The Bible: Something’s Screwy Somewhere: Part Two

Multi-millions around the world accept the Bible as the literal word of God, and as such it cannot be in error. However, an examination of Biblical texts strongly suggests, to those with open minds, that error, or as I like to phrase things “something’s screwy somewhere”, abounds.

I know I probably shouldn’t pick on God and the Bible as often as I do, but, you know, it’s so damn easy it’s like taking candy from a baby. God sure leads with His chin. Anyway, if I haven’t been struck down by lightning by now, I probably won’t be, so here goes another round. As per usual, all references are from the King James Version (KJV) of the so-called “Word of God”.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Biblical Sightseeing

WTF? It takes forty years for the Chosen People to get from N.E. Egypt to the Promised Land (Israel) – it only took the American pioneers six months to get to their Promised Land across the Great Plains and mountain ranges and deserts by covered wagon - something’s screwy somewhere unless the Israelites just stopped to smell the roses and take in the local sights and scenery. Then you figure the distances travelled by Captain Cook and crew, Magellan, Columbus, and all those other seafarers in the golden age of sail. They travelled vastly greater distances in vastly shorter time frames. The more you compare the Exodus trek with other treks, the more anomalous it appears.

Biblical Generation Gaps:

One of the most idiotic themes in the Bible is that the innocent suffer because their ancestors were guilty of some sin or other in the eyes of God, whether it’s on the grand scale of humanity condemned to hardship and suffering because of Adam and Eve’s giving in to temptation (Genesis 3), or the examples of the sons and daughters unto the third, fourth even tenth generation being persona non grata to the Almighty because of an iniquity preformed by dear old great, great, great grandpa or grandma (Exodus 20: 5; Exodus 34: 7; Numbers 14: 18; Deuteronomy 5: 9; Deuteronomy 23: 2-3). That our loving, forgiving, merciful, compassionate Almighty would act in such a manner is anomalous.

Biblical Aliens: The Extraterrestrial Jesus

Several times Jesus admits he is “not of this world”. Check out John 8:23 and 18:36.

Biblical End Times

According to Matthew 24:3-14 and Mark 13:4-13 the signs of the end times are to be along the lines of wars; rumours of war; conflicts between nations and kingdoms; famines; pestilences; earthquakes, false prophets; deadly family feuds; worldwide distribution of the gospels;

So what’s changed in over 2000 years? Why would this be interpreted on being now, not then? That interpretation is highly anomalous, yet it’s what a lot of Right Wing Christian Fundamentalists would have you believe.

Biblical Geography

Though Biblical geography is good in general – no glaring oops like describing massive ice caps and glaciers, that’s no big plus seeing as how the various Biblical authors lived in the areas described by the Bible. I could write a totally unbelievable tale of BEMs (Bug Eyed Monsters of the extraterrestrial kind) on the Moon and yet get the lunar geography spot-on. Not that Biblical geography doesn’t have it’s oops moments, like why no physical evidence or remains of Sodom and Gomorrah; where’s Noah’s Ark to be found that hasn’t already been explored high and low?  And if the weather be part of geography, then having a global spell of very persistent wet weather for forty days and nights (960 hours) is highly anomalous, so much so as to be impossible. It’s called Planet Earth, not Planet Ocean, because there’s not enough of the wet stuff to make it so. Parts of Biblical geography are anomalous.

Biblical Hot Air

The Bible is chock-a-block full of prophets and prophecies, right up through and including the end of the world as we know it (Armageddon). Amazingly, all this soothsaying failed to note and log anything about global warming, climate change, etc., rather major issues in our times. The Bible is big on prophecy; the proof of the prophecy pudding is lacking. That’s an anomaly.

Biblical Characters

There are no independent, verifiable documents, statues, pictograms, stele, inscriptions, grave sites, or any other historical or archaeological evidence that yields any additional credibility to the actual existence of various famous Biblical characters like Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Abraham, Joseph, Moses & Aaron, Noah, Solomon, David & Goliath, Jonah, Methuselah, Joshua, and a host of others. You just gotta take the Bible’s word for the reality of these individuals. It’s like the only reference to Homer & Plato, Aristotle & Socrates, Pythagoras, Euclid & Archimedes, was in an ancient Greek school primer for a beginners’ reader and that’s it. Would the very real existence of these half dozen ancients be given any real credibility given just a reference in a lone text? What makes the Bible a special case then? If Biblical characters are as really real and as really the VIPs they are made out to be, then it’s highly anomalous that there just is no other independent confirmation of that status.

A Biblical Piece of the Action

Both the Bible and the Koran are as two peas in the same monotheistic pod. They collectively have influenced billions upon billions of people – whole societies in fact. These texts therefore somewhat remind me of the “Star Trek: The Original Series” TV episode ‘A Piece of the Action’ (aired January 12 1968) where an entire alien society was in the manner of the Bible/Koran subservient to a ‘religious’ text – in this case a book about Chicago gangsters in the roaring 1920’s. That’s what the aliens patterned their culture after. I’m sure that episode was a deliberate dig at the influence our religious texts have on us. But I consider it anomalous that much of the world’s culture is centred on minor variations on and of a single religious text.

The Biblical Face of God

We’ve all seen images of God, from stained glass windows to Michelangelo to Hollywood. The anomaly is that it’s all make-believe. Unless I’ve missed something somewhere along the line, no where in the Bible is God’s physique noted; no physical description exists. He’s not described as white, somewhere between middle and old age, with a very long flowing grey-white beard and long flowing grey-white hair who looks entirely human. The popular image is that the image of God was created in Zeus’s image. Zeus was the model as Zeus’s image was widely known from statues, pottery, etc. For all you know, God could look extremely alien, or for that matter pass you on the street without you blinking an eye.

You Can’t Trust the Bible

We’re used to current events being set down in the here and now. Journalists, camera crews, microphones, tape recorders, etc. will give you today’s events on today’s evening TV news broadcasts. Reviews of recent events will be covered in your weekly magazines. But if I were to write a new biography of say Alexander the Great, you’d know that it could not be 100% spot-on since there’s no way to interview old Alex or those who knew him. Many a document, monument, inscription, etc. from that era would now be lost or destroyed. But when you read your Bible, do you think of the text as you would the evening news bulletin or weekly magazine news roundup, or, as you would my biography of Alex, someone who died way over 2000 years ago?  If the former, you’re sadly mistaken, for those who penned Biblical texts describing Biblical events can no more be trusted for 100% accuracy than my new biography of Alex, and for a similar reason. Words were put to paper long after the facts of the matter transpired. And as for Biblical quotations, well, no tape recorders existed back then, so take any pithy sayings with a very large grain of sodium chloride. Trusting in the Bible is an example of rather strange and anomalous human behaviour.

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven, Twiddling His Thumbs

 Presumably, at the close of the Old Testament, God has retired to His throne room and penthouse in Heaven, and that’s where He’s been couped up for way over 2000 years now. The question is, what does God do with His time up there in La-La-Land? Even if He eats and sleeps and goes to the bathroom and taken daily heavenly showers and trims His beard weekly, that still leaves a lot of hours for – well what’s the answer? Perhaps He stands at the Pearly Gates greeting new arrivals, or conducting Heavenly orientation sessions for new arrivals. Maybe He plays chess with Jesus or the archangels. Perhaps He conducts graduate classes in advanced Christian theology. Perhaps He ghost-writes articles for religious-themed magazines; watches those hellfire and brimstone televangelists on YouTube, or maybe once a year takes on the role of playing Santa Claus – no mortal could fill those shoes. Like Santa, God needs to keep a list and check it twice to find out who’s been naughty and who’s been nice to ensure that only those with the Right Religious Stuff enters through those Pearly Gates! It remains however that what God does with His spare time is an anomaly that has never been adequately explained.

Conclusions

This little exercise is barely scratching the surface that exposes that God’s infallible word, as recorded in the Bible, is anything but. It is riddled with fallacies, errors, enigmas, anomalies, and a potful of similar synonyms.

The Bible: Something’s Screwy Somewhere: Part One

Multi-millions around the world accept the Bible as the literal word of God, and as such it cannot be in error. However, an examination of Biblical texts strongly suggests, to those with open minds, that error, or as I like to phrase things “something’s screwy somewhere”, abounds.

I know I probably shouldn’t pick on God and the Bible as often as I do, but, you know, it’s so damn easy it’s like taking candy from a baby. God sure leads with His chin. Anyway, if I haven’t been struck down by lightning by now, I probably won’t be, so here goes another round. As per usual, all references are from the King James Version (KJV) of the so-called “Word of God”.

Biblical Close Encounters

Way more people have had a close encounter with the Loch Ness Monster than all the various Biblical characters put together have had with respect to an up-close-and-personal chinwag with the Almighty. If you put faith in ancient Greece mythology, way more mortals had a close encounter – a very close encounter – with Zeus, than ever conversed with God.

In The Biblical Beginning: Genesis

Genesis 1:24-25 tells us God created the terrestrial animals (cattle, beasts, creeping things). Man was then created in Genesis 1:26-27. In Genesis 2:7, God created man (as in the first male), and then the beasts, etc. in Genesis 2:18-19. So which came first the human or the animal?

God says (Genesis 2:17; Genesis 3:3) that if you eat of the forbidden fruit that contained the knowledge of good-and-evil (the Bible never mentions it being an apple by the way) you will kick the bucket, immediately if not sooner. Adam and Eve however had a taste of that good-and-evil brand of snack food (Genesis 3:6), and guess what, like the serpent said (Genesis 3:4); thou both survived and didn’t kick the bucket. So, God was telling fibs! In fact, Adam lived to a ripe old age of 930 years (Genesis 5:5), doing his fruitful and multiplying bit long after tasting the forbidden fruit. So God indeed cried ‘wolf’. In God we trust? I think not.

And does that serpent who lurked in the Garden of Eden know something we don’t, that in fact there is not a god, but gods (plural). Check out the wisdom of the serpent in Genesis 3:5. Polytheism rules, OK? In fact, later on down the track in Exodus, and in other Biblical books, God says the same thing – there are indeed other gods.

Sarah’s age according to Genesis 17:17 was 90 years old when she gives birth to Isaac; Genesis 23:1 records her age as 127 years old at time of death. That should be in the “Guinness Book of World Records” as well as “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”. 

You all know the story of Noah’s Ark and the Biblical Flood and how the animals (every living thing of all flesh) went in two by two, male and female (Genesis 6:19-20; Genesis 7:8-9 and 7:14-15) But in Genesis 7:2-3, clean animals go in sevens, male and female, ditto the fowls of the air, but unclean beasts only go in pairs, male and female. Something’s screwy somewhere when the Bible can’t get the story straight and consistent in one lone chapter.

What age do you expect to live to? If you believe in Genesis 6:3, you’ll live until you’re 120 years old! And here I thought threescore and ten years was the Biblical norm – well I was wrong. I still have another fifty-five years of paying taxes to go, not five. That’s not 120 maximum by the way, but 120 years minimum (since a lot of Biblical characters, like Adam, lived way beyond that). Anyway, 120 years it is. That’s God’s promise. But in reality, sigh, that’s just another of God’s fibs. So if you don’t, live to be 120, you know who to bellyache too!

Genesis 4:17 makes mention of Cain’s wife. Where did she come from?

Then you have that Towel of Babel tale. But it wasn’t just God who went down to confound the language of the builders so that no one would understand anyone else. There is a mysterious, and anomalous other(s), noted in Genesis 11:7 as “let us go down” and do the dirty deed. Who is that “us”? Who knows?

In fact, to be perfectly honest, the entirety of Genesis is one big anomaly from start to finish.

Other Biblical Contradictions

Now where exactly did Aaron, kid brother of Moses, kick the bucket? If you believe Numbers 33:39, Aaron died, at 123 years of age, at Mount Hor. On the other hand, if you believe Deuteronomy 10:6, Aaron died and was buried at Mosera. They certainly didn’t employ fact-checkers back in those days.

Who provoked David to number Israel? Well, according to 1 Chronicles 21:1, it was Satan. But, let’s not give the devil his due quite so fast, because in 2 Samuel 24:1, it was the LORD Himself who did the deed! There’s never a good editor around when you need one.

How many brat kids did Michal, the daughter of Saul have? Well, 2 Samuel 6:23 said she was barren until the day she died. No descendents did she have. But, do not despair for her, because in 2 Samuel 21:8 she gave birth to a total of five strapping boys. Someone (Samuel?) didn’t study enough maths to distinguish zero units from five units.

God says that Jesus preaches peace unto the children of Israel in Acts 10:36. But, Jesus counters that in Matthew 10:34 with his sword overriding any purpose he might have regarding peace on earth. Jesus makes crystal clear that “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth”.

But the biggest contradiction of all is God’s commandment “Thou shall not kill” when not only does God kill again, and again, and again, and again (the Biblical Flood; Sodom & Gomorrah; the Tenth Plague; the drowning of Pharaoh’s army, etc.), but instructs others to kill on His behalf, like in Exodus 32:27 (kill them all) or Deuteronomy 20:17 (destroy them: kill, kill, kill).

So much for the infallible so-called “Word of God”, but then I’m sure that if God decreed that three plus seven equalled a bakers dozen, that His good flock would accept that too without question.

The Source of All Evil

Who is responsible for evil? Is it because Adam and Eve did a naughty and got the heave-ho from paradise for their troubles? Is it because of Satan? Are the fallen angels responsible? No. Who is responsible for evil? God is responsible for creating evil and He admits it. Just check out Isaiah 45:7. So, if there is evil in this world, don’t blame anyone other than the Almighty. Whodunit - The Lord, that’s whodunit!

Biblical Unicorns

The Bible lends credibility to the existence of unicorns, mentioning them nine times over in the KJV.

The Angle on Angels

These are multi-thousands of images from stained glass church windows, to artworks and sculptures, to Christmas cards that show Biblical angels with two wings. I’m damned if I can find any reference in the Bible (KJV at least) that describe angels with two wings - something’s screwy somewhere.

The Bible’s Sir Joseph

Joseph was ‘knighted’ for services rendered unto ancient Egypt, well unto the pharaoh for Joseph had a talent interpreting dreams, especially the pharaoh’s dreams. This really impressed the pharaoh.

Genesis 41: 39-46 notes that Joseph, at age 30, was anointed by the pharaoh at be basically his second in command and ruler over all the land of Egypt

Genesis 45:26: Joseph is governor over all the land of Egypt.

Now Joseph dies at 110 years of age (nice going, though a decade less than expected!) at Genesis 50:26, and is embalmed and buried in Egypt. So Joseph was a very important person in ancient Egypt for about 80 years.

But when we come to Exodus 1:8, we have a new king (pharaoh) of Egypt “which knew not Joseph”. WTF? Obviously the new pharaoh could not have known Joseph personally, since Joseph was dead, but to not even know the name, the famous Joseph, who must have had all manner of texts written about him and monuments and a grave site and so on and so forth. That’s an anomaly. It’s like a new President of the United States (POTUS) who never heard of the existence of a previous POTUS, any previous POTUS.

The latter pharaoh (whoever he was) can probably be excused however for his faulty memory seeing as how to this very day no ancient records, documents, hieroglyphs, stele, far less a tomb has ever verified there being a Biblical Joseph in Egypt full stop.

By the Rivers of Babylon

If God smote Sodom and Gomorrah for being wicked and sinful (Genesis 13:13; Genesis 18:20), why did He not smite Babylon? Despite a lot of godly huffing and puffing in Isaiah and Jeremiah (Isaiah 13:19 and Jeremiah 25:12 & Jeremiah Chapters 50 & 51) that seems to suggest Babylon will cop what Sodom and Gomorrah copped, it was left to the Persians, then the Greeks, and finally the desert to take care of and bury wicked Babylon (which virtually became synonymous with all things evil in the Bible). Maybe that was God’s master plan all along, but it sure was the longwinded way of doing things. If God had been consistent, He would have given Babylon the Sodom and Gomorrah treatment directly. Of course if God were really a fag-hater, He would have smote ancient Greece too and dealt with those upstart Greek deities to boot who weren’t exactly Mr. & Mrs. Purity.

To be continued…

The Creation of Adam and Eve: The Dust-and-Rib Hypothesis

Where did we, the modern human species, come from? Science has a very convincing case that we evolved via Darwinian natural selection from primate ancestors over the past eight or so million years. New Agers suggest we are the product from those same primate ancestors, only by artificial selection via genetic engineering on the part of ancient aliens. Then there’s God’s religious claptrap, one of various mythological creation tales to account for mankind, starting with Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve are the names that we can use as an overall generality for the first humans, the first Homo sapiens, a species which had to come from somewhere. Biologists of course will argue the case for natural selection; evolution from older ancestral primates, especially the chimpanzee. New Agers might opt for an artificial selection or genetic engineering explanation on the part of flesh-and-blood ‘ancient astronauts’ under the clever disguise as deities, or perhaps incorrectly interpreted as deities by primitive man, but still an evolution from older primate ancestral stock. Then there’s a variation on that New Age theme that someone or something created a simulated universe via a computer program that ultimately created us as virtual beings. Finally, there are the creationists – God did it on the sixth day according to the Book of Genesis and no correspondence will be entertained on the matter. The Bible is literally God’s final word on life, the Universe and everything, including how we came to be.

If there were no other viable explanation for our existence apart from God creating mankind, that’s one thing, and there probably wasn’t any alternatives back in Bible times, so the Book of Genesis is understandable from that perspective or point of view, even if wrong. Alternative theories do abound now, with Darwinian evolution by natural selection the clear and preferred leader. One could almost say that evolutionists are really using the brains that God gave them to actually think with – one could almost say that except that implies a total contradiction in logic.

According to the Book of Genesis, Chapter One and Chapter Two, God created mankind, or at least one male (Adam) and one female (Eve) – Adam and Eve actually created the rest of humanity, well at least three sons worth of humanity. Humanity should have then gone extinct since no other women were apparently created to serve as possible mates, yet they (well one anyway for Abel) appear as if by magic. But back to Adam and Eve: were they really created by a supernatural deity, or perhaps genetically engineered by flesh-and-blood ancient astronauts or did they evolve naturally from more primitive ancestors? What do you think? I think we can eliminate God from Creation’s Big Picture.

Here are the relevant quotes:

Genesis 1:26 And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.

Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Later on down the track we get more details.

Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2:21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

Genesis 2:22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Genesis 2:23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

That’s God’s story and no doubt He’s sticking to it!

We can debate the Darwinian and the New Age concepts as viable alternative scenarios some other time, but first creationism as related above has to be dumped into the rubbish bin and incinerated and thus eliminated from all logical consideration as a viable rival scenario.

Reason numero one states the obvious that there is no supernatural God or Allah or Jehovah or any other supernatural deity. If there was overwhelming evidence for such a supernatural deity then there would be no atheists. You don’t find people who deny the existence of gravity since there is so much evidence for it, yet you can’t see it or hear it or taste it or smell it or touch it. There are no gravity atheists. Evidence is everything – faith counts for nothing in any court of law, science or logic. 

Reason numero two is that the dust-and-rib (and variations thereof) scenario is absolutely ridiculous to even the most biologically ignorant, which is probably why it’s not taught in Biology 101. And how could a male rib shape-shift into a fully developed adult female (blonde, brunette, redhead?), minus navel no doubt, but ready equipped with intelligence, vocalization and language? A male rib in any event would contain male genetic information for maleness, but you couldn’t have expected the author(s) of this imaginary (bordering on sci-fi) Genesis tale to have known that. As to Adam’s creation from dust, perhaps all those bored housewives who are dissatisfied with their hubbies might want to save up all that household dust that they deal with daily with the intention of creating some sort of youthful stud rival for hubby’s affections and bedroom favours. I mean if a mere male deity can create a man from dust, imagine what a human female can accomplish with that same ingredient!

Reason numero three is that if God created Eve directly from Adam’s rib, then Adam and Eve are more closely related than any brother-sister pair ever were, and therefore when they did God’s ‘be fruitful and multiply’ thing, well that was incest! And God, by design, promoted that. Wow! Now what God should have done was take a pile of dust from the planet Mars and create Adam; take another pile of dust from the planet Venus and create Eve, and that way you’d really have men are from Mars and women are from Venus and no incest need be entered into (as it were). Further, humans would have had an extraterrestrial heritage and therefore been separate and apart from the rest of the terrestrial animal kingdom (see the following paragraph for that nitty-gritty).

Reason numero four is that if God et al. really wanted to make humans a unique creation, really separate and apart from all else, He would not have moulded us with the same basic body plan and biochemistry as the rest of the animal kingdom. We might have been created with a silicon-based biochemistry and we certainly wouldn’t share any DNA with anything else like chimpanzees, since that just confuses the creation picture. God was not thinking logically, just begging for a Darwin and genetics to come along and give Him a black eye.

Reason numero five is that a perfect God wouldn’t have created so many design flaws or imperfections in the alleged pinnacle of His creationist endeavours, the human species, what with their easily breakable bones, a way too narrow birth canal, bad backs, poor eyesight, and impacted wisdom teeth, as well as those non-functional body parts like an appendix, earlobes and toenails. One does not tend to manufacture something with faulty and non-essential parts. God might have created us a tad more resistant to arthritis, the common cold, as well as a seeming zillion other common afflictions from infections to cavities to the measles to numerous cancers. Then too there are all those nasty God-created personality flaws part and parcel of the human being we’d be better off without. If God created us, God created the automotive equivalent of the Edsel.

Reason numero six suggests a further anomaly that proves just about beyond any doubt that Genesis is the literary work of man and not of God; we note the endless repetition of “And God said.” My question: prior to Adam, just who was around back then to copy down anything that God said? And if the answer to that is “nobody”, then presumably God is just talking to Himself! Or, more likely as not, the entirety of the Book of Genesis, creation and all, is just an early example of what would later become first known as mythology and even later on down the track as science fiction or science fantasy.

Reason numero seven is that remains of Homo sapiens have been dated via various accepted and verified scientific methods to way before any possible Biblical date that’s accepted by creationists. Human remains can be dated to way in excess of an order of magnitude (a factor of ten times) in fact, in fact closer numerically to two orders of magnitude (a factor of one hundred times) vis-à-vis what a literal Bible demands.

Reason numero eight is that if God wanted His Chosen People (starting with Adam and Eve) to occupy what’s today the Land of Israel and surrounds, why create them in mankind’s Cradle of Africa? Africa is apparently mankind’s point-of-origin home turf on the grounds that hominid fossils have been uncovered there while nobody has yet conclusively pinpointed and proved the geographical location of the Garden of Eden, far less found human remains close by.

Reason numero nine asks why a Chosen People at all? If God created Adam and Eve, then they were His Chosen People and then all of their descendents would be God’s Chosen People, not just a select few further on down the line. It’s akin to parents singling out one child of many for special love and attention – it’s not the done thing.

Now another question arises, why would God want to create humans in the first place? The Almighty already had a nice garden for His R&R and a petting zoo created for His pleasure and what with His staff of angels, etc. He surely didn’t need any additional intellectual company – did God create Adam to play a game of chess with? Well the obvious reason is that God wanted someone, actually many some ones, was to lick His boots and kiss His posterior which presumably the fish and birds and beasts refused to do (and who said animals were dumb). Well, if that’s why God created us, beings to worship Him, then it’s high time to cease kissing His posterior but to kick it instead, hard, and often! 

In summary, if you want to come to terms with where you came from, as a subset question of where humans originated from, you should look elsewhere for answers rather than to the Bible, to the Book of Genesis, to God, or to any religion or deity for that matter. A supernatural explanation for creation is no answer at all, well at least until that bored housewife creates her male stud ‘boy toy’ from the innards of her vacuum cleaner! Till that happens then, I’ll file the Bible under fiction.

The Creationist’s Bible, Literally: Part One

It’s one thing to hold extremely religious right-wing fundamentalist views, but quite another to bring them to the fore in a personal manner when holding not only an elected position as a Congressman but also holding a position on a Committee that by its very nature must be the antithesis of that worldview. Such has been the sad case that recently surfaced in the United States. Unfortunately, it’s not a one-off, and the implications are considerable.

On 27 September 2012, and widely reported in the media around 6-7 October 2012, an American congressman, Paul Broun (R-Georgia), caused a bit of a stir when advocating that the Holy Bible was not only to be taken literally, but that it was the pinnacle authority on how he has and would vote in Congress. He said that he believed that God’s creation took place in just six literal days and that the Earth was only literally 9000 years old. The controversy stemmed from the fact that he holds qualifications in chemistry and is a MD and that he holds a senior position on the Congressional H of R Science, Space and Technology Committee. He’s also courted controversy previously by introducing a bill that would have made 2010 the “Year of the Bible” (in which case I suggest 2011 should then have been the year of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins just to even the score and balance the ‘books’ as it were). Fortunately, not all of Broun’s colleagues are as wacky-doodle religious nutters or as ignorant a twit (both an appropriate synonym for Chris Rodda’s phrase “Bible-believing-batshitterist”) as he is, and the “Year of the Bible” bid failed to pass muster. 

Here are his September 2012 remarks:

“God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution, embryology, Big Bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who are taught that from understanding that they need a savior. There’s a lot of scientific data that I found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I believe that the Earth is about 9,000 years old. I believe that it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says. And what I’ve come to learn is that it’s the manufacturer’s handbook, is what I call it. It teaches us how to run our lives individually. How to run our families, how to run our churches. But it teaches us how to run all our public policy and everything in society. And that’s the reason, as your congressman, I hold the Holy Bible as being the major directions to me of how I vote in Washington, D.C., and I’ll continue to do that.”

But once you stick your neck in the literal Biblical noose, you have got to accept that a literal Bible, a literal word of God (as related in whatever particular Biblical version Congressman Broun has tucked away)…

* Means all of creation (life the universe and everything) took place in literally six (24 hour) days.

* Means that Heaven and Hell both must exist, though nobody has ever pinpointed the celestial coordinates where Heaven resides up there, neither has anyone stumbled across the geographical location of Hell somewhere down here.

* Means the Planet Earth is literally less than 10,000 years old, perhaps even a lot less like roughly 6000 years old if you accept that the Genesis Creation was fixed during the year 4004 BCE.

* Means that all fossils must be fakes, the work of the devil, scientific hoaxes and that palaeontology is a fraud. Sorry kids, no dinosaurs and therefore no possibility of there ever being a “Jurassic Park” reality.

* Means that Adam was literally created from dust.

* Means that Eve was created literally from a rib.

* Means that the two originally created humans, Adam and Eve, bore but three male children, Cain, Abel, and Seth, which would, if logic has any significance, suggest that the human race should not exist, and that means Congressman Broun and all fellow Creationists should not exist.. What do we want – women; when do we want them – now. But where did they come from? The Bible is mute on the issue, so something’s screwy somewhere.

* Means that Satan (or the Devil) exists and is really evil, though you never get the chance to hear (or read) his side of the story.

* Means that God is in charge of a group of sex maniacs, the Sons of God, who lusted after and bred with the Daughters of Men.

* Means that a pair of flightless kiwi birds of New Zealand and a pair of kangaroos from Australia (among thousands of possible examples) somehow swam the oceans and made it all the way to Noah’s Ark in time to avoid being drowned.

* Means that Methuselah really lived for well over 900 years, and had some stiff competition to boot in the longevity stakes from numerous others.

* Means that Sodom and Gomorrah were really destroyed, yet no trace whatever can be found of the ruins.

* Means that Lot’s wife really turned into a pillar of salt. Neat trick that one! I bet Congressman Broun (the chemist) has this bit of alchemy all figured out and should be able to explain this with ease.

* Means that a bush really burned without being consumed. That’s another really neat trick!

* Means that the Hebrew’s (i.e. – the Chosen People) were really slaves in Ancient Egypt, though there seems to be no historical record of this ‘fact’ recorded in Egypt.

* Means that God murdered thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands and more of Egyptian firstborns, (another historical event unrecorded in Ancient Egyptian texts), but then again what else would you expect from an all-loving, compassionate, merciful, forgiving, deity.

* Means that pharaoh’s army really got done in via the parting and un-parting of the Red Sea even though there are no records to that effect in Ancient Egypt either.

* Means that the Chosen People headed towards the Promised Land to their northeast by heading south, but then maybe that was before the compass had been invented.

* Means that it took the Chosen People really took forty years of wandering around in the wilderness before stumbling onto the Promised Land – oops, I forgot, that’s an era that’s not only pre-compass, but pre-Boy Scouts. They weren’t prepared.

* Means the walls of Jericho tumbled down long after Jericho was, according to archaeologists, already in ruins.

* Means that Planet Earth instantaneously stopped its axis rotation to allow the Moon and the Sun to stand still in the sky, and then just as instantaneously started rotating again, in total violation of known physics, the same physics that Creationists like Congressman Broun take as gospel whenever they board an aircraft, drive a car or play a round of golf. 

* Means that a human being (Jonah) was able to survive inside a fish (or whale) for three days, none the worse for wear. Of course there are fishy tales and then there are fishy tall tales.

* Means those loaves and fishes multiplied, a housewife’s dream and a supermarket’s nightmare.

* Means that water turned into wine, though wowsers and Prohibitionists would have wanted that the other way around.

* Means Jesus really had the ability to walk on water, though that might be understandable if the water was really icy cold and he didn’t want to get his privates wet.

* Means that all those medical anomalies like a virgin birth and resurrections from the dead and elderly women over-the-hill-and-off-the-pill were able to conceive and give birth, among a host of others, really came to pass. Again, no doubt Congressman Broun (the MD) can lay his hands on medical texts that explain all. I hope he does.

* Means that Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Second Coming, the End of Days, whatever you wish to call it, as forecast in the Book of Revelation, should have happened by about 100 CE. Oops, someone forgot to set the alarm clock!

In other words, literal belief in the Bible means you have got to literally believe in way more than just six impossible things before breakfast, and I kid you not, the above list could be extended by dozens more impossible things all contained in the Congressman’s Creationist Bible.

To be continued…

My Top Religious Anomalies: A List

All of religion is anomalous, but some bits are more anomalous than others. Here are some of those bits.

GOD: This isn’t really an anomaly due to any conflict between theory and observation. There is very little of either. The anomaly here is why anyone in their right mind would believe in such a supernatural deity. The gap between observational evidence and theoretical faith is so vast that it staggers the mind – at least it boggles my mind, all the more so since the only real description of God’s bona-fides, the human penned Old Testament, exhibits Him not as a just, loving, forgiving, merciful and compassionate deity but an all-round SOB that makes Hitler look downright cuddly.

CREATION, THE CONCEPT OF: One of the biggest mysteries to me is why anyone in their stark raving right mind would assume anything and everything had been created from scratch, as in Genesis for example. You cannot make that assumption from first principles based on personal observations and human history. Knowledge that there were in fact creations therefore must be based on information passed down from those with way more insight or knowledge than you could possess. Who passed that information on down the line?

HEAVEN & HELL: If they exist, heaven and hell have to be physical places with some sort of celestial and terrestrial coordinates respectively. Despite all these millennia that have flowed under the bridge since Methuselah was in diapers, nobody has sighted heaven up there or pinpointed where hell is located down here.

BIBLICAL OLD AGE: Though Methuselah is the best known, there are a whole pot-full of Old Testament males-only who reach ripe old age way, way, way in excess of three score and ten. The anomaly here is that even with the best of diets, exercise regimes, health and medical care, and outstanding personal habits (sound sleep, no drugs, no alcohol, no smoking, etc.) no human alive today can come within a bulls roar of the longevity achieved by Methuselah, Adam, Noah, and a host of others. The anomaly is easily resolved in this case – the Bible is full of it; “it” being rather messy and smelly.

NOAH’S FLOOD: A whole textbook could be written about the impossibilities, not just the anomalies, of the Biblical tale of the flood and Noah’s Ark. The amount of water required can’t be produced. The boat isn’t near large enough to house and feed every species that would need to be given shelter. The crew isn’t sufficient to look after their charges. That doesn’t seem to discourage those from spending vast sums of money not to mention time and energy boldly gong where others have gone before and like those who went before, returning empty-handed!

EXODUS, BOOK OF: There are multi-dozens of anomalies, things that just can’t be, reported in the Bible. Of all of these, the most anomalous is the Book of Exodus, because some of the events recorded there can be checked against another independent historical source. If the history in the Book of Exodus is found wanting, and it is, then if one holy book goes down the gurgler, then all the rest of the books are suspect too.

The anomaly here is that the Book of Exodus features the land and peoples of ancient Egypt fairly prominently. A couple of key Biblical characters play leading roles there – Moses and Joseph – not to mention thousands of alleged Hebrew slaves. Nasty things happen to that land and those peoples like the ten plagues and the drowning of pharaoh’s army. The anomaly here is that you’d expect ancient Egyptian records to verify and collaborate and substantiate the Book of Exodus, but you don’t find anything of the sort. It’s as if the Biblical version took place in a parallel universe – or in the imagination of the all too human author.

BIBLICAL MIRACLES: Then there’s this Biblical bit about Joshua commanding the sun to stand still (at least that’s the way I recall it). That’s a tall tale or myth but whatever, it can’t be a physical reality. But wait, there’s more! There’s Jonah and the whale; Eve’s creation from a rib; walking on the waters; the walls of Jericho tumbling down at the sound of no doubt out of tune trumpets or rams horns. In the Bible we have this tale of the multiplying of loaves and fishes out of virtually nothing.

Miracles are part and parcel of any and all supernaturally based religions. Miracles of the supernatural kind (and that’s the only kind of miracle that counts here) violate one or more laws, principles or relationships established by science. There can be no such thing as a supernatural miracle in theory. However, there have been numerous reports of supernatural miracles.

Reported events cannot violate the natural state of things. If they do violate that natural state of things, then they must be supernatural. There’s no known theory that can accommodate supernatural events. That’s part of the conflict between science and religion. The conflict is an anomaly.  

THE AFTERLIFE: A concept that closest to the hearts and minds of nearly all humans and human cultures past and present is what happens to us after we kick the bucket. The answer is we transcend into another life – an afterlife. Every culture, past and present, has an afterlife concept, a life after death concept, or some sort of an eternity or immortality worldview. However, the concept of eternal life is actually hellish as you would rather quickly be bored out of your afterlife skull, and you still have infinity yet to come.

Not all of the versions of the theoretical afterlife can be correct however. Idealistic theoretical expectations that when you die you won’t stay dead, versus practical reality that observations show that dead things stay dead, are indeed conflicting, therefore anomalous. However, nobody has ever come back from the dead to prove the reality of an afterlife to the satisfaction of any unbiased referee.

Creation: God vs. Science: Part Two

Probably among the most familiar of familiar phrases in the English language is one that starts out “In the beginning God created…” However, there are alternative non-theological variations on that phrase that fall more in the realm of natural philosophy (or as we call it today, science). What’s at stake is the credibility of God’s alleged word vs. the credibility of the word of science. Christians might believe the Bible, but they put their real faith in science when they turn on their TV set or board an aircraft. So too should they put their money on the scientific scenarios of the creations.

In the beginning God said a whole bunch of stuff central to His creation of life, the Universe and everything.*

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Botany is next up on the creation agenda. Of course you need land and water before you can have a garden (hydroponics and phytoplankton aside) so the ordering is, well, in order. Except God then makes a mistake. He starts off all things botanical with grass, which, truth be known, is a pretty complex and highly evolved plant. There were lots of simpler plants that pre-existed grasses. Even the dinosaurs existed before grass did! What God should have said is that “let the Earth bring forth algae and phytoplankton and mosses and ferns”. That would have been a detail which would have made botanical atheists stand up and take notice of Biblical bona-fides.

But, just when you think the Biblical creations gets things in a reasonable and logical order, here comes the next bit – the creation of the Sun, Moon and stars. The relevant quote, in case there’s any doubt:

Genesis 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

Okay, the Moon and the stars aren’t all that relevant, but what did all those plants, those grasses, herbs and fruit trees, do for solar energy (photosynthesis) before the Sun got created? This is without question a major Biblical screw-up; the height of all that’s illogical in the scientific ordering of things, but then the Bible and science are not exactly bedfellows. Science on the other hand has the Sun and the Earth formed about 4.5 billion years ago – plants came much later on and thus they never lacked for solar energy.

The screw-ups keep on keeping on. Next up we have the creation of marine life and avian life. Unfortunately for God, He screwed up by including whales among marine life. Okay, whales are marine creatures, but they are not fish. Whales are mammals. God apparently created whales before the end of the fifth day of creation. After the fifth day had ended, and the sixth day had begun, God then apparently created mammals, like cattle, and lots of other critters that in the fossil record preceded whales, as well as those things that “creepeth” upon the earth for example (I assume worms and snakes, etc.). What’s the relevant proof?

Genesis 1:21 And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

We note that whales were created before other beasts as outlined in Genesis 1:24. Yet, as any biologist will outline for you, whales evolved from land mammals and went back to a marine habitat. Whales are a relatively recent product of natural selection. They were hardly an animal that kicked off the mammalian branch of the tree of life, contrary to what God says. 

Take as a further example the creation of the male and female of the human species, which is I’m sure a bit more relevant and personal to all you readers. The barebones (as it were) were given in Genesis 1:26. Now, finally, God gives out the details!  

Genesis 2:7 And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis 2:21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

Genesis 2:22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

Well at least now we get some sort of explanation – the male created from common dust; the female from the masculine rib. Details are still thin on the (dusty) ground, but the dust-and-rib theory is at least something that scientists can explore and play around with. Hands up all of you who attended high school biology class or university Biology 101 and got the dust-and-rib explanation? I thought so. Biologists have found a more convincing explanation. If you don’t need dust, and you don’t need ribs, then you don’t need God either in the equation. That aside…    

Now if you’re a male, are you overjoyed that your original alpha-male ancestor was made out of ordinary everyday garden-variety dust? Would you be happy if you had been made out of dust motes? If you’re a female, does it tickle your fancy that you’re (well your sex is) just a second generation afterthought (there is quite a break in Genesis between Adam’s creation and Eve’s coming to the party); a creation from a masculine rib? Does any of this strike you as slightly ridiculous? That’s all the more so since the creation of the original alpha-male and alpha-female afterthought was just a one-off. Post-dust and post-rib it was creation by that time-honoured mechanism – sex, which is smelly and messy and rather hit-or-miss. I mean hey, if dust and ribs work, well when you’re on a winner, stick to the original blueprint. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. God should have left the dust-and-rib instruction manual behind. So, if a modern loving couple wants a bouncing baby boy, well a bit of housework will round up the raw material. If it’s a little girl, well hubby can have a rib job at the local clinic. Okay, that’s ridiculous. But if it’s ridiculous now, it was equally ridiculous back then.

Now kindly note another creation screw-up here. We’re all familiar with the concept of day and night; morning and evening. Now the question is what celestial object is responsible for there being light and darkness, day and night, morning and evening? Did I hear you suggest that the Sun was the orb responsible? If so, go to the head of the class.

But it comes to pass that we have this verse:

Genesis 1:5 And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.

And then we have this verse (repeated from above):

Genesis 1:16 And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.

So the upshot here is that day and night, morning and evening, existed prior to the creation of the Sun. Wow! Neat magician’s trick that!

Now kindly note yet another creation screw-up here.

Recall: Genesis 1:25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

Recall: Genesis 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.

Now recall: Genesis 2:18 And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.

Now recall: Genesis 2:19 And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them.

In Biblical parlance, this is the equivalent of the chicken and egg question. Which came first, man or beast? The Bible provides statements for both that’s can’t both be correct, so take your pick. Whichever you pick, the alternative then has to be nonsense. Odds are neither version is correct.

Now if God is perfect, there can be no Biblical screw-ups. If there are Biblical screw-ups, then either God isn’t perfect or the Bible is NOT God’s Holy Word. A reasonable explanation is that the Bible was written by non-perfect humans, and God doesn’t exist since the errors, the screw-ups, were never corrected by Him. God never proofread His own Holy Words!

One further anomaly that proves just about beyond any doubt that Genesis is the work of man and not of God; we note the endless repetition of “And God said.” My question – prior to Adam, just who was around back then to copy down anything that God said? And if the answer to that is nobody, then presumably God is just talking to Himself! Or, more likely as not, the entirety of Genesis, creation and all, is just an early example of what would later become known as science fiction.

*Kindly note that all Biblical references have been taken from the Book of Genesis that appear in the King James Version of the Bible.

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.

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.