The truth of this world is very strange.
The book I was brought up to respect,
the book I read a thousand times as a child,
is full of more hate, violence and cruelty
than any other book on my shelf.
We ignore this by simply not reading those sections.
But they are still there.
And if you ever do decide to read the whole Bible,
you will be horrified.
Unbelievably, I would describe the Bible
as
by far
the most evil book
I have ever read.
If someone wrote such a book today
it would be classified as hate speech.
Rape In The Bible:
"few people know that the Bible often condones and even approves of rape. How anyone can get their moral guidance from a book that allows rape escapes me."
Slavery in the Bible:
"slavery is rampant throughout the Bible in both the Old and New Testaments. The Bible clearly approves of slavery in many passages, and it goes so far as to tell how to obtain slaves, how hard you can beat them, and when you can have sex with the female slaves."
Murder in the Bible:
"In much of the Bible, especially the Old Testament, there are laws that command that people be killed for absurd reasons such as working on the Sabbath, being gay, cursing your parents, or not being a virgin on your wedding night. ... There are also countless examples of mass murders commanded by God, including the murder of women, infants, and children."
There are many ancient apocryphal writings that are regarded by the churches
as not divinely inspired.
There is, of course, disagreement about which ones are.
How can anyone decide?
Looking for "facts" about the world in a book of ancient myths
is a pretty strange idea!
Even believers just pick bits of the Bible they believe in and bits they don't.
Which bits do you pick and which do you discard?
Image from
Elisha ben Abuya.
The author expresses well how I feel about the Bible:
"There are a lot of books that come close to inerrancy, but the bible
is not one of them. And its errors are not confined to [typos]
and poor choice of words.
Of all the books that I know of, the bible is the most errant.
It is by far the worst book I've
ever read.
I know of no other book, for example, that commands you to kill homosexuals, Sabbath breakers, nonbelievers, rape
victims who don't cry out loud enough, relatives if they believe differently than you, etc."
For some relief after all that, the sexiest chapters of the Bible must be
Ezekiel 16 and
Ezekiel 23.
Read slowly, and savour the imagery,
though be warned that the ending is pretty gross, disturbed even.
Falsifiable statements are rare in any religion,
and most of the good ones were falsified long ago, in the early days of science.
Probably the only statement from the Bible to be falsified in our lifetime
is
Genesis 6:3,
"My spirit shall not abide in man for ever, for he is flesh, but his days shall be a hundred and twenty years." -
which was falsified by
Jeanne Calment
when she reached the age of 121 in 1996.
Dawkins
nicely points out that our morality, even that of religious people,
comes not from scripture
but from the secular liberal consensus around us,
which determines which bits of scripture we pick and choose from,
and which we regard as "of their time".
Tattoo of Leviticus 18:22
forbidding homosexuality: $200.
Not knowing that
Leviticus 19:28
forbids tattoos: Priceless.
Found in many places online.
Don't know where is original source.
If this is God's great opus, his rules for humanity
produced after long thought,
then why is it so useless?
There is no prohibition of rape,
rape of slaves,
sex with children,
wife beating, violence against children,
forced circumcision,
gender discrimination,
sexual orientation discrimination,
religious discrimination, ethnic discrimination,
witch hunting,
racism,
ethnic cleansing,
or even slavery.
There is no defence of freedom of religion.
There is no defence of freedom of speech,
freedom of the press,
or freedom of sexuality.
There is no defence of democracy
or a free society.
There is no opposition to dictatorship and oppression.
There is no clarification of the rules of war,
treatment of prisoners,
targeting of civilians,
the death penalty, and so on.
There is no clarification on premarital sex, masturbation,
coitus interruptus,
contraception, abortion,
mixed-race marriage,
divorce or homosexuality.
It is obvious that this is man-made
- just a set of arbitrary, confusing and hopelessly incomplete rules
written by primitive desert nomads
from an age best forgotten.
The Ten Commandments.
Why are they so rubbish?
From here.
See terms of use.
The Bible's teaching on family values is completely incoherent.
Marriage in the Bible.
The Bible's completely incoherent teaching about sex.
This is
"100% Historically Accurate Adulterous Woman Story"
by
SyeTenAtheist.
Modern secular morality makes so much more sense than the contradictory chaos in the Bible.
I like Jesus (especially compared to the mass killers Moses and Mohammed)
but he never told us anything new about the universe. Scientists did.
God in the entire Bible
never bothers to give us proof that he exists.
Some evidence of God's existence could easily have been tossed in, such as the age of the earth,
or the distance of the sun.
But God was not arsed.
Sam Harris:
"I mean just think of how good a book would be if it were authored by an omniscient deity.
I mean there is not a single line in the Bible or the Koran that could not have been authored by a 1st century person.
I mean there's not one reference to anything.
There are pages and pages about how to sacrifice animals, and keep slaves, and who to kill and why.
There's nothing about electricity.
There's nothing about DNA.
There's nothing about infectious disease or the principles of infectious disease.
There's ... there's nothing particularly useful, and there's a lot of Iron Age barbarism in there and superstition.
... This is not a candidate book ...
Every one of our specific sciences has superceded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture.
From cosmology, to psychology, to economics, we know more about ourselves than anyone writing the Bible or the Koran did.
And that is a distinctly inconvenient fact .. for anyone wanting to believe that this book was dictated by the creator of the universe."
Jesus visits earth, and does not tell us anything new
about the history of the earth, human origins,
the size and nature of the universe, or useful information that would save billions of lives
such as how the body works
and how to prevent disease.
He does not tell us anything new about mathematics, science, technology, history or medicine.
All he does is perform a few tricks in front of a handful of people,
and tells us vague things that any uneducated ancient Middle Easterner could have said.
As the video says:
"And this is meant to be that god's main advertisement of its existence!"
This is "What Would Jesus NOT Do?"
from the brilliant
"NonStampCollector".
Isn't that a strange one?
Tweet sums it up.
From here.
Jesus dismisses the need to wash hands before eating.
He could have saved millions of lives by telling people to always wash their hands before eating.
He could have saved millions!
But of course, he could not tell about things he did not know.
He had
no clue that washing hands prevents the spread of disease.
Matthew 15
is proof that Jesus is not a god, but just a man, who knows very little.
"It is not to be understood that I am with him [Jesus] in all his doctrines. I am a Materialist; he takes the side of
Spiritualism; he preaches the efficacy of repentence toward forgiveness of sin; I require a counterpoise of good works to
redeem it.
Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct
morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others, again, of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much
untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from
the same being."
- Thomas Jefferson,
private letter.
"merely the ravings of a maniac,
no more worthy, nor capable of explanation than the incoherences
of our own nightly dreams."
- Thomas Jefferson,
private letter, on the
Book of Revelation.
See details.
Finally, the last word on the Bible must go to
this guy in 1995:
"How can anyone possibly believe in the bible if it starts off the way it
does on the first few pages?
If it started off with some kind of seriously believable stuff, then
fair enough.
I'm referring to the Old testament. I'm not sure if there is a New
testament, but I'll have to find out later and have a flick through
that and see if there's any improvements."