The Atheist Blogger

I get email all the time through my contact form, but I rarely get actual physical mail. The rare exceptions are when people send me their books to read. Today though, I received a letter:

A letter from afar

The “AAA” stands for “Atheist & Agnostic Alliance”, and that is my address, which I released in my post “Edging Further Away From The Closet“. The post mark says “LONG BEACH CA 908″, and there are two “USA FIRST-CLASS FOREVER” stamps on it.

What was inside was even stranger. No contact information or anything to hint to a sender; just two pages of 18 bullet points:

1. Day and night was created on day 1 - impossible since the sun was not created until the fourth day.
2. The first woman was created twice: first time on the sixth day (in God’s image) and sometime after the seventh day using one of Adam’s ribs.
3. Since Adam came into existence on the sixth day, how could he or anyone know what happen on the prior five days, and in what sequence, and how long it took?
4. Since Adam and Eve did not die after eating the forbidden fruit, God is a proven liar. If God should speaking to you, be skeptical.
5. The flood story does not make any sense for many reasons. One is that the amount of water would have to be four to five times that which presently exists on earth. Another is that the floods would have destroyed all ice and glaciers, since ice/snow will float on water. From ice core samples (using a tree ring type dating), ice has existed intact in Greenland and Antarctica for over 110,000 years - not the 4000 years B.C estimated from the Bible. Another reason is that water of a depth of five or so miles would have killed off all vegetation so that the released animal would have nothing to east except each other.
   Since the flood story is so obviously fiction, this implies that all stories (Genesis) earlier than the flood are also myths.
6. The anti-abortionists are fond of quoting “Thy shall not kill”. However, with the flood, God committed mass murder by drowning everyone except for eight Jews. The religious do not seem have a problem with these horrendous murders.
7. If the population started with eight Jews after the flood,how did the world create the large variations such as Eskimos, Australian Aborigines, Navajos, African Pygmies (under 5 foot), Tutsi (often 7 foot), etc. unless by evolution.
8. Matthew and Luke listed absolutely totally different genealogy for Joseph starting with King David. One or both must be in error.
9. After birth, Matthew says that the family went southwest to Egypt. However, Luke says the family went north to Nazareth; one or both is lying.
10. Three Magi (eastern so called wise men) went to Jesus’ birthplace. They got lost and first went to Jerusalem. Although the distance between Jerusalem and Bethlehem is only about five miles, they went to the head ruler, Herod, to ask for directions. All they really had to do was ask anyone in town. In addition, the needed a star to show the way, for five miles, barf. Any star will be about the same size as our sun, roughly a million miles in diameter, as well as very hot. Changing the star position from east to south of something that size is ridiculous. Also, something of that size could not pinpoint the manger. Placing a star close to earth would have incinerated earth.
11. Luke misstates the year of Jesus’ birth as being in the reign of Herod. Herod died in 4 B.C, whereas Jesus is believe to have been born in 4 A.D.
12. John says that Jesus was crucified the day before the Passover meal, whereas Mark says that Jesus was crucified the day after the Passover meal.
13. The Bible says absolutely nothing about abortion. The following is taken from one of Sam Harris’ books. It is estimated that 50% of all human conceptions end in spontaneous abortion, usually without the woman even realizing she is pregnant. In fact, 20% of all recognized pregnancies end in miscarriages. If God exist, he is the most prolific abortionist of all.
14. The religious believe in “Intelligent Design” and are opposed to evolution. However, “Intelligent Design” would more accurately be described as “Deeply Flawed Design”. Human variations include cancer, blue babies, cleft lips, Down’s syndrome, appendicitis, allergies and allergic reactions, color blindness, seizures, polio, leprosy, leukemia, insanity, autism, etc, etc. Why would a perfectionist God take credit for these? Various individual groups of people are resistant to malaria, smallpox (which wiped out many American tribes), and tolerant of dairy products. The protection usually occurred because some of their ancestors survived these conditions, which is basic evolution. We are probably are very fortunate that there are flaws. with the millions* of animal species that have occurred over millions of years, we are one of them. [*Perhaps up to 100 million or more.] This brings up a question. It has been estimayed that 99% of the species are extince. If God is so intelligent, why the destruction of so many species?
15. The Jews were slaves to the Egyptians and Babylonians for hundreds of years. Many of the Bible stories are taken/plagiarized from the myths of these two people and surrounding communities.
16. If God ever existed, then God must have been around just prior to the “Big Bang”, some 13 billions years ago. Since the conditions immediate after the explosion were gaseous, then God was surely destroyed. Why be concern about a dead God?
17. Why would a God create dinosaurs and then kill them all off? Not a very bright move.
18. The Bible allows slavery, multiple wives, murder (of unbelievers) and the father to sell his daughters into prostitution.

Not entirely sure what to make of this. Some of the points are good, others are quite petty, and some are just plain silly (16???). So thanks for your efforts random stranger. If you feel like revealing your identity then please do, and in future if you want something posted on the blog, you could try contacting me online and save the postage costs (especially if it is just a few pages).

Not that I mind getting mail that is :D

A team of archaeologists led by Franck Goddio have found a bowl inscribed with the words “DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS”, which could mean either “by Christ the magician” or “the magician by Christ”. Either way, it looks like the earliest reference to Jesus Christ ever found (the bowl is dated to early 1st century).

DIA CHRSTOU O GOISTAIS

Of course, this reference will undoubtedly mean a lot of things to different people. I personally think it counts as evidence that Jesus was a great man who managed to perform all sorts of “godly” feats through trickery (magic). A great find for archaeology though.

I have recently been messing around with a few “Bible Code” generators, purely to see what I could find. For those who don’t know, the Bible Code is the idea that you can find a series of words in the bible by picking a letter and “skipping” letters by 5 each time, possibly more. The idea is flawed, and several statisticians have come forward and revealed that given a large enough volume of text, you can find all sorts of “hidden” messages.

I’ll save my results for another blog post, since I have only just started doing some tests. This blog post details how I set up my comparison text. In order to perform the tests, I decided to use a text version of the King James Bible, and also a randomly generated text of the exact same file-size.

Getting the KJB text was easy enough, as Project Gutenberg has it for free download. All I had to do was remove the long introduction from the beginning, stopping when I got to Genesis 1:1. I then needed to strip everything other than the 26 letters of the alphabet, because the Bible Code algorithms only accept these. So numbers, spaces, carriage returns, apostrophes, colons all had to go. On Linux systems, this is easily done:

dd if=kjv10.txt | grep -ao “[A-Za-z]” | tr -d “\n” > bible-text.txt

dd is a command that copies / converts files, and I gave it the input file (if=kjv10.txt) of the full King James text. I then piped this into grep, telling it to only output characters that matched either A-Z (uppercase) or a-z (lowercase). grep outputs every match on a new line, so I fed that result through tr, which when given the “-d” argument, deletes the following character from the input. The character “\n” is the standard way of showing a new line as a character. The result of all these commands is a long string of characters, and is saved to the file “bible-text.txt“.

A simple command for listing directory contents told me the size of the file.

ls -l

Now I had a file that was 3,224,520 bytes (3.2 megabytes) in file-size, and I needed to procure random data of the exact same size. This was done by a couple of slight modifications to the original command:

dd if=/dev/urandom | grep -ao “[A-Za-z]” | tr -d “\n” | dd bs=1 count=3224520 > random-text.txt

As you can see, the input for the first dd command is now the built-in Linux random generator, which is piped into the same commands to remove illegal characters. This output is then piped back into a dd command, but is set up so that it creates a file with a specific amount of data. The bs value is the blocksize, which for ease of calculation I set to 1 byte, meaning I can then set the output file-size (count) as 3224520. The output of these commands is a string of random characters, equal in size to the string in bible-text.txt, and I saved this to the file random-text.txt.

A further use of the ls -l command confirms that both files are indeed the same size.

This method of generating a set size of random data is fast and easily scripted, which is why I thought it should be shared. Now I need ideas for experiments to run on the random data…

Ray Comfort, who recently changed his blog name to “Atheist Central”, has revealed he is writing a new book. It will have a chapter on atheism, and he wanted to know a few things:

I have a new book coming out soon. There will be a chapter on atheism. Tell me, what do atheists (officially) believe about:

God:

The Bible:

Heaven & Hell:

Sin:

Salvation:

Jesus:

Firstly, unlike Christianity we don’t have a doctrine telling us what to believe, so I can only answer the first of that list definitively. The others are down to personal beliefs, and I shall define my own.

God: All atheists disbelieve in all gods.

The Bible: I think the Bible is simply a book of stories and rules, written by man. It has no divine meaning (see above point about God). It was written to try and explain the unexplainable, but also to control people and make them easier to govern, using the threat of death and hellfire. In a modern society it should not be taken literally at all.

Heaven & Hell: I do not believe in either because I don’t think there is any valid reason why we would have an afterlife. However, I know some atheists who do believe in an “afterlife” of sorts, citing that the conscious mind could go on after death. I don’t think any atheists believe in Heaven & Hell in the Biblical perspective, because it goes against the point about God (again, see above).

Sin: I do not believe there is such a thing as sin, mainly because I do not believe that the Bible is anything other than a load of stories. If there is sin, then there must be moral absolutes, which do not exist because our stance on morality has changed over time. Homosexuality was originally thought of as fine, then the Christians decided it was evil, and now most of us think it is fine again. A continually evolving morality does not have sin, unless the sin were to evolve with it, which makes the entire point of it useless.

Salvation: Seeing as I do not believe in an afterlife, the concept of salvation seems ridiculous and unnecessary to me.

Jesus: Whether Jesus existed or not we may never know. I have mixed opinions on the subject. If he did exist then I think he was probably a very good teacher, who had interesting philosophies. If he claimed to be the Son of God then I would think he was mentally unstable, and probably got a load of followers the same way modern day “messiahs” like Michael Travesser do.

So there you go Ray, I have answered your questions. Feel free to put my answers in your book. My only demands are that I am fully cited (the entire url to my blog post in a footnote or something), and if possible, a free copy of your book when it comes out. You can contact me here.

Angelpuriran recently posted a few questions in a comment to an old post about Questions for God.

Why you decided to become an atheist..? WHAT gives you benefits to become an atheist? does it makes sense? what if you died and you proved that there is hell, eternal death in hell and the only way to go to heaven is to believe to Jesus, what would you do? will you repent?

I don’t know if “decided” is the correct word to use. I would have said it was more that I “realised” I was an atheist. I did so because I saw that whilst I had believed in God and Jesus for many years, I didn’t have a valid reason for believing in them. There was no evidence for God existing apart from in a book which is claimed to have been inspired by him. Such circular evidence went against how I came to know reason. I also saw problems with the whole form of a God that created the universe, because it doesn’t answer the questions about what created God. Why did something so natural like the universe have to be created by a non-natural phenomenon, especially when there have never been any recorded supernatural phenominon in science.

I guess the major benefit to being an atheist is the freedom from the constant worries about death. I believe that when I die, that will be it. My mind will cease to function and I will become a non-concious entity. This is actually one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around, and I think it might be why some people have problems with atheism. Trying to imagine no life after death is akin to trying to think what “not thinking” would be like. It is a mental impossiblity to do because such an action is a contradiction of itself.

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