I thought I would continue along the same train of thought I started a few posts ago. In the last post I talked about why you should live like Heaven and Hell really exist:
Now, here is the point. Wouldn’t it be better to live a Christ-like life with the hope of getting to Heaven and what it has to offer and be wrong, than to not live a Christ-like life figuring there is no Heaven and find out there is a Heaven and conversely Hell? After all if you live a good life and find out Heaven doesn’t exist, at least you lived a good, honest life and were considered good. Whereas if you don’t live a Christ-like life and Hell exists, well, you will end up there. Which is the better bet?
This leads to the next point, how do we live a Christ-like life? The easy answer to this is by reading the Bible and learning what Jesus teaches us. But this is my, and why make something easy when you can make it difficult? During my journey back to the faith one of the tougher questions I had to face was whether or not the Bible is true or not. Obviously there are many people who argue it isn’t true, for many reasons. I certainly am not qualified to explain the Bible and refute all these claims, or even list them all. But we only need to open to the first page to see one of the points non-believers will use to “prove” the Bible is fiction.
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. – Genesis 1, RSVCE
How could God create the universe in six days? Don’t we have scientific evidence which proves it took a lot longer than six days? There are plenty of other points of contention throughout the Bible and unfortunately like the debate on global warming or whether or not life begins at conception or sometime later, for every point for, there is a point against. I admit I had a problem with this, whether the Bible is truth or fiction.
I did a lot of reading, listened to a lot of Catholic radio and spent a lot of time thinking, and that always hurts. And here is what I came up with, it all comes down to faith. If you believe God exists then you will believe in the Bible and that it was written by Him through various writers who were inspired by Him. Again, I am not the scholar, but when you carefully consider the evidence, there is enough proof that it is real. But…
Here is the thing, like the paragraph above from my last post, even if the Bible is fiction, what it teaches is real. What it teaches is how to treat others, how to conduct business and how to live a good life. We can learn an awful lot of good things from the Bible, and isn’t that a good thing?
Here is a link to a PDF book written by one of my favorite Catholic radio show hosts, Father Simon, take the time to read it and who knows you just might be convinced.
The Wayward Catholic 