Biblical Bullshit: Christianity and the Accelerating Risk of a Sixth Mass Extinction

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Copyright © 2017 ‘Theo van Gogh’ as a pseudonym of the author

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Published by BookBaby, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Print ISBN: 978-1-54390-866-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-54390-867-1

As with the author’s previous work, Wake Up!!! How The Coming War With Islam Has Already Been Lost By The West And What The West Should Be Doing About It, the author has used the pseudonym ‘Theo van Gogh’ and has chosen to remain anonymous.

Please see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theo_van_Gogh_%28film_director%29

The author chose to use a pseudonym for this book for the following reasons.

To honor the memory of Mr. van Gogh.

To help retain the memory of the circumstances of his death.

To help with the understanding of the meaning of his death.

THE COVER ILLUSTRATION, showing Moses, reminiscent of the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, is an appropriate image to stand as cover for this book as Cecil B. De Mille’s version of the story is ‘reality’ in many people’s minds. However, there has never been found even the slightest trace of evidence for the presence of the escaped Israelites entering and then having spent forty years living in the wilderness of the Sinai. So there are at least two bases of reasoning for rejecting the ‘Israelites in the wilderness’ story of the book of Exodus: the total lack of any kind of archaeological evidence, and the fact that according to Exodus 12:37-38 and Numbers 1:46 there were just over 600,000 (603,550) men of military age who escaped from Egypt. So when you ‘do the math’ there may have been up to three million Israelites, in total, who crossed the Rea Sea and wandered the Sinai for 40 years before their conquest of what is now, more or less, modern Israel. And they did that without leaving a single skeleton, or a buried-trash site, or a grave marker’s worth of physical evidence. And that ‘complete absence of evidence’ view is the unanimous opinion of Israeli archaeologists.

There are none as blind as those who will not see.

John Heywood

Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.

Joseph Campbell

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

Thomas Jefferson

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.

Robert Pirsig

Contents

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE : A SHORT SURVEY ALL ABOUT YOU

CHAPTER TWO : STARRY STARRY NIGHT

CHAPTER THREE : THREE KINDS OF BULLSHIT

CHAPTER FOUR : GETTING REAL ABOUT THE ACTUAL CONTENT OF THE BIBLICAL TEXT?

CHAPTER FIVE : BIBLICAL ‘CRITICISM’

CHAPTER SIX : THE EFFECT OF BIBLICAL BULLSHIT

ON SOCIETY

CHAPTER SEVEN : CHRISTIANITY AND THE ACCELERATING RISK OF A SIXTH MASS EXTINCTION

CHAPTER EIGHT : THE BURDEN OF PROOF

CHAPTER NINE : IS ANOTHER VIEW WORTH EXAMINING?

CHAPTER TEN : WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Appendix A – How the Bible came into existence

Appendix B – A table of chapter purposes

Appendix C – Questions for the Fundamentalist

Appendix D – Three periods of human consciousness

Appendix E – Something completely different

References

Notes

PREFACE

Unlike my previous book – Wake Up!!! How The Coming War With Islam Has Already Been Lost By The West And What The West Should Be Doing About It – the motivation to write this book came entirely from within. I have always had an interest in the nature of religion and its effects, mostly negative,¹ on the vast majority of mankind. At one stage in my life, for about 25 years, I considered myself to be a Christian; and there are still some aspects of religion which appeal, specifically the parts which are either directly or indirectly concerned with elevated spiritual or moral states, even if my perception of such things was entirely subjective. It was after I attended the beginnings of a University-level degree, a Bachelor of Divinity, where I encountered a rationalist view of religion. It was not long after that experience that I became a spiritual agnostic, which I remain to this day. Religious belief on the basis of ‘faith’, belief without evidence, never really did it for me, and now I know it is perfectly reasonable for me to not be able to know something which is simply unknowable.

Apart from that, my interest in religion is something like that of a sociologist. This is because so many people in the world today identify with one religion or another,² usually the religion of their parents – surprise, surprise. I want to understand why so many billions place their loyalty in something so implausible. The religious cannot, in good conscience, cherry-pick whatever suits them – the whole of the Bible is either the actual and inerrant³ word of God or none of it is, and ‘the religious’ cannot simply ignore the obvious bullshit⁴ that’s in there – the genocides, the absurdities, the contradictions, and so on, on the basis of their own judgment. And I want ‘the religious’ to understand, very clearly, that religions are and have been the inspiration for so much pure evil, so much violence⁵ – even to the extent now of threatening the extinction of all life on this planet through nuclear miscalculation induced by religious dogma – and what, if anything, can be done about that. In an increasingly complicated and unstable world, it is objective fact that the intrinsic irrationality of religion and the religious, this suicidal/homicidal ‘my god is better than your god’ mentality, represents an exponentially increasing risk to world peace, stability and progress. You need look no further than the daily news to see atrocities being perpetrated by one group upon another because their ‘god’ told them to or because ‘God wills it’. And the savagery and frequency of such atrocities has only been increasing.

In any case, if everything is ‘God’s will’, how could ‘Judgment day’ work? The Koran advises that nobody has free will and yet infidels (non-Muslims) will be judged and sent to Hell for an eternity of torture, for conduct over which they had no control. The fate for ‘imperfect’ Muslims is just as bad. In Islam, free will is tolerated only to submit voluntarily to Allah. At the ‘Judgment’ Allah will be judging and sending some to Hell for eternity – again, for the preordained conduct of his own creations – a source of life-long apprehension for Muslims, and no-one has ever been able to explain the justice of this. Christian theology is almost as bad⁶ and yet while all of this ‘religion’ is just too ridiculous to contemplate, we really need to address and hopefully eliminate this dangerous stupidity. So your choice between those two ludicrous theological regimes, comes down to choosing one god (unless you’re a pantheist of course), from between at least two idiot, sadistic but almost certainly imaginary ‘gods’, or choosing none at all.

Theo van Gogh

July 2017

INTRODUCTION

I started my previous book (Wake Up!!! How The Coming War With Islam Has Already Been Lost By The West And What The West Should Be Doing About It) with a chapter called The Problem at the Heart of all Religions. And, despite the focus of that book being about Islam, I decided that in the interests of balance I would point out something which I believe all religions have in common: they require or produce false ‘certainty’,⁷ which, in the case of Islam at least, leads to the most horrific crimes. In this century however, practicing the other major religions merely results in self-delusion ... in many cases.

And, apart from some minor civilizing benefits, the world religions have produced, and still produce, some of the worst excesses of superstition, ignorance and fanatical intolerance fueled by false certainty and, in doing so, have obstructed mankind’s social, economic, psychological and scientific progress.

In ancient Egypt, over thousands of years, most human lives were lived out in beast-like drudgery according to the dictates of the religious ‘truths’ of their day; but ancient Egyptian religious ‘truth’ no longer exists. To the ancient Egyptians, the truths of their religion were self-evident and yet that entire culture eventually vanished, liberating the lives of ordinary Egyptians to develop without it.

Later, in ancient Greece, a battle took place between the mystics (the Pythagoreans) and the scientists of the day (the Ionians), with the mystics eventually gaining the upper hand. In Cosmos by Carl Sagan, that battle and its consequences are described as follows:

In love with whole numbers, the Pythagoreans believed all things could be derived from them, certainly all other numbers. A crisis in doctrine arose when they discovered that the square root of two was irrational ... For the Pythagoreans it came to mean something threatening, a hint that their world view might not make sense...

Instead of sharing [this] important mathematical discovery, the Pythagoreans suppressed [such] knowledge ... The outside world was not to know ... A disdain for the practical swept the ancient world. Plato urged astronomers to think about the heavens but not to waste their time observing them...

As a result of such attitudes, the brilliant and promising Ionian experimental method was largely abandoned for two thousand years...

In the suppression of disquieting facts [and] the embrace of mysticism ... they [the ‘mystics’] set back the human enterprise ⁸…

There is in our time much Ionian science, although not in politics and religion ... [where] there are ... appalling superstitions and deadly ethical ambiguities. We are flawed by ancient contradictions.⁹

The first century of this era saw the founding of a ‘new’ religion, Christianity. Christianity however, was unquestionably developed out of a pre-existing religion (Judaism) by humans,¹⁰ and not by a god. Persistence until now of the view, of some, that Jesus was a god – a supernatural being, not subject to and in control of the laws of nature – still entraps people in a mental world comparable to that of the ancient Egyptians and the Pythagorean Greeks. This is the case regarding any belief in the supernatural – whether it be belief in ‘miracles’, ‘angels’, ‘heaven’, ’72 virgins’ or indeed the supernaturalistic teachings of any religion – where they are held on the basis of personal wants rather than evidence. And, so long as a large proportion of humanity persists, as it does, with ancient modes of thinking, the ‘setting back of the human enterprise’, as Sagan put it, will continue, to our mutual and increasing danger.

This book shows, among other things, how the Bible and, by implication, at least the ‘Holy Scriptures’ of other world religions, come into existence – by ordinary, natural, historical processes, which need no more than natural human beings to activate them. Ultimately, the Bible is little more than one of mankind’s ancient attempts at understanding the world we live in. It is, as someone called it, a kind of ‘fossilized science’. Ancient attempts at understanding how the world came into being, can now easily be seen as pure guesswork, well-intentioned and commendable attempts but which are now distressingly obsolete. If the Bible had first been published in this century, it would be for sale on bookstore shelves next to The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy works. This is not to say that the Bible should be condemned completely. It contains some of the most magnificent poetry and fascinating ‘histories’ ever written, especially in the King James Version.¹¹ It is certainly not, however, what it was trying to be at an earlier stage: the inerrant word of God. How arrogant or delusional would you have to be to think your contribution to the Bible, say, any one of the biblical books or any part of one, was the ‘inerrant word of God’?

The Bible is extremely elastic so that anyone can make it mean anything – that is, if a person needs the Bible to say something that suits their specific needs, an interpretation can be contrived to appear to say something that suits that need. I think there is probably no-one, however, who thinks that this process of bending and stretching can go on forever and, in fact, I suggest that that process shouldn’t be engaged in at all. Surely ‘the holy word of God’ shouldn’t be made to mean whatever anyone wants it to mean; that it should stand on its own? For the purposes of this book, I’ll say there are just two different but relevant approaches to the way that a Bible passage can be understood:

the literal approach (as preferred by Christian fundamentalists¹²), and

the intended¹³approach.

Of course there are other approaches – for example,

there are theological¹⁴ approaches (where the Bible is used as a reference book, for input into theological study), and

historical approaches (to reconstruct the detailed history of ancient Israel and its neighbors) and others,

but theological and historical approaches serve different needs and are thus not especially relevant here. I don’t, however, plan to waste time on discussing anything which is irrelevant. Some commentators argue that there is now no way to be certain about what the words originally meant. I couldn’t agree more.

The literal approach, as preferred by Christian fundamentalists, is seen by them as being the way to the truth to be found in Holy Scripture: what it actually says is what it really means. But how do you avoid the effect of reading that ‘literally true’ scripture subjectively? Whose subjective version is the correct one? People cannot help but look at everything through the lens of their own culture, education, personal experiences, gender, beliefs, personality, abilities, health, age,