…and this is a 
Rewriting Genesis…accurately
Category: Creationism
Posted on: June 7, 2008 2:56 PM, by PZ Myers
The introductory schtick to my talk at the Seattle Skeptics meeting last night was to take a Bible and read a bit of Genesis, making the point that it was vague, wrong, and useless (I also ripped out the page and waved the pathetic thing around a bit, which had several people asking if they could have the bible defaced by PZ Myers afterwards). Then, of course, I summarized some small bits of the story of eye evolution to demonstrate that science has a much deeper and more powerful origins story than that little scrap of piss-poor poetry that half this country wants to make the backbone of our science curriculum.
Now here's something cool: somebody has tried putting the actual creation story as revealed by modern physics into the same kind of portentous, simple language that even a Mesopotamian goat-herder could understand, the point being that if a god had chosen to tell primitive people how the universe came to be, he/she/it could have done so in just as awe-inspiring a way as the false myths we've got.
It's rather neat that modern scientists know more than God.
Politics
Comments
Scientz Pwns G0d.
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 7, 2008 3:04 PM
Big deal, a greeter at Wal-Mart knows more than God, what's yer point?
Posted by: scooter | June 7, 2008 3:07 PM
UMMMmmmm...You tore a page out of a bible!. Man are you in trouble.
Posted by: MissAgentGirl | June 7, 2008 3:10 PM
Thanks for the link. What a great movie - am sending it along to friends.
But won't a religious person just say, "What about the light in the beginning... where did that come from? What was there before that?"
I'm just echoing the questions of my 9 year-old. Which pretty much sums it up...
Posted by: Candide | June 7, 2008 3:23 PM
Wow. If that were in Genesis, I'd be a Christian.
Posted by: Ellindsey | June 7, 2008 3:31 PM
Awesome.
Posted by: The Gay Species | June 7, 2008 3:33 PM
Wow... defacing books, wishing that Christians went about labeled. Is it any wonder that some see atheists as dangerous militants?
Behaving like religious people does none of us any good.
Posted by: Plastic Flag | June 7, 2008 3:34 PM
Nice :) There are just so many little ways in which a deity could have explained reality in simple terms.
Posted by: Jason Dick | June 7, 2008 3:35 PM
#4:
Asking where did the light in the beginning come from is no different than asking where did god come from.
Posted by: Thistledown | June 7, 2008 3:37 PM
narrated by Gandalf, right?
Posted by: alex | June 7, 2008 3:38 PM
"When it could be so, so it was." Great line!
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | June 7, 2008 3:42 PM
So what do we get out of this, eh? The Abrahamic god thing is either make-believe nonsense, or else it's a feckin' edjit. Well, I worked that one out when I was twelve.
But this little movie isn't aimed at the likes of us. It's for the feckin' edjits that believe in the Abrahamic god thing. It ought to make them see reason, but I'm not holding my breath.
Posted by: Richard Harris | June 7, 2008 3:54 PM
I learned from John Rohmer's excellent series "Testament" that the Bible's days of creation (what was created, and the order they fell) correspond exactly to the hierarchy of gods in Sumerian mythology. In other words, it was plagiarized. Who'd have guessed? They stole the Flood as well. Fascinating stuff.
Posted by: Rob G | June 7, 2008 3:56 PM
Heh.
Back when I was confirmed (I was never a very individual and courages kid) we had to put on a show and for reasons I cannot now recall I was assigned some reading from Genesis.
I didn't notice this myself, but our neighbour (whose daughter was up at the same time) afterwards told me that every time I had said "And God said", I cleared my throat before going on. That is it must have gone something like the beginning of that video: "And God said '*ahegm* Let there be light!'"
Posted by: Sili | June 7, 2008 3:58 PM
That video is fantastic.
Carl Sagan would have been proud.
PS: Nice work, PZ. That's certainly pulling no punches.
Posted by: Luke | June 7, 2008 3:59 PM
Catholic apologist John Martignoni does a schtick where he takes a Catholic catechism and tears out selected pages in emulation of "cafeteria Catholics" who pick and choose the tenets they prefer to believe (while discarding those they prefer to disbelieve). His point is that deleting different dogmas reduces the Catholic faith to a kind of Protestantism. Well, of course it does! And if you keep tearing out more pages, you can eventually get it down to nothing! His audience is supposed to be horrified by this conclusion and I imagine he's often pleased with the reaction. Martignoni thinks he's demonstrated that God's plan for humanity is irreducible, whereas he's really shown exactly the opposite.
Instead of tearing out the pages of a Bible or catechism one by one until it's all gone, it's simpler to just shelve the entire book in the fiction section.
Posted by: Zeno | June 7, 2008 4:00 PM
PZ Myers:
I don't believe the Bible is the word of God. There is plenty in the Bible that I actively dislike. But I wouldn't physically destroy any book. And not because it offends believers. Maybe because it's too much like what many believers do. Also, the Koran is as much bullshit when it comes to science. Will you do the same to a copy of the Koran? Can you imagine the reaction if a moron like Robertson or Hagee or the like tore up a Koran? But the video is cool.
Posted by: rufustfirefly | June 7, 2008 4:04 PM
Loved it... but it should have ended with the god-voice saying, "ah... well, let's just go have a cup of tea and not worry about it, eh?"
Posted by: Karen | June 7, 2008 4:09 PM
Candide (#4),
It makes no difference if there are still unanswered questions. The point of the video is that God *could have* dictated an account of creation (using language intelligible to the goat-herders of the time) that would have contained facts that no one at the time could have known. Had the bible contained such an account, our science of today would be confirming those facts. Had the bible contained such an account, it would be strong proof of the existence of God and his role in creation, even if we haven't yet figured it all out.
Similar suggestions have been made by others, all as a way of pointing out that the bible lacks such passages. (My favorite would be the bible stating that the string of digits in pi startng at the 1 billionth decimal place is 535807633906108472764959. Confirmation would take the development of electronic computers.)
Posted by: Divalent | June 7, 2008 4:11 PM
PZ wrote:
"The introductory schtick to my talk at the Seattle Skeptics meeting last night was to take a Bible and read a bit of Genesis, making the point that it was vague, wrong, and useless."
Which passage?
Posted by: buckyball | June 7, 2008 4:12 PM
@ Divalent, #19:
"Had the bible contained such an account, it would be strong proof of the existence of God and his role in creation, even if we haven't yet figured it all out."
But would it be enough?
Posted by: buckyball | June 7, 2008 4:15 PM
Actually, it's rather neat that we humans can interact with the creation in different ways. One of those ways is through mathematical modeling. Another way is metaphor. Both are products of human ingenuity and imagination, and both are useful, even if the metaphor seems vague and 'spiritual' in its tone. Doubtless, the sort of 'scientific mythos' portrayed in this link will be taken as such in certain quarters, but I don't think there's anything wrong with that in and of itself.
Where I part company with the creationists, PZ, is that they wish to dogmatically impose a literal reading of their own untestable commitments into the curriculum. They don't want a useful metaphor that might inspire real science; they want a useless Truth claim enshrined instead of science.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield, OM | June 7, 2008 4:20 PM
What a good and interesting video. I wish Carl Sagan was still alive to narrate it. I am sitting here imagining his voice as I listen a second time. Will be sending this link to friends and family.
Ciao, y'all
Posted by: JeffreyD | June 7, 2008 4:23 PM
What gets me about genesis is that it was obviously meant to be a story. If you read it as fact, it is full of contradictions and doesn't make any sense. The two contradictory creation myths is one. Another example. My comments in bold.
Those bronze age sheepherders were far smarter than the modern creationists. They knew it was mythology and would probably look at the fundies as raving idiots.
Posted by: raven | June 7, 2008 4:24 PM
I learned from John Rohmer's excellent series "Testament" that the Bible's days of creation (what was created, and the order they fell) correspond exactly to the hierarchy of gods in Sumerian mythology. In other words, it was plagiarized. Who'd have guessed? They stole the Flood as well. Fascinating stuff.
Actually, I think a more careful reading is that Genesis 1 is a liturgy that is designed to allude to, but subvert the authority of the Sumerian pantheon. Same thing with their version of the Noah story. The charge of 'plagiarism' is absurd: you're imposing a modern concept of authorship onto the text, a concept that did not exist in these cultures.
Posted by: Scott Hatfield | June 7, 2008 4:27 PM
buckyball asks:
But would it be enough?
It wouldn't hurt, that's for sure. Of course if I were god and I'd inspired a holy book, it would have an appendix that was a copy in Klingon, and a footnote someplace or other reading "eventually you will discover about a number that shall be called 'pi' of the many digits. And you will discover that the 1,000,000th digits of 'pi' are 198408302494820929302928" (or whatever). And do not invest in Enron lest thou losest thy garment. Kthxbai."
Posted by: Marcus Ranum | June 7, 2008 4:29 PM
"The introductory schtick to my talk at the Seattle Skeptics meeting last night was to take a Bible and read a bit of Genesis, making the point that it was vague, wrong, and useless."
Which passage? - buckyball
Does it matter? Any passage from Genesis would do.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 7, 2008 4:36 PM
Just because the modern word for plagiarism wasn't around back then does not mean that the act of rewriting stories and putting your own name - and interpretation - with it was not around as well. As a matter of fact, it was a widely used practice for both religion and mythology in ancient times, especially when conquering nations wanted to pacify populations of cities and states that they had recently taken over.
That is not to say that anyone has attributed the criminal connotation that it holds today to the religions and nations that used this practice in antiquity. Instead, it is brought up in this light in order to show that the claims of ultimate or divine truth that are made on behalf of those religions are far from valid.
Posted by: brokenSoldier, OM | June 7, 2008 4:37 PM
The first part was powerful indeed, and the second may be the clearest, most specific articulation I've seen of how the Bible betrays the limited knowledge and impoverished imagination of the cultures that created its supposedly omniscient, omnipotent deity. This reinforces the need that PZ's articulated for scientists and educators to fight fire with fire by communicating the beauty and majesty of "creation" in more powerful, poetic terms.
I have to agree with Plastic Flag, though, and with PZ's recent post about manners. Knowledge comes closest to a sacred thing in my life, and destroying books goes against my sensibilities as a crime against "thought incarnate" (even primitive, superstitious thought edited and interpreted to support the schemes of power-hungry theocrats). Not that there haven't been books I've wished didn't exist, but getting out a red pen and doing a little post facto copy editing is as far as I'm willing to go. We already have the higher intellectual ground - let's stick to a higher standard of behavior, too, if for no other reason than that civility gets certain fundies foaming at the mouth.
Posted by: Brain Engaged | June 7, 2008 4:37 PM
"Do Notte Buye Betamacks"
Posted by: Patrick Conley | June 7, 2008 4:38 PM
(Note that my last post was in reply to Marcus Rarum.)
Posted by: Patrick Conley | June 7, 2008 4:41 PM
The charge of 'plagiarism' is absurd
Heh, should've just written "stole". Still, it's good to know that the first readers of Genesis had a grasp of "subversion" and "allusion". Bet they laughed their asses of at those silly Sumerians.
Posted by: Rob G | June 7, 2008 4:45 PM
buckyball: (#21) "But would it be enough?" (i.e., would we accept God existence if Genesis really did say what the video author suggested?)
It's an interesting situation to ponder. However, although the video's author is explicitly criticizing the content of the bible as any source of unknown truths that modern science is now confirming, implicit in the work is a criticism of the method by which God is presumed to prove his existence.
If I were God, I wouldn't be so indirect. If he is all that his believers say he is, it would be no problem to just show up every now and then (perhaps in a ginormous form occupying a substantial fraction of our view into space) and just say, "Hey, remember me? I can do this." Followed by some suitably impressive display of his clearly superior powers (like pointing to a distant galaxy and saying "Super nova!")
Posted by: Divalent | June 7, 2008 4:49 PM
Needs more killing.
Posted by: Saint Gasoline | June 7, 2008 4:50 PM
And even if Genesis did begin like that, the rest of the books would still be brutal, dogmatic, and otherwise hard to venerate. No, Einstein probably wouldn't have been a Christian or a religious Jew. He would've been very distressed and conflicted.
I wish the video had included the story of evolution. The video does well enough when it comes to the mysticism and numerology that are the obsession of early man, but no holy book is complete without the epic gristly struggle for survival.
Posted by: mothwentbad | June 7, 2008 4:52 PM
"Always keep in mind the question: why are there not more details?" The narrator (at around 05.30) asks this, and then goes on to ask why there are not detailed, timescale-accurate descriptions of the formation of galaxies, the relative positions of the Sun and Earth, etc. He concludes "there should be hundreds of pages of detailed, factually accurate descriptions."
Bear in mind the target audience. A primitive Bronze Age tribe, who Professor Myers correctly describes above as "Mesopotamian goatherders". To them, a few river valleys in the ancient Near East were the entire world. They could not even conceive of the very concept of galaxies, or of space, or elements. Their language would have had no words even approximating to these concepts.
So what do you ask for? A textbook of science which would have been incomprehensible to its audience, and would have contained answers not useful to human reason until thousands of years later?
I remind everyone that (correct me if I'm wrong about this) to my knowledge, until the 1920s most scientists believed that the Universe was eternal and had not had a finite beginning. When Georges Lemaitre, a Catholic priest and physicist, proposed the "Big Bang model" in 1927 based on the observations of Edwin Hubble, he was widely derided; many thought he was trying to lend credibility to the idea of a finite Universe in order to back up the biblical account. Today, on the other hand, it is widely accepted by physicists that the Universe did indeed have a finite beginning, starting from nothing - just as the Bible suggests.
I'm not saying Genesis is an accurate textbook of science. It's far from it. But considering the audience for whom it was written, I don't think a few poeticised half-truths, metaphors and romanticisations are too bad.
Posted by: Walton | June 7, 2008 4:57 PM
Saint Gasoline @34 -
Yes, it does. Evolution would cover that nicely.
Posted by: mothwentbad | June 7, 2008 4:57 PM
Phil Hellenes is one of the best YouTube Atheists! This is one of his better videos. But his others are really god too.
Posted by: The Science Pundit | June 7, 2008 4:58 PM
buckyball: (#21) "But would it be enough?" (i.e., would we accept God existence if Genesis really did say what the video author suggested?)
[Acknowledgements to Divalent for the paraphrase]
I'd accept that some nonhuman intelligent agent had had a hand in writing it, and hence might have interfered in Earth or human history in other ways. I wouldn't see any reason to worship that agent, or accept it at its own evaluation.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 7, 2008 5:05 PM
No, it says that the Earth was created from nothing (and the "nothing" is an inference too). Saying that the "heavens and the Earth" of the Genesis equals anything like the Universe we know now is stretching it very far.
Posted by: windy | June 7, 2008 5:12 PM
ENTERTAINMENT ALERT:::::ENTERTAINMENT ALERT:::::ENTERTAINMENT ALERT:::::
Thunderfoot has just answered VenomFangX's How to prove the existence of God in 1 minute, which was a thread, here, the other day.
Thnderfoot's response
'Proving' Venomfangx is the Anti-Christ in about 30 seconds
Bwahahaha it's a good one !!
Posted by: scooter | June 7, 2008 5:12 PM
I'm not saying Genesis is an accurate textbook of science. It's far from it. But considering the audience for whom it was written, I don't think a few poeticised half-truths, metaphors and romanticisations are too bad. - Walton
Have you read Genesis? I've recently read the whole thing for the first time, and I was astonished at how badly written it is. Full of absurdities, repetitions and inconsistencies, lacking any dramatic unity, full of disgusting and/or ludicrous behaviour by both God and by his favourites without any sign that the writers recognised this.
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 7, 2008 5:13 PM
The Theologian's Nightmare
by Bertrand Russell
"The eminent theologian Dr. Thaddeus dreamt that he died and pursued his course toward heaven. His studies had prepared him and he had no difficulty in finding the way. He knocked at the door of heaven, and was met with a closer scrutiny than he expected. "I ask admission," he said, "because I was a good man and devoted my life to the glory of God." "Man?" said the janitor, "What is that? And how could such a funny creature as you do anything to promote the glory of God?" Dr. Thaddeus was astonished. "You surely cannot be ignorant of man. You must be aware that man is the supreme work of the Creator." "As to that," said the janitor, "I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but what you're saying is news to me. I doubt if anybody up here has ever heard of this thing you call 'man.' However, since you seem distressed, you shall have a chance of consulting our librarian."
The librarian, a globular being with a thousand eyes and one mouth, bent some of his eyes upon Dr. Thaddeus. "What is this?" he asked the janitor. "This," replied the janitor, "says that it is a member of a species called 'man,' which lives in a place called 'Earth.' It has some odd notion that the Creator takes a special interest in this place and this species. I thought perhaps you could enlighten it." "Well," said the librarian kindly to the theologian, "perhaps you can tall me where this place is that you call 'Earth.'" "Oh," said the theologian, "it's part of the Solar System." "And what is the Solar System?" asked the librarian. "Oh," said the theologian, somewhat disconcerted, "my province was Sacred Knowledge, but the question that you are asking belongs to profane knowledge. However, I have learnt enough from my astronomical friends to be able to tell you that the Solar System is part of the Milky Way." "And what is the Milky Way?" asked the librarian. "Oh, the Milky Way is one of the Galaxies, of which, I am told, there are some hundred million." "Well, well," said the librarian, "you could hardly expect me to remember one out of so many. But I do remember to have heard the word galaxy' before. In fact, I believe that one of our sub-librarians specializes in galaxies. Let us send for him and see whether he can help."
Read entire piece HERE.
http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell3.htm
Posted by: Bishop Pontoppodan | June 7, 2008 5:23 PM
#17
No see...bibles are like cockroaches, PZ was just playing the ORKIN man.
Posted by: MissAgentGirl | June 7, 2008 5:31 PM
To Nick Gotts.
Yes, I've read Genesis. I believe that textual critics explain the inconsistencies and repetitions by the theory that it (along with the rest of the Torah) was compiled from four different sources (labelled the Deuteronomist, Jahwist, Elohist and Priestly texts) around the time of King Josiah of Judah.
I do agree with you that there is some seemingly appalling, and bizarre and inexplicable, behaviour by God; the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob seems remarkably capricious and vengeful. The worst bit is probably the killing of the first-born of Egypt as punishment for the intransigence of Pharaoh; why not just strike down Pharaoh? Did his subjects need to be murdered? And it gets worse after Genesis; in Numbers 31 Moses, on God's instructions, orders the slaughter of the Midianite women, and Joshua is basically the history of a divinely-ordained genocide. It's also difficult to understand why an omnipotent God would resort to so much seemingly spontaneous favouritism and petty forms of intervention.
So I have massive, massive problems understanding most of the Old Testament and how it fits with the idea of a God who is both omnipotent and omnibenevolent. Every Christian theological writer I've read on the subject has failed to give me a satisfactory answer. But the morally outrageous nature of much of the early OT doesn't have any bearing on its truth or falsehood.
Posted by: Walton | June 7, 2008 5:33 PM
Walton, no, you're right in your last sentence, and I shouldn't really have included the bit about their bad behaviour, since what I wanted to share was my astonishment at Genesis's low literary quality. I really did expect better, since it's widely said that the KJV of the Bible (which is the one I'm reading) is a literary masterpiece - which of course it could be even if completely false, and morally outrageous. I'll see if it gets any better from that point of view after Genesis. (I'm not planning to read the whole thing word by word, but given its importance in history and culture, I've long meant to gain greater familiarity with it. Ironic that a couple of months reading and commenting here should have stimulated me to finally get round to doing so.)
Posted by: Nick Gotts | June 7, 2008 5:43 PM
It would follow from Walton's comments that God didn't foresee that his collection of stories would become popular outside Mesopotamia...
But if God was only going for a small segment of the human market, it makes sense that there's no giraffes and penguins in the Bible.
Posted by: Tilsim | June 7, 2008 5:44 PM
But if God was only going for a small segment of the human market, it makes sense that there's no giraffes and penguins in the Bible.
It makes even more sense that the collections were themselves examples of what people do all the time: make up stories including the things around them while also engaging in fantasy.
Posted by: MAJeff, OM | June 7, 2008 5:49 PM
In all of 'scripture' (a word that simply means 'writing') there isn't a single cooking recipe. There's nothing useful like how to sharpen a saw, start a fire, dig a well, or build a fence. The bible was written by men who lived isolated from society because they didn't fit in. So it's not surprising they didn't know anything about their own community, let alone the planet or the universe.
They weren't the intellectual equals of farmers. They'd seen rain in the distance, followed much later by flash floods, and from this they assumed that the rains come down and the waters rise up. Any self-respecting idiot would know that water runs downhill, not up.
That's how stupid these people were. Making stuff up was all they could do. They could never hold down a real job like minding sheep.
Posted by: WTFWJD | June 7, 2008 5:54 PM
The reason god did not reveal basic physics and especially atomic theory, or E=MC2 is because he figured the dumbasses would blow themselves up, cuz they wuzn't all socsully advanced and evolved like us modurn hyoomans.
Posted by: scooter | June 7, 2008 5:56 PM
Wake me up "when [...] Hitchens, drunk of course, throws a bomb into a church". Granted, I have a psychological inhibition against doing any damage to books, but "militant" is still something else.
[citation needed]
Some think that the second creation story, unlike the first, is only about the origin of the People of Israel. After all, Yahwe, the creator in that story, is the god of Israel the same way that Khemosh is the god of Moab (Judges 11:23-24), to mention only two of the seventy sons of El Elyon, the Most High (Psalm 82). Egypt even has several gods (Exodus 12:12, Numbers 33:5, Jeremiah 46:25); I wonder if they are two (Upper and Lower Egypt) -- anyone know if the original has plural or dual? Egypt itself is a dual in the Bible (Mitsrayim), but Ex 12:12 is translated with "all" rather than "both". The Philistines, too, have several gods (1 Samuel 6:5), perhaps one for each of the five cities.
Yes. In the Enūma Elish (the Babylonian version), "the waters" contain the dragon/goddess Tiamat, whom Marduk hacks to pieces to build heaven & earth out of her; in Genesis "the waters" are completely demystified, and the vaguely plural but unspecific 'Elohim create heaven & earth just so. In the Enūma Elish, the sun, the moon and Venus (at the very least) are deities; in Genesis, they are mere creations. It's not a plagiate, it's the almost exact opposite of its source.
A singularity that contains the entire matter & energy of the universe isn't exactly "nothing"...
This is a widespread attitude, even among conservative Europeans. However, having the birds created at the same time as the unspecified fishes and before all land animals is not a half-truth, not a romanticisation, and not a metaphor for anything I can figure out. It's simply wrong.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 7, 2008 6:03 PM
In response to post #49: Wouldn't you say that's rather speculative? Do you have any evidence in support of those assertions?
The trouble with the Torah is that the events it purports to chronicle are so far back in history that we really can't judge its reliability. For instance, there's no independent historical evidence for the existence of Abraham, Isaac or Jacob - but would we really expect there to be, given that it's the history of one nomadic family in Mesopotamia several thousand years ago? The Exodus and the conquest of Canaan are more problematic historically, since the evidence doesn't fit with the conventional chronology (archaeology shows that the Canaanite cities were destroyed around 1550 BC, whereas traditional chronology dates the Exodus to around 1300 BC), but David Rohl's revised chronology goes some way towards addressing this. (While Rohl's conclusions are by no means undisputed, it's worth noting that he's an agnostic, and has no pro-Biblical agenda. His book A Test of Time is worth reading.)
We know that Genesis 1-11 isn't accurate if read literally; in particular, there wasn't a global flood (though - correct me if I'm wrong - current geology suggests that there was a local flood in the Black Sea basin at about the right time). We also know that the Torah texts were passed down through generations and probably corrupted considerably by the time they were compiled in their present form (which is thought by most secular scholars to be during the reign of King Josiah of Judah); so it's no surprise that bits of it seem incoherent, repetitive or distorted. Unlike the Qu'ran or the Book of Mormon, the Bible doesn't purport to be the literal dictated Word of God given directly to a prophet, only to be "God-breathed" (Paul). But as far as we know, it's a fairly reliable historical document (and indeed one of the best ancient primary sources we have, given the several ancient manuscripts - Masoreti, Dead Sea Scrolls, etc. - and the Jewish tradition of memorising and copying the text exactly), though not one that should be relied on to the exclusion of all else.
Posted by: Walton | June 7, 2008 6:06 PM
To anyone interested in a good take off of the bible, I highly recommend The Boomer Bible. But be warned; It is guaranteed to offend anyone. It says so in the introduction.
Posted by: Malcolm | June 7, 2008 6:22 PM
This is a little off topic, but I'm wondering if anyone knows of the content of this video being written somewhere? I haven't really searched that hard, but I'm at work and don't have time.
I'm partially deaf, and the bad audio quality of this video is really hard for me to try and interpret, so does anyone know where I could read the content somewhere, what I did hear sounded good.
Thanks!
P.S: How's this for irony: I work at a space centre, and we have two spaces that can be rented out to public. On Sundays, both spaces are rented out to churches...
I hate coming to work on Sundays, as I want to heard them all upstairs and show them around and say LOOK! LISTEN! USE REASON! Or perhaps I could show them that video (if I could understand it first though...)
Posted by: Keely | June 7, 2008 6:22 PM
Actually, the Bible does contain the claim (in more than one verse) that it is the divine word of God. Then again, due to its contradictory nature - in large part because of the fact that it is not one book, but rather a comparatively small collection of texts that were decided upon as canon - it also contains verses that discredit the claim that it is literal truth.
(Proverbs 14:15 - The simple man believeth every word; but the prudent looketh well to his going.)
As for it being a historical document, that is definitely true. It is not, however, even remotely reliable in a historical sense. While there are events within that have some historical credibility, those are far outweighed by the fact that the major claims made in the text - the Great Flood being, in my opinion, one of the most widely recognized - are unsubstantiated.
As an aside, I came across a theory that posited the Great Flood story, Sumerian in origin, as being a passed down story borne out of the flooding of the fertile plain where the Persian Gulf now sits due to the melting of Ice Age glaciers. I don't know how much this theory is rooted in fact, but it seems much more plausible than a supernatural cause.
Posted by: brokenSoldier, OM | June 7, 2008 6:24 PM
A long comment from me is being held up.
I'd just like to lament that both this video and the one that proves VenomFangX is the Antichrist are among those that YouTube does not let me see. I have recently installed the latest Flash player and can see an apparently random sample of YouTube videos (for example, some of the "Why do people laugh at creationists?" series), but not all of them. Can someone help me?
The worst bit that it uses "Pharaoh" as a name, when in fact it's a title. Given that Jeremiah 46:2 mentions "Pharaohnecho", one would think someone would have got a clue. But no...
Fixed that for you.
The intention behind that book was probably "if you worship anyone above Yahwe, or do anything against his commands, he'll order someone to kick the living shit out of you, like (I say it, so it's true) he did last time".
The J text may have been a Bildungsroman: Yahwe is a little boy who grows up and learns and finally does great deeds. The P text most emphatically wasn't. Conflagrate these, and oh boy will people Fear The Lord™ for the next 2500 years till they go insane.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 7, 2008 6:28 PM
Well, due to various issues I'm having an ongoing crisis of faith, so I'm really not the best person to deal with this particular issue. As I may have mentioned elsewhere, I was raised as a fairly liberal Christian, went through a semi-fundamentalist stage, then became an agnostic for a while. Now I don't know where I stand.
I was playing devil's advocate to an extent, but I really don't think there's massively conclusive evidence either way as to the reliability of most of the Bible. Of course, the fact that it's a disparate collection of texts, collated a long time after the events they purport to describe, means that its reliability is not uniform.
To brokenSoldier: As an aside, I came across a theory that posited the Great Flood story, Sumerian in origin, as being a passed down story borne out of the flooding of the fertile plain where the Persian Gulf now sits due to the melting of Ice Age glaciers. - I've heard something similar, which I alluded to in my post above. I think we all acknowledge that modern geology indicates that there was no global, worldwide Flood. However, it's entirely plausible (and, indeed, the evidence suggests it) that there was a local flood which affected the Black Sea basin and much of the Middle East, probably caused, as you say, by the melting of Ice Age glaciers. This, doubtless, would have seemed like a global flood to the primitive people of the time. (I'm not a geologist and can't evaluate this critically, so all input is, as ever, appreciated.) The "raining for forty days and forty nights" claim in Genesis may not square with this (since the purported flood was caused by melting glaciers), but I would imagine it was a cause-and-effect confusion on the part of people at the time; it rained heavily at the time the flood occurred, so those primitive tribesmen assumed that the rain caused the flood.
Of course, none of that is evidence for God or the supernatural, nor does it have any bearing on the validity of the rest of the Bible; it just suggests that the Noah's Flood story is a somewhat corrupted, mythologised account or memory of an actual event in the history of the Near East.
Posted by: Walton | June 7, 2008 6:40 PM
Oops, forgot to close the <a> tag. But that doesn't matter, all of the text that now forms the link fits the link. :-) I did screw up the link to Pharaohnecho king of Egypt, though (Jeremiah 46:2).
Worse. Throughout the whole time, the land all the way north to the Euphrates (central Syria nowadays) belonged to Egypt! How stupid to make all that grandiose exodus without leaving Egypt a single time!
What would the right time be? If it's 4004 BC or later, we have a problem.
Everything before 2 Kings is completely forgettable.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 7, 2008 6:41 PM
Six days and seven nights it rained according to Utnapishtim.
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 7, 2008 6:44 PM
Posted by: alex | June 7, 2008 6:53 PM
#49 WTFWJD: - I've often wondered about this, given that the entire "Christian" bible is supposedly centered around a carpenter. (I'm a carpenter ...believe me, I've looked hard)
Walton, I appreciate many of your comments on this site. They appear articulate, well-meaning, educated, well-thought-out ...entirely reasonable.
Reading them thoroughly, I believe you are about two steps away from atheism.
There are a whole lot of us here like you, don't especially want to get our ass kicked, but who are just looking for truth. I've found more truth here than anywhere else. Here's to us...
(Shit, I just posted)
Posted by: Bob Vogel CPTR | June 7, 2008 6:58 PM
Reply to #55
The warfare being carried out at You Tube between the kooks and non kooks gets very nasty. One of the tactics used by religious Chooks,Jukes, and Mukes is that they 'Flag' videos which they consider offensive as pornograhic or obscene.
This will AUTOMATICALLY set off any kind of porn blocker or firewall, such as the one here at my workplace, or various institutions, or parental blockers etc.
This is a fairly effective form of censorship, since a lot of us are surfing i.e. goofing off from work. Our particular firewall is fairly sophisticated, and when it blocks something, a page comes up explaining that the URL has been blocked.
I ran into this watching Pat Condell Videos on you tube from work, none of which are sexually explicit, but some are blocked due to a flagging campaign by snake handlers.
There is an appeal process to remove a flagging but it's nevertheless a nuisance and fairly effective dirty trick.
This could be what you're experiencing.
Posted by: scooter | June 7, 2008 7:00 PM
Seriously, the beginning of that video gave me chills.
Posted by: Intelligenceresigned | June 7, 2008 7:08 PM
@ Walton, #36:
"To them, a few river valleys in the ancient Near East were the entire world. They could not even conceive of the very concept of galaxies, or of space, or elements. Their language would have had no words even approximating to these concepts."
Job the sheepherder received a reply in Job 38-41.
@ Walton, #45:
"...and Joshua is basically the history of a divinely-ordained genocide..."
Although Joshua is surprising in places, some of the other civilizations in the area were into things like child sacrifice, etc., which was in pretty sharp contrast to what God was trying to establish with the Israelites. That said, it's still a tough thing to read.
@ WTFWJD, #49:
"There's nothing useful like how to sharpen a saw, start a fire, dig a well, or build a fence."
Yet the instructions for the Tabernacle, and the subsequent temples are ridiculously detailed. For the Tabernacle, see Exodus 26. There's even a city described in the Revelation 21 that is 1,400 x 1,400 x 1,400 miles across.
If you're really bored, you could spend some time at www.templemountfaithful.org to see how some Jews are preparing utensils, bowls, designs, etc. for the "next temple". It's kind of odd.
@ Walton, #51:
"...the Bible doesn't purport to be the literal dictated Word of God given directly to a prophet..."
Er, that depends on which book you are talking about. Ever read any of the books of the minor prophets? Or passages out of Isaiah? Frequently, there are passages which start with "...and the word of the Lord came to [insert prophet's name here]".
Posted by: buckyball | June 7, 2008 7:12 PM
You'll never be faulted for playing devil's advocate, but I'd caution you against making definite claims while doing so. Presenting dissenting opinions is never wrong, but when someone comes on here and does so with a harsh air of certainty that the facts behind their posts do not reflect, the response is usually swift, and often just as harsh.
As for conclusive evidence of the bible not being reliable, such a thing is irrelevant. What is relevant is positive evidence either way. I'm sure you've heard the phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," and that idea is what drives the debate over the reliability of the bible. In a sense, the burden of proof is on proving that the bible is reliable, not the other way around. Just as we can hardly disprove Russell's teapot, it is equally futile to rely on proving the negative concerning the reliability of the bible. If it is reliable, evidence should be offered in support of that conclusion. And since there are plenty of examples that cast doubt upon that reliability, that evidence will have to be extremely convincing.
Posted by: brokenSoldier, OM | June 7, 2008 7:19 PM
I learned from John Rohmer's excellent series "Testament" that the Bible's days of creation (what was created, and the order they fell) correspond exactly to the hierarchy of gods in Sumerian mythology. In other words, it was plagiarized. Who'd have guessed? They stole the Flood as well. Fascinating stuff.
if you read the book of Judith, you would find the genealogy of the Hebrew People: they came from Chaldea in Mespotamia.
Judith Chapt. 5
5 Then said Achior, the captain of all the sons of Ammon, Let my lord now hear a word from the mouth of thy servant, and I will declare unto thee the truth concerning this people, which dwelleth near thee, and inhabiteth the hill countries: and there shall no lie come out of the mouth of thy servant.
6 This people are descended of the Chaldeans:
7 And they sojourned heretofore in Mesopotamia, because they would not follow the gods of their fathers, which were in the land of Chaldea.
8 For they left the way of their ancestors, and worshipped the God of heaven, the God whom they knew: so they cast them out from the face of their gods, and they fled into Mesopotamia, and sojourned there many days.
so, no, the Hebrews/Children of Israel did not "plagerize" they simply retold their own, pre-monotheistic mythos.
Posted by: KellyL | June 7, 2008 7:22 PM
Only a palaeocon would believe that the Bible is "What God knows" and therefore that whatever isn't in the Bible are "things God doesn't know". So North America was a surprise to God?
Also, it is ridiculous to assert that Genesis "could have been written like this" when the video contains phrases like "four thousand millenia". There simply was no way in Ancient Hebrew to say such a thing. Even during the Roman period the largest number that had a name was "myriadoi" (meaning "ten thousand" or "zillion") so any span of time longer than 10,000 years was inexpressible. Hillel (1st century AD, founder of modern Judaism) supposedly said something like "The days of creation were God's days. Each of God's days is like 10,000 years of human time." Since "10,000 years" was the longest span of time with a name, what Hillel said was basically "a zillion years for each Genesis day", which was as close as he could get given that the word "billion" didn't exist yet.
Yes, there's still the problem with darkness-before-light in the Genesis timeline, but something's gotta give when God's Hyperdimensional Word gets filtered through the minds of 3½-dimensional human prophets, whose ability to predict what will happen 20 years into the future is laughably bad yet some of them claim they know Evolution is false and humans and chimps couldn't have had a common ancestor only 5 million years ago because "that's not enough time".
Posted by: Pyesetz the Dog | June 7, 2008 7:34 PM
In light of the consensus on that work, I'd hardly lean on it for historical evidence of the genealogy of an entire ancient population. The link below has far more than the little excerpt I've quoted. But even if Judith was a reliable source, it wouldn't change the fact that stories such as the creation myth and the great flood are obvious adaptations of similar stories from Sumerian mythology.
http://www.specialtyinterests.net/judith.html
Excerpt:
Posted by: brokenSoldier, OM | June 7, 2008 7:38 PM
The least the author of Genesis could have done was get the order of creation. Stars were most certainly not created after plants. That's not-truth, not a half-truth.
Posted by: Citizen Z | June 7, 2008 7:57 PM
Walton #63
'Although Joshua is surprising in places, some of the other civilizations in the area were into things like child sacrifice, etc., which was in pretty sharp contrast to what God was trying to establish with the Israelites.'
What references do you have relating to child sacrifice and other horrible practices outside of biblical text. Even if it was true, was genocide really the best solution god could come up with?
Posted by: Josh West | June 7, 2008 8:01 PM
Oh this one is going into my playlists on YouTube, my blog, and via email to a bunch of folks. I love this.
Posted by: Tony P | June 7, 2008 8:09 PM
Thanks, but that can't be it. I'm at home, and I'd be very surprised if IE 7 had any such blocker inbuilt.
Ah yeah, all that nonsense about heaven (a metal kettle) and earth (flat, with foundations) and ostriches and the storehouses of snow and hail... and that followed by a chapter that flows over with theological contradictions to the rest of the Bible. <yawn>
As opposed to, say, sending a prophet to them (like Jonah to the Assyrians) and telling them to repent...
Posted by: David Marjanović, OM | June 7, 2008 8:12 PM