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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Life is an Amazing Thing

Life is an amazing thing. This world of ours was living and breathing for billions of years before it gave birth to us humans. Our struggle has been going on for a few million years and it seems that in the last century or so we have been winning the struggle, but loosing the earth.  There are now so many of us demanding part of the earth’s resources that they will run out and our grand or great grandchildren will be much poorer than us.  There are simply too many of us and its showing up in many ways…none of them good.

Be that as it may, we still love our family members and are truly distressed when they die.  Death is never welcomed except perhaps by those in extreme pain from a disease such as Cancer. One of my family members passed away today at 2 pm and it saddened many, many people…Son and daughter, husband and brother, and all the in-laws.  Sheryl was a mother to 2, grandmother to 5, sister to 1, wife to one great guy, and friend to many.  She was my son-in-laws mother, and a friend to me and my wife and the rest of our (big) family.  We all truly loved her and will sorely miss her at all the birthday parties, anniversaries, and family get-togethers.  She was felled by a brain aneurism one sunny day and lived on in the hospital for many days fighting for her life, struggling valiantly, but in the end she lost the battle and we are all diminished by her way-to-young death.  She was 62 and way strong, but not strong enough to defeat that tiny little leak of a blood vessel in her brain.

We already miss her terribly…..
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The God of the Hebrews

The God of the Hebrews

“Ye shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind; Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woolen come upon thee” Leviticus 19:19

So said the Lord God Jehovah.  This is the God of the Hebrews speaking, and He’s damn serious about interfering with their lives and customs. This is the “Word of God” writ large. This is the God who created the universe, our world, and US, for God’s sake…He doesn’t want men experimenting and finding out that by doing certain things with their animals and food gardens they can improve their lives; get more milk and meat perhaps and improve their crops resistance to pests or drought and yield more.

Why would a magical and supernatural sky God say such a thing to a poor humble farmer and expect them to honor such an order?  Is this how the Hebrew God amuses Him/Her self?  What possible advantage could be had by not mixing some fabrics together? This is the God who kept telling the Jews to go and massacre men, women, children, babies, and animals for the sin of not believing in Him.  You know…the genocidal God.

And why do modern day Christians and Jews happily go about today with mixed fabric clothing and eat beef, chicken, pork, and other foods that have been genetically modified for a thousand years?  Did God give in at some time in the past and allow such advances that man could work on his own?

Did any of the Leviticus laws make much sense?  Oh sure, the Christians say that the death of Jesus’ made the Old Testament laws not applicable to us anymore…yet they hold on to the ones they want to keep, like homosexuality.

Why didn’t this all-seeing, all-knowing God make laws prohibiting Slavery, rape, pedophilia, treating women as third class humans, murder for religious reasons?  You know…some really useful laws that would benefit these poor souls and help them rise from the grinding poverty that all people suffered in those times.

Come to think of it, why was this God absent for the nearly two hundred thousand years that modern humans have been populating this earth?  And then why on earth pick on a scraggly small tribe of dirt poor Middle Eastern goat herders???

The Biblical stories when taken apart piece by piece make no sense whatsoever. There is no real God there, only dreams and campfire stories of goat herders.
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Was Moses a Real Person

A few wandering families — poor, wretched, without education, art or power; descendants of those who had been enslaved for four hundred years; ignorant as the inhabitants of Central Africa, had just escaped from their masters to the desert of Sinai.

Their leader was Moses, a man who had been raised in the family of Pharaoh and had been taught the law and mythology of Egypt. For the purpose of controlling his followers he pretended that he was instructed and assisted by Jehovah, the God of these wanderers.

Everything that happened was attributed to the interference of this God. Moses declared that he met this God face to face; that on Sinai’s top from the hands of this God he had received the tables of stone on which, by the finger of this God, the Ten Commandments had been written, and that, in addition to this, Jehovah had made known the sacrifices and ceremonies that were pleasing to him and the laws by which the people should be governed.

In this way the Jewish religion and the Mosaic Code were established.

It is now claimed that this religion and these laws were and are revealed and established for all mankind.

At that time these wanderers had no commerce with other nations, they had no written language, they could neither read nor write. They had no means by which they could make this revelation known to other nations, and so it remained buried in the jargon of a few ignorant, impoverished and unknown tribes for more than two thousand years.

Many centuries after Moses, the leader, was dead — many centuries after all his followers had passed away — the Pentateuch was written, the work of many writers, and to give it force and authority it was claimed that Moses was the author.

We now know that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses.

Towns are mentioned that were not in existence when Moses lived.

Money, not coined until centuries after his death, is mentioned.

So, many of the laws were not applicable to wanderers on the desert — laws about agriculture, about the sacrifice of oxen, sheep and doves, about the weaving of cloth, about ornaments of gold and silver, about the cultivation of land, about harvest, about the threshing of grain, about houses and temples, about cities of refuge, and about many other subjects of no possible application to a few starving wanderers over the sands and rocks.

It is now not only admitted by intelligent and honest theologians that Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch, but they all admit that no one knows who the authors were, or who wrote any one of these books, or a chapter or a line. We know that the books were not written in the same generation; that they were not all written by one person; that they are filled with mistakes and contradictions.

It is also admitted that Joshua did not write the book that bears his name, because it refers to events that did not happen until long after his death.

No one knows, or pretends to know, the author of Judges; all we know is that it was written centuries after all the judges had ceased to exist. No one knows the author of Ruth, nor of First and Second Samuel; all we know is that Samuel did not write the books that bear his name. In the 25th chapter of First Samuel is an account of the raising of Samuel by the Witch of Endor.

No one knows the author of First and Second Kings or First and Second Chronicles; all we know is that these books are of no value.

We know that the Psalms were not written by David. In the Psalms the Captivity is spoken of, and that did not happen until about five hundred years after David slept with his fathers.

We know that Solomon did not write the Proverbs or the Song; that Isaiah was not the author of the book that bears his name; that no one knows the author of Job, Ecclesiastes, or Esther, or of any book in the Old Testament, with the exception of Ezra.

We know that God is not mentioned or in any way referred to in the book of Esther. We know, too, that the book is cruel, absurd and impossible.

God is not mentioned in the Song of Solomon, the best book in the Old Testament.

And we know that Ecclesiastes was written by an unbeliever.

We know, too, that the Jews themselves had not decided as to what books were inspired — were authentic — until the second century after Christ.

We know that the idea of inspiration was of slow growth, and that the inspiration was determined by those who had certain ends to accomplish.

This was written in 1894 by Robert Ingersall in his book “About the Holy Bible”

The Bible and Neanderthals

A team of biologists led by Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany have concluded the first detailed analysis of the Neanderthal genetic sequence and determined that the Neanderthals did contribute to modern mans genes through interbreeding.  As many as 4% percent of modern humans in Europe, Asia and some other parts of the world have Neanderthals for distant relatives.

My question is how do you think this will affect the creation vs. evolution debates? The fact that “God’s People” have the blood of pre-humans that weren’t even thought of or explained in the Bible.  How does Christian apologetics reconcile an incredibly old (28,000 to +350,000 year old) race of people that could probably talk, as they had the requisite physiological parts, and we know they did make tools and bury their dead with personal items and flowers, and may have made jewelry, contributing to our gene pool.

So far it looks like the intermixing occurred in the Middle East about 50,000 to 80,000 years ago or maybe longer.  No indication yet of any mixing in Europe where modern humans entered about 45,000 years ago.  There is also no sign of mixing in any of Africa’s indigenous peoples. It is truly amazing what DNA science can tell us, don’t you think?

Someone locally ask me if I thought that the Neanderthal might be the Nephilim mentioned in the Bible and I told him I didn’t think so as the Neanderthals were short (5’2” to 5’ 4”) in stature.

Could this be the people that Cain drew his wife from?  No no no, just being silly, as we all know that Cain wasn’t real, and the last Neanderthal died out about 30,000 years ago.   🙂

Quote of the day

If we go back to the beginning, we shall find that ignorance and fear created the gods; that fancy, enthusiasm, or deceit adorned them; that weakness worships them; that credulity preserves them and that custom, respect and tyranny support them in order to make the blindness of men serve their own interests. If the ignorance of nature gave birth to gods, the knowledge of nature is calculated to destroy them.  Baron D’Holbach

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No Visible Means of Scientific Support

Quote of the day

“But, Gods, gods, angels, demons, devil, heaven, hell, people formed from dust or ribs, the dead rising, water walking, transformation of water into an alcohol, millions of animal species on a boat, etc., etc., defies mans experience, observations and understanding of natural law. It has no visible means of scientific support.  I am not skeptical about it having occurred; I reject it entirely. I am a person who respects the laws of the natural universe and whose thinking is grounded in reality.
Please don’t call me a religious skeptic.  To quote Katherine Hepburn: “I am an atheist and that’s it.” The atheist Camel Chronicles, Dromedary Hump, BookSurge Publishing, 2009

What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. – Christopher Hitchens

Ethiopian Gods

Quote of the day

The Ethiopians say that their gods are flat-nosed and black, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw, and could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own. Xenophanes

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Not only is there no god, but try getting a plumber on weekends. – Woody Allen

O Lord Our God, Help Us Tear Their Soldiers To Bloody Shreds

Quote of the day

“O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…” The War Prayer—Mark Twain

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This Planet is an Experiment

Quote of the day

“You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That’s what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen’s wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can’t say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can’t the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn’t want Lot’s wife to look back, why didn’t he make her obedient, so she’d do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn’t made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would’ve listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.”  Contact by Carl Sagan,  pp 285

The Biblical God IS a sloppy manufacturer, think of our body and the adult playground being situated next to the toxic waste dump, and having to eat and breath through the same tube.  If one thinks hard and observes the problem with acuity, you can understand that evolution was our architect…not some mythical invisible god.

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Let Me Get This Straight…

Quote of the day

So let me get this straight, the unending, all-powerful force of creation that hand-made the universe funneled himself into the body of a human fetus and then teleported the fetus into the uterus of a married virgin. He then spent 30 years on earth walking around doing basically nothing and then one day rearranged reality to set in motion events that would lead to his own death…effectively committing suicide. He does this because his death will, for some or other reason, clear humanity’s sin tally (which he, himself is keeping up in heaven). And then after his plans to get himself killed fall into place, he looks around and asks himself why he has abandoned himself? Is that the basic gist of it?  Hank Guerin

The Koran says that heresy and blasphemy are punishable by Death.

Thank God for atheism…

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