The Fall of Man

The Fall of Man as seen by Thomas Paine

“The Christian Mythologists, after having confined Satan in a pit, were obliged to let him out again to bring on the sequel of the fable. He is then introduced into the Garden of Eden, in the shape of a snake or a serpent, and in that shape he enters into familiar conversation with Eve, who is no way surprised to hear a snake talk; and the issue of this tête-à-tête is that he persuades her to eat an apple, and the eating of that apple damns all mankind.

After giving Satan this triumph over the whole creation, one would have supposed that the Church Mythologists would have been kind enough to send him back again to the pit: or, if they had not done this, that they would have put a mountain upon him (for they say that their faith can remove a mountain), or have put him under a mountain, as the former mythologists had done, to prevent his getting again among the women and doing more mischief.

But instead of this they leave him at large, without even obliging him to give his parole—the secret of which is that they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet into the bargain. After this, who can doubt the bountifulness of the Christian Mythology?

Having thus made an insurrection and a battle in heaven, in which none of the combatants could be either killed or wounded—put Satan into the pit—let him out again—gave him a triumph over the whole creation—damned all mankind by the eating of an apple, these Christian Mythologists bring the two ends of their fable together. They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and Man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing had eaten an apple. Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason, Authors emphasis 

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Adam and Eve No Longer Tenable

Jason Rosenhouse over at EvolutionBlog details some of the theological twists and turns some religious writers are going through trying to explain a religious world with no Adam and Eve to blame original sin on.

“One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were expelled from Eden as a result of a specific sin they committed, and that this corrupted state was in some way passed down to all future human beings, is no longer tenable. A variety of lines of evidence make it clear that the human population has always numbered in the thousands and certainly never dipped down to two. Moreover, evolution makes clear that humans arose through eons of natural selection. There was no moment of creation, and there was no state of primordial perfection for them to sully.”  Jason Rosenhouse PhD, EvolutionBlog.  Full post Here    My emphasis
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Much of Religion is Falsifiable

Fal si fi a ble
“Able to be proven false, and therefore testable; as, most religious beliefs are not falsifiable and therefore outside the scope of experimental science”  Webster’s revised unabridged Dictionary

 The Christian religion makes many falsifiable claims about itself. It likes to tell its members that prayer is answered and is effective in curing sicknesses and helps in almost any situation.  Your pastor or priest or rabbi will not tell you about all the studies that have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that prayer is totally useless, other than as a ‘positive thinking’ or placebo exercise.

Those unlucky people who have had an arm or leg amputation, have never had their prayers answered to regrow said limb…in all of earthly recorded history.

Those two undeniable ‘facts’ completely falsify the Christian claim that prayer does work.  So I wonder why this is?  It seems that Christians would have caught on by now.  Remember Texas Governor Perry having his little prayer meeting trying to get some rain in the state to relieve a terrible drought?   The fires broke out and Texas has had the worst fire season ever…way to go god.

1.  Prayer is a falsifiable claim of Christianity. And it has been proven false.

Since the 1600’s or so science has been relentlessly working on many many projects that have inadvertently invaded the claims and assertions of religion.  Other than the people who write for the Biblical Archaeological Review the scientists whose field is archaeology, paleontology, biology, geology, physical anthropology, or radiometric dating do not work to try and prove the Bible…nor do they work to disprove it.  They simply do their job and report what they find without prejudice.

Likewise the field of genetics, although a relatively new science, it, along with other earth sciences, in just a few short years has made tremendous strides in defining our humanness and ancestry and giving us a sense of history that defies and falsifies what religion has been telling us for thousands of years.

What these sciences together have done is falsify most of the books of Genesis and Exodus.  We now have convincing scientific evidence that falsifies the stories that generation after generation was brainwashed with and told were true history.  From about 500+- AD when the Bible was canonized till the middle of the 20^th century, people who doubted the Christian religion and God were mostly without proofs of what they believed…not any longer.

Now we know where all of us humans came from…Africa…and most likely the Ethiopian area…and most likely about 50,000 + years ago.  Archaeologists and paleontologists have been saying this for years, and just in the last few years genetics and DNA has confirmed this. We have found proof that our ancestors mated successfully with Neanderthals.  There is new evidence (that is not fully confirmed yet), that our ancestors mated with some other ancient hominids.  The evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable…we are not guessing anymore…we have the proof to back it up.

We don’t need a physical ‘missing link’ anymore…we can follow our history in the blood and DNA.  We are the last surviving representative of the genus Homo…which is estimated to be 2.3 to 2.4 million years old…we have really ancient ancestors, we can no longer deny this.  We are not related to a mythical ‘Adam and Eve’ or to the mythical sons of Noah.

2.  Adam and Eve is a falsified claim of Christianity…they are just a Biblical myth. ***

This is going to cost the Christian community a big case of heartburn.  Because of Paul inventing ‘Original Sin’ in the New Testament and placing the blame on Adam and Eve’s fall from grace in the Garden of Eden.  ***There are additional falsified claims in Genesis.

Because of ‘Original Sin’ concept Christianity needs the first couple…badly.  The whole of the need for Jesus was Paul saying that through Adam and Eve’s disobedience and downfall, sin passed down to all of mankind, Jesus had to provide a blood-sacrifice to expiate the sins we humans all have.  Think of this…a blood sacrifice to a god…how insane and silly is that?

Does any of this sound suspicious and slightly familiar?  Didn’t the old civilizations in South America and the really old cultures in the Middle East, and elsewhere kill people as sacrifices to god or the god’s?  Blood sacrifices…like Jesus.

From Wikipedia:
“In Trinitarian Christian teaching, God became incarnate in Jesus Christ, sacrificing his first-born son to accomplish the reconciliation of God and humanity, which had separated itself from God through sin (see the concept of original sin). According to a view that has featured prominently in Western theology since early in the 2nd millennium, God’s justice required an atonement for sin from humanity if human beings were to be restored to their place in creation and saved from damnation. However, God knew limited human beings could not make sufficient atonement, for humanity’s offense to God was infinite, so God created a covenant with Abraham, which he fulfilled when he sent his only Son to become the sacrifice for the broken covenant. In Christian theology, this sacrifice replaced the insufficient animal sacrifice of the Old Covenant; Christ the “Lamb of God” replaced the lambs’ sacrifice of the ancient Korban Todah (the Rite of Thanksgiving), chief of which is the Passover in the Mosaic Law.

3.  The need for Jesus as a blood sacrifice for ‘Original Sin’ is falsified by the non-existence of Adam and Eve.

Most archaeologists and earth scientists have known for years that there was never any evidence of the Hebrews (a million + strong) living in and subsequently leaving Egypt.  Repeated surveys of the Sinai desert by the best scientists in their field has never found the slightest bit of evidence for the Hebrew passage and their camping out for 40 years. There are no Egyptian records or writings supporting the myth of half or more of their population leaving suddenly. This is a non-event…it has no scientific attestation at all.

4.  The truth of the Exodus and the supernatural events that follow in the myth has been falsified by over a hundred years of searching for the slightest evidence…and not finding any.

In the thousands of years of human history, magical or supernatural explanations of phenomena have never once been proved…and natural explanations have ALWAYS worked. Never the other way round.

There is more to all of this, but it’s past my bedtime. 🙂

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleontology
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/elsi/forensics.shtml
http://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/BioBookDNAMOLGEN.html
https://genographic.nationalgeographic.com/genographic/lan/en/atlas.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeology
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_evolution
http://humanorigins.si.edu/
http://www.becominghuman.org/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/prehistoric_life/human/human_evolution/index.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sacrifice#Judaism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_violence.

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There Was No Moment of Creation

One of the many problems modern science poses for Christianity is the question of how to understand original sin. The traditional teaching, which holds that Adam and Eve were the only humans on the planet when they were created on day six of Creation Week, that the ground was cursed and they were expelled from Eden as a result of a specific sin they committed, and that this corrupted state was in some way passed down to all future human beings, is no longer tenable. A variety of lines of evidence make it clear that the human population has always numbered in the thousands and certainly never dipped down to two. Moreover, evolution makes clear that humans arose through eons of natural selection. There was no moment of creation, and there was no state of primordial perfection for them to sully. Jason Rosenhouse, The Evolution Blog http://scienceblogs.com/evolutionblog/2011/09/what_does_original_sin_mean_in.php?utm_source=nytwidget
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Did a Divine Jesus Really Exist or Was He Just Human

The following list is of the historians and writers who lived in the same area and within Christ’s alleged lifetime or within a hundred years after his death

Apollonius         Persius
Appian                Petronius
Arrian                 Phaedrus
Aulus Gellius    Philo-Judaeus
Columella           Phlegon
Damis                  Pliny the Elder
Dio Chrysostom     Pliny the Younger
Dion Pruseus       Plutarch
Epictetus              Pompon Mela
Favorinus             Ptolemy
Florus Lucius       Quintilian
Hermogones         Quintius Curtius
Josephus                Seneca
Justus of Tiberius     Silius Italicus
Juvenal                    Statius
Lucanus                   Suetonius
Lucian                      Tacitus
Lysias                       Theon of Smyran
Martial                     Valerius Flaccus
Paterculus              Valerius Maximus
Pausanias

However, aside from two passages in the works of a Jewish writer mentioned above and two heavily disputed passages in the works of Roman writers, there just isn’t any contemporary–or soon after his death, mention of Jesus Christ in the writing of scholars and historians.

Philo (20 BC-50 AD) was born before the beginning of the Christian era, and lived well after the reputed death of Christ.

Philo was the one who developed the doctrine of the Logos, or Word, and although this Word incarnate (Jesus himself) supposedly dwelt in that land, and in the presence of multitudes he revealed himself and demonstrated his divine powers–Philo apparently never knew it.

His writings include an account of the Jews covering the entire time that Christ was said to exist on earth.  He lived in or near Jerusalem when Christ was supposedly born and when the Herod massacre occurred. Philo was there when Christ made his triumphal entry into Jerusalem; he was there when the crucifixion and reputed earthquake, supernatural darkness, and the resurrection of the dead zombies in the graveyard took place. – He never wrote about it.

Had these events really taken place you would think the word would spread all over the Middle East and Mediterranean world which at the time was teaming with religious fervor and many many stories going around about a Messiah.  Here was a man who would be the Messiah, who raised the dead and cured incurable diseases and yet no one wrote of him.

Justus of Tiberius was a Jewish author and historian who lived in the second half of the 1st century AD and was a native of Christ’s own country, Galilee. He wrote a history covering this time of Christ’s reputed existence. Sadly the original work has perished, but Photius, a Christian scholar and critic of the ninth century who was acquainted with it says: “He (Justus) makes not the least mention of the appearances of Christ, of what things happened to him, or of the wonderful works that he did” (Photius’ Bibliotheca, code 33).

“Josephus:  (37 – c.100 AD) Late in the first century, Josephus wrote his celebrated work, “The Antiquities of the Jews”, giving a history of his race from the earliest ages down to his own time. Modern versions of this work contain the following passage:

“‘Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works; a teacher of such men as received the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was (the) Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. (Book XVIII, Chapter iii, Section 3)

For sixteen hundred years or so Christians have been citing this passage as a testimonial, to the historical existence, and the divine character of Jesus Christ. However most all Biblical scholars agree that the sentence is probably a pious forgery written by a scribe or zealous Christian many years after Josephus.

Consider:

“Its brevity disproves its authenticity. Josephus’ work is voluminous and exhaustive. It comprises twenty books. Whole pages are devoted to petty robbers and obscure seditious leaders. Nearly forty chapters are devoted to the life of a single king. Yet this remarkable being, the greatest product of his race, a being of whom the prophets foretold ten thousand wonderful things, a being greater than any earthly king, is dismissed with a dozen lines.”– The Christ, John E. Remsburg, reprinted by Prometheus Books, New York, 1994, pages 171-3.

I’m divided on this…the man may have existed, but I really doubt he was the Messiah or divine in any way.  Just myths like the Old Testament.  Too much stuff just doesn’t add up…the whole story is incoherent and flawed…not a sign of a God inspired work.

“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

 YEAH!!!…I just heard that bastard  Osama bin Laden is dead 
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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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Some Muslims Reject Allah

Look around…talk to people…even some Muslims are rejecting the lies of religion

We must do all we can to support and help spread atheism wherever and whenever we can

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Yet Another Muslim Bombing

It seems that Sweden is very quickly being taken over by Muslims, and the rest of the western world should be taking notes and preparing themselves, as we are in a 400 year old war with Islam and most people don’t even know it.

Excerpt from a story by Fjordman in Europe News
“On the 11^th of December 2010, the first-ever suicide bombing in Scandinavia occurred when Taimour Abdulwahab, an Iraqi-born Muslim and Swedish citizen with a wife and children in Luton, Britain, was carrying explosives and mistakenly set off an explosion near a busy Christmas shopping street in Stockholm just before he could murder dozens of people.”

Here was a man who had a good life, a good family and one would think every reason in the world to be satisfied and live in peace.  But, his mind was contaminated with a terrible religious virus called “Islam”.  This virus causes its victims to do crazy things like takeover airplanes and fly them into occupied buildings, strap bombs to their bodies and kill innocent men, women, and children, kill (or try to) cartoonists for drawing a likeness of Muhammad, kill their women who talk to a single Christian, or in some way besmirch the family “honor”.

“Prohibiting all forms of criticism or mockery of Islam and its Prophet is an essential part of Sharia, Islamic religious law. According to Islamic historical sources, individuals such as the poetess Asma bint Marwan were killed by the followers of Muhammad for having done nothing other than mocking Islam. This then became a part of the Sunna, the personal example of Muhammad and his companions, which is the most authoritative source of Islamic law next to the Koran itself. It was for the same reason that Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam in 2004. Yes, mainstream, traditional Islam today stipulates that those who mock Islam deserve to be murdered. No other major religion on this planet dictates anything similar.” My emphasis. This alone is legal reason to outlaw Islam.

“If a single non-Muslim says anything critical about Islam, his entire community can in principle be punished for this. Basically, this means that if one cartoonist in Germany, the USA or Denmark makes a cartoon mocking Muhammad, this could potentially trigger Jihadist terrorist attacks against his entire country for “waging a war against Islam,” because his “tribe” is held collectively responsible for his actions. This was exactly the Islamic logic behind Taimour Abdulwahab’s terror attack in Stockholm. There is no such thing as an individual in this culture; the tribe is everything. Muslims, being good hypocrites, are always the first following an Islamic terrorist attack to state that all Muslims should not be punished for the actions of a few, yet this is precisely what their own laws prescribe for non-Muslims.” My emphasis. This shows how treacherous the Islamic religion is…they cannot to be trusted under any circumstance.

This just in (late 12-31-10)…Muslims set off bomb outside a church in Egypt, killing at least 11 Christians of the Copt sect. Watch for details on your local news on New Year’s Day…so sad.

“Totalitarianism (or totalitarian rule) is a political system where the state, usually under the control of a single political person, faction, or class, recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible.

Don’t be fooled by your local Muslims talk of Islam being a religion of peace…it is not…it wants to rule our world and it is working tirelessly to that end.
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God, Homosexuality…and Nazi’s?

This week, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a landmark report on anti-gay defamation. The SPLC certified several new hate groups, including well-known organizations, such as The Family Research Council (FRC) and The American Family Association (AFA).  Here: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/wayne-besen/hate-groups-waiting-in-th_b_787642.html

Now this article on the November 30^th Huffington Post, by author Wayne Besen, reports that last February the Family Research Council’s spokesman Peter Sprigg appearing on MSNBC’s, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and said that we should outlaw gay behavior.

He also reports that Brian Fischer, a spokesman for the American Family Association, said on their blog that, “homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and 6 million dead Jews.”

Now I thought that over the last 20 or 25 years we as a country, and a people, had grown up and passed the point where we were killing or throwing in jail those people who happened to be born or raised in such a manner that they were attracted to people of their own sex.  All the behavioral science seems to point to homosexual behavior as being a trait that people cannot control…in other words its ingrained in their psyche and there is really not much they can do about it.

When you realize that about 5 to 10 percent of the world’s population is homosexual you can see how many humans some of the religious groups are talking about putting to death or in prison…and that’s just unacceptable.  The fundagelicals in America keep denying the obvious truth (of this, and many, many other things) and keep insisting that homosexuality is a conscious choice…that heterosexual people just wake up one day and they are suddenly gay. Once again they are showing how retarded they and their religion is.

Do we really want to live in a world that is controlled by religious revelation?  Much of mankind actually went through this in the European Dark and Middle Ages and the results were not pretty.  Religion has shown over and over again that it is antithetical to intellectual freedom and a life affirming view of humanity if it is in control.  Although today’s Western Christianity is fairly tame and socially useful in our world, it is because secular forces and secular government keep it in its place.  It is not allowed to fully practice what it teaches…although many of today’s politicians are trying to get around this.

All of the religious folk who rail against homosexuality use the verses in Leviticus to show that “God” is dead set against the practice.  What they forget to include is that Leviticus and other parts of the Bible also says that mankind must not shave their beard, mix crops in a field, mix two fabrics together, eat shellfish, curse your mother or father, commit adultery, curse God (blaspheme), work on the Sabbath, they may buy, keep, and pass slaves on to your offspring, and many other things that called for the trespassers death, or at the very least cutting you off from your clan.

Most Christians now realize that these “Laws” from Leviticus are pretty silly and no longer consider most of them to be binding…even though Jesus said that he did not come to change the old “Laws,” but they hang on tenaciously to Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13  They basically want the homosexuals gone…dead as it were.

The quote from Brian Fischer of the American Family Association is just mind-bending.  I don’t even know what the man is talking about. Have you ever heard of anybody tying homosexuality or homosexuals in the military to being a cause of Hitler’s starting the second world war, killing 6 million Jews and being ultimately responsible for over 50 million deaths? This is brainless and evil thinking, and makes no real-world sense at all.

Evangelical fundamentalist (fundagelical) religion seems to be eating the brains of their poor followers…they can’t understand that the world, humanity, and science is leaving them behind…I don’t hold out much hope for them.
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Atheists are Smart :-)

A new Pew Forum poll on religion in America has found that Atheists/agnostics, Jews, and Mormons…in that order…know the most about religion. We out-did Protestants and Roman Catholics in knowledge about major religions and the basic knowledge and tenets of their own religion.

Forty five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion becomes the actual body and blood of Jesus. Catholics call it transubstantiation.  If this were a real phenomenon it would be magic.  We should all know by now…there is no magic…never was.

Less than fifty percent of Protestants knew that the Catholic priest and theologian, Martin Luther, was the person who started the Protestants Reformation which led to their own faith.

You can read all about it HERE

They could have just asked me or the hundreds (maybe thousands) of other atheists who have sites on the internet and we could have told them this. Although I do get many very smart religious folks commenting here, the majority do not know much about their own religions.  Most Christians who reply are using very outdated apologetics; the same refuted, many times over, answers put forth as proofs of their sects.
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