Happy Holidays!

Should we all have a “Merry Christmas” or will just having a “Happy Holiday” suffice? Do we really all need to receive supersaturation exposure to all things Christmas for weeks on end? What is the point of the over-the-top commercialism of a religious celebration that firstly doesn’t apply to everyone and secondly is just a figment of the Christian imagination anyway? Why do we lie to our children about Santa? Is it any wonder that there’s now a “War on Christmas”?

For various reasons, religious, economic, personal, some people just do not do Christmas – shock, horror, absolute blasphemy!!! Not that the naysayer can escape from Christmas, the concept and associated musical and visual baggage being shoved down their throats whether people want it or not from pretty much the last week in November (immediately post Thanksgiving in the US of A) through Christmas Day. That’s roughly 1/12^th of your year when all things Christmas, Christmas and more Christmas is pounded into you. Christmas probably gets more exposure or saturation coverage than a lead-up to a federal election. At least department stores, shopping malls and supermarkets don’t broadcast political candidate’s speeches while they’re on their political hustings. No such respite do these retail establishments give you regarding Christmas. Music, displays, and zillions of ads suggesting this or that perfect gift is the order of the month, and of course all those retail store Santa’s are just egging on the kiddies to pester their all and sundry family and friends with “I want, I want, I want, gimme, gimme, gimme” with produce from their store of course. Maybe that’s why there’s finally an anti-Christmas backlash underway – enough is now enough! It’s called the “War on Christmas”.

There’s been a lot of huffing-and-puffing, especially in the US of A over a so-called “War on Christmas”, summed up I guess by replacing “Merry Christmas” with “Happy Holidays” and other wise downplaying the religious and traditional significance of the, ho, ho, ho, Christmas. For example, no Nativity displays in public areas. Actually that might be working since this year (2012) the annual Nativity display in my local shopping centre has been conspicuous by its absence. I miss it not one bit since it has all the same degree of historical reality of Santa himself. [Actually, the day after I wrote that bit of wishful thinking it showed up – curses, foiled again.]

Personally, I’d be more than happy to have the entirety of Christmas and all of the associated baggage, mainly economic, tossed out the window, preferably a high-rise window. Since that’s not going to happen, I’ll settle for the downgrading. Of course the Christian Right Wing are spouting hellfire and brimstone over this trend, though that’s really irrelevant since Christmas has bugger-all to do with Christianity or anything related to monotheism - more on that shortly.

For better or worse, most of the advanced countries in the world today, especially those in North America (United States & Canada), Europe, and the Pacific region (Australia, New Zealand) are no longer WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) societies, but multicultural societies. That means, cultures that have significant populations that don’t share the WASP culture, including WASP religions and holidays. “Merry Christmas” has little if any significance; “Happy Holidays” probably has more significance to a broader audience than just WASPs.

One example of personal note, I don’t know about your neck of the woods, but where I live, it is near mandatory for supermarkets, department stores, shopping malls, etc. to pipe in and bombard customers with so-called Christmas music. Much of it is just Northern Hemisphere wintertime music like “Frosty the Snowman”, “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let it Snow”, and “Sleigh Ride” (vastly inappropriate in the Southern Hemisphere celebrating high summer where I am, but that’s another issue); some have no religious significance like “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” or “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”. But you get the religiously themes songs too, like “The First Noel”, “Silent Night” or “Hark the Herald Angels Sing”. It’s with the latter I take objection.

The question is, is it the place of supermarkets, etc. to seemingly endorse a particular brand of [monotheistic Christian] religion by playing these religiously themed Christmas Carols? It’s perfectly legal of course, but is it ethical? I mean these stores don’t pipe in music appropriate to the beliefs of Hindus or those of the Buddhist faith. In a multicultural society, I would strongly suggest that department stores, etc. stick to subjecting their customers to non-religious Christmas, or even better winter holiday, songs, and not ram down a specific monotheistic religious point of view to anyone within earshot. I mean this is not voluntarily attending a concert. People have to shop for necessities, like food. Should part of that experience be the involuntary scenario or experience of listening to music you’d rather not be subjected to? Opting to shop elsewhere probably results in no letup since nearly 100% of stores participate in the unrelenting bombardment. Apart from the unwilling shoppers, pity the poor staffers who have to put up with it for eight hours straight, day-in and day-out for the roughly month long duration. As one such staffer told me, they just tune out as best they can and sort of go into zombie mode for the duration.

The other issue is does Christmas really have any religious connection worthy of its salt at all? The answer is clearly no. You will not find, in any religious text, including the Bible (any version of the Bible in any language) the date, month, or even season when an alleged entity we call Jesus, was born. In short, if you celebrate the 25^th of December as the birthday of Jesus, you have only a 1 in 365.25 chance of being correct. So, why was that date chosen?

Well once upon a time, in days of yore, when pagans ruled, it was usual for ancient and in the main rural societies dependent on farming to divide the year into twelve months of thirty days each. Of course that left a remainder of five days, which had to be used up or accounted for, or else the calendar would eventually get seriously out of sync. Now recall that all of this tradition started from and evolved in the Northern Hemisphere. Now what was THE most important thing to these agricultural communities? The Winter Solstice (the shortest daylight day of the year being 21 December) and confirmation that the day’s daylight started getting longer immediately afterwards (the gods were therefore pleased) and that meant that although it might be a while, spring was returning, with that a promise of planting and another harvest and therefore food on the table. And so you used up that surplus five days in a post 21 December celebration that winter would eventually wan and good times would return.

Enter Christianity and their hatred for all things pagan and polytheistic. The easiest way to deal with this annual pagan festive season was not to fight city hall but to assimilate it and use it for their own purposes. Easy, just give the masses another reason to celebrate roughly five days post Winter Solstice – the birth of Jesus was a convenient substitute since no one could prove any different. And slowly but surely as Christianity replaced paganism and rural communities morphed more into urban societies and one realised that lengthening daylight was the norm of nature and not subject to the whim of the gods, well, there you have it, the evolution of Christmas. But Christmas is celebrated under false pretences. It was equally false when the reason was the whim of the god’s bestowed favour and promised another spring, but then those ancient rural farmers didn’t know any better. We know better for both reasons – Mother Nature rules the hours of daylight and the odds are overwhelming that the birth of Jesus didn’t take place when the Christian Church says it did. But please don’t take my word for it, just ask your local religious clergy or priest or whoever to prove that Christmas Day has any Christian religious significance; they can’t, and it doesn’t.

Let’s be brutally honest about Christmas. It has nothing to do with monotheism, Christianity or Jesus, and everything to do with consumerism and the economy. All the month long hype, all the ads, all the displays, all the music, all the Santa’s, all the ho, ho, ho you receive, etc. are designed to get you, as one staffer put it to me, in the proper Christmas mood, which, basically means psychologically getting you to loosening the purse strings and maxing out your credit cards in keeping with all that Christmas spirit, and spirits. Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to this annual manipulation and perhaps are coming around to the point of view that they would just rather have a non-religious “Happy Holiday” without being made to feel guilty that they aren’t having a “Merry Christmas” a concept shoved down your throat by society at large. 

Conclusion: Christmas is as phoney as a $7 bill and therefore the “War on Christmas” is not only just and logical, but way, way, way overdue.

Happy holidays all!

Religion: No Good; Just Bad and Ugly: Part Two

Is our Christian religion really the right religion? Human societies have believed in hundreds of religions, some current, many extinct. Humans have worshiped literally thousands of deities over a hundred thousand or some odd years. All religions, and all deities, can’t all be true. Perhaps none are. Regardless, religion has a lot to answer for.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

As recent and even not so recent revelations have made clear, it has come to pass that not all members in the employment of the inner sanctums of the Church (pick a church, any church) are especially moral beings. If church Vickers, priests, parsons, rabbis, bishops, and associated clergy types are to be believed, as reported in the media and acknowledged by the Church, well let’s just say they don’t apparently always do the right thing by those in their care. 

Speaking of all things moral and ethical, the Church has blood on its collective hands, right up to its proverbial elbows. There’s the Inquisition, the Crusades, all manner of Holy Wars, etc. The Church is guilty of murder, legal death by execution (being burned at the stake, being stoned to death), torture, imprisonment, exile, ridicule, harassment, and all other manner of atrocities, etc. The Church is in no way in any position to cast the first stone, as it were. 

Further examples of religious atrocities now include religious terrorism. Once upon a time, I used to view terrorism as a political act, mainly for the purpose of overthrowing the government-of-the-day; the powers-that-be, by ‘well meaning’ revolutionaries. It wasn’t an attempt to slaughter the average man-in-the-street. The violent revolutions that led to Castro's Cuba or the overthrow of the pro-Western government of Iran are but a few examples of revolutionary terrorism, terrorism with the goal of a forced change of government. Those are but two of many that have taken place in Africa, South and Central America, etc.

Today however, terrorism appears to have a decidedly less political edge to it and way more of a religious context or motivation behind acts of terrorism. It’s also more ‘personal’ since there are millions around the world who wish you dead (and some who would be happy to be your executioner if they could) all because you don’t belong to their religious faith – you’re their infidel. The spate of suicide bombings, the events of 9/11, were (or are) examples of terrorism generally carried out in the name of religion.

While it might be true that some extremely militant fundamentalist Christians might like to eliminate moderate Christians, what I had in mind here is more one faith vs. another - Catholics vs. Protestants (say in Northern Ireland); Muslims vs. Christians, as say in the Bali bombings. Those terrorist bombers, in Bali, wanted Australians, Americans, anyone not of their faith, dead! I believe there is equally faith vs. faith terrorist acts on the Subcontinent, probably of the Hindu vs. Buddhism kind.

How many around the world, who do not share the faith of the average Australian (or other Western democracy), would be happy to see lots of Australians dead? Not the majority of course, but a sizable enough minority, and worldwide, that amounts to millions. That minority of course ultimately form the core of suicide bombers, or at least those who encourage, sanction, condone, support, etc. their actions.

That’s somehow even more disturbing than outright political terrorism. If this is the sort of trait that separates humans from animals, maybe it might have been better to have been born an animal – at least until such time as you’re slaughtered as a sacrifice to someone’s God! You can’t win.  

Then there are those religious vested interests. Let’s face it; organized religion is at least a multi-million dollar industry, if not a multi-billion dollar interest to all and sundry. Religious organizations employ lots of people. These people have a lot invested in the subject matter – money and time and probably training. There’s lots of money tied up in religious real estate and infrastructure.

If someone could conclusively prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was no supernatural God, no supernatural JC, no dastardly Devil, no white-picket-fence heaven and no fire-and-brimstone hell, thousands would be out of work and lots of both big and small business (religious publishers and bookstores, religious institutions/schools for example) would go broke. Not to mention all those individuals, from the popes to your local clergy, having lots of collective egg on their faces. In fact, if God were shown not to exist, that religion was a fraud, it would have a major impact on the economy. 

So, it’s not surprising that religious personnel have to talk up the subject of God, etc. anywhere and anytime the opportunity arises – just in case.

One interesting thing is how religion and those who are religious, have seemingly put religion on an untouchably high pedestal that can not do any wrong. It’s nearly taboo to criticise religion without causing massive offence to those who follow whatever religion you’re having a go at. It’s quite alright to criticise the tax office, the opposite sex, a sporting team, a political party, weather forecasters, the banks and just about any and all other institutions – but not religion. That’s blasphemy. But, blasphemy is IMHO a victimless ‘crime’. God, if there is a God, doesn’t seem to take offence at all those highly profile members of the New Atheist movement. After all, none of them have been struck down by a bolt of lightning from the sky, have they?

Lastly, what is it about these religious nutters from religions far and wide that believe they have not only the right, but the duty to disturb you by doorknocking, phoning, dropping literature into and clogging up your private mail box, etc? They feel they can somehow justify shoving their philosophy down your throat.  If you, like me, are one of the normal members of the multitudes, we do not go around pestering others with our personal philosophy, and we all have one.

No doubt the religious nutters will claim their version of whatever holy book they cling to, tells them to do this. If that book told them to take a long walk off a short pier, or to jump off a high cliff, I wonder if they would feel quite the same sense of duty or compulsion to act. 

Religion: No Good; Just Bad and Ugly: Part One

Is our Christian religion really the right religion? Human societies have believed in hundreds of religions, some current, many extinct. Humans have worshiped literally thousands of deities over a hundred thousand or some odd years. All religions, and all deities, can’t all be true. Perhaps none are. Regardless, religion has a lot to answer for.

So what makes the Biblical religion or the Christian religion or the Old Testament religion the be all and end all of true religion and associated religious deities for the multitudes? I mean there is as much written and archaeological evidence for the existence of Thor, Zeus, Odin, Apollo, Ares, Athena, et al. as there is for God. No longer are people devoting believers in the religions and associated gods of ancient Rome, Greece, or the Norse countries – why? The arguments for those religions and their existence were so weak as to be unsustainable. So, why not go one religion and one God further?

There have probably been more wars, deaths, executions, murders, torture, crime and suffering in general, perpetrated in the name of religion (God and associates) over the millennium than over any other specific cause. Anything and everything can be justified as long as ‘God is on your side’ or the Bible says so, as per holy wars, crusades and inquisitions.  I like the point – not original to me by the way – that if there were no God, no religious moral teachings, no Biblical threats of punishment, or promises of rewards, then you’d have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. Add religion and associated baggage into the mix however and you now have some good people doing evil things – all in the name of their religion and their God. As the sayings go, and apologies to the originators whose names I’ve forgotten, ‘science flies men to the Moon; religion flies men into buildings’ (as per 9/11), and ‘atheists have never killed in defence of atheism, but, religious fundamentalists have certainly killed in the name of God’. That just about sums it all up. Has all the misery religion has caused, or has been caused in God’s name, been justified? I’ll state at the outset that, IMHO, the answer is an absolute NO, if for no other reason than it’s highly unlikely that God even exists! 

So what’s then the origin(s) of religion? If there is no God or gods, no supernatural beings or deities, how come we got religions (plural since there have been and are hundreds of them)? Easy!

Primitive, ancient, cave, etc. men (and women), call them what you will, had little understanding of how the natural world, their environment, worked, including those events that most directly impacted on their day-to-day existence and survival. They had no sophisticated understanding of physics and chemistry, geology, oceanography, meteorology and astronomy. But it was obvious to them that something had to be responsible for what happened to them; maybe even more obvious that the responsible agent was probably someone – maybe plural. Since they didn’t have that sort of level of power or control, that someone (one or more) had to be a really BIG SOMEONE, yet a BIG SOMEONE who stayed out of obvious sight. Since ancient man had no way of naturally explaining things, but the existence of a BIG SOMEONE did explain things, thus a supernatural being(s) was created or born.

It’s equally obvious that you’d want this BIG SOMEONE to maximize good things and minimize bad things, and so you tried to converse with the BIG SOMEONE. But since the BIG SOMEONE wasn’t visible, wasn’t in your face and in person, conversation had to be one-way – call it prayer! It doesn’t take long for patterns and rituals to become established, and the most successful prayer person becomes a leader, a respected member of the tribe, a priest in other words. A religion is born.

This evolution of a religion is reinforced because of the nature of death. Everyone takes note of the fact that something that was alive is now something not alive – maybe it’s just the animal you killed for food, but also maybe it’s your mate or your offspring, or a tribal elder you knew and respected, or a neighbour in the hut or cave next to yours. Someone dies of old age or for no apparent reason. What exactly happened? Why did it happen? Who is responsible? Why, the BIG SOMEONE of course.

Associated with death is obviously noting that whatever is dead doesn’t respond to the environment any more, can’t eat, can’t breathe, can’t enjoy sex, or company, and the overall caveman equivalent of the good life. Also, the dead in fact will eventually decay, rot away and smell. So, death is something to be avoided, and if it can’t be avoided, well maybe there’s a continuation of the good life afterwards in some mysterious way that only the BIG SOMEONE controls. The BIG SOMEONE provides a home we all go to after we die. Tossing up the option of an afterlife, or no afterlife, when there’s no obvious evidence either way, well, it’s a no-brainer. Our number one prayer person, our priest, will tell us what we want to hear! That’s politics.

So it’s relatively easy to explain the origin of a religion and how it can take on a life of its own with loads of trappings, with do and do-not aspects, etc.

But, religions have not also come, but gone. Maybe the great prayer person had a streak of bad luck and so the BIG SOMEONE was replaced – as was the priest. The upshot is that in this age of enlightenment, we have consigned most of our historical collection of BIG SOMEONES, our gods and supernatural beings and deities to the dust bin. The prayers have failed, the priests have failed, the gods have failed or went away, so ultimately it’s now easy to accept that maybe there was no evidence at all for them in the first place – they no longer explain anything. Now all that’s basically left is now just one more final body to get rid of. It’s time God too was consigned to the dust bin.

What about our Religious concepts central to morality, ethics, values, right & wrong, etc.? It is presumed by those in a Biblical frame of mind that our concept of morality (and related) comes from God and Biblical preachings and teachings. Oh dear! According to The Bible, God commits, or commands others to commit, or condones what any moral person living today would term atrocities and crimes against humanity worthy of Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun. In fact Satan comes across as a far more moral character in the Biblical texts than God. After all, it’s God who condemns people to eternal torture or torment, not Satan. It’s God who inflicts plagues on the populace, not Satan. It’s God who condones rape, slavery and cannibalism; it’s God who demands sacrifices, executions and torture, not Satan. Satan actually comes across as a bit of a trickster perhaps, but not really evil incarnate. God is depicted in Biblical texts as the personification of pure evil. Who does the smiting – God or Satan?

Take the morality or ethics of what God dos to Adam and Eve. If Adam and Eve understood that it is evil to disobey God and good to obey God, then Adam and Eve already possessed the knowledge of good and evil, and there was no need for God’s warning and they had no need to give in to temptation and eat that apple! God, being all-knowing, knew this. There would have been no moral reason to punish them. If Adam and Eve did not understand God, if they didn’t comprehend the difference between good and evil, then God punished them, and all their descendents through to and including you, quite unfairly.

I think it is safe to say that animals do not, and can not, read the Bible. Animals and humans are supposed to be separate creations, with mankind somehow something extra special – we’ve had morality bestowed upon us by God (a God who basically says do as I say, not as I do). There’s no mention of God bestowing morals (and related) onto animals. Yet, there are numerous first hand observations of animals exhibiting behaviour which we would describe as moral or ethical or showing distinction between right and wrong. Now either this behaviour in animals evolved naturally, and by implication our morals evolved naturally too, or else God breathed good behaviour into animals – again no mention of that in the Biblical literature. So, humans aren’t a special creation based on morality.

Rather than give second-hand examples of animal morality, here’s one of mine – first hand. My two companion cats hate each other and will engage in a cat fight at the drop of a proverbial hat. However, no attack will even occur when either cat is eating, sleeping, or using the litter box. Then it’s truce time. In human society it’s considered immoral and cowardly to attack someone when they are sleeping – ditto the cat community. In neither case has that come from God or Biblical teachings or passages. 

To be continued…

What the Bible Doesn’t Mention: Part Two

We all know what the Bible mentions. Books featuring ‘stories from the Bible’ are a dime a dozen in bookstores. What doesn’t the Bible mention is way more interesting and amounts to just about most of life, the universe and everything. What the Bible omits tells heaps about the bona-fides of God the alleged deity, and ultimate author!

What the Bible* doesn’t contain is perhaps of far greater importance than what it does say when one comes to examining the relative importance of the document and it’s proper place in the world’s literature. Because of fairly major omissions, I conclude that the Bible is just a fairly minor piece of site-specific pseudo-historical literature (to be kind) or a potpourri anthology of fairly mundane science fantasy short stories because most of the historical context is unverifiable. 

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

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.”

Presumably that means all of the earth’s peoples that populated the earth ultimately were God’s creations (even if many times removed by natural acts of human reproduction), and not just the two original individuals (Adam & Eve) nor just those peoples and human cultures of the Mediterranean region. So, what peoples in general or nationalities or tribes are noted and logged in the Bible (apart from the names of selected individuals).

People’s Positive Mentions: Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Egyptians, Greeks, Hittites, Israelites, Persians, Philistines, Romans, and probably a few other inhabitants, nationalities and tribal cultures located north, south and east of the (unnamed) Mediterranean Sea.

People’s Negative Mentions: Any and all of the ancestral tribes of the Aztecs, Incas, Maya, and Olmecs fail to rate a mention. Any and all of the various Amerindian tribes you can think of - ditto. Aborigines, Asian(s), Asiatic, Blacks, Celts, Chinese, Cro-Magnon(s), Danes or the Danish, Eskimos, Indians (India), Irish, Neanderthals, Negro(s), Nubians, Sea Peoples, Spanish, Sumerians, Welsh, and on and on it goes, or doesn’t go. While God needn’t have noted the natives of Antarctica (penguins), there’s no excuse for ignoring a rather large fraction of humanity that just didn’t happen to be blessed with a Mediterranean climate. 

Discussion:  There’s a whole potful of people and places that should give God the Big Middle Finger for leaving them out of his Big Picture as related via Biblical texts. For God to entirely ignore the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, all of the Americas and all of her native peoples – who existed in Biblical times – is totally inexcusable and unforgivable. 

What about Northern Europe and inhabitants? Confined it would seem to non-existence. God creates the world and the human species but perhaps is embarrassed by those barbarians and pagans way north of the Mediterranean (again surprisingly not mentioned either) and so Biblically deletes them to a sort of Orwellian non-persons status. 

Of course nearly all of the Southern Hemisphere is also conspicuous by its absence from all things Biblical. No acknowledgement of the Australian aborigines; the New Zealand Maoris; the Polynesians, the Micronesians, the Melanesians. Apparently all of these peoples aren’t important enough to rate a mention in God’s Holy Bible, yet aren’t these humans too supposed to be among God’s creations?

While there’s little or no historical evidence for many of the characters that appear and feature prominently in the Bible, right up to and including Jesus Christ or Jesus of Nazareth depending on personal choice, really real individuals whose historical bona-fides aren’t in any doubt living in that neck of the woods in those times don’t rate even a Biblical one-liner. No Greek philosophers or poets or historians get a mention. There’s no Hercules (Roman) or Herakles (Greek) noted (hey, if the Bible acknowledges Goliath and Samson, the least it can do is tell a tale or two of Hercules – besides Goliath and Samson never rated their own TV shows); King Gilgamesh is conspicuous by his absence; there’s no Ptolemy, Cleopatra or Alexandria the Great; no Agamemnon (of Troy fame) mentioned in passing either.

Egyptian pharaohs aren’t identified by their names even though there are about 240 references to ‘pharaoh’ or ‘pharaohs’ in the Bible. That alone reeks of pure Biblical make-believe and identifies the Bible as having no credibility whatever. Pharaohs had actual names, the same as you and I. So that failure is as phoney as a $3 bill and a disgrace to whoever authored those bits on God’s behalf.

Instead of all of these historical individuals that played major roles in the Mediterranean region during Biblical times, we get science fantasy stories like Moses holding a conversation with a burning bush; Jonah and his whale; Joshua’s sonic trumpets at Jericho not to mention his ability to manipulate celestial physics; Methuselah’s marvellous lifespan; and of course Noah and his (never to be found) ark.  Then there are those loaves and fishes breeding like rabbits! At least King Sargon gets one mention, so that’s a positive, and a Caesar or two gets a mention as well. 

Other Non-Mentions: After places and peoples come things. No famous monuments are given their due in the Bible – not the Parthenon, not cities like Troy, not massive structures like ziggurats or mastabas or the Great Sphinx; not even the pyramids. In fact I don’t believe the Bible mentions any of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World – a major oversight IMHO. 

Speaking of the Southern Hemisphere and Noah above, while I don’t expect a massive amount of nitty-gritty detail, there should be some accounting for how a pair of flightless New Zealand Kiwi birds made it to Noah’s Ark and back again! Oh, and by the way, how did Noah have knowledge enough to sex all the animals and how did he know that each pair that he sexed as male and female was actually fertile? Some of those animals may well have been senior enough to have been over-the-hill and off-the-pill or just plain suffering from impotency! Just asking!

Lastly, the Bible fails to mention some fairly obvious legal concepts like genocide is wrong; that there should be equal rights for women; that same-sex relationships behind closed doors is nobody else’s business; that belief in other gods isn’t the end of the world, and so on and so forth. The Bible fails to condemn slavery. It also fails to argue against the death penalty – so much for an all-loving, all-forgiving God. The Bible is very good on instructing people what not to do (‘thou shall not…’), and literal followers of Biblical passages have in fact inflicted massive amounts of personal harm and cultural damage over thousands of years – just ask the Mesoamericans; those tried and convicted by the Inquisition; or alleged witches – always guilt until proven innocent. The Bible most certainly does not turn the other cheek when it comes to paganism and polytheism. It tends to advocate the philosophy of smite first and ask questions later.

Failure to mention, even in passing, all of the above negatives is very odd indeed. It’s as if you built, furnished and decorated your new four-bedroom, two-car garage home, yet the only bits you mention in your letter to Mum was something about the sofa, the kitchen sink, the master bedroom wallpaper and that it was constructed out of bricks – that’s it.

Something is screwy somewhere. So what do we conclude from all of these Biblical omissions?

Despite all the grandiose statements about creating life, the universe and everything, the Bible is just well embellished pseudo-history of a relatively small part of the globe, areas part and parcel of the Mediterranean region, controlled by one alleged deity, no different in principle than Odin controlling the Norse lands; Quetzalcoatl’s strutting his stuff in Mesoamerica; or Viracocha being revered by the Incas of Peru. The proof of that local Mediterranean pudding is that the phrase “God of Israel” appears 201 times in the Bible. Not God of life, the universe and everything – just little old Israel. If you’re not of Israel, then apparently God doesn’t need concern himself with you, at least not in a positive way.

The Bible all up: It’s ultimately a case of what’s included in those Biblical stories (names and places) is not largely supported by archaeological evidence or logic. What is not included is, in a global context, things that any self respecting deity responsible for all things global should have been delighted to have included. That they weren’t speaks volumes – loud and clear.

*King James Version