Is it valid for Jesus to testify about himself?

Contradictions,

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? →
Share this post:

The Bible’s questions, answered—part 10: Answers to questions from Solomon

The bad book

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 Solomon →
Share this post:

Did Jesus do any violence?

Contradictions,

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? →
Share this post:

The Parable of the Trees

Bible stories, , , , , , , , , ,

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 Trees →
Share this post:

Should people blaspheme God?

Contradictions, ,

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? →
Share this post:

Things atheists get wrong

Atheism, Misconceptions, , , , ,

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.

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 combination of 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.

“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.

Take any big controversy or disagreement, and the people on either side will tell you that the people on the other side have a false belief which they refuse to change when they are corrected and provided with arguments and evidence that they’re wrong. I don’t think that’s sufficient to conclude that all those ordinary people are actually delusional. 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.

“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. The consensus among historians is that Jesus is based on a real historical person.

Before you make such a strong claim (without even acknowledging that you are disagreeing with the majority of experts), 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 you? The detail of whether a real but not supernatural Jesus existed or not isn’t even important.

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 hometown1 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.

It does not make your position look very strong if you give people the impression that disproving Christianity depends on disproving the existence of Jesus. If you want to discredit Christianity, surely you can think of a better and more convincing way to do that that doesn’t rely on a fringe theory.

“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.2

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.3 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.

The Bible

(See also: Things the Bible doesn’t say)

“The Bible absurdly implies that snakes used to have legs.”

Genesis has God punish the serpent by making it “crawl on its belly” and “eat dust”, which arguably implies that snakes were originally able to walk instead of slither. But even if that interpretation is indeed what the Bible means, it’s not exactly factually incorrect. Snakes evolved from lizards, so they did used to have legs! Some kinds of snakes even still have tiny vestigial hind legs. The Garden of Eden story is absurd because it says the snake could talk, not because it suggests that it might have been able to walk.

“The chapter before the Tower of Babel story contradicts it by saying the world was already divided into nations with their own languages.”

Genesis 10 is a genealogy that spans several generations. The story in Genesis 11 is set at some point during the time covered in Genesis 10. So the Bible just isn’t putting everything in chronological order here. The alternative would be to interrupt the genealogy by inserting a story in the middle of it, which the Bible should not be expected to do.

“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 contradicts itself regarding the nationality of the people who brought Joseph to Egypt.”

The Bible seems to call the same people Midianites and Ishmaelites, both here in Genesis and later in Judges. That’s not unreasonable when the Ishamelites had apparently taken over Midian.

“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 bats are birds.”

Not really. It includes bats in a category that usually gets translated as “birds”, but that’s not exactly what the original Hebrew word means. So that’s just a problem with the translation.

Similarly, some translations of the New Testament say Jonah was swallowed by a whale, even though the Old Testament says it was a fish, but the original words those were translated from don’t have the exact same meanings as these modern English words.

“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 all 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 quickly getting almost there and then being turned away.

“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 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.4

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.

“The Bible wrongly states that ants have no leaders.”

The Bible makes a lot of scientifically inaccurate claims, but this is not one of them. Ants have no central leadership. “Queen” ants do not give orders to other ants. They just lay eggs.

“Mary and Joseph were undocumented refugees.”

Some American liberals like to call Jesus’s parents “undocumented immigrants” or “refugees”, for some reason. They were not any of those things. At least not until they fled to Egypt a couple of years after the birth of Jesus, which I’m pretty sure is not what these people have in mind.

“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?)

Some things in the Bible do seem suspiciously similar in some ways to the myths of older religions. But that doesn’t mean anyone “stole ideas” from another religion. For one thing, the concept of stealing ideas doesn’t even apply when you’re talking about stories that are meant to be true.

The intention was probably more to correct what the Bible writers thought the pagans were getting wrong. The pagan stories had elements that the Hebrews and Christians found objectionable, so they wrote their own “corrected” versions. For instance, taking a story that portrays country people (like the ancient Hebrews mostly were) unflatteringly, and turning it into a story about the inventor of cities being the first murderer.

“The Bible inconsistently says that Herod died when Jesus was a child, but then was still alive when Jesus was an adult.”

There were actually a bunch of people named Herod, who were all part of the same royal family. It can get confusing, especially since the Bible doesn’t tend to make it very clear which Herod it’s referring to.

The king who the Bible says tried to kill baby Jesus was Herod the Great, and the one who had John the Baptist killed when Jesus was an adult was one of Herod the Great’s sons, Herod Antipas.

So that part is not an error. However, there is still an inconsistency in the Bible involving Herod and Jesus: It claims that Jesus was born while Herod the Great was king of Judea and also while Quirinius was governor of Syria, which is a historical impossibility. Quirinius didn’t become governor till several years after Herod the Great died.

“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 either. 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.

“Paul’s statement about Cretan liars is paradoxical and can’t be true.”

Paul quotes a Cretan as saying that Cretans are always liars, which Paul agrees is true. This may sound like a liar paradox, but it isn’t really. If Cretans are always liars, that doesn’t mean Cretans always lie whenever they speak. It just means every Cretan is a liar. And being a liar does not mean that everything you say is a lie. (If that was what that word meant, “liars” wouldn’t exist. No one tells nothing but lies.) So it is perfectly logically possible and non-paradoxical for a Cretan to be a liar and also to say something true.

“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 now 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. (And that the gospels were originally written in a different language from what Jesus spoke.) 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.

Continue reading Things atheists get wrong →
Share this post:

God must be crazy

The bad book, , , , , , ,

Random, impulsive, and pointless acts of God

After God promises not to kill everyone and everything again, his next statement starts out sounding like he’s going to be expanding on that. Or maybe making another promise, or at least saying something important. But he ends up just saying that seasonal cycles and stuff aren’t going to stop as long as the world exists. Who said they would? That wasn’t ever in question, was it? Why bring it up?

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 that four generations later, his descendants will come and live where he is now. And he says that will happen because… the Amorites aren’t yet as sinful as they’re going to be? What does that have to do with anything?

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 tries to communicate with the king of Egypt by pointlessly making him have cryptic dreams that don’t really convey God’s message. Then since the king of course doesn’t understand what the dreams were supposed to mean, God has to send someone to explain what he meant.

God does the same thing again later, to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, twice. And similarly, God tries to send Belshazzar king of Babylon a message by pointlessly writing something on the wall that the king can’t understand, so then God has to get somebody to interpret it for him. Why doesn’t God just send a prophet to begin with? Or better yet, if he’s going to give the king a message directly, why not make it one that the king can actually understand?

God appears in a burning bush and tells Moses that he has “indeed” seen the misery of his people in Egypt. He’s acting like someone had already brought that topic up, but no one had.

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 says a grain offering must not be baked with yeast, and then as part of the same sentence, he says who he’s letting eat it. What do those two statements have to do with each other? Was that supposed to be an explanation of why they shouldn’t use yeast? Because it isn’t one.

Then God randomly inserts 13 verses about moldy cloths in the middle of telling people how he thinks they should deal with skin diseases.

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 to them opposing the will of God and the king.

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.

In the middle of saying that his people should fear him but that they’re instead stubborn and rebellious, God inserts a random unrelated dubious statement about the way he supposedly designed the sea.

God starts a chapter by talking about his plans to have a lot of human bones dug up. Then suddenly he’s talking about banishing and tormenting his people.

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 says you should sing with joy for the remnant of Israel because… some of them are blind and lame and weeping?

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.)

The Jews in Babylon mention something that’s in Babylon. God responds by telling what he’s going to do to the people who never went to Babylon.

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. A lot of people thought he was demon-possessed. His own family thought he was out of his mind.

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.

Once he’s been baptized, Jesus goes out into the wilderness and starts following the devil around, for some reason.

Jesus says he has come to save the world, but really he just wants to watch the world burn.

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 is constantly making non sequiturs. For instance, he expresses his amazement at how much faith someone has. Then suddenly he’s talking about many people getting into (and other people getting thrown out of) the kingdom of heaven. What does that have to do with what he was saying? Nothing. Do you see this woman? Jesus came into Simon’s house.

Jesus’s moral reasoning consists of non sequiturs as well. If God knows how to give you a good gift, Jesus thinks that’s somehow a reason to follow the Golden Rule. He also tells people to be good and loving and generous to their enemies. But he says the reason to do that is because God is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. That is not a reason to do that. It’s a reason to be ungrateful and wicked.

Jesus talks about the appropriate time for mourning. Then suddenly he’s making two analogies or something about old and new things, which don’t seem to represent anything in particular.

There are times when Jesus changes the topic with every verse, or even more often than that. In one passage, he tells how to rob a strong man, and then who he imagines is against him, and then which sin God won’t forgive even though he could if he wanted to.

Jesus makes a terrible analogy about fish and afterlives. And he says that’s why teachers of the law who become disciples are like an owner of a house who brings out new and old treasures. Then he tells Peter that 77 is how many times Peter should forgive his sibling. And that’s why the kingdom of heaven is like a king who makes slaves of the families of people who can’t pay their debt.

In another passage, he recommends plucking your eye out because he thinks that will somehow keep you out of hell. Then he says everyone will be “salted with fire”, whatever that means, which doesn’t seem to be about the same topic he was just talking about, because this is something that will happen to everyone with no way to avoid it. Then he says something nonsensical about salt losing its saltiness. And then he remarks that it’s good to have salt with you, and also peace is good too. It’s like he can’t remember what he was talking about from sentence to sentence, except that it was something to do with fire or salt or whatever.

He tells a story where people kill people and then someone else kills the people who killed people. Then he quotes a passage from Psalms about a rejected stone, acting like that’s somehow a justification for killing those people. Or like that’s a reason people should have expected the guy to kill those people, or something.

After he finishes a story about evangelism and agriculture, Jesus says you should let everyone see how good you are because people don’t put lamps under their beds, and in the future there will be no secrets, and you should be careful how you listen, whatever that means, and also God is going to reinforce inequality and make it worse.

Jesus warns his disciples in a confusing way about the Pharisees. Then instead of explaining himself, the next thing he says is a repeat of what he said four chapters ago, that in the future there will be no secrets. And it was a non sequitur that time, too.

He says people can only be his followers if they give up everything they have, and then he asks a stupid question about salt again. That question is a non sequitur every time he says it, in addition to making no sense.

Later, he makes even more non sequiturs, saying that God disagrees with people about how good they are because God has alien values, and everyone is forcing their way into the kingdom of God, and God’s laws aren’t going anywhere, and divorce is adultery, and there was a rich man who wore purple.

When someone says he knows Jesus has been sent by God, Jesus ignores what he said, and instead says something about who doesn’t get to see the kingdom of God. He says people shouldn’t be surprised by him claiming that they need to be born again. But instead of explaining himself, he randomly says something dumb about the wind.

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.

Jesus sends a legion of demons to massacre someone’s livestock, just because the demons asked him to.

Jesus’s response to a man begging him to restore his son’s sanity is to randomly get angry at his whole generation. He wishes he didn’t have to live among them anymore, that he didn’t have to put up with them wanting help with their health problems. And he thinks this somehow has something to do with all those people supposedly being “unbelieving”.

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.

Jesus goes into God’s temple and wrecks everything and chases the people out with a whip.

Jesus talks to God, and he points out that he really didn’t need to say what he just said to God. And he explains to God (needlessly) that he was actually saying it so the people watching him would believe that God had sent him. How are they supposed to conclude that? Nothing he just said gives them a good reason to think that.

But Jesus knows that he was sent by God, and that everything is under his power. So he gets up from the table and takes his clothes off.

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.

Jesus tells his disciples he’ll always be with them. Then, instead of actually staying with them and establishing his perfect kingdom on earth and putting an end to evil, he promptly flies away from the world, leaving it to continue to suffer pointlessly. He said he’d come back “soon“, but it’s been thousands of years and he still hasn’t come back, so that was a lie, just like when he said he’d always be with them.

God talks to himself, which some people would say is something 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.

Jesus tells his followers that whenever they get arrested, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit will be there to tell them the right thing to say. He assures them that God will make them sound so wise that no one will be able to argue with them. But then when the Spirit does try to help the Christians decide what to say, it mostly just makes them groan and babble incoherently, causing people to think the Christians are out of their minds.

When a Christian named Stephen gets arrested, the Holy Spirit doesn’t advise him to explain that the accusations against him are false. Instead, Stephen pointlessly tells the Jewish religious leaders all about the biblical history of Israel, as if they didn’t already know about that, and then he insults and falsely accuses the Jews. Instead of giving Stephen anything helpful to say and getting him out of trouble, like Jesus promised, the Holy Spirit inspires him to say irrelevant and heretical things, until the Jews get mad and murder him.

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 starts to tell Noah that he doesn’t want people eating any animal blood. Then he suddenly shifts to talking about killing people. But he makes it sound like he’s still talking about the same thing. But he’s not.

God sarcastically asks Job if he knows where light and darkness live. He implies that to know that, Job would have to have been “already born“. He doesn’t explain when he thinks Job would have to have been born. Or what Job’s age has to do with whether he can know about something that’s happening right now.

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 claims to be against things like punishing children for what their parents did, yet that is exactly the kind of thing that God does all the time.

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 choosing kings, or he prefers 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.

When the Bible tells what God thinks of the morality of particular kings, God’s opinions don’t seem to have much to do with what those kings actually do. For example, Asa of Judah was a good king, according to God. Asa brutally oppressed his own people, led them to steal building materials from the king of Israel, and imprisoned people when they criticized him. He also took money from God’s treasury and used it to pay the king of Aram to fight against God’s people Israel.

Hezekiah was another king who did what was right in the eyes of the Lord. In fact, he is one of multiple kings who the Bible claims were each the most righteous king ever. So how righteous and godly was this Hezekiah? Well, he reformed the rules of the Passover holiday, because God’s original way of celebrating it was too inconvenient. He took all the gold and silver from God’s temple and used it to bribe the king of Assyria to not do God’s will. And when a prophet told him about the bad things that were going to happen to his descendants because of his foolish actions, Hezekiah said he didn’t care, since it wasn’t going to happen to him.

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 acts like he’s talking about a prediction he’s made or something, when the last statement he has made wasn’t a prediction. It was just that idolaters are ignorant. I don’t know what prediction he thinks he’s talking about.

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 approves when the people of Jerusalem free their Hebrew slaves, and disapproves when they take them back. But he seems pretty confused about what exactly he’s disapproving of. He thinks that if everyone doesn’t free all their Hebrew slaves right now, they’re somehow all breaking the law that says Hebrew slaves should be freed after six years of service. Which God misquotes as “every seventh year”.

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 asks who he has chosen to do his will. Then he starts asking who can challenge him, as if that was the same thing. Then he does the same thing again in the next chapter.

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 seems to think that if people are thriving, that’s a reason to have compassion on them.

God describes a city that’s being flooded as being “like a pool whose water is draining away“. Like draining is the problem.

The book of Zechariah starts with God apparently talking about Zechariah’s ancestors. But he randomly intersperses that with telling him to tell other people something, in a confusing way that makes it sound like he’s talking about those people’s ancestors. It would make more sense if he was talking about their ancestors, but that really doesn’t appear to be what’s happening, if you look closely. The parts about “your ancestors” are always outside of the quotes that indicate when something is part of a message to the people.

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??

God tells his people to return to him. He anticipates them asking how they can return… but then instead of answering, he asks his own unrelated question.

Jesus promises that those who follow him will not be excessively burdened. Then he requires people to do completely pointless and unreasonably unpleasant things, like letting criminals abuse them, and cutting off parts of their own bodies.

Jesus tells his disciples not to tell anyone who he really is. His reason for keeping it a secret is to fulfill a prophecy from Isaiah… which says nothing about keeping secrets.

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 a story he had been 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. This guy is not good at answering questions.

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.

Jesus thinks the least of his disciples is the greatest. And that’s why if they welcome some kid, they’re welcoming Jesus and God. I’m not sure what those things have to do with each other. Is he trying to get them to welcome that little kid to be a disciple, so the kid can be the least and the greatest disciple? And then Jesus and God would also become disciples of Jesus?

When asked for a sign, Jesus gets annoyed and declares that he’s not going to give anyone a sign… right after doing a miracle in front of thousands of people.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all seeds, which becomes a big tree. Even though mustard seeds are not the smallest seeds, and mustard plants are nothing like trees. What I’m getting from this is that Jesus has no idea what the kingdom of heaven is like.

Jesus tells a parable that seems to be encouraging people to trick God into selling them the gift of God for less than it’s worth. Even though the Bible says you can’t buy the gift of God with money at all.

Jesus tells another parable, and claims that the point is that you should keep watch. Even though nothing bad happened to half the people in that story who failed to keep watch.

Jesus starts telling a parable in order to explain what he thinks the word “neighbor” means, and what “love your neighbor” therefore means. But by the time he gets to the end of the story and to the part about who was a “neighbor”, he’s forgotten where he was going with that. So he just concludes that you should act like the neighborly character. But his actual point, judging by what prompted him to start telling that story in the first place, was going to be that you don’t need to love people who don’t do good things for you.

Jesus tells a parable where God kills a man for storing up a lot of wealth, because he thinks people who do that can’t possibly be godly. Despite the fact that Hezekiah stored up a lot of wealth, and was very godly.7

Then Jesus has a story about another rich man, who is inexplicably pleased when the manager he employs tries to cheat him out of what people owe him. The manager tells people to just pretend they owe the rich man less than they really do, and the manager will go along with it. The manager is just trying to get those debtors to like him by doing this, but somehow the rich man approves too. I have no idea how to explain that, except to say that Jesus is a very confused person who has no idea how normal people actually think.

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 believers8 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.

Stupidity

Continue reading God must be crazy →
Share this post:

Did Israel have peace throughout Solomon’s reign?

Contradictions,

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? →
Share this post:

The Story of the Circum-Schism—
Paul Hijacks Christianity

Bible stories, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Ignorant outsider declares himself the authority on Christianity

When a man named Paul (also known as Saul) saw that Stephen had been killed, he approved. With the high priest’s permission, Paul started beating, imprisoning, and killing all the Christians he could find.

But then, while Paul was going from Jerusalem to Damascus, Jesus blinded him with a flash of light from heaven, and then sent a Christian from Damascus to un-blind him. Paul had a change of heart, but he just couldn’t make himself stop sinning.

Paul spent several days with the Christians in Damascus, during which he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from them. Then he suddenly started proclaiming that Jesus was the son of God, which confused everyone.

The Jews in Damascus wanted to kill Paul now that he was promoting Christianity. But he escaped back to Jerusalem, and tried to join the Christians there. At first they didn’t believe that their enemy was really a Christian now, but someone convinced them.

But then the Jews there tried to kill him too. So Paul went away and started preaching his own foolish message of Christianity to the world. People thought he was insane. Paul preached only to foreigners, who weren’t familiar with Jesus and so had no preconceived ideas of what he was actually like. Paul and his companions suggested that they might harm people who didn’t do what he thought God wanted. And the terrified foreigners complied.

Three years later, Paul went to Jerusalem briefly and met the Christians there for the first time, again. The apostle Peter (also known as Simon or Cephas) also started preaching Christianity to Gentiles, which the other Christians of Judea thought was wrong. They thought only Jews could be Christians. But Peter said he had had a dream that God told him to eat animals that were forbidden by God’s law. Therefore, it must be okay for Gentiles to be Christians.

Paul briefly questions the reliability of his knowledge about Jesus

Over a decade later, Paul heard that Christians from Judea were teaching Gentiles that they couldn’t be saved unless they were circumcised. Paul, having never actually met Jesus nor learned the original church’s doctrine, had been teaching something quite different. He had taught his followers that Jesus had made all those useless old Jewish laws obsolete. Especially circumcision.

So Paul decided to go to Jerusalem again, to talk with the apostles and make sure he was getting the message right. He found that, contrary to what he thought the spirit of Jesus had revealed to him, the original Christian church believed that all Christians had to follow all the Jewish laws, including circumcision. Peter, who tended to say foolish things, discussed the matter with Paul, who he thought was awfully hard to understand. They seemed to come to an agreement, but that didn’t last long.

The apostles sent Paul out with a letter telling the Gentile Christians that they only had to follow a few Jewish laws. But Paul really didn’t think even Jews needed to follow even those laws. He sometimes pretended to think people were still under the law though, in order to be more convincing to people who thought that way.

The original Christians attempt to debunk Paul’s misinformation

Then Jesus’s brother James convinced Peter and the rest of the Jewish Christian church and even Paul’s companion Barnabas that Gentile Christians did indeed have to live like Jews. Paul opposed them and called them hypocrites.

The Jewish Christian church in Jerusalem sent out their own missionaries to the foreign churches Paul had founded, teaching them their version of Christianity, which Paul disagreed with. They taught Paul’s followers that they had to obey the Jewish laws, including circumcision. They pointed out that they were Jesus’s own chosen apostles, and Paul was not. Some members of Paul’s churches started turning away from Paul and his comrade Apollos, and started following Peter.

So Paul started writing his followers defensive letters, proclaiming himself to be an apostle. He insulted and demonized the “other” apostles, insisting that they weren’t any better than him, and he didn’t need their opinions.

Paul’s insistence on lawlessness gets him arrested

Continue reading The Story of the Circum-Schism—
Paul Hijacks Christianity →
Share this post: