Bible 3 Absurdities
Contents Updated: Thursday, April 29, 1999
Absurdities
Imagine the mighty creator of the universe lying in a crib wailing to be fed or to have his bottom wiped. Now has this god really come to earth as an infant, or is he a god just giving the illusion of it? Does it really like being tickled with a straw or is he really looking on from another dimension, pretending. The idea of the creator of the universe experiencing the role of a human baby, genuinely, while still looking upon his works from beyond is manifestly impossible. If the god is a baby then he has left his heavenly throne for a tadge while he grows up as a human. Omnipotence shorn of all power but to breathe, and cry, and smile! Why then did the devil not use these few years of God’s weakness to take control of the universe? How do Christians know he didn't? Or, if God is simultaneously looking after everything whilst being a human baby, how can he truly experience what it is to be human?
Then again if God (Ex 33:20) was not kidding that “no man can see me and live”, how could it be that God could live as a human on earth for some thirty years meeting many people plainly, all of whom did not immediately shrivel up. Knowing their scripture, could they be expected to believe this man to be God? And if Jesus’s companions could not be expected to believe it, why should God expect other people who never saw him in this spectacular incarnation to believe it on the say so of men who might be devils in disguise for all anyone knows?
Can an infinite being, absolutely and eternally unchangeable, hunger and thirst as did Jesus? Can an unceasingly watchful omnipotent God, whose eye “never slumbers”, sink into unconscious sleep night after night for thirty years, unconscious of the world around him? Truly? Anyone can play an arcade game and finish up being killed by the aliens. Is that what it is like for God pretending to be human? He can die on the machine but if he lost his temper he could take up an axe and smash it into smithereens. He could suffer a blow from an insulting priest but if he'd got annoyed could have squashed him like a greenfly.
Can anyone believe that God could have been really tempted by demons, devils and crawling serpents? When God who owns “the cattle upon a thousand hills” (“Psalms” 1:10) said he had not “where to lay his head”, was he just kidding? Why bother suffering as he supposedly had to when other, more effective, means must have been open to him? If he had “power to lay down his life, and take it up again” (John 10:17), how could he have suffered like a man on the cross knowing that his end was not final? Why could he not cause that all of these Chosen People of his should love him as the saviour, instead of hating him? It is all totally incomprehensible and the only way it can be accepted is by suspending the faculties that the Creator gave us.
We have a bleeding god, an infant god and a vengeful god appeased by murder and streams of blood.
Christians tell us that the human and the divine were united in Christ Jesus. Human foibles were mingled with divine perfection. Mortal weakness was wedded to omnipotent power. Impossible. The incarnation of an infinite god is a shocking absurdity, and an infinite impossibility.
The supposed omnipotence and omnipresence of God is based on the idea that he is everywhere and can act everywhere in the universe. His extent is infinite. If the description “infinite” means that every cranny of the universe, whatever its nature and throughout time, is taken up by an infinite being, it follows that there can be only one such being. The word infinite comprehends all; it covers the whole ground; it fills the immensity of the universe, and fills it to repletion, so that there is no room left for any other being to exist. And whoever and whatever does exist must constitute a part of this infinite whole.
For Christians the Father is God and is all we can conceive of as constituting God and was such from all eternity, before Jesus Christ was born into the world. Paul cuts through the sophistry of Christendom (1 Cor 8:6) by declaring:
To us there is but one God, the Father.
The Father alone is God. But we saw above that only the father therefore can be God. All other beings in the universe are cut off from any participation in the Godhead with the Father. The moment you try to make Christ God, or any part of the Godhead, you declare God not to be infinite or you are dishonest in elevating another to join him in his place. You cannot introduce another being as God in the infinite sense until the first-named infinite God is dethroned and put out of existence. Otherwise we should have two Gods, both absolute and infinite.
If Christ was a mewling helpless infant with a dirty bottom, then how could he have been an infinite god? As an infinite being God must necessarily constitute the child, and not just the infant Jesus but every child, but God is not being a real human child because no human child has the powers of a god and God must be simultaneously retaining his powers. The omnipresence of the Father does and must exclude that of the Son, or any other being, and thus exclude the possibility of his apotheosis or incarnated deityship.
An axiom in philosophy is that the less cannot contain the greater. How then can a finite body contain an infinite body? If Jesus Christ is only a part of the infinite God, then it is evident that he is not God! No philosopher does or can believe in the absolute divinity of Jesus Christ.
If God has appeared on earth in the form of a man, how can He expect other men to be able to distinguish men from God? How is anyone to know that a certain man, who acts peculiarly, is not a God? If everyone knew that God never appeared as a man then there would be no confusion and one source of error would have been removed from human behaviour. Now we only know from professional Christians, all human, that God took the form of a man. Only professional Christians who get a living—often a substantial one—from persuading people of the truth of the story, tell people that God appeared on earth as a man. Common sense tells you that God was inviting trouble among his flocks by doing this. It is easier to believe that Christian ministers are frauds than to believe that God is a fool.
The New Testament itself illustrates the difficulties created by God appearing as a man.
Twice, the author of Revelation, supposedly John the beloved disciple, (Rev 19:10; 22:9) fell down to worship a man whom he mistook for God.
If Christ’s own disciples could be betrayed into the sin of idolatry by the abolition of the distinction between the divine and the human, we surely have a strong argument against such a doctrine. Nothing could favour false worship better than to obliterate the demarcation between God and man. Isn't this the origin of idolatry in pagan countries? They failed to maintain a distinction between a God of infinite attributes, and a being wrapped in human form.
Since they have accepted it, how can Christians condemn any people for worshipping a fellow human as a god? Anyone who could believe that God was Jesus, cannot criticise those who believe that the Emperor of Japan or the Grand Lama of Tibet is God. Only the name differs. Substitute the Grand Lama for that of Jesus Christ, and the thing is done.
Such is Christian logic.
Moral Lessons of Religious History
All religious conceptions, whether doctrine, precept, prophecy, prayer, religious devotion, or a belief in miracles, are an outgrowth of the moral and religious elements of the human mind. They have no supernatural origin.
Common features can be seen in all religious systems, explicable by the common features of human psychology. There is no basis in these hypotheses for any claim to a divine origin of anything in any religion.
Many stories regarded by Christians as miraculous were distortions of real events which could not be told by Christian converts within the Roman Empire. They are not supernatural violations of nature or feats of God in violation of his own laws.
Other miraculous stories, easily identified, are the supernatural acts of pagan gods attached to the Jewish martyr to make him also into a god. Various heathen gods had, long before Christ’s advent, filled the same chapter in history reserved for saviours now granted to him in the Christian New Testament. This type of story related of Jesus Christ have no other foundation than that of heathen tradition.
Conclusion
No advancement has often been made in morals or civilization in any country by the introduction of the Christian bible or the Christian religion. India became corrupted and economically sunk in morals largely after the introduction of the Christian bible. Christian gentlemen tried to make the Chinese into a nation of opium eaters.
Nations without bibles advance faster than those well supplied with them. Japan has advanced into one of the most advanced civilisations in only a century without any Christian bible. Even now, imbued with the cultural imperialism of the USA, it is still a refined and orderly country, relatively free of the crimes and vulgarity that plague the USA.
Ethiopia is Christian, despite the recent interlude of communism. Bibles and churches are numerous. Preaching and praying are heard every day, and crimes of all kinds are commonplace. The people are abject and starving. The daily practice of reading their bible has not benefited these poor people. Where then are its practical and spiritual benefits in the instances of these quite different people?
Christians pretend to defend the world against excessive materialism and pretends instead to be defending spiritual things. Yet modern Christians are thoroughly materialistic and reject every teaching of their god advocating the spiritual benefits of poverty. Christians are and have always been hypocrites.
The Christian Bible does not approve of the words, science and arts. Paul uses the word science only once, and then to condemn it, but Jesus omits any allusion to science, philosophy, or natural law. So thoroughly convinced were the early disciples of the Christian faith that the teachings of their bible are inimical to the arts and sciences, that they destroyed works of art wherever they could find them, and regularly opposed every new discovery in social science and the sciences .
In the early days of the USA, reports were published of the judgement of God manifest as showers of blood. Subsequently science proved the blood was the ordure of butterflies migrating in vast swarms. Yet, Christian children continued to hear that these bloody showers came from God out of heaven to show his displeasure at the sins of the people. The Christian has always had a faith which was proof against science and reason and would not give up the story of falls of blood. How long will Christians continue to tell their children lies like this when the true explanation is known? Facts, proofs, demonstrations the reasoning of science can rarely eradicate dogma from the stubbornness of the religious mind once it is instilled in early life.
Bibles are considered the words of God himself and therefore forever true, not the admirable but faulty attempts of primitive people to account for their world. As bibles represent only the morals and state of society in the age in which they are written, and are not allowed to be altered or transcended, they hold their disciples back in all coming time, and compel them to teach and practice the morals of the age found in their bibles. Bibles prevent the moral growth of the people just as the growth of the feet of Chinese girls were prevented by their being permanently bound into wooden shoes. Morals can be taught without spiritual bindings on the mind.
Absurdities
It would take a long time to go through all the absurdities of the Bible, absurdities which are used to indoctrinate children still. We shall simply review a few. Of course, it all began with Adam and Eve who led the human race into sin!
Incidentally, when God made woman in the Yahwistic creation story, he took one of Adam’s ribs and cut it out and made it into a woman. Naturally, then, women are inferior beings, only being made as an afterthought. How many Baptist preachers would say it was a myth? None! There are some people who still occupy Christian pulpits who say it is, but many Christians would say by so doing the vicar is putting his immortal soul in danger, and not long ago they would have sent them to the stake to prove it. The truth is the exact opposite. Males are the afterthought because the first sex was the female sex. Everyone begins life as a female but by birth about half have developed secondary features of maleness.
In the biblical story, the woman turned out to be a bad lot, which presumably God knew anyway, and she got Adam to disobey God’s instructions. God wanted Adam and Eve to stay ignorant, so they were not allowed to eat of the fruit of a certain tree which would give them knowledge. Eve learnt about this from the Serpent and persuaded Adam to have a bite. God has punished people ever since. Nice God!
What has the human race done that was so bad? Why should eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge bring sin into the world? What are these sins? Did anyone really have to save mankind from their sins in a miraculous way? It is an absurd piece of theology which priests say people must accept on faith. Why? Because reason won't confirm it.
The Bible says the Tower of Babel was so named:
because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth,
the name “Babel” supposedly deriving from balal, to confound. The Holy Ghost was kidding us again! The cuneiform tablets found in the ruins of Babylon tell us exactly what the Babylonians called it—Bab-ilu, “the gate of God”, sometimes written with two signs, a gate and god, so there can be no doubt about it. Now the obvious etymology of Babel in Hebrew is precisely the same, “the gate of God”, so it has nothing to do with confounding. The place was a temple of seven platforms, each tinted a different colour, and each dedicated to one of the seven planets. The story of the confusion of languages was a reflexion of the confusion of the exiles arriving in a cosmopolitan country such that they could hardly dream about.
In the story of Daniel in the Lion’s Den (Daniel 6) the God-fearing and divinely- protected Daniel is saved by the power of God. The same God allowed a gross injustice for a fault they did not commit to the Royal officers, who were simply carrying out their orders, and to their innocent wives and families, though God’s supernatural power could have prevented it.
In the exodus from Egypt (Exodus 7) we find the story of Moses who led the Israelites from Egypt into the Promised Land. Moses had a miraculous rod which could change into a serpent and draw water from a rock. The story is supposed to be set about 1400 BC but was not written down until over a thousand years later. The author of the story therefore had knowledge of the identical story of Bacchus or Orpheus who had a rod with the same miraculous properties and who also passed through the Red Sea dry shod at the head of his army. Nothing of either story is recorded by any historian and it is likely to be purely mythical.
Almost every nation of antiquity had a legend of their holy men ascending a mountain to ask counsel of their gods. Minos, the Cretan law-giver, ascended Mount Dicta and received from Zeus the sacred laws. A similar legend is told of Zoroaster, to whom Ormuzd handed The Book of the Law—the Zend Avesta. When the Old Testament was being written down by priests after the return from Babylonian exile, they used many elements of the myths of the country in which they had lived when in captivity. Their Saviour, the warrior king Cyrus, the Persian, was almost certainly a follower of Zoroaster, and post-exilic Judaism is constructed from the Persian religion.
Joshua was very righteous in the sight of God and the great Israelite general who led them into the land of Canaan after the death of Moses. He was busy killing the people he found there to make room for God’s people. but found himself short of time. He turned to the mountain top and said to the sun, “Stand still till I finish this job”, and it stood still!
Joshua said to the sun: “Stand still”, and it stood still?
Are Christians seriously expected to believe this to gain salvation? Ancient Jewish authors thought that if the sun stood still, the night wouldn't come on. But the motion of the sun through the heavens is only apparent, being caused really by the rotation of the earth on its axis. So if Christians reject this story because it defies all reason, are they wicked and doomed to hell fire? Have they got to get rid of all their knowledge and common sense to save their souls?
Samson’s six exploits are from the labours of Hercules. Now Hercules was a sun god and his twelve labours were an allegorical account of the sun’s journey through the zodiac. The Jews, at one time in their history worshipped a sun God, as the bible itself bears endless witness to. We can be certain that originally Samson, whose name means the sun, Shamas, also had twelve labours but six have been lost or deliberately dropped to loosen the connexion.
In Matthew 12:40, Jesus who, the Christians say, is God in human garb guarantees the truth of the story of Jonah and the big fish. Jonah is swallowed up by a fish within which he lived three days and nights, praying to God. God answered his prayers by making the fish vomit on to dry land and among all the contents of the fish’s stomach was Jonah, alive and well! Christians are fond of miracles but it takes some gullibility to believe this one.
Jesus was born of a virgin. Could anyone get any positive evidence that would compel believe in this story today? No sensible person could consider it today without artificial insemination but there were at least four miraculous births recorded in the Bible—Sarah’s child, Samson, John the Baptist and Jesus.
Miraculous births were fashionable in those days, especially in Rome, where most of Christianity developed. Caesar had a miraculous birth, Cicero, Alexander the Great—great men just had to have miraculous births. Have the laws of Nature changed since then, or were they all fanciful? Today such tales would be rejected yet Christians must believe their bibles without a shadow of doubt. If they do not they are saying that the bible is not true. If it is not true, it must be lying. Proof is that Jesus had brothers and sisters, and his genealogy by Matthew is traced to his father, Joseph. If he wasn't Jesus’s father, why was he in the story at all?
There are many curious tales but also many revolting and immoral ones in the Jewish scriptures, some of which have their equals in other mythologies. The difference is that these, being biblical, are the infallible word of God which must be believed by anyone not wanting to lose their immortal soul to the flames of Old Nick:
- Elijah ascending in a whirlwind,
- the formation of an army out of bones,
- the talking ass,
- the talking serpent,
- the talking cloud,
- the army which woke up one morning and found themselves all dead men (really! 2 Kings 19:35),
- the retrograde motion of the sun (2 Kings 20:10-11),
- the halting of the sun in its daily motions for a whole day at the battle of Jericho,
- the defeat of 600 Philistines by one man armed only with an ox-goad,
- Moses turning the Nile into blood and inducing many plagues.
And many more! These are the infallible or the inspired word of God—depending upon your degree of fundamentalism—which God, speaking in his aspect of the Son, advocated wholeheartedly and which Christians, for that reason, still believe to this day though most of it is incredible.
Can Christianity therefore be sound in its moral teaching? According to the scriptures, which anyone may freely search, God advised or countenanced:
- adultery (Genesis 12:10);
- deception (Ezekiel 14:9; Numbers 14:30-34);
- stealing (Exodus 3:21-22);
- selfishness (Deuteronomy 14:21):
- conquest by force (Numbers 31 and others);
- indiscriminate slaughter (Exodus 32:27);
- violation of virgins (Numbers 31:18);
- murder (Deuteronomy 7:16 and others};
- cannibalism (Jeremiah 19:9 and others);
- killing of witches (Exodus 22:18);
- slavery (Exodus 21:2-5; Leviticus 25:44-46);
- capital punishment for rebellious sons or for seeking false gods (Deuteronomy 21:18-21; 13:6-9);
- human sacrifice (Exodus 13:1-2);
- sacrifices of animals (Leviticus 1:14-15);
The absurdity of believing in Yehouah as a kind or logical entity may be exposed with impunity from the pages of the Holy Book itself. A God who destroyed 70,000 of his chosen people because their king took a census (Chronicles 21) is too paranoid for any but the insane, the gullible and theologians to worship. Indeed it is indicative of the totalitarian power of the priesthood and the gullibility of the people that this pigs ear of a religion has survived for so long.
Adam and Eve were put in a garden where everything was lovely and were allowed to stay there on one condition—that they didn't eat of the tree of knowledge. That has been the condition of the Christian church from then until now. Clarence Darrow said:
They haven't eaten as yet. As a rule they do not!
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