by James Glaser
January 3, 2006

It has bothered me for some quite some time. I am talking about the religious right. I am a Christian, and those who are on the right of our political spectrum claim to be Christians too, but we are so far apart on so many things, and I couldn't figure out why.

My dad was a Republican and many times in my life I would back the Republican candidate. I believed in fiscal responsibility and smaller government, which should have put me in that right wing on politics, but those people in the religious right movement pushed me to the left so many times. It bothered me a lot.

I think I now know why I am not part of that religious right, and I why we are so far apart in our beliefs. We have different Bibles. I was always taught that the Bible was the word of God, but if you go to any bookstore, take a gander at how many different Bibles there are. No doubt there are a couple of dozen, if not more, and that is where we get into problems.

When I write "Thou Shalt Not Kill" in a column, I have people writing back to me saying I have it wrong, that God said we couldn't murder. They claim God never said anything about not killing. These people are sincere and I believe they are reading their Bibles correctly, but they are reading a different Bible than I am. My King James Bible says "Not Kill" while theirs must say "Not Murder." Kill and Murder are not interchangeable, they have different meanings.

You can get on an internet web page that compares different versions of the Bible, and there are a lot of differences. Different words are used in some, some Bibles leave out whole lines that other Bibles have in, and some Bibles even have different authors and "Books" of the Bible.

So, now I know that those people on the right don't really have the same Christianity as I do. Close, but not the same. We believe in different things, because we have different Bibles. My Bible, I believe is the word of God, and their Bible, they believe is the word of God. We can't both be right....

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