman on her period (Lev. 15:19-24); and being male and getting
your hair trimmed (Lev. 19:27). Let’s not forget the two
favorites of those Christian football players who attribute wins to
God but don’t mention his name when they lose, working on the
Sabbath (Exodus 35:2) and touching the skin of a dead pig (Lev.
11:6-8).

In addition to those sinful things that you shouldn’t do,
there are some things that you are encouraged to do. Among
them: burning a bull on the altar as a sacrifice (Lev. 1:9);
selling your daughter into slavery (Exodus 21:7); and possessing
slaves from neighboring countries (Lev. 25:44).

If you don’t follow those guidelines from the Bible,
you’re stooping to the sinful level of the
homosexual. The Bible says so.

Choe also gets into the “free will”
debate. It’s a bit complex, but here’s my take on
it. Christians think God is all-good, all-powerful and
all-knowing. Well, it’s just plain impossible for those
three things to be true in a world where humans sin. If God is
all-knowing, then he knows when he creates a soul, whether the soul
will go to heaven or hell. Yes, the soul has free will while it is
on Earth, but if God really knows everything, then he knows the
future, and so he knows even before he creates a soul that it is
going to hell. And yet he created it. Nothing made him create it,
since God is all powerful. God wouldn’t have created it if he
hadn’t wanted to. But a God who is all-good would not
knowingly create a soul bound for hell.

These three characteristics of God cannot possibly all be true.
If any two are treated as given, the third cannot be true. In this
case, if you assume that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, he
cannot also be all-good. Try taking any other two as given and
apply it to God placing humans in heaven or hell. It just
doesn’t work.

On the topic of hell: hell is eternal torture. Torture is just
about the worst thing possible. Even in wartime, when murder is
accepted it is international law that torture for any amount of
time ““even just two hours ““ is unacceptable. And yet
God damns people to be tortured eternally. This does not sound to
me like a kind God, which is what God would be if he were indeed
all-good.

Furthermore, for Christians, Jews and most other religions, the
belief is that God created everything. Everything. Evil exists.
Therefore, God must have created evil. Some people would argue that
Satan created evil, but God created Satan. Others would argue that
God created a good Satan and that it was Satan’s free will
that allowed him to turn to evil. If that’s the case, then
where did the potential for Satan to become evil come from?

An all-good God would have created Satan so that there was no
potential or possibility that he could choose to turn to evil. And
going back to what I said a few paragraphs ago, an all-knowing God
could have predicted that Satan would turn to evil and just not
created him.

Christians believe that you must accept Jesus as your saviour in
order to avoid going to hell. Jesus is only 2,000 years old ““
what about the vast majority of people, who were long dead by the
time Jesus died? They weren’t even given a chance to go
anywhere but hell because they were never given a chance to be
Christian. So really, God is choosing who gets tortured based on
what they believe, which has a lot to do with where their time and
place of origin is.

Adolf Hitler instituted a strikingly similar program.