Science is not a liberal conspiracy

But is science simply a revealing of the wonders of god's creation?  
Well, if one believes in a god or gods that created everything, then by definition those gods should get credit for all the good and bad things we see in the world, so in a circular sort of way, one's faith could be reinforced by the wonders of science as they are now revealed in our secular age. 
But the problem with this is that it assumes a partnership between religion and science which certainly was not there for much of European Christianity. From the burning of scrolls and later books on the writings of antiquity (which were seen as pre-Christian and therefore pagan) to the persecution of Galileo and the insistence on teaching creationism and abstinence-only education in the place of science today, Christianity has mainly come kicking and screaming into the scientific age. It is a sad indictment that Christian Europe for about a thousand years knew less about the planet - its shape and size and relationship to the sun - than did pre-Christian Greeks. The real flourishing of science did not occur until the Enlightenment, which was a secular (or at least deist) movement hostile to religious mumpsimus. 
One of the founding myths of Judaism and Christianity - the original sin for which women have to suffer labor pangs and men must work, and for which some Christians began to believe Jesus had died in atonement - involves a hostility to knowledge and curiosity. Adam and Eve were not punished for mass murder, gang rape, or torture, but for an illicit fruit-picking expedition (helped by a talking snake). Was it any coincidence that they were happier when they were ignorant, and what does this tell us about the Jewish and Christian relationship to empiricism and exploration of the world as we find it (as opposed to obedient, unquestioning acceptance of religious authority)?
Finally, the sacred texts of Judaism then Christianity had the opportunity to educate the world to the wonders of science and math but either chose not to or were simply incapable of it (the biblical authors were far less educated about scientific and mathematical matters than many of their colleagues in antiquity). This of course badly undercuts the argument that an omniscient god was either literally writing or at least being channeled by these authors, since such a god surely would have known about the shape of our planet, the wonders of light transmission, and genetics (which makes a mockery of the exclusively male family inheritance chains given in the bible (where Abraham begot Isaac, etc.) since a child inherits 50% of genes from each parent, who are therefore equally important, however Jewish and Christian societies demeaned women). Why would such a god hold back on stories that could have amazed, instead telling much smaller ones that he must have known (being omniscient) we would discover were nonsensically false with time? 
As Carl Sagan put it best, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."

What would have been truly "amazing" in the bible...

Here is what would have impressed me in the bible: a formula for cement. The Romans invented it, Christian Europe unlearned it for a millennium. The arch (ditto). Mention in even metaphorical form of DNA, inheritance, evolution, the relationship between mass and speed and time (far more mind blowing than burning bushes), mitochondrial DNA inherited from those nameless biblical females (and only the females), a spherical earth, a heliocentric solar system, an approximation of the speed of light (out at least an understanding that the sun is necessary to generate light, something the genesis authors apparently did not know), the emptiness and vastness of space (and therefore the special place of our life supporting planet). Insects with the correct number of legs, animals not known to biblical authors, pi, zero, decimal points, algebra, logarithms, the normal and power distributions, plate tectonics, carbon and uranium dating, radioactivity.
Repeatedly we are told in the bible that various audiences were amazed usually by some momentary suspension of the laws of physics, but don't you think even a single vaccine, antibiotic, or lightbulb would have been infinitely more amazing (and useful, the sort of thing a compassionate, all knowing father would show his children)?

Is Atheism Irrational?

February 11, 2014
This is the #1 emailed New York Times article at the moment, essentially an interview with Alvin Plantinga, an emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, a former president of both the Society of Christian Philosophers and the American Philosophical Association, who believes in god and tries to explain why he believes the 62% of his philosopher colleagues who are atheists are not only wrong, but irrational (believing something for which they lack evidence and reason).  It's clear that philosophy has gone downhill since the time of the Enlightenment when it peeled away from science (most Enlightenment philosophers were also heavily steeped in mathematics and science, something sorely lacking from those who study humanities today, for the most part).
Speaking of science, close to 100% of physicists - arguably those closest to studying the mind of god if there is one and grappling with eschatology - are atheists.
The modern American Christian theistic argument is quite specific, quite radical, and therefore quite easy to disprove. The good philosopher interviewed here does not seem to be aware of this, or perhaps is ignorant of the principles of probability and joint probability in general.
In general, the more specific a prediction the less likely it is to be true. For example, it is far more likely that Jane will be a librarian than that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library which itself is far less likely than the prediction that Jane will be a librarian working at a university library in New York City.
The broadest theistic argument is that there is some sort of god, or higher power, or original force that created the universe. Let's call this G.
This hypothesis is far more likely than the hypothesis that there is a god and only one god (monotheism). Monotheism is up to infinitely less likely than polytheism or agnostic polytheism (the belief in one god while not making any bet about the existence of other gods). Let's call this hypothesis MG for the two conditions M (mono) and G (god).
The joint probability that there is one and only one god is equal to the probability that there is at least one god times the probability that there is only one god. Both conditions must be true for this hypothesis to be correct. We don't know the probability that there is a god but we can work out roughly the odds that the god chosen by Christians is god by dividing by the numerator of all possible gods. Since this number is theoretically infinite, or close to it, let's instead divide by only the number of gods currently believed in by anyone on the planet. This again is a huge number, and there are doubtless many deities in isolated communities unstudied by anthropologists, but let's use the Hindu number of about 330 million gods since the others are rounding errors in this estimate. So, it is at least 330 million times more likely that there is more than one god than that there is one and only one god.
Again, the Christian theistic argument adds multiple additional conditions. This single god is male. Ignoring for a moment the possibility of androgynous or sexless gods, what is the probability that god has a penis? If we were created in the image of god and 50% of us have penises, then the probability god has one too is 50%. So the condition that god exists, is alone, and has a penis is half as likely as the probability that god exists and is alone which in turn is 330 million times less likely than that god exists and is not alone.
But there is more. The Christian theistic argument states that god has a name: Yahweh and was worshiped by a single people in a single place and time between several thousand to 2,000 years ago. The math can get very complicated here, but for simplicity's sake, let's use the world's relative Jewish population today as the probability that this people and only this people had a visit from god. According to the Pew Research forum as cited in the Economist in 2012, about 2 out of every 1,000 people on earth are Jewish.
So the probability of god being a single male Jewish god is equal to the probability that
   - he is a he (50%) x
  -  probability he is single (1 / 330 million) x
  -  probability he is Jewish (2/1,000).
Let's call this hypothesis YMG and it's probability works out to 1 in 660 billion.

But Christians don't stop there. They layer in more conditions to this already astronomically unlikely prediction. Their god has another name because their god Yahweh impregnated a Palestinian teenager named Mary and had a son who had both godlike and human properties. His name was Jesus, and he lived almost exactly 2,000 years ago, mostly in Palestine. This complicates things quite a bit. We have to ignore the probability of an angel impregnating a teenage girl, something that no one has witnessed before or since (in fact, we are very much left to a single biblical author translated from the Septuagint was by Christians to their advantage in the last decade of the 1st century during the Synod of Jamnia (Jabneh),in Palestine,changing the Hebrew word Aalma (young woman) to the Greek word parthenos (virgin) which changed chapter 7, verse 14 of Isaiah to

  Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel

Ignoring the probability of a chain of authors all copying and translating with true fidelity, or the probability that Isaiah would have agreed, had he been asked, that Jesus of Nazareth was what he was talking about all along, let's just get on with it, asking what the probability of any individual being a god would be, ignoring all the metaphysical leaps of faith and logic that would get us to an immanuel (literally "god in man").
About 200 million people were alive in Biblical times, so the probability that any one of them was a god would be 1 in 200 million. Multiplying this by 1 in 660 billion gives us the odds of god being a single Jewish male named Jesus of  
   1 in 132 thousand million billion or
   1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000
   1 in 1.32 x 1020.

There are other specific claims made by Christianity, but these are the main ones. Each additional condition's probability must be multiplied by the probability of the Jesus Hypothesis (JYMG), reducing it further.
So how likely is this?  Consider that the odds of winning a typical 6/49 lottery where 6 numbers are chosen from a range of 49 is 1 in 13,983,816. So you are roughly 10 trillion times as likely to win the lottery as you are to correctly bet on a single god named Jesus spawned from a male god named Yahweh (who in some sort of circular way was both father and son, but I digress). You may like those odds; I don't.
If you point out that   1 in 132,000,000,000,000,000,000 is not technically zero, so I still have not disproven that God exists, he is male, alone, and named Jesus, then consider this.  The next time you fly a plane, remember that the probability it will crash are about 1 in 11 million. So if you have rock solid certainty in the existence of a single male god named Jesus then you should be 8.3 trillion times as certain your plane will crash - please don't fly!
The modern Christian's insistence that we either prove the non-existence of god or embrace the existence of a male god named Jesus spawned from a Jewish god named Yahweh 2,000 years ago in Palestine through angelic insemination (as thought those are the only two options) is an absurdly high bar we apply to nothing else.
We take medications, fly planes, drive cars, cross bridges that have a far, far, far higher probability of killing us without making the ludicrously overconfident prediction that this particular flight or car trip will kill us. 
How did Mediterranean Monotheism become the default hypothesis? There may very well be some kind of overarching intelligence or force or spirit that moves the heavens in ways we can't understand, blah blah blah, but this does not mean this spirit has a penis, dresses in a toga, or takes sides in football games if called upon with just the right earnest verbal formula (best mixed with incense and candles).
 
"If You Don't Know There Are An Even Number of Stars... You Must Believe in Jesus"
OK, he didn't quite say it that way.   This is what Mr. Plantingea said:

No one thinks there is good evidence for the proposition that there are an even number of stars; but also, no one thinks the right conclusion to draw is that there are an uneven number of stars. The right conclusion would instead be agnosticism.

Where to begin...
We know stars exist.  We can see them, measure them, even determine their chemical makeup.  All people in all cultures of whatever faith or none at all have seen and can count them.
We know that there are far more than one star in the sky. With the naked eye, you can see about 2,000 from anywhere you stand, about 6,000 if you bothered to travel the planet and count them in all seasons and latitudes.
We also know that all things countable fall somewhere in the set of natural numbers {1,2,3,4...} and that there is a 50% probability of any natural number being even or odd.  
We know no such thing about gods. We cannot say with certainty that there is a set of gods {Yahweh, Jesus, Zeus, Poseidon, Mars, Athena, Diana, Thor, ...} and that the disproval of one ipso facto proves the other.
What we do know is that if god exists, no two human beings have ever agreed on what he looks like, whether she has feet, is really tall, can fly, gets jealous, marries humans, starts wars, or makes volcanoes erupt. 
The biggest predictor of how you envision your god is where you live. Gravity, light, and heat don't work that way. All cultures understand that you should avoid cliffs, lightning, and fire because these are not abstract constructs unseen by any mortal.

Take It Away, Al
I close with the words of perhaps one of the smartest atheists who ever lived:

I don't try to imagine a personal god; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it... 

I do not believe in a personal god and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly... The idea of a personal god is quite alien to me and seems even naïve.."

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation, no matter how subtle, can (for me) change this.
For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people. As far as my experience goes, they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them.

- Albert Einstein

Inside the Creation Museum

At first I found this amusing, then weird, then just plain creepy.   

According to MSNBC,

The Creation Museum is a lavish 27-million dollar edifice devoted to a literal belief in the creation of the world as recounted in the Christian Bible. Created by Answers in Genesis, one of the most prominent creationist groups in America, the Creation Museum paints a history of the world where humans coexisted with dinosaurs, the biblical flood carved the Grand Canyon, and the Earth itself is only 6,000 years old. Despite, or perhaps because of its wholesale rejection of modern scientific consensus, the Creation Museum is popular–it claims to have had almost two million visitors since opening in 2007.

I know that tearing apart a fundamentalist's creation myth is a bit like carefully explaining to a child why Santa Claus could not possibly deliver all of those toys to all of those children in one night propelled by flying reindeer while squeezing down chimneys despite a BMI far north of 30.   Most of us simply smile and say something polite such as, That's nice, but the difference is that fundamentalists are not children and they are at risk of making other adults believe this silliness, thereby lowering the scientific IQ of America even further (very few Christians outside of America believe in a literally true Genesis account).  

 Only in Turkey do more people (over 50%) than in the United States (40%) believe that human beings have not developed from earlier species of animals.   In no Western European country except for Greece is the number significantly higher than 20%.   Beyond Europe, only about 11% of Japanese believe that evolution is false.   What is also interesting is that in countries with low endorsement of evolution, there is a high level of confusion ("Not Sure"), further evidence that this is more a function of scientific ignorance than of religious faith per se (not that the two are not highly correlated).  

But the museum is cute in places.  I like how Adam and Eve look like relatively hairless, nudist hippies of Northern European descent - perhaps the people (coincidentally of Northern European descent) who created this exhibit did not realize that the bible was written by Mediterranean Semitic people who were far hairier and swarthier than the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian peoples they never met and certainly never intended as the target audience of these stories.

What's not to like?  An Adam with no body hair and a nicely-trimmed G.I. Joe Beard goes skinny-dipping with Eve.

Did you know that Adam and Eve were vegetarians until Eve's illicit fruit-picking expedition with the talking snake. Not only that, all animals, including the dinosaurs that allegedly co-existed with humans, were vegetarians until Eve broke her diet.  (Why DID an all-knowing god put a talking snake into Eden - surely, he could have anticipated this was a Really Bad Idea if eating delicious fruit within arm's reach (also not so bright) would have such an impact on so many people and animals.)   So anyways...  god went through all the trouble of creating (since there was no evolution in this parallel universe) dinosaurs equipped with tearing claws and razor sharp teeth ideal for hunting, others with wings or speed ideal for evading predators, and others with flat molars and long necks ideal for grazing plants, but make most of those features dormant until bam!  it's fruit-eating time in Eden.

Yet this harmonious model (until Eve ruined it!) ignores the fact that even in a vegetarian world, there is plenty of brutal struggle for survival among and within animals and plants (our bodies are really farms with more host bacteria than cells and specially-equipped cells (phagocytes) whose only job is to surround, devour, and kill invading, competing microbial life (but I guess since this violence is microscopic and unknown at the time the biblical authors were making this stuff up, it doesn't count to a creationist).  In fact, there are carnivorous plants and certainly carnivorous insects; without spiders, for example, Adam and Eve would have been spending so much time fending off mosquitoes, they would not have had time to do much else.  And how on earth could an insect that lives off of blood, sometimes killing its host in the process as it introduces parasites such as malaria, have refrained from bloodshed without dying?   And who says plants don't have as much right to life as animals?  We each need each other for survival, so isn't this plant-ism mean-spirited and misplaced?  Certainly not very god-like.

Adam, a mother-less man, never born, never with an umbilical cord, mysteriously has an umbilicus (belly button).

Eden certainly must have been a very crowded place since without evolution, all species, including the 99.9% we now know are now extinct, must have coexisted in one place and time.  Also, without evolution, the mutation of viruses that leads to the emergence of different strains of virulent influenza would have been impossible, so somehow all of the strains that have ever existed must have existed then.  Small pox, diphtheria, polio, malaria, and even HIV (no evolution, no possibility of a virus evolving).  Who among the early humans was seropositive and how did they have lifespans of 700 years or so without antiretrovirals? 



 

 No!  Leave Voltaire out of this!  And if you must drag him in, at least get the facts right.  Unlike Diderot and some other Enlightenment thinkers, Voltaire was not an atheist, and felt that abandoning religion would be dangerous at a societal level.  On his estate at Ferney, France, he built a church and encouraged anyone from the village to attend.  He was more accurately a Deist.  The idea that the Geneva Bible Society took over his house is a myth, by the way, perhaps one created in America over a misunderstanding in another century (the 19th) in another Swiss town (Lausanne) involving another skeptic (Edward Gibbon).  

OK, I'm done for now.  These would all be harmless beliefs if adults outgrew them or if those who didn't were not intent on dumbing down an already dilute scientific curriculum in our public education system.   Put another way, there would nothing wrong with a Tooth Fairy museum if it didn't make some people get it into their heads that they no longer needed tooth brushes or dentists.

Was Abraham psychotic when he heard a voice telling him to murder his son?

Interesting article in today's New York Times ("The Politics of the Binding of Isaac" by Omri Boehm) but written from the point of view of someone who takes seriously this story, what is popularly but incorrectly believed to be the only instance of god-mandated infanticide in the Bible, but sadly is one of many. Isaac was spared after being traumatized by a false execution. Others such as Jephthah's daughter (murdered after her father promised god he would kill the first person who greeted him on his return if he could just crush the dastardly Ammonites (Judges 11:3-39) and Jesus (killed according to Christians willingly in accordance with the plan of an all-knowing, all-powerful god who some early Christians and most modern Christians believe is god himself, hence the infanticide) were not as lucky.
At any rate, as Richard Dawkins points out, the absurdity and gratuitous cruelty of the story should not distract us from its profound immorality: what sort of a god would ask a man to murder his own son just to see if he really would go through with it? He is god; doesn't he know everything, including the obedience and submissiveness of Abraham? And is this god good? Worthy of worship?
Of course, the biblical authors were writing these stories more along the lines of Aesop's fables - we need not believe in talking grasshoppers and ants to infer moral lessons about work and sloth anymore than we need to believe literally in Abraham wanting to kill his son to infer a moral lesson about absolute, blind obedience (a defense summarized at Nuremburg as "Befehl is Befehl!" (an order's an order!). But if there is a shred of truth to this god-whispering business, as a psychiatrist I can attest that I have treated hundreds if not thousands of Abrahams, absolutely convincing in their charismatic insistence that the voice of god told them to do such-and-such (gouge out their eye, kill their neighbor, move all their possessions to the basement where they should eagerly await the return of Jesus), but it's amazing how these hallucinations and delusions resolve with the right medication, therapy, reality-testing, and tincture of time. In other words, there is no reason to believe that Abraham was not psychotic or manic at the time he reported his auditory hallucinations and luckily had corrective visual and auditory hallucinations (something not all of those suffering psychosis experience unfortunately). The burden of proof is on those who claim otherwise, especially since messianic, grandiose, religious-themed delusions and hallucinations are among the most common (the part of our brain in charge of religious belief seems to become especially active during psychosis or mania).
I don't envy those who feel compelled to force this rambling collection of stories, some overtly psychotic, others simply wrong, many plainly immoral, to make sense or give us something meaningful to learn. My question is why one would even try. A child (especially a child) could tell you that murdering your child is wrong. Every culture has a taboo against such behavior and we are hard-wired to fight like hell, sacrificing our own lives if necessary, to protect our offspring, carriers of our selfish genes into the next generation and beyond. We don't need an Aesop's fable to tell us this, nor should we even consider murdering our own children if a voice told us to (we should get help immediately).

Jesus shared at most 1 in 67 million genes to 1 in 1.1 trillion genes with David

The Lineage of Joseph (and by extension, Jesus)

              The first 16 versus (1.5%) of Matthew addressed the lineage of Jesus, or more specifically of Joseph.  It is quite clear that the authors of this text are responding to an argument, namely that Jesus of Nazareth was not the Messiah predicted by earlier Jewish prophets. Although it seems somewhat awkward to a modern reader, it was important enough for them to devote, in painstaking detail, the first 1.5% of their text to this point, one that seems to be of questionable significance, since elsewhere in the text we are told that Joseph was not the father of Jesus, that his teenage wife was made pregnant by an angel.  If Jesus has no DNA from Joseph, it seems unclear as to why Joseph's lineage should matter.  David lived nearly a thousand years before Joseph, so it is likely that many Jews alive at the time would have descended from him anyway. 

              This is the first problem with Matthew.  The lineage is moot, but it is also contradicted by the other Gospel that addresses Joseph's lineage in pain-staking detail.   Matthew described 26 generations between Jesus; Luke describes 40.  Assuming 25 years per generation, this implies an error of 350 years!   More disturbingly, for those who would like to take these logical accounts literally, is that not a single name on the David-Joseph lineage of Matthew overlaps with the David-Joseph lineage of Luke.   Clearly, they cannot both be right in the way we use the word right today. 

    Another problem with this lineage is that even if Joseph were Jesus's biological father, with 26 generations, Jesus would only have a relatedness of 0.00000149% to David.   

Relatedness is an interesting concept that quantifies the probability of a given gene in one person being shared by another.  Our relatedness to our parents is ½, meaning that there is a 50% probability of a given gene in our parents being in us.  Put another way, half of either parent's genes, on average, are in us.  Our relatedness to our siblings is also ½, by the way.   At each generation, our relatedness is halved, so that our grandchildren will have a relatedness of ⅛ to us, and our great grandchildren 1/16 relatedness.  Given the number of generations n that separate two people in a direct line of descent, our relatedness is 1 divided by 2 to the power of n.  In only a few generations, our relatedness to a given ancestor quickly approaches that of our relatedness to anyone else in the human gene pool.  If you are interested in more detail including an excellent excerpt from Richard Dawkin's classic The Selfish Gene, click here.

Biblical authors knew nothing about this, of course, and had the strange idea (shared by many primitive cultures) that all of a male's attributes (or right to rule) were inherited from his father's father's father's father... (with the mother a nameless breeding vehicle).  Doubtless they never would have spent so much time and energy creating these completely non-overlapping genealogies in such detail if they knew that in the end - even if true - the proportion of Jesus's genes that would be shared with David would only be 1 in 67,108,864.  Put another way, the probability that a gene of David made it through to Jesus would be less than one in 67 million.   

    Luke's 40 generation genealogy is even worse, of course:  Jesus would share only one gene in 1,099,511,627,776 with David, or 1 in 1.1 trillion.  Obviously, since we are all quite literally each other's cousins and quite a bit of interbreeding and outright incest occurs in our species, the background relatedness of any two strangers is much greater than 1 in a trillion, but the point is that by 40 generations, whatever genetic impact David would have on Jesus (or Joseph, to be more specific) would be no greater than that of anyone else on the planet.  I am as related to David as Jesus was, as are all of us.

Deutoronomy 25:11-12: My favorite Biblical references (really)

To all those people out there who hold up signs citing their favorite Biblical verse by chapter and verse without elaboration (as though we should all know what they intend to say), here are a few of my favorites that should send the Bible thumpers scrambling to the nearest Holiday Inn so they can actually read beyond their 2 or 3 favorite cherry-picked verses they have memorized:

Genesis 12:19  God punishes the Pharaoh for taking Abraham's wife as his own; the Pharaoh realizes Abraham lied when he said his wife was his sister,  confronts Abraham, telling him to take his wife and leave Egypt.
Genesis 22:2  Abraham believes god wants him to murder his own son so prepares him for slaughter, only to then believe god calls it off at the last minute.
Genesis 4:1  First sex in the Bible.
Genesis 5:8  Seth lives for 912 years
Genesis 5:3  Adam was a proud father at age 130 when he fathered Seth
Genesis 5:20  Jared lived for 962 years!  Whoah!
Genesis 6:3  God shortens man's life to "only" 120 years
Genesis 6:5  After taking all the trouble to create the earth and life and everything, God said he would kill everything he had created including animals because "every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually"
Genesis 1:14 Shout out to astrology - god creates stars "for signs"
Ezekiel 20:25-26  God shows he's a badass by killing a bunch of babies, so that everyone can know how awesome he is:  "I also gave them over to statutes that were not good and laws they could not live by; I let them become defiled through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the LORD. "
Leviticus 20:9  "If anyone curses his father or mother, he must be put to death."
Deuteronomy 22:20-1  A girl caught having premarital sex must be stoned to death by the men of the town.
Deuteronomy 22:13-21 A woman who marries and is found not to be a virgin shall be executed.
Exodus 35:2  Anyone caught working on the Sabbath should be killed (I'm looking at you, Super Bowl players, staff, and announcers!)
Deuteronomy 14:6-7 You can't eat rabbits or camel.
Leviticus 11:20-22  Insect-eating is OK except "you may eat any kind of locust, katydid, cricket or grasshopper."
Psalms 104:5  The Earth is not hurtling through space but resting on a Foundation, whatever that is, and can never move.  God said so.
Genesis 2:23 Adam goes to sleep and God "took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof" and made the rib into a woman.
Judges 11:35  Jephthah murders his daughter because he made a bet with god, promising he would kill the first family member to cross his threshold if god would let him slaughter his enemies on the battlefield.
Genesis 19:8 Lot offers his daughters to be gang-raped in Sodom.
Genesis 19:32-6  Lot while drunk is seduced by each of his daughters (one each night) who have sex with their father, getting pregnant by him. "Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father."
Mark 8:12  Jesus says to stop looking for signs of god's arrival - there won't be any.
Mark 8:33  Jesus calls Peter Satan.
Mark 9:43  Jesus advocates amputating your hand or plucking out your eye rather than risk going to hell whole.
Mark 10:11-12  Divorce and remarriage is the same as adultery.  (Sorry, Newt)  "Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery."
Leviticus 20:10  Those who commit adultery should be killed (when is General Petraeus's execution?  And does this mean that those who divorce and remarry should be killed?)
James 5:14-15  Faith-healing works, doctors don't.
Genesis 6:15  Noah's house boat is only 450 feet long
Genesis 7:6  Noah was 600 years old when the flood hit.
Quran 29:14 (if you really want to confuse folks)  Noah was 950 when the flood hit.
Genesis 7:19-20  "The mountains were covered" with 15 cubits to spare, meaning Noah's ark must have had oxygen and some kind of heating system and ice-breaking technology (since this would have been higher than Mount Everest, where water freezes and oxygen is thin).
Luke 14:26  If you don't hate your family, you can't really be Christian.  "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."
John 14:27 AND Matthew 10:34 (this will really confuse them)  Jesus says he DID bring peace and also that he DIDN'T.  "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you."  but "Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."
James 5:1  Rich people are going to hell. "Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you."
Matthew 19:23-24  Ditto.  "Then said Jesus unto his disciples, Verily I say unto you, That a rich man shall hardly enter into the kingdom of heaven. And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."
Mark 10:23-25  And again, more rich people burning.
Deutoronomy 25:11-12  No penis, no testicles, no hope of heaven.  "A man whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off may never join the assembly of the Lord."
Titus 2:9  Slaves should be submissive to their masters "in everything" and be "well-pleasing and not argumentative."
Leviticus 25:44-45  You can own slaves, but only from neighboring countries or from temporary residents in your own country.
Exodus 21:20-21  If you beat a slave to death, you have to pay the slave owner some money.
Deuteronomy 20:10-17  God wants you to commit war crimes, killing every last man, woman, child, fetus, and animal, even if they try to surrender.  "When you march up to attack a city, make its people an offer of peace. If they accept and open their gates, all the people in it shall be subject to forced labor and shall work for you. If they refuse to make peace and they engage you in battle, lay siege to that city. When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, put to the sword all the men in it. As for the women, the children, the livestock and everything else in the city, you may take these as plunder for yourselves. . . . This is how you are to treat all the cities that are at a distance from you and do not belong to the nations nearby.  However, in the cities of the nations the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them —the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you."

Biblical errors: why Genesis is not just wrong, but hopelessly wrong

Defenders of Genesis like to make the case that it's not wrong, just not to be taken literally.  Sure, the world could not have been created in 6 days (not 7 - god allegedly rested on the 7th), but who is to say those are really "days"? Maybe they were epochs or billions of years or whatever.
The problem is that the order is impossibly mixed up.  Also, biblical authors were not content at leaving it at that.  Perhaps in an attempt to impress a superstitious, agrarian audience who could never imagine that we would one day be able to prove or disprove their claims, they fabricated gratuitously.
Genesis I and II, for example, can't both be true.
In Genesis I,  God created "heaven and earth" but the universe is older than Earth (13.7 v. 4.6 billion years).  God then  "moved upon the face of the waters" then made Light (1:3) but didn't make light-producing objects (sun) until 4th day, then Darkness (dividing light into night and day) then Water divided to make the sky and the ocean (?)  (Gen 1:7)
We know that all heavy elements are born in collapsed stars that then explode, spewing their new non-hydrogen-only material into space.   So stars must have preceded oxygen which is necessary for water.  So there is no "water" for god to "move upon" without the creation and destruction of stars.
God then creates dry land, grass and seeds  but does this before sun created (1:16) which would have been necessary for photosynthesis.  Without the sun, the earth would be a frozen tundra; no life would have been possible.  And even if some life were able to evolve in such a cold, dark place, it would perish upon the sudden, blistering appearance of the sun, which would be a massive, cataclysmic game changer for which "grass and seeds" would not have been prepared.
The sun and moon (which is incorrectly described as lighting the night rather than reflecting the sun's light) were created THEN stars as an afterthought  ("he made the stars also" - Gen 1:16) to "give light upon the earth" 1:17 but most are not visible to the human eye.  He created Whales and every moving animal are created presumably before microbes (but after land plants, which is incorrect chronology of course)
Adam was made from dust (2:7) but was alone (asexual reproduction).  Adam names all the animals God parades before him 2:19-20, then, tired from his zoological exertions, goes to sleep.
God then "took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof" and made the rib into a woman 2:23.  Very strange stuff, but easily disprovable:  in 1543,Vesalius scandalized Christian Europe by showing that men and women have the same number of ribs.
Also, even if one were to accept that the earth's creation as described by biblical authors was not 6 days but some other long period, it still does not explain why we have fossils from the Cambrian Era 250 million years ago, whereas careful dating by generational analysis from Adam on gives us only 6,000 years.  Since one version of genesis claims man was created first, then the animals, the animals whose fossil remains we know to be hundreds of millions of years old could not possibly be explained.
So the Bible is either wrong about the appearance and order of life or the geological age of the earth or (most likely) both.  In fact, if you do accept "days" as "days" as most fundamentalists do, the creation of Earth is off by a factor of over a million, the proportional equivalent of claiming Los Angeles is only 17 feet from New York.
Nothing in quantum physics or modern cosmology helps defenders of the biblical authors.  If anything, every piece of evidence about how strange the universe is, how large, deep, and old, argues against anything those authors could have dreamed.   The idea that 99.9% of all matter was destroyed in the fraction of a second following the Big Bang by antimatter, for example.  Or that most of space is empty.  Or that most of our bodies and things we think of as solid are empty.   Very weird but unmentioned in the bible.  If god somehow oversaw or executed the Big Bang, he would have whispered in the ears of those who allegedly were channeling his spirit to write Genesis.  Since what we observe is so much larger and stranger and wondrous than what those scribes wrote down, isn't it clear that their inspiration was their own imagination, not god's?

Open letter to Mr. Huckabee on the recent election

Dear Mr. Huckabee, 

You believe that the defeat of your party in the most recent election must be evidence that "our country has slipped into a deeper state of dependence on government than I wanted to believe."  I am confused as to how an election victory for one party can have anything to do with our "dependence on government" unless of course you believe that anyone who votes for a black man must ipso facto be either of color, dependent on government, or both.  Since most of those who are dependent on government - through programs from social security and Medicare to Medicaid to veterans benefits to food stamps - are white, and many of them voted for Mitt Romney, how does this support your thesis?  Do you really believe, as your colleague at Fox News Bill O'Reilly claims, that minorities are looking for handouts from their government, like children looking for free candy?  What evidence do you have from exit polls or other demographic data do you have that this is the case?  

As a man well-versed in Biblical allegories, you compare your national government to "Goliath."  Since Goliath was a giant individual, not a giant government, is this not an odd comparison?  Also, in the Biblical contest between David and Goliath, David, not Goliath, won.  If you are trying to make the case that Mitt Romney was trying to slay what you call the "Goliath of government", why did he lose?  Since the Old Testament story is an attempt to show that god favored David even over a giant, doesn't the latest electoral outcome say exactly the opposite - that god must (at least this election cycle) favor what you see as a giant government?  Or perhaps Mitt just wasn't up to the role of playing David. 
Of course, for any of this to make sense, President Obama must have been responsible for runaway growth of this "Goliath" of a government. As it turns out, most of the growth in government came from his predecessors, particularly the last one, and only two presidents since Eisenhower have had lower rates of government growth than President Obama. 

You go on to claim that our "real problems are not political, but spiritual."  Do you really believe that those flooded out of their homes, men, women and children of all faiths, would agree with you?   Do you think FEMA should be put in charge of setting up places of prayer rather than distribution shelters for food and shelter (through cash vouchers)?  Do the one out of five American children in poverty many of whom have to skip at least one meal a day and go hungry - many who belong to devout families - really need spiritual fulfillment more than food in their bellies?  And why can't they have both?  Since both campaigns generally agreed on the problems facing our nation from the effects of the Great Recession to foreign policy difficulties abroad, what puts you in a position to be able to second guess both, identifying "real problems" that were evident to neither Obama nor Romney?  Since Romney never offered a spiritual solution for what ails us, how would voting for him have solved these "real problems" you believe actually face us? As you admit, "both parties have failed to acknowledge that" (meaning agree with you).
You claim that "Democrats have not wanted to even acknowledge the need for God in our public institutions" to which I must respond that you have not even wanted to acknowledge the need not to split infinitives.  

But I digress.  In virtually every public address, President Obama, a Christian, has acknowledged god in some form and has led prayers during time of national tragedy.  At no time has he moved to strip religious language from the Pledge of Allegience, for example, even though it was inserted in 1954 during the McCarthyist era.  He has not challenged any courthouse displaying the 10 Commandments, and has gone out of his way to please the bishops lobbying against having to implement healthcare reform, offering them multiple exceptions that they have publicly and loudly denounced through press conferences (rather than negotiating in good faith). 

You further claim that Republican leadership mentions god not to out of humility but only selectively, such as in the unquestioning, unconditional support of the current right-wing Government of Israel, which you describe as a "badge of courage."  I can agree with the absence of humility part, but how are Republicans behaving like lambs on the issues of "life and marriage"?  As I recall, they quite vocally opposed abortion prohibition even in the case of rape or incest and the life of the mother (which they believe is never endangered by pregnancy, something that many obstetricians would be curious to hear), and as recently as a week ago, Paul Ryan was telling evangelical Christians that President Obama was waging a "war on religion." The Republican party even went so far as to claim that conception through rape is god's will and that in the case of "legitimate" rape a woman's body has a way to "shut that whole thing down."  Is this lamb-like behavior?  

Regarding the Lion of Judah, his mention in the Bible is not associated with a war on abortion or gay marriage, none of which are really mentioned in the Bible at all.  In your Christian tradition, the Lion of Judah has come to represent Jesus who is allegedly (according to one Biblical version, contradicted by another) from the tribe of Judah.  In Revelation 5:5, this lion makes a cameo appearance:  

And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.  

Again, loosening seals is not very violent and has nothing to do with gay marriage.  Even the version of the Lion of Judah that entered pop culture through Aslan in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia does not rant against marriage equality or in vitro fertalization or stem cell research, as you seem to imply he should. 

You suggest the Republican party should "gear up and get ready for the next battle."  What battle?  We transfer power peacefully in this country via ballots, not bullets.  Are you advocating a coup?  And if you just accused the GOP candidates of being lambs rather than lions, why do you write next battle?  You just said they didn't really fight for what you call our "real problems."  I am confused. 

You claim that the Republicans are a "party of principle" but what principle are you referring to?  Do you not mean principal - it's accumulation and freedom from taxation?   Are you implying that the Democratic party is not a party of principle?  Or could it just be that we share many principles, but prioritize them differently, or that we see different means of achieving the same ends from alleviating poverty, providing healthcare to all citizens, ending war and capital punishment, and other Christian mandates?   Is it really your role, as a mortal among mortals, to be claiming that yours is the party of god and that any Christians who vote for President Obama would go to hell as you did prior to the election?

After bemoaning how the Republican party didn't mention god enough or in the right way, you then claim that they should not "stop believing what we believe" but rather "do a better job of doing what we're supposed to do."  Circularity aside, that claim seems to negate everything you said earlier.  

Finally, you claim that [only by Republicans] "attract[ing] voters and win[ning] elections" can you "save America from herself." Why are you so mistrustful of America that you feel she is inherently self-destructive and needs to be saved?  And do you honestly believe that this salvation can only come from the Republican party?  Since America is not a fixed entity, but a work in progress and a democratic one at that, who says America has to agree with you?  Apparently "she" doesn't.  You seem to confuse losing an election with losing a great Biblical battle between good and evil.  Isn't this a tad grandiose?

One thing the Bible does warn us against is idol worship.  When agreement with our own ideas becomes a litmus test for godliness and righteousness, are you not really saying "my will" rather than "thy will" be done? And if so, how is this compatible with the humility of a good Christian?


Sincerely,


Mike Victor


Appendix:

Growth of government:
After the spending burst of 2009, Mr. Obama, constrained by Congress and aided by repayments of bank and auto bailouts, increased spending just 0.5 percent a year over the next three fiscal years when adjusted for inflation; only two other three-year periods since Eisenhower had lower spending growth. - New York Times


Full O'Reilly and related quotations:

– BILL O’REILLY: “The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff. You are going to see a tremendous Hispanic vote for President Obama. Overwhelming black vote for President Obama. And women will probably break President Obama’s way. People feel that they are entitled to things and which candidate, between the two, is going to give them things?” [Fox News, 11/6/2012]

– RUSH LIMBAUGH: “It’s just very difficult to beat Santa Claus. It is practically impossible to beat Santa Claus. People are not going to vote against Santa Clause especially if the alternative is being your own Santa Claus. [The Rush Limbaugh Show, 11/7/2012]

– SEAN HANNITY: “One other thing that we need to come to terms with as a result of last night. What appears to have happened is that the liberal welfare state in this country has now grown. More and more Americans have become dependent on that welfare state. As they have, they have found themselves siding with the party of government.” [Fox News, 11/7/2012]

– STUART VARNEY: “With Obama’s victory, the takers have taken over. The makers are clearly in the minority.” [Fox Business, 11/7/2012]