Atheism

Politics

Memes

Mind

Matters

String

Interact

Feedback

Email

Links

Debate

Home

Atheist Prayer

Pin-Board

Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?

Theocracy? No Thanks

Atheism and Marriage

Petition to the gods

Christianity and the Death of Civilization

Does God Bless America?

Kill the Puppy Dogs

Debate Unlimited is Bigger Than Jesus

Blinding Faith

The Future Does Not Suck

The Devil Hypothesis

---

---

---

Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |6

27 July 2007 20:56

I don't know how many times I have to tell you this I don't regard the Bible as authoritative, convincing or readable and the rest of the world doesn't either. People who are not obliged to believe that it was written by paragons of holy virtue incapable of error don't do so.

You don't believe that things in days gone by happened in the way they do now. Flood geology was different to modern geology and people in biblical times could not have been hustlers, cultists or religious loonies. You have no evidence or reason to believe these things except your strong emotional need to believe that you have got the correct interpretation.

In modern times tyrants pick on cults they don't believe in and persecute their members because they enjoy kicking out at people they don't like who can be scapegoats for the general malaise of their country. And yet that explanation is not acceptable in "biblical times" leaders have to behave differently, in that stilted Cecil B. Demille Sunday matinee way in which people are not people but caricatures and embodiments of universal human principles of good or evil. If you used your same biblical times standards to judge Hitler as you judge Nero you would have Hitler being terrified that the Jews really were the People of God. AND also the Jehovah's Witnesses who he also persecuted in exactly the same way. That idea is absurd as we know from his own writings and dozens of witnesses of the man, he was not scared of Jews or Jehovah's Witnesses! Why would anybody think that Nero was terrified that Christians were right? It is incredible. Christians were an easy target, a new cult of cannibalistic foreigners with a sex obsession who denied the gods, made a general nuisance of themselves and didn't fight back.

You seem incapable of any sort of detachment and critical thinking at all if your fundamental beliefs are involved. You look upon the Bible as if it is perfect, couldn't possibly be anything less, isn't anything less, and proves itself to be so. You are quite simply wrong in every particular but you are incapable of concluding that yourself without thinking that you are a fool, misguided, evil or tempted by Satan. Religion has got its hooks into you and the barbs are deadly.

Unless a “holy work” is written directly by a god and witnessed by thousands including people who had excellent reasons to be unbelievers to be so the most likely explanation for its existence is that it was written by a religious nutter in the mould of Joseph Smith or by a respected time-server in a religious establishment. Nobody can demonstrate that a document has a divine origin unless it is significantly more miraculous in its accuracy of prophesy, such as prophesying things that clearly haven't yet happened that then happen or showing knowledge of things which can be shown to be true but no man could have been expected to be able to imagine. We do now know many amazing things which insane religious Jews of the first century would not have been able to imagine, but these were not revealed in any books of the Bible. Come on, how about a prophesy such as:

1] Many years before the end of the world man will have walked upon the face of the Moon although some knaves will doubt this and call it trickery

2] The house of the Lord Jesus will be built in Rome and the Empire of Rome shall fill up with worshippers who call upon the Lord Jesus but not until after Rome destroys the Temple in Jerusalem. Verily it shall come to pass that The Church of Christ will endure longer than the Empire of Rome.

3] People who claim to follow Jesus will persecute the tribes of Israel and a great evil man will arise who tries to utterly destroy all the nation of Israel but he shall be thwarted by a war lasting years and involving much death and the dying of nations. Whole cities greater than Jerusalem will burn as hot as a furnace.

4] A new sword of the crescent moon will be raised in the land of Arabia by a man who claims to be a holy Prophet. This sword will kill in the name of God and usurp the city of Jerusalem.

Can you show me where those prophesies are? Can you explain why they aren't in the Bible? I can. Easy peasy.

Your idiotic faith in the accuracy of the Gospels is almost beyond parody. You refuse to accept the likelihood that these were constructed as works of religious propaganda designed to impress the gullible. Your rational sceptical mind is not merely out to lunch on this matter it has been given early retirement. You childishly refuse to acknowledge the capacity for pious fraud that exists by having two decades or more to scour the Scriptures to find prophesies to write the fictional story of Jesus around. The Gospels are perfect, the Scriptures are perfect and they prove each other seems to be the sum total of your argument. I told you from the beginning that I wasn't buying that and you have done nothing to convince me that I was wrong.

You are using the literal surface reading which is intended to appeal to those of limited intelligence, those without eyes to see and ears to hear. You cannot see the messages that were placed in those gospels for more discerning minds because the people who understood them have all been killed for having that understanding. The Roman Empire didn't want a complicated mystery religion with different levels of understanding, it wanted everybody treated like idiots and given the simplest of messages: this is true, believe it. All the higher and deeper understandings which were revealed to early Christians who had been baptized by fire and the spirit were lost, destroyed, wiped out by the official Church of the Empire. As a result Billy Graham and the Pope have to make do with the same meagre fare as illiterate slaves and the superstitious wives of peasants.

The fact that there were Christians between the supposed time of Jesus and the sacking of the Jewish Temple shows that there Christians. Nothing more. Have you studied many cults? Do you know what the average time is between the birth of a cult and its creation of an impenetrable web of myth that tend to obscure its own beginnings? Do you know how many god-man religions were created in the 500 years either side of your non-existent year zero? Do you know how many cults have arisen in the Pacific in the twentieth century? How many parallels and divergences can you demonstrate between the cult of Jesus Christ and the cult of John Frum? Does the existence of the cult of John Frum prove the existence of John Frum? Does the existence of Luddites prove the historicity of Ned Ludd?

It is crystal clear from reading the Epistles of Paul that he knew little about any life of Jesus and cared even less. He doesn't quote Jesus much, all his quotations come from the Jewish Scriptures. Paul doesn't seem very impressed by any of Jesus' miracles, he doesn't mention them. To Paul Jesus is the Messiah and Son of God, the Christ (the Greek word used to unite the two concepts). That is all that matters to Paul, Jesus died for our sins. His evidence for this seems to be a coincidence in timing between his persecution of the nascent cult of Jesus the Nazarene and his own mother of all grand mal seizures. Nowadays we know what epilepsy is and we don't think of it as a funnel by which sacred truth is poured into the world. But Saul was a smart cookie: literate, an expert on Scriptures, a man who was familiar with the Greek language and (then)modern Greek-influenced philosophy and ideas, a man with a great potential to be an impressive "witness". Of course he didn't actually witness anything real but I don't regard him as just a cynical charlatan either.

It is not surprising that a man thinking about persecuting Christians would continue to think about them when his brain was whacked out of alignment. The account of Saul's conversion reads like a terrifying epileptic fit, a 9.9 on the Richter scale. It is not at all surprising that a large fit like that would be interpreted as a religious experience by a man steeped in religion, after all there was no other better explanation available, and there would not be for another eighteen centuries or more. That is the event that launched modern Christianity. If there was a real Jesus he was a minor figure in Jewish history, he did not make any significant impact on the national stage and his cult was so terrifyingly all-pervasive in Jerusalem in 37 CE that the Sandhedrin had assigned a single agent to counter it. Even reading the Epistles and Gospels themselves leaves you with little doubt that this was hardly a runaway success with people flocking in to join. It took several decades for Christianity to grow into a significant movement. By that measure it was significantly less successful than Islam, Mormonism, Scientology and the Moonies.

You say I am assuming the Gospels are not true based upon a denial of the supernatural and modern day thinking. Yes. Guilty as charged. Why aren't you using modern day thinking? Why aren't you being naturally sceptical? You obviously have a capacity for scepticism as you use it against biology, geology, astronomy and history, as a weapon to allow you to maintain your precious beliefs about Jesus. Things which don't impinge on your beliefs are left alone, anything that touches those beliefs (which is actually most things) has to be seen through your filter. Geology has to be barking up the wrong tree because your beliefs require an insanely young Earth. Evolution has to be wrong because it suggests that a supernatural explanation for the diversity of life is not required. The past has to be allowed to be different from the present to allow for the flood story to "explain" geology. No doubt if you thought gravity was unbiblical you would deny that too. What is your position on the shape of the Earth? Does the Earth move? Are the races created by God equal or unequal? What about Jews? As the Bible classes small bats as a kind of bird does that make them birds?

If Philo was a man fallible and sinful weren't also Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and all the men who have read meanings into the words of the Bible? I find it ridiculous that you chide me for not using logical analysis when it is clearly you who has the beam in your eye.

You sent me another short email mentioning the opinion of a disciple on the beliefs of demons, how could any man know what demons believe in? It is patently absurd to imagine that a man could have an accurate insight into the mental processes of a supernatural entity that doesn't exist. How could any man know what Jesus was thinking when he was alone? You obviously see these long dead people as authorities but you have no reason to do so. Even a surface reading of the Gospels shows the disciples screwing up, demonstrating their ignorance, humanity and capacity to deceive.

Shouldn't The Countenance of God have a capital letter? Shouldn't everything you think have a capital letter? Your head is stuffed with woo-woo music. You play that woo-woo music over every thought about God, Jesus, the Holy Land, Jews, Israel and Biblical Times. You force significance and meaning into every thought connected with your religion: Thinking in Capital Letters. You refuse to think "unworthy thoughts" which might lead you to understand what your religion actually is.

You clearly accept the possibility that people may have sincere but wrong religious experiences but you deny the possibility that you may be wrong, by using a belief in your interpretation of the Bible.

I am not asking to see the countenance of God in my sinful condition I am asking you to demonstrate there is something out there worth trying to contact. Scientists don't look directly at the Sun with telescopes because they know that the Sun exists and has the power to damage them. I don't know that God exists, why should I need a fatal proof? Near where I work is a fence that says it is electrified, I am not stupid enough to either simply believe it or to just stick my hand on it either, but I have considered taking my multimeter to work. I am all in favour of an indirect non-fatal proof and I am content to use the vehicle of choice for your god: prophesy. As you think you are in contact with God you can ask him for the proof I need. I don't need my eyeballs frying, my chest exploding or letters of fire written across the sky. I will settle for a simple prophesy of a minor and trivial nature. As I explained before just let me know where is next in the godly cross-hairs. Which is the next city or province to witness the power of God. Earthquake, tsunami or volcano. Floods, droughts, famines and storms are too easily predicted by man. Put the question to him, don't pooh-pooh me or fob me off with a quote from your book of nonsense as to why you shouldn't do it. If you believe you are doing God's will by communicating with me, and your god knows everything he will already know that this is the test I will insist upon. Don't let your idolatrous worship of the Bible get in your way.

How many atheists believe in a global flood? How many Christians believe in a global flood, the Garden of Eden and a virgin birth? There are hundreds of millions of Christians who believe in Jesus and God but also believe in conventional geology, astronomy and evolution. It is only a tiny minority of Christians who feel obliged to accept the Bible as their god and worship it as you do. For millions of Christians your absurd pig-headed denial of science is a chronic embarrassment.

I am not aware of anybody who doesn't screw up their brain to want to believe in Genesis who believes that the universe was created 6,000 years ago and the abundance of fossils is explained by a global flood. Doesn't that fact ever give you cause to doubt your self-hypnosis or reject your brainwashing? People will and do believe the strangest things but your creation and flood myths don't convince anybody who is conducting science with an open mind. What is called creation science is not a form of science at all it is merely applied mythology.

Is there anything that creation science can predict? We are still discovering new animals, especially in the jungles, remote mountains and the deep oceans. What can creation science tell us about what we can expect to find and what we will not find? Conventional science suggests that it is unlikely but perhaps just possible that some kind of yeti might exist, what evidence does Genesis offer? Conventional science has found no native mammals on New Zealand except bats, with the simple explanation that while birds and bats could have flown in to the isolated land mass and then lost their powers of flight there would be no way for rodents or cats to get there before they hitched a ride with men. But Noah's Ark in its forty day traverse of the entire globe could have dropped off anything there. So are we ever going to find any shy little New Zealand native mice? Or perhaps we will find hobbits, eleves and mermaids, God willing.

What were angels and demons doing at the time of the Garden of Eden and the flood? That whole early section of the Bible seems a bit weird on the angels, spirits and demons front: there aren't any. And neither is there any hint of people surviving death. God is appearing to people directly or via proxies such as clouds or burning bushes. Later God starts to use angels and demons appear as well. Why isn't this theological menagerie sorted out in the first few chapters? The God of the early bits of Genesis is a real roll-the-holy-sleeves-up kind of god. He goes places, and also isn't in other places. How could he absent his omnipresent self when the most critical event in human mythology was taking place? How the omniscient fuck could he not know what would happen? How could it be fair to punish snakes for the crime of being impersonated by Satan? How can it be fair to punish all mankind for one crime? Come on, give yourself a slap here. It's myth. Ancient Hebrew mythology and as such no more real than ancient Norse or Greek mythology. The Garden of Eden story is probably a monotheistic reworking of the original myth, the ancient Hebrews believed in many gods but were instructed only to worship one. Whenever they got the chance the other gods would get an airing. Hebrew mythology is full of this fear of other gods whose existence is very hazy. Are other gods real? If they are not real in what way is worshipping them going to make a real god jealous? If there is only one god how can the Hebrew people be so fickle as to rush out and build a golden calf whenever God and Moses turn their back? Myth. Haven't you got that yet? It is all myth. It isn't even a particularly good myth.

Have you ever had a library book that is covered in underlinings and scribbles in the margins? It can be very hard to read and make out what was really intended by the author, especially if the people who made the notes were stupid, which I have found they often are. The Bible is so covered over with scribbles and underlinings that it is extremely difficult to understand what was really intended, especially as many of the notes have been made by people who have studied the subject for years and are also quite clearly barking mad. Do you know what the phrase putting a gloss on it means? Writing a glossary interpreting an opaque text in a way as to force a very far from obvious interpretation on the words. People have been doing that to the Bible for centuries with such nonsense as calling the serpent in the Garden Satan. If they had meant Satan they would have invented him and named him then rather than have to import the concept of the slightly inferior evil god from the Zoroastrians centuries later.

Where is the author of Job when the action takes place? He seems to have the classic story-teller's view.

Why would a psalm describe the crucifixion of the Messiah without the slightest hint that it was referring to the Messiah, or was a prophesy? You don't need to concern yourself whether the phrase is piercing or surrounding like a lion there is nothing in the entire psalm that says this is a] a prophesy or b] about the Messiah. Which other psalms are prophesies? Why would Jews chant a prophesy they didn't understand was a prophesy? If the psalms are all meant to have been written by David and Jesus was meant to have been David's descendant why doesn't Psalm 22 mention any of that, even when it is mentioning descendants of Israel? Read it from verse 19 onwards and you see what it really is, a thank you to the Lord for saving a man from thieves, slavers, wild beasts and other tribulations. It is a thoroughly Jewish psalm with ordinary Jewish themes, it is not a prophesy. BUT, it was a familiar psalm, and the writers of the Gospels used imagery from that psalm to decorate their crucifixion narrative and make it look like a fulfilled prophesy when in reality nobody ever thought it was meant to be a prophesy.

If you don't come up with something more concrete than similarities between two sets of old documents I will have to end this correspondence.

Here are the rules:

1 ] No quotations from the Bible or anywhere else

2 ] Any paragraphs that do contain direct or indirect quotes from the Bible will be ignored by me and rendered in nonsense words or Latin if I decide to publish them at all, many people may not notice.

3 ] Capital letters shall be reserved for proper nouns and the start of sentences, not for pronouns or anything vaguley connected with your god. I am not going to be bullied by your shift key into playing that woo-woo music.

The word god does not merit a capital letter when it is used as a description of a type of entity any more than does cat, teacher, frog, king, prophet, demon or saint.

The word bible does not merit a capital letter when it is referring to a generic class of authoritative book but does when it is the title, just as capital letters are used for Scouting for Boys, The Late Show and Live and Let Die. No religious endorsement is implied.

The word god is rightly capitalized when it is used as the rather unoriginal name of your god, God, or as a title. Think: the Duke of Bohemia was a duke, Duke Ellington wasn't a real duke. Saint Paul used to be known as Saul of Tarsus, be a saint and rub my metatarsals.

Can you explain to me why I don't deserve to see proof of the existence of God when the disciples of Jesus got to witness miracles and see him die and come back to life without demonstrating any faith at all? If proof weakens faith or some such rot why didn't it weaken the faith of those who had it in spades? The disciples believed in God and knew Jesus, they saw him do miracles, they saw him die, they saw him alive after death, that's a hell of a big head start they have on me. In contrast I have to make do with translations of old books written by Jews and people like you telling me those tales are really believable and convincing. No they are not! To be convinced by such tales you have to want to be convinced by them, and why would any sane modern man want to be convinced by a book of dry old Jewish myths which have caused so much trouble in the world? To become President perhaps. Or marry a silver ring babe. To sell a book. That's it, I have run out of reasons.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

29 July 2007 07:16 There are several alternate explanations for the beginning of Christianity, but there is also the history given in the Bible. The biblical history of the account of Jesus Christ and the apostles has been opposed but never proven fictional. The alternate versions have less supporting evidence then the evidence that favours the history in the New Testament. Alternate versions do not mean they are better versions, or correct versions. You must look at all the details and defences for each before you make your claims on the accuracy of Scripture. By having me agree to not use the Bible in the debate as the source of my presupposition would be foolish. That is the basis of my presupposition. Your presupposition denies the authority and truth of the Bible. Asking me to not use the Bible is the same as me asking you to not use anything against the Bible. Your presuppositions depend on the fundamental assumption that there is no God. My presupposition depends on the assumption that there is a God, and as such, I can know Him. You are trying to demolish the worldview as understood through Scripture by assuming your interpretation is right. The only way to really evaluate our opposing worldviews is to look at the evidence and interpret what we find and see if they sound logical, or at least probable, or not. Otherwise you will keep saying that Scriptures are not true because you assume they were written by men since there is no God. Those statements are only true in your mind because of the foundational principles you believe are true in your own outlook. If your foundation is false, then so is your deduction and analysis of the Bible. You and I both have the same facts to look at. The difference is in our interpretations based on our presupposed worldviews. For example, we see the fact that there are different layers of rock. By your presupposition, those layers were formed over millions of years. By my presupposition, the global Flood caused those layers. We can observe similar things in such as geologic sorting. You can deny the global Flood, but that does not mean it is not a possible scenario. Gradual time and millions of years is part of your worldview. That is why things looked old to most atheists. You are taught they are old. I think things are still old, even if the world is only 6,000 years old. 6,000 years only seems like a short amount of time when compared to an innumerable amount of time. There are many sincere Christians who are indoctrinated with humanism. They are taught false statements of evolutionary fact, when it is not a fact, but an interpretation. Creationists also have an interpretation and it is a strong competitor with evolutionary interpretation. Christianity can answer almost all questions required in science. Christians who are persuaded by humanist interpretations compromise their views with the Bible and, maybe even unconsciously, hypocritically believe in the sacrifice of Jesus, who Himself alluded to Genesis as literal history, but deny the teachings of the Bible as literal when it doesn’t suit their views. They cannot have it both ways. They may be saved by divine grace, but are usually useless to the church because they use Jesus as their safety blanket to escape Hell, and ignore Scripture to fit in with the world. If I cannot use the Bible and you cannot use anything that contradicts the Bible, then we will continue to banter about whose right and wrong without engaging in an actual debate. I use the Bible: you use your non-biblical sources, and lets look at facts and interpret them each according to our worldviews. Then we will have a basis for discussion. I suggest if you are honest and want to know God yourself, then ask Him yourself for a sign that He is real. Don’t use my testimony. See if He will answer you. Ask Him to let you know He is there. I will pray for you. Mike

29 July 2007 18:04

You are being disingenuous if you think that the existence of several Gospels constitutes excellent proof of the life of Jesus. What is the alternative explanation for the Gospels? The Gospels are the foundation myths of a cult written in such a way as to "demonstrate" fulfilled prophesies. As such they are extremely dubious sources, expected to be repositories of pious lies and calculated deceptions. These are the (leading) two alternative hypotheses. Because of the nature of the alternative explanation the existence of more than one Gospel does not strengthen the traditional Christian interpretation and the content of the Gospels cannot be used to verify the validity of the Gospels for the same reasons I have repeatedly tried to explain to you with the analogy of the counterfeit signature on the counterfeit note. Gospels first appeared shortly after the destruction of the Temple and they continue to appear for the next two hundred years or so and more. No original manuscripts survive, not even their crumbs. Just think about that for a moment: is there any object in existence you would not trade for an original manuscript of any canonical Gospel? How can they not still exist if they are the directly inspired texts you claim them to be - tangible links with God?

If you are trying to demonstrate that the Gospels are true because they mirror material in the Scriptures you are simply wasting your time. Of course they do, because they are pious lies! It might have been remarkable if the events described in the Gospels happened in a part of the world devoid of Jews in which nobody knew the content of the Jewish Scriptures, just as it would be disconcerting to discover that the natives of Tierra del Fuego in 1550 had battled a nobleman who could turn into a bat and drank the blood of virgins but if such a story turned up in Ohio in 1997 you would not think that a supernatural explanation was appropriate, your first thought would be that the story is fictional and those telling it have made it up and you will wonder why people are wasting your time over such transparent forgeries. The simplest explanation for similarities between Gospel accounts and passages in the Jewish Scriptures is that the Gospel writers made up their story around allusions from and quotations of the Scriptures they were thoroughly familiar with. The more similarities there are and the more widespread across the Scriptures those allusions come from the more obvious this explanation becomes: if it seems too good to be true that's because it is.

Do Christians tell lies? Is the Pope a Nazi? Weeping statues, sacred fire, stigmata, visions of the Blessed Mary, enough relics of the true cross to build a full scale model of Noah's Ark and enough relics of the holy foreskin to upholster an armchair (that turns into a three seater sofa when you rub it). Just go online and see how many "uplifting stories" are shamelessly copied from one website to another, all true, all happening in different places to different people, all unimpeachable witnesses of the highest standards of Protestant probity.

You also have to ask yourself whether these people believed that they were actually lying. Greek thought at that time involved a lot of stuff about different levels of existence, not that dissimilar to modern concepts of higher dimensions and parallel worlds. Dionysus, Attis and Mithra didn't live and die on the same plane as ordinary people. You will probably be aware of the phrase in seventh heaven, why would there be more than one? It is conceivable at least that the Gospel writers were codifying the results of multiple recountings of the tales of Jesus the hero which over time, three decades at least, became more and more mythic and managed to tie in more and more references to passages in the Scriptures. The story of Jesus mirrors not only Jewish Scriptures but echoes themes in the myths of many god-men and demigods in mystery religions which were common around that time across the whole of the Eastern Mediterranean from Egypt to Greece and Persia. What has happened to your Intelligent Design logic here, if something looks designed deliberate design is surely a possibility you have to consider.

The world is full of fake religions and honest but misguided people. Your list of fake and misguided religions is the same as mine with but for the one notable exception you believe cannot be the same as all the rest. Think about Zeus. Do you hate him? Do you scorn him out of malice? Do you think you will be able to stand up to him? Do you believe that everybody who worshipped Zeus really knew that he wasn't real and that the only real god is Jewish? I treat your god the same way as I do the other mythical gods. Hating them is absurd, I can't seriously hate the figments of other people's imaginations! Neither can I love or fear them. To have any meaningful relationship with any entity it must be known to exist. Do you hate my next door neighbour's pet dragon?

You accuse me of trying to prove my case. Duh. Yes, let's look at the opposing worldviews and look at the evidence. Nobody who doesn't feel a religious need to believe in your fairy tale flood story actually does so or gives your crazy 6,000 year time limit any credence. There is no convincing evidence for your interpretation of geology that impresses anybody who is not already primed by religion to believe it. The conventional scientific explanation of geology is not in the slightest bit controversial. Science has woven together a synthesis of evidence from abundant different sources such as rock strata, mud layers in lakes, ice cores and tree rings in both living and dead trees to give a comprehensive map of the past which cross references against isotopic evidence. This time line is comprehensive and continuous and it goes back way beyond the 6,000 years your pathetic small-minded superstition "allows".

The global flood is not in any way a possibility. It is impossible and it provably did not happen. The total lack of "flood geologists" in any mining or oil exploration industries is excellent evidence for how scientific your superstition-driven theories are. Conventional scientists are snapped up by mining companies and oil companies, they don't queue up for graduates of the Bob Jones University of making shit up for Jesus.

The other way of looking at time is that Biblical times only seem ancient and therefore to be expected to be different to modern times to somebody who thinks the time of Jesus is a third of the age of the universe. 6,000 years is not a long time. Your island has been inhabited by people for 13,000 years, this can be demonstrated by archaeological evidence backed up by carbon dating evidence, dendrochronology and genetic markers in the current inhabitants. Your ridiculous chronology leaves no room for ice ages, whose evidence is all around you. The truth of modern scientific geography was brought home to me by travelling on a train south to London. At my end of the journey rivers and streams are all in the bottom of deep and wide valleys which seem ludicrously out of proportion to the water running through them. The train takes me south and I see rivers sitting in small channels and wide flood-plains, a very different pattern. The difference comes from glaciation. My home lies near the Southern edge of the ice sheet and all the valleys nearby once carried huge torrents of melt water which cut massive valleys through the landscape. Fifty miles further South and there was no torrent of flood water and so the landscape looks much softer and rivers don't announce themselves with huge valley sides. My teachers taught me this stuff but it is right there to be seen as clear as day. There is no chance that this could be explained by a global flood. If the whole Earth was flooded every river should sit in a deep and wide valley but clearly those I have seen in Southern and central England don't. 6,000 years doesn't give enough time for ice that thick to form or melt without anybody, including Jews, noticing.

Creation science is as much of a respectable theory as the stork theory of obstetrics.

Flood geology is as scientifically respectable as applied phrenology.

The thoroughly respectable science of dendrochronology has allowed real scientists, not servants of superstition, to trace back accurate and precise histories of tree growth patterns in particular species and areas which go way back beyond the 6,000 year "limit" implied by your book of lies. This is hard evidence which cross references the growth patterns in hundreds of trees living and dead and compares the patterns against each other and against evidence of sedimentation in lakes and cores taken from glaciers which also show annual patterns. All these have been cross referenced against each other and against radiocarbon dating techniques. As time goes on your superstitions will become more and more embarrassing as the weight of conflicting evidence builds up more and more.

Evolution is fact. It is as much open to interpretation and controversy as the theory that the Earth rotates around the Sun. The precise details of exactly how evolution has occurred and is occurring is open to further study and is being studied. Only a religious leader would feel a need to lie to cover up a lack of knowledge. We don't know all the answers but we are willing to ask the questions. In contrast those who place superstition above knowledge will refuse to ask certain questions because the possibility of receiving an answer they can't accept that scares them.

I am not scared of answers and truth but I am not willing to hypnotize myself into belief for the rather obvious reason that I know how suggestible people can be, I will no more ask God into my life than I would play Russian roulette for the same kind of reasons. I know the risks and yes they scare me. The thought of becoming one of the borg is frightening, the thought of doing it willingly is absurd. I will not ask God or Jesus into my life unless I have a good rational reason to believe they exist and I haven't seen any so far. The evidence that I have got is that religious people lie with a breathtaking arrogance pretty much all of the time, and they do so in the name of the truth which I find to be positively obscene and evil. (Evil has meaning as an adjective, but not a noun).

Your church seems to me to be a clear descendent of Martin Luther's church, with a comically literal interpretation of the Bible which leads to a form of idolatry, a worship of the Bible. Also Luther has an obsession with redemption not being available by "works" which is connected with his distaste of the practice of selling indulgences, a practice that was largely abandoned as it made the Church too open to easy ridicule. It seems rather crazy to be still fighting that battle today as if anybody actually gives a shit.

I am still waiting for God's reply to the message I sent him via you. Why haven't you given me his reply? To me the answer to why you don't want to do that is obvious, the prophesy will fail, as prophesies that have to be declared before the events they describe usually do.

To be quite clear about this I do not want to know God myself. I do not want to know God unless he is actually real and powerful. If his existence can be proven to me I will seek him out. If I have to prove he exists by making him real to myself, by lying to myself and forcing myself to believe, I won't do it and I'm not interested. Proof of existence first before "seeking", the other way around is a recipe for self-delusion and I have too much respect for myself to do that. I also have too much respect for God. If he's real I should not need to make an effort to believe, nothing that I know to be true requires a great effort to believe: I examine the evidence and make my judgement without any hint of effort any more than I make an effort to see when my eyes are focused on something. Believing that I love my parents does not take any effort, I just know that however much they may annoy me I love them.

OK if you want me to ask God myself I will. I am asking God, as I type this he can hear me, to [bing bong email received] send me a sign with the name of the next city to be smitten. I just checked that email, it was spam that looks like a link to a porn site but is probably not safe to visit unless I want my computer hijacked. Better luck next time eh? Try sending me a text message, I'm sure an all powerful God like you could get my number and see to it that somebody sends me the message. Just the name of a city or province that will experience an "Act of God" of a sufficient scale to get reported so I hear about it. If God can create the entire universe in six days surely he can manage to send me a clear sign in the forty odd hours before the end of July.

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

30 July 2007 06:17 A catastrophic Flood can account for continental drift, plate tectonics, mountains, and the ice age. The world was drastically changed by the Flood and the climate was no longer what it once was. The ice age would have taken place around 2200 BC and lasted until about 1500 BC. People would have spread abroad as a result of the confusion at the Tower of Babel. Some went on to produce the ancient civilizations we can study today, the others would have migrated, following animals, making tools, adapting to new environments within the first 300 years after the Flood. It is all documented at www.answersingenesis.com. They give scientific explanations from a biblical worldview. After all, you give me evidence base on your secular humanist worldview. Dating methods are fallible. There starting point stems from an assumed condition. Carbon dating has recently dead seals at millions of years old. One part of a mammoth was a few million years older than the rest of it. Dendrochronology does not take into account the effects of climate on ring growth: rings can be added by varying seasonal activity. Ice layers have dated a World War 2 plane at hundreds of thousands of years old. Archaeological evidence proves one thing: there are bones, stone tools, walls, evidence of living, etc. The finds are then interpreted by a worldview. We all have the same facts: we have different ideas about the explanation of those facts. Many catastrophic incidents resulted from Mt. St. Helens in the 1980s. Some trees are being petrified - a process supposed to take millions of years. A small canyon has even formed. If a catastrophe happened in the past and we measure the past based on the assumption that what we measure today was the same as it was then, we will falsely deduce the extent of time necessary for such development to occur. We have no starting measure for the past. We assume everything happened the same. We have no proof it actually did. 6,000 years seems impossible to you because you prefer the interpretation of millions of years. 6,000 years does not cease to be a possibility because you are trained to look at things with gradual age. Truth is an axiom to our human condition. We all believe in some kind of truth. The Bible teaches that God is truth and that truth is the self-expression of God. You and I are having a discussion concerning truth about our opposing worldviews. You look at the world and believe the philosophy of secular humanists. Secular humanists often deny absolute truth by stating their truth of relative thinking. Relative thinking is pointless, contributes nothing, teaches nothing, offers nothing, and is a convenient scapegoat to avoid the disagreement that follows conversations of truth. Relative thinking, (which I am not sure is something you actually agree with), basically says that you and I could be right or wrong or both but we can never really know for sure, maybe. It is an endless philosophical twirl that gives people the convenience of ignorance. God’s power, glory, and righteousness are naturally known to all people through creation and the conscience (Romans 1:19-20; 2:14-16). This truth is so clear that the entire human population is “without excuse” (Romans 1:20). You will be held responsible for rejecting any truth that you can know. There are no arguments against the validity of Scripture that has any merit beyond personal feelings and opinions. Your deductive reasoning on fallible assumptions is how you arrive at your conclusions. At least acknowledge that you assume the Bible was not written through the guidance of the Holy Spirit because you would rather believe in natural theories. Don’t claim to prove the NT as a piece of cultish work because you are indoctrinated through the lies and blind faith of your own worldview. There is not one single piece of evidence that proves macroevolution - zero, zip, nothing. Yet, you claim to follow the beliefs of humanists who like to say evolution is proved. Sure, I can prove anything to: the earth formed as a result of a giant belch from an alien dinner guest. To prove this, I simply need to assume that because the earth is bubble-like, it seems to fit artistic reconstructions of what belches would look like if you could see the full embodiment of vapour that exudes from a burp. Next, because a burp contains cells, which had to come from living matter, there was enough information in the cells of that burp to allow life to form over long periods of death, decay, and adaptation. Assumptions can make anything possible unless we examine the foundations of those assumptions, coupled with the correlation of theories and conclusions drawn from those assumptions to interpret what we see -- the factual evidence -- and make our conclusions. That is how we can arrive at truth and understanding. When it comes to knowing God, I do not need knowledge: I have an experience. The methods of science do not tell us about the Bible. The Bible is the ultimate authority. It is God’s eyewitness account of the beginning, middle, and end of the world. Science allows us to systematically look at evidence in the same way - individual people determine what the evidence means, not science nor those who call themselves scientists. You cannot say true scientists when you reject God - the embodiment of truth. You believe in false doctrines that infiltrate the minds of children and adults claiming macroevolution is a fact when it is nothing more than an interpretation to dissuade your mind from the truth of Creation and conscience. No wonder the Bible teaches that only fools deny God. You have to fight to convince yourself the obvious evidence. Then you cry for signs and wonders when you cannot dissect the proof that surrounds you daily. You have hypnotized yourself into a belief: there is no God, and you are religiously fervent in your obsession with that concept, e.g., your website. You are not asking reasonable questions about truth when dealing with evolution. Before examination, you have excluded through the blindness of your mind embodied in doubt, the possibility of the accuracy of the Bible. Not one atheist has been able to controvert the evidence of Christian apologists with any degree of logical consistency. One of your idols, Richard Dawkins is prime example of concluding there is no god and unable to give any logical reason for the existence of matter. The early Church was the same as it is today. Luther, though not everything he wrote or accomplished is condonable, brought the church back from its corruption in pagan hands over the course of history. If people do not take the Bible literally and call themselves a Christian then have at them. You will find them incapable of defending God’s truth, and you will find them hypocritically trying to believe in an interpretation that says there is no god, while claiming to accept an interpretation that says there is a God. Thomas Huxley even knew they couldn’t have it both ways. You do not have to convince yourself there is a god to seek Him out to reveal Himself to you. He will not reply to your test because He is not answerable to you and will explain to you in your judgment if you fail to repent and put your trust in Jesus the real reason for the motivation of your heart, for denying Him, and for not wanting to know if He is there or not unless He proves Himself to you so you can intellectually acknowledge Him. If you want to know Him, do not test Him with prophecy - those will unfold as you begin to understand His truth; instead, ask Him that if He is real, to get your attention, to let you know if He exists or not. If you do not honestly want to ask Him, then you will never receive an answer because you are not wanting one. You are asking with disbelief. You have already concluded before you ask that God does not exist so that whatever you think is revealed to you must have some rational explanation. Be humble and seek, not to convince yourself, but to say if God exists, let Him show Himself to you and leave it up to Him to do so. He will not answer a proud, arrogant, fool who is bent on denying Him. Be honest for your sake. I do not know what God will do to get your attention, so I will leave that up to you. Again, do not challenge Him. Ask Him to do what He thinks He should do to get you to know He exists. If you find out He exists, then you can begin to figure out how to repent and trust Him. I will not be able to respond until Thursday or so. Thanks for the time. Mike

30 July 2007 20:51

You will believe what you want to believe. I will not bother to refute the transparently silly and desperate nonsense that you pass off as science, it is simply a waste of my time. You would not be convinced by any evidence that your Bible was wrong, as is clearly demonstrated by the ridiculous lengths people go to in coming up with these fairy tales. When you can simply say "things were different back then" you can get out of almost any fix. Playing those games is as futile as playing Superman with a kid who will wriggle and whine to ensure he always wins.

There quite simply isn't anything like enough time available in 6,000 years to explain even a tiny fraction of the natural world we see around us with anything approaching credible science. The world is covered with volcanoes which are clearly built upon marine sediments which show many hundreds of eruptions. If Mount Etna was to have been built since the flood (on those "flood-derived" rocks) it would have had to have been in constant eruption which would have put so much smoke and ash into the atmosphere that we wouldn't have had any growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere for the last four thousand years.

It is not just one or two bits of evidence which disproves your lunatic literalist fairy tale it is virtually all of modern science and ancient history too. Imposing your lie upon science will cripple almost every human endeavour.

Creationism only allows people to pick holes in conventional science, it cannot come up with testable hypotheses itself which explain anything as well as conventional science and nothing is explained better. Christian Bullshit cannot explain why oceanic islands have the small number of peculiar species that are found there and there is no explanation for why different islands were populated at different times. Conventional science can explain why the islands were formed and when and how they came to be populated with unique species of animals and why they were inhabited by people with the language, crops, animals and culture that they have. Creationists couldn't hope to explain why Hawaii has no native goats, horses or unicorns: when you depend upon magic to explain things you cannot really explain anything. If God had wanted there to be unicorns on Hawaii there would be unicorns on Hawaii and you are not allowed to ask why he might want or not want them to be there.

I prefer the timescale of a universe 13.8 billion years old for the simple reason that it appears to be true. Truth is preferable to superstitious bullshit every time. So much is possible if you free yourself from your ludicrous beliefs and allow people to draw conclusions from the evidence they find regardless of whether it is consistent with what the Bible says. I keep telling you that there is NOBODY out there who believes your Young Earth and flood nonsense who came to those beliefs by studying the real world, only from studying fanciful interpretations of the Bible.

How can ice layers date an aircraft? Don't be absurd. You can use ice layers to see how long a piece of ice has been there but there is no way tens of thousands of layers of ice will build up on a crashed plane. I suppose a plane could crash through ice and the momentum carry pieces of it beneath a sheet that has not been disturbed for thousands of years but just use your common sense for one moment and ask who in their right mind would expect an ice sample to be a good way of dating a plane crash compared to say reading the flight plan or the date stamps on the plane's engines. Ask yourself who would gain from telling such a tale and why they might invent it and pass it on: QED. No archaeologist would ever think about dating a plane from an ice sample in the first place and if they did do it common sense tells you that it is an anomalous finding and should not be relied upon too heavily. It is not unusual for anomalous results to occur in science, one anomalous result does not discredit an entire experimental method, it should be a call to recheck the data, repeat the experiment and if the anomaly recurs you need to develop a better theory or a tighter experimental methodology.

If you allow yourself to believe the truth which is rather than The Truth Which Must Be you can converse with people about linguistics, archaeology, climate change, comparative religion, nuclear physics, astronomy, geology, geography, genetics, ancient history and biology. If you insist upon your Young Earth model you have nothing to contribute to those debates at all except a branch off down a dead end. Creationism is the complete negation of science.

Can you please explain what would count as evidence for macroevolution, I would love to know. Evolution is a fact. The fossil record clearly demonstrates that over time animals and plants have come into existence which were not found in any earlier sediments. Lines of descent are clearly demonstrated. Matching the fossil evidence up with plate tectonics allows people to see lines of descent across time with patterns of distribution which make sense (that is not to say there are no anomalies or reasons for further study). Looking at variations in the the DNA and proteins of animals and plants shows descent patterns which match the theories even better than the fossil record shows. Not only are we similar in body shape and habits to chimpanzees our DNA is very similar as are our proteins. No matter what evidence you look at: bones, teeth, DNA, proteins or behaviour man is clearly closely related to chimpanzees and slightly less closely related to gorillas and orang-utans. These similarities do not make sense in a biology in which every species was specially created 6,000 years ago unless the universe was made by such a devious sadistic bastard of a god that he had taken special care to ensure that evolution appeared to be a plausible explanation. If that is the way he wants to play it you can have no confidence that he isn't playing an even bigger cosmic joke on you than on me just because he can and let's face if there ever was a group of people more deserving of such a pisstake I don't know who they would be.

Have you ever tried imagining that you are wrong? If there isn't any kind of a supernatural dimension to reality what would the universe look like? Isn't it blindingly obvious that it would have to look very like it does look? There is no way to get complication out of simplicity except via evolution and there is no way the evidence for it could evaporate and not be visible to be discovered when our culture became smart enough to understand it. If on the other hand I was to imagine a universe created by a supernatural all-powerful deity who had the power to set the laws of physics and to change them on the fly the possibilities for how the world around me looked would be much wider. I would have no reason to think there need be fossil dinosaurs, trilobites, huge dead volcanoes, animals with similar bone and protein structures to people, false prophets, false gods, atheists, cripples, a planet that kills people, a deity who ambushes you when you die and punishes you for not believing in his lack of evidence and most of all I would not have expected there be so bloody much apparently empty and "useless" universe out there. The universe I live in makes your Hebrew tribal walk-in-the-garden god look ridiculously small, unimaginative and frankly silly for all the big words you use about him. Rome, Egypt and Arabia might have seemed a long way off to an ancient Hebrew but that entire biblical universe (firmament, waters and all) created by the "mighty" Alpha and Omega is a mythical hemisphere less than half a light-second wide. The thorough mediocrity and small-mindedness of that conception of reality cannot stack up against the reality we now appreciate and those small-minded primitive little men could not begin to grasp.

Just to take that God of Moses the eight light minutes from Earth (all of it, not just the tenth or so of it that those Bronze Age farmers knew about) to the Sun in the first spiral of the total perspective vortex would blow his feeble mind.

There is no way that a species like ours would not invent gods and once somebody is imaginative enough to invent one or more gods they will evolve to become slippery buggers who live in the gaps where you can never shine the light of proof protected by calls to faith and wrapped up in the claim to have invented marriage, morality, happiness and everything. It could never be any other way, that is not because of the way our brains work but because of the way ideas work. Immortal bullshit religions are inevitable, believing them isn't.

Your alien burp hypothesis is about as plausible as the Yahweh 6 day 6,000 year hypothesis and if you used the methods of creation scientists no doubt you could defend it against all contradictory evidence in a similar way, which will persuade only those who were persuaded before you started. Show me one intelligent person brought to belief in God by studying geology. Just one.

Only by abandoning the scientific method and adopting the methods of propaganda has creationism managed to survive at all. It is thoroughly discredited among all real scientists.

Experience of God is not scientifically validatable, it is subjective and unquantifiable. Even if the experience could be proved to be genuine it could not be proven to be what you claim it is. If we put you in a scanner and measured your brain activity and asked you to imagine Homer Simpson speaking to you and then asked you to pray and "hear the voice of God" I would expect to see very similar brain patterns as you would be imagining both voices. The most impressive results would show less activity in your brain for God's voice, and centred just in your auditory centres, just the same as if you were listening to an external voice. But even if such evidence were found it would not prove that the voice was external or from God. The only way it could be proven to come from God would be if it gave information which God alone would know. Of course such clinching evidence is never encountered in the real world.

You could prove the existence of God in thousands of different ways. A really simple way to do it would be to predict the result of a major lottery between the close of ticket sales and the time of the draw. Prophesy never seems to work like that though, does it? People make prophesies and those that look like they have come to pass get added to the Scriptures afterwards. Prophesies are worded in such a way as to make them impossible to disprove because nobody knows what they are really referring to and they don't seem to work on the same level as a narrative of events that have already happened. The art of prophesy is to say things which sound prophetic without actually tipping anybody off about what the future actually holds.

The Bible is not the ultimate authority on anything.

Why are you debating with me when your beef is really with that great mass of Christians who want to have it both ways? Your stance is to a large extent internally consistent but barking mad and without any credible evidence. Their stance is sane but inconsistent. You have no common ground with me at all and no basis for debate. I don't believe:

1] That there is such a thing as the supernatural

2] That any gods exist

3] That the Bible is a trustworthy authority

4] That the authors of the Bible were telling the truth

5] That the authors of the Bible were the people you think they were

6] That evolution is in any sense scientifically controversial

7] That Biblical times were different

8] That people were different in Biblical times

9] That the past had different laws of physics

10] That Jews are special people

11] That Jewish mythology is any different to any other flavour

12] That believing in something can be a good thing in and of itself

13] That the universe was created

14] That life was designed

15] That people have souls

16] That a soul or anything meaningfully "us" can survive death

17] That there is any form of life after death

18] That life after death makes any sense

19] That a hypothetical creator of the universe would have anything similar to a human character

20] That Jesus Christ was the son of a god

21] That Jesus Christ was God

22] That Jesus Christ was an influential moral teacher

23] That Jesus Christ's historical existence can be assumed

24] That things need a reason to exist

25] That but why is always a sensible question

26] That the human body is capable of feeling truth

27] That feelings are always more reliable than logical thinking

28] That life has a meaning

29] That life is meant to make sense

30] That being right feels better inside than just feeling right does

31] That faith is a virtue

32] That religious views should always be respected

33] That being a Christian is something to be proud of

34] That civilization has anything to do with which gods you don't believe in

35] That Christians are admirable

36] That looking happy is a proof that you believe in the truth

37] That infinite punishment for a lack of credulousness is divine justice

38] That Christianity is any more likely to be true than any other god-myth

39] That a life without religion is meaningless

40] That the end of the world would be a Good Thing

41] That there is any good reason for the ultimate truth in the universe to feel significant

42] That there is any reason to assume we will or won't be able to understand everything given time

43] That death makes life futile

44] That human life is sacred

45] That evil has any meaning as a noun

46] That sane people hear real external voices in their heads

47] That religion has anything to do with morality

48] That if it's true for you it's true

49] That adults need to believe in fairy tales to behave well

50] That teaching religion to a child is doing them a favour

51] That a mortal life needs a reason but an eternal one doesn't

52] That creationism is a scientific explanation

53] That Noah's Flood should be credible to any sensible person old enough to grow pubic hair

54] That lying to people is moral behaviour

55] That Adam and Eve are more real than the Tooth Fairy

56] That the Hebrews were ever enslaved as a nation in Egypt

57] That there are admirable characters in the Bible

58] That Zionism is morally defensible

59] That Israel is anybody's ally

60] That religion can lead to peace

61] That religion makes the world better

62] That the optimum number of religions in the world is a positive integer

63] That voices in your head come from outside

64] That wishful thinking is part of the scientific method

65] That the Bible was ever intended to be a science textbook

Because of all those assumptions we just don't share there is very little chance we will ever be able to debate to a conclusion.

I will give your god one last chance to show me where he will smite. It seems you won't cooperate, he doesn't seem to have the hang of email or phones and I am not inviting my subconscious to conjure him up directly so I will give him the random option. I will spin the world on Google Earth and note down three random locations with my eyes shut.

First shot: Atlantic Ocean near the islet of Abrolhos Farol, North East of Rio de Janeiro, Argentina.

Second shot: Just West of The Maldives, Indian Ocean.

Third shot: Southern Ocean near the Southern Coast of Western Australia, near Albany, South of Perth.

Three chances, three good shots considering they are all open sea but near populated coasts. OK God, do your stuff, put one or all of those places on the world's TV screens, you can even make it a nice story if you want but it has to happen between now and Friday. [3rd August 2007]

--

Martin Willett

http://mwillett.org/

Update: No Acts of God observed at any of the three locations, even after an extra week.

Chapter 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited