Cathedral in the Sky

I chose Cathedral in the Sky is a metaphor, an elaborate and ostentatious edifice constructed over centuries by many generations that represents the composition of the Hebrew Scriptures and Judaism with the New Testament and Christianity.  While cathedrals in all of their beauty, intricacy and grandeur are real structures to be admired, the Judeo-Christian religion, while intricate, involved and grand, is, non-the-less, false, an illusion because it is not what it claims to be and leads people to believe what it not true.

Of course, not everything is false. Myth is often built upon the scaffold of historic events.  The nation of Israel had a history, many things written about Israel actually occurred.  But many oral legends, many of them pure myth, were presented as historical facts.

Cathedral in the Sky is the title of the book I have been working on for two years (beginning in the fall of 2012). The blog will reveal some of the work without quoting any chapters.  The central thesis will show that neither the Hebrew Scriptures nor the New Testament can be relied upon as inerrant or infallible.  The documents in both were written by deeply religious persons in times when life was explained in terms of a supernatural world of gods, angels and demons. Many of them (perhaps even most of them) were sincere, they believed they were speaking in behalf of God.  The spiritual claims of one generation were pass on to the next.  Jesus and his apostles inherited a tradition and a law they were convinced came from God.  The apostles and the early church added Jesus as the Messiah, then Jesus, God in the flesh. The early church assembled the New Testament and passed that onto us.

All the Jewish writers of the Hebrew histories, the prophets, the priests, the scribes, the Jewish sages, Jesus, the Apostles, the early church fathers, the commentators, theologians, historians, kings and emperors have all inherited what they passed on to us--adding, subtracting, editing, refining into theology, handing to us an interpretation of reality that entirely false, while some moral platitudes are valuable but only because they express human wisdom.  It is an amazing and elaborate illusion, authenticated only by its antiquity, the sheer number of its followers and the fear to question its authority.

However, The Cathedral in the Sky is not real, it has no foundation.  It exists only in the collective imaginations of people.  It is a Cathedral in the Sky whose foundation continues to fall away while people in vain continue to build it. It is part of our history and always will be.  It is part of our evolution as human beings.