Phyllis Diller

Phyllis Diller: (1917– ), American comedian.

“Religion is such a medieval idea. Don’t get me started. … Aahh, it’s all about money…”

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler – English novelist, essayist and critic, 1835-1902: “[If] God wants us to do a thing, he should make his wishes sufficiently clear. Sensible people will wait till he has done this before paying much attention to him.”

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce (1842 – 1914) US author & satirist:  Ocean: A body of water occupying 2/3 of a world made for man…who has no gills.

Cardinal Bellarmine

Cardinal Bellarmine,  [Galileo’s inquisitor] – To assert that the earth revolves around the sun is as erroneous as to claim that Jesus was not born of a virgin.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) US science fiction novelist & scholar: ”The Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”

Susan Brownell Anthony

Susan Brownell Anthony [1820-1906], American reformer and leader of the woman-suffrage movement: – I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

Aristotle

Aristotle: “Men create the gods after their own images.”

Napoleon Bonaparte

Napoleon Bonaparte – Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich.

Napoleon Bonaparte – Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet.

Steven Weinberg

Steven Weinberg, US physicist, Nobel Prize winner (1933 – ):

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

“Anything we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization.”

Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie, Novelist [1947-]: 

 I do not need the idea of God to explain the world I live in.

 If I were asked for a one-sentence sound bite on religion, I would say I was against it. 

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas – uncertainty, progress, change – into crimes. 

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln – The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

Robert Heinlein

Robert Heinlein – The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by Homo Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates – “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”

Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein – “I cannot conceive of a God who would reward or punish his creatures, or who has a will of the kind we experience in ourselves.” 

Albert Einstein – A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.

Robert G. Ingersoll

Robert G. Ingersoll – Take from the church the miraculous, the supernatural, the incomprehensible, the unreasonable, the impossible, the unknowable, the absurd, and nothing but a vacuum remains. 

Robert G. Ingersoll – Our hope of immortality does not come from any religions, but nearly all religions come from that hope.

Robert G. Ingersoll: The Bible presents a “God who upholds slavery, commands soldiers to kill women and babies, supports polygamy, persecutes people for their opinions, and punishes unbelievers forever.”

Bertrand Russell

Bertrand Russell – What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires — desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

 Bertrand Russell – I do not think that the real reason why people accept religion is anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it.

Henry Mencken

Henry Mencken –  “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children are smart.” “Puritanism – the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” “Religion is fundamentally opposed to everything I hold in veneration – courage, clear thinking, honesty, fairness, and, above all, love of the truth.”

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson: (1743-1826), third U.S. president.“I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike, founded upon fables and mythologies.”“Christianity is the most perverted system that ever shone on man. … perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind … a mere contrivance [for the clergy] to filch wealth and power to themselves.”“In every country and in every age the priest has been hostile to liberty, he is always in allegiance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection of his own. … History I believe furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. … Political as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves [of public ignorance] for their own purpose.”“I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature.”

Frederick Douglass

Frederick Douglass: (1818-1895), African-American abolitionist leader.“I prayed for freedom for twenty years, but received no answer until I prayed with my legs.”“The church of this country is not only indifferent to the wrongs of the slave, it actually takes sides with the oppressors. … For my part, I would say, welcome infidelity! Welcome atheism! Welcome anything! in preference to the gospel, as preached by these Divines! They convert the very name of religion into an engine of tyranny and barbarous cruelty, and serve to confirm more infidels, in this age, than all the infidel writings of Thomas Paine, Voltaire, and Bolingbroke put together have done!”“We have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand.”

Phil Donahue

Phil Donahue:

From Donahue’s 1985 book The Human Animal:“Science may have come a long way, but as far as religion is concerned, we are first cousins to the !Kung tribesmen of the Kalahari Desert. Except for the garments, their deep religious trances might just as well be happening at a revival meeting or in the congregation of a fundamentalist TV preacher. … As we move further from the life of ignorance and superstition in which religion has its roots, we seem to need it more and more. … Why has religion become a force just when we’d have thought it would be losing ground to secularism?”

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins:

“Could we get some otherwise normal humans and somehow persuade them that they are not going to die as a consequence of flying a plane smack into a skyscraper? … The afterlifeobsessed suicidal brain really is a weapon of immense power and danger. It is comparable to a smart missile. …Yet … it is very very cheap. …To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns. Do not be surprised if they are used.” – 2001

“[A letter to a U.K. newspaper] says ‘science provides an explanation of the mechanism of the [December 2004 Asian] tsunami but it cannot say why this occurred any more than religion can.’ There, in one sentence, we have the religious mind displayed before us in all its absurdity. In what sense of the word ‘why’, does plate tectonics not provide the answer? Not only does science know why the tsunami happened, it can give precious hours of warning. If a small fraction of the tax breaks handed out to churches, mosques and synagogues had been diverted into an early warning system, tens of thousands of people, now dead, would have been moved to safety. Let’s get up off our knees, stop cringing before bogeymen and virtual fathers, face reality, and help science to do something constructive about human suffering.”

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine – Any system of religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system.

Thomas Paine describes the Bible as “a book of lies and contradictions, the work of a demon” more than “the word of God,” and denounced its “obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries . . . the unrelenting vindictiveness.”

Thomas Paine, in The Age of Reason, asked: “Is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie? We have never seen, in our time, nature go out of her course; but we have good reason to believe that millions of lies have been told in the same time; it is, therefore, at least millions to one, that the reporter of a miracle tells a lie.”

Thomas Paine talking about the Bible:

“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind; and, for my part, I sincerely detest it as I detest everything that is cruel.”

Sam Harris – There is No God (And You Know It)

Sam Harris

There is No God (And You Know It)

 Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture, and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of six billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl’s parents believe — at this very moment — that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this?No. The entirety of atheism is contained in this response. Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply a refusal to deny the obvious. Unfortunately, we live in a world in which the obvious is overlooked as a matter of principle. The obvious must be observed and re-observed and argued for. This is a thankless job. It carries with it an aura of petulance and insensitivity. It is, moreover, a job that the atheist does not want. It is worth noting that no one ever need identify himself as a non-astrologer or a non-alchemist. Consequently, we do not have words for people who deny the validity of these pseudo-disciplines. Likewise, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make when in the presence of religious dogma. The atheist is merely a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (eighty-seven percent of the population) who claim to “never doubt the existence of God” should be obliged to present evidence for his existence — and, indeed, for his benevolence, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day. Only the atheist appreciates just how uncanny our situation is: most of us believe in a God that is every bit as specious as the gods of Mount Olympus; no person, whatever his or her qualifications, can seek public office in the United States without pretending to be certain that such a God exists; and much of what passes for public policy in our country conforms to religious taboos and superstitions appropriate to a medieval theocracy. Our circumstance is abject, indefensible, and terrifying. It would be hilarious if the stakes were not so high.Consider: the city of New Orleans was recently destroyed by hurricane Katrina. At least a thousand people died, tens of thousands lost all their earthly possessions, and over a million have been displaced. It is safe to say that almost every person living in New Orleans at the moment Katrina struck believed in an omnipotent, omniscient, and compassionate God. But what was God doing while a hurricane laid waste to their city? Surely He heard the prayers of those elderly men and women who fled the rising waters for the safety of their attics, only to be slowly drowned there. These were people of faith. These were good men and women who had prayed throughout their lives. Only the atheist has the courage to admit the obvious: these poor people spent their lives in the company of an imaginary friend. Of course, there had been ample warning that a storm “of biblical proportions” would strike New Orleans, and the human response to the ensuing disaster was tragically inept. But it was inept only by the light of science. Advance warning of Katrina’s path was wrested from mute Nature by meteorological calculations and satellite imagery. God told no one of his plans. Had the residents of New Orleans been content to rely on the beneficence of the Lord, they wouldn’t have known that a killer hurricane was bearing down upon them until they felt the first gusts of wind on their faces. And yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found that eighty percent of Katrina’s survivors claim that the event has only strengthened their faith in God.As hurricane Katrina was devouring New Orleans, nearly a thousand Shiite pilgrims were trampled to death on a bridge in Iraq. There can be no doubt that these pilgrims believed mightily in the God of the Koran. Indeed, their lives were organized around the indisputable fact of his existence: their women walked veiled before him; their men regularly murdered one another over rival interpretations of his word. It would be remarkable if a single survivor of this tragedy lost his faith. More likely, the survivors imagine that they were spared through God’s grace. Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved. Only the atheist realizes how morally objectionable it is for survivors of a catastrophe to believe themselves spared by a loving God, while this same God drowned infants in their cribs. Because he refuses to cloak the reality of the world’s suffering in a cloying fantasy of eternal life, the atheist feels in his bones just how precious life is — and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all. Of course, people of faith regularly assure one another that God is not responsible for human suffering. But how else can we understand the claim that God is both omniscient and omnipotent? There is no other way, and it is time for sane human beings to own up to this. This is the age-old problem of theodicy, of course, and we should consider it solved. If God exists, either He can do nothing to stop the most egregious calamities, or He does not care to. God, therefore, is either impotent or evil. Pious readers will now execute the following pirouette: God cannot be judged by merely human standards of morality. But, of course, human standards of morality are precisely what the faithful use to establish God’s goodness in the first place. And any God who could concern himself with something as trivial as gay marriage, or the name by which he is addressed in prayer, is not as inscrutable as all that. If He exists, the God of Abraham is not merely unworthy of the immensity of creation; he is unworthy even of man. There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different. Consequently, only the atheist is compassionate enough to take the profundity of the world’s suffering at face value. It is terrible that we all die and lose everything we love; it is doubly terrible that so many human beings suffer needlessly while alive. That so much of this suffering can be directly attributed to religion — to religious hatreds, religious wars, religious delusions, and religious diversions of scarce resources — is what makes atheism a moral and intellectual necessity. It is a necessity, however, that places the atheist at the margins of society. The atheist, by merely being in touch with reality, appears shamefully out of touch with the fantasy life of his neighbors.This is an excerpt from An Atheist Manifesto, to be published at www.truthdig.com.

Richard Dawkins – Why There Almost Certainly Is No God

Richard Dawkins

Why There Almost Certainly Is No God

America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be ‘raptured’ up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the ‘Armageddon’ that is to presage the Second Coming. Sam Harris, in his new short book, Letter to a Christian Nation, hits the bull’s-eye as usual:

 It is, therefore, not an exaggeration to say that if the city of New York were suddenly replaced by a ball of fire, some significant percentage of the American population would see a silver-lining in the subsequent mushroom cloud, as it would suggest to them that the best thing that is ever going to happen was about to happen: the return of Christ . . .Imagine the consequences if any significant component of the U.S. government actually believed that the world was about to end and that its ending would be glorious. The fact that nearly half of the American population apparently believes this, purely on the basis of religious dogma, should be considered a moral and ¬intellectual emergency. Does Bush check the Rapture Index daily, as Reagan did his stars? We don’t know, but would anyone be surprised?My scientific colleagues have additional reasons to declare emergency. Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education – and hence the whole future of science in this country – is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the ‘breathtaking inanity’ (Judge John Jones’s immortal phrase) of ‘intelligent design’ continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards. Scientists, and intellectuals generally, are now waking up to the threat from the American Taliban. Scientists divide into two schools of thought over the best tactics with which to face the threat. The Neville Chamberlain ‘appeasement’ school focuses on the battle for evolution. Consequently, its members identify fundamentalism as the enemy, and they bend over backwards to appease ‘moderate’ or ‘sensible’ religion (not a difficult task, for bishops and theologians despise fundamentalists as much as scientists do). Scientists of the Winston Churchill school, by contrast, see the fight for evolution as only one battle in a larger war: a looming war between supernaturalism on the one side and rationality on the other. For them, bishops and theologians belong with creationists in the supernatural camp, and are not to be appeased.The Chamberlain school accuses Churchillians of rocking the boat to the point of muddying the waters. The philosopher of science Michael Ruse wrote:We who love science must realize that the enemy of our enemies is our friend. Too often evolutionists spend time insulting would-be allies. This is especially true of secular evolutionists. Atheists spend more time running down sympathetic Christians than they do countering ¬creationists. When John Paul II wrote a letter endorsing Darwinism, Richard Dawkins’s response was simply that the pope was a hypocrite, that he could not be genuine about science and that Dawkins himself simply preferred an honest fundamentalist.A recent article in the New York Times by Cornelia Dean quotes the astronomer Owen Gingerich as saying that, by simultaneously advocating evolution and atheism, ‘Dr Dawkins “probably single-handedly makes more converts to intelligent design than any of the leading intelligent design theorists”.’ This is not the first, not the second, not even the third time this plonkingly witless point has been made (and more than one reply has aptly cited Uncle Remus: “Oh please please Brer Fox, don’t throw me in that awful briar patch”).Chamberlainites are apt to quote the late Stephen Jay Gould’s ‘NOMA’ – ‘non-overlapping magisteria’. Gould claimed that science and true religion never come into conflict because they exist in completely separate dimensions of discourse:To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth millionth time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can’t comment on it as scientists.This sounds terrific, right up until you give it a moment’s thought. You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference. God could clinch the matter in his favour at any moment by staging a spectacular demonstration of his powers, one that would satisfy the exacting standards of science. Even the infamous Templeton Foundation recognized that God is a scientific hypothesis – by funding double-blind trials to test whether remote prayer would speed the recovery of heart patients. It didn’t, of course, although a control group who knew they had been prayed for tended to get worse (how about a class action suit against the Templeton Foundation?) Despite such well-financed efforts, no evidence for God’s existence has yet appeared. To see the disingenuous hypocrisy of religious people who embrace NOMA, imagine that forensic archeologists, by some unlikely set of circumstances, discovered DNA evidence demonstrating that Jesus was born of a virgin mother and had no father. If NOMA enthusiasts were sincere, they should dismiss the archeologists’ DNA out of hand: “Irrelevant. Scientific evidence has no bearing on theological questions. Wrong magisterium.” Does anyone seriously imagine that they would say anything remotely like that? You can bet your boots that not just the fundamentalists but every professor of theology and every bishop in the land would trumpet the archeological evidence to the skies.Either Jesus had a father or he didn’t. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle – and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn’t. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it – an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity’s best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to ‘sensible’ religion, in order to present a united front against (‘intelligent design’) creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with ‘moderate’ religion on one side, and I find myself on the other.Of course, this all presupposes that the God we are talking about is a personal intelligence such as Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or Lord Krishna. If, by ‘God’, you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck’s constant, none of the above applies. An American student asked her professor whether he had a view about me. ‘Sure,’ he replied. ‘He’s positive science is incompatible with religion, but he waxes ecstatic about nature and the universe. To me, that is ¬religion!’ Well, if that’s what you choose to mean by religion, fine, that makes me a religious man. But if your God is a being who designs universes, listens to prayers, forgives sins, wreaks miracles, reads your thoughts, cares about your welfare and raises you from the dead, you are unlikely to be satisfied. As the distinguished American physicist Steven Weinberg said, “If you want to say that ‘God is energy,’ then you can find God in a lump of coal.” But don’t expect congregations to flock to your church.When Einstein said ‘Did God have a choice in creating the Universe?’ he meant ‘Could the universe have begun in more than one way?’ ‘God does not play dice’ was Einstein’s poetic way of doubting Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle. Einstein was famously irritated when theists misunderstood him to mean a personal God. But what did he expect? The hunger to misunderstand should have been palpable to him. ‘Religious’ physicists usually turn out to be so only in the Einsteinian sense: they are atheists of a poetic disposition. So am I. But, given the widespread yearning for that great misunderstanding, deliberately to confuse Einsteinian pantheism with supernatural religion is an act of intellectual high treason.Accepting, then, that the God Hypothesis is a proper scientific hypothesis whose truth or falsehood is hidden from us only by lack of evidence, what should be our best estimate of the probability that God exists, given the evidence now available? Pretty low I think, and here’s why.First, most of the traditional arguments for God’s existence, from Aquinas on, are easily demolished. Several of them, such as the First Cause argument, work by setting up an infinite regress which God is wheeled out to terminate. But we are never told why God is magically able to terminate regresses while needing no explanation himself. To be sure, we do need some kind of explanation for the origin of all things. Physicists and cosmologists are hard at work on the problem. But whatever the answer – a random quantum fluctuation or a Hawking/Penrose singularity or whatever we end up calling it – it will be simple. Complex, statistically improbable things, by definition, don’t just happen; they demand an explanation in their own right. They are impotent to terminate regresses, in a way that simple things are not. The first cause cannot have been an intelligence – let alone an intelligence that answers prayers and enjoys being worshipped. Intelligent, creative, complex, statistically improbable things come late into the universe, as the product of evolution or some other process of gradual escalation from simple beginnings. They come late into the universe and therefore cannot be responsible for designing it.Another of Aquinas’ efforts, the Argument from Degree, is worth spelling out, for it epitomises the characteristic flabbiness of theological reasoning. We notice degrees of, say, goodness or temperature, and we measure them, Aquinas said, by reference to a maximum:Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus, as fire, which is the maximum of heat, is the cause of all hot things . . . Therefore, there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.That’s an argument? You might as well say that people vary in smelliness but we can make the judgment only by reference to a perfect maximum of conceivable smelliness. Therefore there must exist a pre-eminently peerless stinker, and we call him God. Or substitute any dimension of comparison you like, and derive an equivalently fatuous conclusion. That’s theology.The only one of the traditional arguments for God that is widely used today is the teleological argument, sometimes called the Argument from Design although – since the name begs the question of its validity – it should better be called the Argument for Design. It is the familiar ‘watchmaker’ argument, which is surely one of the most superficially plausible bad arguments ever discovered – and it is rediscovered by just about everybody until they are taught the logical fallacy and Darwin’s brilliant alternative.In the familiar world of human artifacts, complicated things that look designed are designed. To naïve observers, it seems to follow that similarly complicated things in the natural world that look designed – things like eyes and hearts – are designed too. It isn’t just an argument by analogy. There is a semblance of statistical reasoning here too – fallacious, but carrying an illusion of plausibility. If you randomly scramble the fragments of an eye or a leg or a heart a million times, you’d be lucky to hit even one combination that could see, walk or pump. This demonstrates that such devices could not have been put together by chance. And of course, no sensible scientist ever said they could. Lamentably, the scientific education of most British and American students omits all mention of Darwinism, and therefore the only alternative to chance that most people can imagine is design.Even before Darwin’s time, the illogicality was glaring: how could it ever have been a good idea to postulate, in explanation for the existence of improbable things, a designer who would have to be even more improbable? The entire argument is a logical non-starter, as David Hume realized before Darwin was born. What Hume didn’t know was the supremely elegant alternative to both chance and design that Darwin was to give us. Natural selection is so stunningly powerful and elegant, it not only explains the whole of life, it raises our consciousness and boosts our confidence in science’s future ability to explain everything else. Natural selection is not just an alternative to chance. It is the only ultimate alternative ever suggested. Design is a workable explanation for organized complexity only in the short term. It is not an ultimate explanation, because designers themselves demand an explanation. If, as Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel once playfully speculated, life on this planet was deliberately seeded by a payload of bacteria in the nose cone of a rocket, we still need an explanation for the intelligent aliens who dispatched the rocket. Ultimately they must have evolved by gradual degrees from simpler beginnings. Only evolution, or some kind of gradualistic ‘crane’ (to use Daniel Dennett’s neat term), is capable of terminating the regress. Natural selection is an anti-chance process, which gradually builds up complexity, step by tiny step. The end product of this ratcheting process is an eye, or a heart, or a brain – a device whose improbable complexity is utterly baffling until you spot the gentle ramp that leads up to it.Whether my conjecture is right that evolution is the only explanation for life in the universe, there is no doubt that it is the explanation for life on this planet. Evolution is a fact, and it is among the more secure facts known to science. But it had to get started somehow. Natural selection cannot work its wonders until certain minimal conditions are in place, of which the most important is an accurate system of replication – DNA, or something that works like DNA.The origin of life on this planet – which means the origin of the first self-replicating molecule – is hard to study, because it (probably) only happened once, 4 billion years ago and under very different conditions from those with which we are familiar. We may never know how it happened. Unlike the ordinary evolutionary events that followed, it must have been a genuinely very improbable – in the sense of unpredictable – event: too improbable, perhaps, for chemists to reproduce it in the laboratory or even devise a plausible theory for what happened. This weirdly paradoxical conclusion – that a chemical account of the origin of life, in order to be plausible, has to be implausible – would follow if it were the case that life is extremely rare in the universe. And indeed we have never encountered any hint of extraterrestrial life, not even by radio – the circumstance that prompted Enrico Fermi’s cry: “Where is everybody?” Suppose life’s origin on a planet took place through a hugely improbable stroke of luck, so improbable that it happens on only one in a billion planets. The National Science Foundation would laugh at any chemist whose proposed research had only a one in a hundred chance of succeeding, let alone one in a billion. Yet, given that there are at least a billion billion planets in the universe, even such absurdly low odds as these will yield life on a billion planets. And – this is where the famous anthropic principle comes in – Earth has to be one of them, because here we are.If you set out in a spaceship to find the one planet in the galaxy that has life, the odds against your finding it would be so great that the task would be indistinguishable, in practice, from impossible. But if you are alive (as you manifestly are if you are about to step into a spaceship) you needn’t bother to go looking for that one planet because, by definition, you are already standing on it. The anthropic principle really is rather elegant. By the way, I don’t actually think the origin of life was as improbable as all that. I think the galaxy has plenty of islands of life dotted about, even if the islands are too spaced out for any one to hope for a meeting with any other. My point is only that, given the number of planets in the universe, the origin of life could in theory be as lucky as a blindfolded golfer scoring a hole in one. The beauty of the anthropic principle is that, even in the teeth of such stupefying odds against, it still gives us a perfectly satisfying explanation for life’s presence on our own planet.The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good – as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe – everything we can see – is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren’t we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.The anthropic principle entitles us to postulate a massive dose of luck in accounting for the existence of life on our planet. But there are limits. We are allowed one stroke of luck for the origin of evolution, and perhaps for a couple of other unique events like the origin of the eukaryotic cell and the origin of consciousness. But that’s the end of our entitlement to large-scale luck. We emphatically cannot invoke major strokes of luck to account for the illusion of design that glows from each of the billion species of living creature that have ever lived on Earth. The evolution of life is a general and continuing process, producing essentially the same result in all species, however different the details.Contrary to what is sometimes alleged, evolution is a predictive science. If you pick any hitherto unstudied species and subject it to minute scrutiny, any evolutionist will confidently predict that each individual will be observed to do everything in its power, in the particular way of the species – plant, herbivore, carnivore, nectivore or whatever it is – to survive and propagate the DNA that rides inside it. We won’t be around long enough to test the prediction but we can say, with great confidence, that if a comet strikes Earth and wipes out the mammals, a new fauna will rise to fill their shoes, just as the mammals filled those of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And the range of parts played by the new cast of life’s drama will be similar in broad outline, though not in detail, to the roles played by the mammals, and the dinosaurs before them, and the mammal-like reptiles before the dinosaurs. The same rules are predictably being followed, in millions of species all over the globe, and for hundreds of millions of years. Such a general observation requires an entirely different explanatory principle from the anthropic principle that explains one-off events like the origin of life, or the origin of the universe, by luck. That entirely different principle is natural selection.We explain our existence by a combination of the anthropic principle and Darwin’s principle of natural selection. That combination provides a complete and deeply satisfying explanation for everything that we see and know. Not only is the god hypothesis unnecessary. It is spectacularly unparsimonious. Not only do we need no God to explain the universe and life. God stands out in the universe as the most glaring of all superfluous sore thumbs. We cannot, of course, disprove God, just as we can’t disprove Thor, fairies, leprechauns and the Flying Spaghetti Monster. But, like those other fantasies that we can’t disprove, we can say that God is very very improbable.

Richard Dawkins is the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the author of nine books, including The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker and The Ancestor’s Tale. His new book, The God Delusion, published by Houghton Mifflin, is a NEW YORK TIMES bestseller, and his Foundation for Reason and Science launched at the same time (see RichardDawkins.net).

THE POWER & POWERLESSNESS OF GOD

“For me, religion is serious business — a farrago of authoritarian nonsense, misogyny and humble pie, the eternal enemy of human happiness and freedom.” – Katha Pollitt

Will Power

The bible suggests that God is responsible for everything that happens, it’s God’s plan. But when horrible things happen, Satan often will get the blame. So is God then not powerful enough to overcome Satan’s wishes? Whoes will is stronger?

How Can A Perfect God, Who Makes No Mistakes, Regret?

God orders Saul to kill all the Amalekites but Saul fails to do so. Even though God himself chose Saul to be the first Jewish king, God says, “It repenteth me that I have set up Saul to be king.” I Sam 15:11

The Curious Times God Chooses To Punish

King Herod, who earlier was responsible for the slaughter of so many innocent babies and little children, is making a speech and acting all mighty and god-like. God doesn’t like this so he decides to intervene and use his superpowers. Acts 12:23 – “And immediately the angel of the Lord smote him, because he gave not God the glory: and he was eaten of worms, and gave up the ghost.” So King Herod isn’t either punished nor prevented from his earlier atrocities but, oh boy, act a little full of yourself and God personally interferes in the lives of his creation.

If the Statement is True, Your Religion Is Vile

God created man imperfect & allowed Satan to cause their downfall, after which he would re-instate them only when he had forced them to kill him, ingest his body and rejoice in this plan for salvation.

How To Spread The Word Of God?

How was God’s word supposed to be spread? If he was unwilling to reveal himself & speak his message himself, how? Most of the world was illiterate. There was very little written communication & even less travel, many areas of the world not yet discovered. 2,000 years have elapsed and most people are still destined for hell, either because they have not heard of Christianity or because the salvation legend is especially vulnerable to skepticism.

Show Me One Example Of Perfection

If God is perfect and without fault, why does he consistently make such blundering errors? The civil war in heaven, the flawed creation of humankind on multiple occasions that often lead to mass murder on God’s part, which he occasionally apologizes for (w/ a rainbow, gee thanks), etc.

To Be Fair, Jacob DID Stop Bathing A Month Before The Match

In Gen. 32:24-32 Jacob wrestles with God! During this bizarre incident God touches Jacob’s thigh and dislocates it. But Jacob still prevails over God! God pleads with Jacob to release him but Jacob will only release him after God blesses him. As a result of this incident, Jews will not eat of “the sinew which shrank, which is upon the hollow of the thigh.” Are the Jewish people insane? How do they justify such a bizarre reasoning?

SEX

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” – Steven Weinberg

THE CRUELTY OF THE CREATOR

“The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.” – George Bernard Shaw

God Punishes More Innocent People Than Guilty

Why does God insist on punishing the innocent throughout the bible? Ex 34:6,7 – “… and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children & upon the children’s children, unto the third and fourth generation.” And there are many, many more examples.

Sorry About Getting Your Husband Killed. Wanna Get Married?

I Sam 25:38 – “And it came to pass that the Lord smote Nabal that he died.” This was to punish Nabal for not offering food to David and his men, total strangers to Nabal. Was this a lesson to Nabal or us? Oh, and David marries Nabal’s widow. Lucky her.

God Wants You To F**k Your Dead Brother’s Wife

Gen. 38 – Onan refuses to have sex with his dead brother’s widow, so God kills him.

Your Wife Looks Just Like Your Sister

Gen 12 – Abraham passes his wife Sarah as his sister. The Pharaoh, believing this deception, offers Abraham many animals and slaves to take Sarah into his palace (for what purpose we can only imagine). Abraham agrees to this deal because he is afraid to have his deception revealed. The Pharaoh, unaware that he had taken another man’s wife into his home, is punished by God (no punishment for Abraham) for doing just that with a number of great plagues falling upon his household.

Wife, Sister, It’s All The Same In The Bible

Gen. 20 – Abraham repeats the ol’ Sarah is my sister not my wife deception on yet another king (Abimelech), who also offers animals and servants for her. God, again punishing the wrong people, punishes the innocent by cursing all the women of the king’s family with being barren. Gen. 26:7-11 has Isaac pulling the same scheme because Rebekah is so smoking hot he is afraid if people know she is his wife they will kill him to have her. But her being his sister would prevent this how?

You’re Both Grounded

Gen 34 – Jacob’s daughter Dinah is raped by Shechem, a prince of the Hivites. Shechem agrees to be circumcised so he can marry his rape victim. He also has all the males in his city get circumcised (against their will, no doubt). A few days later Dinah’s brothers Levi and Simeon come and kill every male in the city, rescue their sister, spoil the city and take captive the women and children and animals. Their reward for rescuing their sister is to have their father scold them for doing so.

Am I Supposed To Be Impressed Or Repulsed?

Zech 8:10 – “For I set all men, every one, against his neighbor.” This is God speaking.

Isn’t this also a punishment of David?

II Sam. 6:20-23 – Michal, David’s wife, reprimands him for cavorting naked before the Ark of the Covenant in sight of the maidservants. God punishes her by not allowing her to have any children until the day of her death.

Hey, At Least God Gets You Drunk Before He Kills You

Jer. 13:13, 14 – “Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will fill all the inhabitants of this land, even the kings… and the priests, and the prophets, and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem, with drunkenness. And I will dash them one against another, even the fathers and the sons together, saith the Lord: I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them.”

I’d Really Rather You Didn’t

Jer 8:17- “For, behold, I will send serpents, cockatrices, among you… and they shall bite you, saith the Lord.”

More Innocent Slaughtered By God

Jer 11:22, 23 – “Behold, I will punish them: the young men shall die by the sword; their sons and their daughters shall die by famine: And there shall be no remnant of them: for I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth…”

Fouls of the Heaven is more like it

Jer 15:3 – “And I will appoint over them four kinds, saith the Lord: the sword to slay, and the dogs to tear, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the earth, to devour and destroy.”

What Does He Do To His Non-Chosen People

Jer 15:5, 7, 9 – “For who shall have pity upon thee, O Jerusalem? or who shall bemoan thee? … I will bereave them of children, I will destroy my people since they return not from their ways … and the residue of them will I deliver to the sword before their enemies, saith the Lord.”

Do You Need Any A-1 With That?

Jer 19:9 – “And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend…”

What ever happened to do unto others…?

Jer 50:15 – “…for it is the vengeance of the Lord: take vengeance upon her; as she hath done, do unto her.”

The Ugliness of God Revealed In The Book of Ezekiel # 1

Ez 5:10 – “Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers; and I will execute judgments in thee…”

The Ugliness of God Revealed In The Book of Ezekiel # 2

Ez 23: 46-47 – “For thus saith the Lord God; I will bring up a company upon them, and will give them to be removed and spoiled. And the company shall stone them with stones, and dispatch them with their swords; they shall slay their sons and their daughters, and burn up their houses with fire.”

The Ugliness of God Revealed In The Book of Ezekiel # 3

Ez 5:13 – “Thus shall mine anger be accomplished, and I will cause my fury to rest upon them, and I will be comforted…”

The Ugliness of God Revealed In The Book of Ezekiel # 4

Ez 7:4 – “And mine eye shall not spare thee, neither will I have pity…”

The Ugliness of God Revealed In The Book of Ezekiel

Ez 9:6 – “Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women…” This is God’s command.

God Never Misses An Opportunity To Slaughter The Innocent

Daniel 6:24 God’s response to Daniel being mistreated. ”…they brought those men which had accused Daniel, and they cast them into the den of lions, them, their children, and their wives; and the lions had the mastery of them, and brake all their bones in pieces.” Again with the innocent women and children being punished.

Woe unto them who are not Jewish

Deut 20:17 – “Thou shalt utterly destroy them.” Referring to the Gentile. Jer 4:7 – “Saith the Lord, the Lion (Jesus) is come up from his thicket, and the destroyer of the … Gentile is on the way.” God is clearly a bigot.

Die Fag!!!! Oh, and Praise Jesus.

Lev. 20:13 – If you are gay, you should die. “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.”

I’m Sure This Didn’t Put A Strain On Their Father-Son Relationship

Isaac’s father is commanded by God to slaughter his own son in order to appease God with his blood. Isaac’s father agrees (!) but at the last possible minute God changes his mind. Wow, thanks God for leaving the image of my father standing over me with knife in hand burned forever into my consciousness. Not traumatic at all. And thanks dad for worshiping a God who would demand such a thing. And then turn out just to be playing one of his typical mind games.

It Pleases God To Watch People Be Murdered

To appease God, the seven sons of Saul are hanged. II Sam 21:1-9

Why The Firstborn Cattle Too?

Ex. 12:29 depicts God needlessly killing all firstborn in Egypt, even the firstborn of the captive in the dungeon and all the firstborn cattle.

Golden Images of Your Genital Boils?

To punish those who captured the Ark of the Covenant, God curses them with boils (emerods) “They had emerods in their secret parts.” And not only them but the inhabitants of any city where they take the Ark. And is only appeased when they make offerings to him of golden images of their emerods (and golden mice). Who in his right mind would worship such a god? God is one twisted fuck. I Sam. 5, 6.

Isn’t this type of behavior punishable by death?

If women of God are supposed to be so virtuous, then how do you explain Ruth’s behavior? She is a widow, her mother encourages her to get dolled up and wait for Boaz to get drunk and pass out, and then sneak into his bed and do what he tells her to do. Ruth 3:3-8. Isn’t this type of behavior punishable by death?

No Child Left Behind

There is not one instance in the bible where God spares the life of even one innocent child from the slaughter of his bloodthirsty servants. On a few occasions it may appear that he does just that when he has the female children (virgins) set aside but this is not out of kindness, these are to be ‘used’ by the conquerors. The sexual reward is always the favorite of the God fearing.

How, Exactly, Does God Come Up With These Punishments?

Jer. 19:9 – “And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and they shall eat every one the flesh of his friend.” God’s words.

A Religion Trapped In Barbaric Blood Rituals

 Hebrews 9:22 – “And almost all things are by the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission.”

It Sucks To Be You

Even God’s chosen people aren’t immune to his cruelty, in fact, it could be argued they are treated most cruelly of all. God sells Israel to the king of Mesopotamia for 8 years because the Israelites intermarried with Gentiles & worshiped gods other than him Judges 3:8. He ‘smites’ Israel and delivers the Jews to the Moabite Kings for 18 years Judges 3:14. He sells the Jews to the king of Canaan for 20yrs Judges 4:2. He delivers the Jews to the Midianites for 7 years Judges 6:1. He allows Jerusalem & Judah to fall into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years and to be under the rule of Babylonia for 70 years Judges 13:1.

Congratulations! Now F**k Off!

After many years of service and sacrifice, Moses is forbidden from entering the Promised Land because he struck a rock in anger while trying to produce water. He had early succeeded in this by God’s own instruction. Moses’ brother Aaron is also forbidden from entering even though he did nothing wrong. Num 20:11, 12 & Deut 34.

He Never Said He Was A Fair God

The only way into heaven is through Jesus Christ. If anyone ignorant of Jesus and Christianity dies, they are doomed to eternal torment and torture in Hell’s eternal hellfire. Yes, that’s fair. John 3:36 – “He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life; and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.” SO, a life of pure thoughts, good deeds, selflessness, sacrifice & abstinence will be rewarded by God with eternal hellfire. Nice.

Abortionist to the world

Abortion is the worst thing a Christian can think of but they worship a deity who drowned countless children, babies and pregnant women, and who slaughtered all the first born of Egypt, a direct response to Pharaoh’s refusal to ‘let my people go’. Of course, Pharaoh refused because God ‘hardened’ the Pharaoh’s heart so he would refuse. And then there are all the babies, children and pregnant women in Sodom & Gomorrah.

Pray To God That He Doesn’t Tempt You

God seems to enjoy ‘tempting’ man into doing things they will be punished for. Gen 22:1 – “God did tempt Abraham.” Matt 6:13 – “And lead us not into temptation.” This is from the Lord’s Prayer. We are encouraged to beg God nightly not to tempt us.

Obey My Will And Be Punished

In Romans 9:17-21 it is described how God made us and indeed decides our behaviors but he will still punish those that misbehave even though they are simply obeying God’s will.

God Is Responsible For What Happened To Jacob & Israel

Isaiah 42:24 – “Who gave Jacob for a spoil, and Israel to the robbers? Did not the Lord?” This is God himself asking the question.

Got Your Nose. No, Seriously, I Got Your Nose.

King Azariah fails to get rid of all the altars to idols so God makes him a leper.

Here’s My List Of All The Ways I’m Gonna F**k You Up

In Deut 32 God describes the ways he will punish Jews who are disloyal, one of which states, “…the young man and the virgin, the suckling (baby) also with the man of gray hairs (elderly).” More punishments listed in Deut 28 & Lev 26.

Again, You Want Me To Worship This Guy?

Ez 14:9 – “If the prophet be deceived, I the Lord have deceived that prophet and will stretch out my hand and destroy him.” So God is responsible for the deception and murders the one he deceived for being deceived.

He Creates Evil, Makes Use Of Evil Spirits, Is God The Devil?

I Sam 19:9 – reveals that God makes use of evil spirits, he even sends one upon Saul, causing him to hurl a Javelin at David.

None Who Create Evil Can Be Considered Good

Isaiah 45:7 – “I form the light, and I create darkness. I make peace, and I create Evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.” God creates the evil in the first place.

Why Wouldn’t You Want To Worship This Guy?

Isaiah 13:9, 15, 16 – “Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it … Everyone that is found shall be thrust through: and everyone that is joined unto them shall fall by the sword. Their children also shall be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses shall be spoiled, and their wives ravished.”

How Does God Decide Who He Will Personally Murder?

I Sam 2:25 – “Notwithsatanding they hearkened not unto the voice of their father, because the Lord would slay them.”

How Imperfect Can One God Be?

Nahum 1:2 – “God is jealous, and the Lord revengeth; the Lord revengeth, and is furious; the Lord will take vengeance on his adversaries, and he reserveth wrath for his enemies.”-A strange emotional flaw for an all-powerful, omnipresent, ‘loving’ god to have.

Hell is Full Of Children

Children are not capable/allowed to make any decisions for themselves except whether or not to dedicate their eternal soul to God. Whether or not a child goes to heaven or hell is completely up to the child. If a parent or guardian fails to introduce them to the church soon enough and they die, they go to hell. Period!

Not Even A Baby?

When God murders everyone in Sodom & Gomorrah not a single child, infant, mother or elderly person is spared. Praise God!

Foreskin: God’s Most Bizarre Obsession

Because Moses’ child with a Midianite woman isn’t circumcised, God loses it and nearly kills Moses. Moses is only saved because Moses’ wife chops off the child’s offending foreskin with a sharp stone, casting it at Moses’ feet. Maybe if God would have made the male body right the first time we wouldn’t need this barbaric surgery.

Always With The Overkill

Deut 20:12-17 – “…thou shalt smite every male therof with the sword.” “…thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them.”

What The Hell Is Strange Fire?

Lev 10:1, 2 – For “offering strange fire before the Lord”, two sons of Aaron, priests of the Tabernacle, are killed by God. What the hell is a strange fire anyway? Good luck getting God to explain himself.

These People Never Shut Up

Num 11:1 – After being forced to march through the desert & suffer for years by God, if an Israelite complains (understandably) God will burn them with fire.

God Throws A Fit, All The Quail Die

Num 11:31-33 – When the Jews complain of the lack of meat to eat during their forced march through the desert for forty years, God gets mad (again) & sends quail to cover the ground a days travel in each direction and piled up three feet high. He then smote the Jews with a very great plague.

Another great example of one of the absurd stories of the bible. Does anybody really believe this happened? Seriously?

Woman, Know Your Place!

Moses’ sister, Miriam, criticizes Moses for marrying an Ethiopian, something God disapproved of and was contrary to Jewish custom, but even though she was in the right, God punishes Miriam, not Moses, by making her a leper.

God Hates A Complainer

Num 14 – Because the Jews weren’t thrilled with the idea of moving to Canaan, God was furious (what’s new) and cursed the entire congregation (even those who had not complained. God, being fair as usual) to wander one year for each of the 40 days (40 years) Moses’ spies had spent on the scouting expedition.

What About If You PLAY Pick Up Sticks?

Num 15:35, 36 – A man who picks up sticks on the Sabbath is stoned to death for this as commanded by God.

Were These ‘Alternate’ Laws Written Down Anywhere?

Num 16:32, 35 – For the horrible crime of challenging the authority of Moses, God murders the wives & children of the two princes who dared to do so. I’ve read the Ten Commandments, I don’t recall seeing anything about not challenging Moses’ authority.

Isn’t This An Example Of Moses Defying God’s Will?

Num 21:5-9 – After complaining about the lack of bread and water and sick of manna, God sends fiery serpents to bite the Jews & many die as a result. Does God decide to stop them? No. Instead, Moses has to use Old Testament magic & fasten a brass serpent to a pole & whoever sees it will be cured.

God Rewards Those Who Kill The Best

Nice Work! A man murders the son of an Israelite prince and a Midianite (Gentile) princess by ramming a Javelin through them. God is very pleased by this, declaring, “Behold I give unto him my covenant of peace … because he was zealous for his God.” Num 25:8, 13

Exactly What Quantity Of Blood Is Required To Please God?

In order to please God’s bloodlust, during the dedication of the Temple at Jerusalem, Solomon slaughters 22,000 oxen & 120,000 sheep. I Kings 8:63, 64. Is that the exact number God needed to be happy or could the slaughter have stopped at ten?

Justice, Followed By Injustice

Josh 7:24-26 – During the battle of Jericho, Achan, a Jewish warrior, secretly takes some spoil for himself. This is clearly wrong and he is justly punished by being stoned to death. Oh, and so is ALL HIS FAMILY! And then an altar is built over their bodies.

Nice Save!! NOW DIE!!!!!!

II Sam 6:6, 7 – When the Ark of the Covenant was dipping over, Uzzah stops it by grabbing a hold of it. He is rewarded by God instantly killing him. Even David is not thrilled by God’s behavior here.

And David Is God’s Favorite!

II Sam 12:11-14 – To punish David for fucking Bathsheba, God says he will give David’s wives (women have no say) to David’s neighbor and will kill David and Bathsheba’s child (the innocent are always the ones to receive God’s ‘justice’). How many people suffer because of the poor behavior of God’s chosen?

More Innocents To Suffer

II Sam 21 – Because Saul killed some Gibeonites, God brings three years of famine upon his chosen people (whom he clearly loves to torment). The famine is finally ended only when David gives seven sons (who weren’t involved) of Saul to the Gibeonites to be hanged up (killed) unto the Lord.

How Dare You Take A Census!

II Sam 24 – When David commits the horrible sin of taking a census, God is furious and gives David the choice of one of three punishments. David, of course, chooses the one that will have the most negative impact on the most people.

More Innocents Must Die

I Kings 20:42 – “Thus saith the Lord; Because thou hast let go out of thy hand a man (king of Syria) whom I appointed to utter destruction, therefore shall thy life go for his life, and thy people for his people.” Again, more innocent people punished for another’s sin, and in this instance, those that benefit the most are those who are opposed to and do not worship God.