"The God Who Wasn't There" was a documentary released in 2005 exploring whether or not a historical Jesus Christ even existed. Flemming, the director, compares similarities of the Christ story to other mythical figures that predated him.
You can order a copy of the DVD here. Various clips from the documentary are available on YouTube here and the trailer for the film is below:
Showing posts with label God's immorality. Show all posts
Showing posts with label God's immorality. Show all posts
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
Root Of All Evil?
In January of 2006, Richard Dawkins released the "Root of All Evil?" television documentary in the UK. That documentary consisted of two 45 minute shows where Dawkins argues against religion, faith, and God.
Below are previews of these two episodes. You can watch the full videos online here.
Below are previews of these two episodes. You can watch the full videos online here.
Thursday, June 21, 2007
Giving My Teenage Sister Cancer Has Some Higher Purpose?
by: Kay
My baby sister was just diagnosed with Leukemia. She is 18 years old. None of this makes any sense to me. She was just feeling a little run down and tired, but was still going in to work. I was a little worried about her symptoms so I asked a family friend, who is a physician, to stop by her job site and take a look at her. He thought she probably had Mononucleosis and ordered a bunch of blood work. He said he normally doesn't order so many tests, but was concerned about her bruising. He saved her life by seeing her like this.
She waited over the weekend to get her lab work drawn and was feeling increasingly tired to where she had to call in to work. She was procrastinating because she is afraid of needles. My mom finally put her in the car and drove her over to the lab to get the blood drawn. They called up the ordering doctor within two hours to tell him she has critical values.
She was directly admitted to the Pediatric Special Care unit yesterday. They did a bone marrow biopsy and today she'll start chemo. They are also going to do a spinal tap and inject chemo medication into the cerebral spinal fluid surrounding her brain and spinal chord. This is to prevent the cancer from metastasizing to her brain. The overall treatment is so poisonous and aggressive it may kill her. Without treatment, she's been given only a few weeks to live.
I called up a TBM friend of mine to tell him what was going on. His response was to give me a lecture on how this was a learning experience, we would all grow from this, and even though we didn't understand what the higher purpose is, this is all part of God's plan for us. This line of stupid thinking made me so angry I hung up on him.
Why would God need to give a child cancer and treat that child as a tool, rather than a person with free-agency, just to teach everyone some ambiguous lesson? Why would God choose to punish an innocent child by making them go through the most awful thing possible? If there were no children out there who suffered with cancer we would still have free-agency. A moral God wouldn't inflict his creations with something so horrible by making them suffer like this. If this is supposed to treat us some great lesson why are only 7000 children a year diagnosed with this form of Leukemia? We have a better chance of winning the lottery! Thinking about this when I was on the phone with my TBM friend made me so angry. Normally I would have argued my position, but I have been through so much in the past two days I couldn't deal with someone forcing their ignorance on me.
When I got home I held my 6 year old son and told him how scared I was for his aunt. He held my head, and stroked my face as I cried into his shoulder. He told me in a very concerned way not to worry because she is going to get medicine in the hospital to make her better. Out of all the friends I tried to reach out to today, my son was the only person able to comfort me.
My baby sister was just diagnosed with Leukemia. She is 18 years old. None of this makes any sense to me. She was just feeling a little run down and tired, but was still going in to work. I was a little worried about her symptoms so I asked a family friend, who is a physician, to stop by her job site and take a look at her. He thought she probably had Mononucleosis and ordered a bunch of blood work. He said he normally doesn't order so many tests, but was concerned about her bruising. He saved her life by seeing her like this.
She waited over the weekend to get her lab work drawn and was feeling increasingly tired to where she had to call in to work. She was procrastinating because she is afraid of needles. My mom finally put her in the car and drove her over to the lab to get the blood drawn. They called up the ordering doctor within two hours to tell him she has critical values.
She was directly admitted to the Pediatric Special Care unit yesterday. They did a bone marrow biopsy and today she'll start chemo. They are also going to do a spinal tap and inject chemo medication into the cerebral spinal fluid surrounding her brain and spinal chord. This is to prevent the cancer from metastasizing to her brain. The overall treatment is so poisonous and aggressive it may kill her. Without treatment, she's been given only a few weeks to live.
I called up a TBM friend of mine to tell him what was going on. His response was to give me a lecture on how this was a learning experience, we would all grow from this, and even though we didn't understand what the higher purpose is, this is all part of God's plan for us. This line of stupid thinking made me so angry I hung up on him.
Why would God need to give a child cancer and treat that child as a tool, rather than a person with free-agency, just to teach everyone some ambiguous lesson? Why would God choose to punish an innocent child by making them go through the most awful thing possible? If there were no children out there who suffered with cancer we would still have free-agency. A moral God wouldn't inflict his creations with something so horrible by making them suffer like this. If this is supposed to treat us some great lesson why are only 7000 children a year diagnosed with this form of Leukemia? We have a better chance of winning the lottery! Thinking about this when I was on the phone with my TBM friend made me so angry. Normally I would have argued my position, but I have been through so much in the past two days I couldn't deal with someone forcing their ignorance on me.
When I got home I held my 6 year old son and told him how scared I was for his aunt. He held my head, and stroked my face as I cried into his shoulder. He told me in a very concerned way not to worry because she is going to get medicine in the hospital to make her better. Out of all the friends I tried to reach out to today, my son was the only person able to comfort me.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
A Cute and Cuddly Bedtime Story of Mass Extinction
by: Jon
Just how does mass genocidal extinction become a cute and cuddly bed-time story?
When it's a bible story, that's how.
There are hundreds of children's storybooks, puzzles, games, videos, wallpaper, and toys all depicting Noah's Ark with all his happy smiling animals friends... oh, look! Cute furry bunnies!
Somehow, the rest of the story just doesn't matter. You know, the part where everyone else on the planet DROWNS TO DEATH.
Here is my more accurate portrayal of the flood story:
Sure, 40 days and 40 nights of rain that covers the globe would have eroded every mountain down to a nub, never mind wherever the water came from or where it all went. Forget the fact that such a deluge of water would have diluted the saltwater oceans, destroying the ecosystems and turning them into a barren waste. Don't concern yourself with what the animals ate after they got off the ark, either, since all the plants around the world would have also died... and the carnivores would have finished off everything in the ark in a matter of days. And it isn't important to figure out how the marsupials got back to Australia, the penguins to Antarctica, and so on.
Of course the story makes no sense, but that's not the point.
The point is that this is a story where God comes right out and KILLS everyone because they aren't doing what he wants them to, and then this story is turned into a lovable and cuddly cartoon. This is the bits of the story they don't include in the childrens videos. It's all there. Go read your Bible.
Genesis 6
Angels and humans are getting awfully "friendly" and the resulting half-breed offspring are called "Nephilim." Sounds like something from a L. Ron Hubbard novel.
God sees that everyone is wicked and violent, and he doesn't like violence... so he decides to murder everyone.
But God likes Noah, so he tells him to build an ark, tells him how many animals to put on it, and to put his family aboard. Also, Noah is 600 years old.
Forgetting for a moment the blind hypocrisy of Gods action here, it's interesting that his plan will kill all the animals, too, who are, after all, only doing what he created them to do.
So the waters come, everyone jumps in the boat, the entire earth is covered, and everything dies. EVERYTHING.
The wind started to blow and the water gradually began to disappear... off the edge of the earth, I guess, I don't know.
It takes several months, but they can finally see mountain tops. Noah sends out a dove who brings back an olive branch, and that's how Noah knows there's dry land.
So they land, and the animals scamper out of the ark. God never seems to notice that the animals still eat each other and such, but whatever. Noah kills some animals and offers them as a sacrifice... because God hates violence, remember. God says the barbeque smells really good (Yes, it's there: Genesis 8:21) and now he feels bad, so he promises that he'll never kill everything again. I guess he learned a valuable moral lesson!
He tells Noah to go ahead and eat anything he wants. Since God hates violence, he tells Noah to enforce capital punishment, eye for an eye, etc.. God again promises not to kill everything, but this time he says he won't *flood* everything again. Ah-ha! A loophole! Next time, it's FIRE! Suckers!
But God seems worried he might forget that he promised not to drown everyone, though, so he invents rainbows. Apparently the physical laws of light defraction didn't exist until that moment. Now, every time he sees a rainbow, he'll remember he isn't supposed to drown everything.
Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, and passes out naked. His youngest son sees him and tells his two older brothers, who go to great lengths to cover him up without ever having to actually look at his 600 year old nakedness. Noah wakes up and, in what seems to be a drunken rant, condemns his youngest sons family to slavery for... whatever it was he did.
Yup... Noah was a drunk, his family dysfunctional, and their inbreeding repopulated the planet. Noah dies 350 years later, now nearly 1,000 years old. It's surprising he didn't leave a bigger footprint in history.
The end.
-----------
So... how is this a good story, much less a reasonable one? God doesn't like the way people turned out, so he can just wipe them out? Isn't this a lesson of terror and intimidation? And it's being sent straight to our kids, as if it's no big deal.
I was raised with this story as literal truth. I can't imagine that this is how we want our kids to grow up... to be afraid and terrorized. Christians talk about their God of love... but I don't actually see much of him in the Bible.
Just how does mass genocidal extinction become a cute and cuddly bed-time story?
When it's a bible story, that's how.
There are hundreds of children's storybooks, puzzles, games, videos, wallpaper, and toys all depicting Noah's Ark with all his happy smiling animals friends... oh, look! Cute furry bunnies!
Somehow, the rest of the story just doesn't matter. You know, the part where everyone else on the planet DROWNS TO DEATH.
Here is my more accurate portrayal of the flood story:
Sure, 40 days and 40 nights of rain that covers the globe would have eroded every mountain down to a nub, never mind wherever the water came from or where it all went. Forget the fact that such a deluge of water would have diluted the saltwater oceans, destroying the ecosystems and turning them into a barren waste. Don't concern yourself with what the animals ate after they got off the ark, either, since all the plants around the world would have also died... and the carnivores would have finished off everything in the ark in a matter of days. And it isn't important to figure out how the marsupials got back to Australia, the penguins to Antarctica, and so on.
Of course the story makes no sense, but that's not the point.
The point is that this is a story where God comes right out and KILLS everyone because they aren't doing what he wants them to, and then this story is turned into a lovable and cuddly cartoon. This is the bits of the story they don't include in the childrens videos. It's all there. Go read your Bible.
Genesis 6
Angels and humans are getting awfully "friendly" and the resulting half-breed offspring are called "Nephilim." Sounds like something from a L. Ron Hubbard novel.
God sees that everyone is wicked and violent, and he doesn't like violence... so he decides to murder everyone.
But God likes Noah, so he tells him to build an ark, tells him how many animals to put on it, and to put his family aboard. Also, Noah is 600 years old.
Forgetting for a moment the blind hypocrisy of Gods action here, it's interesting that his plan will kill all the animals, too, who are, after all, only doing what he created them to do.
So the waters come, everyone jumps in the boat, the entire earth is covered, and everything dies. EVERYTHING.
The wind started to blow and the water gradually began to disappear... off the edge of the earth, I guess, I don't know.
It takes several months, but they can finally see mountain tops. Noah sends out a dove who brings back an olive branch, and that's how Noah knows there's dry land.
So they land, and the animals scamper out of the ark. God never seems to notice that the animals still eat each other and such, but whatever. Noah kills some animals and offers them as a sacrifice... because God hates violence, remember. God says the barbeque smells really good (Yes, it's there: Genesis 8:21) and now he feels bad, so he promises that he'll never kill everything again. I guess he learned a valuable moral lesson!
He tells Noah to go ahead and eat anything he wants. Since God hates violence, he tells Noah to enforce capital punishment, eye for an eye, etc.. God again promises not to kill everything, but this time he says he won't *flood* everything again. Ah-ha! A loophole! Next time, it's FIRE! Suckers!
But God seems worried he might forget that he promised not to drown everyone, though, so he invents rainbows. Apparently the physical laws of light defraction didn't exist until that moment. Now, every time he sees a rainbow, he'll remember he isn't supposed to drown everything.
Noah plants a vineyard, makes wine, and passes out naked. His youngest son sees him and tells his two older brothers, who go to great lengths to cover him up without ever having to actually look at his 600 year old nakedness. Noah wakes up and, in what seems to be a drunken rant, condemns his youngest sons family to slavery for... whatever it was he did.
Yup... Noah was a drunk, his family dysfunctional, and their inbreeding repopulated the planet. Noah dies 350 years later, now nearly 1,000 years old. It's surprising he didn't leave a bigger footprint in history.
The end.
-----------
So... how is this a good story, much less a reasonable one? God doesn't like the way people turned out, so he can just wipe them out? Isn't this a lesson of terror and intimidation? And it's being sent straight to our kids, as if it's no big deal.
I was raised with this story as literal truth. I can't imagine that this is how we want our kids to grow up... to be afraid and terrorized. Christians talk about their God of love... but I don't actually see much of him in the Bible.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
The LDS Church Stands or Falls on a Literal Global Flood
by: Kay
Mormonism stands or falls on a global flood. Joseph Smith taught Adam and Eve dwelt in
A global flood can be written of by other theists - who see the geological nonsense supporting it - by saying it was a symbolic flood, or only a limited area was flooded, which seemed like the entire Earth from Noah's perspective.
To believe in the
Before anyone tries to say Joseph Smith was speaking as a man, and this was only his opinion, not revelation, please note Noah’s flood is in fact doctrine. It is canonized in the BoM, PoGP, and the D&C in the following versus:
Moses 7:42
Abraham 1:19
Alma 10:22
Ether 6:7
Joseph Smith-Matthew 1:41-42
D&C 84:14-15
D&C 133:54
3 Nephi 22:9
These cannonized scriptures are revelations from God and all mention Noah as a real actual person, and the flood as a real actual event. The BoM and other revealed scripture of the Church are all supposed to be 100% accurate, true, and literal. Never has an LDS leader stated Noah and the global flood are mythological.
"There was the great Flood, when waters covered the earth and when, as Peter says, only 'eight souls were saved'" – Gordon B. Hinckley, If We Are Prepared Ye Shall Not Fear, 175th Semi-Annual General Priesthood Meeting
"In spite of the world’s arguments against the historicity of the Flood, and despite the supposed lack of geologic evidence, we Latter-day Saints believe that Noah was an actual man, a prophet of God, who preached repentance and raised a voice of warning, built an ark, gathered his family and a host of animals onto the ark, and floated safely away as waters covered the entire earth. We are assured that these events actually occurred by the multiple testimonies of God’s prophets."
1998 Ensign article
The Church has excommunicated members for taking a stance against the literalness of the BoM. Everything in the BoM is supposed to be read as true, without question. Any evidence against the BoM will later be refuted and shown to be wrong. Never mind the continuously mounting evidence against it. Perhaps in this lifetime, perhaps in our children's lifetimes. Someday, someday...just you all wait and see.
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