Knowing or Believing Number 6

Yesterday I met a couple at POPEYES Chicken while eating lunch. We started discussing art initially then gradually waded into religion.

The gentleman was a Church of Christ Minister. His wife seemed to me to be fragile as a result of a hard life as she explained without getting into too much detail. They introduced themselves as James and Charlotte.

James iterated and reiterated that the"Church of Christ is the only church mentioned in the bible and therefore 'The' church of Christ, and, Charlotte kept stressing that the crucifixion and the blood of Christ was the only way to salvation. They both kept affirming that the bible is the word of God. They kept say 'God said' or 'Jesus said' or 'Paul said'. The totality of the basis of their faith was dependent on the bible. No amount of logic could lead them to even consider the possibility that the bible is not the word of God but the many words of men and women.

I hear this from all who profess being a Christian. When I was 13 years old I accepted Jesus as my personal savior and was baptized by immersion. At that time I also accepted that the bible was the inerrant word of God. I no longer believe this. I was only 13 years old and I was, as most kids, very impressionable and believed practically everything that adults told me. They led me to believe that in order to stay out of the eternal burning hell fire, and to get to heaven I had to jump through their hoops and submit to their unyielding belief in the bible.

I do believe that the Christian bibles do make it pretty clear as to their plans of salvation, however, I have come to a point in my life that I do not believe that evil even exists. The hell that anyone will ever experience is brought on by human invalid thinking or the random mishaps of the natural laws. I do not believe in any spiritual adversary nor do I believe that the power that created us is trying to punish us or teach us a lesson.

I have create a lot of seemingly crazy art but I have never created something with which I had an intent to harm anyone. I have, in much of my art, wanted to enlighten those that I believe needed an awakening, but never to harm them. There are however many people that create a multitude of things designed specifically to harm others. This I believe is born, not of evil but of invalid thinking.

I do not know if mankind will ever come to a point that they realize the social problems we encounter throughout the world are as a result of invalid thinking, and not an evil spirit. Evil is merely a figment of our imagination. I suppose we could call any wrong doing an evil act but I refuse to accept Isaiah 45:7 in the Christian bible which states that God " formed the light...and create Evil: I the Lord do all these things." Everyone of us are capable of much wrong doing but strictly because of our invalid thinking. It's such a lame excuse for anyone to try to put the blame of their wrong doings on some evil spirit. The coward always blames someone else.

Our brains are the seats of our pain and pleasure, and for most part if we give proper consideration of these two phenomena we can explain why we react to most stimuli. I realize that each of us can mount many arguments to refute this observation of mine, or support it, and this is good because we will learn from the dialogue.

The one big thing that I think is important in society is for us to just stop blaming Satan or the Evil one for our wrong doings. We just need to grow up and acknowledge our personal weaknesses and jealousies and vengeance and make a sincere effort to improve our thought processes.

Throw Satan and Evil into the trash because they do not exist.

Finton