Here comes Donald Trump with his latest grift. Now, after fingering starlets, sneaking into pageant dressing room to checks out 15-year-old participants, and then continuing his hooker-a-month pattern, despite the fact we’ve never once seen him inside a church other than for a photo op; he’s now saying buy my “God Bless the USA Bibles”. These bibles are edited, incorporating political statements and patriotic songs, like:
○ Handwritten chorus to “God Bless The USA” by Lee Greenwood
○ The US Constitution
○ The Bill of Rights
○ The Declaration of Independence
○ The Pledge of Allegiance
This is the latest of many troubling actions. Christians are not fixed in the totality of religious identity; the speaking in-tongue Evangelicals and the polite Anglicans, are as different as day and night. Each derived from Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Popes in 1517, when he opened the religious Pandora’s Box, to believe whatever you want for the day to be God’s truth. Religion is derived from man and not any God that has visited any man to date. Some argue that the manufacturing and industrial countries of the world, such as China, and Russia, have moved faster forward with a belief in technology than the religious nations putting their belief in their numerous manmade Gods.
The Bible and other mythological teachings have been subject to numerous alterations, omissions, and additions driven by political motives and personal gains. From the exclusion of Gnostic and Apocryphal texts to the reinterpretation of biblical narratives, the political influence on scripture is pervasive. Stories such as the Gnostic account of the Secret Book of John, exploring the origins of the world, were left out, because it would contradict some of the messages of “Good vs Evil” left out in the Christian Bible.
While Evangelical Christians worldwide lose their minds about sodomy, they forget the actual story of Sodom and Gomorrah. When Lot and his daughters were spared but an entire city was killed for supposedly practicing “sodomy”; Lot’s daughters would go on to get their father drunk and seduce him so they could have his children. These stories are acceptable, while Biblical stories of same-sex love are not.
Moreover, stories like the love story of Jonathan and King David, are often dismissed or outright ignored; even though the Bible clearly states that David and Jonathon loved each other with the love of a woman.
If we move to Islam, we know that if you’re a man and honor, Muhammad, said,
“The smallest reward for the Men of Paradise is an abode where there are 80,000 servants and 72 wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine, and ruby.”
Some have even claimed that in paradise one gets prepubescent boys as beautiful and numerous as pearls to serve them.
Let’s not forget the ways “The Apostle Paul” who wrote the majority of the New Testament, despite never having met Jesus, claimed to speak for the Son of God. Paul takes a strikingly different tone from the compassion displayed by Jesus, yet Paul still wields considerable influence over Christian doctrine. Paul’s writings are so revered not because of his connection to Jesus, but because his message aligns with the goals of the Holy See.
All of this is without discussing the tens of thousands of additions, edits, and alterations made by scribes over the centuries. Called interpolations, the current English Bible contains many such edits that did not exist before 1885. These interpolations are listed in part below:
○ John 21
Although many Evangelical Christians were recently losing their mind over Easter occurring on Trans Day of Remembrance, which is the same day every year unlike Easter, these Christians do not remember what their own god, Jesus said about Transgender people in Matthew 19:12:
“For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.”
Beyond Jesus’s statements about trans people, Christians also ignore the numerous references to Jesus’ own sexuality. The Bible is riddled with references to Jesus and the many men he surrounded himself with, like John, “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” Or Lazarus, whose sisters spoke of Jesus’ love towards him, saying “Lord, the one you love is sick.” Don’t even get me started on the wild goose chase they go through trying to explain this verse about a naked man fleeing from Jesus when he was taken captive in the garden of Gethsemane:
“And there followed him a certain young man, having a linen cloth cast about his naked body; and the young men laid hold on him:
And he left the linen cloth and fled from them naked.”
You can forget about any mention or discussion of the Secret Book of Mark, a 2nd-century religious text which is thought to reveal a secret rite of passage between Jesus and his disciples. Where the Son of Man and Fisher of Men instructs a young boy to bathe and come to him at night in linen, so Jesus can share the secrets of heaven with him.
Despite the well-documented and nefarious political history of the Bible, many Christians claim that the Bible is the infallible word of God. Ignoring the thousands of years of edits and ideology that have been built into it. Now, Donald Trump continues that tradition, merging it with good old-fashioned American Patriotism to sell it to his favorite White Evangelical Christian Nationalists. Although it has been thousands of years, people aren’t done adding things to the Good Book.
