Tag Archives: The Bible is Mythology

October 12, 2017

A Short Summary Of The Bible

According to the Bible, the universe began 6,000 years ago. God created the components of the universe a few bits at a time over the course of 6 days. Some people believe the universe is actually about 14 billion years old, and the 6 “days” God spent creating the universe are actually “eras.” If that’s true, then each era lasted about 2.3 billion years. Regardless, the components of the universe were created in the following order:

1: An empty universe and the Earth
2: Light
3: Earth’s atmosphere
4: The oceans of the Earth
5: All land on Earth that is above sea level
6: Plants
7: The rest of the stars, galaxies, and matter in the universe
8: The sun and the moon
9: Fish
10: Birds
11: Animals that live on land

Genesis 1

As an afterthought, God created a sentient being out of the same inanimate matter the rest of the physical universe is made of and named his latest creation, Adam. Then as a second afterthought, God decided to create another human whose body was designed with reproductive organs compatible with Adam’s existing reproductive system.. But instead of creating the first female human out of dirt like He did Adam, God created her by removing one of Adam’s rips and then morphing it into her. Then He named her Eve.

God created a magic garden for Adam and Eve to live in. Then he placed a magic fruit tree in the middle of the magic garden and told Adam and Eve that the worst thing they could do in life was eat the magic fruit from the magic tree.

Adam and Eve obeyed God’s instructions, but one day when God wasn’t looking, a talking snake lied to Eve and told her it was okay to eat the magic fruit. Having no concept of lying, Eve believed the talking animal and ate the magic fruit.

When God found out his inventions had broken the most important rule in the universe and eaten one of the magic pieces of fruit, He got really angry and kicked Adam and Eve out of the magic garden He had given them. Then He left a flying, flaming sword to guard the garden. Historically, this was the first sword to ever exist.

Then God invented thorns and thistles to further annoy human, and He cursed all women to hurt when they give birth and ordained that men would have to spend their lives working themselves to death just to scrape by. God also cursed all mankind with original sin, which meant we would all be born destined to suffer for eternity after death unless we could make amends with our creator during the short time we have on Earth. Finally, God cursed the snake who caused all this trouble to have to crawl on its belly.

Genesis 17:9-14

Then God started handing down rules for Adam and Eve’s incestuous descendants to follow. The first rule God established was to reverse His pre-existing rule that clothes were unnatural… except God never actually said that rule. Adam and Eve just sort of magically knew it. The rest of the rules were dictated by God to humans who wrote them with God’s full authority, and they were pretty interesting:

Deuteronomy 21

You have to cut off the foreskin of men’s penises.
If you find a dead body but can’t figure out who the killer is, you have to break a cow’s neck on top of the body.
If you go to war and take women captive, you can marry them after shaving their head and living with them for a month. However, afterward, you can’t sell her into slavery or treat her like a slave.
If a man has two wives and loves one more, he still has to give his first-born son the majority of his inheritance even if he doesn’t love the child’s mother.
If you have a rebellious son, you should take him to the center of town where all the towns’ men will stone him to death.
If you execute a criminal and hang his body on a pole, you have to leave the body hanging overnight.

Deuteronomy 22:13-29:

If you buy a wife and claim that she wasn’t a virgin when you bought her, but her parents prove she was a virgin, then you have to pay her father 100 shekels of silver and can never divorce her. However, if it turns out she wasn’t a virgin then the men of your town must stone her to death on her father’s front lawn.
If a man has sex with another man’s wife, both the man and woman must be stoned to death.
If a man rapes a woman who is engaged, and the woman doesn’t cry out for help, then both the man and the woman must be stoned to death. If a man rapes an unmarried woman, and she cries out for help, then he must buy her from her father for 50 shekels of silver and can never divorce her.

Deuteronomy 23:1-2

Nobody whose testicles are crushed are allowed to go to church. Neither are people born from a forbidden marriage or any of their descendants.

Deuteronomy 25:11-12

If two men are fighting, and one of their wives grabs the other man’s testicles, you must chop her hand off.

Exodus 22:18

You must kill witches.

Leviticus 11

You’re not allowed to eat camels, rabbits, pigs, anything from the ocean that doesn’t have fins and scales, eagles, vultures, ravens, owls, hawks, ospreys, storks, herons, bats, all flying insects except for locusts, katydids, crickets and grasshoppers, weasels, rats and most lizards. If you eat any of these animals or touch their carcass you’ll be magically unclean for the rest of the day, and you have to wash your clothes because they’re magically unclean also.

Leviticus 19:19-27

Don’t have sex with animals.
Don’t plan different kinds of seeds in the same field.
Don’t wear clothes made of more than one kind of fabric.
If a man sleeps with a female slave who was promised to be sold to someone else, he must give a ram to the city priest.
If you plant a fruit tree you’re not allowed to eat any of the fruit for the first three years. You have to give all the fruit from the fourth year to God. Then you can eat the fruit yourself.
Don’t eat meat with the blood still in it.
Don’t practice divination or seek omens.
Don’t cut your sideburns or the edges of your beard.

If God’s children broke any of these rules, the only way they could make it up to Him was to slaughter and burn animals on an altar. This is of paramount importance in the Bible. God needed the blood of His creations to forgive his children for breaking His rules. Why did the blood of God’s creations please Him so much? There is no sane, reasonable explanation why.

Leviticus 1:1-19

God got upset once since not enough people were following His rules. So he flooded the entire earth and killed all but one family, who then repopulated the Earth incestuous. After the flood God invented rainbows. Before that time water droplets did not refract light in a way that produced the optical illusion of a multicolored arch when viewed from a certain angle.

Genesis 5-10:1

When the human population had recovered, God instructed mankind to build Him a literal home on Earth out of rocks. So men built God a house, and He lived there for a while. Once a year the high priest would visit Him, but if anyone else entered God’s bedroom they died instantly. The high priest would also die if God didn’t like him enough.

1 Kings 6

God only told the nation of Israel about how Adam and Eve made Him curse mankind and that you could be saved from your damnation by sacrificing animals to Him on His front lawn. To God, the rest of mankind was disposable. For several thousand years He helped the Israelis kill thousands upon thousands of other people and take their land. When the Israeli people weren’t obedient enough, God would do horrible things to them like burn their cities and sell them into slavery.

Genesis 19:23-26
Judges 4:1-2
Isaiah 24
Judges 15:3-20
Exodus 12:29-30
Joshua 10:11-14

Since God, Himself was literally dropping burning rocks out of the sky onto the battlefield, the nation of Israel defeated many enemies and grew large and powerful. However, God was no match for the Roman army, which conquered Israel and would later tear down all but the western wall of His house.

After Rome conquered God, He decided to alter his arrangement with humanity. In His infinite wisdom, He decided people shouldn’t have to kill animals on his doorstep to woo Him into forgiving them for breaking His rules. The only problem was that it’s impossible for God to forgive His creations without them killing other things He created. He needed blood. And since the bigger living thing you killed, the more God forgave, that meant someone would have to kill the biggest thing in the universe in order to satisfy God enough that He would not feel the need to punish his creations with everlasting torture anymore. The only thing big enough and perfect enough to kill that would appease God was Himself, and humans can’t kill God. So God found a loophole. He would come to earth and get Himself killed.

Instead of appearing on Earth instantly or building Himself a body like he did for Adam, He chose to impregnate Himself into an unmarried virgin even though He, Himself had commanded that all sexually active, unmarried women were either to be sold to their rapist or beaten to death with rocks in the street.

Deuteronomy 22: 13-28

God grew up in human form kind of knowing He was God but kind of not. Eventually, He remembered why He came to Earth in the first place, to kill himself to appease his own bloodlust so that all people, even the ones He used to think of as disposable, wouldn’t have to worry about Him torturing them for eternity. But first He got drunk.

John 2:1-11

After that, He cryptically explained to his dim-witted groupies that they wouldn’t have to give Him any more animal carcasses to buy his love. However, they would still have to know and believe that He came to Earth to kill Himself to satisfy His bloodlust, and He would force anyone who didn’t know and believe the story about His trip to Earth to spend eternity in unbearable agony.

John 3:16

He also took the time to approve of slavery.

Luke 17:7-10

Then He went to His big, stone house and yelled at the people He had ordained as His spokesmen on Earth for setting extortionate exchange rates and charging too much for animals they sold to pilgrims to slaughter on His doorstep to satisfy His bloodlust.

After being shamed and threatened by God, His spokesmen went to the Roman authorities and arranged to have God nailed to two planks of wood, which was a common punishment at the time for people convicted of treason and/or claiming to be a messiah. God allowed himself to be arrested by human police, tried in Roman court for trumped-up charges, be tortured in the street and nailed to two pieces of wood. If God loves blood, He was not disappointed that day.

In the time it took for the Earth to make three complete rotations on its axis, God experienced the supernatural torture He had been subjecting humans too, but since He didn’t deserve it, He got to leave.

On His way back to Heaven he instantly appeared on Earth (without impregnating another unmarried virgin) and scolded one of His groupies for believing He was dead after watching Him die.

John 20

Nobody ever saw Jesus again after that, but God still had a message He wanted to give to humanity. So God ordained some new spokesmen to pass out some revised rules that everyone had to live by such as:

Women shouldn’t talk in church, and if they have theological questions, they should just ask their husband at home.

1 Corinthians 14:34-38

Women should not have fancy haircuts or wear fancy clothes. Specifically, they shouldn’t wear gold or pearls. Women should also be quiet and submissive, and they’re not allowed to teach men or hold any job that puts them in a position of authority over a man.

1 Timothy 2:8-15

Slavery should be legal, and slaves should obey their masters. This is reiterated at least four times:

After laying down a few new laws and reiterating a few of His old ones, God dictated one final message to mankind. He promised to wipe us all out in a grotesque apocalypse.

Revelations 7-9

That was the last we ever heard from God.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

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Leave a comment | tags: bible ethics, christian ethics, christian mythology, evil bible, evil christianity, mythology religion, problems in the bible, The Bible is Mythology | posted in The Bible is Mythology

October 12, 2017

The Mythology Test (Does your religion pass?)

By wise sloth

A myth is a story told by a specific culture that explains nature, history, and customs. Myths tend to be ethnocentric and scientifically inaccurate. Mythology is the collected myths of a culture. If you can find examples of at least half the items on this list in a religious book, then that book fits the definition of mythology.

1: Are there credible first-hand sources that can verify the authenticity of the events described in the book?

2: Does it have a scientifically inaccurate creation story?

3: Does it have any other scientifically or historically inaccurate events or statements?

4: Does it give supernatural explanations for natural phenomenon?

5: Does it say supernatural phenomenon exist which have never been recorded by scientific instruments?

6: Does it contain talking animals?

7: Does it contain numerology?

8: Does it advocate or condone animal or human sacrifices?

9: Does it contain multiple Gods?

10: Does it have a hero who saves the world?

11: Does it contain a demigod hero who was born from a virgin?

12: Does God or other supernatural beings have human or animal body parts?

13: Does God or other supernatural beings possess tools used by the author’s culture?

14: Does God or other supernatural beings behave like a member of the author’s culture?

15: Does God or other supernatural beings have names similar to those used in the author’s culture?

16: Is the author’s civilization the most important group of people in the world to God?

17: Do the lessons and rules in the book reflect the values of the author’s culture?

18: Does it command you to believe and hold onto the teachings in the book?

19: Does it include permission or commandments to kill certain people?

20: Does it include permission or commandments to take other people’s land and property?

21: Does it condone slavery?

22: Does it have rules regarding property rights, prices, and taxes?

23: Does it contain rules or statements that make women second-class citizens?

24: Does it say the government should be a theocracy?

25: Does it give political power to religious leaders?

26: Does it tell you to give money to God’s spokesmen?

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

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October 12, 2017

You Need To Consider The Possibility Your Religion Is Mythology

By wise sloth

There are at least 4,200 religions in the world today, and countless more have been lost to history. It’s obvious there’s a 0% chance all of them are the true word of God. Some thinkers have speculated that each religion is at least a little divinely inspired and holds a piece of the puzzle left to us by God to put together. But the only way to come to that conclusion is to ignore huge tracts of doctrine in each religion. Ultimately, none of them are compatible. If any religion is true, there’s only one.

This means at least over 6 billion people alive today believe in a religion that was written 100% by human beings and 0% dictated by the creator of the universe. A belief system written by human beings that has no bearing on the factual nature of reality is mythology. The cold, hard truth of reality is that the vast majority of the people alive today believe in mythology and dogmatically refuse to even consider the possibility that’s true. So if you believe in religion, there’s automatically a 99% chance you believe in mythology. If you refuse to question your beliefs, there’s no way for you to know if they’re true, which increases the chance that you believe in mythology to 99.9%. This number is increased to 99.99% if your religion contains any of the following:

1: Human sacrifices

2: Moral values that reflect the needs and wants of a specific primitive culture

3: Instructions to hurt, kill or look down on other people

4: Reasons to look down on yourself

5: A pyramid-shaped authority structure

6: Scientifically inaccurate statements

7: Magical beings, powers or events that no longer exist

Some people have speculated that it doesn’t matter what religion you believe in as long as you believe in something that gives you meaning, instructions and peace. But believing in something that isn’t real is the definition of insanity. It’s not okay to be insane just because you like it because it holds you and society back.

Believing in mythology is counterproductive if for no other reason than it’s a waste of time. It keeps you busy going through meaningless motions while ignoring real world issues that have real consequences to you and the rest of mankind. Your life and everyone else’s would be improved by you focusing on real problems.

To this, you might reply, “But how can we know how to live without religion?” Remember that most of the world doesn’t believe in religion; they believe in mythology. So the real question is, “How can we know how to live without mythology?” If mythology is just a belief system made up by humans, and you’ve spent your whole life living according to those rules, you already know the answer. We can make up our own ethics, and in fact, that’s what we’ve been doing all along. We just haven’t been honest with ourselves about it. If taking personal responsibility for your own ethics sounds scary or haphazard, consider that mythologies can contain horrible rules that can lead you to hurt yourself or others, which makes it all the more imperative you question your beliefs.

This is especially true if you absolutely insist on believing one of our religions is the divine truth. Everyone wants to believe that their religion is the right one, but at least 6 billion people are dead wrong in their faith. Statistically, you’re probably one of them. The only way you or anyone else can find the right religion is to scrutinize yours objectively. This may sound like heresy, but it’s probably not a coincidence that you were created with the capacity for reason, skepticism, doubt, and logic. For the billions of people who believe in mythology, it’s a necessity. If your religion can stand the test of truth, there’s no danger in putting yours to it. If your religion can’t stand the test of truth, objectivity is the only way you’ll ever free yourself.

Your quest for truth isn’t just about you. Most religions encourage you to convert nonbelievers, and even without actively proselytizing on the street corner, you passively send out the message that people should join your faith just by living according to it. If you believe in one of the religions that are mythology, you’re leading unwitting victims into a trap. If enough people in one area buy into mythology, one way or another, their beliefs are going to determine social norms and even laws. This has a harsh real-world impact on people who don’t believe in that particular brand of mythology. Another danger of spreading mythology is that some people will inevitably latch onto the most violent, oppressive, absurd rules within that belief system and use them to justifying hurting other people. So before you go spreading the good word, it’s imperative that you make sure it passes the most rigorous test of truth, not just for your sake but for all of ours.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

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October 1, 2017

4 Questions Every Christian Needs To Answer About Exodus 21

By wise sloth

Exodus 21

New King James Version (NKJV)

The Law Concerning Slaves

21 “Now these are the judgments which you shall set before them: ²If you buy a Hebrew slave, he shall serve six years; and in the seventh he shall go out free and pay nothing. ³If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself; if he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. ⁴If his master has given him a wife, and she has borne him sons or daughters, the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself. ⁵But if the slave plainly says, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free,’ ⁶then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door, or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl; and he shall serve him forever.

⁷And if a man sells his daughter to be a female slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do. ⁸If she does not please her master, who has betrothed her to himself, then he shall let her be redeemed. He shall have no right to sell her to a foreign people, since he has dealt deceitfully with her. ⁹And if he has betrothed her to his son, he shall deal with her according to the custom of daughters. ¹⁰If he takes another wife, he shall not diminish her food, her clothing, and her marriage rights. ¹¹And if he does not do these three for her, then she shall go out free, without paying money.

The Law Concerning Violence

¹²He who strikes a man so that he dies shall surely be put to death. ¹³However, if he did not lie in wait, but God delivered him into his hand, then I will appoint for you a place where he may flee.

¹⁴But if a man acts with premeditation against his neighbor, to kill him by treachery, you shall take him from My altar, that he may die.

¹⁵And he who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.

¹⁶He who kidnaps a man and sells him, or if he is found in his hand, shall surely be put to death.

¹⁷And he who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death.

¹⁸If men contend with each other, and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist, and he does not die but is confined to his bed, ¹⁹if he rises again and walks about outside with his staff, then he who struck him shall be acquitted. He shall only pay for the loss of his time, and shall provide for him to be thoroughly healed.

²⁰And if a man beats his male or female slave with a rod, so that he dies under his hand, he shall surely be punished. ²¹Notwithstanding, if he remains alive a day or two, he shall not be punished; for he is his property.

²²If men fight, and hurt a woman with child, so that she gives birth prematurely, yet no harm follows, he shall surely be punished accordingly as the woman’s husband imposes on him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. ²³But if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, ²⁴eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, ²⁵burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.

²⁶If a man strikes the eye of his male or female slave, and destroys it, he shall let him go free for the sake of his eye. ²⁷And if he knocks out the tooth of his male or female slave, he shall let him go free for the sake of his tooth.

Animal Control Laws

²⁸If an ox gores a man or a woman to death, then the ox shall surely be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten; but the owner of the ox shall be acquitted. ²⁹But if the ox tended to thrust with its horn in times past, and it has been made known to his owner, and he has not kept it confined, so that it has killed a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned and its owner also shall be put to death. ³⁰If there is imposed on him a sum of money, then he shall pay to redeem his life, whatever is imposed on him. ³¹Whether it has gored a son or gored a daughter, according to this judgment it shall be done to him. ³²If the ox gores a male or female slave, he shall give to their master thirty shekels of silver, and the ox shall be stoned.

³³And if a man opens a pit, or if a man digs a pit and does not cover it, and an ox or a donkey falls in it, ³⁴the owner of the pit shall make it good; he shall give money to their owner, but the dead animal shall be his.

³⁵If one man’s ox hurts another’s, so that it dies, then they shall sell the live ox and divide the money from it; and the dead ox they shall also divide. ³⁶Or if it was known that the ox tended to thrust in time past, and its owner has not kept it confined, he shall surely pay ox for ox, and the dead animal shall be his own.”

This chapter of the Bible raises at least four serious questions Christians should be asking themselves before trying to convert nonbelievers:

1. Did you even know these rules were in the Bible?

I hope you didn’t know these instructions were in the Bible. If you made a conscious decision to tell people they need to base their life on “The Good Book,” knowing the full details of Exodus 21, then you’re a terrifying human being.

If you know the Bible includes commandments on how to properly buy and sell men, women and children, and you don’t mention it’s part of the product you’re selling, then you’re marketing your brand unethically.

You’re running a bait and switch scam. You lure recruits in with tales of love and peace. Then you pressure them to make a commitment before they have time to read the fine print. Only after they’re invested, do you tell them the book they just agreed to follow includes rules on how to purchase and beat slaves.

It would be impossible to convince anyone to believe in Christianity without using the bait and switch technique, because if the first verse you share with nonbelievers comes from Exodus 21, nobody will want to believe in your stone age god or his psychopathic teachings.

If you didn’t know you were trying to convince people to base their life on a book that says the punishment for letting your ox gore your neighbor’s slave, is to pay them thirty shekels, then you need to stop preaching immediately. Don’t start again until you’ve read the entire Bible and highlighted every rule so you know exactly what you’re getting people into.

2. Have you doubted your own arguments enough to be sure it’s safe to bet your soul on them?

I’ve asked Christians to explain Exodus 21, and they said human hands corrupted the original texts in some places, which explains the inclusion of obviously flawed morals. So we don’t have to take the barbaric stuff seriously.

But Exodus 21 isn’t an isolated incident. It’s par for the course in the Old Testament. When you put all its commandments in context, they paint a picture of a primitive, tribal theocracy that wrote its existing cultural values into their history, government, and religion.

To put Exodus 21 in context, The Ten Commandments are in Exodus 20:1-17. God’s commandment that slave owners have to set their slaves free if they beat them so hard it crushes their eye, is just a few pages away, in the same list of rules, written by the same author, which, given the culture at the time, was probably a slave transcribing the words of his king/high priest.

If the scribes who wrote the Bible really did make mistakes, then how can you be sure you’ll know them when you see them? Obviously, the stakes are life and death. If you didn’t catch this hole, you could have easily sold your daughter into slavery.

If you believe the Holy Spirit will help you and your converts catch the rest of the men’s mistakes in the Bible, consider that Hitler, David Koresh and the entire Westboro Baptist church all believed the Holy Spirit led them to the truth. The Holy Spirit tends to guide Christians to their preconceived beliefs so often, it could be evidence the Holy Spirit doesn’t guide you anywhere; it could just the feeling you get when you use your subconscious to make decisions.

There are hundreds of religions in the world. Billions of people have felt their own version of the Holy Spirit lead them to different conclusions, which they’re dead certain are true, and they use the inexplicable realness of their experience to justify believing in whatever mythology was most popular in the society they were raised in.

Statistically, you probably believe in a dubious mythology for selfish reasons. If there’s even a 1% chance you might have fallen for the same trap, you owe it to yourself to question your conclusions more than your opponents’ evidence.

3. Can you be 100% sure Jesus abolished these rules?

If you ask enough Christians to explain Exodus 21, sooner rather than later, a smart person you respect, will quote Jesus’s words from Matthew 5:17:

“Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”

Then they’ll wave their hand dismissively and say something like, “See? This passage means the pre-Jesus laws are obsolete, and God made a new covenant with man. So you don’t have to literally make blood sacrifices on a stone altar to please God any more or follow any of his laws that bear a shocking resemblance to the cultural values of an ancient tribal theocracy.”

This settles the issue nicely unless you put the passage in context. It goes on to say in Matthew 5:19-20:

“For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.

¹⁹Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

²⁰For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

It seems pretty clear Jesus expected all the rules to stay in place, with the implied exception of the few laws he specifically reversed Yahwe’s original stance on. Contrary to the creator of the universe’s original commandments, Jesus said communities are no longer supposed to form well organized lynch mobs to beat adulteresses to death with rocks or ranchers who try to rescue an ox that’s fallen in a well on the Sabbath.

I could be misinterpreting this passage, but so could your Christian mentors. You owe it to yourself to get a thousand different opinions on whether or not we’re all supposed to follow all the rules in the Old Testament.

Even if everyone you ask agrees the only requirement to get into Heaven is faith, they could all still be wrong. Biblical scholars have been arguing for centuries if God still expects Christians to obey all his laws, including the ones about slavery.

If you’ve ever told a non-Christian it’s safer to believe in God and hope you go to Heaven, then to stray and be wrong, then you should be enforcing the Bible’s rules on slavery just to be safe. Or you should be questioning why you believe in a book that encourages selling your daughters and kidnapping foreigners.

Even if Jesus did retire some of the Old Testament rules, the following verses from the New Testament indicate slavery wasn’t one of them:

Ephesians 6:5

“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”

1 Peter 2:18

“Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate, but also to those who are harsh.”

Matthew 10:24

“The student is not above the teacher, nor a slave above his master.”

1 Corinthians 7:20-25

^“Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them. ²¹Were you a slave when you were called? Don’t let it trouble you—although if you can gain your freedom, do so. ²²For the one who was a slave when called to faith in the Lord is the Lord’s freed person;similarly, the one who was free when called is Christ’s slave. ²³You were bought at a price; do not become slaves of human beings. ²⁴Brothers and sisters, each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.”

4. Why don’t you obey Exodus 21?

If you truly believe the Bible is 100% divinely inspired, then you should be honoring all of Exodus’s laws and many more like them. But you don’t, and you never will, because they’re in direct contradiction with everything you believe about right and wrong. If a Jewish or Christian dictator enforced these laws in a real country, you’d support America bombing it out of existence.

You don’t, won’t and can’t obey Exodus 21, because your sense of right and wrong were already well established before you ever read the Bible. Every Christian has to cherry pick which passages to believe or make excuses for, because at least half of the morals in the Bible are obsolete.

"The Bible is either absolute, or it's obsolete." Leonard Ravenhill

If you don’t believe me, put yourself and your fellow Christians to a test. Show this list of Bible verses to the Christians you respect most. Ask them which passage’s moral values they agree with and live by, and which ones they disagree with and don’t obey.

The passages they don’t take seriously will be the ones that conflict with modern culture, which proves they cherry pick the teachings in the Bible they’re willing to accept, based on what they already believe. Chances are, you’ll accept/reject the same values, which should make you question how much you really believe in the Bible and whether you should continue coercing other people into accepting it as the ultimate authority on reality.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

The Bible is mythology

Christianity is Harmful to Society

Preaching, witnessing and arguing with Christians

Christian Culture

My Tweets About Religion

2 Comments | tags: bible ethics, christian culture, christian ethics, evil bible verses, exodus bible verses, immoral bible passages, problems with christianity, The Bible is Mythology, tian mythology, toxic christianity | posted in The Bible is Mythology

September 26, 2017

Tales From My Life: The Time I Worked As An Apple Picker

By wise sloth

I arrive at an apple orchard at 6:30am Monday through Saturday. My body hurts even though (or possibly because) I get 10-12 hours of sleep a night. I have to. I can’t stay awake because I’m always so exhausted from work the previous day. I used to start work at 7:00am, but my work crew and I agreed it would be best to get to work thirty minutes earlier so we could work thirty minutes less under the hot sun. So it’s cool and there’s dew on the ground when I get out of the van I pay $5 a week to ride to work in.

I put my backpack full of water bottles and snacks next to a row of apple trees. Then I slather SPF 30 suntan lotion on my face, arms, and legs. I put sports tape around my thumbs and pointer fingers to cover the dirty scars around my cuticles where branches have gouged them. I put on a big, floppy hiking hat, and I start picking excess apples off of my row of trees and throwing them on the ground.

Apple trees are strange trees. Some of the branches hang like octopus arms, and some grow at crooked Tetris angles up, down, left, right. Sometimes when I’m weaving my way through them I pretend like I’m a Shaolin martial arts master, and I make chopping and blocking motions with my arms to move them aside. I don’t get too into it though because I need to conserve my energy. Sometimes I pretend I’m a treasure hunter digging through an impenetrable wall of branches looking for treasure…but I’ve never found any treasure. So far all I’ve found is apples… and pain.

Apples grow on the branches in clusters sort of like grapes. Clusters sizes range from 2 to 20. Each tree has hundreds of clusters. My goal is to pick the apples out of those clusters until each cluster contains one or two apples and those clusters are spaced far enough apart to give the remaining apples room to grow. For reasons nobody has explained to me, different apple trees require different sizes of clusters. Also, the tops of the trees need to be picked thinner than the bottoms of the trees; that’s to prevent the heavy apples from breaking the budding branches.

The whole reason apple trees are thinned is because the remaining apples on the tree will get bigger and juicier. Small apples taste bad, and consumers want big, pretty apples anyway. So the trees have to get thinned, and this job can’t be automated. It has to be done by human hands. Unfortunately for the farmers, nobody wants to do this job, because it’s really quite terrible. This is how terrible it is. Child protective service would take away your children if you made your children do a week’s worth of apple thinning for breaking one of your rules. It’s bad enough to be child abuse, but it’s worse than that because it breaks full-grown men and women.

Apple thinning doesn’t require any heavy lifting (though apple picking does), but neither does cross-country jogging. Apple thinning is a physical, intellectual and emotional endurance contest. Before you even touch an apple tree you have to study it like an artist reassessing a work of art. You identify the flaws in the art, decide on a plan of action and execute your plan. Then you repeat that process all day for nine hours. Playing your favorite video game for nine hours a day every day would be torturous. Picking apples is like playing a boxing game on a Nintendo Wee all day, every day… in the hot sun.

When you walk up to the tree and start snapping off all the excess apples with your thumb and forefinger you have to navigate your way around the branches (like a Shaolin Monk). This requires bending over, reaching overhead and getting on your knees. You always have to carry a big, shiny aluminum (or a cast iron) ladder with you, because after you’ve picked all the apples from one side of the tree that you can reach standing on the ground you climb up the ladder and get the apples on top of the tree. When you’re on top of your ladder you can see out all over the orchard district. It’s surreal up there. All you see are rows of green trees all the way to the horizon. Hobbit hills and windmills are the only other thing between you and the big blue, blazing sky. Each orchard is surrounded by a thick line of coniferous trees cut to look like giant hedges. They keep the wind from blowing through the orchard and making the apples smack together and bruise. So there’s never more than a light breeze on the ground, but sometimes you’ll find a cool breeze when you climb to the top of your ladder. Feeling that breeze and looking out over a sea of parallel green waves you feel like you’re outside of the world. It’s a unique experience that I’m glad I’ve had.

But the serenity is spoiled by the fact that you have to thin a straight row of 200 trees in 9 hours in the hot sun while your body is undernourished because you’re barely paid more than minimum wage and can only afford to buy processed food. Even with a healthy diet, repeating the same yoga stretches for 9 hours per day every day will overstrain and hurt your muscles. You certainly wouldn’t want to do 9 hours of ladder yoga in the blazing hot sun. If you attempted that iron-yoga challenge your body would need more than ten minutes of rest in the morning, a thirty-minute break for lunch and another ten-minute break in the afternoon, but that’s all the breaks apple thinners and pickers get. Most apple thinners even cut that short because they’re so desperate to pick more apples and make even slightly more than minimum wage.

Nobody stands behind you and watches you all day. So you can take as many breaks from your ladder yoga as you want, but you have to weigh the value of listening to your body and taking a break against the fact that you have no money, and you get paid by how many trees you thin. So if you push yourself beyond your breaking point and sustain that level of exertion for three to six weeks then you can make enough money to live off of for two months until apple picking starts. If you can’t maintain that pace you’ll be fired anyway.

You don’t want to get fired because you need to eat, and you don’t want to be homeless. Plus, if you impress your boss then in two months’ time you can come back and do the same job over again, except instead of ripping off tiny apples and tossing them carelessly on the ground you pick the full-grown apples and place them delicately in a huge bucket hanging across your chest. Once your bucket is back-breakingly full you climb down your ladder, walk to a plastic bin somewhere down your row, kneel down and pull two strings on either side of your chest bucket, which opens the bottom of the bucket letting the apples tumble out into the plastic bin (just like cherry picking). Then you stand back up and go fill your bucket again for 9 hours in the hot sun. You can make better money apple picking than you can apple thinning. So you definitely don’t want to miss that.

Apple thinning and apple picking would only be mildly excruciating if it weren’t for the ladder. Modern, aluminum ladders are light (as far as 8-foot tall ladders go), but I shudder at the thought of somebody’s grandparents and great-grandparents doing these jobs with iron and wooden ladders. If you’re having a hard time imagining what that would be like, put an A-frame ladder in your backyard next Saturday, and make a goal out of picking up that ladder 200 times at regular intervals over 9 hours and moving it to another part of your backyard and climbing to the top and doing yoga… in the hot sun. Your back will hate you for it…forever, possibly. If you carry stress balls with you the entire 9 hours and squeeze them constantly then by the end of the day your hands will swell and keep you awake at night throbbing in pain, and you’ll have a good idea of what the people who pick the apples in your kitchen go through to survive.

If you do anything outside all day, inevitably you’ll get sunburned. You could cover up when apple thinning, but the more you cover up the hotter and heavier you’ll be. For men, it’s best to wear light shoes and shorts. I’ve seen female apple thinners wearing nothing but bikinis. One of the perks of the job. Another perk of apple thinning is that you can smoke while you work. That perk is undermined by the fact that, if your orchard has a bathroom at all, it’s too far away to go to. You could lose five or eight dollars worth of working time just by walking all the way to the bathroom and back once. So wash the apples you buy from the store. There’s a good chance they were fondled by calloused, burnt, scratched, suntan lotion-slathered, pee-splattered hands. Most of the apples sold at big grocery stores were also sprayed multiple times with pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals you’ve never heard of through the course of their lives.

When you thin or pick apples the dust from the dried poisons rubs off onto your palms until they’re black. It gets into your scratches, it falls in your eyes. You breathe it in. It rubs off of your fingers onto your sandwich at lunch and onto your hand-rolled cigarettes. The farmer assures you it’s harmless poison, but you know you’re going to die of cancer now someday. So you don’t feel as bad about smoking anymore. One of the perks of the job.

You have to find good things to think of when apple thinning. You have to think of something for 9 hours. Something has to keep your body moving forward repeating an action that every muscle in your body and every ounce of common sense is telling you to stop. Of course, what keeps you moving is that you’ve got no place else to go, and if you can’t endure this Chinese torture method then you die of starvation.

So you pick and pick and pick and pick and pick. You try not to think about how mind-numbingly boring it is to just pick pick pick pick all day long. But it’s hard not to think about it when it’s all you do, and there’s never any change in the routine. Every tree looks more or less the same, and after you’ve done enough trees you’ve seen all the variations of cluster sizes and locations. Eventually, it all blurs into one long, timeless moment. The seconds pass like glaciers. Anytime you look to your left or your right all you see are identical rows of apples. There’s no goal you can work towards. There are no checkpoints you can reach where you get to do something different. There’s just no end in sight. It’s pushing a boulder up a hill all day just to push it back up after you finish. But instead of climbing a hill, you climb a ladder, and instead of a big boulder, it’s little apples. The same little apples everywhere. When you close your eyes you see apples. When you dream, you dream about a wall of apples falling on top of you. Sometimes you want to just run the orchard maniacally shouting, “APPLES!… APPLES! APPLES!” Sometimes you want to ball up into a fetal position against a tree trunk and mumble, “applesapplesapples.”

It helps if you listen to music. I shudder to think of somebody’s grandparents and great-grandparents apple thinning with no music or aluminum ladders. Even if you listen to music you end up listening to the same songs over and over again until you hate them. I’ll never be able to listen to Pink Floyd again. The apple orchard took that from me. Now I find it helps to listen to techno music, because it’s fast, and there aren’t idiotic words pounding in your skull all day. I also like listening to foreign music, because I can’t understand the words, and that helps me zone out. A Slovenian I work with gave me some music, and I’ve been listening to Oda Gudeki by MI2 lately. It makes me smile, and I’m going to be sad when I’ve listened to it so many times I hate it.

Sometimes I sing the chorus of “The Lemon Tree” song except I change the lyrics to “apple trees” instead of “lemon tree.” My taste in music would drive some people insane if they had to listen to it all day, as their’s would me. You have to figure out what works for you and hope you have that kind of music available. One thing is for sure, if you listen to slow, sad music it will slow you down and sap your will to go on.

Sometimes you can’t stand the music anymore and you just have to turn it off and try to enjoy the absolute silence of the apple field. Sometimes your music player breaks or runs out of batteries or doesn’t exist and you have to endure nine hours of almost total silence every day without the benefit of music to help you forget that you exist. Then you’re alone with your thoughts. It’s like being in solitary confinement, except you’re forced to do excruciating yoga outside as you wrestle with your thoughts. It can be quite revelatory, and if you’ve got any fight in you, fighting apple trees will wear it out of you. Apple thinning would be a good way to get the fight out of juvenile delinquents. Well, that or it’ll teach them that hard work only pays barely enough to survive and selling drugs is a lot easier and more lucrative. And if you get caught selling drugs and go to jail, at least you won’t have to work in an apple orchard. So… life could be worse.

It was inevitable that some apple thinner out there has and will use drugs at work to speed them up or help them forget where they are, and inevitably somebody is going to fall off their ladder, especially when it’s cold, windy and/or rainy. Of course, the farmer who owns the orchards will do as little as possible to attend to their workers’ medical needs. After all, if farmers cared about their workers’ health then they wouldn’t work them past the limits of human endurance to begin with.

Even if you have a strong mind and good music, everybody breaks a little eventually. You can’t keep up 9 hours of constant mind-numbing yoga torture forever. Every once a while you have to just sit down (even if it’s not break time yet) and curse your life, the apples, the farmer, God and yourself for getting you into this fuck-awful situation.

Sometimes you work for an ignorant country farmer who has been doing backbreaking work all his life and owns a giant country home surrounded by orchards full of disposable slaves making him richer. The only thing standing between the farmer and more money is the physical and mental limitations and pay expectations of his workers. So some farmers pay their workers less money per tree than is fair. Some farmers degrade and harass underperforming workers, then fire them after they’re burnt out so he can bring in a fresh crop of (hopefully more desperate) workers who are willing to put up with lower pay and worse treatment. Sometimes you end up working for farmers who smile to your face and bring you water and even buy you a little beer and thank you for sacrificing your body, mind, and the irreplaceable moments of your life to make him richer while you’re spending the prime of your life in a death race scraping by with one foot in the gutter. Sometimes you get lucky like that.

A wiser man than myself once said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” Another man once said, “Life doesn’t suck because you’re unlucky. Life sucks because you’re a dumbass.” (paraphrased) There’s a lot of truth to both of those statements. I work with an ex-con who can’t get a “real” job because of his criminal record. Some people would say he’s sleeping in the bed he made. I can recognize without being told that I, myself, am working in an apple field because I screwed up. I took some joy in the first two weeks of pain by telling myself I deserved to be there, that I was paying penance for screwing up. So don’t feel any sympathy for me or my ex-con friend. But feel sympathy for the billions of other people in the world who’s are spending their lives in orchards, fields, kitchens, warehouses, factories, and offices even though they never screwed up. They’ve been doing what they were supposed to: working. Working at degrading, inhumane jobs and doing a great job of it. They just don’t get to keep enough of the profits from their work to achieve stability in their lives because their bosses (the job creators) wants a bigger house and longer vacations.

More than sympathy for the oppressed, we should all feel ashamed every time we walk into the fruits and vegetable section of our local grocery stores, because everything you see there has blood on it, literally and figuratively. Apparently, that’s not important enough to motivate us to demand better pay, shorter work hours and more profit-sharing for workers. It should also motivate us to reassess our standard business practices to identify and rectify the flaws that cause all business owners to feel pressured to pay their workers as little as possible to make ends meet. The call to action isn’t to throw rotten apples at orchard owners. The call to action is to replace our economy with a more sustainable, more humane model.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also like these:

My Life Stories (in chronological order)

What’s it like to be a twin?
The eggnog story
The cow-poline story
The time I got shot
My ghost story
The “good porn” story
My UFO story
How I became a Christian and then lost my faith
Piancanvollo’s traveling snail
The time I got HIV
An American Expat Visits the “Occupy Auckland” protest: Part 1, Part 2
The time I worked in an apple orchard
The time I worked in a vineyard
My experience with the TSA
This is how we live now: Part 1
This is how we live now: Part 2
This is how we live now: Part 3
What it was like in Houston during Hurricane Harvey
The aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in Houston

The Life of the Poor

Leave a comment | tags: abuse of power, agriculture, apple picker, apple thinner, autobiographical, Hastings New Zealand, immigrant jobs, life story, manual labor jobs, predatory capitalism, systemic economic oppression, The Bible is Mythology, travel | posted in My life stories

November 2, 2016

Believing in Christianity is always absurd, but more so for certain ethnic groups.

By wise sloth

It’s absurd for anyone to believe in Christianity, because Christianity is mythology, and you don’t have to be a genius to prove it. Children are famous for pointing out the holes in Christianity. There are so many, an entire branch of academics had to be created to account for them all. It had to be because you can’t believe in Christianity without using speculation and logical fallacies to explain everything in the Bible that contradicts reality.

At least half of all Caucasian Americans, African Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, and Latinos believe in Christianity. I couldn’t find an exact number for Native Americans, but it’s definitely higher than zero. It’s historically absurd for any member of these groups to believe in Christianity because Christianity was spread to their races specifically for the purpose of erasing their culture and controlling their communities.

It doesn’t take a genius or conspiracy theorist to come to this conclusion. It’s the theme of Judaism and Christianity’s history. The Torah is mostly a timeline of the Jewish state’s creation and expansion, which officially began with Moses uniting the factions of his tribe under one religion, driving out all other beliefs, customs, and competition. The story ends after thousands of years of military expansion and ethnic cleansing.

The only reason the leaders of the Jewish theocracy stopped adding lists of victories and biographies of their kings to the Torah is because the Romans conquered Israel. Since Israel’s government leaders were also its religious leaders, their religious authority died with their political power.

The occupying Romans had a much more fluid attitude towards religion than the Jews. They already had experience reducing civil unrest by absorbing religions and spreading their own. In fact, they were the world’s leading experts in expansion and oppression.

That’s why there was so much civil unrest in Jerusalem during the time of Jesus. The Romans were trying to force their government and culture on the Jewish people, who were descended from generations of militant religious fanatics who believed God had been smiting their enemies for thousands of years. The zealousness and ferociousness of the Jewish resistance fighters earned them a reputation in Rome as formidable opponents who would never surrender.

It’s beyond convenient that the story of Jesus began circulating through Israel at this time. Jesus claimed to be Yahweh incarnate and had come to Earth in human form for the first time in history, to change His covenant with the Jews. He no longer wanted Jews to expand Israel by military force. He wanted them to accept foreigners as brothers and let Roman soldiers slap them.

It’s also telling that the author of the Bible made it a point to blame Jesus’s murder on the Jews and absolve the Roman government of any crime. The chances of anyone associated with the Jewish religion writing those words after The Siege of Masada, is slim to none, but the practicality of a Roman writing those words is obvious.

The Jewish insurrection ended as Christianity gained popularity. Within a few hundred years of Christianity’s invention, the leaders in Rome made Christianity the official state religion and published the official version of the New Testament. Then their church leaders added a million more rules outside of the Bible in the form of church doctrine, still claiming the same divine authority they canonized the New Testament with. The chances of the creator of the universe completely reversing the theme of his commandments and abandoning his literal home on Earth in Jerusalem, which He meticulously described how to build, and moving to Rome to speak through Italians, is slim to none.

After Yahweh converted to Catholicism, churches were established in every European country, converting warring Pagans and barbarians into standardized, slap-accepting, Christian workers whose goal is life was to be servile and give God money. So when you read about white Christians oppressing minorities and erasing their culture, keep in mind that white European cultures were the first victims of Christian colonization.

Once Europe became Christianized, the Catholic church sent missionaries with explorers from every European country to spread Christianity to the new world. These explorers weren’t noble woodsmen who just wanted to make maps and build log houses. They had a very specific agenda to loot and plunder. In their own words, they viewed all the indigenous people they encountered as work animals to be yoked or vermin to be exterminated.

The chances of the church sending missionaries with looting murderers to save the souls of God’s children are slim to none. Even if that wasn’t the church’s intention, Christian culture still eroded indigenous cultures everywhere missionaries established churches.

Historian, Adriaan van Oss wrote, “If we had to choose a single, irreducible idea underlying Spanish colonialism in the New World, it would undoubtedly be the propagation of the Catholic faith. Unlike such other European as England or the Netherlands, Spain insisted on converting the natives of the lands it conquered to its state religion. Miraculously, it succeeded. Introduced in the context of Iberian expansionism, Catholicism outlived the empire itself and continues to thrive, not as an anachronistic vestige among the elite, but as a vital current even in remote mountain villages. Catholicism remains the principal colonial heritage of Spain in America. More than any set of economic relationships with the outside world, more even than the language first brought to America’s shores in 1492, the Catholic religion continues to permeate Spanish-American culture today, creating an overriding cultural unity which transcends the political and national boundaries dividing the continent.”

In many places, notably, Hawaii, the early British missionaries became wealthy land and slave owners while locals lost access to their hunting, fishing and gathering grounds. The more scarce their land rights became, the more scarce the necessities of life became, which made them proportionally more expensive. Since the job markets couldn’t grow on isolated islands, poverty, and drug use became epidemic among Pacific Islanders, and they still are today.

Since church attendance is too, Christian leaders are still stockpiling donation from the poorest of the hopeless. To be fair, not all island churches are rich, and many have outreach programs that help their community, but their efforts are lip service towards fixing the fundamental problem they helped create and continue to profit from.

As the world’s island nations were being turned into resource farms for Christian, European nations, so was mainland America. After the British Empire lost control of its colonies, many of the Christian governments left in its wake, notably the United States of America, continued to use Christianity to justify slavery.

As much as African Americans still resent and fear slavery, the Bible still approves of slavery multiple times in both the Old Testament and New Testament. So slavery can only remain illegal in America as long as Americans don’t follow the teachings in the Bible.

If a white man told an African American that slavery should be legal today, most people would agree the white guy had it coming if the black guy beat him up. However, when the Bible says slavery should be legal today, most African Americans ignore it or make excuses, even though those passages are the exact ones used to justify enslaving their ancestors.

After slavery ended, Jim Crow laws and Biblical-inspired racism kept African Americans living like second class citizens. To overcome living in a state of perpetual psychological oppression, the African American culture evolved to value racial empowerment and personal independence more zealously than white Americans, who didn’t have the same motivation to prove their worth.

African American culture’s attitude towards self-empowerment directly conflicts with the Bible’s philosophy of perpetual servility, self-loathing and guilt. A black person wouldn’t accept a white person telling him he’s an unworthy dog, but there are black people with pictures of blonde hair, blue eyed, white Jesus hanging on their walls. And when He says to kneel, they do, just like many Vikings did.

Mexican Americans didn’t officially have to endure Biblical-inspired slavery, but they’ve been treated like slaves most of America’s history. Today, the crime, poverty and church attendance rates in their communities are almost equal to African Americans.

The Bible didn’t create poverty, capitalism did, but the Bible teaches beliefs and behaviors that stimulate poverty and make it harder to escape. The Bible is against birth control, but higher birth rates lead to higher crime rates. The Bible says, “Spare the rod, spoil the child,” but higher child abuse rates lead to higher crime rates. The Bible says divorce is immoral, but higher rates of dysfunctional relationships lead to higher domestic violence rates. The Bible says the poorer you are, the better it is to give more, but the only way to get out of poverty is to save money, and the less money you have, the worse every aspect of your life gets.

In order to be successful in a capitalist economy, you need confidence and education. The Bible indoctrinates you to believe you’re lucky God loves you because you’ll never be good enough to deserve love. It also teaches you to believe stories that contradict scientific evidence, which sets you up to distrust logic and facts. And all the time you spend reading your Bible, praying and attending church functions, wastes time that could be used to succeed in life.

Poor people have been praying and giving money to God for centuries, and it hasn’t helped them out of poverty. It’s only made poverty worse. There’s enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that prayer doesn’t work. The Gospel of Prosperity doesn’t work. The Bible’s instructions on life don’t work.

The DSM-4 defines a mental disorder as, “A clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress or disability or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.”

The DSM-5 defines a mental disorder as, “A syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress in social, occupational, or other important activities.”

It’s counterproductive to give money to churches or practice Biblical beliefs. They both lead to emotional distress and dysfunctional behavior. And to continue believing in Christianity, you have to deny overwhelming evidence and use irrational logic; in other words, you have to think and behave in ways that fit the definition of insanity. It’s literally insane for anyone to believe in Christian mythology, but it’s poignantly ironic when the victims of Christianity’s cultural extermination campaigns do it.

I don’t say this in bitterness. It just tastes that way because it’s a bitter pill to swallow. The call to action these observations raise is not to ridicule Christians. They need treatment, and the only cure for their condition is knowledge.

Most Christians don’t realize how absurd the Bible is because they never read the whole thing. They only know and practice the parts they learned about in church. Nobody wants to accept that they’ve been basing their life on an ancient state-sponsored mythology, especially if they’re afraid of going to Hell. But you can only see so much evidence before you can’t unsee it. Once you see it, you’ll see it on every page of the Bible.

If the Bible is true, then it will stand the test of truth. In that case, the only thing to be gained from testing it is strengthening your beliefs. If there really is enough evidence in the Bible to prove it’s mythology, you stand to gain everything from looking for it.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

Agnosticism

Atheism

Secular Living

Islam

Islam needs an intervention

The Bible is mythology

Christianity is Harmful to Society

Preaching, witnessing and arguing with Christians

Christian Culture

My Tweets About Religion

2 Comments | tags: christian colonization, christian history, christian minority races, christian mythology, spread of christianity, The Bible is Mythology | posted in christian culture

October 30, 2009

10 Ways The Bible Ruins Society

By wise sloth

1. The Bible’s archaic, arbitrary code of ethics is ineffective in the real world.

There are a few common sense rules in the Bible that are good, but when you take every single rule into account you find vagueness, contradictions, absurdities, immorality idolized and morality demonized. The rules in the Bible are all over the place. To make matters even worse, the determining factor of whether or not you’re forgiven or punished for violating these vague, contradictory, absurd rules is whether or not you believe in a story.

Here’s why that’s bad. Imagine if you were trying to control a class of 6 year old children and you gave them an arbitrary set of rules and told them that the only way to escape punishment for breaking the rules is to believe in a story. What would happen? Chaos would break out.

Children who are raised their entire life on vague, contradictory, arbitrary rules grow up into adults with a warped perception of reality. They often feel guilty for doing innocent, natural things, believe they deserve to go to Hell, believe in magical spirits and powers, distrust science, fear pleasure and celebrate selflessness to a fault. These are not the habits of an enlightened society. They’re irrational, and they contradict reality. If you live your life according to beliefs that contradict reality you’re going to have a bad time.

Also, children who grow up believing the archaic, haphazard morals in the Bible, will grow up and become politicians who often try to pass laws enforcing or favoring those morals.

2. The Bible grants you immunity for your crimes.

If you firmly believe that the threat of the death penalty is strong enough to dissuade people from breaking the law then you had better believe that the promise of unconditional release and immunity is strong enough to entice people to break the law. Christian doctrine creates an environment that encourages, or at least excuses, inhumane behavior by removing the perception of consequence for those who believe.

3. Christianity places subservience as one of its top virtues.

This is great for a nation if you want everyone to be slaves. This is terrible for a nation that wants to progress and grow uniformly strong. If you want a nation to excel, you need to teach your children that genius is the highest virtue. A society raised on that value will create beauty you could never imagine possible, but we’ve chosen not to go down that path. We’ve taught people they’re dogs who deserve to be beaten. We’ve taught them that logic is evil and ignorance is strength. It should come as no surprise that every night on the news are stories about people acting like beaten dogs and tearing each other apart.

4. Christianity places faith as one of its top virtues.

The bible teaches that blind faith is virtuous and doubt is evil. Every atrocity committed in history was done by people with blind faith in an ideology. Blind faith is a recipe for exploitation and oppression.

On the other hand, every advancement we’ve made in science, government, economics, the humanities, etc. were achieved by doubting, questioning and improving on the ideas our ancestors came up with. Curiosity and doubt open the door to truth, clarity and genius. Christianity takes those keys away from individuals and society as a whole.

5. Religion siphons money from the public that could be spent saving the world.

6. Making pleasure taboo is harmful.

The teaching of the Bible inspired countless people to regret and deny their sexuality, adopt an austere lifestyle and even revel in suffering. All of that sacrifice is irrational. There’s no sane reason to deny yourself any pleasure or happiness to honor the creator of the universe. All that accomplishes is making the world a less enjoyable place for you and everyone around you.

7. Christianity has a long tradition of holding back scientific progress.

There have been Christians who have made invaluable scientific breakthroughs. For example, a monk named Gregor Mendel proved the existence of genetically inheritable traits. However, Christianity has a long history of stifling scientific thought.

The Catholic church forced Galileo to withdraw and deny his research that proved the Earth is not the center of the universe. Christians regularly pressure public schools to teach children that the creation story in the book of Genesis is real and humanity’s scientific understanding of the universe if false. Christians have opposed the use of condoms and blocked stem cell research. Children have died because Christian parents had faith that God would save their sick child. I’ve even once heard an elderly Christian say that humans didn’t need psychology since the Bible is all you need to solve any problem in the world. When the majority of a population hates the instruments of progress then it becomes much more difficult for that society to progress.

8. Life sucks for everyone else when Christians rule the world.

The Apostle Paul ordered Christians to spread the Gospel until everyone in the world believed in Christianity. Christian missionaries have a good track record of converting entire societies to the point that Christianity became merged with those society’s governments. It happened in Rome, Germany, The United States of America and many other places. All of those governments created laws that oppressed and punished people who didn’t live by Christianity’s archaic, vague ethical code.

Christianity likes to claim it loves everybody, but if you study the history of Christianity you’ll spend an awful lot of time looking at bloody warfare, economic exploitation, the oppression of minorities and slavery. Whenever you have a group who is supposed to be more favored by God than everybody else, and everybody else is so horrible and evil that they deserve to be tortured for eternity, blood will be spilled eventually.

9. Prayer is useless.

Somewhere out there in the world right now someone is praying to God, asking Him to help a starving third world child. Somewhere else out there is a starving child in a third world country praying for some rich, SUV-driving, Starbucks-drinking, Gucci purse –carrying, church-attending Christian to do something about the problems in the world.

Prayer doesn’t work. You know what does work? Work. That’s how every advancement in human history has ever and will ever happen. Prayer keeps that from happening.

10. The Bible teaches people to loathe themselves.

When you tell an entire nation that their righteousness is like filthy rags and they deserve to burn in Hell you’re going to create a nation of self-loathing people. You won’t have the time or motivation to fulfill your potential if you spend your days loathing yourself. And since people tend to treat others the same way they treat themselves, they’re probably going to treat others worse than they deserve.

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16 Comments | tags: bible ethics, bible ruins the world, christian culture, christian ethics, christian mythology, christianity is evil, The Bible is Mythology, toxic christianity | posted in toxic christianity

October 30, 2009

The power of prayer: Spit in one hand and pray in the other, and see which one fills up faster

By wise sloth

Here’s how the universe works. There’s cause and effect. One thing happens, and that effects another thing. That’s it. Now you hold the key to understanding and solving all the world’s problems. If there’s a problem going on in the world then there’s a real world solution that needs to be applied to the problem in order to fix it. In the real world staying at home and wishing for the problem to solve its self has only one effect: It allows the problem to persist because it takes people who are capable of solving problems out of the problem solving game.

Take me up on this challenge. Take your whole church up on this challenge. Every time you feel the urge to pray, go out and help someone. Give up praying for a month and go work in a homeless shelter instead. At the end of the month ask yourself which method really made the world a better place. Now imagine if everyone in the world stopped praying and went out and worked…and not just for a month but for the rest of their lives. There wouldn’t be a problem left in the world.

Even the Pope isn’t foolish enough to bet his life on his faith in prayer. When he asked himself the question, “How can I stop an assassin?” He didn’t turn to God. He turned to scientists and workers who did real world work and built a bullet proof Pope Mobile. Why didn’t the Pope just pray for God to protect him? Because prayer doesn’t work, but actual work does.

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4 Comments | tags: christian ethics. bible ethics, christian mythology, prayer effectiveness, prayer is useless, The Bible is Mythology | posted in christian culture

October 29, 2009

Traditional Christian Values Are Neither Christian or Traditional

By wise sloth

When modern American conservatives use the term “traditional family values” they’re not referring to “the way everyone here has always done things.” They mean “the way we do things right now.” And when they say “we” they mean “white, upper middle-class American Christians.”.

I don’t think it’s fair to everyone else for them to use the word “traditional,” because it only refers to the traditions of one group of people living in one country. It’s ignorant to demand all the people in the most diverse country in the world to follow “traditional” values… especially when you want them to follow your traditions instead of their own. Secondly, this one sliver of one country’s population has 3,000 years of traditions spanning several continents. And the traditions of that one culture has been changing for 3,000 years. So which stage of that cultural development should we stick with? Let’s analyze the history to figure out which time period they’re getting their traditions from.

In early middle eastern culture, when you got a wife you would have to pay the father a “bride price.” In some parts of Turkey, this is still required. I’m sure there are other places too. In modern times the concept of the bride price has been defended by saying it’s a gift to the parents or it proves you can provide for the wife. But you’re giving money to a person and getting a wife in return. That’s called buying. The people who wrote the Torah got their wives through paying a bride price. So the husband owned the wife, and he owned slaves too. He was allowed to beat both of them, and he was obligated to kill his wife if she was unfaithful. And he could kill his child if he/she was disobedient. Here’s an excerpt from Exodus 21:7-11:

“If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as menservants do. If she does not please the master who has selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has no right to sell her to foreigners because he has broken faith with her. If he selects her for his son, he must grant her the rights of a daughter. If he marries another woman, he must not deprive the first one of her food, clothing and marital rights. If he does not provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without any payment of money.”

When Republicans refer to a “traditional” family, this is the earliest stage of that traditions. So technically speaking, values that stray from this model are liberal and heretical.

Fast forward a thousand years past Jesus’s death and observe Europe. Bride prices were largely replaced with dowries, which was a gift to the husband’s family. The dowry served two purposes. One, since women didn’t work they were a financial burden. The dowry offset the cost of keeping a woman. It also bribed men into marrying women since it was shameful to be unmarried. Still, love was rarely a reason to get married. It mainly about money and networking. Husbands were still the head of the household and could beat their wives and children. Wives were housewives. Even if they wanted to get a job they had very limited rights to work since the Bible established them as second-class citizens. The wedding ring came from Egypt a few hundred years after Jesus died, but they were made out of hemp at first, later became iron, later became gold. Rubies were the gem of choice for a while. Oddly, in 1 Timothy chapter 2, it says Christian women shouldn’t wear gold or pears but wedding rings are now gold. The Quakers don’t wear gold rings though because they follow the Bible better than most people. England outlawed slavery within its borders in 1102 A.D. but didn’t make slave trade illegal until 1802. So slaves were still a part of the family well after Jesus died, which isn’t surprising because Jesus gave slavery his blessing by saying to treat your slaves well.

If you’re of Italian descent your pre-Christan era ancestors had another interesting Tradition. In a Roman household when a child was born the husband picked up the child to signify that he would accept it and allow it to live. If he didn’t pick it up the baby was killed or left to die. Romans also had slaves in the house. If your ancestors are from a Nordic country then in your ancestor’s traditional family they stole their wives from villages they pillaged.

Fast forward to the early years of the United States. Nothing much has changed. You could still own slaves, but you could only beat your wife with a rod as thick as your thumb. You could still beat your children, but you wouldn’t want to hurt them too bad, because they were put to work before the age of ten, and that was expected. Your elders lived with you until they died. Women were still second-class citizens and couldn’t vote, which was really the least of their problems as they were expected to be subservient to their husbands, which everyone believed was justified because not only did the book of Genesis say women were flawed but early Americans believed that science proved that since women had smaller brains they were biologically inferior to men. Women were expected to be barefoot in the kitchen and pregnant. Children were not allowed to question their parents no matter how idiotic their parents were.

And here we are today. If you’re a conservative American Christian, your great, great, great grandparents and every generation of your family before them, would view your beliefs about family as insanely liberal and a disgrace to God. Your great, great, great grandchildren and every generation after them, will look back at your generation and view your values as archaic and ridiculous as you view your great, great, great grandparents’ values.

Regardless of how funny and ironic that is, it’s beside the point. The point is that the conservative American concept of a traditional family is a figment of the imagination. It only reflects the traditions of one sliver of the American population, and it doesn’t even accurately reflect the traditions of that culture, at least, not if you go back more than half a lifetime.

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Leave a comment | tags: christian marriage customs, christian mythology, obsolete customs, The Bible is Mythology, traditional family values | posted in christian culture

October 29, 2009

A More Realistic Take On The 10 Commandments

By wise sloth

Note: Whenever I quote the bible I’m quoting the New International Version.

1. “You shall have no other Gods before me.”

If a modern day Christian child were to ask their parents the question, “Why did God say you shall have no other God before me if He’s the only god?” A modern day Christian parent might reply that it’s a figure of speech.

No, it’s not, and two sentences later the author of Exodus makes that clear. Here’s Yahweh’s reasoning for why He only wants you to worship him: “You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” Why should you only worship Yahweh? Because he’s jealous of the other gods. Not because he’s the only god.

More importantly, if you don’t worship him he’ll torment you and all your descendants. Don’t overlook the significance of the Jewish tribal leaders who wrote the Ten Commandments threatening their tax-payers’ family. In near prehistoric times (and especially for nomads) family life was all you had. Your family was absolutely everything. To threaten an ancient Jew’s family was a billion times harsher of a threat than to threaten a modern American’s family. Think about how serious that is. That’s how seriously the Jewish religious leaders wanted control.

2. “You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.”

This is pretty ingenious. First, it directly ends the problem the Jewish religious leaders had been having of people worshiping any shiny statue that impressed them. Secondly, if you don’t have a shiny statue to worship then how are you going to commune with god? Through the religious leaders of course.

3. “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”

Let’s simplify things, every time you see the word LORD, replace it with GOVERNMENT, because LORD is GOVERNMENT in the time and place were talking about. So this commandment is really saying, “You will not question the government or you will be punished.”

4. “Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy.”

The military has an ingenious way of indoctrinating its members. When soldiers walk outside they have to put their hat on. When they walk inside they have to take their hat off. The reasoning for that rule isn’t to keep the sun out of soldiers’ eyes or to keep them from looking tacky inside. This rule exists because it prevents soldiers from forgetting that they belong to the military, and it forces them to police each other. The Sabbath works the same way. It’s a weekly reminder never to forget that your theocracy rules your life. Other than that, it serves absolutely no productive purpose.

5. “Honor your father and your mother so that you may live long in the land the LORD your God is giving you.”

This commandment is written in Exodus 20:12. Exodus 21:17 says, “Anyone who curses their father or mother is to be put to death.”

Deuteronomy 21:18-21 says, “If a man has a stubborn a rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father or the voice of his mother, and, though they discipline him, will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of the city, ‘This our son is stubborn and rebellious; he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones.”

This commandment establishes the elder’s power over the young. It also justifies and indoctrinates the cultural values the Jews were already practicing.

6. “You shall not murder.”

This is the first commandment that lays down a functional civil law, and what civil law is more important than not killing each other? If any group of people were to sit down and come up with laws for society, this is the first law they would all come up with first. In fact, other governments around the world have come to the same conclusion without Yahweh’s divine inspiration. It’s certain this law existed in Jewish culture before the person who wrote the Ten Commandments was born..

7. “You shall not commit adultery.”

Biblical marriage law is based on the premise that men buy their wives from their father in-laws, and women are property to be owned and controlled completely by their husband. That means adultery is equivalent to stealing property. That’s why forbiding adultery was so important to the authors of the Ten Commandments that he had to put it in the top 10 list.

8. “You shall not steal.”

This is another rule that makes good civic sense. It doesn’t take God to come up with this rule, and it was almost certainly around long before the Ten Commandments. Why else would the Hebrew language have the word “steal?” Or do you believe that word wasn’t invented until Yahweh revealed to the Jewish leaders that stealing was wrong?

9. “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.”

This rule doesn’t say, “Don’t lie.” It doesn’t say, “You shall not give false testimony to your neighbor.” It expressly says, “…against your neighbor.” It’s saying you will not lie about your neighbor.

In Jewish culture at the time, your personal reputation and your family’s reputation basically determined your status in society. That’s why preserving peoples’ reputations was one of the top ten priorities of the authors of The Ten Commandments This law reveals yet again that the Ten Commandments are culturally, as opposed to divinely, inspired.

10. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his manservant or maidservant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”

This is the most morally bankrupt commandment in the list. It relegates women to pieces of property less valuable than a house but more valuable than a common slave or a donkey. Either that’s how much the creator of the universe considers women are worth or that’s how much one ancient Middle Eastern tribe once considered women were worth.

But that’s beside the real point of the commandment. Why was this commandment necessary? Commandment #8 already said not to steal. So if you’re not going to steal then what’s wrong with just wanting stuff? Because people who don’t want a better life are easiest to control.

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The Wise Sloth

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Exodus 21

New King James Version (NKJV)

The Law Concerning Slaves

The Law Concerning Violence

Animal Control Laws

1. Did you even know these rules were in the Bible?

2. Have you doubted your own arguments enough to be sure it’s safe to bet your soul on them?

3. Can you be 100% sure Jesus abolished these rules?

4. Why don’t you obey Exodus 21?

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The Life of the Poor

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1. The Bible’s archaic, arbitrary code of ethics is ineffective in the real world.

2. The Bible grants you immunity for your crimes.

3. Christianity places subservience as one of its top virtues.

4. Christianity places faith as one of its top virtues.

5. Religion siphons money from the public that could be spent saving the world.

6. Making pleasure taboo is harmful.

7. Christianity has a long tradition of holding back scientific progress.

8. Life sucks for everyone else when Christians rule the world.

9. Prayer is useless.

10. The Bible teaches people to loathe themselves.

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