Category: Featured


God is love… and divine justice for all.

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April 14, 2012
Ethics and justice

Ethics and justice, the Bible will teach you it...

There are many lovely tales of love and justice found in the Holy Bible. “What, pray tell, is the Holy Bible”, I can almost hear you ask. Excellent question! Let’s have some devout Christians tell us (emphasis mine):

Despite what the world would like to say, there is such a thing as absolute truth, coming straight out of the Word of God, and people ultimately act on what they really think is true, whatever they may say. At Antioch, we want to lay it out up front. Our doctrinal statement declares what is really true, straight from God’s Word, and our Philosophy and Mission statements flow out of our desire to act on that truth.

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And:

We believe the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be the verbally inspired Word of God, the final authority for faith and life, inerrant in the original writings, infallible and God-breathed (II Timothy 3:16,17; II Peter 1:20,21; Matthew 5:18; John 16:12,13).

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And:

I. Biblical Authority

Example Verses: II Timothy 3:16-17; I Peter 1:23-25

Baptists hold to the belief that the Bible and its clear, literal teachings are the final authority for faith and practice. We at least attempt to back up everything they believe with “Chapter and Verse”, and hold that anything that is contrary to the clear teaching of the Bible is not true. Such things as church councils, church leaders, tradition, and other books are often hold some authority for other Christian groups.

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And:

For the Catholic, what follows will make clear the harmony of Scripture and tradition: truth cannot contradict truth. Whether God speaks to us through the Bible or through the voice of tradition, the word spoken is always a true and steadfast guide.

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In short, the Bible is God’s Own Truth.

And, just so we don’t forget, God doesn’t change. “What do you mean God doesn’t change”, I hear you cry. Good that you should ask! Let us get some guidance from ‘the final authority for faith and practice’, God’s Own Truth, The Holy Bible (emphasis mine):

Psalm 102:

102:26 They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:
102:27 But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

Hebrews 1:

1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
1:11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;
1:12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

Hebrews 13:

13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

So, God never, ever changes and the Bible is the inerrant, literal Word of God. Got that? Right, with that out of the way, I have a story I should like to tell. A parable if you will.

Not too long ago there was a gentleman by the name of Rush “Randy” Limbaugh (all characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental) and he was very close to God. As a conservative man, Randy went to church every Sunday (see, I told you it was a coincidence) and prayed to God several times a day and he read the Bible which he firmly knew was the literal Word of God. Randy was as close to God as a good, God fearing Republican could be.

Now, Randy being Randy, he got involved with several women during the course of his life. He was at various stages married to Roxy, Michelle, Marta and Kathryn and he had several sons. Notably, by Marta he had a son called Adam.

Tragically, Randy couldn’t control his… er… love for woman and the one day he saw a very attractive intern at the broadcast corporation where he worked called Betty. Now, Betty was in a relationship with Uri who worked for Randy. Randy was pretty well connected and quite devious. Through some sneaky scheming he got Uri re-assigned to a foreign office on the very day that – incredibly conveniently – incriminating photo’s of Uri were delivered to Betty. Betty broke up with poor Uri and Randy provided a convenient shoulder to cry on. He quickly managed to seduce Betty and have… er… carnal relations with her – which was cheating on his current wife Kathryn. Betty fell pregnant almost immediately - Randy was sure his God didn’t approve of birth control you see.

God didn’t like this one bit – he was incredibly pissed off – so He cursed the child that Randy and Betty had created.

Some time after Randy started cheating on Katheryn with Betty, God spoke to pastor Rick ‘Nathan’ Warren (purely coincidental fiction, I assure you) personally and told him to go and punish Randy. He gave explicit instructions on how Randy’s punishment was to be carried out.

Nathan went forth has God had commanded and hired a great stage to be constructed on the National Mall in Washington DC with all the bells and whistles – big screens so everybody in a large crowd could see the action, fancy lighting, huge sound systems, the works. Nathan then invited every devout Christian in the country to come and witness Randy’s punishment, to be carried out exactly as required by Yahweh – the creator God of the universe.

On the day of the punishment, Nathan’s henchmen brought Randy to the stage and put him in a chair off to the left of the stage where he could properly witness the events of the day. After Randy was seated, Nathan’s people brought out Roxy, Michelle, Marta and Kathryn to the stage followed by Randy’s son, Adam.

Next, Randy’s wife and ex-wives were stripped naked in front of the crowd of millions and Adam proceeded to rape them where everybody could see, so that all in attendance knew the justice of the Lord.

Later, Betty gave birth to Randy’s son but since God had cursed the child, he died a week later. Randy went on to live a long and illustrious life, sleeping with literally hundreds of women.

The end.

I will leave you to figure out the moral of that parable on your own. Now, strangely, some people might be upset by that story and I am not sure why. It is a beautiful depiction of how the justice of the Christian deity works, how much he loves people and how much he loves and respects women in particular. It is a beautiful thing is it not?

What? You don’t believe me? Come on now, you give me too much credit. I couldn’t come up with a gem of a story like that on my own – I simply don’t have the skills. Nay, I did but paraphrase a story directly from the unchanging, inerrant word of the almighty creator of the universe. I shit you, in fact, not.

The beautiful tale is found in 2 Samuel 11 and 2 Samuel 12 with the delightful conclusion in 2 Samuel 16.

Let me quote some of it, I do insist (emphasis mine):

2 Samuel 11:

11:2 And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king’s house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon.
11:3 And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bathsheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
11:4 And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; for she was purified from her uncleanness: and she returned unto her house.
…
11:15 And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.

2 Samuel 12:

12:1 And the LORD sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich, and the other poor.
…
12:11 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 neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.
12:12 For thou didst it secretly: but I will do this thing before all Israel, and before the sun.
12:15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the child that Uriah’s wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.
…
12:18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died.

2 Samuel 16:

16:21 And Ahithophel said unto Absalom, Go in unto thy father’s concubines, which he hath left to keep the house; and all Israel shall hear that thou art abhorred of thy father: then shall the hands of all that are with thee be strong.
16:22 So they spread Absalom a tent upon the top of the house; and Absalom went in unto his father’s concubines in the sight of all Israel.

And there you have it. Divine love and justice. It does make me wonder though, what kind of person – who in their right mind actually – would want to worship the being that figures that having several women raped in public by the son of their husband (I believe that’s a stepson…) and an unborn child killed for the adultery of a man is good and just? Who, in their right mind?

I figure its pretty freaking terrible to be a female Christian. Just think what it must be like to live in a world where, should your cheating bastard husband find himself a bit on the side, you get raped in public for his crime and sweet nothing happens to him. Couldn’t happen? Why not?

And Christian men? How would they feel if dear Jesus had to come down out of the clouds and had to instruct them to rape their stepmother (and possibly their own mother) in public because their father cheated on his wife with another woman and arranged for her husband to have an ‘accident’? I have to ask Christian men the following:

Yes or no: would you happily rape your stepmother in public if God told you to?

Won’t happen? Can’t happen? Why not?

If it can’t happen… then one or both the following is true: God changes and the Bible lies or – more simply – there is no God and these tragic horror stories are entirely man-made.

Seriously, there is something very, very wrong with people who believe in this horror, want to worship the monster who thought it up and who are not utterly repulsed by the thought of this travesty.

God is love? Christian morals? Right. Tell me another one.

Always! Be awesome.

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Caring about what is true – a triumph of science, religion’s greatest failing.

Filed under: Featured, Religion, Science — 2 Comments
April 11, 2012
The Dirac equation in the form originally proposed.

The Dirac equation. Science, winning.

I care about what is true. I care very much about what is true.

One of the things about myself that frustrates me the most is how I am often not skeptical enough. I tend to make snap truth judgements in the moment – due to excitement or distraction or whatever – and later I end up feeling like I didn’t properly evaluate the situation before accepting something as true. This is why I prefer written over verbal discourse: it allows me to properly consider my response, evaluate my position and avoid rash acceptance of claims. I recognise confirmation bias in myself and actively work to overcome it. I realise I am essentially an illogical creature and I try hard to overcome it because I care very much about what is true, about what is in accordance with fact and reality.

Fact and reality.

One could complicate the concept of ‘truth’ and discuss correspondence, coherence, constructivist, consensus or pragmatic theory or the opinions of Fromm, Hegel, Nietzsche or Kant. Or one could just stick to the simple definition of:

truth:

  • The quality or state of being true
  • That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality

What got me started on this post was seeing a picture of Penn Jillette with a quote that says something to the effect of: if every trace of every religion had to be removed from human consciousness, something similar might be recreated in its place but it would never be exactly the same. If every trace of science had to be removed from human consciousness then it would still be true and it would be rediscovered again and the discovered truth’s would be exactly the same.

I think that is pretty profound. Remove everything we know about science and find it all out again from scratch and it would be exactly like it was. The truth discovered by science will not have changed. Remove religion and the facsimile which could replace it will never be exactly the same – other than the fact that it will also be nonsense. Religious ‘truth’… changes.

The Christian God by all accounts is unchanging and eternal. From the Christian Bible:

Psalm 102:

102:26 They shall perish, but thou shalt endure: yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment; as a vesture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed:
102:27 But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end.

Hebrews 1:

1:10 And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands:
1:11 They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment;
1:12 And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail.

Hebrews 13:

13:8 Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever.

Deuteronomy 33

33:27 The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms: and he shall thrust out the enemy from before thee; and shall say, Destroy them.

To me, and I’m sure to most people, unchanging would mean that what I hold true today is what I will hold true tomorrow. If you ask me a question, whether it be today or tomorrow or in 20 years from now, if I was unchanging my answer would be the same, unchanging. Not changing your opinion or answer to the same question is the very embodiment of ‘unchanging’.

This alleged property of God being ‘unchanging’ poses a bit of a problem for Christianity, Islam and Judaism. It causes two problems in particular:

1. The Bible condones some pretty horrific things such as genocide, slavery, infanticide, rape, murder, child abuse and so forth.

If God does not change then he must still condone these horrible things, yet his current batch of followers decry these horrors when they happen today in the third world. I find it terribly strange how devout followers of a God who commanded genocide get outraged when the same thing happens in Africa. Take the recent obsession with Joseph Kony as an example. The man is the leader of the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (no extra points for guessing the ‘Lord’ referred to there) and he has done things – terrible things – but they are pretty damn similar to what a man called Moses did in the Bible in Numbers 31:

31:17 Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him.
31:18 But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

How do these outraged middle class first worlders know that Joseph Kony isn’t following explicit instructions from his God, their God? Because God wouldn’t command it? Is God not ‘unchanging’?

2. For reasons that no religious person has ever adequately explained, religious people almost always get different answers to the same question from the same deity.

Why is it that when people pray to their God, the same God, they can get different answers to the same question? Take the issue in Auckland a while ago where one church put up a billboard and thought it great while another group of Christians thought it was blasphemy. How could two Christians ever disagree over the opinion of the God with which they both have a personal relationship? Is God not unchanging or does he give a different opinion to ever person who prays?

These two issues together pose a massive problem to religious investigation into what is true and what is not. How do you know what is true if your only source of shared knowledge (The Bible for example) contradicts its self in very many places and each person’s personal ‘revelation’ is factually different from virtually every other person’s personal ‘revelation’? On what basis can you decide what is true and what is not?

Science on the other hand has the scientific method.

From Wikipedia:

Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.[1] To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of reasoning.[2] The Oxford English Dictionary says that scientific method is: “a method or procedure that has characterized natural science since the 17th century, consisting in systematic observation, measurement, and experiment, and the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses.”[3]

The process that science follows to arrive at what is true and what is not:

Scientific researchers propose hypotheses as explanations of phenomena, and design experimental studies to test these hypotheses via predictions which can be derived from them. These steps must be repeatable, to guard against mistake or confusion in any particular experimenter. Theories that encompass wider domains of inquiry may bind many independently derived hypotheses together in a coherent, supportive structure. Theories, in turn, may help form new hypotheses or place groups of hypotheses into context.

The scientific method has built-in safeguards – such as peer review, repeatable experiments, independent reproduction – against the many psychological properties of humans – such as confirmation bias, belief bias, bandwagon effect – that make us fundamentally illogical beings. By following the scientific method we are most likely to arrive at what is ‘really’ true, at what is in accordance with fact or reality.

When a fact has been proven scientifically it can repeatedly be proven scientifically. It is a cornerstone of the scientific method for results to be independently reproduced – every person who properly conducts an experiment should get the same results.

This is in complete and utter contrast to religious revelation and the way prayer is alleged to work. No credible evidence is ever provided by religious revelation. No second person can independently verify that a person who has allegedly had a ‘revelation’ is telling the truth or is mistaken or is completely delusional. When people pray to the same God for some reason they get different answers. The answers so different there is reported to be over 38,000 denominations of Christianity and they all claim to have personal relationships with the same deity.

What could explain this diversity within Christianity (let alone Islam and Judaism which supposedly worships the same deity…)? The answer is unsurprisingly simple: there is no God. When people claim to know what God wants they are making it up. There is no God. People who claim to know the mind of God are mistaken. It is not coincidence that God almost without fail has the same biases and prejudices as those who claim to know what he wants.

Belief without evidence is a mistake. Faith…

Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.” — Christopher Hitchens

Simply using modern technology, using modern medicine, even eating modern food is tacit acceptance that science works and finds truth. Useful truth. Religion will try to convince you that the shape of a banana, shaped by generations of human directed artificial selection is proof that a supreme super being designed it for you. The irony is that it’s not too far off – the current shape of the banana is due to science and human intellect. I bet Ray Comfort didn’t have this particular truth in mind when he tried to sell his ‘banana revelation’ but fact is fact and empirical evidence trumps religious opinion every time.

Has a specific religion – such as Christianity - ever arisen spontaneously without the intervention of it’s adherents, in a remote part of the world? No, not one time. Copies of religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism) never arise spontaneously in other parts of the world because religions are made up by people. They can’t spontaneously arise because the deity that each alleges to worship doesn’t exist and so can’t inform people elsewhere of the religion. If Europeans had arrived in Australia (or pick any remote people in the world, Amazon, Pacific islands, China…) and found that the Aborigines were devout Christians even though they had never had contact with Europe or the Middle East it would have gone a long way towards showing Christian beliefs to be real. This has never happened. Not once. And don’t hold your breath, it never will.

Revelation is baseless opinion and it is disturbing how many people will accept a person’s word that his opinion is true without questioning or demanding verifiable evidence. You’d think by now, through the manifold scandals by church leaders that have been exposed, that people would be a bit more skeptical about the motives and truth espoused by those who claim to know the mind of God. It’s not even hard to test: ask three different church leaders what their God thinks about a subject – blasphemy is usually a good subject – and my money is on three different answers. They all claim to have a personal relationship with the almighty. It shouldn’t be a difficult thing to ask your personal friend his opinion. Three different answers, which one is telling the truth? Ask 30. Which one is now telling the truth? Ask 300? Ask 38,000. Who is now telling the truth? All of them? 38,000 different opinions and they are all truthful? Unlikely.

There is a much simpler truth: there is no god.

Science strives to find actual, empirically verified, useful truth while religion tries to sell baseless – often contradictory – opinion as truth. Give me science any day.

Always! Be awesome.

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Pretending to be asleep

Filed under: Atheism, Featured, Religion — Leave a comment
March 31, 2012
You can't wake a person who is pretending to be asleep.

Pretending to be asleep; what being religious is all about in a modern era of pervasive and universal knowledge.

I think that proverb is pretty profound.

Basically it’s saying you cannot reason with somebody who is being unreasonable. You cannot reason with somebody who does not care about the truth, who is willing to ignore facts, evidence and the truth in favour of continuing in whichever belief they prefer.

Because I care very much about the truth and what is true, it is one of the most frustrating parts of dealing with otherwise intelligent people who claim to be religious. There is no reasoning with somebody who is acting stupid, who is forcing idiocy on themselves. Presenting facts and evidence to somebody who flat-out refuses to see it is a pointless and frustrating task.

Having said that, it’s becoming more difficult (in the developed world anyway) to pretend to be asleep. Knowledge and information is so easy to come by now that you have to work much harder to ignore it than before, which is why the global atheist movement is growing so fast. That’s my opinion, at least.

There is another saying that’s similar which says you can’t reason somebody out of something they are not reasoned into. It’s true I think. You don’t reason somebody out of the religion they weren’t reasoned into. You present the facts and hope that eventually they pull their head out of their arse and see the light. Metaphorically speaking of course.

Always! Be awesome.

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Adverts, indignation and a little problem.

Filed under: Comment, Featured, Religion, Video — 5 Comments
March 15, 2012

I had a bit of a laugh today when my wife pointed out this status from a Facebook friend of ours. I find it terribly amusing and not just a little bit ironic.

I will never again in my life drink a Red Bull. It is one thing to have fun with ads, but completely unacceptable to depict the Jesus, whom a large number of us on this planet consider to be the Son of God in such a manner.

Seems a bit like a Muslim sentiment no? Isn’t that amusing.

The indignation comes from a Red Bull advert. It seems the poor guy had his sensibilities insulted when he read this article on South Africa’s News 24 site: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Jesus-ad-doesnt-fly-with-Catholics-20120313 and then watched the horrifyingly offensive video.

The Red Bull energy drink’s “Jesus walks on water” campaign should be cancelled, the SA Catholic Bishops’ Conference (SACBC) said on Tuesday.

“We question the timing of the release of the advert – which seems to be part of an international campaign,” spokesperson Cardinal Wilfred Napier said in a statement.

“While the Red Bull adverts are characterised by their cleverness, we believe that Red Bull South Africa have overstepped a mark.”

Napier said the SACBC welcomed the halting of the campaign, but asked Red Bull SA to cancel it completely.

…

And now… for the horror video. Are, you, ready, for… RED BULL JESUS!

Well torture my ass and condemn me to hell. The horror. Red Bull Jesus.

Haha that’s pretty funny – I love it! I think the advert is great. Of course, I may be biased. Red Bull is, after all, the greatest drink the world has ever beheld.

You see, here is the problem. I asked ANOTHER Christian what he thought of the advert. And THAT Christian loved it. Both Christians talk to Jesus. Christian B reckons Jesus doesn’t have a problem with the ad. Christian A is royally pissed off.

So my question is… which one of them is lying? I mean, before approving it or decrying it… surely they bothered to get the opinion of the figment person deity on who’s behalf they are doing it right? Yea… right.

The religious will never cease to amuse me. Brain. Fail.

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Inventing religion

Filed under: Comment, Featured, Religion — 6 Comments
March 10, 2012

Just because you want it to be true, doesn't mean it is true.

I have a question for… I’m not even sure what to call them. The question is for those people who consider themselves to be Christian but who don’t follow any of the traditional Christian denominations or denominational rules.

My question is this:

How did you come to the conclusion that it was OK for you to invent your own religion and how do you continue to justify it to yourself?

Let me explain.

From my point of view there are several types of Christian. By that, without getting into too much detail, to an average outsider it looks like there are Catholics, Methodists, Anglicans, Baptists and Pentecostals for example. Now I realise that’s not an exhaustive list and even in the few I’ve mentioned there are many sub divisions but I can’t very well list all 38,000 odd denominations. I think this few will serve the purpose.

There are the hard-core fundamentalist Christians and the Biblical literalists who take the religious thing very seriously. Then there are Christians that go to church every Sunday and follow the rules of whichever denomination they belong to and I feel like this is the majority of Christians  - average Christians if you will.

Then you get another kind of Christian. I’ve noticed this new kind of Christian becoming more popular and more prevalent lately. I classify this new kind of Christian into 3 sub groups (as one does with Christian denominations…): Holiday Christians, Creative Christians and Christians-By-Default.

I know a couple in each group and they are the ones I have in mind. Holiday Christians are – and you often find these in the Orthodox denominations – those Christians who go to church for the big holidays like Easter and Christmas and possibly a wedding or the odd communion in between.

Creative Christians are an interesting bunch and they’ve really been popping up everywhere recently. I call them Creative Christians because they say things like “I hate religion but I love god” or “I am a passionate follower of Christ” or “I’m not religious, I follow Jesus”. These people – I really do hesitate to call them Christians since most of them avoid even calling themselves Christian – eschew the standard religious practices in favour of… well, something else. They might even join in when one pokes a bit of fun at their more traditional Christian compatriots and their traditional Christian views. Some Creative Christians even think that religion is a bad thing! I know a couple of people who fall into this category.

And then there are the Christians-By-Default. I know very many people who fall into this category and to be honest, their ‘beliefs’ seem a little bizarre to me. Where the Holiday Christians have re-invented Christianity to be easier to live with while still keeping up pretenses and the Creative Christians have invented an almost entirely new ‘spiritual religion’ loosely based on Christianity, the Christians-By-Default have not bothered to change or re-invent anything, instead watering down a fine, if a bit diverse, two thousand year tradition to a basic, effortless superstition. For example, I know a bunch of people who call themselves ‘Christian’ who have not once in their lives set foot in a church, do not own a Bible and have never read it, who do not normally pray, do pretty nasty things and are generally pretty indecent people. Yet, they firmly believe that they are Christian and will be going to heaven – based purely on the luck of being born into a moderately Christian environment I would imagine.

I have very little respect for any of the three categories. To be fair, I have a really hard time respecting any religious person – for obvious reasons – but I do respect the ones who take their religions seriously a bit more than the ones who don’t. Anybody who claims to believe that there is a God and that eternal happiness and eternal torture is in the balance and doesn’t take it seriously is in my opinion the worst kind of…. stupid? Hypocrite? Fool? I just can’t understand how it’s possible to ‘do religion’ in such a disgustingly half-arsed way. If you believe it’s true, and the consequences are pretty damn severe, it should matter a lot. It should matter much more than anything else in the world matters.

So why doesn’t it I wonder.

The Holiday Christians that I know are a little… perplexing. They love the big orthodox church ceremonies and superstitions. Some of them claim to be Christian but they don’t read the Bible and don’t go to church any other time outside of Christmas or Easter. Some of them claim they think the Bible is rubbish but that ‘there must be something’, ‘there has to be a God’ and ‘there can’t be nothing’. And they flat-out argue this point and insist that one day I too will know (presumably when something bad happens to me). This is confusing. You have to wonder how do they arrive at ‘there must be something’ without even having so much as a Bible to refer to? What evidence could bring them to this conclusion if they admit that the Bible is hogwash and every other religion is wrong? I find their attitude very curious. It seems to me that they’ve invented a fairy tale of their very own to believe in that is really easy to follow since it doesn’t take much to get up early (or stay up late) for church twice a year while still believing you’re going to see dead friends and family in paradise. Convenient; reassuring perhaps, but baseless.

The Christians-By-Default are pretty much useless, some of them even useless as people (at least the ones I have in mind). So intellectually lazy that they couldn’t be bothered to learn the first thing about the religion they claim to be a part of. So ignorant of basic Christian doctrine they’d be hard pressed to state the difference between the Old Testament and the New Testament. What’s there to say? They’ve warped a religious belief so much that the convenient superstition that now features briefly in their lives when things get a bit shitty is barely recognisable. And based on what? Nothing but what is the easiest most convenient outcome for them.

And Creative Christians? How did they come up with this new ‘spiritual Christian’ philosophy? How are they getting it right where a billion Catholics are not?

Which is how I got to my original question. How did they come to the conclusion that it would be just dandy to invent their own religion? I guess the answer lies in the 38,000 odd denominations of Christianity. It seems every second Christian invents his or her own flavour.

Do none of them find this strange? They all claim to speak to the same God. Since they all seem to be getting a different message, are they all right? Does God really enjoy this much variety? It seems a little unlikely to me since He picked only the Israelites to be his extra special people back in the beginning and showed the finger (and the ugly edge of genocide) to the rest. And that’s after granting the even more unlikely situation of this deity existing in the first place.

Before you can even begin to answer how it’s OK to invent your own religion, there are several fundamental hurdles a Christian must cross before being able to legitimately invent a new kind of Christianity.

Jesus Christ said point-blank that you have to obey all of the old laws, all 613 of them in the Old Testament. I guess if your new religion includes all the ’old laws’, no problem there; however, none of the Christianity 2.x religions I describe above do… A bunch of them want to do away with the Bible even (for good reason, it’s chock full of bullshit and contradictions).

Which sort of begs the question of how you know about Jesus Christ without the Bible. They can’t have it both ways: either the Bible is in or its out. If its out, you can’t be a Christian and you have no other way to know about Yahweh.

Unless… Jesus is speaking to them!

But he’s not. It’s simple to prove and any honest Christian could prove it to themselves pretty quickly. They just need to pray to Jesus to put a verifiable fact that they could not possibly know into their brain – preferably one that’s really good and useful like the cure for cancer or a way to end world hunger.

That’s two birds with one stone. Nothing will happen which proves that prayer doesn’t work and Jesus doesn’t talk to anybody.

What about self-labelled ‘passionate followers of Christ’? They might avoid the ‘Christian’ label but the Bible makes a couple of suggestions about ‘following Christ’. Have they sold all their possessions to follow their deity as he suggested? Do they take no thought for the morrow? Do they ever put their own family before their deity? Do they avoid getting rich so that it will be easier to get into heaven? Every single one of the examples I can think of do exactly none of those things. And why not? If they really believe and they sure claim to believe, why do they not do the things Jesus said they should do to increase their chances? Why do they not put everything they have into this belief that is supposed to be the difference between eternal happiness and eternal torture? Or have they also edited out the eternal torture part? I find it very strange that people who claim to believe only do barely enough to satisfy their own conscience or keep up appearances.

How did you come to the conclusion that it was OK for you to invent your own religion and how do you continue to justify it to yourself.

I have a hypothesis.

Holiday Christians are desperate and a little full of crap, Christians-By-Default are flat out lazy and Creative Christians have recognised that Christianity is bullshit but are emotionally invested in it for whatever reason and so are changing arse-backwards bronze age myths into something more palatable, something more ‘modern’, something they can and want to believe but which is no less ridiculous.

If you have a different hypothesis, I’d love to hear it.

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Religion and the advancement of knowledge.

Filed under: Featured, Religion, Science — 2 Comments
March 4, 2012
Beautiful DNA.

Reality: more beautiful than you think and more complicated than you can imagine.

One thing about religion that’s really bothered me from the start is how it does nothing to advance or increase human knowledge and let’s face it, it’s not for a lack of people who spend their entire lives studying religion.

A fundamental part of religion, the Abrahamic religions in particular, is that the devout claim to have a direct line to and converse with the almighty creator of the universe. This super being allegedly invented everything, knows everything and can do anything. People firmly believe they converse with this being. Yet they do not find it strange that they are – and have been for thousands of years – unable to get a single factual bit of new information, that they did not have before, from this being.

Some might want to point out how religious people such as Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton and Max Planck have made many scientific advances. It is true that some scientists are and were religious, especially in the days when not being religious was essentially a death sentence. They, like every other scientist – religious or not – made their discoveries through hard work and by using the scientific method. None of them claim to have received any information directly from the almighty creator of the universe and nobody who could not possibly have come up with a discovery has come up with a discovery. An illiterate goat herder, for example, did not discover perturbation theory.

And why not? If you believe in a ‘loving’ God how do you reconcile that this God withheld the germ theory of disease for several thousand years thereby condemning millions upon millions of people to suffer horribly and then dying prematurely? A huge proportion of the unfortunates being children. Do you just ignore the inconvenient fact and get on with it?

People claim to speak to their God all the time. People claim their God speaks to them all the time. Why does nobody care that they are completely unable to get any new information that they didn’t have before from this God when it speaks to them? How can this not bother people?

The Bible is chock full of vast stretches of bullshit and inanity such as how to burn farm animals – a smell the Christian god apparently finds terribly pleasing – and what to (or not to…) do with woman on their periods. About the only truly useful thing in the Bible was allegedly said by Jesus and goes something like “love… thy neighbor as thyself” but as it turns out he wasn’t the only person to say it and wasn’t the first person to say it, by a long shot. So to be a Christian you need not only accept that your God gives you no information you don’t already have but when he did give you some good advice, it wasn’t even his own, unique idea. And most of the preceding ideas, called the Old Testament, were truly terrible, decidedly inferior to many other civilisations that existed during that time (yes, surprise! The middle east was in fact not the only populated place on earth during the time of the Old Testament).

If you are religious and you want to learn something fundamental about what you believe, say the following prayer when next you speak to your deity:

Dear Lord, please tell me a fact I do not already know.

Want to put money on what you’ll learn? No? Let me help you: you’ll learn that you’re talking to yourself.

There is nothing in any religious text or any religion at all that could not have been invented or imagined by human beings. In fact, that is all religion really is: primitive human musings.

Religion does not increase human knowledge because the universe is stranger than humans are able to imagine and religion is nothing but humans imagining.

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Justice, condemnation, scapegoating and a disturbing lack of reason.

Filed under: Featured, Religion — 9 Comments
February 27, 2012

Scapegoating - justice the Christian way.

A Christian friend re-tweeted the following quote:

“A God who could pardon without justice might one of these days condemn without reason.” (C.H. Spurgeon)

Since a self-confessed Christian wrote the quote originally and it was recently tweeted and re-tweeted by Christians I don’t think it would be unfair to assume that the quote is meant to refer to Yahweh and/or Jesus Christ. Since we’re talking about the Christian God and Christians, it is safe to assume that Christian doctrine applies to that quote.

In particular, the following Christian doctrinal statements:

  1. There is only one God – Isaiah 43:10; 44:6,8; John 17:3; 1 Cor. 8:5-6; Gal. 4:8-9
  2. There are no Gods before or after God – Isaiah 43:10
  3. God knows all things – 1 John 3:20
  4. God is all-powerful – Psalm 115:3
  5. God is everywhere – Jer. 23:23,24
  6. God created all that exists – Gen. 1:1; Isaiah 44:24
  7. Jesus is God – John 1:1,14; 10:30-33; 20:28; Col. 2:9; Phil. 2:5-8; Heb. 1:8
  8. Jesus was sinless – 1 Pet. 2:22
  9. Jesus is the only way to God the Father – John 14:6; Matt. 11:27; Luke 10:22
  10. All people have sinned – Rom. 3:23, 5:12
  11. Jesus died for all our sins – 1 John 2:2; 2 Cor. 5:14; 1 Pet. 2:24
  12. Jesus’ sacrifice was a substitution, for us – 1 Pet. 2:24
  13. Jesus rose from the dead in His physical body – John 2:19-21
  14. Those who reject Jesus will go to Hell – Rev. 20:11-15
  15. Hell is a place of fiery punishment – Matt. 25:41; Rev. 19:20
  16. Hell is eternal – Matt. 25:46
  17. The unsaved go to hell forever – Rev. 21:8
  18. Salvation is a free gift of God – Rom. 4:5; 6:23; Eph. 2:8-9
  19. There will be a final judgment – 2 Pet. 3:7
  20. The damned will be thrown into a lake of fire – Rev. 20:15

The God referred to in the quote is Yahweh and Yahweh alone because of statements #1 and #2: “There is only one God and no other Gods’ before or after”: and the quote is about “the final judgement” (statement #19) in which Yahweh will decide on the reward and punishment of every person that ever lived.

Before something can be pardoned or condemned there must exist a set of criteria against which performance or actions can be measured or a set of rules must exist against which compliance or not compliance can be measured or judged.

Christianity is fairly clear on the requirements of their deity and the associated rewards and punishment for compliance or non-compliance.

The Requirements

It is commonly accepted by Christians that the only requirement to be ‘saved’ or to be judged worthy by the creator of the universe is to firmly believe that: (#7) Jesus Christ is God, (#11, #12) Jesus died for all other human’s sins, (#13) Jesus rose from the dead and (#9) Jesus is the only way to God. It’s neatly summarised in 1 Cor. 15:1-4:

15:1 Moreover, brethren, I declare unto you the gospel which I preached unto you, which also ye have received, and wherein ye stand;
15:2 By which also ye are saved, if ye keep in memory what I preached unto you, unless ye have believed in vain.
15:3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;
15:4 And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:

The requirements that are set and that everybody who ever lived will be judged against are simple. They are that you must firmly believe all of the above: you must accept that Jesus Christ is God, that he is your personal lord and saviour, that he died for you and through dying for you saved you from eternal torture. That is it.

The Reward

From a nice Christian website:

David put it this way: “You will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand” (Psalm 16:11). John described it as a time when “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 20:4). Everyone will be fully happy. There will be no dissatisfaction of any kind. No one will be able to think of even a tiny way in which things could be better. We will have reached the purpose for which God has made us.

Isaiah described some of this joy when he predicted a nation returning to its land: “The ransomed of the Lord will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away” (Isaiah 35:10). We will be in the presence of God, and we will be happier than we have ever been. This is what Christianity has traditionally tried to convey by the concept of “going to heaven.”

Basically, if you meet the requirements outlined above, you will enter a state of being that is so good that nobody in that state could think of a way to make it better. The reward is eternal, never-ending.

The Punishment

If you do not meet the requirements, there are serious consequences and repercussions:

(#14) Those who reject Jesus Christ will go to (#15, #16) Hell, an eternal place of fiery punishment, for all (#17) eternity. If any person is not (#17) saved and receives ever lasting life in heaven as a reward, that person will be sent to hell and be (#20) thrown in a lake of fire to suffer for the rest of (#17) eternity.

The punishment is eternal, never-ending.

The Quote

Let’s examine the quote by C.H. Spurgeon:

“A God who could pardon without justice might one of these days condemn without reason. “

The quote says that if Yahweh were to start pardoning people without justice he could or might start condemning people without having a good reason in the future.

Here’s the problem(s): when you examine The Requirements of Christianity, you notice the following:

1. Christianity is firmly and entirely based on the principle of scapegoating – an innocent is punished for the alleged wrongs of others (or their distant forbears…)

I think you’ll find that this principle is nowhere to be found in any modern justice system. Blatantly obvious: it’s not just to punish somebody for the crimes committed by another person.

2. Christianity requires a person to believe certain things that are not physically possible and for which there is no credible evidence

The complete lack of evidence for god and the disturbing contradictions in the Bible and the utter lack of corroborating evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ aside, there exists not a single shred of evidence that any person has ever come back to life after being dead. In fact, we have a lot of evidence to the contrary. No additional evidence is provided or promised to convince one of the truth of Christianity. In fact, The Requirements must be believes without any proof what so ever.

3. The Requirements were set at a point in time in a specific place.

Before the point in time and outside the immediate area of the place, knowledge of The Requirements did not exist. It could have, had the omnipotent deity in question willed it so but it did not, for reasons that can’t be explained. People before the alleged birth of Jesus Christ did not know of The Requirements and people outside the immediate area surrounding the places where Jesus Christ preached did not know of the requirements. It is safe to say for a good one and a half thousand years, if a person was unlucky enough to have lived in China, Southern Africa, North and South America, Australia or the Arctic it was impossible to know of The Requirements.

There are just as many problems with The Reward and The Punishment:

1. Infinite punishment for finite transgressions

No finite transgression can ever be severe enough to warrant infinite, eternal, never-ending punishment. At best, the punishment – and even the concept of punishment has severe problems – should fit the crime. Not believing something for which there is no evidence is not even a crime in any sense of the word yet the punishment for this non-crime is eternal torture. It’s so much of a non-crime that in every other aspect of life it is a virtue, even to Christians.

No modern person considers torture a valid punishment, for any transgression. No modern society uses torture or even condones torture, not even Christian societies.

2. Infinite reward for finite actions

No finite action can ever be good enough to warrant infinite and never-ending reward. The action of believing things for which there is no evidence or good reason at all to believe certainly does not qualify as something for which a person should receive a reward, at all.

3. The Requirements reward bad people and punish good people

Judgement passed using The Requirements as the criteria will allow bad people to be rewarded and good people to be punished. If a serial rapist, child abuser and murderer accepts Jesus Christ as his personal lord and saviour moments before he dies, he will be rewarded eternally. If an atheist, who dedicates her entire life to helping and counselling the rape victims, children and families of the murder victims of the aforementioned murderer and does not one single bad deed for her entire life, dies without accepting Jesus Christ as her lord and saviour she will be punished, tortured for eternity.

Punishing good people and rewarding bad people, eternal or not, is not justice. Condemning good people to eternal torture is not reasonable. There is no reason what so ever involved in any process that condemns good people to eternal torture.

4. Eternal happiness and eternal damnation cannot simultaneously co-exist unless people are fundamentally changed

How can anybody be happy knowing that billions of other people are being horribly tortured night and day – many of them family members and loved ones – without being fundamentally changed? Can anybody with a straight face say they will be exquisitely happy despite knowing their child is constantly being horribly tortured, forever? To be eternally happy then, a person must be edited to either not care that people are being tortured or to not know that people are being tortured. Clearly, if you are changed, edited, redacted in some way, it’s not really you who receives the eternal reward, merely a shadow of your former self, assuming there’s anything left of you at all. The remaining part being that which doesn’t care or doesn’t know about horror that makes the holocaust seem like a gentle stroll at the beach…

5. God could have made things differently if it chose to

God is, by definition, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent. God can by definition not make any mistakes and God knows, by definition, everything before it happens. God, by definition, made everything exactly the way it is. Then by definition, God could have made it differently but chose not to. God must have had every intention of creating billions of people for the sole purpose of having them tortured for eternity. He knows before hand exactly how everybody is going to behave, exactly what the outcome is going to be so how can the outcome be any different than what God knew? He knows before hand who is going to be tortured, creates them anyway and then goes on to torture them.

It is therefore argued that the God of Mr. Spurgeon and of Christianity already pardons without justice and condemns without reason. Thankfully, there is no reason to suspect that this God, or any other, actually exists.

Christianity and its implications

An omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent being designs and creates everything and knows all occurrences beforehand. This perfect being, unable to make any mistake, designs and creates human beings. It designs and creates human beings in such a way that their actions, thoughts, words and deeds are entirely the product of the structure of the meat (their brain) in their heads. It designs people so that the meat’s structure is determined by a ridiculous number of factors external to a human being, that are outside the control of a human being. Things like a humans’ s body, environmental chemical levels, hormone levels, altitude, brain and nervous system electrical signals, external visual and auditory stimuli, country, culture, family, surroundings, education, the type of food and drink a person consumes, gasses a person breathes, the things a person reads, hears, watches, the parasites a person carries, the diseases a person’s had, the injuries a person has received and all of this and much more over the span of a person’s entire life.

Sam Harris makes an argument that ‘free will’ does not exist, that it is essentially an illusion. Without getting into a protracted explanation or argument, consider that your brain makes decisions based on a billion things you have no control over at all. Since a decision is the product of your brain which is the product of the environment it’s in, decisions are the product, indirectly, of the environment of the brain. Unless you can find an additional, and as yet undetected and wholly unnecessary, source of input to the brain, it does not seem that ‘free will’ really exists or needs to exist. Is a person able to make a decision differently from the decision they have made? (Then why don’t they?)

There is empirical evidence that a change in brain structure can change a person’s behaviour, decisions and even belief in a god or that a change in brain structure can create a belief in god where there was none before.

Yet Christianity balances eternal torture and eternal reward purely and only on the belief that a person holds.

How is that justice or reasonable? How is that right? How can anybody claim to believe that?

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Religion, self reinforcing beliefs and admitting you’re wrong. Or not.

Filed under: Featured, Religion — 1 Comment
February 23, 2012

I saw this on a Christian’s Facebook and it got me wondering. There’s several things going on with this statement and I think the implications are quite interesting.

Facebook Christian Statement

A statement of faith by a Christian on Facebook

I believe in a Creator God who chose me before the beginning of time to Love

I think that bit has a slight problem. The disturbing lack of proof for the existence of a ‘Creator God’ aside, questioning what comes before the beginning of time is a bit pointless since the concept of ‘before’ is meaningless without time. I also think ‘chose’ is pretty much the wrong word to use: if there was a ‘creator god’, he didn’t ‘choose’ you out of a set of options, he invented you, put you together from scratch. In other words, you are now exactly as he decided before you existed. Also, the word ‘chosen’ in that context is actually a bit annoying. It implies you are important; more important than somebody else who was not chosen. Why were other people not chosen? Indeed, why were the Israelites ‘chosen’ and nobody else? Not the Chinese, not the Australian Aborigines, not the Eskimos, not the Europeans… and the list goes on. Why do you think your god plays favorites and why are some people more deserving of his choosing than others?

to Love and know Him

A great many passages in the Bible contain horror and terror actually. Fear is what your god wants most. Love should be earned, fear is demanded. Love should not be demanded yet that is what your god does. Love me or I will torture you forever. Sure, you’re free to not love me but you will be tortured for eternity if you don’t. Love? How do you love something that not only invents The Worst Thing Ever(tm), eternal torture, but then goes on to bestow that privilege on most of humanity – that he personally designed and created by the way. And know Him? Really? Through one terribly badly cobbled together, self-contradictory, reality contradictory book of dubious origin and not a damn thing else? If he wanted you to know him, he’d be talking to you unambiguously and you’d be able to prove it simply by getting verifiable information you didn’t have before. Which you don’t.

who sacrificed much

Well, no. You see, here’s the thing. You can’t have an omnipotent, omniscient, immortal super being on one hand and then claim that 72 hours of temporary loss of human existence is a sacrifice of any kind. Do you even need me to equate that to something? Ok, let me try. Let’s assume that at the time of the alleged crucifixion the world was just 4,000 years old and lets just work with that, discarding that this god had allegedly been around for a trillion trillion years before that and will be around for another trillion trillion years after that. God, being omniscient and omnipotent knows perfectly well that he will be ‘dead’, in other words, lose his earthly mobility – because he KNOWS death is not the end of existence, merely a change – temporarily. He will ‘die’ and be ‘dead’ for 72 hours and then he will be ‘alive’ again.

If he was only 4,000 years old he ‘sacrificed’ the minuscule equivalent of about 100 minutes of a human life. That’s a sacrifice? Are you kidding? Do you know what people who die of AIDS or cancer or Ebola go through? And they know the end is the end, there is no coming out the other side after a quick, temporary, 72 hour episode of death. People suffer heinous deaths every day, suffer for months even years before they die and you want to call giving up a pathetic fraction of a fraction of a percent of a never-ending life a sacrifice? I don’t think so.

to have you Love and know Him too

Yea? Me too? Well that’s pretty simple and since he knows everything and can do anything he knows how to get me to get to know him. He just has to start talking. It’s so incredibly simple – just give me some of that divine knowledge. Tell me the proof for Goldbach’s conjecture. Put the mathematical equation that shows how to fit gravity into the standard model in my head. Tell me how to prove or disprove M-theory. No? The requirement is that I have to believe in something while all the evidence points to something else? That’s a bit strange don’t you think? Why is this god trying to trick me?

He is amazing

Really? Which part of him precisely? The genocidal part? The infanticidal part? The bit that invented eternal torture and suffering? The misogynistic woman hating part? No, the stories that contain this horrible character were amazing to bronze age goat herders. What’s amazing is that you, a modern, educated, thinking person can ignore the truck load of problems, horror stories, gross injustice and just plain terrible shit, happily, to carry on sprouting this idiocy.

the best thing about my life is He is in it

And here we get to the crux of it, as it were.

Imagine for a moment, what it would take to convince a person, who repeats this kind of statement to themselves every day, that this god they think is the best thing about their life is a figment of their imagination. I think this is one of the main things that keep people in religion. Having to think that you’ve gone around for years and years saying things like ‘He is amazing and the best thing about my life is He is in it’ and having that sentiment reinforced once a week by people that you trust and then to think that the ‘he’ part of that statement doesn’t actually exist must be pretty disconcerting.

All other things aside, I think it takes a hell of a lot to get over the sheer embarrassment that the realisation that there is no god brings and I think this is why the realisation builds over time instead of just arriving like a ton of bricks all at once (usually). The knowledge that this god you carry on about is a figment of your imagination must be a profoundly uncomfortable thing to realize when your entire life up to that point essentially consisted out of ‘the best thing about my life is that he is in it’. How would you feel if you had to find out the ‘best thing in your life’ was really a shitty horror story and nowhere near even resembling the truth. And a lot of people around you know it. And you’ve been saying this really stupid shit and rubbing it in their faces at every opportunity you got… for years…

I think this is also why it is so difficult to get a person who is religious to take an objective view on what they believe, just for a moment. To take that objective view involves having to look at that statement and the thousands just like it, made repeatedly over years and consider that it was all nonsense. The thought actually has to enter your brain and I think it is kept out by sheer embarrassment.

I don’t think Christians or religionuts of any other description seriously consider what it is that they say or do. I don’t think they can. If they could, I think they’d understand how profoundly stupid and ridiculous it really is and they would stop.

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Lies, damn lies and the people who ignore them

Filed under: Featured, Religion — 6 Comments
February 5, 2012
Got touching Adam...

God and Adam (sitting in a tree...)

What do you blog about when you don’t feel like blogging and don’t have anything to say? The Bible! Nothing like a bit of Bible study to get you going right? Right.

I thought that today, I’d go back to the beginning. You know, this bit:

1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

I think even some Christians might recognize that line. It’s the first line of the Bible (the King James version anyway…). And I know what you’re thinking: “he’s going to tear into the horse shit that is the creation story and point out how it’s not scientific at all, has no evidence and is generally laughably impossible”.

Well, no.

Instead, we’re going to have a look at the characters of the creation story. ‘Story’ since it is a story, on par with the Hindu creation myths and the ancient Greek ones and the ancient Roman ones and the Norse ones and the Egyptian ones… you get the point. There is not one iota of evidence that makes the Christian story more credible than any of the other aforementioned stories. Christians can’t even agree among themselves on the truth of their own creation story and god knows they allegedly speak to the same deity and could just ask him. They even have a ‘personal relationship’ with it. Strange no?

Anyway, there’s four characters we’ll look at:

  • God – Perfect, omniscient, almighty creator of the universe.
  • Adam – The first human being created by God
  • Eve – The second  (or third, depending on how much attention you pay when you read the Bible) human being created by God
  • The Serpent – A garden variety snake created by God. And no, I don’t see any evidence in the Bible that says the snake was anything other than a snake.

Everybody knows the story, right? Ok, fine, several billion people know the story, right? Right.

God slaps the universe together in a couple of days, gets lonely (or something) and makes a dude called Adam who seems lonely so God makes him a wife called Eve. He puts them in an awesome garden and from the rest of the story we can infer that their lives are pretty much awesome: low stress, high relaxation, essentially on an ever lasting holiday at an out of season nudist resort.

In the mean time, God had also made two magic trees. We’re not even going to go there. Ok, fine, we will, but not now.

God:
2:17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

Pretty straight forward: eat the fruit of the tree and you will die until you are DEAD on that very same day. You picking up what I’m putting down people?

The Serpent:
3:1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

Like I said, God made the snake, plain old garden variety. Only, back then, snakes could talk. Somehow. Not too sure where the vocal chords went since then. Maybe snakes were telepaths or something? Right? Right.

Eve:
3:2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
3:3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

So there’s Eve telling The Serpent pretty much exactly what God said.

The Serpent:
3:4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

What is this? The Serpent is contradicting the almighty creator of the universe! Sure folly! No! Don’t do it Eve! You’re gonna die! You! Gonna! Die!

3:6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

OMG they ate the poisonous, man killing fruit! They’re gonna die! Poor bastards. Not even 5 pages into the history of the world and the original people are dead. Not a great start.

3:7 And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.

Say what now? No horrifying death? Must still be coming.

God:
3:11 And he said, Who told thee that thou wast naked? Hast thou eaten of the tree, whereof I commanded thee that thou shouldest not eat?

Yea man, here it comes, horrible horrible DEATH!

Adam:
3:12 And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.

Good on Adam, saying it like it is. Staring certain death in the face and still manning up.

Eve:
3:13 And the LORD God said unto the woman, What is this that thou hast done? And the woman said, The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat.

Good on Eve. She’s about to end her short existence by dying horribly and she’s still saying it like it is. Well done. I mean, what’s the point in lying to an omniscient being anyway?

3:16 Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
…
3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
…

3:23 Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
3:24 So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

Ah, Houston, we have a problem.

Read this and remember it:

Numbers 23:19
God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent.

1 Samuel 15:29
The Strength of Israel will not lie nor repent.

2 Samuel 7:28
Thou art that God, and thy words be true.

Titus 1:2
In hope of eternal life, which God, that cannot lie, promised before the world began.

Hebrews 6:18
It was impossible for God to lie.

Out of the four characters in the story:

The Serpent – spoke the truth about the tree of knowledge
Adam – spoke the truth about what he had done
Eve – spoke the truth about what she had done
God – lied his pants off about what would happen when they ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge

But God can’t lie. But he did lie. But he can’t lie. But he did lie.

Hey, don’t look at me, I don’t believe that crap. A billion or two Christians allegedly do believe that crap. Or they just ignore the lies. And the hundreds of other contradictions in the Bible.

Oh, wait, let me guess, Adam and Eve died a spiritual death, not a physical one. Oh yea? Show me the passage that says that. Quote me the verse. Show, me, it. No? Quite.

So… let’s ‘go there’. About the trees… there were two of them. The tree of knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. Why did God create these two trees and place them exactly where the creation story and the rest of the Bible would need them, to explain why we’re all wretched, disgusting immoral bastards in great need of some saving by the human sacrifice of a god-man? Oh, convenient! So all-knowing God creates these trees knowing full well The Serpent will convince Eve to eat it and she would convince Adam to eat it. Bit of a bastard thing to do, setting them up like that and acting all astonished when this played out exactly like he knew it would… And he did know:

Omniscience (all-knowing) – John 16:30 the apostle John affirms of Jesus, “Now we can see that you know all things.
Omnipresence (all-present) – Jesus said in Matthew 28:20, “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

Not only did he know what was going on, he acted like he didn’t:

3:9 And the LORD God called unto Adam, and said unto him, Where art thou?

Acting like you don’t know something when you do know something… isn’t that also lying?

Anyway, the second tree is pretty interesting when you think about it. The tree of life, eat of it and you live for ever:

3:22 And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:

That implies that Adam and Eve were not going to live forever to begin with. Since, why create a tree that gives an ability they already have and tell them to not eat it? Why stop Adam and Eve from gaining something they already have?

So… Adam and Eve were going to die at some point anyway, they just didn’t know. (Also… when God says ‘one of us’… who’s the other’s in the us? Just a thought.)

Christians: your god lies. Actually, no, if you believe this crap the problem is with you. How, on god’s green earth can you believe this rubbish? And, might I take this opportunity to once again point out that some of you ‘Christians’ don’t actually believe this rubbish and yet those of you who do believe this tripe speak directly to the same deity than those who don’t believe this tripe. Allegedly.

I have a simpler explanation: It’s a freaking story and your god is a figment of your imagination. A pretty bad story if you ask me, and, there, is, no, god, at, all.

RAmen.

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A personal relationship.

Filed under: Featured, Religion — 7 Comments
January 29, 2012
Dude, grass, clouds and sunshine.

One happy dude, grass and sunshine... does not a personal relationship make.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read or heard from Christians that they have “a personal relationship” with Jesus Christ I would probably not be writing this on account of the unimaginable wealth I would have accumulated. You see, Christians love saying it:

I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

or

Getting to know Christ.

or

Jesus is my best friend!

Yeah, OK, let’s see about that.

Right, so first stop is the dictionary to get what the words officially mean:

per·son·al [pur-suh-nl]
adjective
1. of, pertaining to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private: a personal opinion.
2. relating to, directed to, or intended for a particular person: a personal favor; one’s personal life; a letter marked “Personal.”
3. intended for use by one person: a personal car.
4. referring or directed to a particular person in a disparaging or offensive sense or manner, usually involving character, behavior, appearance, etc.: personal remarks.
5. making personal remarks or attacks: to become personal in a dispute.

re·la·tion·ship [ri-ley-shuhn-ship]
noun
1. a connection, association, or involvement.
2. connection between persons by blood or marriage.
3. an emotional or other connection between people: the relationship between teachers and students.
4. a sexual involvement; affair.

So the dictionary definition of “personal relationship” is essentially that Christians say they believe that they have “a connection, association, or involvement” with the creator of the universe that is “of, pertaining to, or coming as from a particular person; individual;”.

Some examples of personal relationships could be between:

  • a man and his wife
  • a mother and her daughter
  • two friends
  • siblings

All of the aforementioned have several things in common but one thing is crucial, without which a relationship cannot and does not exist: communication. For a relationship to be personal in nature, the communication has to be bidirectional. Both parties in the relationship must be able to take part, share ideas and convey and effect the emotional content of the communication in the relationship for it to be considered personal.

As any married man knows (or should know…), without communication a marriage disintegrates rather rapidly. If there is no (or bad) communication between a mother and a daughter, their relationship disintegrates. Can two people who do not communicate (to give or interchange thoughts, feelings, information, or the like, by writing, speaking, etc.) really be considered friends? Perhaps for a time, even a really long time, after communication ceases but to become friends there had to have been communication and interaction first – you cannot become friends with a person with whom you have never communicated in any way.

There has to be bidirectional communication, discourse, the exchange of ideas, for a relationship to be considered personal.

A person could zealously read every single article that a writer publishes without the writer ever being aware of that person’s existence. While the interaction between a writer and a reader can be considered a relationship, it cannot be considered a personal relationship. I have read a great many of Christopher Hitchens’ articles and books and while I wish that I had a personal relationship with him I cannot say that I did. The man did not know I existed.

This is not to say that every person in this kind of relationship is rational about it and accepts that an admired celebrity is not a friend of theirs.

My wife has a relationship with a woman (I hesitate to call her a friend, at least, not any more) who gets obsessed with celebrities and in some cases ends up stalking them. She’s had restraining orders taken out against her; one by a well known cricket player in particular. This is a great example of a relationship that exists and is a personal relationship in the mind of one person but most certainly is not a personal relationship in the mind of the other. Any rational person looking at the situation would agree that there most certainly is no personal relationship between my wife’s acquaintance and the celebrities that she is obsessed with.

There can’t be a personal relationship without bidirectional communication, without the ability to freely share ideas, get feedback and have shared knowledge.

A relationship between two people can be considered personal if:

  • bidirectional communication occurs – both parties are transmitters as well as receivers
  • thoughts and ideas are shared – the parties have shared knowledge
  • both parties receive feedback to their transmissions

Personal relationships are fundamental to human beings. So important, in fact, that for the first several years of our lives personal relationships are the only way for us to learn anything at all. In the beginning of a person’s life, they learn from their parents, siblings, aunts, uncles. Family, through very personal relationships, teach you the things you need know to survive very early on. A little later – and any parent can relate to this – come a flood of ‘why’ questions from a child. A child wants to know something so it transmits its request to its parent or to another who is in a personal relationship with the child. Usually (ok, sometimes) the other party responds to the query by transmitting a response to the child and this back and forth continues and the child learns, gains knowledge it did not have before.

Happily, this interaction provides us with a simple but effective way to define and test if a relationship: a) exists and if it can be b) considered personal.

For example, let’s test if I have a personal relationship with my wife. To do that, I need to answer a couple of simple questions.

Does my wife communicate with me?

Why, yes, this morning she told me she was going to the shop and that she would be back in about half an hour. I went upstairs a couple of minutes after she told me this, to fetch a hot cross bun. I found that my wife was indeed not in the house. About half an hour later my wife came down-stairs. I asked her if she went to the shop and she replied that she had and told me what she bought.

My wife transmitted information to me. I transmitted information and a request for information to her. I received feedback on my request and gained knowledge.

Do I have a relationship with my wife? Clearly, yes I do.

My wife is studying linguistics. While watching television last night she commented on the way the narrator spoke in the program we were watching; she said the show had an interesting ‘register’. I did not know what ‘register’ meant in this context so I asked her to explain it to me. ‘Register’, she said, was the type of language that being used and how the language was used to convey something. For example, using ‘father’ in formal situations and not ‘dad’ which is more informal or how one could stick to prescribed grammar or not depending on the situation or the tone one was trying to convey.

I lacked the specific knowledge of what ‘register’ meant in that context and transmitted a request to my wife upon which I received feedback from her which added to or increased my knowledge. I verified this newly acquired knowledge that I gained from my wife by reading Wikipedia – it agrees.

Do I have a personal relationship with my wife? Undeniably, yes I do.

I could easily test this empirically. And, as it happens, people do sometimes have to prove, empirically, that they have a personal relationship with another person. Let’s say for argument’s sake that I wanted to convince an immigration official that I had a personal relationship with my wife. How would I go about that?

Happily, immigration officials of the United States of America (and many other countries) do this kind of thing every single day of the week. They check to make sure that when people claim that they are married, that they really do have a personal relationship with that person; that they are telling the truth. In fact, the legality of immigration by marriage rests almost entirely on this principle: being able to prove you have a personal relationship with another person.

For those who don’t know how this works, it’s pretty simple: get a bunch of photos of them together, get some legal documents, preferably financial that show their names together, some documents that show they’ve lived together and get the two people who claim to have a personal relationship in two separate rooms, ask them the same questions about each other and see if they come up with the same answers. It’s depressingly easy to test. In the end, all they are doing is checking if a reasonable amount of reasonably exclusive shared knowledge exists and that each person really knows the things they should know if the relationship is real.

So, how do we apply these widely accepted standards to test if a personal relationship exists between a Christian and the alleged super being they worship?

First, we need to define some of the properties of this super being, Jesus Christ. Happily and fortunately, Christians have done the job for us many times over. Here are the properties of Jesus Christ as described by a Christian website backed up by the Christian Bible that was allegedly written by the Christian’s creator of the universe himself:

Omniscience (all-knowing) – John 16:30 the apostle John affirms of Jesus, “Now we can see that you know all things.
Omnipresence (all-present) – Jesus said in Matthew 28:20, “Surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Omnipotence (all-powerful) – All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me,” Jesus said in Matthew 28:18
Eternality (no beginning or end) – John 1:1declares of Jesus, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Immutability (unchanging) – Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Can’t argue with that right?

So Jesus is omniscient, he knows everything. This is excellent news! Let’s test this relationship thing!

One might have a conversation with a Christians that goes something like this…

A note for Jesus to read...

If you happen to be a Christian, please speak to this Jesus Christ, who is omniscient and all-powerful by your own admission, and ask him to tell you what the sentence is that I wrote on a folded piece of paper that is on my desk marked “For Jesus Christ 0×001″. It should be a breeze. Write the sentence in the comments below.

Ah, but it doesn’t work like that, I hear a Christian snort. Why not? Can’t test the almighty like that, even to save the soul of an atheist? Ok. Fine.

How about asking Jesus Christ, omniscient son of the almighty creator of the universe how to cure cancer and save millions from dying unimaginably horrible deaths? No?

Then, ask Jesus Christ for a way we can get rid of Malaria without irreversibly damaging the environment? No? Cure for HIV? No?

How about asking Jesus Christ how to fit gravity into the Standard Model of Particle Physics? No? The solution to Goldbach’s conjecture perhaps? No?

But you have a personal relationship with this omniscience being? If you can’t get this being who, by your own definition knows the answers to these questions, to answer any of them, how do you know you have a relationship with it? How do you know? Something other than gaining useful knowledge that you didn’t have before must have convinced you then? What is that thing? You speak to Jesus Christ and he speaks back to you (except he can’t actually answer any useful questions)? Fine, I’ll go with that.

What does Jesus Christ sound like? What accent does he have? What is the tone of his voice? He spoke English to you? American English, Australian English, New Zealand English, South African English, British English, which one? What were the exact words he used when he spoke to you, quote them, verbatim.

Oh, I see, it doesn’t work like that either. Fine, I have one last test, one that no Christian can possibly deny is appropriate since it’s what they do every day of their lives and go to church for.

Speak to Jesus and ask him what he wants. Simple right? Surely he can communicate to you what he actually wants you to do? I mean, that’s pretty basic right? Jesus surely is able to let you, his follower and friend know what it is that he wants you do to?

I ask because not so long ago there were some inter-Christian issues at a church in Auckland city. One Christian sect put up a Christmas poster showing Mary with a pregnancy test. Another Christian sect thought this was terrible blasphemy and tore the poster down. Once sect didn’t believe it was blasphemy, the other did believe it most definitely was blasphemy. Both sects claim to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Pray to Jesus now and get him to tell you which sect what right and which sect was wrong. Write the answer in the comments below. Preferably quote the actual words used by Jesus Christ to tell you this.

No?

Ok, take three Christians (hell, take three from the same Church) and put them in three separate rooms and ask each of them the same set of questions to ask Jesus Christ with whom all three have ‘a personal relationship’ and see if the answers match.

They won’t. Do you know why? Because Christians do not have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, whether he exists or not. They do not have shared knowledge. Not even a functionally retarded immigration official would be convinced.

You can’t get knowledge you didn’t have from Jesus Christ by asking him a specific question with a specific answer, you can’t say what he sounds like, which words he uses in which context and two Christians asking the same vague question don’t even get the same vague answer.

Even when the alleged communication is about a fundamental part of Christianity and the answer only has to be a vague guidance feeling, an internal yes or no feeling, a completely unprovable hunch or an urge, it is still inconsistent and different even between a small group of similar Christians. How, after all, can there be 38,000 denominations of Christianity if they all speak to the same deity and have the same manual as reference? Does Jesus have the worst case of split personality the universe has ever seen? A terrible memory perhaps?

‘But the Bible’ one might say.

No, even if Jesus exists and the Bible happens to be true, one does not have a personal relationship with somebody from a one way transmission, especially a single book at least a thousand seven hundred years old. I don’t think I have a personal relationship with William Shakespeare, do you? I don’t believe I have a personal relationship with any author that I’ve never met, at all. Who does? The insane? Those who are on drugs? Does any normal, well-adjusted person think they have a relationship with another person who does not take part in any communication what so ever, aside from a single book written nigh on two millennia ago (that contradicts itself hundreds of times, has fabrications, provably so and isn’t supported by modern archeology performed by people who have a vested interest in proving the book true with empirical evidence)?

I have bad news for those who believe they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Science, reason and empirical evidence say no.

They, empirically, do not.

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