Paul asks: Who has ever given to God, that God should repay them? He seems to think the obvious answer is that no one has ever given God anything. Like it’s impossible to do that, or something. But that’s obviously not true.
Continue reading Has anyone ever given anything to God?The Parable of the Rich Thief
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.
“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 says God massacred the babies of Egypt in the last of the ten plagues.”
It says he killed the firstborn of Egypt. I know, that word makes you think of babies, because it has “born” in it. But firstborn doesn’t mean babies! Your firstborn child is your oldest child. You could be any age and be the firstborn in your family, as long as you never had any siblings older than you. Killing all the firstborn would include some babies, but it does not mean that God was specifically targeting babies.
“The Bible says Moses took 40 years to get from Egypt to the promised land for some reason, when it shouldn’t have taken anywhere near that long.”
It actually says Moses and the Israelites got there fairly quickly, but then God wouldn’t let them take over the land yet. It says the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years after they had already pretty much arrived at their destination, because God made them do that, to punish them. They didn’t wander for 40 years because they were too slow, or couldn’t find their way.
Up until that point, whenever the Bible mentions how long it’s been since they left Egypt, it’s never later than the second year, even just a few chapters before God stops them from entering the promised land. It does say they ate manna for 40 years “until they reached the border of Canaan“, which is rather ambiguous. But I think that can be reasonably interpreted as “until God let them actually cross the border”.
It says the manna started just after they left Egypt, and it stopped once the Israelites actually settled in the promised land. That doesn’t leave any room for an additional 40 years for them to make the journey from Egypt to Canaan. So it would have to mean the 40 years of wandering after getting almost there and being turned away.
“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.
Overbroad lists of atheist songs
When I look at lists of atheist songs, I find that they are often full of songs that really have little to nothing to do with atheism. The people making these lists aren’t being very careful when they decide that something is an atheist song, and this makes it hard for me to find actual atheist music.
A song isn’t an atheist song just because it’s about science. A song isn’t necessarily an atheist song even if it mentions atheism, or has a vaguely anti-religious sounding title. For instance, “Losing My Religion” is not an atheist song. It’s just a song that uses a phrase that happens to sound atheistic, but actually just means something like “losing my temper”.
In my own atheist music list, the songs are ranked based on a few different factors, one of which is how relevant a song actually is to the topic of atheism. Songs that are not so much about atheism (or closely related topics) are less likely to appear on my list, and if they do, they will tend to be lower on the list.
“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.
“Alabama lawmakers once attempted to legally define pi as 3, to make it conform to the Bible.”
That story originated as an April Fool’s joke. The closest thing to that that ever happened in real life was the so-called “Indiana pi bill“, which was a case of someone mistakenly thinking he had solved a notorious mathematical problem, and then going about publishing his findings in a wildly wrong way. But that bill did not actually involve any direct statements about pi, and none of the various incorrect values of pi that can be derived from the bill are equal to the supposedly biblical value 3, so it was clearly not biblically motivated.
“Religion is a mental illness.”
Lots of people have stopped being religious by thinking critically about their religion, learning things they hadn’t been aware of, or considering the evidence and logical arguments. Their religion wasn’t cured by some psychiatric treatment.
Can it really be a mental illness if it’s possible to reason your way out of it, or to have your mind changed just by being exposed to new evidence or information? No, I don’t think that’s consistent with any reasonable definition of mental illness or delusion. To the extent that false religious beliefs are persistent, it’s because of the same cognitive flaws that affect everyone, not because they have some mental illness that you don’t have.
Labeling people as mentally ill just because they’re mistaken about something, or just because you disagree with them, is a dangerous path, and we should be very hesitant to go there. Declaring beliefs to be mental illness would imply that we should be looking for ways to change people’s beliefs with medical treatments instead of by reasoning with them, which should be a horrifying idea to any freethinker.
“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.
“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 crucified and 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?
(The idea that Jesus was born on the 25th of December probably was copied from the god Mithra, but that claim about Jesus isn’t even in the Bible, so who cares about that?)
“Jesus never existed.”
The idea that Jesus never existed at all (as opposed to the idea that he really lived, but then people made up a bunch of crazy stories about him later, or even in contrast to the idea that we just don’t know if there was a real Jesus or not) is a fringe theory that most scholars do not accept.
Before you make such a strong claim, think about whether you have good reasons for it. Do you really have compelling enough evidence to think it’s true? And even if you could prove that the gospels were made-up stories about a made-up person, rather than made-up stories about a real person, what good would that do?
If the whole Jesus story was completely made up, and not at all based on the life of a real person, then why did the writers give him a name and hometown2 and other details that didn’t match the prophecies they were trying to make him fulfill? And why would they include things in the stories that make him seem suspiciously like a fake, like the part where he can’t fool the people who know him best? The most likely explanation for these things being included in the stories would seem to be that there was a Jesus, and these facts about him were too well known to deny.
“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.
“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.3
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.
“Religion is the root of all evil.”
Not all of it. The fact that religion can cause evil doesn’t mean that nothing else causes evil. Evil surely existed before religion was invented. There have been non-religious people who have done great evil for reasons unrelated to religion, or even sometimes because of overzealous opposition to religion.
God is made in the image of humans. If some people weren’t already (without religion) inclined to do the kinds of evil things that religion promotes, they wouldn’t have invented a God who told people to do those things. And God is not the only possible justification people can give for doing those things.
Not that justifying these evils was the purpose of inventing religions. The evils that religions promote were already widely accepted in ancient times, so there would be no need to invent a religion if you wanted those things to happen. Religion was not invented to enable oppression, nor was oppression invented as a result of religion.
Some views that most atheists would consider to be religiously-motivated evil ideas really have nothing to do with religion. There are atheists who have the exact same views, and make the exact same arguments for them.
I personally find some of the moral views that happen to be popular with atheists to be far more concerning than those of typical modern Christians.4 I think we should spend more time deeply questioning our own moral opinions, not just those of the outgroup.
Taking the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s name in vain
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.
I kinda get why you like to do this, but I also 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.
Continue reading Things atheists get wrongIs a student above the teacher?
God must be crazy
Random, impulsive, and pointless acts of God
God teams up with Satan to torment Job, the most righteous and godly person in the world, including by killing all his children. God does this just to see if Satan is right that Job’s love of God is conditional on God being good to him. Satan does turn out to be right about that, but God never admits it.
God tells Abraham to murder his son, then stops him at the last second and says it was just a test. A sane God would have said Abraham had failed the test, but this God is actually very pleased that this guy was willing to spontaneously murder his child just because a voice in his head told him to.
God decides he hates Esau, when Esau has done nothing wrong, because he hasn’t even been born yet.
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 manipulates people into selling Joseph into slavery, falsely accusing him and sending him to prison, then putting this prisoner-slave in charge of a whole country just because he claims to know the “meaning” of some surreal dreams, and letting him unjustly oppress the country he now rules… all because God can’t think of a better way to “save” people from the famine that God is causing.
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.
God communicates with the Israelites through Moses incredibly inefficiently. He needlessly makes Moses go up and down a mountain so many times, the author of Exodus repeatedly fails to keep track of where Moses last was. God’s reasons for Moses to go up or down the mountain are things like:
Moses needs to be on top of the mountain to talk to God (even though he’s already been talking to him just fine from the bottom of the mountain). And Moses needs to deliver messages between God and his people (even though God already knows what the people said). And Moses needs to go warn the people not to get too close to the mountain (even though he’s already done that).
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. Apparently God can’t remember which people are holy unless they’re labeled. 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. (Then he forgets about that problem and decides to go with them anyway.)
After Moses breaks the tablets of the law, God says he’s going to write the same laws on some new tablets. But then he makes Moses write the laws on the new tablets, and they turn out to be almost completely different from the laws that were on the original tablets.
God gets mad at his people for doing what one of his prophets wanted them to do, and so God starts killing tens of thousands of his people. But then he sees Aaron’s grandson stick a spear through a couple of people who are having sex in a tent. This makes God very happy, and he decides he doesn’t need to kill any more Israelites for now.
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…
God’s law says if you find a person who has been killed, and you don’t know who did it, you can just blame it on a cow. Break the cow’s neck, and God’s bizarre sense of justice will be satisfied. Who cares if the actual killer is still on the loose?
Apparently God would have punished someone if that offering hadn’t been made, but now God thinks no one needs to be punished. That means either that murderers can bribe God to ignore what they’ve done, or that whoever God was going to punish wasn’t guilty, but God doesn’t care about that and would have killed them anyway, but now he’s decided not to kill them, because they killed a cow.
Moses repeatedly has to stop God from killing off his entire chosen nation when he gets mad at them for doing perfectly reasonable things. And when God changes his mind about that, it’s always for selfish reasons, like when Moses convinces God that killing off his people would be bad for God’s reputation.
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?
God wants to talk to young Samuel, but when he calls to Samuel, he doesn’t say who’s calling. After God sees that this isn’t working because Samuel thinks it’s somebody else calling, God just does the exact same thing a few more times, until somebody happens to somehow figure out what’s going on.
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.
When Saul idiotically decides to put a curse on any of his men who eat anything that day before they defeat the Philistines, God seems to take that seriously. After Saul’s son, who isn’t even aware of the curse, does eat something, God refuses to communicate with Saul, except to let him know that his son has angered God.
God communicates this after Saul says that whoever is responsible will have to die, so apparently God wants Saul to kill his son, and now Saul wants to, too. But then Saul’s men prevent his son from being killed, and neither Saul nor God seem to object.
When Saul and his men are trying to hunt down the man who God has chosen to be the next king, God makes them strip their clothes off in public and lie there naked all day and night.
2 Samuel 24 begins by saying that God’s anger burned against Israel. It doesn’t say they had done anything to provoke such a reaction. God seems to just get angry first, and then afterward, he gets somebody to do something that he can claim is wrong, so he’ll have an excuse to kill tens of thousands of those people he had been feeling angry at. Who aren’t even the ones who end up committing the alleged wrongdoing.
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.
When Moses asks to see God, God tells him he can’t see his face, because no one can see God and live. This is when Moses is already in the habit of speaking with God face to face, so what God is saying is a completely obvious lie. The Bible says people can see God’s face, and that seeing it is desirable, not deadly. Not seeing God’s face is what’s deadly.
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 says the inhabitants of the promised land have already been expelled from the land, when that obviously hasn’t happened yet. God insists that he has 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.
Saul supposedly disobeys God, and God rejects him as king of Israel. (What Saul has actually done is make an offering to God, which God thinks is somehow a reason to abandon, torment, and kill Saul.) Then Saul supposedly disobeys God again, and God rejects him as king of Israel again, apparently having forgotten that he’s already done that.
God claims that when he chooses people to become kings, he judges them by their character, not their appearance. God then promptly chooses as the new king of Israel a handsome man, who will go on to do way more evil than the king he’s replacing.6
This is typical for God. Whenever he personally chooses a new king, it’s generally someone with a striking appearance, who turns out to be evil. Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d expect based on how God says he chooses kings. Either God is extremely incompetent at this, or he’s lying about his criteria for kings, or he wants his kings to be evil.
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. Why does God keep making all these bizarrely obviously blatantly false claims?
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. Later, God complains that his people aren’t giving him any sacrifices, and then right after that, he claims that he never told them to make sacrifices for him. So what’s he complaining about?
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.
Jesus complains that none of his disciples have asked him where he’s going… after both Peter and Thomas have asked him just that, and he has refused to actually answer that question every time they asked it.
Jesus says everyone who believes in him will be able to do all the miraculous things he did, and more. He says everything is possible for believers, because they can ask him for anything they want, and he will do it. All it takes is the tiniest amount of faith, and you can move mountains, according to Jesus. Yet in reality, there are lots of people who have way too much faith, and not even they can move mountains.
You don’t even have to actually test this claim to see that Jesus is wrong. Just think about what will happen if two believers7 ask Jesus to do two incompatible things for them. They’re not both going to get what they asked for. Jesus’s absurd claims that Christians can do anything are clearly false, which should have been obvious to everyone, including him, and he should have thought of that before he made those claims.
God considers slaves to be free when they become Christians, and considers free people to be Jesus’s slaves when they become Christians.