steve howard's update of the new testament
BARBARALBA BIBLE

THE NEW NEW TESTAMENT

Paul's first letter to the CORINTHIANS

 

chapter 13

vs. 1: I may be able to speak the languages of men and even of angels, but if I have no love, my speech is no more than a noisy gong or a clanging bell. EQ.

Love is like language. It did not exist before us. It is something that has grown in us. It is a very large part of our brain that generates this new life form. And it is something that is still growing. And we are slowly getting to feel comfortable with it.

And once we kick the shit out of the pricks that propagate only vile news all through the media, we will see that there already is a fair amount of love everywhere. And that it is growing and spreading. Much to the chagrin of those who persist in the paranoid realm of hate. Simply for the material profit in it.

vs. 4: Love is patient and kind... EQ.

vs. 6: is happy with the truth. EQ.

And the truth is, there is no one true God. No writing is holy. And writing that proclaims it is of God is deceptive. And there is more love outside of religion than there is in it. It is easier to love when one isn’t instructed as to how and when to do it. It is instinctive. It is a part of what makes us what we are. It makes us different from lizards.

vs. 7: Love never gives up... EQ.

vs. 8: Love is eternal. EQ.

This is a nice thing.

Imagine you are piloting in from a dead universe into the first place you can find in a young universe. You can be certain of very little for understanding is still very infantile.

But you can recognize love for it is the nature that is necessary for a being to make the leap from a functioning life form of consuming enough raw material to generate the energy in the body form that has evolved to survive, to a creature that is aware that it has come to find itself. Love simply seems like it has survived the death and rebirth of a universe. And it is the love that helps you land back into the new here and now.

“That sounds like fun.”

“It was a hell of an adventure.”

And this next bit is the story Plato gave us with the shadows in the cave:

vs. 12: What we see now is like a dim image in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. EQ.

Jesus also said we are like newly born. We are just starting to understand that we are here.

And when we do. Like we finally are beginning to. We will know that we are the angels of heaven. For we are in heaven. It is ours because we are in it and we are of it. And seeing this makes everything different. Everything eternal.

Not because a God made it so. Because that is the way it is. And we are it.

vs. 13: ... and the greatest of these is love. EQ.


chapter 14

Strange tongues. Foreign languages. If, for example, you are in Germany, languages that are not German are strange tongues. Many speak English. Some French. And some almost any language.

But to have a conversation all should use the same language.

This may seem obvious. It is not to all. Many persons are happy to hear themselves talk and don’t care if anyone else understands their language. In fact, Paul uses this chapter to try to explain to people that if someone wants to talk to someone they need to have a common language.

Sometimes you see American tourists yelling in American English because someone wasn’t certain what they mumbled in American English. They assume that everyone speaks American English all over the world because they do in America and God is an American. The world outside of America is only there to serve America.

“Not all Americans.”

“No, of course not. Some Americans aren’t idiots. And most of the idiots don’t get out much.”

vs. 1: ... Set your hearts on spiritual gifts, especially the gift of proclaiming God’s message. EQ.

I, your narrator, have been convinced by the Gods to change this command to ‘the messages of the Gods’. For there is no one of anything. It is not the nature of nature. Even the universe is not one. It is hard to examine this with our present means. But by it’s very nature and the clarity of the eternal and infinite, we can speculate with all probability that it is not likely that the universe we are in is the first or only one.

My Mother wrote a book about the women in the Bible. And I could tell her to read vs. 20: Do not be like children in your thinking, my brothers; be children so far as evil is concerned, but be grown-up in your thinking. EQ.

She would be offended. For she does not believe Sarah was pimped out to a Lord. That the Lord took her in for a few nights but didn’t have sex with Abraham’s little sister. Paid for the sex, but just to be nice. As if Kings gave a shit about being nice.

“No. It was written that the Lord feared God so didn’t rape the little sister of Abraham.”

“Well, the Lord didn’t give a flying fuck about Abraham’s fairy tale God. He raped Sarah just like many Lords have raped many little girls. All through the history of bloody patriarchy. And it is bloody well time we stop thinking like children when we read the horror stories of our religions and history. Rape is a common event. Pretending it isn’t will not make it go away. Pretending Moses was found in the reeds does not make the rape of children by their own fathers go away. It is there to be read and those who ignore it are childish in their thinking.”

“Okay.”

“Shall we also say dinosaurs can’t be true if they aren’t in the Bible. If God wants to make a universe that looks like it is 13.7 billion years old, well, he can do anything. He let the devil put the dinosaur bones in the ground to fuck with us. God made the rocks of the earth millions of years old to fuck with us. He sent light from stars billions of years ahead of the time when they were supposedly created just to test our faith. Has the real nothing to tell us. Only this fucking book that says God said it was so and if anyone questions its contradictions to itself and the real then off with his head. Well, fucking wake up and grow up in your thinking you frightened children.”

“If you say so.”

“It is not I that say so. It is evident. It can be examined and understood. Adam and Eve were not the first humans and all several billion humans did not come from them. The billions of years before that are evident. We are in the real. And we are real. One must not die to go to heaven. One must awaken to find one’s self in heaven. For it is here and now.”

“You seem to take it personally.”

“I find it very frustrating to talk to believers. They are so caught up in their fantasy that they will simply ignore the real.”

vs. 34: the woman should keep quiet in the meetings. They are not allowed to speak... EQ.

In case anyone was wondering.

vs. 35: If they want to find out about something, they should ask their husbands at home. It is a disgraceful thing for a woman to speak in church. EQ.

It is assumed, of course, that a woman is married to a man for if she is no longer under the authority of her father, she has no business being single or a lesbian.

“Why come.”

“Because woman was made to serve man. It says so in the book, so it must be true.”

“Why do women put up with sperm religions.”

“I haven’t a fucking clue. Unless they are ignorant.”

vs. 37: ... he must realize that what I am writing to you is the Lord’s command. 38. But if he does not pay attention to this, pay no attention to him. EQ.

Paul. Go fuck yourself.


chapter 15

Okay. I know why no one has ripped this book apart in the last many years. It is enough to drive one mad. Ever repeated foundationless irrational gibberish. Who in their right mind would take the book seriously.

“Aren’t you.”

“Aren’t I what.”

vs. 4: that he was buried... EQ.

Christ was not buried. He was taken to a tomb. A new, never once used tomb. And he was not dead. He died later. 20 or 50 years later. And for the record, from Friday afternoon till Sunday morning is less than two days. And is therefore not three.

“It’s a mute point if he never made it to the tomb.”

“My question is what is the significance of three.”

“Maybe to remind us of the three sisters, called the three kings or three wise men.”

“The three stars in the sky that point toward the rising sun at the beginning of winter in the northern hemisphere. I doubt it. But who knows.”

“Maybe it is letting us know that a third monotheistic religion is in the makings.”

“Also highly unlikely but an interesting point is the Coke Pepsi theory. Either Jesus died on the cross and the disciples stole his body. That’s the Jewish belief. Or the Christian belief, he died and was raised from the dead, which is simply mad.”

“Unless he wasn’t dead and they just pretended.”

“That’s the most plausible for the story. But the whole idea that there was one Jesus Christ and the details about this one Jesus Christ are argued about between the Jews and the Christians, and now the Moslems. But fuck, it is simply cornering the market for possibilities. Even pricks that run the hospitals in this country won’t let people work as doctors or nurses if they don’t have a monotheistic religious belief. It is tyrannical insanity. Jesus Christ is not a one-time event. There are millions trying to say exactly what this one character has said.”

“And what’s that.”

“Fuck off with your fucking tyranny. Your dictating how we fucking think. What we have to believe. It is fucking insane. You are a bunch of fucking insane myopic sick fucking apes.”

“A bunch of assholes.”

“A whole fucking flock of assholes.”

Vs. 8: Last of all he appeared also to me – even though I am like someone whose birth was abnormal. EQ.

“Was he created in a lab like the monster of Dr. Frankenstein.”

“No, I think his father jerked off on a rock and he hatched in the sun.”

“Well, he must have been the most special person in the world if Jesus Christ talked to him on the desert road and no one else with Paul saw or heard him. Jesus must have bent the shit out of reality to get that one done. And to tell Paul to contradict everything he said and build an empire of churches just like Jesus Christ had spent his life fighting against.”

“Well, if that doesn’t make Paul the Super Jew the most important person in the whole world.”

“Then why do you think he keeps saying he is the least.”

“He is mocking us. For he, though impotent, is the biggest prick since Moses.”

vs. 9: For I am the least of all the apostles, because I persecuted God’s church. EQ.

“He made the church. The Christian church is based on Paul’s ranting. They have nothing to do with Jesus. They nail him to a cross and leave him there to remind everyone not to fucking well question authority.”

“Everything is just about perfectly backwards.”

“My father once said it was better for the church that I rejected Christianity.”

“Why did he say that.”

“Because I was a bastard for details. I might have ended up a real tyrant instead of a real bastard.”

“You might have taken on the roll of Paul instead of the role of Jesus.”

“As a Paul, I would have had more of a chance to fuck up Christianity from the inside. Now it is too late.”

“You could say you found Jesus Christ. Tell them you recant and become a preacher in your own television show. Like Oral Roberts.”

“I did find Jesus Christ. Or let us say: I have found the meaning of Jesus Christ. And I have talked to the fish. And he or she told me not to lie. The time for truth is now. That I must keep it real.”

Paul is an asshole.

vs. 17: And if Christ has not been raised, then your faith is a delusion... EQ.

True dat. Your faith is a delusion. Faith is a mental disease.

But on the other side. Reincarnation is a real thing. But one must be born again. Of a woman. One doesn’t jump up out of the grave. Even with a thousand trumpets being sounded. For fuck sake.

Our bodies are dead when they are dead. They do not come back. What comes back hasn’t left. It is in something that continues in the all of us. Maybe in language. Maybe in love. It’s yet to be fully understood. And if it isn’t something real, it is a delusion. We don’t yet know our instinct. It definitely carries something.

Jesus Christ is an inevitability. It is, he or she is, in our instinct. It is what we are evolving to. It is enlightenment. And it does not need to be called Jesus Christ. It does not need to be called anything. Evolution ain’t done with us yet. And we are not done with evolution.

vs. 24: Then the end will come; Christ will overcome all spiritual rulers, authorities, and powers, and will hand over the Kingdom... EQ.

Back to the animals. And ownership will be revoked. And we will stop being blind to our responsibility to the rest of life. We will be the angels. The Gods.

Lay down your lies. Religion is over.

vs. 26: The last enemy to be defeated will be death. EQ.

Death is not our enemy. It is part of evolution. Evolution is the will of the gods.

The last enemy is ignorant obedience.

vs. 36 You fool! When you sow a seed in the ground, it does not sprout life unless it dies. EQ.

Well that contradicts what death is. It tells us we need death, which is true. It is part of how evolution works. Only when new creatures or plants are born over and over do they mutate and evolve. Death is part of life. Without it, well, who knows. For there isn’t a without it. Everything dies. Everything is born again.

vs. 39. And the flesh of living beings is not all the same kind of flesh; human beings have one kind of flesh, animals another, birds another, and fish another. EQ.

Wrong. Complete ignorance. We are hardly different from other primates. Flesh is so very similar for all creatures. There is very little difference between a human and a fish. We have similarities with the trees. We all come from the same soup.

Paul rambles such a lot of gibberish about the end of death and physical and spiritual being two things as if he knows but it is all base on nothing. He is simply making it up as he goes along.

The holy books were written by very unholy and quite ignorant arrogant men.


corinthians chapters 16