Blasting the Bible… because I care
I created this blog for many reasons. First and foremost, I want to help people in different ways. So when people see me as blasting religion, they ask how that is helping.
So I must blog on why those blogs are helpful. And I will have to go down a rather long tangent to make my point.
Christians refer to themselves as “saved” and seem set on “saving” those of us they believe are shielded from the “truth” of the Bible. Problem is, former Christians who have seen the light, such as myself, see it quite differently. In fact, it’s those very Christians who are the ones who need saving by introducing them to the very truth they choose to ignore… the history of the Bible itself.
When I was involved in the church, the questions I asked are what started my ascent out of Christianity. I have always been a very curious person. I had already read the Bible several times over and was interested in the history of it. This is something most – not many, but most – Christians fail to do. They can quote obscure passages and know how many gray hairs were in Jesus’ beard, but they haven’t the slightest idea when the Bible was written or who wrote it. In fact, you rarely hear pastors/preachers/ministers/priests really pushing the history of the Bible. And when they do talk about the history of the Bible, they only quote the Bible itself as proof!
Doesn’t it seem that if you’re going to stake your entire existence on a book that you might want to know a little about where it came from?
I did.
A good friend loaned me “The Evidence for Jesus
Time for a tangent.
The Woodstock music festival was less than 40 years ago. If you were to take a poll across the country of who attended Woodstock, you’d probably get about 5 million people who said they did. A slight exaggeration. If you were to poll the people around Roswell about what they saw in 1948, you’d hear all kinds of crazy UFO stories.
Moral of that tangent: Urban legends spread like wildfire, even in the modern age. How do you think legends spread 2000 years ago?
30 years after a legend sprouted up – even possibly based on some real, earthly events – one can imagine how the gospels evolved orally until someone wrote down an early version of Mark.
But it gets worse.
Aside from the Bible itself, there are no… ZERO… historical writings from the time Jesus supposedly lived to support it. The most ardent defenders will point to writings by historians decades after the fact, and who weren’t there. The events of Jesus were in a time and place that was heavily documented by historians of the day. If miracles were being performed in front of thousands, it’s hard to imagine someone not going to investigate and write about it. It’s not until about 70 years later that anything independently is written about Jesus, and even those earliest mentions are questioned as being later insertions.
And we have no idea who the actual authors of the Bible were. The names ascribed to the gospels are simply pseudonyms attached to anonymous authors.
We don’t know who wrote it and it wasn’t written when the events supposedly took place. And there is no independent historical record to support any of the events of Jesus’ life.
Christian scholars have answers to all of these questions, but they have to really tap dance with the facts to come up with anything.
And don’t get me started on the “perfect” Bible which is completely riddled with contradictions and confusing dogma. Or some of the “logic” that has evolved to explain away obvious questions that tear at the heart of Christianity.
I’ve had Seventh Day and Mormon visitors at my door. I feel sorry for them actually. They seem sooooo brainwashed, don’t they? Even “regular” Christians see them that way. (ALL Christians seem that way to me). They are usually surprised when I answer the door and start asking polite, yet biting, Biblical questions that they simply can’t answer, or have to make something up quickly.
This is fodder for another blog, but here are a few questions (out of many dozens) that Christians have never been able to answer fully to me:
- If God is omniscient and omnipotent (all knowing and all powerful), wouldn’t he want to destroy evil and the devil? Why let Satan traipse around f’ing things up for people? Any good parent would stop someone from leading their children down a bad path in life.
- Does the Bible say we make it to heaven via works or by faith? (It says both – which is it?)
- Why does God even bother to create people he knows will end up in hell for eternity? Doesn’t that seem rather cruel?
- When people of other cultures ask God to reveal himself to them, why do different people find different gods? Shouldn’t God be more powerful than the devil and reveal himself to them, as he promised when Jesus said, “Ask and you shall receive.”?
- Why are portions of the Bible incomprehensible and open to wild speculation, such as Revelation? Why include such texts if it isn’t clear to everyone who reads them?
- Why would sacred texts include misreferences, non-canonical quotes, and “prophecies” taken out of context (such as the virgin birth from Isaiah 7:14)
Anyone who says there are no inconsistencies in the Bible is in complete denial.
So let me get back to the question at hand. Why do I go after the Bible and Christianity instead of just leaving them alone and let them believe what they want?
I respect everyone’s beliefs, believe it or not. But I’ve had a lot of marginal believers who I’ve pointed out a few facts to, and had them realize it was nothing more than the Santa Claus effect. They wanted to believe, and Christianity is the particular flavor our culture embraces. But it’s a fraud, a scam, and there are a lot of people who hand their lives over to this lie.
Christians do not lead the most righteous lives in our culture. They have a higher divorce rate than atheists, and many addicts grew up in highly religious families – only to feel like failures in attempting to live up to unrealistic moral standards.
Like sex.
Why do you think so many Catholic priests end up molesting boys? Could it be that they suppressed their sexual thoughts and urges so long that they ended up blowing a gasket and humping the nearest flesh they could get their hands on?
They would have been better off just “hand”ling it themselves, but alas… that is “sin” too.
Didn’t God create everything? Then he created evil and lust, too.
Huh?
Conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity often says he wonders where non-believers get their moral code from. He apparently doesn’t realize that the moral standards he gets from the Bible are cherry-picked among many other currently taboo standards. Does he treat women as second-class citizens, as the Bible promotes? Does he follow the old Mosaic laws? Does he speak in tongues or require his wife to wear head coverings? Did he do as Jesus said, and give away everything he has and simply followed God? Why do modern Christians only seem to follow the things they want to follow in the Bible, and simply ignore the rest? Then point their fingers and speak of atheists as morally bankrupt scum of society.
But to answer his question, I believe there is a basic human sense of what is right and wrong. Other religions and secular societies all agree on these basic principles. Murder, rape, and theft are wrong. I have no doubt most humans have felt that way long before any religious writings ever existed. Most mammals have a sense of right or wrong, which is why they take care of their young and rarely kill those close to them, or family members. Even many insects (like ants) seem to “know” not to kill their own kind, and I doubt they believe in the Bible.
So while I respect anyone’s beliefs, I am entitled to my opinion as well. I also see the Religious Right trying to wrestle power away from middle America and I am offended by it. They don’t represent me or my beliefs. Their holier-than-thou attitude is even more offensive. I believe most of them don’t even represent or understand the book they think they believe. Not to mention they are being puppeted by religious leaders with an agenda.
They’re a group of cherry-picking lemmings who never bothered to ask “Where did the Bible come from?”
Tags: atheism, christianity, religion