Yearly Archives: 2025

Is there anything under the earth to support it?

Contradictions,

Job said God suspends the earth over nothing. And God confirmed that Job had spoken the truth about him. So if God is right that Job is right about this, the earth does not have anything under it supporting it. The Bible disagrees, though.

Job previously suggested that the earth is on pillars, and since he was talking about God at the time, that must have been true too. Asaph says God agrees that the earth has pillars. Samuel’s mother says God has set the earth on foundations. David and Solomon agree that the earth has foundations, and David also says the earth is floating on the sea. Other psalmists, like Asaph, agree that the earth is on foundations.

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The Story of Ananias and Sapphira—
The Communist Cult

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The disciples of Jesus were given the ability to perform miracles better than Jesus, and they convinced thousands of people to join their new religion. The members of this original Christian church didn’t keep any personal property; they shared everything they had. Everything they earned had to be brought to their leaders to be distributed among the community according to their needs.

The goal was for everyone to be equally well off, with no one having too little or too much. Everyone was to be paid the same regardless of how much or how little work they did, just as Jesus (and his ancestor David) had taught.

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The Communist Cult →
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Solomon’s girl

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The “Song of Songs” is a weird love song that ambiguously seems to claim to be written by Solomon, which is the only reason this eight-chapter erotic poem made it into the Bible.

The song is full of descriptions of the appearance of someone who is apparently Solomon’s favorite of his many lovers. He says she is altogether beautiful and perfect, with no flaw. She is a rose of Sharon and a lily of the valley, and she’s also a wall. She’s like a mare among Pharaoh’s horses.

Her head crowns her like a mountain, and her hair is like a royal tapestry and a flock of goats. Her eyes are doves, her nose is like a tower, her lips are like a scarlet ribbon dripping with honey, and her teeth are like shorn sheep. Her breasts are like towers, clusters of fruit, and twin gazelle fawns. Her hands are dripping with myrrh, her waist is a mound of wheat encircled by lilies, her legs are like jewels, etc., etc.

For some reason, all those artists of past centuries who liked to paint biblical scenes don’t seem to have done any pictures of this girl that capture these descriptions. But with the help of GPT-4o, we can now visualize what Solomon’s loveliest girl looked like. Behold the beautiful Shulamite:

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The Story of the Crucifixion of Jesus—
Jesus Goes Back Home for the Weekend

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Mad, bad, or God?

Jesus spent a lot of time with disreputable people. He violated the sabbath law, and encouraged others to do the same. When he saw people trying to enforce God’s law, Jesus got in the way. He told his followers to further break God’s laws by refusing to take oaths, eating unclean food, drinking blood, and hating their parents.

Jesus would go on long rants against the Jewish religious leaders. He acted like he thought he was God. He cured some people’s disabilities, only to give them to others. Jesus rudely discriminated against foreigners when they begged him to heal their children. He performed exorcisms despite knowing that it would make people worse off in the end. He sent a legion of demons to massacre someone’s livestock, just because the demons asked him to. This made everyone in that town want Jesus to go away. So he did.

Jesus said he was there to save the world, but he really just wanted to watch the world burn. He went into the temple and wrecked everything and chased the people out with a whip. He promised that those who followed him would not be excessively burdened, but then he required people to do completely pointless and unreasonably unpleasant things.

Jesus insisted on talking in confusing parables, and then got mad when no one understood him. The more he talked to people, the more they hated him. But he couldn’t figure out why. He offered people a reward, but said they could only get it if they didn’t expect a reward. People thought he was demon-possessed. Even his own family thought he was crazy.

God betrays Jesus

But there were also a lot of people who were convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, which the Jewish leaders were worried would get the Jews in big trouble with their Roman overlords. God inspired the high priest to point out that it would be better for one man to die than for the whole Jewish nation to be destroyed over the treasonous claim that Jesus was their king. So the Jewish religious leaders that Jesus had so often disparaged plotted to get him killed. Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, agreed to get paid to hand Jesus over to them.

Jesus knew what they were planning, and he didn’t want to die. He repeatedly asked God to prevent his death if that was possible. But even though it was possible, God chose not to save him, because he wanted to see him suffer. God wanted to strike Jesus with a sword. How else could God demonstrate his righteousness and justice, if not by getting his innocent son killed instead of punishing all the actual evil people? Unless Jesus let himself be killed, God wouldn’t love him anymore.

Judas “betrays” Jesus

The religious leaders sent soldiers to arrest Jesus. Judas had arranged to let them know who they were after by kissing Jesus. But Jesus told them who he was himself, so Judas didn’t actually have to do anything. But he kissed Jesus and got paid for betraying him anyway. Later, Judas decided he didn’t want that money, and gave it back to the religious leaders, and he also used it to buy a field.

The soldiers took Jesus to the high priest. After he was questioned by the high priest, Jesus was sent off to the high priest, who for some reason wanted to know if Jesus was the son of God. When Jesus replied that he was, the high priest was shocked that Jesus would say such a thing, and the Jewish religious leaders said Jesus should be put to death for blasphemy. But though the Jewish law said Jesus had to be killed, the Jews didn’t have the right to execute anyone under Roman law.

So they handed him over to Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, who for some reason thought Jesus was the king of the Jews. Even though no one but those astrologers had ever called him the “king of the Jews” before. And even though the Jews didn’t recognize him as their king. And even though Jesus had refused to become king of the Jews. And even though Jesus, being a descendant of Jehoiachin (AKA Jeconiah), wasn’t even eligible to be king of the Jews.

Pilate didn’t think Jesus had done anything wrong, and he wanted to release him. But the crowd insisted that he should be executed, because the Jewish leaders had somehow gotten all their people to suddenly stop liking Jesus.

So Pilate handed Jesus over to his soldiers to be crucified, while blaming the Jewish people for his decision and proclaiming himself to be innocent, as if he couldn’t overrule the commoners. (It was really God’s fault, though.) The soldiers stripped Jesus, stole his underwear for themselves, beat him, mocked him, and nailed him to a cross. He died, and was put in a tomb.

The totally convincing account of the resurrection

Continue reading The Story of the Crucifixion of Jesus—
Jesus Goes Back Home for the Weekend →
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Should people be childish?

Contradictions

Yes.

Jesus welcomes little children, because the kingdom of heaven belongs to people like them. He says you can’t get into the kingdom of heaven unless you become like little children. And he says the way to become the greatest in the kingdom of heaven is to take the lowly position of a child.

No.

When some boys acted like children (because they were) and made fun of a bald prophet, God sent bears to kill 42 of them.

Jesus said the people of his generation were like little children, and also that they were a brood of snakes who would be condemned to hell on judgment day.

Paul told his followers they needed to stop thinking like children. He said Jesus wanted them to become mature in every respect, and stop being gullible and undiscerning infants.

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Refuting divine command theory

Flawed concepts,

Divine command theory is the idea that God’s commands are what determines whether things are morally right or wrong.

Believers believe that what God says is good is good, and what God says is bad is bad. But does God command certain things because they’re good? Or are those things good just because God commands them?

Divine command theory says it’s the latter. If the former was true, if God had reasons behind his judgments of certain acts as good or bad, that would be contrary to divine command theory. This would mean that there are important things that God did not create, and has no power over.1 It would also mean that we don’t need God to tell us what’s right and wrong, since we could just figure out for ourselves what the actual reasons behind morality are and what principles of behavior they entail.

So that first option doesn’t tend to be very popular with religious people. But it’s the only option that works.2 If the second option was true, if morality was indeed defined solely by whatever God decided to command, rather than being based on some separate objective standard, that would make morality completely arbitrary and meaningless. If there was somebody who could just say that something was good, and that was how you defined good, then anything could be “good”.

It would mean that instead of saying you shall not murder, God could just as easily have said murder was the best thing in the world, and it would be so. Imagine a world where all believers think murder is always absolutely good, because God said so. Sounds bad, right? But how could it be bad if it was what God commanded? If you think that scenario would still be bad somehow, that proves that you have moral standards that are independent of what God says.

If you think God would never command something like that because he’s not like that, what makes you think that? The idea that God wouldn’t command a particular thing seems to be based on the assumption that the thing is evil, and God would never do something that’s evil, because God is good.

But what makes you think it is an evil thing? Evil is just whatever God happens to say is evil. An act is wrong if God says it’s wrong, but he doesn’t have to say that. Unless you reject divine command theory, the only thing making the bad thing bad is the arbitrary choice of God to call it bad. You have no reason to think he couldn’t have just as easily said the opposite. Divine command theory says he could have.3

According to divine command theory, “God would never command something evil” just means “God never commands things that God doesn’t command”, which is perfectly compatible with murder being something he does command.

There can be no reason he couldn’t have commanded that, unless God isn’t actually the source of morality.4 There can’t be anything about the act itself that makes it wrong, or there would be something other than God that defines morality. If you don’t think that evil things could have been good things if God had happened to make different decisions when he made up the rules of morality, then you don’t believe in divine command theory.

Another problem with divine command theory is that we have no commands from God regarding a lot of ethical issues. The laws given in the Bible have nothing to say about torture, or about child molestation. So I guess there is no right and wrong when it comes to those things, according to divine command theory.5

The Bible doesn’t mention God giving humanity almost any rules about moral issues for the first 2500 years or so. But sexual deviancy and murder and stuff are already considered morally wrong in the Bible during that time, before God gives Moses the law. How could those things have been wrong when there had been no divine commands about them?

And why would commands be what makes things good or bad, anyway? If God had told us what the speed of light was, is this what you would be asking: “Is the speed of light 299,792,458 m/s because God said so, or did God say so because that’s what it is?” No, you wouldn’t be asking that. It probably wouldn’t even occur to you to think that God telling us it was so might be why it was so, because that’s absurd. If God has anything to do with why that value is what it is, it’s because he made it that way, not because he said it was that way.

But when we’re talking about moral facts, for some reason we instead jump to the bizarre idea that those facts are somehow caused by someone telling us about those facts. Why do people who claim to believe morality is objective not think about it the same way they think about other objective facts?

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Should people be patient?

Contradictions

Yes.

The Bible says God waited patiently for Noah to get done building the ark before flooding the earth. And God didn’t mind Abraham repeatedly challenging his plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. He didn’t get angry when Abraham repeatedly asked what he would do if there were increasingly small numbers of good people there.

So God is patient. Otherwise, he would have destroyed everybody by now. The Bible describes God as long-suffering, forbearing, and patient. It says God is love, and love is patient. And everything God does is right, so we should follow his example and be patient.

According to the Bible, Jesus is God, and Jesus is immensely patient too, which is an example we should follow.

David says you should wait patiently for God to help you. That’s what he did, and God approved of everything David ever did.

Solomon says being patient shows that you have great understanding, and being quick-tempered shows that you’re a fool. Hot-tempered people start conflicts, and patient people resolve them. Patience is better than pride, and better than being a warrior.

Paul advised his followers to be patient. He said love is patient, and you should follow the way of love. He commended himself for remaining patient throughout all his hardships. Forbearance is one of the fruits of the Spirit. (And also there’s no law against it, which means you should definitely do it!) Paul prayed for God to give his followers great endurance and patience.

Christians should imitate people who have been patient enough to get what God promised them. James says you should patiently wait for Jesus to come back, like a farmer patiently waits for rain.

Jesus commands you to patiently endure the trials he’s going to inflict on you, and if you do, then maybe he’ll give you a break from them for an hour. Or something. You might be destined to be taken captive and killed with a sword, but just be patient. Everyone is going to be forced to worship the beast, and then everyone who worships the beast will go to hell forever. But being patient will help, apparently, somehow.

No.

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The Story of the Resurrection of Lazarus—
A Friend Who Stinks

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Jesus heard that his friend Lazarus was very sick. If Jesus had gone to help him, Lazarus wouldn’t have died. But God had made Lazarus sick, just to give Jesus a chance to show off. So Jesus chose to stay where he was and let him die.

Then four days after Lazarus died, Jesus finally went to the hometown of Lazarus, whose sisters were mourning. Jesus went to the tomb and told Lazarus to come out, and he did. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t still sick.6

Continue reading The Story of the Resurrection of Lazarus—
A Friend Who Stinks →
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