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Things atheists get wrong

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I used to think atheists were smart. Then I visited an atheist social media community.

People were posting all kinds of unbelieverably stupid things in there, like “Why should I have to disprove the existence of your God when you haven’t proven it in the first place?” Do these people really think that the only time something can be proven false is if it has already been proven true? Or do they not know what the word “disprove” means? Or are they just not putting any thought into what they’re saying?

Anyway, here are some things I wish my fellow atheists would stop getting wrong.

Taking the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s name in vain

I kinda hate it when people miss the point of a clever idea or joke, but start repeating it all the time anyway, until other people start getting tired of it, and they’re not even using it in the way that originally made it actually clever or funny.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster was a clever idea when someone demanded that Pastafarianism be given equal time in schools, in order to make a point about creationism being taught in schools. It’s not so clever when you’re just using it as an example of something that would be absurd to believe in, or when you’re just using it as a silly name for God, or when you’re just pretending to be religious for no reason.

“The Israelites made up the story of Lot and his daughters to make their enemies look bad.”

I doubt it. The Bible does claim that the Moabites and Ammonites had an incestuous origin, but it also says the Israelites themselves had incestuous origins. Abraham’s wife was his sister, to name just one example of incest in the history of Israel according to the Bible. Were they trying to make themselves look bad too?

“The Bible has two contradictory versions of the loaves and fishes miracle story.”

The Bible is full of contradictions, but this is not one of them. The two loaves and fishes stories are meant to be about two different events. You can tell because after both of those events happen (in the same gospel), Jesus mentions both of them having happened.

“The Bible is an arbitrary collection of books that were chosen by a vote at the Council of Nicea.“

So says The Da Vinci Code, but that story isn’t known for its historical accuracy. Learn about the real origins of the Bible. The Bible did come to be for a lot of ridiculous bad reasons as a result of mistaken beliefs, obviously flawed methods, and arbitrary decisions, but none of that involved a meeting that decided on the canon all at once.

“The Bible we have now is a translation of a translation of a translation, etc., so we don’t really know what the original said.”

It’s true that we don’t really know exactly what the original scriptures said, because the earliest manuscripts we have are not the earliest versions that ever existed. And it’s true that there have been some versions of the Bible that were made by going through at least two iterations of translation. But biblical manuscripts do still exist in the languages they were originally written in, and Bible translations are generally made by translating directly from those.

“The Bible gets the value of pi wrong.”

Not really. The value implied in the Bible isn’t exactly equal to pi, but neither is 3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067.1

How precise do you expect these measurements to be? The Bible doesn’t specify lengths in units shorter than a cubit all that often. If the circumference of a circle is 30 cubits, then the diameter, calculated using the correct value of pi and rounded to the nearest cubit, is 10 cubits. Which is what the Bible says it was. The numbers the Bible gives for this are a perfectly reasonable approximation.

“I don’t believe in things; I accept them, or I understand them.”

Some atheists seem to be averse to the word “believe”. There’s no good reason to be. The concept of “belief” is not limited to supernatural things. And accepting a statement is the same thing as believing it.

A belief is just a person’s mental representation or personal understanding of how things are. No matter what it’s about, and whether it successfully matches reality or not, it’s still a belief. People may be more likely to choose to use the word “believe” when they’re unsure about something,2 but believing something does not mean you’re unsure.3 Everything you know is also something you believe, because knowledge is a type of belief.

There is one good reason you might want to be careful about the “believe in” wording, though: To “believe in” something can mean believing something exists, but it can also sometimes mean having a favorable opinion of it. So if you think someone might plausibly misinterpret you in that way, then you might want to avoid using the words “believe in”.

“It doesn’t matter what you believe; that doesn’t change the facts.”

What you believe does matter, because what you believe influences what you do. If you say it doesn’t matter what you believe, you are saying that it’s okay to have wrong beliefs. That is not a clever way to respond to people who have wrong beliefs.

“Religious beliefs are so obviously absurd, there’s no way anyone actually believes that stuff.”

There are religious people who think the same thing about your views, that there’s no way you can really think there’s no God. You’re both wrong about that. There really are people who don’t think like you.

(Actually, I have seen some interesting arguments for thinking that religious people don’t really believe what they think they believe. But if you’re going to make that claim, you’d better have much better reasons for it than that their beliefs sound absurd to you.)

Plenty of things that sound absurd to some people are honestly believed by a lot of other people. And there are even a lot of things that sound absurd (especially if you don’t know much about them) but are actually true.

“You can’t reason theists out of their belief if they didn’t reason themselves into it in the first place.”

Of course you can. Plenty of people have stopped believing things because of logical arguments, regardless of whether logical arguments were involved in the original formation of their beliefs.4

And if you really don’t think we should be trying to convince people with logical arguments, I’d like to know how you think we should deal with them. Are you saying we should use illogical arguments, and convince people to have beliefs that they won’t have any good reasons for believing? Are you saying we should use psychological manipulation and trick them into changing their views? Are you saying we should give up on reason and use force instead? Are you saying we should just let people keep being wrong?

Stop it. Reason is the best option, and you should not be saying things like this, that discourage people from using it. Stop making excuses for not engaging with people you disagree with. Refusing to debate is not going to help reduce the amount of false beliefs people have. If you find that your arguments are ineffective, maybe you just need to learn how to argue more effectively.

“Most people believe in God for non-rational reasons.”

A poll asking people why they believe in God found that while most people think that other people believe for entirely non-rational reasons, about half or more of respondents said their reason for believing in God was based on some kind of evidence. I’d say their evidence isn’t very good evidence, but they do at least believe for evidence-based reasons, as opposed to something like faith or comfort or upbringing.

And most people do value rationality, even if they may not have successfully applied it to all of their beliefs. I think it’s important not to falsely label people as uninterested in reason. That’s just another lame excuse for not reasoning with them.

“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 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.

“The story of Jesus is copied from earlier stories about gods like Horus, who were said to have been born of a virgin under a star in the east, been subject to assassination attempts as babies, fasted for 40 days, had 12 disciples, performed the same miracles, been resurrected after three days, etc.”

If you actually read the stories of those gods from sources written before the New Testament, you will not find most of these alleged parallels. The story of Horus’s birth, for example, is that he was born after his mother had sex with her brother who she had reassembled after he was killed and dismembered by another of her brothers. Doesn’t sound anything like the story of Jesus, does it?

“Hitler was a Christian.”

Maybe, but the evidence is pretty unclear. He did sometimes claim to be a Christian. He also sometimes said he wanted to destroy Christianity. He also denied that he was against Christianity. But maybe that was just because openly opposing Christianity would cost him too many supporters. Or maybe he changed his mind. Or maybe he believed in an unusual version of Christianity that he recognized should probably not really count as Christianity. Whatever he was, he does seem clearly to have been against atheism, though.

“We are all atheists regarding most gods. Some of us just go one god further.”

We are all nonbelievers in most gods. We are not all atheists. People who believe in one God are monotheists, not atheists.

“When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.”

Not necessarily. Not everyone rejects other religions for the same reasons. Sometimes the reason religious people reject other gods is that their religion tells them there’s only one God. Knowing that is not going to help them understand why you reject theirs.

“Historical dates should be written with the religiously neutral terms BCE and CE, not BC and AD.”

Jesus is the only reason we count years starting from around 2000 years ago. No matter which terms we use for it, we are still using a Christian calendar. So why pretend we’re not? If you’re not going to actually invent a new and improved calendar system with an objectively better starting point and convince everyone to use it, just admit that we are all using a Christian calendar. Dishonestly calling something by a different name doesn’t change what it is.

If we’re not going to insist on renaming the days of the week just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, and renaming the months of the year just because we don’t believe in the gods they’re named after, then we don’t need to change the terms BC and AD just because we don’t believe in the god those are named after. Just use BC and AD. They’re easier to tell apart than BCE and CE.

“Morality can be explained by evolution.”

Not exactly. Evolution may be a good explanation of how we came to have some of the inclinations we have that happen to align with morality, but evolution can’t be what defines morality, for reasons similar to some of the same reasons that God can’t be what defines morality.

Did we evolve to be inclined toward certain behaviors because those behaviors are good? Then goodness is something that exists apart from evolution, and is not fully explained by it. And anyway, that’s not how evolution works. Evolution doesn’t have goals like that.

Or are good behaviors good just because that’s what we evolved to do? No, that would mean that any behavior resulting from evolution would have to be good. But that’s not true. Evolution also produce behaviors that are not morally good. Sometimes it produces behaviors so wildly opposed to morality that it would never occur to humans to do such things. Unless you want to argue that every behavior that occurs in nature is actually good, because it comes from evolution, you shouldn’t be claiming that evolution is where morality comes from.

“Galileo was punished by the anti-science Church for disagreeing with their dogma that the Earth was the center of the universe.”

The Church was wrong to censor and punish Galileo for what he said, but this was not a science vs religion thing. The Church was open to new scientific discoveries, and had been for centuries, as long as there was actually strong evidence for them. But as of Galileo’s time, there was nothing particularly scientific about rejecting geocentrism.

The Church was very supportive of Galileo, until he started saying the scriptures should be reinterpreted to conform to his unproven pet hypothesis. They didn’t object to heliocentrism because it was heretical; they objected to it because there wasn’t enough evidence for it yet.5

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.

“When an apologist says you need to be more knowledgeable about theology before you can reasonably argue that God doesn’t exist, that’s like if the emperor’s courtier replied to the assertion that the emperor’s new clothes don’t exist by saying by saying that the child didn’t have enough expertise on invisible fabrics to be qualified to make that judgment. If the thing in question doesn’t even exist, then there’s nothing to study, and any attempt at a sophisticated analysis of the topic would inevitably be meaningless and pointless.”

You may not need to be an expert on something before you can prove that it doesn’t exist, but you do need to at least know enough to know what you’re talking about. Otherwise, for all you know, you’re more like a kid who says the emperor has no clothes… because the kid mistakenly thinks the word “clothes” means “antlers”.

If the version of God you’re disproving is not what believers actually mean by “God”, or if the version of an argument you’re refuting is not an accurate representation of the argument that believers actually make, then you do indeed need to learn more about what they believe before you can say anything that will actually be relevant to their beliefs. You do need to know enough to know what people actually believe, or else you’ll just be attacking a straw man. You can’t meaningfully argue against a claim unless you have an accurate idea of what the claim is.

Imagine a creationist dismissing a defense of evolution as a “courtier’s reply”:

“When I say evolution doesn’t exist, the evolutionist will say I don’t even know what evolution is, that I don’t have enough expertise on biology to be qualified to judge whether evolution makes sense.

“This is like if a courtier replied to the assertion that the emperor’s new clothes don’t exist by saying the skeptic doesn’t have enough expertise on invisible fabrics to be qualified to make that judgment.

“If the thing in question doesn’t even exist, then there’s nothing to study, and any attempt at a sophisticated analysis of the topic would inevitably be meaningless and pointless.”

Do you still think that’s a good argument? It’s not, no matter who’s making it. You can’t dismiss an objection to your argument on the grounds that it doesn’t matter because the thing you’re arguing about doesn’t exist anyway. The nonexistence of God is a possible conclusion we’re trying to evaluate, not a premise that we can start with. You have to resolve all the potential flaws in your disproof of God first. Until you’ve done that, you haven’t actually established that God doesn’t exist, which means you can’t use that as a premise for any further reasoning.

When people say you’re wrong because you’re not an expert, are you sure they’re even saying that’s how you’re wrong? Maybe what they’re saying is not that “because you’re not an expert, it inherently logically follows that you’re automatically wrong”. Maybe they’re saying you’re wrong, and then they’re additionally suggesting that the fact that you’re not an expert could explain what caused you to be wrong. Showing how you’re wrong is something else, that they can do separately. If all you’re refuting is the assertion that you’re not an expert, you’re not actually addressing what they think you’re getting wrong.

By the way, the courtier analogy doesn’t actually fit the situation that it was originally used to describe. The term “courtier’s reply” was first used to refer to theists who said Richard Dawkins should have done more research on theistic beliefs and arguments before writing a book attempting to refute them. Those theists weren’t saying Dawkins needed to be an expert before he personally could disbelieve in God. They were saying he really should have done more research before writing a book trying to convince people that God doesn’t exist.

“If you can’t explain where God came from, God is useless as an explanation for anything else.”

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God must be crazy

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Random, impulsive, and pointless acts of God

God teams up with Satan to torment Job, the most righteous and godly person in the world, 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, 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 warns Laban in a dream that he supposedly needs to “be careful not to say anything to Jacob, either good or bad”. Laban then completely ignores this pointless command, with no consequences.

God talks about God in the third person, then apparently realizes that’s kind of confusing, and feels the need to clarify that he wasn’t talking about some other God.

God chooses Moses to be the one to speak to Pharaoh about letting his people go. But then God decides to let Moses’s brother Aaron do the actual speaking, while Moses tells Aaron what to say, and God tells Moses what to tell Aaron to say. Why does Moses need to be involved at all, then? Just because God can’t admit that he was wrong to choose Moses? He’s making Moses into a pointless middleman. (But Moses still gets all the credit as the leader, for some reason.)

When some of the people of Israel ignore God’s instructions, God gets mad at Moses and acts like he’s the one disobeying.

God apparently decided to help his chosen people in battle only when Moses had his hands up in the air.

In the story of the Golden Calf, God communicates with the Israelites through Moses incredibly inefficiently, making Moses go up and down the mountain way more times than necessary. Good thing Moses can teleport. Apparently.

God’s Ten Commandments include a rule against making images of anything. Apparently God hates art.

God’s law says it’s okay to kill a thief who breaks into your house, but only if you do it at night.

God thinks there is somehow “guilt involved” in giving him gifts, which could potentially make those gifts unacceptable. But as long as Aaron is wearing a “holy to the Lord” label on his forehead, it’s okay. 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.

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…

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, 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?

Saul makes an offering to God to make sure he has God’s favor. Then Samuel comes and tells him that God has rejected him as king, for supposedly breaking some command. I have no idea what command Saul is supposed to have broken by making an offering to God.

David says he has heard two things, even though God only spoke one thing. He says what the two things were, and neither of them make any sense for God to say. Apparently God talks to himself and reassures himself about how powerful and just and loving he is.

David also says God announced that he has a dove with gold and silver on its feathers while people sleep among sheep pens.

Solomon claims that the results of casting lots are actually controlled by God. If he’s right, that would mean that God’s decisions are so completely random that they’re indistinguishable from the results of a random decision generator.

God sends down fire to kill a hundred men because their leaders tried to tell a prophet what to do. He sends bears to kill a bunch of little boys for making fun of a bald prophet. And he gets someone trampled to death for doubting the bald prophet’s prediction.

God has a day of crying out to the mountains.

God makes people… queef? Painfully?

In the middle of talking about his plans for mass destruction, God randomly says he’s crying out and gasping and panting like a woman in childbirth.

God says someone is going to wear her children as ornaments, because he thinks that’s what brides do.

The first vision God shows his prophet Jeremiah is an almond tree branch, which has no purpose other than to make an opportunity for God to make a pun.

God makes Jeremiah buy a belt, bury it, and dig it back up only when it has become ruined and useless. The only purpose of this is so Jeremiah will have a comparison to make when he talks about God’s plans to make his people “ruined and useless”. But that won’t be very meaningful to the people he’s talking to, since they didn’t experience the thing with the belt.

God makes Ezekiel do all kinds of outrageous and silly and unpleasant things that are completely unnecessary. He starts by confusing Ezekiel with a vision of bizarre otherworldly creatures when he’s not even a prophet yet, which God never explains and which seems to have no purpose. Then he tells him he has to go prophesy to Israel, though God doubts they’re going to listen to him. And then the first thing God requires Ezekiel to actually do is eat a scroll.

Next, God makes Ezekiel besiege a drawing of Jerusalem. Then he ties Ezekiel up, and makes him lie on his left side for 390 days, and on his right side for 40 days. And even though he’s tied up, God expects Ezekiel to somehow still be besieging his drawing. He also expects him to bake bread over burning poop and eat it, while he’s tied up.6 And he instructs Ezekiel to be afraid while he eats and drinks. That’s not how emotion works, God. You can’t just tell people how to feel.

God makes Ezekiel shave with a sword, then burn some of the hair, and attack some of it with the sword. And he says he’s going to punish his people by shaving them. Then he tells Ezekiel to talk to the mountains, more than once. (He makes Micah talk to mountains too.)

God tells Hosea to name his daughter “Not Loved”. This God sucks at picking names.

God wishes for God to rebuke Satan. Why doesn’t he just rebuke Satan, instead of talking about himself in the third person like that?

God says he’s setting a stone with seven eyes in front of a priest who is apparently the branch that he’s talking to the priest about as if the branch isn’t there yet and which will supposedly also be a king.

God threatens to curse the priests’ blessings. And then he says he’s already done it, without giving them any time to do anything about it, so what was the point of the threat?

The Bible says Jesus is God, so of course Jesus is crazy too. His own family thinks so.

John the Baptist baptized people by immersing them in water, but he said he was just preparing the way for Jesus, who would baptize people with fire.

John thinks Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around. Which makes sense if Jesus is indeed God, since he wouldn’t need anything done to him that baptism supposed to do for people. Baptizing God would be pointless. But Jesus insists on getting baptized anyway. I don’t know what that’s supposed to accomplish, unless it’s to show that Jesus is not God.

Jesus asks what reward you’ll get if you only love those who love you. You’ll get love, duh. But what kind of person thinks you need a reward for loving?

Jesus says the crowds don’t need to go away, even though it’s getting late. Then after he feeds the crowds (who were going to go eat anyway), he immediately sends them away. Sounds more like they didn’t need to stay.

When a man begs Jesus to drive the demon out of his son, Jesus’s response is to randomly start insulting his generation.

Jesus says that when he returns, some people will be “taken” and others left. But when his disciples ask where those people will be taken, Jesus tells them where vultures gather, instead of answering the question. As a result of Jesus failing to answer that question, a lot of people now mistakenly think he was saying that some people will be “raptured” to heaven.

Jesus asks a woman for a drink, when what he really wants is for her to ask him for a drink.

When Jesus is expecting to be betrayed soon, he tells his disciples they need to sell their cloaks so they can buy swords. But then when one of them tries to use his sword to defend Jesus, Jesus seems to disapprove of them using swords at all. So why did he tell them to buy swords?

When the elders ask Jesus if he’s the Messiah, Jesus responds that if he asked them, they wouldn’t answer. Because they don’t know the answer, because he hasn’t told them. But he seems to think the fact that they wouldn’t have answered means he doesn’t have to answer. Even though the reason for them not answering obviously doesn’t apply to him.

The reason God loves Jesus is that he got himself killed and then came back to life. That’s a pretty weird reason to love someone. If Jesus hadn’t died, or if he had died by accident, or if he had stayed dead, God wouldn’t love him.

Jesus wants to indicate how Peter is going to die, so he says a bunch of confusing stuff about getting dressed and going places and feeding sheep, which doesn’t make it at all clear how Peter is going to die.

God talks to himself, which some people would say only crazy people do. I don’t think that’s right, but would a sane person talk to himself indirectly by telling other people to talk to him, and then telling them what to say to him because they don’t know what to say to him, but then the things he tells them to say to him are just wordless groans?

God makes Christians seem crazy too, by getting them to say things that make no sense to anyone else. He goes further and gives them the completely pointless “gift” of talking completely unintelligibly so that no one has any idea what they’re trying to say, including themselves, which makes everyone think they’re crazy.

God sends Paul and his colleagues with God to talk to God.

God is going to present undead people to himself.

The book of Hebrews claims that God said a bunch of stuff about himself in the third person, for some reason.

Revelation predicts that Jesus is going to come with a double-edged sword sticking out of his mouth, so he can fight people using the sword of his mouth.

Jesus is going to angrily trample the world’s grapes (either that or he’s murdering trillions of people) in a big winepress, causing a massive flood of blood.

God is going to invite all the birds to eat all the people.

Forgetful, confused, and delusional

God threatens Egypt with plagues that will kill some of their livestock… after he’s already sent a plague that killed all the livestock of Egypt.

For the Passover ritual, God says you have to use a lamb, but you can take it from either your sheep or your goats.

God likes to describe himself as compassionate, forgiving, and slow to anger, even though he is constantly getting angry and killing people over nothing. And when God decides to punish people, a lot of the time he ends up punishing the wrong people for some reason.

God’s law says if a man has lost his hair and is bald, and he has a certain kind of sore on his bald head, then the bald man has to let his hair be unkempt.

God punished the land of Canaan. He didn’t just punish the people there, who were having sex with animals and stuff. He specifically says he also punished the land, for the land’s sin.

God demands that his people love him with all their heart and soul and strength. That is not how love works. You can’t just tell people to love you.

God says when you attack a city, you shouldn’t cut down its fruit trees, because they’re not people. Because there’s no point in doing something if it doesn’t involve killing people. Then he says you can cut down the non-fruit trees. Because those trees are people, I guess.

God is apparently so worthless that he has worthless inanimate objects for rivals, and he’s very insecure about it.

According to Solomon, God told David that since the day his people left Egypt, he had never chosen anyone to be ruler over Israel. That’s obviously not true, since the person God was talking to was someone God had chosen to be ruler over Israel. And he wasn’t even the first one.

God tells Elijah to go out and stand on a mountain. When Elijah does, God asks him what he’s doing there, apparently having already forgotten what he had just told Elijah to do.

God tells Isaiah that all these people are annoying him by bringing him meaningless offerings of dead animals. God asks who has asked this of them, apparently having forgotten that he has.

God wishes there were briers and thorns confronting him, so he could march against them in battle and set them all on fire. Or maybe let them make peace and come to him for refuge. Whichever.

God thinks of himself as a righteous savior, but his idea of righteousness and salvation doesn’t rule out letting everyone on earth die.

After describing his plans to poison his people, pursue them with a sword, kill their children, and ruin their cities, God describes himself as “the Lord, who exercises kindness“.

God says he intends to fulfill a promise that he has already fulfilled.

God implies that the children of the people he’s talking to are dead. Then he says their children will come back, acting like the only problem is that they’re in another country right now.

God says some particular houses will be filled with dead bodies, forgetting that he just said those houses have been torn down so the materials can be used for other things. Those houses can’t be filled with anything.

God tells people he will restore them to their land, when those people have never had to leave their land in the first place.

God calls Sodom Jerusalem’s “younger sister“, even though the Bible indicates that Sodom was destroyed about 700 years before the Israelites settled in Jerusalem, so Sodom is actually much older.

When God decides to turn against his chosen people and attack them and rip them open and devour them like a wild animal, he calls himself their “helper”.

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

God tells Zechariah to say that God says something that makes no sense for God to say. Something about having been sent by God. God wants us to know that God was sent by God?? Why does God keep saying he sent himself to deliver a message from himself?

God tells his people to plead with God to be gracious to “us”. So God is among the people God wants to punish? And he needs other people to intervene and try to convince him not to punish himself??

Jesus says anyone who does God’s will is his brother and his sister and his mother. And the Bible says Jesus did God’s will, therefore Jesus is Jesus’s brother and Jesus’s sister and Jesus’s mother. In addition to being his own father.

Because people think the kingdom of God is going to appear at once, Jesus tells a parable… which doesn’t address that issue at all.

Jesus thinks if people didn’t call him a king, stones would.

Jesus tends to ignore the questions he’s been asked, and respond by saying something barely relevant or completely unrelated instead. Jesus starts to answer a question about when everything will end. But he ends up just stating whether certain things will end. When people ask Jesus where his father is, instead of answering, he just tells them that they don’t know his father.

When Peter asks him who he’s talking to, it says “Jesus answered” …but he doesn’t actually answer the question. Jesus instead asks something about the story he was telling. That’s not an answer. And when Peter asks him where he’s going, he doesn’t answer that either. He just says his disciples can’t follow him there.

Jesus explains why he thinks he doesn’t need to wash his hands before he eats. Then he tells a couple of brief parables, or mixed metaphors, or something. These metaphors are to explain why it doesn’t matter that he offended the Pharisees with his opinions. But then when Peter asks him to “explain the parable”, Jesus instead goes back to trying to justify his opinions on hand washing. His response to Peter says nothing about the topics of those parables, or about parables at all. But he still acts like he thinks he’s “explaining the parable”.

Jesus says people shouldn’t be surprised by him claiming that they need to be born again. But instead of explaining himself when asked, he says something dumb about the wind.

Jesus gives his followers a new command: to love each other. That’s still not how love works. But Jesus thinks everyone will be able to tell who is a disciple of Jesus, by the fact that they love each other. Apparently he thinks his people are the only ones who do that.

Jesus wants his disciples to break and eat his body and drink his blood. He wants everyone to eat his flesh and drink his blood, because he thinks he’s bread. And don’t forget to drink his spirit, too.

God considers slaves to be free when they become Christians, and considers free people to be Jesus’s slaves when they become Christians.

Stupidity

Continue reading God must be crazy →
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The Story of the Circum-Schism—
Paul Hijacks Christianity

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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 →
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The Story of Queen Esther—
A Leisurely-Delivered Urgent Message

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An ineffective feminist, a beauty queen, and a genocidal anti-Semite

Xerxes king of Persia (the grandson of Cyrus) held a banquet. He showed off his vast wealth to his nobles and officials and subjects there. He wanted to show off his beautiful wife Vashti too, but she refused to come. The king consulted seven wise men, and they said he should divorce Vashti. That way, all the women in his kingdom wouldn’t think they could get away with disobeying their husbands. So he divorced her.

Now the king needed to find a new wife. So he had lots of beautiful young women from all over the kingdom brought into his harem, so he could try them out. After four years of this, the king found that a girl named Esther was the most attractive. And he made her his new queen.

King Xerxes’ top official was Haman, a descendant of Agag the Amalekite and enemy of the Jews. The king commanded everyone to kneel before Haman, but Esther’s cousin, Mordecai the Jew, refused to do so. This made Haman very angry. So he convinced the king to have all the Jews in the kingdom killed at the end of the year. The king was happy to issue this decree. (He didn’t realize that his wife Esther was Jewish, since she had never told him.)

Esther tries to waste her opportunities

When Mordecai heard about what was happening, he told Esther she should talk to her husband about it. But Esther said no one was allowed to approach the king without being summoned. Anyone who did was usually killed. And the king hadn’t called for her in a month. But Mordecai said if Esther didn’t go to the king, she would be killed anyway, because she was Jewish. So Esther decided to go ask the king for help.

The king was happy to see his beautiful wife, and decided not to kill her for entering his presence. He asked her what she wanted. But instead of telling him, she asked him and Haman to attend a banquet with her. At the banquet, the king asked Esther what she wanted again. But instead of telling him, she asked him and Haman to attend another banquet with her the next day.

Continue reading The Story of Queen Esther—
A Leisurely-Delivered Urgent Message →
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The Story of David and Bathsheba—
The Only Thing David Ever Did That God Didn't Approve of

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King David heard that Nahash, the Ammonite king who had wanted to gouge out the eyes of all the Israelites, had died. So David sent diplomats to tell Nahash’s successor how sorry David was that such a kind man had died. But the Ammonites assumed that David’s men must be spies plotting to overthrow them. So they sent the diplomats away half naked, and started a war with Israel. David stayed home while he had his commander Joab go out and lead Israel in fighting the Ammonites (which God had commanded them not to do).

David was walking around on the roof of his palace one night, when he saw a beautiful woman taking a bath. He learned that her name was Bathsheba, and that she was the wife of Uriah, one of David’s chief warriors, who was away fighting in the war. David had Bathsheba brought to the palace, had sex with her, and sent her back home.

Continue reading The Story of David and Bathsheba—
The Only Thing David Ever Did That God Didn’t Approve of →
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The Story of King Ish-Bosheth—
The One Where Nearly Everybody Gets Killed, But It's Not God's Doing for a Change

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After Saul and his whole family died, his dead son Ish-Bosheth succeeded him as king of Israel. But David was made king of the tribe of Judah. The commander of the army of Israel was Saul’s cousin Abner, and the commander of the army of Judah was David’s nephew Joab.

These commanders thought it would be fun to see some men stab each other to death. So they made two dozen of their soldiers stab each other to death. But Joab’s brother Asahel didn’t like that, so he chased Abner. Abner didn’t like that, so he stabbed Asahel to death. Joab didn’t like that, so he chased Abner, too. But then Abner suggested not chasing him. So Joab stopped chasing him.

King Ish-Bosheth offended his commander Abner by accusing him of sleeping with Saul’s girlfriend. So Abner decided to desert Ish-Bosheth and help David take over Israel. When Abner offered to help David become king of all Israel, David agreed to let him do that… but only if he did David a favor first.

By this time David had married at least four women. But Saul had taken back his daughter Michal, David’s first wife, and given her to somebody else. David had Abner steal Michal back for him and make her other husband go away. After doing that, Abner went off to convince the Israelites to make David their king.

But David’s commander Joab didn’t like Abner, who had killed Joab’s brother. Joab thought Abner must have only come there to spy on David for Ish-Bosheth. So Joab found Abner and stabbed him to death. David didn’t like that (even though he had previously declared that Abner must die). So David put a curse on Joab’s family, and later had his son kill Joab.

Continue reading The Story of King Ish-Bosheth—
The One Where Nearly Everybody Gets Killed, But It’s Not God’s Doing for a Change →
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Mistranslations in the Bible

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A lot of things you’ll see in English translations of the Bible are translated to say what the translators thought the Bible should say (or what the people buying Bibles think it should say), rather than what it actually says in the text they’re translating from.7

Usually when I write about the Bible, I just go by what it says in the version that’s the default option on Bible Gateway. That’s not a particularly accurate translation, but even after they’ve mistranslated away a lot of the things that would make it too obvious how flawed the Bible is, it’s still full of outrageous and absurd things. But now let’s look at some of the things the Bible really says…

The English word “heart”, when used metaphorically, refers to a person’s emotions, in contrast to rational thought. But the Hebrew and Greek words for “heart” were used to mean the entire mind, not just emotions, so translating them as the metaphorical English “heart” is misleading.

The Bible isn’t exactly using “heart” metaphorically, though. Like most people in ancient times, the writers of the Bible believed that people literally thought with their hearts. And their kidneys. Seriously, the Bible talks about the kidneys as if that’s where the mind was located, just like it does with the heart. Have you read the Bible and never noticed that? That’s because English versions of the Bible nearly always either mistranslate the word for kidneys as something like “mind”, or use “reins” (an obscure word for kidneys), so it won’t sound so silly.8

Some translations change the lists of Shem’s sons and Eliphaz’s sons in 1 Chronicles to say that not all of them were the sons of those guys, so you’ll think those parts don’t contradict Genesis.

In the Hebrew text, Abraham clearly says that gods have caused him to wander, and Laban clearly says the gods of Abraham as well as the gods of Nahor can judge between Laban and Jacob. But almost all English translations, being made by monotheists, change it so they say those things about God instead.

A lot of translations change Laban from being Nahor’s son to being his grandson, so you won’t notice the contradiction between that and the part that says he was Bethuel’s son.

The Bible says the Passover sacrifice should be made when the sun goes down, at the same time of day the Israelites left Egypt. But since the Bible also says they left Egypt after midnight, some versions hide the contradiction by just saying the sacrifice should be made at the same time of year.

The Hebrew text has the Israelites singing about how they’ve conquered the peoples of Canaan and settled in their land… before that has even happened. A lot of versions of the Bible mistranslate away this anachronism, and have them instead sing about what will happen.

The Bible says the punishment for causing a miscarriage is merely to pay a fine, as opposed to the death penalty that it requires for killing a person. That doesn’t fit very well with pro-life beliefs, so after the abortion controversy got started, some versions of the Bible started saying this was about making a woman “give birth prematurely” instead.

Moses said God taught his people that you can live on whatever God says you can live on (which in that case was manna). But this is almost always mistranslated to make it sound like he’s saying you can live on God’s words themselves, instead of living on what God’s words are referring to.

Why did the translators change this statement into something that makes less sense than what it really says? Probably because the only other way to make it match the way Jesus quoted it would be to pretend that Jesus had quoted it correctly, which would make what Jesus says make even less sense than what Jesus actually said.

Most English translations change the verse that tells the gods to praise God’s people, pretending it’s just telling the nations to rejoice with God’s people.

Joshua recounts the time Balak king of Moab fought against Israel… Except according to other parts of the Bible, he never actually did that. So some versions of the Bible change it so Joshua just says Balak prepared to fight against Israel.

The book of Judges mentions Hobab being Moses’s father-in-law, but some versions change it to say he’s his brother-in-law. I guess they thought Moses already had enough fathers-in-law.

All the earliest manuscripts that have been found say Goliath was less than seven feet tall, but almost all English versions of the Bible continue the tradition of saying he was over nine feet tall. Even versions that were made recently enough that the translators should have known better.

There’s a verse in 2 Samuel about how many enemy men David captured that’s translated several quite different ways in different versions. It doesn’t seem to agree with what 1 Chronicles says about the same thing, so some versions just replace it with what 1 Chronicles says.

Some versions of 2 Samuel call someone an Ishmaelite to make it agree with 1 Chronicles, rather than making it agree with any of the Hebrew manuscripts of Samuel that they’re supposed to be translating from, which say he was an Israelite.

There’s a passage that, in almost all the manuscripts it’s translated from, says David killed his own stepchildren, the sons of his wife Michal. But the translators of the majority of the English versions apparently found that too inconsistent or otherwise objectionable, so they decided to say David killed the sons of Merab, Michal’s sister who David didn’t marry.

Some versions of the Bible say Elhanan killed the brother of Goliath, even though the actual source texts don’t say anything about a brother. All it really says is that Elhanan killed Goliath. But everybody knows it was somebody else that did that, so the translators had to make it say something else.

The Hebrew text of 2 Samuel says one of the punishment options David was offered was seven years of famine, but some translations change it to three years, so it won’t contradict 1 Chronicles.

Psalm 8 says humans are just a little lower than God, but some translations instead say we’re a little lower than the angels. They’ve changed it to make it match what the New Testament says when it quotes a mistranslation of the Old Testament, rather than making it match the original Hebrew.

Some Christians say Psalm 22 contains a prediction of Jesus’s hands and feet being pierced when he was crucified, but that’s a mistranslation. It doesn’t even say “pierce” in the Hebrew Bible, but that’s how the early Christians happened to interpret it at one point when they made a translation of a translation of that psalm. And since that came out looking so much like a prediction of Jesus, Christians have always opted to translate it that way since then.

In Psalm 51, David says he was conceived, formed, and/or born in sin, which is ambiguous. It could mean his parents sinned in some way when they conceived him. But some English versions of the Bible, versions that want to promote the nonsensical and unjust idea of inherited original sin, translate it to say that David was a sinner all the way back then. And other versions leave it ambiguous.

Some versions have 1 Kings say Solomon had 4000 stalls for his chariot horses, just so it will match what 2 Chronicles says, even though 1 Kings actually says he had 40,000. Most English translations also change the amount of wheat he gave Hiram, for the same reason.

The Bible says humans are animals, but some translators didn’t like that idea for some reason, so they changed it to just say humans are like animals.

There’s a verse where Solomon is obviously talking about his lover’s vulva, but almost all English translations change it so he instead says the same things about her navel, her hips, her belly, her thighs, her waist, or her body in general, which doesn’t make much sense that way. Only a few versions even get close to what it should say.

A lot of translations change the part that says Maakah daughter of Abishalom was Asa’s mother, and instead make it say she was his grandmother. Which she was, apparently, but that’s not what it’s supposed to say. I guess the translators just didn’t like the fact that the Bible seems to be saying Asa’s father had sex with his own mother, so they changed it.

All the Hebrew manuscripts say in 2 Chronicles that Ahaziah became king at age 42, making him older than his own father. But most English versions change it to 22, to make it match 2 Kings, even though it doesn’t.

Most English versions mistranslate away (in one way or another) the absurd part where Isaiah says that after an angel slaughtered thousands of Assyrian men, those men woke up in the morning and noticed they were dead.

Even though almost all existing Hebrew manuscripts say in 2 Chronicles that Jehoiachin became king at age 8, some English versions say he was 18, just because the translators didn’t want 2 Chronicles to contradict 2 Kings, even though it in fact does.

2 Chronicles says Zedekiah was Jehoiachin’s brother, but some translations change it to say he was his uncle, because that’s what it says in 2 Kings.

Some of the gospels claim that Jesus came from a virgin birth, and that the prophet Isaiah had predicted that would happen. But Isaiah never actually said anything about a virgin giving birth. It looks like what actually happened is that the gospel writers got that idea from a previous mistranslation of the scriptures.

If Isaiah had actually intended to predict a miraculous virgin birth, he would have made that clear by using the Hebrew word that specifically means a virgin. Instead, he used a Hebrew word for a young woman, which was later mistranslated as meaning a virgin.

This mistranslation first occurred a few hundred years after Isaiah and a few hundred years before Jesus, in the first-ever translation of the Bible. The Jews were starting to forget how to speak Hebrew, and had to translate their scriptures into Greek. Now, since the New Testament needs the Old Testament to provide a prediction of a virgin birth for Jesus to fulfill, most Christian Bibles opt to translate that part of Isaiah from the Greek mistranslation instead of from the original Hebrew.

Christian Bibles mistranslate another of Isaiah’s prophecies to make it sound like the human king he’s talking about is to be called God. It was probably originally either just saying what God would call the king, or saying a name that contains a reference to God, as plenty of other biblical names do.

Isaiah predicted that satyrs would live in the ruins of Babylon and Edom, but satyrs aren’t real, so most English translations change it so it just says goats will live there.

Isaiah said God would speak with either stammering or mocking lips. But in the New Testament, Paul misquotes that as foreign lips, so now a lot of versions mistranslate it that way in Isaiah, too, so you won’t notice Paul misquoting it.

Isaiah also predicted that the Egyptians will be “like women”. (Meaning the ones who aren’t actually women, I guess?) And then he explained how they would be like women. But a few translations skip the woman simile, and change that word so it just says the Egyptians will be weak, or weaklings. Which probably isn’t even what the simile actually meant.

Jeremiah and Nahum, though, do seem to simply use “women” to mean “weak”. So a few translations again change it so it just says the men are weak, or weaklings, so you won’t know the Bible is using “women” as an insult.

The word “Messiah”, besides meaning a specific prophesied savior of some kind, can also refer to any “anointed king”, or even to “anointed” people and things more generally. But Christian Bibles always translate the parts of the Hebrew Bible that Christians think are about Jesus as “Messiah” (or occasionally as a capitalized “Anointed One”), and translate all the other uses of the same word in other ways.

Some versions make it sound like the anointed ruler and the anointed one in Daniel 9 are both Jesus, even though they were probably not even supposed to be the same person, and the anointed ruler is clearly not on God’s side. Some versions also make it awkwardly say it will be 7 “sevens” and 62 “sevens” before that ruler comes, even though the 62 “sevens” were probably meant to be after the the ruler comes. But translating these things correctly would have made it even more obvious that this chapter isn’t about Jesus.

In Esther, when the king of Persia gives the Jews permission to kill all their enemies, he says they can also kill their enemies’ women and children. Some translations completely change this to make it sound like only the Jewish women and children are in danger. And other versions make it ambiguous so you can’t tell which of those things it’s saying.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego’s response to being sentenced to be thrown into the furnace is ambiguous: They’re either questioning whether God is capable of rescuing them, or questioning whether God exists at all. But a lot of people disagree with the Bible’s implication here, so a lot of translations change this to make it sound like they’re not questioning God at all.

In Hosea, God states that he is from Egypt. A lot of translators didn’t like that idea, so they changed it to make it sound like he was talking about the Israelites having come from Egypt.

The gospel of Luke says Jesus was born during a census while Quirinius was governor of Syria, which is incompatible with what Matthew says about when that happened. So a couple of translations change it so Luke says it happened during a census before the one when Quirinius was governor of Syria.

Most English Bibles, being translated by people who are used to the idea of worshiping Jesus, tend to mistranslate scenes where people bow to Jesus, and have those people actually worship him. They even claim that the Magi worshiped baby Jesus, even though the original merely says they bowed and honored him. There’s no reason to think these Zoroastrians would suddenly decide to worship someone other than their god Ahura Mazda.

The gospels often wrongly refer to the “Sea of Galilee” as “the sea”, even though it’s actually just a small lake. So some translations change that and call it “the lake” instead, even though that’s not what the Bible actually says, and even though the way the story portrays it is unrealistic for a small lake.

There’s a verse in the gospel of Mark where Jesus goes to the region of Judea beyond the Jordan, even though no such region exists, and he would be going out of Judea if he crossed the Jordan. So most English translations change it so he goes to the region of Judea, and then crosses the Jordan.

There’s a verse in the gospel of John where Jesus goes into the land of Judea, even though he he was already in the capital of Judea. That doesn’t make sense, so some versions mistranslate that verse to say he went into the countryside of Judea. Those versions translate the word for “country” correctly everywhere except that one verse.

Another verse in John is usually translated as saying the Spirit “had not been given” yet. A more accurate translation would be that there was no Spirit.

When Pilate asked Jesus if he was the king of the Jews, Jesus avoided answering, and instead falsely accused Pilate of saying Jesus was the king of the Jews. For some reason, some translations change it so Jesus treasonously states that he is the king of the Jews, even though the Bible says he was not willing to be their king.

The gospel of John says Barabbas was a robber, but some versions change it to say he was a revolutionary, so you won’t notice that John doesn’t actually say the same thing as the other gospels.

John has Jesus tell his disciples that he will no longer call them servants, only friends. Later, it has him call to his disciples using a word that can refer to slaves, so some versions change that and have him call them friends instead.

Some translations try to tone down the Bible’s communist propaganda by adding “from time to time” instead of just saying that all the Christians sold all their property and gave all the money to their leaders for redistribution. And also by changing where one sentence ends and another begins, so you can’t tell that it’s saying their economic system was the reason none of them were needy.

When the Holy Spirit inspires Stephen to misquote the prophet Amos, one version of the Bible tries to cover it up by putting a premature closing quotation mark in the middle of a sentence.

Continue reading Mistranslations in the Bible →
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The Story of David and Abigail—
David Expects to be Treated Like a King Prematurely

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David sent messengers to a rich man named Nabal, asking him to give David and his men something, anything he could find. David thought Nabal owed him something in exchange for not harming Nabal’s employees. But Nabal chose not to give David anything, since he didn’t even know who David was. So David took 400 men with him and went to attack Nabal and murder all the men who worked for him.

Continue reading The Story of David and Abigail—
David Expects to be Treated Like a King Prematurely →
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The Story of the Calling of Samuel—
Why the Family of Eli Was Cursed

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A man named Elkanah had two wives, named Hannah and Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah didn’t, because God wouldn’t let her. Peninnah kept tormenting Hannah about this for years, and she was miserable. Her husband told her she should stop crying, because she had him, which was better than having children. Hannah silently asked God to give her a son. When Eli, the priest and leader of Israel, saw her mouth moving but didn’t hear her saying anything, he told her she needed to stop getting drunk.

Then God let Hannah have a son, and she named him Samuel. She was so happy to finally have a son that she gave him away to Eli, whose sons were scoundrels. Eli tried to get his sons to change their ways, but God wouldn’t let them repent, because he wanted an excuse to kill them.

Continue reading The Story of the Calling of Samuel—
Why the Family of Eli Was Cursed →
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The Story of Samson’s Riddle—
Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat

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Samson was another judge, who saved his people when God let the Philistines take over Israel. Samson was a life-long Nazirite, which required him to abstain from wine, corpses, and haircuts.

While Samson was on his way to a Philistine city to visit a Philistine woman, he was attacked by a lion. God gave him the strength to easily kill the lion with his bare hands. Later, when he was on his way to the Philistine city again to marry the Philistine woman, he found that some bees had made a nest in the lion’s body. He took some honey out of the dead lion and shared it with his parents. But he didn’t tell anyone where the honey came from.

Samson challenged 30 Philistine men to try to solve a riddle by the end of his week-long wedding feast. They agreed that the losing party would have to give the winning party 30 sets of clothes. So Samson told them a “riddle” that they couldn’t possibly make sense of without knowing about the lion incident that no one but Samson knew about.

The Philistine men realized that Samson was unfairly trying to take their property. So they threatened to burn down his new wife’s house unless she told them the answer to the riddle. Samson’s wife cried constantly for the rest of the week until Samson gave her the answer. Then she told the answer to the men, and the men gave the answer back to Samson.

Samson knew those 30 Philistine men must have cheated, since there was no other way they could have possibly solved his “riddle”. But he gave them the promised 30 sets of clothes… which he got by killing 30 other Philistine men.

Continue reading The Story of Samson’s Riddle—
Out of the Strong, Some Way to Cheat →
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