START MAKING SENSE

 STOP MAKING SENSE - DAVID BYRNE

Well, David Byrne almost got it right. I agree with him hitting himself on the forehead though. I feel like doing the same when Robert makes silly god and religious statements on his blog.

Reading Robert's blog and the Catholic Apologists' links he provides, confirms with me that religion is either a big hoax or the product of monumental mistakes. I lean towards the latter.

The Bible is a good case in point. This 'written' book is really the product of handed down stories and lore through generations until some people, many centuries later with the development of writing and then printing, wrote and printed the legends, myths, stories and lies. Now I don't for the life of me believe that these transcribers from the 4th to the 18th century were experts in spelling and grammar so many mistakes must have been made.

We all know the story of the Sinner's Bible:

Wicked Bible, sometimes called Adulterous Bible or Sinners' Bible, is an edition of the Bible published in 1631 by the royal printers in London, meant to be a reprint of the King James Bible. The name is derived from a mistake made by the compositors: in the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:14), the word "not" in the sentence "Thou shalt not commit adultery" was omitted, thus changing the sentence into "Thou shalt commit adultery". 

          - From Wikipedia.

And the Monty Python film The Life of Brian captured this well in the Sermon on the Mount with:

Blessed are the Cheesemakers

The Greek will inherit the earth

Here's my take on what, to me, are other forms of misprint and misinterpretation. I'm using some quotes from Robert's blog (until it gets deleted) as my bible (the old family one) is being used to prop up one of the bookshelves.

God is life.

This makes no sense at all. I think what was intended was 'Life is good' and this was at first misspelled - 'good' to 'god' and then transposed - 'Life is good' to Good is life'

It's not surprising really given that the quotes were handed down by word of mouth before being transcribed by some people with dodgy grammar skills and would have had to have been translated from several different languages, some of which were extinct.

God is Spirit.

Again, this is odd but turns up repeatedly in the Catechism - 'The Holy Spirit' for example.

In the early days - pre Jesus, there were a lot of mystical religions that celebrated ancestors and 'ghosts' but these were disparaged by the Catholic church so it's unlikely that the early teachings would have condoned  their god as a ghost.

In Latin however 'spiritus' means 'breathing' so the earliest lore-makers were probably just saying 'god's alive' or something like that which makes sense of Nietzsche reversing it later and saying "god is dead"

I believe in one God the Father almighty creator of heaven and earth...

A bit of early to later christian gobbledygook this. It's a Catechism catch-all to disparage other religions and, as Richard Dawkins said is an attempt to get away with not understanding science and the real world.

Jesus is present in the Eucharist

It's pretty unlikely that even the earliest and uneducated christians would have believed that Jesus was actually inside the bread that they ate at church services. That is ridiculous. It was only invented much later by some possibly schizophrenic and starving monk who may have eaten some magic mushrooms by mistake in his foraging. The original lore might have been that Jesus was making a present of bread and other food to anyone who wanted to gather and listen to him.

Forgive, or at least pray for the other, and forget.

This is pure Robert this and obviously makes no sense.

It's possible that he was alluding to the old 'Jesus forgives' motto that he wheels out occasionally - the most recent when saying that women who, for whatever reason, have abortions, will suffer terribly until they confess their 'sin' and then jesus will forgive them.
The earliest christians most likely recounted that Jesus, on the eve of his arrest knew that he was likely to be executed and 'forgave' the apostles and disciples the debts they owed him. Remember that he kicked the money-lenders out of the temple and most likely took over the instant loan business himself.

God is the Word.

Jesus was a carpenter. You knew that. In his travels he most likely promoted the family firm so it's not out of the question that he said things like 'Wood is good". As he most likely said this a lot the early evangelists, using his words would have recounted his most favourite sayings. Later transcribers may have doubly misspelled this before transposing 'Wood is good' to 'God is the word'.

I hope that this has been helpful.