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When I was young we would play “the telephone game.”  Essentially, a large group of people would get together and one person would start with a phrase like, “The portal opened up into a new dimension.”  That would be whispered to the next person, who would whisper it to the next and so on and so forth until it gets to the last person.  The last person would then say the phrase out loud and it would almost inevitably lead to a huge roar of laughter.  What was, “The portal opened up into a new dimension,” would now be, “The turtle suffered from severe dementia.”

The telephone game wasn’t intended to be one where you intentionally changed what was said, it was something that happened.  It happened because someone would mishear a word or part of the phrase and assume what it was.  It happened because no matter how hard we try to tell a story exactly as it happened, we alter it based upon our own perceptions.

To me, much of the Bible is like the telephone game.  Obviously, if Adam and Eve were indeed the only humans on Earth, there were no scribes to write down events as they happened.  Therefore, one would assume that Adam and/or Eve relayed the stories to their sons (either before or after the incestuous relationships resulted in the populating of Earth).  In turn, their sons would relay the stories to their children, and so it goes from generation to generation until someone decides to write the story down.  Therefore, it’s very possible that Adam was actual Allen and Eve was actually Eva.

Thus, when I hear someone like Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell or John Hagee or any other evangelical minister using the word “truth” to describe the words in the Bible, it strikes a very unnerving chord on my internal piano – something you may hear just before someone is attacked in a horror movie.  I often think of Pat Robertson and his lot as Don Quixotes in that their quest is driven by their inability to distinguish fact from fiction, or more particularly, belief from truth.

For an example that relates to this site and myself, many evangelicals take the position that God’s truth is that “man shall not lie with another man as he does a woman.”   But is that true?  Is it true that God said this?  The Bible says this, but did God speak those words to a crowded gymnasium?  Did something get lost in the repetition, translations — in the telephone game?

In fact, Cardinal Bellarmine once taught God’s truth and said:

To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Another example of Christian “truth” was far more horrific.  In fact, Christian ministers used to preach that black people didn’t have souls and were cursed, hence the color of their skin.  One minister, R. Furman (a Baptist) had this to say:

The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.

The minister is right, there is slavery in the Bible, but does that mean it is God’s truth that we should have slaves?

But sometimes, even the ministers disagree as to what God’s truth is:

God gave the savior to the German people.  We have faith, deep and unshakeable faith, that he [Hitler] was sent to us by God to save Germany. — Hermann Goering

Many of those people involved in Adolf Hitler were Satanists, many were homosexuals — the two things seem to go together. — Pat Robertson

The point here is that those people that claim God’s truth don’t really know it to be truth anymore than I know what is true when it comes to God.  I know what I believe; I believe there is no God.  I believe that if there is a God and those people like Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler, Pat Robertson, R. Furman, Jerry Falwell and all the other Don Quixotes are going to Heaven – I don’t want to go.  It’s bad enough I have to spend life on earth with that sort of ignorance. The last thing I want to do is spend eternity with it.

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