Divisive Apologetics

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

I have so many things I want to write, and I didn’t know how to pick which to write to start my return to my general discussions–so I ended up picking the one that had been fermenting in my mind the longest. I fear that my failure to write it down may have caused the idea some stagnation and rot, so bear with me as I try to pull the relevant bits together into something that sounds coherent.

A fairly recent post on Creation Today is titled “Today’s Church trumpets an uncertain sound.” The goal stated by Creation Today, and its founder’s father, Kent Hovind, is that the Church of Christ must preach a consistent message in order to be taken seriously in a modern world. I won’t lie, their stated goal is admirable, until you get to the point where they state “And the message we have to preach, because it is the only correct message, is the message that we came up with.” The following part is implied, but I suppose I have little choice but to take it at face value, “Because we have discovered the truth behind the message of Jesus that has been hidden from everyone for the last 2000 years.”

Their message is hardly unique, and it definitely has some roots in the Bible, but the ferocity with which they believe in it, to the exclusion of all contradictory evidence, is the problem. I suppose how fiercely they believe it is neither here nor there, but they are getting new followers in the American South faster than I find entirely comfortable. The point, though, is that most people I know who are staunch Christians do not share their message. The Pope himself doesn’t share their message, though many Protestant Christian belief systems believe that the Pope is the seat of the antichrist, so perhaps his endorsement of an opposing view is something of a detriment to my side rather than something that speaks to my side.

Obviously science has something to say in this arena… And no, I am not talking about the arena of whether or not God exists. That is something that is still (and perhaps indefinitely) beyond the scope of scientific range. I am talking about the still very young field of “Creation Science”, or if you prefer “Intelligent Design.” To claim the Earth is 6,000 years old stands in stark contrast to modern scientific consensus. I am not saying that science knows the age of the Earth to an absolute value, but to compare hundreds of dating methods that agree on the general age of the Earth to within 5% to a book written by scientifically illiterate middle eastern shepherds… That is something of intellectual dishonesty that is difficult to understand, let alone believe in. Even then, to believe the Earth is 6,000 is your right, and I suppose I don’t have a problem with the belief itself. I do, however, have a problem with the attitudes that come out of that belief system.

Many Young Earth Creationists who hold fast to creation science will often speak of the “Arrogance of scientists,” and their “presuppositions.” To say “You are definitely wrong, we are definitely right, and your looking for evidence makes you the arrogant ones with a prestanding belief that ruins your objective outlook,” hurts me. It really does.

I am not writing this to merely state that I don’t like their view, but to state that I find their view to be somewhat reprehensible in a way that isn’t absolutely obvious. The issue is, they claim several things; they claim that they are right, that science bears them out, that the evidence of God is self-evident, that (as per the legendary Bible quote Romans 1:20) anyone who does not realize they are right is a fool (and they will use it as an insult, though while telling you they mean no such thing).

The other issue with this belief system is that it exists within an echo chamber; the population of the United States consistently shows in polls that they believe the Young Earth View. The United States as a general idea seems to have grown increasingly arrogant in the last decades, believing themselves to be the World Police, morally right, the freest nation on the planet. Somehow, though they only came to nationhood in the 18th century, you will hear many people say that they are the elect of God and Jesus; George W. Bush believed (or at least stated his belief) that he was elected to the Presidency by God, a view that perhaps gave him a surety in his many objectively poor decisions that borders on dangerousness. If a strong believer actually fully believed that their ideas were endorsed by He of the Most High, what ruin could he wreak with his decisions, believing they were correct the whole time?

That question isn’t really rhetorical, we have evidence, in the global recession that occurred under Bush. Bill Clinton managed to create a budgetary surplus; the United States was on track to clear their debts. They are now so far in debt, so far in the red, no one on either side of the party really knows how they are going to reverse it.

This comes down to the religiosity of the voting public, and I think this has some kind of basis in modern apologetics. The reason apologetics has become divisive isn’t in their message (they do mostly preach peace, though there are certainly some issues with hatred in some parts of their message, I believe they could be ironed out), but it is because of their fanaticism. Like so many religions that came before, young earth biblical fundamentalism has some malignancy that has yet to be ironed out. To believe, for example, that their religion should be spread at the point of a sword is still a problem many face. Even if not at the point of a sword, many in the young earth movements believe that the world would be a better place if everyone believed in their brand of religion. This has created a divide. (HAH! See, I worked this post around to the title, and all it took was one thousand words! With a word economy like that, I could really be a writer, hey?!)

The problem with apologetics is that it relies, leans, depends, upon the statement that “Our God is not a God of confusion,” and further that the Bible should be read literally. The idea that the Bible is without error has been proven false, both here and elsewhere, and many have done it far better than I could. This has created an issue where people on the same side, that of young earth evangelism, end up fighting each other. Dr Henry Morris is credited with founding the idea of modern creation science. It is odd, but I think it worth pointing out that the PhD that earned Dr Morris his title was in hydraulic engineering, a field that I am not sure really aligns with any requirement to make definitive statements about the Bible. That being said, his book (the New Defender’s Bible) is generally heralded as the best book on apologetics that the average person could hope to find. Obviously, it is based on the King James Version, which for some reason is touted by many as the perfect bible despite modern translation improvements showing certain phrases to be in error…

If God is not a God of confusion, why does Kent Hovind repeatedly state in many of his speeches that he disagrees with Dr Morris on several counts? If God is not a God of confusion, why do so many apologists trumpet such a different sound? As an improvement on the old message, it is worth noting that the modern message of Eric Hovind (son of Kent Hovind) is aligned with Answers in Genesis… Though I would go as far as to say that this is less that he believes as they do, and more to do with the fact that AIG is such a powerhouse in modern apologetics, to fight against that current would be to drown and disappear.

The other reason apologetics is divisive is that it also balances upon the statement “We know everything now that we need to know.” So often evangelical preachers have stood against science, mostly when it runs perpendicular to their own personal message, but it isn’t always so. We know almost nothing, so little that it is impossible to list what we don’t know; that list would dwarf the list of what we do know so completely that it would hardly be worth the time to write down what we know… Except for the fact that we need this basis to build more knowledge.

What was it that eradicated small pox? It wasn’t religion. What was it that caused the murder of women in Salem? It wasn’t science.

The above was incredibly unfair, but rhetoric often helps to make a point. If everyone in the world were a peasant making food in the service to some enlightened person in the Church, I doubt we would be where we are today. I am not calling the Church anti-scientific, though it has had… Phases? There are times when it has stood against scientific flow, and modern YEC evangelism is still standing in stark opposition to science. To argue against Darwinian evolution is a failing point. To argue against spontaneous life is certainly valid, but I do not understand why “from nothing came something” is impossible, but God created everything by speaking it into existence, and only an ignorant person would stand against that! I do not understand what it is about that statement that makes it so compelling to so many people.

That being said, to say “You don’t know how life began,” is not an insult; it is a mere statement of fact. Science does not know how life first formed, though they are at least working on the problem. If they figure it out, what happens then, I wonder? YEC scientists would never try to create life in a lab, I think, because their belief system calls the idea impossible.

I’d like the think that science relies on the idea that nothing is impossible, just very, very, unlikely.

The point of this semi-coherent ramble is this; if you are right, secular science will eventually come to the same conclusions of you. So shouting “you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” at the top of your lungs helps no one. You should be working with scientists in secular laboratories, helping them find the answers. The problem is, in order to do that, you must start from the assumption that we don’t yet know the answer, that we have yet to find it.

Perhaps you can use the Bible as an answer key, in some cases, but only in hindsight. You still have to show your work, and quite often most scientists will say that the creation scientist has ignored a key piece of evidence or has ignored some new piece of information found after the presented information, and anyone who keeps up with the field would have known that.

If that is the case (and I would tend to think it is so), why should we rely on scientists who ignore contradictory evidence? How does one trust them?

It is a universal thing, really; a fanatic will ignore anything that would stand in the way of their fanaticism. It creates a divide between the true and the imagined. I think Justin Bieber is almost the perfect example; he has been caught doing awful things, like spitting on fans, like driving under the influence of alcohol, like being a general jackass… But many Beliebers will say that he didn’t really, or that he was misunderstood, or any one of a thousand excuses. The same is true of YEC scientists, I fear.

Again, this wouldn’t be a divisive issue if they kept their beliefs… But their own ideas require the Christian to attempt to spread these ideas.

They don’t even want to work with secular science, that is why they have their own schools, their own colleges and universities, their own areas of study and labs–they don’t even want to work with scientists unless the scientists will agree with them.

So what I propose is we leave each other alone for fifty years, let the YECs toil away in their labs, general scientists toil away in the labs of public universities, and then we can compare notes in 2065. I am sure we will all learn a lot from each other, and I think science would progress at a much higher pace if we stopped fighting… Particularly because the United States has a lot of money to spend on science, and the YEC influence that is huge in that country is slowing things down.

It’d be awesome if we all just acted like adults rather than kids who could fight for weeks about “MY DAD IS BETTER THAN YOUR DAD!”

Bah, I don’t really like how this post came out. It is kind of negative, doesn’t really prove a point. I suppose it is just here to put some information down, consolidate some of my own thoughts. When I take two weeks off of writing, a whole bunch of crud builds up. I think it is going to take me a few posts to get over it all. The next few days will probably see me writing with less cohesion than normal, so please forgive me while I figure some stuff out.

Thanks for reading, and have a wonderful 2015!

Would you make a human sacrifice to walk again…

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

I was privileged yesterday to have had a very lengthy (in the area of four hours) conversation with someone whose ideas are so perfectly opposed to mine that I almost think I hallucinated the whole thing. My only evidence remaining that it happened is that I am in the room with the guy right now, and he seems to recall the conversation… And he also seems to recall that we have almost perfect disagreement on all points, so I feel comfortable at this point with the idea that I actually had this conversation.

To start, I am going to describe this man as the most intelligent Fox News viewer I have ever spoken to (at the least), and certainly is more intelligent than I ever thought a Fox News viewer had the capacity to be. That being said, his grasp of evidence was incredibly skewed, and his tactic of discussion incredibly… Well, he was certainly sincere, but to me it seems his beliefs are quite disingenuous.

When we arrived on the topic of Stem Cell Research and more specifically Embryonic Stem Cell research, it was the choice quote that I made the title of this post that really brought me to a screeching halt. It came down to an argument of joint biology combined with the legendary arithmetic of souls. “A blastocyst,” to his credit he was familiar with what the term, “is a human being just as much as you or me.”

My reply came from the perspective of my motto, to bring more happiness than I take, and I replied “If embryonic stem cell research had even one half of one percent chance to allow even a single quadriplegic to walk, it would be a worthwhile field to study.”

“Would you,” he patiently intoned, “Sacrifice a human being so you could walk again?”

This gave me pause, and I will admit that I was stymied a little. I was not stymied because I thought he had the right of it, but because it was at this moment that the root, the core of the issue to the two of us was different, and I was not sure I had the evidence that I would need to even tell him was my side is let alone have him believe it.

It was only after the conversation, during my later musings and research, that several points began to coalesce in my mind. The first of the points that I believe came to serve my side comes in the form of spontaneous abortion (or, to use the more common term, miscarriage). The National Institutes for Health, an organization in the United States, estimates that over 50% of pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion before the end of the first trimester. Now, given the US birth rate (2014) of 13.62/1000 persons, we can reason that there are some 360,000 or so pregnancies wherein the fetus is killed not by doctors, not be intent, but by the mother’s own body for reasons that are unclear or difficult to study. To rephrase an idea I first heard from Sam Harris, if you are worried about abortion, you should worry about God–surely he is the most prolific abortionist of all.

If we are going to get into the arithmetic of souls, what happens to the souls of these spontaneously miscarried first trimester fetuses? In the Catholic tradition, a soul is imparted at conception, and many other Christian denominations agree. What happens, then, to these 360,000 excess souls? The souls of the children that die less than 90 days after they are conceived? Did God craft that soul in His hands, in His heart, for the purpose of killing it before it had a brain?

I will leave the answer to that question as an exercise to the reader, and move on to my next point.

The cells used in embryonic stem cell research are grown in a petri dish and would not otherwise be implanted in a woman. These embryos, used for medical research on generally the third day of development, are about 150 cells in size and are not recognizable as anything human unless viewed at the level of DNA. If I lined up 1000 microscopes with 1000 different 3 day old embryos in them, you would not be able to find the human among them. If I lined up 2 microscopes, you would not be able to tell the difference. But even then, that isn’t the point.

These embryos serve an incredibly high calling. If you believe they have a soul, then that soul could go to making a person walk. That soul could go to preserving the soul of a young person dying in a burn ward. That soul could go to allowing the blind to see.

If you want to compare it to the story of Jesus, that soul could be described as allowing the blind to see, the lame to walk, the deaf to hear, and may open the very door to allowing the deceased to walk again. (That last one is exaggeration, I just wanted to complete the metaphor.)

I was told by this man that embryonic stem cell research was a worthless field, and that no breakthroughs had come or could come from it. I did not speak to it at the time because I have not followed the field closely, but my original thought was that “Well, of course not much has come from it… It is illegal in the United States, the country where most pharmaceutical research is done.” I have since checked in on it.

At its peak, there were two firms researching embryonic stem cell treatments, and one went under due to lack of investment (no one would invest in it out of fear of legal repercussions, which is sadly very valid). The second, though, has made breakthroughs of incredible importance, and did so on its first attempt on humans. In 2012, ACT (Advanced Cell Technology) performed a clinical trial based on embryonic stem cell research that restored sight to a man with macular degeneration so bad that it had caused blindness. Macular degeneration is a process that is not otherwise reversible, and generally affects all people as they age to varying degrees. This man, blinded, was obviously less lucky — generally you end up with sight degradation, but not complete blindness.

They reversed the macular degeneration. I will type that again, so it is clear. It was reversed. It was not just stopped, resulting in his vision being static; they restored the dead nerves. These are the types or procedures that could restore walking in humans, as nerve regrowth has been a problem with human healing for … Well, as long as medicine has been a thing.

This is the medical field that my partner in discussion said was dead and worthless. This brings me no end to my sadness, as I know there are more people (certainly more in the United States) that think as he does, and fewer who think as I do.

Why has growth in this field been so slow? Well, slow is a bit of a misused word… It is a field that is very young, less than two decades old. And in that two decades, we have restored sight to the blind. Perhaps there is a fear that we are treading upon the toes of miracles, but I believe that if humans can create miracles, we have something akin to obligation to do so. In any case, the reason that growth is so slow is due to staunch religious opposition even to investigating this. I would think that the knowledge that as many as 50% of all pregnancies ending (50% of all fetuses dying) should give you the required perspective to realize that the purpose to which embryos in stem cell research are put is far greater than could possibly be stated merely in words by some small time blogger. The destruction of 10,000 embryos today could save the life of a trillion people over the future of human history, and yet the progress is stymied by the fact that a soul may be destroyed in the process?

This does not seem the fault of doctors or scientists, this seems the kind of thing one should ask God directly. Why would He, in His infinite wisdom, destroy half of the souls he creates before there is something recognizable as a body attached to them? Why would He create a universe where the answer to an infinite number of medical conditions lies at the heart of a cluster of cells so small that a fly could not even see them for standing on them?

God, surely, had the ability to create us with the ability to heal from things such as a break of our spinal cord… But He did not. God, surely, could have placed the answer to these medical issues in a place that would not require the destruction of embryos… But He did not. God, surely, could have told us when a soul is imparted upon a human being… But He did not.

The answers to all of the above questions of great moral weight have never been in the hands of God, but in the hands of men who care more about the suffering of human beings who think and feel than they do about the theological arithmetic of souls. Perhaps there is a soul imparted at conception, but if there is God spared no word in the Bible to that effect. Perhaps the souls of children are subject to different laws than the souls of adults, for surely they cannot have given God any cause to punish them aside from their original sin… But a strict reading of original sin means they go to hell. If the souls of destroyed embryos go to hell, surely the question should be raised to God why it is He who destroys half of all souls before they have the ability to see, to think, to breath, even to feel.

And what if those souls go to heaven? We are then given to wonder why anyone would want to stop stem cell research when the outcomes would be 100% positive? A soul goes to heaven, and an additional soul is spared from pain, given sight, given the ability to walk. Everybody wins!

You end up with an odd question, if you probe the depths of this too deeply. What does the soul of a cluster of 150 cells look like? When it goes to heaven, does it have a personality? Does it have the ability to feel? If it goes to hell, what is it that arrives in hell? Are Satan’s floors littered with 150 cell souls, so small he does not even realize they have arrived? How does one torture these souls? To step on them would do nothing according to any physics we know. To throw them in fire eternal, where the flame never quenches and the worm never dies, even that would do nothing — for the cells have no nervous system.

Does God impart upon them the soul of their fully developed selves? Does God give to them an adult soul, only to snuff half of those souls out? If so, what is wrong with your God? Why would anyone worship such a being? If the souls of these dead embryos go to heaven, then perhaps there is some mercy in your God, but if they do not, if these souls go to hell as punishment for Adam’s original sin, I would not worship such an evil God under threat of eternal hellfire. Such a tyrant the world has never known; the death of six million Jews? God has snuffed out one hundred thousand times more than that, even before they saw the light of day, drew their first breath. If He sent that number to hell, if He crafted those souls to the purpose of the Pit of Hellfire, He does not deserve worship. He deserves war.

These are all idle speculations, of course — there is no theological evidence either way, to know what happens to these souls. God did not see fit to tell us. Does that not worry you, if you believe in the soul at conception? Does God have something to hide?

I believe in the goodness of most human beings. There are evil among us, but they are not the majority.

I believe that the humans who work in stem cell research are not murderers, but men and women with the goal of alleviating suffering, of curing the sick, of giving the blind to see and the lame to walk. I would worship these humans more readily than I would worship a God who crafts souls only to snuff them out before the mother knows she is pregnant. Unless those souls get a free ride to Heaven, of course — if they do, I will give your God a passing grade. It is pointless, mind, that He would create a soul, place it in an embryo, snuff it out, and recall it to Himself in under 8 weeks, mind — an act of futility, almost a waste of effort, but as I have been told, His ways are mysterious, His plans inscrutable.

After you have read this, tell me in the comments, please. Tell me what it is that has you in opposition of embryonic stem cell research. Tell me what it is in your faith that sees the suffering of a blind man, the suffering of a quadriplegic, the suffering of all those around you, and says “No, I will stand in opposition of helping those people.”

I do not see it, I cannot understand it, and it is in this arena that the darkness of your beliefs snuffs out so much of the light of your religion to me. I cannot see the love of it. I cannot see the glory of it. I cannot see the Hand of your God in it.

Best Friends with God

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

The below contains some straw man arguments; it is not because I am intentionally doing so, it is more because as soon as a Christian hears an atheist speak of their religion, the conversation ends. I would like to speak with someone about my concerns below; I am not irreligious because I want to be, I am irreligious because no one seems to want to answer my questions and religion has left me adrift–but atheism took me in with open arms.

I have many Christian friends of various faiths, some nondenominational, some Anglican, some Catholic… I have one Muslim friend, and several atheist friends. I have one friend whose own personal religion would be impossible to describe without at least three textbooks, some art supplies, and a team of interpretive dancers. I am not going in the direction you might think I am going in with this; what I am saying is that, despite the fact that we may disagree on questions of ultimate meaning, we all have personalities that are otherwise very compatible. If my Christian friends were of the intolerant kind, I would be deprived of great friendships for my latent atheism (and, if they would permit me to say so, I think they would be deprived of a very eccentric friend in me).

So, let’s talk about our relationship with God; I don’t care whether or not you believe in Him, I don’t, but even then my nonbelief could be framed in terms of my relationship with the idea of God.

My relationship with God, my not believing in His existence (or, at the very minimum, my not believing in the existence of the Christian God) could be seen in a fairly negative light. If He exists, I suppose it could be said that I have a fairly dim view of him. But let’s talk about your relationship with Him, theoretical straw man who doesn’t like to talk to me!

How would you describe your relationship with God? Do you love Him? Does He love you? Before you answer “Yes, and yes!” I would like you to step back and think very hard about the reason you are answering the way you do. I would like for you to give me examples from the Bible that show God’s love for you. I will not permit things such as God saying I love you, as words are fickle and can mean many things. God says He is Just and slow to anger, but it was very, very, very shortly before saying this very thing that He said “They built a golden calf. I have chosen my people poorly. I will kill them all.” (Exodus 32:9-10, 34:6)

So please, let us let God’s actions speak for Him, and tell me why you think He loves you. I am going to disqualify a couple of things that I know you will mention, and if you manage to requalify them by evidence that’s ok–but it had better be pretty good.

First, sending His only begotten Son to redeem our Sins. This seems great, as I have been told many times “Sins must be punished,” but you are using this as a “Get out of Jail Free” card; ‘I don’t have to go to hell because Jesus died for my sins.’ This is odd to me, as Jesus did not die (or rather, it was a temporary condition) and then, if Jesus did, how do you justify this? God can forgive your sins now, because Jesus died? Is that the condition for your God’s love? That something dies? Is that love?

“I am sorry, dear wife, that I have cheated on you.”

“Oh, well, if you kill our son I will forgive you.”

No, this does not indicate love. If our God was a God of “boundless” love, of “unconditional” love, of “unconditional” forgiveness, as I’ve been told colloquially, where is the evidence of that? It sounds to me like the bound of His love is “sinning even one time,” like the condition of His love is “kill something in my name, and make it good,” like the condition of His forgiveness is “recognizing that I killed something awesome.” The things i have just mentioned are bounds and conditions that completely and logically prove that God has conditions and bounds.

So how would we describe this relationship, then? I would say we have, or rather you have, a friendship with God. Not just a friendship, but a best friendship. You can tell Him anything, because He already knows your secrets.But you can disagree with His views on the universe and still be friends with Him; Moses did, and Abraham did. “What what what?” you say, “Moses and Abraham disagreed with God? But I must take His will in the most literal and binding sense!”

In Exodus 32, God says “I am going to smite the Israelites and start over.”

Moses replies “No, don’t do that. How could you even think of doing that? No, let’s go and work with them, maybe only kill a few of them.” (Well, 3000 of them ended up being the death toll of Moses’ judgement of the Israelites, which admittedly is far more merciful than God tends to be. Exodus 32:27-28)

“But Jesus blotted all of that out! He preached love and tolerance and acceptance!” Yes, he did, to a degree… But he certainly did not blot out the Old Testament’s draconian rules and commandments of sacrifice (Matthew 5:17-20). Jesus may have preached a more tolerant version of the Old Testament, he still thought that sacrificing lambs and doves was a requirement for the forgiveness of sin. If you want to use Jesus as an example of God’s love, I fear you are teaching not Jesus but Paul. I am perfectly willing to admit that Paul taught a doctrine of love, but Paul was but a man writing letters to people containing his version of morality, and I fear that using him as an example of God’s love gives my column more points than it does yours. Paul became a force for love and tolerance, though prior to his conversion to Christianity, he was a draconian acolyte, killing Christians wherever he found them.

“But Paul is a story of redemption, of a man who realized he was in the wrong and came back to the light of Christ!” What you have to remember is that Paul was preaching Paul’s own brand of Christianity; the gospels were not formalized back then, it was mostly oral, and until the second and third centuries there were so many different views of Christianity, so many different gospels, that the two biggest forces in the history of the young Christian Church, Paul (Saul of Tarsus) and James, the brother of Jesus, whom they call the Christ (Quoted from the Jewish historian Josephus), may have engaged in fisticuffs on the temple stairs (Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth)

So again, show me something that indicates God’s unbounded love through action, not through Paul’s letters, or God himself saying “I totally love you in an unbounded way. Now turn around while I annihilate this city. Also, I am slow to anger, but please forget that I wanted to wipe out the Israelites (again) two chapters ago, and that it was a human who had to remind me of the covenant I made with Abraham.”

The good thing about being friends with God is that you can disagree with Him but still like Him. I think that would be a much healthier religion, personally. I know that isn’t what your current relationship with Him is, but consider it.

I do not want you and God to break up, I just want you to communicate and work through your problems. This teenaged crush you have on Him (OH EM GEE He is like… SO PERFECT! I can’t even tell you how perfect He is! YOU HAVE TO LOVE HIM TOO!) is not helping anyone. So figure some things out between the two of you, because it makes me sad that you let God emotionally abuse you so much, and yet you still come to His defense.

Let Him defend Himself. Let God’s actions defend God. If God is all that, why should you have to defend Him at all? A perfect, timeless God should have been able to make an unambiguous book that speaks through the ages and across languages, and if that is what the Bible is, let me read it and come to my own conclusions. If the Bible is perfect, I’m sure we’ll all agree in the end… Right?

A Personal Kind of Excuse

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

Edit: Happy 100th post everyone!!!

“I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians — they are so unlike your Christ.” -Mahatma Ghandi

“With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, you need religion.” -Steven Weinberg

“I’d like to think that, thanks to my intelligence, I make very few mistakes… But when I do make mistakes, they tend to be legendary.” -Me

The above three quotes tie together so well that it almost seems some kind of magic, even some kind of miracle. I don’t think that is an accident; the quote I gave from myself is one I tend to use as a talisman to ensure I retain some level of humbleness; it is when I think I am right most often that I make the worst mistakes (I once made a mistake so legendary it made the news, though thankfully my name was removed from the story). This is not anything to do with religion, this is to do with being a human, but it ties back so often to religion and to war that I felt it important to include it as a counterbalance to the Weinberg and Ghandi quotes.

Carl Jung, a great psychiatrist and psychoanalyst of the early 20th century, has been quoted (and the quote slightly varies, but the idea is always the same) as having said “I do not need to believe [in God], I know [God exists]!” This is the type of knowledge that leads to mistakes that can end up being legendary. “In the fullness of time,” writes Sam Harris, “One side of this debate will really win and one side will really lose.” It is in this vein that I try, as best as I am able, to never make an absolute statement with regards to religion.

I will fully admit, of course, that my own brand of intelligence has led me to lose my belief in God, but I would never say “there is no God.” That being said, I am comfortable saying the following: “There is probably no God, and if there is, he/she/it is probably not of the Christian variety.” If I am wrong, and both of those statements turn out wrong (and I am comfortable saying I cannot know the truth until I die), then I am comfortable admitting that I have made a mistake that was, in fact, more grand in scope than I could ever imagine in this life. Perhaps, I am open to thinking, there is something to the Christian religion, and to the fact that I may burn in hell for the things I have come to believe about the world and nature.

That being said, many of my beliefs in nature align with Christian beliefs, though that word was chosen carefully and advisedly. Belief and practice are often two very different things, as any public atheist tends to learn in the fullness of time. It is very few, the number of atheists that have not been told they will burn in hell, or that they should die, or that they are (quoting a letter sent to Richard Dawkins) “Only alive because my God commands me not to kill.”

Perhaps it is my naive reading of the Bible that has made me come to this conclusion, but I would think that wishing a person dead is in direct breach of Matthew 5:27-28, which states that, in part, “Any man who has looked at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” It is in my own naivete that I believe this is a broader commandment, one that charges Christians to keep a pure mind, not only with respect to adultery but with respect to all of the core commandments. This is, again in my mind, bore out by the fact that one of the core commandments states that thou shalt not covet thy neighbors goods; this is not just saying “thou shalt not steal,” but is further saying “thou shalt not think about stealing.”

I think the Golden Rule really needs to be more prominently on display in the Bible, and in the hearts of its readers. I really think that sending hate mail, no matter how justified you feel, is in breach of this rule. I think hating, or in any way persecuting homosexuals, is in direct breach of this rule. I think there are greater moral teachings than the Golden Rule, though it is very good, but like an artist with a block of clay, I work with what I am given. Much in the same way, now that I think about it, an apologist or Christian works with their own block of clay. There are parts of the Bible that no person can say are moral (or if you do, you are looking through some heavily tinted sunglasses), but they are there, so we work through them, all of us, even non-Christians.

Oh, but how do non-Christians deal with the Bible? I would ask the “witches” of Salem, whose belief or nonbelief in God did not matter. I would ask the “heretics” in the middle east for the hundreds of years that the Crusades lasted. I would ask the hundreds of thousands, or perhaps millions, whose delicate flesh got in the way of the Inquisitor’s hammer (That’s how that worked, right? The Inquisitors were Godly men, and thus never meant to hurt anyone, these people just happened to get in the way. By accident.).

If these examples are too archaic, then how about the Scopes trial of 1925, where science was denied in the very name of God? Or the more recent Vashti McCollum trial of 1948, where her family was ostracized, her children bullied, her name sullied for years. Is that recent enough?

I am not here to bash religion, but I am certainly not above bashing things that are done in the name of Christianity.

If we want to go even more recent, even today Teach the Controversy is being forced (or, at the very least pushed) upon a barely aware populace. The numbers from Gallup and Pew as to the scientific literacy of the United States of America are almost stunning to those outside of the country, and they seem to correlate with increasingy fundamental beliefs in certain areas of the country, rather than more progressive beliefs and education.

There is no “controversy” among the scientific populace, except perhaps between proponents of kin selection versus proponents of group selection, but even then it is a debate that is being solved by evidence and ideas.

The Scopes Trial, or the Vashti McCollum incident could have been gentle non issues; if you would treat an atheist like you would treat any other brother or sister in Christ, history would barely remember her. She would be referenced in court cases, and would certainly have a place in constitutional history, but who remembers the names of the people who pressed for constitutional amendments? No, I doubt seriously that I would be accutely familiar with (or even have heard) the name Vashti McCollum in a truly Christian world, where people practiced truly Christian beliefs.

But in a human world? Perhaps, perhaps I would have, and indeed, I have.

This is the point where you may say “AHA! You admit that being human is the problem! Well, Christianity allows us to transcend our baser instincts!” I am sorry for using a Straw Man in this case; very few people will speak to me of religion face-to-face, so I am forced to use hypothetical readers. I would like to think I am not an obnoxious atheist, but I am passionate where it comes to eliminating human suffering, so I may get more heated than I would like whenever someone defends their bigotry with the Bible… That being said, I must reiterate, I am not here to take religion away, I am here to take away the evil/bad parts of religion, and I will stay the course to that end. Worded another way, I do not want to debate, I want to discuss.

Now, off of that tangent, we are back to speaking about humans and their base instincts. I do not think it is a prevalent belief that women should be murdered wholesale, but why do you think the people of Salem held the witch trials? I do not believe they were evil people, I believe they were good people who did evil things out of fear and superstition–and they used their Bible as the justification.

It is not humanity that is evil, and it is not Christianity that is evil, but this is a case of chemistry taking two things, putting them together in a beaker, and the result is often ugly. To parallel that with something in the real world, I like mentos, and I like Diet Coke (get off my lawn, it still tastes good!!!), but I know that taking a mentos followed by a shot of diet coke is going to end poorly.

This goes back to a point I’ve made before; if we separate religion from our personal image of ourselves, we can transcend this negative interaction. If I say to you “The Bible preaches many evil things, among the good things,” your first reaction should not be one of indignation or hurt; that is a sure sign that the chemical reaction of religion/humanity is curdling your soul. If you ever defend bigotry using the Bible, that is a sure sign that the chemical reaction of religion/humanity is curdling your soul.

If, however, you admit that the Bible has a dark side, and that we can transcend it, but that religion is ultimately a force that allows you to surpass your own baser nature? I will be on your side. I will help you find Bible verses that support you. I will celebrate and trumpet your religion, but you have your humanity in one beaker and your religion in another, and you understand that they can compliment each other, but should perhaps not be directly mixed.

A moralist who takes the good of the Bible and throws out the bad has an incredibly sturdy foundation. That being said, a moralist is perfectly capable of being moral without using the Bible as their foundation, and that should be recognized, too.

We all have different ways of transcending our own personal flaws. Some use religion, though many in different ways. Some use the love of Jesus as a guide to loving thy neighbor; some use the fear of hell. These are two very different things, and I should hope that even the most die-hard Christian can see that. Some do not use religion; for me, it is my empathy. I do not believe in your God, but even so I believe in being moral and loving to those around us. I believe this should extend to the planet we live on, to those who do not share our beliefs, to those who do not share our opinions, to the animals around us. An issue I have taken with many Christians is that their Bible (and their personal beliefs) often do not extend to the protection of animals–but that, I will admit, is only a minor complaint in the big picture.

To summarize, perhaps, using the same example I’ve used before of the pastor who said he’d be a murderer if not for Jesus… You know what? If that is what it takes for you to be moral, ok, I’ll accept. The issue I take with that pastor is that he takes the Bible wholesale; he has the superiority complex that comes of one of the Chosen, he believes all people must be Christian, he believes that Muslims are the height of evil. Those are not moral beliefs, and I have a problem with his religion. His personal religion.

Do I have a problem with all Christians? Certainly not. I have a problem with the immoral Christians.

If you are Christian, I am going to ask you to take a look into yourself and ask not “What does the Bible tell me,” but “Am I doing unto others as I would have them do unto me?”

To bring out a tired example, if homosexuality were the norm and being heterosexual were punishable by ostracism (in progressive places) or death (in less progressive places), would you think anyone should have the right to decide what you do in the privacy of your own home when both parties are completely consenting? No one is harmed by your heterosexuality, you reason, and yea; no one even needs to know you are heterosexual. It has no bearing on anything outside of your love of your husband or your love of your wife.

“Hey Jim, have you finished your homosexual accounting?”

“No, Charles, I did heterosexual accounting.”

“Why’d you tell me that? Now we have to fire you.”

I should hope we all find the above conversation, regardless of our religious views, ridiculous. And that’s the whole point.

So, to beat home what I have said many times on this blog, let’s all be moral, regardless of our background. If only 10% of us would choose to live that way, the world would be a better place within the week.

Everything You Ever Wanted

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

I know I’ve spoken about morality and religion frequently, but each time my understanding moves forward a notch, I feel like I should post something that helps me consolidate my own knowledge.

The Old Testament is a moral mess, almost no one will argue against that. Whether you are a literalist or a moderate, the apologia you must construct for the Old Testament is a mine field of carefully constructed defense and the slightest misstep can end with your argument blown up and out. “Well, the book of Leviticus is just a set of rules for the Levites, so we can ignore that part.” That kind of thing.

But Exodus! That is a good book; it contains the Ten Commandments, and a wonderful story of redemption from slavery and a kind God who saves His people–but that’s the whole point; He saves His people. He goes out of his way to torture an entire nation (as I’ve written about before). His rules for morality and being Good in the eyes of God are a bit of a mess, too; there is specification of when it is OK to kill, there are commandments directly from God to steal from people, and the real ten commandments are odd to the modern reader, to say the least.

But let’s go back even further, to Genesis, and take an internal look at the beginning of the three Abrahamic faiths. Abraham, after whom the faiths were named.

What you have to remember about the story of Abraham is that there was no religion of God before him, whether God interacted with others; it was never formal.

So now we have a guy who heard a voice in his head that he attributed to God telling him to kill his first born son. Whether you believe that having faith in God is the highest calling, you have to admit; if your closest relative, your mother or father, son or daughter, brother or sister, came up to you and said “I’m sorry, the voice in my head that claims to be Jesus said I have to kill you,” your first reaction would generally not be “This is a reasonable statement, and I support you.”

But even then, God stopped him! To steal an example that Richard Dawkins has used in the past, what of the Judge of the people, Jephthah? He vowed to God that if he won in an upcoming battle, he would “sacrifice whatever first came out of his door when he arrived home.” That just seems to be a wildly unintelligent thing, though, because what did he expect would come out of his door? Probably not a cow or a sheep, unless he had pets of that kind, so he was left with only two options… Either it would be his wife or his only child. In the fullness of time, his own daughter comes out, and he rents his shirt in despair–but “Did to her as he vowed to do.” The whole story is recounted in the Book of Judges (11:31-39).

Whether you believe this literally happened or did not, a general Christian will accept that it is in the Bible for a reason. I am no scholar of theology, I could not tell you why this is in the Bible, but to me it indicates that “the God of Life” does not shy from death. A man sacrificed his daughter as the price for having killed hundreds of people, maybe thousands! And yet, as per the Arithmetic of Souls, we are not allowed to experiment on Blastocysts, as they may have souls? Jephthah killed without any reason to believe he was protecting lives; yea, the war he was fighting was to protect God, not people. The scientists who perform stem cell research have strong reason to believe that this may be the biggest medical breakthrough of a generation, of several generations.

To quote Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation, “A blastocyst is a collection of some 150 cells. To contrast, the brain of a fly has roughly 100,000 cells… But the rights of this blastocyst has the same rights as a seven year old girl with third degree burns over 80% of her body?”

That seven year old girl will likely die, but not before spending days or months in excruciating pain. Obviously, as per Christianity, we cannot just let her die, perhaps even if we know she has no chance of surviving. But stem cells? There is promising research to show we could regrow her skin. There is promising research that we could give quadriplegics the use of their arms and legs back, the horizon for the benefits of stem cell research is so far off we cannot even begin to imagine what this medical breakthrough could do for the good of the world–and all it would cost is a bundle of cells so small a fly would not even notice them.

One would think, as per the morality (if you can call it that) of the God of the Old Testament, we should be in full support of the death of the blastocysts to improve the lives of His acolytes. Using blastocysts to save lives and reduce suffering surely must count as a lesser evil than Moses’ slaughter of the Jews (Exodus 32:25-29), or the countless slaughters and rapes in the book of Numbers or Judges, that God is a direct party to?

How about God’s own chosen righteous? Lot, who said “Oh, you want to rape my guests? No, they’re men. Rape my daughters instead.” (Genesis 19:6-9) Or the Levite priest who was visiting Gibeah. An old man took him and his concubine in (Oh yes, the priest had a concubine), and people came to the house; “Send out your guest so we can have sex with him!”

The owner shouts back “No, this man is a guest, but my daughter is a virgin, do what you want with her. Also, he has a concubine, go nuts with that too.”

So the daughter and concubine are sent out. On the morning, the priest gets up and prepares to leave. When he opens the door to his host’s house, his concubine is laying on the doorstep. “Get up, time to go.” She does not move, for she was dead.

For good measure, the Levite cuts her body into 12 pieces and sends the parts to the 12 tribes of Israel because… Wait, what the hell? What the ACTUAL F***?! What is going on here? What am I supposed to learn?! (Judges 19:22-29) I think, at least in context, that they are supposed to be angry that the woman was killed by the rapists (that, it should be said, had full permission) when they receive the body parts… But killing someone by accident is not really grounds for serious punishment according to God, for He lets accidental killings happen (Exodus 21:12-13).

Now, all of this has been working up to a point. Most people say we can safely ignore the Old Testament, or take from it symbolic lessons — but the thing is, I do not know what I am supposed to learn. What do I learn from God wrestling Joshua, losing, then dislocating Joshua’s hip? (Genesis 32:22-30)

I think I know why Christians are so bitter towards Muslims. Muslims have had the good sense to call the Bible a holy book, but not make it binding, per se. Muhammad (PBUH, for the purposes of cultural sensitivity) cites the Bible frequently in the Qur’an and Hadith, but cites it as lessons–not as binding. I think Christians are bitter that the Muslims had foresight, and the ability to designate canonical readings of their holy books. The Hadith is a sort of magnifying glass through which you are to read the Qur’an.

I think everything the Christian has ever wanted is the ability to feel superior (something that comes directly from the Old Testament) while not opening themselves to moral criticism. So maybe take a page (ehehehehe) from Islam and designate the Old Testament a book of great origin, but which is not part of the True Gospel. Make the Bible contain only the New Testament, then designate the entirety of the Old Testament as the Tanakh; important reading, but nonbinding. Then you could cherry pick to your heart’s content, and close those gaping holes in your theology that let people like me read through the Old Testament and think with pure horror that people believe the Bible is a book of morality. BAM! So many problems solved.

It would seriously be everything you ever wanted.

A War of Gentlemen

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

This is a debate between Christopher Hitchens (one of the most prominent atheists in the world until, and indeed after, his death in 2011) and Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1997-2007. The audience was polled as they entered as to their opinion of the resolution at hand (Be it hereby resolved that religion is a force for good in the world), and polled after as to whether their opinion was changed, and to vote on the winner. Whether one side won or not, the true metric of the debate was whose side had the greater sway over the audience.

During the debate, Mr Blair and Mr Hitchens respectfully spoke with each other, had a cross examination and rebuttal, and fielded equal questions from the audience. Not only that, but their rebuttals directly touched upon the points of the other, this is an important distinction.

This debate was hosted in Canada in formal style with formal debate rules.

This is a debate between Bill Nye the Science Guy (who needs no introduction) and Ken Ham, who I believe is one of the most negative forces in the world as far as scientific advancement goes, creator of the Creation Museum in Kentucky, the largest of its kind, as well as the Arc Encounter, a project spending multiple millions of dollars creating a 1:1 scale Noah’s Arc.

During the debate, there are hangups on the most trivial things and the debate ended up devolving into two men giving semi-related speeches trying, almost desperately to make their points, regardless of what the other said.

This debate was hosted in the States, and had rules, but was in no way done in formal style. Who won? Both sides will tell you their side won because they “made their points.” Well of course you can make your points if you completely ignore the presence of the other side.

To be fair, there was some lip service to rebutting the other side–but when the rebuttal stage includes a prepared set of slides, you obviously knew what you were going to say before the other side made their point. That isn’t debate, that is speeches, and while similar on the surface, it doesn’t work like it is supposed to.

The point of rebuttal is your ability to think on your feet, to counter the points of the other. The points you choose to counter say as much as your counter argument itself, and the points you choose to ignore (if not purely for time constraints) say more still. There was no point to the Ham/Nye debate, no resolution was reached, the root question was barely stated.

The Hitchens/Blair debate made points, suggested outcomes, and each man clearly worked with the other instead of ignoring their point.

This reminds me of a 2 hour joke I watched two days ago. It basically starts out “A Theist, an Atheist, and Eric Hovind walk into a bar…” It was supposed to be a debate, but the whole thing was a mess. It was a mess because the theist and atheist both ended up fighting Hovind, who clearly has no idea how to argue against someone who believes in God and Science at the same time. Like, Hovind came right off the rails several times, because how can you believe in God, but not that the Earth is 6000 years old?! That being said, it is a unique person who can be both charismatic (to a degree) and yet get an atheist and a theist to gang up on him. Hovind in this debate was asked to do something he is not used to, and yet he still used his script (his “questions” were from a direct script he has read verbatim, alone, on two of his various shows (Creation Today and Creation Minute) which basically showed that he is unable to think on his feet; if he goes off script, it’s all over). The problem came about one third of the way into the debate where Hovind could no longer break any new ground, and kept trying to bring the debate back to the formal definition of the word “know” against a man who has a DOCTORATE DEGREE in Linguistics. To the theist’s credit, Pastor Bob was incredibly patient with Eric.. Almost like he was trying to teach a lesson to a child who simply could not get it.

I think that goes to the core of what people *think* a debate is in popular culture; to them, it is just people arguing. No, “debate” is a formal thing, it has rules, it has outcomes, there are metrics to judging them… But I have seen far too many “debates” between theists and atheists that added up to two people seeing who could speak more loudly.

We need more Hitchens/Blair debates and fewer Nye/Ham debates. The former helps expand understanding, the latter is an entertainm… Oh shit, I just figured out why people in the US debate that way.

I’ll show myself out.

Worldviews: My Manifesto

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

I’ve mentioned it before, but many religious evangelists and apologists cite “the atheist worldview” as something to be scared of, worried about, and blotted out. It has never really bothered me, as my world view is in no way colored by religious leanings unless perhaps subconsciously; thing is, I hadn’t considered it from enough angles.

On Creation Today, they posted a story from a Christian who was “re-saved” after becoming “bored with atheism”. Those were his words, “I became bored with atheism.” That opened a whole new avenue of research for me, and I realized that reading books by exceptional atheists with whom I share a great deal of common thought really doesn’t capture the breadth of beliefs in the atheist culture. So I went digging down another rabbit hole, and came out knowing more–and that is the greatest compliment I can pay to any venture.

I had paid lip service, in the past, to the different kinds of atheism, but I can honestly say that I understand it now much more clearly than I did even a week ago. I watched the documentary “The Case for Christ,” which many people (for reasons unclear to me) have said is a convincing argument for becoming Christian. It also opened my eyes to the views of certain atheists, and I feel like I finally understand the vitriol one sees on the legendary reddit sub-site (subreddit, to those who reddit) /r/atheism.

The type of atheist that Lee Strobel (Case for Christ) and Mark Sebert (linked Creation today de-re-conversion story) are is that of what I am going to term (and perhaps there is a better term used by more learned people) a religious atheist. They believe atheism as a dogma, and while they don’t really strive to understand the underlying ideas, they believe (often with far more overt conviction) that there is no God. This is not a lack of belief in God, this is a group of people believing there is no God simply because very smart people told them so, much as a congregation believes in God because someone very smart wrote the Bible.

A primary reasoned cited by Lee Strobel for his conversion to Christianity, for example, is something I have written about sarcastically in the past; that of the mathematical chances of Jesus fulfilling prophecy (See my earlier post, The Mathematics of Prophecy). If you are an atheist and are able to take the idea of Jesus as a historical construct in the Gospels, you are not an atheist for what I will term the right reasons (though with trepidation, as I do not like to call anyone outright wrong) as it does not take a very thorough look into history to understand that while portions of the Gospels may be true their bulk is historically invalid. The culling of the innocents by Herod sounds like the kind of thing that would bear mention in at least one other history book, but it is invalid. The Census taken that was the excuse given for Jospeh’s presence in Bethlehem happened many years after Herod died (The census wasn’t taken until 6AD, and wasn’t even a census ordered by Caesar–it was merely a small, provincial census), therefore Herod would not even have been around to order the culling of the innocents anyway. What I just did, in only a few lines, was taken a huge chunk out of the historicity of the Gospels and simplified your calculation for Jesus’ “chances of fulfilling prophecy” greatly.

An atheist who can be convinced by this fallacious reasoning (taking the Bible as historically accurate) was never an intellectually honest atheist. Mark Sebert cited that he “became an atheist” (which I don’t believe is the way most atheists would describe themselves; for me, I would say “the long period over which I questioned my belief in God”) because he “wanted to be a free thinker.” That’s right, “I wanted to be a free thinker, so I thought how other people thought. I mean, I can’t see a problem with that.”

To me, and at least to Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, one does not “believe in atheism”, one “does not believe in God.” To further expound that point, as Mark Sebert said “there was so much more going on than a dictionary definition, that is ‘the lack of belief in God or gods,” I have looked at data, at history, at science. I did not begin to believe in atheism, I lost my belief in God. I did not lose my belief in God because Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens told me to, I lost my belief in God because I read books about science and history, because I read the Bible and found the narrative lacking, because when speaking with a Pastor about my issues with faith, he was unable to answer my questions and replied instead “I can see that you are digging holes and then looking for holes, but you really just have to have faith.”

This was deeply unsatisfactory to me; I wasn’t digging holes, I was walking through a minefield and looking for dirt to fill the holes I kept falling into. This brings me to another class of atheist, and this next statement is going to sound highly egotistical, but I can think of no better way to word it. Lee Strobel and Mark Sebert were religious atheists; I would describe myself as a rational atheist. The rational atheist, which generally contains the vast majority of those in the upper echelons of scientific discourse share(and here is the ego, for I would like, if you would let me, to count myself as sharing beliefs with them, beliefs that I came to independently), is one who comes to atheism through an extended search through the evidence for both sides. Lee Strobel stresses repeatedly “I was a hard core atheist. I didn’t want to hear about Christianity, I didn’t want to talk about the Bible, I thought it was all just stupid superstition.”

The view taken by atheists such as Strobel is not the view of almost any rational atheist. Extensively in their books, Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins cite chapter of verse of the Bible. Frequently in my blog I have done the same; I do not avoid Christianity, and I don’t even want to take Christianity from anyone. I don’t want to “make anyone become an atheist”. I became an atheist of a sort, there is no doubt about that, but the loss of religion is something that takes a serious toll of anyone who was brought up in the fold. What I ultimately want is for Christians to examine their own beliefs, and at the very least discard the hateful parts of it. What I write here is not prompts to leave your faith, but prompts to think. If you lose your faith, I do not want it to be because I told you so, but because you internally decided it was the correct course of action. I am sorry if I have harmed anyone through my blog, in any case.

I read and immerse myself in the Christian Bible, or with those teaching the Christian Bible, nearly as much as I immerse myself in the works of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris. I also immerse myself in books by people who do not profess their stance either way; to read a book on history, one does not need to believe or not believe, that is irrelevant; history is a study of what happened and when, and your opinion about those things does not change what has already passed. I do not avoid the teachings of Christians, I merely seek to find what it is that they see as evidence that makes them believe as they do. Often, I will say that their science is bad, their assumptions erroneous, but I will never insult them for their assumptions (though for the purposes of theatrics, I will make fun of the assumptions themselves very frequently). I love Eric Hovind, because he is clearly sincere in his beliefs. He gives me an almost pristine case study of what it is that the hardline Christians believe, and that is valuable to me.

Another thing that you will often see in religious atheists is that they do want, actively, to take away your religion. They will insult “the stupid Christians,” something I would never say. They will say the world would be better if “everyone thought as we think.” I do not believe this is so, because the underlying world view they take is dangerously exclusive. They are as likely to go to war as they would accuse Christians as being, and that is never what I want.

Richard Dawkins opened his book “The God Delusion” with a preface containing a line I think speaks volumes. “I will never go out of my way to offend, but I will also not dawn [white gloves] and handle [religion] with undue care and reverence.”

I know what I say offends the beliefs of many, but what I say is never meant to offend, as so often Christian comments, and atheist comments do. Again, I will stress that any atheist that will offend or insult Christians is no friend of mine.

Sometimes, I reread what I wrote in stream of consciousness style, and see that I ran off on a tangent. This happened, but I am going to leave it. Let’s get back on track as I near my conclusion, though, and I apologize for wandering off; what I wanted to clarify is the view of a rational atheist.

Now we come to the core of the Christian criticism of “the danger of the atheist world view.” There are those who very likely would take it to the extreme you do, whoever you are that spreads this dogma. In fact, I believe if those I have termed “religious atheists” become the norm, we will eventually end up with at least a small outbreak of people whose conscience was eroded by the fact that they fear no hell; it is, admittedly, something I worry about. Any faction, any faction, any faction, (I have repeated this three times for clarity) will have its extremists. Religious atheists have a strong militant dogma against religion, much as religious people have a strong dogma against atheists. Men have killed in the name of religion, no one can deny this; you can say they were misguided, they were extremists, they were wrong in their beliefs, but no matter how you try to justify it, they killed because, in their mind, their religion commanded it. I am afraid this works more for my side than it does for yours; there will be those who kill in the name of stamping religion out (and, in fact, many have done so). These are not rational atheists, these are those who embrace a dogma of atheism.

An extremist rational atheist would be someone along the lines of Richard Dawkins. At his most vitriolic and vehement, he will aggressively try to talk you out of your religion, but any well educated, intelligent, rational person would never kill you for your belief, other than in self defense. They may punish you for things you do because of your belief, but I’d say that is fair game.

The point of this long rant is this; there are different kinds of atheists, and I will stand beside many Christians in their criticism of those I would term religious atheists. They sully the name of atheism, poison the pool, and darken the hearts of Christians against anyone who doesn’t believe in God. They hurt our cause as much as you believe they are hurting yours.

You can have them. You can have people like Lee Strobel and Mark Seber. They do not bring anything to the table, and I know how you do so love to swell your numbers. You will take anyone, and that is fine for you, but I do not want people like that on my side of the fence, frankly.

If I were the only atheist left in the world, I would still be happy. That is a huge difference between you and I, theoretical Christian. I believe what I believe not because it is cool, or because someone told me to, or because there are others I admire who share my belief, but because I have walked a journey of discovery and this is where I am right now. Do you know what, though? The difference between you, who have planted a pole with a sign that reads “God” and chained yourself to it for all time, and me is this: I am still journeying. If your God is out there, I may find him. I may find Brahma, I may find Allah, or I may continue in my nonbelief until the end of my journey; death. But rest assured, I will keep journeying until I die.

And people who are on this same journey, this journey of discovery and learning, this journey, where anyone walking the road in good faith (and I chose these words more carefully than many I choose) is welcome to share in my journey and share insights and ideas, those people are those I want on my side of the fence. We do not fight, we discuss. We do not insult, we learn. If there are Christians walking this same journey and finding God, I still want them on my side of the fence, so I can enjoy their company and their reason. We can all learn together. We can make the world a better place.

You can have the religious atheists, for they have planted a pole that says “No God,” and chained themselves to it. They are not welcome on the road I travel, and I don’t want them on my side of the fence.

This is my world view. This is my manifesto.

It is different form my simple mission statement, which is to bring more happiness into the world than I take out of it, but the two are compatible.

This is my “atheist worldview”, if you are dead set on pigeonholing me into it. But I would call it a “rational worldview” or a “personal worldview”. I do not believe I have to share my worldview with anyone else; I am happy holding it in any case.

Thanks for reading, thank you for being part of my journey. I look forward to walking this journey with all of you.

The Real Ten Commandments

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

This will be a short post, and I will have something of full length forthcoming for the day, but I just thought I would mention it. In Exodus chapter 34, God writes ten commandments on stone tablets. Hurray, right? There is something that popular culture got right!

NOPE!

According to Exodus 34 (and I will cite verse to make sure no one calls me dishonest), the below are the ten commandments. The punishment for breaking any one of the following commandments is that you, your kids, your grandkids, and your great grandkids go to hell (Exodus 34:7)

Commandment One: Thou shalt kill the Amorites, Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, and do not forge any contracts or alliances with them. You will destroy their altars to their gods. Only worship me. (Exodus 34:10-14)

Alright, commandment one is somewhat familiar, if a little wordier. Since all of the peoples God commands killed are extinct, the only part left is “Thou shalt have no gods before me,” which is the familiar first commandment.

Commandment Two: Thou shalt not make any idols of worship. (Exodus 34:17)

Again, we are still on familiar ground.

Commandment Three: Celebrate the Passover feast, and make really sure the bread is unlevened. SERIOUSLY! NO YEAST! (Exodus 34:18)

Commandment Four: The first offspring of every womb belongs to me. For the firstborn of every donkey, sacrifice a lamb. If you don’t sacrifice a lamb, break the donkey’s neck (for some reason). For the firstborn son, sacrifice a lamb. (Exodus 34:19-20)

Don’t know why God hates donkeys, but there you go. There is no provision for what happens if you don’t sacrifice a lamb for your firstborn son, but if we use extrapolation…

Commandment Five: No one is to appear before God without a sacrifice prepared. (Exodus 34:20)

Well, that does seem consistent with the personality of the Old Testament God.

Commandment Six: Keep holy the Sabbath. Do no work, light no light, do not start any fires. (Exodus 34:21)

We’ve moved a commandment, but you might recognize this from the original ten you learned.

Commandment Seven: There is to be a festival of the harvest, and you are to sacrifice your first harvest of wheat to God. (Exodus 34:22-25)

Commandment Eight: When you make a sacrifice to me, make REALLY SURE none of it has any yeast. Or looks at yeast. Or has been in the presence of yeast. Did I mention I hate yeast? Because yeah, I hate yeast. (Exodus 34:25)

Commandment Nine: Sacrifice the first fruits of any soil to God. (Exodus 34:26)

This one seems a duplicate, but it seems God really had a point to make here, and He was going to get it across.

Commandment Ten: Thou shalt not cook a young goat in its mother’s milk. (Exodus 34:26)

Yup, that is commandment ten.

Exodus 34:27:

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Write down these words, for in accordance with these words I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.” 28 Moses was there with the Lord forty days and forty nights without eating bread or drinking water. And he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant—the Ten Commandments.

So there you go. These are the Ten Commandments that were chiseled in stone.

These are the moral teachings of the covenant of God.

Just thought you should know.

Do as I… What Was I Talking About Again? Part 2

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

This one is a little more boring than Part 1, as most are pretty well versed in the plagues, and Part 2 doesn’t go off the rails of the traditional script. But once we’re through Part 2, Part 3 is gonna be a ton of fun (for me).

When we left our intrepid protagonists, Moses and Aaron, Pharaoh had just betrayed them by going back on his word! The plague of flies drove Pharaoh to again promise to set the Israelites free (on the condition that they were only going to go worship their God for a while, then come back), but as soon as the plague was retracted decided that this was a silly thing to do. God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart against the plight of the Israelites, and so nothing could be done to persuade him to let them go. As we enter Exodus chapter 9, God is turning up the dial on plague-craft.

Moses went in front of Pharaoh and told him thus: “Alright, dick move, but you’ve still got a chance. Tomorrow, sometime, our God is going to kill literally all of your cattle, sheep, goats, oxen, camels, and he won’t touch even a single one of the Israelites’. If that doesn’t prove he means business, I don’t know what will.”

Pharaoh, who is probably history’s worst poker player (“He has told me what he has in his hand every time we bet, but this time I’ll be he’s bluffing for sure!”). Protip: God does not bluff. The very next day, the Egyptian food supply became the food supply of the plague of gnats that is probably still flying around there somewhere. And, just like God said, not one of the stock of Israel was killed by whatever unholy disease it is that swept the Egyptian countryside and presumably ruined the livelihood of the Egyptian peasants that had as much control over the Pharaoh as the Israelites did, because they are guilty of the sins of their ruler for some reason. Also, God did not provision for the removal of the frog corpses, so they are bloated and decomposing all over Egypt, as well. Yummy.

Pharaoh, as God knew beforehand, still wouldn’t back down. “OK, he is still playing a perfect game of poker. But he is probably out of cards at this point, and the cattle can’t get any more dead… So no, no the Israelites cannot go.”

Moses thus returns with a handful of soot, and warns them “It’s about to get real ugly. If I throw this soot into the air, you are going to get just… Just the worst boils imaginable, all up in your business, and in your animal’s business. I mean, I know your animals are already dead, but if you bought more they are going to get all full of boils, too.”

“Bullshit,” said Pharaoh, with all the poker sense of … Well, there is no one in the history of the planet that bad at poker.

And so, in a move that surprised no one, BOILS EVERYWHERE! The Egyptian sorcerers at this point could not even stand, as the boils on their feet were so bad that no pressure could be put on them, and obviously the sorcerers could not heal what God hath wrought.

“Alright, alright, alright. Whoever this ‘God’ fellow is, he must be out of cards this time! No dice, you’ve played the last ace up your sleeve. The slaves stay.”

Again, though, we are reminded in Exodus 9:12, “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would not listen to Moses and Aaron.” Why did the LORD keep Pharaoh’s heart hard? One presumes just because he still had more plagues. Again, following the chain of events, the plague killing the cattle and the massive outbreaks of horrible boils could have been a result of the massive hills of rotting frogs that had nowhere to go.

So God brings out the big guns. “Alright, it’s time to get serious. I could have killed you all already, but I kept you alive just to show you how far I can go. You wouldn’t let my people go, so I am going to have the greatest hailstorm EVER hit Egypt. I know my slaves will be outside when it comes, but the devastation you see will be all the greater for it! HAH!”

And the hail came, and it killed all the cattle outdoors, and all the slaves outdoors, and all the Egyptians outdoors. It didn’t hail on Goshen, where the slaves lived, but you have to remember that some slaves were still out in the thrall of their masters, and were struck down by a hail that “stripped all of the trees bare.” (Exodus 9:25)

Pharaoh was done with this horrible game of poker. “Alright, you win. I’m terrible at poker. Take your people and get out of here.”

Moses, having learned of Pharaoh’s trickery, said “Alright, once I am out of the city, I will make the hail stop.” He did not stop to think that he would be brutally struck down by this hail on his way out of the city, but apparently neither did the writer for Moses leaves and stops the hail. Then… SURPRISE! Pharaoh’s heart was still hardened by God, and he went back on his word. Again. Because he is very, very, very bad at poker. In fact, this is like Moses showing him a royal flush, and then having Pharaoh bet against him for… Reasons?

“Just so you know, Moses,” God says, “I hardened the heart of Pharaoh so I could smite the crap out of Egypt for one purpose; to give you an awesome story to tell your grandkids about how awesome I am. Remember to tell them about me. OR ELSE.” (Exodus 10:1-2)

So God had another plague ready to go. “Your livestock is dead, and your crops ruined. You are going to have an awful winter; I know it. But here’s the thing; I know you have grain stores. So if you don’t let my people go (and I know you won’t, because I commanded it of your heart), I will send locusts, and they will eat your entire grain store.”

Perhaps better at poker than Pharaoh himself, his advisers said to him “DAMMIT, MAN! Let the damn slaves go! Seriously, we are already ruined. We can’t take another of these plagues!”

Pharaoh, again, says “Alright. You win. Go and worship God, as long as you come back when you are done with your sacrifices. Oh, also, only men can go. Everyone knows gods hate women and children anyway.”

“Hey, hey, hey, you think I am calling down these plagues for funsies? No, we all go, or you get the locusts!” And so it was that locusts came.

And Pharaoh said “Stop it! STOP IT! Ok, you can go. What is wrong with your God? Why does he love punishing us so?!” But as soon as Moses left, God reminds us that he had hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 10:20) so that MORE PLAGUES! Yay!

So then we get what is actually the most tame plague in days; the plague of darkness. Everything was so dark that no one could even move, except the Israelites because they get light. So Pharaoh, AGAIN, says “Take them away, and I am running out of even sort of funny ways to say this because I have said it so many times my face is stuck in a grimace of displeasure! Except leave your flocks and herds behind.”

“But Pharaoh, how can we sacrifice stunning amounts of cattle and sheep to God if we can’t bring our cattle and sheep? Seriously, you have no idea how bloody things are going to get once we start sacrificing.”

“What? No. I said no flocks!”

“It gives us the flocks or it gets the plagues again!”

And again, God hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and Pharaoh said “No dice!!” (Exodus 10:27)

And God said “Ahahahahaha look how mad he is! Isn’t this hilarious?”

Moses replied “Umm… Not really. Millions are going to die of starvation and disease, and I’d like to remind you that it was you who forced Pharaoh to keep the Israelites in bondage.”

God replied “Pfft… You’re no fun. I can hardly get my smite on with you killing my buzz, Buzz Killington. Fine, just one more plague, and I am going to make it a doozy. In fact, I am going to make it so bad that Pharaoh will make you leave and so badass that you will have a feast to remember it by for the rest of eternity! How does that sound for a party?! So here’s the plan; I am going to kill all the firstborn sons of everyone in Egypt, except the Israelites, then you guys can leave Egypt. Also, remember that thing I said about taking everyone’s gold and silver. Don’t forget their gold and silver.” (Seriously, God reminds them to rob the Egyptians blind, and says he’ll make sure the Egyptians are totally ok with it; Exodus 11:2)

“And remember,” God reminds Moses, “I am doing this so that you have cool stories to tell your grandkids. I could have let the Israelites go before all of these plagues, but what fun would that be?” (Exodus 11:9-10)

“Now, it is difficult for me to tell the difference between my chosen people and the Egyptians, so here’s what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna go to all of the Israelites (there’s only… What? A couple million of you? (Exodus 12:37)) and tell them each to prepare a lamb and put its blood on the doorframe. Also, you aren’t just going to cook a lamb, you are going to prepare that lamb, and here’s how you are going to do it: (The below is copied and pasted, because I actually can’t make it more ridiculous than it already is) (Exodus 12:6-11)

6 Take care of them until the fourteenth day of the month, when all the members of the community of Israel must slaughter them at twilight. 7 Then they are to take some of the blood and put it on the sides and tops of the doorframes of the houses where they eat the lambs. 8 That same night they are to eat the meat roasted over the fire, along with bitter herbs, and bread made without yeast. 9 Do not eat the meat raw or boiled in water, but roast it over a fire—with the head, legs and internal organs. 10 Do not leave any of it till morning; if some is left till morning, you must burn it. 11 This is how you are to eat it: with your cloak tucked into your belt, your sandals on your feet and your staff in your hand. Eat it in haste; it is the Lord’s Passover.

“Anyway, once that lamb is properly prepared, and your door marked, that’s how I’ll know you are one of my chosen people! Simple, right?”

And in the back of Moses’ head, surely he must have thought “You know, I am starting to have a few reservations about this plan…”

God interrupted Moses’ thoughts, continuing, “You know, I don’t just want stories told to your grandkids. This is too awesome for stories. Every year, you are going to have a bitchin’ party, and you are going to use it to remind everyone how awesome I am! Also, my parties aren’t just for a day, Moses. My parties last a full week!” (Exodus 12:14-16)

God wanted to show he was serious, so he killed the firstborn even of those in prison, because they didn’t have the good sense to go kill a lamb and paint their prison cell with blood. The shame of it!

After every household in Egypt, save for those of the Israelites, had lost a loved one, Pharaoh summoned Moses. “You win! Get the hell out of Egypt! We never wanted you here anyway! Oh, and when you are praying to your God, put in a good word for me, eh? That’d be cool.” (Exodus 12:32)

So the Israelites packed up and left, but not before taking all of the silver, gold, and clothing from Egypt! (Exodus 12:36)

“Remember,” said God. “You were slaves of Egypt for 430 years. Remember to tell your kids that number when you tell them the story of how awesome I am. 430 years! To the day!” (Exodus 12:40) “Oh, also, when eating the lambs for my bitchin’ party? Make sure ONLY circumcised people eat it. Seriously, check their penises. If they aren’t circumcised, no lamb for them. Hey, hey, are you listening to me? I’m serious here.”

Aaaaand we’re done with the plagues, so here is a good time to conclude part 2. In part 3, we find out that the Israelites have really, really, really, really short memories. I would say goldfish short, but studies have shown that goldfishes can be trained to swim through hoops for food, and they remember that trick longer than the Israelites remember (spoilers).

Part 3 is going to be fun.

Do as I… What Was I Talking About Again? Part 1

Posted by The Guy Who Wrote This

The Bible is described, by strong Christian believers, as the height of moral teaching. The Golden Rule is touted as one of the greatest pieces of bite-sized wisdom put to paper. Jesus spoke exclusively of love and tolerance of all people. The Bible is, at the very least, inspired by the spirit of God; whether you are a literalist or not, it is a general belief that the things that are in the Bible are there because God wanted them to be.

I know I’ve mentioned before the confused nature of the Old Testament, but I think I need some concrete examples to really drive the point home. Honestly, I felt the need to write this post after I was told to go and read Exodus again–my knowledge of the Bible is, generally speaking, deep, but it is certainly rusty in spots and always in need of updating. So I cracked the book open, and began to read… I am going to give you a paraphrased summary of Exodus, trying to include all of the details of… Well, how weird things get. This won’t be like my usual posts, this will be a combined summary and review, in a very sarcastic style. If you are super familiar with Exodus, maybe you will like the way I paraphrase it, and if your knowledge of Exodus comes almost strictly from The Ten Commandments, maybe you will get a chuckle out of learning what is written in that section of the Bible. Or maybe I am wasting your time. Overall, I am just trying something sort of new here–if it works out, I may make an alternate blog where I paraphrase the Bible in my own irreverent style. Let me know in the comments if that’s something that would interest you.

WARNING: The below is like… SUPER irreverent. If picking apart the Bible will offend you, this is probably not the best thing to read.

One doesn’t have to go very far to start to get an odd picture; in Exodus 2:23-25, the Israelites are slaves of Egypt, and they are not happy about it (why would that be? Slaves are totally justified according to the Bible, as long as they are not Israelite slaves). And so it goes that “The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob.”

So… God is basically like “Ugh, what are they complaining about? My chosen people are always on about somethi… Oh crap! They’re slaves now? How long has that been going on? And I promised Abraham stuff like this wouldn’t happen! I’d better do something about it!!”

That being said, instead of using his omnipotence to set his people free, he appears before Moses (who, it should be said, is living in self-imposed exile after having murdered an Egyptian. Lucky for Moses, though, there was literally no law for the Jewish people at this time what with how the ten commandments had not yet been written. At least, with how hard some Christians lean on the ten commandments, one would think they are the only laws that matter). Anyway, at this point Moses is married and has a kid, and lives mostly as a shepherd of his father-in-law’s flock of sheep. So, understandably, he’s like “Ummm… Okay… But here’s the thing, I am a shepherd, I am probably not what you are looking for.”

But whatever, this post isn’t just a summary of Exodus, it is only about the weirder parts, and we don’t have long to wait, friends! Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods is another of the commandments that did not exist yet, thankfully, as through the will of the LORD, the Israelites are compelled to take, as they leave Egypt, the clothes and food and silver and gold of their neighbors. Well, isn’t that nice?

Exodus chapter 4 is rife with examples about how the LORD, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, seems to have little idea what He is doing. First, he transforms a staff into a snake, and says “There. That’ll show ’em that I am God!”

Moses is like “That’s cool, bro, but what if it doesn’t?”

God follows: “You know what, maybe you’re right. Hey, put your hand into your cloak. BAM! Leprosy. Then put it back again! HEALED! There you go, miracles. Miracles will teach them that I am God! But if they still don’t believe you for some reason, take some river water and I’ll turn it into blood. Yeah, yeah this time that’ll definitely show them!”

Moses, full of excuses, complains that he doesn’t know how to speak real gud bruh. God tells them that he is the one who makes men speak or makes them mute, deaf or hear, blind or see (in case you needed reminding that God is the source of all good and the source of all suffering), so Moses should get his ass in line and do as he’s told.

This next bit is fairly well known, so I won’t belabor it, but it bears mention. “Perform these miracles in front of Pharaoh, but I will harden his heart so he won’t let your people go.” Wait. What? Why? Why would that, in any case, be a good thing to do? What purpose does it serve? I have my own personal theories; God was feeling a bit restless, and just wanted to smite some people but wanted an excuse. If Pharaoh didn’t let His people go (and God obviously knew he wouldn’t because He made the choice for Pharaoh. I am sure there is something about free will in there…), he would have his excuse to get up with the smiting! In fact, before Moses ever gets to Egypt, God actually confirms that very thing; “You would not let my people go, and Israel is my Son, so I will smite your first-born son!” And that, before Pharaoh even knew Moses was coming, was decided; without even having a reason, the firstborn son of all of Egypt was going to die.

Now things come off the rails a little bit; no one talks about this part, and it is absent from Charlton Heston’s legendary portrayal of Moses.

On the way back to Egypt, God sees Moses on the road. He is still angry at Moses for talking back to Him, so He goes and wants to kill Moses, that little complaining son of a… But while God was getting ready to kill him, Moses’ wife circumcises their son and … Rubs… the foreskin… On Moses’ feet? And for some reason, God is like “Well, can’t kill him now. Damn.” (Seriously, Exodus 4:24-26. Again, WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO LEARN FROM THIS?!)

Now, God’s action have an unintended side effect (unintended…? Isn’t He omniscient?). Pharaoh is bitter that Moses came to make the slaves stop working, so he basically doubles their labor and has them whipped EXTRA HARD if they fail to meet quota. Boy, sure am glad God is looking out for His people at this point, eh? Things are even worse for the Jewish people at the beginning of Exodus 5 than before God set to have them set free! In fact, the Israelites pray to God to judge Moses and Aaron (they blame the two upstarts for their increased burden and suffering, and want God to smite them. Little do they know, this was God’s plan all along! Why? WHO KNOWS!). Moses then shouts at God “Seriously, dude! What is going on here?! Now people hate us! In fact, right now, this is all your fault!” (Exodus 5:22-23)

But the funny thing is, at the beginning of Exodus 6, God says “All is going according to plan. Now I’m gonna really ruin Pharaoh’s day, and then he will let my people go! Just sit back and watch the show; and by sit back, I mean go in front of Pharaoh and say what I tell you to say. And stop being a little bitch about it.” (Exodus 6:1-12)

In Exodus 7, after Moses and Aaron have performed the miracle of changing a staff into a snake, Pharaoh is like “Yeah, that snake is cool and all, but my men can do the same thing. No dice; the Jewish people will stay slaves.”

God says to Moses “See? I told you he’d say that! I told you Pharaoh would say that exact thing, aren’t I AWESOME?!” (Exodus 7:14) Seemingly, Moses and Aaron forgot that God actually forced Pharaoh into that exact reaction, so it’s less awesome and more “I’m pulling the puppet strings, so of course it all goes to plan.”

In any case, God wasn’t ready to stop plagueing and smiting yet, so Pharaoh’s heart was still hardened (By God. I can’t overstate that.), especially since Pharaoh’s own sorcerer’s were also able to turn water into blood… Which actually raised a question to me; if pagans could change water into other liquids, why is it considered such a miracle that Jesus was able to change water into wine? Sounds like that’s the kind of thing that just happened regularly back then. Weird.

And again, in Exodus 8, God sort of acts like a child with a stink bomb. “Tell Pharaoh this… Heheheh… Tell him, if he doesn’t let my people go (and he won’t, I made sure of it!) I will cover everything in Egypt with frogs! EVERYTHING! Aren’t I awesome?” (Exodus 8:1-6) But guess what? Egyptian sorcerers ALSO made frogs come out of nowhere, again kind of making God’s power seem not so great if Egyptian sorcerers can do the exact same thing that God said, previously, “Will make them believe in me!”

Oddly, though, even though Pharaoh’s sorcerers created even more frogs, Pharaoh could not make the frogs go away; in verse 8 he begs Moses and Aaron to click undo! One would think that his level of blackmail would be enough for God; soften Pharaoh’s heart, and let the people go! But no, God wasn’t done having His fun with the people of Egypt yet; He could have freed his people at this point (I mean, the Nile smelled like rot, and there were piles of rotting frog corpses at this point; living in Egypt had to be pretty awful, whether slave or not, and made all the worse for being a slave). NOPE! LOCUSTS! That’s what we need. More locusts! Now, if you are fighting for the historicity of this (even though the evidence that any of this happened is nearly nonexistent), I have a theory. Flies came to eat of the rotting river Nile, the frogs came to kill the flies, the frogs died of various causes, and then the insects came to clean up the frogs (including gnats, flies, and locusts). BAM! Chain of events. Maybe God didn’t let His own people go yet because once this chain of miracles was started, he just shouted “THERE’S NO BRAKES ON THE CRAZY TRAIN!” and sat back to laugh?

Interestingly enough, this is where God starts to do things that Pharaoh’s sorcerers could not; he turns all of the dust in Egypt into gnats. One may recall that Egypt is both very large and very dusty. Pharaoh told his sorcerers to do this, though one wonders, if all of the dust was gone already, what were the sorcerers trying to turn into gnats? Whatever, they fail. BAM! Score one for God! I think it is worth reminding you, now, that these plagues affected everyone in Egypt. Including his own people. God was never big on targeted destruction, He just goes whole hog in everything He does.

So we’ve got snake staves, river of blood, frogs, and gnats so far. But you know what? It is time for God to start targeting people; after all, if His plagues affected the Israelites as well as the Egyptians, how could they prove that the plagues came from God? So after four miracles, and three major plagues, God says “Incoming flies! And this time, I won’t plague my own people! I AM A GOD OF LOVE!” And so flies came. (Exodus 8:22-24)

And at this, Pharaoh said again “Okokokok, you win. You can sacrifice to your God, but do it here. No reason to leave Egypt to worship, right?”

Moses replies with some level of self-awareness; “Look, our sacrifices are actually pretty nasty, not gonna lie. They are gonna gross you out so badly that Egyptians will probably stone us. Let us head out to the wilderness to make our sacrifices so we don’t gross you out. We won’t run away from your horribly oppressive slavery. We promise.”

“Ugh, fiiiiiine,” replies Pharaoh with all of the honesty of a teenaged girl. “You can. Just don’t go far.”

“Oh, cool beans! But this time, Pharaoh, no funny stuff! If you say we can go, let us go. For realsies!”

“You can trust me, Moses!”

SURPRISE! Pharaoh goes back on his word as soon as the flies left. One thinks an omniscient God would train Moses as a negotiator at least well enough to only pay out on their blackmail price after the Israelites have left Egypt? “The flies stay until my people have left?” No? alright, fine. Take the flies away such that Pharaoh can say “GOTCHA AGAIN!”

This is getting pretty long, and we are only just entering into Chapter 9. I am going to post this as part 1 and continue on with the weirdness and the plot twists of the book of Exodus in part 2!

Thanks for reading, and let me know in the comments if this is entertainment or just unfunny, offensive drivel.

Blog42: My Stream of (semi)Consciousness

Rants about life, the universe, and everything

Religion

Divisive Apologetics

Would you make a human sacrifice to walk again…

Best Friends with God

A Personal Kind of Excuse

Everything You Ever Wanted

A War of Gentlemen

Worldviews: My Manifesto

The Real Ten Commandments

Do as I… What Was I Talking About Again? Part 2

Do as I… What Was I Talking About Again? Part 1