Take a walk back in history with me as we visit 1987. Swaggart was involved with a prostitute at a Metaire, Louisiana, hotel called the Travel Inn on Airline Highway, when some associates flattened the tires on Swaggart’s car, went to get cameras, and took photographs of Swaggart exiting the hotel with the prostitute.
The story broke on February 20, 1988, four months after Swaggart had promised to confess his sin. On February 21, 1988, on his television show taped in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Swaggart tearfully confessed that he was guilty of an unspecified sin and made comparisons to himself and King David.
Here is a BBC presentation on that whole affair. The quality is not stellar, but finding any video on this subject has proven to be quite challenging.
The fact that people still follow this insane religious freak just shows how many people in this world are stupid and rather hopeless.
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Related posts:
- Church Lady And Jimmy Swaggart
- Jimmy Swaggart Threatens Homosexuals
- Westboro Baptist Church: The Musical!
May 18th, 2006 at 12:17 am
perhaps people ought to profit off this guy by selling tshirts ^^
’sinner’ or some such, just as long as its not libelous :-P or to much for that matter
i dunno, i think most people who like him don’t know him
then again most people who know bush like him cause he’s so ‘normal’ like they are
February 8th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
Jimmy was…and is…hardcore; I’d assert that he’s flat out sincere and genuine, BECAUSE he repented on live national TV. How many fakes and swindlers would do THAT?
You’d have to have known his preaching style before the scandal, but note how subdued and humble-sounding he is after the scandal…i.e., recognizing his hypocrisy, and acting a LOT LESS JUDGMENTAL.
Before this it was lots and lots of damnation, after this it was “we’re all sinners, we all screw up”.
I ain’t really a fan, just giving credit where credit is due.
February 11th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
no suprise…because its the nature of his religion.. u can repent then do sins, even a 5 yr old would know better.. wot exactly would it take 2 convince people like this.. i really dont know,,
May God guide all those misguided to the straight path - Ameen -
April 29th, 2007 at 11:11 am
Man, what a phony
August 7th, 2007 at 11:05 pm
Man, I can’t believe that people would beliee that type of phony crap.
I mean, the bible speaks more of prostitution than playboy, hustler, and pnthouse put together, and you have these brainwashed morons telling us it is wrong, when the bible, THE BIBLE, GOD DAMN IT! speaks of it. I say, continute to ridicule the pastors, such as this clown. Church isn’t worth it anymore
October 18th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Most people you talk about aren’t real. This man is real. Jesus said “He who hath sin, cast the first stone.” He’s repented, so we have to forgive him. God says if we can’t forgive, we can’t be forgiven. God forgot.
December 24th, 2007 at 12:32 am
I wonder if those who freely toss compassion and ‘credit’ swaggarts way are aware of his subsequent transgression with a prostitute in California in 1991 not mentioned in this post?
How compassionate do you feel to know that this whoremonger continues to collect 350K a year from his so called ministry as last reported in 1995?
December 27th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
i gave my life to jesus christ in 1985 while watching jimmy swaggart broadcast.jimmy is only a man . all have sinned and come short .except jesus christ.we are to love jimmy and not just jimmy but each other.God loves those who sin,he does not love the sin itself..evanglist jimmy swaggart is one of the greatest preachers that has ever lived..he that is without sin let him or her cast the frist stone..
January 20th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
One would have to understand the annointing power of God in order to comprehend the tremendous man of God that Jimmy Swaggart once WAS. Any Christian with discernment will attest to this. In the 80’s before his public fall there is no doubt in my mind that he has led literally millions to the Lord. I pray that the disgraced individual that he has become would only cry out for mercy.It is apparent that he has now a spirit of arrogance and pride in him. I ask the Holy Spirit to bring conviction upon him before it is too late. And I pray in Jesus name that every individual that may have stumbled due to Jimmy Swaggart’s spiritual demise has been restored. I will never forget what a mighty man of power that he was and can only hope that all his works would not be burned up.
January 20th, 2008 at 5:59 pm
“” In the 80’s before his public fall there is no doubt in my mind that he has led literally millions to the Lord.”"
Something for which he should be severly punished. Scamming and decieving people is a crime you know.
“And I pray in Jesus name…”
Yes, because that really works.
March 11th, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Jimmy Swaggart would not said ” I have sinned” if he was NOT COUGHT !!!!!!!!! He is the biggest lier in the world.
He is a thief, a killer. He is a thief because he got our money and spending it on himself and on his prostitutes.
Just because he was CAUGHT he said “I HAVE SINNED”
iF HE WAS NOT COUGHT , HE WOULD HAVE KEPT STEELING OUR MOUNEY, AND KEPT SLEEPING WITH THESE FLESHES.
God does not forgive a person who other people find out about his/her sins. No ! God forgives a person when this person HIMSELF finds out he is sinning, and doing the wrong thing, and then he stops doing it and stops sinning and asks God for forgiveness.
No ! Jimmy Swaggart only says I have sinned because he was cauhgt. If he was not cought , he would have kept going and going on steeling our money and trusts.
I EVEN FEEL BAD TO SAY I AM A CHRISTIAN.
Jimmy Swaggart needs not to show his face to anyone at all.
He keeps putting other religiouns down , yet he is himself is the scum of earh, the dirt of earth
March 12th, 2008 at 8:41 am
I can well imagine your frustration, Ruth B. Furthermore, I appreciate that you condemn Swaggart in no uncertain terms. Too many religionists are too quick to forgive one of their own yet slow to forgive the stranger.
I have to admit I am strongly tempted to try and get you to give up your religion. But that would be selfish, agenda-pushing. Instead I’d like to make a couple of observations. First, hypocrisy and abuse can take place in any kind of organization, including religious ones. So don’t be ashamed of your Christianity because of one (or even several) bad eggs. There are many good reasons to give up religion but the actions, however sensational, of a small minority of its practitioners is not one of them. Second, instances like these prove that religion is not sufficient to guarantee moral behavior.
Finally, I’d like to remind you of a related point. Lack of religion does not guarantee immorality. There are plenty of non-hypocritic (as far as is humanly possible), non-abusive non-believers.
April 3rd, 2008 at 12:26 pm
Jimmy Swaggart’s confession might have been honest and sincere AT THAT TIME. But yet his pride never left him. He wanted to get back into the lime light of his ministry within 3 months itself! His church wanted him to be out for atleast a year since he disgraced not only millions of honest bible beleving Christians but our very Lord Himself.
And again later in 1991, he was caught with another prostitute. What shame. And this man is still in public ministry and preaching. WOE UNTO YOU! Ye Pharasees!
James 3:1
My brethren, be not many masters, knowing that we shall receive THE GREATER CONDEMNATION.
Jimmy’s fall was as great as his rise. That he was a public minister puts more responsibility on his shoulders for holy living. Millions look at him and are supposed to see our Lord. Yet, what do they see? A hypocrite who condemned so harshly his fellow brothers of the same sin while he himself was indulging in it.
Galatians 6:7
Be not deceived; God IS NOT MOCKED: for whatsoever a man SOWETH, that shall he also REAP.
Most of these teleevangelists are only after the money and glitter. The finiancial scandels rocking teleevangelists brought great shame to many a Christian. It is so hard to share the gospel to someone who is aware of all this. This was just like another business empire.
If Jimmy was really repentant, he would have stepped down from his ministry. He should have stepped down from any sort of public ministry
People like Jimmy, Ted Haggard, Jim Bakkar, Tammy faye… with their love for publicity lives, they bring much disgrace to our Lord. The following portion best fits them:
Philippians 3:18-19
18 For MANY WALK, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ:
19 Whose end is destruction, whose God IS THEIR BELLY, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind EARTHLY THINGS.
It’s worse to see millions still following these false prophets who are wolves in sheep clothing.
May 23rd, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I can’t help but to not overlook, what Ruth B said. Not that what she said wasn’t true, but that she sees it wrong, even though it sounds correct. Yes you are correct, about Swaggart getting caught, but you have also ASSUMED, that Swaggart wouldn’t have repented, if he didn’t get caught. Since in that it didn’t happen that way when indeed it may have. And even at that, 99% of the people change after getting caught on some things. And 100% of the people
on at least one thing. What does it take to change the accents of a man? Most of the time hardship, were are a people of natural proclivities.
It sure is easy to point out peoples faults hiding behind a pseudonym. I wonder if what you posted, you would actually say to the man in which your referring too? More than likely not! He who is without sin cast the first stone.
Despite Jimmy Swaggart’s mistakes, he’s still one of the few that refuses to stray from what the bible actually has to say. And by doing that, his integrity is still in-tacked, when in fact some people would have just given up altogether and managed to twist scripture to justify themselves!! I sure don’t recall hearing Swaggart ever doing that, after all he said he was wrong didn’t he?
May 31st, 2008 at 6:06 am
THE ONE THING I WILL SAY, HE WITH OUT SIN THROW THE FIRST STONE, I THINK OF WHERE I WAS WITHOUT JESUS IT SCARERS ME, EVEN IN MY WALK WITH HIM, HOW I FELL, BUT BY HIS MERCEY HE HAS FORGIVEN ME, I THANK HIS HOLY NAME, PRAY FOR JIMMY THATS ALL I WILL SAY.
May 31st, 2008 at 7:29 am
Yeah, of course it scares you. You’ve been living your whole life without having to confront the big bad reality of the world out there.
You’re free to hang on to your crutch, but don’t bother the rest of us with your sad fantasy.
June 22nd, 2008 at 8:14 pm
“Yeah, of course it scares you. You’ve been living your whole life without having to confront the big bad reality of the world out there.
You’re free to hang on to your crutch, but don’t bother the rest of us with your sad fantasy.”
Too right on alcari, I mean hell, to the rest of us who have lived in the real and dangerous world without being sheltered, we don’t give a rats in general.
I kinda agree with ruth, sidfaiwu, and mainly george basically, and to ron who’s also to say that it would have happened (repenting) if he wouldn’t have gotten caught? So it can be said on the flip side as well, like ruth said at first. Like sid said, they are willing to forgive their own, but condemn the everyday person, or the liberal types (hippies, entertainers or troublesome actors, etc.) I guess since they’re sinful cretins anyhow I guess.
September 7th, 2008 at 10:47 am
Oh it is so easy to critisize Jimmy Swaggart but the truth is that all those who critize him do nt understand the Blood covenant! Jesus paid for the sins of Jimmy just as much as he paid for mine and the whole world’s (that includes you critic!…i.e. if you truly turn to him). Thank you Jesus that your grace abounds!
September 7th, 2008 at 11:23 am
I understand the Blood Covenant because I used to be a Christian. I even used to minister to people and fight against sites like this. But then one day started questioning what I was always told was true and I found error in it all. That is why I fight ignorant people like you and try to shed the light of truth on a world which has been blanketed with the shadow of ignorance for so many millenia. Your religion is a farce, just like all others in the world. It’s easy to criticize Jimmy because he is hypocrite, much like it’s be just as easy to criticize you if your dirty little secrets became public. I know you have them, everyone does.
September 8th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
To MarcDLS,
Quote “I used to be a Christian”…..No you didn’t. You tried the “christian religion”, period. To be a Real Christian, you must be born-again by God Almighty Himself, brought to life by The Holy Spirit, and that is a work of Grace. When you meet Jesus, by His Spirit, you are sealed until the day of Redemption….given Eternal Life. And you don’t do it, God does. I pray that you seek The Truth, Jesus Christ, crucified, buried and resurrected, seated at the right hand of The Father! AMEN
September 8th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Well, according to those who believe that once you are saved that God does his magic hoobi-do and presto you can never turn away from him, I was not saved. However, even in the Christian world, you are the minority. So I “tried the Christian religion,” for like the first 18 years of my life, not that long of a time, and I studied it extensively, what do I know about it? Obviously, you, who I’m guessing just eats up whatever is spoon fed to you and just bows your head and accepts it, know much more about it than me. I apologize for offending you with my mindless dribble. My only question to you is that how is one supposed to “know” if they are “really saved?” Is it just one of those “cross-your-fingers-and-wait-till-the-end” sorta things? I thought I was saved but, according to you, I was mistaken…my bad.
September 16th, 2008 at 10:26 pm
I was just wondering if jimmy gave rebates to anyone, is he in the pen doing time? some of his comrads flattened his tires while he was in the room doing the dirty deed you say, so when swag came busting out of the room to make his get away with his gal he could`nt go anywhere cause his tires had no air in them you say, very interesting, i bet next time he will wear a disquise, i can just see swag with long hair and a moustache wearing a bunch of hippy garb, he might tell everybody he is one of the last of the dieing breed of the flower children, well i don`t know if he could fool anyone or not, one things for sure, he will have to get rid of them horn rim glassess….
September 16th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Did someone really let the air out of swags tires? i wonder what his wife said to him after she got through flaling them jaws, she probably striped hid leggs, i bet he won`t preach anytime soon wearing ber mooda shorts…….poor ole swags got more trouble than a goat in a hail storm…..
September 16th, 2008 at 10:39 pm
does anyone know? it was said that swag offered them girls of the evening 10 dollars, i bet they would`nt let swaggart even smell of their socks for 10 dollars……….
September 30th, 2008 at 8:44 am
Its funny that all the people who are supporting Jimmy Swaggart in the above comments cannot even write properly.It just goes to show the intelligence of these people.
September 30th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Ok but what about God ? Does the sin of men change who God is ? Let God judge Jimmy and all his good and bad works, lets remember what we do when nobody is watching, there are a lot of need out there, what are we doing about it ? What will you do one day if there is a God and you have to account about you own life and secrets ? Just focus on your faith and do not disregard Jesus because of people !
September 30th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Willie,
Perhaps instead you yourself should focus not on blind faith, but rather on reason and the multitude of evidence that shows the Christian bible to be nonsense in so many ways.
Also, re “What will you do one day if there is a God”, just google on “Pascal’s Wager” for why that is a failure as an argument.
Religion is ridiculous.
October 8th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Every great man in this world has a very deep dark secret,and so do we all.This weakness/thorn is so that we may be humbled again.It is a sign that we need him in our lives always,thus it is written,those who have faith in him continue to cleanse themselves from sin whilst their holy.Everything we do will come to light,most importantly it is how we respond afterwards that matters most,remember Adam and Eve,when caught they shifted blame to the next person,ever wonder how the world would be like if they took responsibility for their actions.I say big ups to those who own up to their sins,for it is only then that we can trully forgive and find peace.
October 19th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Although Pastor Swaggart made a mistake, we are all human and make mistakes. The Lord will judge him. We cannot do that. I will be in prayer about my occasional support of JSM. We cannot let the entire ministry suffer because of one man’s mistakes.
October 20th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
It’s not just one man that is the center of this. He is just one of many so called Christians who say one thing but live entirely separate lives. They all do it and everyone is sick of hearing their crap when we all know what most likely goes on behind closed doors. You know why we know? Because we know they are human.
October 21st, 2008 at 10:15 am
Jimmy is a mighty man of God.He confesed his sin a thing which many of us fail to do.We need to understand that we are living in the last days and we should work on our own salvation.We cannot aford to cling to someone’s mistakes. He asked for forgiveness from God and I believe He has forgiven him.So why should we not forgive him so that we may be forgiven.
October 21st, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Every generation thinks they are in the last days. Get over yourself and stop trying to use scare tactics to get people to believe in your fairy tales.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:02 pm
Marc, your post #30 was spot on.
Its sad that people cant see these lunatics for the conmen they are.
In Oz, we just had a fantastic case of a pastor who faked cancer for 2 years, had a hit single about it, then said he was cured because he had faith in God. LOL when he got busted and tried to blame an internet pornography addiction for his lies. Nup, its the fake moralising and unnatural supression of perfectly normal behaviour that f**ks people up!
The Ted Haggart saga was another recent gold episode.
October 24th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
This is the most stupidest thing I heard since sliced bread. Jimmy Swaggart is a awesome preacher and will always be.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:25 am
JSM is not a ministry, it’s a business. The sooner people understand this then the sooner people will be able to look at it with an open eye & ear. I can tell you this from a personal perspective. I’ve went to school there, bible college, church, worked there & have held an upper position. I was not on the ministerial staff. I know that there will people who are never going to see JSM in terms as a business but it is nothing more. I know there are good people that go there & work there. All I can say is that those who know, know. Those who don’t, may never know.
November 12th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Furthermore, all religious ministry that collects money is business, and should be taxed accordingly. No more tax breaks for religion. Too often, religion has masqueraded as charity.
November 18th, 2008 at 9:51 am
Wow unto all of you who pass judgment on any of God’s creation. We are only to judge the “sin” in the person, not the person himself or herself. God’s word says in Mark 11:25-26, ” And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him,so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.” his word also says in Romans 3:23-24; “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Crist Jesus.” We all sin, even Christians at times, we are not perfect, we live in a body that is not perfect. Jesus Christ is the only perfect human being that walked the face of this earth, past present or future. As humans we see sin in different degrees, God is a Holy God, he looks at sin all the same, a liar is just as sinful as an adulterer. Galations 5:19-21; “the acts of the sinful nature are obvious; sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, orgies, and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” 1John 1:8-9 says ” if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us, if we confess our sins, he (God) is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins, and purify us of all unrighteousness.” I pray all of you come to know and accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Saviour, and learn the truth and Love of God and his word. Jimmy Swaggart is a true man of God, he sinned, he repented his sins to God, he has been forgiven according to God’s word and promises. There are few people who preach the true word of God uncompromised, Jimmy and Family Worship Center are faithful to God, they preach Christ and him Crucified.
May God bless and forgive us all of our sins, and may he have mercy on us.
November 18th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
Well, thank you for the “wow”, Ninette. It’s great that you’ve been positively impressed like that, and a cheer is nice to get once in a while.
However, in regard to your preaching and your copying and pasting of the same old rubbish, in the absence of you presenting any evidence for your particular religious myths, we have to recommend that you follow this important link.
Religion is ridiculous.
November 19th, 2008 at 8:16 am
I want to apologize to all the readers, for my typing error in my comment I left yesterday (#37).
Wow, should have been Woe, Woe meaning take heed. Yes, even Christians make mistakes.
I want to express my deepest regret and anguish for Korgan. I am sorry you feel God’s word is a myth, as well as your catch phrase “Religion is ridiculous”.
I pray that God reveal himself to you, the truths of His Word and His Love that he has for all his creation.
John 3:16 says ” For God so loved the world that He gave his only Begotten Son, that WHOSOEVER beleives in Him should have Everlasting Life”.
I pray this Truth out of Love be revealed to all who read this, for Love heals all things.
Love,
Ninette
November 19th, 2008 at 10:25 am
Ninette,
While it is likely that you really do think that you are sharing positive sentiments, the ugliness and evil of Christianity still surfaces above the typical platitudes of your post:
You said that
“even Christians make mistakes, ”
but that is a typical, if subtle, positioning of Christians above others. Given all the evil that Christianity has to answer for throughout history, considering e.g. the violence of the inquisitions, the suppression of free speech, reason and science, and much more, the opposite positioning should be the case.
The reality of what is presented in the bible, and in historical record, is that the message of Christianity is not one of love. It is overall a message of violence, unjustified punishment, and suppression of truth.
Furthermore, given the absurdity of the concepts presented in the bible, such as eternal punishment merely for not believing in the face of insufficient evidence, the inconsistencies of bible fiction with reality, and so on, Christianity exemplifies that Religion is ridiculous.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:34 pm
All who claim to be Christians aren’t. That belief has hardened many hearts toward real christianity. A true born-again believer in Jesus Christ never is above anyone or thinks himself better than others.
November 22nd, 2008 at 12:12 am
All who claim to be true Scotsmen aren’t. That belief has hardened many hearts toward Scots. A true Scotsman never is above anyone or thinks himself more truly Scottish than others.
November 23rd, 2008 at 6:48 pm
Korgan
The christian faith is the only one that say, Pray for your enemies. turn the other cheek, Matthew 5 the Beatitudes says blessed(oh what bliss what self-contained joy for the man or woman who is)poor in spirit, they that mourn(when others hurt,sin and effects of sin& our own sin)meek… don’t blame the atrocities that MAN did in the past under the name of God & the Church, because Jesus said you can hang everything on two commanments:”Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your might and love your neighbor as yourself.” pretty much the way a real chistian with godly motives behaves.
November 23rd, 2008 at 7:17 pm
Alan, you really need to read up on the No True Scotsman fallacy.
Anyway, your statement “The christian faith is the only one that say, Pray for your enemies. turn the other cheek, ” is demonstrably false. Dozens of non-Christian faiths mention some form of the same thing, but just to cite one example (that being sufficient to prove your statement false), the Hindu faith calls for peaceful tolerance of enemies, and Gandhi himself actually exhibited and extolled this reaction in his exemplary way.
The bible also says a lot about how enemies should be dealt with that is horribly violent. Witness the murder of whole peoples along the bloody path of the bible and Christianity, for a variety of “reasons”. That’s just one more contradiction of this man-made fiction known as Christianity.
Now since you’ve brought in the “commandment” “Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your might”, maybe you can answer this old chestnut of a question:
Why does a purportedly omnipotent being need and demand worship? That is an absolutely and utterly absurd characteristic to ascribe to an omnipotent being, and is yet more evidence that the Christian god is man-made. Demonstrating yet again, as I always say,
Religion is ridiculous.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Korgan
“Religion is vain” Jesus said that.
as to your chestnut I with out him I would still be in a lifestyle and an attitude of filthy, rotten things that i am ashamed of, and i would be as bitter as a lot of atheist i meet having said that he saved me from myself and a world heartache i love my life, my family, and my God before the love of god i hated everything and everyone. It’s not that he demands worship he deserves it. And until you see what he’s done for you, all I can say is you are missing the greatest chestnut that I ever found
November 24th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
Umm, alan, how is a commandment that says “Love the Lord your God with all your heart with all your soul with all your might” not a demand?
Hint, since you are struggling: that commandment obviously is a demand.
Your statement is simply absurd, and again demonstrates that
Religion is ridiculous.
Now, as for those the filthy and rotten things that you did that you were ashamed of, you’ve actually exposed yet another problem with religions such as Christianity. That problem is the following: Religion shifts responsibility out of the hands of the individual that did the shameful act and onto some mythical being. That is horrible; you should be shamed of those “filthy, rotten things”, rather than be allowed to offload responsibility for everything to your sky fairy.
November 24th, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Korgan
I give up you want me to be opened minded to you and your beliefs about “religion.” Still you will argue anything i say just because I am a born again child of God! you can never explain away what he did FOR me and FOR my life
I dust my shoes goodbye
November 24th, 2008 at 9:29 pm
At last: that you cannot explain what god has done for you is a point we can agree on.
Religion is ridiculous.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
**ATTENTION** My Brothers and Sisters, i give thanks for Korgan and the testing of your faith in our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Stand firm, Stand on the Rock and Hope of your Salavtion which is Christ Jesus.
If you have been tested know that others before us have been tested of their faith in Jesus.
Here is some scripture of the Love that brought you to the point in your life, for now see the truth, the truth in the Power of God and His Son.
“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved”
In 1 John 2:3-6
And hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.But whoso keepeth his word, in him verily is the love of God perfected: hereby know we that we are in him.He that saith he abideth in him ought himself also so to walk, even as he walked.
the love, the truth you have in you comes from above and the testing of this, should only reveal the love of God, Emmanuel.
November 24th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
Korgan, i am *kicking* a can and i just kicked this to you. want to play?
Korgan, a no true scotsman, interesting. I look forward to reading that story.
November 25th, 2008 at 9:48 am
hyrocket:
Can you explain why God would test Christians if he supposedly knows the end from the beginning? After all, why give the test if he already knows the outcome? Especially if the result of the test would be a failure and a push away from God. As, in my case, completely away from his religion and into non-belief? Once again, contradictory.
November 25th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Hey MarcDLS,
i appreciate your post 51.
Here is what Korgan said about you with a conversation with Lynn and shows some admiration for you in post 27 on another page(MontyPthon).
“Christianity is a threat to rational people everywhere, and long has been. That is part of why I and others are, and will remain, adamant about pointing out the obvious flaws in it. MarcDLS’s post 17 is a great example of that.”
You said,
17 ““2- the sinner must have full knowledge of what they are doing and what it entails in the eyes of God.””
“By that logic people who don’t believe in God have no fear of committing sin since they don’t believe in the thing that defines sin. If those who don’t believe in God cannot sin, they cannot be sent to hell. If they cannot be sent to hell what reason would they ever have to believe in God if such belief would then make them subject to the possibility of eternal torture imposed on them by a being who loves them. This is yet another example of how your silly little religion just doesn’t work.”
MarcDLS, “Can you explain why God would test Christians if he supposedly knows the end from the beginning? After all, why give the test if he already knows the outcome?”
This can be explained in science, with Korgans science knowledge with metals or solids.
My Friend MarcDLS, “in my case, completely away from his religion and into non-belief? Once again, contradictory.”
what is contradictory? Marc, so you’re a brother? Marc, it is nice to know that you once held to a certain religion and i can say from experience that you had no one to help you deal with the situations you were in, to be a mentor for you at a young age? Were you part of a church that did not explain scripture but lived like there was none. I can relate to you if this is the case.
intercession on a hill will i mention. i too hold a banner that says Jesus in arabic.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:54 am
It is contradictory in that according to your Bible God loves everyone and wants them to go to heaven, however if God chooses to test someone knowing he will fail it is God forcing them away. A God that claims to love his creations in one text but then through his own action/inaction forces them away is contradictory. I was a member of a Full Gospel Church. This is also known as Interdenominational. What drove me away were the many contradictions in religion. If a God hasn’t the power or the will portray himself in a consistent and coherent manner he either can’t exist or is not worthy of worship due to it’s many deceptions. I turned away when I was 18, well beyond the age of reason. That is my own fault. It should have been much younger.
December 4th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Korgan
I just thought I should let you know that the Bible has an incredible amount of evidence supporting it. It has been verified through Archeological, and historical discoveries. The Bible contains Science, locations and information that has been verified. You cant argue with the Bible once you truly discover whats in it. Please visit this Web page to view what I am talking about. I am not intending to advertise. I just want you to see the truth.
http://www.youtube.com/ciphro
December 18th, 2008 at 3:19 pm
WHAT IS SO WRONG WITH SEX????
Why is sex viewed so terribly by Christians? Why can’t we enjoy one of God’s greatest gifts??? What is so wrong with the fact that Jimmy Swaggart likes to have sex, especially considered men are biologically designed to “reproduce”?
Brother Swaggart’s mistake is that he condemned others on the same things he himself did. But let’s not lower ourselves or cloud the issues; sex is NOT BAD PEOPLE!!!!!!!!!!!!
We should be upset with him for violently attacking others and not following the Lord; soft, peaceful, yet strong leadership.
December 20th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
post 55 -tavis -you’re an idiot! i am saying this in french.
March 19th, 2009 at 9:42 pm
I have read most of the posts. Let all those that condemn beware! Some of the same ones that condemned Jimmy have fallen in the same sexual trap. I love Jimmy and JSM Ministries; they have weathered a storm like many of us will never see.
1 Cor 10:12 Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.
It could happen to you or me… I pray not!
Norman
March 19th, 2009 at 10:40 pm
Hello Norman, so what then… what should we do what should we put our focus on? who? help the brethren to understand your thinking?!
April 16th, 2009 at 9:31 am
Just so everyone knows, Ruth B. is not a christian. everyone who’s reads these comments, please please please do not read anything from Ruth B. This person should never use the word “christian” in reference with their self. Ruth said “I EVEN FEEL BAD TO SAY I AM A CHRISTIAN”, well i have news for you…you’re not.
April 16th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Jesse, go read about the No True Scotsman fallacy, and come back when you understand it.
Religion is for the stupid, the ignorant, and the gullible, and for those who would profit from them.
May 4th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
salam
does some one remember his debat with el-chiek ahmed deedat when de made a joke on islam when he said christianity allowed me one woman so i have to choose one wife and i should to take the best!
June 3rd, 2009 at 11:42 am
This is to all the people that think Brother Jimmy Swaggart is still a wrong man. Before you send him to hell in your heart ask yourself have i messed up, have i done wrong somewhere in my lifetime? I believe you will say yes. So, first you need to look at yourself and see whats wrong with yourlife. At least this man is trying to serve God and still preaching the word of God. While you sit there and judgeing him he is still preaching the word of God. I am a preacher myself and i mess up somethimes too. I am far from perfect just like brother Jimmy. So to the ones that are worrying about Jimmy, worry about yourself because your a human just like he is.
June 3rd, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Another example of man messing up religion, faith and ultimately spirituality.
Someone who goes to church and daydreams of fishing is religious.
Someone who goes fishing and talks to God (insert Higher power here if you like) is spiritual.
June 3rd, 2009 at 4:03 pm
If he stood to loose millions of dollars of course he’d repent.[for being caught]. Strange how unfullfilling the ‘American dream’ is, that makes Americans so superstitious.
June 25th, 2009 at 3:07 pm
[...] Jimmy Swaggart was involved with a prostitute at a Metaire, Louisiana, and hotel called the Travel Inn on Airline [...]
June 26th, 2009 at 9:51 am
This is madness. Anybody wishing to copulate with a kidnapped, mesmerized and raped female, that lives in an unconscious state of mind and therefore is to be legally an morally considered a sexual slave,is just a mad man.
If this is not enough in legal and moral terms, prostitutes are in a such confusional metal state of mind, thta they barely wahs themselves, and hell knows what they are capable to do when they are alone that it is just disgusting.
In conformity of these two logical evidences, the man is to be considered clinically mentally insane becosue of lack of elementary mental power in order to be disgusted and repelled by prostitution and other forms of criminally insane kinds of abuses on unaware children.
July 11th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
anyone who mocks jimmy swaggert will answere to God for their acuzations. he is one of the few ministers that are preaching Christ cruxfied and the blood.
July 11th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
“Waaa-waaa-waaaa, you’re making fun of the man I look up to cause I am so pathetic that I need a hero!”
Fuck off, ass-hat.
July 27th, 2009 at 8:54 pm
Pride & arrogancy runs in the family: I mean, look how blatantly arrogant Jerry Lee Lewis is! Let’s review the facts.
1. In 1986, Jimmy Swaggart was responsible for the fall of “preacher” Marvin Gorman (for having sexual affair with a married woman he was counseling).
2. In 1987, Jimmy Swaggart was responsible for the fall of “preacher” Jim Bakker…. Jimmy Swaggart said on Larry King Live, that “he (Bakker) is a cancer to the body of Christ and a cancer needs to be excised (cut out).” (NEVER have I seen any proof that Swaggart apologized to Bakker, after getting caught for the same thing shortly after.)
3. In 1987. JS was caught leaving hotel with whore Debra Murphy (may have spelled her name wrong?).
4. For 4 months he said he was going to confess; however, do you know when he confessed? Feb of 1988, the day after the story broke.
5. Then, he wrote a book (which I have) about how poor Jimmy was wrong but now he’s better…Which you can’t even find now (since his 2nd episode happened after the book was written).
6. Assemblies of God elders (National) gave him the exact punishment (discipline) that any other prominent leader would have gotten and Jimmy knew this was their code all the years he paraded under their name (which is one year stepping down).
7. Still, no apology to the other two fuckers he exposed (Gorman/Bakker), he gets caught again 3 years & eight months later with another whore. This time, the cousin Jerry Lee (arrogance) really comes out in him as he boldly tells his congregation (concerning his tryst), “God told me it was flat none of your business.” I’d love to screw his wife and then throw the same line of defense to him. The arrogant thing couldn’t take it then.
Think about this: Debra Murphy (whore) said “he was a regular customer” … Then he gets caught again almost 4 years later. The laws of average lead us to suspect there may have been many other times and with many other women (although these two cases are all we know of). Only God, the devil, little weasel Jimmy & possibly a host of whores know the truth.
Megastar control freaks need money, sex, worship, and most of all, NOT to take the same discipline they preach others should take if caught up in the same scandal. Let me explain: I have his 2003 Expositor’s Study Bible and it’s full of notes on adultery. You’d think a squeeky clean man of God would have written them.
How could JS really have “redeemed” himself with the public and have been believable. Why, he gives the principles in the Expositor’s Study Bible (there again, that’s not for him–but for you and me if we fall; he’s above it all!) Anyway, he could have redeemed himself by:
1. Stepping down for the entire year (regardless of whether his then present ministry collapsed or not). If God was in it, he’d rebuild that ministry again in his time.
2. Apologize (publically & privately to Jim Bakker & Marvin Gorman for exposing their sexual appetites while his hands were up a cunt at same time.
3. Never do it again (as in 1991)or else be willing to even be disciplined much stronger. (HOW CAN YOU BELIEVE SOMEONE has truly repented that won’t yield to these “TRUE SIGNS” of repentance).
He always runs to David & Bathsheba: David ONLY DID THIS ONE TIME! Why want he go to the new testament where Paul gave qualifications to Timothy for church leaders (which were strict so the gospel they preached would be believable).
You people who say don’t judge Jimmy, Apostle Paul judged men like Jimmy (even called some dissenters by name) and even called for one fornicator to be excommunicated. So, Paul would have said to test (prove) him for a while before allowing him back into fulltime ministry. Which means, “watch him for a while & let him gain your trust again little by little….and that’s the biblical process of restoration for poor fallen creatures! (Jimmy knows the new testament instructions on this–but, remember, that ONLY applies to you and me; we aren’t as high on the totem pole as Jimmy is!)
By!
September 18th, 2009 at 12:32 am
I personaly don’t know jimmy but I have seen a muslim man by name of deedat saying alot of stuff about him
I think jimmy did cause great sin before God almighty because false prophet will go through greater condemnation
But 2000+ years ago word became flesh lived perfect life without sinning and he fulfilled the scriptures and took the sin of the world. He said who ever believe in my son will not perish but have ever lasting life..
If you repent and trust in Lord he will never forsaken you yes even jimmy.
Jesus > whole universe
because we were created for him and by him we shall be with God (only way to father is thru his son)
Amen
Peace
September 18th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
and there jcendless what you said is why your god just can’t be. no real god would need all your hoopla around a son to get the saving done. Also such being need no trust and could just make 100% belief happen. No books either required & no trust.
now define “universe”
personally you don’t know much.
September 19th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
mind cleanse…
Jimmy Swaggart - I Have Sinned ” Religious Freaks is an excellent post. But I feel it is missing on a few points….
September 21st, 2009 at 8:53 am
yeah and you are missing “on a few” words…
and stow your spamming of your website link if you cant elaborate first.
December 19th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Even people who had a righer calling like Rev. Jimmy Swaggart are vulnerable in satanic attacked and deception.I believed he has done his mission.
December 19th, 2009 at 9:58 am
a “righer calling”? Is that like a blowjob? LOL. The prostitute did her mission, anyway.
Jimmy was just another con artist selling a god fraud, nothin more. But satanic intervention, no, Jimmy’s just seling the same old fraud as any other preacher screacher.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:11 pm
That is what Christianitry is all about. Forgiveness. If any one of you readers can stand there and say you have not sinned at any time even after you were saved, then throw a stone at him. God forgives everyone if they ask and turn away from their sin. Just because someone is born again, doesn’t mean they are perfect from then on. We fail from time to time. The guilt tears us up and that is why we do not continue in it. Satan is always out there, waiting to see who will give in to his temptations.Jesus is the only One who never committed any sin. Jimmy Swaggart is an anointed teacher. I forgive him. And guess what? So did his wife and family.
January 6th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
and there lies the true terror of christianity. You can do just about anything and be forgiven on a drop of a hat.
It does not really matter if you are a mass murderer, rapist or any other sort of criminal or merely just unpleasent person who merely does lipservice to the faith until one is acught, fears of being caught or any other fear rises its ugly head.
Just drop on your knees, say few lines and start anew, you are saved and your sins are washed away.
People who actually believe this all are truly scary as hell as they have a carte blanche to do their worst and then just ask forgivance and all is good again.
Luckily, justice system does not seem to follow such chain of thought.
January 10th, 2010 at 12:13 pm
When speaking of and about the Lord please don’t forget to be respectful. I have read most of the posts and there are many opinions, but that is mostly what they are just opinions….. please give opportunity to take some of the scripture posted and read it. It may make clarifaction for you.. Let’s all not forget that Jimmy, whether you follow him or not, is a Godly man… What he did was very wrong, but the Lords judgement is awaiting him, as is all of us…. Satan rears his ugly head through many of us who let him… Salvation continues to be the only way to Heaven and being able to spend eternity with Him…. Let’s not lose focus of what truly matters…. I will leave you with one question.. how many of you have witnessed to someone about Christ? Use your time wisely and remember it is limited….
January 10th, 2010 at 1:13 pm
And lets not forget that the lord that needs this respect wants to kill my friends, says that rape is ok as long as you are not caught and even then just marry the woman.
The same lord who thinks it is ok to sell your daughter to slavery if you are short on cash. Who thinks it ok to kill your children if they dare to oppose you in word or deeds.
and lets us not forget his hatred of shellfish, hairdressers and modern textiles.
It also bears repeating that this lord whom we are to respect himself raped a girl. To sacifice himself to himself to forgive people who he first doomed to be able to commit rape later.
Respect? I think, not.
January 13th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
Re; Post 79 ??????????? Jagannath, what in the world …?
You are so wrong dude, so UTTERLY wrong.
You said : “this lord whom we are to respect himself raped a girl.”
God was engaged in worthy pursuits and would not resort to having sex with ants ;)
God does not want or need sex; neither would the redeemed who will be in heaven need or want it.
He was engaged in worthy pursuits such as taking the penalty you deserve so that you can have a shot at eternal life.
Jagannath, I expected better from you! Korgan is scared and that’s why he ’s irrational and he clings to nonsensical teachings but you ain’t scared and therefore you should be more rational.Please don’t follow crazy ol’ Korgan and those dudes over at that annotated bible web site.You really should quit reading that nonsense you know cuz by beholding you become changed and next thing you know, bam! we have Korgan #2 throwing “mantrums” all over the place :(
Sorry Jag, that was a lil’ lecture; you know from experience how I get when I’m defending false claims about my Jesus ;)
January 13th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Re: Post 77
Jag said: “and there lies the true terror of Christianity.”
Only for those who misconstrue its teachings.
Look my friend, even amongst some proponents of Christianity there are misconceptions in regard to the true teachings of the bible.
*sigh*, God has been grossly misrepresented all throughout the ages. Alas, He will be misrepresented till the end of this ol’ world. However, the TRUTH WILL triumph!!!
Now, you do NOT understand the Christian concept of forgiveness.
I’ll get back to this in a minute.
Jag said : “People who actually believe this all are truly scary as hell …”
I’m glad you acknowledge that hell will be “scary” ;) See? that’s why I don’t want you to end up there. Oh my friend, I chose not to tell you more about hell as yet cuz you won’t understand the concept of it cuz you’re misconstruing the basic teachings of Christianity. Therefore, how will you understand about hell?
Jag, I hope you’re not annoyed that I didn’t take you to hell? lol
I mean in our forum over in “Catholic School Girls In Trouble”? lol
…………………………………………………
Jag said :”Luckily, justice system does not seem to follow such chain of thought.”
I’m glad we both agree that there should be a separation of church and state :) You’re absolutely right! let the civil authorities and the judicial system deal with crimes and laws of the land and let the church worry about pointing people to the One that the crimes are ultimately against, and i.e. the creator God and owner of us ALL.
………………………………………………….
OK, about God’s forgiveness (grace); Dick Innes summed it up pretty nicely. He said:
“Justice is when we get what we deserve.
Mercy is when we don’t get what we deserve.
But grace is when we get what we don’t deserve.”
Rom.6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God could have wiped out Adam and Eve and not given them and the rest of us a chance to live and a chance to live for eternity at that, but God is good and gracious so He did not do that. He took the penalty that we deserve, he took the curse upon Himself so we can gain eternal life with Him. Those sins that Jesus took upon Himself are eventually gonna be transferred to the devil but those humans who REFUSE the free gift of salvation will consequently be destroyed with the devil and his angels; they will have to pay the penalty for their own sins :(
You know something Jag? Christianity does teach that : Justice delayed is NOT justice denied. God is longsuffering (2 Peter3:9); vengeance is His (Rom. 12:19 “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but [rather] give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance [is] mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”).
God will repay and that’s a promise! He,s just giving people chances so that they can repent, i.e. sincere sorrow and turning away from sins. This lesson is clearly depicted in the bible, the bible is replete with lessons about God’s grace and longsuffering.
For instance, Manasseh was one of Israel’s wickedest kings, they suffered tremendously under his rulership and for a very long time too; do you know that Manasseh will be resurrected when Jesus returns and he will inherit eternal life? Manasseh sincerely repented and God accepted him. I could just imagine Manasseh and Isaiah being reunited; Manasseh had Isaiah the prophet sawn in half. When they see each other Isaiah might say something like “So, you made it; I did not die in vain” or some sort of such :D
Christians should NOT commit the sin of presumption cuz God is gracious, they could die before they repent and consequently be lost or they could destroy the eternal life of others by their influence.
God is fulfilling His promise to Abraham, that is that he (Abraham) would [indirectly] be a father to many nations; from our vantage point it seems to be taking a long time for God to get enough folk to fulfill that promise, people are rebellious and therefore they don’t want God. The people of this world and the devil and his minions are the only ones that are sorta atheistic in their thinking; They don’t “need” God, don’t need God indeed [sarcasm], that’s why this planet is so messed up!
………………………………………………………………..
Mic. 7:18,19 God willingly pardons.
Heb. 8:12 God remembers our sins no more.
Acts3:19 He blots out our transgressions.
1Jn.1:9 He freely forgives.
Isa.44:22 God will not remember our sins.
Ps32:1 Forgiveness brings happiness.
Isa.55:7 God abundantly pardons.
Neh.9:17 Even in our rebellion, He is a God ready to pardon.
Col.1:14 Forgiveness is rooted in the very character of God.
Ps.103:3 God’s forgiveness is complete. He forgives all our iniquities.
Lk.7:47 He forgives our many sins.
Eph.4:32 WE FORGIVE ONE ANOTHER BECAUSE HE HAS FORGIVEN US.
2 Cor. 2:7,9 To be Christlike is to forgive.
P.S. If anyone wants to know more about human to human forgiveness, read Corrie Ten Boom’s writing sometime :)
January 13th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. Piss off for good.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
>i>Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:38 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. Piss off for good.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:42 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. Piss off for good.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:43 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 14th, 2010 at 9:15 am
The Reason Project has launched!
Here’s some fantastic news to fling in the face of the latest nonsensical Allycrap spew, and the rest of the absurdity that the religious wingnuts have been flinging this way lately:
http://www.reasonproject.org
The Reason Project is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. Drawing on the talents of some of the most prominent and creative thinkers across a wide range of disciplines, The Reason Project seeks to encourage critical thinking and wise public policy through a variety of interrelated projects — all with the purpose of eroding the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.
The Advisory Board for the project includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Pinker, Salman Rushdie, and Steven Weinberg. Frankly, these are some of my heroes, in some cases for the brave stances they have taken against religious idiocy and bigotry from the Ally’s of the world.
Donations can be made via the Reason Project website above. Please support this truly great project.
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
January 23rd, 2010 at 4:58 am
Yeah.. he confessed his sins in front of the public. then was caught again in 1991.