Religion: Some More Random Observations

Do you have greater credibility for your personal worldview and biases, or are you taken more seriously if you invoke God, Jesus and/or the Bible in support? Perhaps you may think a wicked city like Las Vegas should be destroyed. Thumbs down, but then you say well look what God did to Sodom and Gomorrah. You’d get short shrift if you advocate executing disobedient children, until you can cite the Biblical chapter and verse which states the exact same thing. Wacky ideas get the thumbs down; Biblical wacky events that mirror those ideas – thumbs up. 

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Anybody reading the story of the crucifixion in Matthew, Mark or Luke will note that for three hours, between noon and three pm apparently, it became very dark. John doesn’t mention this, and Matthew and Mark only note the three hours of intense darkness. But Luke (23:45) notes specifically that “the sun was darkened’. That clearly implies a solar eclipse. However, there are several problems with this. The first is that the crucifixion of Jesus took place at Passover. Alas, Passover happens or is celebrated when the Moon is in its Full Moon phase (or when the Earth is between, but not quite in direct alignment with, the Sun and the Moon). A solar eclipse can only happen when the Moon is totally dark, that is when it is in its New Moon phase (when the Moon is between the Earth and the Sun). So, when the crucifixion happened, that is at Passover, the Moon was Full, not New, therefore no solar eclipse. The second problem is that the New Moon only covers the Sun causing a solar eclipse thus causing intense darkness, for a maximum just shy of eight minutes. That’s just a tad less time than Mathew, Mark and Luke allow for. The third problem is that the crucifixion happened as far as can be determined in April of 30, or 33 or 34 CE. There is no solar eclipse in Jerusalem in April in any of those months and years and is therefore irrelevant, misleading and immaterial. So, either it’s all just fiction, added in for dramatic effect, or it was a miracle (which is probably the official church line). I’d opt for the fiction myself.

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Be sure to check out Wikipedia’s entry for “List of scandals involving evangelical Christians” – very, very enlightening. Also, if you have access, read the following:

Gardner, Martin: “Prime-time preachers” (in) The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher; Prometheus Books, Buffalo, New York; 1988; p.223-245.

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This is the latest Right Wing Watch Cindy Jacobs story.

“Cindy Jacobs’ five-year-old daughter can stop tornadoes.”

Apparently her trick is to shout out “I told you to be quiet in Jesus’ name!” and the tornado just goes poof.

My response: Hello, my name is Alice and I’ve gone through the looking glass into wonderland – whee!

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Speaking of the Right Wing Watch, their coverage of the extreme right wing fundamentalist religious personalities like Pat Robertson, Bryan Fischer (especially Brian Fischer), Cindy Jacobs, Glenn Beck; and dozens more, show that these individuals and the organisations they represent (like the American Family Association) are stridently anti-President Obama, and have been since Obama rose to the fore in 2008. I’ve never witnessed any American president being subjected to the vitriol and abuse that President Obama has routinely been by the religious right. Amazingly, it doesn’t seem to be a racist thing, it’s just Obama stands for everything the extreme right wing is against like gay marriage. So, Obama is the antichrist; Obama doesn’t believe in the Bible; Obama hates America; Obama isn’t even an American citizen; Obama is anti-Israel; Obama is pro-Muslim; Obama is a closet Muslim; Obama is a closet gay; Obama is America’s Lenin or Stalin; Obama hates the military; Obama is an illegitimate president; Obama should be impeached. There’s a lot more negatives, but you get the drift.

But it’s not so much about what Obama is (sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me) but what Obama’s agenda is. Obama will declare himself God; Obama wants to destroy the American economy; Obama wants to raise a black army and kill whites, especially right wing Christian whites; Obama wants gun control to disarm his enemies; Obama wants to precipitate another Civil War; Obama will turn America into an Islamic state; Obama discriminates against Christianity; Obama declares war on white America; Obama is out to destroy the family unit; and on and on and on it goes without any shred of evidence whatever.

While that might be an example of America’s freedom of speech, I wonder whether or not any of these individuals will apologise in January 2017 when Obama leaves office and nothing whatever has come to pass that even remotely confirmed these outlandish shock, horror, it’s the end of the world or at least of America, claims. My gut feeling is that there won’t be an “I’m sorry” or “I got it wrong” from anyone that’s a member of any one of the extreme right wing fundamentalist religious groups. By then they will have moved on and will be bucketing some other person.

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Why is it that a select number of those with a religious conviction feel they have a moral and ethical right to disturb and inconvenience you, at their convenience of course, in order to shove their religious worldview down your throat? The nice thing about atheists is that they don’t disturb and inconvenience you; they don’t do doorknocking!

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Ancient art works that depict ‘flying saucers’ all seemingly have a religious, especially New Testament, Jesus/Mary themed context: Why? Perhaps because the religious figures central in the artistic works aren’t supernatural but flesh-and-blood of an ‘ancient astronaut’ variety.