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Sunday, August 9, 2009

Questions about God and the Bible

If god exists, and the bible is the divine being's message to humanity as christians say it is, I have some questions for them.

If god is justice incarnate, holy, righteous, good, pure and the moral leader of humanity, why has he commissioned and committed some of the most heinous crimes ever inflicted on mankind? Can any other tyrant or super-villain claim the title of 'destroyer of humanity' or 'global infanticide perpetrator' that god seemed so proud of telling us in genesis when he flooded the world. Not only does the god of the bible take pleasure in wiping out the whole world, he takes pleasure in having animals slaughtered needlessly, perhaps it makes him feel better about himself. The celestial tyrant doesn't stop there, he carries on throughout the old testament threatening to kill people because they havn't been circumcised, or because they stupidly worshipped other imaginary celestial beings. The same christians who believe god was justified in committing these atrocities, I imagine are horrified at the lengths Islamic fundamentalist extremists go to when carrying out their Jihad on the infidels. The god of the bible was slaughtering people for the exact same reason the modern day terrorists are, because they worship other gods.

As if the acts of god himself weren't detestable enough to warrant a bible-burning session, he then proceeded to give laws to his chosen people (hang on..... god is an homicidal racist?) that are just as horrific, if not more than the way he behaved in genesis. These laws include things like the following:
-If you have a "stubborn and rebellious son," then you and the other men in your neighborhood "shall stone him with stones that he die." (Jesus even advocates this law in Matthew 15, so Jesus would like me to be stoned to death, what a nice guy) Deuteronomy 21:18-21
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God gives detailed instructions for performing ritualistic animal sacrifices. such bloody rituals must be important to God, judging from the number of times that he repeats their instructions. Indeed the entire first nine chapters of Leviticus can be summarized as follows: Get an animal, kill it, sprinkle the blood around, cut the dead animal into pieces, and burn it for a "sweet savor unto the Lord." Leviticus 1 through 9
-God's law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patients right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering.
Leviticus 14

So not only is god a genocidal tyrant, his sense of morality is deplorable judging by the laws he sets for his people, and those three I mentioned are a mere taste of the old testament laws. We find out later in Leviticus 26 that if you don't follow all of the laws in the Old Testament, god will shower you with many curses, which are mentioned in the next 25 verses. So now we have a genocidal tyrant, who has a deplorable sense of morality, who writes non-sensical laws for his people, and if they don't obey them he becomes very vengeful and curses them. This is the same god that christians sincerely believe they have a personal relationship with.

Morality and non-sensical laws aside, the bible is still a laughable book riddled with contradictions, inaccurate or often incorrect historical records that contains ridiculous statements about the nature of the world, or how the world works. You would think that a book penned, or inspired by the creator of the universe would have been able to get simple facts, whether historical or scientific correct? After all, don't christians claim that their god is omniscient? Why would an omniscient god forget what he had written already in his own book, and then write something that contradicts what he had previously written? Why would an omniscient god who also created the universe (and life) write ideas and concepts about life and the universe that mere mortals have since discovered are false, by my reasoning, that would make humanity more intelligent than an omniscient god.

The one thing that really bugs me though, is why would an omniscient, omnipotent god create a universe that points toward his non-existence the more we learn about it? It's as if he wanted us to finally come to the realisation that he doesn't exist, and that his book was written by delusional tyrannical bronze age men living in tents in the desert, who loved running around raping, pillaging and slaughtering every other town, city and culture they encountered.

11 comments:

  1. man why is your blog so boring

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  2. Because you touch yourself at night.

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  3. dammit... i saw five comments and thought they would incite compelling debate which i could read. instead i get this...

    nice use of 'an homicidal' :D

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  4. Yeah every time I see a new comment on this I think to myself "OOH, someone has decided to take on the bible challenge" but no, nothing there.

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  5. Ok KJ, I have some questions:
    Logic and mathematics are abstract principles that have been discovered rather than invented. We cannot do science, communicate, or navigate this world without them. They appear to stand outside of nature to describe and measure it. As Albert Einstein said, "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
    What is the source of math and logic? The existence of this remarkably fine-tuned universe aside, how is it that we have these "languages of reality" to so elegantly describe and interact with it?

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  6. Logic (and critical thinking) developed slowly over hundreds of thousands of years of human development. If you look back in our bipedal evolutionary history, the size of the brain gradually increased until it reached what we consider to be the "modern human" or 'Homo sapiens'. This is the same time that our ancestors discovered how to use tools and started thinking ahead of time, something most other animals do not do. They started storing food for the winter and so on.
    Mathematics is a more recent development though. Just off the top of my head I believe that the ancient greeks and arabs were the ones who kicked off mathematics. The Chinese were pretty good at it too.
    Science (as we know it) on the other hand is a very recent development and really took off in the 19th century.

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  7. @ dude

    the universe appears very fine tuned due no doubt to the fact that it has been around for about 13.5 billion years... you know, long enough for a certain amount of equilibrium to eventuate. If you throw a handful of rocks in a pond, it's pretty chaotic to start with, ripples going this way and that, smashing into other ripples, creating more ripples... but you leave it for 30 seconds or so, and is it chaotic anymore?

    Maths and Logic exist because our minds progressed far enough to create frameworks to better understand the universe. To a person who is used to thanking a god for everything, I can understand these concepts as looking like something that was created by a supreme being. But the reality is that mankind created these methods of understanding everything ourselves by evolving far enough to be able to make sense of it all.

    Mathematics might be universal and always work, but we didn't discover it, we created it when we started adding, subtracting, multiplying etc. The universe doesn't rely on Maths to work (it doesn't stop and do some multiplication every time it performs fusion in the centre of the Sun), but we can use Maths to understand how it is that many of the parts of the universe work. Maths is our gateway to understanding how the universe works, and logic drives us as a species to find out more.

    Early man had no need to add or subtract anything until logic developed and they suddenly required a framework for expressing and understanding these concepts.

    Finally, if we didn't create Maths ourselves, why is there then aspects of it that either don't work, or we can't make work? Ever tried dividing by zero? You might even call that a limitation in our system...

    -Mick

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  8. if you belive there is no God , why you trying so hard to prove he's not there

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