How I learned to stop caring about other people’s religious beliefs.
I am not a religious believer...period! Unfortunately, my dear departed brother was a devout Christian who used to waste a lot of my time trying to convince me of the validity of his religious beliefs. One day I told him that I was going to write a book that would scientifically explain how the Universe came into existence, and that would completely destroy his biblical Genesis story. It was his response that made me stop trying to convince believers in the errors of their ways, and just accept them for who they are. My brother’s heartfelt pleading response was, “Don’t take our beliefs away from us!” It was at that moment that I kinda wished that I, too, was a religious believer, for at that moment I realized exactly what his religious beliefs meant to him, and every other religious believer throughout the world. What my brother didn’t want me to take away from him was all of the comfort and joy that his religious beliefs brought to him. I don’t know how one’s religious beliefs interact with one’s brain chemistry, but there’s something about religious beliefs that provides believers with feelings of great joy and companionship and compassion and hope and a sense of being forgiven and accepted and appreciated and community and so much more.
Then I got to thinking about the Biblical Genesis story and the Origin of the Universe. Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity tells us that Energy is equal to a mass at rest multiplied by the speed of light squared. E=mc^2. What Einstein’s theory doesn’t tell us is where did all of the Energy come from, and what mechanism caused the Energy to convert into mass??? And for that matter, just what the Hell is Energy anyways? So it all comes down to this dichotomy: for the science believer....Where did the Energy come from, and for the religious believer....Where did God come from?
See my Substack to read my “Apeiron Cycle Hypothesis” that “scratches my personal itch” for an explanation of how the Universe might have come into existence. It ain’t perfect. More like a diamond in the rough that needs polishing by a trained cosmologist/mathematician.
Prof. Bart Ehrman is THE best source to learn the historicity of Christianity!
How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee
https://a.co/d/9hRAMyQ
Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior
https://a.co/d/eKiTRxX
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why
https://a.co/d/c9KA5gi
Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
https://a.co/d/ie8ZtSI
Prof. Bart Ehrman on YouTube:
https://youtube.com/@bartdehrman?si=JLN7zriMIxfvo5SN
https://religion.unc.edu/_people/full-time-faculty/ehrman/
Bart D. Ehrman is the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He began his teaching career at Rutgers University, and joined the faculty in the Department of Religious Studies at UNC in 1988, where he has served as both the Director of Graduate Studies and the Chair of the Department.
Professor Ehrman completed his M.Div. and Ph.D. degrees at Princeton Seminary, where his 1985 doctoral dissertation was awarded magna cum laude. An expert on the New Testament and the history of Early Christianity, has written or edited thirty books, numerous scholarly articles, and dozens of book reviews.
In addition to works of scholarship, Professor Ehrman has written several textbooks for undergraduate students and trade books for general audiences. Six of his books have been on the New York Times Bestseller list: Misquoting Jesus; God’s Problem; Jesus Interrupted; Forged; and How Jesus Became God. His books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Testament textual criticism section of the Society. Among his editorial positions, he has served as associate editor for the Journal of Early Christian Studies, book review editor of the Journal of Biblical Literature, and editor of the monograph series The New Testament in the Greek Fathers (Scholars Press). He currently serves as co-editor of the series New Testament Tools, Studies, and Documents (E. J. Brill), co-editor-in-chief for the international journal of early Christian studies, Vigiliae Christianae, and area editor (early Christianity) for the Encyclopedia of Ancient History.
AWARDS & APPEARANCES
Professor Ehrman has been the recipient of numerous academic awards, grants, and fellowships, including the UNC Undergraduate Student Teaching Award (1993), the Phillip and Ruth Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement (1994), the Bowman and Gordon Gray Award for excellence in teaching (1998-2001), the Pope Spirit of Inquiry Teaching Award (2008), and the Religious Liberty Award from the American Humanist Association (2011).
Professor Ehrman has featured widely in television, radio, and print media, including The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, The Colbert Report, CNN, Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic, BBC, Fresh Air, Talk of the Nation, The New Yorker, Time Magazine, Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Washington Post.
https://www.bartehrman.com/barts-biography/
Jewish messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only come to reinforce the old Jewish narrative. These are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond races, peoples, cultures) and that are the daily sustenance of our schools, in the media, in our popular culture, at our universities, and on our streets have reduced our biosymbolic identity and our ethnic pride to their minimal expression.
No country is running its own race during this invasion, because it is all a political agenda led by the UN and put forward by the Jews and their puppets (politicians). Most people just won't know or understand that this is a political agenda. However, some manage to understand that the politicians are deliberately working to import Muslims and replace the people, but that's where it ends, they're like a computer that can't go on because the program doesn't allow it.