Atheism In The 1700′s

 ABSTRACT OF THE TESTAMENT OF JOHN MESLIER

By Voltaire

Excerpted from a longer volume

In regard to the Lord’s Supper, the first three Evangelists note that Jesus Christ instituted the Sacrament of His body and His blood, in the form of bread and wine, the same as our Roman Christ-worshipers say; and John does not mention this mysterious sacrament. John says that after this supper, Jesus washed His apostles’ feet, and commanded them to do the same thing to each other, and relates a long discourse which He delivered then. But the other Evangelists do not speak of the washing of the feet, nor of the long discourse He gave them then.

On the contrary, they testify that immediately after this supper, He went with His apostles upon the Mount of Olives, where He gave up His Spirit to sadness, and was in anguish while His apostles slept, at a short distance. They contradict each other upon the day on which they say the Lord’s Supper took place; because on one side, they note that it took place Easter-eve, that is, the evening of the first day of Azymes, or of the feast of unleavened bread; as it is noted (1) in Exodus, (2) in Leviticus, and (3) in Numbers; and, on the other hand, they say that He was crucified the day following the Lord’s Supper, about midday after the Jews had His trial during the whole night and morning.

Now, according to what they say, the day after this supper took place, ought not to be Easter-eve. Therefore, if He died on the eve of Easter, toward midday, it was not on the eve of this feast that this supper took place. There is consequently a manifest error.

They contradict each other, also, in regard to the women who followed Jesus from Galilee, for the first three Evangelists say that these women, and those who knew Him, among whom were Mary Magdalene, and Mary, mother of James and Joseph, and the mother of Zebedee’s children, were looking on at a distance when He was hanged and nailed upon the cross. John says, on the contrary, that the mother of Jesus and His mother’s sister, and Mary Magdalene were standing near His cross with John, His apostle. The contradiction is manifest, for, if these women and this disciple were near Him, they were not at a distance, as the others say they were.

They contradict each other upon the pretended apparitions which they relate that Jesus made after His pretended resurrection; for Matthew speaks of but two apparitions: the one when He appeared to Mary Magdalene and to another woman, also named Mary, and when He appeared to His eleven disciples who had returned to Galilee upon the mountain where He had appointed to meet them.

Mark speaks of three apparitions: The first, when He appeared to Mary Magdalene; the second, when He appeared to His two disciples, who went to Emmaus; and the third, when He appeared to His eleven disciples, whom He reproaches for their incredulity.

Luke speaks of but two apparitions the same as Matthew; and John the Evangelist speaks of four apparitions, and adds to Mark’s three, the one which He made to seven or eight of His disciples who were fishing upon the shores of the Tiberian Sea.

They contradict each other, also, in regard to the place of these apparitions; for Matthew says that it was in Galilee, upon a mountain; Mark says that it was when they were at table; Luke says that He brought them out of Jerusalem as far as Bethany, where He left them by rising to Heaven; and John says that it was in the city of Jerusalem, in a house of which they had closed the doors, and another time upon the borders of the Tiberian Sea.

Thus is much contradiction in the report of these pretended apparitions. They contradict each other in regard to His pretended ascension to heaven; for Luke and Mark say positively that He went to heaven in presence of the eleven apostles, but neither Matthew nor John mentions at all this pretended ascension. More than this, Matthew testifies sufficiently that He did not ascend to heaven; for he said positively that Jesus Christ assured His apostles that He would be and remain always with them until the end of the world.

“Go ye,” He said to them, in this pretended apparition, “and teach all nations, and be assured that I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Luke contradicts himself upon the subject; for in his Gospel he says that it was in Bethany where He ascended to heaven in the presence of His apostles, and in his Acts of the Apostles (supposing him to have been the author) he says that it was upon the Mount of Olives.

He contradicts himself again about this ascension; for he notes in his Gospel that it was the very day of His resurrection, or the first night following, that He ascended to heaven; and in the Acts of the Apostles he says that it was forty days after His resurrection; this certainly does not correspond.

If all the apostles had really seen their Master gloriously rise to heaven, how could it be possible that Matthew and John, who would have seen it as well as the others, passed in silence such a glorious mystery, and which was so advantageous to their Master, considering that they relate many other circumstances of His life and of His actions which are much less important than this one?

How is it that Matthew does not mention this ascension? And why does Christ not explain   clearly how He would live with them always, although He left them visibly to ascend to heaven? It is not easy to comprehend by what secret He could live with those whom He left.

I pass in silence many other contradictions; what I have said is sufficient to show that these books are not of Divine Inspiration, nor even of human wisdom, and, consequently, do not deserve that we should put any faith in them.   JEAN MESLIER

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Religion And Politics…Very Scary

I keep hearing that ol’ G.W. was trying to kick start the Apocalypse with invading Iraq

Having a pretty good idea of how the man **thinks…I think the rumor is probably true.

**From watching and listening to him for 8 loooooong years.

The Oppression of Religion…?

“If you think that it would be impossible to improve upon the Ten Commandments as a statement of morality, you really owe it to yourself to read some other scriptures. Once again, we need look no further than the Jains: Mahavira, the Jain patriarch, surpassed the morality of the Bible with a single sentence: “Do not injure, abuse, oppress, enslave, insult, torment, torture, or kill any creature or living being.” Imagine how different our world might be if the Bible contained this as its central precept. Christians have abused, oppressed, enslaved, insulted, tormented, tortured, and killed people in the name of God for centuries, on the basis of a theologically defensible reading of the Bible.”  Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation  My bold emphasis

Jesus is a Hoax

Jesus is a hoax.  How can I say that? Pretty easily it turns out.  I can say that because I follow a chain of logic from a known fact.

Evolution is a fact.  Lots of people in America want to ignore this, and many choose to try and disprove it by using junk science and holding on to beliefs that were long ago discredited.  There are those who denounce and scream that it cannot be true because it removes the need for a God and His dogma, something they just know is right and true, despite the lack of any proof whatsoever.

You don’t get to vote on evolution…which a lot of evangelical Christians think they can do and make it go away. Evolution is real science and is not really a “theory” anymore, though the title ‘Theory of Evolution’ will remain because that’s the way science works.  The fundamentalist Christians attempts to discredit evolution and teach their phony alternatives, “Creation Science” or “Intelligent Design”, in schools is a total failure and it is recognized by most intelligent people as just religious doctrine posing as science.

Science moves forward on the basis of testable, repeatable, and reviewable evidence, religion however has no evidence behind it and depends wholly on the non-questioning faith of its adherents.  Any teacher who tries to teach faith-based dogma in a science class is clearly not suited to be a teacher. Our leadership in science and technology cannot be subservient to anyone’s religious persuasions.

Evolution today presents a major conundrum to Christianity and it’s dominate dogma of original sin and the blood atonement of Jesus.  Just believe in Jesus and your ‘sins’ are washed away.  Well that Jesus may or may not be reality.  We know that evolution could not produce a single parent couple through which we all descended; this is predictable from the way we know evolution works.  Additionally there is the DNA and archaeological evidence totally backing this up.

This is what gets the ball rolling.  These simple proofs that there was NO Adam and Eve is what gives lie to the whole Bible. If there is NO Adam and Eve, as described in the Bible and this is surely fact, then there is surely NO fall and the subsequent original sin, and it is original sin that the whole Christian shtick is based on.  If there were NO original sin then there is no need for redemption; if there is NO need for redemption then there is no need for Jesus, If there is no need for Jesus…what use is the story of a crucifixion and resurrection?  Besides lacking any contemporaneous proofs at all, the whole story reeks of Bronze Age myth.  Are we still to believe in gods that demand blood sacrifice?  Haven’t we grown past this medieval, dark ages reasoning?  I know I have.

Religions problems with science are many and varied. Evolution tells us the earth, biosphere, animals, and humans evolved in a certain way and on a schedule of sorts. It makes predictions of what is to be found and how things will work.  Genesis has stories that conflict with known science.  We know in fair detail how and when the universe came into being, how and when our earth came into existence, and how and when humans came to inhabit our planet.

If you claim to be an intelligent member of modern society do you still believe in magic and demons, witches, devils, imps, goblins, incubuses, succubus’s, wraiths, unicorns, etc.?  Christians do, and of course in the dark ages the churches killed people who they thought were witches or devils and such and those who denied some of the Bibles more egregious blunders.

The primal reason Evolution is giving Christians so much grief is of course that evolution says the Christian creation story is just flat wrong…it never happened that way and the first two chapters of Genesis are totally wrong…the story is not factual in any way.  We know how dinosaurs and other land animals, plants, insects, birds, fish, humans, etc. came into being and we know it was not by ex-nihilo creation by some Bronze Age god.

Evolution could not, did not, produce a single mother and father of all future humans, so there was no Adam and no Eve. And with this now known to be fact the Christians have to really rethink their beliefs and decide where they are to go from here on. There is no voting on this…we do not get to choose what we want to be reality.  What is real and true is truth, no matter what some goat herders wrote a few thousand years ago.

John Schneider, former teacher of theology at Calvin College in Michigan says it’s time to face facts:

“There was no historical Adam and Eve, no serpent, no apple, no fall that toppled man from a state of innocence. Evolution makes it pretty clear that in nature, and in the moral experience of human beings, there never was any such paradise to be lost. So Christians, I think, have a challenge, have a job on their hands to reformulate some of their tradition about human beginnings.”

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The Rapture on May 21st.

Have you kind people been preparing for the Rapture?  Have you told all your relatives and friends to not fly or take a road trip on this coming Saturday, May 21^st.?  Have you made arrangements for some pagan to come and care for your pet dog or cat or whatever?

I’ve been trying to get some rapture believers to sign over the deeds on their houses and any prime real estate they own, but have been so far unable to persuade them that they should.  I suspect/think they really don’t believe the rapture will happen. Imagine that…doubting their own prophecies.

So far I have put up new sandbags around the old bomb shelter, restocked 50cal. Ammo for the machine guns, laid in a year’s worth of food and water and first aid supplies, finally picked up that short wave radio and put in the burglar alarm system I have been procrastinating about.  The neighbors are looking at me kind of funny lately…I don’t know why.  NOT 

I hear that there are thousands of “Rapture Parties” planned all across America…personally I think this is the appropriate response to this really stupid display of how ignorant much of the American Christian community is.  Men and women of the Christian persuasion have been predicting the “end times” for 2000 years now and all of us pagans get to laugh at them when the date just flies by with not a burp or bump to signify anything.  Hell, even Jesus himself predicted the end of the world in his own time…just shows you how much that supposed Man/God knows.

Well if you look at the Christian record of things they have been pretty bad prognosticators about much of what they believe in.  They can’t seem to come up with any real evidence to back up most their claims about God and Jesus and end times. They revere a 1700 year old book like it is the be all and end all of human existence…totally ignoring what we have learned in those 1700 years as humans.

One of the Christians champion debaters (W.L. Craig) has recently said it is alright to kill children if “God tells you too.”  They believe that it’s O.K. to kill people for things the Bible rails against such as: disrespect to parents, mixing crops in a field, mixing two different fabrics together,  adultery, homosexuality, masturbation…hell,  just about anything to do with sex, except married couples in a missionary position.

The believers are hoping that come May 21^st. they will be looking down from heaven at us poor souls and laughing their heads off…I suspect I will be looking at those poor silly confused people…laughing MY head off come that day
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Morality Probably Doesn’t Come From Bible

Is the Bible the source of morality?  Many people think not.

How can this book be an arbiter of morality when God advocates the killing of people for adultery, for disrespecting their parents, homosexuality, masturbation (or was that coitus interruptus), kidding old bald people…things we do not even consider crimes today.  How does this morality stand up to the fact that God directed the Hebrews to molest, kill, rape (save the young virgins though), destroy, and enslave people, to bash babies against a wall, to run a sword through the abdomen of pregnant women?  Whole tribes and cities…this is certainly Bronze Age human mentality at work…not a God.

There are countries around the world who don’t worship a Christian God and they have as much morality as anybody.  Thinking back over the disgraced Christian church leaders and ministers, priests, etc., in Christian lands–they may have even more morality…and they certainly didn’t get it from the Bible.

Some of the countries who are lowest in religious belief are some of the safest places on earth.

The Christian God himself (if he were real, which is debatable) has committed inexcusably horrible, and depraved acts… that God is an utterly immoral being.

Morality does not necessarily flow from the Christian Bible, it has many other sources.

Did you know?
In California now the police can search your cell phone without a warrant if you are arrested.  However if you put the cell phone in your cars glove-box or trunk they need a warrant to get to it.  And, if you’re using an Apple iPhone of course that means your every movement for the last year is available to The Man.  This countries getting more and more like a communist state.  Seems the fourth amendment is going the way of first amendment freedom of speech.
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Creationist Lose Again

Just one more brick in the wall separating real factual evidence and religious, creationist, ID, YEC  nonsense.
Human language almost certainly started in Africa (where WE as the human race started coincidentally) and it started MANY years before the Bronze Age (c.4000 +-BC) It has been speculated by many that the invention of language was the beginning of man’s rising intelligence and domination.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346.abstract

Puts a whole new outlook on the “Tower of Babel” story from the Bible, Huh?
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The True Core of the Jesus Myth

The True Core Of The Jesus Myth by Christopher Hitchens

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And the Exodus story is BS also @ 6min+

Prayer…Does it Ever Work?

“…In addition, history has served as a de facto test of alternative forms of healthcare. Until approximately the last two centuries effective medical techniques to treat and cure serious illnesses were largely absent.  During that period prayer and other religious rites were commonly employed medical interventions.  Juvenile mortality rates were probably over 50% (they still exceeded 25% in 1900 Britain and the United States), young adult mortality rates were high, and average life spans were as low as two decades.  The number of children lost probably exceeded 50 billion; only a modest minority of those born made it to old age.  Significantly higher rates of mortality would have probably collapsed the human population and lead to extinction of the species, so it appears that death rates were near their highest sustainable maximum.  The evidence indicates that supportive prayer whether remote or in the presence of or by the patient has been a largely or entirely ineffective treatment for most or all of human history.  G. Paul, Journal of Medical Ethics, November, 2008 Here My emphasis

So for all of human history…up to about the 1800’s, all we had to combat disease or sickness was prayer or the witch doctor.  We, as a species, barely survived.  Enter modern science and medicine and we start to overrun the planet.  So do you think prayer (or the witch doctor) were ever effective?

We know for a fact that prayer is never effective against medical problems that are not subject to spontaneous remission or placebo effect. Medical problems such as Down’s syndrome, Spina-bifida, amputated limbs, etc. cannot, and have never been cured by prayer.

We know that prayer can never restore a heart damaged by heart attack, never restore lungs damaged by emphysema.  Humans are working on many of these medical problems, and if we survive the growing religious wars of this world, we will probably cure them.

Meanwhile, we can seriously doubt that there is a God who answers prayers, or if there is even is a God.

Addendum
Regarding that “Inerrant Bible” instructions about the efficacy of prayer:

Matthew 7:7 Jesus says:
“Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”

The message is restated in Mark 11:24:
“Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”

In Matthew 17:20 Jesus reiterates that same message:
“For truly, I say to you, if you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.”

In John chapter 14, verses 12 through 14, Jesus speaks to all of us about how easy prayer can be:
“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.”

In Matthew 18:19 Jesus says it again:
“Again I say to you, if two of you agree on earth about anything they ask, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”

Really???
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Christian Apologists

“Christian apologists think it is rational to seek out evidence that supports their preconceived beliefs and ignore the evidence that doesn’t. They already know the truth, and so view their job as making a case against any arguments from skeptics and doubters. Scientists, even if they have preconceived beliefs, examine all the evidence and go wherever the data lead.”  Victor Stenger, Physicist, Author of – God: The Failed Hypothesis

Christian Apologists do all they can possibly do to try to prove their God…and they fail miserably.  There is not one bit of evidence they can point too that is irrefutable; however the atheist or scientists can point to proof after proof that things written about and believed from the Bible are false.

Scientists find proof that a Biblical story is false and the Christian Apologists say, “Well we always thought the story was allegorical” or “the story is just to teach a moral lesson.” Or, some Christian Apologists swear-and-be-damned that the science is wrong and bring forth their own Christian Scientist to put up a smoke screen of lies that fools most trusting members of the fold…in other words they lie to their own brethren, and they hope that any of the general public that happens to notice will also fall for it.

This is one of the defining characteristics of today’s Christian Apologists.  The only way to make the case they want…is to lie their ass off.  They haven’t the brains and learning to dispute the actual true evidence and proofs that science can bring to bear.  They have to lie. How Christian of them.

To my knowledge ALL of the rebuttals that Christian Apologists have used against science, trying to prove that their religion is true, are provably wrong.  The only thing the religious can do is hope that most people don’t take the time to check out the facts.  Most every Christian Apologist out there that writes to atheist bloggers is sooo mislead and unlearned and many don’t even know the details of their own religions dogma.

To my mind something that cannot be proven by any means at all…does not warrant belief.  If someone tells you that UFO’s are real and they can’t offer any real tangible proofs (and so far, despite what you hear, NO one has been able to do that) what are you supposed to do, believe it anyway?  I don’t think so.  Christianity has had two thousand years to prove it is true and all it still has is anecdotal stories; nothing that can be tested or confirmed in any way shape or form.  For hundreds of years the Christian church killed all those that disbelieved, now that humanity has grown up all they can do is apply peer-pressure…thankfully

I have heard that as much as 70 percent of Americans cannot read and understand the science section of the New York Times, and only 20 to 25 percent of Americans are scientifically savvy enough to understand DNA, evolution, what radiation or a molecule is.  I would guess that it’s those same people who cannot read and understand all the evidence that’s coming from the relevant sciences that religion is nothing but fiction.  They are seemingly unable to follow the lines of logical deductions that lead to this conclusion.

All Christians are in denial…they have to be to keep believing the in the house of cards they have built. They can believe in other modern day sciences, in fact they can build facets of their lives around some sciences, but not those sciences that show, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are throwing their life away on a non-existent deity.

A tactic that has fairly recently shown up is to try and deflect all the real evidence and throw up a smoke screen by asserting that science and religion are separate ‘Magisteria,’ and that one should not attempt to use science against religion because religion has it’s own ‘truths.’  I suggest that this position is natural animal fertilizer…religion has no ‘truths’… it is pure lie and it has to constantly change in minuscule amounts year after year to try to keep up with the real world.
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