Did Moses Lie?

There is a lot of apparently wrong information in the books supposedly authored by Moses. I want to assure readers that I wholly respect their beliefs and I am not writing this to belittle any faith or attack anyone. I just want to exercise my freedom of expression.

All my life I have searched for meaning and for God. I still am. I do not want this to be a long story so I will say that I tried and studied a lot of faiths. I wavered many times between skepticism and mostly Christianity. I was an angry skeptic, then a fanatical Christian. There was a lot of pain and growing up. If you are over 50 like I am, fill in the blanks. It’s a long story.

Eventually, Hal Lindsay led me to Bible prophecy and that was the beginning of my understanding of the Bible. Again I will spare you the agonizing details. Still wavering, I began to notice Creation Science which dealt largely with the Earth Sciences. So I went to University and got my degree in Geology. Still searching for God I had decided to ignore the difficult and unanswerable questions raised by some passages in the Bible. With the help of prophecy books, and Christian Apologists, I became a passionate Christian with a better than average understanding of the Bible and of the faith. Yet science had raised some important questions and I wanted them addressed. I wanted to be able to defend my faith so I looked long and hard at the core of the Bible. I read CS Lewis. I read Lee Strobel who wrote “The Case for Christ”, “The Case for a Creator” and many other similar books which attempted to show that cutting edge science left little doubt as to the reasonableness of our belief in the Christian faith. I read some of his references including “The Historical Reliability of the Gospels” by Craig Blomberg and many others. I read Michael Behe’s Intelligent Design theories. I thought their arguments were reasonable.

Yet questions remained. I could no longer ignore the really big questions. Why were the Genesis creation stories utterly mythical? Why were there two differing accounts? Why would Moses, if indeed he wrote those books, record false information? I began to be convinced in my mind that if Moses did write these books and put them forward as the work, or the dictates of God, that either he was a liar, or God was a liar. Or, perhaps God did not tell Moses how the Earth began during Mose’s sojourn with God on Mount Sinai. Maybe neither God nor Moses is a liar, which means that God said nothing about creation events, and Moses decided to give his own beliefs to the people. Perhaps Moses just re-stated creation myths from the beginning of time which Moses himself believed. It really makes you wonder what else was just Moses’s idea and not God’s.

That is not the only point. The account of Noah and the flood also did not happen verbatim as recorded in the Bible. The flood was a local flood, and Noah only took his farm animals with him. I will spare you the details as to why this is, but it involves millions of species, fishes and mammals in the oceans of Earth, the Australian Aborigines, Mount Everest, and a whole lot of water that just is not here any more. And as for the day that God allegedly made the sun stand still (was it for Gideon, I do not remember), do you have any idea what that would involve? God would have to put the entire Universe on hold, frozen in time. He would have to stop the rotation of the Earth instantly, and going from a speed of 1000 miles per hour at the equator, that means an instant stop would cause natural catastrophes unparalleled in the history of time, not to mention flinging people off the planet and into space. Before you say well God is all powerful and can do all that without harming the people, why would he? Why would he break his own natural laws on such a whim while then refusing to do some real good by sitting down with his children and speaking with them like a real father would? Why does did God never act like a real father?

What does a real father do? A real father does not go away somewhere unattainable. A real father does not ignore his children. A real father would communicate with his children rather than be silent. Even a lowly human father has the courtesy to write a letter to, or phone his children to express his love. A real father spends time with his children, to guide them. A real father does not put his children in a box to fend for themselves. A real father would not remain aloof while his children cry for him. A real father would not murder or allow others to be murdered. A real father would sit us on his lap and babble to us in our baby talk. A real father would never say, you are too filthy for me, I cannot abide you until you are perfect.

Also going through my mind were very difficult contradictions such as how Jesus is shown to be quoting from the old scriptures. That implies Jesus believed the old scriptures were accurate. Yet in Revelation, near the end, he says that if anyone adds to or changes the words of that book then bad things will happen to that person. In my mind I thought that there is no way he would say that if there was no possibility that the Bible would get corrupted. If Jesus thought the possibility was there, it is almost certain that it did happen – the words of God have been corrupted. Jesus could not have been referring to the same scriptures we know as the old testament and still be the son of God. That means that Jesus was referring to uncorrupted scriptures of which we are perhaps only partially aware. There was also a period of time where the people of God lost their scriptures, that is they had become corrupted by those responsible for their preservation, until an original copy of the LAW was found in an alter. The people repented and began to read and implement the real LAW. That means that the Bible has parts that cannot be the word of God. This presents a huge problem in deciding what IS the word of God.

I began to look at the promises of Jesus. Promises of sending the Holy Spirit. None of these promises came true for me; none of them came true for anyone else either that I could be convinced of. I remember attending a special Pentecostal church prayer meeting at night and the followers were lying in the aisles in front of the altar, humbling themselves before God and babbling in tongues. I was impressed and sincerely wanted to experience God as well, but I wanted God to touch me, I did not want to “get in the mood”. People were approaching each other and slaying each other in the spirit by touching their foreheads. Then the slain people would fall to the floor backwards, eased down by supporting believers behind them. I thought that was weird. Old men were prancing about and dancing and babbling with silly grins on their faces like they were drugged or on botox or something. Then one of the elders approached me and slapped me on the forehead to slay me in the spirit. I wanted to be co-operative. I wanted God to take me over, desperately so! But I did not want it to be artificial, brought on by mob hysteria. I felt the slap on my forehead. Nothing. A look of concern came over the elder. He slapped me a couple more times to no effect, then to my horror he deliberately stepped on my foot and tried to push me over backwards. I resisted. I never went back to that fraudulent church again. Anyway, to get back to the point, at first I thought that maybe all these promises were just for Jesus’s immediate apostles, disciples and followers. I concluded that because I had never seen nor heard of any verifiable evidence that modern men also could supernaturally heal people and so on. I was also appalled at the antics of Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart and I became disillusioned at the oh-so-friendly, kind, and loving Peter Popoff and his “healing” powers. Thank you James Randi for exposing his shameful scam. He is not the only shyster who used secret radio communications to deceive an audience desperately looking for salvation and guidance. They didn’t find it there. Thank you Jim Jones and David Koresh. Their ridiculous antics put the lie to their humanity. They were all bad people, with below average morals, even when compared to a criminal mind.

In spite of the clever and compelling way in which Bible “prophecies” and the Bible theme as a whole came together as a tightly woven unit, there were too many errors. Once I realized this, I suffered a crushing blow and I went into a crisis. I was devastated because I had been praying to Jesus and to God and that got me through some tough times. Make no mistake, Jesus DID save me. I now believe it was just a placebo. Jesus and God gave me the fearlessness and the courage to persevere during some pretty horrible periods in my life. I survived because I believed there was an all-powerful being who cared about me and who would protect me and guide me back to life. I had an all powerful father figure to get me through the tough times. Now, in my new crisis, I had nothing. I began to panic, wondering how this would affect my morality and outlook.

I now realize that I do not need to believe in God or in Jesus to maintain a high moral standard. I have not become suddenly evil just because I now dismiss the Bible as a work of fiction. Nevertheless I keep at it, researching and looking for more clues. I honestly do not know for sure how much of the Bible is for real, and how much is pure mythology. I probably will never know. I find myself missing Jesus from time to time because I actually grew to love the man, even if he was a fictional character. Maybe he was not fictional, but how am I to know?

I feel compelled to add that my own mother, a fanatical fundamentalist Christian, had no small role in my eventually rejecting Christianity, however the rejection was mostly based on the the events and facts I have already mentioned. She lives her life in fear. She definitely does not practice what she preaches, nor does she understand what she believes. Her belief in God is dominated by fear of punishment and of eternal hell-fire. I will not go into the messy details.

I remember being astonished when Lee Strobel spoke of a long-time evangelist, I believe a friend of Billy Graham, who had come to reject Christianity and, troubled by Alzheimer’s, later died. The evangelist told Lee that he missed Jesus. He missed him because he no longer believed and missed him like you would miss a life-long friend who had passed away. I had absolutely NO inkling that I too would someday be missing Jesus in the same way. I would like to conclude by saying that you do not get rid of a life-long obsession overnight. I still somehow believe that all will be well, that someone somewhere really is looking out for me. Perhaps it is Jesus. But I am no longer sure. I am not frightened by this.

I remain astonished at it all.