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He’s coming! For those who believe in him and who have been good, Santa will come and give his wondrous gifts. Billions believe in him, and you should too! If you are on his “good” list, you will receive his gifts on the appointed day, but you never know when he’ll show up. He knows everything – even your thoughts - and can tell if you’ve been good or bad. He loves everyone and wants everyone to be good. He lives forever and sits on a throne atop the world.

All hail Santa!

Now… let’s change two words in the paragraph above…

He’s coming! For those who believe in him and who have been good, Jesus will come and give his wondrous gifts. Billions believe in him, and you should too! If you are on his “good” list, you will receive his gifts on the appointed day, but you never know when he’ll show up. He knows everything – even your thoughts - and can tell if you’ve been good or bad. He loves everyone and wants everyone to be good. He lives forever and sits on a throne atop the world.

All hail Jesus!

True Christians don’t like the concept of Santa Claus, because he is a lie and never really existed. Atheists say the same about Jesus, mind you. And as you can see above, Santa replaces Jesus in quasi-Christian families.

To non-believers, however, Santa is merely the training wheels on the road to blind faith, and belief in many lies and deities that lie ahead.

Also see this cartoon.

The 2008 Republican campaign dealt a well-deserved blow to the Religious Right of the Republican party. But didn’t they see it coming? The presumed front-runner throughout all of 2007 was Rudy Giuliani, who was the only vocal pro-choice candidate. After his disastrous wait-for-Florida strategy put him out of the race, we were left with Mormon Mitt Romney, moderate and 2000 also-ran John McCain, and ordained Baptist minister Mike Huckabee. With a split in evangelical votes, McCain surprised everyone on the right and pried the nomination away from the right wing of the party.

For the record, I am a Republican. A moderate, and proud of it.

The likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter are beside themselves with no “true” conservative to support. In other words, McCain doesn’t pander to the right wing of the party. This is supposed to be a bad thing?

(more…)

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” which is a pro-Christian book. Problem is, after reading the book, I felt less convinced than ever that the Bible was a valid historical document. Even the pro-Christian spin can’t whittle down the gap between Jesus’ supposed existence with the time the 4 gospels, or the earliest historical citiations, were written. The most conservative estimates are 30 years after the fact.

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?”

There are as many as 1 billion Christians, or at least people who call themselves Christians. We know that the number of faithful practicing Christians is much smaller. But let’s say there are a billion practicing, active Christians in the world today. There are 6.5 billion humans alive today, which means there are 5.5 billion people who reject Christianity. 

So according to Christian thinking, God created 5.5 billion people who he KNEW would burn in hell for eternity. Remember that God is omniscient, when means he knows everything. He knew before you were created that I would burn in hell for eternity for not accepting him, yet still created me anyway. Of course God’s omniscience can be debated using Biblical passages, but that’s fodder for another discussion.

Many Christians will jump in and say, “Well God gives us free will to make our own decisions.” That is highly debatable (free will in this context isn’t covered much in the Bible, and many of the passages that do pertain to it imply that people don’t have free will). And it is a moot point. No matter what we choose, an omniscient God will know beforehand what our choices are. A truly merciful God would not bring us into existence in order to avoid an eternity in hell as punishment for a few misguided years on earth. (Billions upon untold billions of years of punishment in hell for a couple of decades of non-belief? That’s hardly the punishment fitting the crime!) Free will or not – he should know my choice but lets it all happen anyway. So in other words, if free will exists, God sits on his hands and lets us take the wrong path, and then punishes us for it in the end. If free will doesn’t exist, we were put here for the sole reason to burn in hell forever. NICE!

Apparently the author of Jude was reading a different Bible than that of modern Christians. In Jude 1:14-15 we read: “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these [men], saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.” 

Enoch 1:9 reads: “And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His holy ones To execute judgment upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly: And to convict all flesh Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.” 

If Jude’s words are scripture, and inspired by God, why would he be inspired to quote such a book? Shouldn’t the author of an inspired work know that he is quoting a work that would not be included in the canon? Or should Enoch have been included in the Bible? If so, why would God allow it to be snubbed?

So what if Jude did quote this book? It doesn’t change the meaning of the New Testament. Well, if Jude gives credibility to the Book of Enoch, then you must take the entire book as scripture. If that’s the case, then you must consider such concepts as fallen angels to be a part of Christianity. And remember that Enoch was regarded as scripture for hundreds of years. Did all of those Christians follow a false book?

So many people in this country call themselves Christians. When someone they love dies, they say that person is in heaven. YET, how many people also think their loved one is somehow watching over them and visits them? My ex-wife’s family talks about her departed sister as if SHE is God. Something falls over – that’s her. Something good happens – that’s her. She is watching us. They practically pray to her when times are tough. So is the person in heaven or is the person floating around my living room? Which is it? I could be mistaken, but I thought that if a loved one is a ghost… that would mean they aren’t in heaven. Or are they just all floating around waiting for the resurrection? I don’t think people have any damned idea what they’re talking about. That’s why ghouls like John Edward sicken me. That bastard preys on people’s grief and cold-reads his way into their beliefs. He should be strung up by his balls until he admits he’s a fake.

So when someone dies, people say they’re in a better place, right? Well have you noticed that those same people say stuff like, “I think she’s here watching me” or “I felt a cold feeling when I went into her room” or “She gave me a sign” or “I thought I saw something move by her room” - stuff like that? Well… those are ghosts! You can’t have it both ways. A person can’t be up in heaven and also be roaming around their old stomping grounds.

To me that also confirms my theory that people “find” religion as an act of desperation in such times. The same way they grasp onto the idea of their ghost loved ones. That’s why jerks like John Edward have become so popular. That ass uses cold reading techniques (and savvy editing on his TV show) to make people think he’s communicating with their dead relatives. It’s ghoulish, but you see how desperate these people are. Shouldn’t there be a distinct line between ghosts and heaven? There should but there’s not. I guess people like to cover their bases by believing in both at the same time. Does the Bible support the idea of ghosts? And I don’t mean demonic spirits. I mean - if a person is going to heaven, does the Bible support the idea that they can communicate or somehow still be in the vicinity of this world? Eh hem.. No.

Sylvia Brown was once approached by a couple on the Montel Williams show. They said their son had been kidnapped and wanted to know if he was still alive. Sylvia said that he was dead and the person responsible had dreadlocks. Well a few years later who would have guessed that this boy turned up alive in a high profile case, and his kidnapper was a regular old fat white dude. The kid’s name was Shawn Hornbeck.

I’m an extremely skeptical person, and get more skeptical every day. I said it before… I think there is more evidence for UFO’s and ghosts than there is for the reliability of the Bible as an historical document. There is certainly more to the world that we can sense. (We know that’s true – X-rays, gamma rays, frequencies we can’t hear, etc.) Maybe that’s not ghosts though.

And what about expelling demons or ghosts? Most religions deal with ghosts/possessions. I think it’s odd how a witch doctor in Africa can expel ghosts just as efficiently as a Catholic priest. Does that mean both of their gods are relevant? Why would ghosts respond to more than one god during exorcisms in different cultures? If Jesus’ name can expel them, why are they also expelled by Kabuto the God of Dirty Feet? Anyway…

I wonder how many demons/spirits/ghosts (I’ll refer to them as DSG’s from here on out) throughout the world have been successfully rebuked in the name of Allah, Buddah, Mohammad, etc. If a DSG has been driven out in the name of a false god, does that render the entire process moot? I don’t think using the name of Jesus would scare a ghost, unless somehow that ghost believed in him too. But why would a ghost believe in Jesus? Can you give me any non-Biblical citations of ghosts/demons/spirits being driven out in Jesus’ name? How about non-Catholic? Why do the Catholics believe in possession but the non-Catholics don’t? Someone is wrong there.

I can get creeped out at times about the thought of ghosts, but I think if they do exist they’re no more powerful than we are. Probably less. I mean moving a chair or knocking stuff over isn’t exactly my idea of powerful. My twins did that when they were toddlers. Didn’t really scare me. If ghosts do exist, I think they’re just as stuck in their world as we are in ours. And maybe they don’t even know what they are or what we are. It could be ghost sightings are random chance encounters where the energy from both planes materialize to each other. Think about it – if we all turned out to be ghosts without realizing it, we would be “haunting” certain areas that we spend most of our time – our living rooms and our bedrooms, computer rooms, etc. Who’s to say that my bedroom is the lobby of a hotel in some other dimension, and they occasionally see my energy walk by? Do I believe that? Hell no! But who knows? I’ve considered the possibility that ghosts are actually living people from different times whose energy somehow becomes apparent to us. How about the possibility that we’re seeing our OWN energy from days, months, or years past? I can create as many crazy theories as the next guy.

For the most part, I’m just not scared until I have something to be scared of. If I ever come face to face with a ghost, I’ll 100% believe. If I ever come face to face with God, I’ll 100% believe. (That reminds me of another Bible contradiction. In some parts, God appears, but in other parts we are told no one has ever seen God. Haha.). I do believe that there is more to the universe that we can sense, as that is proven. I also believe that most of the time UFO’s, ghosts, etc. end up being people’s imagination run wild, and these things can be fueled by conspiracy theorists themselves. Sometimes I think ghosts are the adult version of the boogeyman and God is the adult version of Santa Claus. Of course I still love watching UFO and “mystery” shows out of sheer curiosity, too, so what do I know…

I wonder… if a DSG is just a form of energy, would a big electromagnetic pulse blast ‘em to smithereens?

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.