Left to right, Ihjaz Ali, Mehboob Hussain, Umar Javed, Razwan Javed and Kabir Ahmed.

I’m sure I know how most Americans would feel about this, whether they agree with the homophobic message or not – But speaking for myself, I’m torn.

On the one hand, this is certainly a form of censorship. On the other hand, it’s censoring a group of extreme bigots who are trying to promote hatred to the point of actual murder.

At the moment I’m leaning towards this prosecution being a good thing – This is not a thought-crime, it’s attempted incitement. They actively promoted murdering innocent people. That’s the point where I think they lost their right to free expression. That said, I’m still open to persuasion.

Unfortunately, extremists like this will also raise questions about why Britain is so accepting of Muslim migrants (albeit these men seem to be second-generation, born British) who have no intention of adapting to Western values. I’ve argued many times that there is no such thing as an indigenous Brit, and that we are a country made up of migrants and the descendants of migrants. I’ve also said many times that there’s real strength in diversity. But here I’m forced to wonder if there is not such a thing as a British culture and British values, and if this kind of diversity really brings strength, or if it only brings division. Of course, it is to be hoped that these men are a minority within a minority, and that their time will soon pass. We shall see.

For now, I’ll throw this open to the floor: Where do you fall in this discussion, and what’s your reasoning?

If anybody thinks of something they’d like to add to it, leave it in the comments. I’d like this to be an evolving entry in the style of a wiki, open to all contributors and commenters to improve over time. So, like I said, leave suggestions and I’ll try to keep on top of them.

If Daniel, Vorjack, or Elemenope want to alter it, they should feel free.

So, tips for the theist commenter:

Consider your audience

Whilst UF has regular commenters who are religious, the vast majority of the blog’s audience is atheist and the religious guys tend to be liberal Christians. This means that there are certain things which you might be used to expressing in social situations with other Christians, which would cause offense here. Examples include, but are not limited to:

“The fool says in his heart there is no God”;

“Repent before it’s too late”;

“You’re all going to go to hell if you don’t bow down and obey Jesus”;

“You can’t experience love if you don’t believe in God”.

Comments in that vein may well draw an angry response, and if it’s your first comment and we don’t know you, it’s possible we’ll assume you’re just a drive-by troll and delete your post. This leads me nicely to my next point:

Trolling softly is still trolling

As a general rule of thumb, if you’re getting some kind of thrill out of “witnessing” to all us Godless atheists, then chances are you’re already winding people up. It comes across in the tone of comments, and it’s very rude. Remember, we’re only atheist because we reject one more God from history’s ample supply of Gods than you do – You yourself are likely atheist about Thor and Odin and Pan and Baal and Bacchus and Helios and Ganesh and all the rest. We’re not so very different, and the fact that we’re not convinced by the supernatural claims made for the personality at the centre of your particular religion does not make us bad people. So be nice and engage politely! Lurk a while, read some old threads, and for the love of all that’s good don’t use some of the following tired arguments:

Evolution is “just” a Theory

The number one, all-time favourite Creationist line of argument: Not acknowledging that the same word can sometimes have two different meanings. In general, what Creationists are actually arguing is that evolution is a hypothesis, not a Theory (I’m capitalising Theory to denote a scientific Theory as opposed to the other kind). Creationists are wrong about that, as we shall see. A hypothesis is a precursor to a theory; it’s the idea that’s initially being tested – So it must be falsifiable. For any non-scientifically literate people reading, that means that it must correctly predict the outcomes of testable questions. It doesn’t become a theory until it’s been tested many times and some kind of consensus exists that it provides a model that accurately reflects what’s going on in the real world.

This is why the Theory of Evolution is science and Intelligent Design (ID) is religion – There are criteria which, if met, would prove the Theory of Evolution wrong. There are no criteria by which ID could even be tested as a scientific Theory. It cannot change or adapt with evidence; it is a matter of faith – It might be a religious theory, but it is certainly not a scientific Theory.

So, to summarise, courtesy of http://notjustatheory.com/:

When scientists use the word theory, it has a different meaning to normal everyday use.

In science, a theory is not a guess, not a hunch. It’s a well-substantiated, well-supported, well-documented explanation for our observations.

Some people think that in science, you have a theory, and once it’s proven, it becomes a law. That’s not how it works.

A theory never becomes a law. In fact, if there was a hierarchy of science, theories would be higher than laws. There is nothing higher, or better, than a theory.

Just because it’s called a theory of gravity, doesn’t mean that it’s just a guess.

The Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection is our best explanation for the fact of evolution.

Evolution is not just a theory, it’s triumphantly a theory!

“Truth” can be different for different people

Fundies use the word “truth” a lot – But to quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means”. Of course, it is arguable that fundies use “truth” in a special, specific-to-context way that is not the same as the way that it is used in everyday conversation – Scientists have their own meaning for “Theory”, after all. The difference is that scientists can use that word in both contexts and know the difference, while fundies tend to learn their own definition of “truth” – which seems to be “what feels emotionally pleasing and agrees with my beliefs” – in everyday conversation, as if it is the only version of the word that matters.

Well, seekers after truth, let me give you a heads-up:

Truth

Noun

1. Conformity to fact.

2. A statement proven as true.

And just for completeness:

Fact

Noun

1. The quality of being actual.

2. Something that has occurred or is actually the case.

It is important to note that neither strength of belief nor emotional response have any bearing on what is “truth”, in the normal conversational use of the word. So go ahead and use “truth” in a specific, religious context if you want to – But please be aware that it also has a wider definition that has nothing to do with faith!

The historicity of Jesus is proven by evidence

[Update] I feel the need to put a note here for the skim-readers since this particular entry has sparked discussion. I’m not arguing that Jesus did not exist as a historical person. I’m arguing that’s there’s no substantive, third-party evidence that Jesus existed as a person. Read the whole entry before accusing me of being a conspiracy theorist or a kook, please![End of update]

This has been a favourite line around here lately. We’ve had a lot of commenters blandly assert that the actual existence of Jesus is a proven historical fact – But not a single one of them has ever presented any of the alleged “proof” when asked. In fact, to get a serious analysis of the evidence, I had to ask another atheist – Cue Nox with a wall of text on the forum. Whether you’re a Christian or an atheist, I strongly suggest you read it – Nox is a very knowledgeable cookie when it comes to theological history, and you will be educated by it.

The upshot is: There’s no good extra-Biblical evidence for the historicity of Jesus. I accept that if you believe the Bible is true then you won’t find that such an issue – But most of us don’t believe that, so it is a problem for us.

The other part of this issue is, as Ursa Minor has repeatedly pointed out, so what? It’s not difficult to accept that in a time and place where there were a lot of Jewish apocalyptic “prophets”, there might possibly have been one named Yeshua, who might possibly have inspired the writing (decades later) of the various books of the New Testament. But so what? It certainly doesn’t follow automatically that he was God, or the Son of God, or a miracle worker, or in any other way supernatural.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, folks. I see lots of claims and zero evidence.

The universe was created by God – My God

This is one that I strongly recommend fundies to sit and think about for a while:

Could any of the arguments you use in favour of your God, be used only in favour of your God, and not in favour of any other Gods?

Let’s enter fantasy land and assume for one second that you can prove that the whole universe was created by an omnipotent being, who then endowed the first naturally formed amino acids with the gift of life, setting the whole chain in motion to create you: Why does that mean that the omnipotent being in question was the particular version of the particular one that you worship?

Just a point to ponder.

John C says it, therefore I can say it too

In a word: No. John gets a pass on what would be considered trolling from anybody else, because, well, he’s John C. He’s been here about as long as the blog’s been going, and nobody is 100% sure that he isn’t the most successful Poe in the entire history of the internet. He denies it. I’m not so sure. But either way, he gets to behave in ways that you don’t.

You can’t disprove my God, so it doesn’t matter that I can’t prove it, so we’re even

Thanks to Len for reminding me to add this one. It’s a common argument, and it completely ignores the fact that burden of proof doesn’t lay with the disbeliever. To be specific: I do not believe in God, not because there’s any positive evidence against God, but because there is no positive evidence for God (though it should be noted that there’s lots of evidence against many specific versions of God).
Let’s base a quick metaphor on Russel’s Teapot. It’s an example I’ve used before, but it’s one I happen to like and it works:

Atheist: “How did the universe come into being?”
Theist: “God did it.”
Atheist: “I will need to be convinced of that before I believe it. What is your evidence?”
Theist: “I have none, but since you can’t disprove my explanation, you must accept that it’s true.”

Does that seem reasonable? How about if we alter the metaphor slightly again:

Judge: “Why have you arrested that man for murder?”
Police: “Because he murdered another man.”
Judge: “I will need to be convinced of that before I convict him. What is your evidence?”
Police: “I have none, but he has no alibi and therefore cannot prove he didn’t do it, therefore you must accept that he is guilty.”

Does that seem reasonable? The point here is this: As a theist, you are providing an answer to the question the atheist posed above, therefore it is for you to provide the evidence.

This is where theists really need to take a step back and decide which side they’re arguing: Do they want faith without evidence, or do they want to debate their religion as a question to be settled? If the former, then commenting is probably pointless – We don’t have faith, and you can’t convince us without evidence. If the latter, then have at it – If you are the theist who can actually post substantive evidence for the existence of something supernatural, then the Randi Foundation has a million dollars waiting for you to claim.

Everybody will be impressed with the story of how I was a baby-eating, Satanical, rock ‘n roll loving, junkie, atheist with a miserable life before I found love and joy in Jeeeeesus-uh!

No. We really won’t. It’s amazing how many theists try that nonsense here – Each and every one of them is absolutely convinced that being an atheist necessarily means leading an immoral, criminal life of debauchery and hedonism. And that’s how every atheist who reads such tales knows that they’re an absolute crock of shit. Save those stories for other fundies – Apparently some of them are ignorant enough to believe them. Here they’ll earn you nothing but scorn.

If only you’d crack a Bible / read my favorite passage, you’d embrace Jesus!

Again: Nope. In the words of Blonde Nonbeliever:

“If you have a Bible on your bookshelf, you may be a Christian.
If you have a Koran on your bookshelf, you may be a Muslim.
If you have a Torah on your bookshelf, you may be Jewish.
If you have all three, you are probably an atheist.”

We have regular commenters and contributors who know several versions of the Bible inside out and back to front. If you ask deconverted Christians why they started on the road to deconversion, I would bet dollars to pesos that a lot of them would answer simply “because I read the Bible”. Perhaps you are a Christian who has read the whole thing, however most Christians we encounter here seem to be blissfully unaware of what the Bible says beyond specific cherry-picked passages that their Pastors have selected for them.

You also need to remember that the Bible is not just a religious document; it’s also an historical social commentary. As Richard Dawkins has observed, one cannot make a serious attempt to fully understand any historical English literature unless one has read the Bible – So a lot of us have read at least one version of it, and some of us have read more than one.

You deconverted therefore you weren’t really a Christian in the first place – No True Scotsman

The phrase “No True Scotsman” was coined by Anthony Flew* in his book “Thinking About Thinking”. It goes something like this:

“Imagine Hamish McDonald, a Scotsman, sitting down with his Glasgow Morning Herald and seeing an article about how the “Brighton [Brighton is on the South coast of England] Sex Maniac Strikes Again.” Hamish is shocked and declares that “No Scotsman would do such a thing.” The next day he sits down to read his Glasgow Morning Herald again and this time finds an article about an Aberdeen [Aberdeen is on the East coast of Scotland] man whose brutal actions make the Brighton sex maniac seem almost gentlemanly. This fact shows that Hamish was wrong in his opinion but is he going to admit this? Not likely. This time he says, “No true Scotsman would do such a thing.

The point here is this: Before you can use something as an analogy, you must first define it. In this case, a Scotsman: Was he born in Scotland? If yes, he is a Scotsman, regardless of other considerations.

This extends to religion fairly simply: When told of Christians who have deconverted, it is standard for other Christians to respond “Well, s/he can’t have been a true Christian” – But that’s nonsense! First define the term:

Christian

Noun

1. A person who is a believer in Jesus Christ and his teachings.

That’s it. that’s all a Christian is. There is nothing in there about inability to be persuaded by evidence or change their mind.

* I’m well aware that Flew embraced Christianity at some point after he’d already embraced senility, please don’t feel you have to point that out.

What is a straw man and why do theists keep burning them?

In simple terms, a Straw-Man argument is where you misrepresent your opponent and then argue against your own misrepresentation of them, rather than arguing against what they’re actually saying.

This is not always deliberate. Straw-man arguments often result from ignorance of the subject that you’re arguing against, or from repeating arguments you’ve heard from other people who you regard as authorities (such as your Pastor). For example, when discussing the Theory of Evolution it is common to hear phrases such as:

“Evolution is just a theory!”[See above]
“Dogs don’t just randomly turn into cats!” [Theory of Evolution agrees]
“I ain’t evolved from a monkey!”[Theory of Evolution agrees]

This leads me to suggest a top tip for all theists who seriously want to engage in debates: READ! Learn about what you’re arguing against – You might not be quite so keen to argue against it if you do, and you’ll be a lot more interesting to talk to either way. Another top-tip to avoid the straw-man is, be critical when you hear arguments from others, and ask yourself if the person you heard it from can make a serious claim to authority on that specific subject. Your Pastor might be considered a reliable source of apologetic arguments, but that doesn’t make them an expert on evolutionary biology.

Theistic and Atheistic Morality

In view of the rather lackluster way that religion’s physical, empirical claims stack up against comparable scientific ones, a common backup claim among the religious is that religion really shines in the mushier, less clear cut areas where science has been either absent or somewhat less successful. Psychology, aesthetics, and personal well-being come up under this heading, though not nearly as often as morality. This is used as a form of trump: “Science may well discover how things work, but can never tell us what matters and why!” This generally segues into how their particular religion purportedly succeeds to provide these things that science and materialistic, atheistic philosophy cannot. In the context of monotheism, this means that religion is claimed to reveal God’s preferences for human behavior and action, which rather straightforwardly dictates what is right and what is wrong, what is pious and what is profane. Because God has an objective perspective of the universe and the creatures within it, God’s view on rightness and wrongness is the highest standard for those concepts and is unappealable. Without this guidance, it is claimed, morality devolves into sentiment, competing personal tastes, and arbitrary choices.

There are several problems with this account. The first, perhaps the most important, is also the oldest. Predating Christianity itself by nearly four centuries, in a short dialogue called the Euthyphro Plato pointed out through the character of Socrates that the religious claim of an objective source of morality is entirely hollow. Long story short, Socrates asks the question (altered slightly to apply to modern monotheists):

“Does God like good things because they are good, or are good things good because God likes them?”

If the first is true, then God really had nothing to do with defining what is good, since God is merely responding to a quality preexisting in the thing or behavior at issue; God is not the source of morality. If the second is true, then God’s determination of goodness is entirely arbitrary, since no concept of goodness preexists God’s assignment of goodness. With this short, simple argument, the theist is presented with a stark choice: abandon God as the author of morality, or admit that if there are God-given morals, they are as arbitrary as those of other sources.

Aristotle, a contemporary of Plato, had meanwhile codified an approach to ethics that was essentially atheistic, in that its claims to authority do not rest on it being God-given or divinely inspired in any way. This approach is generally referred to today as Virtue Ethics. While a generally vast and complicated subject, virtue ethics at its base is about developing character. The idea is that the goal of life is to flourish, and in order to accomplish that goal a person must recognize the goodness of certain virtues which if properly identified and acted upon lead to well-being; when a person is properly trained by good teachers and becomes experienced through real-life moral dilemmas they become better at being moral. In this view, in short, morality is a skill: the ability to identify in specific situations which general virtues lead to the best outcome. The emphasis isn’t on whether a particular act is right or wrong, but rather upon the capacity of a person in a situation to figure out what is right or wrong, given their commitment to virtue, their experience, and their training.

Plato’s list of these virtues–wisdom, justice, fortitude, and temperance–should sound familiar to most Western theists, who tend to call them the “Four Cardinal Virtues”. They sound familiar because they were copied wholesale from Plato, which shouldn’t be terribly surprising given that this approach was the popular approach to ethics at the time and place the events in the New Testament allegedly occurred. There was really only one competitor.

The other major ancient approach to ethics that predates Christianity in the West is the ethical system of its progenitor, Judaism. In Judaism, from its earliest written records up to about the time of the New Testament, there was a very obviously theistic system, wherein God makes a contract with his worshipers to adopt a certain number of programmatic rules and prohibitions in return for being their patron. In this case, the generally accepted number is 613, separate rules that either prohibit or require certain behaviors, activities, and relationships. Obeying and internalizing these rules formed a covenant that signaled to the ancient Jews that they were acting morally, which literally meant in accordance with God’s wishes.

As with all rules-based ethical systems before or since, there was a magical ingredient left out of the text of the Torah that had to be provided by the people following the rules themselves. That magical ingredient was abstraction, and it is made necessary both by the simple fact that six hundred rules simply isn’t enough to cover all human situations, and even more worryingly sometimes the rules directly conflict with one another when one tries to apply them to a real situation. Abstracting a rule is an attempt to figure out the essential concepts behind it; what is a rule aiming to achieve, why is it important? This allows the resolution of ambiguities by analogy, and of conflicts by figuring out which rule supports the more important essential concept in the situation.

By the time of the New Testament, the Jews had been using these rules for several hundred years and under many different circumstances and contexts. Given this, the drive to abstract the law into the most general possible terms was finally famously brought to conclusion by two fairly different answers. A famous one is attributed to the Rabbi Hillel (the Elder), who was challenged to state the essence of the whole law while standing on one foot and replied:

“That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.”

The other famous summation is written in the New Testament and attributed to Jesus:

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

This desire to distill the laws and regulations of God down to a simple universally applicable statement will again crop up when we get to modern systems of ethics. Before we do that, though, let’s recap the important points for enterprising theists who wish to comment in an informed fashion:

1. Theistic and atheistic ethics are equally subjective, either because they are both subjective in precisely the same way (good things are good simply because they are considered so), or because the theist claim to access to the source of morality is false.

2. Christian morality borrowed very, very heavily from contemporary pagan Hellenic philosophers

3. The theistic moral rules upon which Christianity is based (the commandments of the Torah) is fundamentally incomplete, as it requires a process not indicated in the text itself to extract useful, meaningful guidance for behavior.

[more to come; section in progress]

Topics waiting to be addressed:

Atheists and the slightly bizarre “intellectual elite” ad hominem
You lose nothing by worshiping my specific God – Why Pascal’s Wager was meant to be ironic
Thermodynamics and evolution?! Seriously?!

[via]

[cectic]

Rich says of Miravalle, “The first 1/2 hour his tone of voice was something I could only call “argument by whining” for the existence of god.” Yeah, he’s trying too hard.

Click here to view the embedded video.

“(3)
If Matthew (assuming for a moment that the author of Matthew is the same person as the apostle Matthew) did not meet Jesus until Matthew 9:9, how was he able to create such a detailed transcription of the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5,6, & 7 (one of the 3 longest red letter passages anywhere in the 4 gospels)? And how does he know what Herod said to the jewish priests, or what the angel said to Joseph, or what the Devil told Jesus in the wilderness?

Even after Matthew hooks up with Jesus, the book tells us that Matthew was not with Jesus during the trial, the crucifixion, the transfiguration, or all those private talks Jesus had with Peter, James and John. The popular christian answer to this question is that “Matthew” and the other biblical authors were working under the inspiration and guidance of the holy spirit. But if this were the case, I have to wonder, why does Matthew get so much sh*t wrong?

Right out of the gate the first words in the first gospel are a bastardized reading of the old testament. Matthew devotes the first 17 verses of his first chapter to a genealogy (of Joseph for some reason) which retells a genealogy from 1st Chronicles 10 except it leaves out 4 generations of the Chronicles genealogy. Immediately after this Matthew (1:22) tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin and that this was a fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14.

But if you read Isaiah 7, Jesus is absolutely ruled out of this prophecy. In fact Isaiah makes it very clear that the prophesied child would be born 600 years before Jesus (according to Isaiah 8, he was and his name was Mahershalalhashbaz). The “prophecy” in this case was not even that the virgin would conceive, the young woman conceiving was meant to be a sign of the prophecy. The prophecy itself was that King Ahaz of Judah would be successful in an upcoming battle (according to 2nd Chronicles 28, Ahaz lost that battle and was killed in the aftermath).

Right after this (Matthew 2:5) we get another fulfilled prophecy. Herod asks the priests where the messiah is to be born and they quote Micah 5:2 to him stating that he is to be born in Bethlehem. The 5th chapter of Micah does make mention of Bethlehem, but clearly states that the person who fulfills this prophecy must be a military leader. According to Micah this promised redeemer “shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian”.

By the time Jesus arrived, the Jews were a lot more worried about Romans than Assyrians. The next 2 prophecies come back to back in Matthew 2:15-18 claiming that Jesus living in Egypt is a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1 which is not a prophecy but a past tense statement about the Jewish exodus from Egypt (“When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt”). 3 verses after this Matthew tells us that Jeremiah 31:15 is a prediction of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

Jeremiah seems to think differently, and if one reads the chapter in question he is quite explicit that this is a description of the Jewish exile in Babylon (see the book of Daniel). In Matthew 2:23 we are told that Joseph moved to Nazareth “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene”. This one is not a mere misunderstanding. There is absolutely nowhere in the old testament that anyone is called a Nazarene, nor is it predicted anywhere that someone will later be called a Nazarene.

It is either a made up prophecy or it is attempting to quote Judges 13:5 where an angel tells Samson’s parents that their child (Samson, not Jesus) will be a Nazarite (Not even close to the same thing as a Nazarene). There are a couple dozen more of these scattered throughout the 4 books. Every one of them falls apart when you read the passage it claims to be quoting from.”

You can find the first two parts here and here.

Thanks again to Nox for the serious amount of wor and research that went in to his giant wall of text; I wish I could say that it inspired an original response from NAoC, but alas it hasn’t yet.

More to follow….

According to Genesis 1:10-12, the first plants were growing on earth a day before the Sun existed (also as I mentioned, there was sunlight for 3 days before the Sun existed). This seems a little iffy to me.

Genesis 1 tells an account of the first six days of creation. Then as soon as it finishes, Genesis 2 gives us a completely different account. In Genesis 1 Adam and Eve are created at the same time after the animals. In Genesis 2, god creates Adam, gives him the rundown on the fruit policy (before Eve exists [slight oversight on god’s part]), then he creates all the animals, then has Adam name the animals, and after all this he creates Eve.

In Genesis 3:8-9 Adam and Eve hid behind a tree and god couldn’t find them.

Ok this one isn’t so much an accuracy issue as it is just something that has always struck me as really f*cked up (even when I believed the Earth was 6,000 years old). In Genesis 2:17 god tells Adam “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”. We see this repeated in Eve’s answer to the talking serpent (did I mention there’s a talking snake in this story?) “’You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die”. The talking snake tells Eve “You will not surely die, For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (v4-5). Obviously one of these characters is lying. We found out in verse 7 after they eat the fruit and “Then the eyes of both of them were opened” (also Adam lives another 930 years according to Genesis 5:5). The kicker to this is that after god banishes the humans he uses almost the exact same words as the serpent to describe the effects of the tree, “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil”. So according to the bible, the talking snake (commonly thought to be the devil, though Genesis makes no mention of this) was telling the truth and god was lying.

In Genesis 4:14, when Cain tells god “every one that findeth me shall slay me”, aren’t there supposed to be only 3 humans on the planet at this point in the story? And then Cain finds a wife. And they build a city (Genesis 4:17).

In Genesis 6:13 god becomes distraught because there is too much violence going on down on Earth (this is the one stated reason that god gives Noah in the flood story “the earth is filled with violence through them”). So what is god’s solution to all this violence? You guessed it. He kills everyone (well not everyone, there was this one guy, and some animals).

So god decides to kill everyone with a global flood, but first he gets a 600 year old man, and tells him to gather 7 of every “clean” animal and 2 of every “unclean” animal (by the way, if Noah was before Moses, how did he know which animals were unclean) and put them on a 450’x75’x45’ boat (presumably including animals which have never been indigenous to northern Africa) (and since we know from Genesis 1 that animals don’t evolve, then Noah’s gonna need 7 of each subspecies. So that’s not 7 elephants on the ark. It’s 28 elephants) (and 7 each of the 30,000 or so species of spiders) (and 7 isn’t even really enough genetic diversity to propagate a species) (seriously the math on this only works if you assume a very small number of species [much smaller than the number that can be seen to exist today]).

As for the flood itself, it is said to have covered the mountains (Genesis 7:19). So that would have to be enough water to raise the sea level of the entire planet (meaning every ocean at the same time) thousands of feet. This brings up the question of where all that water went afterward. Then there is the question of why the geological record does not mesh with the flood story.

According to Genesis 8:20 the first thing Noah does after getting off the boat is start killing his specimens (the ones he was trying to keep alive on the ark) and sacrificing them to god. Wouldn’t it have been a more efficient use of ark space to take 6 of each clean animal and call the 7th a drowned offering than taking 7 and killing the 7th as soon as you land?

This is as good a time as any to mention the shape of the Earth. Now the bible never explicitly says ‘the earth is flat’. But there are numerous sentences (some from the mouth of god himself) that simply would not make any sense unless they were describing a certain specific form. Take a quick look at Genesis 1:14-17, Genesis 11:3-9, Psalm 93:1, Isaiah 40:21-22, Matthew 4:8, 1st Samuel 2:8, Job 38:13, Deuteronomy 13:7, Revelation 8:10, Daniel 4:10-11 or Joshua 10:12, and ask yourself what is being described in these passages.
Which brings us to the tower of Babel, In Genesis 11, the people of Earth being of one language decide to build a tower to heaven. When god finds out about it he is worried that it will work, so he steps in and interrupts this moment of universal human cooperation to confound their language and scatter them so that they can’t finish their tower to heaven. Yes, it literally says that, “let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven”. And we see in verse 6 that god was worried they would succeed if he didn’t intervene. Leaving to one side the issue that god supposedly wants people to get to heaven (enough to kill himself to get them in), and that these people who would have died a couple thousand years before Jesus was born and thus would have no possible opportunity of converting to christianity and getting into heaven through the front door, the real problem is that this passage portrays heaven as a physical location above Earth. We have sent manned missions to the moon, probes to the edges of the solar system, and photographed much of the galaxy outside our own solar system, without finding “heaven”. The al Burj tower in Dubai (not far from where Babel would be if it were a true story) stands 828 meters (2,717) feet and it does not reach heaven (there are also [as far as I know] no accounts anywhere of airplanes colliding with angels in midair). If god had not stepped in surely construction would have been halted by the thinning oxygen as the ancient builders began to get into the upper levels of the atmosphere. And there is really only so tall you can go with a tower made of brick and mortar. And how did these people even have a concept of heaven? There’s been no mention of heaven in front of any of the human characters anywhere in the ten chapters preceding this incident.

Since the real topic at hand is the new testament (specifically the gospels), and since the stories of Abraham and Moses are each as complex (and full of plot holes) as the story(s) of Jesus I’m gonna skip ahead a bit, but I would like to mention one other thing in relation to the old testament. And that is the inherent contradiction between “thou shalt not kill” and “thou shalt kill”. Some of the worst atrocities in literary history are commanded by the judeo-christian god and his prophets in the old testament. And the law of Moses (the same place you find “thou shalt not kill”) orders execution for hundreds of innocuous acts from working on the sabbath (Exodus 30:15), to a girl not being able to prove her virginity to her husband (Deuteronomy 22:13-25) to cursing your parents (Leviticus 20:9). After giving Moses this “moral” code, god commands Moses to tell the Israelites to commit genocide, offering them the promised land, but telling them that first they must murder every man woman and child currently occupying the land. The god who tells Moses “thou shalt not kill” tells Moses “But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth: But thou shalt utterly destroy them” (Deuteronomy 20:16-17). This is also the same god who is Jesus later in the book.

Which brings us to Jesus…

Thanks again Nox – and once again, to be continued!

Update from Dan: I put some paragraph breaks in here… I just couldn’t take it.

Update from Custador (AKA Mike): Censorship! Booo! :p

Somewhat inevitably, though, NAoC fell back on an old Christian argument in the face of adversity:

“[The] Bible is not biased the apparent contradictions actually confirm its truth take the gospels for example you have four different eyewitness accounts of the same events its unlikely that each person from a slightly different standpoint would come up with exactly the same details.”

Regular poster Nox is something of a Bible scholar, and in response to that assertion he produced what I can only describe as an epic wall of textual ownage, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that all ur bible r belong 2 him. Because he put so much work into it and covered so much ground, I decided to reproduce it on the blog for all of y’all. Note that this wall of text is part of an ongoing discussion, so at times it addresses NAoC directly and references earlier posts. The link above is to the whole discussion if you need context.

Now, I’m usually guilty of dismissing epic posts as tl;dr – in this case, however, I recommend making yourself a cup of your favourite hot beverage, settling yourself down and having a good read. You’ll learn a lot.

Over to Nox:

“(1)
Welcome back NotAshamed,
I’m glad to see you decided this wasn’t a waste of time. And I hope you are getting something out of it. I always enjoy a good discussion. Sorry I wrote you off a bit early. You understand we do get a lot of drive by posters here. But I do give you credit for still being here and being willing to discuss these issues. As a former christian I am familiar with the discomfort that comes from having one’s faith criticized. But I honestly am trying to help you, and I do hope you’ll stick around for awhile.
“Besides, all the new Testament books were written down only 40 years after Jesus died.”
Where do you get this figure? Mark, the first gospel is believed to have been written down around 70 AD (about 40 years after the estimated date of the crucifixion) with Matthew and Luke showing up about 10 to 20 years later. The gospel of John was almost certainly written in the 2nd Century, around 90 years after the estimated date of Jesus death. There is however, pretty solid reason to believe that some of Paul’s letters (ie Galatians) were written less than 40 years after 33 AD. These dates aren’t controversial. They are accepted by the majority of biblical scholars (both secular and christian).
“Everyone believes that Julius Caesar came to Btitain in 55 BC but we have only 9 or 10 manuscripts to support this, and the earliest was written 900 years after the event!”
We have Caesar’s own account of his campaigns in Gaul and Pompey, written by Julius Caesar while Julius Caesar was alive (that may sound redundant but it is an important distinction). We have nothing that was written by Jesus. Nor do we have one thing that was written about Jesus during his lifetime. We have only the gospels, which show themselves to be historically inaccurate, and the letters of Paul (who never met Jesus) which give us almost nothing in terms of biographical details. And we have the unanimous silence of contemporary historians about a guy who would have been noticed if he did the stuff the gospels describe him doing. And while there may be thousands of “manuscripts” from the middle ages, it is worth noting that we do not have the original manuscript of any of the 4 gospels.
You said earlier “its just that I genuinely wonder how people do not believe in God when, in my mind anyway the wonders of creation the human body and brain shout out the existence of God”. We could get into how cosmology makes the deist god unnecessary. Or how natural selection explains the complexity of life without needing to invoke an extra party. Or how a modern understanding of electricity calls into question the existence of Thor. But what we are really talking about here is yhwh, the god in the bible. And the reason I don’t believe in the god in the bible is because I’ve read the bible. And really when you get down to it, there isn’t really any other source for the claim that yhwh exists (this is why I wanted to make a point of clarifying that yhwh is the god we are debating).
Let me give you a few examples of what I mean and why I can’t buy the bible as a historical document (at least not as an accurate historical document), and certainly not a reliable enough source to upon which to base belief in any entities which have not thought to give us any other reason to suspect their existence. There are scientific and philosophical issues as well, but since the bible is the topic that’s come up (and its kinda a hobby of mine), and since for me personally the bible was what convinced me that the bible was not true, then what I’d like to talk to you about today is the bible. ”

To be continued – I couldn’t post the whole lot at once because it’s gigantic – I’ll post more over the next couple of weeks. Thank you, Nox, for having a gigantic brain and sharing it with us!