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Posted by richard smith on October 28, 1999 at 10:14:31:
I was once a Christian, now I am a Jew (reform).
I read the New Testament in Greek and Latin, the privary ancient version.
I have spent years reading the NT and Christian Theology and history. I have
studied Hebrew for about five years at UCLA along with a course in Aramaic and
a year of Arabic.
While in High School I was the Christian club president for three years and
"lead" many young people to Christ. As a club leader I organized the group
for MS marches, preaching at the Resuce Mission and sundry other club activities.
After graduation I pursued the study of the Greek and Latin Clics, Ancient
History, Plato and Aristotle etc. My purpose was to prepare for a ministry
in apologetics; I was particularly interested in defending the doctrine of
the Trinity marshalling arguments from language, history philosophy.
In my study of history, I came across Jewish History and the history
of the Jews in Europe during the middle ages in particular. I was to dis-
cover, to my chagrin, that the faith that I held so dearly and which I
was convinced held out the hope of love for all Mankind had been re-
sonsible for the formation, cultivation and desimination of 1500 years of
anti-semitic and anti-Jewish feeling.
Realizing that the New Testament blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of
Jesus (Retzach El), "the murder of God", that the New Testament targets the
Jews for conversion as THE PRIMARY group for faith in Jesus, that the re-
jection of Jesus, the alleged Messiah, by the Jews was due to their "hard-
ness of heart", their "blindness of eyes", their "stiffness of neck", their
love for sin, wickedness, darkness and beign opposed "to all men", I found
that I could no longer maintain the purity of my religion in forming per-
haps the greatest blight of human history and therefore, I decided to make
change.
Obviously I could not change the text of the Bible, nor the minds of my
fellow believers who refuse to believe that "true" Christians are capable of
such things, obvious to was the fact that "True believer" groups do not count-
tenance "dissenters" or even any margin of difference of opinion, so I de-
cided to leave this "faith".
"Faith", I say, because in our modern world, I view anything that places
adherence to diving revelation of the accomplishments of human reason as a
cult. A good example comes from faith healing as opposed to penicillin.
If I was on a Gilligan's Island of sorts, and there was no modern science, I would
pray for want of medicine, when some one of us castaways fell ill. On the
other hand, to pray in the presence of modern civilization and to ignore med-
icine cannot only be backward, but even criminal. However, if this was 1770
and no one understood even "micro-organisms", prayer would be just as good
as the next remedy.
So now what do I think about the Ten Commandments in school?
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