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What gets me about the so-called Christian apologists is that they seem to think there MUST be a logical explanation for EVERYTHING they defend, not matter how ridiculous it is. Many must do acrobatics with their logic to try to explain away obvious discrepancies. Like the resurrection. It’s interesting if you look at the four accounts in order of authorship, how from Mark to John the story grows and is embellished. But no one can really reconcile all four versions of the resurrection, can they? And I recently read a huge article about the whole Immanuel issue, where Jesus is supposed to be fulfilling prophecy that says a virgin will give birth to a son named Immanuel. The apologists say that’s because Immanuel means “God with us,” so it’s still accurate. Of course he was never CALLED Immanuel though. AND if you read that entire prophecy, it’s not talking about Jesus at all. It’s taken out of context. Isaiah 7:14 is quoted in the bible as the source, but if you read the entire passage, Ahaz is being told HE will receive a sign of the lord. And as you read on, the stuff that Immanuel is supposed to do – Jesus didn’t do! Or the two lineages of Jesus. The common explanation is that one of those is through Mary’s line. But it doesn’t say “Jesus, son of Joseph, son-in-law of Heli”… Luke does use the term “son in law” so it’s not like that’s a foreign term. You know how recent converts feel the urge to go preach from the rooftops? I swear sometimes I feel like a recent convert with the urge to do the same thing. But I think even in the face of a mountain of evidence, they just WANT to believe. And they don’t want to think they’ve been duped. And they don’t want to think they’ve invested so much in a fraud…. I won’t change any minds, and sometimes I feel like banging my head up against a wall….

I don’t know how in the world I ever believed in the Bible. I guess like 99% of “Christians” out there, I just felt too afraid to question it, and I believed that all the people preaching were being truthful. But the Bible is so easy to pick apart and so difficult to defend. Have you noticed that pointing out problems with it like that require a sentence or two, but apologists’ defense take multiple paragraphs, or more? As the saying goes, the simplest explanation is often right. When raising these questions, the simplest explanation is always on the side of skepticism.

And Christianity offers what again? Christianity can’t account for the depths of human suffering. Ask any Christian – Why would God allow John Couey to sneak into a 9-year old girl’s bedroom as she slept at night, kidnap her, rape her repeatedly, and bury her alive in a trash bag? How can Christianity account for shit like that? I want to vomit when I hear the lame, “We don’t know God’s plan” bullshit. THAT is a plan? FUCK THAT! My kids know a Christian kids’ song from the Veggie Tales series called “God is Bigger Than the Boogeyman” but is that really true? It wasn’t for Jessica Lundsford. Christianity’s response is a piece of shit to that. And why is it that when anything GOOD happens, PRAISE JESUS!!! But when anything bad happens, a very detached “Well we don’t know why God does these things” is the response. If that was God’s plan for Jessica, her dad should have said, “PRAISE JESUS for letting my girl get raped and murdered! God’s plan has been fulfilled!! Whoo hoo!” No religion can account for that, so therefore NO religion has any fucking idea what they’re talking about… If there is a God and a Devil, then God is getting his ass kicked on a daily basis.

Do I think I’ll get punished for saying that? No. The whole concept of an organized religion is to keep people in order like sheep, so they ARE accountable for their secret actions, in the afterlife. But that’s for another discussion…

And if Christians say that the existence of evil somehow proves the existence of God, that’s even more gullible. We are part of the animal kingdom, like it or not. Sometimes animals do kill just to kill. Sometimes people do, too. Are you saying that if a bear rips a deer to shreds just because it got too close and pissed the bear off, that the devil played a role in the killing? Or it was God’s plan? Or was it just nature on the fringes or normalcy? Sometimes animal instinct goes out of whack. All men have the urge to have sex, but sometimes the events in his life or the chemicals in his brain alter that urge to include young girls or animals or shoes or whatever. That’s not the devil, it’s life. God didn’t save Jessica any more than the devil made John Couey rape and murder her.

I have to angrily laugh when people try to lift Christianity above other religions such as Buddhism, for example, by saying Buddhism doesn’t address fairness and justice. The Bible is riddled with unfair and unjust teachings, often by Jesus’ own example (not to mention contradictory teachings, to which people seem to pick whichever one fits).

Even well-versed Bible scholars can’t see the forest through the trees. They really have to dance around the facts to explain away why there is no historical evidence outside of the Bible for the events that supposedly took place in the New testament. You often hear there is one path to God, but I find this curious because the NT is NOT CLEAR WHICH path is the one to God!! Salvation by works or salvation by faith? If it’s both, then there ARE two paths to God and the Bible is then absurd for that reason alone.

Job 38, discusses how God appears after having been silent… If God showed up to me like that (besides the Bible, or “in spirit” only to people who already believe), then he’d have me. But God doesn’t show up to people in need. Good things might happen at the right time, but that doesn’t mean it’s God. Often bad things happen at the worst time – and that’s not God or the devil either. Why doesn’t Jesus show up to people in India or Africa or China? It’s always their local God who bails them out, isn’t it? Jesus usually appears only to Westerners. Odd.

Scholars use the Bible to prove the Bible, and the absurdity of that requires that I simply leave it at that.