According to the Bible, human beings came into existence just over 6000 years ago in what is now Iran. Research has established that the birth of humanity was in Africa millions of years ago. The aborigines have been in Australia for over 50,000 years.
The essential element for Christianity is the obvious myth of the fall of Adam and Eve through the deception brought about by a talking snake. This is stated as the cause of death. This myth is crucial for Christianity as it provides for the claimed necessary death of Jesus of Nazareth to cancel this inherited flaw in humanity. The baptism of infants is simply another empty religious ritual.
Over thousands of years humanity has invented at least 20,000 gods, whom devotees have sought to appease by the sacrifice of their produce and then by human sacrifice, usually of children. A couple of such events are included in the Bible. Christians consider that thousands of gods have not existed and do not exist. Atheists just add one more to the list by including the god of the Bible, Yahweh. Of course that also applies to the nonexistence of devils, demons, angels, ghosts, spirits, cherubims, seraphims, unicorns, cockatrices etc that the Bible has invented.
From the point of view of history the Bible is also flawed. There is no other source that mentions Abraham and all the other forebears of the Hebrews. Even Moses is not a name – it is a suffix added to the names of the Egyptian gods, Ra and Tuth.
There is no evidence that the Hebrews were ever, as a large community, slaves in Egypt, for the Egyptian empire embraced all of what was Canaan and later Palestine. It is likely that the tablets of stone with the laws that the Hebrews were to observe, were pillars erected by the Egyptians for their vassals. The exodus of over two million Hebrews from Egypt did not take place and the Passover rite is based on fiction. The bulk of the OT was written while the Hebrews were captive in Babylon just prior to 600 BCE and, with no written language, any prior events were simply derived from folklore and tradition.
We come now to the gospels. Who wrote them is uncertain and the number of them is unknown. They bear the names of Mary, Thomas, Peter, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John etc. None appear to have been written prior to AD 60, for Paul or anyone else does not mention them.
The pregnancy of Mary as the mother of Jesus, is given in the interpretation of dreams. That she was a ‘virgin’ is simply a mistake in a translation of the OT into Greek in the Septuagint. The current idea then and until about two hundred years ago, was that a woman simply provided the place where the seed of a man could develop prior to birth. We know now that the ripe ovum of the female must be fertilised by one of fifty million sperm provided by the male.
This is an insurmountable problem for a joint human and spirit conception. The ovum and sperm must be compatible. There is the technical problem of who provided the ‘Jesus sperm,’ as the Bible says that Jesus was involved with the creation of the universe. How did a mature god become a sperm or fifty million sperm and how was the injection accomplished? Was Jesus in the womb and in heaven at the same time? Could a trinity function as a duo?
These questions demand answers if Jesus is to be regarded as being a god in a human frame that the Bible asserts that he was in fact. The Jesus of the gospels has no more knowledge than the general population, for he considered that mental illness was caused by demons. He believed that humans had an immortal element destined for heaven or hell.
He believed that the laws of physics could be changed so that water could become wine and decaying bodies restored to normal living humans. The Bible states that several saints arose from their graves and walked into Jerusalem at the time of the crucifixion. Despite the specific commandment against Jews ingesting blood, Jesus introduced a ritual drinking of his blood.
Paul’s specific message was that the god Yahweh required the death, after ghastly torture, as an atonement for the sins of humanity – innocent scapegoat sacrificed as the primitive tribes did. A truly primitive concept not acceptable today.
Strangely, no secular or official citizen in the time of Jesus considered it worthy to record any of the miracles that Jesus was said, by his followers, to have performed. Not even his crucifixion was recorded by the Romans. Only his disciples saw him ascend to heaven and this begs the question – where is heaven? For hundreds of years no one realised that as one ascends the amount of oxygen decreases and the temperature falls. Today science knows plenty about the zone that surrounds the earth, for it has been captured by astronauts – it is the place for the satellites so essential for modern communication etc. In deep space the temperature plummets to minus 270 degrees.
Is it rude to ask Christians where heaven is and how will conscious intelligent mortals enjoy eternity in the company of the god Yahweh whose morals are so starkly described in the 31st chapter of Numbers?
The Koran has come under scrutiny lately so the morality of the textbook of Christians should be also examined. Let us look first at the 31st chapter of Numbers and quote a few verses:-
Verses 1 & 2- The Lord spoke unto Moses, saying “avenge the children of Israel of the Midianites”.
Verse 7 – And they slew all the males.
Verse 17 – Kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man but all the women children that have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.
In the New Testament Matthew 10:34 Jesus says “I came not to send peace but a sword”.
Luke 14:26 “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters and his own life he cannot be my disciple.”
John 1:3 – “All things were made by him (Yahweh) and without him was not anything made.”
Luke 16:22 – “The rich man died and in hell, being in torment, he cried and said ‘have mercy on me’.”
By Keith S Cornish