Being A Believer

"IT IS BEYOND ME", Goethe said, "how anyone can believe that God speaks to us in books and stories. If the world does not directly reveql itself to us, and if our hearts do not tell us what we owe ourselves and others, we will most certainly not learn this from books, which at best are designed only to give names to our mistakes. Amen to that. The Christian bible has been published in more languages, in more editions, and more translations and versions than any book in history, precisely because it is the most important book in history. Thousands of authors have added to it, subtracted from it, changed it, remade it in their own self interested image, and in toto have so greatly altered the original scriptures in the past fifteen hundred years that our current versions are vastly different from the originals. When Jesus was alive in human form, teh Hebrew scriptures he staunchly defended as the true gospel were even then being changed, and were not yet in complete form. The Council of Nicea assembled the Neew testament by popular vote in 325 A.D.. The clerics chose what to include and what to leave out collectively, by majority rule, and they left out much, left our many gospels. If the Bible is indeed the Word of God, the word of god is then very flexible, very changeable, very malleable, the word of a seemingly fickle god...In extreme western Arkansas, surrounded by heavily forested, rolling hills, is a tiny town named "natural Dam", named after after its local tourist attraction, which has few tourists. The dam itself is a couple hundred feet long, several feet high and thick and appears to be made of large blocks of neatly chiseled rectangular gray granite, carefully stacked. it looks for all the world to be man made, but isn't. The water flows over it, usually in a fast running clear water creek, during times of drought in two or three waterfalls which resemble water coming from a faucet. People did not build this dam, but something or someone intelligent did. Whatever force built the universe built this dam, likely over a very long period of time, without human involvement. Einatein called it "tehhenfinitely superior spirit", and perhaps my favorite of all: "the ancient one". For me, any one of them will do just fine; I'm a believer.