Wednesday, January 24, 2007 . 1/24/2007

I had an argument with my dad lastnight.

We were watching American Idol (bleh) and this guy with a beard comes on and says that some people think he looks like Jesus. My dad said something along the lines of, "That's silly, no one knows what Jesus really looked like". I stared at him and mentioned the paintings, but he went on saying "Yeah, but he could have looked completely different". He was making things so fucking difficult.

After this I stated that Jesus probably didn't even exist anyway. That nearly 200 years after Jesus was supposed to be born, people only just started writing about him. If there was a man performing miracles, you would think scholars all over would be writing about it, but that simply isn't the case. This shut him up for a moment, before saying something like "Well how do you think people from all over the world, and hundreds of years appart, could write these different books of the Bible and they MATCHED!".

Now first of all, taken from this site: "The effect of its origins as selected parts of whole bodies of scripture, written by at least a hundred and fifty different people in dozens of different places at different times, many centuries apart, and for different reasons, colors what its authors wrote. Yet that simple fact is widely ignored, both by people who naively follow what they read in it as the inerrant word of God, and by more liberal scholastic theologians, who seek to understand its historical context as well as a body of doctrinal scripture, which they often blindly follow, even though they know full well its messy origins."

Apparently, he chose to believe that all these people wrote about the exact same thing and the exact same god.

My dad knows that the Bible has been translated, but he only thinks that very little of it lost it's meaning. I'm guessing that he's thinking of the more modern translations, such as the King James versions and so on.

I kept on telling him that it was translated so many times, that people added things to it and took things out, but he wouldn't believe it. He also refused to believe that myths such as the one of Ra were religions once, when just a few months ago he agreed with me about this.

He shut up eventually, smiling like some ignorant bigot, and then I asked him if he thought the earth was 6,000 years old, and he honestly didn't know. I asked him about evolution and before he could say something stupid, I pointed out that it may be called a theory, but that's the closest thing to the truth in the scientific world.

We somehow got back to the argument of where the Bible originated, but it's extremely hard to debate on something like this with someone who knows next to nothing about the origins of his religion, and refuses to learn anything new.

At one point I asked where he got all his knowledge of the Bible from, but he didn't say anything.

Eventually I told him that he should seriously consider looking these things up, but he kept saying that he didn't need to. I got so frustrated that I cried and left the room. Real mature, I know, but it's almost that time of the month and I couldn't help it.

I just wish that my dad would look up this stuff on a non-bias, non-religious website just once. Apparently, he finds it hard to believe a mere 16-year-old who spends most of her time reading.

Anywho.. this Friday we're going to my aunt and uncle's house. At this point, I'm not sure I even want to go since I've been crying for no reason lately. I'll just have to wait and see, because if a discussion comes up on gays or something similar and I get frustrated, I don't want to just give up and cry and seem a fool. 0 Comments - Post/view comments