A reply to a friend on Facebook about belief in God.

by Angela K. Durden
The Most Brilliant Woman in the World

Citizen Journalist.  Novelist. Author of other stuff. 

Business writer.  Songwriter.  Protecting creator's copyrights. 

I made a post on Facebook wherein I said, "My Heavenly Father self-identified as male. I'm good with that." 

And comments followed. Like from this fellow here.


After some back and forth, that you can see if you click the link, I then replied back to him this:

James, in my forty-plus years of studying and discussing it, I've learned the Bible is a book that tells us a few things. One: Why we are here. Two: How we got here. Three: Why the world is in the state it is in. Four: Who our real enemy is, why he is the enemy, and how to identify that one as well as his followers. Five: The history of God's dealings with mankind as it relates to the outworking of His purpose. And six: Has a lot of stories that relate the struggle for keeping faith, the troubles from loss of faith, and from which we can gain meaning and guidance for our own lives.

The Bible has been manipulated for political purposes (which is why the quickly and badly interpreted King James version came to be). It has been interpreted through the prisms of social mores of agendized groups. Subsets of believers have killed other subsets of believers because of doctrinal beliefs and other power grabs (think WWI and WWII: Christian nations fighting other Christian nations).

Parts of the Bible have been falsely changed to represent specific doctrinal beliefs (think the doctrine of the Holy Trinity). It has been rubbed as a talisman and wielded as a sword. It has been outlawed and burned. It has been sacrificed on the altar of the scientific opinion du jour. It has been ignored and made fun of.

However, with all that, it is the most widely published and distributed book of all time, bar none. With much research and comparing of current texts with ancient scrolls as they are unearthed, we find that, by and large, the Bible we have today has remained intact.

People have given their lives to protect the right to own a copy and to read it. They fight in courts around the world for the right to speak with others of it and God and their beliefs. Christians are still being tortured and killed — just in Nigeria alone in 2018 many thousands of Christians, including children, have been burned alive, chopped to bits, raped, beheaded, and otherwise killed — for refusing to give up their belief in the truths it contains.

When we humans read, we read through the lens of our own set of limited knowledge. Those who believe the Bible (example, when it says "the earth hangs upon nothing") over the science of the day (example: the earth is flat and sits on the shoulders of Atlas who is standing on the back of a turtle, etc.,), yes, those who believe may be laughed at, but we believe Almighty God because we trust He will not lie to us, and we wait for the information. And sure enough, when scientific ability caught up with the Bible, what did we find? We found the earth hangs upon nothing...just like our Heavenly Father said.

The example of the earth hanging upon nothing is just one way we know the Bible was inspired of God. At the time of that writing humans had no way of going into space and seeing the planet from far away, so we know they did not write that from their personal experience. Therefore, true faith, laughed at and derided and held in contempt, is trusted because of "the assured expectation of realities not yet beheld" based on the promises God has made and the promises He has kept.

Everybody else can believe as they like, but as for me, I will never apologize for believing in a known power higher than myself. Not for me the faceless higher power many today call The Universe.

So, to get back around to my original post above that started this whole chain: If my Heavenly Father calls himself a male, then I will believe Him even if it is politically or socially inconvenient to do so. And if His meaning of "father" is one unknown to me and He cares to expand upon it and make it clear at a later date, then I'm good with that.