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Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?

Theocracy? No Thanks

Atheism and Marriage

Petition to the gods

Christianity and the Death of Civilization

Does God Bless America?

Kill the Puppy Dogs

Debate Unlimited is Bigger Than Jesus

Blinding Faith

Different Universe, Same God?

The Future Does Not Suck

The Devil Hypothesis

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Give me one good reason for believing in Hebrew mythology rather than any other flavour.

Remembering of course that circular arguments are futile, as I don't accept Hebrew mythology I don't accept biblical authority.

The universe is not evidence for Hebrew mythology, your mythology is simply one which is consistent with the existence of a universe, albeit apparently very different from the one we live in. All mythology is consistent with the existence of a universe.

I do not accept the fact that a nation of 300 million people with access to more oil than any other nation could consume believes in a particular myth to be any form of evidence of the truth of that myth.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

Give me one good reason why Hebrew mythology is to be believed rather than studied as something quaint that has a few insights into reality but nobody in their right mind would dream of talking literally.

Just one reason would be a start.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

It is a common assertion that atheists are not Christians only because they want sex or drugs or something of the sort. It makes no sense to imagine that you can stop hell existing simply by not believing in it, just as silly as imagining you can conjor up the wrath of God against the people you decide he doesn't like either. Truth is not a matter of opinion or belief, it is a matter of fact. Beliefs don't change facts.

How dare you assume your morals are superior to mine just because you believe in magic or can quote from some old magic tome? The basis of your morality seems to be obedience through fear, which is the morality of the dog who pines to go outside to piss rather than do it inside and get a kicking. My morality is based on doing what I know to be right. I don't need to read a book of rules to see what is right and wrong, I can use my own powers of reason and empathy to ensure that I take actions that don't hurt other people or make me hate myself. No human society has ever decided that murdering your neighbours (especially if defined as members of your own tribe) was good, stealing was acceptable and promises were made to be broken. Morality is a human universal, as time has gone on we have become more moral, less arbitrary, more consistent. We have left behind the idea that slavery, child labour and the beating and raping of wives and smoking at your desk was acceptable. That is down to civilization not people following arbitrary rules from the Bible.

The concept of sin is entirely unhelpful. The greatest good to the greatest number is the foundation of morality. An action is wholly wrong if it causes great harm and minimal or no benefit. Postulating a great big nasty ogre in the sky who will get cross if we do the wrong thing might be a way of scaring children into line but it is itself an evil act because of the unnecessary suffering it causes.

I regularly hear poor parents (in both senses of the word poor) tell their children not to do a particular thing because somebody is watching or might shout at them. That is very poor parenting, but typically Christian. Don't do it because God say's it is wrong. No, don't do it because it is wrong, it is hurtful, it is damaging, it is disrespectful, it inconveniences other people. Don't do it because you wouldn't like it done to you. That makes sense. If everybody thought in that way life would be sweet for us all and nobody would feel bad about other people or themselves. Of course in the real world we know some people will fall short or may take pleasure in being good at being bad. Willing them to hell isn't going to achieve anything.
When Christianity or Christ says something smart the world takes notice, because it can see the merit of what has been said. The world has not taken on board the more ridiculous aspects of religion such as crippling one day in seven, refusing to tolerate mixed crops or mixed fibres, irrational taboos on menstruation or the absurd concept of turning the other cheek or forgiving seven times seventy times (how many Christians have supported three strikes and you're out sentencing?). Do as you would be done by makes perfect sense, forgiving seven times seventy times does not.

The prisons are groaning full of Christians not atheists. If atheism really was a ticket to guilt-free amorality you should expect atheists to fall foul of the law much more often than Christians but they don't. Atheists are under-represented in prisons, born-again Christians are over-represented.

It may be true that more atheists get drunk or smoke pot or have sex before marriage but that does not extend any further. Atheists are not more likely to steal, rape, murder, defraud or abuse children. It is true that the most prolific mass murderers in history have been atheists but they were not simply atheists, they were ideologues, fired up with a belief that history has a direction and a goal, they were empowered by faith. They were not sceptical atheists murdering believers for believing. The reason they killed more is that they had better technology available. If medieval Popes had access to thermonuclear weapons Arabia would still be uninhabitable. I mean even more uninhabitable.

Nobody who is not a Jew or a Christian looks upon the Bible as a text book on astrophysics or biology or a reliable account of history of the Jewish people or a credible biography of Jesus. Of course it is mythology. Like much mythology it combines invention with some truth.

To those people who measure their own personal worth by how much they defend Hebrew mythology and its foreign psychopathic schizophrenic god of course the Bible will never be discredited. But that is because of faith, human deliberate bloody-mindedness. It is not any kind of a gift from God as can be seen by the acts of faith demonstrated by people who are not Christians. It is absurd to imagine you deciding that suddenly you are going to negate the thing that has given your life direction just because you read the Bible. You will never read the Bible with an open mind. Never. You believe it would be a sin to do so, you believe to do so would be to make you less of a person. You will probably continue the rest of your life reading the Bible with the woo-woo track playing along inside your head at full volume, willing meaning and significance into every line.

If something changes and you decide to think for yourself look me up. I can't guarantee to be able to help, you may have damaged your brain irrevocably already, and I don't mean that facetiously. Every thought we have shapes the way our brain develops. Unused pathways not chosen become impassable. Your brain may already be so badly damaged by faith, by cerebral masturbation, that you cannot ever learn to think rationally, at least not quickly, easily and without inducing headaches.

Irrational belief may be the only way your brain can now operate and retracing that same path over and over again through your brain may be the only way you can feel good without feeling guilty. I have the same sort of pity for the faith-head as I do for any addict. I know of course that could never have happened to me but I feel empathy all the same. I am sincerely sorry that you are a victim of Christianity.

You really are being deliberately stubborn about circular reasoning. The Bible cannot be used to prove that God wrote the Bible or that God exists. To accept the Bible as evidence requires you to already assume the thing you are attempting to prove, your analogy of the President and the White House also shows how clearly biased you are, you think you are attempting to prove something which is known to be true. But the existence of God is not known to be true. Those people who do not believe in your god or any god do not share your assumptions. Any proof that is meant to satisfy those who do not share your assumptions has to start from the solid ground of shared knowledge and use logic, not be based upon assumptions that only a faith-head makes.

The Bible cannot prove the reality of God because the Bible is just some old book of lies or God doesn't need proof because you already believe in him. There can be no tenable sane position which somebody could take up which would involve doubting God's existence but accepting the Bible as an unimpeachable authority. If you doubt the existence of God you must logically be less than 100% convinced by the Bible, although it is quite reasonable to believe in a single one true god and to think the Christian Bible is less than perfect, such is the stance of the Jew, the Mormon, the Deist, many Hindus and indeed even many self-proclaimed Christians. Actually it is the position of everybody who believes in God, it is a logical impossibility to accept such an obviously self-contradictory rag-bag of documents as being literally inerrant, everybody is an a la carte believer or a yeahbut literalist.

It is very straight-forward to prove the existence of God. It can be done instantly. There is an almost infinite list of things which could not be done except by a god at the helm of the Universe. Writing "It's me, The Lord, Yahweh!" into formations of spontaneously generated bejewelled butterflies and have them marquee across the sky morphing into different European languages and then reverse back in Hebrew and Arabic would be a neat trick. All the temples of the world which worship the wrong god or the right one in the wrong way could spontaneously turn to sand, or homes for the poor. Or end poverty instantly by making everybody happily accept the doctrine of from each according to his abilities for each according to his need. Or have a suspension of free will across the human race for one day, nobody dies, nobody commits a crime and everybody goes to church, even if they have to build one first. All the books filled with lies about God could turn into King James Bibles and everybody would be able to read them and understand. Why would that be such a bad thing? Why is it so important to allow people to fuck up and hurt people before God sorts it all out at the end of time or when they die? Why does faith have to be built on such a shallow foundation: accepting a story as true on the basis of seventy generations of hearsay propped up by faith and fear or be rejected as irredeemably evil and not be allowed to marry any daughters of the righteous flock.

Without faith God is nothing, right? Yeah. It's fine by me that way. The most powerful force in the entire universe is powerless if you don't believe in him. He needs people to do his slaying, praying, singing and saving but if you say you don't believe in him he'll get you later because he knows where you live. That is just so typical of a bully: I'll not give you the beating you have earned just now as there's people watching, but trust me, I'll get you when you're dead and then you'll be sorry. But this bully gets other little bullies to put the frighteners on children for him.

The world I see around me is clearly imperfect but marvellous. If there was a god pigeons would eat cigarette butts. If there was a god the tenderest consciences would belong to those with the greatest power to hurt. But that isn't the world I live in. This world is full of people who hate in the name of a god of love. A world in which twisted minds make children feel guilty for being children and emotionally scar them for life in the name of Jesus. A world in which people lie and suppress the truth in the name of Truth.

This is a world in which people who love to hate have invented and invoked a hateful god of love to justify and excuse their hatred. This god is apparently self-evidently real to those who believe they are doing what he wants. Those who believe in those gods (there surely cannot be one god who makes such contradictory demands) also try to project all the bad things that happen in the world onto disbelievers. Why is disbelief or doubt a bigger sin than murdering children? What kind of a jerk is this god who hides away, refuses to demonstrate his reality and then punishes those who demonstrate scepticism more than those who do the most heinous crimes and then ask for forgiveness? Seriously, ask yourself if it wasn't for the risk of being tortured for all eternity in ways which the sick liars who wrote the Bible must have taken weeks to think up why would you ever consider it sensible to suck up to such a creepy self-absorbed git?

God makes rules for everybody to live by and gives them only to his pet tribe. Then the pet tribe reject him so he divorces them and goes along with this new family (a bit of a cult if you ask me) instead. And everybody in the whole world will be judged by how well they follow the rules he didn't give them and if you don't believe the message the cult have tried to spread it is down to you being deliberately naughty not to the farcical incompetence of the messengers. That is so fucked up.

If gods are nothing but the imagined fantasy creations of man then there can be no such thing as divine inspiration, therefore there can be no such thing as inerrant texts, therefore quoting the Bible at somebody who does not believe in gods is less convincing than quoting a passage from a work of universally agreed value.

Could a person who claims to be a prophet be in error? Of course, you must accept that the world has seen thousands of lying or crazy prophets and gurus, and you know dozens of them have been taken seriously by at least some people. Unless you somehow would like to make out that people never lie about being a prophet or are never crazy in this way but are instead possessed by evil spirits you have to admit that there are such things as false prophets. I will assume for the moment that you can accept this. Now what we need to look at is whether there is or has ever been any such thing as a true prophet.

Your quotation from Timothy is truly pathetic as regards prophesy. You might as well predict that next year the sun will shine some of the time and it will rain a bit too. There has never been a time in which people who have got God up their arse would not be able to point at society and say these people love themselves and money more than they love God. If I really had to I am sure I could get examples of people making such laments for every decade since 1800 as a minimum and other quotations too lamenting the youth of the day going back thousands of years. The end times have been a long time coming.

Your admission of an error over Nietzsche's library is typical of the behaviour of Christians in spreading what are nowadays called urban legends or chicken soup for the soul and in the past were known as pious lies.

Fourteen hundred years later, Voltaire, a French atheist and philosopher, predicted that the Bible would be eliminated shortly after his death.

"One hundred years from my day there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity seeker." ~ Voltaire

Twenty years after Voltaire died, the Geneva Bible Society purchased Voltaire's house and used it as a base of operations to print and distribute Bibles. Later it became the headquarters for the British and Foreign Bible Society.

Twenty years? wasn't it 100?

In 1776 Voltaire, the French philosopher, announced, “One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible in the earth except one that is looked upon by some antique seeker.” One hundred years later, Voltaire was dead and his own house and press were being used to print and store Bibles by the Geneva Bible Society.

Facts?

Voltaire opposed Christian beliefs fiercely. He argued that the Gospels were fabricated and Jesus did not exist - that they were produced by those who wanted to create God in their own image and were full of discrepancies. On the other hand, he quoted the Scripture extensively and expertly in such works as Traité sur la Tolérance to argue in favor of tolerance for "fanatic" religious minorities, in that case the Protestants. Neither did he hide his sympathy for the Jansenists.

"In 100 years this book will be forgotten and eliminated...", although there is no direct evidence that he made such a statement. In his later years (1759) Voltaire purchased an estate called "Ferney" on the French-Swiss border. As the property straddled the border, Voltaire joked that when the French Catholics were against him, he lived on the Swiss (Protestant) half, and vice versa. There is an apocryphal story that this house was purchased by the Geneva Bible Society and used for printing Bibles, but this appears to be due to a misunderstanding of the 1849 annual report of the American Bible Society [2]. Voltaire's chateau is now owned and administered by the French Ministry of Culture.

Right pious lie, wrong atheist, who wasn't an atheist but a deist.

But what do the facts matter eh? Jesus wasn't above simply making shit up to tell a story and so "prove" something was he? Oh. I made the assumption there that you would know that the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and so on were fictional, but perhaps that was an error on my part, no doubt some people believe that Jesus was physically incapable of imaginative fiction and either told the truth at all times or whatever stories he told somehow became true just because he told them. Getting my head around what religious people believe can be hard work.

Nobody who is not a Christian is in any way amazed by the prophesies in the Bible. I have never come across anybody ever trying to explain how the prophets were so accurate, only Christians think they were accurate and they don't want another explanation as they like the one they've got. Once you believe it is just a big collection of old manuscripts written by dozens of people across several centuries and amended and edited many times all hint of mystery evaporates. There will be a war sometime. The people will turn against God sometime. A foreign king will rule over the Jews. That is about as amazing as predicting there will be a storm some time in the future or that winter will be colder than summer. None of these prophesies come with timescales.

There will come a king of the Jews who will rebuild the temple and rule over all the world and he shall be called Emmanuel. Wrong on every point. Josephus didn't call Jesus the king of the Jews, no Roman account exists of the execution of a Jewish king. Jesus wasn't named Emmanuel he was named after that genocidal thug Joshua, have you read what he did? Jesus did not rebuild the temple he knocked over a few tables and the text does not relate whether he offered to help them pick them up afterwards.

Most of the apparent prophesies apparently fulfilled by the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus are simply explained by the obvious undeniable fact of chronology: the gospels were written at a time when the prophesies and lines made out to have been prophesies were in the public domain. If you were to invent a tale about a trip to Atlantis what do you think you would use as source material? It is another classic example of circular reasoning: the Gospels are true because they are the very definition of truth. Because the Gospels cannot be doubted they count as evidence, if the Gospel shows a prophesy fulfilled that is a prophesy fulfilled. The whole thing falls on its face if you consider the possibility that the gospels were written in order to show that prophesies had been fulfilled, and that is an entirely reasonable assumption to make. If you wanted to kick-start a fake religion isn't that exactly the sort of thing you would do?

Why would anybody want to start a fake religion? Just look at those people who have done so. Starting a new religion is a good way to make yourself famous and some money, it can also be an excellent way to get yourself killed. Preached a new message from God, imprisoned, exiled, ridiculed, persecuted, followed by thousands, killed by an angry mob of fine upstanding religious people, now followed by millions. That isn't the story of Jesus or an early Christian martyr it is the story of Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon cult. Imprisonment; banishment; claims of fraud and sexual deviancy; claims of subversive actions against the state; claims of breaking up families; public vilification; strenuous defence by his followers; violent deaths: these are common threads running through so many of the stories of religious leaders and founders of cults.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_claimed_to_be_God

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_claimed_to_either_be_Jesus_or_the_Son_of_God

Nobody needs any new evidence to prove that false prophets exist and that people can die believing in causes which cannot be true. At the simplest God cannot be on the side of the Catholics who burned Protestant martyrs and the side of the Protestants who burned Catholic martyrs to say nothing of martyrs for the Emperor(s), for Islam, the Branch Davidian, Jim Jones and Heaven's Gate.

Dying rather than say what your captors want you to say isn't even uniquely religious behaviour as hundreds of captured and tortured spies and even gangsters have demonstrated. No solid lesson can be drawn from a person dying for his beliefs except to say that they possessed human courage. It really annoys me when my species gets bad-mouthed by its own members, as if we are not capable of anything noble without the aid of ghosts and fairies "giving us the strength".

If you were really interested in truth you should have studied mathematics and physics.

The religious people's abuse of the word truth is a grave insult to me and anybody who is seriously interested in finding what the truth actually is rather than people who are content to proclaim that the truth is known and anything else we find out later isn't important. To me truth is a negative concept, like cold. Absolute zero is theoretically possible but unknown in real life. Cold isn't a substance, it is the absence of an opposite property. The opposite of truth is lies and error. It is to me so obvious that it barely needs explaining that any human project the size of the Bible has to be flawed. If you say God is capable of ensuring that the Bible is perfect then why have a tribal myth as the basis of The Holy Truth? A perfect Bible presupposes a god capable of working through many people at once (editing committees) and through individuals (anonymous and named authors) and capbale of keeping an eye on a project for many centuries. This does not compute for me. It seems a very stupid and inefficient way to use divine powers. How could a wise god fail to anticipate the problems with having a favourite tribe? Does he not understand jealousy? That is hard to credit as he is claimed to be jealous, he is clearly shown to be moody and resentful at the slightest suggestion that "his" people worship some other god. This attitude is peculiar to say the least, if the Alpha and Omega has got ego issues and insecurities what hope is there for mortals?

I can think of plenty of very reasonable and plausible reasons for why people have developed a religion with a god who is interested in upholding the interests of middle aged powerful males: a god interested in making women stay faithful to their husbands, upholding the institution of property and bringing justice to bear on those who escape vengeance and retribution on Earth. What I have much more difficulty in doing is seeing what is in it for God. Why would a god want to play these games? A being capable of magic is what we are dealing with, as God is described as being capable of doing anything, possibly even to the point of being able to contradict logic.

Why would a real magician want to pull a rabbit out of a hat? To eat rabbit? Why not just magic away his hunger instead? To impress the unmagical audience? Why not just cut out the tedious business of performing any specific magic tricks and instead just magic everybody satisfied? Or why care about what muggles think? The only way to make stories of magicians or superheroes interesting is to invent hidden rules to maintain the drama. People have had to invent rules and limits for unlimitable gods and to invent kryptonite, Satan and promises not to do miracles any more now the rubes are getting a bit smarter.

Can you tell me why your god backed the wrong tribe? Why did God speak only to Jews and then quite abruptly stop talking to Jews (many of whom carried on as if he was still speaking to them but they apparently received the wrong message) and instead talk to Greeks and Romans and later Frenchmen, Germans and proud, fearless American xenophobic homophobes?

Can you explain why God talked to many Christians and asked them to write Gospels and other books for the Bible and at the same time other men seemed to have received similar callings but these turned out to be wrong numbers? Can you explain why nobody has been called to write a new book for the Bible in the last fifteen centuries? Can you explain why Biblical times ended, and how?

Is it really simply a coincidence that nothing new has been added to the Bible since shortly after the Roman Empire adopted Christianity? He didn't stop with sending his son, he continued to recruit more authors for quite some time then all of a sudden he simply retires from writing, stops being The Great Dictator. You think that isn't in any way fishy?

My explanations are very simple, not at all far-fetched and are based on human tendencies we can see at work in the present and the past, in familiar societies and exotic ones. The only explanations I have heard from Christians are expressed in the nonsense language of theology, the only thing that has absorbed and swallowed without trace more human ingenuity than even the violin.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

Noah's Flood.

Flood stories are indeed common in many places. But surely the earliest example is the one that is most likely to be the original.

The Epic of Gilgamesh is several centuries older than Genesis.

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/floodorigins.html

The version of the flood contained in Genesis was probably written in the 6th century BCE, while the Epic of Gilgamesh was written approximately 1400 years earlier.

Israel was a backwater. A land of shepherds way behind the times compared to the civilization of Mesopotamia, a land which was truly fertile and abundant due to the great rivers the Tigris and Euphrates. This was in the earliest days of agriculture before centuries of soil erosion and environmental degradation. It is simply absurd to imagine that the Mesopotamians would have learnt anything from the rubes in the dry barren hills, it would be more absurd than modern Americans being influenced by Albanians. The prevailing wind of culture was blowing in the other direction, Mesopotamia heavily influenced the Levant, not the other way around.

Only people dogmatically determined to accept the stories told by the Hebrews as incapable of error would conclude that Gilgamesh is a rip-off of the true tale of Noah and the flood. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers are prone to flooding, they are surrounded by a relatively flat area, it is reasonable to conjecture that a man with a bigger than average river barge laden down with cargo could emerge from a catastrophic flood a rich man. We know how rich men have myths told about them. All this is easy to imagine. We know how tall tales get taller in the telling, especially when nobody has any reason to dispute them. We also know how cultures borrow stories. Story telling is tricky stuff, it is easier to take a tale you know works and adapt it for a new audience, and of course everybody knew the Hebrews were a xenophobic bunch who always needed Jewish heroes and a staring role for their god.

If you believe in the biblical flood as literally true in all respects there is little prospect for any discussion, just as I have little to say to people who believe that George W Bush is a lizard alien or that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

© 1999 - 2010 by Martin Willett.

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