Posts Tagged ‘Bible is not historic fact’

Twenty Strangers Kiss For the First Time. And Fred Phelps carks it. Hallelujah, a good day, all round.

Posted: March 21, 2014 in Political musings, Popular Culture et al, Religion
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Two items caught your indefatigable correspondent’s eye today, Dear Reader.

The first is a YouTube video (currently 65 million hits and rising) in which 20 strangers volunteer to kiss someone they have never met before. And we mean, properly kiss: real tonsil tangling, spit-swapping snogging.

It is really rather beautiful and life affirming and funny and wistful and weird and vaguely erotic and heart warming. See what you think.

It’s the work of someone called Tatia Pllieva and it’s the first video she has posted. I suspect we’ll be hearing more from her. Well done.

The second is the death of Fred Phelps, the founder and thoroughly awful leader of the Westboro Baptist Church who became famous for celebrating the death of American soldiers (and picketing their funerals) as punishment from God because gays exist in America.

If you really want to refresh your memory as to his drivel, you can watch this.

He thinks he’s going to Heaven. I was never more certain of anything but that he is going straight to Hell … do not pass Go, do not collect $200 … and people like Tatia Pllieva are going to Heaven.

The one thought that cheers me this morning more than any other is that Fred Phelps is today standing in front his Maker, hearing in no uncertain terms exactly how much of an un-Christian asshole he was.

Phelps died on Wednesday in a Kansas hospice at the age of 84. “People die – that is the way of all flesh,” a blog post on the church’s website said.

Earlier this month, his son Nathan, who ran away from home as soon as he turned 18 and later became a gay rights advocate, said in a Facebook posting he had learned Phelps was near death in a hospice and that he had been excommunicated in 2013. The church would not confirm the excommunication report, saying membership issues were private.

Phelps’ church was widely denounced as a hate group and was not part of any mainstream Baptist organization. Its membership has been estimated at about 100, many of whom were related to Phelps.

By Phelps’ reasoning, cancer, the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, school shootings and the deaths of soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as other tragedies involving Americans, were God’s retribution for a lax attitude toward what he called “the modern militant homosexual movement”.

“God Hates Fags” was the overriding slogan for Phelps and his followers, as well as the name of their primary website. They carried that message to protests, brandishing signs declaring “Thank God For AIDS,” “America Is Doomed,” “Thank God For Dead Soldiers” and “God Blew Up The Troops”.

“Look, you can’t preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God,” Phelps said in a 2010 Huffington Post interview.

The news of his death was met with an outpouring of comments on social media, including many who said Phelps’ teachings inadvertently served to promote tolerance.

“I’d like to thank Fred Phelps today, for accidentally inspiring me and countless others like me to fight for tolerance and against hate,” Russell Hainline, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, tweeted.

Phelps’ rhetoric was hotter than fire and brimstone. He called President George W. Bush a “Bible pervert,” Barack Obama a “bloody beast” and conservative TV commentator Bill O’Reilly a “demon-possessed messenger of Satan”.

Phelps’s church gained notoriety in 1998 by picketing the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was beaten outside a bar in Wyoming and left to die. His story was turned into a movie and play.

SUPREME COURT RULING

Phelps and his congregants had their biggest impact at military funerals, where they faced an angry backlash from veterans’ families and their supporters. Their right to picket led to action by the U.S. Congress and a freedom-of-speech legal battle that the church won at the U.S. Supreme Court.

The father of a Maryland soldier killed in Iraq took on Westboro, seeking damages and saying church members had turned his son’s 2006 funeral into a circus. But in an 8-1 ruling in 2011, the court said that even though the Westboro protest was hurtful, it was constitutionally protected. Phelps’ daughter, Margie, argued the case.

To curb Westboro, Congress in 2006 passed the Fallen Heroes Act, which prohibited protesters from coming within 300 feet of a federally administered cemetery within an hour of the beginning or end of a funeral. States passed similar laws.

Phelps based his ideology on an Old Testament passage – the book of Leviticus, chapter 18, verse 22 – that says, “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.”

Phelps, however, was mis-informed and wilfully ignorant, as you can read here: http://wp.me/p1LY0z-wX

If you’re feeling research minded, (or just irritated by bigoted fundamentalist neighbours) you can also read how it is now scientifically proven that the Bible is not literally true by clicking here: http://wp.me/p1LY0z-1Y5

Or even how the Roman Catholic Church no longer believes the Bible is literally true: http://wp.me/p1LY0z-ud

On its website the church claimed to have held almost 50,000 demonstrations since 1991. Westboro would send protesters on the thinnest of premises. A store in Topeka was a regular target because it sold vacuum cleaners made in Sweden, where a preacher had been prosecuted for his anti-homosexuality message. Phelps’s church even sent a contingent to Pittsburgh in 2003 for the funeral of Fred Rogers, the mild-mannered host of the children’s TV show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood,” on the grounds that he was “a wuss” and had not denounced homosexuality. Other protest targets included churches and synagogues, rock concerts, NFL games, Twitter headquarters and the school attended by President Barack Obama’s daughters.

British journalist Louis Theroux lived with the Phelps clan for three weeks while making the 2007 documentary “The Most Hated Family in America”.

“The dominant note in his personality was a bitter contempt for humanity in general and me specifically,” he wrote in the Guardian newspaper.

Theroux said the family did not always seem hateful.

“Away from the pickets, they were – much of the time – very, very normal,” he said. “Not just normal, but intelligent and urbane. They’re not hillbillies, they’re urban professionals.”

Well, anyway, he’s gone, Thank God.

And now I think I’ll go and watch the 20 strangers kissing again and make my mind feel just a little cleaner, and creep a little closer to my understanding of God at the same time.

Categorical evidence: the Bible was written long after the events of the early chapters. And it is NOT literally true.

Posted: February 14, 2014 in Religion
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"I just became the most controversial issue in twenty plus centuries of religion. Really, who knew?"

“I just became the most controversial issue in twenty plus centuries of religion. Really, who knew?”

In major news breaking now that will shake up both the Jewish and Christian religions – assuming their adherents are interested in facts rather than merely having a fundamentalist obsession with literal truth – evidence has emerged that the early chapters of the Old Testament were written long after they have sometimes been suggested to have been written. And they are historically inaccurate.

In short, the chapters were not eye-witness accounts, and even if they were brought down by oral tradition, they were later embellished by the actual writers, which contradicts long-held dogma that they were transmitted without a word being changed or added from the earliest story tellers.

Biblical scholars have long been aware many of the stories and accounts in the sacred book were not written by eyewitnesses, and according to new research, further evidence of that historical distance has appeared in the form of a hump-backed camel.

New research using radioactive-carbon dating techniques shows the animals weren’t domesticated until hundreds of years after the events documented in the Book of Genesis.

The research was published by Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen, archaeologists from Tel Aviv University in Israel. They believe camels were not domesticated in the eastern Mediterranean until the 10th century B.C.

And yet, the hump-backed creatures are mentioned repeatedly alongside Abraham, Jacob and Isaac, indicating the Bible’s writers and editors were portraying what they saw in their present as how things looked in the past. These camel stories “do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium,” said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, “but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period.”

While there are conflicting theories about when the Bible was composed, the recent research suggests it was written much later than the events it describes. This supports earlier studies that have challenged the Bible’s veracity as a historic document, for example, by pointing out that the destruction and plundering of Jericho actually occurred some centuries distant from the life of the long-asserted Hebrew general and leader Joshua.

The new biblical questioning wasn’t the focus of the recent research, though, just an after-the-fact observation.

The question over “phantom camels” is not new one, according to TIME magazine. Biblical scholar William Foxwell Albright “argued in the mid-1900s that camels were an anachronism.”

In an opinion piece for CNN, Joel Baden writes that there was no deliberate deception intended on the part of the Bible’s authors.

“Biblical authors,” Baden writes, “simply transplanted the nomadic standards of their time into the distant past. There is nothing deceptive about this. They weren’t trying to trick anyone. They imagined, quite reasonably, that the past was, fundamentally, like their present.”

A similar conclusion was reached by Smithsonian.com author Colin Schultz, who wrote, “these findings don’t necessarily disprove all the stories of the Bible. Rather, knowing that there are camels where there definitely shouldn’t be shows that the Bible’s authors, working thousands of years after the events they were describing were supposed to take place, took a modern lens to these ancient tales.”

At long last, can we focus on the eternal truths in the book that affect how we treat our fellow humans, rather than worrying about every dotted 'i' and crossed 't'?

At long last, can we focus on the eternal truths in the book that affect how we treat our fellow humans, rather than worrying about every dotted ‘i’ and crossed ‘t’?

Nevertheless, the findings confirm again that the Bible is not LITERALLY true.

This should not really come as a surprise to Jews and Christians. Authoritative figures in the Roman Catholic Church have already said it, in plain language. Like their acknowledgement that Adam and Eve never existed.

With this latest finding, it is simply scientifically impossible for us to see the Old Testament as entirely, immovably factual.

And we now also have categorical evidence that the Old Testament authors were operating based on their current world view, which would undoubtedly reflect predominant cultural mores, too.

Here’s the key point: if we can unarguably subtract one fact from the Bible, then it is logically consistent that we can subtract others, too.

For example: the few lines that are (incorrectly in my opinion) supposed to be about homosexuality, which have caused misery, persecution and death for millions of good people down through the centuries.

Or, most dramatically: creationism. Specifically “young Earth” creationism.

Today is a day for celebration. The moment we acknowledge that the Bible need not be literally true to be true, we free humankind from mindless, meaningless intellectual navel gazing, and set free our own critical faculties, to lead us closer to the Divine.

Now, to coin a phrase, that’s Good News for Modern Man.