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.

Those Tall Tales of Biblical Disasters: Part One

Despite what you might hear in church, or view on Christian websites, the Bible isn’t all about those ten Godly commandments, loving your neighbour, doing onto others, mercy, forgiveness, compassion, truth,  justice and everlasting life. Star Wars aside, there’s a dark side to the Force. Even apart from hell, fire and brimstone and lots of sins and sinning, there’s much death and destruction all around. The Bible is full of tales of disasters that rival anything Mother Nature has conjured up. 

We all tend to love a good disaster story. In films, we have “Atlantis, the Lost Continent”, “The Towering Inferno”; The Poseidon Adventure”; “Earthquake”; “Deep Impact”; “On the Beach”, “Swarm”, “Twister”, “When Worlds Collide”, etc. not to mention more alien invasion films than you can care to mention, far less remember. Surely films about nasty extraterrestrials are an order of magnitude greater than your fingers and toes put together, and when you toss in those nasties that Mother Nature can summon up, well it’s just pure gloom and doom all around. There’s no escape! 

It’s even better when a gloom and doom scenario is based on a real disaster – Pompeii (79), the San Francisco earthquake (1906); the floundering of RMS Titanic (1912), the Hindenburg crash (1937), the SS Andrea Doria sinking (1956), the Asian tsunami (2004), Darwin’s Cyclone Tracy (1974), the Black Plague, and literally thousands of other disasters, from plane crashes and train wrecks, to hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, floods, explosions; you name it – if it causes death and destruction it’s front-page and evening TV news.

Biblical disasters hold special pride of place (there’s even several documentary DVDs devoted to the theme) but first I’d better define what I mean by disaster. If an ant gets hit by a lump of hail, or even several humans wiped out in a car accident, well that’s a disaster for the ant or the humans, but not really a disaster in the larger context of what we think of as a real disaster (so Jonah and the ‘Whale’ isn’t a real disaster come survival against all the odds story). A bona-fide disaster has to inflict major damage and/or loss of life on a reasonably high percentage of the geographical area impacted upon. That ‘geographical area’ could of course be a ship or a plane carrying a relatively large numbers of passengers and crew down to their gloom and doom.  

Now there are disasters contained within the texts of the standard Bible. Some, especially the story of the flood (Genesis), have parallels in many other mythologies. Most are one-offs. I will make no absolute claims for the truth and accuracy, reality or non-reality, of these tall tales; apart from the observation that there are no non-Biblical bona-fide historical references or archaeological confirmations for the lot of them. Instead, they are just to be taken as  ‘riveting’ or as ‘captivating’ as much as the various real and imaginary disaster happenings part and parcel of our modern society that hold the attention of the reading and/or viewing audience.

*We Are Sailing on Noah’s Ark (Genesis)

Fortunately, Captain Noah doesn’t run into any icebergs on his maiden voyage. Disaster lurks elsewhere, and its Noah and crew who get to enact the great escape of all great escapes and survive. Survive what of course is that burst water main that floods everything for a rather long period of time, which is bad news for those 99.999% not on board with Noah as cork or foam-filled life jackets haven’t been invented yet. It is sink or swim time, and those without either life jackets or the timber deck of the Ark to stroll upon end up sinking.

If 99.999% of the world’s human (and non-human) population drowns because of this unprecedented and singular event (that 40 day and night global rainstorm and resulting flood), well that’s got to meet the dictionary definition of a disaster. There’s no evidence for it of course, and an event of this magnitude on a global scale isn’t physically possible in any event, but small-scale floods that can get embellished and blown out of all proportion in the telling and retellings, well that’s a different kettle of fish. But that’s hardly going to put a major dent in the human (and animal) population. Still, if you’re a fan of disaster flicks, this Biblical downpour (or water main burst) has appeal and will float your boat as it were, and no doubt it had appeal to disaster fans way back then. But all up, I suspect this was a minor event that got hyped up out of all proportion from its actual reality (if any). 

*Then there’s Sin City: Sodom & Gomorrah, the Las Vegas of the Era (Genesis)

Genesis 19: 24: Then the LORD rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the LORD out of heaven.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown! This almost reads as if God was doing a preseason exhibition demonstration as a warm-up to Pompeii!

So what was the reason for this massive exercise in smiting? What exactly pissed the Almighty off? Apparently, among other wickedness, all sorts of unnatural acts (close encounters between the same sex) were enacted.

One question therefore immediately arises, if God was so against unnatural acts, how come He didn’t smite ancient Greece, ruled by those – shock, horror – ‘other gods’? That’s strike one alone. Homosexuality was socially acceptable in Greek society (strike two), not only between consulting adults but between adults and minors as well (strike three). Well maybe God was more than just a tad worried about being thrashed by Zeus and his brothers Poseidon and Hades, and being outnumbered by the Olympians, thought discretion was the better part of valour. 

Maybe God should now smite down the United States and other Christian countries that have given equal rights to their gay communities. Well see that hasn’t happened (much to the disappointment of Christian Fundamentalists) which either tells you something about the reality of God or of God’s alleged wrath against unnatural acts – or maybe God’s too scared to take on the might of the USA, et al. least He get nuked in return.  

In any event, archaeologists and other ancient historians and Biblical scholars haven’t yet been able to turn the Biblical Sodom and Gomorrah into a patch of physical real estate despite apparently knowing where to look (the Dead Sea region). Still, if a disaster via geological forces (i.e. – Pompeii) is your bag; Sodom & Gomorrah fits the fire and brimstone bill. If of course you get away from an Act of God to a Deliberate Act of God (as the Bible says it was), then there’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan) or Dresden (Germany) as parallels (though whether or not Acts of War qualify as disasters is another issue, but in that context I’ll rule out the Battle of Jericho as a Biblical disaster).       

To be continued…

The Biblical Flood: All Washed Up, Left High and Dry: Part Two

Everyone loves a good end-of-the-world disaster story and the one about the global flood as related in The Bible is a case in point. The trouble is that like most of the Bible it's pure mythology. Unfortunately, way too many people take the tale literally.

I find it quite amazing there are certain sincere, albeit misguided, individuals who spend thousands of dollars on expeditions chasing up, in search of, something and an event that doesn’t exist. Amazingly, every few years you’ll get a press report that the object (and thus the event) has been found. Alas, there’s never a follow-up story that confirms and authenticates the discovery. It’s always a case of ‘oops, goofed again’; ‘back to the drawing board’; ‘better luck next time’. Oh, what’s the object? The object in question is Noah’s Ark of course; and the event, the story of the Biblical flood.

Continued from yesterday’s blog…

There’s also a few other quirks. Actually in some cases you need more than two per species. You can’t have just two dogs or two cats, but two of every dog breed and two of every cat breed. Multiply that by all other species that have various distinctive breeds. Speaking of breeds, where did all our genetic racial diversity come from if there were only a few (Noah and crew) survivors of this Biblical (global) flood?

In fact, since some animals only eat live (animal) food, I guess more than two of some species had to be on board to serve as appropriate snacks. I mean there wasn’t any tinned or dry cat food available for the moggies, no means of refrigeration of raw meat or fish, so extra live mice had better be on hand. That sort of example could be multiplied many times over.

After-the-fact, when the flood waters receded, what food would the herbivores eat? It would take some time for the grasses and bushes and trees and forests to regenerate. Further, immediately after-the-fact, wouldn’t the predator-prey ratio be all screwed up? I mean in a healthy population, prey vastly outnumber predators. If there are 200 deer and 2 lions, both survive. If there are two deer and two lions, both go kaput pretty quickly, the deer killed for food, the lions then starve.

And isn’t it strange that there were no other boats in existence that would have carried other survivors? I mean apparently every other boat in Biblical time’s existence sank, apart from the Ark! Rather inadequate boat building skills back then apparently or perhaps the whole story has all the reality of a Twilight Zone episode.

Now God may have a bone to pick with humans, but not with innocent animals. Although God dos the right thing by ‘saving’ a pair of each species, God also exhibited extreme cruelty in murdering (drowning) untold multi-millions of innocent animals.

There’s that concept of murder which God perpetrated on the human race en masse despite his or her own commandment about not killing.  Thou shall not kill is one of the Ten Commandments I believe. So you’d think that God would practice what he (or she) preaches, but doesn’t, according to the Old Testament. Because the Biblical flood was God’s flood, God was the greatest mass murderer in the history of the world, a murderer that puts tyrants the likes of Hitler to a status of rank amateur! I mean there are not only the Biblical flood story, but what about Sodom and Gomorrah? You can’t trust a god who basically says ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

The logic of it all is illogical in the extreme. And even if the Biblical flood were only a localized affair (which makes far more sense and explains some of the above problems), that still doesn’t absolve God from being a mass murderer.

If God – assuming a God exists and being all powerful and such – really wanted to wipe out all but a very few of his or her originally chosen people, those made in God’s image, humanity in other words (but please spare the innocent animals), he or she certainly picked a complicated way of doing it. A really all powerful God could have just snapped his or her fingers and instantaneously all of the humanity bar those very few special ones (Noah and company) would have become the dead dust of history. But why be quick and merciful (‘snap’) when you can drag it out and make them suffer!

Now the tale of the global flood is in fact global! Cultures from around the world tell similar tales to the Biblical flood. The argument is that therefore the story must be true as these diverse cultures had no contact with each other. My answer to that is related to bovine fertilizer! End of the world tales, or myths, the concept of Armageddon, punishing the wicked with total catastrophe was as common and popular then as now. We all love a good ‘end of the world’ story that has a moral attached. Alas, the choices or mechanisms available for said end of the world stories to myth makers’ way back then were rather limited. They had no knowledge of supernovae or gamma-ray bursts or massive solar flares or nuclear war and resulting holocausts or killer asteroids smacking into Planet Earth, etc. All they had to work with was the day-to-day sorts of routine natural events part and parcel of their daily lives. In fact, many tale-spinners might not have been familiar with, say, volcanoes, and while most relatively violent weather phenomena, like tornadoes, may be destructive, they aren’t destructive enough to wipe out the wicked that populate a wide area.  However, everyone would have experienced rain, heavy rain, even torrential rain say from hurricanes, etc. that resulted in minor flooding, or say witnessed storm surges from the sea that inundated the land, and/or witnessed rivers, ponds and lakes overflowing. It doesn’t take that much imagination to notch up minor real events, in the guise of story telling, to mega disaster proportions. If it rains heavily for one day and there’s some local flooding, up the ante to 40 days. It’s difficult to imagine any story teller from 5000 years ago coming up with any other sort of end of the world scenario!

The one point to end-of-the-world, mega disaster stories is that there must be at least one survivor to tell the tale! I gather in this case that includes survivors such as Noah and kin.

Another possibility, perhaps complementary to the above or perhaps as a standalone in its own right is that many regions, high and dry, often arid, give rise to rock strata that contain fossilized sea shells, fossilized fish, and other marine organisms. Now natives seeing these anomalies, knowing nothing of historical geology and palaeontology, would obviously conclude that there must have been a massive body of water here at one time, which they interpret as a relatively recent giant flood, so gigantic that it must have been universal. Of course it was a ‘flood’ of sorts. As the configurations of the continents have changed, invasions of the sea have created vast oceans eons ago where now stands dry land. The natives couldn’t have known that – the concept of deep (geological) time didn’t exist for them.

I have read of one other explanation for universal flood stories. If I recall correctly, a student of Freud came up with the idea that the tellers/inventors of flood tales got the idea from dreams in their sleep. And they dreamed the dream all because they were asleep with relatively full bladders. Personally, I think that’s a piss-weak explanation!

Is there another solution? Well, here’s one possibility. What if God, she, he or whatever, were in reality a very ‘flesh and blood’ extraterrestrial (E.T.) computer programmer, who has written a software package called, say “Planet Earth”. Maybe it’s a computer or interactive video game – maybe a homework assignment for a smart E.T. student. Anyway, computer software easily explains all the Biblical miracles (virgin births; the resurrection, etc.) or anomalies (like where did the entire Biblical flood’s rain come from; where did all the water go; how did Jonah survive inside a large fish, etc.) or inconsistencies (like Cain’s wife, the discrepancies between Biblical time and geological time). Regarding the Biblical flood, no humans actually died; no animals suffered and drowned, and so on, because the humans and animals were never real to start with, just as you and I aren’t real, just part of – for want of a better analogy – a computer game simulation. Now that’s pretty outlandish, but probably no more so that actually spending time, effort, energy and your hard earned dollars in search of the mythological and IMHO nonexistent Noah’s Ark.

But if you still believe in the physical reality of Noah’s Ark., then I guess it is logical to believe that the Ark must of carried unicorns, fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the-garden, dragons, centaurs, leprechauns, elves, sirens, Bigfoot, griffins, werewolves, trolls and just for good measure, the Cyclopes (plus a host of others).

The more obvious conclusion or implication is, if the Bible – the alleged word of God – gets this alleged event so wrong – it fails on any level of logic you care to apply – then how much faith can you put in the rest of the Biblical text? What sort of credibility does the Bible have? My belief is that it has absolutely none. So, potentially then the entire Bible, judging by the tale of the global flood, is a farce – just a collection of myths and fairy tales for grownups.

The Biblical Flood: All Washed Up, Left High and Dry: Part One

Everyone loves a good end-of-the-world disaster story and the one about the global flood as related in The Bible is a case in point. The trouble is that like most of the Bible it's pure mythology. Unfortunately, way too many people take the tale literally.

I find it quite amazing there are certain sincere, albeit misguided, individuals who spend thousands of dollars on expeditions chasing up, in search of, something and an event that doesn’t exist. Amazingly, every few years you’ll get a press report that the object (and thus the event) has been found. Alas, there’s never a follow-up story that confirms and authenticates the discovery. It’s always a case of ‘oops, goofed again’; ‘back to the drawing board’; ‘better luck next time’. Oh, what’s the object? The object in question is Noah’s Ark of course; and the event, the story of the Biblical flood.

In terms of  Old Testament tales, the Biblical flood story makes for a great science fiction read, even makes a grand (but fictional) epic film spectacular, but that’s about as far as it goes. The accent here must be on the word ‘fiction’. In fact, this has just got be the greatest crock of bovine fertilizer I’ve ever read about. How any thinking person can swallow this fairy tale is beyond me. Just consider.

Where did all the water come from? There’s certainly not enough water vapour in the atmosphere to precipitate out for 40 days and nights! And would 40 days and nights of rain even be enough to cover the highest mountain peak? I doubt it. And where did all the water go after-the-fact?

Then there’s that minor detail of actually building the Ark. Given the size it would have to be (room for all those multi-tens-of-thousands of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish and millions more invertebrates), just using a very few labourers without modern power tools, it would have to take decades, if not centuries to complete the task. And that’s after you have gathered all of the raw materials and transported them on site. From an engineering point of view, there is a limit to how big you can make a viable, sailable wooden boat using only materials and technology available at the time. Too large, as the Ark would have to be, it would at best leak and slowly sink; at worst break apart and rapidly sink, sailing on a rough and stormy global sea. With no land masses to get in the way, can you imagine the force the winds could get to? Cape Horn would be a smooth pond comparatively speaking.

After taking mega-years to build the damn ship, your work isn’t finished. Somehow you have got to find, collect, gather together all the supplies needed as well as find, collect and gather all the animals required for the voyage. That would take quite some considerable time – as in more mega-years. How long would it take you to round up two of every animal species on Planet Earth along with all the resources required to keep them in the style of life to which they have become accustomed for forty days and nights? Don’t forget that many animals have very precise dietary, etc. requirements. I think most pet owners find it quite daunting enough to deal with the time and energy to look after just a few animals, far less several hundred thousand!

And just how did all those thousands of species of animals not native to the region happen to make it to the Ark if they weren’t collected by Noah and friends? I mean like polar bears and penguins and animals native to the Americas? I assume koalas and kangaroos went along for the ride. How did they get to the Holy Lands? How did these animals get returned to their native lands after-the-fact? Then too, there’s been lots of new species discovered since Noah’s time. Presumably they were unknown to Noah too back then, so how did they survive the Flood?

There are the logistical and manpower issues that need to be looked at after the building and gathering together aspects. There’s the need to load and store all those supplies for the adequate care and feeding of at minimum a hundred thousand animal species (times two – one of each sex), and that’s excluding all the insects and other invertebrates (so add several million more). What sort of manpower is needed to care for, feed, exercise, clean (especially clean) and dispose of the organic refuse of all those animals? Let’s just say that a typical zoo has way fewer animals and lots more staff. Noah and crew would never have gotten any sleep. Since there are only 86,400 seconds in a day, each animal would have rated less than a few seconds a day even multiplying allowable seconds in a day by all the available manpower for said care and feeding and exercise and cleaning. Perhaps Noah and crew were born on and came from Krypton!

Was Noah and crew (family) qualified in the care of wildlife? Were they certified veterinarians who could look after a sick animal? After all, if one of the two-by-two of a kind died, then it’s curtains for that species. It goes extinct! I’d guess they probably weren’t so qualified, which was a major oversight IMHO.  How did Noah, etc. know the animals (and even plant seeds) were actually fertile?

Relatively few life forms would have survived in a global ocean. That includes most fish as all that additional fresh water would have diluted the oceans enough, and the rising sea water levels contaminate fresh water lakes, etc. such that nearly all marine and fresh water fish would have died. Therefore, I guess the Ark had to have been a floating aquarium in addition to everything else.

And just how did all those dry land plants survive after being submerged for weeks on end? Well, I guess the Ark had to carry a lot of plants too! Of course fresh water for all the plants wouldn’t have been much of a problem, but what of sunlight since everything had to be stored below decks? Of course perhaps all plants were stored as seeds, but how do seeds (or the actual plants for that matter) native to Australia, New Zealand, or Hawaii say get to the Middle East?

And how could the Ark maintain all those proper environmental conditions on board to sustain the lives of such a diversity of wildlife? From polar to tropical, desert to rainforest, how? And how could the Ark carry hundreds of thousands of animal species (including nearly all the birds), millions if you include insects (which you’d have to do), along with appropriate food for all, all for a minimum of 40 days and nights (plus additional time for the waters to entirely recede)? Do you realize how entirely inadequate the Biblical accounting of the Ark is for such a mission? It’s like trying to house and feed a human population of thousands in a bed-sitter flat!

Speaking of proper environmental conditions, you have got to pity the poor human occupants on board – the crew. I mean between the massive animal stink and animal noise and the constant wet and constant seasickness from the rolling global ocean, plus very poor ventilation and what with no electric lights, inhaling the smoke and fumes from whatever oil-based light source(s) they had – well there sure was no occupational health and safety back then!

To be continued…