A Biblical Quiz: Part Two

Believing in the reality of Biblical stories is, IMHO akin to accepting the reality of the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the Adventures of Superman. Or, perhaps it’s more akin to accepting the reality of that other Holy Trinity – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy! Next time your local clergy starts shooting off at the mouth about the reality of all things Biblical, the Glory and the Greatness of God, here are a few awkward questions to pose (or perhaps just forward this on to your local place of worship along with a “please explain”).

I’ve said it before but it probably bears repeating that the moment you question the bona-fides of any part of the Bible you have got to question the lot. So here are a few questions of mine which if truth be known could easily be expanded to monograph lengths.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

MIRACULOUS ANOMALIES: You live in your modern day world and observe all and sundry around you and all appears as it should – no unexplainable surprises ever happen, which isn’t the same thing of course as unexpected. The sun and the moon in your universe obey the laws of celestial physics; if you get swallowed by a fish you die; everyone you know has a mother and a father who contributed genetic material equally to their being (i.e. – you don’t know anyone born of a virgin); rock musicians at a concert you attended don’t cause nearby buildings to collapse; the loaves and fishes in your pantry only get replaced if you go to the supermarket; your glass full of water doesn’t suddenly acidify and turn into fermented grape juice – that would put the wine industry’s knickers-in-a-knot; you’ve never witnessed 960 hours of continuous rain; people at the beach swim in the water rather than walk on it; speaking of  the waters, they just don’t tend to repel like, well like poles of a magnet do; people who diet by going without food and water for 40 days die; the dead you once knew stay dead; people like yourself don’t learn new languages instantaneously; people, like your neighbours, don’t live for over 900 years; you’re rather unlikely to see anyone get turned into a pillar of salt; rivers don’t morph from water into blood; shape-shifting is something fictional found only in the pages of mythology, science fiction, science fantasy and horror; if you get a haircut, you don’t need to take out gym membership to make up for your power loss; punishments in your society tend to fit the crime. The next time you smack your golf ball into the water hazard, wouldn’t it be nice to imitate Elijah and Elisha at the River Jordan and of course Moses and wave your arms about and the waters would part so you could hit your golf ball and just get on with your game. 

Quiz question: How come the unexplainable was a regular happening but only for all practical purposes in Biblical times?

CAIN’S WIFE: We all know that in the beginning God created Adam and Eve, and the two then produced two sons, Cain and Abel, and then a third son Seth after Cain failed to show brotherly love for Abel and introduced to the world the first homicide on record. Now in order for the human race to get their ‘be fruitful and multiply’ act kick-started, these young lads needed to shack up with the opposite sex. Now apparently Cain was able to do for the Bible says he knew his wife. (Genesis 4:17).

Quiz question: Where did Cain’s wife come from? 

CAIN’S BOUNTY HUNTERS: Given the same set of characters, after Cain slew Abel, God was pretty pissed and punished Cain by exiling him, but Cain was more worried that it would come to pass, that every one that ran across his would slay him in return. That would ruin God’s punishment so He forbids anyone to slay Cain. (Genesis 4: 12-15).

Quiz Question: If there were only Adam, Even and Cain in existence, who was around and about to act as bounty hunter?

THE BIG WET: We all know the story of the Big Wet, that world-wide flood as related in Genesis and Noah’s Ark and all the animals that went in two-by-two, etc.

Quiz question: How did a pair of kangaroos (just one of numerous possible examples) hop from Australia to the Middle East and back again? Or, how did terrestrial vegetation survive underwater in total darkness for the duration?

NOAH’S ARK: Noah’s Ark has been claimed to have been discovered a dozen times over and every time it’s a case of back to the drawing board.

Quiz question: Why hasn’t Noah’s Ark really ever been found using all of the high-tech equipment available to Biblical archaeologists?

SODOM & GOMORRAH: Since 1945 there have been lots and lots of chin-wagging over and about ‘weapons of mass destruction’. Japan knows about them first hand; they were a major reason behind the second Gulf War. But who was the first to actually make and employ weapons of mass destruction? God, that’s who. Perhaps it will jog your memory if I mention Sodom and Gomorrah, and other nearby cities. In fact, God used a weapon of total destruction, since no trace of these settlements, have ever been found to this day.

Quiz Question: Why hasn’t Sodom and Gomorrah ever been located?

HOMOSEXUALITY: One question immediately arises from God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah due to sexual wickedness. If God was so against homosexuality (‘strange flesh’), how come He didn’t smite ancient Greece, ruled by those – shock, horror – ‘other gods’? That’s strike one alone. Homosexuality was socially acceptable in ancient Greek society (strike two), not only between consulting adults but between adults and minors as well (strike three). 

Quiz question: Why didn’t God smite ancient Greece?

TENTH PLAGUE:  One well known example of God’s foreign policy was the Ten Plagues inflicted on ancient Egypt, most notably the final one, death to all the Egyptian firstborn, regardless of name, age, sex or rank. So mass murder was definitely one of God’s foreign policy instruments (and that’s God’s story and He’s sticking to it, though fortunately the ancient Egyptians don’t seem to be aware that they were culled).

Quiz Question: Why didn’t the ancient Egyptians note and log anywhere that they had been culled by God and that their gods were powerless to prevent it? Why did an all-powerful God have to resort to mass murder as an instrument of foreign policy – to make Pharaoh “let my people go”? Surely it would have been sufficient to just torture Pharaoh into submission and spare the rest of the innocents.

PHARAOHS: Biblical texts often refer to the title of Pharaoh, yet the actual identities of these kings of ancient Egypt are never given.

Quiz question: Why aren’t Pharaohs named in the Bible, given that they indeed have names? Why is that? Did anyone who actually penned any part of the Bible that talks about Egypt actually ever set foot in that country?

GOD OF ISRAEL: I am given to understand that God is a God for all people, all nations, all races, all cultures and ethnic backgrounds. Yet it is crystal clear from the Bible that God is the “God of Israel” – it’s stated often enough. That’s reinforced because God is clearly not a God of Egypt; God is clearly not a God of the Land of Canaan. In fact during that era, the peoples of the Americas, Asia, the Subcontinent, most of Africa, etc. hadn’t a clue that the Almighty God even existed. Rather bad PR on God’s part wouldn’t you reckon?

Quiz question: If God is a universal God, why does His Holy Book usually refer to Him as just the “God of Israel”?

 

PROMISED LAND: Back around 1500 BCE the world’s population was a heck of a lot less, at least relative to the numbers around the world today. There would have been many fertile areas, lands of milk and honey, sparsely populated, like parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas. So, if God is looking for a good geographical location to plunk His Chosen People into, given that He can just snap His fingers and send them from Point A to Point B (like He did in that Tower of Babel scenario), why not choose a desirable and easy option, say Cuba, or New Zealand? There were no doubt vast tracks of sparsely inhabited lands in the Americas or southern Africa, all available relative to forcing an invasion of the Land of Canaan with associated death and bloodshed.

Quiz question:  So why did He choose instead the tough and bloody option – not only making His Chosen People walk the long walk, but having to fight for their Promised Land because it was already well and truly inhabited?

 

EXODUS: Related to this, outside of the Book of the Exodus and other Biblical references there is no other historical evidence or historical record that any of those events ever happened.

Quiz Question: Why aren’t the events as related in Exodus, an obviously major historical happening, of supreme significance if true, recorded anywhere else, as in ancient Egyptian historical records for example?

To be continued…

A Biblical Quiz: Part One

Believing in the reality of Biblical stories is, IMHO akin to accepting the reality of the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and the Adventures of Superman. Or, perhaps it’s more akin to accepting the reality of that other Holy Trinity – Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy! Next time your local clergy starts shooting off at the mouth about the reality of all things Biblical, the Glory and the Greatness of God, here are a few awkward questions to pose (or perhaps just forward this on to your local place of worship along with a “please explain”).

I’ve said it before but it probably bears repeating that the moment you question the bona-fides of any part of the Bible you have got to question the lot. So here are a few questions of mine which if truth be known could easily be expanded to monograph lengths.

MONOTHEISM vs. POLYTHEISM: The Bible is supposed to be the foundation on which monotheism rests, yet there are hundreds of references to the reality of ‘other gods’ in Biblical texts.

Quiz question: Why do the Bible and God (who is actually quoted) give credibility to the existence of ‘other gods’ and therefore the reality of polytheism? 

CONTRADICTIONS: The Bible says both ‘love your enemies’ and ‘smite your enemies’. So which is it to be? In the first chapter of Genesis, God created beasts before man; in the second chapter of Genesis, man was created before the beasts. Sigh.

Quiz question: Why is the Bible contradictory on these and other issues if it had ultimately just one holy author (albeit a lot of scribes)?

WHEN WAS “IN THE BEGINNING”? There seems to be a discrepancy between the Rock of Ages, and the ages of rocks. It was once common knowledge, calculated by those apparently qualified to do so, that according to the Bible, “In the beginning” was fixed at 4004 BCE, and if memory serves, it was also fixed down to the exact month, date and time. Now the Earth’s “In the beginning” is dated back to roughly 4.5 billion years BCE; the Universe’s (Heaven’s) “In the beginning” goes back farther than that to roughly 13.7 billion years BCE. There is a rather large anomaly here.

Quiz question: Why is that?

CAUSALITY “IN THE BEGINNING”: Genesis states quite clearly that God created (caused) the universe – heaven and earth. Therefore God must have existed prior to anything and everything else having existence. Yet if causality has any meaning, any cause, like God, is the effect of a previous cause.

Quiz question: If God created the Universe, what, or who, created (caused) God? If God has always existed, then God’s infinitely old. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His creation of our Universe – which is an absurdity. How is it that you exist for an infinite amount of time and the get then all of a sudden get this bright idea or urge to create a Universe? What was God doing the ‘day’ before He created our Universe?

DAY OF REST: In the beginning, over a six day period, God created this, that and the next thing, or in a more modern turn of phrase, ‘life, the universe and everything’. On the seventh day God took the day off and rested (what He did on the eighth, ninth, tenth, etc. day isn’t recorded).

Quiz question: If God is all powerful, why did God need to rest on the seventh day?

ALL-POWERFUL: While on the theme of God being all-powerful, surely there are logical limitations to that power.

Quiz question: Can God travel back in time; undo or change the past; travel faster than the speed of light; contravene the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics; or accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Can God draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper?

HEAVEN: It seems clear that since various physical beings such as angels, as described in the Bible, descend from and ascend to Heaven, including mortals like Enoch and Elijah, that Heaven must be a physical 3-D place with geographical, or rather celestial, coordinates.

Quiz question: We know where Mars is; where’s Heaven and why has it eluded our astronomers and/or space probes since it has to be fairly close by as celestial objects go?  

INTELLIGENT DESIGN: One of God’s creations was Adam and Eve and therefore the human species. God, being an all-knowing and all-powerful being, would obviously create a human body that was perfect, in keeping with His own perfection. Why create something to a standard less than your best?

Quiz question: I’ll put it this way, if God created/designed humans, if ‘man’ is created in God’s image, well, next time your back goes out of whack (or any other part of your anatomy for that matter), have a few choice utterances about how great a designer God really is! Translated, did God fail Anatomy 101?

MONUMENTS: Given the apparently vast importance of all things Biblical and all things Godly, it is quite surprising that not one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World has any connection to God or the Bible.

Quiz question: Why weren’t the ancients impressed enough with the Almighty to honour Him with a monument or two or ten?

AN IN-YOUR-FACE DEITY: Now according to the Old Testament, God conversed with several mere mortals, from Adam and Eve, to Noah and Moses and Jonah and a host of others.

Quiz question: Why doesn’t God speak His face today? I mean, He wasn’t all that shy about conversing with us mortals way back in Old Testament days, so what is God so afraid of today? Surely He hasn’t run out of profound things to tell us, or at least a few of those religious bigwigs like the pope, or world leaders? Where are all those reports about modern ‘burning bushes’?

PRAYER: The Bible is full of references to praying and the power of prayer. But does prayer actually get you anywhere? It’s understandable the God might not grant you your prayer to win the lottery, but when, over time, millions and millions and millions more people, from popes down through the commoners, have prayed for world peace, an end to suffering, no more famine, a chicken in every pot, a roof over every head, good health to all, etc. basically a global utopia, what has been the result? Read your daily newspaper; watch the nightly news. There seems to be a large gap between Biblical rhetoric and reality when it comes to the power of prayer. Truth be known, God doesn’t give a flying fig about you and your prayers. He’s got bigger fish to fry like how to keep Heaven warm as the Universe ever expands and cools off. Those energy bills are straining even His budget.

Quiz question: Why is prayer a worthless activity if the Bible tells you to pray? Never have so many, prayed for so long, for so little results. The natural odds of you winning the lottery are far higher than getting God to notice prayers, your or anyone else’s.

To be continued…

And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Battle of Jericho

One of the more popular Biblical bedtime stories is Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, a sort of Biblical version of the big bad wolf who huffed and puffed and blew the house down, only in this case the huffing and puffing went into playing musical instruments and the resulting noise brought the house down. Is this just another example of a story in the Bible’s collection of stories that only the gullible could accept? In this case, I’d have to say the answer is a very loud and unmusical “yes”.  

Despite extensive archaeological excavations at Jericho, there is no actual hardcore evidence that emerges that supports the Biblical (“Joshua 6”) account of Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. Jericho was in ruins many hundreds of years before Joshua (if there ever was a Joshua) existed and stumbled across the site.  So if the walls came a-tumbling down, they tumbled way before the Biblical account.  Joshua and the Israelites hadn’t yet been dreamt up in anyone’s mythology, and those ruined walls were probably done in because of numerous earthquakes that naturally occur in the region.

However, let’s play the ‘what if’ game. Can Joshua’s priestly jazz band comprised of seven ram’s horns bring down massive stone walls? Can pigs fly?

Here’s the basic story as outlined in the Biblical “Book of Joshua: Chapter Six” (King James Version).

Now God wanted Joshua to take the ‘city’ of Jericho, but in a rather strange way at least for a typical military strategist. That strange bit is why God’s war strategy (which surely must be perfect coming from an all-knowing deity) isn’t taught in the war colleges of the armed forces of the world – I surely don’t recall it having been used in any other military campaign, ancient or recent. Anyway, God’s strategy, the key to the success of the siege of, or the Battle of Jericho as led by Joshua, was to apparently circle the city for six days with his men of war and seven priests carrying ram’s horns. Maybe the inhabitants were meant to laugh themselves to death at such antics.

Anyway, on the seventh day, those priests, renowned musicians all, were to play those trumpets shaped in the form of ram’s horns, play them fortissimo, and then some. Oh, and everybody was to shout long and loud, but not before the actual time required – dawn or shortly thereafter on that fateful seventh day (which you’d think would have been a day of rest from all that previous six days of marching ‘round Jericho). Timing was everything! So you have a lot of noise – seven ram’s horns making really loud trumpet sounds, and lots of shouting. Then, and only then, would the walls of Jericho come a-tumbling down and Joshua and his army could lay siege to the city and among other things grab all the city’s gold, silver, brass and iron to add to the Lord’s collection of treasures for His treasury. Why God needs silver and gold and brass and iron is quite beyond me since presumably He could create as much of the stuff as He wanted! Anyway, The Ark of the Covenant was also present, but what actual role it played, if any, isn’t made very clear. Probably none as it was just a storage device – a portable library containing all those Biblical “thou shall nots”. 

Okay, so at dawn or thereabouts on the seventh day the priests played (blasted out) their number one song on the Biblical hit parade; everybody shouted (exactly what they shouted isn’t made clear), and the walls of Jericho came a-tumbling down. Then Joshua’s henchmen stormed the city, and except for one family, took no prisoners, putting all and sundry (even oxen and sheep) to the sword – no doubt this is where General Santa Anna got his ‘show them no mercy’ inspiration from at the siege of the Alamo. Anyway, then for good measure they burned what was left of Jericho’s rubble (except for the gold and silver and brass and iron which went into God’s coffers). Because of Joshua’s actions, God saw to it that he achieved everlasting fame (though I’m not sure it’s the sort of something I’d like to be remembered for in the history books). That’s the Battle of Jericho in summary. So, what do we make of sound as a military weapon?

In terms of application to warfare, it is known that very low frequency sounds can create the sensation that your bowels and contents have turned to jelly. Translated, it’s very difficult to be a 100% efficient soldier if you are in desperate need to go to the bathroom!

Very high frequency sound on the other hand can disorient one. A disoriented soldier is not an effective soldier.

However, we don’t see anything along those lines from the front lines in any current military conflict that I’m aware of. To the best of my knowledge, sound hasn’t been used to any great extent, if ever, on the battlefield, maybe because of limited range; maybe because sound doesn’t discriminate between the opposing sides.

So, sound as a military weapon against a biological enemy must not be all that viable.

Still, the biological viability aside, that sort of military application has no effect on the nonliving, which I assume the Walls of Jericho were – nonliving that is.

Sound (vibrating air) is a force. It’s a pressure wave in the atmosphere. Just like a water wave can push things around, and destroy solid objects (as we’ve all seen in recent films of tsunamis), so too can sound waves, but of course because or since air is way less dense a medium than water, the effects are equally reduced. Sound can of course travel through solids as well and is also a pressure wave that compresses the ‘solid’ (which is actually mostly empty space) as it passes through, just like sound travels through liquids – think of whale songs or sonar.

If you’re looking at just pure air pressure, or the pressure exerted by the air in the form of the winds, I doubt whether even a massive hurricane (or typhoon/cyclone) could have caused even minor destruction to the walls of Jericho, not that that region of the world is normally subjected to such extreme weather events. 

A series of F-5 tornadoes might have done the trick, but then the Bible should have given credit where credit was due – to an act of God (no need for a middle man or men or musicians). It would have been a miracle actually since F-5 tornadoes aren’t standard weather issued events in the Jericho region either. When’s the last time you saw tornado footage and destruction from that part of the world?

That leaves the wind or blast of a nuclear weapon, but then Joshua and his priestly jazz band would have become toast too, being within a trumpet-shout of ground zero. There would have been no survivors inside left to slaughter, and those treasures of gold, silver, brass and iron wouldn’t have been worth a damn thing – just radioactive slag. Besides, there’s no archaeological evidence of intense heat (vitrified or fused sand) at that site or of anything blowing up of any nature for that matter. 

But that’s not quite the end of the story. If it were, Jericho’s walls would still be standing (assuming no earthquakes of course). There’s a physics phenomenon termed resonance. Most physical objects have some sort of natural property which causes them to not only act in phase with external vibrations of a just-so nature, but those very vibrations keep on building up to ever greater and greater amplitudes. The solid object in question oscillates back and forth to ever greater extremes. If those extreme violent swaying motions become so strong that they become greater than the physical forces holding the object together, the object shatters in a resonance disaster – in other words, it suffers a catastrophic failure.  

We’ve all heard of or seen (even if just in the movies), that parlour ‘trick’ where an opera singer shatters a wine glass through just the sound of her voice alone. The vibrations from her voice are in sync with the natural resonance frequency of the glass. But then again, if the opera singer sings softly, softly, the glass is out of harms way. Of course a thin wine glass is one thing; a massive stone walled fortress is quite something else yet again.

I’d suggest that not even a modern metal heavy rock band, with all the high tech available to it, even circling Jericho with boom-boxes galore, wouldn’t have come close to bringing the walls down. The residents might flee in terror from the so-called ‘music’ but the walls would remain intact.

That’s true even for other modern loud noises like a sonic boom or say the launch of a Saturn V rocket or the Space Shuttle. There’s a heck of a lot of loud rumbling, but all those infrastructures in the vicinity still stand after-the-fact. The vibrations of the one either don’t match the natural resonance of the other, and/or just aren’t energetic enough.  

It’s going to have to take something more powerful than existed back then (like shouting and ram’s horn trumpets) or even something we have today like heavy metal bands and rockets. If the Battle of Jericho is true, if sound really did bring down massive stone walls, then alien technology must have been employed – terrestrial technology of that era (and ours as well) just wasn’t and isn’t up to the task. However, given a choice of believing extraterrestrials (‘God’ and company) had some sort of grudge against the residents of Jericho and employed some of us humans to resolve that grudge (buck-passing), or that the Battle of Jericho was nonsense from opening notes to final coda, well you would have to bet on the side of pure nonsense. I mean is there anyone reading this who seriously believes they could, as a parallel event, fly a seven or even a seventy piece band to say the Great Wall of China and knock even a tiny section of it down just by playing a bit of Wagner, Gershwin, or even rock & roll?  I didn’t think so.

Speaking of Biblical sites and destroyed cities that have no archaeological evidence to establish their historicity whatever, there’s the very tall Biblical bedtime tale of Sodom and Gomorrah. Those twin cities were destroyed in a rain or fire and brimstone (no earthquake or trumpets here), but there’s been no active volcanic activity in that region of the Dead Sea for multi-thousands and thousands of years. Of course it might have been a nuclear weapon as some speculate that there was an advanced human civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago that had attained such advanced high-tech (highly doubtful), or perhaps a meteor strike. Such speculation however is of no use unless an actual site can be identified, explored and evacuated by archaeologists, and that’s proved ever elusive, as elusive as the ancient Lost Continent of Atlantis, the one that’s allegedly beyond those Pillars of Hercules.  

Immortality: Who Wants To Live Forever? Part Two

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death, or the lack of death, the latter is my topic under consideration. The question I pose is, can technology deliver on what religion promises, but probably can’t deliver on - that is to say, the promise of life eternal.

Assuming that there is no actual afterlife, or reincarnation, then perhaps one can try for (near to actual) immortality, or at least as much immortality as the ultimate fate of the Universe allows for, and cheat death. I believe Woody Allen is quoted as saying something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my films; I want to achieve immortality by not dying’! How can immortality by not dying be accomplished, if indeed it can be accomplished?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Apart from the immortality question, let’s say you have an intense personal desire to have a career exploring the planet Jupiter – not via telescope, but in person. Today, for various reasons, your prospects are bugger-all. There’s no way to get you there at the moment, and you couldn’t survive the hostile environment even if you did. There’s no part of your organic body that would survive the Jovian (Jupiter’s) environment.  And if you wanted to explore, in person, extra-solar ‘Jupiters’,  in addition to inherent hostile environments, you wouldn’t survive the time frames necessary to get you to them which would require interstellar travel, travel to be measured in tens to hundreds of thousands of years at present, even extrapolated advances in spacecraft velocities in the near to midterm future.

So, even a combination of your organic biology coupled with some machine technology (you becoming a cybernetic bio-mechanical hybrid) wouldn’t ultimately help your goal. What would work would be an entirely technological or mechanical ‘organism’ – a robot with artificial intelligence – one that could survive the lengthy journey times and the hostile environments. But that doesn’t do you (or more to the point your mind that’s within you) any good – unless you became that robot! However, one needs then to get the relevant organic parts of you – your mind or your brain - into an inorganic form.

Just as it’s currently possible for one to transfer or download the contents of one computer into another computer, and just as your brain (which contains your mind) is an advanced type of computer – it’s your mind’s software that controls the rest of you - so too might it be eventually possible for your organic mind-within-your-brain to be downloaded into a nuts-and-bolts computer which could then be merged with an appropriate mechanical body or some other technology specifically designed to achieve a particular goal that’s unachievable by actual  flesh and blood. Examples are exploring Jupiter, space travel to distant stars and solar systems, or undersea exploration. You cannot, unaided, dive to the depths where RMS Titanic rests of the bottom of the Atlantic. If your mind however was somehow contained within a silicon and steel robot, well exploring the oceanographic depths would be easy. Robotic probes have explored the Titanic and the deepest of the deep parts of the ocean.

The upshot is that if your mind, the inner “you”, were part and parcel of residing inside an inorganic body, given that inorganic materials last a hell of a lot longer than organic bodies, then you’ve achieved quasi-immortality!  That’s ditto the case in that when your mind becomes the software in an inorganic computer. That software can later be transferred to another computer and then another and then another – right on down the line. That can also lead to lots of copies of your mind being around. Not only quasi-immortality, but cloning as well!

Using nanotechnology, building from the ground up, atom by atom, tiny but useful machines/things is a current rapidly emerging technology in our 21^st Century. Fast forward to the far future – if one has, down to the last detail, a blueprint for a living thing, then even that living thing could be created, from the ground up, atom by atom, using nanotechnology techniques, again and again and again – all identical. That living thing could be the physical you combined with the inner you – your mind - a being identical to whatever the pre-existing you was. Immortality! [As an aside, this is the way, atom by atom, that organic bodies are naturally constructed. Our food, air, water, etc. are broken down and recombined into organic compounds, bio-chemicals and so on up the chain through to cells and tissues and organs, etc.]

Of course such complicated nanotechnology may well be many centuries (if ever) away before this version of immortality is even a remote possibility. But, who knows what advancements might be possible that far ahead?

That said, it’s therefore possible that very advanced extraterrestrial intelligences have already achieved, if not immortality, then at least something approaching it. Such a civilization would have no difficulty, if so inclined, in exploring, even colonizing the galaxy in fairly short order – several millions of years at most, even at sub-light speeds. That’s a small fraction of the age of our galaxy. Extraterrestrials can colonize the galaxy akin to how humans have colonized Planet Earth – it doesn’t take that long relative to the age of the object – galaxy or Planet Earth – being colonized.

Quite apart from achieving immortality through silicon and steel, or nanotechnology, you know there is no law of nature that states you must die after so many days; after three score and ten years; after so many heartbeats; after so many cell divisions; after so much calorie intake; after so much whatever. Therefore, perhaps you might be justified in firmly believing that no matter what, you will always wake up the next morning. You are so convinced of that that you have never even remotely contemplated making out a will, or buying a graveyard plot, or making any sorts of arrangements post your death –cause it ain’t gonna happen! That’s the power of positive thinking as it were! Of course that leads to the converse, perhaps if you do acknowledge that there’s no uncertainty when it comes to your death, you’ve sealed your own fate! Once you accept that you will die, you will indeed. Of course it may not matter one bit what you firmly believe or refuse to believe in or acknowledge – like your own croaking. I assume it doesn’t matter since I suspect over time there have been lots of individuals who have denied death’s inevitability, but nevertheless, are now stone cold dead.

Of course in one sense we all achieve a form of immortality. Some of our atoms and molecules that made us up will eventually recycle and become incorporated into new life forms - maybe as bacteria, or plants or bugs or maybe a part of another person. The heart may not go on, but the atomic bits and pieces will. Perhaps after billions of years, after our sun and solar system are no more, some of the fundamental particles that make you, you, might find its way across the cosmos to eventually become incorporated into some extraterrestrial life form! The reverse might also be true – molecular bits of you might once, eons ago, have been part of an alien organism.

Immortality: Who Wants To Live Forever? Part One

“Nothing is certain but death and taxes”, so the saying goes, and while much has been written about taxes, death, or the lack of death, the latter is my topic under consideration. The question I pose is, can technology deliver on what religion promises, but probably can’t deliver on - that is to say, the promise of life eternal.

Assuming that there is no actual afterlife, or reincarnation, then perhaps one can try for (near to actual) immortality, or at least as much immortality as the ultimate fate of the Universe allows for, and cheat death. I believe Woody Allen is quoted as saying something along the lines of, ‘I don’t want to achieve immortality through my films; I want to achieve immortality by not dying’! How can immortality by not dying be accomplished, if indeed it can be accomplished?

Some cautionary notes first of all, and that is physical immortality could be as downbeat as any afterlife. While nearly everyone wishes for immortality, whether they realize it or not, this is a case of be wary of what you wish for, least you get it. Immortality (which doesn’t preclude death by accident or design – just natural [aging] death), if achieved, would be a very boring existence as you’d end up spending trillions of years in a dark, intensely cold, lifeless (heat death) Universe. Looking at current observational evidence, our Universe will keep on expanding, and expanding at an ever accelerating rate at that, continues to ever cool as stars and galaxies ultimately die as their energy supply becomes exhausted and what energy there is becomes diluted throughout an ever increasing expanding volume. Such is the predicted fate of our cosmos.

Even if the fate of the Universe is a Big Crunch, that is, our Universe slows down the  expansion rate, halts, and starts contracting again under the collective gravity the Universe’s mass has, that alone would terminate your immortality quick-smart!

I should note that it’s the fate of the Universe that’s important here vis-à-vis becoming, and more importantly, staying immortal. The demise of Planet Earth is of no consequence.  If you achieve immortality, then by the time Earth goes kaput, you will have had ample time to have packed your bags and left. You’ve fled and escaped elsewhere in the Universe to a location that hasn’t yet gone kaput. But when the entire cosmos goes kaput (in either direction – Heat Death or Big Crunch), then it’s ultimately curtains for you too! It’s hard living the comfortable life when the temperature of the Universe is just a tiny fraction above absolute zero; in the Big Crunch, down a Black Hole you go!

Oh, the other cautionary note is that if you achieve, in your organic body, immortality, you had better have achieved eternal youth as well. There’s no point in living to a ripe old age of several million years if your aging process doesn’t stop! Unlike some of the mythological gods, Norse I believe in particular, there is no endless supply of golden apples to keep you eternally youthful. Apart from that, the mythological gods are given as immortal, or as close to immortal as makes no odds, so if you should come across Zeus or equivalent, you can always ask them what the secret is!

Anyway, for starters, there’s no way (currently known) that, assuming you possess an organic multi-cellular body, that you can stop, far less reverse, the aging (and ultimately the death) process. There is, alas, no combination of vitamins; no health club membership; no fountain of youth; no “Picture of Dorian Gray”; no magic witch’s brew that can, or will accomplish that objective. And while you can eat fruit, nuts and vegetables till you’re blue in the face, they alone won’t see you into the 23^rd Century, far less the 123^rd Century!

A unicellular organism (like an amoeba) can (in theory) achieve a sort of immortality via reproduction – dividing in two (mitosis). Where there was one, now there is two, and since there’s been no recombination of genetic material, both are clones. Continued reproductive mitotic division over the days, weeks, years, centuries, millennia, would see an organism in 2000 AD identical to its ancestor from 2000 BC. Well, you, as a complex multi-cellular critter, can’t divide in two like an amoeba, so that fast track to immortality is out.

Cloning is also out because while that might produce an identical physical body, it wouldn’t replicate the inner you (your brain, your grey matter or your mind) that inhabits that body. A cloned you can’t ever duplicate that inner you. A cloned brain would be a virgin brain – a blank slate. It wouldn’t have your memories, personality, and other facets which are largely environmentally imprinted. 

Anyway, casting those above methods aside, how could you (actually that inner you – your mind) achieve if not infinite immortality, at least near quasi-immortality? The first catch is that what actually needs to be preserved is that inner you. That’s the inner you  that’s part of your physical body you – your emotions, memories, personality, awareness, likes, dislikes, habits (good and bad), etc. Survival for all eternity of your big toe or your wisdom teeth is fairly irrelevant in this context. For that matter, so is your blood, muscles, skin and bone, liver, etc. What needs to survive forever and ever (amen) is the seat of the real you – the inner you. That of course is your brain or your mind. Of course your brain, being organic, and subject to the aging process, can’t survive forever and ever (amen). Even if it could, after millions upon millions of years of living, its carrying capacity for memories, knowledge, etc. would have become exhausted – our brains have trouble in the here and now coping with sensory and information overload. Brain volume doesn’t expand to meet needs above and beyond that of our roughly three score and ten lifespan expectancy. It certainly can’t cope with three million score and ten! However, there’s no point in being immortal without having ongoing sensory inputs, at least sight and sound (you could probably do if necessary without the rest), although all input could be direct and electronic, like how a computer receives data.

And therein we come to the technological fix.

To be continued…

God’s Temper Tantrums and General Bad Behaviour: Part Two

God is a kind god; God is a loving god; God loves you; God cares about you; God is a compassionate god; God is a forgiving god; God is a merciful god. You see it on church billboards – “God loves you anyway”. We’ve nearly all had that drivel rammed down our throats since we were kids in Sunday School and some of us actually believe it. Does the hype match the Biblical reality? Can pigs fly?

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

DEUTERONOMY: There’s one major problem with the Promised Land as far as the Israelites are concerned – it’s already inhabited and occupied by non-Israelites. As the Amerindians, the Mesoamerican Aztecs and the Australian aborigines found out, possession maybe nine-tenths of the law, but it doesn’t protect you from bullets (or spears and swords).

Hitler had his chosen people invade Europe. God directs His Chosen People to invade the Land of Canaan (the Promised Land). That makes God no better than Hitler IMHO.

Oh, Moses finally caves in to old age (at a relatively youthful 120 years young, at least when compared to Methuselah and a few others) – RIP. However, before heading off Heavenly-bound he gives the Israelites a good old fashion Winston Churchill type V-for-Victory speech akin to ‘meet them on the beaches’, etc. 

JOSHUA: Hitler had his generals, and so too God.

God appoints Joshua to replace Moses as leader, and to command and lead the invasion of the Promised Land along with a little rape and pillage, looting and wanton destruction on the side.

Jericho is the first to fall, followed in quick order by the rest of the cities in Canaan Land – and you thought the Germans perfected the blitzkrieg. In old Wild West America there used to be a saying that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”. That has a precedent. There’s nothing original there for the Israelites are well known for taking no prisoners. All shall be put to the sword. Whether that’s Gods philosophy or Joshua’s I’m not sure*, but more likely as not Joshua took his marching and smiting orders from his non-elected commander-in-chief, president-for-life, Sir God. I’m sure Joshua wouldn’t have done anything without God’s approval, least he be replaced, court martialled and smote as well. Anyway, to the victors go the spoils and so the invaders divide up the newly conquered land between them. God must now be quite pleased with Himself as His Chosen People are now King of the Hill!

JUDGES: Once the Israelites get settled into their Promised Land, lapses into idolatry and a bow and scrape now and then to some of those ‘other gods’ happen. God has to redress this wickedness via some more smiting – just to keep His Chosen People on the straight-and-narrow mind you.

1 SAMUEL: The wicked Philistines nick off with the Ark of the Covenant, but a bit of Heavenly sent germ warfare takes care of that and the Ark is returned to its proper custodians.

2 SAMUEL: Another first-born gets wasted by God’s wrath, this time the offspring of David and his unmarried bed-partner, Bathsheba.

JOB: Job involves not only Job but a very, very ‘odd couple’ bedfellow-sharing partnership indeed. God gets all buddy-buddy with Satan and in fact hires Satan to cause our hero all sorts of misfortunes and calamities. For example, Satan employs one of God’s favourite tools, germs, to test Job’s immunity against them. Alas, Job has no immunity against divine germs, and so Job ends up covered with boils from head to foot. All of this was just a means to an end, the end being to test Job’s faith in God in the face of adversity. So, Abraham and Job have something in common with which to vent their spleen over and pour their bile on – your ever loving and always compassionate God.

JONAH: In the Book of Jonah (Jonah 4.6-11) God has the audacity to say (in admittedly a rather obscure way) that He’s God of all nations and has concern for all nations and their peoples, not just His Chosen People. That’s because He spared the Assyrian city of Nineveh (after Jonah warned them to shape up or else) which wasn’t inhabited by His Chosen People. Regardless, tell the Egyptians that God is God of all nations! God should go crawling down on His hands and knees to Cairo begging for forgiveness from the Egyptian people for fairly obvious reasons.

While there are many references in the New Testament (Luke, Romans, Ephesians, etc.) of others saying or implying that God is a god of all nations and peoples, not just Israel and the Israelites, I can’t find a reference where God Himself says this, so it’s all apparently a case of someone who told someone who told someone, etc. It’s all second hand testimony to that effect, unlike the Book of Jonah where God speaks for Himself.

Yet even in the New Testament we find in Luke 1: 68 a passage that praises the “Lord God of Israel”, so it’s difficult to know what to believe. But assuming a shift, then one could also view the shift of ‘God of Israel’ to ‘God of all nations’ as a behind the scenes grab for power – a coup against all those detestable ‘other gods’ who ruled over other kingdoms and nations. Gods like Odin, Zeus, Baal and Horus. That would certainly be consistent and fit in with God’s egomania and sadistic personality, behaviour and constant demands for all and sundry to bow and scrape down to Him. God acknowledges numerous times that there are other gods that He does so really hate mortals to worship, so why not bump them off Mafia style and take over the world Himself?  

At this stage God petty much just retires to sit on His Heavenly throne and no doubt pats Himself on the back for a job well done up to this point. He no doubt keeps Himself amused with all of the shenanigans we mortals get up to down on terra firma. Most of the rest of the Old Testament is full of office politics, who’s sleeping with who, local wars, civil wars, revolts, personal squabbles, back-stabbings & assassinations, infightings, political intrigues, idolatry, corruption, executions, with more ungodly plots and amoral subplots than you can shake a serpent at – the sorts of things commonly reported today on the nightly news or in the morning newspaper, or round the clock if you’re surfing the Internet. There’s also a few fairy tales thrown in for lite entertainment involving say Samson’s haircut or Jonah’s whale of a tale. 

Based on a lot of those above-mentioned shenanigans, there’s also lots of Old Testament Biblical finger-wagging about what God’s gonna do when His already short and burning fuse reaches the dynamite. It’s sort of like the standard “just you wait until your father gets home”! God actually commands a lot of people (like Zechariah, Ezekiel, Jonah, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, Micah, etc.) to wag their fingers on His behalf. Methinks that’s a tad too much like buck-passing. It’s God’s responsibility to wag His own finger and say “naughty, naughty – daddy’s gonna take off his belt and whip you good now”, not that any of this finger-wagging actually eventuated to date in anything or to anything. Talk about crying wolf. Father doesn’t come home! Well, maybe God’s alarm clock failed to go off and He’s still sawing logs, and all hell will break loose when He finally arrives at the office.

Or maybe in the end God is perhaps getting tired of all His smiting and His wickedness. Not that He has turned over a new leaf entirely – not by a long shot. In that final Biblical book, Revelation, which is as far removed from ‘warm and fuzzy’ as you can get, God delegates others to do His dirty work for Him. It’s a rather unusual hands-off approach for Him. God is the scriptwriter (or inspired the mortal scriptwriter), producer, director but not the star of the show. He’s not one of the actors in the drama. He leaves the acting to others, like angels and his son.   

Oh, speaking of Revelation and all that it implies, among other of God’s little pleasantries, He created Hell so you’d have a warm place to sleep your eternal sleep. How very thoughtful of God to provide the ancient’s equivalent of the electric blanket!

Now in conclusion, is this the sort of deity you really want to spend eternity in Heaven with?

If you still believe after all of this that God is a loving, compassionate, caring, merciful, forgiving God then there’s this rather large statue in New York Harbour I’ll sell you going real cheap!

P.S. - Jesus too had a temper and a mean streak. Like father like son? But that’s another topic for another time. 

*Though I guess this little gem settles the matter:

Deuteronomy 20:17 (KJV) “But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee:”

God’s Temper Tantrums and General Bad Behaviour: Part One

God is a kind god; God is a loving god; God loves you; God cares about you; God is a compassionate god; God is a forgiving god; God is a merciful god. You see it on church billboards – “God loves you anyway”. We’ve nearly all had that drivel rammed down our throats since we were kids in Sunday School and some of us actually believe it. Does the hype match the Biblical reality? Can pigs fly?

Assuming there is a God and assuming that the Bible is God’s word and an historical record of His activities (and you won’t hear anything to the contrary in church and from other formal Christian religious organisations) then the standard hype you hear, the standard image projected of God (and son) tends to be ‘warm and fuzzy’. It’s all about love, compassion, mercy, kindness and forgivingness, not hell, fire and brimstone. There’s at least one Bible-oriented Internet site that gives you a “verse-of-the-day” which is always ‘warm and fuzzy’ – a Biblical verse you’d whisper to your dying grandmother. However, if the church, religious organisations, even Biblical Internet sites stuck to a ‘wrath of God’ message they would be way more intellectually honest. Alas, people want to hear ‘warm and fuzzy’ not ‘wrath’.

Here are just a few selected ‘warm and fuzzy’ KJV Biblical quotations.

2 Corinthians 13: 14: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with you all. Amen.”

Daniel 9: 9: “To the Lord our God belong mercies and forgivenesses, though we have rebelled against him;”

Ephesians 2: 4: “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us,”

Ephesians 4: 32: “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.”

Joel 2: 13: “And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God: for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and repenteth him of the evil.”

So now let’s turn to and examine the Biblical ‘wrath of God’ and see how ‘warm and fuzzy’ God really is. In the beginning, God spits the dummy…

GENESIS: In the beginning God starts off on the wrong foot and continues out of step throughout Genesis.

Well Adam and Eve get booted out of the Garden of Eden by you know who. Now this is hardly the action of a good host, especially when there wasn’t a readily available hotel room down the road as an alternative for our original loving couple. There’s no mercy, compassion or forgiveness here.

Then God drowns nearly the entire human race with forty days and nights of torrential rain. Only Noah and a few of his kin plus a few selected animals ever get to see dry land again. Now if that’s not genocide, I don’t known what is! Hitler could have cited this as a precedent for his own extermination philosophies. One interesting puzzle here is that if God singled out Noah and a few of his relations to survive that flood, then Noah and kin must be God’s chosen people. Therefore their descendents must also be God’s chosen peoples. Alas, since those descendents repopulated the planet, and since not all of that repopulation were favoured by God, then something’s screwy somewhere.

Then we come to the Tower of Babel. People build a tower (early prototype of the skyscraper) upwards towards the sky (i.e. – Heaven). God is apparently terrified by this action, and retaliates by creating and fostering numerous languages on these upstarts so that the architects and builders, etc. can’t communicate since they all speak now in different tongues. How that is accomplished isn’t adequately explained. Still, it’s a rather painless way of learning a foreign language even at the expense of forgetting your own native tongue. Further, to ensure that no correspondence will be entered into, all and sundry get scattered to the four corners of the globe – did God hire a fleet of jumbo jets to transport them? Anyway, since even the tallest of modern terrestrial structures don’t remotely reach Heaven, God worried needlessly. It’s often said that “God works in mysterious ways”. My translation of that pithy but copout statement (something that explains nothing) is that God is as loony as the Mad Hatter. God needs not only to chill but is in desperate need of some serious therapy. 

God then, having gotten up on the wrong side of the bed again, terrifies poor Abraham and nearly gives him a heart attack by ordering him to execute his son, Isaac. An animal is substituted at the last minute and so God says “ha-ha, fooled you, I was only playing a little joke”. However, the damage was done and that sort of joke is hardly good PR designed to command loving respect. Ask yourself, is this the way a real loving God would behave? Would you appreciate being on the receiving end of God’s little joke?

After another bad hair day, God gives Sodom & Gomorrah the A-bomb treatment since the good folk of the twin cities don’t meet God’s moral standards - moral standards? Talk about casting the first stone, or the pot calling the kettle black! God did such a good job of destruction here that to this day no trace of the twin cities has ever been found! Some alchemy is also practiced as the complex multi-element biochemistry of Lot’s wife’s human body is transformed into a pure compound of just two elements – sodium and chlorine. Neat trick that one.

Throughout Genesis God’s composure is anything but cool, calm and collected. He really needs an aspirin and a good lie down at this point, and, we’re only through just the first Biblical book. What horrors are yet in store?

EXODUS: Apparently God was just warming up in the bullpen with his temper tantrums and smiting in Genesis. His nasty side really shines and comes to the fore in Exodus.

Ancient Egypt is ground zero for starters when God inflicts the ten plagues on the Egyptians (obviously not His chosen people). Those plagues included mass murder of the first-born as the grand finale.

God’s not done with the Egyptians however as for an encore He drowns Pharaoh’s army in the Red Sea, or was that the Sea of Reeds?

God’s personal Constitution is then imposed on His own Chosen People, the Israelites. That Constitution is more widely known then and now as the Ten Commandments, but God exempts Himself, especially the bit about “Thou shall not kill”.

LEVITICUS details a potful more of God’s ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ and ‘or else’s’. God loves laying down the law – as long as it’s His law. In any other context He’d be considered a bully at best or a dictator at worst. He’s certainly not into making laws via the concept well known as democracy.

NUMBERS continues the ‘do this’ and ‘don’t do that’ parade, but also contains some bits not fit for kid’s TV viewing – violence!

There is dissention in the ranks of the Chosen People out there in the Sinai wilderness and so there’s mutiny afoot and the Biblical equivalent of Captain Bligh (i.e. – God) will not be denied His wrath.  Actually there were two related mutinies. The first and minor mutiny ends with a whimper and not a bang. The second and major mutiny ends with a bang and not a whimper. It ends when God kills thousands of His Chosen People with a plague (love those germs) and an earthquake (shake, rattle and roll) as punishment for rumblings in the ranks. Further on down the wilderness track we have the episode of the ‘golden calf’ mark II (i.e. more idols; more idle worship). So God, knowing that His Chosen People didn’t build up sufficient immunity from His last plague, sends another – the local undertaker gets to bury another 24,000 Israelites.

Somewhere along the line here, a pissed-off God does an about-face and instead of leading His Chosen People to the Promised Land via a pillar-of-fire by night and a pillar-of-a-cloud by day in quick-smart fashion as in Exodus, He now dooms the Israelites to wander about aimlessly in the desert wilderness for forty years instead. Not even the Spartan army toughened up its recruits via living-off-the-land survival training in this sort of barbaric way. Who’d want to be an Israelite? So with ‘friends’ like God hanging around looking after you: who needs enemies! But enemies there were.

To be continued…

Should God Be Tried for Crimes Against Humanity?

Could God be tried in absentia for alleged Old Testament crimes and atrocities committed against humanity in say the International Court of Justice or more likely as not the International Criminal Court? It would be no less than He deserves given a track record that puts many of our historical despots to shame. Hitler (as an example) had no monopoly on genocide.

Here’s some Christian church propaganda: God loves each and every one of us. God cares for and about us. God is a just God. God is a merciful God. God is a loving God. God so loved the world that he gave…, etc. Blah, blah, blah. Spare me the hype – what a load of crap! God’s track record in these matters is the exact opposite.

Surely the Christian churches have to acknowledge God’s very existence. Surely they have to go along with acknowledging that if God says (via the Old Testament) He did some things (that we’d consider evil), or ordered others to do some things on His behalf (that we’d consider evil), or stood by and applauded certain evil actions by others, then the Church has to accept that those evil things happened as gospel. Surely the Christian churches would have to take a position that if humans have to take responsibility for their evil actions or activities or deeds, then that applies even more so to a deity. That the Christian churches (in general) don’t condemn God for His crimes against humanity speaks volumes. 

If God exists and is all powerful, then there are no such things as natural disasters. All disasters are Acts-of-God since God sanctions them. If you could have prevented a tragedy but willingly failed to act, then in the eyes of humanity you have a lot to answer for. And note this has nothing to do with God not acting because He doesn’t wish to interfere with your free will. There’s no free will involved when you’re caught up in an Act-of-God; which need not have happened. God appears to just sit back and enjoy the unfolding show. God has a lot to answer for.

Failure to act is bad enough, but the Old Testament is full of tales of God wilfully bringing about miseries equal to, often bettering those of the worst human tyrants in human history. And in cases where God didn’t directly inflict suffering on the masses (or individuals) first hand, the Bible is full of tales where God asked others to do His dirty work and where God condoned the evil actions of others.

Without going into endless case histories (this is an essay, not a book), the word-of-God, the Bible, gives the okay to beat children and slaves, right unto death if they disobey. Rape is okay by God, as is slavery. It’s God’s will to execute those committing all manner of ‘crimes’ from homosexuality to blasphemy, to working on the Sabbath, to practicing witchcraft and sorcery, to heresy, adultery, worshiping someone/something other than God, etc. History is filled with examples of religious figures and institutions committing the foulest manner of atrocities ‘in the name of God’ because that’s what the God of the Old Testament decried. Does the Inquisition ring any responsive chords to doubting Thomases? Well similar case studies can be found within the pages of your Old Testament.  

Any God who orders up animal sacrifices is no God I wish to have an association with. Societies charged with the responsibility of speaking out and preventing cruelty to animals should speak out on this issue, since animal sacrifices is apparently condoned, and sometimes still practiced by some of the world’s major religions even today!

God hates ancient Egypt. There was all these ten plagues inflicted on the great unwashed citizens of Egypt; Then God, via Moses, drowned Pharaoh’s army as well. 

Thou shall not kill is one of the Ten Commandments I believe. So you’d think that God would practice what He preaches. But isn’t, according to the Old Testament, God the greatest mass murder in the history of the world that puts tyrants the likes of Stalin to a status of a rank amateur? I mean there is that Biblical flood story and what about Sodom and Gomorrah? You can’t trust a God who basically says ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

With a bit of help from God, Joshua and his all-star band, blew down the city of Jericho, totally destroying it, and marching inside, took no prisoners. To add to the total destruction, the remains were burned and dire warnings were given to anyone attempting to rebuild the city. If God Himself didn’t do some of the huffing-and-puffing, He sure didn’t mind the total slaughter.

And who’s the deity that actually condemns you to an eternity of torture in Hell, Hades, Tartarus, the underworld, whatever you wish to call it? It’s your ever-loving God, that’s who. You don’t get a slap on the wrist, a fine, a ten year prison sentence, hard labour – no, God dishes out an eternity of you being tortured. If that’s a loving God, I’d hate to meet an unloving one! 

In conclusion, if any human being, tyrant, dictator, general, etc. committed 1/100^th of the atrocities that God has committed or sanctioned, well I can remind you about the post WWII Nuremburg trials, the fate of Mussolini, and what happen to Saddam Hussein and cronies in Iraq. As a general rule we don’t tend to worship, rather we tend to punish, those whose abuse of power runs counter to our general sense of good government. For some reason I’m quite unable to comprehend, God seems to be the exception to the rule. Perhaps it’s time for that to change.

Since God isn’t about to willingly volunteer to stand trial for His catalogue of crimes against humanity, well, He can always be tried in absentia. Now that would put the church’s knickers in a knot for sure!

God Has Left the Building! Part Two

The alleged most important being in the cosmos has the absolute least amount of evidence to verify that very existence. Either that being is incredibly shy, doesn’t exist, or exists under false pretences or via a human misconception. And that’s just the tip of the Godly anomalies.

Let’s start with several premises. 1) There exists, or existed, a being that we collective call God. 2) God isn’t an actual God, but ‘God’ a flesh-and-blood extraterrestrial who arrived on Earth in his Starship Heaven. 3) ‘God’ has ‘left the building’. To suggest that “God has left the building” is actually a tad kinder than that well worn 60’s phrase “God is dead”, though that may well be the case since ‘God’ is just another mortal flesh-and-blood being, albeit extraterrestrial, but if ‘God’ is just an extraterrestrial then he drops significantly in the cosmic scheme of things and is hardly the most important being in the cosmos. 

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

If you think the Income Tax Act is an unholy mess, that’s nothing, nothing compared to the Bible. At least the Income Tax Act hasn’t been endlessly translated from one language to another language to yet a third, fourth and fifth language (with no loss in meaning) and modernised (several times over) and interpreted 1000 different ways by 1000 different taxation scholars. If the Bible really is the word of a supernatural God, it should be absolutely clear cut, no wriggle room; no correspondence need be entered into. 1000 Biblical scholars will agree 100% of the time on the meaning to 100% of the Biblical passages. That’s clearly not the current status quo. Quite apart from everything else, the Bible tells such tall tales that make science fiction writers seem downright unimaginative. Raise hands all of you who believe that you can be turned into a pillar of salt, that the Red Sea (or Reed Sea – scholars differ) actually parted, or that you can survive inside the belly of a fish! And that’s just three of the tall tales you’re expected to swallow hook, line and sinker.

Hands up? Didn’t think so! But if you question any one part of Biblical reality and interpret any part as being Biblical nonsense and pseudo-science at its worst, then you’ve got to logically question all of it. Nothing is sacred; nothing is unquestionable.

Speaking of the Bible, history, as has often been pointed out, is written by the winners. That there are “two sides to every story” is another quaint saying. Unfortunately, there are lots of Biblical tales told from the winner’s point of view; the losing side of the story isn’t heard. If you could take all of the so-called villains of the Bible (Adam & Eve; Judas; Satan) and put them on trial and into the witness box, what would their version of events; their side of the story, be? I mean we need Satan’s version of events to balance the books; ditto for all the others who have been vilified by God and company. That’s fair. But who ever said that God was fair hasn’t done his homework.

Eden: The Real Story: Just to show I can be as inventive as the authors of the Bible, well  Eden was ‘God’s’ retreat or summer home away from His duties as commander of Starship Heaven or perhaps the proprietor of this ancient camp grounds / park / reserve. ‘God’ was willing to share paradise with lesser beings – i.e. humans, but guests were instructed not to touch – keep to the pathways and trails and established grounds! When one vacationing couple (guess who) didn’t and vandalised one of the endangered botanical species, they got their marching orders and no further humans were ever invited again to vacation in Paradise Eden.

By the way, given our so-called ‘loving’ God’s Biblical track record for throwing temper tantrums, such as against Adam and Eve in Eden, would you really want God to lovingly embrace you? I mean you might be better off embracing Jack-the-Ripper!

Premise Three: God has left the building. The basis for suggesting this is that even if you take the evidence for God’s existence as revealed in the Bible at face value – burning bushes, pillars of salt, universal floods, etc. There has been nothing one can hang one’s hat on for the past several thousand years in the way of evidence for God. No interviews, no photographs, no new Commandments, no verified miracles that God and only a God could preform, total and apparent wilful ignoring of the pope’s prayers for all the sorts of things popes go on and on about (like praying for world peace – a futile gesture if ever there was one), etc. Now, if God were really not God, but ‘God’, an extraterrestrial, well Starship Heaven and crew might have left the building (Planet Earth) eons ago and sought greener pastures. I mean his Old Testament temper tantrums got him nowhere; we still take his name in vain and curse him “God damn it”; his Ten Commandments are often ignored by the great unwashed; J.C. seems to get more press coverage and P.R.*; God has lots of competition from other deities, as well as other goods and services that rival his. I mean God can no more compete with prime time reality television and rap music and cell phones and iPods and the Internet’s MySpace and Facebook, than J.C. can compete with consumerism and commercialism on the 25^th of December**! No, I think ‘God’ (the extraterrestrial since I don’t believe the supernatural God exists) has voluntarily give humanity the ‘big finger’ and taken his bat and ball and gone home to sulk. Or perhaps ‘God’ has been involuntarily exiled. I mean if ‘God’ exists, then perhaps the ‘gods’ must also exist, and because there are many, many ‘gods’, well I mean even the schoolyard bully can be send packing with tail tucked between legs if enough of the bullied gang up and fight back. There’s no love lost between God and the gods since God ascended the Top Dog throne and Commanded that the gods be considered persona non-grata.

*Well after all God is indeed a jealous God by His own admission via the Ten Commandments so it stands to reason that He’d be miffed that His son has stolen His limelight. However, God laughs last and best because obviously J.C. didn’t get to follow Dad home since he of course met his waterloo nearly 20 centuries ago. Actually our extraterrestrial God wasn’t totally without compassion for His executed son (the straw that broke the camel’s back?), so before departing He no doubt ‘beamed’ J.C.’s body aboard His Starship Heaven, and in so doing explain the resurrection and the empty tomb!

**Christmas is celebrated under totally false pretences, if one celebrates the birth of J.C. that is. The ultimate origins of Christmas have to do with a rebirth, not a birth. Christmas evolved from a winter festival that celebrated the rebirth of the Sun – the return of ever lengthening hours of daylight and the heralding of the return of spring, warmer weather and the growing season. Nobody has a clue when J.C. was born or even for that matter whether or not J.C. even existed in the first place. Christianity just thought it in their interests to hijack a pagan festival (can’t have pagan festivals) and replace it with something more religiously (as in Christian religiously) warm and fuzzy, not that lengthening daylight wasn’t something warm and fuzzy to the pagans.