Once there was a rich man and a poor man. The poor man had nothing but one lamb, but he loved it much more than the rich man loved any of the many sheep he had. When a traveler came and stayed with the rich man, the rich man needed a sheep to make a meal for the traveler. But instead of using one of his own sheep, the rich man stole the poor man’s lamb. King David said the rich man should be killed, and be forced to give the poor man four new lambs.
Continue reading The Parable of the Rich ThiefIs it valid for Jesus to testify about himself?
No.
Jesus says that if he testifies about himself, his testimony is not true. And that if he glorifies himself, his glory means nothing. His enemies agree: If he appears as his own witness, his testimony is not valid.
(Jesus tries to get around this by claiming that his father is also testifying about him. He thinks this satisfies the requirement of two witnesses. But even if it was valid to merely testify that someone is testifying about you, rather than having that person actually appear and testify, that still wouldn’t work. Because Jesus insists that he and his father are one. So either Jesus is a liar, or there’s still only one witness. And we’ve already established that his testimony is not valid, so even if there was another witness, that still wouldn’t be enough.)
Yes.
Continue reading Is it valid for Jesus to testify about himself?The Bible’s questions, answered—part 10: Answers to questions from Solomon
The Bible contains a lot of questions, and it doesn’t always provide satisfactory answers. So I’ve been answering some of the Bible’s questions myself. This time, I’m looking at questions from Solomon. And from whoever else might have written or contributed to the books generally attributed to Solomon.
Some wise person asks: Who has woe? Who has sorrow? Who has strife? Who has complaints? Who has needless bruises? Who has bloodshot eyes? Answer: Most people have at least some of those things, don’t they?
Solomon repeatedly asks: What do people gain from all their labors at which they toil under the sun? Answer: Money and stuff.
Solomon hears a man ask: For whom am I toiling? Answer: For the mutual benefit of you and your employer.
He hears the man ask: And why am I depriving myself of enjoyment? Answer: Because you have to spend some time working to fulfill your needs. Otherwise, you’ll be even more thoroughly deprived of enjoyment.
Solomon asks: What benefit are goods to consumers, except to feast their eyes on them? Answer: Some of them keep you alive, some make your life easier, some are enjoyable (visually or otherwise), etc.
He asks: Do not all go to the same place? Answer: No, some people stay in other places all their lives. And they’re not all disposed of in the same place after death, either.
Solomon imagines someone asking: Why were the old days better than these? Answer: Possible reasons the past might seem better than the present (whether it really was or not) include:
- You weren’t old then.
- You weren’t burdened with so many responsibilities when you were a kid.
- Happy memories are more memorable in the long term.
- Technology makes it easier to find out about the bad things that are happening that you were less aware of in the past.
- The news tends to focus more on bad news, because good news is often relatively boring.
- Only the best artistic works from the past are preserved and remembered, while the majority are forgotten because they weren’t worth preserving.
- You don’t know enough about history to realize how bad things were.
- You’re hearing about the past from people who didn’t realize how bad things were in other places.
A lot of things are actually better than they were in the past, mainly thanks to technology. There are also a lot of things that probably really were better in the past, which you may not be aware of for some of the same reasons you may not be aware of the parts that were worse. But in any case, these trends are not universal and linear and unchanging. There are things that used to be worse, but also used to be better before that, or vice versa.
When Solomon knocks on her bedroom door, his lover asks: I have taken off my robe—must I put it on again? Answer: I don’t think that will be necessary.
Solomon asks their friends: Why would you gaze on the Shulammite? Answer: Because she’s beautiful?
And the friends ask: Who is this coming up from the wilderness leaning on her beloved? Answer: The Shulammite, I presume.
Questions about morality
Solomon asks: Should your wells, cisterns, or springs overflow in the streets, your streams of water in the public squares? Solomon’s answer: No, that would be wrong; you have to keep what you have to yourself. Let them be yours alone, never to be shared with strangers. Real answer: If you have plenty, then yes, of course there’s nothing wrong with sharing what you have; generosity is good.
He asks: Why be intoxicated with another man’s wife? Why embrace the bosom of a wayward woman? Answer: Maybe her bosom is nicer than my wife’s… Anyway, being in love with a deer doesn’t sound like a great option either.
And he asks: Who can say, “I have kept my heart pure; I am clean and without sin”? Answer: Noah, Job, Abraham, John the Baptist’s parents, a blind man and his parents, Paul…
Some wise person asks: Doesn’t God know it when you make excuses? Answer: I wouldn’t count on it. There are quite a few passages in the Bible that indicate that God has a pretty hazy idea of what’s going on in the world. Including having limited awareness of whether people are doing something wrong.
The wise ask: Won’t God repay everyone according to what they have done? Answer: I wouldn’t count on that either, because there are also lots of passages in the Bible that indicate that God doesn’t care about ensuring justice, even when he is aware of what people are doing.
Somebody (Lemuel, maybe?) asks: Who can find a wife of noble character? Answer: John the Baptist’s father did, and a blind man’s father did. In fact, if Solomon is to be believed, all wives are good. (And he had plenty of experience with wives. The Bible disagrees with him, though, and says Solomon’s wives in particular were not good.)
Solomon asks: What does pleasure accomplish? Answer: Well, it can motivate people to do what they need to do. But it’s really more of an end, not a means. Or you could say it’s a bonus that you get when you accomplish other things.
He asks: When you make a vow to God and then try to get out of it by saying your vow was a mistake, why should God be angry at what you say and destroy the work of your hands? Answer: Because you made a false vow.
Solomon asks: What do the poor gain by knowing how to conduct themselves before others? Implied answer: Nothing, so they might as well not know how to conduct themselves. Real answer: They probably do benefit in some way, but that doesn’t really matter. The purpose of knowing how to conduct yourself before others is mainly about benefiting those other people, not about gaining anything for yourself. But the concept of non-selfish motivations is something that everyone in the Bible seems to struggle to grasp, for some reason.
Then he asks: Who knows what is good for a person in life, during the few and meaningless days they pass through like a shadow? Answer: Not you, apparently. I don’t see what the big mystery is…
And he asks: Since a king’s word is supreme, who can say to him, “What are you doing?” Answer: Plenty of prophets did that in the Bible.
Continue reading The Bible’s questions, answered—part 10: Answers to questions from SolomonDid Jesus do any violence?
Christians consider Isaiah 53 to be a prophecy about Jesus. It says he was assigned a grave with the wicked, even though he had done no violence.
But the gospels indicate that Jesus had done some violence by the time he died. Like chasing people out of the temple with a whip. In fact, violence was his purpose in coming to earth. He came to bring fire and a sword, not to bring peace.
Continue reading Did Jesus do any violence?The Parable of the Trees
One day, some trees went to find a king to rule over them. They asked an olive tree to be their king, but the olive tree was too busy making olive oil for gods and humans to enjoy. So then they asked a fig tree to be their king, but the fig tree was too busy making delicious figs. Next, they asked a grape vine to be their king, but the vine was too busy making wine for gods and humans to enjoy.
Continue reading The Parable of the TreesShould people blaspheme God?
No.
God commanded his people through Moses not to blaspheme him. He said blasphemers must be cut off from Israel.
When one half-Israelite man blasphemed God’s name, the others weren’t sure what God wanted them to do. So God clarified that anyone who blasphemed his name was to be stoned to death. Even if they were foreigners. So they did.
When Eli’s sons blasphemed God, God rejected them and put a curse on their family forever, with no hope of atonement. Even though God had promised that they would be his priests forever.
The king of Assyria and his commander blasphemed God, so God got the king’s sons to kill him with swords. And when the king of Tyre called himself a god, God said he would send the king’s ruthless enemies to prove his mortality to him.
God had an angel kill Herod Agrippa just because other people called him a god. God didn’t even give him a chance to say what he thought about it.
According to Mark, Jesus said blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is the only sin that God never forgives.
Maybe?
According to Matthew and Luke, though, Jesus also said that “every kind of sin and slander can be forgiven“. And that “anyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven“. So if you sin by slandering the Holy Spirit, God might forgive you. And if you sin by slandering Jesus, God will definitely forgive you.
Yes.
Continue reading Should people blaspheme God?Things atheists get wrong
I used to think atheists were smart. Then I visited an atheist social media community.
People were posting all kinds of unbelieverably stupid things in there, like “Why should I have to disprove the existence of your God when you haven’t proven it in the first place?” Do these people really think that the only time something can be proven false is if it has already been proven true? Or do they not know what the word “disprove” means? Or are they just not putting any thought into what they’re saying?
Anyway, here are some things I wish my fellow atheists would stop getting wrong.
Taking the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s name in vain
I kinda hate it when people miss the point of a clever idea or joke, but start repeating it all the time anyway, until other people start getting tired of it, and they’re not even using it in the way that originally made it actually clever or funny.
The Flying Spaghetti Monster was a clever idea when someone demanded that Pastafarianism be given equal time in schools, in order to make a point about creationism being taught in schools. It’s not so clever when you’re just using it as an example of something that would be absurd to believe in, or when you’re just using it as a silly name for God, or when you’re just pretending to be religious for no reason.
“The Israelites made up the story of Lot and his daughters to make their enemies look bad.”
I doubt it. The Bible does claim that the Moabites and Ammonites had an incestuous origin, but it also says the Israelites themselves had incestuous origins. Abraham’s wife was his sister, to name just one example of incest in the history of Israel according to the Bible. Were they trying to make themselves look bad too?
“The Bible has two contradictory versions of the loaves and fishes miracle story.”
The Bible is full of contradictions, but this is not one of them. The two loaves and fishes stories are meant to be about two different events. You can tell because after both of those events happen (in the same gospel), Jesus mentions both of them having happened.
“The Bible is an arbitrary collection of books that were chosen by a vote at the Council of Nicea.“
So says The Da Vinci Code, but that story isn’t known for its historical accuracy. Learn about the real origins of the Bible. The Bible did come to be for a lot of ridiculous bad reasons as a result of mistaken beliefs, obviously flawed methods, and arbitrary decisions, but none of that involved a meeting that decided on the canon all at once.
“The Bible we have now is a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., so we don’t really know what the original said.”
It’s true that we don’t really know exactly what the original scriptures said, because the earliest manuscripts we have are not the earliest versions that ever existed. And it’s true that there have been some versions of the Bible that were made by going through at least two iterations of translation. But biblical manuscripts do still exist in the languages they were originally written in, and Bible translations are generally made by translating directly from those.
“The Bible gets the value of pi wrong.”
Not really. The value implied in the Bible isn’t exactly equal to pi, but neither is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.1
How precise do you expect these measurements to be? The Bible doesn’t specify lengths in units shorter than a cubit all that often. If the circumference of a circle is 30 cubits, then the diameter, calculated using the correct value of pi and rounded to the nearest cubit, is 10 cubits. Which is what the Bible says it was. The numbers the Bible gives for this are a perfectly reasonable approximation.
“I don’t believe in things; I accept them, or I understand them.”
Some atheists seem to be averse to the word “believe”. There’s no good reason to be. The concept of “belief” is not limited to supernatural things. And accepting a statement is the same thing as believing it.
A belief is just a person’s mental representation or personal understanding of how things are. No matter what it’s about, and whether it successfully matches reality or not, it’s still a belief. People may be more likely to choose to use the word “believe” when they’re unsure about something,2 but believing something does not mean you’re unsure.3 Everything you know is also something you believe, because knowledge is a type of belief.
There is one good reason you might want to be careful about the “believe in” wording, though: To “believe in” something can mean believing something exists, but it can also sometimes mean having a favorable opinion of it. So if you think someone might plausibly misinterpret you in that way, then you might want to avoid using the words “believe in”.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe; that doesn’t change the facts.”
What you believe does matter, because what you believe influences what you do. If you say it doesn’t matter what you believe, you are saying that it’s okay to have wrong beliefs. That is not a clever way to respond to people who have wrong beliefs.
“Religious beliefs are so obviously absurd, there’s no way anyone actually believes that stuff.”
There are religious people who think the same thing about your views, that there’s no way you can really think there’s no God. You’re both wrong about that. There really are people who don’t think like you.
(Actually, I have seen some interesting arguments for thinking that religious people don’t really believe what they think they believe. But if you’re going to make that claim, you’d better have much better reasons for it than that their beliefs sound absurd to you.)
Plenty of things that sound absurd to some people are honestly believed by a lot of other people. And there are even a lot of things that sound absurd (especially if you don’t know much about them) but are actually true.
“You can’t reason theists out of their belief if they didn’t reason themselves into it in the first place.”
Of course you can. Plenty of people have stopped believing things because of logical arguments, regardless of whether logical arguments were involved in the original formation of their beliefs.
And if you really don’t think we should be trying to convince people with logical arguments, I’d like to know how you think we should deal with them. Are you saying we should use illogical arguments, and convince people to have beliefs that they won’t have any good reasons for believing? Are you saying we should use psychological manipulation and trick them into changing their views? Are you saying we should give up on reason and use force instead? Are you saying we should just let people keep being wrong?
Stop it. Reason is the best option, and you should not be saying things like this that discourage people from using it. Stop making excuses for not engaging with people you disagree with. Refusing to debate is not going to help reduce the amount of false beliefs people have. If you find that your arguments are ineffective, maybe you just need to learn how to argue more effectively.
“The story of Jesus is copied from earlier stories about gods like Horus, who were said to have been born of a virgin under a star in the east, been subject to assassination attempts as babies, fasted for 40 days, had 12 disciples, performed the same miracles, been resurrected after three days, etc.”
If you actually read the stories of those gods from sources written before the New Testament, you will not find most of these alleged parallels. The story of Horus’s birth, for example, is that he was born after his mother had sex with her brother who she had reassembled after he was killed and dismembered by another of her brothers. Doesn’t sound anything like the story of Jesus, does it?
“Hitler was a Christian.”
Maybe, but the evidence is pretty unclear. He did sometimes claim to be a Christian. He also sometimes said he wanted to destroy Christianity. He also denied that he was against Christianity. But maybe that was just because openly opposing Christianity would cost him too many supporters. Or maybe he changed his mind. Or maybe he believed in an unusual version of Christianity that he recognized should probably not really count as Christianity. Whatever he was, he does seem clearly to have been against atheism, though.
“We are all atheists regarding most gods. Some of us just go one god further.”
We are all nonbelievers in most gods. We are not all atheists. People who believe in one God are monotheists, not atheists.
“When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”
Not necessarily. Not everyone rejects other religions for the same reasons. Sometimes the reason religious people reject other gods is that their religion tells them there’s only one God. Knowing that is not going to help them understand why you reject theirs.
“Historical dates should be written with the religiously neutral terms BCE and CE, not BC and AD.”
Jesus is the only reason we count years starting from around 2000 years ago. No matter which terms we use for it, we are still using a Christian calendar. So why pretend we’re not? If you’re not going to actually invent a new and improved calendar system with an objectively better starting point and convince everyone to use it, just admit that we are all using a Christian calendar. Dishonestly calling something by a different name doesn’t change what it is.
If we’re not going to insist on renaming the days of the week just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, and renaming the months of the year just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, then we don’t need to change the terms BC and AD just because we don’t believe in the god those are named after. Just use BC and AD. They’re easier to tell apart than BCE and CE.
“Morality can be explained by evolution.”
Not exactly. Evolution may be a good explanation of how we came to have some of the inclinations we have that happen to align with morality, but evolution can’t be what defines morality, for reasons similar to some of the same reasons that God can’t be what defines morality.
Did we evolve to be inclined toward certain behaviors because those behaviors are good? Then goodness is something that exists apart from evolution, and is not fully explained by it. And anyway, that’s not how evolution works. Evolution doesn’t have goals like that.
Or are good behaviors good just because that’s what we evolved to do? No, that would mean that any behavior resulting from evolution would have to be good. But that’s not true. Evolution also produce behaviors that are not morally good. Sometimes it produces behaviors so wildly opposed to morality that it would never occur to humans to do such things. Unless you want to argue that every behavior that occurs in nature is actually good, because it comes from evolution, you shouldn’t be claiming that evolution is where morality comes from.
“Galileo was punished by the anti-science Church for disagreeing with their dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.”
The Church was wrong to censor and punish Galileo for what he said, but this was not a science vs religion thing. The Church was open to new scientific discoveries, and had been for centuries, as long as there was actually strong evidence for them. But as of Galileo’s time, there was nothing particularly scientific about rejecting geocentrism.
The Church was very supportive of Galileo, until he started saying the scriptures should be reinterpreted to conform to his unproven pet hypothesis. They didn’t object to heliocentrism because it was heretical; they objected to it because there wasn’t enough evidence for it yet.4
Heliocentric models predicted that there should be parallax and Coriolis effects that nobody actually observed until decades after Galileo died. Based on the evidence available in Galileo’s time, the heliocentric model wasn’t any more reasonable a conclusion than the geocentric model. The ancient Greeks had not discovered heliocentrism long before; some of them had decided to believe in heliocentrism for wildly unscientific reasons, and happened to be right.
More recently, Copernicus had also proposed a sort of heliocentric model, but his reasons for preferring heliocentrism weren’t particularly rational either. His model didn’t explain the evidence available at the time any better than geocentrism did. And because Copernicus didn’t realize that orbits were elliptical, his model was overly complex, so Occam’s razor says the Copernican model was not to be preferred. And that flawed model is the one Galileo promoted, using arguments already known to be wrong, like saying the tides prove the Earth is moving.
Then Kepler had come up with a model (involving elliptical orbits) that would turn out to be more accurate than Copernicus’s, but there still wasn’t enough evidence available at the time to tell which model was more accurate. Anyway, Galileo completely ignored Kepler’s insight, and dogmatically refused to even consider the possibility that orbits weren’t perfect circles. Galileo’s attitude in this matter was decidedly less scientific than that of the Church.
“If you can’t explain where God came from, God is useless as an explanation for anything else.”
Continue reading Things atheists get wrongIs a student above the teacher?
God must be crazy
Random, impulsive, and pointless acts of God
God warns Laban in a dream that he supposedly needs to “be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad”. Laban then completely ignores this pointless command, with no consequences.
God talks about God in the third person, then apparently realizes that’s kind of confusing, and feels the need to clarify that he wasn’t talking about some other God.
God chooses Moses to be the one to speak to Pharaoh about letting his people go. But then God decides to let Moses’s brother Aaron do the actual speaking, while Moses tells Aaron what to say, and God tells Moses what to tell Aaron to say. Why does Moses need to be involved at all, then? Just because God can’t admit that he was wrong to choose Moses? He’s making Moses into a pointless middleman. (But Moses still gets all the credit as the leader, for some reason.)
When some of the people of Israel ignore God’s instructions, God gets mad at Moses and acts like he’s the one disobeying.
God apparently decided to help his chosen people in battle only when Moses had his hands up in the air.
In the story of the Golden Calf, God communicates with the Israelites through Moses incredibly inefficiently, making Moses go up and down the mountain way more times than necessary. Good thing Moses can teleport. Apparently.
God’s Ten Commandments include a rule against making images of anything. Apparently God hates art.
God’s law says it’s okay to kill a thief who breaks into your house, but only if you do it at night.
God thinks there is somehow “guilt involved” in giving him gifts, which could potentially make those gifts unacceptable. But as long as Aaron is wearing a “holy to the Lord” label on his forehead, it’s okay. God also requires Aaron and his descendants to wear special underwear when they go near his stuff, and threatens to kill them if they don’t wear the right underwear.
God demands that people put sheep blood on each other’s ears, thumbs, and toes. Why? Because that’s part of the requirements to become a priest, because God said so. But the priests had better not go near God’s tent or altar with unwashed hands or feet, or he might kill them.
God tells the Israelites to go on to the promised land without him, because he is so lacking in self-control that he expects he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from murdering them all if he had to spend any time around them.
For some reason, God thinks he needs to forbid his people to go back to the place he rescued them from. That seems completely pointless, unless they weren’t actually as bad off there as God’s book makes it sound…
When Joshua wants to know why God has stopped helping his people, God explains that one of them has stolen something that God claims belongs to him. And therefore God is angry with the whole nation for what one person did. God tells Joshua to have each tribe come before him so God can say whether the culprit is in that tribe or not, and then do the same with each clan in the guilty tribe, and so on, until they narrow it down to the individual thief. But God is already speaking directly to Joshua, so why doesn’t he just tell him who’s guilty right now?
Saul makes an offering to God to make sure he has God’s favor. Then Samuel comes and tells him that God has rejected him as king, for supposedly breaking some command. I have no idea what command Saul is supposed to have broken by making an offering to God.
David says he has heard two things, even though God only spoke one thing. He says what the two things were, and neither of them make any sense for God to say. Apparently God talks to himself and reassures himself about how powerful and just and loving he is.
David also says God announced that he has a dove with gold and silver on its feathers while people sleep among sheep pens.
Solomon claims that the results of casting lots are actually controlled by God. If he’s right, that would mean that God’s decisions are so completely random that they’re indistinguishable from the results of a random decision generator.
God sends down fire to kill a hundred men because their leaders tried to tell a prophet what to do. He sends bears to kill a bunch of little boys for making fun of a bald prophet. And he gets someone trampled to death for doubting the bald prophet’s prediction.
God has a day of crying out to the mountains.
God makes people… queef? Painfully?
In the middle of talking about his plans for mass destruction, God randomly says he’s crying out and gasping and panting like a woman in childbirth.
God says someone is going to wear her children as ornaments, because he thinks that’s what brides do.
The first vision God shows his prophet Jeremiah is an almond tree branch, which has no purpose other than to make an opportunity for God to make a pun.
God makes Jeremiah buy a belt, bury it, and dig it back up only when it has become ruined and useless. The only purpose of this is so Jeremiah will have a comparison to make when he talks about God’s plans to make his people “ruined and useless”. But that won’t be very meaningful to the people he’s talking to, since they didn’t experience the thing with the belt.
God makes Ezekiel do all kinds of outrageous and silly and unpleasant things that are completely unnecessary. He starts by confusing Ezekiel with a vision of bizarre otherworldly creatures when he’s not even a prophet yet, which God never explains and which seems to have no purpose. Then he tells him he has to go prophesy to Israel, though God doubts they’re going to listen to him. And then the first thing God requires Ezekiel to actually do is eat a scroll.
Next, God makes Ezekiel besiege a drawing of Jerusalem. Then he ties Ezekiel up, and makes him lie on his left side for 390 days, and on his right side for 40 days. And even though he’s tied up, God expects Ezekiel to somehow still be besieging his drawing. He also expects him to bake bread over burning poop and eat it, while he’s tied up.5 And he instructs Ezekiel to be afraid while he eats and drinks. That’s not how emotion works, God. You can’t just tell people how to feel.
God makes Ezekiel shave with a sword, then burn some of the hair, and attack some of it with the sword. And he says he’s going to punish his people by shaving them. Then he tells Ezekiel to talk to the mountains, more than once. (He makes Micah talk to mountains too.)
God tells Hosea to name his daughter “Not Loved”. This God sucks at picking names.
God wishes for God to rebuke Satan. Why doesn’t he just rebuke Satan, instead of talking about himself in the third person like that?
God says he’s setting a stone with seven eyes in front of a priest who is apparently the branch that he’s talking to the priest about as if the branch isn’t there yet and which will supposedly also be a king.
God threatens to curse the priests’ blessings. And then he says he’s already done it, without giving them any time to do anything about it, so what was the point of the threat?
The Bible says Jesus is God, so of course Jesus is crazy too. His own family thinks so.
John the Baptist baptized people by immersing them in water, but he said he was just preparing the way for Jesus, who would baptize people with fire.
John thinks Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around. Which makes sense if Jesus is indeed God, since he wouldn’t need anything done to him that baptism supposed to do for people. Baptizing God would be pointless. But Jesus insists on getting baptized anyway. I don’t know what that’s supposed to accomplish, unless it’s to show that Jesus is not God.
Jesus asks what reward you’ll get if you only love those who love you. You’ll get love, duh. But what kind of person thinks you need a reward for loving?
Jesus says the crowds don’t need to go away, even though it’s getting late. Then after he feeds the crowds (who were going to go eat anyway), he immediately sends them away. Sounds more like they didn’t need to stay.
When a man begs Jesus to drive the demon out of his son, Jesus’s response is to randomly start insulting his generation.
Jesus says that when he returns, some people will be “taken” and others left. But when his disciples ask where those people will be taken, Jesus tells them where vultures gather, instead of answering the question. As a result of Jesus failing to answer that question, a lot of people now mistakenly think he was saying that some people will be “raptured” to heaven.
Jesus asks a woman for a drink, when what he really wants is for her to ask him for a drink.
When Jesus is expecting to be betrayed soon, he tells his disciples they need to sell their cloaks so they can buy swords. But then when one of them tries to use his sword to defend Jesus, Jesus seems to disapprove of them using swords at all. So why did he tell them to buy swords?
When the elders ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah, Jesus responds that if he asked them, they wouldn’t answer. Because they don’t know the answer, because he hasn’t told them. But he seems to think the fact that they wouldn’t have answered means he doesn’t have to answer. Even though the reason for them not answering obviously doesn’t apply to him.
The reason God loves Jesus is that he got himself killed and then came back to life. That’s a pretty weird reason to love someone. If Jesus hadn’t died, or if he had died by accident, or if he had stayed dead, God wouldn’t love him.
Jesus wants to indicate how Peter is going to die, so he says a bunch of confusing stuff about getting dressed and going places and feeding sheep, which doesn’t make it at all clear how Peter is going to die.
God talks to himself, which some people would say only crazy people do. I don’t think that’s right, but would a sane person talk to himself indirectly by telling other people to talk to him, and then telling them what to say to him because they don’t know what to say to him, but then the things he tells them to say to him are just wordless groans?
God makes Christians seem crazy too, by getting them to say things that make no sense to anyone else. He goes further and gives them the completely pointless “gift” of talking completely unintelligibly so that no one has any idea what they’re trying to say, including themselves, which makes everyone think they’re crazy.
God sends Paul and his colleagues with God to talk to God.
God is going to present undead people to himself.
The book of Hebrews claims that God said a bunch of stuff about himself in the third person, for some reason.
Revelation predicts that Jesus is going to come with a double-edged sword sticking out of his mouth, so he can fight people using the sword of his mouth.
Jesus is going to angrily trample the world’s grapes (either that or he’s murdering trillions of people) in a big winepress, causing a massive flood of blood.
God is going to invite all the birds to eat all the people.
Forgetful, confused, and delusional
God threatens Egypt with plagues that will kill some of their livestock… after he’s already sent a plague that killed all the livestock of Egypt.
For the Passover ritual, God says you have to use a lamb, but you can take it from either your sheep or your goats.
God likes to describe himself as compassionate, forgiving, and slow to anger, even though he is constantly getting angry and killing people over nothing. And when God decides to punish people, a lot of the time he ends up punishing the wrong people for some reason.
God’s law says if a man has lost his hair and is bald, and he has a certain kind of sore on his bald head, then the bald man has to let his hair be unkempt.
God punished the land of Canaan. He didn’t just punish the people there, who were having sex with animals and stuff. He specifically says he also punished the land, for the land’s sin.
God demands that his people love him with all their heart and soul and strength. That is not how love works. You can’t just tell people to love you.
God says when you attack a city, you shouldn’t cut down its fruit trees, because they’re not people. Because there’s no point in doing something if it doesn’t involve killing people. Then he says you can cut down the non-fruit trees. Because those trees are people, I guess.
God is apparently so worthless that he has worthless inanimate objects for rivals, and he’s very insecure about it.
According to Solomon, God told David that since the day his people left Egypt, he had never chosen anyone to be ruler over Israel. That’s obviously not true, since the person God was talking to was someone God had chosen to be ruler over Israel. And he wasn’t even the first one.
God tells Elijah to go out and stand on a mountain. When Elijah does, God asks him what he’s doing there, apparently having already forgotten what he had just told Elijah to do.
God tells Isaiah that all these people are annoying him by bringing him meaningless offerings of dead animals. God asks who has asked this of them, apparently having forgotten that he has.
God wishes there were briers and thorns confronting him, so he could march against them in battle and set them all on fire. Or maybe let them make peace and come to him for refuge. Whichever.
God thinks of himself as a righteous savior, but his idea of righteousness and salvation doesn’t rule out letting everyone on earth die.
After describing his plans to poison his people, pursue them with a sword, kill their children, and ruin their cities, God describes himself as “the Lord, who exercises kindness“.
God says he intends to fulfill a promise that he has already fulfilled.
God implies that the children of the people he’s talking to are dead. Then he says their children will come back, acting like the only problem is that they’re in another country right now.
God says some particular houses will be filled with dead bodies, forgetting that he just said those houses have been torn down so the materials can be used for other things. Those houses can’t be filled with anything.
God tells people he will restore them to their land, when those people have never had to leave their land in the first place.
God calls Sodom Jerusalem’s “younger sister“, even though the Bible indicates that Sodom was destroyed about 700 years before the Israelites settled in Jerusalem, so Sodom is actually much older.
When God decides to turn against his chosen people and attack them and rip them open and devour them like a wild animal, he calls himself their “helper”.
God describes a city that’s being flooded as being “like a pool whose water is draining away“. Like draining is the problem.
God tells Zechariah to say that God says something that makes no sense for God to say. Something about having been sent by God. God wants us to know that God was sent by God?? Why does God keep saying he sent himself to deliver a message from himself?
God tells his people to plead with God to be gracious to “us”. So God is among the people God wants to punish? And he needs other people to intervene and try to convince him not to punish himself??
Jesus says anyone who does God’s will is his brother and his sister and his mother. And the Bible says Jesus did God’s will, therefore Jesus is Jesus’s brother and Jesus’s sister and Jesus’s mother. In addition to being his own father.
Because people think the kingdom of God is going to appear at once, Jesus tells a parable… which doesn’t address that issue at all.
Jesus thinks if people didn’t call him a king, stones would.
Jesus tends to ignore the questions he’s been asked, and respond by saying something barely relevant or completely unrelated instead. Jesus starts to answer a question about when everything will end. But he ends up just stating whether certain things will end. When people ask Jesus where his father is, instead of answering, he just tells them that they don’t know his father.
When Peter asks him who he’s talking to, it says “Jesus answered” …but he doesn’t actually answer the question. Jesus instead asks something about the story he was telling. That’s not an answer. And when Peter asks him where he’s going, he doesn’t answer that either. He just says his disciples can’t follow him there.
Jesus explains why he thinks he doesn’t need to wash his hands before he eats. Then he tells a couple of brief parables, or mixed metaphors, or something. These metaphors are to explain why it doesn’t matter that he offended the Pharisees with his opinions. But then when Peter asks him to “explain the parable”, Jesus instead goes back to trying to justify his opinions on hand washing. His response to Peter says nothing about the topics of those parables, or about parables at all. But he still acts like he thinks he’s “explaining the parable”.
Jesus says people shouldn’t be surprised by him claiming that they need to be born again. But instead of explaining himself when asked, he says something dumb about the wind.
Jesus gives his followers a new command: to love each other. That’s still not how love works. But Jesus thinks everyone will be able to tell who is a disciple of Jesus, by the fact that they love each other. Apparently he thinks his people are the only ones who do that.
Jesus wants his disciples to break and eat his body and drink his blood. He wants everyone to eat his flesh and drink his blood, because he thinks he’s bread. And don’t forget to drink his spirit, too.
God considers slaves to be free when they become Christians, and considers free people to be Jesus’s slaves when they become Christians.
Stupidity
Continue reading God must be crazyDid Israel have peace throughout Solomon’s reign?
A passage in 1 Kings claims that all of Israel had peace and safety on all sides during Solomon’s lifetime. (Perhaps because Solomon ruled over a lot of the surrounding nations, in addition to Israel.)
But later in 1 Kings, it says Solomon had foreign adversaries, including a man named Rezon. Rezon had been a conqueror since Solomon’s father was still king of Israel. Rezon was hostile toward Israel, and was Israel’s adversary as long as Solomon lived.
Continue reading Did Israel have peace throughout Solomon’s reign?