The Egocentric Nature of Religion

In a memorable game vs. the Pittsburgh Steelers, Denver Broncos quarterback, Tim Tebow, threw a pass to receiver Demaryius Thomas that resulted in a game winning touchdown in overtime. The team’s deeply Christian leader then dropped down to one knee and gave thanks to his god for the win. Yes, Tim also famously gave some love to Demaryius Thomas but we all know who Tim really believes deserves the credit. He has no doubt that the god he worships prefers one team to win over another and that out of all the players casting their desperate pleas God’s way on any given Sunday, that Tim’s prayers are the ones he finds worthy enough to act upon. You will be hard pressed to find an interview in which Tim is being asked about his performance in a game where he doesn’t give credit to his god. Inspiring, yes? The message seems to be that anyone can be a good quarterback as long their god is a fan. So stop practicing, everyone, and start praying. Oh, and never, ever have sex. God will not help you if you have sex.

Understandably, Tim’s fellow Christians love him.

Atheists love him too.

You see, Tim Tebow is the absolute perfect example of the egocentric nature of religion. Most religious people truly believe that their god has so much time on his hands that he will regularly interfere in their lives, in often the most trivial of ways, in order to make their lives just a little bit better. He loves them that much. And honestly, how can you not find such an idea appealing? If I worship the “right” god he will help me to achieve my goals and even protect me from life’s daily inconveniences. Neat!

All of us have heard the testimonials of people giving their god credit for influencing their lives in the most superficial and trivial of ways. Apparently God truly cares whether or not your child gets into that specific school. Apparently God didn’t want you to get pulled over for speeding and be late for that important job interview. Apparently it really matters to God if you get that line of credit. Apparently God favored that particular actor/rapper/singer over the others during award season. Apparently the outcome of just about every sporting event rests in God’s hands. Apparently God didn’t want you to get into a fender bender when you ran that stop sign while texting your mother the address of the restaurant where you two were supposed to be meeting. Apparently God felt bad about letting your dog run away and so helped get him back to you (all those posters you stapled to every telephone pole in town had nothing to do with it). Apparently God is invested in the outcome of every political election (though he clearly has no specific political affiliation, otherwise the Holier Than Thou Party would win every time). Apparently God loves drunk drivers … and priests who rape children in his churches … and televangelists who pilfer the life savings from the desperate and lonely … and on and on and on. The religious seem to believe that their days are often filled with moments where their god intervenes in the daily occurrences of their lives.

And how incredibly egomaniacal you must be to believe that.

You see, in the exact moment that Tim Tebow believes his god was influencing the outcome of that particular football game, somewhere in the world an innocent child was being raped. In that exact moment that your god was helping to reunite you with your lost pet, somewhere in the world an innocent child was starving to death. In that exact moment that your god helped you avoid getting into an accident when you ran that stop sign, somewhere in the world an innocent child was being murdered. In that exact moment that you were giving your god credit for whatever trophy it is that you were just awarded, somewhere in the world an innocent child was being diagnosed with cancer. In that exact moment that your god helped you get elected, somewhere in the world an innocent child was dying of thirst. In that exact moment that your god was revealing that last box to be the final gold bar you needed in your scratch off ticket, somewhere in the world an innocent child was being born … to someone who didn’t want him. In that exact moment that your god was proving to you how special you are, somewhere in the world an innocent child is suffering.

In that exact moment.

Every time.

How do the religious reconcile their adoration of a god who acts on their pettiest of wishes but ignores the suffering of innocent children? How can the religious, in all their arrogance, even pray for their own selfish needs while every second of every day there are innocent children suffering in a myriad of ways throughout the world?

When Barack Obama was elected and took power, if he refused to help anyone else in the world except those specific individuals who voted for him (no SSI, no Medicaid, no unemployment, etc), and once more, he wouldn’t even listen to those who didn’t vote for him, he would be considered a monster. Adolf Hitler supported only a very specific collection of people, all the rest he persecuted. According to what many religious people appear to believe, their god seems more like a discriminatory dictator than a deity deserving of one’s devotion.

Once upon a time I myself worshiped the Christian God and I often pleaded with him to grant me my petty wishes as if he were a fast talking blue genie. But once I realized that faith was simply a synonym for hope, I found I could no longer dedicate myself to a fantastical being who I hoped was real, especially when all the evidence, which I was finding increasingly difficult to ignore, seemed to prove otherwise. But I have recently come to understand that even if one of the religious multitude were able to convince me that their god was real, still I would not drop down to my knees in supplication to him. For if god were real he could fall into only two categories: He has the power to help the innocent, suffering children of the world but chooses not to or he would help them if he could but he is unable to. You are therefore left with only one of three choices: You can either worship a neglectful god, worship a helpless god, or worship no god at all. The world may be complicated but religion is not. For a rational thinker, the choice is a simple one.

The decision of whether or not to worship a god is a deeply personal one and that is especially true when a person decides to stop worshiping a god. Therefore, I truly believe that it is not the non believer’s duty to try and “convert” the believers into their way of thinking. It is simply our duty to supply the information that helped guide us out from under the blanket of subjugation in the hopes that the gleaning of this knowledge may help do the same for another.

One last thing. To all those people out there who are having fun with the whole Tim Tebow thing. You know what I’m referring to; the douche bag who successfully bounces a ping pong ball into a cup of beer and immediately drops down into that silly pose, or the girl who finds she aced her mid term exam, whoops and does the Tim Tebow. It’s becoming a bit of an epidemic. Yes, Tim has sort of become the clown prince of Christianity but there is something you should remember. Whenever you’re jokingly dropping down into that silly pose after a somewhat remarkable accomplishment, remind yourself that this guy, this grown adult male, is completely serious.

And that, my friends, isn’t funny, it’s just sad.

 

Thomas Keane (DoubtingThomas)

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Mythological Origins of Christianity Pt. 1 of 3

 

 

The Mythological Origins of Christianity

–Part One of Three–

 

 

By Thomas Keane (DoubtingThomas)

 

 

 

“The Hebrews merely used for their poetic imagery the characteristic beliefs of the people to whom they made direct reference.” — E. E. Goldsmith (from Ancient Pagan Symbols, p. 94)

 

“The religion of the Masters – the Babylonians and Assyrians – was transferred almost bodily into Christianity.” — Madame Blavatsky

 

 

 

Far from “the word of God”, the bible is simply a collection of stolen pagan mythology. The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden were taken from the Babylonian account. The Hebrew word Eden comes from an old Babylonian name for Mesopotamia, Gan-Eden, the garden of the Middle East. Noah’s Flood is just one of around four hundred flood accounts and the equivalent of the Ark and Mt. Ararat can be found in many of them. Even the names given to Noah’s sons are not original. And the recycled mythology continues with Moses, who is clearly fashioned after the Syrian Mises, and the ‘laws’ found in Exodus are obviously influenced by Hammurabi’s code. Egyptian scriptures even supplied the biblical Messiah. Between Jesus and the Egyptian Horus there are hundreds of similarities, much like those between Christ and Krishna. One of the oldest known civilizations, the Sumerians, were one of the first to keep a written record of their beliefs. The similarities between the stories written on these surviving clay tablets and the ones contained in the bible are so striking and so numerous it would be easier simply to direct you to a few websites that thoroughly catalog the parallels. You can find them here: 1, 2.

 

And let’s consider the numerology that is so prevalent in the bible. The bible is Hebrew mythology and this is why so many events in Jewish history take seven days or take place on the seventh day or year and require forty days or years to occur. SEVEN appears in the bible (KJV) a total of 668 times and the number FORTY appears a total of 158 times. Seven is the word for week in Hebrew but the world/universe being created in seven days fable is by no means original as almost every ancient cosmology was based on it. The Greeks believed their gods created the world in a week of seven days, and in the Hindu Purânas, Brahma does the same. You can find the names of these seven days in Hindu manuscripts as early as 5,000 B.C. And it wasn’t the Hebrews who first made the seventh day a sacred day. Hesiod (eighth century) said, “The seventh is the sacred day.” Plato wrote: “The gods, pitying the laborious nature of men ordained for them as a rest from all their labors, the succession of religious festivals.” The first of these was every seventh day. The sun god Apollo had the seventh day of every month dedicated to him, thus Sunday. Even the word Sabbath didn’t originate with the Hebrews. Derived from the Babylonian word Sabattu, meaning day of rest, it was observed by the Babylonians long before the Hebrews adopted it.

 

And consider the “tree of life”. Every ancient race has had its “tree of life.” Zeus gave the Hesperides a tree that bore golden apples (Gogard). Zeus placed Ladon, a serpent, at the base of the tree to guard it; with the Norse it was Yggdrasil, the ash, at the foot of which was Nidhogg, their serpent. For the Tibetans, the “tree of life” was Zampun, and with the Persians, it was Homa. The Hindu god, Siva, sent a fig tree to woman and prompted her to tempt her husband with the fruit. She obeyed, telling the man it would grant him immortality. After the man ate, Siva cursed him. “The mundane tree of life” was symbolized by the oak tree with the Druids. Even the Chinese had their “tree of knowledge,” Sung-Ming-Shu.

 

Even the name Adam is not Hebrew in origin. Adam Adami can be found in Chaldean scriptures that predate those of the Hebrews. Among some ancient Babylonian clay tablets an account of creation identical with that of the bible was found. The name of the first man? Adamu. And in The Prophecies by Ramutsariar, a Hindu book predating the bible by two thousand years, the creation myth is again almost identical. And the name of the first man? Adama. Oh, and the name of the first woman? Heva. Strange how the authors of the bible thought that simply removing a single letter was enough to lay claim to another’s work. This is the reason why one shouldn’t confuse the Ethiopia of the bible for the African Ethiopia. Return the A to the front of the word and you discover it comes from the Greek Aethiopia (mythic land of darkness and mystery).

 

So the God of the bible put Adam to sleep and removed a rib (bone) to create woman? Nothing new there. According to the Tahitans, their god, Taaroa, “put men to sleep for long ages,” and he also took a bone (Ivi) from man, and it became a woman.

 

Regarding Noah’s Ark, the word ark is Egyptian. It means a chest or box for preserving something sacred. Another idea that is by no means original; the Hindus had their Argha, the Greeks, their Cista, the Argonauts, their Argo. And don’t forget Pandora’s box. And the numbers in this story are obviously symbolic. Seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven. So many sevens.

 

And let’s consider Noah sending forth a raven and later three doves while seeking signs of land’s return. The Babylonian Noah, Utnapishtim, sent a dove, then a swallow, and finally a raven. The Babylonian ark rested on Mount Nisir, the Hindu ark on Mount Himalaya, and the Greek ark on Mount Parnassus. And the word Ararat, or Arath, is the Aramaic source of the word earth.

 

When Noah and his crew finally find dry land, they quickly build an altar and start making sacrifices to God. First, which animals were sacrificed? In other words, which animals were rendered extinct by this reckless and needless slaughter? The bible says God both saw and smelled these sacrifices and was pleased by their “sweet savor” and thus came the covenant with Noah to never again destroy the earth by a deluge. But to make sure he didn’t forget (!) his promise, God made a rainbow in the sky as a reminder. So, are we supposed to believe that the basic law of refraction hadn’t operated before this? So no rainbows resulted from the interaction of the sun and the rain in Adam’s day, not to mention during all those endless “begats”?

 

Zeus, Jupiter to the Romans, also became offended with his own creation. He also decided to drown them all, sparing only Deucalion, and Pyrrha, who had “found grace” in his eyes. He allowed them to escape in a boat which finally landed on Mt. Parnassus. The Babylonian account can be found on the tablets of Assurbanipal. Here Enlil, again, also offended by man’s wickedness, decides to destroy him with water, but Ea, the god of wisdom, learns of Enlil’s plan and tells a man, Utnapishtim, about it. Like Noah, Utnapishtim is tenth in line from the first man, and walks with Ea. Ea tells him to build a enormous boat, one that will hold he and his family and also, you guessed it, all the beasts and birds and creeping things. And as soon as it was finished it began to storm, a storm so great that even the lesser gods “trembled in fear.” It stormed for six days and nights and on the seventh it stopped. The boat floated around until it finally came to rest on Mount Nisir. It should be noted that Mt. Nisir sits between Medea and Armenia, making it practically identical with Ararat. Utnapishtim also sent out a dove, swallow, and raven when seeking land. He also built an altar upon making land and offered incense upon it. And, yes, the gods smell the “sweet savor” and gather around; and, Ishtar, “the lady of the rainbow,” hung out her multicolored necklace.

 

With the Persian and Hindu myths it is not physical birds and beasts that are brought into the ark but their seeds — “… (take) the seeds of sheep, oxen, men and women, dogs, and birds and every kind of tree and fruit, two of every kind, into the ark seal it up with a golden ring and make in it a door and window.” An avatar of Vishnu warns the Hindu Noah, Vaivasvata, about the flood and tells him to build a vessel for his family and bring on board plant seeds and a pair of animals. After the flood the boat comes to rest on Mount Himalaya. And the number of days the storm lasted coincides exactly with the number in the Hebrew account.

 

The Tepanecans of Mexico also reported a great flood that lasted exactly forty days and nights. The Society Islanders say the god Tangaloa, again angered by the wickedness of man, created such a mighty flood to punish them that only the mountaintops remained. And according to Inca mythology, the god Viracocha promised by the rainbow to never drown mankind again. And Bochica, a god of the Chibehas of Bogota, perched on a rainbow and quelled the flood. And even among the Jews there were additional Deluge myths; one depicting an angry God scalding the sinful antedilvians.

Many bible believers would try and argue that these other accounts were copied from the Hebrew account, however, it should be noted that the Chaldean, Hindu, Babylonian and Egyptian accounts predate the Hebrew versions by many centuries.

Also consider the names of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Taken from Maurice’s history of Hindustan: “It is related in Padmapooraun that Satyavrata, whose miraculous preservation from a general deluge is told at large in the Matsya, had three sons, the eldest of whom was named Jyapeti, or Lord of the Earth; the others were Charma and Sharma, which last words are in the vulgar dialects usually pronounced Cham and Sham …” In The City of God, St. Augustine uses these same forms, also Chanaan for Canaan.

 

Following the flood a man named Nimrod wanted to build a tower (tower of Babel) out of anger at God for drowning the race. He didn’t believe God would keep his promise (why would he) and thought there could be another mass murder. To quote Josephus verbatim: “He wanted to avenge himself on God for the destruction of his ancestors (weren’t they spared in the ark?) thus: he would build a tower so high that the waters of another flood, with which the world might be afflicted, would not be able to submerge it.” The Babylonian parallel ends similarly: “But all this they did only from fear of another deluge.” Even the name Babel (gate of God) came from the Akkadian Summerian Babili, about 3900 B.C., and means Gateway of God, one with the Greek “Gateway of the gods.”

 

Bible believers think the scriptural Pharaohs were three Egyptian kings. The fact that outside of the bible there is no account of these specific kings, particularly the cruel Pharaoh, doesn’t seem to bother them. There is also no record of Joseph, Moses, or even the captivity. The bible depicts Moses as practically destroying Egypt, yet if this were literally true, there should be some record of these events but there are none. And why is it that no direct reference to the Exodus can be found among any Egyptian inscription?

 

Speaking of Moses, this is another myth that is shared by many other mythologies. As depicted in the Orphic hymn to Bacchus, Mises was also found in a box floating upon the waters. Also, like Moses, Mises’ laws were written on … wait for it … two slabs of stone. Again like Moses he had a rod that he worked miracles with, and what could the rod turn itself into? That’s right, a serpent. Mises uses his rod to divide the rivers Orontes and Hydastus and he even strikes a rock with it to provide water for his thirsty army. The Egyptian Osiris was also put in a coffer or coffin and set adrift on the river Nile. Moses was discovered and raised by Thermuthis, which was also the name of a serpent sacred to Isis. The Greek lawgiver, Dionysius, was said to have held up two tables of stone on which the law was engraved.

 

Hammurabi of Babylon, a contemporary with Abraham, was given a code of laws by Shamash, the great sun god, which he delivered to his people. This code predates the Mosaic code by more than a thousand years. Regarding this similarity, I. Elliott Binns remarked: “The variety of cases provided for is much greater than in the Mosaic codes, but where they deal with the same matters there is an extraordinary similarity in their ordinances, especially in phraseology.” Was it the biblical God or this older code that was the source of the Mosaic code? The answer seems obvious.

 

The Egyptians, whom the Jews believed to be morally inferior, in fact had a well-developed sense of morality. You can find evidence of this in the Egyptian “Oath of Clearance,” which contains six of the ten commandments and existed thousands of years before the Jews were ever heard of.

 

It reads in part as follows:

 

I have not committed fraud and evil against men.

I have not diverted justice in the judgment hall.

I have not caused a man to do more than his day’s work.

I have not caused a slave to be ill-treated.

I have not taken milk from the mouths of children.

I have not stolen cattle.

I have not been weak.

I have not been wretched.

I have not been impious or impure…

 

 

This is the end of Part One.

 

Part Two can be found here:

 

https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/the-mythological-origins-of-christianity-pt-2-of-3/

 

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Mythological Origins of Christianity Pt. 2 of 3

 

 

The Mythological Origins of Christianity

–Part Two of Three–

 

 

By Thomas Keane (DoubtingThomas)

 

 

Continued:

 

The story of Daniel, who the bible shows to be a contemporary with Nebuchadnezzar, was written in Aramaic, a language not adopted by the Jews until centuries later.

 

The scriptures call Belshazzar a king, but the historical Belshazzar was only regent for Nabonidus, never king. Also he was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar AND it was Nabonidus, the last of the Neo-Babylonian dynasty, who became ill not Nebuchadnezzar.

 

And what of King David’s son, Solomon (both men completely fictional characters). According to 2 Chronicles 9:23: “… all the kings of the earth sought his (Solomon’s) presence.” Odd then, that none of them mention him. He was supposed to have lived just prior to Homer and Hesiod, but these men never mention this richest and wisest one. Herodotus who traveled throughout the entire Middle East never mentions Solomon OR even the Jews!

 

Solomon’s “holy temple” is exalted as one of the greatest of all buildings, yet if you judge it by its measurements it was fairly small, only about 40 by 125 feet, and the chancels built around it were comparatively insignificant. Nagkon-Wat in Cambodia is 769 by 588 by 250 feet and is covered in elaborate carvings and surrounded by great columns. The stonework depicts approximately 100,000 figures, one picture spanning 240 feet. Three different times the bible states that Solomon built the walls of Jerusalem, yet in the fourteenth century B.C. the historical Jerusalem was already a walled city. Also historically false, the suggestion that Solomon began to build the temple four hundred years after the Exodus from Egypt. And when Ezim-geber, said to be the site of Solomon’s navy yard, was excavated an article stated: “Not a vestige was found of the cradles and ways where for centuries the ships of the Jewish navy were built and launched.” Truthfully it’s very unlikely that the Jews of that time ever had a ship larger than your basic fishing boat, and it is even more unlikely that they ever had a mighty kingdom, king or temple. Ancient Israel’s military power is constantly touted in the bible, but this was likely as mythical as its naval power. In fact, whenever other nations even mentioned the Jews in their military accounts, it was only ever to record their triumph over them. The literature of the Jains of India tells a very similar story as that of Solomon. And Proverbs 22:17-23:11 is almost a word for word translation of The Wisdom of Amenemope, an Egyptian book written about 1,000 B.C.

 

And what about the second Jewish captivity? There is just as little proof for it as there was for the first. Around the time the scriptural “return” was happening, the Greek historian Herodotus visited Babylon, yet he makes no mention of it. And his history of ancient Egypt reveals no mention of the first captivity. In fact, Herodotus never mentioned the Jews; neither did Homer, neither did Plato; neither did Socrates. But this doesn’t bother the die hard believer.

 

So Elijah was supposedly taken up bodily into heaven in a fiery chariot? Romulus, the founder of Rome, was also taken up to heaven in a chariot of fire. Similarly Mithra of Persia. But it only really happened with Elijah, right? The other stories are clearly fictional, why not the biblical one as well?

 

The story of Jonah and the whale is clearly a fairy tale, but is it an original fairy tale? In the Heracleid it is said that Hercules was also swallowed by a whale, and how about this, it occurred at exactly the same place, Joppa. And how many days did he remain in the whale’s belly? You guessed it, three. The Persians say that Jamshyd, their hero, was eaten by a giant sea monster and was later vomited out safe and sound upon the shore. And in the Samadeva Bhatta, and even older mythology from India, we learn of Saktadeva who was swallowed by a giant fish but was able to step out later completely unharmed.

 

And then we come to the Messiah. A story that is clearly unique, right? But wasn’t Hercules also born of a virgin, Alcmene, and didn’t he also have a god for a father (Zeus)? The mother of Sosiosh, the Persian was also a virgin, as was Nana, the mother of Attis. Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were sons of the god Mars, so it was with Bacchus, Aesculapius, Zarathustra, and many others. And Sanchoniathon tells us that Saturn offered his “only begotten son” to his father Uranus.

 

There were many historians that lived during and around the time of Jesus and some of them were the most illustrious of all time – Tacitus, Plutarch, Livy, the two Plinys, Philo and Josephus, etc. Not to mention many other men of note such as Seneca, Martial, Juvenal, Epictetus, Plotinus, Porphyry, Vergil, Horace, and Ovid, the latter living till Christ, if real, would have been twenty-two. All these men were deeply interested in the doctrines and morals of their day and were all men of great intellect. So one must ask why they didn’t record this wonder-working Savior of the race? Is it because they wrote about historical matters and not mythological ones?

 

Livy died before Jesus began performing his miracles, however he was alive at the time of two of the most sensational and unnatural events in human history; the Immaculate Conception and virgin birth, and yet he failed to mention them. Plutarch was alive from about 46 to 120 A.D. (A(fter) the D(elusion)) but apparently never heard of Christ. Pliny the Elder was Christ’s contemporary, yet makes no mention of him. The younger Pliny, 62-110 A.D., mentions the Christians of Pontus and Bithnia but as for Jesus, he is only referred to as the object of their worship and never as a man. And Tacitus and Pliny had nothing but contempt for this new religion. Seneca, brother of Gallio, was proconsul of Achaia when Paul is said to have preached there. Seneca documented many lesser things but nothing of Paul or the wonder-working Christ. How could Jesus’ miracles, virgin birth, etc. not have been worth mentioning? Philo, a philosopher historian, lived both before and after the time of Christ, yet never mentions him. This would trouble me if I were still a believer in Christian mythology.

 

When Justin Martyr was attempting to convert the Jews to Christianity, he encountered a Jew named Trypho who had this to say: “Now Christ, if he has indeed been born and exists anywhere, is unknown and does not even know himself and has no power until Elias come and make him manifest to all. And you, having accepted a groundless report, invent a Christ for yourselves and for his sake are inconsiderately perishing.” Trypho also referred to Jesus as “that Jesus who you say was crucified…” A clear and very early Jewish denial of Christ’s existence.

 

Matthew 1: 22&23 — “Now all this was done, that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.”

 

This passage was translated from the Greek text which used the word parthenos, which does mean virgin, but in the original Hebrew, from which the Greek was taken, the word used is almah, which translates simply to young woman. The error was corrected in the later Greek translation, the proper Greek equivalent neanis being substituted. But, of course, the Church chose to leave it in its “virgin” Greek, and so it remains. Just another example of how these multiple revisions are less about creating a more accurate bible and more about manipulating man into believing a lie.

 

Matthew 2:11 – “And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense, and myrrh.”

 

Why do none of the other gospels mention these gifts? Could it be because the author of Matthew was clearly copying earlier mythology? When Socrates was born, 469 B.C., “Magi came from the east to offer gifts at Socrates’ birth, also bringing gold, frankincense and myrrh” (The Anacalypsis). At the birth of Krishna, 1200 B.C., “angels, shepherds and the prophets attended, gold, frankincense and myrrh were brought to him.” And when Confucius was born in 598 B.C., “Five wise men from a distance came to the house, celestial music was heard in the skies and angels attended the scene” (The Five Volumes).

 

Rabbi Wise, an eminent scholar of the nineteenth century, searched the records of Pontus Pilate’s court, still extant, for evidence of Jesus’ trial but could find nothing.

 

The cross was used by the Aztecs and they never heard of Christ until his followers came to rob, rape, and murder them. Like all Christian paraphernalia, the cross is just another appropriation of pagan mythology.

 

Justin Martyr thoroughly chronicled the early Christians and yet never mentioned Paul or his Epistles. The same with Tertullian, who stated that “The Epistle to the Hebrews” was written by Barnabas. And the second century writer, Marcion, said The Epistle to the Ephesians was formerly called the Epistle to the Laodiceans.

 

The title originally given to Jesus was Chrest but by the time the Christians got done with it, second and third century, it was Christ. In his Apology, Justin Martyr calls his coreligionists Chrestians. Massey said, “In Bockh’s Christian Inscriptions, numbering 1,287, there is not a single instance of an earlier date than the third century wherein the name is not written Chrest or Chreist.” The devotees of this somewhat obscure doctrine were called Chrestianoi. Their headquarters was located in Asia Minor, specifically Antioch, and it was here, not in Jerusalem, that they first became known as Chrestians, now written Christians. The Judean sect didn’t even call themselves Christians; they preferred Nazarenes, Galileans, and Brethren. It was only later, disdainfully, that the label Christian was applied to them.

 

Regarding the teachings of Jesus, almost identical principles were suggested by Hillel: “Judge not thy neighbor until thou hast been in his place.” “Do not do unto others what thou wouldst not they should do unto thee; this is the whole of the law…” And similar ideas were taught by Socrates and Plato, Buddha and Confucius. “The doctrine of our master (Confucius) consists in having an invariable correctness of heart, and in doing towards others as we would that they should do to us.”

 

In his History of Moral Philosophy, Staeudlin said, “In reading Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius or Seneca, I often believe myself hearing the sage of Nazareth. The dignity of man, the all surpassing value of virtue, the independence and fortitude of the righteous man, the superior value of spiritual qualities as compared to all worldly goods, the sacrifices of selfish enjoyments and of life for the sake of virtue and truth – all these ideals, so worthy of reverence, we find in the one as well as in the other. The striking resemblance between the Christian and the stoic doctrine … cannot escape being noticed by all.”

 

 

This is the end of Part Two.

 

Part Three can be found here:

 

https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/06/01/the-mythological-origins-of-christianity-pt-3-of-3/

 

 Part ONE can be found here:

https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/the-mythological-origins-of-christianity-pt-1-of-3/

 

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

Why Our Labels Always Fail To Define Us

What is an Atheist? What is a Christian? Why our labels always fail to define us.

 

By Thomas Keane

(AKA DoubtingThomas)

  

A·the·ist (ā’thē-ĭst): noun, One who disbelieves or denies the existence of God or gods.

Chris·tian (krĭs’chən): noun, (1) One who professes belief in Jesus as Christ or follows the religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus. (2) One who lives according to the teachings of Jesus.

Which of these labels define me? Which of these labels define you? Does the fact that I went to church and Private Christian School for the majority of my life define me as a Christian? Does the fact that I no longer worship the god depicted in the bible or any other god define me as an Atheist? Can you be an Atheist and have doubts about the Theory of Evolution or the Big Bang? Is it possible to be a Christian and question the validity of the story of Noah and the Ark or whether or not there was ever an actual Garden of Eden? Just how accurate and reliable are the labels we carry and for whom do they really exist? Who do they benefit the most? Is it the person being labeled or the person doing the labeling? Clearly it depends on the label.

People might be surprised by how many labels they carry. Are you pro-life? Pro-choice? Democrat? Republican? Christian? Catholic? Atheist? Feminist? Chauvinist? White? African American? Man? Woman? Parent? Child? Teenager? Senior Citizen? Upper-class? Middle-class? Experienced? Inexperienced? Employed? Unemployed? Blonde? Brunet? Bald? Obsessive Compulsive? Manic Depressive? Chemical Dependant? Drug Addict? Alcoholic? Anal? Slob? Neat Freak? Irresponsible? Punctual? Aries? Sagittarius? Husband? Wife? Heterosexual? Homosexual? Vegan? Carnivore? Stubborn? Open Minded? Anorexic? Obese? Buff? Ugly? Beautiful? Average? Victim? Criminal? Citizen? Immigrant? Doctor? Patient? Sweetheart? Asshole? Prude? Whore? Do any one of these labels truly describe who you are? Does any combination of them describe you in your entirety? I would bet that if each and every one of us sat down with pen and paper and tried to list all the labels that we currently carry; first, none of our lists would be complete, and second, no matter how inclusive we may have managed to make our lists, the list still wouldn’t paint an accurate picture of who we are.

Bill Gates, Penn Jillette, Sam Harris, Salman Rushdie, Diane Keaton, Warren Buffett, and Gore Vidal are all self described Atheists. However, none of them have the exact same beliefs about religion, the bible, Evolution or the origin of life. Just as an Evangelical Christian, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon, a Presbyterian and the Amish don’t have the exact same belief about Christianity, the bible and the origin of life. All of us are far more complex than any label or combination of labels could ever hope to encapsulate. So again we must consider who it is that benefits most from a label’s simplification of a complex set of opinions, or a lifestyle, or a belief system, or a pattern of behavior, etc.? Certainly not those who find themselves constrained by the implied boundaries of whatever category they’ve been assigned. And yet, it isn’t unusual to find that someone has assigned themselves with one or more of these labels, often times embracing them. Clearly it takes a lot less effort to describe oneself using a single word rather than an entire paragraph but aren’t we slighting ourselves when we chose to do so? Aren’t we being slighted when someone else does the same? If my personal list of labels came to a total of twenty-three (and those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head), how can being referred to by any one do me any favors? And what about those people who assign themselves a label they don’t deserve. How does the cop who plants the gun on the body of the pimp, he mistakenly thought was armed, warrant calling himself ‘just’? How does a Pope call for the assassination of the Queen of England and still call himself ‘pious’? How many teenage girls regard themselves as ‘fat’ or ‘ugly’ when they aren’t? How many of our self imposed labels would be considered accurate?

A label can change not only the way others perceive us but how we perceive ourselves. It was once thought that the labels applied to an individual influenced their behavior, particularly the application of a negative or stigmatizing label (such as criminal or deviant), creating a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. A person would become a criminal if society were to label that person as a criminal. This was commonly referred to as Labeling Theory (also known as Social Reaction Theory). If a parent calls their child stupid enough times, will that child grow up believing that they are, indeed, stupid and, as a result, neglect their education and avoid anything that would test their intelligence? You can see a similar, self imposed reactionary response from those who believe in Astrology. Someone is labeled an Aries, reads that an Aries is aggressive, willful, powerful, and assertive, and actually alters their personality traits accordingly. And consider how many people identify themselves as black even when one of their parents was Caucasian, or Spanish, or Asian. Often times these children will have skin that would be considered tan at most, but if they have ‘black features’ inevitably someone will label them as black regardless of their actual racial makeup or pigmentation. These children commonly grow up identifying with blacks, focusing on black issues and embracing black culture. They practically ignore, and certainly neglect, the fact that they have a white parent. But do bi-racial people really have a choice? Society labels you as black, therefore you are black.

And then there are the labels, the uses of which have provoked some of mankind’s most shameful acts. In 1231, Pope Gregory IX instituted the papal inquisition for the apprehension and trial of Heretics, heresy being defined as a deliberate denial of an article of truth of the Catholic faith. The atrocities committed against those labeled as Heretics are legendary. And although many were reportedly killed long before this; as the result of a judicial sentence of an inquisitor, the first documented Witch (Hugues de Baniol) was burned to death in 1275 in Toulouse, France. Do I even need to mention the Salem Witch Trials? In many parts of the world women are still being assaulted and murdered as a result of being labeled a Witch. And to be labeled a Jew in 1940s Germany was the equivalent to being labeled a dog. Many were even forced to wear their label in the form of the Star of David, their own version of the scarlet letter. And, as we now know (holocaust deniers aside), millions of those labeled Jew were executed for this reason alone. Even being called a Christian or an Atheist was once a potential death sentence in certain parts of the world. Some could argue it still is.

As a group, children are clearly the most affected by being labeled. Almost as soon as they enter the school system they are placed in some sort of category. Even when children are left on their own they will often split off into groups, groups based on some sort of perceived similarities (usually race, sex, and/or class). And when a child joins any type of distinctive organization; whether it is the A/V club, Chess Club, Basketball Team, Band, they will almost immediately be branded: Jock, Nerd, Band Geek, Brain, etc. The school bully just loves to pummel their victim with a good, vicious label. But perhaps the worst distinction a child can receive is one that has almost become an epidemic. A child misbehaves or acts out and they are promptly labeled as having ADHD and are encouraged to begin taking a medication infamous for its detrimental side effects. Is the ever increasing percentage of children being identified as having ADHD the result of more and more children actually suffering from this illness or is it the result of too many people too quickly embracing a blanket diagnosis that clearly benefits the person doing the labeling more than the one being labeled?

According to Bruce Perry, co-author of The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog and Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook, “There is no doubt that we are labeling children more. [In Fact], in order for clinicians to get reimbursed, they have to label. There is also a tendency on the part of both educators and parents to want to get an answer. They are very uncomfortable with ambiguity.”

Robert Sternberg, psychologist and Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, says there are numerous, complex factors involved in the increasing use of labels. “One reason is that in order for them to get special services, kids often need to be labeled. A second reason is for testing. In order to get accommodations like extra time, they need that label.”

Because a diagnosis is often required before insurers will cover medical treatment, the rising use of psychiatric medications is also tied in with the trend toward labeling. Is it any surprise that over 3 million children in the United States are taking medication to control behaviors associated with ADHD? Since the year 2000, the use of Ritalin has increased 700%, a trend that is assuredly bolstered by pharmaceutical advertising (AKA drug pushing). These figures are not likely to decrease until parents force themselves to resist the urge to shove their children into neat little categories. Sometimes that satisfying label only serves to conceal more problems behind its supposed answer. And we mustn’t forget that when labeled individuals are separated into groups that serve to establish a sense of disconnection between “us” and “them” a label can quickly become a stigma. The end result of stigmatization is always discrimination.

When something occupies a neat little category, we are comforted, believing that everything that resides in that category can be defined by it. This is rarely, if ever, the case. We must never forget this. If someone identifies themselves as an Atheist, it may mean that you can rightfully assume that they don’t believe in a god, but it doesn’t mean that you should assume you now know their feelings on religion, yours or anybody else’s. Nor can one assume they know who a person is simply because they call themselves a Christian. If history has taught us anything, it’s that many of those who have referred to themselves as Christians, if judged on actions alone, would not have been labeled as such by anyone else. And just because a person doesn’t worship a god doesn’t mean that they are more likely to live a life filled with drugs, drunkenness, tax evasion and promiscuous sex.

No single label or collection of labels will ever be able to completely define any one of us. Our complexities are what individualize us. It could be argued that each person’s collection of labels are as unique as their fingerprints. Even two of the most pro-life, vegan, P.E.T.A. supporting, Feminist, Texas native, Republican, Born Again Christians are going to find themselves on opposite sides of an issue at some point. Inevitably when we dismiss someone, or accept someone, simply because they share the same label as us, eventually we will find ourselves with a disastrous mismatch. On the other hand, if we refrain from making hasty judgments, the list of potential mistakes we could avoid making is endless; joining that law firm, dating that coworker, moving in with that roommate, marrying that significant other, going ‘All In’ with two pair, etc. We must learn to never be satisfied by the label someone has assigned themselves or one which we have assigned to someone else. Encounter someone on a Friday and you would most likely form a completely different opinion of them than if you had met them on a Monday. Remember there is always something new to learn about a person, something that could possibly completely alter your perception of them. Imagine how the world would benefit if we would all just stop assuming we knew who a person was based on the fact that they were labeled an Atheist or rich or a Democrat or a woman or overweight or Mexican or a police officer or pretty or an alcoholic or a teenager or a homosexual or a Sagittarius, etc. So the next time we encounter someone, whether they be a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger, let’s take a moment to reconsider what we truly know about them, sans labels, and perhaps marvel at how much more there is to discover.

 

DoubtingThomas

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

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

 

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the THE POWER/POWERLESSNESS OF GOD link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

 

• A Question of 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?

 

• 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?

 

• Only the loner is welcome – Are only hermits welcome in heaven? Matt 19:29 – “And everyone that hath forsaken horses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my names sake, shall receive an hundred fold and shall inherit everlasting life.”

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

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

  

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the THE CRUELTY OF THE CREATOR link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

 

• 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.”

 

• A Perfect Example of the Ugliness of the God of the Bible – Only Lot, his wife and his two daughters are deemed worthy of being sparred God’s wrath. Once again, much like with Noah, it’s conveniently all in the family. AND YET, even though God just moments before had deemed her worthy of living, when Lot’s wife (she never has a name) looks back and witnesses her family and friends being murdered by God, she is no longer worthy and God kills her. As a result, Lot’s two daughters end up having sex with Lot in order to produce an heir. Gen 19:32-36 “Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.”

 

• The God of the Bible is a Monster – Jephthah promises God to make a burnt offering of the first thing that greets him if God will give him victory in battle. He assumes it will be a dog. The all knowing God knows it won’t be a dog and agrees, giving Jephthah the victory he desires (again, more personal interference from God). Only when Jephthah returns from battle it is his young daughter that rushes out to greet him. No mercy from God. Jephthah burns his daughter to death to keep his promise to God. And God, no doubt, reveled in it. Judges 11:30-39. The only thing you can assume from this story is either God knew it would be his daughter that would run out to greet Jephthah and not the dog and agreed to his bargain anyway OR God himself held the dog back and encouraged the daughter to run out to teach Jephthah a lesson. Either way God is a monster.

 

• 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 his 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?

  

• 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. Isn’t this also a punishment of David?

 

• 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.” What ever happened to do unto others…?

 

• 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 # 5 – 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.

 

• 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

 

• Overkill, as usual – 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.

  

• 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 (Jew) – 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 the 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’ son 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.

 

• What Happened to Free Will? -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 send 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.

 

• 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.

 

• 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 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.

 

• God LOOOVES Children … To Slaughter! – II Kings 2:23, 24 – Because some (42) children tease him about his bald head, Elisha curses them and calls upon God to punish them for this horrible sin. God obliges and sends two she bears to tear the children to bits.

 

• To Er is Human – Jacob’s grandson Er is so hated by God that, “Er was evil in the sight of the Lord and he slew him.” I Chron 2:3. God then kills Er’s brother, Oman. Not because he was evil as well, but because Oman refused to fuck Er’s widow. Gen 38: 7, 9, 10.

 

• The Inspiring Story Of Job – In order to prove Job’s loyalty, which Satan has questioned, God torments Job with numerous horrible tests, a few of which are the deaths of his servants (innocents), his children (more innocents), the loss of his wealth and his health. Job 1, 2. This story is supposed to be inspiring? I’m sorry but a god that would torture someone like this simply to win a bet with another god is not worthy of worship.

 

• Why Does Your God SOOOO Love To Punish The Innocent? – If one doesn’t obey the Mosaic Law they will be cursed by God and that curse shall “…be upon thy seed forever.” Deut. 28:46. Again with the punishment of those who did no wrong.

 

• Who needs Zoloft, I’ll just go kill some kids – Psalms 137:9 – “Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.” The ‘little ones’ are the children of Babylon. The words are Gods.

 

• God Encourages Rape & Infanticide – Isaiah 13:15, 16 – “Everyone that is fouled 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.” So according to the Lord, in certain circumstances, children deserve to be murdered and women deserve to be raped.

 

• Hmmmm, A Spanking Or Thrust Through With The Sword? – Zech 13:3 – “… and his father and his mother … shall thrust him through when he prophesieth.” According to God, a parent should murder their own children if they speak of any other religion.

 

• Again, What Merciful God? – Deut 7:1, 2 – God has his Jews invade and conquer the seven nations of Canaan, saying, “…And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant (peace) with them, nor show mercy unto them.” Merciful God? What Bible are they reading?

 

• Just what part of No Other God Before Me did you not understand? – Ex 32:27 – Just what part of No Other God Before Me did you not understand? The punishment for those who worshiped the golden calf, “Take every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and  every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.” So if your neighbor worships a god other than the Christian God, you can be killed for their ‘sins’?

 

• You Want Me To Worship This Guy For What Reason Again? – Num 16:1-40 – This section depicts both how fallible God is and how ‘merciful’. A couple of Levite Princes challenge Moses’ leadership and God gets very upset by this and wants to murder the entire congregation. Moses, however, points out to God the injustice of this course of action. Astonishingly, the infallible Almighty sees his error and concedes to Moses’ logic. So instead, God the Merciful, buries alive the wives, sons and ‘little children’ (once again, all innocents) of the two princes and sends a fire to consume the remaining princes. What in the world was God’s original punishment going to be? Thank God Moses talked him out of it. OH, in response to these horrible killings by God, a large number of Jews rebel, so God sends a plague (his favorite weapon) to wipe them out. Num 16:41-49.

 

• Don’t Forget To Slaughter The Little Ones – Moses sums up the slaughter of the Amorites, under God’s order, “We … utterly destroyed the men and the women and the little ones.” Num 21:25 and Deut 2:34. God nearly has as many women and children killed as men.

 

• Ahhhhhh, Will You Look At That Sunrise – Num 25:4-9 – God’s instructions to his favorite hit man, Moses, about the 24,000 Israelites (God’s chosen people) who were worshipers of Baal and co-habited with Moabite women, “And the Lord said unto Moses, Take all the heads of the people, and hang them up before the Lord against the sun…”

 

• Good Guess, Now Die! – After some Philistines guess Samson’s riddle, the spirit of the Lord came upon him and he killed 30 of them. Judges 14:19.

 

• The Innocent Always Suffer – A few people glance into the Ark of the Covenant as it happens by and God kills 50,070 (innocent) people as punishment. I Sam 6:19. This is just one of many examples where God punishes the innocent, the blameless, the wives and children, instead of those actually guilty.

 

• Maybe bottle feeding would be preferable – God’s orders, “Slay both man and woman, infant and suckling…” I Sam 15:3, 7.

 

• LAME! – II Sam 5:6, 7, 8 – “…and smiteth the Jebusites, and the lame and the blind…”

 

• A Merciful God? – I Sam 27:8, 9 – “…leaving neither man nor woman alive.” Never spares the women, who are usually innocent as they aren’t warriors or kings.

 

• Way To Satisfy Your Bloodlust, God – I Kings 20:28, 29, 30 – After the children of Israel slaughter 100,000 Syrian footmen, God personally kills the remaining 27,000 by causing a wall to fall onto them. High five God! Nice assist!

 

• God Loves Killing Children – II Kings 9:8 and II Kings 1:1-11 – God calls for the 70 children of King Ahab of Israel to be destroyed. Their heads are put into baskets at the gates of the city.

 

• More Dead Children – II Kings 10:12-17, 30 – More children killed by God or in God’s name, this time the 42 children of King Judah.

 

• In God’s Own Words: I Am Not Perfect – Ex 20:5 – “…for I am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.” Jealousy is an imperfect, emotional response. How then does God possess such a flaw?

 

• Adam, Eve, David, Moses, Don’t Expect To Meet Them In Heaven – Paul states that Adam, God’s first human, is not in heaven! He claims Adam’s death was an eternal death. The promise of eternal life can only come with belief in Jesus Christ. Peter agreed with this. Paul also stated that those that lived between Moses and Christ aren’t eligible for everlasting life.

 

• God Is Such A DIIIIIIIIIICK!!!! – Hebrews 3:10, 11 – Paul, speaking for God, about the Jews who escaped Egypt. “Wherefore I was grieved with that generation and said, they do always err in their heart, and they have not known my ways. So I swear in my wrath, they shall not enter into my rest.” No heaven for you!

 

• No heaven for you, David! – Acts 2:34 – “For David (God’s chosen) is not ascended into the heavens.”

 

• God hates the Naive – Gen 27, 28, 29, – Jacob tricks his brother, Esau, into selling him his birthright and disguises himself in order to fool his father into blessing him and granting him this. As a result, and apparently also deceived, God comes to Jacob in a dream (of course dreams are never just dreams in the bible) and blesses Jacob and all his seed. Also an eventual result of Jacob’s deception, God states quite clearly that he hates Esau (Malachi 1:3, Romans 9:13)! Jacob later carries out a scheme to obtain an unfair share of his father-in-law’s livestock.

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Abuse of Women in the Bible

 

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!” – Émile Zola

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the THE ABUSE OF WOMEN link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

 

• Hey, Woman, God Says To Zip It! – I Cor. 14:34, 35 – “Let the women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law. And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.” These are more of the woman hater Paul’s words. I guess women preachers, priests, nuns, etc. should not be permitted then.

 

• Great Guy, Horrible Father – When the men of Sodom demand Lot send out two angels they believe he is housing (because that was such a common occurrence back then), Lot refuses (so brave) but does offer the men his two virgin daughters instead. Are these the same daughters that sleep with their loving father after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Gen 19:8 – “Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes….” Remember, this is the Lot who is later deemed by God as the only man worthy of sparing the horrors that are soon to befall the populace of Sodom and Gomorrah.

 

• Occam’s Razor (look it up) – Women in the bible are often depicted as being barren but strangely men are never sterile. An act of God is often used to cure the women of their barren wombs. Doesn’t it seem a little more plausible that the men were the ones that were infertile and couldn’t get their wives pregnant, but when the women got pregnant by another man they concocted some story to explain it?

 

• A Shame Women Have To Be Mentioned At All – Women are often times nameless. They are just the woman, or so and so’s wife, or so and so’s mother. I’m sure it begrudged the writers of the bible to mention them at all.

 

• Are all women in the bible barren? – Judges 13:3 – Describes Samson’s mother (another nameless woman) as being barren. But an Angel of the Lord, or the Lord himself, comes to her and she conceives. For some odd reason her husband, when he meets this angel, doesn’t recognize it as an angel. He just sees a man.

 

• Another barren woman – I Sam. 2:21 – “And the Lord visited Hannah, so that she conceived, and bare three sons and two daughters.” Hannah was barren until the Lord ‘visited’ her. And just how many times did the Lord ‘visit’ Hannah (three sons and two daughters)?

 

• Do women even count? – Whenever a group or multitude is counted or one of the frequent censuses taken, the total announced in the bible is always the tally of the men, “…besides the women and children.”

 

• Women: Fodder For God’s Punishments – Women are often used by God as punishment for those God does not favor. “Therefore I will give their wives unto others.” Jer 8:10. “And the city shall be taken and the women ravished.” Zech. 14:2.

 

• Good to know –“It is better to dwell in the corner of the housetop than with a brawling woman.” Prov. 25:24

 

• Wives, Submit To Your Husbands – Eph. 5:22, 24 – “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: …. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.”

 

• Women: Created By God To Serve Man – I Cor. 11 – “A Man is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man: for neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man. But I would have you know that the head of every man is Christ: and the head of the woman is the man: and the head of Christ is God.” These are more of the woman hater Paul’s words.

 

• No Equality As Long As Religion Exists – I Tim. 2:11, 12 – “Let a woman learn in quietness with all subjection. But I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness.” These are more of the woman hater Paul’s words. Do women really expect any better treatment in heaven?

 

• Rape as a reward – Num. 31:15-18 Moses’ words – “…kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

 

• Abortion is a sin, right? – II Kings 15:16 – “All the women therein that were with child he ripped up.” Describing the actions of Israel’s King Meabem (Meahem). Abortion is a sin, right?

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

SEX IN THE BIBLE

 

Steven Weinberg – “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.”

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the SEX link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

 

• Rape anyone! – Moses sends all the Jewish forces back to finish off all the male children & women of Midiam but saves the girl babies and virgins. Considering how little worth women had at the time I wonder what the intention was. Rape anyone!

 

• Got Raped? Lucky You! Bible Says You Get A Husband – Deut. 22:28, 29 – Describes how if a man rapes a woman and is discovered, “…then he shall give unto the damsel’s father 50 shekels of silver and she shall be his wife…” What happens if they are not found during the act? But hey, lucky for the rape victim, right? She gets a husband! Woo Hoo!

 

• 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.

 

• 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?

 

• It’s All About Sex – Solomon whiles away his time with 700 wives and 300 concubines. I Kings 11:3. Are we supposed to believe that the reason for all these wives and concubines wasn’t sex? King Rehoboam has 18 wives and 60 concubines, 28 sons and 60 daughters. II Chron. 11:21. King Abijah has 14 wives, 22 sons, 16 daughters. II Chron. 13:21.

 

• Kinky! – According to the bible, infidelity is ok for certain people on certain occasions. Many men in the bible have multiple wives and many concubines. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, who is barren, gives her maid Hagar to her husband so they might have a son (Ishmael). Gen 16:1-4.

 

• Incest is the Best – There are nineteen specific cases of incest in the bible, not counting necessary shenanigans of Cain and Seth and starting with Abraham’s marriage to his half sister Sarai. David’s son, Amnon, pretends to be ill so his sister, Tamar, will tend to him and he can make a move on her. And this is following the advice of a friend (II Sam. 13). And don’t forget that Lot’s two virgin daughters get him drunk in order to have sex with him in order to produce an heir. Gen 19:32, 36 “Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.” This is neither punished nor even referred to in a disapproving manner. Gen. 38 describes the events of Judah’s daughter in law Tamar, who pretends to be a harlot to have sex with him. She conceives twins.

 

• SLUT! – II Sam. 13 – David’s son Amnon has desires for his sister, Tamar. His friend suggests he act sick and have her treat him so he can make a move on her. Amnon follows this advice and ends up raping Tamar. Afterward he hates her and sends her away.

 

• Women Were Valued For Only One Thing – Women were expected to have only one sexual partner in life whereas men could have plural marriage and concubines.

 

• If God Wants You To F**K Someone, You Do It! – Gen. 38 – Onan refuses to have sex with his dead brother’s widow so God kills him. ALWAYS screw who God asks you to, dummy.

 

• How Dare You Allow Yourselves To Be Used For Sex! – When David’s son, Absalom, sexually uses David’s concubines (the nerve!), David punishes the concubines by imprisoning them for life. II Sam. 16:22 and 20:3.

 

• You Know, You’re Not As Hot As I Thought – Deut. 22:21 – If after consummating the wedding night, the groom were to go to the brides parents & claim she was not a virgin and the parents were unable to produce evidence (blood stained sheets) to dispute his claim, the bride must be brought to the door of her father’s house, “…and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die.” How many men, who unhappy with the choice of a wife, made this claim to free themselves from an unwanted marriage.

 

• As Usual, In Religion It’s All About The Sex – Deut. 21:11-14 – Describes how the conqueror should take women amongst the captives to have sex with and if they don’t want to stay with you after, to send them on their way. “And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and thou hast a desire unto her, and wouldest take her to thee to wife; then thou shalt bring her home to thy house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; and she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thy house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not deal with her as a slave, because thou hast humbled her.” Where would a captive, divorced, possibly widowed ‘slave wife’, no longer a virgin if she was before, go exactly? Where would she be welcome?

  

• Make Some Noise Ladies! Or Die! – Deut. 22:23, 24 – States that if a betrothed virgin is raped in the city and is not heard to cry out, she shall be stoned to death.

 

• All Sex Is Unclean – Under Mosaic Law sexual relations are unclean. Paul was especially against the sex act, “…it is good for a man not to touch a woman … I say therefore to the unmarried and widows; It is good for them, if they abide even as I … Now, concerning virgins … I say it is good for a man so to be … Art thou bound unto a wife? seek not to be loosed. Art thou loosed from a wife? seek not a wife..” I Cor. 7 It’s Understandable why he would think that sex was unclean, just think about how rarely anyone bathed back then. Yuk! I agree with Paul.

 

• More abuse at the hands of God – God punishes David for his misconduct with Bathsheba by giving his wives to his neighbor to have sex with them. “Thus saith the Lord, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house; and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbor, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.” II Sam. 12:11. On top of this God is clearly condoning polygamy. He clearly never condemns it or speaks ill of it.

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

NOAH AND THE ARK

 

The Bible is “what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach.” – Voltaire

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the NOAH AND THE ARK link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

 

• Luck They All Had Such Good Taste In Women – God so despised (so much for ‘good’) the offspring of the first nine generations of his creation he decided to not only kill them all (why bother with trying to save them?) but to kill every other living thing upon the face of the earth! No exception was made for children, pregnant women or even babies. Only Noah, his three sons and their four wives were spared. How convenient that Noah and his sons had such perfect taste in women.

 

• Did God Cause The Worlds First Abortions? – In the time it took Noah to gather up all the animals (7 of every ‘clean’ beast & 2 of every ‘unclean’ beast & 7 of every fowl of both sexes (14 each) , and a male & female of every ‘creeping thing’) and construct the ark (even working with his sons and the wives it would have taken years), how many women became pregnant? How many gave birth? How many babies did God murder with the flood?

 

• No Concern For Friends And Loved Ones? – How is it neither Noah, his sons, nor their wives were at all concerned about worshiping and blindly obeying a God (really Noah as he was the only one in direct communication) who was determined to kill all their friends and family? Did they all really believe everyone they knew deserved to be murdered?

 

• Where’s A Sears When You Need One? – The tools required to build such a large vessel (100? times larger than any built at the time) didn’t exist at the time.

 

• Simply Not Enough Trees For Such A Vessel – The lumber required to build such a large vessel (500ft long, 85ft wide, 60ft & 3 stories high) wasn’t readily available & would have been VERY expensive. Gen 6:15 – “…The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.” The size is the equivalent of 522 standard stock cars or 8 freight trains of 65 cars each.

 

• Um, is the water supposed to be coming through the windows? – The weight of the ark, filled to capacity with animals, food and supplies would result in a non-buoyant vessel.

 

• Origin of the Species – How did all these species of animals migrate across numerous foreign continents in their return home after the flood and yet leave no trace behind? The fossil record should basically show that all species originated wherever the Ark landed (Turkey).

 

• And Two of Every Parasite? – How did Noah keep the birds from eating all the insects? And what about the parasites they (and the other animals) carried? Do those count for the two of each living thing?

 

• The Crew of The Ark – It would have been impossible for Noah, his wife, his three sons and their three wives, (8 people total) to both crew the vessel and care for and feed and clean up after all the animals.

 

• Did God Provide The Blue Prints Too? – Only an expert ship builder could hope to construct a vessel never before imagined and hope to make it sea worthy.

 

• The Big Question – Why all the trouble? Again, why didn’t God just snap his almighty fingers and poof there is the ark and snap all the animals are on board? Did he want to sit and stew in his anger while Noah and his sons attempted to obey his command. And better yet, why not just snap his almighty fingers and all the bad people just drop dead or disappear in a puff of smoke? Why the need to kill every living thing?

 

• Pity The Fool Who Had To Wrangle The Brown Recluse – Insects must have been included (creeping things maybe) in the to be saved list, otherwise the majority would have drowned.

 

• No Room For Fish? – Were all fish excluded? What happened to the fresh water fish when the seas rose and mixed with their water? And vice versa?

 

• The Story of Noah’s Ark (Or How To Guarantee The Extinction of All Life) – As any zoologist will tell you, a male and female of any species aren’t necessarily compatible as mates and there is no guarantee if they were that they could produce an offspring.

 

• The Big Question (AGAIN) – And in case any believer suggests at any point that God interfered in order to guarantee his plan worked out (i.e. all animals mated and produced offspring, never attacked one another, no sickness on board) I again ask why not just snap his almighty fingers and make all the offending humans fall dead? I mean if he is going to use his infinite powers to take part in the great plan, why not that?

 

• Such A Drama Queen! – How many ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’ beasts are carnivores? How about the 14 of each fowl? And the creeping things? How many extra animals were brought on board to feed them? Or did God once again conveniently interfere to make the lions herbivores for the duration of the voyage? And if God is going to interfere at all, why not just strike down all those who truly deserved to die instead of murdering the whole world?

 

• Just How Long After The Flood Were Lions Vegans? – And what about after the voyage? What did all the carnivores eat then? How many generations of animals would have to be born before they could all safely start preying on one another again?

 

• Glad God Picked You, Noah – Noah, one of only 8 people on earth God deems worthy of sparing his wrath, at one point lies about naked and is spied on by his son, Ham. He gets drunk from wine of his own vineyard. How long does it take to get a vineyard going? How much priority was given to creating wine when they needed to repopulate and regrow the entire world? Gen. 9

 

• After the Flood, Only Death and Disease – After the waters receded the whole of the earth would have been covered in rot and death. Disease would have been unavoidable.

 

• Pork too? – After the flood, of the few remaining animals left on earth, God tells Noah, “…every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.” Gen. 9:3 How quickly would each species become extinct if such an occurrence had actually taken place? And what happened to kosher?

 

• Every Living Thing – “And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.” Gen 7:23 Please don’t suggest that fish, or whales, or plants survived God’s tantrum.

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

MARY – The Mother of God?

 

“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.” – Abraham Lincoln

 

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the MARY link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

  

• The immaculate conception was a lie – Only Matthew and Luke claim that Mary was a virgin when she conceived. The rest of the New Testament ignore that fact and even deny it. Clearly Matthew and Luke were of the belief that anything to do with sex was dirty and couldn’t have the son of God created in this way. There is no explanation as to why or how Matthew & Luke came to this conclusion and no one else even mentions it. Wouldn’t this have been a huge miracle that everyone would have mentioned on a regular basis when defending/supporting Jesus? And Matthew doesn’t mention telling Mary, only Joseph is told, and only as he is considering putting her away privately (whatever that means) for being pregnant before he had had sex with her. But Luke states that an angel pre warns Mary even before God ‘visits’ her.

 

• Just when did they reveal their amazing secret (lie)? – Clearly neither Mary nor Joseph told anybody about Mary being pregnant before sleeping with Joseph because no one would have believed him and she would have been stoned to death. Just when did they reveal this to others?

 

• Why was the purification ritual necessary for Mary? – If Mary’s conception was indeed ‘immaculate’ and she wasn’t defiled by the act as with regular sex, then why did she have to go through the purification rituals of the law of Moses as stated in Luke 2:22 – “And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished…” And also the 40 days of cleaning rituals after Jesus’ birth.

 

• Why Neglect Jesus – Why do Catholics hold Mary in such high regard when Jesus held her in such low regard?

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

THE TRUTH ABOUT JESUS CHRIST

 

“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.” – Robert Heinlein

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the JESUS H. CHRIST link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

  

• Why do Christians have such a high opinion of this guy? – Matt 15:22-28 – Describes an encounter between Jesus and a Gentile woman who begs him to heal her daughter. Jesus ignores the woman. She persists and he finally says to her, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is not meet to take the children’s (Jews) bread and to cast it to dogs (Gentiles).” Woman won’t give up and eventually Jesus finally relents and heals the child. Christians want us to worship a God who refused to heal an innocent child until he was pressured into it. Wow.

 

• How conveeeeeeenient – How convenient that almost (maybe all) all demons cast out of someone by Jesus immediately identify him as the son of God (for the benefit of those witnessing the spectacle). Luke 8, Luke 4:41, Mark 3:11, Mark 1:23 – 28…
• How conveeeeeeenient II – Malachi’s prophecy that told of the arrival of the Messiah clearly states that Elias (Elijah) would return before the Messiah does. When Jesus is confronted with this fact he states that Elias did come … but no one noticed. Matt 17:12. Simple enough! I guess we’ll just have to take his word for it. It’s not like he could have an ulterior motive or anything. He even tries to pass off the identity of Elias onto John the Baptist to help cement him as the Messiah but John denies that he is Elias. John 1:20, 21.

 

• Jesus was a bigot – Matt 10:5, 6 – depicts Jesus instructing his workers to go out and spread his word, but only to the Jews. “Go not into the way of the Gentiles … but rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”

 

• Not really the welcome I was expecting, guys – In Luke 24:37 when Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the eleven apostles, they are terrified. Didn’t they know he would be returning? How little faith did they have in their own Messiah? Why so little preparation for his return? Most of Jesus’ followers just went back to life as normal or went into hiding. Lazarus’ return from the dead was met with more enthusiasm.

 

• Was Jesus cool with animal sacrifice? – The people Jesus so dramatically drove from the temple were merchants who sold doves for the sacrifices people regularly made there. Yet Jesus never condemns the sacrifices themselves.

 

• What’s with this guy? – Matthew 10:35, 36 – What is Jesus’ deal? “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” These are Jesus’ words.

 

• As with all religions, at its core, it’s all about sex – Matt 25:1-13 – Jesus tells an allegory explaining how everyone must be prepared for his arrival at the end of the world: He tells of ten virgins (of course) awaiting their one bridegroom, but five forget to bring extra oil for the lamps and run out to get some. While they are away, the bridegroom arrives. When the virgins return to a locked door they implore him to open to them. He replies, “Verily I say unto you, I know you not.” This story is creepy not because it reflects the exclusive quality of Christianity, but for its depiction of ten virgins for one bridegroom.

 

• Sorry, I didn’t recognize you Penis, er, I mean, Jesus – What did Jesus wear upon resurrection? He was in his same body but Luke 24:12 clearly says his grave clothes were left behind. Yet when he shows up with the apostles, he makes no mention of clothes nor do they. Is he naked?

 

• Hey, aren’t you that Messiah fella? – If Jesus was so popular, why then did he need to be identified by Judas in the garden of Gethsemane?

 

• Jesus wasn’t even the best Messiah – Considering the number of people claiming to be Messiah back then, it would have been nice if there could have been just a few unbiased witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection and ascension. After all, one ‘false’ Messiah had 400 followers when he was executed, that’s 280 more than Jesus had.

 

• Jesus is kind of a dick – Luke 9:59-62 – depicts Jesus recruiting his disciples. When one asks if he can bury his recently deceased father, Jesus says, “Let the dead bury the dead.” And when another wishes to say farewell to his family back home, Jesus says, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the Kingdom of God.” In Matt 4:21, 22 two other disciples are forced to leave their father to mend the fishing nets by himself.

 

• What happened to Honour thy father and thy mother – John 2: 1-4 – Jesus to his mother, “Woman, what have I to do with thee?”

 

• Please Jesus, chop it off – Matt 19:12 – reminds us that sex with women is unholy and Jesus gives extra commendation to eunuchs, especially those who castrate themselves.

 

• Jesus: Not an Environmentalist – Matt 21:19 & Mark 11:13 – When Jesus gets hungry & finds a fig tree bearing no fruit, the reason being that it’s out of season, he curses it. “Let no fruit grow on thee henceforth forever.” The tree withers away on the spot. No one is with Jesus at the time so we’ll just have to take his word for it.

 

• Jesus, so full of love and kindness – Matt 11:20-23 – Jesus damns whole cities to hell. “Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto thee, Bethsaida! … And thou, Capernaum … shalt be brought down to hell.”

 

• Check out the big ego on Jesus – Matt 12:6 – “In this place is one greater than the Temple.” Matt 12:41 – “Behold, a greater than Jonas is here.” Matt 12:42 – “Behold, a greater than Soloman is here.”

  

• Do as I say, not as I do – In Matt 5:22 Jesus says not to call anyone a fool but in Matt 23:17 he says of the Pharisees, “Ye fools and blind.” Matt 23:33 – “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?” Matt 12:34 – “O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things?”

 

• Fools for taking Jesus at his word – Luke 21:32 – Jesus, speaking of the second coming –“Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass away, till all be fulfilled.” The Apostles actually believed they would be the first occupants of heaven from the rapture, not as a result of death. How could they have been so wrong?

 

• Not even an original Messiah – Every one of Jesus’ so called miracles was preformed by another non Messiah in the bible before and/or after him.

 

• Another odd choice – Why does Jesus choose Peter to be the foundation/cornerstone of the church when Peter earlier famously lies and denies Christ three times and later frightens two early converts to death over the matter of a few coins? And Jesus calls Peter ‘Satan’ at one point. Matt. 16:18, 23, Acts 5, Matt. 26:69-75.

 

• Jesus: Not a member of PETA – Jesus casts a horde of demons out of a couple of protesters (because they must be possessed if they don’t dig the Messiah) and per the demons wishes, casts them into a herd of 2,000 pigs. The pigs then run violently into the sea and die. That herd must have been of great value to he who owned them but Jesus does not compensate this person. Besides, to eat swine they must have been Gentiles, so fuck ‘em! Matt. 8:28-33 and Mark 5:13.

 

• Some of the ridiculous teachings/commands of Jesus: Accumulate no wealth; turn the other cheek; judge no ones behavior; don’t use your mind but be as children; do not question or philosophize; love those who mistreat you; avoid associating with the ‘dogs’ (Gentiles) of this world; sell all your possessions and give it to the poor (now you’re poor! Hoorah!); have no thought for the morrow (make no plans); everything you do and have is probably a sin; take no pleasure in this world; love those who treat you cruelly as much as those that are kind to you; mutilate yourself; be 100% certain Jesus bought your way into heaven through his torturous death; if the sight of someone of the opposite sexually arouses you, pluck out your eye; for special approval with God, become a eunuch; Servants, obey your masters; citizens, obey your rulers unquestioningly; children, obey your parents in all things; love your enemies; abandon your family and be rewarded in heaven; do not assert yourself; do not achieve prominence in this world, for the first shall be the last in heaven; if a criminal robs you of $50.00, give him another $50.00; etc. (By the way, how can love be a command? Love is an emotional response and can not be controlled.)

 

• Bad Career move  – John 21 – describes how after Jesus’ resurrection, some disciples go back to their fishing jobs but somehow have totally forgotten how to do it. It takes Jesus telling them to toss their nets off the other side of their boats for them to catch anything. They catch so many (153) that they can’t haul up their nets (thanks a bunch, Jesus!). In the bible this suggestion is treated as another of Jesus’ miracles.

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

IN THE BEGINNING

 

“A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.” – James Feibleman

 **This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as not to confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is click the IN THE BEGINNING link in the categories section at the top right of my main page and scroll down. You will find the original, individual posts. Click on one and read any comments and responses there.

  

• What light through yonder window breaks? – On the first day God separated the light to rule the day & the lesser light to rule the night, also the stars. Gen 1:16. And yet the sun, moon and stars aren’t set into the formation until the fourth day.

 

• Define Good – God declares everything is ‘good’. Does that mean good = deserts, swamps, frozen wastelands, germs, viruses, bacteria, beasts of prey, leeches, hornets, poisonous snakes & spiders, tsetse flies, fire ants, plague carrying rats, malaria bearing mosquitoes, extreme climates, storms, floods, earthquakes & volcanoes?

 

• How can the innocent sin? – Adam & Eve are deemed the first sinners. How can anyone who doesn’t know right from wrong be expected to practice obedience? How can the innocent sin?

 

• God is NOT a member of PETA – To help Adam & Eve hide their shame (their nakedness) God fashions skins for them to wear. Does he kill the animals he has just created just for their skins (fur)? Does he sew? Does he teach them to sew? What do they use? Bone and pig gut? So God is pro fur then?

 

• Always the innocent suffer – After the devil deceives Eve, God, in all his infinite wisdom, punishes the serpent that the devil disguised himself as. God’s punishment is to have it crawl upon its belly from that day forward. Are we to believe a serpent was a legged animal before this point? Just how many legs would be required for a snake to get along? Are there any records of any mammal or reptile (non insect) ever with more than four legs?

 

• A bloodthirsty God – Clearly God is not a vegetarian. His disdain for the ‘fruit of the ground’ resulted in the first murder, by the first offspring, by his very first creation. Didn’t he judge all his creation ‘good’? What kind of being could only be appeased by blood shed? Why did an innocent animal have to be slaughtered to satisfy God’s bloodthirst? How many lives, both animal and human, were lost in order to appease God’s need for bloodshed?

 

• You can’t blame the parents – What kind of parents were Adam and Eve if their first son becomes a killer? Could they really be expected to have done any better? Cast out by a thoughtless, heartless, vengeful, evil God for being too innocent to see through the deceptions of a being almost as powerful as God himself, left to fend for themselves with little or no guidance from their creator (we didn’t ask to be created, you know!), it’s no surprise they did such a piss poor job.

 

• Who were these companions of God? – As revealed in Gen 1:26 & Gen 3:22 God had companions in the ‘nowhere’ he existed in before he created everything. If not angels, who were they?

 

• Flawed from the start – A ‘vast’ number of angels side with Satan in the rebellion in heaven. Matt 25:41. Why is it, that even before the earth and humanity is created, already those who know God are dissatisfied with him?

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

BIBLICAL INCONSISTENCIES

 

“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.” – Albert Einstein

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as to not confuse anybody. Also, if you wish to review any past comments all you need to do is scroll down and click the original individual post titles located just below this one.

  

• I see you! No you don’t! Ex 33:20 –“Thou canst not see my face, for there shall be no man see me and live.” AND John 6:46 – “Not that any man hath seen the Father.” Jesus is speaking. BUT THEN Ex 33:11 – “The Lord spake unto Moses face to face.” And Jacob claimed, “For I have seen God face to face & my life is preserved.” Gen 32:30. AND DON’T FORGET Deut 34:10 – “And there arose not a prophet since in Israel like unto Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.”

 

• Who and how many? John 10:30 – “I and my Father are one.” (Jesus’s words). John 14:9 – “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” John 17:22 – “…even as we are one.” (Jesus’s words). AND THEN – John 14:28 – “My Father is greater than I.” (Jesus’s words). Luke 18:19 – “And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? None is good, save one, that is, God.”

 

• Jesus can’t be the Messiah – If Jesus is the son of God and Joseph’s seed had nothing to do with his creation (Mary was a virgin after all), then he isn’t Joseph’s son and is not of the line of David which is a requirement of being the Messiah.

 

• Stop confusing the two – Luke is the only book to mention the angel of the Lord visiting any shepherds to tell them of Jesus’ birth. And only Matthew mentions the ‘wise men’. There is absolutely no evidence that the shepherds and the wise men are the same people.

 

• Why can’t anyone agree on such an amazing event? – Matthew, Mark and Luke mention the following events at the crucifixion: the veil of the temple being rent and it becoming dark from the sixth to the ninth hour, however only Matthew mentions that there was an earthquake, and the graves opened and bodies of the saints arose and went into Jerusalem, appearing to many (so beating Jesus to the resurrection). Only John speaks of Jesus’ side being pierced.

 

• Jesus, such an inapropriately shy guy – Only Matthew mentions that the Jews asked Pilate for a guard to prevent the body of Jesus from being stolen by the disciples, and for the tomb to be sealed. No wonder the Jews don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah. Considering Jesus made no appearances to any who wasn’t already a believer after his ‘resurrection’, the Jews who believed the disciples would try and steal the body must have believed that is exactly what occurred.

 

• An Inconsistant Resurrection – Matthew says that there was an earthquake at Jesus’ tomb and an angel came down, rolled back the stone and sat upon it, then spoke to Mary Magdalene and Mary, mother of Jesus. Then Jesus appears and they go to tell the disciples. Mark says that the women who visited the tomb found the stone rolled away, entered the tomb and saw an angel sitting on the right side. The angel speaks to them and Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene. Luke says the women found the stone rolled away and entered the tomb. Two angels appeared to them. John says Mary Magdalene found the stone rolled away and told Peter and John, who went to the tomb and entered it. Mary stooped down and looked into the tomb, sees two angels, one at the head and one at the feet. They spoke to her. Jesus the appeared to her, but she fails to recognize him at first!

 

• Does any of this make a lick of sense to anyone? – Whom Jesus appeared to after the resurrection once again differs depending on the book. Matthew says an angel at the tomb told the two Marys, and that Jesus also told them, to tell the disciples to meet him in Galilee (thank God they were there). The disciples then went to a mountain previously agreed upon, and met Jesus there. This would be Jesus’ only appearance, except to the two Marys. Matthew devotes only five verses to this visit with the disciples. Mark says that Jesus walked with two of the disciples in the country, and that they told the rest of the disciples, who refused to believe. Later he appeared to the eleven disciples at mealtime. Luke says two followers went, the same day that Jesus rose from the dead, to Emmaus, a village eight miles from Jerusalem, and there Jesus joined them but was unrecognized. It wasn’t until later, while eating a meal together that they recognize Jesus, who then promptly disappears. Returning with impossible haste back to Jerusalem, they told the disciples their experience, and suddenly Jesus appeared among them, frightening them. Jesus then eats and preaches to them. John says Jesus appeared to the disciples the evening of the day he arose, in Jerusalem, where they were hiding. He breathed the Holy Ghost upon them (?), but Thomas was not present and refused to believe. Eight days later Jesus joined the disciples again at the same place, and this time he convinced Thomas. Once more Jesus made an appearance to the disciples at the sea of Tiberias but again was not recognized. After telling them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat, Jesus becomes known to them and prepares bread and fish for them. They all eat together as they converse.

 

• I’m sorry but you’re not on the list – Both Paul and Peter claim that none who lived between Moses and Christ are eligible for everlasting life AND YET, Jesus says, “When ye shall see Abraham and Isaac, and Jacob and all the prophets, in the Kingdom of God…” Luke 13:28.

 

• Why the big hurry? – Mark 16:19 – In Mark Jesus rises from the dead, gets everything done and ascends into heaven all in one day.

 

• Why are there armys of God at all? – II Kings 19:35 – Why does God need men to die fighting his battles at all if he can send an angel, who in one night, kills 185,000 Assyrians who are threatening Jerusalem?

 

• We may need a judge’s ruling on this one – Lev 19:15 God says, “In righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor.” But in Matt 7:1 Jesus says, “…judge not that ye be not judged.”

 

• Yes, but it doesn’t say impossible! – Prov 18:11 “The rich man’s wealth is his strongest city.” But in Mark 10:25 Jesus teaches, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.”

 

• Here forever, gone tomorrow – Eccles. 1:4 – “The earth abideth forever.”  But in II Peter 3:10 – “The earth … and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

 

• Keep it holy, unless the game’s on – Ex 20:8 – “Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.” But in Romans 14:5 Paul equivocates: “One man esteemeth one day above another: another esteemeth every day alike. Let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind.”

 

• Don’t forget to turn the other cheek before you pluck out his eye – Ex 21:24 – “An eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But in Matt 5:38, 39 Jesus says to turn the other cheek.

 

• Sunday, Bloody Sunday – Ex 20:13 – “Thou shalt not kill.” Relayed by Moses, a murderer. He would also mastermind the slaughter of thousands during the long march to reach Palestine. And not long after laying down this holy law, in Ex 32:27 Moses ordered: “Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Put every man his sword by his side, and go in and out from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.” And in Luke 22:36 even Jesus said, “… and he that hath no sword, let him sell his garment, and buy one.” What is a sword for but to kill another?

 

• Should a sinner never procreate then? – Ez 18:20 – “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father…” But God told Moses in Ex 20:5: “…for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation…”

 

• God is Love … Unless you piss him off! – Jer 17:4 – “…for ye have kindled a fire in mine anger, which shall burn for ever.” These are God’s words. But in I John 4:16 “God is love.”

 

• Mercy, mercy me – I Sam 15:2, 3 – “Thus saith the Lord … Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” AND Ex 12:29 – “And it came to pass, that at midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the firstborn of cattle.” Oh, but James 5:11 – “…that the Lord is very pitiful, and of tender mercy.” People who abhor the killing of babies sing praises to this author of wholesale bloodshed against them.

 

• It’s all about the bloodshed, baby – In Romans 15:33 Paul speaks of “…the god of Peace.” And Christians refer to Jesus as the Prince of Peace. But Jesus himself said in Matt 10:34 – “…I came not to send peace, but a sword.” And in the Old Ex 15:3, God is described thusly, “The Lord is a man of war”

 

• It was the Aliens I tell ya! – Both Elijah (II Kings 2:11) and Enoch (Gen 5:24) were taken bodily into heaven but Jesus claims this distinction only for himself in John 3:13 – “And no man hath ascended up to heaven, but he that came down from heaven, even the Son of man which is in heaven.”

 

• Depends on who you ask, I guess – In Matthew 5:32 that a man may divorce his wife for ‘fornication’. But in Luke and Mark Jesus says divorce is not permitted for any reason and, “Whosoever putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery; and whosoever marrieth her that is put away from her husband committeth adultery.” Luke 16:18.

 

• Vampirism – The Old Testament God made a covenant with Noah and Abraham that the eating of blood would not be part of the Jewish diet, but Jesus offers his blood symbolically to be drunk by the disciples during the Last Supper. The Catholics actually believe the ceremonial wine they drink ‘becomes’ the blood of Jesus upon consumption.

 

• Make room for the Gentile ‘dogs’ – The bible makes it very clear that only the Jews are the chosen people, Jesus even calls Gentiles “dogs”. But in Romans 2:10 it says God will give “glory, honor and peace to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile.” So the Gentile is welcome, but needs to know their place (beneath the Jew).

 

• Paul: Writer of his own rules – According to Paul, “Where there is no law (before Moses) there is no transgression.” Romans 4:15. So God killed all those people for nothing then? Certainly Adam and Eve were punished before any law was laid down.

 

• Are these guys two different people or something? – Paul’s ‘biography’ is outlined in Acts and his ‘autobiography’ is written in Galatians. They are completely contradictory.

 

• The Son of God, NOT the Son of Joseph – When listing the ancestry of Jesus (which should only be one: God), Matthew compromises 28 generations and Luke lists 43. Only David, Joseph, Salathiel and Zorobabel appear in both lists. Jesus is simply not an ancestor of David as Joseph’s seed had nothing to do with his creation. Therefore, Jesus could not be the Messiah. AND YET, Jesus states in Rev. 22:16 “I am the root and the offspring of David.”

 

• What? No one had a watch? – The time of the crucifixion is reported in Mark as the third hour (9am) but in John it is the sixth hour (noon).

 

• So they couldn’t tell time either? – The time of the resurrection, according to Matthew, was Sunday at dawn, and in Mark the sun was rising, and in John it was dark.

 

• Same event, SO many different versions – According to Matthew, those witnessing the crucifixion are: many afar off, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and the mother of Zebedee’s children. But Mark and Luke tell of many afar off, Mark includes Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James the Less. John states Jesus’ mother stood at the cross, along with her sister and Mary Magdalene.

 

• Was there a guard or not? – Only the book of Matthew depicts a request for a guard to be placed at the door to Jesus’ tomb and for it to be sealed.

 

• More evidence that the bible can’t be relied on – Those who visit the tomb, according to Matthew, the two Marys. Mark says it was the two Marys, Joses and Salome. Luke says the two Marys, Joanna, other women and Peter. John says Mary Magdalene alone (!?), and later Peter and John.

 

• Yeah, that makes sense – In the book of Matthew it says the guard at the tomb of Jesus was paid to tell everyone that the disciples stole Jesus’ body. No other Gospel mentions this. So let me understand, the guard requested by the Jews, who believed the disciples were going to steal Jesus’ body, and assigned by Pilate to guard Jesus’ tomb, claims to have witnessed the disciples stealing Jesus’ body just as the Jews had feared would occur and that Jesus wasn’t in fact resurrected from the dead and Matthew quickly explains that, oh yeah, he was paid to say that.

 

• The Inconsistincies of The Ascension – Matthew & John do not mention the ascension of Jesus into heaven at all. Mark casually states Jesus was received into heaven after talking to the disciples in Jerusalem. Luke says Jesus led the disciples to Bethany and while he blessed them, he was parted from them and carried up into heaven. Such a significant event and yet treated so off-hand and perfunctory and only two of the apostles mention it and they can’t agree on the location. But then Acts contradicts all four stating that Jesus visited the apostles for forty days and “…while they beheld, he was taken up: and a cloud received him out of their sight.” Acts 1:3-11. AND Paul states 500 people saw Jesus, even claiming he (Paul) saw him. I Cor. 15:6, 8. AND it reveals the primitive way the writers of the bible thought. WHERE DID THEY THINK HEAVEN WAS? Floating on some cloud somewhere so Jesus could just glide on up and come in for a perfect landing on an airstrip made of gold?

 

• Why doesn’t the math in the bible EVER add up? – According to Matthew there were 63 generations between Adam and Jesus. How can this be if men such as Adam (930 years) and Methuselah (969 years) lived so long? And did any women live that long? If not, why not? Is that why men had so many wives and concubines?

 

• NEW vs. OLD (different religions, different gods) – The Old and New Testaments seem to represent two different religions and two different gods. The God of the Old is all about the Jews and the Gentiles (non Jews) are basically doomed. The God of the New basically reverses this, even consigning his former favorites to burn in hell for continuing to trust in the ‘Old Promise’. AND if one believes the words of Joseph Smith (Mormonism) then God changes his mind once again (and in a pretty drastic way, at that), the same of one who believes in Mohammed’s words.

 

• The Two Gods of the Bible – God of the Old Testament would enact great and immediate revenge on those who opposed him or challenged him. The New Testament God, by comparison, is practically impotent. Are people aware that the reason the old and new testament are usually separate books is because they represent two different religions and two different gods?

 

• I need a little clarification here – John 3:36 says only belief on Jesus is necessary to get into heaven but James 2:26 says “…Faith without works is dead.” suggesting that more than just belief in Jesus is required. So which is it?

 

• Incest is best … or not – Why is incest or brothers having sex with brother’s widows etc depicted in the bible but in Lev. 18:6, 9, 15, 16, 20 it clearly says it is a no-no? “None of you shall approach to any that is near of kin to him, to uncover their nakedness:… The nakedness of thy sister, the daughter of thy father, or daughter of thy mother, whether she be born at home, or born abroad, even their nakedness thou shalt not uncover … Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she is thy son’s wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness … Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness … Moreover thou shalt not lie carnally with thy neighbour’s wife, to defile thyself with her.”

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

ANGELS

 

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” – Susan Brownell Anthony

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as to not confuse any body. Also, if you wish to review any past comments please click on the comment archive link just beneath this post (or just click here).

  

• All I need is one provable sighting to renew my faith – Why are angels so commonly seen and interacted with and active in the bible but now … nothing but empty claims?

 

• Were/are the angels minorgods? – The angels seem to be gods themselves. They are powerful and, like God, they existed before the earth’s creation, some even rising up against God in a rebellion. The bible seems to suggest there were many gods and God was either just the most powerful or simply the first to act to take charge.

 

• And you are? – Judges 13:16 – “For Manoah knew not that he was an angel of the Lord.” Why do people sometimes not recognize an angel for what it is?

 

• Was the earth really created to hold the cast out angels? – Matt 25:41 – has Jesus declaring that hell was prepared for the Devil & his angels. And just when did God prepare hell for Satan & his host if Satan & the other angels rebelled and were cast out before earth was created.

 

• When to send in the muscle – II Kings 19:35 – depicts an Angel who kills 185,000 Assyrians overnight, all by himself. Why didn’t God just always put the Angels to work in this manner? Why the dramatics with Sodom and Gomorrah and the Flood? Why all the God started wars and invasions? If Satan and all the other Angels that stood with him were all as powerful as this Angel, what must the rebellion in heaven been like? Are angels gods? In any other religion they would be.

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

ARCHIVED COMMENTS

 

 

 ARCHIVED COMMENTS FROM ORIGINAL POST(S) —ANGELS:

BLUE = ORIGINAL POST

BLACK = COMMENTS

 

 

* All I need is one provable sighting to renew my faith – Why are angels so commonly seen and interacted with and active in the bible but now … nothing but empty claims?

1.

mjdcrx Says:
January 10, 2008 at 2:13 am e

When an angel is seen in the Bible, it is usually to perpetuate the spreading of God’s message (be it a prophetic message, or a message to a single person). The one time that angels were so widely discussed in the Bible was with the siting of the two angels by the two women delivering spices to the tomb after Jesus’ death. Even then, the two women spread the word of the angelic site only to the Eleven apostles and the others (an unknown number, but in a time of hiding and mourning, it couldn’t be a ridiculous amount). The way angels work in the Bible has always been primarily quiet (save the few battles angels aided Israel in), and even today people proclaim to see angels, but have no solid proof. Did the people of the Old Testament have any physical proof? No – they had others to back up their claims. Inasmuch as we like to see physical proof for the existence of a creature, item, or whatever it is, angels are still active:
* Worship and praise – This is the main activity portrayed in heaven (Isaiah 6:1-3; Revelation 4-5).
* Revealing – They serve as messengers to communicate God’s will to men. They helped reveal the law to Moses (Acts 7:52-53), and served as the carriers of much of the material in Daniel, and Revelation.
* Guiding – Angels gave instructions to Joseph about the birth of Jesus (Matthew 1-2), to the women at the tomb, to Philip (Acts 8:26), and to Cornelius (Acts 10:1-8).
* Providing – God has used angels to provide physical needs such as food for Hagar (Genesis 21:17-20), Elijah (1 Kings 19:6), and Christ after His temptation (Matthew 4:11).
* Protecting – Keeping God’s people out of physical danger, as in the cases of Daniel and the lions, and his three friends in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3 and 6).
* Delivering – Getting God’s people out of danger once they’re in it. Angels released the apostles from prison in Acts 5, and repeated the process for Peter in Acts 12.
* Strengthening and encouraging – Angels strengthened Jesus after His temptation (Matt 4:11), encouraged the apostles to keep preaching after releasing them from prison (Acts 5:19-20), and told Paul that everyone on his ship would survive the impending shipwreck (Acts 27:23-25).
* Answering prayer – God often uses angels as His means of answering the prayers of His people (Daniel 9:20-24; 10:10-12; Acts 12:1-17).
* Caring for believers at the moment of death – In the story of Lazarus and the rich man, we read that angels carried the spirit of Lazarus to “Abraham’s bosom” when he died (Luke 16:22).

So to say that angels, right-off-the-bat, are “nothing but empty claims,” is erroneous. Angels serve a purpose still today, but due to a severe amount skepticism today (“We Want Proof!” (Some may not even believe with proof!: Luke 16:31)), it is highly probable that people may just stop reporting angelic sitings for fear of being rebuked as a Bible-Thumper or a Loon.

Good Talking to you again!

~~mike

2.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 10, 2008 at 3:14 am e

Mike, I have a MAJOR problem with your focus on the New Testament’s depiction of angels. Please review the rest of my site to be reminded of the behavior of angels as depicted in the Old Testament (Especially Lot’s harboring of two angels, see post here https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2007/12/16/great-guy-horrible-father/). That is, unless you belong to a sect of Christianity that doesn’t believe the Old Testament is legitimate. Please clarify this for me.

Thanks again for visiting my site. I continue to look forward to your comments.

3.

mjdcrx Says:
January 10, 2008 at 5:40 am e

I’ll take a look at it next time I have some time to sit down and read for an extended period (so be ready Friday for a debate >:P). And to my knowledge, I don’t belong to a sect of Christianity unless non-denominational counts? hehe.

Were/are the angels minorgods? – The angels seem to be gods themselves. They are powerful and, like God, they existed before the earth’s creation, some even rising up against God in a rebellion. The bible seems to suggest there were many gods and God was either just the most powerful or simply the first to act to take charge.

 

 1.

mary a. kaufman Says:
May 28, 2008 at 8:27 am e

The following isn’t all about angels, but it’s all I have at hand at the moment.

THREE TIMES AND YOU ARE OUT!

God is Good. God is love, or so believers say
and all who hear and doubt this ‘Truth’
are doomed to hell on Judgment Day.
In the Beginning there was God,
naught but God, and God, Alone.
If God is Good and God is Love
then surely Sin was yet unknown.
If God with Holy Powers made,
to keep Him company,
a Heavenly Host of Angels, Pure,
as sinless Pure as He
then How and When, then What and Who
caused Lucifer to fall from Place?
Who tempted him, as he is blamed
for Eve and Adam’s Fall from Grace?

Without the Devil’s Wily Schemes
we’re told that Eden still would be
the Realm of Man with Sin unknown,
with only Good for Thee and Me.
But Satan foiled God’s Plan for Earth,
but how was Satan tempted?

When once this earth has passed away
and Goats and Sheep are separating,
the How and When, the What and Who
will still be out THERE, waiting!

2.

mary a. kaufman Says:
May 28, 2008 at 8:41 am e

really, there should be a way to edit ones comments. I left out two important lines:
But Satan foiled God’s Plan for Earth
but how was Satan tempted?
Will Heaven see God’s plan perfected
and the Saved from Sin, exempted?

When once this World has passed away
and Goats and Sheep are separating,
The How and When, the What and Who
will still be out there waiting!

Can anyone disprove the existence of a How, When, What and Who, to tempt the angel Lucifer, who seems to have somehow metamorphosed into the Christian Devil

3.

JoshWink Says:
August 15, 2008 at 9:54 am e

Oh, Thanks! Really funny. Big ups!

 

* And you are? – Judges 13:16 – “For Manoah knew not that he was an angel of the Lord.” Why do people sometimes not recognize an angel for what it is?

 1.

billindetroit Says:
December 16, 2007 at 6:38 am e

Neither did Zecharaih or Mary. The reason being that they are not constrained to any particular form. Some present themselves as huge, others lower their armor so far as to wrestle with a man all night.

They identify themselves when the time comes … but it doesn’t come every time.

Why do people sometimes not recognize an undercover narcotics officer for what he is?

 

* Was the earth really created to hold the cast out angels? – Matt 25:41 – has Jesus declaring that hell was prepared for the Devil & his angels. And just when did God prepare hell for Satan & his host if Satan & the other angels rebelled and were cast out before earth was created.

 1.

bitterhermit Says:
January 10, 2008 at 4:39 pm e

Well, the most obvious answer is the one I use against evolutionists and creationsists alike on the whole creation issue: God is outside of time. Because he is outside of time, all things happen within one moment for him – a moment that takes eternity to unravel.
Buddhism offers a good visual imagery of this condition.
Here’s the part that I can’t wrap my mind around: if God is omnipresent, where is Hell? Hell is supposed to be a place absent of Him, thus making it an unbearable darkness of agony.
I wrote in a poem once, “Sermon on the Lawn” is the title, that God is an autistic child from the seventh dimension.
David

A Manipulative God

 

“When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.” – Robert M. Pirsig

**This post was recently revised to simplify things. It now contains all the separate posts together in one. When you wish to comment on a specific point please copy and paste it at the top of your comment so as to not confuse any body. Also, if you wish to review any past comments please click on the comment archive link just beneath this post (or just click here).  

 

• So Unnecessary – As a direct result of his own actions (curses, humankind born sinners, etc.) God must come to earth as a specimen of his own creation & cause himself to be put to a hideous death in order to redeem humanity from the condemnation which he himself imposed upon it. And don’t forget the resulting deaths for those who followed Jesus. 

 

• Voter Tampering – Romans 11:7, 8 – “What then, Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for, but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded according as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear.” Isn’t this voter tampering. This is a major crime now. 

 

• So vile, this god’s behaviour – Another example of how God manipulates man. In order to bring about his desired outcome (the death of King Ahab), I Kings 22:20-23 says, “And the Lord said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramothgilead? …And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will persuade him … I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he (God) said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so. Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee.” Now check this out – Ez. 14:9 “And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him.” Why not ‘stretch out’ your hand and destroy King Ahab? 

 

• Reign O’er Me – James 5:17 states that in answer to Elijah’s prayers, God made it not rain on earth for three years and six months! If this really happened, all life on earth would have come to an end, but perhaps those in the sea. As a result of God’s actions a great famine causes some Jews to eat their children.

 

• Quick, get an editor in here! In Josh. 10:12-14 Joshua, desiring a longer day for his armies, commands the sun and moon to stand still. And they do. Here the level of ignorance of the workings of the universe by those who wrote the stories of the bible is in evidence as the sun is already still. It is the earth itself that is moving. “So the sun stood still in the midst of the heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”

 

• Moon Light – Isaiah 13:10 – “The moon shall not cause her light to shine.” How can an all knowing God allow such ignorance of the world be depicted in His Holy Word?

 

• Hornets from God – Ex 23:28, 30 – Describes how God wanted Moses and the Jews to overrun & seize the seven nations of Canaan & how God would send hornets to drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite. Another example of God being directly involved. Why doesn’t he send swarms of hornets against the Palestinians in current Israel? 

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

ARCHIVED COMMENTS

  

 

ARCHIVED COMMENTS FROM ORIGINAL POST(S) —A MANIPULATIVE GOD:

 

BLUE = ORIGINAL POST

BLACK = COMMENTS

 

 

• So Unnecessary – As a direct result of his own actions (curses, humankind born sinners, etc.) God must come to earth as a specimen of his own creation & cause himself to be put to a hideous death in order to redeem humanity from the condemnation which he himself imposed upon it. And don’t forget the resulting deaths for those who followed Jesus.

 

 

bigham Says:
December 30, 2007 at 2:54 pm e

Hello,
Thank you for your comment on my blog. I would love for you to expand your thought process a little bit and to share what it is that you find laughable about my explanations.

I wanted to comment on your main page, but I guess that is not doable, so this comment is intended for what is there. I will try to get back and read more when I am able.

I would like to know what denomination you were “indoctrinated” in at an early age. I find a lot of problems with the Catholic denomination of Christianity, and have seen several Catholics who, like you, read the Bible and “de-convert” because of the differences between what they read in the Bible and what they see in Catholicism and learn in their Catholic school.

But, alas, more churches than not stray from the Bible more often than they stringently stick to it, so that issue is not monopolized by Catholics.

Also, I agree that it is wrong for parents to indoctrinate their children, IF they are not sufficiently convinced themselves. If the parents believe simply because they have been told and it sounds good, then they cannot and should not expect their children to believe for their whole lives simply because they tell their children that God, Jesus, and Christianity are true.

I personally believed simply because I had been told and it sounded good all the way through high school. However, when I was old enough to think for myself, my beliefs, which were based on other people, were not strong enough to withstand the barrage of temptation to which a young man is submitted.

So I became an unbeliever and was really going to have to be sufficiently convinced if I was going to go back to fighting the difficult battles that I had fought in my Christian youth.

Praise and honor and glory be to God, for He has convinced me that He is the Creator and Giver of all, and that He is just and good and loving and perfect; and that my sins, which are many, seperate me from Him and the perfection and righteousness that He demands; and that Jesus Christ, by His perfect life and death on the Cross and Resurrection is the King of the universe; and that I must submit to His authority in order to take hold of the eternal life to which I have been called.

You can read more about my re-conversion, if you like, at my blog.

Thanks again for the comment,
David

bigham Says:
December 30, 2007 at 2:57 pm e

On the Catholic thing, I meant to also say that a lot of people commit the error of association Catholicism with Christianity, such that Catholicism equals Christianity in their minds. If a person makes that association and finds flaws in Catholicism, which I believe there are many, then they see them as flaws with Christianity.

There are many flaws with Christians, but no flaws with Christianity or with Christ, who is the author and founder of our faith!

brooksrobinson Says:
December 30, 2007 at 6:12 pm e

God sent himself as a sin offering because there is no sacrifice that could cover sin, except a pure lamb (Jesus). Man put condemnation on themselves when Adam and Eve took the first fruit and spoiled the bloodline of humans to follow. God imposed rules and they violated them. Sin cannot be in the presence of God, therefore sinful beings as ourselves need something to bridge that separation sin causes, thus Jesus comes into the picture. Saying that God condemns us from a imposed sanction is like blaming the government for giving you a speeding ticket, going to jail, or something else to that affect for disobedience to the law.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 5, 2008 at 5:58 pm e

brooksrobinson: God set everything in motion. Got created Adam, Eve and the snake and gave them knowledge (how to move talk and so on) and personality’s and he put the tree of knowledge where Adam and Eve could get to it. If God had given the snake a different, less manipulative personality, made Adam and Eve less naive and put the tree of knowledge somewhere where they could not get to it than things would have tuned out different.
If God created everything than God set everything in motion and everything goes back to God, God is then the root cause of all the problems in the universe.
And can’t God do anything? If so than all he has to do is say “all is forgiven” and all is forgiven barbaric sacrifice needed.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 7, 2008 at 8:08 pm e

bigham appears to have taken off.
I hate it when they do that.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 8, 2008 at 8:51 am e

The simple point is, brooksrobinson, that a perfect god wouldn’t need a sacrifice of any kind. A perfect god wouldn’t create a situation where sin could exist. It could be argued that a perfect god COULDN’T create a situation where sin could exist. You state that sin can’t be in the presence of God, and yet, in another post, you state that God himself came down to Sodom and Gomorrah to see the sinners sinning up close and personal in order to verify that it was as bad as it appeared all the way up in heaven (apparently God needs glasses). And I’m sure you didn’t really mean to compare the laws of your god to the laws of our country, laws that change from state to state and often from city to city and county to county. Not to mention laws that are constantly erased, added and adjusted as we evolve as a society.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 8, 2008 at 9:20 am e

And, bigham, you state that you agree that it is wrong for parents to indoctrinate their children in religion, IF the parents are not sufficiently convinced themselves. So the parents who followed David Koresh and believed he was the second coming of Christ and taught their children that this was indeed the case, you have no problem with that, seeing that the parents were absolutely certain in their convictions? The same for followers of the various cults that have and currently exist or even religions like Mormonism or Scientology.

And I am curious about your reconversion, bigham, but can you provide the link to your blog. I used to be able to just click your user name but that is no longer working.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 8, 2008 at 6:14 pm e

“It could be argued that a perfect god COULDN’T create a situation where sin could exist.”
Not necessary, if God wanted people to sin than it could. But that would bake God evil and theists dislike that ore than an imperfect god.
But of course the god(s) of the bible is evil so they have no way around that except ignoring it and Christan’s and Jew (and Muslims but thats a different book) are good at that..

bitterhermit Says:
January 10, 2008 at 4:59 pm e

On an archetypal level – far displaced from the doctrine – I would say that it was absolutely necessary. And, I would argue that God created the situation by design as well as by secondary manifestation. He breathed His breath into dirt and caused it to be a sentient being. Being spirit, He could not *experience* His own creation in human terms. And so, at the first transgression (disobedience having nothing whatever to do with sexuality), He set Himself up to redeem humanity by experiencing human life *perfectly*. Without this experience, He could not comprehend His own creation. By living and dying as a human, and subsequently returning to His immortal state, God opened the door for humanity to become divine.
Again, it is very important that you understand here that God resides *outside* of Time as well as being everpresent in creation.
This suggests to some a kind of duality in God . . . but I think that He resides in dimensions we cannot yet comprehend. This is what the esoterics explore – the multiple dimensionality of reality and the force or being who created it.
Blessings! Have a super day!
David (fringemonkey)

Lone Wolf Says:
January 12, 2008 at 7:55 am e

bitterhermit: What do you mean by “out side of time”? What dose that mean?

Lone Wolf Says:
January 15, 2008 at 1:38 am e

Looks like bitterhermit doesn’t want to answer the question. I suppose its hard to answer the question when its premise (God being out side of time) is vague and doesn’t make sense.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 15, 2008 at 9:45 am e

Lone Wolf, believe me, bitterhermit probably just forgot or hasn’t realized your request for him to expand on his meaning is just sitting there. David (bitterhermit) LOVES to explain his theories; it’s why I love his comments, even if I don’t often agree with them. And let’s give the guy some credit; he is one of the most open minded believers I’ve encountered on this or any other blog. He may be a little too ‘deep’ in his thinking for me to follow sometimes but, you must admit, his comments are VERY fun to read.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 15, 2008 at 1:35 pm e

Well, I hope he answers.

bitterhermit Says:
January 15, 2008 at 6:39 pm e

Sorry. I didn’t get the question until just now. I’ve been off doing work. Such a drag . . .
Okay. Here’s the thing: we exist in four dimensions. We live in three dimensions of space and one of time. The specific dimension of time in which we live is called “now”. There is no other point of time in which we can exist because of our physical limitations. We can have memories or imaginations of past and future, but can only experience ‘now’.
For a being to have created the four dimensions we know – or even that which is manifest within those four dimensions – that being must be ‘other’ than its own creation. In order to create what did not before exist, it must have existence completely removed from that which it creates. This means that it must stand outside those four dimensions. Therefore, God, as Creator, must exist outside of what we recognize as time.
The question is whether he is the absolute origin of all universes. If said creator is the origin of all things . . . it gets really deep from there . . . because that creator must be All things. Not only creator, but creation and all that issues from it and from said creator. In this scenario, God is a multi-dimensional (or, perhaps, mega-dimensional) being. From here, we can only guess at that creator’s nature as viewed by the dim reflection that creator casts within the creation. Nature reveals a great deal. We have numerous disciplines through which we attempt to discern that being’s nature: science, philosophy, religion, spiritualism, etc.
In short, a being capable of creating time could not be held to its strictures. Time is a mere framework in which all things occur. God stands outside that framework. Time is part of our environment. What keeps the Creator synchronized? That is a fascinating quandary.
We measure time by the movement of light. What would the creator of light use to measure time? Is it a dimension to him similar to our dimensions of space? Can he move through it in the same manner as we do through air? I think perhaps it is possible. BUT, I don’t think he can do it in any physical form. Just as I do not think that humanity will ever acheive bodily interstellar travel . . . .

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 15, 2008 at 6:46 pm e

Well there you go, Lone Wolf.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 16, 2008 at 2:54 am e

I see what you mean but to say God exists out side of time is not the most accurate way of saying it. What your saying is God exists out side of the universe.
But theres a problem with that idea, yes God could exist out side time in this universe but where ever God exists there has to be time (not necessarily time as we know it but time non the less). With out time, nothing can happen. If time ceased to exist it would be like pressing pause on a movie, nothing happens, nothing moves, not even photons. With out time nothing happens so where ever God exists there has to be time in some shape or form.

As a consequence of your idea, it brings up another idea, a multiverse. If God exists out side of our universe than God must be another universe. That brings in the possibility of other universes and the multiverse is an possible explanation for the existence of our universe (our universe came out of another universe). Which leads to another point, there is no need for God as an explanation for the universe or anything.

And the idea that God created everything has problems of its own. God is a thing so if God created everything than God created himself but that would make the whole of existence a massive predestination paradox that God is a part of. But of course you can say God created everything except him self but that then gets into a different topic.
Another problem is the problem of evil, if God created everything than God created evil and suffering and that would mean God is not good.
And the idea that God created everything goes right back to my point, God set everything in motion. So if God was perfect than everything would happen how he envisioned it which then means God made some mistakes or God wanted the bad things that have happened to happen.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 16, 2008 at 9:32 am e

I have a bad feeling Lone Wolf and David (bitterhermit) could end up going back and forth on this for a while

bitterhermit Says:
January 16, 2008 at 4:07 pm e

What’s to feel bad about?
Define “perfect”. It really only means ‘complete’.
Define “evil”.
Define “good”.
God created us to have free will. That is a variable within the context of creation that leaves it open to our influence. If God has the power to create even one solar system, I don’t think I want to call him out for being a jerk. But then, if I thought he was a petulant and pedantic prick as the Bible thumpers and hellfire preachers suggest, then I’m ready to party away eternity among the sinners in Hell – certainly don’t want to be a slave to a tyrant and have to sing and bow through eternity. Pardon the invective, but FUCK that. Yes. I cuss. Like a sailor. I don’t have a problem with it. If I know it offends anyone, I’ll refrain from it around them, but that’s off-topic . . .
Assuming God as Creator, I agree with you that he set things in motion. However, I don’t really see things from a perspective of “good” and “evil” anymore. I’m working my way around to a systems perspective, and from this perspective it is a matter of natural consequence. Not shame and blame, which are worthless – actually, they are powerful but destructive means of controling people, and I prefer to avoid them – but instead to view the world and life and society as a system of living beings in which we are either responsible or irresponsible. To be responsible means to live according to an understanding that we effect each other in all that we do, think, and say. If I murder someone, the natural consequence of that is a great deal of emotional suffering and a certain amount of destruction to my own mind and being as well as any social consequence such as imprisonment or execution.
One thing is certain: if you are not responsible for yourself, someone will force responsibility on you. That is the way of society. It is natural law. The law God built into His creation.
Going back to the belief that God made us in His image, I’d like to point out what incredibly curious animals we are (when not opressed by bullying dogma). From this, I conclude that God is a very intellectually curious person. What was His purpose in creating the world and a sentient race?

Lone Wolf Says:
January 17, 2008 at 12:54 am e

” I don’t really see things from a perspective of “good” and “evil” anymore. I’m working my way around to a systems perspective, and from this perspective it is a matter of natural consequence. Not shame and blame, which are worthless – actually, they are powerful but destructive means of controling people, and I prefer to avoid them – but instead to view the world and life and society as a system of living beings in which we are either responsible or irresponsible. To be responsible means to live according to an understanding that we effect each other in all that we do, think, and say. If I murder someone, the natural consequence of that is a great deal of emotional suffering and a certain amount of destruction to my own mind and being as well as any social consequence such as imprisonment or execution.”
Thats a very good way to view the world, its the best ways to find solutions to problems.

Replace evil with suffering and the problom still remains. God created a would ful of suffering. And not just in humans, in animels as well.

Perfection, God incapable of making mistakes, allways doing things exastly right ith out any error. If God is perfect that everything wpuld happen they way God invisioned it. With out any error, everything would happen acording to hs plans.

As for free will, that argument simply dose not work. First: God dose not seem to care about peoples free will. A man can go out ans rape and kill a woman, she had no choice in the madder, his will overtook hers. Think about how often people wills are suppressed by others.
Second you have to deal with determinism which can be easily and logically explained but free will can not be logically explained. In free will vs determinism, determinism wins every time.
Then what about omniscients? If God is omniscient than he know what people are going to do before they do it and if they do differently, he’ not omniscient.

As for humanity being made in Gods image. Why would such a bing as God have an image? And even if he did, why would it be in human form? God could choose any form we wanted. Human animal, glowing blob, dust cloud, giant 1 eyed, 8 legged, 5 armed headless monster. Why would a bing as powerful as God be confined to 1 form or any form.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 17, 2008 at 1:06 am e

Didn’t really mean ‘bad’, David (bitterhermit). Alas, I’m afraid the discussion has moved a bit beyond my comprehension. But no worries, I actually love reading what you two have to say.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 17, 2008 at 1:08 am e

And, just so we’re clear, I don’t limit any kind of speech on my blog

whiteman0o0 Says:
January 17, 2008 at 1:17 am e

Lone Wolf: i just stumbled across this post and saw you’re thing about the “multiverse” explination of the origin of the universe. However for that theory to be true and for it to be the ultimate origin of the universe, then there would have to be an infinite chain of universes. This creates an impossibility, For there to be and infinite chain of events leading up to and away from every point in the chain. This would mean that we had to overcome and infinite amount of time to reach the point the universe was created in. Therin lies the impossibility. !)avid

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 17, 2008 at 1:47 am e

Hey whiteman0o0, good to see you jump into the deep end by joining this discussion. It’s without a doubt one of the more interesting ones to sprout up on any of my posts. I’ve pretty much stepped aside to allow this rather multifaceted discussion run its course.

And I guess I’m going to have to refer to both you and bitterhermit by your usernames seeing as you’re both named David.

I hope you’re up to the challenge as I’m certain your last comment will NOT Jbe the last word.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 17, 2008 at 6:09 am e

whiteman0o0: There dose not need to be an infinite number of universes, it is possibility though.
Second you can have an infinite amount of time, it is a very difficult to imposable thing to comprehend cause of how we think of time. But that is just the limitations of our brains, not time.
Thirdly: time would not be part of the multiverse, it would be part of the universe. If you got o another universe, time might not exist there and if it does, it could be different than time in this universe. For example, say a man built a partial to another universe, he then went and spent a week exploring the other universe, he then. He then comes back to this universe and then finds that he is a week in the past. In our universe time goes in one direction how ever in the other universe time goes in the opposite direction,

bitterhermit Says:
January 17, 2008 at 6:01 pm e

I’m not buying your assertion about determinism trumping free will. You’re being too linear in your approach. We’re not each making our free choice decisions in a vacuum! We’re variables in a seemingly infinite equation. The guy choses to rape or not. She choses to fight or not. The court decides to prosecute or not. The brother decides to avenge or not. There are almost always options. Yes, there are a certain number of deterministic factors with which we have to deal, such as natural law, but by and large we have a great deal of latitude in how to live our lives. We have the choice to be moral, immoral, or even amoral. We have the choice to pursue education or art or vice or virtue or a craft or profession or any number of combinations thereof. We have the choice of adapting to our environment, adapting it to us, or to flee to another environment. By and large we are raised with a victim mentality that keeps us opressed by the erroneous assumption that we ‘have to’ or ’should do’ what others want or demand or expect us to.
I’ve had opportunity and motive numerous times to commit murder, but I never have. Same with theft, rape, robbery, fraud, and lots of other crimes and misdemeanors – and at times I made bad choices and commited more than a couple infractions of the law. Other times I’ve erred on the side of following the letter of the law. All were choices I made and led to various consequences. I’m not a rat in a maze. God has no strings on me, no ring in my nose leading me on.
As far as any supposition that a perfect being is incapable of setting into motion an imperfect creation . . . non sequitor. God as the Creator made the creation to have a life of its own. The creation – each creation and/or creature – has the choice to remain perfect or to transgress. God has that choice; his default is perfection.
Suffering is part of life. Embrace it. Honor it. Be grateful for it. What would joy be if there were no pain? It is the contrast of pain and pleasure that bring meaning and distinction to life. Frankly, I believe Adam and Eve are in heaven fucking each other’s brains out in celebration of choosing to go ‘where angels fear to tread’. That’s kind of a radical thing of a believer to say, but I’m a pluralist overall. I intend no offense, nor to shock or what have you, but merely to introduce a different perspective.
God’s omniscience led to the whole of history. He saw trouble and built in corrective measures. But then, I’m not completely sold on God’s omniscience and omnipresence. He talks a couple times in the Bible about His spirit not dwelling here forever. In the book of Job, he seems to come from somewhere to join Job in the guise of a thunderhead. And then there is the matter of angels – why does He need messengers if He can just tap us on the shoulder and say, “Uh, hey, David. Would you mind not slandering my saints? The Bible is my Word. Take my word for it. Go forth and pacify.”
Sorry, I realize I have a habit of raising more questions than I answer, but ain’t that just the way of things?
Peace & Health!
David

Lone Wolf Says:
January 18, 2008 at 5:39 am e

I think you missed the point about determinism.
Theres no way to explain how free will would work however its easy to describe how determinism would determine even the thoughts in our heads. Even if you bring in the randomness of quantum mechanics, that only brings a random variable in to play, it dose not give you free will.
Think about it this way, if you grew up in another country (say somewhere in the middle east) and raised by different parents with different beliefs. You would be a different person with different belief and even think differently. If you where raised by a Islamic fundamentalist family, in a primarily Islamic fundamentalist area and a situation came up where you had a chance to become a suicide bomber. Now you can argue you have free will but what it comes down to is you DNA, what you’ve been exposed too, when you were exposed to it and by whom. All those come together and determine what your decision would be. Its not really a choice, its the culmination of multiple variables coming together

When I say suffering, I don’t mean small things I mean starvation, torture, chronic instance pain. You know the horrible things. God could have created a world with out such things but God created a world with these things, even in animals. God didn’t have to create the world like it is, he could have made a world with out such things. And the fall doesn’t explain it cause 1. thats not our fault, 2. God should have the power to change the would and make it better and 3. those where stupid mistakes God made that lead to the fall (he couldn’t put a guard to make sure they never would approach the tree or put the tree somewhere else where they couldn’t get to it)

bitterhermit Says:
January 18, 2008 at 4:32 pm e

No. I didn’t miss the point. I merely disagreed with it . . . conditionally. There are a great many deterministic factors in our life and world, but that does not contraindicate free will. We all have choices. It is our right, responsibility, and privelidge to make choices. Our choices lead to consequences that may or may not be determining factors in others’ lives. Others make choices that become determining factors in our lives. But it is a matter of CHOICE. We decide. Most choices are limited by deterministic factors, yes; however, we retain our freedom to choose.
I was born in America. I’m grateful. I was raised by fundamentalist (emphasis on ‘mental’) Christians with a love for the belt and a penchant for corporal punishment. Despite that, I have reformed my life. It was not determined for me (except in large part by me).
Determinism is a crutch. An out. An excuse. Personal responsibility requires the realization that we have the choice, power, privelidge, and duty to make beneficial choices. It requires free will.
Were you biologically moved to clack out the above entry? Why would any deterministic factor require that of you? Did you not make the choice of how to react? What words to use? Whether to capitalize God or His personal pronouns?
I am not denying that we are beholden to a great many deterministic factors; I am adamantly declaring that we have choices, which is to say that we have free will. Otherwise, logic itself is predetermined and there is no point whatsoever for abstract thought or reason. It would be completely unreasonable to assume that we have the capability of abstract thought and higher reasoning by some accident of bio-chemistry. All things in this world – this universe – have their place and have pragmatic use to the entire system.
Suicide bombers are not born, they are made. Same with murderers and theives and adulterers and Bio-chem majors and saints and sinners of every stripe and spot. I am intensely grateful to be an American with a good education and not a person who has lost his sense of free will.
As for why God created the world as it is . . . I’ll go hang out with the agnostics on this one. I have only conjecture and questions on the matter. Frankly, I think a great deal of it is created by humanity and the choices tyrannical leaders make – tyrants of all species, corporate as well as government and household, etc.
It is quite easy and intuitive to explain how free will works. You’re at a stoplight; do you adhere to the law or act irresponsibly by ignoring it? Your choice depends on a conscious decision. It is not predetermined by any other factor that you have not created by your own will. You choose whether you will remain beholden to the law for the sake of law. Or whether you only adhere to rules when they appeal to your reason. Or only when it is convenient. Or only when enforcement is likely.
Be careful here, though, because your choice has consequences. It may become a deterministic factor in your life or the life of other drivers. But it is not determined until you engage your free will to either drive responsibly or be a scofflaw.
Deterministic factors are constants in the extended equation, and each choice made is a variable that affects the rest of the equation. That is the nature of dualism – as well as pluralism.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 19, 2008 at 12:16 am e

Your view of determinism is wrong. Its not a Church or an excuse. It is an explanation of why people do what they do. It dose not negate responsibility, It dose not mean people should not be punished when people do wrong, the point of punishment is to deter and teach people not to do those things. We still have responsibility, we still are responsible for our actions, determinism just tels us why we do what he do.
It dose not mean that w.e do not have abstract though and the ability reason, we have those things, those things come from how we proses information which is a product of determinism.
All determinism does is explain why people do what they do. It is a better view point cause it informs our decision on how to deal with circumstances, how to salve problems like crime, terrorism, poverty, war and so on.

One thing to understand about determinism is it involves so many variable that its so complicated that not even with all the processing power of all the brains of all living things and all computers combined you couldn’t comprehend it all. Even on an individual level. And it is those countless variables that determine whether I capitalise “god” or not.

How can free will exist? This is my main problem with free will. How can a decision that has not been determined? How can you make a “free” decision?

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 19, 2008 at 1:04 pm e

bitterhermit (or whomever wishes to reply), regarding the issue of free will, I was wondering what your thoughts were on people whose mental issues may result in them not having the ability to control their own actions. Is it possible for God to judge such a person? Is it possible for them to be punished and sent to hell to burn for their sins, sins that were committed with a complete lack of free will?

bitterhermit Says:
January 19, 2008 at 2:21 pm e

Of course it’s possible. Anything is possible. But, if He is that much of a tyrant, I don’t want to spend eternity with him!
I have a brother with bipolar disorder, and a mother whose undergone ECT enough times that she ‘gets confused’ about things. She believes God is that judgemental. I believe he is much more generous, forgiving, and loving than that. I believe He takes all things into consideration.
And, frankly, I do not believe in hell as a place. I believe that what we cosider Hell is merely the suffering we undergo in this life. Not all of it has to do with sin and punishment. In fact, the majority is simply circumstantial consequence.
If we have no power to chose, then we cannot be condemned for doing what we were not given the option of not doing. That’s like a man who beats his dog just because he’s within arm’s reach. So, what, we see God as a mean drunk? I can’t accept that. He’s going to have to come down and bitch-slap me into believing that scenario if He wants that to be the truth for me.
Actually, I think the entire spirit of the gospel is contained in the idea that God does not, and therefore we should not, judge people at all. He judges behavior, and so should we. It is our right and responsibilty to call right right and wrong wrong, but it is not our right to condemn a person for doing one or the other.
How’s that for an answer?

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 19, 2008 at 2:23 pm e

Yes, but does that person have free will?

bitterhermit Says:
January 19, 2008 at 4:22 pm e

Yes. But . . . It’s a matter of degrees. Can a lame man travel? Yes, but not by the usual means. A person has free will to the limit of their cognitive ability.
Biblically speaking, the original sin was not an act as such. The original sin was disobedience. If someone lacks the capability of obedience or rebellion, then to that degree they lack free will.
I’m kind of a heretic in many ways. One of my weird and unsubstantiated beliefs is that there are people born without souls. In the OT, they speak of the “sons of man” and they speak of the sons of Adam as being different. Very curious, yes?

bitterhermit Says:
January 19, 2008 at 4:27 pm e

Lone Wolf . . . bite me! LOL
We can only continue to discuss this rationally if you take the trouble to define what you mean by ‘determinism’. And what you mean by ‘free will’. Otherwise we’re just flagellating each other with ungrounded assertions. Which is as meaningless as a world void of free will.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 19, 2008 at 10:07 pm e

ECT? Electroshock? They still do that?

Determinism: that easy, our actions and thoughts are determined by preexisting variables. Free will: the ability to make a choice with out it being determined or destined (in part or full).

As Ive said, it only explains why people do things, it dose not take away responsibility. If I went out and killed some one, regardless of what variables lead to it, I am still a murder. If you disagree (as you do), think about it another way. The world is mostly gray. Killing is wrong but there are certain circumstances where it is excepted and even needed, steeling is wrong but if you had to steel to get food to feed you family its wrongness is out weighed by circumstance, in fact in such circumstances it would be far more wrong you not to do what is needed to feed your family.
If determinism negates responsibility, there is still a need for it and that need would out weigh the consequences of determinism.

bitterhermit Says:
January 20, 2008 at 3:00 am e

They do it even better these days. It’s pretty much regarded as barbaric in the mainstream, but it’s much more common than it should be. Overall, mental health medical practice is woefully behind the technological times.
I don’y buy your idea of freewill. You say the world is gray, and yet you take an extreme polar position on the definition of free wiil. That’s bad logic.
Our thoughts and actions are INFLUENCED not determined by those factors.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 20, 2008 at 3:20 am e

I said in part or full
“Free will: the ability to make a choice with out it being determined or destined (in part or full)”

One thing you have not dealt with yet, its easy to explain how determinism works but free will, there is no way to explain how it would work. How can you make a decision that has not been determined or only influenced by determinism? How dose free will work?

bitterhermit Says:
January 20, 2008 at 3:15 pm e

I did give you examples. Free will is rather simple: you DECIDE which available option to take. You decide, “I WILL shrug and walk away instead of punching this dimwit in the mouth.” That is how free will works. You have the power, AND responsibility to consciously DECIDE how to live your life.
That’s all there is to free will.
And your definitition reads as being being totally exlusionary. “In part or full”, as stated, is a polarized definition that claims that if the decision is even partially determined, then there is no free will. And that, friend Lone Wolf, is the part with which I disagree.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 21, 2008 at 2:50 am e

Making decisions does not mean we have free will, those decision are determined. When you decide to do something, that decision is based on series of variables that determine what the decision will be. So the question remains.

It dose not polarise, even if 9 times out of 10 your decision are determined, that 1 in 10 decision is based on free will, thus you have free will.

bitterhermit Says:
January 21, 2008 at 3:45 am e

LW, your logic really sucks.
If we had no free will, we would not have choices to make.
Free will means that WE consciously determine our own choices. Decisions made without deliberate intent are deterministic. When we CHOOSE – that is free will. If the decision is determined by something outside our own intent, that is determinism.
You’re not even using logic. You’re just making the same assinine assertions time and again.
YES, having the power of decision IS free will. Otherwise, it would not be our decision; it would be a DETERMINED response based on external factors.
Go take a course in rhetoric and learn to proof your writing. You stopped making any knid of rhetorical response about ten comments ago. At this point, you’re just beating me over the head with a dry, dead assertion which you have completely FAILED to state in any coherent or convincing manner.
Peace and Consciousness.
David

Thomas: Thanks for hosting this discussion. I appreciate your patience. I’m done on this subject unless someone brings something new and interesting and LOGICAL to the discussion.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 21, 2008 at 5:17 am e

Oh, I think see now. Are you a Compatibilist?

bitterhermit Says:
January 21, 2008 at 2:53 pm e

I have never heard the term “Compatibilist”.

bitterhermit Says:
January 21, 2008 at 4:00 pm e

First, I’d like to note here that I prefer to remain “undeclared”. I shun labels.
From the glossing read I gave a few sources on Compaitilism, it seems compatible with the rest of my pluralistic concepts/ethics/philosopies/beliefs. One link in a chain. I believe that life demands free will . . . AND also that free will absolutely depends on deterministic factors.
Any decisions we make are instances of free will. Otherwise they would be COMPULSIONS, and not decisions. Free will is the ultimate variable in every deterministic causal equation. It must therefore be both a cause of determinism and a seperate concept – an outside factor.

Lone Wolf Says:
January 22, 2008 at 6:07 am e

I see. Than we must agree to disagree.

whiteman0o0 Says:
January 23, 2008 at 4:51 am e

whiteman0o0: There dose not need to be an infinite number of universes, it is possibility though.
Second you can have an infinite amount of time, it is a very difficult to imposable thing to comprehend cause of how we think of time. But that is just the limitations of our brains, not time.
Thirdly: time would not be part of the multiverse, it would be part of the universe. If you got o another universe, time might not exist there and if it does, it could be different than time in this universe. For example, say a man built a partial to another universe, he then went and spent a week exploring the other universe, he then. He then comes back to this universe and then finds that he is a week in the past. In our universe time goes in one direction how ever in the other universe time goes in the opposite direction,

Lone wolf: I will agree with your statement of the possibility of time flowing on opposite directions because i believe it to be a linear function. However that does not change the fact that we would have to have overcome an infinite number of points to reach the present for there to be an infinite universe spawning superverse.

Allow me to give an analogy for a moment.
If I have an infinite number of apples and I give you all of the odd apples the I am still left with an Infinite number, however you also have an infinite number. Hence the problem of dealing with infinite proportions in any type of conversation.

Because while time may flow in opposite directions into infinity there is still an infinite amount of time either way, So It would still be impossible for the universes to be infinite in number, there must always be a point of origin, whether it be to the superverse or anything else.
I hope this was vaguely coherent as i was just snowballing on an idea. !)avid

lou Says:
January 23, 2008 at 6:54 am e

lone wolf would never understand so please,don’t waste your time bitterhermit

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 23, 2008 at 10:08 am e

lou, bitterhermit was not wasting his time. To suggest that because he and Lone Wolf didn’t come to an agreement (other than agreeing to disagree) means that their discussion wasn’t productive is missing the point. Clearly they both have two very interesting takes on this particular subject and I for one enjoyed trying to force my mind around each of their thought processes. And I’m sure I’m not the only one. Even whiteman0o0 felt compelled to join the discussion. Few blogs are designed exclusively for only those who agree on a particular thing to share their thoughts. I may not understand how anyone can believe, that of the thousands of gods mankind has invented over countless generations, that when man discovered THEIR chosen god, well, that time he got it right. But that doesn’t mean someone would be wasting their time if they attempted to explain.

whiteman0o0 Says:
January 23, 2008 at 2:37 pm e

Lou this is one thing that I will agree with doubtingthomas on, And to perhaps help you understand it a little better I will explain something that you seem to misunderstand.

An argument does not have to be won, a debate does not have to have a clear victor, These two were making thier points in order to inspire thought within the other, This is the problem that I find with most xians in todays society, they expect to find that one argument that will make an atheist fall on his/her knees and repent, however it doesnt work like that. The thing you have to do is get them to think, while keeping and open mind and thinking on what they have to tell you as well. Hope that helped lou.

!)avid

bitterhermit Says:
January 23, 2008 at 3:42 pm e

What more is there to life than wasting time?
Thanks for the advice, lou. I appreciate the sentiment.
My aim was not so much to convince anyone of anything as it was to, as white* states, inspire thought in others – assuming, perhaps rashly, that far more than Lone Wolf and myself were audience to the discussion. Also, I find it a good practice to engage in ‘vain’ discussions as an exercise of testing both my faith and my ideals (my heart and my head). I’ve been swayed to different perspectives by many a good argument. I’ve also come to such impasses as this current one numerous times. I learn from them. As education and knowledge and clear reasoning are core values for me, this makes the discussions fruitful and valuable to me.
In this discussion, I’ve actually become more convinced of free will. And while I’ve actually come to have a deeper understanding of determinism, I find it a reprehensible and dangerous philosophical polemic. WHich is to say that determinism fits into the equation, but those who believe it to BE the equation have opened themselves to the temptation of complete irresponsibility. If everything is predetermined, then responsibility is not what most of think it is as it becomes merely another predetermined and determining factor as forces external to ourselves drive us to do whatever we do. THAT is dangerous. And, in my opinion of course, both highly amoral and downright irrational.
But I believe each of us has the right to declare our beliefs whatever they are. That’s a gift of the both God and the Constitution – and other humanistic documents of social liberation.

Have a super day!
David

Lone Wolf Says:
January 25, 2008 at 3:20 am e

whiteman0o0: As I’ve said the problem is how we perceive time but time doe not work the way we perceive it. For insistence the term “points in time” time does not not have points, thats simply how we perceive it.
Another problem is, no madder what you believe, be it eternal universe, multiverse, eternal god, all would require and infinite points in times. Even if you take causality of the universe (people/things can travel back and forth in time and can change the past) there is still going to be an infinite number of points of time, there just not going to be linear and involving an infinite number of changes to the time line.

whiteman0o0 Says:
January 25, 2008 at 2:04 pm e

I agree that the eternal universe and the multiveres both require infinite time, However with an eternal God, he transcends time, and space, making himself able to be infinite.

Ok, im a little bit lost but I think that I get the gist of what you are trying to say here. And for people/things to travel back/forth in time we would need to be able to exceed the speed of light which (according to relativity) is implausible. And lets see if we can get a better analogy to use for time. say, an expanding shpere? where it can extend in any direction eternally? !)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
January 25, 2008 at 3:10 pm e

What do you mean by “transcend time”?

The method time travel method is not important to the point. What is important is the ability. The point is even with out causality, if time is not linear but relative (past present future all depend on persecutive) and things can go back and forth through time (which could be achieved in a multiverse through the interactions between universes (a universe can come into existence, interact with another universe and prevents its parent universe from coming into existence) you would still need infinite points in time, just not linear time.

whiteman0o0 Says:
January 25, 2008 at 4:21 pm e

I mean that he is outside of the dimensions that we can comprehend(time being the 4th dimension).

Now I will agree that there is no absolute time, Einstein I believe proved that, however the travel back and forth in a reality where there is infinite time, is rendered useless. As I have stated in my last posts, even a single universe having time in an infinite system would make it impossible for the cycle to perpetuate itself.

!)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
January 26, 2008 at 2:41 pm e

What your saying is God can travel back and forth through time? Or that God exist at all points in time at once? Well if God can travel back and forth through time that does not self the infinite points in time thing but if God exists at all points in time at once, well then for God there would be no time and with out time, nothing could happen, God couldn’t crate anything cause he couldn’t do anything, not even think.

I didn’t say every universe would have an infinite amount of time, by the nature of a multiverse any universe that has time, time would have a beginning and possibly an end.

whiteman0o0 Says:
January 29, 2008 at 2:37 pm e

Wolf: I didnt say that God exists inside of time at any point, allow me to use a quick analogy.

I plan to record this years super bowl, so that I will actually be able to watch it since I will be busy sunday and I hate comercials. Now when I pick up my remote I can select to play that game. I can fast forward and see what happens in that “world” when I want to. This is the basic idea behind how God works. Except for the fact that since he is outside of time he can see every point in time at once.

But for Time to have a beginning then there has to be some sort of beginning for the system that the time is involved in. And just curious, but I have been looking into the structures of time, and while I have seen that there is indeed no Absolute time. I have yet to find that there is any type of system that has no time at all, In my mind time is a facet of reality.

!)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
January 30, 2008 at 2:33 pm e

Where ever God exists there has to be time in some form as time is needed for something to happen, for God to say “let there be light” there has to be time for for that be be able to happen.

I don’t really get your analogy

Time is part of our reality as we know it.

whiteman0o0 Says:
February 6, 2008 at 2:44 pm e

Wolf, Sorry its taken so long to post back, I’ve been sick for a few days and am still recovering so please pardon me if my rant becomes incoherent.

You say that wherever God exists there has to be some for of time, But Why would the creator of time need time to function? If he was able to exist before there was time, why would he not be able to function without it? The thing here is that as far as we know in our limited knowledge there has to be time for there to be actions, But to a transcendent creator who is outside of time, why does there need to be time? !)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
February 9, 2008 at 10:14 pm e

A creator would need time cause with out it, nothing could happen. With out time in some shape or form nothing moves, nothing happens, it would be like pausing a movie, it would all be still. Time is an integral part of actions, with out it, there can be no actions.
For insistence there is a before creation, after creation and creation, To get from the before to the after, you need time.

whiteman0o0 Says:
February 11, 2008 at 2:36 pm e

For that view to be true you still have to go back to there being an infinite amount of time which as I stated earlier is impossible, because you can’t overcome the infinite. !)avid

i am the son Says:
February 12, 2008 at 6:25 am e

To Lone Wolf

For insistence there is a before creation, after creation and creation, To get from the before to the after, you need time.

Not necessarily if all is in the now. Time is a concept for man. Creation may never have been and may never be over.

Lone Wolf Says:
February 12, 2008 at 6:59 pm e

Your not getting it. For there to be a creation, for something to go from one form or another or from nothing at all to existing, that requires a before and after and that requires time. Just as it requires times for an object to move from one point to another.
For a creator to create, there has to be time not necessarily times as we know it but times non the less.

whiteman0o0 Says:
February 13, 2008 at 4:15 pm e

Perhaps Im not getting it, but I would still like to say. We have limited comprehension abilities, we dont understand all of time, and probably never will. However God being all knowing and all powerful, is outside of that, He has perfect knowledge of time, and due to his omnipotence he can be outside of it. !)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
February 15, 2008 at 9:37 am e

For something to happen, there needs to be time in some shape or form. For God to create the universe, where ever he exists, there has to be time in some shape or form. Before and after requires time. You can say that God exist out side our universe, you can say God has the power to manipulate times thus go back and forth through it but if something exists out side of time, where there is no time, it can not do anything no matter how powerful it is.

By saying God is omnipotent and omniscient your bringing in paradoxes. Could an omnipotent bing create a rock too heavy for it to lift? If so than there is a limit to its power, if not there is a limit to its abilitys thus ether way, it has limitations thus it can not be omnipotent. And omniscients, well, you can’t have free will with omniscients. Omniscients are mutually exclusive.

whiteman0o0 Says:
February 15, 2008 at 2:42 pm e

You seem to misunderstand what I meant by Omnipotent. When I say omnipotent I mean that he has the ability to do whatever, is logically possible, and by all knowing I mean that he knows all that can possibly be known. So He can do whatever is logically and conceptually possible, and because of his perfect knowledge he knows everything that Is logically and conceptually possible. So no an omnipotent being can’t create a rock to heavy for it to lift, because that is logically impossible. !)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
February 16, 2008 at 7:42 am e

Thats not omnipotents, thats near-omnipotents which isn’t the same as omnipotents.
In a deterministic world a bing with all possible knowledge would know what your going to do before you do it thus no free will.

whiteman0o0 Says:
February 19, 2008 at 4:40 pm e

Mmk now you are just taking random words and stringing them together in a nonsensical argument. 1. Your question about the rock isnt even a logical question, its a strawman, and illogical. 2. You are redefining the words that I am defining. 3. You are assuming a deterministic world, which is not true.

I have dealt with those questions many times in the past and they annoy me just as much now as they ever have, because no matter my response I still get a “awww you cant say that!” or “No thats not what that means”. So please humor me and leave the questions that you are using to get me to try to sound ignorant out of this.

Now the words I have defined are in accordance to the Nature of God. You have taken them and shaped them into what you think works best with your argument. hence Strawman.

So aside from the fact that I can choose what I want to do apart from my nature if I so choose, then I entirely agree on determinism. !)avid

Lone Wolf Says:
February 21, 2008 at 11:33 pm e

The omnipotence paradox it not a straw man, it is a logical question that people have been discussing for thousands of years, usually as a thought experiment until some people decided that there 1 god was omnipotent.
You are the one who has redefines the word omnipotent, omnipotent means all powerful, infinite power and the ability to manipulate (create, change, destroy) all things with that power, in other words, the ability to do anything even the logically imposable.
You don’t want to debate me on determinism, I spent years thinking about it and debating it. Your actions are determined by your personality, mindset and circumstances, your circumstances are determined you past actions and the past actions of others, your mind set it determined by your currant circumstances and past (mostly recent) circumstances, your personality is determined by your genetic personality traits and your past experiences, your past experiences where determined by the circumstances you were in. Even if you want to use the randomness of quantum mechanics, thats on a scale so small a neuron in your brain is the size of the sun in comparison so quantum mechanical randomness will not effect us.

bitterhermit Says:
March 13, 2008 at 2:24 pm e

Lone Wolf . . . that post is so riddled with horse lumps it’s almost not worth rebutting. You’ve shown yourself to recalcitrant and uninterested in a logical or reasonable debate. You’re starting with a conclusion – “a conclusion is what you come to at the end of reason.”
I have asthma. What causes that? Microscopic lumps of plant and animal residue. What happens on the smallest scale effects and affects the entire sphere of its NETWORK of influence – not merely its own sphere of influence, but the networked influence of its own sphere and every sphere with which that sphere interacts. Quantum mechanics effects us every infinitesimal moment of time!
“Currant circumstances”? Like what wine I’m drinking? Dessert?
What is the determining factor in your penchant for obvious and aberrant misuses of terminology and conventional spelling? Is that genetic, or edumacational determination?
I can change my thoughts from this focus to that one. From quantum mechanics to ad Hominem and either/or fallacies. From poetry to science to relationships to speculation on the ontology of the universe. My thoughts are determined by MY WILL. They are often *influenced* by situation, education, language, my environment, etc. But I have a choice in what and how to think. I know a great many folks who have the same ability. I know only a few – okay, I *associate* with only a few – who believe in the utterly ridiculous, illogical, heretical, and unscientific position of determinism. And my primary reason for not associating with such persons is their penchant for victim mentality and self-disempowerment.

Lone Wolf Says:
March 13, 2008 at 9:35 pm e

Wow, what a fallacious non-response. You disregard my comments and them make a statement that you have free will even though there is no logical way to describe it yet I easily described determinism.
I have logically described determinism, yet no one has logically described free will. There is no logical way for free will to work yet there is a logically way for determinism to work.

If quantum mechanics some how effects out actions, that does not mean its free will all it does is introduce a random factor. And there is no evidence that the randomness has an effect on a scale the size of the inner-workings of our neurons.

Whether you like determinism or not has no baring on whether we are deterministic or not. Whether you like something or not has no baring on whether it is true or not. And determinism is not “victim mentality and self-disempowerment” it is an answer to a question.
The question of “do we have freewill or is our actions determined” can not be proven or disproven scientifically (as it would require large scale immoral and imposable experiments) so it goes into the realm of logic and the only logical answer is or actions and thoughts are determined by our currant mindset and personality, our mindset is determined by our currant circumstances, our personality’s are determined by by our experiences and genetic personality traits, out experiences are determined by our past action and the actions of others.

bitterhermit Says:
March 13, 2008 at 9:57 pm e

Lone Wolf, your argument is null.
Free will is very simply experienced. Did I decide to post this reply, or was it decided for me? As I made the decision myself, I have free will. I had the choice to respond or not. I choose now to respond. You’re also very sloppy and spell a lot of words wrong. Is that determined by your choice, temper, distemper, logic, or other verbal malfunction?
“Currant” is a FRUIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!! “Current” is a matter of proximity in time.
I determine my own mindset. THAT is free will. Free will is simply the ability of a sentient being to DECIDE among seemingly arbitrary choices. We can decide to be illogical, unlawful, unethical, or whatever. To some degree, that free will is limited by deterministic factors such as physical reality, physical limitation, natural consequences of poor choices, etc. ad nauseum.
I won’t bother to insult your intelligence; you’ve taken care of that for me. Thanks.
David

Lone Wolf Says:
March 13, 2008 at 10:25 pm e

Wow, more fallacy’s. You know attacking the person does not affect the validity of his argument right? Didn’t think so.

None of what you said describe free will, all it is is screaming “I decide! I choose! I decide! I Choose!” To describe free will you have to describe (in logical terms) how you (or any one) can make a decision not based (or not fully based) on pre-existing factors.

bitterhermit Says:
March 13, 2008 at 11:05 pm e

Repeating your inane assertions is not a viable rhetorical stance. And YES, asswipe, I know damn well what Ad Hominem is. And, yes, describing experience IS a viable position. It takes no logical terms; it is simply emperical observation.
And I did define free will. You’re reading skills seem to be as truncated as your rhetorical enfeeblement.

Lone Wolf Says:
March 13, 2008 at 11:21 pm e

You claim to know what an Ah Hominem is yet you uses them, you fail to produce any real argument and you make only 1 good point (your right on the blasphemy thing (different post), I was wrong), you misrepresent what determinism is and you fail to produce any logical argument that refutes my own and end up effectively screaming “I have free will, I have free will!”
I see no reason to continue these conversations.

bitterhermit Says:
March 13, 2008 at 11:41 pm e

And you’re the one with an Ad Hominem fallacy every other post. THAT is why I’m not being a bit friendly about it any more. You’ve been a jerk from hell throughout this thread and a couple others. I’m just here to call you on that.
And my argument is cogent. You’re just blinded by your own stubborn prejudice. You started ass-backward from a conclusion and are evidently incapable of understanding anything that contradicts it.
And your opinion is completely irrelevant because of your assinine insistence that everyone else is wrong and you are right.
You’ve chosen to be an ass. You continue to choose to be an ass. That’s the experience I am currently observing. What has determined this? We are only as much victims of circumstance and determinism as we allow ourselves to be. THAT is my point.
YES, it is terribly unfortunate that some people are terribly limited by deterministic factors. But that does not condemn them to being controlled by external factors.

bitterhermit Says:
March 14, 2008 at 2:56 pm e

“So Unnecessary
As a direct result of his own actions (curses, humankind born sinners, etc.) God must come to earth as a specimen of his own creation & cause himself to be put to a hideous death in order to redeem humanity from the condemnation which he himself imposed upon it. And don’t forget the resulting deaths for those who followed Jesus.”
Let me ask you this, Thomas: what death is not hideous?
I find the sacrifice of God to himself as truly beautiful and elegantly symmetrical act of supreme selfishness and altruism. It’s not pretty, but it does strike me as majestically beautiful. What is it that makes life precious? Mortality, I think. And to some extent I really believe that God wanted to experience that. And though he was tortured and suffered through a great deal of it, I also think his life as a human was more full of benefit than detriment. He was loved and adored by many, loathed and feared by more. But don’t we all have that dualism in our lives to some extent? If there were no pain, how would you know pleasure? Pain and pleasure are simply reactions to stimuli. Even in the spiritual sense. It is all relative to a great many other factors. To me, the story of Jesus is a wonderful one regardless of its historical fact. So are the stories of other great mystics and prophets and gurus and such. And how many of those stories are filled with terror, loathing, pain, torture, war, pestilence and so on? That’s life. And these stories are not *about* the suffering; they are about the redemption, and the virtues that led to redemption. God did not put Jesus of Galilee to a heinous death, the Romans did (as a natural consequence of their laws, and his being convicted by a duly appointed court; my point being that it was really nothing special or bizarre or holocaust-like). Of course, it is stated that He “hardened the hearts” of key figures and otherwise influenced and permitted it to happen. But in concrete terms, Jesus was crucified as a dissident. The rest of the Gospel story is about the meaning of it in context to a new doctrine that eventually became known as Christianity . . .
If the Bible is true, and its revelation of God’s plan is accurately portrayed within, then it was necessary – according to God – to play it out this way. And, like any good story teller, He foreshadowed it numerous times in the Hebrew traditions and histories: Abraham & Isaac; Moses’ caduceus; Jonah and Seamonster; sacrifices and rites of atonement; and so forth.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
March 15, 2008 at 11:29 am e

Bitterhermit,

I’m not sure what else happened to you on March 13th but it clearly must have been a bad day (also see https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/01/06/does-a-soul-have-nerve-endings/ ). Your personal attack on Lone Wolf was uncharacteristic, unfair and uncalled for. You may find his arguments to be the products of a stubborn and willful mind but couldn’t the same be said for your own? Couldn’t it be said about everyone who is passionate about a personal opinion/concept? And as frustrating as you may find Lone Wolf’s reasoning and passion for his beliefs, I don’t recall him ever resorted to personal attacks and name calling. Nor have you until now. And to think I even defended you on this very post (see above – January 15th). I can only consider your more courteous and tolerant tone on your other posts and assume you were having a bad day. Could everyone please resist the urge to attack a commentator regardless of how much what he said may have irritated you. And everyone, unless a misspelled word results in you not understanding what a person was trying to say, PLEASE DON’T ATTACK SOMEONE FOR A SPELLING ERROR ON A BLOG SITE! It is petty and serves no purpose other than to boost your own self esteem. REMEMBER, most people read something posted, hurriedly type a response in the comment box, and click Leave Comment. The majority of spelling errors on blogs aren’t a result of a poor education but are simply the result of a hurried response. The comment box does not have spell checker. If you know someone means does when they type dose, gleefully pointing out the spelling error is childish and a waste of space. Let’s focus on the CONTENT of the comments.

Thank You,

DoubtingThomas

doubtingthomas426 Says:
March 15, 2008 at 11:45 am e

Bitterhermit,

FYI, if you go back and reread your own comments on this very post you will find a number of spelling errors.

I’m just saying.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
March 15, 2008 at 12:42 pm e

Bitterhermit,

Now to respond to your comment directly related to my original post (reading all the comments on this thread I almost forgot how it all started!).

You asked – “what death is not hideous?”

Dying in my sleep in the arms of my beloved wouldn’t be too bad (hopefully before I loose control of my bodily functions, natch). Physician assisted suicide seems like a pretty nice way to go. Just to name a few. I’m sure you had a point in asking the question but I fear I must have missed it.

Did you mean to say “supreme selfishness” OR supreme selfLESSness? I’ll respond with the assumption of the latter. The reason I don’t find Christ’s death on the cross as “majestically beautiful” or “elegantly symmetrical” is simply because I don’t find this stagy, melodramatic display to be necessary. And to clarify, regardless if Christ and God were/are equal (one and the same), when Christ was on earth he was separate from God. His suffering was his own. Don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying God didn’t ‘feel’ for Christ as he was tortured and died, just that His son’s pain was felt by Christ alone. His nerve ending, his pain receptors, his suffering. I just can’t get past the idea that all of the genocide, murder, rape and suffering caused by God (as depicted in the bible) or as a result of God’s neglect, was utterly unnecessary. God CHOSE suffering, but it wasn’t the only or even the best choice he could have made. The idea that God must make one suffer before offering redemption isn’t appealing to me.

You said – “God did not put Jesus of Galilee to a heinous death, the Romans did.”

Of course you know that the vast majority of Christianity believes that God sent Jesus down to earth to die for our sins. So a parent throws his 5yo child into a den of lions. The lions rip the child apart and devour him. Let me get this straight, you blame the LIONS and not the parent?

And again, it wasn’t necessary for Christ to suffer and die in order to deliver a new doctrine. God got his point across just fine to the people depicted in the Old Testament. Why the need for a visit from the ‘Son’? There was no need. It was a choice. God’s choice. I judge him based on that. That was the point of the original post. Most of my posts are simply a catalog of responses resulting from my years of studying the bible and the stories depicted within. I chose to create it in a blog format to allow others to put in their two cents. And BOY have they.

Thanks for the response, bitterhermit.

Take Care,

DoubtingThomas

bitterhermit Says:
March 15, 2008 at 2:25 pm e

Thomas,
First, I apologize to you for the misbehavior.
Second, LoneWolf, I apologize to you for the personal attack; it was, indeed, petty – and very much a transgression of my own standards. At the time, I duped myself into believing that I was insulting the person but really only taking the behavior to task. So, please forgive my behaving badly toward you.
Thirdly: I was having a great day on the 13th; but I did engage in some rather . . . hypomanic . . . behavior. I apologize to all who were or felt harmed and/or offended and/or confused by the behavior displayed here. It was “not to do” to attack LoneWolf as a person instead of continuing the discussion.
FYI: Thomas, I intended to email you but could not find your email address.
More later . . .

bitterhermit Says:
March 15, 2008 at 2:36 pm e

Yum. Crow omelet.
Yes, Thomas, I know about my own errors. I went back yesterday to investigate the source of the burr under my saddle. That is, to a large extent, why I came back and posted on each thread postings intended to get back on topic. It was my attempt to ammend my hijacking of the thread. Again, I apologize.
I do find it quite humorous that you toss the spelling thing at my feet like a smoking gun, Thomas, as though to say, “let he who is without sin . . .”
I’m just saying . . .

bitterhermit Says:
March 15, 2008 at 3:22 pm e

Thomas, I do not blame anyone. Blame is a silly and ineffective distraction. I am much more interested in responsibility and the manifestation of better outcomes. Nature is a vast network of action and reaction, action and consequence. It seems to me a quite aberrant thing for a parent to toss any child, especially a blood relation, into a den of lions. But, the parents did not kill the child. The child died as an indirect (and predictably so) consequence of the parental misconduct; however, the lions actually did the killing. Morally speaking, the parents are more responsible for the death than the lions because we consider the parents as aware of the harm they inflict.
I definitely intended to use the word “selfishness”. The sacrifice of God as the Son to God as the Father is a multi-dimensional paradox. God was glorifying Himself by showing off His triumphant and immaculate virtue in the willingness to sacrifice “His only begotten Son”. That such a sacrifice was intended to atone for all sin was the altruistic, the selflessness, part. It was a supreme act of both at the same time.
Was Jesus’ death on the cross intended to bring the new covenant? I thought the point was that his death was the death of the old covenant, which wasn’t working. His resurrection was the sign of the New Covenant. Symbolically, it was necessary, I believe, at that point in history. It made for a figure that people could rally around and believe in.
Have you ever read Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant”? He gives a beautifully outlined argument for the Christ story without really ever bringing in the whole God thing as such. Basically, his conception of it is that the creator is just an ambitious tinkerer who built the world. When he built it, he had a few subconscious issues that came out in his creation as seeds of evil and corruption. When he had finished, he framed the creation in “the arch of time”. Breaking the arch would destroy the whole creation. So, when the creator looked down at the world and noticed the flaws he had created, he felt great remorse. He learned of the part of himself that was corrupt, and somehow he pulled it out of himself and the two parts of him struggled. At the end of the struggle, the evil part had been somehow thrown down into the creation and sealed into it by the arch of time. The tinkerer wanted to destroy that part of himself that was so hideous and unworthy, and with it the flaws within his creation, but his compassion for his creation stopped him from reaching through the arch to wipe out the evil, because doing so would also destroy all the good and beautiful things along with the evil. Instead, he had to find an end-around. He sent agents through somehow to work his plan for him. His agents were powerful within creation, but they had to contend with the evil part of the creator to fulfill the creator’s plan. Sometimes these agents were killed or corrupted and betrayed the plan and the creator. So the creator had to conceive of new plans and find new agents. He did what he felt was necessary.
My point? I am not convinced that the plot of salvation was either necessary or unnecessary. In the end, I think it is more important whether it was effective. Not that the ends justifies the means. I don’t care for that kind of extremism. But pinning it all on one guy as a sacrificial lamb instead of making the sun go supernova to wipe out the aberrations of man seems a relatively compassionate alternative. I’d volunteer for the job myself – if I were absolutely convinced that it would save others. Not that I am some icon of virtue and compassion or anything (recent evidence makes that a laughable idea), but, in truth, to die for a cause is much easier than living for one. Keep in mind, though, that despite my being a reformed zealot, I retain some of the romance of the zealot. I find such sacrifice and death quite beautiful and elegant. To me, a terrible death is one that comes before one realizes one’s primary purpose in life – which seems to me pandemic. A beautiful death is one in which the dying person leaves this world without the burden of unaccomplished goals. I won’t go all the way into this because it is far tangential to the discussion of “necessary”, but I find it to be very respectful to honor slaughtered animals by eating them and wearing their fur precisely because it fulfills the purpose of their lives. Humans, though, are not purposed to slaughter for food (except Irish infants, lol). We have choices about our purpose(s) in this life. We can make them ourselves, or we can refrain from choice and have such choices inflicted upon us.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
March 18, 2008 at 12:15 pm e

Bitterhermit,

Bravo! I was very impressed by your response to my somewhat grandiose chastisement.
I’m a firm believer that eating a little crow once in a while always strengthens a person’s character.

On the topic of the New Covenant vs Old Covenant, I have always found this to be contradictory to biblical teachings. The idea that God is perfect but didn’t have it right in the Old Testament so sort of ‘started over’ with the new covenant just doesn’t fit for me. It seems too revisionist to me. I even have the rather scandalous opinion that the Old and New Testaments actually represent two different religions and two different gods. It almost seems as if this guy named Jesus decided to ‘hijack’ Judaism and revise it to suit a more evolved society.

I have read the Stephen R. Donaldson Thomas Covenant books (at least the first three. Were there more?). It was some time ago and I remember being disappointed (they had been highly recommended) but I don’t recall noticing the Christ correlation. Perhaps I should give them another read. I know a friend still has his set. Funny how different a book can be upon the second go around.

You stated – “A beautiful death is one in which the dying person leaves this world without the burden of unaccomplished goals.”

What a fantastic notion. Sadly it seems to me that this lovely ideal would be all but impossible to realize. How many of us, even after living a long and full life, would find that upon our death beds there was not a single thing left in the world that we wanted to do? What an accomplishment if one were able to achieve such a feat! Certainly a life worthy of review. I’d buy the movie rights.

FYI, I have similar feelings regarding the purpose of animals. I am opposed to killing just for sport (hunting) but am constantly perplexed by people who find that a pride of lions taking down and devouring a gazelle while the animal is still kicking and bleating is just fine but humans killing a cow and eating its flesh is abhorrent.

“We have choices about our purpose(s) in this life. We can make them ourselves, or we can refrain from choice and have such choices inflicted upon us.” — Bitterhermit

I couldn’t agree more! Let’s put it on a bumper sticker.

Take Care,

DoubtingThomas

bitterhermit Says:
March 18, 2008 at 4:20 pm e

Thanks, Thomas.
On the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: there were two trilogies; the first one seems to have a lot of allusions to the Bible, but in an archetypal way. I didn’t pick up on it until my third reading of them. And then I was wonderfully fascinated by it. Covenant is a sort of christ figure, only he’s more like Jonah and Moses in being totally rebellious and then pissy about the whole matter of having to mule the creator’s plan.
It’s not that the Old Dispensation was a bad plan. Sorry, I botched that wording. It’s that mankind had failed miserably to make it work. I find it totally revisionist as well; however, I think that perhaps it was God’s plan all along to ‘dispense’ His plan at times and in ways that humanity as a whole could understand. Which meant waiting until they were evolved enough to have discovered logic and reason, and having found the value in them to overcome despotism and barbarity.
Again, the New Covenant is like a tree that grew from the acorn of the Old Covenant. Of course they look completely different. They work on completely different systems of belief. Christianity is more enlightened and evolved (at least it would be if we could practice the pure gospel without all the superstitious crap people seem to want to add to it). But, not wanting to offend anyone, let me also say that there have been movements in Judaism and its doctrines that seem to keep it more progressive.
The one big religion that seems most out of whack to me is Islam. It’s a bad rehash of Zoroastrianism and Mosaic law as though seen and memorized in an opium and physical deprivation induced hallucination (yeah, I know, Revelations reads the same way). But whatever the source, I believe it to be a dead religion. I say this because it adamantly refuses to evolve with humanity. It is completely unchanging and inflexible. Priests of that religion have to memorize from oral tradition the *exact* Koran. But, please, understand that I am in no way judging any person or their faith in stating this opinion. If it’s blasphemy, may the Almighty forgive me.
Love the bumpersticker idea;-)
Fringemonkey

bitterhermit Says:
March 18, 2008 at 4:24 pm e

PS: I don’t exactly buy stock in the Perfect Almighty school of thought, either. Perfect compared to us. But omniscient and omnipresent? Not sold. I’m hoping He’ll sell me on that if I need to be. But I have this heretical notion that creation is all about God learning Himself. Our evolution is God’s growing self-knowledge . . . Granted, this is a kind of melding of Buddhist and J-Cian idealisms. But it’s fun conjecture.

 

 

 

• Voter Tampering – Romans 11:7, 8 – “What then, Israel hath not obtained that which he seeketh for, but the election hath obtained it, and the rest were blinded according as it is written, God hath given them the spirit of slumber, eyes that they should not see, and ears that they should not hear.” Isn’t this voter tampering. This is a major crime now.

 

 

 

brooksrobinson Says:
December 30, 2007 at 6:37 pm e

This isn’t a scripture on election… the Israelites disobeyed God(many times throughout the scriptures) so God hardened their hearts to him, much like yourself has been hardened to God(do not take this as an insult). The elect in this verse is referring to those who chose to follow Christ. Paul is writing this to the fact that the Israelites, as i mentioned earlier, rejected Christ and instead believe on the basis that its by their works/bloodline that they are saved, when in reality its grace. Paul is also saying, as earlier stated, that God did not reject his people because he gives them an option of grace through Jesus, which opens up salvation to all who believe.

bigham Says:
December 31, 2007 at 4:57 pm e

DT,
Keep reading. Paul is doing the exact same thing that you are doing in the book of Romans. He is bringing up objections to God and Christianity. Then he refutes those objections. So quoting bits and pieces of Paul’s letter to the Romans would be like me quoting bits of pieces of your writing- as a matter of fact I will do so here:

“a lifelong Christian who went to church every Sunday and private Christian schools most of my life… studying the holy book (the Bible). …Like almost all other religious people I was indoctrinated into my religion as a young child.” If I just give you those excerpts, you could be a Christian, right?

But, if you read your whole page, it is very clear that you are not a Christian. Similarly, you must read the entire chapter of Romans 11 to get Paul’s intention there, if not the entire book of Romans.

Paul has been trying to persuade Jews that Jesus was the Messiah for something like 20 years, and he uses all of the objections that he has heard over those many years in the book of Romans. Then, he refutes those objections. Therefore, it is laughable to quote the objections that he raises without quoting the refutations.

-David Hamilton

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 2, 2008 at 8:45 am e

Not sure what you’re referring too, David. The passage above is simply another example of God manipulating man, once again disproving the whole ‘free will’ idea so many Christians like to pretend exists in their religion.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 3, 2008 at 4:58 am e

The passage doesn’t disprove freewill… elect is referring to your place in heaven if your a believer. The Bible is clear that its your choice, however that position if you so choose to believe, is elected to guarantee you everlasting life.

 

 

 

 

• So vile, this god’s behaviour – Another example of how God manipulates man. In order to bring about his desired outcome (the death of King Ahab), I Kings 22:20-23 says, “And the Lord said, Who shall persuade Ahab, that he may go up and fall at Ramothgilead? …And there came forth a spirit, and stood before the Lord, and said, I will persuade him … I will go forth, and I will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. And he (God) said, Thou shalt persuade him, and prevail also: go forth, and do so. Now therefore, behold, the Lord hath put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these thy prophets, and the Lord hath spoken evil concerning thee.” Now check this out – Ez. 14:9 “And if the prophet be deceived when he hath spoken a thing, I the Lord have deceived that prophet, and I will stretch out my hand upon him, and will destroy him.” Why not ‘stretch out’ your hand and destroy King Ahab?

 

 

 

brooksrobinson Says:
December 31, 2007 at 12:12 am e

In 1Kings 22:20-23 you notice that it’s not God whose going to put the lying spirit, its possibly another agent. In 21 it says “Finally a spirit came forward, stood before the Lord and said, ‘I will entice him.’” In other words God gave them over to their lying spirits and allowed them to continue on, whether that agent is the devil or his demons we don’t know. You’ll find if you sincerely read the Bible God gives people over to their desires once their desires over take them and they abandon God for the sin.

bigham Says:
December 31, 2007 at 5:18 pm e

On your main page, you mention that many Christians do not actually read the Bible. Then you say,
“If one reads the ‘good book’ expecting to find a joyous life-guide encouraging love and happiness they will be sorely disappointed. Instead they will find a collection of fables obviously derived from earlier mythologies full of superstitious ignorance, atrocities, inhuman cruelty, violence, vengeance, threats, petty jealousy, incest, curses, injustice, unfair punishment, murder, rape, depravity, anger and death. Sooooo much death.”

The error there is in your expectations. You say that it is not a “life-guide” and then give a list of examples that happen in our lives, do they not? Have you ever seen or heard of ignorance, atrocities, inhuman cruelty, violence, vengeance, threats, petty jealousy, incest, curses, injustice, unfair punishment, murder, rape, depravity, anger and death in the world that we live in?

God could have given us a Bible that was nothing but a “joyous life-guide” but it would not have been cruelty if He did not include things that we will encounter in His world.

I believe that you may be suffering from the effects of being sold a version of the “prosperity gospel.” This false gospel promises, more or less, that God’s #1 concern is the happiness of His people. If you take that perspective, then much of the Old Testament, especially the book of Job, as well as all of the suffering in the world prove that God is either incompetent or non-existant. Either that, or our happiness is not His #1 concern. I believe that our happiness is very high on His list of concerns, but not in the way that the world would measure it.

If you take into account the existance of hell, then it would be cruel for God to allow us to be happy if it means that our happiness in this life will lead us away from Him and to an eternity in hell. So it would definitely make sense for God to hold our eternal happiness as a higher concern than our happiness in this life only.

Also, God’s #1 concern is His own glory. Our satisfaction with God gives Him the most glory, so He is greatly concerned with our satisfaction.

bigham Says:
December 31, 2007 at 5:19 pm e

*would have been cruelty (in the third “paragraph”)

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 2, 2008 at 9:29 am e

Beautiful! Thank you so much for your comment, David.

[[[…God’s #1 concern is His own glory.]]]

Could a phrase more perfectly reveal what a vile god the Christian god is. How can any self respecting human willingly get on their knees and worship a god whoes main concern is being glorified, worshiped, praised, etc.? And yes, I understand this is just David’s version of Christianity (one of 80+ varriations out there) but any that use the bible as their refference/guide deserve the same condemnation.

[[[Our satisfaction with God gives Him the most glory, so He is greatly concerned with our satisfaction.]]]

It’s strange how closely, David, your version of the Christian god so closely resembles North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il, or most of the worlds past and present dictators, for that matter.

And, no, I don’t find that, as you put it, reading the Old Testament, especially the book of Job, and witnessing all of the suffering in the world prove that God is either incompetent or non-existant. I take it to prove that the god you worship is a careless, irresponsible monster. Your god is one who regularly deceives and manipulates his creation in order that they fail him. And for their failure to see through his deceptions, they are punished in the most heinous ways imaginable. There is no denying that mankind’s failures are God’s plan. I’m sorry, David, but this sort of god can only be described as evil. And if there were a lick of evidence that such a god actually existed, rest assured that I wouldn’t waste a single second worshiping him. In fact, much like those brave, good souls did when confronted with Hitler, I would be encouraged to oppose him. I know this offends you, David, and I’m sorry. I’m sure you’ll respond with some fire and brimstone condemnation of my words for fear your god won’t approve of you if you don’t, and I’m fine with that, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to do a continuous back and forth with you on this as my life is simply too full to allow time for such things.

Thank you for your comments.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 3, 2008 at 5:15 am e

All these evils you point out Thomas are all created by man… Hitler committed atrocities, started a war. Man starts wars, murders, robs, rapes, pillages, steals from all facets of life. It’s all mans doing, If we as the US gave all our wasted food to Africa we could prob. feed the whole contanent. Instead we eat eat and become the fattest nation on the earth, and throw away platefuls daily, we have buffets where we can graze on food all day for 8$’s and you have the nerve to blame God? God gave each and everyone of us the ability to do good. You acknowledge evil and say God is evil? So are you now not an atheist? Why would an evil God create good, because to say there is evil you have to acknowledge good. Your wasting so much of your life devoting your blog to something that you believe doesn’t exist, thats like making a blog on why unicorns don’t exist.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 4, 2008 at 1:21 am e

Do hundreds of millions of people believe in the existence of unicorns? Do they worship them? If so, then a site dedicated to showing that unicorns aren’t real would hardly be a waste of time. And suggesting that the evils I connect to god on this website or in this post are all created by man is utterly false. Please point out examples. Also, I say that the god of the bible is evil. This in no way suggests that I believe in God and believe he is evil. And, Atheist is a title/category. My feelings about god worshipers and religion go way beyond the simple definition of that word. Please read Penn Jillette’s There Is No God in my THE WORDS OF OTHERS section. He puts it so well I couldn’t possibly put it better.

And to clarify, all the posts on this site existed LONG before the site ever did. I have been studying the bible and religion for a very long time. Over the years I made massive catalogs of notes. Eventually I transferred them to my computer, and at the urging of a friend, I created a site to categorize them all and give others a chance to read and respond to my conclusions and questions. Strange how only religionist think I should be doing something else with my spare time.

 

 

 

 

• Reign O’er Me – James 5:17 states that in answer to Elijah’s prayers, God made it not rain on earth for three years and six months! If this really happened, all life on earth would have come to an end, but perhaps those in the sea. As a result of God’s actions a great famine causes some Jews to eat their children.

 

 

brooksrobinson Says:
December 31, 2007 at 12:06 am e

A. The Greek word for earth, ghay (in English lettering) is also used to describe, region, land, or soil. So in other words it could mean Israel, which is probably the case as you continue to read through 1kings 18 you find that the famine was in Samaria. Before finding errors in the Bible use the original context, lettering, and read the versus around it, and other versus that are linked to it scattered in other books of the Bible.

brooksrobinson Says:
December 31, 2007 at 12:06 am e

The Greek word for earth, ghay (in English lettering) is also used to describe, region, land, or soil. So in other words it could mean Israel, which is probably the case as you continue to read through 1kings 18 you find that the famine was in Samaria. Before finding errors in the Bible use the original context, lettering, and read the versus around it, and other versus that are linked to it scattered in other books of the Bible.

Paul Rivas Says:
March 29, 2008 at 7:54 pm e

Another misrepresentation, as Brookrobinson has pointed out.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
March 30, 2008 at 12:16 pm e

Sorry, again no misrepresentation on my part but a wish on your part that I use one of your preferred, revised versions of the bible that better suits a more evolved and knowledgeable society. We now know, of course, that if such an event occurred that all life in the area (earth, land, ground) would perish. Does it really matter, then what word was used?

And when exactly does earth mean earth then? Only when you want it to?

Earth (KJV, ASV, LIT, DRB, WEB, MNT)
Land (YGB, WEY, WNT)
Ground (ISV)

And reading what came before or after this passage reveals nothing more than how obviously fictional it is. One single man stops and starts the rain for the earth, land, ground, whenever he feels like it. A shame God doesn’t grant anyone these special, grand wish fulfillment moments anymore.

DoubtingThomas

Paul Rivas Says:
March 30, 2008 at 5:14 pm e

What does the word earth mean in English? How do we determine what it means and when? Simple ability to read in context, and know that there are various uses for the word.

 

 

 

• Quick, get an editor in here! In Josh. 10:12-14 Joshua, desiring a longer day for his armies, commands the sun and moon to stand still. And they do. Here the level of ignorance of the workings of the universe by those who wrote the stories of the bible is in evidence as the sun is already still. It is the earth itself that is moving. “So the sun stood still in the midst of the heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.”

 

 

bigham Says:
December 31, 2007 at 5:31 pm e

who are you to call into question the living God and His Word?
Could not the Author and Creator of the universe and all life not have the power to control that which He created?

This is a human record of the event, and the humans at that time did not necessarily have the grasp of the workings of the universe that we have now. But, this does not prove the Bible to be a lie.

I don’t want you to think that I am trying to scare you into a Pascal’s wager or anything, but you do need to know the gravity of your actions.

You believe that there is no God and have not seen any evidence for the contrary. But, you cannot prove that there is no God. Just think about the consequences if you are wrong. The living God of this universe, the Creator and Giver of all, is who you are offending with this site.

Romans 1:22 says that everybody knows there is a God, some just suppress the truth. Deep down you know that there is a God, you just do not want to believe that there is a God, for whatever reason. Think about the way that you react to evidence for or against God. I am sure that you are eager to accept and drink in anything that seems to disprove God, while you claim to have not seen any convincing evidence for the existence of God.

My question to you is, what do you do when you see anything that claims to be evidence for the existence of God? In my atheism, I claimed to have no covincing evidence for God, all the while rejecting without consideration and/or avoiding any and all such evidence.

There will come a day when your mouth is shut to speaking against the living God of the universe, and your knee will bow and your tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Your sins against the living God deserve the penalty of death. The choice is yours, whether you pay that penalty with your own death, the “second death” as the Bible calls it, an eternity in hell. Or you can let Jesus Christ, the Son of God, pay the penalty for you. His death on the cross declared God righteous, for His righteousness was called into question in letting the sins of man go unpunished. His death also has the power to declare you and I righteous, although there is no righteousness in either of us apart from God. Let Christ pay your penalty. Let His death take the place of your death, be satisfied in God by enjoying Him forever!

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 2, 2008 at 10:51 am e

David, I understand that, according to your version of Christianity, I deserve to rot in eternal hellfire. This is one of the primary reasons I no longer worship the Christian god (or any other, for that matter). If there IS a god out there that would punish those who think like me with an eternal existence of torture in hell’s fiery dungeons, this is not a god I would deem worthy of worship. A god who created mankind solely to stroke his own mighty ego is an appalling one. A god who fathered a human child, simply so that child could be tortured to death in some bizarre replacement for the barbarous, ritualistic blood sacrifices that were previously required for man to atone for their perceived ‘sins’ hardly declares god ‘righteous’ but instead reveals him to be grotesque.

Your statement that “There will come a day when your mouth is shut to speaking against the living God of the universe, and your knee will bow and your tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” is truly disturbing. Your suggestion that your god would shut my mouth from speaking against him (am I truly such a threat?) and force me to kneel before him and state that Jesus is Lord only serves to reveal what an insecure god it is that you praise so diligently. No true god would ever require anyone worship him. It absolutely defeats the argument of perfection to suggest that a god NEEDS anything.

You ask what do I do when seeing anything that claims to be evidence for the existence of God? And then suggest that I have or do on a regular basis but choose to ignore it. I assure you that I have never been presented with any evidence of God’s existence. If you have any, please feel free to present it. In fact, get rich while you’re at it – go to http://www.godsreward.com/ and provide the proof there as well. But remember what happened to all those religions of the past which also could not offer proof; The Greeks couldn’t provide proof of Zeus’s existence, the Romans couldn’t provide proof of the god Jupiter’s existence, the Aztecs couldn’t provide proof of Coatlicue’s existence, the Egyptians couldn’t provide proof of Ra’s existence, and on and on and on. And, David, the main reason I created my site in blog format was to allow those who believe to reply to my comments and offer their opinions. I don’t isolate myself in my belief like so many god worshipers do. I welcome differing opinions. And remember, I didn’t ‘fall away from God’ while being away from believers but while being among them.

David, you state “that everybody knows there is a God, some just suppress the truth. Deep down you know that there is a God, you just do not want to believe that there is a God”. This argument that ‘deep down’ all of humanity knows that the god of the Christian Bible is the real and one true god is beautiful in its idiocity. The idea that all of the hundreds of millions of people who have lived and died worshiping the thousands of gods that mankind has invented over the years, did so fully aware that the Christian god even existed is so beyond the scope of reality and reason as to be laughable. And to suggest that they are all burning in eternal hellfire as a result of their ‘choice’ is perfectly revelatory of what a truly vile god it is that you worship.

You also state that the bible is a human record of the events, susceptible to the ignorance of humanity at the time. True, but you then state that this doesn’t mean the bible is a lie. Again, true, but it does mean that the bible is fallible. In other words, it means your perfect god allowed his holy word, the work that represents him and his religion, to be full of inaccuracies. What kind of all powerful, perfect god would do that?

You ask, who am I to call into question the living God and His Word? I am an independent, free thinking human being blessed with an unclouded mind. Now, if it’s your god who blessed me with this mind, then to punish me for using it is all the proof I need that he is not a god worthy of my praise.

Thank you for your comment.

 

 

 

• Moon Light – Isaiah 13:10 – “The moon shall not cause her light to shine.” How can an all knowing God allow such ignorance of the world be depicted in His Holy Word?

 

 

Paul Rivas Says:
March 29, 2008 at 7:57 pm e

So, you are saying that the Bible cannot use poetic language? Where does this passage give any indication that it is to be taken as a scientific explanation?

doubtingthomas426 Says:
March 30, 2008 at 12:31 pm e

Paul,

You asked – “So, you are saying that the Bible cannot use poetic language? Where does this passage give any indication that it is to be taken as a scientific explanation?”

You really want to go there, Paul? Really? OK, I’ll paraphrase; Where does the bible give any indication that it can be taken literally? How much should we assume is ‘poetic’ or ‘parable’ or ‘allegory’ or ‘false’ or ‘a lie’ or ‘nonsense’? Where is the codex that will reveal which parts of the bible I can be certain are true and which parts are a fairy tale? Maybe I should just rely on you, Paul, huh? Or should I rely on another Christian’s concept of God and the meaning of a particular bit of scripture? But which sect? Which sect of Christianity is most in tuned with God? I get the funny feeling that you think it is yours. But SOOOOO many would disagree. Do you have any idea which sect believes the story of Noah and the Ark is fact and which believes it is fiction? Do you think there is a single story contained in the bible that EVERY SINGLE SECT OF CHRISTIANITY would agree on? What may be ‘poetic language’ to you, Paul, is ABSOLUTE FACT to another. But I should only accept YOUR opinion as truth, right?

A small window into my frustration.

DoubtingThomas

Paul Rivas Says:
March 30, 2008 at 5:10 pm e

DT

When you are reading a news story how do you know which parts are fact and which parts are metaphor? When you are talking to a friend how do you know he doesn’t literally mean he could eat a horse?
We have common metaphors and sayings and phrases. Do you think those are unique to our times? Do you seriously think the writer who wrote, “the moon shall not cause her light to shine . . . ” was trying to convey scientific fact? That people misinterpret, or are ignorant of how to read and understand the Bible does not make it untrue.
To use a modern example, there are many different theories of evolution. Not everyone agrees how it happened, or how long it took, or where the first humans originated, etc. Do these different interpretations of the fossil record mean it didn’t happen?
Again I say we have to look (as much as we can) at the intent of the writer. If the writer’s intent was to state scientific fact, then we can question “How can an all knowing God allow such ignorance of the world be depicted in His Holy Word?”
But I do not believe this is the case, and I think context and historical evidence backs up that claim.

 

 

 

 

• Hornets from God – Ex 23:28, 30 – Describes how God wanted Moses and the Jews to overrun & seize the seven nations of Canaan & how God would send hornets to drive out the Hivite, the Canaanite and the Hittite. Another example of God being directly involved. Why doesn’t he send swarms of hornets against the Palestinians in current Israel?

 

 

mary a. kaufman Says:
December 20, 2007 at 5:45 pm e

I’d like to write that this is one damn great blog site, but is the word ‘damn” acceptable? It’s a darn good one, if not. Mary from Meander With Me

doubtingthomas426 Says:
December 29, 2007 at 12:20 pm e

Mary, ALL language is acceptable here. I am strongly opposed to all forms of censorship. Hope you keep coming back and checking in.

brooksrobinson Says:
December 31, 2007 at 12:22 am e

God promised them the land of Canaan, it’d only make sense to get directly involved considering the Hebrews where wandering around the desert for 40yrs, and before that slaves to the Egyptians. These nations were well established, fortified, and had armies that were certainly battle hardened. God told them to enter and take it from these people because as described in previous, and latter books, only evil all the time, and would only cause harm to the Hebrews if allowed to live. Guess what the Hebrews allowed them to live and now those people are causing harm to them and are a thorn in their side.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 2, 2008 at 12:15 pm e

The point is that the bible regularly depicts a god that is actively involved in effecting the outcome of human events, often in dramatic ways. He sends angels to slaughter massive numbers of men, sends plagues, and swarms of insects to do his bidding, pretty much every mythological cliché. A human army calls upon God to knock down the walls of a fortified city and stop the sun from rotating around the earth (again, the SUN from rotating around the EARTH). The bible is filled with depictions of the Christian god aiding his followers in murdering those that worshiped other gods, not converting them, killing them, dooming them to eternal hellfire. The reason I repeatedly point this out is to compare how involved God was then to how UNinvolved he is now. If there ever was a time when the power of God needed to be displayed, perhaps in a mighty swarm of hornets helping the Israelis to defeat the Palestinians, it’s now. But, of course, this will never happen as the events depicted in the pages of the bible are fairy tales, not soon to be replicated in reality.

Thank you for your comment.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 3, 2008 at 5:21 am e

Israel defeated Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt in 1948. They lacked a military and many fresh from the holocaust… Meanwhile the Arab nations had fresh armies, British trained, and British equipment. Israel not only defeats them all, but takes land. When in such a time does a group of people get a nation when they haven’t existed as a nation for 2000years? If thats not a miracle I don’t know what is. You keep dinging on these issues of the sun rotating around the earth… Does that seriously determine whether or not the Bible is true? Because it appeared to men back then that the Sun rotates around the earth? Your basing your whole after life on that one line ? God takes an active part in today and it is clear if you understand Biblical prophecy.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 3, 2008 at 5:22 am e

Israel defeated Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Egypt in 1948. They lacked a military and many fresh from the holocaust… Meanwhile the Arab nations had fresh armies, British trained, and British equipment. Israel not only defeats them all, but takes land. When in such a time does a group of people get a nation when they haven’t existed as a nation for 2000years? If thats not a miracle I don’t know what is. You keep dinging on these issues of the sun rotating around the earth… Does that seriously determine whether or not the Bible is true? Because it appeared to men back then that the Sun rotates around the earth? Your basing your whole after life on that one line ? God takes an active part in today and it is clear if you understand Biblical prophecy. The reason why God told them to kill all those people because as the Bible quotes many times. Those people are only evil all the time, if you do not kill them they will only be a thorn in your side. Hence why the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab nations are a constant threat. Israel disobeyed God and are still dealing with its consequences.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 4, 2008 at 1:59 am e

[[[You keep dinging on these issues of the sun rotating around the earth… Does that seriously determine whether or not the Bible is true? Because it appeared to men back then that the Sun rotates around the earth? Your basing your whole after life on that one line?]]]

Out of a couple hundred posts and comments I mention the whole sun rotating around the earth incident only a handful of times. The reason is always the same; the sun doesn’t rotate around the earth. As you state, in their ignorance, the men who wrote the bible believed that was what happened. But it isn’t. Meaning, this all knowing, all perfect god allowed his holy word, the book that represents him and his religion, to contain blatant falsehoods. If a person writes their autobiography and it is later revealed that, in it, they lied about a certain incident, every single other story they wrote would be brought into doubt. Credibility would be completely lost. Just as it is with the bible. And if you’ve reviewed my site even briefly you will realize that, NO, I don’t base my whole ‘after life’ on this one inaccuracy.

[[[Those people are only evil all the time, if you do not kill them they will only be a thorn in your side. Hence why the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab nations are a constant threat. Israel disobeyed God and are still dealing with its consequences.]]]

You’ve mentioned this whole — the Palestinians need to be killed because, otherwise, they will continue to be a thorn in the sides of the Israelis before. I’m not sure if you’re Jewish or not, but I have difficulty understanding how you can defend this way of thinking. Palestinians aren’t evil. They aren’t demons. They are as human as you or I. How can you justify god’s mandate that they should all be killed? Are you telling me that they truly have no good reason to believe they have a right to be there? Not even one? And you say that Israel disobeyed god by not killing them all and so are still suffering the consequences. If their god wanted them to succeed so badly, why didn’t he send in a great swarm of hornets, or an angel to slaughter the enemy of the Israeli as he does so often in the pages of the bible? You say that an American supported and armed Israel’s success in invading and conquering a vastly under-funded, under-trained and unprepared army and establishing their own nation was a miracle and evidence of God’s aid? You, sir, are easily satisfied.

Also, GOOD and EVIL are adjectives used to describe typical human behavior. They do not represent an existence of a soul or a god. Christians are as capable of ‘Evil’ or ‘Good’ deeds as a Hindu or an Atheist. You can describe a murderer as ‘evil’ as a way to reveal your opinion of that person but are they truly ‘evil’? A psychological explanation is always more likely.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 4, 2008 at 1:32 pm e

“and it is later revealed that, in it, they lied about a certain incident” Your assuming they lied about the incident. The problem is your going to have inaccuracies with any ancient literature, whether its due to issue of transferring it language to language or just an ancient understanding of the world.

“You say that an American supported and armed Israel’s success in invading and conquering a vastly under-funded, under-trained and unprepared army and establishing their own nation was a miracle and evidence of God’s aid” Perhaps a little history lesson is in order for you. Israel did not receive support from anyone in the 1948 wars. They defeated these nations solely alone. Today its not just us supporting Israel, but Israel supports us to. Many of our weapons come from Israel, and they’ve succeeded in military technology that are still in test phases here, like the Land Warrior program. If you still aren’t satisfied, perhaps you should look up the Israeli “force field” that was recently invented and we purchased.

“the Palestinians need to be killed because, otherwise, they will continue to be a thorn in the sides of the Israelis before” The Palestinians are merely the descendants of the evil people God told to kill.I never said they were demons, but evil? The majority of the Palestinians want to see Israel burn, and its evident of that by the suicide bombings and the breaking of every treaty Israel has ever signed with them. The Bible has already predicted whats going to happen with Israel.

“A psychological explanation is always more likely” This maybe true, but the idea’s of morals have existed outside the “Jewish-Christian” religion as well. Christians are no different then Hindu’s or Atheists, man is man, and is imperfect. The idea’s of evil however, should not of needed to come to pass if its just nature. Our emotions spike if a human kills a human, or even if an animal kills a human. But when animals kill animals we think “Oh, thats just nature” That same process doesn’t enter our minds with us. Murder is just nature, if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t of existed since the dawn of man.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 5, 2008 at 10:51 am e

Again you miss the point. If inaccuracies exist in your holy book, your perfect, all powerful god allowed them to be there. In other words, he allows an inaccurate book to represent him.

In 1947 Britain decided to hand the matter of Palestine over to the United Nations. A special committee of the United Nations sent out to study the problem produced a plan of partition on terms more favorable to the Zionists than the 1937 Peel Commission had come up with. This was accepted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in November 1947, WITH VERY ACTIVE SUPPORT FROM THE UNITED STATES AND FROM RUSSIA, which wanted the British to withdraw from Palestine. The Arab members of the United Nations and the Palestinian Arabs rejected it, and, faced once more with the impossibility of finding a policy which both Arabs and Jews would accept; Britain decided to withdraw from Palestine on a fixed date, 14 May 1948… As the date came nearer, British authority inevitably decreased and fighting broke out, in which the Jews soon gained the upper hand. This in turn led to a decision by the neighboring Arab states to intervene, and thus a series of local conflicts turned into a war.

Israel would not exist if America wouldn’t have stepped up to back its formation. Period.

NOTHING about the Israel-Arab war had anything to do with God’s intervening to aid his people. The war was about ego and greed and power and arbitrary lines drawn in the sand of some of the ugliest, most inhospitable land on the face of the earth. Why is the promise-land such a crappy place to live?

Finally, why, exactly, do the Israelis have MORE of a right to that chunk of land than the Palestinians? And the bible can’t be used to support your reasoning.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 6, 2008 at 6:33 am e

There is nothing inaccurate about that verse. Everyone today does the exact same thing. How many times in your life even after being an Atheist, have you said When the sun goes down? Does that mean now your statements are false now because you weren’t scientifically precise about the sun? Not to mention I think you have a big misconception of what the Bible truely is. Its not a book literally written by God, nor is the Bible handed down to man from God. No Christian can and should say that. What the Bible is, is a book that is inspired by God through man. The story and main points all add up, most of the side information all add up, infact many of the errors in the Bible are simply mistranslation errors. So unless you know Greek or Hebrew, it may not be wise of you to talk about contradictions and errors. The Greek language is set up differently then English and something like Dog bites man and Man bites dog might literally mean the same thing in the Greek. Now onto Israel-Arab issues, Just because America/Russia is instrumental in bringing Israel together does not mean God did not influence the situation. The Bible has time and time again showed that God used many empires to punish Israel for disobeying God. Israel has many times been a cause of issues, and at many times has not caused issues but God has saved them either way. The United States has many times attempted to create new countries or saved governments and has failed at it, so using the US as this almighty trump card does not work. We created the modern Iraq who has more oil deposites and riches then Israel yet cannot hold itself together. Israel who had nothing, and a cultural minority has been able to withstand out numbering Arab forces many times. Israel has a claim to the land because they have lived there before hand. Jews have attempted to repopulate the land even before ww2. Most of the Palestinians were brought over there to work on Jewish farms. Im also not opposed to Palestinians having their own land, just not in Israel, but the fact that Palestinians do not want to compromise with Israel period without their death should be troublesome.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 6, 2008 at 9:53 am e

[[[The story and main points all add up, most of the side information all add up, infact many of the errors in the Bible are simply mistranslation errors.]]]

brooksrobinson, I give you just one single example, the story of Noah and the Ark:

• God so despised (so much for ‘good’) the offspring of the first nine generations of his creation he decided to not only kill them all (why bother with trying to save them?) but to kill every other living thing upon the face of the earth! No exception was made for children, pregnant women or even babies. Only Noah, his three sons and their four wives were spared. How convenient that Noah and his sons had such perfect taste in women.

• In the time it took Noah to gather up all the animals (7 of every ‘clean’ beast & 2 of every ‘unclean’ beast & 7 of every fowl of both sexes (14 each) , and a male & female of every ‘creeping thing’) and construct the ark (even working with his sons and the wives it would have taken years), how many women became pregnant? How many gave birth? How many babies did God murder with the flood?

• How is it neither Noah, his sons, nor their wives were at all concerned about worshiping and blindly obeying a God (really Noah as he was the only one in direct communication) who was determined to kill all their friends and family? Did they all really believe everyone they knew deserved to be murdered?

• The tools required to build such a large vessel (100? times larger than any built at the time) didn’t exist at the time.

• The lumber required to build such a large vessel (500ft long, 85ft wide, 60ft & 3 stories high) wasn’t readily available & would have been VERY expensive. Gen 6:15 – “…The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits.” The size is the equivalent of 522 standard stock cars or 8 freight trains of 65 cars each.

• The weight of the ark, filled to capacity with animals, food and supplies would result in a non-buoyant vessel.

• How did all these species of animals migrate across numerous foreign continents in their return home after the flood and yet leave no trace behind? The fossil record should basically show that all species originated wherever the Ark landed (Turkey).

• How did Noah keep the birds from eating all the insects? And what about the parasites they (and the other animals) carried? Do those count for the two of each living thing?

• It would have been impossible for Noah, his wife, his three sons and their three wives, (8 people total) to both crew the vessel and care for and feed and clean up after all the animals.

• Only an expert ship builder could hope to construct a vessel never before imagined and hope to make it sea worthy.

• Why all the trouble? Again, why didn’t God just snap his almighty fingers and poof there is the ark and snap all the animals are on board? Did he want to sit and stew in his anger while Noah and his sons attempted to obey his command. And better yet, why not just snap his almighty fingers and all the bad people just drop dead or disappear in a puff of smoke? Why the need to kill every living thing?

• Insects must have been included (creeping things maybe) in the to be saved list, otherwise the majority would have drowned.

• Were all fish excluded? What happened to the fresh water fish when the seas rose and mixed with their water? And vice versa?

• As any zoologist will tell you, a male and female of any species aren’t necessarily compatible as mates and there is no guarantee if they were that they could produce an offspring.

• And in case any believer suggests at any point that God interfered in order to guarantee his plan worked out (i.e. all animals mated and produced offspring, never attacked one another, no sickness on board) I again ask why not just snap his almighty fingers and make all the offending humans fall dead? I mean if he is going to use his infinite powers to take part in the great plan, why not that?

• How many ‘clean’ or ‘unclean’ beasts are carnivores? How about the 14 of each fowl? And the creeping things? How many extra animals were brought on board to feed them? Or did God once again conveniently interfere to make the lions herbivores for the duration of the voyage?

• And what about after the voyage? What did all the carnivores eat then? How many generations of animals would have to be born before they could all safely start preying on one another again?

• Noah, one of only 8 people on earth God deems worthy of sparing his wrath, at one point lies about naked and is spied on by his son, Ham. He gets drunk from wine of his own vineyard. How long does it take to get a vineyard going? How much priority was given to creating wine when they needed to repopulate and regrow the entire world? Gen. 9

• After the waters receded the whole of the earth would have been covered in rot and death. Disease would have been unavoidable.

• Pork too? – After the flood, of the few remaining animals left on earth, God tells Noah, “…every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.” Gen. 9:3 How quickly would each species become extinct if such an occurrence had actually taken place? And what happened to kosher?

• “And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.” Gen 7:23 Please don’t suggest that fish, or whales, or plants survived God’s tantrum.

brooksrobinson Says:
January 6, 2008 at 8:16 pm e

If God really commanded this ( the almighty creator of the Universe) I don;t think it would be difficult for Him to keep animals from eating each other, or to guide them to where Noah was located, or even give Noah the ability with knowledge, on how to do this impossible feat, to keep disease from being prevalent. God did not command the Hebrews to not eat pork until the law and theres a reason for this( An atheist professor, explained to my friends class that perhaps the Jews associated God to these commands, because there is evidence that pigs had a disease because of their filth in those days, and understood why the Jews did not eat meat). The Bible is clear on why God flooded the earth, man became wicked because they were the descendants of what is called the Nephilim (Demons had sexual relations with humans and created giant offspring who were only evil all the time) this in turn corrupted man and as God said in Genesis, “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time” So God judged them because of this. Compare this to the book of Numbers 13, which the Hebrews spot these nations whom God told them to destroy were giants, and even Nephilim themselves, and therefore are only evil all the time. God judged these people because they are only evil all the time, and did nothing good, not one thing. Noah did sin, just as I sin, but Noah did not do evil all the time, and believed in God and followed his commands as best as humanly possible, where as the others perhaps did not.

doubtingthomas426 Says:
January 8, 2008 at 9:39 am e

Really, you religionists MUST stop defending the implausible depictions in the bible by citing your god’s superpowers. If your god deemed every living thing deserved to die except Noah, his sons, their wives and a handful of each type of creature, he could have simply snapped his almighty fingers and made it so. But no, the god of the bible LOVES drama. So the idea that God commanded Noah to do all these impossible things and then uses his magical powers to do them himself is absurd. God could have killed only the guilty and spared the world, but, as was the case with Sodom and Gomorrah, this ‘perfect’ god of yours apparently has no ability to control his tempter.

And Demons having sex with humans?! Really!? Is there NOTHING in the bible that makes you roll your eyes? Nothing?

mary a. kaufman Says:
May 24, 2008 at 4:20 pm e

Doubting Thomas, of course, there is absolutely nothing too far-fetched, too ridiculous, too insane and too infantile for a believer such as Brooksrobinson to accept as God’s Word. Everything written in the Bible is not only possible, but factual.
I wonder to what fantasy-land he would go to explain “God’s” command, and this is after the Israelites made thier exodus out of Egypt, to sacrifice every newborn son as a burnt offering to himself. Exodus 22:29 and 30. True, God relented and later, permitted “His” people to redeem their sons, but how many newborn babies were horribly sacrificed and sent to God as burnt offerings in the interim . . . and all because Moses believed himself to be the people’s one and only connection to God, at the time.

brooksrobinson Says:
May 24, 2008 at 8:17 pm e

Mary:

The first born humans were not sacrificed, just the animals. As chapter 13 explains they were consecrated to the Lord. If you read 13:14, it says “In days to come, when your SON asks you, What does this mean?” If the baby was sacrificed on the 8th day, he cannot ask questions what this means. Read also Luke 2:22-24, which is Jesus’ consecration, but it gives an account of what a consecration consists of.

Numbers 3:40 has the Lord taking the Levites for him instead of the first born sons and livestock. By how your looking at this, it would seem as if God wants the tribe of Levites to be sacrificed to him, however they were set aside as the priestly tribe.

 

 

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

 

 

Why Atheists Are NOT Wasting Their Time

Why Atheists Are NOT Wasting Their Time

By Thomas Keane

AKA DoubtingThomas

 ***NOTE: This article was originally published by the people at www.PathofReason.com and is reprinted here with their permission.

One of the most common criticisms Atheists are confronted with is the question of why we waste so much time discussing religion, god worship, the bible, etc.? Why do we focus so much time on something we don’t believe in? Don’t we have anything better to do with our time? The reason why these questions are always so frustrating has less to do with how often we are confronted with them and more to do with how obvious the answers should be. When your child tells you they believe there is a monster in their closet or under their bed, do you ignore them or tell them the truth? If she told you that the reason she believed there was a monster under her bed was because she had read a story that told her about these monsters, wouldn’t you be curious to read this story in order to better understand how your child came to her erroneous conclusion? Now what if your daughter is 21 and has a 3 year old daughter of her own. Her boyfriend, the father of her child, is involved with a group that believes their founder (Avalon) is the second coming of Christ and is in direct communication with God. If you discovered that your daughter had also become a follower of Avalon and was teaching/raising your 3yo granddaughter to believe in the same things, would you be wasting your time if you decided to speak up and express your belief that Avalon was a fraud and even offer proof to support your opinion?

What if your daughter refused to listen and instead ran away with her boyfriend, your granddaughter and Avalon to an isolated compound somewhere and you didn’t see them again for another fifteen years? What do you think the likelihood is, that once you are finally allowed to see your, now 18yo, granddaughter, that anything you say will convince her that what she has been raised to believe isn’t true? The odds are that your words would fall on deaf ears; however, that doesn’t make your efforts meaningless. Nor does it mean you should give up. The more you learn about this cult that swallowed up your daughter and granddaughter the greater your ability will be to address the issues you have with it. After all, even the strongest barrier of misinformation can’t withstand a constant barrage of truth.

There is a reason why the majority of god worshipers are devoted to the same god that the people who raised them worshiped. It isn’t because their god is any more legitimate than any of the other 2,000+ gods mankind has invented over the years. It is simply because once myth has been established as fact in a child’s innocent, naïve mind, it is very difficult, even as an adult, for that person to shake that belief. Faith is not a synonym for fact, it is a synonym for hope and it is the definition of foolishness to devote one’s every life decision around the hope that a thing is true.

Once upon a time, people believed that the earth was the center of the universe and everything (including the sun) revolved around it. Once upon a time people believed that tossing a virgin into a volcano or carving out their still beating hearts was the only way to appease their god(s). Once upon a time people believed Zeus’ wrath resulted in thunder and lightning and Poseidon’s resulted in tidal waves. Once upon a time people believed that you could take ‘it’ with you and as a result they built elaborate tombs and filled them with treasures and even servants so that in the afterlife they would continue to enjoy the lifestyle to which they were accustomed. Once upon a time people believed in a great many things that we now know to be erroneous.

If we discovered that there were people in the world who still believed in established myth, would we be wasting our time to confront them with evidence that reveals the fallacy of their beliefs? And when a Christian or Mormon missionary travels deep into the Amazonian jungles to tell the native people there that the gods they worship are false and that they should instead believe in this or that god, aren’t they doing the same thing that an Atheist does when they contradict Christian beliefs? The only difference here seems to be that an Atheist supports his beliefs with evidence while a believer relies only on hope, AKA – faith.

What could possibly be more admirable than knowing the truth of something and, when encountering someone who only knows the lie, taking the time to share with them what you have learned. How could this ever be considered a waste of time? How many people ‘wasted their time’ trying to talk reason with a follower of Jim Jones (900 dead, 300 of whom were children). How many people ‘wasted their time’ pleading with family and/or friends who were members of the Heaven’s Gate cult? How many of the 80+ followers of David Koresh, 21 of whom were children, who died in the Waco, Texas catastrophe might have been spared if more people had ‘wasted their time’? If an Atheist had encountered a member of any of these groups you can bet that they would have spoken up. Are we to believe that a Christian would have tucked their bible away and bit their tongue?

It is in all of our best interests that we resist the tendency to dismiss the opinion of another simply because it differs from our own. If someone is willing to take the time to challenge something you believe in, the least you can do is take the time to listen and consider. Christians like to act all mystified as to why Atheists spend so much time discussing something they don’t believe in but the fact that they never protest when an Atheist wastes his or her time playing Guitar Hero or watching an American Idol marathon reveals that what they are really expressing is anxiety, not confusion. No one likes to be confronted with the prospect that what they accept as truth could possibly be a lie. But such a revelation can only benefit us, individually and as a society.

If anything it is the religious who are wasting their time. Just consider how much further along we would be as a society, not to mention as a species, if it weren’t for religion. The endless struggle for religious supremacy has led to innumerable wars and countless lost lives. Consider the incomprehensible amount of literature that was hunted down, confiscated and/or destroyed by the church. How much knowledge have we lost because of the fears of the religious? How many of our greatest minds were persecuted and imprisoned because they dared to disagree with someone’s concept of one god or another? How many dreams, ideas and inventions were snuffed out by worshipers of gods? How many more men like Aristotle, Galileo, Voltaire and Socrates would we have if not for religion? Consider all the trials, the imprisonments, the banishments, the riots, the persecutions, the genocides, the repression, the bigotry, the sexism, the mutilation and the division, so much division. Has anything in history ever divided one man from another more than religion? But it’s the Atheist who is wasting his time? Could anything be more laughable? Just imagine where we would be now as a people if we had focused on peace, coexisting, civilization, progress and philosophy instead of saving souls and deciding whose god was better than another’s. No one has wasted more of their own time, and worse, humanity’s time than the religious.

If the human race has any hope for a bright future it certainly doesn’t rest with the religious or whatever god they may worship. Their god will not create peace on earth. Your god will not protect our children from the evils of the world. His god will not reward us with eternal life. Her god will not assure our armies of success in battle. We can only rely on ourselves and on each other. There simply is no one else. And it’s not a waste of time to say so.

 

Thomas Keane (DoubtingThomas)

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Wickedness of the Popes

 

The Wickedness of the Popes

 

By Thomas Keane

AKA DoubtingThomas

 

All but one of the first fifty popes were deemed saints. Whether or not they were deserving of such a title will always be debatable, however, beginning around 500 A.D. the corruption of the Catholic Church becomes undeniable. After that, finding any pope worthy of being called a saint becomes all but impossible. The Papacy had by then become a means to power, and only those craving power pursued it, and they pursued it with all their might. From the New Standard Encyclopedia: “In the furious strife of local parties, the papacy came to be hardly more than the spoils of party victory. Candidates of every variety of incapacity and unsuitableness were set up by rivals.”

Keep in mind that this information was not gleaned from the writings of the Church’s enemies but from the records of its own historians, popes and cardinals: Victor II, Pius II, Cardinal Baronius, Bishop Liutprand, Father Salvianus, and historians, Milman, Gerbert, Buchard, Guicciardini, Vacandard, Draper, and others.

During the atrocities of the Dark Ages these divinely guided popes were so busy murdering each other that there were ten in twelve years (891-903) and forty in just over a hundred. According to Cardinal Baronius and Vulgarius, Pope Sergius III murdered his two predecessors. Toto, a noble at the head of the rabble following, used his influence to have his brother, Constantine II, appointed pope in 708. Constantine II had his eyes put out by Christopher, his chief official. Christopher learned that Karma was a bitch when he and his sons had their eyes put out as punishment for plotting against Pope Gregory. Pope Leo III’s two nephews, Pascal and Campulus, both clerics, hired a band of assassins to murder their uncle and when the hirelings failed, the two nephews took matters into their own hands and dragged the pope into a nearby monastery and killed him.

Another treacherous Christopher deposed Pope Leo the V, and was in turn deposed and succeeded by the bloodthirsty and power hungry Sergius III. During this time the Holy Ghost was not the one selecting the popes but what Cardinal Baronius called scortas, AKA whores. This was known as “the rule of the courtesans,” or sometimes the Pornocracy, or reign of the whores. One of the more notable members of this select group, Theodora, was a woman Cardinal Baronius called the “shameless whore.” Theodora’s daughter, Marozia, was a mirror image of her mother both in appearance and behavior. Both women had sons by none other than Pope Sergius III, and both put their illegitimate sons on the papal throne – John XI and John XII. The first ended up in prison while the second “turned the Lateran Palace into a brothel.” Some of Pope John XII’s crimes – murder, perjury, adultery, incest with his two sisters, bleeding and castrating his enemies, giving church treasure to a mistress, just to name a few. It was said he died at the hands of an outraged husband.

Pope Benedict VI was strangled to death on order of Cardinal Francone, after which the Cardinal became Boniface VII, “a horrid monster surpassing all other mortals in wickedness,” according to the historian Gerbert. Pope Boniface VIII was little better, as he orchestrated the murder of the halfwit Celestine V in order to gain the papacy. However, the Romans drove him out before he even had time to redecorate and after his death, a successor, Pope Clement V, had him tried posthumously where he was found guilty of many horrible crimes including pederasty and murder. But it turned out Clement wasn’t much of a saint himself, as his successor, John XXII, revealed that Clement had stolen the equivalent of five million dollars of papal money which he had given to his nephew.

So corrupt was John XXIII that Sigmund of Hungary felt compelled to call a council to investigate him. The council produced fifty-four articles describing him as “wicked, irreverent, unchaste, a liar, disobedient and infected with many vices.” As a cardinal he was described as having been “inhuman, unjust and cruel,” and as Pope “an oppressor of the poor, persecutor of justice, pillar of the wicked, statue of the simoniacs, addicted to magic, the dregs of vice … wholly given to sleep and carnal desires, a mirror of infamy, a profound inventor of wickedness.” His acquirement of the Papacy was through “violence and fraud and sold indulgences, benefices, sacraments and bulls.” He practiced “piracy, sacrilege, adultery, murder, rape, sodomy, incest and theft.” The council deposed him in 1414.

Benedict V fled with the Vatican treasury after dishonoring a young girl. For 1,500 pounds of gold, Benedict IX sold the papacy to a successor. Pope Urban VI subjected his cardinals to torture and murder. Pope Innocent VIII took no measures to hide his illegitimate children and even filled their pockets with church riches. During his time as a papal legate, Clement VII ordered the slaughter of the entire populace of Cesena, including the children. Some popes were so offensive they were exiled. At least two were punished for their wickedness by having their eyes and tongues carved out before each man was tied to the tail of an ass and dragged through the streets. Others were so despised that they weren’t safe even in death, the vengeance seekers digging their corpses up and throwing them into the Tiber. The church did such a poor job of leading by example that Pius II reported that “scarcely a prince in Italy had been born in wedlock.”

And then came the shameful Borgias clan, most notably Rodrigo (AKA Pope Alexander VI). Few popes could equal this man in wickedness. For the equivalent of three million dollars he bought his place at the top of the divinely elected hierarchy. The notable historian, Guicciardini, described him thusly: “…private habits of the utmost obscenity, no shame or sense of truth, no fidelity to his engagements, no religious sentiments, insatiable avarice, unbridled ambition, cruelty beyond the cruelty of barbarous races, burning desire to elevate his sons by any means: of whom there were many, and among them one – not any less detestable than his father.” Alexander VI’s son, Cesare Borgia, gained a cardinalate by murdering his brother John, his sister’s husband, and two cardinals. But when he found that he wasn’t making as much money as he had expected, Cesare Borgia renounced his blood-soaked title in order to seek out more profitable enterprises. He made himself Duke of Valentinos, positioned his brother to become Duke of Gandia, and his sister, the Duchess of Ferrara, and later a princess after arranging her marriage to one of the King of Naples’ sons. While still a cardinal, Cesare Borgia turned his quarters in the Vatican into a brothel. Burchard, the papal historian at the time, reported that Cesare indulged in nightly carousing in his rooms, rooms that were just above his father, the Pope’s. Burchard also spoke of the courtesans “dancing naked before the servants of the Lord and the Vicar of Christ.” And Lucrezia, Cesare’s sister, reportedly gave out prizes to whoever “had had carnal intercourse with courtesans the largest number of times.” The church loves to govern the populace but who governs the church?

During the Middle Ages the College of Cardinals was a den of corruption. For anyone with money and influence securing a cardinalate was a breeze. Character, education or ability played no part in it. Even age wasn’t a factor. Paul III appointed two of his teenage grandchildren to office. Paul IV made his nephew a cardinal even though he himself admitted that “his arm is dyed in blood to the elbow.”

In a bizarre episode, just as the cope (Catholic vestment) was being placed upon Alexander III, Cardinal Octavian tore it away and put it on himself, backwards, and proclaimed himself pope. A sort of tug-of-war broke out between Octavian and one of Alexander’s supporters until a group of soldiers loyal to Octavian charged in and declared him a winner. Alexander was forced to flee to France where he raised an army and eventually returned in an attempt to reclaim his title. The battle that followed destroyed several churches and left the floor of St. Peter’s strewn with corpses. The Romans were able to drive out Alexander’s army but not permanently. His second attempt was a success and for the next three years Alexander made his rivals suffer for their insolence.

If the Catholic Church has proven anything over the years it is that it can always be relied upon to be a refuge for the abominable, a sanctuary for the corrupt, a safe haven for the perverted, a protector of the virtue-less, and an exemplar of greed. Both Sadism and Masochism were created and perfected by the Catholic Church. Guilt and oppression are its tools and it uses them with unparalleled skill. Inspired and deluded by its own arrogance and greed, the Catholic Church lit a fire beneath a monster (the Crusades) and to this day the monster still feels the burn and desires retribution. How much longer must we allow religion to divide all of mankind, how much longer must we allow it to revise history, how much longer must we allow it to influence and shape government, how much longer must we allow it to stifle our potential, how much longer must we allow it to abuse our children, how much longer must we allow it to warp our concept of sexuality, how much longer must we allow its organized form tax exempt status, how much longer must humanity suffer and stagnate?

DoubtingThomas

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

ABORTION: The most contentious, confused and misunderstood issue that continues to divide us

Abortion: The most contentious, confused and misunderstood issue that continues to divide us.

 

By Thomas Keane

AKA DoubtingThomas

 

The volatile and never-ending issue of whether or not a woman has the right to terminate her own pregnancy now seems to be centered on the question of when during the prenatal development the fetus is considered viable or human. For a very long time it was accepted that one wasn’t actually ‘alive’ until they were born and took their first breath. This was even supported in scripture; Adam only “became a living soul” once God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.” (Genesis 2:7). However, now some ultra conservatives actually argue that humanity (life) begins at conception. It’s not hard to imagine these same people grieving over the millions of potential humans that are lost every single time a man ejaculates.

Whether it is more willful to suggest that life begins upon that first inhalation or when the spermatozoon joins with the ovum to form a zygote is all dependant on one’s own bias. As for where the law/government stands on the issue; as is often the case, it is somewhere in the middle. The determining factor seems to be the point at which the fetus can survive outside of the womb. It has been well established that any premature birth can, and often does, result in some sort of negative developmental issue, whether in infancy, childhood or adulthood. The most common afflictions are cerebral palsy, vision and/or hearing loss and learning problems. And yet none of these potential disabilities are taken into account when judging viability. In fact, the main factor that influences whether or not a woman may be allowed to request an abortion is simply the number of weeks of gestation that have elapsed in her pregnancy. In most U.S. states that magic number is twenty-one. If the fetus makes it into week twenty-two, the choice of whether or not it can be terminated is taken from the woman and given to the doctor.

For pro-lifers, the idea that they are standing up for the rights of the fetus, who has no voice of its own, is an inspiring one. But is it also misguided? If it really is about the rights of the fetus and the fetus has no ability to express or even form its own opinion, does it really make the most sense that someone with no connection to the mother or any knowledge of the circumstances should be making the decisions? If the fetus is incapable of declaring an opinion for itself, doesn’t it seem reasonable that the person who should be allowed to decide for the fetus would be the woman whose body sustains and contains it? Is there a more logical candidate? Would this not be the case if we were discussing another living mass of cells residing within someone’s body, such as a tape worm (parasite) or a tumor? Shouldn’t this be the main focus when considering the topic of abortion, not whether or not the fetus is human, not when life begins, but who has the right to make the decision seeing that the fetus has no ability to do so for itself?

If the decision on what can be done with what resides within a woman’s body is to be given to another, who should it be? A stranger? The government? A priest? The church? A parent? A doctor? A Judge? A husband? The ‘father’? Any man for that matter? How can anyone justify placing any of these people/organizations above the person whose body the fetus/tumor resides? And if you were to grant the government jurisdiction over a woman’s pregnant body, at what point would they take control? At conception? Upon first confirming that the woman is pregnant? After the quickening? After the first trimester? The second? If she were a first time mother? If she were a mother of fifteen illegitimate children? If she were an I.V. drug user? A victim of incest or rape? Mentally retarded? Mentally deranged? If she were a Mormon? A Scientologist? An Atheist? An illegal immigrant? Underage? Middle-Class? Homeless? HIV positive? Brain dead? And if the government was to take steps to protect the human rights of the fetus, shouldn’t it also monitor the mother’s consumption of tobacco, alcohol and drugs (both legal and illegal)? Shouldn’t the mother’s very behavior be authorized and restricted based on the perceived effect on the fetus? And why stop there? Why not also allow the government or church to decide who, when and if someone should be on birth control and what type. Why not have the government/church decide who we should be allowed to have sex with. Why make any decisions for ourselves? Why not just give up all control to the government and/or the church? Or should only the decisions categorized as moral be governed in such a way? And who is to decide what is moral? Would a Buddhist have a say? Would an Atheist?

Good Samaritan laws state that a person can’t be forced to save another’s life if doing so would risk or even inconvenience their own except under highly specific circumstances. For example, you can’t be forced to be an organ donor; you can’t be forced to donate blood; if a person struggling to save a panicked drowning victim is forced to abandon their efforts in order to protect themselves, they cannot be charged with a crime if the person they attempted to save perishes. Yet, for some reason, forcing women to carry someone within their own bodies appears to be the exception to the rule. Somehow the rights of the fetus have superseded the rights of the woman to have autonomy over her own body even though the physical use of another’s body for one’s own survival is not, and has never been, a human right.

If we as individuals continue to insist that our particular philosophical understanding of an issue be established as a universal absolute, governing the lives of all, then we will continue to be divided as a people. For if there is only one absolute truth, it is that there are no two people in the world, not Christian, not Atheist, not man or woman, who will ever be in total agreement on all things. No one will ever be so wise as to know what is right and what is wrong for each and every one of us. There will always be choices that we as individuals must be allowed to make for ourselves. Humanity thrives on such freedom. It is the core of the American ideal. We must strive to never forget that.

DoubtingThomas

  

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Mythological Origins of Christianity Pt. 3 of 3

 

 

The Mythological Origins of Christianity

–Part Three of Three–

 

 

By Thomas Keane (DoubtingThomas)

 

 

Continued:

 

 

The Evangelists put so much energy into obliterating any evidence of Christianity’s Gnostic and pagan sources one has to wonder what they were so afraid of. Edward Carpenter wrote: “…they took special pains to destroy the pagan records and so obliterate the evidence of their own dishonesty.” The Church ordered all the books of the Gnostic Basilides burned, the same for Porphyry’s thirty-six volumes. All the ancient lore that filled the Apollo library was lost when Pope Gregory VII had it burned to the ground. Understanding that they contained the doctrinal basis of the Gospels, Emperor Theodosius had 27,000 schools of the Mysteries papyrus rolls destroyed. For the very same reason, Ptolemy Philadelphus had 270,000 ancient documents destroyed. It was said that the baths of the early Christians were heated with the Ancient Wisdom.

 

Perhaps the greatest crime the Crusaders committed was burning every book they could find, the original Hebrew scrolls among them. In 1233 twelve thousand volumes of the Talmud were burned along with the works of Maimonides. In 1244 eighteen thousand books of various kinds were destroyed. Draper reported that Cardinal Ximenes “…delivered to the flames in the square of Granada eighty thousand Arabic manuscripts.” In the New World, the Spanish Christians destroyed the lore of the native peoples and the temples that contained it.

 

With the original sources now destroyed, the early Christians could freely substitute whatever they chose. They changed words and inserted verses that were nonexistent in the original texts in an attempt to substantiate their new religion. Celsus, who witnessed the alterations, said of the revisionists, “Some of them, as it were in a drunken state producing self-induced visions, remodel their Gospel from its first written form, and reform it so that they may be able to refute the objections brought against it.”

 

Gerald Massey also commented on the practice, saying: “They had almost reduced the first four centuries to silence on all matters of the most vital importance for any proper understanding of the true origins of the Christian superstition. The mythos having been at last published as a human history, everything else was suppressed or forced to support the fraud.”

 

In 250 A.D., Eusebius left a record of the Church that reads: “But since from our great freedom we have fallen in neglect and sloth when each had begun to envy and slander the other, when we waged intestine war against each other, wounding each other with words as with swords and spears, when leaders assailed leaders, and people assailed people, hurling epithets at each other, when fraud and hypocrisy had reached the highest heights of malice … when devoid of all sense, we gave no thought to the worship of God, but believing like certain impious men, that human affairs are controlled by no providence, we heaped crime upon crime. When our pastors despising the rule of religion, fought with each other intent on nothing but abuse, threats, jealousy, hatred and mutual enmity, each claiming for himself, a principality as a sort of tyranny.”

 

There was little unity among the early Christians, in fact they were divided into numerous fanatical cults, each contending for place and power. There were the Arians, Nestorians, Martionites, Marionites, Jacobites, Basilidians, Carpocratians, Collyridians, Eutychians, Sabellians, Valentinians, Gnostics, Ebionites, to name just a few. All had their own interpretations of the scriptures and the version that made it to the present was simply the one that triumphed over the others.

 

Bishop Hilary revealed a great wisdom when commenting on the origins of the Church’s creeds, dogmas, rites and rituals, saying: “It is a thing equally deplorable and dangerous that there are as many doctrines as inclinations, and as many sources of blasphemy as there are faults among us, because we make creeds arbitrarily and explain them as arbitrarily. Every year, nay every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries; we repent of what we have done; we defend those who repent; we anathematize those whom we defend; we condemn either the doctrines of others in ourselves, or our own in that of others; and reciprocally tearing each other to pieces, we have been the cause of each other’s ruin.”

 

Until the triumph of Christian fanaticism, the ancient world was progressing toward true enlightenment. In addition to those already mentioned, it had produced such men as Pythagoras, Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, and many notable others. Together these men pioneered the philosophic and scientific foundations for true civilization, until the Christian Church came and laid them to waste.

 

Compayre said, “Once the pagan schools were closed Christianity did not open others, and after the fourth century a profound night enveloped humanity. The labor of the Greeks and Romans was a though it had never been.”

 

Throughout history religion and ignorance have gone hand in hand. The seeking of knowledge was an admirable pursuit everywhere except in Catholic Europe. When even the kings of Christendom were illiterate, a Moorish king’s private library held some six hundred thousand books. At a time when nearly every Christian could neither read nor write, there were eight hundred public schools in the Moorish city of Cordova. And according to S. P. Scott in The History of the Moorish Empire in Europe: “…there was not a village within the limits of the empire where the blessings of education could not be enjoyed by the children of the most indigent peasant.”

 

The Church discouraged people from expanding their minds as the acquiring of knowledge always seemed to be accompanied by the abandonment of faith. To the church, the only ability the Christian truly needed was the ability to pray. When Celsus criticized the Christians for doing nothing to help the pagans defend the (Roman) Empire, Origen replied, “We defend it with our prayers.” Their prayers, of course, did nothing and so Rome fell and a thousand years of darkness followed.

 

The Church criticized Montesquieu, a humanitarian and agnostic, because he was against slavery and the use of torture. His book The Spirit of Laws was condemned. The trade in African slaves was not just unopposed by the Church but was often blessed by it. The Spanish Government’s slave charters were signed “in the name of the Most Holy Trinity.” Captain Hawkins, the notorious slave trader, named his slave ship Jesus. And from Jesus’ deck sick slaves were regularly thrown to the sharks.

 

But the slave trade wasn’t the only way the church amassed it wealth. During the thirteenth century, the clergy operated many brothels that were so prosperous the financers decided to tax them. The church’s treasury was also enhanced by the constant sale of counterfeit relics. Manufactured by the thousands, they included everything the church imagined Jesus, his family, and his followers could have used, owned or come into contact with. To name just a few: there was Christ’s milk teeth, his still wet tears, barbs from his Crown of Thorns, his naval, and even his foreskin, quite a few of them in fact (one account had the number at fifteen). And let’s not forget Mary’s hair, undergarments, and even vials of her milk. There were so many nails and wood fragments supposedly from the cross of the crucifixion that one could have built a score of them. Regarding the wood of the cross, Washington Irving had this to say – “There is enough extant to build a ship of the line.” A Saxon ruler proudly proclaimed to be in possession of 17,000 relics, including a branch from Moses’s burning bush and a feather plucked from the wing of the Angel Gabriel. Historian Charles Mackay reported that Spanish churches possessed the thighbones of the Virgin Mary, seven of them in fact, and that the toenails of St. Peter were so prevalent that there were enough to fill a sack. Canterbury Cathedral exhibited what they claimed to be the clay that remained after God created Adam. Every church in Europe had their own collection of “holy relics”; amazingly three of them claimed to possess the one spear that Longinus had used to pierce Jesus’ side. Understandably this caused some serious discord among the arrogant leaders of these churches. A Sultan was the first to present the supposedly real one to the city of Rome. But the French cardinals weren’t having any of it, insisting that the real one was in Paris. And the German cardinals dismissed both, proclaiming that everyone knew that the original was in Nuremberg. How typical that it never occurred to them to question the legitimacy of all three claims. Every single church on earth seems to believe that they are the center of their god’s universe.

 

The Crusades turned Golconda into a battleground presumably to wrest the tomb of Christ from the “unclean” hands of the infidels, but really it was motivated by the jealousy and envy of Middle Eastern riches. In an address at Clermont, Pope Urban II said: “The wealth of our enemies will be yours, and you will despoil them of their treasures.” Several hundred thousand Jews and Mohammedans in Spain were killed or banished and their property confiscated as a result of the greed of the Church. Vacandard, a Catholic historian, wrote that “the Pope granted indulgences to all who carried on this pious work.” How many thousands of years has murder and thievery been considered pious work by the church?

 

But it’s not only the ‘enemies’ of the church who have had their possessions taken from them, it’s the members of the church as well. This divine pilfering of the people was called “giving unto the Lord.” Why is it that with religion it is always those who have the least who are required to give the most? Why is it that the leaders of religions regularly live in mansions while their followers so often live in squalor? How many more homes and cars and vacations do the viewers of the 700 Club have to buy Pat Robertson before they wake up? But is it really a surprise that the poor are drawn in by the empty promises the church provides so copiously.

 

Christians have woven their “holy scriptures” into mankind’s ignorant soul and we have all paid the price – two thousand years of ignorance, bigotry, intolerance, inquisition, massacre and war. Because of religion our people hate, our nations fight, and the idea/ideal of peace has never been farther away. Because of the Bible our world leaders can’t decipher myth from history and so act upon the lie. Religion is but a way for man to control his fellow man, to rob him of his money, and their fictitious gods are simply accessories. When man hungered for answers but had none, these myths sustained them. To the robbed and starving man a rotten apple resembles ambrosia and the ravenous age that religion helped create swallowed it without chewing or worrying at its sour taste. But as that age fades away, the feeble crutch and rotten apple need to go with it. Instead, let the hungry consume the fruit the church has always forbidden. Let them eat of the tree of knowledge.

 

It is time for another Emancipation Proclamation.

 

 

END

Part ONE can be found here:

 

https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/the-mythological-origins-of-christianity-pt-1-of-3/

 

Part TWO can be found here:

https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/the-mythological-origins-of-christianity-pt-2-of-3/

 

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

Where In The Hell Did Jesus And Elijah Think They Were Going!?

According to the Christian bible, both Elijah and Jesus rose up bodily into heaven, Elijah in a chariot of fire (just like Romulus the founder of Rome, similarly Mithra of Persia) and Jesus like superman. One can’t help but wonder where exactly Christians think heaven is? Clearly the writers of the bible believed that this place of gold-paved roads was literally floating above our flat earth on a VERY sturdy cloud (which makes one wonder how important the time of liftoff was considering if either man had waited 12 hours they would have been headed in a COMPLETELY different direction) so where do Christians think heaven is? In other words, where in the hell did Elijah and Jesus think they were going? How high did they get before they were no longer able to breathe and their bodies turned to ice? Also, when these two men with their human bodies arrived in heaven, a place populated by souls, angels and a God, what then? Did they have to eat? What did they eat? How did they get all their necessary vitamins and minerals? Did they wear clothes? The same clothes? Every day? Did their hair continue to grow? Did they have to sleep? Where did they urinate and defecate? Did they have gas? Did they have B.O.? Did they get involuntary erections as all men do? Did their noses produce snot? Could their bodies be injured? Could they suffer from aging? Were the angels and souls jealous of Elijah and Jesus’ human bodies or contemptuous of them? I occasionally get criticized for asking silly or frivolous questions but I truly am curious as to what Christians think about these things. I appreciate anyone who will take the time to voice their opinion on this subject.

Thank You

DoubtingThomas

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

 

VICTIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

  This post was originally left as a comment by Erynn on my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) but was much too long so I cut and pasted it here as I felt it contained a great deal of interesting historical information deserving of review.

—————

 VICTIMS OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

“WONDERFUL EVENTS THAT TESTIFY TO GOD’S DIVINE GLORY”

Listed are only events that solely occurred on command of church authorities or were committed in the name of Christianity. (List incomplete):

Ancient Pagans

As soon as Christianity was legal (315), more and more pagan temples  were destroyed by Christian mob. Pagan priests were killed. Between 315 and 6th century thousands of pagan believers were slain.

Examples of destroyed Temples: the Sanctuary of Aesculap in Aegaea, the Temple of Aphrodite in Golgatha Aphaka in Lebanon, the Heliopolis.

Christian priests such as Mark of Arethusa or Cyrill of Heliopolis were famous as “temple destroyer.” [DA468] Pagan services became punishable by death in 356. [DA-468]

Christian Emperor Theodosius (408-450) even had children executed,  because they had been playing with remains of pagan statues. [DA-469]

According to Christian chroniclers he “followed meticulously all Christian teachings…” In 6th century pagans were declared void of all rights. In the early fourth century the philosopher Sopatros was executed on demand of Christian authorities. [DA-466]

The world famous female philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria was torn to pieces with glass fragments by a hysterical Christian mob led by a  Christian minister named Peter, in a church, in 415.[DO-19-25]

Mission

 Emperor Karl (Charlemagne) in 782 had 4500 Saxons, unwilling to convert to Christianity, beheaded. [DO-30]

Peasants of Steding (Germany) unwilling to pay suffocating church taxes: between 5,000 and 11,000 men, wome and children slain 5/27/1234 near Altenesch/Germany. [WW-223]

Battle of Belgrad 1456: 80,000 Turks slaughtered. [DO-235]

15th century Poland: 1019 churches and 17987 villages plundered by Knights of the Order. Victims unknown. [DO-30]

16th and 17th century Ireland. English troops “pacified and civilized”  Ireland, where only Gaelic “wild Irish”, “unreasonable beasts lived  without any knowledge of God or good manners, in common of their goods, cattle, women, children and every other thing.” One of the more successful soldiers, a certain Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, ordered that “the heads of all those (of whatsoever they were) which were killed in the die, should be cut off from their bodies… and should bee laid on the ground by each side of the waie”, which effort to civilize the Irish indeed caused “great terror to the people when they saw the heads of their dead fathers, brothers, children, kinsfolk, and  friends on the ground”. Tens of thousands of Gaelic Irish fell victim to the carnage. [SH-99, 225]

Crusades (1095-1291)

 First Crusade: 1095 on command of pope Urban II. [WW11-41] 

Semlin/Hungary 6/24/96 thousands slain. Wieselburg/Hungary 6/12/96 thousands. [WW-23] .9/9/96-9/26/96 Nikaia, Xerigordon (then Turkish), thousands respectively. [WW-25-27]

Until Jan 1098 a total of 40 capital cities and 200 castles conquered (Number of slain unknown) [WW30] fter 6/3/98 Antiochia (then Turkish)  conquered, between 10,000 and 60,000 slain. 6/28/98 100,000 Turks incl. women & children) killed. [WW-32-35]

Here the Christians “did no other harm to the women found in [the Enemy’s] tents – save that they ran their lance hrough their bellies,” according to Christian chronicler Fulcher of Chartres. [EC-60]

Marra (Maraat an-numan) 12/11/98 thousands killed. Because of the  subsequent famine “the already stinking corpses of the enemies were eaten by the Christians” said chronicler Albert Aquensis. [WW-36]

Jerusalem conquered 7/15/1099 more than 60,000 victims (Jewish, Muslim, men, women, and children). [WW3 0] In the words of one witness: “there [in front of Solomon’s temple] was such a carnage that our people were wading ankle-deep in the blood of our foes”, and after that “happily and crying for joy our people Marched to our Savior’s tomb, to honor it and to pay off our debt of gratitude”). e Archbishop of Tyre, eye-witness, wrote: “It was impossible to look upon the vast numbers of the slain without horror; everywhere lay fragments of human bodies, and the very ground was covered with the blood of the slain. It was not alone the spectacle of headless bodies and mutilated limbs strewn in all directions that roused the horror of all who looked upon them. Still more dreadful was it to gaze upon the victors themselves, dripping with blood from head to foot, an ominous sight which brought terror to all who met them. It is reported that within the Temple enclosure alone about ten thousand infidels perished.”  [TG-79]

Christian chronicler Eckehard of Aura noted that “even the following summer in all of Palestine the air was polluted by the stench of decomposition. One million victims of the first crusade alone. [WW-41]

Battle of Askalon, /12/1099. 200,000 heathens slaughtered “in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ”. [WW-45]

Fourth crusade: 4/12/1204 Constantinople sacked, number of victims unknown, numerous thousands, many of them Christian. [WW-141-148]

Rest of Crusades in less detail: until the fall of Akkon 1291 probably 20 million victims (in the Holy Land and Arab/Turkish areas alone).  [WW-224]

Note: All figures according to contemporary (Christian) chroniclers.

Heretics

Already in 385 C.E. the first Christians, the Spanish Priscillianus and six followers, were beheaded for heresy in Trier/Germany [DO-26] 

Manichaean heresy: a crypto-Christian sect decent enough to practice birth control (and thus not as irresponsible as faithful Catholics) was  exterminated in huge campaigns all over the Roman empire between 372 C.E. and 444 C.E. Numerous thousands of victims. [NC]

Albigensians: the first Crusade intended to slay other Christians.  [DO-29]

The Albigensians (cathars) viewed themselves as good Christians, but would not accept roman Catholic rule, and taxes, and prohibition of birth control. (thousands burned alive) [NC]

Begin of violence: on command of pope Innocent III (greatest single pre-nazi mass murderer) in 1209. Beziérs (today France) 7/22/1209 destroyed, all the inhabitants were slaughtered. Victims (including Catholics refusing to turn over their heretic neighbors and friends) 20,000-70,000. [WW179-181]

Carcassonne 8/15/1209, thousands slain. Other cities followed. [WW181]

subsequent 20 years of war until nearly all Cathars (probably half the population of the Languedoc, today southern France) were Exterminated. [WW183]

After the war ended (1229) the Inquisition was founded 1232 to search  and destroy surviving/hiding heretics. Last Cathars burned at the stake 1324. [WW183]. Estimated one million victims (cathar heresy alone), [WW183]

Other heresies: Waldensians, Paulikians, Runcarians, Josephites, and many others. Most of these sects exterminated, (I believe some Waldensians live today, yet they had to endure 600 years of persecution) I estimate at least hundred thousand victims (including the Spanish inquisition but excluding victims in the New World).

Spanish Inquisitor Torquemada alone allegedly responsible for 10,220 burnings. [DO28]

John Huss, a critic of papal infallibility and indulgences, was burned at the stake in 1415. [LI475-522]. University professor B.Hubmaier burned at the stake 1538 in Vienna. [DO59]

Giordano Bruno, Dominican monk, after having been incarcerated for seven years, was burned at the stake for heresy on the Campo dei Fiori (Rome) on 2/17/1600.

Witches

From the beginning of Christianity to 1484 probably more than several thousand. In the era of witch hunting (1484-1750) according to modern scholars several hundred thousand (about 80% female) burned at the stake or Hanged. [WV]incomplete list of documented cases:The Burning of Witches – A Chronicle of the Burning Times 

Religious Wars

15th century: Crusades against Hussites, thousands slain. [DO30]

1538 pope Paul III declared Crusade against apostate England and all English as slaves of Church (fortunately had not power to go into action). [DO31]

1568 Spanish Inquisition Tribunal ordered extermination of 3 million rebels in (then Spanish) Netherlands. Thousands were actually slain. [DO31]

1572 In France about 20,000 Huguenots were killed on command of pope Pius V. Until 17th century 200,000 flee. [DO31]

17th century: Catholics slay Gaspard de Coligny, a Protestant leader. After murdering him, the Catholic mob mutilated his body, “cutting off his head, his hands, and his genitals… and then dumped him into the river […but] then, deciding that it was not worthy of being food for the fish, they hauled it out again [… and] dragged what was left … to the gallows of Montfaulcon, ‘to be meat and carrion for maggots and Crows’.” [SH191]

17th century: Catholics sack the city of Magdeburg/Germany: roughly 30,000 Protestants were slain. “In a single church fifty women were found beheaded,” reported poet Friedrich Schiller, “and infants still sucking the breasts of their lifeless mothers.” [SH191]

17th century 30 years’ war (Catholic vs. Protestant): at least 40% of  population decimated, mostly in Germany. [DO31-32] 

Jews

Already in the 4th and 5th centuries synagogues were burned by  Christians. Number of Jews slain unknown. 

In the middle of the fourth century the first synagogue was destroyed on command of bishop Innocentius of Dertona in Northern Italy. The first  synagogue known to have been burned down was near the river Euphrat, on command of the bishop of Kallinikon in the year 388. [DA450]

Council of Toledo 694: Jews were enslaved, their property confiscated, and their children forcibly baptized. [DA454]

The Bishop of Limoges (France) in 1010 had the cities’ Jews, who would  not convert to Christianity, expelled or killed. [DA453]

First Crusade: Thousands of Jews slaughtered 1096, maybe 12.000 total.

Places: Worms 5/18/1096, Mainz 5/27/1096 (1100 persons), Cologne, Neuss, Altenahr, Wevelinghoven, Xanten, Moers, Dortmund, Kerpen, Trier, Metz, Regensburg, Prag and others (All locations Germany except Metz/France, Prag/Czech) [EJ]

Second Crusade: 1147. Several hundred Jews were slain in Ham, Sully,

Carentan, and Rameru (all locations in France). [WW57]

Third Crusade: English Jewish communities sacked 1189/90. [DO40]

Fulda/Germany 1235: 34 Jewish men and women slain. [DO41]

1257, 1267: Jewish communities of London, Canterbury, Northampton, Lincoln, Cambridge, and others exterminated. [DO41]

1290 in Bohemian (Poland) allegedly 10,000 Jews killed. [DO41]

1337 Starting in Deggendorf/Germany a Jew-killing craze reaches 51 towns in Bavaria, Austria, Poland. [DO41]

1348 All Jews of Basel/Switzerland and Strasbourg/France (two thousand) burned. [DO41]

1349 In more than 350 towns in Germany all Jews murdered, mostly brned live (in this one year more Jews were killed than Christians in 200 years of ancient Roman persecution of Christians). [DO42]

1389 In Prag 3,000 Jews were slaughtered. [DO42] 

1391 Seville’s Jews killed (Archbishop Martinez leading). 4,000 were slain, 25,000 sold as slaves. [DA454] Their identification was made easy by the brightly colored “badges of shame” that all Jews above the age of ten had been forced to wear.

1492: In the year Columbus set sail to conquer a New World, more than 150,000 Jews were expelled from Spain, many died on their way: 6/30/1492. [MM470-476]

1648 Chmielnitzki massacres: In Poland about 200,000 Jews were slain.  [DO43]

(I feel sick …) this goes on and on, century after century, right into the kilns of Auschwitz. (many believe Hitler was an atheist, which is debateable, but keep in mind the vast majority at his command, the ones actually commiting the autrocities, were Christians).

Native Peoples

Beginning with Columbus (a former slave trader and would-be Holy Crusader) the conquest of the New World began, as usual understood as a means to propagate Christianity.

Within hours of landfall on the first inhabited island he encountered in the Caribbean, Columbus seized and carried off six native people who, he said, “ought to be good servants … [and] would easily be made Christians, because it seemed to me that they belonged to no religion.”  [SH200]

While Columbus described the Indians as “idolaters” and “slaves, as  many as [the Crown] shall order,” his pal Michele de Cuneo, Italian  nobleman, referred to the natives as “beasts” because “they eat when they are hungry,” and made love “openly whenever they feel like it.” [SH204-205]

On every island he set foot on, Columbus planted a cross, “making the  declarations that are required” – the equerimiento – to claim the  wwnership for his Catholic patrons in Spain. And “nobody objected.” If the Indians refused or delayed their acceptance (or understanding), the requerimiento continued: “I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter in your country and shall make war against you … and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church … and shall do you all mischief that we can, as to vassals who do not obey and refuse to receive their lord and resist and contradict him.” [SH66]

Likewise in the words of John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony: “justifying the undertakers of the intended Plantation in New England … to carry the Gospel into those parts of the world, … and to raise a Bulwark against the kingdom of the Ante-Christ.” [SH235]

In average two thirds of the native population were killed by colonist-imported smallpox before violence began. This was a great sign of “the marvelous goodness and providence of God” to the Christians of course, e.g. the Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony wrote in 1634, as “for the natives, they are near all dead of the smallpox, so as the Lord hath cleared our title to what we possess.” [SH109,238]

On Hispaniola alone, on Columbus visits, the native population (Arawak), a rather harmless and happy people living on an island of abundant natural resources, a literal paradise, soon mourned 50,000 Dead. [SH204]

The surviving Indians fell victim to rape, murder, enslavement and Spanish raids.

As one of the culprits wrote: “So many Indians died that they could not be counted, all through the land the Indians lay dead everywhere. The stench was very great and pestiferous.” [SH69]

The Indian chief Hatuey fled with his people but was captured and burned alive. As “they were tying him to the stake a Franciscan friar urged him to take Jesus to his heart so that his soul might go to heaven, rather than descend into hell. Hatuey replied that if heaven was where the Christians went, he would rather go to hell.” [SH70]

What happened to his people was described by an eyewitness: “The Spaniards found pleasure in inventing all kinds of odd cruelties … They built a long gibbet, long enough for the toes to touch the ground to prevent strangling, and hanged thirteen [natives] at a time in honor of Christ Our Savior and the twelve Apostles… then, straw was wrapped around their torn bodies and they were burned alive.”  [SH72]

Or, on another occasion: “The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts…Vasco [de Balboa] ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.” [SH83]

The “island’s population of about eight million people at the time of Columbus’s arrival in 1492 already had declined by a third to a half  before the year 1496 was out.” Eventually all the island’s natives were exterminated, so the Spaniards were “forced” to import slaves from other Caribbean islands, who soon suffered the same fate. Thus “the Caribbean’s millions of native people [were] thereby effectively liquidated in barely a quarter of a century”. [SH72-73]

“In less than the normal lifetime of a single human being, an entire culture of millions of people, thousands of years resident in their homeland, had been exterminated.” [SH75]

“And then the Spanish turned their attention to the mainland of Mexico and Central America. The slaughter had barely begun. The exquisite city of Tenochtitlán [Mexico city] was next.” [SH75]

Cortez, Pizarro, De Soto and hundreds of other Spanish conquistadors  likewise sacked southern and mesoamerican civilizations in the name of  Christ (De Soto also sacked Florida). .”When the 16th century ended, some 200,000 Spaniards had moved to the Americas. By that time probably more than 60,000,000 natives were dead.” [SH95]

Of course no different were the founders of what today is the US of  America. Although none of the settlers would have survived winter without native help, they soon set out to expel and exterminate the Indians. Warfare among (north American) Indians was rather harmless, in comparison to European standards, and was meant to avenge insults rather than conquer land. In the words of some of the Pilgrim Fathers:

“Their Wars are far less bloody…” so that there usually was “no great slawter of nether side”. Indeed, “they might fight seven years and not kill seven men.” What is more, the Indians usually spared women and children. [SH111]

In the spring of 1612 some English colonists found life among the (generally friendly and generous) natives ttractive enough to leave Jamestown – “being idle … did run away unto the Indians,” – to live among them (that probably solved a sex problem).

“Governor Thomas Dale had them hunted down and executed: ‘some he  appointed (sic) to be hanged Some burned Some to be broken upon heels, others to be staked and some shot to death’.” [SH105] Of course these elegant measures were restricted for fellow Englishmen: “This was the treatment for those who wished to act like Indians. For those who had no choice in the matter, because they were the native people of Virginia”

Methods were ifferent: “when an Indian was accused by an Englishman of stealing a cup and failing to return it, the English response was to attack the natives in force, burning the entire community” down. [SH105]

On the territory that is now Massachusetts the founding fathers of the  colonies were committing genocide, in what has become known as the “Peqout War”. The killers were New England Puritan Christians, refugees from resection in their own home country England.

When however, a dead colonist was found, apparently killed by Narragansett Indians, the Puritan colonists wanted revenge. Despite the Indian chief’s pledge they attacked.

Somehow they seem to have lost the idea of what they were after,  because when they were greeted by Pequot Indians (long-time foes of the Narragansetts) the troops nevertheless made war on the Pequots and burned their villages.

The puritan commander-in-charge John Mason after one massacre wrote:

“And indeed such a dreadful Terror did the Almighty let fall upon their  Spirits, that they would fly from us and run into the very Flames, where many of them perished … God was above them, who laughed his Enemies and the Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven …

Thus did the Lord judge among the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies”: men, women, children. [SH113-114]

So “the Lord was pleased to smite our Enemies in the hinder Parts, and to give us their land for an inheritance”. [SH111].

Because of his readers’ assumed knowledge of Deuteronomy, there was no need for Mason to quote the words that immediately follow: “Thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth. But thou shalt utterly destroy them…” (Deut 20)

Mason’s comrade Underhill recalled how “great and doleful was the bloody sight to the view of the young soldiers” yet reassured his readers that “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents”. [SH114]

Other Indians were killed in successful plots of poisoning. The colonists even had dogs especially trained to kill Indians and to devour children from their mother’s breasts, in the colonists’ own words: “blood Hounds to draw after them, and Mastives to seaze them.” (This was inspired by Spanish methods of the time)

In this way they continued until the extermination of the Pequots was  near. [SH107-119]

The surviving handful of Indians “were parceled out to live in servitude. John Endicott and his pastor wrote to the governor asking for ‘a share’ of the captives, specifically ‘a young woman or girl and a boy if you think good’.” [SH115]

Other tribes were to follow the same path.  Comment the Christian exterminators: “God’s Will, which will at last give us cause to say: How Great is His Goodness! and How Great is his Beauty!” “Thus doth the Lord Jesus make them to bow before him, and to lick the Dust!” [TA]

Like today, lying was OK to Christians then. “Peace treaties were signed with every intention to violate them: when the Indians ‘grow secure upon (sic) the treatise’, advised the Council of State in Virginia, ‘we shall have the better Advantage both to surprise them, & cut down their Corn’.” [SH106]

In 1624 sixty heavily armed Englishmen cut down 800 defenseless Indian men, women and children. [SH107]

In a single massacre in “King Philip’s War” of 1675 and 1676 some “600 Indians were destroyed. A delighted Cotton Matter, revered pastor of the Second Church in Boston, later referred to the slaughter as a ‘barbecue’.” [SH115]

To summarize: Before the arrival of the English, the western Abenaki people in New Hampshire and Vermont had numbered 12,000. Less than half a century later about 250 remained alive – a destruction rate of 98%. The ocumtuck people had numbered more than 18,000, fifty years later they were down to 920 – 95% destroyed. The Quiripi-Unquachog people had  numbered about 30,000, fifty years later they were down to 1500 – 95% destroyed. The Massachusetts people had numbered at least 44,000, fifty years later barely 6000 were alive – 81% destroyed. [SH118]

These are only a few examples of the multitude of tribes living before Christian colonists set their foot on the New World. All this was before the smallpox epidemics of 1677 and 1678 had occurred. And the carnage was not over then.

All the above was only the beginning of the European colonization, it was before the frontier age actually had begun. A total of maybe more than 150 million Indians (of both Americas) were destroyed in the period of 1500 to 900, as an average two thirds by smallpox and other epidemics, that leaves some 50 million killed directly by violence, bad treatment and slavery. In many countries, such as Brazil, and Guatemala, this continues even today.

More Glorious events in US history:

Reverend Solomon Stoddard, one of New England’s most esteemed religious leaders, in “1703 formally proposed to he Massachusetts governor that the colonists be given the financial wherewithal to purchase and train large packs of dogs ‘to hunt Indians as they do bears’.” [SH241]

Massacre of Sand Creek, Colorado 11/29/1864. Colonel John Chivington, a former Methodist ministers and still elder in the church (“I long to be  wading in gore”) had a Cheyenne village of about 600, mostly women and children, gunned down despite the chiefs’ waving with a white flag: 400-500 killed.

From an eye-witness account: “There were some thirty or forty squaws collected in a hole for protection; they sent out a little girl about six years old with a white flag on a stick; she had not proceeded but a few steps when she was shot and killed. All the squaws in that hole were afterwards killed …” [SH131]

More gory details: By the 1860s, “in Hawai’i the Reverend Rufus Anderson surveyed the carnage that by then had reduced those slands’ native population by 90 percent or more, and he declined to see it as tragedy; the expected total die-off of the Hawaiian population was only natural, this missionary said, somewhat equivalent to ‘the amputation of diseased > members of the body’.” [SH244]

20th Century Church Atrocities

Catholic extermination camps Surpassingly few know that Nazi extermination camps in World War II were by no means the only ones in Europe at the time. In the years 1942-1943 also in Croatia existed numerous extermination camps, run by Catholic Ustasha under their dictator Ante Paveliç, a practicing Catholic and regular visitor to the then pope. There were even concentration camps exclusively for children!

In these camps – the most notorious was Jasenovac, headed by a Franciscan friar – orthodox-Christian Serbian (and a substantial number of Jews) were murdered. Like the Nazis the Catholic Ustasha burned their  victims in kilns, alive (the Nazis were decent enough to have their victims gassed first). But most of the victims were simply stabbed, slain or  shot to death, the number of them being estimated between 300,000 and  600,000, in a rather tiny country. Many of the killers were Franciscan friars. The atrocities were appalling enough to induce bystanders of the Nazi “Sicherheitsdient der SS”, watching, to complain about them to Hitler (who did not listen). The pope knew about these events and did nothing to prevent them. [MV]

Catholic terror in Vietnam

In 1954 Vietnamese freedom fighters – the Viet Minh – had finally defeated the French colonial government in North Vietnam, which by then had been supported by U.S. funds amounting to more than $2 billion. Although the coteries assured religious freedom to all (most non-Buddhist Vietnamese were Catholics), due to huge anticommunist propaganda campaigns  many Catholics fled to the South. With the help of Catholic lobbies in Washington and Cardinal Spellman, the Vatican’s spokesman in U.S. politics, who later on would call the U.S. forces in Vietnam “Soldiers of Christ”, a scheme was concocted to prevent democratic elections which  could have brought the communist Viet Minh to power in the South as well, and the fanatic Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem was made president of South Vietnam. [MW16ff]

Diem saw to it that U.S. aid, food, technical and general assistance was given to Catholics alone, Buddhist individuals and villages were ignored or had to pay for the food aids which were given to Catholics for free. The only religious denomination to be supported was Roman Catholicism.

The Vietnamese McCarthyism turned even more vicious than its American counterpart. By 1956 Diem promulgated a presidential order which read:

“Individuals considered dangerous to the national defense and common security may be confined by executive order, to a concentration camp.”

Supposedly to fight communism, thousands of Buddhist protesters and monks were imprisoned in “detention camps.” Out of protest dozens of Buddhist teachers – male and female – and monks poured gasoline over themselves and burned themselves. (Note that Buddhists burned themselves: in comparison Christians tend to burn others). Meanwhile some of the prison camps, which in the meantime were filled with Protestant and even Catholic protesters as well, had turned into no-nonsense death camps. It is estimated that during this period of terror (1955-1960) at least 24,000 were wounded – mostly in street riots – 80,000 people were executed, 275,000 had been detained or tortured, and about 500,000 were sent to concentration or detention camps. [MW76-89].

To support this kind of government in the next decade thousands of  American GI’s lost their life.

Christianity kills the cat

On July 1, 1976, Anneliese Michel, a 23-year-old student of a teachers college in Germany, died: she starved herself to death. For months she had been haunted by demonic visions and apparitions, and for months two Catholic priests – with explicit approval of the Catholic bishop of  Würzburg – additionally pestered and tormented the wretched girl with their exorcist rituals. After her death in Klingenberg hospital – her body was littered with wounds – her parents, both of them fanatical Catholics, were sentenced to six months for not having called for medical help. None of the priests was punished: on the contrary, Miss Michel’s grave today is a place of pilgrimage and worship for a number of similarly faithful Catholics (in the seventeenth century Würzburg was notorious for it’s extensive witch burnings). This case is only the tip of an iceberg of such evil superstition and has become known only because of its lethal outcome. [SP80]

Rwanda Massacres

In 1994 in the small African country of Rwanda in just a few months several hundred thousand civilians were butchered, apparently a conflict of the Hutu and Tootsie ethnic groups. For quite some time I heard only  rumors about Catholic clergy actively involved in the 1994 Rwanda  massacres. Odd denials of involvement were printed in Catholic Church  journals, before even anybody had openly accused members of the church.

Then, 10/10/96, in the newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany – a station not at all critical to Christianity – the following was stated: “Anglican as well as Catholic priests and nuns are suspect of having actively participated in murders. Especially the conduct of a certain Catholic priest has been occupying the public mind in Rwanda’s capital Kigali for months. He was minister of the church of the Holy Family and allegedly murdered Tootsies in the most brutal manner. He is reported to have accompanied marauding Hutu militia with a gun in his cowl. In fact there has been a bloody laughter of Tootsies seeking shelter in his parish. Even two years after the massacres many Catholics refuse to set foot on the threshold of their church, because to them the participation of a certain part of the clergy in the slaughter is well established. There is almost no church in Rwanda that has not seen refugees – women, children, old – being brutally butchered facing the crucifix.

According to eyewitnesses clergymen gave away hiding Tootsies and  turned them over to the machetes of the Hutu militia. In connection with  these events again and again two Benedictine nuns are mentioned, both of whom have fled into a Belgian monastery in the meantime to avoid  prosecution. According to survivors one of them called the Hutu killers and led them to several thousand people who had sought shelter in her  monastery. By force the doomed were driven out of the churchyard and were murdered in the presence of the nun right in front of the gate. The other one is also reported to have directly cooperated with the murderers of the Hutu militia. In her case again witnesses report that she watched the slaughtering of people in cold blood and without showing response.

She is even accused of having procured some petrol used by the killers to set on fire and burn their victims alive…” [S2]

As can be seen from these events, the Christianity of the Dark Ages never come to an end.

References:

[DA] K.Deschner, Abermals krähte der Hahn, Stuttgart 1962.

[DO] K.Deschner, Opus Diaboli, Reinbek 1987.

[EC] P.W.Edbury, Crusade and Settlement, Cardiff Univ. Press 1985.

[EJ] S.Eidelberg, The Jews and the Crusaders, Madison 1977.

[LI] H.C.Lea, The Inquisition of the Middle Ages, New York 1961.

[MM] M.Margolis, A.Marx, A History of the Jewish People.

[MV] A.Manhattan, The Vatican’s Holocaust, Springfield 1986. See also V.Dedijer, The Yugoslav Auschwitz and the Vatican, Buffalo NY, 1992.

[NC] J.T.Noonan, Contraception: A History of its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, Cambridge/Mass., 1992.

[S2] Newscast of S2 Aktuell, Germany, 10/10/96, 12:00.

[SH] D.Stannard, American Holocaust, Oxford University Press 1992.

[SP] German news magazine Der Spiegel, no.49, 12/2/1996.

[TA] A True Account of the Most Considerable Occurrences that have Happened in the War Between the English and the Indians in New England, London 1676.

[TG] F.Turner, Beyond Geography, New York 1980.

[WW] H.Wollschläger: Die bewaffneten Wallfahrten gen Jerusalem, Zürich 1973. (This is in German and what is worse, it is out of print. But it is The best I ever read about crusades and includes a full list of  Original medieval Christian chroniclers’ writings).

[WV] Estimates on the number of executed witches: N.Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch Hunt, Frogmore 1976, 253. R.H.Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, New York 1959, 180.  J.B.Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, Ithaca/NY 1972, 39.  H.Zwetsloot, Friedrich Spee und die Hexenprozesse, Trier 1954, 56.

CHRISTIANS – An Atheist Is Seeking Answers. Can You Supply Any?

 CHRISTIANS – An Atheist Is Seeking Answers. Can You Supply Any?

To all who visit this page and attempt to offer an explanation: Thank You. In your comment please refer to which question you are addressing (#). If you wish, most of these questions can be found listed individually under the QUESTIONS FOR GOD AND HIS BELIEVERS category. Also, and this is important, please do not answer with ‘faith’ or by using scripture. Remember, I may have once been a die-hard Christian and may have studied the bible extensively in its many forms, but I am now an Atheist and the bible no longer holds any authority for me. I am merely trying to understand how people still believe the way I once did. How do you personally justify your beliefs, NOT how others justify them for you. If you visit my main page you can get a clearer understanding of where I’m coming from.

• 1) Will the saved in heaven miss their skeptical friends and family who are doomed to eternal torment in hell? The bible says there will be no sorrow. Are you the same age in heaven as you were when you died? Child, old man? Or in your ‘prime’? Who decides? You? Will they have bodily functions? The bible mentions feasts in heaven? If you eat in heaven will the resulting bodily functions occur? Will they always be ‘pleasant’? Is there sex? How will we recognize each other if we don’t have a recognizable form? Will we have wrinkles? Gray hair? Be bald? Fat? Male or female (if no sex then why different sexes? Why genitals at all?)? Teeth (if no eating, no teeth)? Noses (nothing smells, no need)? Will lost appendages be restored? Infirmities erased? What about birth defects? Will a born cripple still be a cripple in heaven? If you’re beautiful in life will you be beautiful in heaven? The same with ugly? In other words, will anybody stand out? Will we all look alike? Same race? If not there will be certain discrimination in heaven as there always is with those that aren’t alike. Luke 22:29, 30 – “And I appoint unto you a kingdom … that ye may eat & drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.”

• 2) God is so zealous in his obsession that man be circumcised that one wonders why he created such a flawed body that requires such an operation in all of mankind in order to be worthy of God’s acceptance. And long before these operations were safe or sanitary. God tells Abraham to circumcise boys at age 8 days but Abraham himself wasn’t circumcised until he was 99 years old. Gen 17:24 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. In order to purchase Saul’s daughter, Michal, for a wife, David kills 200 Philistines in order to obtain their foreskins to present as a gift to King Saul, and Saul only asked for 100. Why is this wee bit of skin so damn offensive? Could it be that it so closely resembles an ape’s (animal’s) penis and this reality frightens believers?

• 3) It is a statistical fact that the more inteligent, highly educated a person, the less likely they are to belive in a god. In other words, the less educated, or more ignorant a person is, the more likely they are to believe in a god. If it was proven that the less educated, or more ignorant a person was the more likely they were to drive a Ford or wear Addidas sneakers, and you realized you drove a Ford or wore Addidas, wouldn’t you reconsider the car you drove or the sneaker you wore?

• 4) So, say a married man dies (car crash or something) and goes to heaven. His wife remarries and lives a long happy life with her new wonderful husband. Many years later the wife dies but her second husband goes on to live quite a few years longer. When the wife arrives in heaven are the original married couple reunited in bliss? And what happens when the second husband dies and arrives in heaven? In heaven is one marriage more legitimate than the other? Is the first always more legitimate than any marriage that follows? What if the first was miserable (abusive spouse)? Or the second? Or the third? The answer seems to be that arrival in heaven results in an immediate divorce. In Mark 12:25 Jesus states that there will be no marriage in heaven. Husbands and wives will be no longer. So why the requirement for marriage in the first place if it’s just going to be voided upon death? Be fruitful and multiply was the command. God didn’t mention anything about first signing some unrealistic, legally-binding contract and having a silly ceremony. How can a person look forward to arriving in heaven if it means losing the love of their life?

• 5) Why do so few of God’s creation (humanity) believe in him? Isn’t that a terrible failure on God’s part considering that all the non-believers are doomed to burn in eternal hellfire? Why has God allowed so many thousands of gods to be invented and worshiped by his creation? Why aren’t we all naturally inclined to know of and believe in our ‘creator’? How do Christians justify dismissing all gods mankind has invented over countless generations as fictitious and yet, lacking any evidence more legitimate than the worshipers of these other gods had, claim that their god is absolutely, undeniably genuine?

• 6) None of the Gospels claim that more than a few besides the disciples saw Jesus after the resurrection, but in I Cor. 15:6 Paul claims there were 500. Where did this number come from? Why is Paul the only one to report a number anywhere that large? And if that number is accurate, few seemed to be impressed, for at the first meeting after Jesus’ ascension, only 120 people showed up (including the disciples and Jesus’ relatives) Acts 1:15. Why did Jesus’ time on earth, his miracles preformed, his resurrection and ascension into heaven impress so few people. The Jews were longing for the Messiah’s arrival and yet very few followed Jesus. Strange how only after a great many years have passed and the stories can no longer be proven/disproven, that so many now choose to believe. But still not the Jews! Why did God do so little to ensure that his chosen people (the Jews) accepted Jesus as the Messiah? Why did God bother to send Jesus down to earth, have him be born from a virgin, do all that he did, being the self proclaimed Messiah and savior King of the Jews, destined to die for them, be resurrected and rise into heaven, only to be rejected by God’s chosen people (the Jews)? What a waste. But then there is always Jews for Jesus.

• 7) The writers of the bible clearly believed there was more than one god, more than one deity who could grant powers to those who followed/worshiped him just like the Christian god. If God is the only true/real God, then who granted the Pharaoh’s sorcerers the ability to match Moses’ magic with their own special ‘rods’? Ex. 7:11, 12, 22. If you try and suggest it was Satan, then please clarify; are you stating that Satan is a god? Are you saying the Pharaoh and all the others were Satan worshipers? Knowingly or through deception? Are you saying that the writers of the bible didn’t know it was Satan who was standing in for all of these deities? God didn’t think to let them in on this little fact? And, most importantly, what are you basing this opinion on?

•  8 ) How is this not child abuse? It seems that in order for religion to really stick (last a lifetime) it must be introduced (indoctrinated) as a child. A child’s untried mind, peopled with fanciful characters as real as any (Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, etc.) represents just the level of thought processes necessary for acceptance of a religious system so rooted in superstition and mythology. An adult tells the child of Santa Claus and the child believes, whole heartedly that he exists. If that child was protected and isolated from those that would tell him otherwise and surrounded by those that would continue to encourage his belief in Santa, would said child ever stop believing in Santa? How is this different than belief in God (Jesus)? If you believe that the parents who taught their naïve children that David Koresh was in fact the second coming of Christ were doing something wrong, how do you differentiate that from teaching a naïve child about your particular religion and god?

• 9) Rev 17:8 – “And they that dwell on the earth shall wonder, whose names were not written in the book of life from the foundation of the world.” Rev 20:15 – “And whosoever was not found written in the book of life was cast into the lake of fire.” Wow! What a Revelation! Where did this ‘book of life’ come from? Why did no one ever mention such an important book before Revelations? And if the names of those that will be allowed into heaven are written in it ‘from the foundation of the world’ then why, according to the bible, aren’t those that were born before Jesus allowed to have everlasting life?

• 10)Why do non-Jews follow the Bible? Specifically the Old Testament? The bible is a book about the Jews, their history, customs, lifestyle, superstitions and religion. Gentiles (non Jews) should have no interest in it. Their treatment by Israelite armies at the direction of their God is so vindictive it should horrify any non Jew. Remember, Jesus called Gentiles (non Jews) “dogs“. Joseph Smith was so put off by how little the bible had to do with his people (Americans) that he actually rewrote it to suit him and started his own religion (Mormonism).

• 11) What happened to thou shalt not kill? “If thy brother … or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying Let us go and serve other gods … Thou shalt surely kill him … and thou shalt stone him with stones that he die.” Deut 13:6, 9, 10. So if someone you love wants to be another religion and asks you to consider joining their religion, you should disobey the Ten Commandments, and righteously kill him, condemning their soul to eternal torment in hell? This is the command of a god you want me to worship and love and dedicate my life to? Really?

• 12) How many children has your god doomed to burn in eternal hellfire? At what age are children judged to be responsible for making their own decisions about religion? They are born sinners according to the bible. If an atheist if guaranteed a place in hell, then how about that atheist’s 5 year old child? How about their 6 month old infant? Do they get a free pass? If so how about a ten year old? What is the cut off age? What about Mormons? According to Christianity, all Mormons are doomed to hell. What about their children? The children of a Mormon are being raised in their religion. They believe what their parents are teaching them (Santa!). They aren’t being given a choice. Will they be punished for innocently believing in their parents teachings by being sent to hell? Are the kids who died in the Waco, Texas compound fire with David Koresh in hell?

• 13) What happens to people who have physical and mental infirmities that prevent them from hearing, or reading, or understanding? Is God a devil who would doom them to eternal hellfire OR is he a tender and merciful God who grants them free access into heaven? And what level of retardation is required to acquire this free pass? Is a person with downs syndrome exempt because they can conceivably make decisions for themselves? What about a person who was once ‘normal’ but as a result of a brain injury became mentally retarded? What if they were an Atheist before the accident? A Scientologist? A Serial Killer? Will they be judged for who they were before or after the accident?

• 14) On the topic of free will; how does your god judge those who don’t have free will? Such as a person suffering from a mental disorder such as schizophrenia or bi-polar disorder? How about someone with a major dependency issue, such as an alcoholic or meth addict? How about someone with some sort of mental retardation? How about a child whose decisions are made for them?

• 15) Are all who are naïve of Jesus’ existence (Amazonian Tribes) doomed to burn in eternal hellfire? If yes, then God is a devil and unworthy of worship by anyone who would call themselves good. HOWEVER, if God is indeed a merciful God, then those that are naïve of Jesus’ existence will not be punished for their innocent ignorance and will be granted entrance into heaven. If the later is the case, however, then wouldn’t the people of the world be better served by missionaries not coming to their lands? One minute the tribesman has a free pass to heaven from a good and merciful God, the next a missionary arrives and tells him to stop worshiping his god and worship Christ. The tribesman, not understanding, or not trusting this pale faced foreigner decides to continue worshiping as he and his people have for countless generations. The next day a jaguar attacks the tribesman and kills him. Fastpass to HELL for the tribesman. The very introduction of the missionary into their tribe dooms them. Thanks God! Thanks do-gooder Christians!

• 16) How does God decide who he is going to have casual conversations with? In Gen. 25:23 Rebekah asks God about her pregnancy symptoms and God apparently isn’t busy so he replies, “Two manner of people shall be separated from thy bowels.” Another fine example is in Acts 10 – Peter is fasting on a rooftop and God decides Peter can be done fasting and sends down a sheet full of four-footed beasts and wild beasts and creeping things and foul and speaks to Peter, saying “Rise, kill and eat.” God the Almighty has just preformed a bit of magic and spoken directly with Peter, commanded him really, but does Peter obey his Lord? No, he refuses! Is God so unimpressive? God actually repeats his command three times but still Peter refuses. Finally, God gives up! Don’t these examples strike anyone as odd? And why are such pedestrian conversations unfathomable now? Even a Christian would think someone claiming to have such informal conversations with God is mad or a liar.

• 17) During the God mandated wandering the Jews did before being allowed to enter the Promised Land, God provided manna, which was sweet and like coriander and could be made into cakes (using no other ingredients?). Just what sort of nutritional value could manna have had? What would happen to the human body if forced to eat nothing but manna for forty years? And if you answer with the typical pat, ‘God would make it so they wouldn’t get ill’, then you are required to answer the follow up question as well. If God is going to actively interfere with the bodies of these people, why not just make it so they don’t need to eat at all?

• 18) How many people have died as a result of a single passage in the book of James? “And the prayer of faith shall heal the sick.” James 5:15

• 19) Why do female televangelist clearly defy God’s commands about appearance? I Tim. 2:9 – “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array…”

• 20) What existed outside of the Garden of Eden? God created the Garden of Eden and inhabited it with all the creatures in existence (silly and mathematically impossible) and created a man to name and oversee everything and a woman to serve him. But what existed outside of the boundaries of the Garden? Was it a barren wasteland? Considering how many millions of years old the beautiful natural wonders of the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls and Yosemite are, to name just a few local sites, it seems unlikely. When Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden, what were they cast out into? And why were all the animals cast out of paradise as well? Why were they punished for man’s sins? In the Garden the Lion and the Lamb were bros., outside they were the predator and the prey, the eater and the eaten, the fed and the food. And how long would man and animal have needed to remain vegans outside of the Garden? Obviously many generations of animals would have needed to be born before they could be killed for their flesh (and coats), otherwise they would have quickly been rendered extinct. And were blood sacrifices really prudent at this point? And how did all these animals that are currently native only to a few very specific regions of the earth manage to get there? Would you argue that all the continents of the earth were one single land mass just a few thousand years ago? And finally, where the hell is the Garden of Eden now? Where did it go?

• 21) If Public Schools require the teaching of creationism alongside evolution, would you require your Private Christian School or church to teach evolutionary science? If not, why not?

• 22)Do Angels really have wings? Do they really need wings to fly? If not, then why do they have wings?

• 23)Which came first; Dinosaurs or Adam and Eve?

• 24)Do you believe in Jack and the Beanstalk as well? In Num. 13:33 the scouts for the Israelites advise against entering Canaan because they claim to have seen giants there. Giants appear a number of times in the bible, most notably in the tale of David and Goliath. David and his servants slay a number of other giants as well, including one with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. Why is it in the most archeological excavated locations in the world (those mentioned in the bible), that no evidence of these giants have ever been found? Could it be because giants are creatures of Myth, just like Dragons, which are also repeatedly mentioned in the Bible as if they were real? Neither Dragons nor Giants exist. Never have.

• 25)In Luke 24:37 when Jesus rises from the dead and appears to the eleven apostles, they are terrified. Didn’t they know he would be returning? How little faith did they have in their own Messiah? Why so little preparation for his return? Most of Jesus’ followers just went back to life as normal or went into hiding. Lazarus’ return from the dead was met with more enthusiasm. Why do the disciples have such an insignificant reaction to Jesus’ resurrection and ascension? They seem relatively unimpressed by these incredible feats. They don’t tell anyone and aren’t tempted to tell anyone. Nobody gloats to the scribes and Pharisees. Nobody tells Jesus’ mother (!). Nobody celebrates. Nobody says, “I told you so!” They don’t assemble a crowd for the ascension. And if they really believe what Jesus said about his second coming is true and that it will happen in their lifetimes, why weren’t they hotfooting it to try and ‘save’ as many Jews from hell as they can? Don’t they have any friends, family or loved ones they would like to see get into heaven?

• 26)Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?

• 27) Every religion–Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Mormonism, Scientology, Buddhism, etc. claims to have religious experiences. If EVERY supernatural belief system boasts religious experiences, then doesn’t that pretty well devalue religious experiences as an indicator of actual truth?

• 28)Why won’t any religious person pray that an amputee’s limb grows back? Is it because you know that it is impossible and praying for the impossible is foolish? Why can’t an all powerful god heal an amputee? Why don’t parents who wanted a baby boy but got a baby girl pray for the baby to change genders? Why do Christians so rarely pray for anything that is completely impossible?

• 29)A simple scientific test for the validity of prayer. Gather up the religeous leaders of your particular religion and put them and 200 of their most loyal and feverent followers on an airplane. At 35,000 feet, the pilot and co-pilot will exit the plane via parachute. Autopilot can not be used. At this point every person remaining on board will begin to pray for the plane’s safe landing and every passenger’s survival. If God’s hands guide the aircraft to a safe and smooth landing, prayer’s efficacy will be proven. If the plane crashes, the power of prayer will have been disproven. Would even one of these believers step foot on that plane to participate in this test? Any volunteers?

• 30) Aren’t you an Atheist almost exactly like me? Do you believe in Baal? Do you believe in Ammon Ra? How about Zeus? Or Wotan? Or Poseidon? Or Apollo? Guess what? Me neither! If I made a list of every god ever worshiped by man I bet you would check them all off as being false just like me. The only difference between you and I seems to be the one god you would leave unchecked that I would include with the others. Not much of a difference between us after all is there? You exclude your god from your atheistic beliefs whereas I include him. That’s all.

• 31) Should the church be able to prevent someone from donating a kidney to their dying sister? Does the kidney belong to the person whoes body it resides in? Is it theirs to do with as they please? How about a tumor? A tumor is a living, growing mass of cells. A tumor doesn’t necessarily cause any harm to the human whoes body it is growing in. Does a person have the right to have it removed, even if it’s not currently causing them harm? What about if it might kill them to do so? Does the tumor belong to them? How is a fetus (a living, growing mass of cells) any different? Because it is human? Fine, then is the fetus capable of making the decision? No? Then who should the decision logically fall to? How can it be anyone other than the person whoes body the fetus/tumor/kidney resides in?

• 32)If an ancient Aztec text was discovered and in this text it was reported that their leader commanded an offensive tree to uproot itself and march away into the jungle, would you believe that this actually occurred? If not, why not? There is no evidence that the events depicted in the Bible actually occurred, in fact quite the contrary, so why would you blindly believe those stories but not the one depicted in the Aztec text?

• 33)If a Christian does not spend every waking moment of their lives trying to ‘save’ people in order for those people to go to heaven when they die, can they truly call themselves a real Christian? How can a real Christian just sit idley by knowing that, according to the Bible, of the thousands of people who die every day, the majority of them are going straight to hell?

• 34)Why isn’t knowledge of God a natural part of our existence? Why aren’t we born knowing him? In other words, why if a man is born and left alone, and he never encounters a Christian or reads a bible, he would live his whole life never knowing or believing in God? If God is real and deserving of our love, why has he stacked the deck so highly in favor of mankind eventually finding themselves in hell rather than heaven?

• 35)Did Adam and Eve have sex in the Garden of Eden? If so, did they do it purely for procreation purposes? Who taught them how to have intercourse? God?

• 36)Did pain exist before Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge? If so, why? If part of the punishment for eating the fruit was pain during childbirth, does this mean pain receptors didn’t exist in the female body before this? How else would childbirth have been free from pain?
• 37) If God intended for his religion to be (embraced) for all (not just the Jews) why did he make it so restrictive and exclusive? Invading, attacking, and slaughtering all who weren’t his chosen people hardly seems like an invitation.
• 38)

What Happened To Thou Shalt Not Kill?

 “If thy brother … or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying Let us go and serve other gods … Thou shalt surely kill him … and thou shalt stone him with stones that he die.” Deut 13:6, 9, 10. So if someone you love wants to be another religion and asks you to consider joining their religion, you should disobey the Ten Commandments, and righteously kill him, condemning their soul to eternal torment in hell? This is the command of a god you want me to worship and love and dedicate my life to? Really? I think I’ll pass.

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

DoubtingThomas

Why Is God Such A Dick To The Jews?

Why Is God Such A Dick To The Jews?

 

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.

 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 a three foot high pile of quail covered the earth for miles in every direction? Seriously?

 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. 

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.

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. 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the left hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

Save Yourself From Religion!

Save Yourself From Religion! 

Robert M. Pirsig: “When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.”

All gods have been invented by man. Since the earliest days of our existence we have created gods to comfort our fears (mainly death) and explain the unexplainable. It’s absurd to suggest that primitive humans guessed wrongly about everything else, but were spot on regarding the origins of life. Once upon a time it was our god(s) who caused the lightning to strike and the thunder to rumble, same with the windstorms, plagues, tidal waves, floods, and earthquakes. It was our god(s) who lifted the sun into the sky (if the sun itself wasn’t the god) and darkened the moon. How many times has something, especially the origin of something, that was once attributed to a god, had the truth revealed by science? Whenever a new truth is discovered, some religious belief falters. And rarely, if ever, does a new scientific discovery ever support any religious theory. Just how many of the stories of the bible need to be proven fallacies before those who hold its pages in reverence will begin to question their conviction? Let’s face it, there are many who, even with the evidence of a story’s fiction placed right before them, will deny its validity before they even consider denying the absoluteness of their holy book. Is there truly any way to convince such people? Is faith simply a synonym for willful ignorance? How is it that the faithful can so casually dismiss ALL the other gods and religions mankind has invented over the years, acknowledging that they are ALL fallacious man made drivel, ALL, that is, with the exception of THEIR god and their particular religion? Could there be a more perfect example of arrogance and narcissism?

On what do you base your faith? Dogma? The pretty, comforting scripture you repeat over and over like a mantra, carefully avoiding the rest of the biblical passages that are utterly horrifying and/or obviously fiction? Are you simply the faith of your parents? And by parents, I mean original/birth parents. Are you more likely to belong to the faith of those who birthed you or those who raised you? If, at 4 years old, your parents died while taking you on a Christian missionary expedition through the mountains of Afghanistan, and a local family of Muslims found you and raised you as their own, do you really think you wouldn’t grow up a Muslim? Why would God allow a Muslim family to lead one of his children away from the one, true faith? Is it because what religion you belong to is completely arbitrary? And can anything arbitrary ever be taken as an absolute?

The truth WILL set you free. But you will not find it in the pages of the bible or any other religious doctrine. But please do read the bible, and in its ENTIRETY, but do so with open eyes and a clear mind. No one who does so can possibly come away having any desire to glory in the god depicted in its pages. 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the left hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Fallacy of the Flood (Noah’s Ark)

 

The Fallacy of the Flood (Noah’s Ark)   

God so despised (so much for ‘good’) the offspring of the first nine generations of his creation that he decided to not only kill them all but to kill every other living thing upon the face of the earth! No exception was made for children, pregnant women or even babies (not to mention kittens, puppies and flowers). Only Noah, his three sons and their four wives were spared. How convenient that Noah and his sons had such perfect taste in women.

 

Noah was commissioned to construct a ship of such size that no one at the time had ever even conceived of such a vessel (500ft long, 85ft wide, 60ft & 3 stories high or less than half the size of the Titanic or about a ¼ the size of the Queen Mary II).  In fact, the lumber (gopher wood) required to build it would have been extremely expensive and, frankly, nearly impossible to acquire even if they had chopped down every gopher-wood tree in the area (it’s a wasteland, people!). And the tools needed to create such a vessel didn’t even exist. The tools would have had to have been created from scratch. On top of this, Noah had to do this with little to no knowledge of shipbuilding (and let’s face it, only an expert ship builder could hope to construct a vessel never before imagined and hope to make it sea worthy). Oh yeah, and while he was constructing the ship he also was commanded to gather SEVEN of every ‘clean’ beast & two of every ‘unclean’ beast & SEVEN of every fowl of both sexes (14 each), and a male & female of every ‘creeping thing’. He had to do this with the assistance of only seven other people. Even if they didn’t eat, sleep, piss or shit, this would have taken a VERY long time (I ignore the 120 years bible literalists give as it is a completely willful assumption which has no actual biblical support). This begs the question; How many innocents were born in that time and why weren’t they spared? How many dead babies were floating on the waters of God’s tantrum?

How is it neither Noah, his sons, nor their wives were at all concerned about worshiping and blindly obeying a god (really they were obeying Noah as he was the only one in direct communication) who was determined to kill all of their friends and family? Did they all really believe everyone they knew deserved to be murdered? Oh yes, that’s right, in their leisure time (what leisure time!) they were all preaching to the God doomed masses. I guess they really sucked at it as not a single person repented their sins and received an invitation on board. Even on day 39 of the rains they couldn’t bring anyone back to God? Wow?

 So, who stays behind to build the Ark while the others go in search of all the animals (and insects), the VAST majority of which the people of that time had no idea even existed. Let’s say half and half. No, wait! Even better, let’s assume God used his magical powers to influence every animal and insect to make its way to Noah and the Ark, leaving the men to focus on building the ship (ignore the fact that this completely disputes the bible). Even assuming that, however, one must ask how, exactly, did the various species that only exist in certain parts of the world (Koala Bear, Polar Bear, Panda Bear, etc.) manage to reach the Ark? Wait! I know, let’s assume that all the continents were still a single land mass just a few thousand years ago (more like 100 million, but who’s counting?).  Problem solved. Now, one must ask, how long would it take for a Sloth, native to Southern and Central America, to march its way to the Ark? And did we really need to include the Brown Recluse Spider and the Black Mamba? Really?

OK, so the Ark is completed just in time as all the animals and insects arrive and crowd on in. Except they won’t fit. This is understandable as the people who wrote the bible were only familiar with a very, very small percentage of the creatures that dwelled upon the earth so their measurements would have seemed more than adequate. But, of course, in reality they weren’t. The size of vessel that would be required to hold 2-7 of every living thing, including insects and fish, is too absurd to even contemplate. And that doesn’t even take into account all the food and fresh water that would be needed to sustain both man and beast for the 190 days they were on board the Ark (not to mention during the wait). Does this mean even more animals so the carnivores have some fresh meat? And what about after the flood? The whole of the earth would have been covered in rotting corpses and vegetation. There will be nothing edible for a very long time, even if Noah and his clan immediately started planting seeds upon making land. And, again, what about the carnivores? How many generations would have to pass before they could start preying on the offspring of the survivors of the flood? Of course, according to the bible, the slaughter started immediately, as, after the flood, of the few remaining animals left on earth, God tells Noah, “…every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you.” Gen. 9:3 How quickly would each species become extinct if such an occurrence had actually taken place? And what happened to kosher?

And what about all those who witnessed what Noah and his family were up to? No doubt everyone scoffed at Noah’s endeavor, especially when he and his family locked themselves inside the Ark with all the animals. But then it began to rain. And it rained and rained and rained and rained, and the waters began to rise. At what point did the others realize they wanted to be on the Ark as well? Day 20? Day 30? Day 39? How exactly did the Ark survive the panicked mob that assuredly came down upon it once everyone realized they were being murdered by God? Not a one managed to pry open the door impractically placed in its side? And is there a ship designer alive who believes that a vessel constructed at that time with a door in its side could possibly ever be sea worthy?

Oh, and let’s not even consider that the weight of the Ark, filled to capacity with animals, food and supplies, would result in a completely non-buoyant vessel. And think about it; it would have been impossible for Noah, his wife, his three sons and their three wives, (8 people total) to both crew the vessel and care for and feed and clean up after all the animals. And how did Noah keep the birds from eating all the insects? And what about the parasites they (and the other animals) carried? Do those count for the two of each living thing? Probably more like the seven.

Think of what the conditions must have been like on board the Ark for 190 days. How is it no viruses or diseases were spread? Realistically, how many of the animals would have died during the voyage? What about after? How many would have refused to mate with the one they were partnered up with? As any zoologist will tell you, a male and female of any species aren’t necessarily compatible as mates and even if they were, there is no guarantee that they could produce an offspring. And in case any believer suggests that at any point God interfered in order to guarantee his plan worked out (i.e. all animals mated and produced offspring, never attacked one another, no sickness on board), I ask why not just snap his almighty fingers and make all the offending humans fall dead? Why all the drama? Why not just snap his almighty fingers and poof there is the Ark and snap all the animals are on board? Did he want to sit and stew in his anger while Noah and his sons attempted to obey his command? If a believer is going to suggest that God used his infinite powers to take part in the great plan, then they must concede that there was no need to kill every living thing, God simply wanted to. There’s simply no denying that the God depicted in the story of Noah and the Ark is nothing but a petulant monster. Lucky for the believer, this story is shown (and proven many times over) to be a complete work of fiction.

This leaves us with one simple question: Knowing that the story of Noah and the Ark is nothing but a fairy tale, how can anyone continue to believe in the legitimacy of the Bible? Do we need to address the story of David and Goliath (and the Beanstalk?)? Or Jonah and the Whale? Do we? Really? —

*** PLEASE visit my Main Page https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/ and check out my many other posts in the various categories listed on the left.

All Gods Are Inventions of Man

The Christian God is no different than Zeus or Horus or any other dismissed god of the past, and Jesus was only one of many crucified saviors. God’s come in very handy. They help explain the unknown, and might help you if you treat them right. And if you want to be important, how better than to make up a supreme being who names you his chosen people and despises everyone else? If you want to control your people, how better than to put a thousand rules into a god’s mouth and have him annihilate anyone who disobeys them? If you want to take other people’s land, how better to justify it than to have your god tell you to do it and leave no one breathing? If you want to be sexist and racist, how better to condone it than by having a sexist, racist god not only approve it but order it? If you are typical of the times and inclined to be cruel, how better to burn, hang, drown, smite, mutilate, and torture than to have your god command you to do it and set the example himself? If you want to kill your neighbor, your friend, and members of your family, and thrust your children through when you’re not beating them black and blue, what better way to get permission than from a god who is an amoral fiend himself? Poor God! We can’t always choose our biographers.

 

Please visit my main page (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) to gain a better understanding of where I am coming from. There you will find all my observations regarding religion and the bible categorized on the top Right hand side of the page. Please feel free to read through them and leave a comment or two if you like.

The Legality of Religious Indoctrination

Should religious indoctrination in children be illegal? Is it the equivalent of child abuse? Should a person not be allowed to choose what god they want to worship until they are an adult? A person most often becomes the religion of their parent for no other reason than that is the person who raised them. There was no conscious choice. There was no careful examination of the various religions and gods currently being worshiped and then whichever one they ‘connect’ with becomes their religion. Consider the following scenarios: A young child of 7 years-old is being raised by Christian parents, and during a camping trip in Utah, both parents are bitten by a poisonous snake and die. The child wonders off into the wilderness and is later found by another family who was also camping. The child is taken in by the family and raised by them. The family is Mormon. Will the child grow up to be a Christian or a Mormon like his ‘adopted’ family? How about if the Christian family is doing missionary work in Afghanistan and their vehicle hits an old landmine and everyone is killed but the child who wonders off into the desert and is found by an Afghani family. The child will grow up and be a Muslim not a Christian. How about if the Christian family is doing missionary work in the depths of the Amazon and is attacked by a Jaguar and the parents are killed. Say a local tribe finds the child and raises him amongst them. That child will grow up worshiping the river god Waesaritu. Why would God allow the innocent child to be misled this way, damning him to eternal hellfire?

Is Heaven Really Hell?

Will the saved in heaven miss their skeptical friends and family who are doomed to eternal torment in hell? The bible says there will be no sorrow. Are you the same age in heaven as you were when you died? Child, old man? Or in your ‘prime’? Who decides? You? Will they have bodily functions? The bible mentions feasts in heaven? If you eat in heaven will the resulting bodily functions occur? Is there sex? How will we recognize each other if we don’t have a recognizable form? Will we have wrinkles? Gray hair? Be bald? Fat? Male or female (if no sex then why different sexes? Why genitals at all?)? Teeth (if no eating, no teeth)? Noses (nothing smells, no need)? Will lost appendages be restored? Infirmities erased? What about birth defects? Will a born cripple still be a cripple in heaven? If you’re beautiful in life will you be beautiful in heaven? The same with ugly? In other words, will anybody stand out? Will we all look alike? Same race? If not there will be certain discrimination in heaven as there always is with those that aren’t alike. Luke 22:29, 30 – “And I appoint unto you a kingdom … that ye may eat & drink at my table in my kingdom and sit on thrones judging the 12 tribes of Israel.” *** PLEASE visit my Main Page and check out my many other posts in the various categories listed on the left.

The Origin of Life

This is a comment by Whiteman0o0 (David). I deleted it from my main page to place it here. 

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[[[I have a quick question, really more of a chain of thought that I have been mulling over for a few months and I hope one of the “rational thinkers” here can explain it to me since me being a xian has apparently made me devoid of all rational thought process. Trace the evolutionary tree back, finally you get to the one celled organisms, where did they come from? Protiens, but where did the protiens come from? amino acids, But where did the amino acids come from? The basic question I am asserting here is where did the first life come from? Abiogenesis?, Aliens?, Chuck Norris? someone please give me an answer with your “rational” thought process.

P.S. In case you havent read other posts on this site, I am a Xian and I believe that modern science does not refute God’s existence but rather supports it. I also believe that God created the earth, and still works in it today. !)avid]]]

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I love Whiteman0o0’s question as it is one of the most challenging questions for those who don’t believe in the biblical explanation of how life began. Personally, I think the Chuck Norris option is the most plausible. Kidding, of course, but the reality is this question of how life began is one of the main motivating factor for a large number of the gods mankind has created over the years. Gods help us explain the unexplainable. As our knowledge of our world and our universe expands, we as a species need rely less and less on superstition to illuminate these mysteries. Nevertheless, there are still a great many mysteries left unexplained. Whiteman0o0 believes that science will eventually prove the reality of the Christian god, while I believe it has already proven just the opposite. As for the origin of life; I truly don’t believe any current explanation has it right. But let’s face it, the ALIEN explanation is FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR more believable than ANY explanation supplied by ANY religion, especially Christianity. 

I hope others will do their best to answer Whiteman0o0’s excellent query.

Test Your Faith

PLEASE SEE MY MANY POSTS ON THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION ON MY MAIN PAGE (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) ALL CATEGORIZED ON THE LEFT

THIS POST WILL SOON BE DELETED AS IT IS AN EXPERIMENT AS I AM STILL LEARNING HOW TO MAKE THIS SITE WORK.

10 Sound Reasons To Abandon the Christian Faith

PLEASE SEE MY MANY OTHER POSTS ON THE SUBJECT OF RELIGION ON MY MAIN PAGE (https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/) ALL CATEGORIZED ON THE LEFT

10 sound reasons to abandon the Christian faith.

1. Christianity—in all its obnoxious denominations—is illogical, irrational, unreasonable and, of greatest import, unscientific. From mammalian parthenogenesis to talking non-human animals, from repeated corpse resurrection to impossible human longevity, this particular brand of mythology is unscientific to its core. Various absurdities, found in both the Old and New Testaments, simply cannot be reconciled with science-based reality and natural principles.

2. The Bible, in the not-too-distant past, reasonably has been interpreted to permit—or even condone—“witch” burnings, slavery, torture, female subservience and all manner of detestable horror. True, some passages in the Good Book speak about love, charity, forgiveness and solidarity. But, other passages—equally numerous if not more—prescribe stoning people to death for fictitious offenses such as gathering sticks on the Sabbath. In short, the very same tome that pious people clutch in church on Sundays was in the bloodstained hands of murderous primitives inflicting the thumbscrew on innocents guilty only of non-conformity in a Christofascist, pre-scientific world.

3. James Ussher’s Bible-based dating of Creation—that it took place nightfall before October 23, 4004 BCE—is egregiously, laughably fictitious. As Sam Harris snickers, “This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.” A 6000-year-old earth is so absurdly in conflict with the evidence as to make the proposition strictly comical and unworthy of scholarly attention. In contrast to the Bible’s small and young (and non-existent) universe, cosmologists have discovered that there are more than one hundred billion (10^11) galaxies in our universe, each featuring hundreds of billions of stars. The sun—the center of our solar system—is merely an ordinary star, in an ordinary galaxy. Our universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. And, who knows if we might live in some sort of grand cosmic multiverse, of which our universe is merely an insignificant speck.

4. Atheism is the only consistent position with respect to faith-based religious mythology. Christians, for example, are non-believers with respect to every faith except Christianity. Christians are utterly atheistic about every deity (of the infinitely many which could be conceived) except Yahweh. How oddly inconsistent. Muslims, too, reject every world religion save for Islam, which, to them, has a monopoly on absolute Truth. How is it reasonable to reject 10,000 faith-based religions, yet cling to the absolute authority of one? The only reasonable method by which to choose one religion over another would be hard evidence—something that all modern religions lack equally. Absent hard evidence, isn’t faith in Yahweh equal to faith in Enlil (or any other fantastical imagining)?

5. Historic “heroes” of Christianity are worthy neither of respect nor reverence. Harris writes, “It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews and witches.” Here, once again, we return to severe punishments prescribed for fictitious offenses. The Christofascist societies of centuries past (ruled over by the same Bible one finds at Sunday Services) bear a frightening resemblance to the modern-day Islamofascist Middle East, into which we have butted our collective nose.

6. Yahweh is woefully unworthy of worship. As portrayed in the Old Testament, he is the very embodiment of human frailty: vicious, vengeful, jealous, egotistical, insecure and, most frighteningly, endlessly murderous. Yahweh also seems to have difficulty separating the important from the insignificant, as evidenced by the Ten Commandments. Harris writes, “And what are we to make of the fact that, in bringing his treatise to a close, the creator of our universe could think of no human concerns more pressing and durable than the coveting of servants and livestock?” Yahweh’s special list of ten alternates between self-aggrandizement, statements of the obvious, pronouncements of the silly and declarations of the trivial.

7. No God, the Christian character or otherwise, should be worshipped given the results with which we live. If Yahweh is real, then cancer, smallpox, AIDS, malaria and aphasia are all products of his cloud-enshrouded laboratory. “Acts of God” such as Hurricane Katrina and the devastating tsunami of a few years ago are exactly that—the life-extinguishing playthings of the creator of the cosmos. Then there are starvation, homelessness, birth defects, genetic disease….

8. Piety can directly result in mass death. Harris writes, “Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. This kind of piety is genocidal.” He continues, in a note, “If you can believe it, the Vatican is currently opposed to condom use even to prevent the spread of HIV from one married partner to another.” This is truly sickening, folks. In the fundamentalist mind, agonizing death is preferable to the imagined sin of sex aided by contraceptive.

9. Virulent Christian anti-Semitism helped create the environment in which the Holocaust took place. Harris writes, “…the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.”

10. Let us turn, for just for a moment, to David Mills’ Atheist Universe: “The Church angrily denounced the introduction of medicines, antibiotics, anesthesia, surgery, blood transfusions, birth control, transplants, in vitro fertilization and most forms of pain killers. Supposedly, these scientific tools interfered with nature and were therefore against God’s will.” The Church’s modern-day anti-science positions, obviously, should come as no shock. Diminishing human suffering never has been a high-level concern. After all, in a mind deranged by religion, there is another life to which to look forward. The earthly is merely ephemeral and, thus, suffering is a-ok.

–TAKEN FROM MY CASE AGAINST GOD BY DAN FERRISI  

Words of Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens states in God is not Great, “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think—though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one—that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell.”

Got Raped? Lucky You! Bible Says You Get A Husband.

Deut. 22:28, 29 – Describes how if a man rapes a woman and is discovered, “…then he shall give unto the damsel’s father 50 shekels of silver and she shall be his wife…” What happens if they are not found during the act? But hey, lucky for the rape victim, right? She gets a husband! Woo Hoo!

Does a Soul Have Nerve Endings?

Another problem for the soul-particularly in relation to Hell-Does the soul have the ability to feel pain. Can a soul be tortured and brutalized? Pain is a particularly bodily phenomenon; it involves nerves, it involves tissue, it involves, most importantly, the brain. Please explain how a ghostly essence, separated from the body, can feel pain.

10 Sound Reasons To Abandon the Christian Faith

10 sound reasons to abandon the Christian faith

–TAKEN FROM MY CASE AGAINST GOD BY DAN FERRISI–

1. Christianity—in all its obnoxious denominations—is illogical, irrational, unreasonable and, of greatest import, unscientific. From mammalian parthenogenesis to talking non-human animals, from repeated corpse resurrection to impossible human longevity, this particular brand of mythology is unscientific to its core. Various absurdities, found in both the Old and New Testaments, simply cannot be reconciled with science-based reality and natural principles.

2. The Bible, in the not-too-distant past, reasonably has been interpreted to permit—or even condone—“witch” burnings, slavery, torture, female subservience and all manner of detestable horror. True, some passages in the Good Book speak about love, charity, forgiveness and solidarity. But, other passages—equally numerous if not more—prescribe stoning people to death for fictitious offenses such as gathering sticks on the Sabbath. In short, the very same tome that pious people clutch in church on Sundays was in the bloodstained hands of murderous primitives inflicting the thumbscrew on innocents guilty only of non-conformity in a Christofascist, pre-scientific world.

3. James Ussher’s Bible-based dating of Creation—that it took place nightfall before October 23, 4004 BCE—is egregiously, laughably fictitious. As Sam Harris snickers, “This is, incidentally, about a thousand years after the Sumerians invented glue.” A 6000-year-old earth is so absurdly in conflict with the evidence as to make the proposition strictly comical and unworthy of scholarly attention. In contrast to the Bible’s small and young (and non-existent) universe, cosmologists have discovered that there are more than one hundred billion (10^11) galaxies in our universe, each featuring hundreds of billions of stars. The sun—the center of our solar system—is merely an ordinary star, in an ordinary galaxy. Our universe is roughly 13.7 billion years old. And, who knows if we might live in some sort of grand cosmic multiverse, of which our universe is merely an insignificant speck.

4. Atheism is the only consistent position with respect to faith-based religious mythology. Christians, for example, are non-believers with respect to every faith except Christianity. Christians are utterly atheistic about every deity (of the infinitely many which could be conceived) except Yahweh. How oddly inconsistent. Muslims, too, reject every world religion save for Islam, which, to them, has a monopoly on absolute Truth. How is it reasonable to reject 10,000 faith-based religions, yet cling to the absolute authority of one? The only reasonable method by which to choose one religion over another would be hard evidence—something that all modern religions lack equally. Absent hard evidence, isn’t faith in Yahweh equal to faith in Enlil (or any other fantastical imagining)?

5. Historic “heroes” of Christianity are worthy neither of respect nor reverence. Harris writes, “It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews and witches.” Here, once again, we return to severe punishments prescribed for fictitious offenses. The Christofascist societies of centuries past (ruled over by the same Bible one finds at Sunday Services) bear a frightening resemblance to the modern-day Islamofascist Middle East, into which we have butted our collective nose.

6. Yahweh is woefully unworthy of worship. As portrayed in the Old Testament, he is the very embodiment of human frailty: vicious, vengeful, jealous, egotistical, insecure and, most frighteningly, endlessly murderous. Yahweh also seems to have difficulty separating the important from the insignificant, as evidenced by the Ten Commandments. Harris writes, “And what are we to make of the fact that, in bringing his treatise to a close, the creator of our universe could think of no human concerns more pressing and durable than the coveting of servants and livestock?” Yahweh’s special list of ten alternates between self-aggrandizement, statements of the obvious, pronouncements of the silly and declarations of the trivial.

7. No God, the Christian character or otherwise, should be worshipped given the results with which we live. If Yahweh is real, then cancer, smallpox, AIDS, malaria and aphasia are all products of his cloud-enshrouded laboratory. “Acts of God” such as Hurricane Katrina and the devastating tsunami of a few years ago are exactly that—the life-extinguishing playthings of the creator of the cosmos. Then there are starvation, homelessness, birth defects, genetic disease….

8. Piety can directly result in mass death. Harris writes, “Christian missionaries have been known to preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages where no other information about condoms is available. This kind of piety is genocidal.” He continues, in a note, “If you can believe it, the Vatican is currently opposed to condom use even to prevent the spread of HIV from one married partner to another.” This is truly sickening, folks. In the fundamentalist mind, agonizing death is preferable to the imagined sin of sex aided by contraceptive.

9. Virulent Christian anti-Semitism helped create the environment in which the Holocaust took place. Harris writes, “…the anti-Semitism that built the Nazi death camps was a direct inheritance from medieval Christianity. For centuries, Christian Europeans had viewed the Jews as the worst species of heretics and attributed every societal ill to their continued presence among the faithful. While the hatred of Jews in Germany expressed itself in a predominantly secular way, its roots were religious, and the explicitly religious demonization of the Jews of Europe continued throughout the period. The Vatican itself perpetuated the blood libel in its newspapers as late as 1914. And both Catholic and Protestant churches have a shameful record of complicity with the Nazi genocide.”

10. Let us turn, for just for a moment, to David Mills’ Atheist Universe: “The Church angrily denounced the introduction of medicines, antibiotics, anesthesia, surgery, blood transfusions, birth control, transplants, in vitro fertilization and most forms of pain killers. Supposedly, these scientific tools interfered with nature and were therefore against God’s will.” The Church’s modern-day anti-science positions, obviously, should come as no shock. Diminishing human suffering never has been a high-level concern. After all, in a mind deranged by religion, there is another life to which to look forward. The earthly is merely ephemeral and, thus, suffering is a-ok.

 

More Words By The Genius Sam Harris

Sam Harris says in Letter to a Christian Nation, “…just imagine how breathtakingly specific a work of prophecy would be, if it were actually the product of omniscience. If the Bible were such a book, it would make perfectly accurate predictions about human events. You would expect it to contain a passage such as ‘In the latter half of the twentieth century, humankind will develop a globally linked system of computers—the principles of which I set forth in Leviticus—and this system shall be called the Internet.’ The Bible contains nothing like this. In fact, it does not contain a single sentence that could not have been written by a man or woman living in the first century. This should trouble you.”

THE ABUSE OF WOMEN

“Civilization will not attain to its perfection until the last stone from the last church falls on the last priest!” – Émile Zola, French Journalist & Novelist (1871-93).

Hey, Woman, God Says To Zip It!

I Cor. 14:34, 35 – “Let the women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but let them be in subjection, as also saith the law. And if they would learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home: for it is shameful for a woman to speak in the church.” These are more of the woman hater Paul’s words. I guess women preachers, priests, nuns, etc. should not be permitted then.

A Perfect Example of the Ugliness of the God of the Bible

Only Lot, his wife and his two daughters are deemed worthy of being sparred God’s wrath. Once again, much like with Noah, it’s conveniently all in the family. AND YET, even though God just moments before had deemed her worthy of living, when Lot’s wife (she never has a name) looks back and witnesses her family and friends being murdered by God, she is no longer worthy and God kills her. As a result, Lot’s two daughters end up having sex with Lot in order to produce an heir. Gen 19:32-36 “Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.”

The God of the Bible is a Monster

Jephthah promises God to make a burnt offering of the first thing that greets him if God will give him victory in battle. He assumes it will be a dog. The all knowing God knows it won’t be a dog and agrees, giving Jephthah the victory he desires (again, more personal interference from God). Only when Jephthah returns from battle it is his young daughter that rushes out to greet him. No mercy from God. Jephthah burns his daughter to death to keep his promise to God. And God, no doubt, reveled in it. Judges 11:30-39. The only thing you can assume from this story is either God knew it would be his daughter that would run out to greet Jephthah and not the dog and agreed to his bargain anyway OR God himself held the dog back and encouraged the daughter to run out to teach Jephthah a lesson. Either way God is a monster.

Penn Jillette – There Is No God

 There Is No God

by Penn Jillette (comedian/Magician/Genius)

 I believe that there is no God. I’m beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy — you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do. You can’t prove that there isn’t an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word “elephant” includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.

But, this “This I Believe” thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”

Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.

Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.

Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.

Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.

Believing there is no God gives me more room for belief in family, people, love, truth, beauty, sex, Jell-O and all the other things I can prove and that make this life the best life I will ever have.

Please check out my Main Page at https://doubtingthomas426.wordpress.com/ for more on Atheism & Religion. 

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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.