Thursday 30 October 2014

Awkward moments not found in your average childrens Bible

If we want to be as caring, considerate and civilised as possible then we need to criticise and condemn behaviour that does not meet modern standards. This book shows there are plenty of examples of savage & barbaric acts in the Bible stories which should be viewed with disgust and abhorrence.
One of the best things about this book is it's list of authors who helped inspire Horus Gilgamesh. I especially recommend looking into the books and videos of:
 Seth Andrews, "The Thinking Atheist" on Youtube and his book,"Deconverted, a journey from religion to reason"
Richard Dawkins' books especially, "The Ancestor's tale" & "The God delusion"- which mention so many great books in their bibliography and index that they act like a hub for exploring skeptical free thought.
Lewis Black's book,"Me of little faith"
Richard Carrier's book,"Not the impossible faith" and many Youtube debates
Robert M. Price, also known as The Bible Geek. My favourite books of his are, "The reason driven life" & "The case against the case for Christ"
John W. Loftus,"Why I became an atheist"
Valerie Tarico,"Trusting doubt"
Jerry Coyne, "Why evolution is true"
Robert G. Ingersoll wrote many articles which were skeptical of the writings in the Bible. These are found in many books on Amazon but also the website theingersolltimes
Ken Humphries' book,"Jesus never existed" which examines the case that the gospels are mostly fiction.
TalkOrigins archive,exploring the creation/evolution controversy

I accept that life on Earth evolved by natural selection and that culture evolves. The authors of the pamphlets that make up the Bible lived cultures dominated by superstition, long before the rise of modern scientific method. They made their best guess about the origins of life and how to govern society. It should be obvious they were wildly mistaken in their thinking. Horus Gilgamesh helps the reader take a critical view of the stories. I think there are a few errors in this book though and it could have been  better.

With the Noah's ark story how is it that Noah shows no knowledge of the food crops of the Americas ? The theory of evolution and the theory of plate tectonics explains how it is that many important foods are native to the Americas but this does not fit with the story of a Noah's global flood at 2300 BCE. Reverend Ussher worked out the date of the flood by using Bible genealogy and by this method also worked out the Bible puts first life on Earth at 4004 BCE.

The Bible claims that God is able to do many supernatural miracles in the world but if so then it would mean God was at fault for not making the world a far better place. Awkward moments mentions the Genesis 38 story of Tamar and Onan which claims that God magically put Onan to death for a trivial act, well if God was able to terminate people who had done things that displeased him then why did he not switch off Hitler before the atrocities were committed ?
Interesting that Genesis 38v27 claims that Tamar became pregnant by Judah and that there were twin boys in her womb. How would anyone in those times know even that there were twins let alone that they were both boys. Would the midwife need to have thought this was the case to bother tying a scarlet thread on the wrist to tell which was born first ? Was this story just made up ? Did the storyteller imagine more than could have been known ?

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