Thu 31 December 2009 4:00 AM
Babble
Well, my little brothers, I've let you down. No rants this holiday season about Chistian's forcing the public to pay for their nonsense with public nativity displays, or about how Jesus has very little to do with the season or about the non-existent war on XMas or about how I hate you all and pray nightly for nuclear holocaust. I managed to blissfully skate through most of the holiday season in a work-induced coma. I shall presently make up for my shortcomings with a rant of Biblical proportions. Indeed, I am a raving, rabid, atheistic, pinko son of a whore, but my rants, they are the PCP-laced joint of truth, so inhale deep.
--
Against by better judgement, I have recently been conversating with a fundamentalist Christbot, a name of Judd Nelson. Judd's position is that he has arbitrarily chosen to believe whatever the Bible says and the reason he and I are unable to find any common ground on which we can have a meaningful debate is not because of the sheer stupidity of his decision about the Bible but some presuppositional nonsense about my metaphysics clogging up his ontology. Whatever the fuck, I say.
My position is that if Judd's god exists and it made this shit trap of a universe then god graciously handed us our common ground: reality. And any "special revelation" (i.e., retarded mystical god shit) that comes from this creator god cannot possibly contradict "natural revelation" (i.e., reality). So, I throw it back into his god-fucking face. If the Bible is god's word, how is it that it gets soooo many plain facts about the universe so horribly wrong? Not to be half-assed about my atheistry I decided to enumerate some of the plain facts the Bible actually does get wrong. This is off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more thorough details the Bible manages to fuck up, as well.
1. There is no evidence that the earth originally formed "covered in water". In fact, quite the opposite. During the Hadean period the surface of the earth was probably continuously in a semi-molten state.
2. There is no evidence that species are separate categories or that they are immutable. What the evidence provides us is a twin nested hierarchy - both morphological and genetic data show that all life is related and groups into a nested hierarchy with more similar species being more closely related, i.e., evolution.
3. Flood - no evidence of a global flood. By the way, we do know what it would look like if there were one because the Scablands in the Pacific Northwest are now accepted as being the result of a local flood of (almost) Biblical proportions which occurred about 15,000 years ago when the ice dam forming Lake Missoula burst (perhaps several times over a couple thousand years). Mean old levee.
4. Post-diluvial family - There's no evidence that all post-diluvial humans descend from Noah's three Semitic sons who lived in Turkey (Mt Ararat) about 6000 years ago. The evidence shows that all extant human beings have descended from an initial population of about 1000 people who lived in Africa 150-200,000 years ago.
5. Exodus - no evidence that 2 million people sat around in the desert for 40 years. It is absurd to postulate that archaeologists would be unable to find evidence for that.
6. Conquest of Judea and the united kingdom- there's no evidence for the conquest of Jericho or other towns recorded in Joshua and Judges. Some of the towns listed didn't even exist when the Bible says the conquest was going on. There's no evidence that the borders of Solomon's kingdom extended as far and as wide as recorded in the books of Kings and Chronicles. King David was a slightly noted local monarch and his son was not much better known.
7. Pi - it's not 3 (I Kings 7:23-26)
8. The doctrines of predestination and omniscience are incompatible with quantum indeterminacy.
--
Against by better judgement, I have recently been conversating with a fundamentalist Christbot, a name of Judd Nelson. Judd's position is that he has arbitrarily chosen to believe whatever the Bible says and the reason he and I are unable to find any common ground on which we can have a meaningful debate is not because of the sheer stupidity of his decision about the Bible but some presuppositional nonsense about my metaphysics clogging up his ontology. Whatever the fuck, I say.
My position is that if Judd's god exists and it made this shit trap of a universe then god graciously handed us our common ground: reality. And any "special revelation" (i.e., retarded mystical god shit) that comes from this creator god cannot possibly contradict "natural revelation" (i.e., reality). So, I throw it back into his god-fucking face. If the Bible is god's word, how is it that it gets soooo many plain facts about the universe so horribly wrong? Not to be half-assed about my atheistry I decided to enumerate some of the plain facts the Bible actually does get wrong. This is off the top of my head, I'm sure there are more thorough details the Bible manages to fuck up, as well.
1. There is no evidence that the earth originally formed "covered in water". In fact, quite the opposite. During the Hadean period the surface of the earth was probably continuously in a semi-molten state.
2. There is no evidence that species are separate categories or that they are immutable. What the evidence provides us is a twin nested hierarchy - both morphological and genetic data show that all life is related and groups into a nested hierarchy with more similar species being more closely related, i.e., evolution.
3. Flood - no evidence of a global flood. By the way, we do know what it would look like if there were one because the Scablands in the Pacific Northwest are now accepted as being the result of a local flood of (almost) Biblical proportions which occurred about 15,000 years ago when the ice dam forming Lake Missoula burst (perhaps several times over a couple thousand years). Mean old levee.
4. Post-diluvial family - There's no evidence that all post-diluvial humans descend from Noah's three Semitic sons who lived in Turkey (Mt Ararat) about 6000 years ago. The evidence shows that all extant human beings have descended from an initial population of about 1000 people who lived in Africa 150-200,000 years ago.
5. Exodus - no evidence that 2 million people sat around in the desert for 40 years. It is absurd to postulate that archaeologists would be unable to find evidence for that.
6. Conquest of Judea and the united kingdom- there's no evidence for the conquest of Jericho or other towns recorded in Joshua and Judges. Some of the towns listed didn't even exist when the Bible says the conquest was going on. There's no evidence that the borders of Solomon's kingdom extended as far and as wide as recorded in the books of Kings and Chronicles. King David was a slightly noted local monarch and his son was not much better known.
7. Pi - it's not 3 (I Kings 7:23-26)
8. The doctrines of predestination and omniscience are incompatible with quantum indeterminacy.
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