Bart Ehrman Lecture on the King James Bible

Fundies believe the KJB is the definitive text, which of course it's not.  But don't take my word for it, skip to 9:30 (unless you want to hear a lot of speechifying) and check out what Bart Ehrman has to say about it:

March 9 Links, a rather motley assortment

 Texas Christians teach the Bible in public schools, but they teach it objectively and they're inclusive.  Uhhh yeah right.

The Scarlet S:  Getting Branded for Being Single.  I didn't write it, but I could have.

Evolution in action:  one invasive species of ants seems to be doing better than another invasive species of ants.

I think the woman who got killed by a lion deserves a Darwin award.   Seriously.  Look at these pictures.  Just because you love big cats doesn't mean big cats love you!

Make your own fossils!  (shhh don't show this to creationists!)

Kansas Republicans pass an anti-abortion bill that includes a provision preventing employees of clinics that provide abortions from bringing cupcakes to their children's schools.  Yes.  Really.

Amnesty International calls on Bangladesh to protect minority Hindu population

Meanwhile, in India, Hindu radicals are reportedly attacking minority Christians.  They claim they only do "moral policing" and speak up for their gods and goddesses. 

Bulgaria "expresses regret" for deportation of 11,000 Jews during the Holocaust.  Better late than never?  Fortunately for 45,000 other Jews, the public didn't want them to be deported.

Muslim teens in the Netherlands think Hitler didn't go far enough.

At least the Jews of Venezuela can breathe easier now that Chavez is dead.... or can they?  If they are descendents of the Sephardic Jews who were kicked out of Spain in 1492, they are now welcome to come back.  Better late than never?

Turn off your irony meters!  The ambassador attending a ceremony to honor a French woman who saved Jews during the Holocaust is named "Bigot."  Really.  Looky here.

Bill O'Reilly sows a tiny seed of accommodation in an interview with creationist Jeffress.  Ken Ham fries his bacon.  Hilarity ensues.  Pop the popcorn this hatefest is just heating up.

"Club Beyond" is beyond the pale in prosletyzing to military youth.

How Trustworthy is the Bible?

Can anything in the Bible be considered well.... gospel truth?  Christianity is based on the factual truth of most of the New Testament, leaving aside the parts that are inconvenient to one's prejudices, of course. 

People who want to take the Bible literally should be aware of some well-known facts about their favorite book: 

• No part of the Bible survives in manuscript sources from the time they were supposedly written.
• None survive in copies that agree 100%
• None are error-free in any copy
• There are many, many contradictions in the Bible, even in the most "recent" parts
• The New Testament wasn't codified until 325 C.E.
•  The Torah (First Five books) took final form ca. 900 - 450 BCE
•  The Talmud was completed ca. 200 CE & 500 CE (two parts)
• The Old Testament was codified after the New Testament was
• Writings that were widely believed to be legitimate were not selected for inclusion
• Writings that have proved to be forgeries were selected for inclusion
• The Synoptic gospels were written at least 50 years after the death of Christ
• The Book of John was written almost 100 years after the death of Christ
• Mark, the earliest Gospel, says Christ will return before the apostles' demise, but he didn't
• Mark, Mathew, Luke and John didn't actually write the books named for them, nor do they have any connection to them whatsoever
• Paul went against Jewish law, insisting on Baptism rather than circumcision, in order to appeal to gentiles.
• Paul was not the undisputed leader of early Christians
• Paul never met Christ in person, and he was at odds with people who did
• Many of the letters attributed to Paul are forgeries
• The Gnostic Christian theology was suppressed because it disagreed with the idea that Jesus could be both God-spirit and human (they thought he was God-spirit only)
• The Ebionites were suppressed because they disagreed with the idea that Jesus could be both God-spirit and human (they believed he was human only)
• The places mentioned in Exodus were only settled at the same time during the 7th Century B.C., not during the supposed time of the Exodus
• Old Testament stories made Israel look bad because the final editors were residents of Judah and were trying to establish Judah as the true heart of the Jewish faith
• The New Testament's anti-Jewish bias dates each part - the more anti-Semitic, the later the book was written, because the earliest Christians considered themselves Jewish
•  Old Testament law was only thrown out so that gentiles didn't have to get circumcised or change their diets to become Christians, i.e., the O.T. laws were inconvenient
• Mathew & Luke are based on Mark, with some embellishments that seem to have specific agendas.

If your history textbook had this many problems, you would throw it out!

The Bible, on The "History" Channel

I was hoping for a history of the Bible, but no, it's a depiction of the Biblical stories.  Phooey.

Here's the Huffpo write-up:  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/01/the-bible-history-channel-miniseries_n_2767706.html

Part entertainment, part evangelism, "The Bible" is accompanied by a tremendous commercial push, with trailers in movie theaters and ads across A+E Networks channels, including Lifetime. There are also three books based on the series and a DVD study kit....The series' website includes lesson plans for pastors who want to incorporate the show into Sunday sermons and study groups.

I think I'll pass.

Links for March 2

Just a few somewhat random links:

Take-down of William Lane Craig's position on morality.   (WLC doesn't participate and why should he? He phones in the same tired "answers" in every debate anyway)

William Lane Craig is organizing a Roots of Christian Civilization Cruise.   Israel is not on the tour.  Really.

Indiana drunk arrested after calling 911 (repeatedly) for a cheeseburger.  Funny but pathetic.

Woman sues prior employer, whom she says fired her because she voted for Obama.

Procrastination is not laziness.  It's neurosis.  So the blog author will get started working on it... on Monday.  Sheesh. Hey, whether you're a loser because you're lazy because you're neurotic, you're still a loser!

After losing his court case for assisted suicide, This man stopped eating and died.  He should have been helped to die with dignity.  h/t Naturalistic Atheism

National Geographic looks at the decimation of the African elephant due to poaching for Chinese purchase.  They interview a Buddhist art dealer who tells himself that the elephant died to donate its tusk to statues honoring Buddha, and that they are happy in the afterlife because of this.  (PBS page here)  Buy the DVD here.

A new book says the early Christians were not persecuted, at least to the extent they claim to have been.  Early Christians were liars?  Say it ain't so!

8 Reasons the Duggars are a creepy cult.  Brilliant breakdown of the "family" values in that crazy baby-factory family.  I found them creepy from the start, but I admit I couldn't stand to watch them enough to deconstruct their Godspeak.

Things are not looking good for private corporations suing to deny birth control to employees.

Ignorant Christian thinks he has "unanswerable" (scientific) questions for atheists.  And they call us arrogant!

David Barton got his quotation about 19th Century schools being defended by gun-toting students FROM A LOUIS LAMOUR NOVEL!!!!  Argh!  What a tool.

Ten "Cardinal" Sins Taint Pope Vote  And these are only the dirty child-raping rapist-protecting scum that we know about in the College of Cardinals.

Scientology reports on people who report on Scientology.

Edited to add:
Check out the comments for this post from the Why Evolution is True blog!

Useful things religion gave us

That religion gave us some wonderful cultural or personal goodies is no argument for religion being true, or even useful.   Without religion we would still come up with whatever our psyche demands because our psyche demands it.  People are people.

One example is meditation.  It was developed in Buddhism, migrated around the world, and now can be  completely divorced from the religion that developed it.

I have used it at points in my life and I find it very calming and focusing.  Awhile ago I ran into this article in the L.A. Times about meditation led by a former Buddhist nun.  The local museum here offers it unguided except for downloadable tracks to help you destress at the end of the week.

I'm an art lover, and I can get into a trance state at a concert or at a museum just from the art.  I can also meditate without tibetan chimes or an mp3 over earbuds.  This makes me think that meditation and the resulting feelings could have come about without religion, but without neuroscience people wouldn't understand their illusory mental state.

Neurologists have managed to study the effect of meditation (.pdf) on the brain.  Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows the brain in action, and studies have shown that meditation affects many parts of the brain.  Occam's razor would suggest that meditation is "all in the mind," and not at all supernatural.  I've heard the argument that neurological phenomena that have been interpreted as religious experience are evidence that God has made the human mind such that he can dial in, when the human has made his/her brain receptive of course.  But the same people who make this argument also believe that babies with undeveloped brains, brain-dead people, and people with severe brain damage have souls.  How conveeeenient.  So the soul is in the brain when it's having a religious experience, but it's also in the brain when it's incapable of having a religious experience.
So... religion may have invented meditation, or at least developed it, but it's all-natural and would probably have been discovered at some point anyway.  We discovered mind-altering drugs all over the world.  We would have discovered mind-altering practices, too.  Not to mention, it's possible to have a mental state that feels divine in many different cultures, with many different deities messing with the brain.  If there were one true deity, wouldn't everyone have the same interpretation of their weird neurological states?

And speaking of art, if not for religion, would we have Bach's B Minor Mass?  What about the Sistene Chapel?



Because I'm an art and music lover, this has been lobbed at me by believers more often than any other "argument."  Or perhaps "jabbed" would be the better word, since it is usually said with an implied "Touché."  I try very hard not to sigh before I point out that Bach also composed the Brandenburg concertos and the Mona Lisa is not a religious painting (not by Michelangelo, but still... )

In the past, artists did not have the artistic freedom that they do now.  Michelangelo and Bach had employers, and they had specific job duties.  In some eras, artists worked on commission, but they didn't have a free hand then, either.  They were the best of their generations, so they had employers or patrons with the means to give them a broad canvas so the products were pretty spectacular.  Michelangelo had many "canvases" and Bach had fine singers and instrumentalists to work with.  But Michelangelo didn't have the freedom to paint pagan stories at the Vatican and Bach couldn't tamper with the words of the Mass.  So the argument falls apart because of patronage.  You can turn it around and say something like this:  "Without the greediness of The Church, the best artists of Western Europe would have had the freedom to execute their own vision rather pander in religious sentiment."

The ultimate utility of religion is social control, especially supposed control of supposed morality.  This one gets trotted out often in the letters to the editor in the local paper, and probably all over the country.  A favorite version is: "Since they took God out of the schools there's been a decline in morality and society's going to hell in a handbasket."  Not to mention, Newtown happened because God was expelled.  There are a lot of problems with this, but foremost is that there are two Biblical moralities:  in the Old Testament, God punishes the whole species, or a whole country, or a whole city, based on what only some people are doing.  This terrifies the "good" people who think the rest of us are going to get them into trouble with their brutish sky daddy.  In the New Testament, morality is a total mess, because salvation is based not on works, but on belief, but the main idea is forgiveness.  Except in old-fashioned Catholicism, anything can be forgiven, including murder  (but not butt-sex!)

There is something to the idea that religion influences morality, but not as much as believers think.  First, not hurting other people is something you learn as a child in your family and then extend to your fellow humans in wider and wider circles.  Whether you learn not to hit other kids in school, Sunday school, or the soccerfield, you still learn that lesson.  Likewise, if your family is messed up or you have some brain malfunction and you turn out to be a sociopath, it doesn't matter if you go to church.  A church-going sociopath has a ready-made pool of gullible suckers to take advantage of, and the unchurched sociopath has to make mayhem somewhere else.

Fear of the wrath of the invisible sky-daddy does seem to help some people stay on the "right" side, but only because their beliefs in the supernatural have been a crutch preventing them from developing their natural moral muscle.  Those in the middle, a.k.a. those the Devil and God are battling for, will be influenced by whatever social force is most important to them, regardless of their religion.

So.... does the utility of a religion make any difference in whether it should be followed?  If you think that atheists should join a church even though they don't believe in any of the tenets, then maybe yes (though I strongly disagree on that point)  But if you think that the utility of religion is some kind of proof that atheists should believe in that religion, then the answer is NO!  It's just proof that money, power, and human evolution can sometimes result in something useful.  It's not proof of the supernatural.

Grandma Kills Grandkids, Mom Thinks They're With God

http://news.yahoo.com/cops-grandma-shot-self-young-grandsons-car-145334468.html

PRESTON, Conn. (AP) — A woman who picked up her two young grandsons from daycare and was supposed to bring them home so the 2-year-old could open his birthday presents instead drove them to a neighboring town and shot and killed the children and herself, state police and family members said.

The bodies of 47-year-old Debra Denison and her grandsons, 2-year-old Alton Perry and 6-month-old Ashton Perry, were found Tuesday night in a car parked near Lake of Isles in Preston, in the southeastern part of the state.

...Family members said Denison, the boys' maternal grandmother, had a history of mental health problems.

...Denison also had a 13-year-year-old son and, in her suicide note, she said in part that God was watching over him on Tuesday, White [the other grandparent] said.

In Facebook postings late Tuesday and Wednesday morning, Brenda Perry [the mom] thanked people for their prayers and said she loved her sons.

"God (has) two beautiful angels helping him now," the postings said. "My boys are in an amazing place we got a few great angels watching over us. love you Ashton and alton."

Well naturally you're going to go right into the God-talk when you yourself allowed your mentally ill mother to be on the approved list of people to pick up your kids even though the kids overwhelmed her.  And did mom know that grandma had access to a gun?  How did that happen?

Guilt and grief are terrible things, but how does imagining that God has enslaved a toddler and infant make things better?

Grandma left a suicide note, acknowledging that she is leaving her youngest child motherless.  God is watching over him?  God couldn't prevent her from offing the toddler and the baby, what good will God do for the teenager?

I seriously hope for the teen's sake that he gets placed in a foster home far, far away from his nutty Christian family.  As crazy as they are, he'd be better off being sent to a Catholic boarding school and being fucked up the ass by a pedophile priest.  At least those priests aren't murderers.