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The Logic of Christians
Why I am an Atheist
Why We are Atheists
Do You Want to Buy My Soul?
The Power of Faith
Faith, Hope and Belief
The Leap of Faith
What the Bible Says About Abortion
Aborting Babies
Animal Rights
Women and Islam
Evils of Music
Kill the Puppy Dogs
Masturbation
Does God Bless America?
Teenage Sex
The Clitoris
First we have to look at what sacrifice is and why a god might want a sacrifice and why a man might offer one. The answer here is that it is a bit of primitive magic. It is a bribe. A man sacrifices, that is gives up something valuable and does without it and slays an animal, the earliest forms of sacrifice were literally giving up a valuable animal in the hope of gaining favour with an unseen power. Men were used to the idea of tribute, the protection money charged by the local warlord often in the form of food to feed the thug who extorted it in the first place so the idea of the priest eating the sacrificed animal would not seem unusual. It is easy to imagine this concept getting mixed up with beliefs in supernatural forces. Giving the king's men a sack of grain kept them from burning your whole barn down, killing one calf was a similar bribe to the big bad warlord in the sky to make him happy with you so he wouldn't kill too many of your children and cattle.
It makes sense on the simplest gut level but of course as soon as you investigate the idea any further it falls apart. Why does a god who can make the whole universe need to inhale the smell of burnt goat? What's in it for him? Is there a critical shortage of burning goat aroma in heaven? It doesn't even remotely begin to make any sense, God made all the goats and bulls and first born sons, why would he need any killed? The idea is nonsensical. Therefore it is vitally important to ensure that people don't ask such simple questions. This is where mystery comes in.
Hocus Pocus. Misdirection. Don't look at that man behind the curtain! Listen to the voice of The Mighty Oz! Look at his robes! Behold his silly hat, his stick and his magic tome, isn't that every inch the picture of a mighty wizard or a priest of virtually every god you have ever heard of? He has the secret power - he can read the magic spells in the magic book. If you do look behind the curtain you are faced with the biggest mystery of them all: how did people remain bamboozled with this bullshit for so long? |
A great god in the sky who could be placated by sacrifice makes a certain sense if you don't think about it very hard, but once you do think about it the sense evaporates. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people. The people who make the most sacrifices are no more lucky in love or battle than anybody else. People who try to demonstrate otherwise tie themselves in knots. Just look at the history of the Jews, apparently God's chosen people whose fortunes have risen and fallen through the ages, with every up being attributed to the mercy of God and every down to the fallibility of man, never the other way around. Can you spot any great changes in the worthiness of the Jewish people between, say, 1919, 1944, 1948 and 1967? I can't, and I have little doubt that there was no corresponding increase and decrease in piety or sacrifices that explain the history of the Hebrews. If you want to understand Hebrew history you will learn infinity more by studying the relative power of neighbouring tribes and empires than you learn by investigating how many goat a particular high priest slaughtered or whether he coveted his neighbour's ass.
Apparently the Jews did have a great King or two at some time in history, although if you read anything other than the Bible you would be forgiven for not noticing. Nothing the Hebrew people ever built made it onto the list of the Seven Wonders of the World. Compared to Egypt, Greece and Iraq Israel's history and archaeology is distinctly third rate. While the Egyptians, Babylonians, Greeks and Persians made great contributions to civilization the Hebrews seem to have contributed hardly anything. They picked up the concept of alphabetical writing and then wasted it by using it for holy books to such an extent that people saw language as too sacred to be used for anything as sordid as commerce or culture. The Bible isn't just a book, it is to all intents and purposes the only thing the Jewish people did between the Bronze Age and the Enlightenment. Jewish inventors, poets, playwrights, architects, scientists and so on are now quite common, but where were they for the best part of the last four thousand years? The Jews were at the crossroads of civilizations, possessed of a written alphabetic language and a culture with very high literacy rates but just like modern Muslims they did very little with those advantages. They wasted millions of lives praying when they could have been making the world a better place.
Why would the creator of the universe have a pet tribe? Yes, I have made that question particularly pointed, I do want to point out the utter absurdity of the idea and yes I want to do that because I want to damage Christianity. OK, confession over, can we have an answer? A coherent one? Why would the creator of the entire universe have one special tribe he appeared to and championed? It doesn't make any sense unless you believe in a racist Jewish god. Why would anybody other than a Jew believe the universe was created for Jews by a racist god? It is a tribal creation myth that is fundamentally racist and xenophobic like so many other tribal myths. Why does the modern world respect such a belief? There is only one god and he made the universe and he made it for us because we are special.
Of course the message has been softened and reinterpreted by Jews anxious to address this issue that makes Jews the world's favourite fist-magnet. They try to make out being God's chosen people is more of a burden than a privilege. It's a tough job but somebody's got to do it. Bullshit.
If you believe as an article of faith that your people are superior and chosen by the only god there is a reasobale chance that you are going to live to regret it someday. It is absurd to imagine that the rest of humanity will always meekly agree with you that you are special, they are not, and you're right to say it and there's no hard feelings.
If there is a creator god there is no good reason to expect him to adopt one tribe for a couple of thousand years and forsake the others. It makes no sense. The only way that sense can be made of the relationship between the one true god and a particular tribe is that is exactly what you would expect a tribal myth to be. No tribe is going to postulate a god that adopts another tribe as its favourite. Except Christians and Mormons. Pathetic, isn't it? How can you respect any religion that denigrates your ancestors as being second rate?
There is another way to square the circle, the ultimate get out of jail free card: God moves in mysterious ways, or another way of expressing that is if it doesn't make sense to us we should just accept on faith that it makes sense to God. If God thought we were bright enough to understand it he would have explained to some old dead Jew long ago and therefore the fact that he didn't shows he was right to judge us too stupid to understand. Refer to rule one (God is smarter than you are, if you don't understand something then that's your problem, God doesn't have problems). Only the violin comes anywhere near theology as a waster of human intellect.
The Mystery of the Trinity.
The trinity is a concept that does not appear in the Bible. It is an invention of the church. Just in passing it might be a good idea to list a few things which don't appear in the Bible:
The Trinity
Celibate priests wearing dresses
Hymns
Organ music
Veneration of Mary
The possibility of life beyond the first century
The infallibility of the Pope
The Pope
The divine right of kings
The superiority of America
The existence of America
Acceptance of capitalist mechanisms such as interest, corporations, the transferability of debts and intellectual property rights
The superiority of democracy and capitalism
The possibility of church schism
Remedies for church schism
The idea that souls leave the body the moment the heart stops beating and start their journey to heaven or hell. Remember the Last Trump? Christians surely wait for full bodily resurrection until doomsday. NDEs either disprove Christianity as much as atheism or they are irrelevant 'experiences' generated inside the brain by the brain and are nothing to do with any 'soul'.
The sanctity of life of the unborn.
The restriction of sympathy to a single nation (unless it is the Jews). Can you really see the author of the Sermon on the Mount and the scourge of the Pharisees approving of armed border guards arresting poor Mexicans for the "crime" of wanting to live in the USA?
The requirement to wear crucifixes, crosses, fishes on cars and other forms of tasteless Christian bling.
The possibility of divorce and remarriage.
The trinity is an invention of theologians, people who bullshit for a living. How can there be only one god and Jesus be divine and the son of God? For most religions this isn't an issue, there is no requirement for monotheism. Of course the ancient Hebrews were not monotheists. They believed there were lots of gods, but they chose only to worship the one. Yahweh was a jealous god. Why would the only god be jealous unless there was something to be jealous of? If you were the only god and your people worshiped “another god” you would not be jealous as much as frustrated with their idiocy. I'll leave the question as to what the only god needs worshipping for to one side. I can't address every absurdity at once. If the people are worshipping a god who isn't real what can an all powerful god who communicates with people in dreams, on mountaintops, from burning bushes, pillars of smoke and fire and with images in tortilla chips and damp patches on walls and in words carved on tablets of stone and who apparently personally speaks to priests and nuns and lay preachers and ordinary people all over the world possibly do about it? I mean other than blame people for the problem.
The trinity allows Jesus to be a god and have the only god as his father and the Holy Spirit gets to be a motherfucker.
Unusual relationships are hardly new for gods. Lots of gods marry their sisters or become their own fathers. Since the time of Alexander five centuries before the gods of the Eastern Mediterranean were heavily into having sons, often born of human virgins visited by the father god with the subsequent offspring being born in a cave or stable on either 25th December or 6th of January. A date of no scriptural or indeed biblical significance whatsoever. It was just a handy date since it fell during the holidays.
The Blood Price
Back in the days of The Old Testament Yahweh was apparently demanding lots of blood sacrifices and burnt offerings (holocaust: A sacrificial offering that is consumed entirely by flames), that was what The Temple was: a great big barbecue set for Yahweh. And like any proper barbecue this was a male-only domain. But fashions change, temples get destroyed and chosen people get dumped on by great empires. These days blood and smoke don't feature much in worship, at least not real blood. Besides, the priests think 10% off the top of your income is a much better deal than a few well-done goats and tips received for the odd circumcision. |
A great big barbecue set for Yahweh |
Christians explain the lack of sacrifices by saying we don't need to do it any more because of Jesus. God, who abhors human sacrifices and isn't serious when he demands them, doesn't need them any more because he had a son who was himself and the son was sacrificed to himself to placate his wrath. Can you remember Jesus calling out to himself on the cross after he abandoned himself to die to placate his wrath against mankind? So that's that then, isn't it? It all makes perfect sense as long as you simply accept that it must do because all those clever people make out that they believe it. I mean, what would the Emperor be doing walking the streets in the nude? The very idea is quite absurd, isn't it? People have believed this stuff for nearly two thousand years, admittedly the first dozen or so actually had to see it for themselves before they believed it but you don't have that problem, you can take it it all on faith, just like they didn't.
Jesus has been killed to kill death just like Osiris and Bacchus and Dionysus (is that the same dude? You see one god triumph over death and you've seen them all) and Mithra and Attis did before him, which is of course a Satanic lie. And any resemblance between Satan and Pan or Hell and Hades is purely coincidental. So now Jesus is alive and real and death is an illusion. That much is quite obvious, isn't it? Nobody has died in the last two thousand years because Jesus is alive. Praise the Lord!