Here’s a little something that Jagannath sent to me and I thought I’d share it with all of you :)
1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
3. Do not murder
4. Do not commit adultery
5. Do not steal
6. Do not give false testimony
7. Honor your father and mother
Today, a Christian, specifically a follower of Christ, confronted me as he quite often used that particular expression. He had heard me talk of the commandments on earlier time and this time he took his time to disagree with me in a shrill voice and flaring nostrils.
He kept disagreeing with me until the he was interrupted by the security who promptly escorted him out due his disruptive behavior. Apparently other clients of the establishment had made several complaints of his screaming and yelling, it scared the children. Truth to be told, I was not all that calm myself either as the word firebrand is quite apt in his case.
But his point could be easily condensed to two things, there are Ten Commandments in the bible and only those following them are followers of Christ. Now, my counter points were drowned by his antics but I decided to write about the commandments.
Now to me a follower of Christ is one who follows the New Testament. The Old Testament is mainly concerned of Judaism and of those that god decided to kill for one reason or another. That is the main point in my view of Christianity. You cannot follow both testaments but you have to choose or be merely religious groupie. You either follow the teachings of the Christ to be a so-called true Christian. You might disagree with the distinction, but as always it is your right.
Then to the actual commandments, the Old Testament versions are well known but those in need of a refreshment course can break open the book on Exodus 20:3-17. But are those Christian commandments or the commandments Jesus acknowledged?
I use the gospel by Matthew for references as it is most often used and frankly, the other gospels are quite alike, in a more terse form. So what is the first commandment by Jesus?
“‘Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?’ Jesus replied: ‘”Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.’”
-Matthew 22:36-40
So number one is total devotional love of God followed by love your fellow man. And those are to be the basis for all else. Jesus actually mentions the love your fellow man in more than one occasion so one can say he like that one more.
“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven.”
-Matthew 5:43-45
“So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.”
-Matthew 7:12
“Do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not give false testimony, honor your father and mother, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
-Matthew 19:19
Now the last one is other part of my reasoning for the number of commandments for Christians. It seems that Jesus followed only half of the commandments given by god, but such is the way with life, sons tend to want to improve upon the works of their fathers. Jesus told a man to keep the commandments to which the man promptly replied with a query, which? And the answer can be read above.
Clearly Jesus believed that they’re to be only five commandments worthy of following from the old set of ten. And I tend to agree, as those are good rules for all to follow, not killing, not committing adultery, not stealing, not lying and honoring parents are good rules. The one rule Jesus seemed to be quite insistent on, love your neighbor, is always a good one to follow. He was actually so insistent on that command that he even wanted Christians to love their enemies and pray for them.
So there is only seven commandments by Jesus and of those, two are by Jesus while the rest are by god but the laws of Jesus are, at least according to the man himself, the two most important laws of all. Noticeable difference being between the two sets of commandments that all the strict laws of god reverence are gone and replaced with voluntary desire to love god.
Maybe if those would be the commandments Christians would follow, I might not have so much trouble with them as I do love my seafood and rounded beard.
–Jagannath
Related posts:
- 10 Things I Hate About Commandments
- Ten Commandments Super-Sized With A Side Of Crazy
- Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda, Christ Or Antichrist?
- Jesus Christ Supercop 6
- Jesus Christ Supercop 4
Hasnt Sid entered stories on here before? or had he just given them to Gasmonso?
Fuck the jesus….
you’re idiot!!!
if your agree with your “The Seven Commandments According To Jesus Christ”
why america always distrubing other country??! keeping kill inocent people??
where’s the commandments “3. Do not murder”????!
fuck you…!!
fuck the jesus..!!!!!! -anjing sia,,,goblok..-
fuck the america!!!!!!!!!!!!
fuck the yahudi!!! they must be die….!!!!
bocah Says:
Jag is a brother? he makes it sound like he is one. whats a yahudi?
Jag welcome to our world, brother.
I have authorship privileges, but not publishing privileges. So I could submit stories directly, but gasmonso is the only one who can publish them as far as I know.
whatever bocah
yeah, jesus lovers can go fuck off and die.
but then to be fair, same goes for all the dicks who think muhummad was a cool guy
i mean for fucks sake, he was a violent, genocidal wife beating paedophile who married a 9 year old.
islam can eat as much dick as christianity ~ religion of peace my arse!
Hey Jayman, how about you quit pussyfooting around and tell us how you really feel? :)
I stand by my argument, and most of the god people that post on here stand as proof, that religion is not only the worst thing to ever happen to the human race, but will also be its ultimate downfall. If we wish to continue as a species, we MUST throw off the yoke of religion and learn to be good people, not because some invisible psychotic mass murderer in the sky will punish us, but because it is just the right thing. Empathy.
Humanism is the way forward, religion is a barbaric throwback to the bad old days. Throw away your chicken feet, bibles and holy water (god, I laugh at that every time), pull up your big boy pants. Its time the human race grew the hell up and tossed out the binky.
Just to get this straight..
“micheal hyrocket” = “hyrocket” =/= “Micheal”???
alcari Says:
Just to get this straight..
“micheal hyrocket†= “hyrocket†=/= “Micheal�??
I think you are questioning whether I am “Michael Hyrocket /hyrocket”, and the answer is an “oh my GOD, no”. I have been posting on here quite a while with just my first name. In retrospect I guess that was a bad idea. I am a semi-militant atheist, not quite up to the levels of Blasphemaster, but no one is perfect! :)
Alcari, you are right, i’ll just hyrocket, not to get confused with Michael, for he has been here long before me.
welcome mt world Michael… hahaha!
“I stand by my argument, and most of the god people that post on here stand as proof, that religion is not only the worst thing to ever happen to the human race, but will also be its ultimate downfall.”
i agree wholeheartedly (and also with the rest of your post)
in this age where we are so utterly capable of inflicting mass death, religion (with all of its championing of genocidal slaughter!) is too great a risk to be ignored or even tolerated.
while im not advocating the banning of religion or anything similar (cos not only would it not happen, but surely it wouldnt have the desired effect anyway) i think that religion needs to be regularly submitted to attack on all fronts.
and yeah, i daresay you could classify me as a humanist…
Jayman “I stand by my argument, and most of the god people that post on here stand as proof, that religion is not only the worst thing to ever happen to the human race, but will also be its ultimate downfall.â€
I find your comment interesting. When i drove in this morning, i saw people in front of a building lining up to go into a ferderal court of law. people lining up to see a federal judge, for what? that’s the question.
Sid, people are wicked and they use religion for their wicked ways. on the other you say that no religion is also the worst thing that ever happened to human race, but will also be its ultimate downfall. everyone is a killer with or without religion. the lies in human will be the ultimate down fall.
Here is a good example of religious people and not religious, in Luke 11:53-54 they want to catch Jesus in his talking, so they can bring charges against him and put him to death.
And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of many things:
Laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him.
Sid, check this video clip, reminds of what you just said and want to do.
Sid, don’t buy into a lie or a lie down the street or buy a lie in a dark ally.
sorry, that’s the chatbot in me… hahaha!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6tXsO35TQ-0&NR=1
“Here is a good example of religious people and not religious, in Luke 11:53-54 they want to catch Jesus in his talking, so they can bring charges against him and put him to death.”
Actually, it wasn’t “not religious” people who supposedly conspired to and eventually killed Jesus, it was followers of the pharisaic sect of judaism. I’m sure the “non-believers” of that time probably didn’t care what yet another whackjob was spouting on about.
“everyone is a killer with or without religion.”
I know I’m not a murderer, that sounds like a dangerous assumption to meBut religion just gives them another excuse.
It is funny how some people only remember that part, pharisees and scribes trying to get some dirt on Jesus but forget how the thing started.
Jesus was asked to dine with a pharisee who questioned why he did not wash as was customary before the meal. Jesus as any ‘polite person of religious bend’ started to insult his host and even other people present. He even went on calling them fools in contrary to his own teachings in the Matthew 5:22
The conversation most likely got somewhat heated after that (thirteen verses of insults) but yet no one seems to see nothing wrong with the actions of Jesus? Who would not get annoyed over people who start to insult you after you called them to a dinner?
What is a man who accuses others of hypocrisy while being guilty of the same act? A Politician or a religious leader?
Hello hyrocket,
What a sad way to view your fellow people. Almost every person I’ve ever met is not wicked. Indeed, I find that most people are mostly good. When I do see wickedness, it’s often a product of circumstance, not some innate state of human wickedness.
I don’t think that was me. I don’t presume to know the worst thing to ever happen to humanity. I consider religion to be, on balance, bad for the human race, but not likely the worst.
The video you linked was cute, but irrelevant.
So, I watched the clip and what was the idea?
Any believer of supernatural concept wants to turn you into one also?
I was the person that made the comment that you quoted. How does this in any way relate to what I said? The law of man supercedes the law of god. If you disagree, go stone to death the next kid that disrespects his or her parents, and see what happens.
Again, complete nonsense. Humans are not inherently wicked. They ARE inherently selfish, but that is the result of evolutionary pressures and biology. This behavior can be, and most often is, mitigated through upbringing. No, god is not how people become good people. Their parents teaching them right from wrong, within the context of the society they are a part of, is how it happens. God is not in any way required for this process. It just so happens that most people are still a bit superstitious and like to involve fairies and unicorns in their children’s upbringing.
The rest of this comment is just tossed out, you can not use the bible to prove anything. The bible itself is the object in question. I don’t believe THE Jesus ever existed as depicted in the bible. There may have been a Jesus, and there probably were many, but the events of his life in the bible are almost assuredly false. Can I start trying to make points to you by quoting from that most only of books: The Lord of the Rings?
irishthunder:
The problem is, many god people believe that if you aren’t of their particular sect, then you ARE a non-believer.
God people have a long history of dangerous assumptions, just look at the Salem witch burnings. How many innocent women were horribly tortured and murdered in the name of the christian god? How about the Crusades? The Inquisition?
God people, are you tired of that coming up every time? Well stop glossing over it and admit that YOUR people have done some of the most horrific, despicable, and evil things in the name of YOUR psychopathic mass murderer in the sky.
Your site is refreshing! I accidentally commented on your Feb. ’07 post today and figured you probably wouldn’t find it. So to sum it up: Thanks for the Thanksgiving pic from Nov. ’06(I think it will make a nice post for the weekend-I’m going to “borrow” it–save and re-post)
you guys did a great job and a wondeful explaination. It is easy to stand where you stand and to me that is wonderful. I Do Believe in Jesus and that’s where we differ. I am grateful for all your post. i copied and pasted your post below and in them-to me i find the answer.
Art thou the Christ? tell us. ANd he said unto them, if I tell you, ye will not believe: And if I also ask you, ye will not answer me, nor let me go. Hereafter shall the SOn of man sit on the right hand of the power of God.(luke 22:67-69)
Then said Pilate to the chief priest to the people, I find no fault in this man Luke 23:4( you can say this about all killings in the name of God-christians killings- to the people i find no fault)
And when Herod saw Jesus, he was exceeding glad: for he was desirous to see him of a long season, because he had heard many things of him; and he [hoped] to have seen some miracle done by him. then he questioned with him in many words; but he answered him nothing.
Pilate, examined him before you, have found no fault in this man touching those things whereof ye accuse him. No, nor yet Herod. Pilate therefore, willing to release Jesus, spake to them.
But they cried, saying, Curcify him, crucify him.
(Jesus Christ foretells his resurrection in luke 18:31-33).
Guys, i just put these verses for it relates to what you posted- that’s all.
Michael,Jag,Sid,Irish,Jayman,Alcari & Simon,RRock,Simon,Katie, Bios and Gasmanso… Happy Thanksgiving, I hope you guys have a great day with your Family and friends!
can share this one verse with you in Luke 17:16 And fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks ans he was a Samaritan… this is me:)
I don’t believeI don’t believeI don’t believeI don’t believeI don’t believeI don’t believeI don’t believe
The rest of this comment is just tossed out, you can not use the bible to prove anything. The bible itself is the object in question. I don’t believe THE Jesus ever existed as depicted in the bible. There may have been a Jesus, and there probably were many, but the events of his life in the bible are almost assuredly false. Can I start trying to make points to you by quoting from that most only of books: The Lord of the Rings?
YOUR psychopathic mass murderer in the sky.
They ARE inherently selfish, but that is the result of evolutionary pressures and biology. This behavior can be, and most often is, mitigated through upbringing. No, god is not how people become good people. Their parents teaching them right from wrong, within the context of the society they are a part of, is how it happens. God is not in any way required for this process. It just so happens that most people are still a bit superstitious and like to involve fairies and unicorns in their children’s upbringing.
I know I’m not a murderer, that sounds like a dangerous assumption to meBut religion just gives them another excuse
The law of man supercedes the law of god. If you disagree, go stone to death the next kid that disrespects his or her parents, and see what happens.
God people have a long history of dangerous assumptions, just look at the Salem witch burnings.
Does anyone else find hyrocket’s last post completely unfathomable? I have to wonder if he was actually trying to say anything at all, or just wasting time at work.
Most of his posts are all too similar to the latest one, it is getting hard to differentiate between god-bot and jesus-bot.
Cleansing the world of idiocy with offensive posts on a website. That would make the world a much better place, especially when you compare this noble cause with missionaries who are actually carrying out humane work in developing countries. How insignificant.
I’d like to propose making a section on RF just for comments such as Rob’s. These nearly content-free comments are mostly aimed at insulting gasmonso and/or other commenters. Also, 90% of the time, the authors of such comments never return to read rebuttals thus responding is generally a waste of time. For example, I refrained from responding to this recent gem for just that reason.
What do you think we should call this section, if created?
Well Sidfaiwu, I guess we could make a section called, “gasmonso Fan Site”. I could put my death threats in there as well ;)
gasmonso
I actually believe that having a section for those messages is useless as the hit-and-run trolls are just that, indirect flame-bait which has atrocious hit-miss ratios.
I find these comments interesting…
Internets Says:
Nick Vujicic, A Miracle of God?
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:28 am
Another disgruntled atheist who’s so jealous that someone with fewer resources than he has actually influencing more people than him…
Good luck on your noble quest, sir.(post 276)
Sid,”I refrained from responding to this recent gem for just that reason.”
(from internets comments ans Gasmonso article, on Nick Vujicic, A Miracle of God?
Rob,”Cleansing the world of idiocy with offensive posts on a website.”
*Gasmonso*, are you going to create one? “I could put my death threats in there as well ;)”
“I think that on the balance the moral influence of religion has been awful. With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.” -Steven Weinberg
Y’shua was the word.
My greatest concern is that most christians (of which “jesus” was not) don’t neccesarily want to worship jesus so much as they want to be jesus.
to have that written down is a great privlage as we are blessed with the lord jesus christ and with that amazing blessing our “World” is turned in side out and we are reborn to be as he would want us to be…isnt it strange that we judge his love for us …but how he does not judge our love for him i say? and threw that i leave you with that question?
It is said that :”Great minds contemplate the significance of existence.” and it is obvious that the author of this article has a great mind because he’s contemplating about the commandments which are basically a summary of God’s character and God is responsible for our existence.
Mr. Jagannath wrote: “Now to me a follower of Christ is one who follows the New Testament. The Old Testament is mainly concerned of Judaism and of those that god decided to kill for one reason or another. That is the main point in my view of Christianity. You cannot follow both testaments but you have to choose or be merely religious groupie.”
I strongly disagree with this pov though.
Great minds Need the help of the Holy Spirit to help them understand scripture ;)
The bible is its own expositor and the bible says : 2 Timothy 3:16 ALL scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness:”
“ALL” means in toto, not a jot or tittle should be added or taken away from it! See Deut.4:2; Prov. 30:5,6; Rev.22:18,19 as well as John 10:35; Isa.40:8;55:11; Jer. 23:28.
Through the help of the Holy Spirit one is able to decipher which portions are for doctrine, which parts are for reproof, which parts are for correction, or which parts are for instruction in righteousness (ya know, like not making the mistakes of the people in both testaments who maybe lied or stole or murdered others etc.?), or which parts are combos of 2 or more of those principles.
Verse 17 of 2 Timothy 3 sums up the purpose of the WHOLE of scripture :17That the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto ALL good works.
Jag said: “The Old Testament is mainly concerned of Judaism …”
Yes, the Jews had a prominent part in bringing the Messiah into the world but God is concerned about MANKIND.
Besides, Abraham was not even Jewish, he was Chaldean. Salvation has been and is open to EVERYONE. It just so happens that Abraham by FAITH, was the one that accepted the invitation to follow God’s will.
Galatians 3:27-29 says:There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
AND N.B. Jesus is the subject of the entire bible. See 1 Peter1:7-11; John 8:56 <– He (Jesus) uses the name of Deity “I AM” [see Exodus 3:14]; John 8:42; John 17:5; and in Micah 5:2 there’s a prophecy about Jesus.
…………………………………………..
Matthew 22:36-40 is a summary of ALL the commandments.
‘”Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” This is the first and greatest commandment.
<— This is a summary of the 1st 4 commandments;
And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” <—this is a summary of the last 6 commandments.Ya know if you love your neighbor (neigh brother) you WON”T disrespect/disobey (parents,elders etc.) or kill them or cheat on ‘em (commit adultery), you won’t steal their stuff, you won’t lie to or on them and you won’t covet anything that belongs to ‘em. See? Love your neighbor as yourself is a summary of all of those cuz if people don’t do bad things to each other it enhances relationships and it makes everyone HAPPY :)
When the commandments were codified, by God’s own hand, mind you, they were written on two tables of stone. One should be able to follow the 1st 4 commandments according to the dictates of ones conscience.
The last 6 commandments are concerned with morality and the morals of Christianity and the Judeo-Christian ethic must influence government because they are foundational morals for any society; otherwise we would have bedlam!
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. 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
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
If you throw out the OT how would you know what this means : John 3:14 14″And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up:”
What literal and spiritual lesson is to be learned here huh; what happened with Moses and the serpent?
or wouldn’t one want to know about Cain when they read this: 1 John 3:12 (KJV) 12Not as Cain, who was of that wicked one, and slew his brother. And wherefore slew he him? Because his own works were evil, and his brother’s righteous.
BTW one of the commandments that Cain broke was one of the ones that the rich young ruler you cited in Matthew 19:19 broke, they were both covetous, both of them did not love their neigh brother.
Dude, that rich young ruler was a hypocrite! Jesus tested him and it EXPOSED his hypocrisy that’s all.That rich young ruler committed a sin of omission —–> James 4:17 Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.
He did not want to help his POOR neighbors. Also, if the narrative is read in context, you see that Jesus said that “…there is none good but one, that is, God: ” so if that rich young ruler was indeed putting God first which is the greatest commandment, he would have obeyed Jesus.
Ha! hypocrisy exposed!!!! God can read hearts and that ruler was self-righteous AND self-deceived and the test Jesus gave him showed up his TRUE self.
… AND check this! In Matthew 9 there is an ACTED PARABLE or story of “The Woman with the Issue of blood.” Without the OT God’s people would not be able to understand this parable and thereby have hoooope! :D
Matthew 9:20,21 20And, behold, a woman, which was diseased with an issue of blood twelve years, came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment:
21For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole.
In the bible a woman can represent a church or God’s bride (see Isa.54:6, Rev. 19:7). The issue of blood means she has no relationship with her husband (Jesus) and therefore she has no children (converts), (see Lev15:25-27; Isa. 54:5,6)
The woman came behind Jesus which is the place for sin, “behind us” (see Gen.19:17,26; Mat. 16:23.)
By faith that woman (church) reached out and touched the hem or border of Jesus’ garment. The hem represents the 10 commandments (see Num.15:38,39).
Jesus’ garment represents His righteousness (see Rev.19:7,8; Zec. 3:3,4). That woman (church) got down on her knees — which represents humility — and touched Jesus. “Touched” in the concordance it means to attach oneself to.
By touching the hem of Jesus’ garment she was made whole. In the concordance, “whole” means safe to save.
I tell ya, the bible is REPLETE with these OBJECT lessons and when one starts to understand it, it makes one oooooh and ahhhhhh and woooooooow all over the place! :D The bible gives lots and lots of hope. It is God’s love letter to His BRIDE. God lets us know how much He loves us through His word. He lets us know that this world is soooooo TEMPORARY and this sin thing needs to be purged out before we could meet the rest of His creatures.
Um, sorry, I went all preachy :)
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Jag said: “Jesus actually mentions the love your fellow man in more than one occasion so one can say he like that one more.”
Um, Jesus kept stressing that cuz: 1 John 4:20 (KJV)
20If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?
GOD DOES NOT WANT ANY TIMESERVERS, people tend to follow God for only what they could get. If one treats his fellow man lovingly, even his enemies, it tends to be because they love God first. If one treats their fellow man like crap it’s cuz they don’t have an abiding relationship with God.
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Jag said: “Now the last one is other part of my reasoning for the number of commandments for Christians. It seems that Jesus followed only half of the commandments given by god,”
Not true, Jesus never sinned. Sin is the transgression of the law i.e. the 10 commandments. (see 1 John 3:4). Besides, Jesus is the one that wrote them in the first place. (See John 1:1; 1John 5:7). The trinity is like the fingers of a hand separate and yet one with the hand. The Godhead, all three entities are ONE in purpose, mind and character.
1John 4:10 10Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.<—– Only a SINLESS person could save us.
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Jag said: “…but such is the way with life, sons tend to want to improve upon the works of their fathers.”
LOL, too cute Jag, too cute but sooooooo NOT true.
Jag said: “So there is only seven commandments by Jesus …”
Nope, all 10 are STILL binding; Matthew 5:17 (KJV)
17Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. Fulfil meaning to bring it into fruition or to magnify it:)
Jag said:” Noticeable difference being between the two sets of commandments that all the strict laws of god reverence are gone and replaced with voluntary desire to love god.”
Bravo Jagannath! You were sorta underatanding the difference between the old and New covenants. However, God NEVER forces people to love Him, the fault was with the people in the OT, they kept saying they would keep the commandments and they kept breaking them. In the NT Jesus exemplified the commandments and He allowed them to be written in our hearts through His sacrifice. (See Hebrews 8:10)
Jag said: “Maybe if those would be the commandments Christians would follow, I might not have so much trouble with them as I do love my seafood and rounded beard.”
lol. I’m sure your beard is quite nice and nothing is wrong with eating CLEAN seafood :)
God loves YOU and I’m sure He wouldn’t mind your beard. Heh heh, Matthew 10:30 30But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Maybe God extends that to beards and mustaches too lol.
That thing with the beard was most likely one of Moses’ ceremonial laws which were nailed to the cross :) I dunno where you got that but you sure are funny :D
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. 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
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. 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
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. 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
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
The Reason Project has launched!
Here’s some fantastic news to fling in the face of the latest nonsensical Allycrap spew, and the rest of the absurdity that the religious wingnuts have been flinging this way lately:
http://www.reasonproject.org
The Reason Project is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. Drawing on the talents of some of the most prominent and creative thinkers across a wide range of disciplines, The Reason Project seeks to encourage critical thinking and wise public policy through a variety of interrelated projects — all with the purpose of eroding the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.
The Advisory Board for the project includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Pinker, Salman Rushdie, and Steven Weinberg. Frankly, these are some of my heroes, in some cases for the brave stances they have taken against religious idiocy and bigotry from the Ally’s of the world.
Donations can be made via the Reason Project website above. Please support this truly great project.
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
It’s all here http://evilbible.com.
It’s 2010. Fuck your stupid jesus stories.
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if i hav sinned against jesus vil he help me out in dis world agin. .does he earse my sin nd love me the same as before. .
i wanna quite dis wrold coz evn god is nt vith me rite nw i feel fr the way i sinned