Lies of the Christians #2

Gawaine Caldwater Ross

The Bible is inerrant. Or, to state it more broadly, so that it includes the entire Abrahamic tradition, Jews, Christians and Muslims; Scripture is inerrant. I call it a lie because after taking a look at the facts it is evident that this claim is more than simply a statement of faith, it is a denial of reality. Biblical criticism, which began in earnest in the Age of Enlightenment, has produced shelves full of books catalouging the Bible's contradictions. Fundies and Evangelicals simply pretend this literature doesn't exist. This is why they must be continually reminded.

Embarassingly, the contradictions begin right in Genesis, on the first page yet. The order of creation has two accounts. In the first, on the 1st day, God separated light from darkness. On the 2nd, he separated the waters above from the waters below. On the 3rd, he created dry land  and plants and growing things. On the 4th, he created the stars and the planets, the sun and the moon. (Note that the Sun appears after the fruiting plants, a physical impossibility.) On the 5th day he created fish and birds; on the 6th, wild animals and humans. On the 7th he rested. So is the account as it is laid out from Genesis 1:1 - 2:3.

But there is another account of the Creation, beginning Genesis 2:5. Here God created Adam before there was any vegetation. Next he created the wild beasts and all the birds of heaven. After Adam named them all, God created Eve out of Adam's rib (Adam is made from red dirt). It may seem trivial to object that there are 2 accounts of creation, but it's not. This is the first indication in the Bible that more than one hand was involved in its composition. Scholars have established that there are 4 sources for the Old Testament, called the P for priestly, the J for Yahwist, the E for Elohist, and the D for Deuteronomic.

These sources couldn't always agree as to which version of a particular story was the best or holiest, so a sort of compromise was reached in which both (or more) versions would be held as scripture, with no editorial comment to link them. With this finding in mind, much confusion is eliminated. Unfortunately it also destroys the argument that God wrote it, because an omniscient being couldn't possibly evidence any confusion as to which version of a story is the right one. Once you accept the fact of these contradictions, you can find so many of them that to treat them adequately requires an entire volume, which is exactly what biblical scholars have done.

Adam and Eve were the first people. They had children together, which is natural enough. Those children had sex with each other, since there weren't any other people around, which means that they were incestuous. One fanatic tells me that this was OK because they were so close to God. So close, in fact, that the first son, Cain, murdered the second one, Abel.  Cain's punishment is not the death penalty (as the law demands in 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth'), but banishment, which is much more in keeping with what we know of the treatment of criminals in clans and tribes.

It is a lie that there is only one God. Right in Genesis 6:1 'the sons of God' saw that the daughters of men were pleasing, and married them. Jews pretend that 'sons' here means angels, but if they were angels, why didn't they call them that? This expression, 'the sons of God', occurs in multiple places in the Bible.

Rather than call the story of the Flood a lie, it is more charitable and accurate to call it a myth. Universal flood stories abound in the mythologies of the world, but they are not found everywhere. When the last period of glaciation ended it is thought that the Black Sea very suddenly filled with water, which could produce a long memory of a giant flood.

Noah's ark was 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide by 30 cubits deep. This gives a volume of 450,000 cubits. A cubit is about 18 inches, or half a yard. 450,000 x 18 in. = 8,100,000 cubic inches. Divide this by 36 and we will get the number of cubic yards, or 225,000. Now Noah had to put 2 of every kind of animal in this ark, plus enough food for them to eat for the entire duration of the flood. Since carniverous animals like tigers and pythons would need entire animals to eat, it is obvious that he needed to bring aboard more that two of every kind. The text makes no reference to whales, of which the ark couldn't possibly hold more than 4 adult whales. So maybe aquatic creatures were left out, but even so animals that spend a lot of time in the water but some necessary time on land, such as seals, turtles, penguins and so forth would still have to be brought aboard. There are over 500,000 species of animals, not including insects. Clearly this ark was much too small to harbor all these animals, even if they were all babies. As a myth it is colorful and meaningful. As scripture is is simply wrong, and it is wrong to insist that it was a fact.

In Genesis 17:1- 17-8 God gives to Abraham's descendants the entire land of Canaan in perpetuity. Historically, it hasn't worked out that way. First of all, the Jews had to conquer Canaan - what kind of a gift is it if you have to fight for it?- and secondly, they were taken out of it during their captivity in Egypt, in Babylon, and then again, most disastrously, after 70 c.e. when all the Jews were driven out of Palestine by the Romans. This diaspora lasted very nearly 2,000 years, a not inconsiderabe period of time for human beings. God lied or he withheld the truth. The Jews later explained this rupturing of the covenant by placing the blame on themselves for not being holy enough (even though they were the Chosen Ones, a guide and light to all nations).

God sends evil spirits.He sent an evil spirit to Saul ( 1 Samuel 14-23). Thus the claim that God is absolute goodness is false. Elsewhere in many places God claims to be jealous, vengeful and wrathful. Which of these qualities is good?  In mythology many gods have an ambivalent nature - Zeus was a good and great god, but he had dozens of affairs. It is one thing to worship a god who has an abivalent nature, but to claim both that your god is absolutely good and yet also vengeful and wrathful is nonsense.

More lies will be exposed.

In Praise of the Human

by Gawaine Caldwater Ross

We are accustomed to hearing people say “Praise the Lord!” and “Praise be to Jesus!” This is fitting and good if you happen to believe in them. But I find that people are nearer to hand, and even bad people are interesting, if you study them.

It may very well be that we are not the “Crown of Creation,” as the Jefferson Airplane once sang. But I believe we are close to it, and here's why:

We belong to that very agile and intelligent order of animals known as primates. The word itself comes from the Latin primus, 'one of the first, excellent, noble.' And who cannot admire the dexterity of gibbons swinging through the trees, the clowning of chimpanzees, and the insatiable curiosity of monkeys? All of the primates have opposable thumbs. It is the long opposable thumb of humans and our large brains that give us our many artistic and practical abilities.

Humans dexterous? I would think that playing Flamenco music on the guitar would qualify. Not to mention we invented musical instruments in the first place, and invent more all the time. True, not everyone is a Segovia or a Clara Schumann. Some people use their dexterous hands to embroider, to quilt, to sculpt, to perform surgery, to make cabinets and houses, make and repair engines, and play baseball. Nor are humans as weak as is commonly supposed. The weight lifter who can lift and press a thousand pounds is probably as strong as a gorilla. We are better climbers than monkeys and other primates too: the sport of freestyle rock climbing (in which the climber uses no ropes or pins or other tools) shows that human climbers can climb up massive overhangs by jamming their hands and feet into cracks and inching themselves along. This makes us, actually, the best climbers of any mammal. We can also climb higher, and over sheer ice for long distances.

If you watch a gymnast or a figure skater or a ballet dancer you get a good idea of how agile we really are.  Not only are we very agile, but we also have incredible endurance. A fit human can easily outrun a horse. (Not in speed, but in distance.) The same is true for our ability to outrun deer, antelope, and nearly any other kind of animal except for the canines, which are truly fantastic runners. But even that may be changing. In the news we have a marathon runner who is going to run 26 miles a day for 50 days in a row, and after that he plans to run 100 miles nonstop. Zulu warriors used to run 60 miles (barefoot) and then plunge into a battle without resting. We can do this because we have very efficient biological methods of excreting waste, using fat, and controlling our internal temperature.

We have no wings, so we manufactured them. We are the first animals to find a way to move freely in an environment that is not natural to us. The speed with which we learned first to fly in the atmosphere and then to propel ourselves into space is breathtaking. Barring a global catastrophe, we should have colonists on Mars within 50 years. I'm not saying this is desirable, or should be done, but the fact that we may very well pull it off is simply outstanding.

As for language, it is true that many animals communicate with each other. Even if they can't make any noise, like most fish, they can still communicate with bodily signals and by releasing chemical compounds that say “I'm here and ready to mate!”  And, it is true that the language of whales and dolphins may do many things of which we are as of yet unaware. Just recently it has been reported that dolphins have names for each other, and humans and dolphins can communicate fairly well. Dogs also have a vocabulary of some 50 different types of growls, barks, whines, yips, howls and so on. More remarkably, dogs can understand some human speech. It was reported last year that dogs can attain the vocabulary of a three year old child! And Koko the gorilla learned American Sign Language. She makes up short sentences even, and has been know to lie.

All this is wonderful, but compare it to the human achievement. I'm willing to bet that whales and dolphins have a universal language that is understood by them all over the world. Humans have over 4,000 languages, some of them extremely unlike the others. Not only that, but humans discovered writing, so that the poetry of a Sumerian poet from 4,000 years ago is accessible to us, once it was learned how to translate it. Writing encouraged the human ability to tell stories, some of them (the epics), long and complex. I can write an email to a friend in China and send it over the Internet. She'll get it almost instantly. I'd like to see any other animal be able to communicate across the world like that! Our languages can also be sung: we compose entire operas and musicals, many of them very entertaining. Do that, Mr. Chimpanzee! Not only this, but we also discovered the language of mathematics. It's true that some animals can count – we think of a cat counting her kittens – but being able to count is nothing like the ability to use math to weigh a distant planet. Or, for that matter, to even know what a planet is.

Cynics and twisted theologians like Calvin will insist that humans are wicked, stupid or useless. This is terribly uncharitable. It is true that we  belong to the aggressive side of the simians, and that thanks to our ability to make tools we are adept at killing each other. On the other hand, we have also become highly skilled at caring for people who are ill. We do this even for people we don't know – some people devote their entire adult lives to caring for others. Elephants, which are intelligent and which have a high degree of empathy for each other, can't do this. Thanks to veterinary science we also do the same for injured or sick animals.

Michaelangelo, stupid? Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale, wicked? Mozart, useless? I think the assessment of the cynics and misanthropes is way off base.

It is true that we are facing a global crisis of environmental degradation, largely brought on by human activity. But I know that we have the ability to repair much of the damage. It is our duty to do this, and I believe we will do it, if we stop wasting time and resources fighting each other. If we learn to love human beings as much as we say we love God, we may very well pull it off.