Muhammed Caricatures
UPDATE Feb 13, 2006: HAMSHAHRI HOLOCAUST CARTOONS HERE
UPDATE Feb 4, 2006: MUSLIM RESPONSE IS HERE
Here is a permanent home for the 12 Muhammed caricatures that were printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. If you don’t have a sense of humor then leave. They are just cartoons and nothing more. Comments will be enabled on here so please feel free to leave them. Keep it civil and please don’t storm my website with RPGs and machine guns. Oh, flag burning is unacceptable aswell. But feel free to boycot my site as that is a peaceful means of protest.
UPDATE Feb 13, 2006: HAMSHAHRI HOLOCAUST CARTOONS HERE
March 17th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
So very glad I found this truly great site
March 12th, 2010 at 10:49 pm
What a great straight post! All these snacks and pancakes are junk food. And these cause worst effect on body and mind.
Hypnotism for Weight Loss
March 7th, 2010 at 8:47 am
God damn you.useless things.God damn Denmark.We hate u pigs
March 4th, 2010 at 2:55 pm
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 here 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.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:52 pm
Allycrap alert! 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.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
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.
March 4th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
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.
March 4th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
Re: post 3984 MW, you took issue with what “Pauline” aka schizo dude aka Netyahoo aka … wrote, which was: ‘“That killing, to many Muslims, is very visibly the correct “practice”.’
Yeah MW, I too concur with you when you said: “Many Muslims? How many Muslims Pauline? Then come to Turkey to meet real secular Muslims who have no intention to kill anybody. ”
Schizo dude is a negative Nicky, but duh, he’s schizophrenic ! :(
MW, NORMAL people ought to know that there are many, many Muslims who are peaceful and who care about others; I mean, there’s over 1 billion of y’all so if schizo dude’s premise of many Muslims killing were true, the world would truly be in some serious mess.
However, there are some minority groups of Islam that are well, barbaric.The bible did prophecy about them though,see here: (This prophecy is talking about Ishmael and SOME of his descendants.)
Gen 16:12
12And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren.
Hey, this commentary explains Gen.16:12 quite nicely “(v. 12): He will be a wild man; a wild ass of a man (so the word is), rude, and bold, and fearing no man—untamed, untractable living at large, and impatient of service and restraint. Note, The children of the bondwoman, who are out of covenant with God, are, as they were born, like the wild ass’s colt; it is grace that reclaims men, civilizes them, and makes them wise, and good for something. It is foretold, (1.) That he should live in strife, and in a state of war: His hand against every man—this is his sin; and every man’s hand against him—this is his punishment. Note, Those that have turbulent spirits have commonly troublesome lives; those that are provoking, vexatious, and injurious to others, must expect to be repaid in their own coin. He that has his hand and tongue against every man shall have every man’s hand and tongue against him, and he has no reason to complain of it.”
It also explains why God permits radical Islam to occur.
“And yet, (2.) That he should live in safety, and hold his own against all the world: He shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren; though threatened and insulted by all his neighbours, yet he shall keep his ground, and
for Abram’s sake, more than his own, shall be able to make his part good with them.
Accordingly we read (ch. 25:18), that he died, as he lived, in the presence of all his brethren. Note, Many that are much exposed by their own imprudence are yet strangely preserved by the divine Providence, so much better is God to them than they deserve, when they not only forfeit their lives by sin, but hazard them.”
……………………………….
MW, my question to you is, since these radical Muslims are the minority, where’s the voice of dissent from the majority? I think I did see something on the news about other Muslims fighting the Taliban though, so unlike schizo dude, I’m gonna look at the positive side!
MW, did you know that Job was a descendant of Ishmael and so were the wise men from the East that went to see baby Jesus? :) There are many lovely Muslims out there and many are looking for truth.
I’m going back to a not so positive note now though; Muslims seem to want to run their religion as a theocracy; granted, a lot do not get violent like the radicals. They seem to want to force others to join them,even if they don’t do it as violently as the radicals, so it does make one wonder how much of the billion plus Muslims are there because they actually want to be; are they following the dictates of their conscience or are they coerced into it?
Also, what I would like to know is, are the foundational teachings of Islam instructing proponents of the religion to slay Jews, Christians and pagans?
If it is, then the majority of you are RIGHTLY ignoring it.
I found this quote “The very power (Ottoman Islam based in Turkey), whose seemingly innumerable warriors (see Revelation 9:16) rode on “horses” (see Revelation 9:17) giving the appearance of have “mouths [that] issued fire and smoke and brimstone” (because they used rifles and firepower in their conquest of Constantinople), submitted its sovereignty to the Christian powers of Europe at the end of the exact time period predicted in Revelation 9:15.
Ooooooh MW, could it be that the Judeo- Christian ethic had an influence on Turkey? ;)
MW, people are evil, some are more barbaric and I know Muslims are getting a bad rap; they’re getting the “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch”, huh?
Yeah, some Muslims even on this thread exhibit barbaric characteristics but then again, so does schizo dude as shown here ,and so does countless other people who aren’t Muslim.
March 3rd, 2010 at 7:40 am
The drawing by Kurt Westergaard wasn’t supposed to be of Mohammed the prophet but a terrorist who uses religion to justify the killing of innocents. I know what I’m talking about since I’m Danish ;)
February 27th, 2010 at 6:43 pm
for Pauleeeene…
February 26th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
3984 is also loaded with No True Scotsman fallacy by the wheelbarrow load.
Everything is easy for Pauleeene.
February 26th, 2010 at 1:00 pm
If Turkey would fill acceptable number of the requirements, Turkey would join EU, I have no doubt in my mind about that. And most european countries if not all have muslim population already so that is hardly a cause for denying acceptance into EU. The problems are not with turkish people but religious extremists and accommodators.
I personally have issues with the leniency EU is giving to any countries in regards of the requirements and Turkey was also offered leniency on many issues making it easier to join. My issue with the leniencey is that it can lead to discord when there is different levels of requirements for different countries.
As a country, Turkey has various export products that are already purchased by countries in EU. One might wonder whether joining EU could actually affect negatively the trade between turkey and usa but such trade would most likely be easily recouped on the EU market.
The problem I see is if Turkey is willing to conform to the requirements. That could be a problem for some facets of society, but not all EU countries, if any ,were unanimous in regards of joining EU.
February 26th, 2010 at 6:05 am
jagannath - OK but do you really think Turkey will be accepted in EU if it solves all these 35 items someday although it has a Muslim population? According to you, “being Muslim” has nothing to do with it? As I know, Turkey would be the only Muslim country in EU if it was accepted… A neutral answer please. Thanks.
February 25th, 2010 at 6:30 pm
why Turkey is not accepted to EU?
Because;
1. Free Movement of Goods-Further efforts
2. Freedom of Movement For Workers-Very hard to adopt
3. Right of Establishment For Companies & Freedom To Provide Services-Very hard to adopt
4. Free Movement of Capital-Further efforts needed
5. Public Procurement-Totally incompatible with acquis
6. Company Law-Considerable efforts needed
7. Intellectual Property Law-Further efforts needed
8. Competition Policy-Very hard to adopt
9. Financial Services-Considerable efforts needed
10. Information Society & Media-Further efforts needed
11. Agriculture & Rural Development-Very hard to adopt
12. Food Safety, Veterinary & Phytosanitary Policy-Very hard to adopt
13. Fisheries-Very hard to adopt
14. Transport Policy-Considerable efforts needed
15. Energy-Considerable efforts needed
16. Taxation-Considerable efforts needed
17. Economic & Monetary Policy-Considerable efforts needed
18. Statistics-Considerable efforts needed
19. Social Policy & Employment-Considerable efforts needed
20. Enterprise & Industrial Policy-No major difficulties expected
21. Trans-European Networks-Considerable efforts needed
22. Regional Policy & Coordination of Structural Instruments-Considerable efforts needed
23. Judiciary & Fundamental Rights-Considerable efforts needed
24. Justice, Freedom & Security-Considerable efforts needed
25. Science & Research-No major difficulties expected
26. Education & Culture-Further efforts needed
27. Environment-Totally incompatible with acquis
28. Consumer & Health Protection-Further efforts needed
29. Customs Union-No major difficulties expected
30. External Relations-No major difficulties expected
31. Foreign, Security & Defence Policy-Further efforts needed
32. Financial Control-Further efforts needed
33. Financial & Budgetary Provisions-No major difficulties expected
34. Institutions-Nothing to adopt
35. Other Issues-Nothing to adopt
These are the true reason why Turkey is not accepted in EU
February 25th, 2010 at 6:14 am
“That killing, to many Muslims, is very visibly the correct “practice”.”
Many Muslims? How many Muslims Pauline? Then come to Turkey to meet real secular Muslims who have no intention to kill anybody. Give up “killing”, just knock at a Turk’s door, say “I’m God’s guest. Can you help me for a few days as I’ve nowhere to stay”… Then you’ll see what kind of a hospitality is waiting for you. They all race with eachother to serve you. They share all their food with you and give you their most comfortable bed at home.
Especially Muslim Turks don’t deserve your injustice words… Najwa is completely right but don’t try to tell these in vain, Najwa, as I’ve already tried for a long time here on this forum but couldn’t convince anybody. They are speaking from memory although they don’t know all the Muslims in the world. They have just been held up some terrorists and think that all of us are so. Let everybody believe what he wants to… I know myself, you know yourself and all the secular Muslims know themselves. Be calm and don’t care about the caricatures or some racist films. Try to take them in a sense of humour if you can or don’t even look at them if you can’t. You can never change biased opinions about Muslims as you’re always a potential terrorist according to most of Europian and American people. Think why Turkey is not accepted to EU for example. Preconceptions… Nothing else…
February 23rd, 2010 at 9:04 am
najwa, one of the most common interpretations of a core part of your religion’s doctrine is that all non-followers of islam should be killed. That killing, to many Muslims, is very visibly the correct “practice”. So you shouldn’t be surprised when your religion is not passively allowed to propagate. In fact, all forms of non-violent opposition to Islam, including mockery, seem very appropriate.
February 22nd, 2010 at 12:32 pm
to non- Muslims, it’s ok if u don’t want to believe in Islam and to reject it’s teaching but i think it is rude to make fun of Muslims’ role model (Prophet Muhammad s.a.w). can’t we live in a more harmonious world? u practice what u believe, we practice ours, respect each other .
February 4th, 2010 at 6:17 pm
such ignorance. probable source http://allykattales.com.
February 4th, 2010 at 6:08 pm
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.
February 4th, 2010 at 6:04 pm
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.
February 4th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
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.
February 4th, 2010 at 6:00 pm
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, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
February 4th, 2010 at 5:15 pm
Re: posts3964 and 3968 , schizo dude you’re responsible for those aren’t you? and probably a few of the other crazy posts since those were posted too.
In post 3964 you said “Begone, you woman. You are the origin of sin,… ”
Um, sin originated with Satan i.e. the devil who was Lucifer.
Re your chauvinistic statement about “Women keep silence for it is not permitted them to speak of scripture.”
Humph, says you, you male chauvinistic …! 1 Timothy 2:11-14
2:11 Women should learn with an attitude of quiet submissiveness. Paul seemingly wanted to be certain the women were well - grounded in the Word of God [2 Tim.3:6,7]. This should be:
“In silence” [Gk. hesuchia}, meaning "quietness," a more appropriate meaning since women did normally speak in the worship assembly [1 Tim. 2:11,12; see 1 Cor. 11:5; 14:26];
“With a submission,” suggesting that instruction was to be received respectfully.
………………………………………………
Regarding your silly quotation of “‘Thy husband shall rule over thee.’ ”
Genesis 3:16 (KJV) … and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Sheesh, unfortunately that prophecy has basically been fulfilled to a T. God knew sin will cause men to wanna treat women like crap; He did not want it to be so, He just knew it would happen.
Galatians 3:28 (KJV) says28There 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. See? :p
Schizo dude? I would recommend you STOP wresting the scriptures to your own destruction `:-) (see 2 Peter 3:16) Yeah man, quit taking texts outta context.
You said ” Women who profess Christianity and disobey these simple rules are like the whores of babylon.”
You don’t know squat diddly!!!! You’d better watch it or else the mother of harlots would cause you to get the Mark of the beast in your right hand or maybe in your forehead. :( See here:
http://www.projectrestore.com/bible_guides/nwo/nwo2.htm
http://www.projectrestore.com/bible_guides/nwo/nwo3.htm
That is if you’re alive when all these events take place.
February 4th, 2010 at 11:23 am
Pass the joint, sarmir. You’ve had enough.
February 4th, 2010 at 10:39 am
a muslim cannot be a mümin… 90% of muslims on the world have a god illusion that fucking so hard with him night and day!.. first words of rasullullah muhammed sav. was; there is not any got existence, only allah! and allah is not a god!
if u can see allah in all directions (including you)!
then u cannot be nervouse, angry, sad or bad.. this obligate u automaticly to be blind, forgiven and respectfull to all stuped creations or religions.. then u can be mümin!!
i am not yet a mümin jesse! but i promis u i try
i wait ur fucking answer!
February 4th, 2010 at 10:27 am
jesse j… jessssseeeeeeee benim sikimi bi yese.. tadina doyamaz!! ananin amcini gotten skerim senin orrospunun pici, picin dölünün evladi, müslümani gördügüm yerde skerim diyorsun… ama sikin kalkana kadar o müslüman hem seni hem ananin amini götten sikip öldürür.
jesse and mohamid.. its right that u fuck each other.. or speculation? , jessseee, do you have so terrible pain in your ass.. maybe because of 30cm snake of mohamid?…
if you can kill your judgements and ego mountains.. at last I-sence.. then maybe you can kill a muslim
February 4th, 2010 at 9:36 am
http://www.ahmedhulusi.org
The sense of I-ness you feel right now is the same sense of I-ness felt by each being…
Even though there are many observers, there is only one mind and one consciousness. Two independent minds cannot exist anywhere in the universe… The ego, the one we normally say “me,” therefore is an illusion; the universal one is however real…”
There can only be a single mind in the universe…”–Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.
["One Physicist's Vision of Spirit, Soul, Matter and Self." 1999.]
The Spiritual Universe: How Quantum Physics Proves the Existence of the Soul.
On one hand, you are a human being in this world having a spiritual and conscious experience on the other hand, you are a spiritual consciousness having an individual human experience for a limited period of time in this world One cannot attain universal mysteries unless one can see that what appear to be two separate entities as physical and spiritual are in fact “one”…
Although you may think that you are mortal human being on earth having some spiritual experiences, whereas in fact you are an immortal mind having a worldly experience through a body for some time. You, the journeyer of infinity! How are you aware that you are only having a journey in this world and will leave soon?
Egoistic desires conflict with our needs to observe the truth of facts. Ego claims are opposite to what the Truth is. Therefore, keep your eyes open to be appreciative of the spiritual gift and favor you are given while you have hard times (go through an experience that touches) and when it feels too difficult for ego to tolerate.
Generosity” is not a matter of a full wallet, but is a matter of a heart that feels full upon seeing the invalidity of the concept of ownership …
“Gratefulness” is not a matter of a tongue that acts in response to what is given, but is the state of a mind that realizes the invalidity of the concept of neediness …
“Service” is not the state of someone who dedicates himself to multitudes, but is the state of a mind that surpasses the fear of separation, and reaches the spiritual state of connection, and becomes total with the Truth
If you wish to know your place at the sight of TRUTH, try to observe your capacity to endure your nonexistence–that is total absence of concern about yourself! You are only pulled down into this world as long as you strive to assert and prove your self! The weight of your assertion on existence imprisons you in this world, and also will keep your soul from fleeing away when the Hell-fire, the sun, surrounds the earth during Doomsday! You are free from this world as long as you accept and endure your nothingness, by being released from the heavy burden of I-ness! Given that there cannot be any weight to hold down nothing, one can rise to its range equally high in the Hereafter, to the level of one’s capacity to endure his nothingness… Failing to understand the significance of that system means that your existence is filled with your world of the five senses, and you are not even able to take a breath. Do not wait until you die to see this truth: Die while you are alive!
Hold onto nothing and have no restrictions! Detach from demands and expectations! Quit being concerned with yourself! Only experience your nothingness: open yourself to Hu, the Limitlessness One that subsists at every point, whether or not we observe.
Everything comes with a price! Everything–even what you were given without concern, including your ingenuity and your beauty!
We may not be aware of it, but sooner or later, we will have to pay the price for everything we once had. There will come a day when we will leave all that was once ours. Then, the full price of having them will be paid. Their price will be to lose them! Losing and coming apart from them, one by one, will be their payoff.
Tell me something that you will not leave behind in this world! You cannot!
Therefore, get ready for the day when you will be left with nothing from this world, and you will return to your true self, which is free of worldly concerns and without attachments. But, until you totally return to your true self, you will taste the pain of separating from anything to which you were attached.
If you are mindful, hold onto nothing in this world, and be generous and thankful! Do not be fooled into thinking that having things may cost you nothing! Understand this system of life in which everything comes with a price!
Say, “We all are at heart one!”
Or, say, “You are separated, I am separated, and we are all separated.”
In the Book of the Universal System, every one of us lives the effect of our thoughts that come into being through ourselves.. Anyone can utter any of these statements.
Recognize the weight of thoughts in hearts rather than the words on lips!
The words and actions of someone who is trapped in his ego will yield opposition, polarity, competition, fighting, and separation in the end. However, the words and actions of someone who is aware of the truth will make others aware that differences do not exist so that we may create judgments, conflicts, separation, or for us to take sides. Differences exist for cooperation and the enjoyment of their richness…
Observe the outcome of your thoughts and actions, and realize your spiritual state!
If you were told right now that in your present place there is a sea, or there are mountains, rivers and forests and you live in them, what would you say?
What if you were told that when you dream of yourself in such places, you are, in fact, in a small room right at that moment; how would you react? In our worlds of dreams, there are countless levels of perception that are not restricted by the rules of the physical world; each dream is a different dimension or realm. Sleep is an analogy for death. When a person is awakened from this world, he finds himself in a completely different dimensional world known as hereafter… Essentially, all dimensional worlds are subjective and imaginary; however, we perceive them to be objective, and out-there, and as a concrete reality.
He says he expects his god to be so merciful so as not to burn all these billions of people in the hellfire! May your God bless you!.. How many times so far have you suffered the pain of burning? Haven’t you seen yet who gave you that pain?
You were burned by the fire of your sadness when you were sad! You were burned by your anger when you are angry! You were burned by your greed and selfishness when you were helpless! You were destroyed by the fire of egotism and pride when you were not able to find esteem! When you lose something you had, you burn in pain for days, months, even for years!..in desperate straits, as your stomach twists with sorrow, and you regret inwardly…while you burn with pain…do you ever consider who gives that pain to you? Is there someone out-there who puts that sorrow inside you? As that fire burns you, day and night, can anyone remove the pain from your insides? If there were a god hereafter to remove fire from your insides, where is he now? Has a god-out-there put the fire in your haunch so that he might take it back from there?
You have been tormenting your own soul by your unknowingness of the System and unfaithfulness to the Truth!
Your god is only an illusion in your mind! His mercy is nothing other than a fancy dream! As long as you do not know “Hu” and you do not understand your own truth.. you will be blind to the fire you carry with your hands, and you will assume that it is a god-out-there that will burn people in the hereafter and so you may assume his favor to reach you.
the most beautifull crystals grow in darkness.. without judgement, lets read http://www.ahmedhulusi.org
February 4th, 2010 at 8:21 am
I usually don’t normally post on many another Blogs, nevertheless I just has to say thank you… keep up the amazing work. Ok regrettably its time to get to school.
January 30th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
anal?n? it’s rad?y? sicktiming orosu çookoo?u…senile gemini?ini geçko?ini anal? it’s rad?n? for?y? j?k?i? colon?unu çocu?unu ?ork?y? topdown??n? sicker.senile kaletonin for?n?n amc?chrysler??na dodge?m piç caruso.yam?na na na na ?rrrrrfff?yes?lu.got un greece buns? for nez?l anal? sicker.senile….senile jedi yoda?iktaktoe?ikitiktaki sicker.senile.sick?rrrf.vengen?lulol.
January 30th, 2010 at 1:18 pm
anas?n? avrad?n? siktimin orosu çocu?u…senin gelmi?ini geçmi?ini anan? avrad?n? bac?n? k?z?n? çolu?unu çocu?unu ?rk?n? topra??n? sikerim.senin kaleminin bac?n?n amc???na sokar?m piç kurusu.am?na kodumun haysiyetsiz ?erefsizi.am?n o?lu..götün yiyorsa gelde türkiyey aç?kla bunlar? bak nas?l anan? sikiyoruz senin….senin yedi ceddini ecnibiyetini cinsini cibilyetini e?ikteki be?ikteki sülaleni ceddini sikerim senin.siktimin ?erefsizi.pezevengin o?lu.
January 22nd, 2010 at 10:16 pm
such ignorance. probable source http://allykattales.com
January 21st, 2010 at 11:21 am
The Reason Project has launched!
Here’s some fantastic news to fling in the face of the latest nonsensical Allycrap spew, and the rest of the absurdity that the religious wingnuts have been flinging this way lately:
http://www.reasonproject.org
The Reason Project is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. Drawing on the talents of some of the most prominent and creative thinkers across a wide range of disciplines, The Reason Project seeks to encourage critical thinking and wise public policy through a variety of interrelated projects — all with the purpose of eroding the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.
The Advisory Board for the project includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Pinker, Salman Rushdie, and Steven Weinberg. Frankly, these are some of my heroes, in some cases for the brave stances they have taken against religious idiocy and bigotry from the Ally’s of the world.
Donations can be made via the Reason Project website above. Please support this truly great project.
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:20 am
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.
January 21st, 2010 at 11:19 am
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 21st, 2010 at 5:22 am
Begone, you woman. You are the origin of sin, the temptress the seduces, the cause for mankinds fall from the grace. Do not profess to know the will of god nor the scriptures are it is said in the holy book;
Women keep silence for it is not permitted them to speak of scripture.
If you wish to learn the scripture, then ask your husband to teach you. As it is written in the beginning of the good book that ‘Thy husband shall rule over thee.’ Obey the word of the Lord.
Women who profess christianity and disobey these simple rules are like the whores of babylon. Attempting to pervert the word of God. Pervert it with their sin filled desires of equality which goes AGAINST THE WORD OF THE LORD!!
Amen.
January 20th, 2010 at 3:08 pm
Oh yeah my P.S. in the previous post totally debunks Korgan’s spew. Korgan and the other surface readers wrote ” 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, … . The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# # Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11.”
The God of science is not limited like we are; He is the CREATOR, he could slow down or accelerate His creative acts if He so wishes :)
…..
It also debunks the arguments for theistic evolution huh?
January 20th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Re: post 3957
Hey MW, you like these dudes too huh? Yeah MW we believe in an afterlife and we would not like our friends on here to miss out on eternity :)
You know MW the last time I posted on here I did not realize what was going on in Haiti :( Oh, they need much prayers and as much financial or other tangible support that we can give.
……………………….
MW said :”Then you’re not around a religion which teaches that God will burn sinners??? So I want to ask a question: According to the christianity, won’t God burn sinners? How will sinners pay for their sins then? Or will God burn them for a short time? I just wonder what the Bible says about this…”
My religion believes in sola scriptura and what we teach about hell is in agreement with the bible which teaches that hell WILL exist in the future and it will be TEMPORARY, caliente, but temporary; God’s justice will be meted out to those who cling to sins and who don’t accept His FREE gift of salvation.
MW, TRUE hell will ultimately be the missed opportunity to have eternal life :(
…………………….
Yeah MW some of these atheistic types (ahem, Korgaaaaaan) have double standards, they want freedom of speech for their religion but don’t want to afford that same right to others.
…………………….
P.S. MW do you remember our conversation on God’s luminosity that we had a while ago in post 3856? I had forgotten to tell you that the extent of God’s luminosity is alluded to in the book of Revelation.
Rev. 22:5 “5And there shall be no night there; and they NEED NO candle, neither light of the sun; for the Lord God giveth them light: and they shall reign for ever and ever.”
See, God outshines the sun and there’ll be no need for the sun? :) The sun will exist it’s just that it won’t be necessary for us and the plants etc. cuz God will be with us.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:38 am
The Reason Project has launched!
Here’s some fantastic news to fling in the face of the latest nonsensical Allycrap spew, and the rest of the absurdity that the religious wingnuts have been flinging this way lately:
http://www.reasonproject.org
The Reason Project is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society. Drawing on the talents of some of the most prominent and creative thinkers across a wide range of disciplines, The Reason Project seeks to encourage critical thinking and wise public policy through a variety of interrelated projects — all with the purpose of eroding the influence of dogmatism, superstition, and bigotry in our world.
The Advisory Board for the project includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Bill Maher, Craig Venter, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Stephen Pinker, Salman Rushdie, and Steven Weinberg. Frankly, these are some of my heroes, in some cases for the brave stances they have taken against religious idiocy and bigotry from the Ally’s of the world.
Donations can be made via the Reason Project website above. Please support this truly great project.
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:35 am
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 14th, 2010 at 8:34 am
Don’t feed the troll.
January 14th, 2010 at 6:15 am
Ally - There are very interesting parts in your writing with which I completely agree:
“I love atheists, honest I do, I even find a few of the atheistic types on this ws to be quite interesting, but I hate atheism.”
—–
“The belief of atheism is worse than the belief of Satan worship in that it causes an atheist to be like an alcoholic who’s always sloshed and continually says “I don’t have a problem”. It’s harder to help people that are in denial and the Satan worshipers are like an alcoholic who is sloshed and says “yeah I’m sloshed and I like it.” In that case it might be easier to convince them that being sloshed is not healthy for themselves as well as others.”
——
On the other hand, you have written this:
“if I was around a religion that taught that God will burn sinners forever and ever I probably would have deluded myself into thinking God did not exist and we came from nothing”
Then you’re not around a religion which teaches that God will burn sinners??? So I want to ask a question: According to the christianity, won’t God burn sinners? How will sinners pay for their sins then? Or will God burn them for a short time? I just wonder what the Bible says about this…
—-
I remember very well the days on which atheists on this forum defended the latitude of thought passionately. They had insisted that Mohammed caricatures and Fitna video were only the products of the latitude of thought, not disrespect for islam or Prophet Mohammed. The caricaturist and Geert Wilders had right to explain their ideas freely. And the atheists on this forum had right to defend all these… Well, you have to be tolerant toward Ally now for she’s only explaining her ideas and answering my questions. Please give her some “latitude of thought”:)
January 13th, 2010 at 8:45 pm
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.
Donations can be made via the Reason Project website above. Please support this truly great project.
Religion is a disease of the mind. Inoculate against it with reason.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:40 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. Piss off.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 13th, 2010 at 8:36 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away. Piss off for good.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
January 13th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Hey Korgan, if you did not like those flowers all you had to do was say so you know. I could have gotten you an edible arrangement; you know those fresh fruit bouquets? Those taste good and they’ll give you lotsa fiber so you won’t be so cranky ;)
… and dude, what are you, a poster boy for the french revolution?!
………………………………………………………………….
Hi MW, I’m glad you liked that song :) Sometimes when the going gets tough, I listen to it and I get encouragement.
Um MW, you said : “Belief gives love and mercy into the hearts.” and “I can see the difference between an atheist and a christian.”
From a Christian’s POV I would say that belief gives HOPE. Christians are admonished to look at the teachings of systems instead of individuals cuz as you said :” There may be exceptions of course and this may not be valid for everybody.” and also Korgan is right to a certain extent in that throughout history a lot of religions mucked up societies :( and I still think that some “religious” person tormented that dude hence his hatred of religion. Awwwww, MW I love Korgan (cuz God commands us to love) and I really really REALLY like him and the thing is, I don’t know why :D but I think it’s because God wants me to ;) Yeah I know he’s going to go berserk when he reads this post but then again, he always go berserk with all my posts lol.
See, if my hunch about Korgan is correct then what Korgan CAN”T see is that ditching God because of some nut job of a religious person is like trying to get a fly of of his forehead by shooting at it with a bazooka; it’s purely suicidal!!!! :(
Eh, I might as well bad mouth atheism a lil’. I love atheists, honest I do, I even find a few of the atheistic types on this ws to be quite interesting, but I hate atheism.Though it is their right to practice their religion, heh heh.
Out of all the belief systems, atheism is the dumbest one! cuz a lot of them are in denial plus they’ve been suckered into another branch of New Age without realizing it :(
The belief of atheism is worse than the belief of Satan worship in that it causes an atheist to be like an alcoholic who’s always sloshed and continually says “I don’t have a problem”. It’s harder to help people that are in denial and the Satan worshipers are like an alcoholic who is sloshed and says “yeah I’m sloshed and I like it.” In that case it might be easier to convince them that being sloshed is not healthy for themselves as well as others. MW I hope you understood my analogy. In all honesty though, I would much rather talk to an atheist than a Satanist lol
You know what? if I was around a religion that taught that God will burn sinners forever and ever I probably would have deluded myself into thinking God did not exist and we came from nothing :p It’s teachings like that, that drove Darwin nuts and that’s why he chose to believe in Macro evolution :(
P.S. Hey atheists don’t get mad at me OK? If you’re the type that would like there to be a God then you won’t mind my criticisms and if you’re the type that doesn’t want there to be a God cuz of some type of cherished sin , then go to a sports ws or Hugh Hefner’s ws or some sort of such and leave me alone `:-) .I do remember the host of this site saying he does not hate religious people, so he won’t mind my comments; see Korgan?
December 31st, 2009 at 5:41 pm
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.
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.
December 31st, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away before the new year already. Piss off for good.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
December 31st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.
December 31st, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert! Allycrap alert!
Ally, fuck off and go away before the new year already.
Ally, stop spewing your absurd bible crap about that asshole of a god that you worship, and fuck off and go away. The absurdity of your religion is plain to see, and as usual, Skeptics does a fine job of showing just how far wrong the xtian bible is, and how the absurd (and fortunately fictional) god that the bible describes would simply be a vengeful, cruel ASSHOLE rather than a reliever of suffering, if such a being actually existed. See here
http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html
and here are a few examples to shield us from the stench of ally’s crap:
Genesis
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”
God purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey.
# The Genesis 1 creation account conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In Genesis, the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. The order of events known from science is just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
# God creates light and separates light from darkness, and day from night, on the first day. Yet he didn’t make the light producing objects (the sun and the stars) until the fourth day (1:14-19). And how could there be “the evening and the morning” on the first day if there was no sun to mark them? 1:3-5
# God spends one-sixth of his entire creative effort (the second day) working on a solid firmament. This strange structure, which God calls heaven, is intended to separate the higher waters from the lower waters. 1:6-8
# Plants are made on the third day before there was a sun to drive their photosynthetic processes (1:14-19). 1:11
# God lets “the earth bring forth” the plants, rather than creating them directly. Maybe Genesis is not so anti-evolution after all. 1:11
# In an apparent endorsement of astrology, God places the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament so that they can be used “for signs”. This, of course, is exactly what astrologers do: read “the signs” in the Zodiac in an effort to predict what will happen on Earth. 1:14
# God makes two lights: “the greater light [the sun] to rule the day, and the lesser light [the moon] to rule the night.” But the moon is not a light, but only reflects light from the sun. And why, if God made the moon to “rule the night”, does it spend half of its time moving through the daytime sky? 1:16
# “He made the stars also.” God spends a day making light (before making the stars) and separating light from darkness; then, at the end of a hard day’s work, and almost as an afterthought, he makes the trillions of stars. 1:16
# “And God set them [the stars] in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.” 1:17
# In verse 11, God “let the earth bring forth” the plants. Now he has the earth “bring forth” the animals as well. So maybe the creationists have it all wrong. Maybe God created livings things through the process of evolution. 1:24
# God gave humans dominion over every other living thing on earth. 1:26
# God commands us to “be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over … every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” 1:28
# “I have given you every herb … and every tree … for meat.”
Since many plants have evolved poisons to protect against animals that would like to eat them, God’s advice is more than a little reckless. Would you tell your children to go out in the garden and eat whatever plants they encounter? Of course not. But then, you are much nicer and smarter than God. 1:29
# All animals were originally herbivores. Tapeworms, vampire bats, mosquitoes, and barracudas — all were strict vegetarians, as they were created by God. 1:30
# “God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” He purposefully designed a system that ensures the suffering and death of all his creatures, parasite and host, predator and prey. 1:31
# In Genesis 1 the entire creation takes 6 days, but the universe is at least 12 billion years old, with new stars constantly being formed. 1:31
# Humans were not created instantaneously from dust and breath, but evolved over millions of years from simpler life forms. 2:7
# After making the animals, God has Adam name them all. The naming of several million species must have kept Adam busy for a while. 2:18-22
# God fashions a woman out of one of Adam’s ribs.
Because of this story, it was commonly believed (and sometimes it is still said today) that males have one less rib than females. When Vesalius showed in 1543 that the number of ribs was the same in males and females, it created a storm of controversy. 2:19
# God curses the serpent. From now on the serpent will crawl on his belly and eat dust. One wonders how he got around before — by hopping on his tail, perhaps? But snakes don’t eat dust, do they? 3:14
# Because Adam listened to Eve, God cursed the ground and causes thorns and thistles to grow. Before this, according to the (false) Genesis story, plants had no natural defenses. The rose had no thorn, cacti were spineless, holly leaves were smooth, and the nettle had no sting. Foxgloves, oleander, and milkweeds were all perfectly safe to eat. 3:17-18
# When Lamech was born, nine generations were alive at once. Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, and Lamech were all alive at the time of Lamech’s birth. Adam lived to see his great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson. 5:25
# “There were giants in the earth in those days.” 6:4
# Noah is told to make an ark that is 450 feet long. 6:14-15
# Whether by twos or by sevens, Noah takes male and female representatives from each species of “every thing that creepeth upon the earth.” 7:8
# God opens the “windows of heaven.” He does this every time it rains. 7:11
# All of the animals boarded the ark “in the selfsame day.” 7:13-14
# The flood covered the highest mountain tops (Mount Everest?) with fifteen cubits to spare. 7:20
# “The windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained.” This happens whenever it stops raining. 8:2
# Noah sends a dove out to see if there was any dry land. But the dove returns without finding any. Then, just seven days later, the dove goes out again and returns with an olive leaf. But how could an olive tree survive the flood? And if any seeds happened to survive, they certainly wouldn’t germinate and grow leaves within a seven day period. 8:8-11
# When the animals left the ark, what would they have eaten? There would have been no plants after the ground had been submerged for nearly a year. What would the carnivores have eaten? Whatever prey they ate would have gone extinct. And how did the New World primates or the Australian marsupials find their way back after the flood subsided? 8:19
# “And the Lord smelled a sweet savor.”
Noah kills the “clean beasts” and burns their dead bodies for God. According to 7:8 this would have caused the extinction of all “clean” animals since only two of each were taken onto the ark. 8:20-21
# “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.” Although this would have been good advice for the mythical Noah, it is deadly advice for humankind as a whole. Overpopulation is one of our greatest problems, yet there is nothing in the bible to address it. 9:1
# According to this verse, all animals fear humans. Although it is true that many do, it is also true that some do not. Sharks and grizzly bears, for example, are generally much less afraid of us than we are of them. 9:2
# “Into your hand are they (the animals) delivered.”
God gave the animals to humans, and they can do whatever they please with them. This verse has been used by bible believers to justify all kinds of cruelty to animals and environmental destruction. 9:2
# God is rightly filled with remorse for having killed his creatures. He even puts the rainbow in the sky to remind himself of his promise to the animals not to do it again. But rainbows are caused by the nature of light, the refractive index of water, and the shape of raindrops. There were rainbows billions of years before humans existed. 9:13
# Some creationists believe that this verse refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. But many other creationists disagree. 10:25
# “The whole earth was of one language.” But this could not be true, since by this time (around 2400 BCE) there were already many languages, each unintelligible to the others. 11:1, 6
# “Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.”
God worries that people could build a tower high enough to reach him (them?) in heaven, and that by so doing they will become omnipotent. 11:4-6
# According to the Tower of Babel story, the many human languages were created instantaneously by God. But actually the various languages evolved gradually over long periods of time. 11:9
# The ridiculously long lives of the patriarchs. 11:10-32
# “Abram … pursued them unto Dan.”
This is an obvious anachronism, since the city of Dan was not named “Dan” until the time of the Judges (see Judges 18:29). In fact, Dan (for whom the city was named) was not even born yet (see Genesis 30:6). 14:14
# “And they returned to the land of the Philistines.” But the Philistines didn’t arrive in the region of Canaan until around 1200 BCE — 800 years after Abraham’s supposed migration from Ur. 21:32, 26:1, 8, 15, 18
# Laban learns “by experience” that God has blessed him for Jacob’s sake. “By experience” means “by divination”, at least that is how most other versions translate this verse. 30:27
# Jacob displays his (and God’s) knowledge of biology by having goats copulate while looking at streaked rods. The result is streaked baby goats. 30:37-39
# God (or an angel) praises Jacob for his fancy genetic work in Gen.30:37-39. 31:11-12
# Joseph and his magic divining cup. 44:5, 44:15
Exodus
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 16:35
# The Israelite population went from 70 (or 75) to several million in a few hundred years. 1:5,7, 12:37, 38:26
# Why are some people born with disabilities? Because God deliberately makes them that way. 4:11
# God killed Egyptians and their livestock by smashing them with huge hailstones mixed with fire. 9:24
# God led the Israelites through the land of the Philistines, hundreds of years before the Philistines were established in Canaan. 13:17
# If you do what God says, he won’t send his diseases on you (like he did to the Egyptians). But otherwise…. 15:26
# “The manna referred to in the Bible, in Exodus 16:14, seems to have been the dried excrement of Trabutina mannipara, a scale insect that feeds on tamarisk trees.” Benjamin B. Normark, The Sex Lives of Scales, Natural History, Sept. 2004. 16:14-15
# A magical trumpet played loud while God came down in smoke, fire, and earthquakes onto Mt. Sinai. 19:16-18
# “In six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them.”
Believers often say that the “days” of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days. 20:11
Leviticus
# The bible says that hares and coneys are unclean because they “chew the cud” but do not part the hoof. But hares and coneys are not ruminants and they do not “chew the cud.” 11:5-6
# Bats are birds to the biblical God. 11:13, 19
# Four-legged fowls are abominations. 11:20
# Be sure to watch out for those “other flying creeping things which have four feet.” (I wish God wouldn’t get so technical!) I guess he must mean four-legged insects. You’d think that since God made the insects, and so many of them (at least several million species), that he would know how many legs they have! 11:23
# God’s law for lepers: Get two birds. Kill one. Dip the live bird in the blood of the dead one. Sprinkle the blood on the leper seven times, and then let the blood-soaked bird fly off. Next find a lamb and kill it. Wipe some of its blood on the patient’s right ear, thumb, and big toe. Sprinkle seven times with oil and wipe some of the oil on his right ear, thumb and big toe. Repeat. Finally kill a couple doves and offer one for a sin offering and the other for a burnt offering. 14:2-52
Numbers
# The Israelite population went from seventy (Ex.1:5) to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in just a few generations! 1:45-46
# When the tabernacle was set up, it was covered by a cloud during the day and by fire all night. 9:15
# God led the Israelites from one camp to the other with a cloud. When the cloud stopped and rested someplace, the Israelites pitched their tents. When the cloud started moving again, the Israelites followed it. 9:16-23
# God sends quails to feed his people until they were “two cubits [about a meter] high upon the face of the earth.” Taking the “face of the earth” to be a circle with a radius of say 30 kilometers (an approximate day’s journey), this would amount to 3 trillion (3×1012) liters of quails. At 2 quails per liter, this would provide a couple million quails for each of several million people. 11:31
# God strikes Miriam with leprosy. (In the Bible, leprosy is caused by the wrath of God or the malice of Satan. 12:10
# “They … cut down … a branch with one cluster of grapes, and they bare it between two upon a staff.”
A single cluster of grapes was so heavy that it took two men to carry it. I guess that’s what you’d expect, though, since they were in the land of giants. (See verses 32-33.) 13:23
# “And there we saw the giants … And we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight.” This statement may have been figurative, hyperbole, typical biblical exaggeration, or an actual description of the sons of Anak, in which case they must have been about 100 meters tall. These are the same giants (the Nephilium) that resulted when the “sons of God” mated with “the daughters of men in Gen.6:4. Of course these superhuman god-men should have been destroyed in the flood. So what are they doing still alive? 13:33
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 14:33, 32:13
# God’s cure for snakebite: a brass serpent on a pole. 21:8
# God has “the strength of a unicorn.” Oh heck, I bet he’s even stronger than a unicorn. 23:22, 24:8
# “He made them wander in the wilderness forty years.”
It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than a few weeks. 32:13
Deuteronomy
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more a few weeks. 2:7, 8:2, 29:5
# “A land of giants: giants dwelt therein in old time.” (They must have been much more common back then.) 2:10-11, 20-21
# Og, the king of the giants, was a tall man, even by NBA standards. His bed measured 9 by 4 cubits (13.5 feet long and 6 feet wide). 3:11
# God promises to cast out seven nations including the Amorites, Canaanites, and the Jebusites. But he was unable to fulfill his promise. These nations were “greater and mightier” than the Israelites, who according to Ex.12:37 and Num.1:45-46 already had numbered several million. So the region, according to the bible, must have had a population of more than twenty million! 7:1
# This verse mistakenly says that the hare chews its cud. 14:7-8
# To the biblical God, a bat is just an another unclean bird. 14:11, 18
# “And thy heaven that is over thy head shall be brass, and the earth that is under thee shall be iron.” 28:23
# “The LORD shall make the rain of thy land powder and dust: from heaven shall it come down upon thee, until thou be destroyed.” 28:24
# “An eagle … beareth them on her wings.”
Do eagles carry their young on their wings? I know of no evidence (except for the single anecdote provided here) that they do. 32:11
# “Their wine is the poison of dragons.” I wonder what genus and species the bible is referring to when it mentions dragons. 32:33
# Joseph’s “horns are like the horns of a unicorn.” 33:17
Joshua
# It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days. 5:6
# Joshua says that those who try to rebuild Jericho will be accursed by God, and will have to sacrifice both their oldest and their youngest sons in its construction. Well, Jericho still exists today, and is often considered to be the world’s oldest, continuously occupied city. 6:26
# In Joshua 8 the Israelites destroy Ai and make it a desolate heap. But Ai was an abandoned city by the time of the Israelites and this story is a myth invented to explain the ruins of an ancient city that the Israelites encountered. See Archaeology and Biblical Accuracy by Farrell Till. 8:1-29
# This verse says that Ai was never again occupied after it was destroyed by Joshua. But Nehemiah (7:32) lists it among the cities of Israel at the time of the Babylonian captivity. 8:28
# In a divine type of daylight savings time, God makes the sun stand still so that Joshua can get all his killing done before dark. 10:12-13
# “And the coast of Og king of Bashan, which as of the remnant of the giants….” 12:4, 18:6
Judges
# “The stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” Unless astrology is true, how can the stars affect the outcome of a battle? 5:20
# “As the sun … goeth forth in his might.” The sun, according to the bible, goes around the earth. 5:31
Ruth (None)
1 Samuel
# “The pillars of the earth are the LORD’s, and he hath set the world upon them. 2:8
# “So Samuel called unto the LORD; and the LORD sent thunder and rain.” 12:18
# After Jonathan’s first slaughter (20 men in one half acre), God showed his approval with “a very great trembling.” 14:15
# Goliath was ten feet tall (”six cubits and a span”). 17:4
2 Samuel
# “He weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels.”
Absalom’s hair was heavy upon him 14:25-26
# In what is surely a biblical exaggeration, we are told that “the servants of David” killed 20,000 soldiers in one day. And that “the wood [forest] devoured more people that day than the sword devoured.” It must have been spooky forest to have devoured more than 20,000 soldiers. 18:7-8
# A giant with six fingers and six toes. 21:20
# “There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”
What happens when God gets mad? The earth shakes, the foundations of heaven move, smoke comes out of his nostrils, and fire out of his mouth.”22:8-9
# “The foundations of the world were discovered … at the blast of the breath of his nostrils.” 22:16
# How many soldiers did Israel have? This verse says that Judah and Israel had a total of 1,300,000 fighting men (1 Chr.21:5 says 1,570,000) in this battle. Of course, this is a ridiculously high number for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 24:9
1 Kings
# This verse implies that the value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.)
Good Math, Bad Math: Innumerate Fundamentalists and ?
7:23
# God creates droughts by causing “heaven to shut up” as a punishment for sin. 8:35
# Ever the playful spirit, God withers, and then restores, the hand of king Jeroboam. 13:4
# God passes by and causes a great wind, earthquake, fire, and a little voice. (God was in the little voice.) 19:11-12
2 Kings
# Lehi prayed and pillar of fire appeared out of nowhere on a rock. 1:6
# God sends two bears to rip up 42 little children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head. 2:23-24
# Elisha restores the life of a dead child, but only after laying on him a couple of times, putting his mouth on the child’s mouth, his eyes on the child’s eyes, and his hands on the child’s hands. Finally, the child responds by sneezing seven times.
Was this a miraculous healing or artificial respiration? 4:32-35
# Elisha cures a leper, but only after the leper dips himself seven times in the Jordan. 5:14
# Elisha not only can cure leprosy, he can also dish it out. Here he makes his servant (Gehazi) and all his descendants lepers forever. 5:27
# A dead body is brought to life when it accidentally touches the bones of Elisha. 13:21
# “So, king of Egypt”
There was no king of Egypt of the time named “So” or with any similar name. 17:4
# Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.” 20:7
# Isaiah, with a little help from God, makes the sun move backwards ten degrees. Now that’s quite a trick. All at once, the earth stopped spinning and then reversed its direction of rotation. Or maybe the sun traveled around the earth in those days! 20:11
1 Chronicles
# Some creationists believe that this verse (and Gen.10:25) refers to continental drift, which, they say, began to occur during the days of Pelag (which means “division”), about 100 or so years after the flood. 1:19
# “The earth … shall be stable, that it be not moved.” It doesn’t spin on its axis or travel about the sun. 16:30
# According to this verse David’s army had 1,100,000 men from Israel and 470,000 men from Judah, Of course, this numbers is ridiculously high for a battle between two tribal armies in 1000 BCE. (The United States had about 1.37 million active duty soldiers in 2001.) 21:5 David provides Solomon with a fantastically large amount of gold and silver with which to build the temple: 100,000 talents of gold and 1,000,000 talents of silver. Since a talent was about 60 pounds, this would be about 3,000 tons of gold and 30,000 tons of silver. 22:14
# King David collects ten thousand drams (or darics) for the construction of the temple in Jerusalem. This is especially interesting since darics were coins named after King Darius I who lived some five hundred years after David. 29:7
# As usual, the reported amounts of gold, silver, and iron are grossly exaggerated. (5000 talents of gold, for example, would be about 150,000 kilograms, which would be worth about 4.2 billion US dollars in today’s market.) 29:7
2 Chronicles
# Since the molten sea was round with a diameter of ten cubits and a circumference of thirty cubits, we know that the biblical value of p is 3. (The actual value is approximately 3.14159.) 4:2
# Abijah spoke to 1,200,000 soldiers at one time. (He had a really loud voice.) 13:3-4
# 500,000 soldiers die in a single God-assisted slaughter. 13:16-17
# In the largest single God-assisted massacre in the bible, Asa, with God’s help, kills one million Ethiopians. 14:8-14
# Asa, when he had a foot disease, went to physicians instead of seeking the Lord. (God disapproves of those who seek medical help rather than “seeking the Lord.”) 16:12
# God makes Uzziah a leper for burning incense without a license. 26:19-21
Ezra
# In the house of the rolls … in Babylon” This is the only library building mentioned in the Bible. The author mistakenly thought that Media was a part of Babylon. 6:1-2
Nehemiah (None)
Esther
# “Haman thought in his heart.” Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts. 6:6
Job
# The earth rests upon pillars and doesn’t move (unless God gets angry or something). 9:6
# “Which commandeth the sun, and it riseth not.”
The earth is fixed and the sun travels about it. 9:7
# “The measure thereof is longer than the earth.”
(What is the length of a sphere?) 11:9
# Heaven is set upon pillars that tremble when God gets mad. 26:11
# “By the breath of God frost is given.” 37:10
# The earth is set on foundations and it does not move. 38:4-6
# “That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, that the wicked might be shaken out of it.”
God could (if he wanted to) pick up the earth by its ends and shake all the wicked people off of it.
38:13
# God has snow and hail all stored up to use later “in time of trouble. 38:22
# God spread out the sky, which is a solid structure, hard and strong like a mirror. 37:18
# Wilt thou hunt the prey for the lion?”
God seems pleased to have created prey for lions and ravens to eat. 38:39-41
# Ostriches are not cruel and stupid birds who abandon their eggs to die after laying them, as these verses imply. They are, in fact, careful and attentive parents. The male scoops out a hollow for the eggs, which are incubated by the female during the day and the male at night. After the eggs are hatched, they are cared for by the mother for over a month, at which time the chicks can keep up with running adults. 39:13-16
# The bible is wrong about ostriches being cruel and inattentive parents (39:13-16). But if they were, whose fault would it be? Why would God deprive them of the tools that are needed to do the job right? 39:17
# “The eagle … seeketh the prey…. Her young ones suck up blood.”
God is pleased with the way that predators kill and devour their prey. 39:27-30
# Bible believers have identified the behemoth as a hippopotamus, dinosaur, wildebeest, or crocodile. But my favorite is the way these verses are translated by Stephen Mitchell: “Look now: the Beast that I made: he eats grass like a bull. Look: the power in his thighs, the pulsing sinews of his belly. His penis stiffens like a pine; his testicles bulge with vigor.” 40:15-16
# “Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord?” 41:1-34
# “His [the leviathan's] teeth are terrible round about.”
God has equipped predators with teeth that tear the flesh of their prey. 41:14
Psalms
# “My reins also instruct me in the night seasons.”
Jesus will search your kidneys 16:7
# The earth shakes whenever God really gets mad. 18:7
# The sun moves around the earth. 19:4-6
Religion is for the ignorant, the gullible, the deluded, the cowardly, and the stupid, and for those who would profit from them.