Noah and Biblical Inerrancy
by Roedy Green ©1996-2008 Canadian Mind Products“Man is certainly stark mad. He can’t make a flea, but makes gods by the dozen.”
~ Montaigne, 1588
I tackle the first question in my essay on whether there is a God.
I tackle the fifth question in my essay on what god must be like given the evidence of the creation.
I give my reasons for wanting to discourage Kristianity in my essay on the evils of modern kristianity.
Jerry Falwell claims that every last word in the Bible is the infallible word of God, and that any minister who does not espouse this should "get an honest job". I claim that is ludicrous and, oddly, blasphemous, and further that Jerry made a Freudian slip. My basic thesis is, God could not have been responsible for writing the entire Bible, or He would have done a much better job. If God were the author of the entire Bible, it would mean that He was inconsistent, bungling, partial and forgetful, quite different qualities than we normally attribute to Him. The Qu’ran too is blasphemous, painting Allah as a cruel tyrant. But to be fair, no written words could do anything but blaspheme the creator of the universe.
The Bible is just a book. It has no more right to claim to be the word of God than the Qu’ran, the Lotus Sutra or The Three Pigs. All are simply works of men, aiming to teach proper conduct. There is nothing special at all about the Bible that hints at divine authorship. Most of it is inept, hardly the work of one who created the entire universe. The only reason people treat it as special is because their mothers told them to. There is nothing in the least inherently remarkable about it. It is a preposterously overrated book.
The essence of my argument is this. Consider the grace of the Thompson’s gazelle and the indescribably delicate ghostly beauty of the blue damsel fish. The beauty of the Bible is not even in the same league. The Bible is thus clearly a forgery because it is so ham-fisted in comparison with God’s other work.
The only "evidence" that the Bible is the word of God is that the Bible claims it to be. There is no outside corroboration. The patently silly Book of Mormon makes the same claim, as does the Qur’an that Christians reject out of hand without even reading. Such claims are not evidence.
To the Christian, a Mormon is someone who deeply believes the preposterous because he was indoctrinated with poppycock at an early age, or when they were emotionally vulnerable. Christians don’t realise they are equally deluded for exactly the same reason.
I am endlessly amazed how so many people treat the Bible as absolute truth. It is just a book for heaven’s sake. It was not handed down by God on titanium tablets. The authors were ordinary men who fancied their writings were divinely inspired. The Bible is full of blatant error and contradiction. For the most part it is abominably written, rambling inanely or raving incoherently. Whoever wrote the Bible was not the God who created the austere perfection of quantum mechanics. Without any evidence at all, people presume the Bible is the direct word of God. How can people be so stupid? Do they really think God could be the bumbling nincompoop who wrote the Bible? Perhaps they have never read it cover to cover to realise just how silly a document it is. They have formed their opinions from a few choice selections.
If you are a fundamentalist, you will find this essay disrespectful and rude. That is because you define disrespectful as anything but pretending to agree with you or maintaining silence. But I do profoundly disagree with you. If you find that rude, let the chips fall where they may. I am not about to hide the truth to save your overly-sensitive feelings. I can understand why you would reject what I say even if you find my arguments irrefutable. To accept the truth means you would have confront the fact you have wasted your life on a myth, that you have been donating huge sums of money to a giant con, where you could have done great practical good instead. Admitting you were massively duped is psychologically extremely difficult. Clinging to delusion is much easier. Discovering your faith is false is even more disappointing than discovering there was no Santa Claus. Whether you have the courage to face the facts depends on just how much you love the truth, and just how much comfort you imagine you get from the delusion. The irony is the truth is much less terrifying than the delusion a God will judge and torment you and your loved ones after death for eternity for tiny transgressions of his arbitrary rules.
One of the oldest techniques of the con man is to pretend to have his feelings hurt if the mark does not trust him without evidence. Christians and Muslims have taken this con artist’s trick to a high art. Even a skeptical question is treated as an insult to god. Ordinary Christians and Muslims are part of the con without even realising it.
“Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.”
~ Isaac Asimov (1920—1992), Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer
“To a Christian, it is completely obvious that Islam has it wrong. To a Muslim, it is completely obvious Christianity has it wrong. To a Hindu, it is completely obvious both the Muslims and Christians have it wrong. To an ancient Greek worshipper of Poseidon, these three religions would all be blasphemous. To an atheist, it is obvious all four have it wrong. Four to one say that Christianity is obviously wrong. What is different about the people who do believe it? Very simply, they were brainwashed with it at a very young age, same as any other religion. Whether one believes in a given religion has nothing at all to do with the religion itself. It is purely an accident of birth which religion was force fed before the ability to use reason to reject nonsense developed. Almost never does one adopt a religion other than the one he was exposed to in early childhood. It is not a rational or even personal decision.”
~ Roedy (1948-02-04—)
“If the bible were written by the creator of the entire universe, doesn't it seem odd he was unfamiliar with any technology more advanced that the donkey cart? Why did he get the cosmology wrong? Why not even a passing reference to atoms, quarks, electricity, fusion, DNA?… A god with early onset Alzheimers? There is nothing in the bible that demonstrates knowledge beyond that of an ordinary man of the period. Surely god is brighter than that!”
~ Roedy (1948-02-04—)
“The church says the earth is flat; but I have seen its shadow on the moon, and I have more confidence even in a shadow than in the church.”The creation account in the Bible is clearly not literally true. All physical evidence points against it. For example, it has light being created after the earth and after water. It has creation happening only about 4000 years ago where the geological record shows it has to be much much older. Since God presumably created all the misleading physical evidence, it would seem He does not want us to believe the Genesis account either. Which evidence is more trustworthy, that penned by man or created directly by God? Surely God did not forget how He actually created the universe, and how celestial dynamics work. Why is it then the Old Testament is so full of error on such matters. If you will recall, it claims the earth is square and flat and that the sun revolves around the earth. Did God have a temporary lapse of memory while composing the Old Testament? Or did human Biblical authors, in their hubris, imagine their works were of divine origin.
~ Ferdinand Magellan, Some claim it was Robert Green Ingersoll, who quoted it without attribution.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.”
~ Carl Sagan
Fundamentalist Christians assert that the Bible is the literal word of God without ever offering a shred of evidence to support the claim. Since they are the ones making such an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof should be on them. At the very minimum, Christians should have to show the Bible is so unusual, it could not have been written by humans, it could not have been written even by an advanced civilisation from another planet, it only could have been written by the creator of the universe. They would have to show the Bible gives information only the creator of the universe could have known at the time the Bible appeared. I would have to be written with skill, clarity and accuracy so extraordinary, only the creator of the universe could have done it. None of those claims come remotely close. The only extraordinary thing about the Bible is the fact it has been a best seller for such a long time. That hardly makes it supernatural any more than the best selling horror novels of Steven King must have been ghost-written by God.
If the bible were written by the creator of the universe, you’d think it would show some hint of knowledge of astronomy, physics, quantum mechanics, chemistry, cellular biology etc. After all the creator ought to remember how he created the universe to function. Yet the authors of the bible appear to be just as ignorant as any people of the time. There was nothing of God’s knowledge included that would have later assured the Bible’s authenticity. God of the Bible seems to have forgotten that the earth is not the centre of the universe.
If the Bible were the word of God, you think there would at least be a poetic allusion to molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles and relativity to sign his work as genuine. It is as if God forgot all his cleverness in the construction of the universe, and even forgot he created the earth as a sphere. Oddly, according the Bible, God seems to have no more knowledge of how the universe functions than a shepherd 4000 years ago.
However, since I am attempting to convince Christians of the falsity of their beliefs, I will offer evidence for the contrary assumption, that the Bible was written by fallible humans.
Not even all the biologists of all time working full time have even begun to collect them all. Yet Noah supposedly collected all manner of insects, fresh water fish, South American tree frogs, Australian kangaroos, not to mention white and black rhinoceri from thousands of miles away.
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recommend book⇒An Inordinate Fondness For Beetles | |||||||||||||||||
| hardcover | ||||||||||||||||||
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| ISBN10: | 0-8050-3751-9 | |||||||||||||||||
| ISBN13: | 978-0-8050-3751-7 | |||||||||||||||||
| publisher: | Henry Holt and Co. | |||||||||||||||||
| published: | 1996-12-15 | |||||||||||||||||
| by: | Arthur V. Evans and Charles L. Bellamy | |||||||||||||||||
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Even if we assume God magically transported all the animals to the ark site, complete with a living supply of whatever food they needed, plumbing more advanced than any existing zoo to deal with the immense volumes of waste, and the electricity and advanced technology to keep them at the right temperature, pH, salinity etc., How could they possibly fit inside such a tiny ark? Just how much space would there be for each animal?
According to Genesis 6:14 the ark could fit in a giant box 300 × 50 × 30 cubits. A modern cubit is 46 cm (18 in) that gives a volume of (300 × 0.4572) × (50 × 0.4572) × (30 × 0.4572) = 43,006 cubic meters.
[The largest wooden ship ever was the Great Republic built in 1853. It was 334 feet long, 53 feet wide, and 39 feet deep. It would fit in a box of only (334 * 0.348) * (53 * 0.348) * (39 * 0.348) = 29,095 cubic meters. Any larger ships had to be made of steel. Noah supposedly funded and built by far the biggest wooden ship of all time supposedly all on his own, with primitive hand tools, all after the advanced age of 500 years. Uh huh.]
On average, how much room then does each animal get for itself and its food and water for the for the year long voyage? Presuming the low estimate of 6 million species: 43,000 ÷ (6,000,000 * 2) = 0.0036 of a cubic meter, or a box about 15 cm (5.9 in) on a side. That would be rather cramped. Perhaps what Noah really did was collect DNA samples for God to somehow revive. Perhaps God miniaturised all the animals and put them in suspended animation for a year so they would not need any food or water. How come Genesis does not explain this?
Consider the problem of dealing simply with the koala. Somebody had to sail all the way to Australia to collect a pair. Koalas only eat live eucalyptus leaves. Because eucalyptus are such a low grade food source, koalas need a lot of them. So Noah also had to bring back a small forest of eucalyptus trees and find room for them on the ark in that 0.0036 cubic meter allotted them. He had to go to North America, South America and Antarctica, even though no one at the time even knew of these places.
Then there is the problem of ventilation. There were no electric fans in those days and God commanded Noah to cut only one tiny window Genesis 6:16.
I have only scratched the surface on how ludicrous the story is. Mark Isaak has done an analysis.
“Society would not tolerate legislation declaring that the theory that the sun circles the earth be given equal time with the theory of a heliocentric solar system; it should not pay attention to the equally preposterous notions of ‘scientific creationism’”
~ Robert Ornstein
“Pseudoscience known by its supporters as ‘scientific creationism’ is strict Genesis literalism masquerading as science in a cynical attempt to bypass the First Amendment and win legislatively mandated inclusion of particular (and minority) religious views into public school curricula… Intense debates about how evolution occurs display science at its most exciting, but provide no solace (only phony ammunition by willful distortion) to strict fundamentalists.”
~ Stephen Jay Gould
“Our school systems teach the children they are nothing but glorified apes who are evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud.”
~ Tom Delay, GOP Majority Whip , blaming the Columbine High School shootings on the teaching of evolution, 1999-08. It is interesting how frequently the Christian politician is using faith as a cloak of respectability to disguise his corruption. You'd think people would have caught on by now.
“There are clues from the distribution of DNA codes throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, of protein sequences, of morphological characters that have been analyzed in great detail. Everything fits with the idea that we have here a simple branching tree. The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you’d expect if evolution were a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.”
~ Richard Dawkins
Fundamentalist Christians, including (thankfully former) Republican house leader Tom Delay, want this Biblical fairy story taught to all school children, not in anthropology class studying the creation myths of various cultures, but as a scientific theory on par with evolution. The story is so obviously false it has no standing as a scientific theory. Oddly they don’t want any mention of the creation myths of any other religion but Christianity. So much for separation of church and state.
“Let us pray it is not so, or if it is, that it will not become widely known.”
~ Wife of the Bishop of Exeter on hearing of Darwin’s theory of the common descent of humans and apes.
Some Noah apologists claim that Noah actually only took a few thousand species with him. However, that does not explain how the 30,000,000 other species somehow survived this global flood.
The creationist are an odd lot. If there is anything they don’t understand about evolution, they don’t blame it on their ignorance or refusal to study a textbook, they blame it on the theory itself.
For example, Creationists constantly complain that every intermediate fossil form has not been found, deliberately blinding themselves to three obvious truths.
If they find even one thing that does not make sense to them, they feel justified in rejection evolution.
They get their objections from fellow creationists who are charlatans or fools who have not the first inkling of what the theory of evolution is or the overwhelming body of facts supporting it. These charlatans create straw men, poking holes in their own imagined theory of evolution, especially the “explosion in a junkyard” argument. Natural selection is anything but random, only mutation is. Natural selection is what selects the new designs. Mutation is just the drawing board of millions of possible incremental changes.
Yet for their own pet theory, creationism, they ignore all the obvious evidence against it and total lack of evidence for it. They believe all they have to do is question evolution in some tiny way and their goofball theory wins by default.
Creationists are such pathetically dishonest people.
British scientist J.B.S. Haldane, when asked what would constitute evidence against evolution, famously said, “Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian”. They’ve never been found. Nothing like that has ever been found. Evolution could be disproved by such facts. But all the fossils that have been found are in the right place. To be a scientific theory, it must be in principle disprovable and testable. Creationism is neither, everything depends on a blind faith acceptance of unobserved acts of God’s massive deception.
“The church hates a thinker precisely for the same reason a robber dislikes a sheriff, or a thief despises the prosecuting witness.”
~ Robert Ingersoll
According to Genesis 7:4 it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. This was sufficient rain to cover the highest mountains. Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall. How much rain would have to fall per hour to cover it 40 days and 40 nights?
There are 40 × 24 = 960 hours of rain. You would need 8,848 ÷ 960 = 9.21 meters of rain per hour. Rain is usually measured in cm or inches. This would be the same as 9.21 metres (30.2 ft) per hour or 0.2213 km (242 yards) per day. 10 inches per day is the most ever recorded in a hurricane. It would be like a fire hose squirting down on every inch of earth. It would flatten the ark. We must presume God somehow redirected the rain away from the ark. I know it does not bother fundamentalist Christians, but where did all that water come from and where did it go? Why did it not leave a trace in the geological record? That huge weight should have buckled rocks. It should have left a fine silt layer all over the earth. Yet there is no trace of it.
You might think Noah would have had trouble breathing at the elevation of the top of mount Everest. However, the miraculously created water would displace the air higher, so he should have had no problem.
What happened to everyone else who owned a ship? How come only the ark survived the flood? When the flood was over, how did Noah get the animals back to where they came from — kangaroos to Australia, pandas to China, penguins to Antarctica etc. The ark had no sails and all other ships were supposedly destroyed. If everyone besides Noah’s family supposedly drowned, how do you account for modern day Australian aborigines, North American native people, Chinese people, black people, Hottentots etc.?
A study of DNA mitochondria and the fossil record shows no sudden collapse of every species at the time of the reputed flood. How did this collapse of the entire species down to two animals manage to preserve full genetic diversity? Normally if you inbreed a population from only two animals it rapidly goes extinct. Further, there is no sign whatsoever in the geological record of the global flood. If this indeed happened, God went to extraordinary lengths to make it look as if it never did happen.
First, the global flood supposedly (scripturally) covered the planet, and Mount Everest is 8,848 meters tall. The diameter of the earth at the equator, on the other hand, is 12,756.8 km. All we have to do is calculate the volume of water to fill a sphere with a radius of the Earth + Mount Everest; then we subtract the volume of a sphere with a radius of the Earth. Now, I know this won’t yield a perfect result, because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, but it will serve to give a general idea about the amounts involved.
So, here are the calculations: First, volume of earth with water topping Everest:
4.525 × 109 cubic kilometres (4.525x109 km3) Or, to put into a more sensible number, 4,525,000,000,000 cubic kilometres. This is one helluva lot of water.
For those who think it might come from the polar ice caps, please don’t forget that water is more dense than ice, and thus that the volume of ice present in those ice caps would have to be more than the volume of water necessary. Some interesting physical effects of all that water, too. How much weight do you think that is? Well, water at STP weighs in at 1 gram/cubic centimetre (by definition)…so,
Now, remember earlier that we noted that it would take 4.525x109 km3 of water for the flood? Well, looking at the Wisconsinian glaciation, all that ice (which is frozen water, remember?) would be precisely 0.222% […do the math](that’s zero decimal two hundred twenty two thousandths) percent of the water needed for the flood.
Well, the Wisconsinian glacial stade ended about 25,000 YBP (years before present), as compared for the approximately supposedly 4,000 YBP flood event.
Due to these late Pleistocene glaciations (some 21,000 years preceding the supposed flood), the mass of the ice has actually depressed the crust of the Earth. That crust, now that the ice is gone, is slowly rising (called glacial rebound); and this rebound can be measured, in places (like northern Wisconsin), in centimetres/year. Sea level was also lowered some 10’s of meters due to the very finite amount of water in the Earth’s hydrosphere being locked up in glacial ice sheets (geologists call this glacioeustacy).
Now, glacial rebound can only be measured, obviously, in glaciated terranes, i.e., the Arabian peninsula is not rebounding as it was not glaciated during the Pleistocene. This lack of rebound is noted by laser ranged interferometry and satellite geodesy , as well as by geomorphology. Glacial striae on bedrock, eskers, tills, moraines, rouche moutenees, drumlins, kame and kettle topography, fjords, deranged fluvial drainage and erratic blocks all betray a glacier’s passage. Needless to say, these geomorphological expressions are not found everywhere on Earth (for instance, like Saudi Arabia). Therefore, although extensive, the glaciers were a local (not global) is scale. Yet, at only 0.222% the size of the supposed flood, they have had a profound and easily recognizable and measurable effects on the lands.
Yet, the supposed flood of Noah, supposedly global in extent, supposedly much more recent, and supposedly orders of magnitude larger in scale; has exactly zero measurable effects and zero evidence for it’s occurrence.
Golly, Wally. I wonder why that may be…?
Further, Mount Everest extends through 2/3 of the Earth’s atmosphere. Since two forms of matter can’t occupy the same space, we have an additional problem with the atmosphere. Its current boundary marks the point at which gasses of the atmosphere can escape the Earth’s gravitational field. Even allowing for partial dissolving of the atmosphere into our huge ocean, we’d lose the vast majority of our atmosphere as it is raised some 5.155 km higher by the rising flood waters; and it boils off into space.
Yet, we still have a quite thick and nicely breathable atmosphere. In fact, ice cores from Antarctica (as well as deep-sea sediment cores) which can be geochemically tested for paleoatmospheric constituents and relative gas ratios; and these records extend well back into the Pleistocene, far more than the supposed 4,000 YBP flood event. Strange that this major loss of atmosphere, atmospheric fractionation (lighter gasses (oxygen, nitrogen, fluorine, neon, etc.) would have boiled off first in the flood-water rising scenario, enriching what remained with heavier gasses (argon, krypton, xenon, radon, etc.)), and massive extinctions from such global upheavals are totally unevidenced in these cores.
Even further, let us take a realistic and dispassionate look at the other claims relating to global flooding and other such biblical nonsense.
Particularly, in order to flood the Earth to the Genesis requisite depth of 10 cubits (~15' or 5 m.) above the summit of Mt. Ararat (16,900' or 5,151 m AMSL), it would obviously require a water depth of 16,915' (5,155.7 m), or over three miles above mean sea level. In order to accomplish this little task, it would require the previously noted additional 4.525 × 109 km3 of water to flood the Earth to this depth. The Earth’s present hydrosphere (the sum total of all waters in, on and above the Earth) totals only 1.37 × 109 km3. Where would this additional 4.525 × 109 km3 of water come from? It cannot come from water vapour (i.e., clouds) because the atmospheric pressure would be 840 times greater than standard pressure of the atmosphere today. Further, the latent heat released when the vapour condenses into liquid water would be enough to raise the temperature of the Earth’s atmosphere to approximately 3,570 C (6,460 F).
Someone, who shall properly remain anonymous, suggested that all the water needed to flood the Earth existed as liquid water surrounding the globe (i.e., a "vapour canopy"). This, of course, is blisteringly, staggeringly stupid. What is keeping that much water from falling to the Earth? There is a little property called gravity that would cause it to fall. Let’s look into that from a physical standpoint. To flood the Earth, we have already seen that it would require 4.252 x 109 km3 of water with a mass of 4.525 × 1021 kg. When this amount of water is floating about the Earth’s surface, it stored an enormous amount of potential energy, which is converted to kinetic energy when it falls, which, in turn, is converted to heat upon impact with the Earth. The amount of heat released is immense:
Currently, the Earth radiates energy at the rate of approximately 215 joules/m²/sec and the average temperature is 280 K. Using the Stefan-Boltzman 4'th power law to calculate the increase in temperature:
The temperature would thusly rise 1800 K, or 1,526.84 C (that’s 2,780.33 F…lead melts at 880 F…ed note). It would be highly unlikely that anything short of fused quartz would survive such an onslaught. Also, the water level would have to rise at an average rate of 14 cm (5½ in)/min; and in 13 minutes would be in excess of 1.8 metres (6 ft) deep.
Finally, at 1800 K, water would not exist as liquid.
It is quite clear that a Biblical Flood is and was quite impossible. Only fools and those shackled by dogma would insist otherwise.
Granted God could have solved all these problems with sufficiency of miracles, but oddly He never bothered to brag of all that effort in the Bible. Further God is reputed to be truthful not the artful liar demanded by that explanation. Surely the rocks created by God are a more truthful record of his meaning that words corrupted passing through fallible human hands. And why would God go to such extreme efforts to erase all trace of his handiwork? He certainly has not been shy about letting us see his celestial creations. Why are we allowed to see the effects of the earlier Wisconsin glaciation but not the Noah flood? The obvious explanation is that there never was a global flood. Men lie and exaggerate. Sediments don’t.
Prof. Ze’ev Herzog teaches in the Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He took part in the excavations of Hazor and Megiddo with Yigael Yadin and in the digs at Tel Arad and Tel Be’er Sheva with Yohanan Aharoni. He has conducted digs at Tel Michal and Tel Gerisa and has recently begun digging at Tel Yaffo. He is the author of books on the city gate in Palestine and its neighbors and on two excavations, and has written a book summing up the archaeology of the ancient city. He reported his findings in Ha’aretz Magazine, Friday, October 29, 1999.
Following 70 years of intensive excavations in the Land of Israel, archaeologists have found out: The patriarchs’ acts are legendary stories, the Jews did not sojourn in Egypt or make an exodus, they did not conquer the land. Neither is there any mention of the empire of David and Solomon. In other words, David and Solomon and their exploits are tall tales. You foolish Christians read an ancient Paul Bunyan tale and mistook it for literal truth.
Those who take an interest have known these facts for years, but Israel is a stubborn people and doesn’t want to hear about it. This is what archaeologists have learned from their excavations in the Land of Israel: the Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the God of Israel, YHWH, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.
So much for Biblical inerrancy.
Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.
This is clearly not true. There is little evidence that prayer does any good. Get two people together and pray for peace in Ireland or the end of hunger in Africa and see what happens. Why do we continue to pretend that prayer works when it is so clearly ineffective? We are like primitive man sacrificing pigeons to the rain gods. By convention, we pretend not to notice that prayer does not work. We sometimes make the excuse that the problem is not enough faith. Yet Jesus’ promise has no such escape clause. If no one on the planet has sufficient faith to make prayer work, then the issue is rather academic, don’t you think.
The only kind of prayer I have seen work is one where someone prays to be delivered from alcohol or drugs, then they feel a higher power has helped them because before that point they could not make a dint in their addiction. Prayer may be good for the soul, to quiet the mind, to focus the mind on building good character, but it does not work to create miracles. If it did the houses of Christians in a tornado’s path would be spared, and the insurance companies would have noticed and raised the rates for non-believers.
“You’ll get pie in the sky when you die” — that’s a lie!”Pie in the sky is not only untrue, it is an ancient and deliberate deception to con people out of their money and personal power.
~ Joe Hill, IWW folk song performed by Woody Guthrie.
“Miracle: An event described by those to whom it was told by men who did not see it.”If prayer were as powerful as reputed, surely it with would stand up to scientific scrutiny. We see nothing today like the miracles reputed to have occurred in Moses time. Yet God supposedly does not change.
~ Elbert Hubbard (1856—1915)
“We have heard talk enough. We have listened to all the drowsy, idealess, vapid sermons that we wish to hear. We have read your Bible and the works of your best minds. We have heard your prayers, your solemn groans and your reverential amens. All these amount to less than nothing. We want one fact. We beg at the doors of your churches for just one little fact. We pass our hats along your pews and under your pulpits and implore you for just one fact. We know all about your mouldy wonders and your stale miracles. We want a this year’s fact. We ask only one. Give us one fact for charity. Your miracles are too ancient. The witnesses have been dead for nearly two thousand years.”
~ Robert Green Ingersoll (1833—1899)
Tithing gives you a feeling of prosperity, and it is good to donate to worthy causes, but it does nothing whatsoever for your own prosperity. Recipients of the tithes endlessly repeat the superstition that tithing will increase the giver’s wealth. It is amazing how many people believe it considering there is no evidence that it works.
All of the religions (and I include the animist religions of tribesmen in Borneo and tropical Africa) disagree with each other, even on very basic things like when it is OK to kill someone and what happens to you after you die. They can’t all be right. At most one could be correct. All the rest are false i.e. made up by man. It seems most likely then that all religions are made up by man. Religions are man’s way of persuading people to behave. So often religion’s rules are so petty and downright silly it becomes laughable that a God who created the entire animal kingdom and its wildly variant behaviours could possibly have been their author.
“A good example of the colouring of religious agendas is the whole heart-warming legend of Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, followed by Herod’s massacre of the innocents. When the gospels were written many years after Jesus’ death, nobody knew where he was born. But an Old Testament prophesy (Micah 5:2) had led Jews to expect that the long-awaited Messiah would be born in Bethlehem. In the light of this prophesy, John’s gospel specifically remarks that his followers were surprised that he was not born in Bethlehem; ‘Others said, This is the Christ. But some said, Shall Christ come out of Galiliee? Hath not the scripture said, That Christ cometh out of the seed of David, and out of the town of Bethlehem, where David was?’Historians tell us this census occurred in 6 AD long after Herod’s death. So how is is possible Jesus was in danger from Herod?Matthew and Luke handle the problem differently, by deciding that Jesus must have been born in Bethlehem after all. But they get him there by different routes.”
~ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion page 93.
“Luke screws up his dating by tactlessly mentioning events that historians are capable of independently checking. There was indeed a census under Governor Quirinius — a local census, not one decreed by Caesar Augustus for the Empire as a whole — but it happened too late in AD 6, long after Herod’s death.”
~ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion page 94. In other words Luke’s story is historically impossible and internally incoherent. He lied to fudge the fulfillment of Micah’s prophesy and to provide a villain to play off Jesus is his fictitious drama.
Steve Wells has annotated the entire Bible from a skeptic’s point of view, pointing out errors and inconsistencies.
Have you any idea of the degree of inerrancy of the Real God? He created all the billions upon billions of protons in the universe absolutely identical. Not a one has ever been found off weight even in the tenth decimal place. How could that creator of the universe have also authored something so bungling as the Bible that can’t go four pages without contradicting itself?
How can the Bible help but contradict itself? Much was composed from dreams. How well can people remember dreams? How sure can we be a dream was truly and completely composed by God?
Why did God need a scribe? Surely, had he wanted His work accurately transcribed He could have done it Himself on tablets of gold-plated titanium. God could have created the tablets in such a way it left no doubt they could not have been produced by humans. By using bungling humans as scribes, God guaranteed the introduction of error.
“The point is well known to biblical scholars and not disputed by them. The Hebrew word in Isaiah is almah, which undisputedly means 'young woman', with no implication of virginity. If virgin had been intended, bethulah could have been used instead (the ambiguous English word 'maiden' illustrates how easy it can be to slide between the two meanings). The translation occurred with the pre-Christian Greek translation known as the Septuagint rendered almah into παρθενος (parthenos), which really does mean virgin. Matthew (not of course the apostle and contemporary of Jesus, but the gospel-maker writing long afterwards), quoted Isaiah in what seems to be a derivative of the Septuagint version (all but two of the fifteen Greek words are identical) when he said '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 same Emmanuel' (Authorised English translation). It is widely accepted among Christian scholars that the story of the virgin birth of Jesus was a late interpolation, put in presumably by Greek-speaking disciples in order that the (mistranslated) prophesy should be seen to be fulfilled. Modern versions of the New English Bible correctly give young woman in Isaiah. They equally correctly leave 'virgin' in Matthew, since they are translating from his Greek.”What of the two different tales of Jesus’ early life and birth? In Matthew 2:1 Jesus was born during the latter years of King Herod’s reign, while Luke 2:1-7 puts the birth during the time of the Roman occupation — when all the world would be taxed under Quirinius, the governor of Syria at the time.
~ Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, endnotes on chapter 2
It is known that Herod the Great died in 4 BC. It is also known that Quirinius could not have imposed taxes before 6 EV — that being the year in which Judea came under direct Roman rule. This taxation was further reliably recorded by Josephus as an unprecedented event of that year. So, when was Jesus born?
And what of his family? We all know that Joseph was his surrogate father. But, who was his grandfather? In Matthew 1:16, Jacob holds that position. However, in Luke 3:23, that honor is given to Heli. Now, I have seen some strange parental battles in the news, but this one tops them all. Not only isn’t Jesus’s father human, his surrogate human father apparently had two human fathers of his own. Birthday parties must have been interesting.
How is it that John The Baptist, King Herod and Pilate all made it into the secular history books but nothing at all of Jesus? A guy who could raise the dead, or raise from the dead himself you’d think would be sufficiently famous to make it into the history books.
Another odd item in the Bible is that the releasing to the multitude of any one prisoner whom they wanted during the feast of the governor — where Barabbas was chosen over Jesus, as reported in the above accounts — has no historic corroboration.
Paul himself states that our time is short in First Corinthians 7:29. A similar assertion, by God no less, of "swift coming" is contained in Revelation 22:20. Yet, I notice something odd. Jesus and Paul prophesied that the end was near, and God said that He was to return "quickly". Apparently the End has come and gone. (For who am I to suggest that Jesus and Paul, not to mention God, would lie?)
This was no doubt a relief to Oral Roberts during that little escapade of his in the late '80s.
The Bible we all know and love is not the word of God, but, rather the word of the Church of England. (Don’t believe me? Look at the copyright.) Why should we place much faith in the "truth" espoused by a political organism? (Which is what the church was when the King James version was written.)
Let us next proceed to the unique geological views of the Earth presented in the Bible. Since when does the planet have 4 corners? Well, if one is to believe in the Bible Isaiah 11:12 Revelation 7:1 and not the various and sundry satellites orbiting the planet, it does.
Another interesting item is Jesus’s cursing of the fig tree in Matthew 21:18-19 Surely a man of approximately 30 years of age would know when fig season was. And surely a gentleman as supposedly wise as Jesus would know if the tree was too young or too old to bear fruit. He’d also know if the fig tree required pollination. But, he’s hungry. Heaven forbid he have to wait for mother nature to follow through God’s designs…
Jews have similar problems with their scripture. For example Moses is the reputed author of a certain section of the Torah. However, that section describes Moses’s own death.
With a straight face the fundanmentalists assure us the bible is correct when it tells us that:
We have seen religion used to justify torture, slavery not to mention discrimination against sexual and racial minorities.
By their fruits you shall know them. Using that measuring stick, I think we would be better off without most of what passes for religion on this planet. To start, let’s stop this outrageous, possibly even blasphemous, reverse plagiarism, ascribing works authored by wise but fallible humans directly to the creator of the universe. They are obvious forgeries.
“Men have had the vanity to pretend that the whole creation was made for them, while in reality the whole creation does not suspect their existence.”
~ Camille Flammarion (1842—1925) French astronomer
The bottom line is, God may forgive you for believing the obvious lies about Him in the Bible, but is it worth the risk?
“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing, which man should not wish to learn.”
~ St. Augustine
“The bible is the ultimate blasphemy. It claims to speak for God, yet it was written by men.”
~ Roedy (1948-02-04—)
Religious people don’t get any traction with scientists because they offer unfalsifiable hypotheses. To get the attention of a scientist, a Christian could say, “You could convince me Christianity were wrong if…”. Instead they say, “No matter what evidence you presented, I would not change my mind.”. There is no room for discussion.
If you said “The Easter bunny is responsible for laying all the coloured eggs in the world. Nothing you can say, no evidence you present will make me change my mind.” This is not evidence for the truth of the assertion. It just means you are ridiculously attached to the notion, when even taking you to a candy factory to see people making coloured eggs would not suffice to get you to drop the delusion.
Unless are prepared to put your assertion to some sort of test, you won’t have much luck in getting others to believe it, unless they are your children. On the other side, the Christian could ask a scientist, what would evidence would you need to take Jesus seriously?
So either Jesus carefully reenacted the myth of Horus, in a slavish copycat (odd behaviour for god incarnate), or there was no historical Jesus. Jesus is Horus.
If somebody plagarised Tom Sawyer, calling the hero of the story Bill Carpenter, what are the odds Bill Carpenter was a real person? Almost none!
There was nothing written about Jesus during his life. There is no evidence at all for the historical Jesus. This fraud at the core of Christianity is explored in the book and documentary below The Pagan Christ.
The theme of death and resurrection is common to nearly all cultures for obvious
reasons. Most parts of the world have seasons either cold-hot or dry-wet. Life
and vegetation dies off and then miraculously returns in spring. Further all
ancient people’ studied the heavens. They were all deeply aware of the
celestial drama of the winter solstice where sun appears to die, i.e. stop
moving for three days, then come to life again, bringing on the renewal of all
life. This happens against the background of the southern cross with the three
stars of Orion’s belt (called the three wisemen in some cultures) looking
on. This myth occurs all over the earth and long predates Christianity.
Christians pretend it belongs to them alone.
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recommend DVD⇒The God Who Wasn’t There | ||||||||||||||||
| DVD | |||||||||||||||||
| by: Brian Flemming | |||||||||||||||||
| This movie debunks Christianity by showing how all parts of the Jesus legend were borrowed from earlier religions, and that even the church fathers admitted that. It also shows how early Christian writers were not talking about a literal historical person. Finally it shows how the Bible is at odds in many crucial places with established history. See the TheGodMovie.com website for a variety of clips. | |||||||||||||||||
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| The Secular Bible by Jacques Berlinerblau | Consciousness Explained by Daniel Dennett | The End of Faith by Sam Harris |
| The Making Of the Fittest by Sean B. Carroll | Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett | Mythology’s Last Gods by William Harwood |
| The Astonishing Hypothesis by Francis Crick | Freedom Evolves by Daniel Dennett | American Fascists by Chris Hedges |
| The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins | Misquoting Jesus by Bart D. Ehrman | God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens |
| The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins | Creationism’s Trojan Horse by Barbara Forrest | Christianity: The Ultimate Urban Legend by Paul John |
| Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins |
