Who Wrote The Bible

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.

Robert G. Ingersoll, 1894

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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 Times Are Changing

Scientists say survival of the Kindest…not the Fittest.
Scientists at UC Berkeley are saying that we humans are not necessarily hardwired to be selfish, but kind and compassionate, and they have a growing body of evidence to back it up…we are evolving

 Fundamentalists Starting To Agree With Me…No Adam and Eve
“Let’s go back to the beginning — all the way to Adam and Eve, and to the question: Did they exist, and did all of humanity descend from that single pair?

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.””

Hey, doesn’t the Venema guy have some connection to the BioLogos Christian blog?

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Adam and Eve Are Dead…Finally

Well actually they never existed…and the proof is available for all to see.

Christian scholar Dennis R. Venema is the BioLogos senior fellow for science and the biology chairman at Trinity Western University.  He writes that the chimp genome displays “near identity” with the human genome as detailed by (Francis) Collins’s team.  The detailed analysis involves sequences of genes and the makeup of individual genes, but especially important are the locations of “pseudogenes” that are seemingly no longer active. The cumulative evidence, Venema concludes, shows that “humans are not biologically independent, de novo creations, but share common ancestry” with prior primate species.””

Atheist-turned-Christian Francis S. Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a federally funded organization. Collins’s wrote a 2006 bestseller, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, where he said there are scientific indications that anatomically modern humans emerged from primate ancestors perhaps 100,000 (currant science says 200,000) years ago, long before the apparent Genesis time frame, and that they originated within a population that numbered something like 10,000, not two individuals. Far removed from the traditional belief that God specially created man and woman in the Garden of Eden, and they were biologically different from all other creatures alive at the time.

In his recent (2011) pro-evolution book, The Language of Science and Faith, Collins and co-author Karl W. Giberson step up matters, announcing that “unfortunately” the concepts of Adam and Eve as the literal first couple and the ancestors of all humans simply “do not fit the evidence.”

The story of Adam and Eve in Genesis has long been subjected to scientific challenges, but “there was a lot of wiggle room in the past. The human genome sequencing took that wiggle room away” said Randall Isaac, executive director of the American Scientific Affiliation.  DNA science is totally changing what many believed about human beginnings.

Will the Adam and Eve question become a groundbreaking science-vs.-religion dispute, in the 21st-century? The modern day equivalent of the once disturbing argument about whether the Sun orbits the earth or vice-versa?  The possibility is there: the emerging science could be seen to challenge what Genesis records about the creation of humanity and also the species’ unique status of being created in the “image of God,” Christian doctrine on original sin and the Fall, the genealogy of Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and, perhaps most significantly, Paul’s seminal teaching that links a historical Adam with redemption through Christ.

The fall-out from the non-historicity of the Biblical Adam and Eve will be huge.  Many people in the earth sciences have known for some time that the Genesis stories are just myth, the science behind the notion is just too darn strong to endlessly ignore.

South Carolina pastor Richard Phillips, chair of the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology worries, “Can the Bible’s theology be true if the historical events on which the theology is based are false?” If science trumps Scripture, what does this mean for the virgin birth of Jesus, or his miracles, or his resurrection? “The hermeneutics behind theistic evolution are a Trojan horse that, once inside our gates, must cause the entire fortress of Christian belief to fall.”

All these years Christianity has been working under the assumption that Genesis is true and that all humans who lived in the past, and are alive today, are descendents of Adam and Eve.  The whole dogma of original sin and the blood sacrifice of Jesus to redeem humanities sin goes out the door.  Combine the fact that DNA, and other evidence, says that Adam and Eve did not exist…with other revelations that science is making about the Biblical myths, and I predict that Christianity is facing a real crisis of belief.  
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Free Will Doesn’t Cut It

“When people are trying to make a decision, not just about what’s real but about how to act on it, denying us relevant information does not make us more free. It makes us less free. In every area of life other than religion, this is clearly understood.  It’s the foundation of the principle of informed consent: when relevant information is denied us, our consent is impaired at best, and negated at worst. Having the best possible information about reality is essential to making good decisions about how to act in that reality.”  Greta Christina

So the Free-Will argument doesn’t cut it. The whole idea that if we have real factual evidence of God we wouldn’t be able to choose any other path…is a bogus argument promulgated by Christian apologists. Think back to your own Christian religious manual. If the book of Genesis and Exodus was true, the people following Moses through the desert for forty years supposedly had proof positive of the reality of Yahweh, but they went off and made golden statues, and worshipped them, and forgot all about what they were told and supposedly saw firsthand.  The very people (and there was reputedly a million or more of them) who were actually closest to this will-o’-wisp and whose leader talked to Him face to face, just blew Him off after a few days.

So we have a million people who “traveled with God”, supposedly saw His miracles, and then turned their back on him in a New York minute…how interesting/perplexing is that?

This is just one of the dumbfounding pieces of foolishness out of hundreds, maybe thousands, of bits that don’t add up to a rational religion.  Adding them all together proves it is a false religion…a man-made con.
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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”

What I Learned in Bible School

In very late 2006 or very early 2007 some friends of mine convinced me that I should take a Bible study.  As my wife had within the previous few years took on the mantle of a professing Christian, the friends intimated that my following in her steps would be good for me and for my wife.  Having long been at least agnostic, and leaning very heavily towards atheism, I told them several times that they would probably be wasting theirs and my time.  Well they didn’t listen and they finally wore down my resistance.

I would meet with them once a week for what was supposed to be a 1 hour study. Inevitably that 1 hour stretched into 2 or 3 hours.  There was not one page of their study material that I did not question or have some legitimate objection too.  I was not trying to be difficult or mean to them—they were friends after all—but what they were saying and the stuff from the Bible just made no sense to me.  I was excited because I was finally laying out and writing down what was heretofore just a vague feeling or sense.  I was getting organized and I researched and researched everything, I was learning about the Christian history and its dogma…and it did not bode well for the Christians.  I started this blog in November of 2007 to try to keep some track of what I was learning.

I learned that the earth, sky, waters, animals, plants, and the human race are not roughly 6,000 years old. There is just too much conclusive evidence that this is not true

I learned that there was no Adam and Eve (4000+- BC) as portrayed in the Bible. There are thousands of anatomically modern skeletons and hundreds of thousands of human bones that go back hundreds of thousands of years.  There is no doubt, at all, that modern humanity did NOT begin 6000 years ago.  Then there are the tens of thousands of bones of human type species (Homo-erectus, Homo-habilis, Homo-neanderthal, etc.)  that did not make it through to our times, and they made and used tools and fire and there is some evidence of art.  They walked upright and didn’t live in trees and surely they were our long lost cousins.  I also learned that All of humanity alive today has their ultimate roots in Africa.  The fact that there was no Adam and Eve has tremendous consequences down the road.

I learned that there was never a whole earth covering flood (2350+- BC) that destroyed all of mankind except for a mythical man, his wife and three sons and their wives.  The evidence against the flood has been known since the 1700’s and keeps getting stronger as the years go by.  I learned that people keep searching this one mountain in modern day Turkey for remains of Noah’s Ark in vain and that at least 5 people have perpetrated a hoax on the public by announcing they have found the Ark. One person even doctored some wood planks at home to try to make them look old enough to have come from such a vessel.

I learned that there was never a Tower of Babel scenario (2000+- BC) such as told in Genesis.  We now know beyond a doubt that there were already millions of humans spread ALL over the earth at that time.  The Biblical story is nothing more than a fairy-tale, a crude attempt to try to explain the different languages that were spoken at the time the story was written.

I learned that Moses was probably a fictional character, as we know that the work attributed to him (The first five books of the Bible…the Pentateuch) was written by more than one person (3-4) and was probably written around 600-550 BC as a fictive work passed off as holy to bring the Hebrews tribes together again after the exile in Babylon.

I learned that the Exodus as described in the Bible is just a fairy tale. Archaeologists have been scouring the Sinai for over a hundred years looking for signs of at least a million people passing through and living on the land for 40 years…they have found Nothing!  They did find evidence of much earlier humans visiting and living there, but no Israelite signs from the era supported by the Bible story.  This also means that there was no exodus of Hebrews trodding across the Red/Reed Sea, no burning bush, no water spouting rock, no Ten Commandments carried down Mount Sinai, no golden calf, and no manna from heaven.

I learned that Joshua did NOT fight the battle of Jericho. Extensive archaeological work has determined that most all of the towns he was supposed to have squashed were already empty and in ruins at the time indicated in the Bible—both the 1400’s BC and the 1200’s BC theory. But then he was a fictional character anyway so it doesn’t matter.

I learned that Moses couldn’t have written at least some parts of Genesis because he wrote (probably in the 1400’s BC) that Abraham came from “Ur of the Chaldee’s” but we know from history that the Chaldeans did not control the city until around 600-500 BC.

Also Moses wrote that Abraham rescued Lot from the city of Dan which did not exist under that name at the time of Moses.  300 years later the town of Laish was captured by the tribe of Dan and renamed Dan.

I learned that God cannot defeat Iron Chariots used by us war-like humans.

I learned that God does not answer prayers…at least not of those with limb amputations.  Not once in all of recorded history has God ever restored some poor person’s amputated arms or legs and there have been many, many millions of people who have suffered this. You may even know someone from the armed forces who lost a limb or two in Iraq or Afghanistan…or Viet-Nam. The Bible tells us that Jesus raised the dead and threw out spirits or demons and healed some really bad diseases, and he himself was supposed to have risen from the dead, but no mention of limb re-growth anywhere.

I learned that God was really really mean. One mistake in the garden and He curses Adam and Eve and ALL the billions of their offspring to a miserable life with disease and famine and wars and all manner of horrible torture and deaths.  He orders the tribes of Israel to murder man, woman, and child of innocent villages or towns. He fire-bombs villages, He orders running thru pregnant women with swords, bashing babies skulls against the walls or rocks, beheading hundreds or thousands, tossing live people into the fires and who knows what else. And, the animal cruelty you don’t even want to know about.  All in all, the God as described in the Bible is a horrible figure…not God-like at all.  Of course we know that the entire God ordered killing was just the Hebrews way of conquering territory and booty.  There was no God to order all that murder and mayhem.

-end part 1

Warning: This video has a few cuss words…easily offended–don’t watch.

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Some Failed Prophecy of the Bible

Genesis 26:4
“I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and will give them all these lands, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed”
Here God tells Isaac that his descendants (Hebrews) will be as numerous as the stars. There are billions and billions of stars…obviously this never happened

Isaiah 17:1
“An oracle concerning Damascus: See, Damascus will no longer be a city but will become a heap of ruins.”
Carbon-14 dating at Tell Ramad, on the outskirts of Damascus, suggests that the site may have been occupied since the second half of the seventh millennium BC, possibly around 6300 BC. However, evidence of settlement in the wider Barada basin dating back to 9000 BC exists.  Damascus is known as the oldest continually inhabited city in the world.  There has never been a time when it was not a city since its founding.

Isaiah 19:4-5
“I will hand the Egyptians over to the power of a cruel master, and a fierce king will rule over them, declares the Lord, the LORD Almighty. The waters of the river will dry up, and the riverbed will be parched and dry.”
The river mentioned here is the Nile which has never in recorded history dried up.

Isaiah 52:1
“Awake, awake, O Zion, clothe yourself with strength. Put on your garments of splendor, O Jerusalem, the holy city. The uncircumcised and defiled will not enter you again.”
There are uncircumcised and defiled people living in Jerusalem; has been for over a thousand years.

Ezekiel 29:10-11
“therefore I am against you and against your streams, and I will make the land of Egypt a ruin and a desolate waste from Migdol to Aswan, as far as the border of Cush. No foot of man or animal will pass through it; no one will live there for forty years.”
Never in its long 6000+ year history has Egypt ever been uninhabited for forty years.

Ezekiel 30:10-11
“This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will put an end to the hordes of Egypt by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon. He and his army – the most ruthless of nations – will be brought in to destroy the land. They will draw their swords against Egypt and fill the land with the slain.”
Ezekiel predicts that Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon will conquer Egypt utterly destroying it, slaying and scattering its people. In 568 BCE Nebuchadnezzar tried to conquer Egypt and Egypt survived with no apparent damage. Aahmes ruled for another generation over a prosperous Egypt and lived to see Nebuchadnezzar die. The Egyptians were not/ever scattered or dispersed.

Matthew 16:28
“I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”

Matthew 23:36
“I tell you the truth, all this will come upon this generation.”

Matthew 24:34
“I tell you the truth, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened.”
Jesus states that all the signs marking the end of the world in Matthew 24 would be fulfilled before his generation ended. That generation ended 2000 years ago, and the world has not come to an end, neither has all those signs been fulfilled.  Since Jesus pronounced this lie many, many disciples of this possibly fictitious character have predicted the end times….and here we are still living and breathing.  Never fear though, the faithful keep track of the predicted signs and they have still not been fulfilled.

NCSE on Evolution and Genesis

“The general public knows very little about the theory of evolution beyond the knee-jerk reaction that it makes them uncomfortable. Most are unaware that the theory of evolution has had a long history, and many Christian — often creationist — scientists contributed significantly to the development of the theory of evolution. They are unaware that the entire worldview of unchanging, specially-created species, a creation event lasting six 24-hour days, and a 6000-year old earth had already been abandoned by even religious scientists in the years prior to 1859 — the publication date of Darwin’s Origin of Species.”

So far this is the earliest mention I have found of the flood story being untrue…twom

“Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) observed that the fossil shells in the Alps were frequently found in pairs and rows and stated, “if the shells had been carried by the muddy deluge they would have been mixed up, and not in the regular steps and layers, as we see them now in our time” (quoted in Gohau 1990: 34). Leonardo noted that the Alpine strata showed no evidence of a single violent episode of deposition (Newell 1985: 3&7), and in 1508 rejected the idea of a universal flood (Dean 1985: 95)…”

“Many hundreds of years before the publication of Darwin’s Origin, data that challenged the scientific authority of Genesis began to accumulate in at least four areas that impacted upon the theory of evolution. First, the processes that shape the earth were studied, and scriptural accounts were called into question. Second, exploration of new continents led to the discovery of new animals and plants, many more than were described in ancient texts. Third, it became possible to estimate the age of the earth. Fourth, the geologic column was explored and the fossils were systematically analyzed.”

“Long before Darwin dreamed of publishing Origin, devout Christians made fundamental discoveries concerning the classification of species, the formation and age of the earth, and the geologic column. In 1840 the publication of the book that would rock the belief systems of the Western world was nineteen years away from publication. Nevertheless, Genesis was no longer accepted as a scientific treatise, even by devout Christian scientists. The concept of fixed, specially-created species was laid to rest with the work of Linnaeus. Buffon and others estimated the age of the earth to be greatly in excess of 6000 years. Scientists like Cuvier and Buckland, who opposed the theory of evolution, saw the Genesis Flood as, at most, a regional event. The geologic column was in wide use, not because it supported evolution, but because it was useful in industry. A literal reading of Genesis was, to paraphrase Daniel 5:27, “weighed and found wanting,” and like any scientific theory, it was modified to accommodate new evidence.”

Excerpts from: National Center for Science Education. http://ncse.com/

And those Idiots at AiG are still pushing this crap that Genesis is literally true.  They just don’t get it.

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Human Origins at the Smithsonian Musuem

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” -Mark Twain

The Smithsonian Museum has a new exhibit at the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in Washington, DC.  The exhibit will take you through about 6 million years of pre-human and human history.  Their website can be found HERE

“The strong similarities between humans and the African great apes led Darwin in 1871 to predict that Africa was the likely place where the human lineage branched off from other animals – that is, the place where the common ancestor of chimpanzees, humans, and gorillas once lived. The DNA evidence shows an amazing confirmation of this daring prediction. The African great apes, including humans, have a closer kinship bond with one another than the African apes have with orangutans or other primates. Hardly ever has a scientific prediction so bold, so ‘out there’ for its time, been upheld as the one made in 1871 – that human evolution began in Africa.

The DNA evidence informs this conclusion, and the fossils do, too. Even though Europe and Asia were scoured for early human fossils long before Africa was even thought of, ongoing fossil discoveries confirm that the first 4 million years or so of human evolutionary history took place exclusively on the African continent. It is there that the search continues for fossils at or near the branching point of the chimpanzee and human lineages from our last common ancestor.  From Smithsonian: http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/genetics