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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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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Moses and His Writings

I’ve written of this subject before, but no one seems to know the answer to it. If some Christian scholar out there in the ‘ether’ reads this and has a response. I would appreciate hearing from you.

Genesis 11:31. This verse describes Abraham as living in the city of Ur, and associates that location with the Chaldean’s. However archaeological evidence indicates that the Chaldean’s did not exist as a tribe at the time of Abraham, or Moses, for that matter; they rose to power as much as 1000 years later.

“And Terah took Abram his son, and Lot the son of Haran his son’s son, and Sarai his daughter in law, his son Abram’s wife; and they went forth with them from Ur of the Chaldees, to go into the land of Canaan; and they came unto Haran, and dwelt there.”

Genesis 14:14: This verse refers to Abram pursuing some surviving kings of Sodom and Gomorrah to the city of Dan. However the archaeology says that place name did not exist until at least 300 years later

“And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants,
born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and pursued them unto Dan.”

So is there any evangelical fundamentalist theist out there that can explain how Moses can be writing about these things long before they existed. Sure seems to be proof that Moses was redacted, revised or otherwise rewritten. So, that would mean that the Pentateuch was not clearly written by Moses, and is likely not the ‘Inspired Word of God.’ It was tampered with probably sometime after the Jews return from exile, as by then ‘Ur of the Chaldee’s’ was properly used and the original city of Laish…was renamed Dan.

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Real Truths About Religion and God

People have responded to many of my posts about religion by asking me where my proofs come from. I suspect these people are just religious believers who want to convert me, and others, who write about non-belief.

There is information on any subject you can imagine on the Internet (as I’m sure you all know), including original research papers on subjects relating to Biblical truth. The popular science-type magazines all have a web presence. And contrary to some Christians beliefs, they are not part of an evil cabal out to satanize all who view them.

I have a blogroll type list of websites I use to gather information from, on the right side of my site…if you’re reading this…you will see it as you scroll down. These are legit sites and they have reliable, mainstream, real world information. If Christians were to ever actually seriously research their Biblical beliefs they would soon see how much they have been misinformed, and how wrong the Bible is.

I am a realist however, and I just put the stuff out there with the hope that it will strike a chord with someone who is searching for the truth, and maybe cause them to go to real world proofs, instead of Hebrew myths, that are a waste of precious time and energy.

The famous site listed below has all the answers to flood myth lined up and they are checkable. Other parts of the site have some of the best general information about scientific origins of the earth, universe, humans, etc. They have been around since the early nineties. If you take time to explore it thoroughly you will find links to original research and real world explanations of our earth, and all who live on, and in it. The people who write there are experts-who happen to not have a Doctorate of Divinity.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-noahs-ark.html

If the Noachian Flood can be disproven (and it has been), then other parts of the Bible are also suspect of being wrong. And there are many other disproven Biblical assertions. Many Christians just don’t accept the truth. They cling very hard to a 2800 year old Hebrew myth, a view of a childish God, that people of the time didn’t have enough knowledge, or intellectual sense of the world, to question.

That the Christian faith has survived this long is not an indicator of its being true. To the contrary, it is an indicator of how easily the church adjusts its theology to conform as much as possible to currant social conventions (think slavery, polygamy, prostitution, kings killing on a whim, etc.). The church is known to burn papers (and people) that disagree with currant theological thought.

Think about the currant ‘state of the religion.’ Now, about 2008 years since the birth of Jesus (?) Roughly 1700 years since Christianity got the official ‘okey-dokey’ from secular rulers, and its still in a state of disrepair. There are maybe thousands of sects and they all differ. Muslims believe in the same God…so they say, and they are out to kill us…for heresy. Catholics believe Protestants practice heresy, and vice-versa. Mormons…who knows what they believe. There is either one that is right…or none is right. There is not two of them who are right…or three, or four…

Through manipulation of human thought and incorrect reasoning, physical threats, actual physical harm, and burning at the stake, or as little as social/societal ostracism, Christians have spread their evil plot to take over the world and control humans…every actions and thought…for more than two thousand years. Think about it for a while; think about the whole long history of Jews and Christians and what they have always wanted from us.

What has been, and is, their ultimate goal? It’s to take over control of all humanity and tell us how to think and act…they actually have that kind of control of a significant portion of the US population…think Bible belt and the Deep South. Churches are the social center and source of information, on how to conform…of many hundreds of thousands or millions of Evangelical Fundamentalist type people. I think those people are afraid that if they don’t belong to a church, they’ll automatically go out and start sinning in the worst possible way.

There is some evolving news about change in the Catholic position on humanity. They are actually starting to accept that humans have a looong history. Go to the site below and check it out. Notice in the upper right hand corner where the paper comes from. That old fossil…the Catholic Church…might have some life and intellect left after all. http://www.lifeissues.net/writers/zim/zim_251adamandeve.html

Below is a quote from the article mentioned above.

“The Catholic position on this is clear. St. Thomas says that “one should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous.” It is simply nonsense to say that the world is only 6,000 years old (Catechesis, Creation and Evolution, Zenit News, Dec. 19, 2005).” My emphasis.

The Catholics are leading the pack in the changing of theological thought to match what is known to be true nowadays, although their present thought is a little dopey. I look forward to following this change. I also look forward to how the Evangelical Fundamentalists will continue to deny In-Your-Face truth.

Some suggested Google search terms that I have followed: Religion, God, Jesus, El, Elohim, Yahweh, Jehovah, biblical tribes, Scripture, Noah’s flood, Ur of the Chaldeans, city of Dan, city of Laish, sea people, Babylon, age of earth, Hebrews, Christian myth, Sumerians, Akkadians, Mesopotamia, Jericho, Chaldea or Chaldeans, Assyria, Indus valley civilization, ancient Egypt, Hammurabi, Gilgamesh, flood stories, flood myths, Myths, ancient native Americans, Solutrian, Clovis points, cave paintings, Adam and Eve, African civilization(s), Bronze age, iron age, ancient Briton, ancient Europe, Neanderthal, Hebron, Abraham, Lot, biology, Midrash, Torah, Jewish myths, ancient languages, archaeological dating, carbon dating, dating methods, Dendrocronology, stratigraphy, oil geology, Permian, Paleontology, DNA, rNA, genetics, human history, human pre-history, ancient India, ancient Iran, Stonehenge, henges, pyramids, stelas, Rosetta stone, cuneiform writing, hieroglyphs, Euphrates river, Tigris river, Geology, life sciences, and on and on….

The above terms represent maybe one twentieth of the search terms (sorry they aren’t alphabetized) I have used in following the paths of Christian religion. I have been doing this for about two years now, in my spare time. If the site is religious sect sponsored, they will often try to deny real world science by any means they can, including, but not limited to, lying and misdirection. There are a few exceptions that are starting to tackle the problem head on though, and the Catholic Church, as mentioned above, is one of them.

There is not one or two sites that can disprove all things religious untrue, though talkorigins.com comes close. I find you have to visit and really absorb many, many different viewpoints and disciplines and slowly let them simmer in your head. Good hunting.

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Moses is Not Writer of Genesis

So, we all know that Moses wrote of Abraham as coming out from “Ur of the Chaldeans” in Genesis 11:31

“Terah took his son Abram, his grandson Lot son of Haran, and his daughter-in-law Sarai, the wife of his son Abram, and together they set out from Ur of the Chaldeans to go to Canaan. But when they came to Haran, they settled there.”

We also know that Moses wrote of Abraham coming to the rescue of his nephew Lot, in the city of Dan, in Genesis 14: 14-15

“When Abram heard that his relative had been taken captive, he called out the 318 trained men born in his household and went in pursuit as far as Dan. 15 During the night Abram divided his men to attack them and he routed them, pursuing them as far as Hobah, north of Damascus. 16 He recovered all the goods and brought back his relative Lot and his possessions, together with the women and the other people.”

So what we end up with in the timeline is this: Dates are ‘roughly’ and may vary slightly from sect to sect.

Abraham Born 2020 BCE-Died 1845 BCE
Moses Born 1595 BCE-Died 1475
City of Laish–renamed Dan 1200-1100 BCE
Chaldean tribe comes into existence 1000-900 BCE
Chaldeans take over the city of Ur c.627-625 BCE. Ur then became known as “Ur of the Chaldeans”
Moses died a few hundred years before the city of ‘Dan’ existed.
Moses died about 800 years before “Ur of the Chaldean” existed. Not the city, but the Phrase.

How did he write about it? He didn’t. The Pentateuch was rewritten and redacted well after Moses died. From this evidence, there is no real doubt about the Documentary Hypothesis.

The Catholic Encyclopedia pretty much admits this. Look up the whole thing here: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01051a.htm

“Quite a different view on the section of Genesis treating of Abraham, and indeed of the whole of Genesis, is taken by modern critical scholars. They almost unanimously hold that the narrative of the patriarch’s life is composed practically in its entirety of three writings or writers called respectively the Jahvist, the Elohist, and the priestly writer, and denoted by the letters J, E, and P. J and E consisted of collections of stories relating to the patriarch, some of older, some of later, origin.”…

…”Finally, the moral to be drawn from the various events narrated is more clearly set forth in this third writing and, according to the critics the moral standpoint is that of the fifth century B.C. Lastly, after the time of Ezra, this last history, P was worked up into one with the already combined narrative J.E. by a second redactor R. JEP, the result being the present history of Abraham, and indeed the present book of Genesis; though in all probability insertions were made at even a later date.”

So, what all of this is saying, is that Moses couldn’t have written the parts that are ascribed to him, and whoever did write it, had to be from a time much later than Moses. Therefore parts of the Bible are false.

If someone can prove parts of your religious belief are wrong; why should anyone believe your religion is true? What else could they be wrong about?

For later: Do Christians believe that God made us immortal, and Adam & Eve caused us to die because of their sin?

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