Happy 200th

It’s Friday the Thirteenth. I could talk about that but when it comes down to it, that’ll happen again next month, so maybe I’ll talk about it then. Instead I’d like to mention that yesterday was the 200th birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln.

Now if those two seem like strange people to put together in a post on Unscriptured, let me bring up a couple of things that God pointed out to me.

Both of these men had to have the courage and conviction to face off against countless opponents, both in their lives and in the decades since, that were good at using the Bible to support the positions that they wanted to hold all along. In Darwin’s case it’s been people that would like to make a literal, God-dictated, account of the way things were out of something that was clearly intended to be a fable at worst, an allegory at best. In Lincoln’s case, the thing he mainly wanted to do was to preserve the United States, but he ended up having to abolish slavery well before he thought we were ready. At that time, and ever since, there have been disingenuous souls who try and misdirect the argument by saying that it was about State’s Rights, without wanting to cop to the fact that the only right it was really about was the right for States to allow slavery. And, at the time, they too were only too willing to point to slavery in the Bible to make their case that it was the natural and right order of things.

Well, God and I are here to tell you, the Bible is not the inerrant word of God. It’s the errant ramblings of power hungry men, some sane, some not, some in touch with God, most not. Like Aesop’s Fables or the tales of the Brother’s Grimm, the Bible has a lot of good advice but not all of it still applies today. So take a moment to wish a Happy Birthday to Chuck and Abe and then learn to take some responsibility for figuring out what’s right and what’s wrong. After all, some other people that depended on religious leaders to interpret things for them ended up drinking a pretty bad batch of Kool-aid.

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