Jesus Was/Is A Myth

If one follows the many earth sciences closely enough you are presented with facts that if followed deeply enough and cogitated about long enough, reveals to you that all is not as it seems.

For example, science tells us that actual humans (Homo-sapiens…us), have walked the earth for near 200,000+-  years. Among scientists this is pretty much an un-disputed fact, Other, almost humans, walked the earth for several million years…some modern day European and Asian people have actual DNA from some of these ancient ancestors, meaning there was inter-breeding and viable, fertile offspring.

DNA and the old bones are telling this story…this is indisputable, non-judgmental,   unbiased science that is narrating the story of our ancestors life, not a book written by goat-herders–millions of years after the real beginning of the tale.

All of the above, and more, leads us to the necessity to re-examine and measure many old tall tales that have been passed off as truth to billions of people…namely the Biblical myths of our earthly Genesis.  Moses nowadays is thought to be pretty much a mythical figure.  His “contribution” to the Bible (The Pentateuch) is probably a product of earnest Jewish scholars of the sixth or seventh century BC …long after the reputed time of Moses…trying to keep a tribe together

We know that the essential stories of Genesis…Adam/Eve, Noah, dispersion of language, slavery of the Hebrews in Egypt, Exodus, exploits of Joshua, etc. are mythical or allegorical tales.  Some people may think this is not a big deal, but some cogitation on the subject proves otherwise.  In fact if these stories are not true, the consequences ricochet through time…to the story of Jesus, and then go even greater lengths to prove the whole chapter–maybe the whole book–is only myth.

Follow this: there was no Adam/Eve as portrayed in the Bible. The Bible gives clues that much of civilization and early technology was miraculously “there” almost as soon as the story got going. This irrevocably puts the stories into the fifth or sixth millennia BC…a time that is extremely well researched and known about by our earth sciences.  The bone evidence and DNA evidence agree in their respective branches that there was never a time when our ancestors only numbered 2 in the case of Adam/Eve, and further out, the 6 mythical procreating members of the mythical Noah’s Ark.

As stated above man/womankind has walked the earth for 200,000 +- years…there was never an Adam/Eve couple six or eight or ten or fifty thousand years ago.  No Adam and Eve mean no “Original Sin” which irrevocably means there was no need for a Jesus to die as “blood atonement” for non-existent sins.  If you think about it God said, before Paul invented Original Sin, that children are not guilty of the sins of the father. Also the blood atonement think is kind of stupid…it’s nothing but theater, a contrivance to batten up a weak plot line.

With that thought in mind we go to some thoughts of people who are, or were, in the front lines of scholarship in matters of the Christian religion.

“It is important to recognize the obvious: The gospel story of Jesus is itself apparently mythic from first to last”…Robert M. Price, professor of biblical criticism at the Center for Inquiry Institute

“We can recreate dimensions of the world in which he lived, but outside of the Christian scriptures, we cannot locate him historically within that world”…Gerald A. Larue, The Book Your Church Doesn’t Want You to Read.

“The question must also be raised as to whether we have the actual words of Jesus in any Gospel” …Bishop John Shelby Spong.

“According to the declaration of the Second Vatican Council, a faithful account of the actions and words of Jesus is to be found in the Gospels; but it is impossible to reconcile this with the existence in the text of contradictions, improbabilities, things which are materially impossible or statements which run contrary to firmly established reality”…Maurice Bucaille, The Bible The Quran And Science

“Jesus is a mythical figure in the tradition of pagan mythology and almost nothing in all of ancient literature would lead one to believe otherwise. Anyone wanting to believe Jesus lived and walked as a real live human being must do so despite the evidence, not because of it”…C. Dennis McKinsey, Bible critic, The Encyclopedia of Biblical Errancy

“Even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn’t one anymore. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern re-mythologizing of Jesus. Every “historical Jesus” is a Christ of faith, of somebody’s faith. So the “historical Jesus” of modern scholarship is no less a fiction”…Robert M. Price, Jesus: Fact or Fiction

“So unreliable were the Gospel accounts that “we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus”…Rudolf Bultmann, University of Marburg

So Prof. Bultmann is saying that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are unreliable, so bad that we can’t be sure about Jesus. Just how much faith can we put in the Gospels?  Let’s see what some other scholars believe…

“We know virtually nothing about the persons who wrote the gospels we call Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John”…Elaine Pagels, Professor of Religion at Princeton University, The Gnostic Gospels.

“All four gospels are anonymous texts. The familiar attributions of the Gospels to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John come from the mid-second century and later and we have no good historical reason to accept these attributions”…Steve Mason, professor of classics, history and religious studies at York University.

“The gospels are so anonymous that their titles, all second-century guesses, are all four wrong”…Randel M. Helms, Who Wrote the Gospels?

“But even if it could be proved that John’s Gospel had been the first of the four to be written down, there would still be considerable confusion as to who “John” was. For the various styles of the New Testament texts ascribed to John- The Gospel, the letters, and the Book of Revelations– are each so different in their style that it is extremely unlikely that they had been written by one person”…John Romer, archeologist & Bible scholar, Testament.

“Paul did not write the letters to Timothy to Titus or several others published under his name; and it is unlikely that the apostles Matthew, James, Jude, Peter and John had anything to do with the canonical books ascribed to them”…Michael D. Coogan, Professor of religious studies at Stonehill College.

“Yet today, there are few Biblical scholars– from liberal skeptics to conservative evangelicals- who believe that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John actually wrote the Gospels. Nowhere do the writers of the texts identify themselves by name or claim unambiguously to have known or traveled with Jesus”… Jeffery L. Sheler, The Four Gospels

“The bottom line is we really don’t know for sure who wrote the Gospels”…Jerome Neyrey, Weston School of Theology, Cambridge, Mass.

“The world has been for a long time engaged in writing lives of Jesus… The library of such books has grown since then. But when we come to examine them, one startling fact confronts us: all of these books relate to a personage concerning whom there does not exist a single scrap of contemporary information — not one! By accepted tradition he was born in the reign of Augustus, the great literary age of the nation of which he was a subject. In the Augustan age historians flourished; poets, orators, critics and travelers abounded. Yet not one mentions the name of Jesus Christ, much less any incident in his life”…Moncure D. Conway, Modern Thought

Some really bad press for a few people from the Christian religion. They keep saying there is all this evidence that their religion is the true one.  I’m wondering where it is.

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Muslims Continue To Kill Christians

This past Tuesday an off-duty Muslim police officer boarded a train in Southern Egypt and opened fire on a group of Coptic Christians, killing one and wounding 4 others.  This comes less than 2 weeks after the New Years bombing massacre that killed 25 Coptic Christians at their church in Alexandria

The state news agency, MENA, quoted an Interior Ministry official as saying a Muslim police officer boarded a Cairo-bound train in the town of Samalut in Minya province and began firing a handgun. The official said a 71-year-old Coptic man was killed and his wife and four other Christians — three women and a man — were wounded.

I wonder if this Muslim police officer was a moderate or extremist.  You can’t really tell by looking at them can you?  Most people would assume that the good guys work for the cops, but that does not seem to be true anymore does it?

This just naturally leads into the next story.

David Briggs, writing in Tuesdays Huffington Post reports that a new study is showing that Muslim-controlled countries are far worse in allowing religious freedoms and human rights

He writes:
“Few nations keep their vows when it comes to religious freedom.

Churches are attacked on Christmas in India and Egypt. Religious believers in North Korea are tortured in prison camps. Hindus and Sikhs are harassed in Afghanistan.

“Despite routine constitutional promises to the contrary, religious freedoms are denied around the globe and violent persecution is pervasive,” Brian Grim of the Pew Research Center and Roger Finke of Pennsylvania State University report in a new book.

Yet even amid this widespread disregard for religious freedom, one group of countries stands out: Muslim-majority nations.

“Religious persecution is not only more prevalent among Muslim-majority countries, but it also generally occurs at more severe levels,” Grim and Finke write in The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.”

So not only are Muslim-controlled countries persecuting more people, but they are much more severe in their persecution.  The Muslims really like to kill people…Jews and Christians particularly, for the smallest offense.  You know like writing about Islam and telling all just how stupid, evil and blood-thirsty the religion really is. Or maybe wanting to believe in another religion and leave Islam in the sh-t-heap of history where it belongs.  If I was writing this blog in Iraq or India or any of several dozen other countries that are bogged down in this horrible medieval cult of murderers, I would be, in a very short time, killed by a righteous Muslim gunman.

Islam cannot survive in the light of day; it cannot endure close rational, non-sectarian examination, by logical and truthful people.  It has even more problems than Christianity in its dogma and Koran with logic, misunderstanding, absurdities, inconsistencies, contradictions, ethics and precepts problems a-plenty.

Christian Fundamentalists and ALL Muslims hold it to be true that if the Bible or Koran is without error or inconsistency, it must be the work of God, and because it is the work of God, it must be without error or inconsistency. It seems not to matter which proposition comes first, the other is thought to follow.  Perfect example here of circular reasoning that is to be found in almost all religious thought.

Some of the findings that authors Grim and Finke write about in: “The Price of Freedom Denied: Religious Persecution and Conflict in the Twenty-First Century.”

• 78 percent of Muslim-majority countries, compared with 10 percent of Christian-majority countries and 43 percent of other nations, had high levels of government restrictions on religion.

• Violent religious persecution is present in every country with a Muslim majority with a population of more than 2 million.

• 62 percent of Muslim-majority countries had at least moderate levels of persecution, with more than 200 people persecuted. In comparison, 28 percent of Christian-majority nations and 60 percent of other countries had similar levels of abuse.

• At the highest levels of persecution, 45 percent of Muslim-majority countries — more than four times the percentage of Christian-majority countries — were found to have more than a thousand people abused or displaced because of religion.

To me, this is a real good indicator of just how evil this religion is.  It talks peace and love, but is shown by cold hard statistics to be ruthless and unforgiving in the real world.  It doesn’t deserve any respect and should not be allowed in civilized company.
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There Are NO Moderate Muslims

Salman Taseer, the Pakistani governor of the Punjab province who was killed by one of his own bodyguards for being too liberal and wanting to reduce the penalty for blasphemy from death to a lesser sentence, apparently was considered too liberal by mainstream Muslims in the country.

From The National Review by Jonathon Goldberg 1-7-11

“A group of more than 500 leading Muslim scholars, representing what the Associated Press describes as a “moderate school of Islam” and the British Guardian calls the “mainstream religious organizations” in Pakistan not only celebrated the murder, but warned that no Muslim should mourn Taseer’s murder or pray for him.

They even went so far as to warn government officials and journalists that the “supporter is as equally guilty as one who committed blasphemy,” and so therefore they should all take “a lesson from the exemplary death” of Salman Taseer.

If that’s what counts for religious moderation in Pakistan, I think it’s a little late to be talking about extremists hijacking the religion. The religion has long since been hijacked, and it’s now moving on to even bigger things.”  My emphasis

So now “moderate” Muslims, the ones who keep telling us that we shouldn’t judge Islam by what the “extremists” are doing are now backing the killing of those who want to “really” moderate Islamic craziness.

This just backs up what I have been feeling for a long time…there are NO moderate Muslims that just want to be left in peace to practice their religion. The majority wants pretty much what the “extremists” want; the expansion of Islam in all of its glory and insane excesses against human rights to everyone in the world, and woe is the person who gets in its way.

The people (after all they are the ones who actually make the religion come alive) of the Islamic religion are the most dangerous people on earth.  They are unrepentant killers, and squashers of human liberty and rights.  They will do anything necessary to disperse the Islamic virus to every person, in every corner of the earth.
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How Much Our Government Lies to Us

“WikiLeaks’ Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us

Wikileaks has shown that our government and military form a ‘vast lying machine’ that perpetrates mass murder in our name.

Do you believe that it is in Americans’ interest to allow a small group of U.S. leaders to unilaterally murder, maim, imprison and/or torture anyone they choose anywhere in the world, without the knowledge let alone oversight of their citizens or the international community? And, despite their proven record of failure to protect America — from Indochina to Iran to Iraq — do you believe they should be permitted to clandestinely expand their war-making without informed public debate? If so, you are betraying the principles upon which America was founded, endangering your nation, and displaying a distinctly “unamerican” subservience to unaccountable authority. But if you oppose autocratic power, you are called to support Wikileaks and others trying to limit U.S. Executive Branch mass murder abroad and failure to protect Americans at home.”  Excerpted from AlterNet

And to think the government wants to prosecute You, if you lie to them.  That is so evil.  Our government has got to the point where it is totally corrupt and non-responsive to Americas many ills.  Since 9-11 our leaders have managed to “lose or misplace” a minimum of a trillion bucks and be the primary cause of up to a million civilian deaths.  We can guess that the trillion+ bucks that “disappeared” has been distributed to cronies of those in power in Washington and into the maws of the International banking system.  From what I hear this “war” on terror we have been fighting in the last 7 0r 8 years has made more millionaires then all the wars that came before combined.

It has sucked money from our country alarmingly quickly.  It has created a cadre of storm troopers and snoopers that infringe/stomp on our constitution on a daily basis.  It has created government agencies that plot together to keep us under their thumbs and always guessing…what’s next.  It has created the perfect war…the one that never goes away and is always sucking up more and more of Our resources.  We will never have peace from this war and one of the main reasons is our Federales can whip up more attacks anytime they want…just kill a few innocent Muslim citizens and tell the crazy Muslims that we pee’d on their Koran.

We as a country have mortgaged our future and sold our soul, following dysfunctional presidents and politicians and a perverted foreign policy and we break into war whenever our presidents get their lies together.  Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,  Lebanon, Somalia, Panama and Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan, with offshoot smaller wars now in Somalia (yet again), Yemen, Mauritania and Mali comes to mind.

What I find kind of funny is that Christian fundamentalists practically to a man/woman approve of our war against the Muslims.  God is a god of peace…until the Muslims get involved.

We Americans in particular and the world in general are the most manipulated humans that ever existed.  We let our leaders get away with anything they want and cheer them on when we go to war…how patriotic and loyal we are to liars and manipulators.  Sadly I think America has lost its high place, and it wasn’t the American people that caused it…it was our leaders…the ones getting rich on our blood.
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The Problem With Islamic Fundamentalists…

Sam Harris once again lays out the smartest and most logical reasons why Islam is a failure as a respectable and worthy religion. The followers are dupes and are constantly manipulated by their religious leaders and they are unable to see this. It’s a shame that the world may go to war over this insane nonsense.

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Well I have an Owl…therefore your argument is superfluous

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Pakistan and Muslim Blasphemy Laws

The Muslims just can’t seem to enter modern day society.  Now in Pakistan, Islamist parties are trying to prevent the country from changing their blasphemy laws to a more moderate way of treating offenders.  As the law stands now a person accused of blasphemy is liable (likely) to be put to death.  The law has been used by Muslims to persecute religious minorities…especially Christians.

From the New York Times:
“In fiery speeches across all major cities and towns, religious leaders warned the government on Friday against altering the law, which carries a mandatory death sentence for anyone convicted of insulting Islam.”  My emphasis

So again…in yet another country…the Muslims are allowing the extremists in their midst to show the world just how insane the religion and its followers are.  This cannot be stated strong enough…the Muslim extremists are truly insane and cannot be trusted to live among the rest of humanity.  They are constantly plotting to kill normal people.  They believe all people on earth must follow a 7^th. century pedophiles vision of religion and his interpretation of  delusional dreams.

When the Muslim extremists commit their atrocities against humanity, the mainline Muslims come out and say we mustn’t judge their peaceful faith by the sins of a few, but they refuse to clean up their ranks.  The government, because it is controlled by extremist Islamists, do nothing to stop the evil obscenities their own brethren commit.  Mainline Muslims need to clean the nest of vipers from their midst, or face retaliation from worried normal people around the world.

“After a brief, semi-retirement of a few hundred years, religion has returned as the number one cause of violence, war and death.” ???
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