"Found some tablets" should be "claimed to find tablets" as the church can not produce them. Also, the (nearly extinct as most have been indoctrinated into whatever Christian based church the government paid the church to (Educate) them) traditional Native American religions are largely comparable (based on?) Shintoism. I find their traditional "religion" vastly superior to any Abrahamic religion.

@NoMagicCookie The original Native Americans Indians before abuse by the white man, have a very naturalistic approach. They are very spiritual. I admire their ability to say so much with so few words. Like: ' Know the power that is peace.' Black Elk. That is on the side of a ranger building on indian reservation land in Montana.

Your belief system is your right, so allow others to have theirs.

Yep, yep, yep ... believers truly think they will burn in the flames of eternal hell because their books tell them so. The "holy" books can have some words of wisdom .... but they also have a lot of B.S. Being a woman, of course, I do not love the anti-woman stuff in these "holy" books.

Yes - ever try to dig into the bible of your own volition? Unless you are in some type of instructional class I defy 99.9% of people to read it all the way through. Vonnegut says it better anyway

@GeorgeBedford I began reading through the entire Bible when I was eight, even though my missionary parents weren't particularly religious, being United Methodists. I read it so many times I almost had it memorized.

After I began reading it in the original Hebrew and Greek, I realized that 99% of what I'd been taught in church wasn't in the Bible anyway. I felt relieved when I read the Sumerian texts and saw that the Bible was copied from them.

birdingnut - Thank you so much for your commentary and your journey - very appreciative

I was raised Catholic. My parents were believers of a sort but really not all that doctrinaire. I believe we went as a family because that was expected. Growing up I lived in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Those are the most Catholic states in the entire country. The bible is very much a Protestant thing as you know one of the main thrusts of the movement was that all should read the bible. Although of course being a Christian church we held the bible to be a holy book we were not encouraged as lay people to read it.We were not told to not read it but it was really something that a priest should tell you about or at least a nun.There was much more emphasis on the new testament - the old testament was to the Catholic church too related to the Hebrews. All the Sturm and Drang was really for the Protestants to agonize over. We had religious instruction of which I went to until I was a senior in high school. Although most of the mass nowadays is in English when I attended church in my youth nearly the entire service was in Latin. The only English spoken by the priest was the sermon. So the bible is really not a part of being a Catholic to this very day. So my family did say grace but swapping stories from the bible just wasn't part of our reality.. As I've said I have picked it up on my own but found it near impossible to get into.I did know this one old chap growing up who told me the bible is the truth it just isn't factual. Nowadays when a televangelist gets wound up with the bible in hand quoting from the old testament I nearly always disagree with what is being said. I am reading the new testament in conjunction with reading two books by Elaine Pagels - who is a minister of religion at Princeton. She is quite good - she puts Satan - Adam and Eve - the Serpent in context of the times they were written in. How history affected the writing. She has a very interesting discussion on the synoptic gospels Mark - Mattew - and Luke.and points out the subtle differences between the largely identical texts. I might add she is respectful and her goal is for the reader to follow along and see how they got to be the way they have become..

@GeorgeBedford LOL! If you read the Sumerian texts, carved on the walls of Babylon 2000 years before the Bible was written, you'll see that the Bible was copied from the texts. They tell the same stories, similar names, except from the perspective of aliens, who genetically engineered humans by blending their DNA with that of human apes. In the story of Noah, for instance, the Sumerians showed their favorite human, Noah, how to build a submarine, then put the DNA of all the animals in it, instead of the actual animals.

The origins of human beings according to ancient Sumerian texts [ancient-origins.net]?

@birdingnut and now you know the real story. Many words do not translate from languages. They improvise. in Spanish, My Colombian friend said his wife thought he was funny because ceiling and roof in Spanish ar the same word. So is ground and floor. For generations it was told mouth to mouth before it was even attempted to be written done. Some of it sounds childish, like where did Adam and Eve's son's get wives? The Bible is a beautiful book in places, but in other places makes no sense. The John that wrote Revelations fasted on an island 2 months. It is all nuts.I have a girlfriend who fasted for 3 weeks in Greece. She was American and woke up about 10 months later in a mental ward. She ask them what she did. They said she sang much of the time..