Of course, I am insane. How many times do I have to tell you that? The mythologians who created Me were insane, although not all as insane as Jesus, thank Me, and they created Me in their own image. If I was not insane, or my worshipers were not insane, I would not have survived Satan's invention of the scientific discipline of history.

It happened in the nineteenth century of the Christian era. Historians had already learned to compare statements in alleged nonfiction with facts known from other sources, and where the two were incompatible to expose the alleged nonfiction as nothing of the sort. That technique, plus the detection of anachronisms, enabled them to expose Geoffrey of Monmouth's Chronicle of the Kings of Britain, long touted as sixth-century history, as in fact a twelfth-century historical novel. Would you believe that Geoffrey had King Arthur's father, lusting after Arthur's mother, chase her into Tintagel Castle in Cornwall six hundred years before Tintagel Castle was built?

Satan persuaded a small group of historians to apply their newly perfected techniques to the Judaeo-Christian Bible. And he taught them the additional methodology of searching for pairs of statements that contradicted each other and therefore could not both be true.

The results, when published, terrified Me and terrified the pope. The Bible contained over one thousand pairs of mutually exclusive statements, and therefore contained at least one thousand lies even if no others were present. It contained dozens of anachronisms, such as a mention of Alexander the Great by an author who had allegedly lived more than two centuries before Alexander's birth. It contained hundreds of prophecies that the historians showed to have been already fulfilled at the time of writing, always accompanied by prophecies of the future that failed to be fulfilled.

For example, the anonymous author of Mark prophesied the destruction of my temple in Jerusalem, which happened in 70 CE, not a difficult feat for a man writing in 73 CE. But he then went on to prophesy Jesus' return visit no later than the reign of the emperor Hadrian. He seems to have been delayed.

The pope was frantic. „What can I do?" he wailed. „We’ll be destroyed. There must be some way to rebut them."

"Appoint your own historians," I advised him in a dream. "Make sure they're all card-carrying Catholics who never miss Sunday mass and go to confession at least several times a year. Tell them to examine the evidence the historians have uncovered, and find the simple mistake the historians made that led them to their false conclusions.

The pope followed my direction. He appointed a group of Catholic historians to examine the Bible with piety and faith, and find the true explanation for its apparent inconsistencies. Boy, was that a mistake!

The Catholic historians confirmed the findings of the secular historians. The Judaeo-Christian Bible was pure fiction, written by authors who contradicted one another, authors who believed in a flat earth and a solid domed sky, authors who correctly prophesied the past but failed miserably whenever they attempted to prophesy the future, authors who guessed, fantasized or lied in order to make a point, and authors who credited Me with whatever action they felt they would have taken in my place.

The pope's historians gave him their report. Realizing that he was certain to suppress it, they also leaked it to the press. Then, without exception, they at some time in the next three or four years declared that they had ceased to be Me-worshipers. Christianity is totally dependent on the veracity of its Bible, and since they had proven beyond the last shred of doubt that the Bible was fiction, they recognize that for their Bible to be a hoax, their religion must also be a hoax. The pope was devastated. Facing instant unemployment, or worse, he considered killing himself. But I gave him an alternative.

"Since the methodology of history refutes the Bible," I told him, "what we have to do is invent a new methodology that can be used to prove the opposite. Instead of starting with the evidence and following wherever it leads, as the historians do, we start by determining what conclusions we're going to reach, and then make the evidence fit those conclusions. We can call the new methodology theology, 'knowledge of God', and get the universities to give degrees in it and tout it as a discipline every bit as respectable as history.

"Of course," I warned, "we have to be careful that the new methodology is never applied to any book but the Bible. If it's applied to Alice in Wonderland or Gulliver's Travels or the memoirs of Graf von Munchausen, it'll show all of them to be nonfiction, and we don't want that to happen. But that's a risk we have to take. Unless every time a historian proves that a biblical story is fiction, we can produce a theologian to prove it's not fiction, we're both dead. Don't worry. I know this will work."

And it did. I am very proud of theology. It requires that its practitioners be ignorant of the methodology used not only by historians but also all scientists. It also demands that they have the stubborn, inflexible gullibility and mental dysfunction for which P.T. Barnum would have beaten a path to their doors. But it saved the Christian church. It saved Me-worship. To this day, when the mindless masses hear that a scholar with a doctoral degree in history declares the Judaeo-Christian Bible to be a demonstrable fraud, and an alleged scholar with a doctoral degree in divinity declares it to be revealed truth, they see the situation as a dispute between equals that cannot be settled one way or the other. So they go on believing the one that offers pie in the sky when they die.

To paraphrase Barnum: There's a Me-worshiper born every minute.

*

The Autobiography of God can be ordered from Xlibris.com or by special order from any bookstore. The first excerpt from Dr. Harwood's The Autobiography of God was published in the 2000 March/April issue of the American Rationalist Š

Po przeczytaniu tego tekstu, czytelnicy często wybierają też: Ecohumanism, ed. Robert B. Tapp Przyjazny feudalizm. Mit Tybetu

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