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Pastimes : Ask God -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam Ferguson who wrote (17348)	6/10/1998 10:30:00 AM
From: Sam Ferguson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 39621

The Christian Bible presents to the reflective mind one of the most astounding phenomena of modern life. Though neglected and even repudiated by a large segment of modern thinking, and evidencing few signs of a controlling influence on current modes of life, it yet occupies a place of dominance that can only be realized when its position and authority are challenged. More than that, it exercises through the subtle power of tradition and child-indoctrination a totally unbelievable thraldom over the common mind which can only be compared to a type of hypnotic obsession. The force and sweep of the subtle acceptance is not dreamed of by the person who has not become consciously emancipated from it and can view it objectively, or from the outside. Few people have been able to dissociate themselves sufficiently from their indoctrined prepossession in this regard to objectify this phenomenon of the psychological life of the day. Only a trained and freed mind can stand out from under its own inherited habitudes of thought and feeling and subject them to rational and dispassionate criticism. Few can rationally appraise mass sentiments. This is the function of the philosopher and thinker. For the most part, people accept as authoritative the mass conceptions amidst which they grow up, and regard their general vogue as the seal and surety of their rightness. In such fashion the Bible has been accepted as the great unique work of divine authority, and, with the force of sanctified allegiance back of it for generations, it now wields a perfectly unrealized power over the common mind. Even those who have outwardly rejected it are unwittingly influenced by it in ways they little dream of; for society has been insidiously impregnated with the germs of a thousand ideas, springing from the vast number of phrases, texts and incidents which have taken unshakable rootage in the mass consciousness. In the area of Christendom the book is still regarded as the supreme moral and spiritual guide of the race. And from time to time one reads the oft-broadcast declaration from eminent divines that what the world needs most of all as a salve for its ills, is more consecrated study of the Bible. We have pondered this assertion deeply and sought what truth there may be in it. It is one of those equivocal statements that are true without meaning much after all. The answer might be "yes" and "no." We would say "yes," but with tremendous qualifications and reservations. We can agree that more study of spiritual things is decidedly a need of our time. But we face a strange situation here, which does not seem to have been discerned by the advocates of Bible study. To begin with, there never has been a book that has been studied so assiduously and zealously as this. No book has received such devotion and reverence. No other has been preached on so often and so fervently. It has been organically dissected and analyzed without end. Thousands of volumes of exegesis have been written upon it. Yet we are told we need to study it more. And a prominent writer has, with general approbation, dubbed it The Book Nobody Knows, and its central hero, The Man Nobody Knows. If this is the outcome of past study on an enormous scale, what profit to study it further? The outcome of centuries of consecrated effort to glean its message is held up as a nullity!