NPR had a great show on yesterday about an evangelical Christian group called the Christian Embassy and it’s ties to the Pentagon. The issue was raised when a video surfaced showing several key military and civilian players at the Pentagon endorsing the Christian group. This may sound like a yawner, but I managed to find the video and I honestly have to say that I’m rather shocked.
The video clearly shows several Pentagon officials endorsing Christianity and admitting that it guides their decision making process. Words can’t even begin to describe the video. One Senior Executive, Judy Guenther, breaks down in tears talking about how Jesus died just for her and saved her from a life of sin. Do you want her making decisions that quite possible effect the entire globe? I sure don’t!
Take a look and watch the entire video. Near the end you’ll even see Republican Congressman Gresham Barrett of South Carolina burst into tears. Good God man!
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- Next Generation Of Religious Freaks
- Freaks at the workplace
- Religious Freaks Slogan Survey!
- Religious Freaks Rises From The Ashes!
I officially give up – when can the non-believers start colonizing Mars.
I’m not surprised by this and I’m not really that concerned. It’s really no secret that a lot of government officials consider themselves Christian and claim that Christian principals influence their decision. Even Clinton said similar things. It’s mostly just talk.
Also the term “Senior Executive” is a bit misleading. There are hundreds of Senior Executives just at the Pentagon. In the entire Senior Executive Service there are over 6,000 Senior Executives serving in different areas of US Government. So if a couple dozen of them want to have bible study, it’s not that big of a deal.
As for Judy:
Judith A. Guenther serves on the Army Secretariat as the Director of Investment for the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army (ASA) for Budget. She was assigned to this position in July 1999. She serves as the principal advisor to the Deputy ASA for budgetary policies and issues involving Army investment resources (including procurement, research and development, military construction and family housing).
Source: http://www.asafm.army.mil/secretariat/bios/Guenther.asp
She chooses whether the military is going to use Goodyear or Michelin, and what food service company is going to make meals in army mess halls. She in in charge of implementing portions of the budget, but she does not write the budget. Not exactly “making decisions that quite possible effect the entire globe.”
Shit.
Reagan based some of his decisions on Astrology.
“my first priority is my faith in god then my family THEN my country”
WTF
Some woman in the movie states: â€he died on the cross for me personallyâ€
Ok, can anybody please explain this for me?
How does jesus dying on a cross help anybody in any way, is there some hidden zero sum game in the bible that I haven’t seen? OK, here you have this one guy that experience something really shitty, so since he endured that we are all in the free because…why?? Sorry I don’t get it. Another thing, jesus is supposed to have given the ultimate sacrifice….What?? According to the bible he is the almighty God for crying out loud (or at least his son) so why should something as trivial as giving up his physical form be any problem at all, and BTW he didn’t even sacrifice that, he was resurrected after 3 days so what kind of sacrifice is this??? On top of that he didn’t even go through it with a straight face, one should think that this power guru could endure some earthly pain without blaming God, but nooooo… he even abandons his belief on that cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?†So why do Christians insist its all a matter of faith, when even his “one true son†turns on away in his time of need??
OK, ill stop rambling now….
The general idea (that varying in degree depending on sect) is that all sin must be paid for by punishment. However, the punishment can be done to a proxy, if the proxy happens to be Jesus. In the Garden, Jesus became a proxy for all past and future sins, and suffered pain for them so bad that he bled from every pore. Only Jesus could be the proxy because only someone Divine could possibly have enough love and willpower to atone for all the sins of mankind. So yes, it’s a hidden zero sum game.
The “ultimate sacrifice” thing gets explained 3 different ways depending on who you ask. 1. The ultimate sacrifice was the atonement in the Garden. See above. 2. The ultimate sacrifice was dying on the cross in a humiliating manner to demonstrate that the world is wicked enough to attempt to kill God. 3. The ultimate sacrifice was separating himself from the presence of God to come to Earth. (This view is less common, but you hear it from people who believe that Hell is the permanent separation of a person from God’s presence.)
All three of those reasons have nothing to do with losing his body, so the resurrection question isn’t that relevant.
The people who believe #2 about would point to the fact that he was choosing not to use divine power to manage the pain, and God also did not supply him with any. The reasoning is that he had to suffer pain as a man in able to truly take on the pain and sins of mankind.
Disclosure: I am an ex-Mormon and now an Atheist.
Thank you for a thorough answer to my question. It makes no sense to me but I guess it makes sense to believers.
BTW: I would love to hear your story, you being a ex-mormon, maybe gasmonso could open a thread somewhere where people leaving such groups could tell their story (or would this be to personal?).
Anyway, let’s hope that the courts around the world don’t start to practice this type of law. I would hate to be appointed as a proxy :)
I really hope this is just a propaganda video for naive fundies. It would be too shocking if it werer real.
NewOne, I agree… there needs to be an outlet for people who have seen the light. Recently I asked if I should add a forum and more readers said yes than no.
I will probably set up a nice little forum section and this would be a great place for people like Andrew to share their story.
Of course, I guarantee religious people who converted from Atheism will share theirs as well :)
More on that in an update this afternoon!
gasmonso
NewOne: I’m game. I am an ex-Mormon myself, although my story is probably not too different from anyone leaving any of the Christian faiths. Most of the progression is in my blog. When I first started I was still faithful and over the course of the last year I have progressed into the atheist you see here today.
BTW: Andrew, were you Mormon born and raised or a later convert? I was raised Mormon, even did a mission, and I always find it interesting to see why others left.
Hey, why don’t I get any recognition? I was born and raised a southern baptist and kicked the god habit to become an atheist! Not that it was a huge accomplishment, since I, to this day, fail to understand how anyone with an IQ greater than that of oatmeal can actually believe all that god nonsense. But I digress, where is my hero cookie?!?
Oh on the topic at hand. Na, doesn’t make me fear one bit. The world has survived this long ruled by religious freakazoids, and likely will be for a looooong time to come since people seem to have this need to have SOMETHING make them feel like they are something special. Actually loved by a omnipotent being. One that sits on their shoulder and guides their pathetic little lives like some kind of driver. If that makes them feel better than me, so be it. I know the truth and don’t need Allahbuddahjehovahgodzeusthor to tell me.
I was born Mormon, did a Mission in Hungary, and left the church a few years after. I’ve talked about parts of it in different threads.
Hmm… Maybe if I had Mormons coming into my workplace EVERY FREAKIN DAY to have Book of Mormon study with me I wouldn’t have left… Where’s the “Mormon Embassy” or for that matter the “Jewish Embassy” and “Muslim Embassy?” Do these groups not care about the souls in the Pentagon or is the “Christian Embassy” getting special treatment?
Michael: Here is your cookie. (:.) Chocolate chip I believe. Seriously though, I can totally agree with the oatmeal IQ remark. That said, I spent almost 27 years believing that nonsense. Suddenly I feel dumber…
Andrew: Did mine in the exotic region of Dayton, Ohio… boring but at least I could eat the food. One of my buddies did Korea and nearly starved to death. Something about wanting his food dead BEFORE he ate it…
ok, to drag this back on topic…
I was rather shocked by the same thing as Rickler up there.
“”“my first priority is my faith in god then my family THEN my country—"
excuse me? so, instead of doing your job, you’re just going to do whatever you feel like? Hmmmm, i’d get fired if I said that.
Now, I don’t give a **** about whatever superstition anyone chooses to follow, as long as it doesn’t impair their ability to function, both on your job as well as in society. Putting ‘god’ before whatever you’re supposed to be doing should get you fired.
“”Dayton, Ohio… boring but at least I could eat the food. One of my buddies did Korea and nearly starved to death. Something about wanting his food dead BEFORE he ate it…”"
try being a vegitarian…have fun surviving in most of the land-locked states. (or central europe for that matter)
Alcari:I have to agree, although if you had asked me that during my religious years I’d have chosen God over any job. One of the downsides of dealing with the brainwashed is their inability to see said brainwashing.
The “God then family then job” mantra is really just a cliché. I’m sure everyone in the SES works 40 hours a week, spends less than 10 hours with their family (watching TV doesn’t count, in my opinion), and spends 5 hours tops doing religious activities.
It’s easy to say, “If God told me to quit my job I would.” It’s easy because God doesn’t exist so he’ll never ask you that. Now family over job I understand, and I know there are people out there who quit there jobs to take car of sick family or to relocate because of their spouse’s career.
Side note: I live in Ohio. Was Yellow Springs part of the Dayton Mission? I ask because the strangest thing I ever ate was in Yellow Springs. Madagascar hissing cockroach. It tasted kind of like liver.
Andrew: Dayton was actually in the Columbus mission but I spent my entire time in and around Dayton including Beaver Creek, Xenia, and Fairborn (little Kentucky). Yellow Springs was one area I didn’t get to.
As to the “If God told me to I would quit my job thing”, I quit more than one job over persecution for being Mormon in a strongly Baptist/Catholic community. The moment I said I was Mormon most want me sent out on a rail.
This is just plain disgusting. Would Jesus work in The Pentagon?
Remind me that this country was built upon the desire for the settlers to enjoy religious freedom. That also includes the right to not worship some nonsense invisible man in the sky.
These idiots who have infiltrated the authorized militia of this land need to be purged.
@ dave
Maybe you got his the wrong way around, it could be that these guys are â€soldiers†first, then men of God. It’s all about getting their hands on Gods arsenal. Just picture it. Whatever country opposing US would really be in for it.
Bush: OMG they are asking for it, call in the circle.
General: First platoon form praying circle!
/prayer circle formed/
Officer: Sir. first praying circle is ready
General: Sir, circle is ready to go.
Bush: Good, commence prayer…….muhahahaaha!!
/Target country is engulfed in fire and brimstone, while angels annihilates anyone trying to escape.
Jupp, why use conventional weapons if you can get a almighty mass murderer on your side http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/2006/08/how-many-has-god-killed.html
@gasmonso: Im looking forward to reading the stories of the people who have leaved the more obscure religious movements. I believe this will be both educational and also give these people some way of talking (anonymously) to others who have experienced something similar.
Personally I do not have any great stories about leaving any church societies, I was a casual member of the “state church†in Norway (earlier we were all automatically included at birth), during my confirmation I chose to go to a “confirmation camp†for a few days, since it was much more convenient than showing up for class every Friday for 6 months.
Anyway at this camp I took a serious bashing from the people in charge. Because I advocated Darwin in one of the first discussions at this camp, I was referred to as “monkey boy†for the rest of my stay. Wtf!! I was a young man back then and took this hard, having grown ups calling me names and really sticking it to me whenever possible. When I came back from camp I terminated my “membership†with the church and wrote a long article which I sent to the newspaper. I believe the consequences where minor for the people in question, but I felt much better after my article was printed in the newspaper, at last I had been able to get back at them in some way.
if god asked me to bang a hot, tall, blond, i totally would…
hey, there’s no proof god did anything, you can just say he did.
Now, that wouldn’t be much of a problem with the blonde (*), the real problem lies when “god tells you to invade isreal/kill all unbelievers/forbid condoms” etc
(*) yeah, i know, no need to bring it up, whatever you’re thinking, i didn’t mean it like that.
NewOne said: “he even abandons his belief on that cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?†”
Now this is a misleading representation of what this means.
Jesus was quoting a psalm(Psalm 22) with that phrase. Most believe that it was a prayer to god from him.
read the psalm: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=23&chapter=22&version=31
If you read it you will see it is almost a prophecy of the death of the messiah and the pain he will suffer for the whole world.
Disclaimer: I am Jewish by birth, Catholic by upbringing and Atheist by choice, although I am not opposed to Deism.
With religious freaks in control of the military (and the country) , it’s no surprise that Gays and Lesbians can’t serve freely in the military. How many arabic translators have been expelled from the military because they are Gay? And we need them now more than ever! What idiots the military decision makers are!
The Pentagon should start bieng time cop. The new testiment Bible verse that says “we are all together shakin together one body” has shunk by a few words in a planet wide time warp that has zapped all the Bibles on planet Earth. The wicked people at the museum where the origanal manuscript is at have blasted the books with their jet black voice patterns and smothered it. I suspect the security guard at that museum is also a suspect doing this to the Good Book. If more bible verses change magically in a time warp people should get together and relate how they origanely remember it. I dont remember that verse about the Dragen in the Book Of Revelation having ten horns and seven heads like the beast it use to say there is a “second beast”
Ok NewOne: Andrew has it pretty close. My beliefs vary slightly as I am Southern Baptist. Jesus came to Earth to pay the price for all sins. While on Earth he was both fully human and fully God. Jesus while being God’s son is also God. The three parts of the trinity(God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit) are separate but also one. Anyways as I said Jesus had to die on the cross because he was the only sacrifice that was completely perfect. One who has sinned couldn’t do it because then they would atone for only their sin. Only a perfect sacrifice could pay the price for all sin. When Jesus cried out on the cross “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he wasn’t giving up his faith he was just expressing his feelings as any human would. He was in great pain and being fully human he felt the pain just like me or you would. The resurrection actually does mean something. It is Jesus overcoming death. The one thing that no human could conquer. It shows that Jesus is all powerful and that not even death can hold Jesus back or down.
By the way feel free to trash me and say that I’m brainwashed and all that. It won’t hurt my feelings or phase me because I’ve heard it all before said straight to my face from people I’ve known my whole life.
Also just wondering when someone sneezes around you what do you say?
Also if you’d like to trash me via email or just not on here you can email me at p2ptravler@hotmail.com.
Devyn, no private addresses please. This is a public discussion and let’s keep it in the open.
Maybe you can explain why it is that your all-powerful “god” couldn’t just forgive sins and make the world right in a blink without the jesus sacrifice and all the fuss around it? ( The line some people use about needing to make man aware doesn’t pass for what is supposed to be a god.) The jesus thing seems totally unnecessary and more like just a story built around a crucifying that didn’t quite go as planned but could have happened with no actual miracle nor any divine stuff going on.
Your sneezes question might be more of a problem for what you believe than you realize. Many cultures say many things, many of those with no god reference. But why would a god “design’ us so we ever need to sneeze, or hiccup, or fart, or belch, just to cite a few examples of many? Seems like a flawed “design” if it were one. Can’t be by the god you seem to be claiming, so maybe you want to think a bit more about sneezing and other human actions and come back on that one yourself.
Netyahoo: Jesus didn’t have to die on the cross. He chose to. God could have wiped away our sin with another sacrifice but Jesus chose to be the sacrifice. Even historians believe that Jesus existed and died on the cross. The only disputed part is whether he rose again and if he didn’t rise again where is his body. I’m not believing that the disciples stole his body and hid it somewhere else. Tombs were just as sacred then as they are today. They wouldn’t have violated his resting place.
I know that no matter what I say you aren’t going to change your minds. Your hearts are too hard to listen. To you the message of the cross is foolishness. Just as it says in 1 Corinthians 1:18. I ask only one thing of you… watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e4zgJXPpI4. I pray that one day somewhere down the line you’ll feel the pull of the holy spirit and instead of ignoring it that you’ll listen to it. If you believed in God at one time he’s still there. He’s just waiting for you to turn to him once more. He’s still there waiting and loving you. He’s still knocking at the door of your heart waiting for you to let him back in. He still holds you in his hand nothing can remove you.
As for my question. It actually didn’t have anything to do with God in that moment. I simply wondered what you say.
Way to miss the point Devyn. No way can what you describe be of an omnipotent creature. “Sacrifice” when you have all the power? What a fucking ludicrous farce you believe in.
And this isn’t the place for you to spout religious drivel. Stow your bullshit preaching about your guy on a stick already.
You must be really fucking stupid to believe that jeebus crap.
“It’s nearly 2010. Fuck off with your jesus stories.”, to rougly quote someone else here. Be gone, already.
“The only disputed part” brother Devyn, stand firm in your faith and your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. Devyn, seek His word, for you have been stamped and sealed of the love of Jesus Christ.
i love Psalm 33, Praise OUR Lord & Saviour Jesus, the Son of the Living God.
verse 4 “For the word the LORD is right; and all his works are done in truth.”
hyrocket, you’ve proven in post after post that you belong in a mental institution. Now go there, be quiet, and stop bothering us.
“It’s nearly 2010. Fuck off with your jesus stories.” Be gone, already.
Wow Netyahoo: you must feel real big insulting a 19 year old college student online who has been nothing but nice to you. I have not insulted you once, even though I have wanted to. I also find it interesting that my response angered you so much. You are so angry in your latest post you didn’t even try to refute any of what I said. Could that possibly be because you couldn’t think of anything to argue with? Instead of arguing what I posted you instead start attacking me personally. Like I said interesting. Also, I don’t know if you meant to do it or realized you did but you also put “jeebus” instead of Jesus. Also somewhat interesting. In your anger you seem to have made a spelling error, which I haven’t noticed in any of your earlier posts. In regard to my intelligence level I was reading, comprehending, and writing in depth book reports on a college sophomore’s level when I was in sixth grade. For some reason I get the feeling that you feel your way of life and your beliefs are threatened by me. When it’s not really your beliefs that are under attack, mine are the ones being attacked.
Hyrocket: Thank you for your support. Actually it would be sister Devyn. I also love Psalm 33.
As I said in my last post, I pray that one day you all will open your hearts to God.
Wow, Devyn. You must not even realize how obsolete and wrong your idiotic beliefs are. Better study harder in college. Hopefully you aren’t at a bible-thumper “college”; you won’t learn much about the real world there.
Maybe try taking a basic biology class while you’re at college, too. Might open your mind and your eyes to reality and modern science a little.
Stow your pissy preaching and your sickening psalms from your book of fairy tales. Heard all that bullshit before.
Putting yourself in the same basket as hyrocket the mental case is not a great move. You are in pretty poor company with that dolt.
It’s 2009, and your beliefs are now just plain silly in the light of modern science. Guess you aren’t studying biology at college…
Devyn, the Lord will bless your efforts. You have once again planted the seed of salvation.
Don’t worry. You’re not alone here.
Just remember,
-Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake-
**But just in case you are feeling a bit weary, just remember,
-Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you-
I guess I am in need of medical attention as well. Devyn, they can put us in mental institutions if they want, we’ll just share the gospel there too. Other patients, visitors,nurses…they need salvation as well, don’t they?
Netyahoo: so you think my beliefs are idiotic and wrong and out of date. I honestly don’t care what you think. I study hard enough in fact I have A’s in most of my classes. I’m not at a “bible-thumper college” I’m at a community college to start out with. I have taken a basic biology class(took it in high school). I also took a physics class. I feel that science only proves that God exists. I mean look at the big bang theory. To me THAT is stupid. I mean one of the main principles of science is that energy can not be created or destroyed in only changes forms. Yet in the big bang theory it says that there was a bang and our solar system formed and that the bang was caused by a star exploding but it doesn’t explain where that star came from, how that star was formed. Also scientists say we evolved from apes but yet there are still apes. If we evolved from apes wouldn’t all of the apes evolved and therefore apes no longer exist? Why don’t you look up the protein Laminin. It’s a pretty interesting protein. Again with the insults. I mean is that your last resort for when you run out of things to say? You don’t see us insulting you. By the way I’m actually study elementary education. I’m going to be a teacher.
D.: thank you. I know I’m not alone. I might actually thank them for putting me in a mental institution I could use the vacation and you’re right the other patients need salvation too.
Devyn, the instance of your post gives lie to your words “I don’t care what you think”. You let out your bullshit like a true christian idiot. Congratulations, fool.
Evolution is a fact of science. As a putative future teacher, re you going to teach evolution, or deny it like so many other idiotic and stupid Christian wingnuts?
Your ignorance of evolution is mind blowing and your “argument” about existing apes is a tired and wrong one. The coming into existence of a new clade does not require the end of the ascendant species, nor does it rule out other descendants from the same ancestor.You apparently either learned nothing in bio class or you are denying what you were taught. Fuck, you’re stupid and ignorant.
Fucking Christian idiots are stuck in their primitive fairy stories and don’t have the guts to face the truth.
Fuck your stupid jesus stories; it’s nearly 2010.
“re” in the second paragraph of 37 should have been “are”. Just a typo, but regardless, the question should be clear.
Just to present a simple near-analogy to what netyahoo is trying to get across in 37, I’d like to present the following for Devyn especially to think about.
Devyn, you have parents. Your parents didn’t need to stop living after you were born, and they were likely capable of having other kids. You and your then potential or existing siblings aren’t a perfect copy of your parent DNA components in all your cells. Close, but not perfect, at least not in all cells. After many generations of mixing and imperfect copying, any sibling branch might lead to a suffiently divergent being to be a new species. Now, and this is what you need to get, the parent root and the other descendents don’t necessarily have to die (and most of the time, they just move away, certain college-age and beyond kids lingering at home excepted :-)). Their lineages may or may not continue, depending on suitability, available resources in view of competition, and so on. That’s roughly how it works, in very crude terms, although there is much more to it. It’s a very consistent and proven picture, and unfortunately for Christian folk, the evidence for evolution is solid and that evidence contradicts the bible.
netyahoo, I understand your frustration, but chill out. Devyn has only had a high school bio class, and even in the more secular UK vs. the United States, high schools tiptoe pretty carefully in presenting evolution because those people with a vested interest in religion, especially the religious authorities, are still so powerful and will try to crush and marginalize people who dare contradict the religious doctrine. You can’t be too suprised when the Devyn’s of the world are the end product of such a poor early education. But thanks to the efforts of e.g. Richard Dawkins and other courageous people who present reason and evidence, there are glimmers of hope.
“Many people will profess loudly that they do not believe in God because ‘science’ has proven that evolution explains our existence without God. But according to the NSES’ own stipulations, evolution fails the test they have put forth to qualify as true science.
In light of this, why do so many scientists, who ought to know better, blindly accept evolutionary notions of our origins, instead of at least considering the possibility of a Creator?
Science Evolution
1-Observational data Fail
2-Accurate predictions Fail
3-Logical Fail
4-Open to criticism Fail
5-Accurate information Fail
6-No presuppositions Fail
Perhaps Hebrews 11:6 is appropriate to cite in this context. It says:
And without faith it is impossible to please him, for whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who seek him.”
http://creation.com/is-evolution-scientific
……………………………….
Another thing, so called atheists keep citing violence in the bible to discourage belief in it but “… Nazism flourished in the most scientifically advanced nation on Earth, with a third of all science Nobel Prizes awarded up to that time.”
Any religion or any person who consistently goes against the creator God is evil and their ultimate allegiance is to the devil!
……………………………………………….
One type of animal CANNOT “evolve” into another kind. If evolution is true and it’s NOT, then if a fish could spring legs and become a land dweller then how come human amputees can’t will legs into existence; aren’t they supposed to have evolved and therefore be more advanced than fish?
“Richard Dawkins and other courageous people” are building their houses on the sand and when the rains and winds come, their houses are gonna fall flat!!!
P.S. Schizo dude, quit fooling around already ;)
P.P.S. Please save your ad hominems that consist of gutter language, OK?
Devyn, Darwin did in fact write that people evolved from monkeys but when the “power hungry” scientists realized that people are insulted by that, they changed their story to say humans had a “common ancestor” with the darn monkeys. I mean sheesh, monkeys are ugly :) These dishonest scientists use … Oh! let me let this gentleman say it, he was sooooooo SPUNKY!!! ——> “Millions of Christians have been intimidated by the high-sounding technical language of educated evolutionists, many of whom are vitriolic in their attacks on special creation. What we do need is more information on exposing the loopholes in the evolutionary theory; its base is so riddled with unscientific inconsistencies, often concealed under the gobbledygook of scientific jargon. ”
……………………………………
Now watch a certain someone act like a live plucked chicken again, however, I do love ‘em :)
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that asshole of a god that you worship.
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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that jerk of a god that you worship.
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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that asshole of a god that you worship.
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
Ally, fuck off and die soon.
# “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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that asshole of a god that you worship.
The absurdity of your evil 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Ally,
FUCK OFF AND DIE.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that asshole of a god that you worship.
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
Ally, piss off already.
# “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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that asshole of a god that you worship.
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
Ally, piss off already.
# “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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
Ally, piss off.
# 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap and linkspam about that asshole of a god that you worship.
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
Ally, piss off already.
# “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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
#
3915
Korgan Says:
November 7th, 2009 at 6:22 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship. 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
# “The righteous God trieth the hearts and reins.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 7:9
# “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 foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils.” (The earth is set on firm foundations and does not move — unless God blows his nose.) 18:15
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6. Uh, right.
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
Just to present a simple near-analogy to what netyahoo is trying to get across in 37, I’d like to present the following for Devyn especially to think about.
Devyn, you have parents. Your parents didn’t need to stop living after you were born, and they were likely capable of having other kids. You and your then potential or existing siblings aren’t a perfect copy of your parent DNA components in all your cells. Close, but not perfect, at least not in all cells. After many generations of mixing and imperfect copying, any sibling branch might lead to a suffiently divergent being to be a new species. Now, and this is what you need to get, the parent root and the other descendents don’t necessarily have to die (and most of the time, they just move away, certain college-age and beyond kids lingering at home excepted :-)). Their lineages may or may not continue, depending on suitability, available resources in view of competition, and so on. That’s roughly how it works, in very crude terms, although there is much more to it. It’s a very consistent and proven picture, and unfortunately for Christian folk, the evidence for evolution is solid and that evidence contradicts the bible. You can further your reading about it here:
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/evolution/what-is-the-evidence/living-evidence/index.html
and here
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=6024&page=10
and many other places.
netyahoo, I understand your frustration, but chill out. Devyn has only had a high school bio class, and even in the more secular UK vs. the United States, high schools tiptoe pretty carefully in presenting evolution because those people with a vested interest in religion, especially the religious authorities, are still so powerful and will try to crush and marginalize people who dare contradict the religious doctrine. You can’t be too suprised when the Devyn’s of the world are the end product of such a poor early education. But thanks to the efforts of e.g. Richard Dawkins and other courageous people who present reason and evidence, there are glimmers of hope.