A NEW WAY OF AFFIRMING AND APPRECIATING THE BIBLE

1. We can think of those people (of the Bible) as people who faithfully lived their lives, based on their
    awareness as a prescientific people and, consequently, saw themselves they were not wrong in believing
    what they believed in.
2. But today, the Bible can be seen as a mirror or, more appropriately, as an x-ray machine, which depict not
    only their faces, but also their inner beings. They did not only tell the good things about themselves, they
    also told everything, including their attitudes, hopes, dreams, and their "secret feelings and secret lives."
3. How do we handle this matter?
   A) We need to acknowledge that when they told their stories, they did it based on the level of their
        awareness as prescientific people. 
   B) We can now say their ideas about themselves and their world, were not wrong but limited in some way;
        but we can say we know and understand reality better than they did, thanks for the gift of science and
       our awareness of evolutionary process, a reality that has always been at work then and now.
   C) Our task now is to write or tell our own stories as our ancestors did. We make sure that when we write
        or tell our stories, they truly mirror everything about ourselves, inside and out, like what an x-ray
        machine does. Our stories will be read by future generations and they be the ones who can fully
       determine how fully aware we were during our time, and compared and contrasted to their own.
       My hope is that they, too, will find how faithfully we have lived our lives, based on the level
       of our awareness. They, too, must eventually write their own stories, hoping they'll tell them as honestly
       as their ancestors did (both the Bible stories and ours)..
 D) This means, we don't have to discard or forget everything about the Bible. On the contrary, the Bible will
       then become more precious to us and to future generations. For in this book we can see the
      evolutionary process at work, just as in our time and space.

Juan N. Riingen
August 12, 2012