scriptures

The situation: A school wants to take 6th and 7th graders to a Fossil Discovery Center to attend a Rocks and Mineral Festival.

The problem: Those awful people are going to tell little Johnny – oh heavens! – that rocks are old!

From I bet that kid is popular in class at the Fail Blog: It's a simple field trip permission slip defaced by a barely-literate parent who thinks a Mineral Festival needs to begin and end with Jesus. The scrawl reads:

Note: Just to let you it is not that we don’t believe in things like that, it is just misleading when you talk about it being billions of years old, when we all know that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So why would I pay so that you can misslead my children, your world is just a revolving(?), ours has a start and an end. God created the world. He created animals and man all in the same week. It was also Adam who named all the animals, they will do the essay 'Rock and Minerals' but it might not be 5 pages long, and about billions of years, it will be according to the Bible.

(Hmm, is this from the United States? Hmm, do we even need to ask?)

We can laugh at the idiot parent, but what's being done to the poor kid is just sad.

Bible Is "A Catalogue of Cruelties," Says Saramago

I had a throwaway comment I wanted to add in regard to PZ Myers' post on a kook who's been "updating" Norse creation mythology. The Pharyngula site won't take comments now without registration, and currently won't let me register either, so here's the gist of my rejected comment with a little added padding:

It appears that a Norwegian musician named Varg Vikernes is "updating" Norse creation mythology with elaborate ties to modern cosmology. That makes for a blending of two awesome themes, and I'm all for their illicit coupling – assuming there's a proper sense of tongue-in-cheek goofiness behind it all, of course. Based on Pharyngula readers' comments about Vikernes' mental state and his apparent seriousness about his religion, though, I think I'll wait for someone else to meld Odin and the Big Bang before I jump aboard to play along.

Anyway, a commenter named Greg F took note of the relative mediocrity of the Abrahamic creation myth. That's so true; of all the wild and woolly origin myths out there, Genesis' tale is about the most boring I've come across. The rest of the Bible doesn't get much more exciting. That's why any kiddie Book of Bible Stories is always so dull too; it's working with pretty bland material, and all a bored kid can do is read the Ark story, and David & Goliath, over and over. The magic gets pretty thin after that. Readeth thou more

Warning stickers on evolution books? How about a warning sticker on this book?

Original found at nanovirus. Edited here with inset for size purposes.

Via Debunking Christianity comes the video Proving that the Bible is Repulsive, from website God is imaginary. It's another foray into the pages of the greatest horror story ever written:

Not much need be said about the content, other than to note that it's a great way to explain to believers why so many tenets of Abrahamic religion are not merely unbelievable to the rational mind, but are outright disgusting. Death to anyone working on the Sabbath... Death to rebellious children... Death to adulterers... Death to homosexuals... Death to followers of other gods... Eternal fiery torment... Subjugation for women... Ownership and even murder of slaves... Massacres of children... Repulsive is too kind a word for such an immoral, subhuman code.

Needless to say, over in the Debunking Christianity comments there's the predictable-as-death-and-taxes attempt to weasel out of the Bible's grotesque commandments:

The 10 commandments weren't given to people who work at Burger King or Wal-Mart. They written for and to the Israelites only.

Israelites only – true or false? It doesn't matter. Just as it doesn't matter whether God got mellow and toned down the bloodlust around 2000 years ago when He became a pappy. What matters is this: If the Bible's alleged God ever forced those inhuman laws upon anybody, then He needs to be hunted down and killed. Period.

In all of Christian apologetics, there's nothing that strikes me as repulsive as "Oh, well, God inflicted those horrors on other people, not on me. So it's OK!" As I don't want to wear out the word "repulsive", I'll just label that apologetic response as sick.

The Dark Bible
The Bible exposed to light. It ain't pretty.

One of the most disturbing bible stories is in 2 Kings: 2:11-22: God murders dozens of children for calling a prophet bald. (Which he was. Moral: Stop being honest, kids.)

Here it is in quick comic form, courtesy of the famous Bob the Angry Flower.

http://www.angryflower.com/bibbal.html

"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

John 3:16. It's one of the most widely-quoted Bible verses there are. It's been called "the Gospel in a nutshell", for its succinct summary of the New Testament's "message".

A verse as vital and revered as John 3:16 deserves proper examination in the light of the rest of Holy Scripture. Let's place it into the wider context of the entire Bible: Readeth thou more