BIBLICAL NONSENSE HIGHLIGHTS
It’s not a shocking
discovery that parents pass on their religious beliefs through their children.
Muslim parents tend to have Muslim children; Christian parents tend to have
Christian children; atheist parents tend to have atheist children. These
traditions simply cannot be maintained by chance
alone. Because religious beliefs are certainly not in our DNA, a child’s
environment must necessarily affect his religious affiliation in some manner. In fact, all children are born agnostic and remain so until
influenced by the religious convictions of their parents. I think it
would be more than fair to say that if the most avid Christian preacher of your
hometown had been born in Israel to Jewish parents, he probably would have been
the most avid Rabbi in a comparable Israeli city. Subsequently, he would have
been just as certain that he was preaching the truth about Judaism as he is now
doing for Christianity. It also follows that he would view Christians as
misguided and pray to God for them to stop
acknowledging Jesus as his son.
In almost every case, individuals become members of their respective religious
groups because their parents were also members. Likewise, the parents are only
members because their parents were also members. This pattern should
prompt the question of how far back this visionless trend continues. To answer,
recall the primary reason from the previous chapter why America and Europe are
Christian regions: the citizens of the Roman Empire needed stability in their
government. Roman acceptance probably had nothing to do with what they
analytically believed was the most accurate religion. Instead of initiating an
honest and impartial analysis of the new evidence that science and enlightened
thinking have provided, people simply bury their heads in the sand and observe
whatever beliefs they were conquered with or whatever religion their ancestors
needed thousands of years ago. Moreover, this type of reckless behavior goes unnoticed
because religious individuals exhibit it throughout almost every culture around
the globe.
When children are at a very
young age, their parents unknowingly initiate the conditioning process by
informing them that everyone is imperfect. Because they’re not perfect, they
must take a role model who seemingly defines perfection: Jesus Christ. By
turning their lives over to Jesus, they receive forgiveness for their
imperfections and inadequacies. Next, parents must make their children fear the
consequences of remaining alone with their imperfections. As a result, they are
convinced that Hell is the ultimate destination for people who don’t rely on
the support system. In this place called Hell, those who choose not to accept
Jesus will burn in perpetual agony. Since the consequences of not accepting the
support system are so horrific, and the steps necessary to eliminate the
consequence are so simplistic, children will learn to adopt these beliefs if
only to keep a distance from the supposed punishment. By this point, children
certainly become willing to follow those who know this system best.
To continue the conditioning process, parents must successfully keep their
children free from external contradicting influences by encompassing them
within a Christian environment in a Christian country with weekly Christian
refreshment. Other religions would obviously present conflicting information
and weaken their bonds with Jesus Christ, the head of the support system. The
other religions would also illustrate the contradictions and consequential
uncertainties shared amongst all beliefs. This mental havoc would also create
cognitive dissonance, the tendency driven by uncomfortable feelings to repel or
justify contradictory information, before there is enough conditioning to
stabilize the belief.
Just as
Paul told the Romans that there was a sense of urgency in accepting Jesus,
parents tell their children that they’ll go to Hell if they know about Jesus
and refuse to worship him. Since Jesus could possibly return today or tomorrow,
time is of the utmost essence. They absolutely must accept Jesus as soon as
possible in order for God to save them from the perpetual punishments of Hell.
If they choose not to accept Jesus before they die, that trip to Hell would certainly
be in order. Finally, we must not forget about the ultimate reward for
accepting Jesus: an eternal stay in Heaven with infinite happiness. How many
impressionable young children could possibly refuse this “genuine” offer?
At the
tender age this process usually begins, children typically aren’t able to
rationalize these assertions or challenge their validity. Just the opposite,
children habitually give benefit of the doubt to their parents and role models.
As time goes by, the vast Christian American environment consistently pounds
the imperative system into their heads day after day, week after week, month
after month, and year after year. By their teenage years, most Christians
couldn’t possibly consider the presence of an error in the Bible, much less a
completely erroneous foundation, because it’s unquestionably the perfect word
of God to them. They believe this notion because they’re lifelong members of a
society that has continually reinforced the “special” nature of Christianity. Needless to say, every religion is “special” in its own
isolated environment of observance.
The United States has finally become the
absolute last modernized country to see a sharp drop in the proportion of
Christians comprising its population. The landmark ARIS 2001 study indicates
that the percentage of Americans who consider themselves Christian has dropped
about one percent every year, from 86.2% in 1990 to 76.5% in 2001. Less than
half that number will ever satisfy the simplistic purported requirements of
entering Heaven. Meanwhile, the percentage of Americans who have no religion
grew about one-half percent every year, from 8% in 1990 to 14% in 2001.
Furthermore, 13% of Christians joined the faith after belonging to a different
religion, while 17% of Christians will eventually leave the faith. On the other
hand, 23% of those with no religion left Christianity or some other belief,
while only 5% will eventually leave a state of agnosticism/atheism to join a
religion.
Later in Genesis, Jacob successfully alters the color
patterns on lambs and goats so that he could differentiate the stronger ones
from the weaker ones. He purportedly accomplished this feat by placing peeled
tree branches in front of the mating livestock (Genesis 30:37-39). Following
his absurd achievement, an angel of God visits him in a dream and praises him
for his work in genetics (Genesis 31:11-12). As someone with a thorough
background in human physiology, I hold the opinion that this is easily the single
most embarrassing error contained between the Bible’s covers. Peeled branches
have absolutely no effect on an organism’s appearance; DNA does. As an
extremely quick summary of the topic, the general rule is that half of an
offspring’s DNA comes from each parent with the more dominant type being physically expressed. The specific genes in the DNA
sequence are the determining factor for the animals’ colors. Of course, such
advanced understanding was way beyond the scope of the ancient Hebrew.
Divine inspiration obviously doesn’t resonate from this passage either.
The suggestion that the Bible is lacking a scientific
foundation is nothing less than a colossal understatement. The Bible has failed
fair, impartial, and universally applicable tests in multiple fields of
science. If God truly is the inspiration behind this purportedly divine
declaration to the world, he shows absolutely no interest in its
understandability or accuracy in astronomy, cosmology, zoology, botany,
anthropology, geology, ecology, geography, physiology, and several other
disciplines not covered in this chapter. In fact, the Bible handicaps those who
use their “God-given” talents of reason and logic to settle blatant biblical
problems. Nothing can be more detrimental to the authenticity of a statement
than contradictory phenomena that we readily observe and experience. With no
other evidence to consider, these natural manifestations should always
override what we might hope and think to be correct explanations for
unignorable discrepancies. Such is the power of science and reason. They are
the impartial pursuit of an answer to a question, not the search for
supplements to a predetermined answer.
A little known but important piece of information
about the Genesis flood is that the extremely similar Epic of Gilgamesh in the
Sumerian legend predates Noah’s story by at least one thousand years in the
written form and at least five hundred years for the setting. The similarities
between the two tales are so remarkable that we cannot write them off in good
conscience as mere coincidences. In the earlier flood legend, Utnapishtim
receives instructions and exact dimensions on how to construct a large ship to
avoid an imminent flood (as does Noah in Genesis 6:14-16), takes animals and
his family aboard to preserve life on earth (as does Noah in Genesis 6:19-7:1),
lands the ship on a mountain after the flood has stopped (as does Noah in
Genesis 8:4), releases a dove and a raven from the ship in order to aid his
search for dry land (as does Noah in Genesis 8:6-11), and burns a sacrifice
after the flood for the gods who find its odor pleasing (as does Noah in
Genesis 8:20-21). Because several additional minor parallels exist, I would
encourage everyone to read Tablet XI of the short epic in its entirety in order
to appreciate fully the similarities between the two legends. Since the
Gilgamesh tale is the earlier version of the two, we can only surmise that the
authors of Genesis copied the Epic of Gilgamesh or inadvertently patterned the
story of Noah’s ark on an even more ancient flood legend that we have yet to
discover.
It’s painfully obvious that the story is burdened with a
number of significant problems. For this reason, many apologists will attempt a
hopeless defense for it by suggesting that the tale was speaking of a local
flood. This notion, however, clearly contradicts the text, which states that
all the mountains of the earth are covered (Genesis 7:19-20). Although the word
in the text used for earth, erets, has an ambiguously additional meaning
of land, we can still easily determine the author’s intended connotation
for this specific passage. How else would God’s flood annihilate every living
thing on earth, as this was his stated intention, unless the elevated water
extended well beyond the Middle East? An additional difficulty, randomly
selected from the pile of problems with the local flood suggestion, is the
inability of the ark to travel hundreds of miles to Ararat without water high
enough to reach the oceans. Liquids seek their own level and don’t stand in one
area without complete confinement. Since the barriers required for this magical
constrainment are not present, we can only conclude that a local flood scenario
is not only logically impossible but also entirely incompatible with the
biblical text.
Recent archaeological evidence, on the other hand, has shed some light on the
possible origins of the ancient global flood legends. Researchers have
suggested that the
Additionally, secular scholars agree that the biblical version of the flood
account most likely culminated during the Babylonian Exile. During this
troubling period for the Israelites, their priests likely embellished the
historical event with supernatural attributes, possibly as a way of
manufacturing propaganda to intimidate their captors. In essence, the
Israelites may have wanted to increase their own power by frightening others
with a deity angry enough to decimate even his own people. If the mystery
behind Noah’s ark has this much simpler explanation, why shouldn’t we apply the
same reasoning to the remaining ridiculous, unverifiable, and supernaturally
based accounts of the incredulous Old Testament?
On the other side of the
coin, there’s a singular instance found in Isaiah that Christians often flaunt
to promote an imagined harmony between the Bible and the true configuration of
the earth. All the while, previously mentioned scriptures authored by Isaiah
and his colleagues go completely ignored. Isaiah 40:22 says, “It is he that
sitteth upon the circle of the earth.” The word in question here is “circle.” A
circle is a flat two-dimensional object, while a sphere, the approximate shape
of the earth, is a three-dimensional object. The original Hebrew term used in
this verse is chug, meaning circle. The same word is used twice in the book of Job to describe Heaven and the
sea, two areas that we have no reason to believe anyone ever considered
spherical. Furthermore, Isaiah does not use the actual Hebrew word for sphere, kadur,
in 40:22 even though this utilization would have been much more appropriate if
Isaiah intended to convey a spherical planet. In addition to this logical
analysis of the verse, historians have long determined that a disc-shaped earth
was a popular belief not only in the Middle East, but also in Greece before the
time of Aristotle. We even have ancient maps of Babylon and Egypt containing
illustrations of a circular sea surrounding circular land. When you combine
this tangible evidence with other biblical comments regarding the shape of the
earth, the likelihood of Isaiah 40:22 referring to a sphere is
extremely remote.
Since the authors leave us
with these erroneous notions in the Bible, the majority of unbiased persons who
hold the knowledge contained within this chapter would not dare defend the blind
belief that an omniscient and omnipotent being directly inspired its
authorship. These curious statements are just part of the growing number of
solid reasons to consider biblical passages twice before recognizing them as
absolute truth. We should never accept any statement based solely on the fact
that we can find it in an ancient book claimed to have been
co-authored by one of ancient society’s many gods.
The authors of Genesis
would also have their readers believe that God created the stars on the
universe’s fourth day (1:16), about 6000 years ago. However, modern
observations tell us that the most distant stars are considerably more than ten
billion years in age. Astronomers obtained this valuable piece of knowledge by
looking through the powerful Hubble telescope and performing complex number
crunching over the discoveries. Because we have applicable procedures for
measuring distances this great, such as redshift and parallax (too complicated
to get into here), we know the approximate location of distant stars. Since we
also know the universal speed of light emanating from these stars, we can now
determine that it took the light x amount of years to reach the
observing telescope, where x represents the distance of the star divided
by the distance light can transverse in one year. Therefore, stars must be at
least as old as the time it takes their light to reach the earth from the
previously measured distance. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see these stars because
their light wouldn’t have reached our eyes yet. In other words, if we are able
to see a group of stars ten billion light years away, the distance light can
travel in ten billion years, we know that the group of stars is at least ten
billion years old because it took the light ten billion years to reach us.
How can light from a star be billions of years old if God created the star only
6000 years ago? The hilarious apologetic answer to this glaring complication is
often that “God created the stars 6000 years ago but created their light in
transit for us to be able to see them.” To paraphrase this proposal, God is
making us see things that never really happened. This suggestion is a classic
example of what has been termed a “how-it-could-have-been-scenario,” which
substitutes a painfully ridiculous and nonsensical explanation for the obvious
answer in the interest of apologetics. It seems that no complication is too
difficult for some Christians to invent absurd justifications and phantom
harmonizations even though they will consider these acts to be logical
violations when used by other religious sects to justify alternative beliefs.
The reason that God decides
to drown the entire world, killing nearly every living person and animal on
earth, is his belief that people are evil and unworthy of existence (Genesis
6:5). So what if they were evil? As Lenny Bruce once exclaimed, “The
fault lies with the manufacturer!” God allegedly created humans, yet he faults
us for being guided by our desires, instincts, and
natural tendencies. Since he’s supposedly omniscient, God realized how we were
destined to turn from the beginning. He must also have realized that his lament
would fuel the urge to destroy his precious creations, only to leave himself
back where he started. Even so, he creates Adam, yet hundreds of years later,
he drowns nearly all the men, women, and children on the face of the earth
because he deliberately chose not to make us to his liking the first time.
Even if we suppose the adults deserved to die slow and torturous deaths,
what association could we conceivably make between their decisions and the
adolescent victims of the flood? Couldn’t God have
just placed the innocent children and animals aside for a while so that they
wouldn’t drown? If not, how about a humane death at the very least? Drowning is
a horrible way for people to die. As a result of
hopelessly treading water for hours, their muscles burned due to large amounts
of lactic acid production. Once they finally gave up, went under, and held
their breaths, acidic carbon dioxide eroded their lungs until the unbearable
pain forced them to inhale where there was no air for them to breathe. The
water brought into their lungs robbed their bodies of oxygen, causing them to
go numb. As water violently rushed in and out of their chests, the currents
eventually laid their heavily breathing, slowly dying bodies at the bottom of
the ocean. The inhaled water caused their lungs to tear and bleed profusely. As
their blood supply dwindled, their hearts slowly came to a halt. Even so, their
brains continued to process information for another couple of minutes. They
were patently aware that death was imminent, yet they could do nothing to speed
it or prevent it. I imagine that their final reflections would have been on
what they did to deserve such treatment.
As you see, drowning is not a quick and painless death. Regardless, this
is what God did to every man, woman, child, baby, and animal on earth because he
made a mistake! To make matters disgustingly worse, the flood accomplished nothing!
The omniscient God realizes after the flood that a man’s imagination is
evil from youth (Genesis 8:21). He seemingly allows us to be evil to this day,
just like those he purportedly drowned in the flood. Even if this was the sole
befuddled and immoral act carried out by God, I’m positive that I couldn’t
bring myself to worship him. However, this is only the beginning of his
mass-murdering spree.
In an exploit of inconceivable irrationality, God
sends forth two bears to kill forty-two children for making fun of
Elisha’s bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24). Why would the omnibenevolent God feel the
necessity to have two bears viciously maul little children for acting
like…children? This is supposed to be the same “wonderful” and “loving” God who
promises us eternal life, but an entity capable of these inane activities could
certainly change his mind and banish all of his worshippers to Hell. Christians
never have to justify such passages because, of course, they never read them!
If a man rapes an engaged virgin who doesn’t cry loud
enough to draw attention, the community should consider the attack consensual
if it took place within the city. Thus, the whore must be stoned to death per
God’s instructions. It obviously doesn’t matter if the woman is too scared to
scream because the law makes no such exception. The man will be stoned to death
as well, not because he committed a brutal atrocity against the woman, but only
because he “violated another man’s wife” (Deuteronomy 22:24). Note the
shamefully sharp contrast in disciplinary action between raping a woman with a
husband and raping a woman without a husband: death versus a pound of silver.
Since it’s all the same to the woman, it now becomes clear that God feels the husband
is the one who is the victim of the attack.
Dozens more examples of cruelty to women exist
throughout the Bible, but I feel this will be sufficient in making my case.
Women had suffered terribly for thousands of years because of what men,
not any god, wrote in the Bible. To some extent, women still endure coarse
treatment stemming from their own religious beliefs and those observed by their
husbands. I hope you realize that the authors of the Pentateuch were not
divinely inspired to write declarations of women as the sole property of men. Instead,
the books should once again read as though some group is depending upon the
gullibility of the people to serve their own desires. In essence, the Old
Testament authors misled the New Testament authors into believing that they
actually recorded the “wonderful” and “loving” God’s authentic orders. Not
knowing any other society than the one in which they were
raised, the New Testament authors felt compelled to endorse these
regulations.
This is the thought that I’m
hoping Christian readers will consider among themselves: “I feel that God is a
wonderful and loving creator, yet the men who wrote the Old Testament say that
God encouraged people to make slaves of foreigners because they worship
different gods. He also allowed women to live as slaves because the men
believed that females were the inferior gender. These aren’t wonderful and
loving decisions. The Old Testament writers even say that God sold slaves and
gave rules to Moses permitting his people to beat the male slaves and rape the
female slaves. This does not seem right at all. Did God actually say and do
all these horrible things, or were the authors probably trying to advance
ulterior motives by tricking a gullible audience into believing that these
ghastly commands were truly of divine origin?”
As the events of Genesis are purported to have started taking place at least
3000 years before we know of anyone who recorded them on hardcopy, no primary
eyewitnesses were around to testify for or against the legitimacy of these
claims. If you decide that God actually said the things written in the Bible,
it certainly throws out the notion that he’s “wonderful” and “loving.” If, on
the other hand, you decide that God would never make the aforementioned suggestions,
it certainly brings the validity of the Bible’s content into question. Think
about it for a while.
In the first chapter of
Matthew, we see the ancestry of Jesus spanning from King David to Joseph,
Mary’s husband. The complication with this genealogy is the absolute lack of a
blood relationship between Joseph and Jesus. As the story goes, Jesus, a man
without an earthly father, was born from a virgin impregnated by God. If the
Matthew genealogy is true, Jesus was not a descendant of David. Consequently,
he could not be the Messiah allegedly prophesied to arise from the line of
David (Psalm 132:11). As you should expect, this was obviously not the author’s
intent. Seeing as how the author of Luke probably realized that tracing Jesus’
lineage this way would be a blunder, he created his own genealogy passing
through Heli. Even though Luke is specific in stating that Heli is Joseph’s
father, I have given Christians the benefit of the doubt that he is Joseph’s
father-in-law instead of a second father. To very little surprise, Heli and
Mary just so happen to be descendants of King David as well (Luke 3:23-38). The
Bible has now begun to insult the intelligence of its audience.
Accounts also differ from Matthew and Luke on when Jesus was born. The more popular
account of Matthew has King Herod alive at the time of Jesus’ birth (Chapter
2). From several historical sources, we know Herod’s reign ended in 4 BCE with his violent death. Thus, according to Matthew,
Jesus must have been born in or before 4 BCE. The date
later designated as Jesus’ birth is misplaced, but there’s nothing biblically
wrong about that. However, Luke says that Mary was still with child at the time
Quirinius was conducting a census as Governor of Syria (2:1-5). According to
meticulously kept Roman history, Quirinius couldn’t
have carried out this census until at least 6 CE. Thus, according to Luke,
Jesus must have been born in or after 6 CE. In order
for the two accounts to be harmonious, Jesus had to be born before 4 BCE and after 6 CE: a feat impossible even for a
supernatural being. The two accounts provide a ten-year discrepancy in need of
a difficult resolution.
To rectify this insurmountable problem, Christians have desperately proposed,
without justification, that Quirinius was a governor twice. They say this
earlier phantom governorship was held sometime before 4
BCE in order for Luke to be consistent with Matthew. Here’s what we know from
Roman history: Quintilius was governor from 6 BCE to 3 BCE; Saturninus was
governor from 9 BCE to 6 BCE; Titius was governor from 12 BCE to 9 BCE;
Quirinius, the governor in question, didn’t obtain consulship until 12 BCE,
making him ineligible to hold Syria’s office of governor before that time; no
one ever held the governorship of Syria twice; Josephus and Tacitus, the two
most important historians from the early Common Era, never mentioned Quirinius
holding the post twice; and there would be no reason for Quirinius to conduct a
census prior to 6 CE because Judea wasn’t under Roman control until that time.
A few contributions of irrelevant evidence and several wild explanations claim
to rectify this obvious contradiction, each one through its own unique method,
but they’re all nothing more than the most outrageous “how-it-could-have-been-scenarios.”
The two accounts contradict greatly over the time Jesus was allegedly born.
God laid down a strangely curious law when he
declared that any man with damaged or missing genitals, as well as any man who
doesn’t know the names of his ancestors to ten generations, cannot enter into
religious congregations (Deuteronomy 23:1-2). First, I don’t see how anyone
would know another person had a genital abnormality unless someone literally
screened the visitors at the door. As for the burden of proving an ancestry, I
doubt that any Hebrew was able to keep accurate and truthful records thousands
of years ago. How could anyone indisputably prove that he knew his family line
that far back? What was to prevent someone from just conjuring up some names so
that he could attend worship? If no one knew this person’s ancestry, no one
could disprove him. Wouldn’t the omniscient God realize this futile law wasn’t
going to work? More importantly, why is God thoroughly preoccupied with the
condition of a man’s genitals? I know I’ve mentioned it before, but the whole
matter is patently asinine. This is one of the many absurd
rules that Big Brother allegedly distributes to keep his society in order.
Likewise, instead of including undeniable proof for the book’s authenticity, he
tells us not to wear a piece of clothing made of more than one fabric
(Leviticus 19:19). These examples of God’s foolish rules will have to serve for
now in order to keep the topic at a reasonable length.
Like mutated locusts, talking animals aren’t uncommon
in the Bible. Everyone should remember the talking serpent tempting Eve in the
Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:1), but there’s an even more hilarious example of an
atypical animal. In this instance, a man named Balaam is riding along on his
donkey. When the donkey sits down on him twice, Balaam gives it a beating for
its rebellion. When the donkey notices a murderous angel in their path, it sits
down for a third time. Of course, Balaam delivers an additional flogging upon
the donkey’s body. The donkey then asks Balaam, “What have
I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?” Yes, the
donkey argues with its master! Then, Balaam, who does not appear to be the
least bit surprised that his ride is questioning his motives, decides to engage
in a debate with the donkey by claiming that it mocked him by sitting down.
Furthermore, he informs his donkey that it would have already been dead if he
had a sword nearby. The donkey then outsmarts him by pointing out that he has
always let his master ride him but never asked to ride his master. Thoroughly
outsmarted and outclassed, Balaam then concedes defeat in his debate with the
donkey (Numbers 22:27-30). Seeing as how no concluding comment that I could
make here would do this outdated and obtuse blunder justice, we’ll move on.
While I consider exorcism more of a scientific error
than an absurdity, there are definitely some aspects of Jesus’ demon-removals
that fit better in this section. According to Matthew, Jesus once encountered a
couple of men possessed by devils. As they ask Jesus for a cure, he approves
their request by driving the devil spirits into a drove of pigs. Possessed by demons, the pigs leap off a cliff and plunge to their
deaths. The witnesses in the town then turn against Jesus as a result of his decision to drive the swine insane
(Matthew
Daniel 9:24-27 proclaims that in seven sets of
seventy weeks (490 weeks), a ruler will arrive and reconstruct a city. The
Hebrew word for week, septad, actually means sevens, but the
Israelites commonly used the term to refer to a set of seven days. In order for
the upcoming prophecy to fit, disingenuous apologists must alter the obvious
meaning of septad to seven years in quintessential post hoc
fashion. Nevertheless, even if we give the benefit of the miniscule doubt to
the apologists and assume that septad refers to a set of seven years,
the arrival of this ruler would take place in 55 BCE. We know the starting
point of the time in question because the passage refers to Cyrus’ order of
cleansing the city in 545 BCE. Thus, prophecy inventors must once again alter
the obvious intent of the passage and claim that Cyrus’ heir, Artaxerxes, was
the one who gave the order. This puts the new date of arrival around 39 CE, approximately
seven years after the presumed death of Jesus. Next, the apologist must shorten
the length of a year by averaging the length of a solar year and the length of
a lunar year in order to make the prophecy fit nicely with the year of the
crucifixion. Even when you allow all of these absurd leniencies, there’s no
potent evidence to support the notion that this passage refers to Jesus in any
way, shape, form, or fashion. Jesus wasn’t a ruler, and he didn’t rebuild any
cities. Even so, a few Christian zealots would like the world to believe that
this is a fulfilled prophecy. Would these same apologists
bend over backwards to support the text if such statements were found in the
Qur’an?
Speaking to a crowd of Pharisees, Jesus preaches
about a series of events destined to come upon them that inevitably conclude
with their damnation to Hell (Matthew 23). When will these scenarios play out?
“Verily I say unto you, All these things shall come upon this generation”
(Matthew 23:36). The connotation is clear: the events mentioned throughout the
chapter were to take place during the lifetimes of those living in that
generation. In order to defend Jesus’ statement, some Christians claim that the
makers of the KJV Bible should have translated the Hebrew word genea as age
or race. While modern lexicons may support this translation for the
very same reason that Christians believe it, what evidences contemporaneous
with the era do they have to support this assertion? Nowhere in the New
Testament did the translators interpret genea to be anything other than generation.
The obvious choice of translation is also consistent with all other failed
return prophecies. Again, they begin with the faulty premise of inerrancy and
search for the most likely way to maintain this quality. What religion wouldn’t
survive an infallibility test given such luxurious leniencies?
With the explosion of
Gospel accounts in the second century, containment was an obvious priority for
keeping the religion within reasonable limits. The first man known to have
offered such a proposal on behalf of the church was Irenaeus of Lyon around 180
CE. His idea was to accredit only four Gospels because there were four zones of
the world, four winds, four forms of living creatures, four divisions of man’s
estate, and four beasts of the apocalypse. For these poorly thought-out
reasons, Irenaeus believed that there should only be four Gospels accepted by
the church. As was the case for the horrendous slave-trading institution having
its origins in superstitious nonsense, it certainly follows that the most
potentially important books in human history would have been decided in a
likewise manner. Instead of God providing an unquestionably fitting reason for
these Gospel choices, we have a perfectly appropriate act of senselessness
leading to the foundation of contemporary Christian faith. Yet, it’s no wonder
surrogate accounts, such as the Infancy Gospel, didn’t make the cut when you
consider that Jesus strikes his teachers and playmates dead for attempting to
correct him.
Just like the apologists of every world religion, I could make the same bald
assertion that the Infancy Gospel, along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
had God’s inspiration to make it 100% accurate. If anyone thinks that they can
find a way to invalidate my claim, I’ll simply generate a
“how-it-could-have-been-scenario” that maintains the Gospel’s inerrancy while
paying no attention to the improbability and absurdity of my proposed solution.
What if Irenaeus accidentally omitted a fifth truthful Gospel
that contained an additional prerequisite for entering into Heaven?
Christians won’t accept the stated extrabiblical requirement because there are
four, not five, beasts of the apocalypse. I trust that you understand the
fundamental flaw with the blatantly uncertain Christian system.