God: the Intelligent Designer? Oops! [+] Intermission

One alleged proof of an Almighty is that life, the universe and everything is apparently designed in an intelligent, not in a random way. Part of that life is of course human beings, like you. Are you intelligently designed? If you answer “Yes”, I’ll say “Bull”!

Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems? Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? Mr. Supreme Being, that's who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say "the Almighty"? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say "the Almighty" again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don't think so! Did the Almighty fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

As an example of so-called ‘intelligent design’ our nakedness relative to our furry primate ancestors and current primate ‘relatives’ is another clue that God failed Anatomy 101 – there are multi-dozens upon dozens of primates; only one ‘naked ape’ (humans). Why did we get created without fur? I mean when the temperature drops much below the comfort threshold, we require in no uncertain terms clothing. When it hits freezing point, we can’t survive without clothing, yet our furry animal cousins seem to manage A-OK. There’s many an image of a furry mammal surviving, even thriving in the snow. Quite apart from the fact that fur is a better regulator of temperature than just sweating, loss of fur resulted in two other highly negative evolutionary rock and hard place restrictions. We’ve been given a temperature regulation mechanism via sweating. Humans of all the mammals are the species that sweat the most. The retrograde step of temperature control via sweating instead of fur imposed two additional restrictions on us. 1) We were forced to stay close to reliable sources of fresh water. 2) It also makes us way more dependent on supplies of salt since salt is excreted from the body via sweat. Salt supplies in the natural environment are rare – so rare that once upon a time salt was extremely valuable and you got paid in salt. It’s were we get our word, salary from. If only the Almighty had given us our fur.

Another screw-up by our Supreme Being has to do with our bipedal gait relative to the rest of the mammals. Name me one other mammal that routinely walks on two legs?  That’s probably because there are many negatives to a bipedal gait, like loss of stability. Humans are more prone to losing balance and falling over than say a cow or a cat. If you’re alone and quadrupedal (or an insect or even better a spider) and lose the use of a leg, you’re hurting but not critically. If your alone and bipedal and lose the use of a leg, you’re up fertilizer creek. God should have given us six limbs – four legs and two arms! Now that would have been intelligent design.   

That’s probably enough Bible-bashing and kicking God’s privates for the moment. I’ll be back on both bashing and kicking on both an irregular as well as an irreligious basis. Meantime, see also, if so inclined, my “All Things Extraterrestrial and “All Things Natural Philosophy” blogs.

Is our Supreme Being A Deity For All the People?

If you believe the Bible, the Almighty has His Chosen People - the Hebrews. The Almighty has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn't America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or Russia, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren't the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called Israel; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that the Almighty is the "God of Israel". So, if you ain't associated with the Almighty's Chosen People and His Promised Land, it's impossible to believe that you are one of those in His holy grace! In short, it's safe to give your alleged Supreme Being your Big Middle Finger, even both of them!

The All-God: All This, All That, All the Next Thing

God is certainly considered by the faithful to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and of course omni-warm and omni-fuzzy.

Can a Supreme Being Be All-Present?Since the Almighty is a physical being, after all He utters sounds and causes things to happen, and as such, cannot be in all places at all times. That’s just total nonsense. Scratch omnipresent.

Can a Supreme Being Be All-Knowing? Hardly! If such a being is omniscient, what's the point in the whole creation business? There's no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So a Supreme Being created Adam and Eve, but since that Supreme Being is alleged to be an all-knowing deity, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That's why people don't usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven't yet seen. If you're told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

That applies equally to that final Biblical New Testament Book of Revelation. The Bible is the Almighty's Holy Word. Revelation is therefore the Almighty's Holy Word. Everything that is to come is spelt out in detail. The ending is not in doubt. How the ending is achieved is not in doubt. The Almighty knows all of this in advance. Satan, being a literate sort of entity, knows all of this as well. Therefore, what's the point in enacting out the scenario? If everyone has to go through the fixed Revelation scenario, then that confirms everything is predestined and that there is no such thing as Free Will despite the Almighty's utterances to the contrary. Just like in a novel or a film, the plot plays out the exact same each and every time. The characters have no choice but to follow the plot line - they have no Free Will. Scratch omniscient.

Can a Supreme Deity Be All-Powerful? Hardly! If such a Deity can not prevent evil, then that Deity is not omnipotent. If that Deity can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then that Deity is hardly benevolent. If that Deity allows evil to exist in humans, and that Deity created humans, then that Deity must share some responsibility for that evil. It's akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

The Almighty is not omnipotent since not even He can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle's precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, the Almighty, like gravity waves, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can't operate at faster than light speed. If our Supreme Being wants to smite you down, and He is ten light-years away, then you're safe for a decade before His bolt of lightning hits you.

If the Almighty exists in a physical location within the Universe, then He can't know about an event until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from that event reaches Him. Since light has a finite speed, the Almighty is in the 'dark' as it were until the light and information it contains reaches Him. For example, if the Almighty is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason our Sun goes supernova, the Almighty (as well as the rest of humanity) won't know about it for other eight-plus minutes - the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.

Not even a Supreme Being can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something, like going back in time and posting a "No Trespassing: Keep Out: Serpents Will Be Shot On Sight: This Means You" sign at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Nor can a Supreme Being accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Can a deity, any deity draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper. I think not.

If the Almighty is so omnipotent, why did He need to rest on the Seventh Day? Scratch omnipotent.

Is the Almighty an All-Loving, Merciful, Compassionate, and Forgiving Deity? Yes you say? You have got to be joking! Have those spouting off such nonsense actually read the Old Testament? From the universal flood, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to the tenth plague, to the invasion of the Land of Canaan, to countless other large-scale right down to individual (i.e. - Abraham and Job) atrocities committed, the Almighty is the driving force. Hitler in his wildest dreams couldn't conceive of such death and destruction as Mr. Supreme Deity inflicted on not only His enemies, but also on His own Chosen People. If 'military intelligence' is a contradiction in terms, even more so is the phrase 'the loving Almighty'. I'd sooner take my chances with 'a loving person-eating shark'! Scratch God being all omni-warm and omni-fuzzy.

The Almighty does in fact have one 'All' quality. He's an all-nothing. The Almighty, the supernatural deity, doesn't exist.

Reasons to Question an Alleged Supreme Being’s Bona-Fides

There are lots of names applied to our monotheistic deity. There's God, the Almighty, the Supreme Being, the Lord, and so on. But no matter the name, no matter which way you slice and dice the concept, it retains such philosophical baggage that any rational being has just got to question the bona-fides of such a deity.

There’s something odd about God’s origin and nature. It’s downright illogical at best; in fact it’s really quite impossible! The concept of God has the same degree of believability as the concept of Santa Claus.

If a Supreme Being created the Universe, then what, or who, created that Being? Who are the Almighty's parents in other words? Causality applies to Supreme Beings as well as anything else. And if something or someone created the Supreme Being, what then created that something or someone and so on and so on down the line? It's an infinite regression. It's far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn't mean our Universe didn't have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to 'who created the Almighty?' is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way. Humans created the Almighty in mans' image (and probably all other supreme deities as well), rather than the reverse - The Almighty didn't create humans in His own image.

However, as an afterthought, perhaps man was created in the image of the Almighty. Based on the texts of the Biblical Old Testament, our Supreme Being has to be described as a dictator what with all those "thou shall not..." commandments. The Almighty is also a hypocrite as in 'do as I say, not as I do', for example "Thou shall not kill". Further, the Almighty is someone who's vain and petty always demanding all and sundry to bow and scrape to Him. He's also someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name, such as the Battle of Jericho, which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes. All up, the Almighty is just someone who's cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist; someone who's totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around Son of a Bitch. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of, like your average run-of-the-mill Homo sapiens?

If cats have a deity, I'm sure their supreme deity would have whiskers and claws and purr (or more likely go 'meow-meow'). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question - the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if the Almighty has always existed, then He is infinitely old, beating Methuselah's longevity by a mile. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His (I'll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) 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 our Supreme Being doing the 'day' before He created our Universe? Perhaps one answer is that He has always created universes, one after another after another - creating universes, that's the Almighty's thing! And if the Almighty is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence. Well, some cosmologists do postulate that our Universe is one of many - the concept of the Multiverse.

Speaking of creation, but assuming just one Universe, that's an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if Mr. Supreme Deity created everything, then He created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moons). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can't see Pluto with the naked eye. Even with a telescope Pluto is just a tiny dot. If Pluto didn't exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that's a fairly safe bet). Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn't it have been easier on Mr. Supreme Deity not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of the Almighty's efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It's sort of like buying a china teapot or a baseball bat, for your pet canary. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn't see 99.99% of the observable universe, and 99.99% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What's the point then of creating all that extra 99.99%?

If the Almighty exists, why doesn't He show His warts-and-all face today? I mean, He wasn't all that shy about getting in humanity's face way back in the days of the Old Testament, so what is He so wary of today? Maybe He's afraid of our nukes! But that's silly seeing as how He's all-powerful. That aside, it wouldn't be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a showing today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If the Almighty so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to an Almighty that something only an Almighty (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kiwi birds had been mentioned, or icebergs, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that sugar was a mixture of several things, or what about another commandment akin to "Thou shall not travel faster than the speed of light". Just one simple little sentence - that's all it would have taken - something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn't have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks the Almighty missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, our Supreme Being could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the surface of the Moon, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Red Sea split asunder for a spell!

If a Supreme Being exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring an Almighty hypothesis, then the Almighty has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself a total irrelevance!

In conclusion, the Almighty, the supernatural deity, doesn't exist. That’s the most obvious logical option when looking at the Almighty’s bona-fides. One line of evidence in support of that is that our alleged Supreme Being hasn't struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless 'crime'. And no, I don't hate the Almighty. You can't hate something that doesn't exist.

Jesus of Nazareth: R.I.P.

Assuming that the Christian religious figurehead known as Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth actually existed, and that is not a given by any stretch of the imagination, then the odds are, IMHO, that he was just another mortal human and not an immortal supernatural deity, the alleged ‘Son of God’.

There's this concept or character of Jesus Christ (JC), or Jesus of Nazareth (depending on religious philosophy), the alleged Son of God. JC is probably the most famous or most well known character in all of recorded history, even if in his own time he was as unknown and unheard of as 99.9% of rock and film star wannabes are today. But did Jesus actually exist? It would really be a bummer if JC had all the reality of other famous and well known but fictional characters like Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Santa Claus. Yet for someone so famous after-the-fact, there's damn little documentation outside of religious texts to support his reality, and all of that 'reality' was penned many decades after-the-fact. Not only that, but the four main New Testament gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, that detail the life and times of JC don’t always agree on various key points.

While there is relatively little doubt in my mind that there really was an historical figure that went by the name of Jesus, there are those scholars who would, and do, argue that Jesus was as totally a mythological figure as Zeus and Apollo, or for that matter Santa. That aside, I suggest that JC was a person who was very human, born in the normal way, died as any human eventually does, and has remained dead ever since.

If JC is indeed an historical figure, I suggest that while he existed he was seen as a very charismatic character, but one who alas, would most certainly have been mentally ill. Our mental institutions or asylums are full of people who sincerely believe that they are this person, or that person, or a reincarnation of this or that historical figure, but in reality, are totally delusional. I'm sure this syndrome is not unique to this era. I just mean that I'm sure mental illness existed some 2100 years ago - then as now - and it's possible that JC could have suffered from delusions of grandeur to some greater or lesser degree assuming he made some extraordinary claims about himself.

There have been lots of charismatic religious figures over the centuries, which, in another time and place, if claiming to be the Son of God, would have attracted a massive following, and a near mythological aura. Perhaps JC just happened to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right personality to pull the charade off - in fact JC probably sincerely believed his own story. I'm no expert on what exactly JC said about himself, or has been alleged he said (if any of his quotations can be taken a face value). Perhaps he made relatively few claims at all and it was only others who embellished him as something he never really claimed to be. If that's the case, then of course maybe he wasn't mentally ill. Regardless, the bottom line is that JC, whatever he and/or others thought he was, was the son of a man and a woman, not the Son of God. To accept JC as a deity is to, IMHO, accept one of Alice’s White Queen's pre-breakfast impossibilities.

The Quotable Bible: Fact or Fiction?

Our culture is awash with Biblical quotations uttered by Biblical personalities. You can quote God, or Moses, or Jesus, or Noah, or any of the dozens of others from the various chapters and verses in the Bible. The question is how much faith can you muster and attribute to the bona-fide accuracy of those you quote? If you’re really honest with yourself, the answer is bugger-all!

Odds are, if you go to church on Sunday, or tune in to a televangelist, or even hold a conversation with colleague, friend or neighbour on the topic of religion, you will hear whoever is speaking quote God and/or Jesus and/or some other Biblical figure about this, that or the next thing. The one and only source for these quotations is of course the Bible. But who was actually there at the appropriate time and place to act as scribe, secretary or minutes taker? The answer is often nobody!

Let’s take one set of particulars. In the first couple of chapters of Genesis, you get conversations between God and Adam, between Adam and Eve, between Eve and the Serpent, between God and the Serpent; between God and Eve; between God and Cain. Who wrote all those conversations down? Did pen and paper even exist in the Garden of Eden and surrounding territory?

Even more puzzling, in the very first chapter of Genesis, God said “let there be light”; “let there be a firmament”; “let the waters under heaven be gather together”; “let the earth bring forth grass”; “let there be lights in the firmament”; “let the waters bring forth”; “let the earth bring forth” and “let us make man in our image”. Who, what mortal might I ask, was there with pen and paper in hand writing all of this down? This was an era way before there was any Pulitzer Prize winning human journalists around looking for a scoop!

Assuming there was no journalist on the spot taking down God’s immortal words “let there be light” for example, then who was God speaking to? Was God talking to himself here? Maybe not because of that “us” reference in “let us make man in our image”, whoever “us” refers to. Maybe “us” refers to the Titan god Prometheus, since that Greek deity is credited with creating humans from clay. That’s only one of many possibilities since one could name hundreds of deities from cultures around the world credited with creating mankind. 

Now I don’t believe Noah is accredited with writing Biblical chapter and verses, yet the Bible quotes God talking to Noah, as in “God said unto Noah”. Who wrote that conversation down? Abraham likewise isn’t credited with Biblical penmanship, yet we have “God said unto Abraham”. Then there’s “God said unto Jacob” and “God said unto Moses” (also “Moses said unto God”) and “God said unto Balaam” and “God said to Solomon” and “God said to Jonah” (and vice versa), and so it goes. How remarkable that each and every time “God said” that a scribe just happened to be Johnny-on-the-spot to write God’s sayings down for posterity, not to mention the replies of us mere mortals that He was addressing! 

Anytime anyone says anything that’s quoted on down the track, in the days before Dictaphone machines and tape recorders, etc. there had to of been someone there taking down the words verbatim for posterity. If they weren’t written down until well after the fact – well you know how reliable human memory is! What if they got it slightly wrong? What if they got it mainly wrong? What in fact if they made it all up?

Then the Bible (New Testament) says “Jesus said” a total of 65 times. No doubt Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all took secretarial, shorthand, stenography courses in order to accurately take minutes and record the wit and wisdom of Jesus. Except of course there were times when Jesus wasn’t in the presence of any scribes, like when Jesus and Satan had a bit of a private chinwag in the wilderness, yet Jesus is still quoted as if he was carrying around a portable tape recorder to record for posterity the exchange.

Jesus reminds me that there’s another slight problem with Biblical quotations. The Bible sometimes records conversations of a rather highly private and delicate nature where there was no one else was present to take down notes. In fact some of those conversations happened in dreams and thus couldn’t have been transcribed there and then by any scribe. Let’s take the delicate nature of Mary and Joseph’s relationship which was thrown into turmoil by Mary becoming in a family way without input from Joseph. 

If one consults Luke, chapter 1, verses 26 through roughly 35, there is a private conversation between the angel Gabriel and Mary in which the later is informed by the former that she will become pregnant without benefit of any intimate relationship of a sexual kind. 

Just to make sure that Mary’s husband-to-be doesn’t get all hot and bothered by this, we note the following quotation.

Matthew 1:20: But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the LORD appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost.

Now clearly all of this is of a highly personal nature and interviews on the subject are rather unlikely to have been granted. Not by Gabriel or Joseph’s angel of the Lord, and probably not by Joseph or Mary. Would you blab to the press about this if you were in their shoes (or sandals)? So how come all of this highly personal and intimate stuff gets into a public document for all to see and quote?

Here are two more examples within the nature of ‘God said’ via a dream. So who told tales out of school, God or the dreamer? And who did the interviewing and the recording?

Genesis 20:3: But God came to Abimelech in a dream by night, and said to him, Behold, thou art but a dead man, for the woman which thou hast taken; for she is a man's wife.

1 Kings 3:5: In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream by night: and God said, Ask what I shall give thee.

Finally, the Biblical Book of Revelation has dozens of quotations of various entities spouting off about this, that and the ‘End of Days’ in general. The issue I have with that is that the events in Revelation haven’t yet happened. How can you quote a saying related to a future event, an event and saying that hasn’t yet transpired? Here’s one famous example: 

Revelation 1:8: I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.

That quotation doesn’t appear previously – it’s an original to Revelation.

And here’s one more for the road to illustrate the point.

Revelation 8: 13: And I beheld, and heard an angel flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of the earth by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound!

Now both God and Jesus are quoted extensively in the Old and New Testaments respectively. Seeing as how nobody had access to tape recorders or other sound recording devices back then, probably not even pen and paper, how can exact quotations from these Biblical deities be taken at face value? Perhaps the authors who penned the Biblical verses just made it up as they went along! It wouldn't be the first time that someone has put words in someone else's mouth! Sometimes making things up results in legal action; perhaps God and Jesus should sue for libel, slander or being quoted out of context.

IMHO the quotable God and quotable Jesus is pure myth. The Old and New Testaments weren't written by God and Jesus respectively. The Old and New Testaments weren’t even written down in real time. In fact the texts of the Bible were written down many decades to centuries after the fact. For example, in the case of the New Testament, the Gospels weren't penned until four to ten decades after Jesus left this mortal plane.

Anyway, the next time your local clergy preaches that "God said" or "Jesus said", just pipe up with a "hang on there a minute. How do you really know what God or Jesus said? You weren't there and neither were those Biblical scribes." In fact the next time anyone, anywhere, anyplace, anytime quotes you God or J.C., or anyone else from the Bible for that matter, demand to know how they know that, and if they say "well, the Bible says so", read them the riot act about Biblical accuracy. In other words, quoting God, Jesus or any other Biblical character is just plain impossible in terms of that quote being a really spot-on historically verbatim and accurate account of that they said, if they said anything at all since the Bible might have the same degree of historical bona-fides as “Alice in Wonderland".

God’s Population and Environmental Policy: Genesis 1: 28

One part of the Bible that people like and take seriously is that God commands people to have sex – with the opposite sex of course, even if only for the purpose of producing more people who will grow up and eventually have sex, etc. Humans tend to be very good at this, regardless of race, IQ, occupation, status, income, overall health or even disabilities. Unfortunately, the consequences have been less than a utopian paradise or heavenly.

Most would agree that humans have had less than a perfect record when it comes to observing and keeping the Ten Commandments. But there is one other commandment that predates the Big Ten that humans have taken to heart and have had no trouble at all obeying. But instead of leading to positive results, this commandment has led humanity into turning our home, Planet Earth, into a cesspool of filth and suffering even death on a massive scale, not just for us but also for the innocents that had no say in the matter as well. The root cause is God’s population and environmental policies.

Though God’s population and environmental policy isn’t confined to just this one Biblical chapter and verse, that specific chapter and verse, Genesis 1: 28, is probably the most destructive statement in all of recorded history. Genesis 1: 28 is God’s population and environmental policy for mankind. It basically amounts to breed, like, well like rabbits! Further, there’s a subclause that suggests we speak loudly and carry a big stick and let Mother Nature know in no uncertain terms who is King of the Mountain. 

God's policy on population growth is flawed. God's not a Greenie or an environmentalist! We all know the passage from Genesis 1: 28 (King James Version) - It goes something like this: "And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth."

In fact, it doesn’t seem to matter if you’re starving, are poverty stricken, have little if any access to basic amenities, the need to obey Genesis 1: 28 is so strong that little else matters. We’ve all seen horrendous images of the greatest of the great unwashed living in filth and poverty with children not much more than living skeletons, and dying like flies. Fast forward a generation and it is déjà vu all over again, only it’s now twice the number of the greatest of the great unwashed. Despite living in the most appalling of conditions, you can count on the universal – sex. And of course the poorer you are the more you will take dominion over resources in order to survive. A poverty-stricken man would gladly kill the last surviving member of an entire animal species if it brings in enough money to get him and his family through another single day.     

It’s normally Mother Nature’s way to keep population growth under checks and balances, except, thanks to God, humans prove the disastrous exception to the rule. When human populations suffer to the extent that death on a massive scale starts to transpire, other humans provide assistance to get them over the hump. Thus, the next time disaster strikes and people start dying off, you have a situation where they are even more in need of assistance since those who would have died the previous time lived instead to breed more - the next generation, now under the gun. Human compassion, or morality or ethics – presumably also a gift from God – always lauded, ultimately can lead to even greater need for compassion. It’s a vicious cycle.

Of course when it comes to non-human species, humans are not quite so compassionate, moral or ethical. It’s that “subdue” and “dominion” bit. Humans don’t wait for Mother Nature to take charge, rather assume responsibility themselves, as a logical extrapolation of Genesis 1: 28.  Here in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), the ACT government authorises yearly the culling (i.e. – shoot to kill) of multi-thousands of kangaroos because these animals allegedly have a detrimental effect on the native environment of the ACT (i.e. – they get in the way of humans). Never mind the fact that the animal is a native (not an invasive species) to the area and their presence predates human settlement by millions of years. Also, never mind that humans outnumber kangaroos by thousands to one. Even locally, humans vastly outnumber the kangaroo. Guess which of the two species has the higher impact on the natural environment. The example of the kangaroo can be retold in other contexts thousands of times over – the American buffalo for example. That's quite apart from humans killing animals for 'sport'; not for food or clothing, but just for a hell of it; because it makes the brave hunters feel big – king of the mountain in fact. Genesis 1: 28 strikes again, and again and again.  

Now Genesis 1: 28 is ultimately a Biblical impossibility because it is unsustainable, as should already be bleeding obvious to blind Freddy, and should have been obvious to God Himself. But God is selfish. God wants worshipers and the more the better. God may well want more and more and more humans to bow and scrape to Him, but at what ultimate cost to the Earth He allegedly created; all those plants and animals He allegedly created; and His ultimate alleged creation, humanity?

Apart from mice and rats (which have a low ecological footprint), there's probably no wild mammalian species still in existence that outnumbers us anymore. There's something seriously wrong when there's threatened and endangered species, some  that now only total 500 to maybe (if lucky) 5000 individuals left, when humans are seven billion strong and ever accelerating in numbers, especially in Africa. What hope is there for God's animal creations? We've living in an era of mass extinction right now, and we're the cause. What lifestyle for humans when there's no more fit air to breathe; no fit water to drink; all natural resources depleted; disease and hunger rampant.

God may enjoy all those billions of humans here and now with billions more to come worshiping and praying to Him, but those "fish of the sea" are a fraction of what once was; ditto the "fowl of the air" and ditto, ditto "every living thing" - well, maybe not cockroaches, not yet at least (until they become a human food source of last resort and you'd eat them if it were down to a choice of that or starvation - besides they're rich in protein). The Book of Revelation maybe impossible nonsense, though the ‘End of Days’ (for humans) might not be, thanks to Genesis 1:28. It would be rather ironic if God just barely spared mankind via Noah’s Ark, only to have mankind go kaput because of that other extract from Genesis.

Of all of God’s crimes against humanity, which have been numerous (like the Genesis Flood), this apparently innocent statement contained in Genesis 1: 28 in the long term will be the one with the most implications, and ultimately the worst one of all, and God made it, and an all-knowing God should have known better. Of course that’s if you place any credibility in Biblical quotations. But that’s another topic.

Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part Two

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated; perhaps they fell in the lap, not of the gods, but of God.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Impossibility Three: Is God All–Knowing?  Hardly! If God is all knowing, what’s the point in the whole creation business? There’s no fun or satisfaction to a creation if you know to the tiniest detail, exactly what will happen at each and every moment to everything, everyone, and everywhere. Would your life be worth living if at say age 10, you had absolute knowledge of the future and knew exactly what each and every future second would be like for you in advance? So God created Adam and Eve, but since God is alleged to be an all-knowing God, then He knew even then what would happen in the Garden of Eden, so why bother instructing Adam and Eve not to eat forbidden fruit? What would be the point? That’s why people don’t usually want to be told the resolution to a film they haven’t yet seen. If you’re told before-the-fact whodunit, why see the film or read the novel?

That applies equally to that final Biblical Book of Revelation. The Bible is God’s Holy Word. Revelation is therefore God’s Holy Word. Everything that is to come is spelt out in detail. The ending is not in doubt. How the ending is achieved is not in doubt. God knows all of this in advance. Satan, being a literate sort of entity, knows all of this as well. Therefore, what’s the point in enacting out the scenario? If everyone has to go through the fixed Revelation scenario, then that confirms everything is predestined and that there is no such thing as Free Will despite God’s utterances to the contrary. Just like in a novel or a film, the plot plays out the exact same each and every time. The characters have no choice but to follow the plot line – they have no Free Will.

Impossibility Four: Is God All-Powerful? Hardly! If God can not prevent evil, then God is not all powerful. If God can prevent evil, but chooses not to, then God is hardly benevolent (see Impossibility Two above). If God allows evil to exist in humans, and God created humans, then God must share some responsibility for that evil. It’s akin to parents having to shoulder responsibility if their child or children runs amuck.

God is not all-powerful since not even God can get around the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics, which states that it is impossible to know simultaneously any particle’s precise position and trajectory.

Presumably, God, like gravity, and anything comprised of mass and/or energy can’t operate at faster than light speed. If God wants to smite you down, and God is ten light-years away, then you’re safe for a decade before His bolt of lightning hits you.

If God exists in a physical location within the Universe, then God can’t know about an event until the light (or other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum; or gravity) from that event reaches God. Since light has a finite speed, God is in the ‘dark’ as it were until the light and information it contains reaches God. For example, if God is residing on Planet Earth, and for some reason our Sun goes supernova, God (as well as the rest of humanity) won’t know about it for other eight-plus minutes – the time it takes light to reach Earth from the Sun.

Not even God can change the past. I mean, there are any number of instances where to correct some mistake; it would have been easier to backtrack in time and undo something, like going back in time and posting a “No Trespassing: Keep Out: Serpents Will Be Shot On Sight: This Means You” sign at the entrance to the Garden of Eden.

Not even God can accomplish something that is self-contradictory, like creating a spherical cube or a cubical sphere! Not even God can draw more than one straight line between two points on a flat piece of paper.

If God is all-powerful, why did God need to rest on the 7^th day?

Impossibility Five: Is God A God for All People? If you believe the Bible, God has His Chosen People – the Hebrews. God has His Promised Land for His Chosen People. That Promised Land isn’t America (far less California) or Australia/New Zealand or Europe (with or without Great Britain) or Antarctica or Asia or Africa or Russia, etc. Those Chosen Peoples aren’t the Italians, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Aboriginals, the Amerindians, the Polynesians or the Turks, and especially not the Egyptians! The Promised Land is the Land of Canaan, now called Israel; The Chosen People are, obviously, the Israelites. In fact the Bible (King James Version) makes crystal clear, not once, but 201 times that God is the “God of Israel”. So, if you ain’t associated with God’s Chosen People and God’s Promised Land, it’s impossible to believe that you are one of those in God’s holy grace! In short, it’s safe to give God your Big Middle Finger, even both of them! 

Impossibility Six: God versus Intelligent Design? Do you need a hearing aid? Do you need glasses? Did you require your tonsils or appendix or wisdom teeth to be removed? Do you suffer from haemorrhoids or back problems?  Have your hips, knees, and ankles let you down? Do you suffer from baldness, tooth decay, arthritis, acne, colds, the flu, even cancer? Do you have issues with your sexuality or the functioning of your private parts? Do you suffer from mental illness? Who created the human species and therefore by definition created you? God, that’s who, created you! Who created your physiology and anatomy? Did I hear you say “God”? So who created all of your psychological, physiological and anatomical problems? Did I hear you say “God” again? Is this what you would consider Intelligent Design? I don’t think so! Did God fail Anatomy 101? I think so.

God does in fact have one ‘All’ quality. He’s an all-nothing. God, the supernatural deity, doesn’t exist. One line of evidence in support of that is that God hasn’t struck me down dead by lightning by writing and posting this! So you see, blasphemy is a victimless ‘crime’. And no, I don’t hate God. You can’t hate something that doesn’t exist.

Six Impossible Godly Concepts: Part One

We all like lists: The ten best this, the top dozen that; the five worst ranking next thing. That’s why the popularity of the Guinness Book of Records. In “Alice through the Looking Glass”, the White Queen believed in six impossible things before breakfast. Exactly what those impossible things were is not stated; perhaps they fell in the lap, not of the gods, but of God.

I spotted a book* a while back and looked over the dust jacket. It was regarding the afterlife, and the jacket said something akin to God was One; and you were part of His oneness; and your afterlife with God was outside the realm of time and space. And I thought to myself what a load of utter claptrap! God is One – One what? Who knows; the book jacket didn’t say; it’s not explained for those thinking of buying the book. If there is an oneness, then that implies there must be a two-ness and a three-ness and a four-ness and so on down the line. If you exist in an afterlife outside of space and time then whatever you are in that afterlife, you have no volume, no area, no length – you are a zero dimensional dot point. Further, nothing can ever change in that afterlife since there is no time which is what gives substance or reality to change. So, what other impossible things of a godly nature can we pour the waters of scepticism on?

Impossibility One: The Concept or Nature of God is Impossible: There’s something odd about God’s origin and behaviour. It’s downright impossible!

If God created the Universe, then what, or who, created God? Who is God’s mother in other words? Cause and effect apply to God as well as anything else. And if something or someone created God, what then created that something or someone (and so on and so on)? It’s an infinite regression. It’s far easier to believe the cosmos has always existed though that doesn’t mean our Universe didn’t have a point-in-time origin or beginning since a previous universe can give rise to another universe (like ours) in sequence.

Actually, I strongly suspect the answer to ‘who created God?’ is fairly easy, probably downright obvious in an intuitive sort of way.  Humans created God in man’s image (and probably all other deities as well, including Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy), rather than the reverse – God didn’t create humans in God’s image. [Actually, perhaps man was created in God’s image. Based on the writings in the Old Testament, God has to be described as a dictator (‘thou shall not…’) and a tyrant, a hypocrite (do as I say, not as I do), someone who’s vain and petty, someone who sanctions any number of atrocities in His name (which if committed today would results in charges of war crimes), someone who’s cruel, jealous, nasty, raciest, and sexist, someone who’s totally up Himself, highly demanding and basically an all around SOB. Remind you of anyone you know, or know of?] 

If cats have a deity, I’m sure their god would have whiskers and claws and purr (or more likely go ‘meow-meow’). I suspect that humans have a quasi hard-wired need to believe in a something(s) that one can always fall back on to explain and answer those unanswerable questions, as well as provide comfort for that ultimate question – the nature of death and what follows on from that.

Anyway, if God has always existed, then God’s infinitely old, beating Methuselah’s longevity by a mile. In that case, an infinite amount of time had to pass before His (I’ll keep with tradition and assume the masculine) 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? Perhaps one answer is that God has always created universes, one after another after another – creating universes, that’s God’s thing! And if God is infinitely old, then there must have been, or are, an infinite number of universes created and in existence. Well, some cosmologists do postulate that our Universe is one of many – the concept of the Multiverse.

Speaking of creation, but assuming just one Universe, that’s an awful lot of Universe created just for little old us! Seriously, and for example, if God created everything, then God created the planetoid Pluto (and associated moons). My question is what was the point of expending the resources to do that? We can’t see Pluto with the naked eye. If Pluto didn’t exist would anything on Earth be different? Pluto adds nothing to our quality of life (or lack of it) and presumably ditto applies to any extraterrestrials in our solar system (assuming that Pluto and moon are uninhabited that is, and that’s a fairly safe bet).  Of course you may argue that perhaps Pluto was impacted by a killer asteroid that otherwise would have hit us and therefore has affected our quality of life. Then wouldn’t it have been easier on God not to have created Pluto and not created that asteroid as well? This creation of things with no relevance to the apparent pinnacle of creation (the be-all-and-end-all of God’s efforts), that is to say, us, makes no sense. It’s sort of like buying a china teapot or a baseball bat, for your pet canary. What would be the point? Further a field, we couldn’t see 99.999% of the observable universe, and 99.999% of the observable universe has no bearing on our day-to-day existence. What’s the point then of creating all that extra 99.999%?

If God exists, why doesn’t He show His face today? I mean, He wasn’t all that shy about getting in the human race’s face way back in Old Testament days, so what is God so afraid of today? Maybe He’s afraid of our nukes! That aside, it wouldn’t be all the difficult for a Supreme Being to make a show today akin to some of the stunts He pulled way back when!

If God so wants humans to believe in Him, then it would have been so ultra easy to have just one sentence somewhere in the Bible that would be understandable to later generations, even if that Biblical sentence were baffling to contemporaries. The sentence would have been a sentence attributed to God that something only God (or an extraterrestrial) could have known at the time. For example, if kiwi birds had been mentioned, or icebergs, or that bright light in the sky that moves slowly through the heavens had rings around it, or that sugar was a mixture of several things, or what about another commandment akin to “Thou shall not travel faster than the speed of light”.  Just one simple little sentence – that’s all it would have taken – something, anything one-off that illustrated a knowledge of biology, geography, astronomy, chemistry or physics that the natives of the time wouldn’t have known about. Alas, it was not to be. Methinks God missed a golden opportunity to reveal His actual existence beyond reasonable question. Or, updating to the present, God could fuse the Ten Commandments onto the surface of the Moon, easily visible through modest telescopes, or do a repeat of one of those Biblical happenings like making the Red Sea split asunder for a spell! 

If God exists, yet we can explain life, the Universe, and simply everything without requiring a God hypothesis, the God has gone to extraordinary lengths to make Himself a total irrelevance!

Impossibility Two: Is God All-Loving, Merciful, Compassionate, and Forgiving? Yes you say?  You have got to be joking! Have those spouting off such nonsense actually read the Old Testament? From the universal flood, to Sodom and Gomorrah, to the tenth plague, to the invasion of the Land of Canaan, to countless other large-scale right down to individual (Abraham and Job) atrocities committed, God is the driving force. Hitler in his wildest dreams couldn’t conceive of such death and destruction as God inflicted on not only His enemies, but also on His own Chosen People. If ‘military intelligence’ is a contradiction in terms, even more so is the phrase ‘a loving God’. I’d sooner take my chances with ‘a loving person-eating shark’! 

*Spong, John Shelby; Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell; HarperOne, New York; 2009.

To be continued…

Biblical Doomsday: The End of Days

While many Biblical concepts resonate with the general public, one of the most interesting and personal concepts is the ‘End of Days’ prophecy and the Book of Revelation. Old Testament prophets predicted (speaking on behalf of God) gloom and doom. Jesus has been cited as a deity obsessed with the Apocalypse, forever preaching about the ‘End Times’. Over the following 2100 years, religious fundamentalists have followed suit, dragging the faithful along by their short and curly bits. It’s even spawned a minor publishing industry. Alas, it’s all bovine fertilizer.    

For religious reasons relating to the concept of ‘eternal life’, many look forward to the world going down the gurgler, because that means that they, while going down the gurgler too, get deposited at the other end of the tube into an eternal paradise. Or so they believe. 

It’s a pity that so many peoples’ lives are so miserable that they literally look forward to someone else (i.e. – God and/or Jesus Christ) ending their mundane existence of everyday mortality and transporting them into another one of peaceful eternity, although who really knows, maybe it’s a case of going from the frying pan into the fire, just in case they go south instead of north!  Regardless, the great unwashed get support in their beliefs from religious fundamentalists or evangelists and those obsessed with the ‘End Times’.

It would seem that every time there is a natural disaster (even oil spills qualify), anywhere in the world, but especially in America, right-wing Christian fundamentalists and televangelists jump for joy, do high fives and are more than happy to point out, even gleefully telling “I told you so”, and the more the destruction, the better the mayhem, the greater the death toll, the higher they jump, the happier they are and the more they rub their hands gleefully together. Why? It’s to them yet another Sign that the ‘End of Days’ are near. That’s quite apart from those wars and rumours of wars, etc.

Of course if our fundamentalists and television Bible thumpers had lived 500 years ago, or 1000 years ago, or 1500 years ago, they would have been strutting out the same old line, the same old hype, the same old gloom and doom (gloom and doom for the rest of us sinners that is).

How long can these televangelists go on playing the same old ‘End of Days’ song before credibility runs out? - Seemingly indefinitely if you’re already preaching to the converted and/or the gullible.  No doubt 500 years from now their descendents will be screaming out the same old tired ‘End Times’ tune.

Is the 'End of Days' prophecy really believable? When it comes to the Bible, for all the prophecies therein, and all the prophets that pontificated, there's only one prophecy that ultimately matters - the 'End of Days', the apocalypse, Armageddon, etc. There are only two points that need to be made here. The first point is that 100% of Biblical scholars, Christian fundamentalists, televangelists, even the great unwashed reading and interpreting the Bible, who have predicted the end of the world, have got it wrong!

This is more than just a tad relevant. 100% of all ‘End of Days’ prophecies, and there have been thousands of them, scholarly or otherwise; have failed to come to pass; so much for the Bible being the literal word of God; so much for spot-on Biblical accuracy. I hope all here-and-now Christian fundamentalists and especially those televangelists take note of this (not that they will of course).

100% is not a trivial percentage! 100% of all end-of-the-world predictions have failed (that’s bloody obvious isn’t it? I mean we’re still here; we’re still standing)! If I’d received a fiver for each failed ‘End of Days’ doomsday prediction, I, my bank manager and the tax man would all be happy little campers.

Despite endless predictions, the 'End of Days' has not happened. So, what are you to believe when the next soothsayer (Christian fundamentalist, televangelist, etc.) comes along and says on such-and-such a date Armageddon will arrive? My response would be a swift kick in their private parts!

The second point, for those who take the Bible literally, is that Jesus told any and all who would listen that there would be those hearing his utterings about the ‘End Times’ that those very ‘End Times’ would happen within their lifetime. Alas, there is no one alive today who heard Jesus speak, so Christ's own prophecy has to be graded as an "F". Now either J.C. hasn’t a clue what he’s talking about, or the ‘End of Days’ he thought was imminent has now been cancelled (2100 years on is a bit of a stretch to call it a mere postponement). IMHO, if it hasn’t happened by now, it’s not going to.

In short, if you are eagerly awaiting the apocalypse, have a good supply of reading material and DVDs on hand, because it's going to be a Very Long Wait! If you’re eagerly waiting for the ‘End of Days’, have a nice wait. The odds are greater you’ll find a pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow first; but at least you’ll have something to do – search for the pot; spend the gold – while you wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, then wait some more. 

It's just plain impossible for any rational person, given the historical track record, to accept that the 'End of Days' is not only near-and-dear but will happen at all.

By the way neither the phrase “End of Days”, “Second Coming” nor the phrase “End Times” actually appear in the (King James Version) of the Bible. Neither does the word “doomsday” nor “apocalypse” though “Armageddon” makes a singular appearance. But least you think it’s safe to go back into the waters, the phrase “end of the world” appears frequently. Here’s but one example.

Matthew 24:3: And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

My response is to quote Gershwin and Heyward in “Porgy and Bess”: “It ain’t necessarily so, It ain’t necessarily so, De tings dat yo’ li’ble, To read in de Bible, It ain’t necessarily so.” Amen to that!

Bibles Galore

We have all heard of ‘The Bible’, but that’s really a misnomer. What you have heard about, or have in your home, is ‘a Bible’, not just one copy of many, but one copy of the many versions of the so-called ‘The Bible’. Now the questions to be asked are if there is but one God, therefore but one holy word of God, why are there dozens of different versions with differing texts? And if no one version is more correct than another, then perhaps no one version is correct. All Bibles in all languages are works of fiction!

In the La-La, Never-Never Land of all things Biblical, is there one Bible or are there multi-Bibles? How can the Bible (let's say the King James Version) be considered a unified whole when not only are there two Testaments that are radically different in tone, but all up the Bible has been cobbled together with various bits and pieces included and excluded in a totally ad hoc fashion. No two scholarly or Biblical experts will agree on exactly what texts should comprise THE Bible.

Let’s consider the excluded bits, the Apocrypha. There are over a dozen writings or ‘books’ whose status as bona-fide Old Testament Biblical canonical texts have been in and out of the ‘official’ Bible depending on who had the authority to decide these things. Since the 16^th Century the verdict has been ‘out at the plate’! Some of these excluded ‘books’ include Tobit, Judith, the two to four books of Maccabees (depending on who you talk to), and the two books of Esdras, etc. Further, there are additional but excluded chapters and verses to the established books of Esther, Daniel and Psalms.

There’s also a whole library of excluded New Testament Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles and Apocalypses. All up, it’s all like several chapters and paragraphs have been excluded from your favourite literary work, or even your common paperback novel.

Then you have the trilogy of books from Enoch, as well as Jubilees, which are even further outside of the fold. Depending on who you talk to, they form part of the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. In fact the Pseudepigrapha all up is a collection of about 65 documents that have been excluded, though there is some overlap with the Apocrypha (like a few of those ‘books’ of Maccabees), again depending on who you talk to.    

Then too, some of the official canon was hotly disputed and only made it into the Bible by the proverbial skin of the teeth – like the Book of Revelation. 

Even taking just the ‘official’ Bible, depending on the version you consult, the ordering of the Books will be different. Try that with your paperback novel and see if it makes the same degree of sense!

Then too, there exists dozens of English language versions of the Bible, from the "Good News Translation" to the "New Living Translation" to the "American Standard Version" to the "New American Standard Bible" to the "Common English Bible" to the "English Standard Version" to the "English Standard Version Anglicised", and that's just for starters. Then there's the "King James Version", the "New King James Version", and the "21st Century King James Version", not to mention all those other languages the Bible is published in with those unavoidable mistakes, losses and uncertainties that must arise in translating from one language to another. It's like your favourite novel was amended or tweaked every couple of years. I’m sure if you read your favourite novel in English, then read it again but in a different language, say Italian or Japanese, there will be something lost, even strange to you in the translation.

I’m sure most viewers here read, write and speak modern English. Yet when it comes to the Bible, modern English is the foreign language. The pathway from the original cobbled together Biblical texts, to what you tend to find in your home, motel rooms, your church, local library and bookstore is so long and so tortuous it’s a wonder 100% of the Bible isn’t gibberish instead of just most of it.

In conclusion, the Bible as a one unified word-of-God text is an impossibility to accept at face value. It makes more logical sense to chuck it all out the window and accept that there just is no such animal in existence at all and never will be.

Biblical History: Fact or Fiction?

The Bible is apparently one of the best, if not the best selling books of all times. Why it isn’t for sale though in the mythology or fiction section of bookstores (or available in similar locations in libraries) is beyond me. Simply put, the Bible isn’t believable as non-fiction and as a historically accurate record of those ancient times.

Is Biblical history fact or fiction? Well, it's probably a mixture of both but the emphasis is weighted heavily on the fiction part - say by a ratio of 99% bovine fertilizer to 1% wheat among the chaff. I mean the Bible was written by a multitude of authors, with hidden agendas (who never had to take a polygraph test), over eons of time, and has suffered through dozens of versions and translations and mistranslations. I like an analogy of a row of twenty people - whisper a sentence into the ear of person number one and have that person whisper that sentence to person number two, hence person number three, and so on down the line. Have person number twenty then relate the sentence back to you. Odds are that there will be little similarity between what you originally whispered and what you ultimately heard after the twenty translations.

Since the texts of the Bible weren't written down until many decades after the 'fact', what does that tell you about the reliability of the texts being literally accurate? History is a very inexact science, written by the winners, patchy at best, and the farther one goes back in time, the patchier it gets. Historians often have a hard time documenting and agreeing on who, what, where, when and why of happenings 200 to 500 years ago. So how can we put faith in the literal truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth regarding events 2000 to 5000 years ago?

Anyone can make up or embellish stories and write them down and frequently do. Our bookshops and libraries are full of books labelled 'fiction'. Further, no one believes that all of those non-fiction books lining the shelves are without any shade of doubt always literally non-fiction from first page to last. One can easily find two non-fiction books on the exact same topic that are totally opposite in content and in context. Can anyone absolutely state that those who authored the various Testaments, those books, chapters and verses of the Bible weren't sort of making it up as they went along, or at least padding things a mite and slanting things according to their own worldview? In fact I've seen one book title that alleges that most of the Gospels and other parts of the New Testament are downright fraudulent*. Humans at best can make mistakes in copying or in making translations; they like to embellish stories and tell little white lies (even whoppers), and at worst invent pure fiction (in the guise of truth) for their own purpose(s).

As has been often pointed out, including by me immediately above, history is written by the winners. Perhaps it would be interesting to have had Adam and Eve's side of the story, or Satan's side of history instead of just God's version of events!

So is the Bible literal history? There's no other historical or archaeological evidence for most of the people, places and events in the Bible: people, places and events like Noah and the Ark, Jonah, Solomon, Samson, David, the Exodus, the Battle of Jericho, Sodom & Gomorrah, or the Garden of Eden. Why isn't the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and the Ten Commandments tablet(s) in a museum - if they really exist? Does any rational person really suggest that a virgin birth happened; that there were literally giants in the earth; that angels are historical (or should that be hysterical), that the Star of Bethlehem, whatever it was (if it was) guided wise men; that all of the above reflect really real reality? All those Biblical tales read like modern sci-fi stories. There are just no independent sources, outside of the Bible, that verify any of these, IMHO, rather tall tales. The historical bona-fides of the Bible are seemingly impossible to independently verify and thus believe in. That said, I've often maintained that behind every mountain of mythology lies a molehill of reality. Still, the Biblical mountain as being an historical mountain and not a mythology, regardless of the hidden molehill, is an impossibility to swallow hook, line and sinker.

For a specific example, I’ve read quite a few dozen books on or about ancient Egyptian history over the years, and I have to note that certain words tend to be conspicuous by their absence in both text and index. I mean words like Joseph, Moses, Israel, Israelites, and Hebrews. Also, I have noted a lack of references to anything akin to all those plagues of frogs, locusts, boils, etc.; references all those firstborn kicking-the-bucket simultaneously, or pharaoh losing a hell of a lot of his army, horses and chariots by drowning in the Red Sea (or Sea of Reeds). The King James Version of the Bible states that Rameses was the kick-off point in the N.E. Nile Delta for the Hebrew Exodus, yet all the maps of ancient Egypt fail to show any such place. Even my ancient Egyptian dictionary fails to note Rameses as a place. There is noted on the map a Per-Ramesses in the Nile Delta in ancient Egyptian history, but that’s not what the Bible mentions. Per-Ramesses, a.k.a. Qantir, which is right adjacent to Avaris, but those place names don’t get a Biblical mention either. The next stop off location according to the Bible was Succoth but that’s not a location noted on the ancient Egyptian map. Then the next Exodus location, according to the Bible was Etham. Guess what? That’s not on the map either!  Doubt my word? Kindly consult your own choice of scholarly texts dealing with ancient Egyptian history. In short, the Exodus and all associated with it is fiction pure and simple and any belief in it as an historical event is a purely delusional one, along with all the associated baggage, like the Passover.

*Ehrman, Bart D.; Forged: Writing in the Name of God: Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are; HarperOne, New York; 2011.

Biblical UFOs, Abductions & Ancient Astronauts: Part Three

Nearly all of us are familiar to a greater or lesser extent with the concept of ‘ancient astronauts’ – extraterrestrials that influenced human history many millennia ago. Evidence is cited from around the world, and draws on mythology, religion, out of place artefacts, artistic works, and the construction of various monumental megaliths that modern society and modern engineering would be hard pressed to reconstruct. It shouldn’t be surprising that a small fraction of that evidence has been culled from the Bible. You won’t hear this preached in church!

I have long maintained that God and the gods were not totally imaginary, but not supernatural either, rather extraterrestrials (ET). What ET is known for today, among other things, are not only those UFO encounters of the first, second and third kind, but those alleged abductions of humans for various purposes – close encounters of the fourth kind. Perhaps as it is now, so it was back in Biblical times.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

CHARIOTS

Chariots are an obvious choice as something associated with UFOs, especially given Erich Von Daniken’s best seller “Chariots of the Gods”. Most chariots in the Bible are clearly your standard horse-drawn ground vehicle. Of course there are exceptions.

2 Kings 2:11: And it came to pass, as they still went on, and talked, that, behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder; and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven.

*I repeat this famous passage to illustrate the association of a chariot with an up, up and away whirlwind.

Psalm 104:3: Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of the wind.

*I repeat this verse to indicate the cloud-chariot connection as well as the other aerial connection of walking-wings-wind.

Jeremiah 4:13: Behold, he shall come up as clouds, and his chariots shall be as a whirlwind: his horses are swifter than eagles.

*I repeat this verse to point out the connection of a chariot with both the whirlwind and clouds. The horses are given an aerial connection being compared to eagles, all the more obvious since the “he” in question is ascending.

Isaiah 66:15: For, behold, the LORD will come with fire, and with his chariots like a whirlwind, to render his anger with fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.

*We note the association with the whirlwind; the implication that the chariots are airborne.

Zechariah 6:1: And I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came four chariots out from between two mountains; and the mountains were mountains of brass.

Zechariah 6:2: In the first chariot were red horses; and in the second chariot black horses.

Zechariah 6:3: And in the third chariot white horses; and in the fourth chariot grisled and bay horses.

*Zechariah must have been puffing on the good stuff. The four chariots appear to be aerial coming out from between two mountains, mountains that were made of brass – WTF? Further, all the horses aren’t pulling the chariots; they are “in” the chariots!

FLYING ROLLS

And whatever are we to make of this incident?  Is he doing some more puffing on the weed perhaps? What transpires in Zechariah is hardly an incident that anyone would suggest is an alien abduction, nor is there a cloud noted, but it’s still obviously a close encounter of the third kind.

Zechariah 5:1: Then I turned, and lifted up mine eyes, and looked, and behold a flying roll.

Zechariah 5:2: And he said unto me, What seest thou? And I answered, I see a flying roll; the length thereof is twenty cubits, and the breadth thereof ten cubits.

*A “flying roll” is a near perfect description for a standard disc-shaped UFO. Now a cubit is roughly equal to 18 to 22 inches, so let’s call it 20 inches even. That makes the “flying roll” 400 inches in length and 200 inches in breadth, or a bit over 33 feet in length and a bit over 16.5 feet in breadth. That’s pretty good ballpark figures when compared to your average run-of-the-mill modern UFO sighting.

Zechariah 5:9: Then lifted I up mine eyes, and looked, and, behold, there came out two women, and the wind was in their wings; for they had wings like the wings of a stork: and they lifted up the ephah between the earth and the heaven.

*These winged females are not identified in any shape, manner or form as being angels. In fact they aren’t identified as anything at all, except winged females.

WINGED HUMANOIDS

While non-human entities in the Bible aren’t depicted with green skin, or pointed ears or antenna or oozing slime or hoisting ray-guns, there are certainly some out-of-this-world creatures in the Bible. The most notable of these are the winged beings called the Cherubim and the Seraphim. [Note: despite popular depictions, angels aren’t winged.]  

Exodus 25:20: And the cherubims shall stretch forth their wings on high.

2 Chronicles 3:13: The wings of these cherubims spread themselves forth twenty cubits: and they stood on their feet, and their faces were inward.

Isaiah 6:2: Above it stood the seraphims: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.

JESUS, THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL

John 8:23: And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world.

*Though one could put this statement in a supernatural context, one could just as easily interpret this as having an extraterrestrial context.

So there you have it. This is by no means an exhaustive list of relatively suggestive close encounters as related in the Bible. For more of same, see my further suggested reading list immediately below.

Further readings: While dozens of books on ‘ancient astronauts’ and UFOs will discuss the more famous of the Biblical UFO events, there’s more to Biblical UFOs than just The Star of Bethlehem and the Wheel of Ezekiel.

Blumrich, Josef F.; The Spaceships of Ezekiel; Bantam, New York; 1974:

Dean, John W.; Flying Saucers and the Scriptures; Vantage Press, New York; 1964:

Downing, Barry H.; The Bible & Flying Saucers; Avon, New York; 1968:

Jessup, Morris K; UFO and the Bible; Citadel Press, New York; 1956:

Leonard, R.; Flying Saucers, Ancient Writings and the Bible; Exposition Press, New York; 1969: