- 25 - doctrine of ‘eternal damnation’, designed only to inspire fear. What is more, that doctrine made it more difficult to carry out the Plan of Salvation conceived by a God Who sent to sinful and suffering humanity this message of all-forgiving love: Isaiah 49: 15: ‘Even if a mother could forget her child, I will never forget you.’ Many passages in your Bible have shared the fate of the paintings by the old masters placed upon the walls of some of your ancient churches. In later times, so-called ‘church painters’ came and daubed their commonplaces over the masterpieces. When you carefully remove the outer layer of paint from the walls today, the ancient pictures are once more revealed, leaving the beholder enraptured over the art of the great masters. In the same way the truthful picture presented by the original Bible was defaced in later times. • Erring mortals revised the Biblical accounts, omitting what they could not understand or adding their own mistaken explanations. Their successors ‘improved’ further upon the previous work, adding and deleting at will. In this way not only was the truth crowded aside, but many things crept into the Scriptures that tend to make a travesty of the word of God. A human poet coined the phrase: ‘Books have their fates.’ And unfortunately, this is true of the Bible also. Much of what it should contain has been eliminated, and much of what it does contain should never have been admitted, because it contradicts the truth. “When some ‘churches’ refuse to acknowledge this fact and persist in regarding the Bible you have as ‘authentic’, they are serving the cause of God poorly. In fact, they are doing it more harm than good. Even the less educated, when they read the Bible carefully – and especially the account of the Creation – must realize that some of what is written there cannot be correct. God Himself complains through the prophet Jeremiah about the falsifications introduced into the Old Testament: Jeremiah 8: 8-9: ‘How can you say, “We are wise and possess God’s law”? I tell you that the false pen of the copyist has made it into a lie. The wise are ashamed and dismayed, for they have trapped themselves. They have discarded the word of the Lord, so what manner of wisdom is left them?’ Elsewhere in the Holy Writ the truth has suffered at the hands of translators who have rendered certain words and phrases of the original text so inadequately as to distort their real meaning beyond recognition. From what I have said you can see the reason for the great obscurity and the many misstatements to be found in the story of Creation as you have it today. Only occasional references retain a faint glimmer of the truth. Some of the stages of the evolution of material Creation are hinted at, but they are not consistent with the facts, whether in point of number or of sequence. The same is true of the Biblical account of the Creation of the first human beings.
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