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 Justice Of God…The Mercy Of Christ

“All that the human race has suffered in war and want, in pestilence and famine, in fire and flood, — all the pangs and pains of every disease and every death — all this is as nothing compared with the agonies to be endured by one lost soul. This is the consolation of the Christian religion. This is the justice of God — the mercy of Christ.

This frightful dogma, this infinite lie, made me the implacable enemy of Christianity. The truth is that this belief in eternal pain has been the real persecutor. It founded the Inquisition, forged the chains, and furnished the fagots. It has darkened the lives of many millions. It made the cradle as terrible as the coffin. It enslaved nations and shed the blood of countless thousands. It sacrificed the wisest, the bravest and the best. It subverted the idea of justice, drove mercy from the heart, changed men to fiends and banished reason from the brain.

Like a venomous serpent it crawls and coils and hisses in every orthodox creed. It makes man an eternal victim and God an eternal fiend. It is the one infinite horror. Every church in which it is taught is a public curse. Every preacher who teaches it is an enemy of mankind.

Below this Christian dogma, savagery cannot go. It is the infinite of malice, hatred, and revenge.”
Robert Green Ingersoll
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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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The Theory of Everything

I wonder if those creationists who keep trying to get local school boards to treat the Theory of Evolution as “just a theory” and require equal time for Christian dogma disguised as “scientific creationism” or “Intelligent Design” also want to teach alternate “theories” of atomic theory, cell theory germ theory, theory of relativity, Asymptotic theory, Catastrophe theory, Chaos theory, Coding theory, Deformation theory, Dimension theory, Field theory, Game theory, Graph theory, Group theory, gravitation theory, Homology theory, Homotopy theory, K-theory, Knot theory, L-theory, Lie theory, Matrix theory, Model theory, Morse theory, Music theory, Number theory, Obstruction theory, Perturbation theory, Potential theory, Probability theory, Ring theory, Set theory, Shape theory, Spectral theory, Stability theory, String theory, Stable theory, etc., etc..

Surely the theory of evolution is not the only one that needs sanctification and certification by the Christian right’s Mutawa’een.

The Christian right wants to assure their cultural reproduction and defend and disseminate their beliefs and lifestyle, and they realize that the teaching of evolution and having their children learn the truths of science can neutralize their efforts.  They either welcome a theological control of life on earth, or they can’t, or don’t want to, think things through.

There is prodigious effort and money behind the religious right, and they are continually plotting the demise of democracy and secularism. They are evil.

Quote of the day

“We are always making God our accomplice so that we may legalize our own inequities. Every successful massacre is consecrated by a Te Deum, and the clergy have never been wanting in benedictions for any victorious enormity.” Henri Frédéric Amiel

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Is The Christian Trinity Real?

Hi daymore,

In response to your Feb. 28, 2008 reply:
I am posting a reply to you in a regular column. I hope you don’t mind.

You write to my question of the trinity: “About trinity I can’t explain it to you. I can’t explain how telepathy works either. But I know it works. I live with many other mystries in life. Do you have answers to all questions about life that you live with, like how the food that you eat becomes blood and marrow? If you decide to eat only after you could explain fully how metabolism works, I bet you’ll never be able to eat.”

I don’t need explanation for digestion; that has been explained very adequately by doctors. Nor for telepathy, as I swear my wife can read my mind. The Trinity has not been.

You are basically saying to me that the Trinity is a mystery and could not be explained to me. I don’t care for the mumbo-jumbo I have been given as an answer to this question by you and others… I mean that in a nice way…perhaps I might explain it to you. 🙂

Matt. 26:39, “Going a little farther he [Jesus Christ] fell on his face and prayed, ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

If the Father and the Son were not distinct individuals, such a prayer would have been meaningless. Jesus would have been praying to himself, and his will would of necessity have been the Father’s will.)

John 8:17, 18, “[Jesus answered the Jewish Pharisees:] In your law it is written that the testimony of two men is true; I bear witness to myself, and the Father who sent me bears witness to me.”

So, Jesus definitely spoke of himself as being an individual separate and distinct from the Father.

Acts 7:55, 56 reports that Stephen was given a vision of heaven in which he saw “Jesus standing at God’s right hand.”

John 14:28, “[Jesus said:] If you loved me, you would have rejoiced, because I go to the Father; for the Father is greater than I.”

Matthew 27:54, But the army officer and those with him watching over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake and the things happening, grew very much afraid, saying: “Certainly this was God’s Son.”

The fact is, the word “trinity” does not even once occur in the Holy Bible. Nor are such expressions as “one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” or “one substance with the Father,” found in the Bible. To the contrary, the Bible speaks of Christ as “the beginning of the creation by God,” and says, “The head of the Christ is God.” (Rev. 3:14; 1 Cor. 11:3) Thus, the New Catholic Encyclopedia says of the Trinity: “It is not, as already seen, directly and immediately the word of God.”-Volume 14, page 304.

The New Catholic Encyclopedia also states: “The formulation ‘one God in three Persons’ was not solidly established, certainly not fully assimilated into Christian life and its profession of faith, prior to the end of the 4th century. But it is precisely this formulation that has first claim to the title the Trinitarian dogma. Among the Apostolic Fathers, there had been nothing even remotely approaching such a mentality or perspective.”-(1967), Vol. XIV, p. 299.

The New Encyclopædia Britannica says: “Neither the word Trinity, nor the explicit doctrine as such, appears in the New Testament, nor did Jesus and his followers intend to contradict the Shema in the Old Testament: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord’ (Deut. 6:4). . . . The doctrine developed gradually over several centuries and through many controversies. . . . By the end of the 4th century . . . the doctrine of the Trinity took substantially the form it has maintained ever since.”-(1976), Micropædia, Vol. X, p. 126.

The Encyclopedia Americana says: “Christianity derived from Judaism, and Judaism was strictly Unitarian [believing that God is one person]. The road that led from Jerusalem to Nicea was scarcely a straight one. Fourth century Trinitarianism did not reflect accurately early Christian teaching regarding the nature of God; it was, on the contrary, a deviation from this teaching.”-(1956), Vol. XXVII, p. 294L.

My interpretation of all of the above is that there is no “Trinity,” it is all made up; and men, specifically Early Catholic hierarchy, were the makeupees. This was done in the 4th. century AD, is not mentioned in either testament…I doubt it’s true.

Now perhaps you could try again. There are too many discrepancies going on in that Bible, or at least people seem to keep making them up.

Also, where in the Bible does it mention “rapture?” But, that’s for another time.

New Intelligent Design…BaaaD Science

“We often refuse to accept an idea merely because the tone of voice in which it has been expressed is unsympathetic to us.” Nietzsche

The creationist and Intelligent Design pushers continue their desperate fight against science and rationalism. The recent sample I came across is filled with doublespeak and lies disguised as truths. It will be available the end of this month from Tate Publishing Co.There will three books in the series and they carve up Evolution and call it the ‘old physics of cause and effect.’ Seemingly aimed at the High School market, the excerpts I read made me more confused than I already am:)

Chapter 3 Book 1 The Quest for Right
The Agency of Revitalization

“The fact-finding investigation concentrates on the importance of the earth’s inner heat and reveals the hitherto unknown mechanism of said heat. The surprise findings, taken from the pages of the Bible, tighten the reins on those theorists who permitted their imaginations to slip past the boundaries of true science, beyond the pale of investigation. The vain assertions of geologists are pitted against classical physics, the old physics of cause and effect, and the scientific record of creation, the Bible.”

And this, from Chapter 4 Book 3
Filing Fictions Away
” The outlined premises, based on the dictates of classical physics, justify the disposition that the scientific record of creation, heretofore considered religious dogma by obstructionists and not worthy of scientific regard, remains intact as a responsible and verifiable truth; the evidence upholds the fact that the moon was formed within a 24-hour period only 6000 years ago. The conceptional errors of Baldwin are annulled by the bona fide truths presented by the investigation.”

Now of course I have only read excerpts from the authors page, and I may be wrong, but it seems to me that he is saying that magic is the new science. This is going to screw up more teen-age brains than all the pot in California.