I live in America and in this country and around the world there are a lot of Christians who take…
Category Bible
I was discussing religion with a Christian online (as I often do) and he started to brag about how great…
I haven’t created a YouTube video in a while, so I figured now might be a good time to get back into that. In my latest video, I ask religious believers and former religious believers about the line of religious crazy. Basically, I am curious about what aspects of religion are too crazy even for the religious. Check it out:
I recently received a comment from a Christian pointing out that the Bible supports fasting for health reasons and that a scientific study has shown that fasting can be beneficial to cancer patients on Chemotherapy. The commenter then added that “this was another case of science catching up with God’s advice.”
Many more progressive religious believers and a few misguided atheists insist that religion isn’t really the problem; the problem is merely how some extremists interpret religion. They claim that atheists like me want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I disagree. I just don’t want to drown the baby in baptism.
Yes, A Christian actually told me that atheists take the Bible too literally. I burst out laughing because as an atheist, I don’t take the Bible literally at all; I take the Bible factitious!
While fundamentalist religious believers certainly have a lot of ridiculous beliefs, I actually can understand their position much better than I can understand the position of the more nominal believers — as the old saying goes, in for a pinch; in for a pound.
Despite the fact that the Bible is hopelessly boring, the characters have no depth to them, and many of the stories challenge human credibility and morality the Bible remains the bestselling book of all time. The History Channel recently capitalized on the books popularity with much success. Now they are planning on creating a sequel mini-series.
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The Bible contains a lot of extremely silly and ridiculous claims and unless you are a diehard Bible literalist, that should be pretty obvious. When religious believers come face to face with these silly and ridiculous claims of their religion, they typically fall back to the old, “that part is a metaphor” card. Let’s examine that briefly.
For starters, I would like to inquire about this so called “metaphor.” What exactly is the claim a metaphor for, exactly? I mean when Jesus says that it is better to pluck out your eye and chop off your hand rather than to steal or feel lust, he prefaces it why saying that it is better to lose these body parts than to have one’s soul tortured for all eternity. So what exactly is that a metaphor for? Maybe that wasn’t one of those metaphor parts of the Bible?
There is an atheist meme that states that any part of the Bible that contradicts science or is just blatantly ridiculous is obviously a metaphor. Basically, this meme is making light of the ever sliding scale of biblical credibility.
The old “metaphor” card seems to be the new “God of the Gaps” excuse. It seems that as time goes by and our scientific understanding of the universe grows, there also seem to be more and more metaphors in the Bible. Funny how that works out.
Last night, I was a guest lecturer at a community college sociology class. The subject was atheism and secular humanism. I started out talking about the beginnings of religion and at one point outlined how the Old Testament came together. One fundamentalist Christian in the class questioned my account and well she should have because it is pretty damning to her fundamentalist beliefs and because I think it is important to question everything.