The War on Christmas Disbelievers

         

            Is there really a war on Christmas? It appears Christians need to get thoroughly riled up at this time of year, otherwise, who would take their religion seriously? If there is a war, it’s a war on those who do NOT believe; it's a propaganda war based solely on Christian’s exaggerated indignation. It doesn’t matter that the bible doesn’t agree on the details of the Christmas stories in Matthew or Luke's accounts, which are the only ones in the four gospels (Paul doesn’t even refer to it in the books claimed written in his name and he is credited with writing his accounts BEFORE any of the gospels were written.) You have to show respect for Christian idolatry and their interpretation of Christmas, or all is lost, and the nation is doomed. With that false premise, they have made up a war and then claim they must fight against those who deny their fantasy.

Inside Florida’s capital building in Tallahassee, a festivus pole (a six foot tall stack of empty beer cans) made Fox TV national news. Commentator Bill O'Reilly lamented Florida's tolerance for such persecution of Christianity, while Gretchen Carlson and Catholic League guest Bill Donohue expressed disgust that someone would slight their beliefs by celebrating their own holiday at the same time near a Christian nativity display in a government building. Apparently the U.S. government is supposed to allow crèches and crèches ONLY between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day at any public facility. Gretchen even added to the false sense of outrage by suggesting she took her children out to view the nativity scene, but her kids couldn’t see it because a three inch wide pole stood in front of it. You drove your kids all the way from Greenwich, Connecticut looking for a crèche, didn’t see any in front of churches or private homes for 1500 miles, and when you finally found one down in Tallahassee, you couldn’t walk three feet to the left or right of the beer can pole so your kids could see it, Gretchen? Is it any wonder why few people take you seriously?

  
        Bill Donohue writes about the bloody engagements he's seen in this never-ending 'war': “There is little doubt that the anti-Christmas side is weakening. But the war is hardly over. The big battle won by the Thomas More Law Center in securing the right of a nativity scene to be erected on a public median in Warren, Michigan is evidence that we need to fight for our rights. Thanks to the Catholic League, senior citizens in Newhall, California got their Christmas tree back after management tried to ban it. Children who attend Terry Elementary School in Little Rock, Arkansas know about the War on Christmas: their planned trip to a local church to see “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was cancelled. An anti-Christmas billboard in Times Square that shows a depiction of Jesus crucified (Wait…wasn’t he?) is testimony to the vile nature of the War on Christmas. There is no shortage of such examples.”
So someone putting up a festivus pole or asking to use government property to promote another holiday is considered vile, but telling people they are going to hell for not believing like, say, Donohue, O'Reilly, or Carlson do, is not.

             In the state capital of Oklahoma, Satanists want to put up a display near the nativity in that federal building, and in Mississippi’s capital, secularists asked to exhibit a Winter Solstice sign, which would be located in the same lobby as a nearby nativity. Reacting to this news, one of Fox’s other bubble-headed bleach blondes, Megyn Kelly, announced that the war on Christmas is comparable to the Holocaust. Megyn is counting on gullible viewers to believe that Christians across the country are being rounded up, put into concentration camps, and then killed in record numbers for celebrating Christmas...because having to look past a Satanist display or a Solstice sign to see a crèche is identical to being murdered by Nazis. Who’d have guessed?

But the whole contrived mess is based on a fundamental flaw; the bible stories themselves.Those accounts are filled with problems that start with 1) the genealogies, which don't match...2) when the birth supposedly happened (was it during the reign of Herod, or Quirinius? There is a ten year span between them.)...3) an empire-wide census that required people to return to an ancestral city (There are no records to indicate the Romans, or any other civilization, ever required that.)...4) the murder of thousands of children by Herod's soldiers...and 5) the time of year it happened. For example, in the Matthew and Luke accounts the sheep are in the fields. This means the event happened in the late spring or early summer, not in winter. If it was in winter, the mangers would be filled with sheep trying to keep warm, not free for people to use as impromptu delivery rooms. Mangers were small caves hewn into a hillside for keeping a shepherd's flock safe and contained, and they were terribly unsanitary, with years of sheep and animal droppings everywhere. They were never cleaned out, so they would constantly reek of manure. If any baby were born in a manger, it would have died, or at best, suffered from some disease contracted from the waste in the wattle, or kicked up by the hem of the mother’s clothing. But why let facts get in the way if you are promoting a unsupportable ideology and fighting a phony war?

This is how Constantine's Christianity became a world religion: at the point of a spear.

        In reality, the bible's 'Christmas' stories are nothing but fairy tales made up to promote the Jewish god and his ‘savior’ son to compete with the other popular deities of the time. The reason we celebrate the holiday in December is because there were celebrations to the god Saturn, who was the god of the harvest, and Mithra, who was the god of light. The emperor of Rome in 336 CE was a Christian named Constantine, and he concluded that all the pagan rituals were detrimental to the Christian cause. But what to do since those rituals were immensely popular with the people of the Roman Empire. Solution? Proclaim December 25th as Jesus Christ's birthday, because it was right in the heart of all the pagan celebrations. That would trump all those pagan gods.
        During these pagan celebrations it was customary to give gifts, sing songs, have a feast, and decorate homes with pine boughs and greenery. Kings and clergy co-opted these traditions and rituals and claimed them as Christian in order to get the heathens to worship the god they supported, and to attend Christian services where royalty and priests would benefit from the money they could fleece and demand from the pagans. Every one of the current Christmas rituals is just an improvised version of the pagan rituals. The Christmas tree would come later when it was adapted from a Norse tradition of bringing a tree into the house and decorating it as a celebration of life in the midst of winter, not because of a baby’s birth.

Another Christian victory in the 'War on Christmas'.

      Over the intervening centuries, the Christmas stories were promoted by the priesthood (who had a vested interest in promoting them) as historically accurate because they were in the bible, and by the 1100s, if you did NOT believe it was the truth, you could be burned at the stake as a heretic. Nothing says something is the truth like the threat of death if you don't believe.
      Just for the record, Christmas hasn't always been embraced by Christians as it is today. In the 1600s, England and the American colonies outlawed Christmas because of it's pagan roots.

         George Washington's crossing of the Delaware River on the night of December 25, 1776 took place at that time in hopes of catching the Hessian garrison in Trenton off guard because they'd be nursing severe Christmas morning hangovers. The Continental forces didn't celebrate Yuletide, and in 1776, they were busy putting boats in the river. After the Revolutionary War ended, celebrating Christmas fell out of style as most people in the new nation considered it too "British". 
        Christmas eventually came back into fashion in the 1800s, only this time around, it was given a more religious twist so it would get support from the churches. The clergy were only too happy to comply. Christians didn't bother checking whether the biblical information on the birth of Jesus was based on reality, or at least supported by some evidence. They just took it on faith that the bible got it right. That assumption became the truth, and from that, lies by the thousands have poured forth from Christianity.

     Why do Christians still adhere to the Christmas myth? Simple. People don't want to have their illusions destroyed. They've practiced them for so long, the illusions have become like a warm and fuzzy security blanket. When life becomes complicated, just fall back on stories and fables you were taught as a child, like the Christmas story, and tell yourself that all life's mysteries will be answered after you die, as long as you believe the right versions of the legends and myths. It is more comforting to accept a beautiful lie than to confront the ugly truth.
     There has never been a war on Christmas, only a make-believe war so that Christians can act morally outraged that others don’t prostrate themselves before the faithful's fairy tales. Christians are confusing ‘war’ with not getting what they want, which is everyone respecting and honoring their illusions and fantasies...and they are reacting like bratty, whiny, self-centered five year olds. Someone needs to tell them Santa Claus isn’t real too.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination - my perspective 50 years later

                It was the voice of Walter Cronkite that came crackling over the school loudspeakers sometime after 2 PM that day to announce that the President of the United States was dead. I was in 6^th grade math at Ontario Junior High School in Ontario, Ohio. On hearing the news report, our teacher burst out crying and ran out of the room. The rest of us began whispering to each other trying to make sense of what we’d just heard, but for most of us, it had no immediate impact. Two days later, my family had the TV on after coming home from a church service and we saw Lee Oswald get shot live on TV. The events completely baffled me. I couldn’t understand why someone would want to kill the president. Then, who would try to kill his alleged assassin right in front of a room full of policemen? Surely our government officials would get to the bottom of this and give us the truth.

           Yes, there were anomalies, like J. Edgar Hoover immediately claiming Oswald did it alone, before any investigation had been undertaken. (How did he know?) Yes, there were the Parkland doctors and nurses who said the president’s massive wound was on the back of his head, not on the side or front. (Apparently these trained medical experts were ALL wrong and only the Bethesda autopsy team, under the ‘guidance’ of a cabal of high-ranking military officers jamming the autopsy room and overseeing things, got it right.) Yes, the FBI and Secret Service said that all three shots hit their mark, yet they didn't account for the bullet that struck the curb across Dealey Plaza and slightly injured bystander James Tague who was near the triple underpass. (To this day, they still maintain that all three shots hit their mark and none missed.) And yes, there was the CBS report in the summer of 1964 that stated none of the expert riflemen they’d assembled could duplicate Oswald’s shooting, even when allowed all the time they needed for the first shot. (Cronkite claimed even if others couldn’t do it, obviously Mr. Oswald could.) I refused to believe our government would lie to us and mislead us, so I was sure they had solved the murder with the final report from the Warren Commission in September 1964. Its premise was: Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy, and he in turn was gunned down by Jack Ruby who, wonder of wonders on this weekend of wonders, just happened to time it perfectly, was armed, and in the right place in the crowd assembled in the basement of the Dallas Police building just as Oswald was being transferred to the county jail. The government let everyone know that any other scenario was conjured up by sensationalists, kooks, and people with an ax to grind, and their information was just utter nonsense. I had no reason to doubt it. I never even thought the immediate benefactor of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson, could be party to something so heinous. But in my defense, I didn't see the picture below until years later. 

         Johnson turns and winks at Albert Thomas immediately after taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One. Does either man look unhappy with the turn of events?

             It wasn’t until 1988 while working at a radio station in Raleigh, NC that I met someone who told me a completely different version of the assassination and its aftermath. At first, I thought they were crazy…no government could be that underhanded, that deceptive, and that malevolent. They wouldn’t really try to hide the facts of the murder from us and pin the whole thing on an innocent man. This researcher and writer encouraged me to read the books of Harold Weisberg, Mark Lane, and Sylvia Meagher and see what I thought afterward. I already had the Warren Commission Report and had read William Manchester’s The Death of a President so I felt I had all the facts at hand I would need to disprove any of those other authors and their conspiracy theories.

            At last count, I’ve read the works of 42 authors on the Kennedy assassination that cover the entire pro and con spectrum regarding the Warren Commission Report, all 26 volumes of the Warren Commission evidence and testimonies, seen countless TV specials on various aspects of the murder, heard hours of radio interviews with many of the people involved in the event and purchased 16 different video documentaries on the assassination. Without hesitation, I can say the books of Harold Weisberg are, by far, the best on the subject. None of the Warren Commission defenders have been able to find any fault with his investigation. Many have condemned him, by employing ad hominem attacks, but none have been able to refute his conclusions. Mr. Weisberg used the same information that was available to the Warren Commission, only he didn’t have an agenda to find Oswald guilty at all costs. He let the evidence the FBI, the Secret Service, the CIA, and the Dallas Police Department collected speak for itself. Lee Harvey Oswald didn’t shoot anyone on November 22, 1963, and Oswald was killed to keep his mouth shut. He was exactly what he shouted he was in the Dallas Police Department building...a patsy!

             We’ll never know just who killed John F. Kennedy, but the cover-up in the assassination is still maintained by people within the United States government so there is duplicity on the part of our government officials even to today. If you don’t believe that's possible, take a look at just this one inconsistency. These are from the official JFK Autopsy photographs and X-rays that are housed in the National Archives in Washington DC. The keepers of our national inheritance insist these are authentic:

 

Does the “stare of death” photo of Kennedy coincide with what is shown in the X-ray? How can his face, especially his right brow area and eye, hold their structure and position when the X-ray clearly shows there is no bone remaining behind them with half of the right eye socket missing? How can these possibly be of the same body? If they can botch this up, and they have; what else has the government botched? The Archive information and Warren Commission evidence is rife with thousands of other inconsistencies that Mr. Weisberg has ferreted out, but check into that one first and see what conclusion you reach when you read about what kind of an autopsy was carried out on JFK’s body. It was a travesty.

The incomplete autopsy sheet that was verified and signed by presidential physician Dr. George Berkley who was the only doctor that saw the body at Parkland and Bethesda.

 

            We’ve been lied to for the past 50 years, and we continue to be lied to. One would think a government that had nothing to hide in the Kennedy assassination wouldn’t have locked up various records from the FBI, Secret Service and CIA until September 14, 2038. I’ll be an old man by the time they are released, but I hope to be there when they are. I’m not holding out hope that they haven’t already gutted those files of any useful information, but I’ll be curious to see just what was so important to the government that it had to hide it away from the American people for 75 years. By then, the perpetrators of the crime will have long since died, but I’ll bet there will still be supporters of this injustice.

Announcing Kennedy's death at Parkland Hospital, Assistant Press Secretary Malcolm Kilduff indicates where the fatal shot hit the president; not where it exited, but where it entered.

            My trust in our government was shattered by the way they handled the JFK assassination. They’ve earned my disgust and condemnation. They’ve earned yours too.

Like it or not, Syria is NOT our problem

What is it with the American government, its covert services, and military? Have we done such an admirable and praiseworthy job in Afghanistan, and left a stable, peaceful, and democratic situation behind in Iraq, that we now want to put that same expertise to work in Syria? And drag other unwilling nations into the quagmire with us? Has the summer heat finally gotten to our politicians and military leaders? I’m asking a lot of questions in this post because our politicians and military haven’t.

Why do we need to stop Assad? We don’t do jack about Kim Jong Un in North Korea. We don’t do diddley about the daily killings in Somalia, Sudan or the Democratic Republic of Congo. Look how Ahmadinejad is no longer considered a big threat. He’s still making the same noise as before, but we now just consider him a loon, even though his regime has killed hundreds of Iranians. But let Assad gas his own people, (like Saddam did to the Kurds in 1988 while we stood around with our thumbs jammed up our sphincter…Hell, we even helped him.) and suddenly, Obama grows a pair and threatens to take our military into another mess.

Haven’t U.S. politicians learned anything? Do they understand what George Santayana meant when he said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”? This is the information age, and we’re swamped with information technology, so It’s not like the facts and statistics from past U.S. misadventures isn’t available, in an easy-to-read second grade level format (which is the right level for our Congress and administration), So how are they missing the warning signs to stay clear of Syria? Does the president think he has a great relationship with Vladimir Putin and can talk the Russians into staying on the sidelines? Didn’t John Kerry learn anything about the misapplication of the U.S. military when he served in Vietnam? Are Syria’s friends in the Middle East (and there are several) just going to lets us walk in and beat up Assad? Does our military think that we’ll only lose a few thousand of our men and women in uniform when we go up against a well-armed military with state-of-the-art Russian hardware, unlike those backwoods tribal yahoos armed with second-rate black market weapons in Afghanistan that have cost us a couple thousand casualties? Those Afghani bumpkins have been easy to subdue in the past ten years; so no doubt, the Syrians will be a pushover.

Oops, wrong target!

We’ll play it safe and initiate combat by using our Predators and other drones to selectively take out the people who are deemed the biggest threats…which has worked so well in Pakistan, Yemen and Afghanistan with no collateral damage to come back and haunt us. And when that doesn’t resolve anything, we’re going to put U.S. troops on Syrian soil…to do what? How will we tell friend from foe? And getting involved in Syria’s civil war will benefit us how? How many American lives is this effort worth? When were we given the badge, and the task, to be the world’s policemen? Team America: World Police was meant to be a crude, funny movie, not the way the U.S. really operates. And naturally, with our superpower status and vibrant economy, we’ve got plenty of money to pour down the Syrian rat hole.

Those who think we as a country need to ‘man up’ and get involved in the Syrian mess should be in the first invasion wave and put their money (and their lives) where their mouth is. Senator Bill Nelson (D-Florida), if you REALLY believe we need to go into Syria to stop Assad from killing his own people, I want to see YOU in uniform, leading the troops in the front line with your bayoneted rifle poised to kill the first Syrian who challenges you. And take John Kerry and Obama with you!

A 'righteous' response that is just wrong

            City Magazine, a local Central Florida publication, recently printed a letter from Dr.Terry Pooler who is the Lead Pastor of the Sabbath Grace Fellowship Church in Apopka, Fl. in response to a CNN iReport’s article Why I Raise My Children without God by Deborah Mitchell. Her article was a mother’s response to the way religion, particularly Christianity, justified certain actions and was used to shape people’s thinking in a manner that she realized was wrong.

            I sensed before reading it that Dr. Pooler probably had a vested interest in ‘debunking” Deborah Mitchell’s story as it could have a long term effect on any possible growth at his church, and bottom-line, his paycheck. So he had to find ways to dissect and disembowel her article in a way that makes it appeared she just didn’t truly understand the living god and that’s why she was raising her children free of religion.(How he knows…actually knows...the living god, and by what means he confirms this is never addressed.) But he makes the same errors that all other theists make when they try to defend their version of Christianity. They fall back on the Bible and what God and Jesus supposedly said (actually, what Dr. Pooler interprets as he reads the Bible)…by cherry-picking the verses they believe will bolster their view. That is not a wise direction in which to go because, as any ‘True Christian’ will tell you, you have to take the whole Bible into consideration, not just the parts you like.

            In the second sentence of his article, Dr. Pooler starts by stating that Mitchell ‘brushed aside a grieving parent’s plea that taking God out of our public schools was partially to blame.’ As if, up until the removal of all things Christian, our schools were models of Christian morality, thought, and conscience. Sorry Doctor Pooler, but you have to be able to prove God was actually there to begin with. You can’t just say ‘because I believe so’, or ‘because the bible says it is written’. You wouldn’t give that latitude to Muslims or Hindus and their ‘holy’ books. You have to provide evidence. And you can’t. So don’t take her to task because she dismisses a grieving parent who falls back on an emotional plea about the supposed presence, or lack of presence, of a god as an explanation for why a mass murder occurred. Does that grieving parent really believe that, if only the Ten Commandments were placed in the school, if only teacher-led Christian prayers were allowed, and if only every child had a bible on their desk, that somehow, that would have thwarted the gunman from entering the school and killing twenty students and six teachers? It didn’t stop Charles Roberts in Lancaster Pennsylvania on October 2, 2006 from killing five little Amish girls in the West Nickel Mines School. Oh, but they didn’t practice the right kind of Christianity, did they? When the God Dr. Pooler believes in has fixed the child abuse that routinely occurs in His churches, eliminates starvation that occurs all over the world, stops creating “natural” disasters that kill and maim and leave children orphaned, and ceases creating agonizing diseases that disfigure and kill, then He, or those who claim to speak for him, can come back and ask us about schools.

            Dr. Pooler then comes up with a strange non-sequitur. Mrs. Mitchell states she is not campaigning for the elimination of religion, but wants it kept at home like a toothbrush or a pair of shoes. From that statement, Dr. Pooler indicates that what she meant, without any explanation, was, religion ‘should be quarantined.’ Last time I checked, no one’s toothbrush or shoes were quarantined from the public. How do you go from something taught at home (and is practiced in numerous churches and religious institutions that vastly outnumber schools across the country) to, it is being quarantined? Dr. Pooler simply uses outrageous and disingenuous hyperbole to cast Mitchell’s intent in as negative a light as possible.

            He goes on to claim she is a victim of erroneous indoctrination, missing the irony of making such a claim himself. He chastises her for writing that ‘a child should make moral choices for the right reasons’, and not feel as though he or she is being watched over by a heavenly policeman who is much like Santa Claus looking to see who’s naughty or nice. But that is exactly how the bible portrays God. Believe He is watching you, and you’d better believe in him and return that love. Because he loves you SO MUCH, that he created a special place called Hell to send you to if you don’t love him back. I found it quite amazing that Dr. Pooler would use the imaginary Santa character as a contrast to convince readers of the legitimacy of the god character. There is not a shred of evidence that either one exists. Why should we believe in one and not the other? Doctor?

            The God’s Desire versus the God’s Plan comparison argument he makes is a mountain of nonsense piled on an even bigger mountain of nonsense. How do you know God’s Desire OR God’s plan, Doctor? If you draw it from the Bible, how do you know it is accurate? If you claim God talks with you, how do you know it is the Christian God, or any god supposedly responding to you? How do you assess that you are not just making up the conversation in your mind and reading into it?

The rest of his article is filled with one a priori assumption after another. All fall back on ‘God is’, ‘it is from the Bible’, ‘God’s plan’, God’s desire’, ‘eternal God’, yet he offers no proof or evidence that ANY of those are accurate or reliable. He simply believes them because, most likely, he was taught as a young child to believe them. In his later adult years, he sought out and studied books and texts which adhered with what he was taught as a child. If I wrote ‘Allah says’,’ the Koran is explicit’, ‘Vishnu is eternal’, ‘the book of Mormon states’, Zeus is all-knowing’, would Dr. Pooler give them the same weight and credence as he does in his world view seen solely through the prism of Christianity?

                                        
    He ends his article with a paragraph that begins with, “I wonder if the number of school shootings and child abusers will dramatically decrease if the next generation, flushed with the belief that they are insignificant parts of a big machine, can successfully squelch the current religious fever in our country that promotes God’s moral values…” If Dr. Pooler recalls his bible reading, God requires that unruly children be stoned to death. The same sentence is also mandatory for homosexuality, witches, and even picking up sticks on Sunday. Or how about when a woman is raped; the rapist has to marry that woman and pay her father fifty pieces of silver? Does that sound fair? Are those the moral values he is referring to? They are all God’s; it says so right in the Bible. Read it yourself and see if it is correct. How many slaves does Dr. Pooler own? Because neither God nor Jesus condemn slavery. If a tree doesn’t produce fruit, even when it is not in season, would Dr. Pooler demand it be cut down? Jesus condemned a fig tree for the same reason, and it follows that Jesus was only reflecting God’s values and morals.

                           According to the Bible, that fig tree has only a few moments left to live

Dr. Pooler has a right to express his views about Mrs. Mitchell’s article. What concerns me is his attitude that she is wrong because the God he believes in says it is wrong. But he offers nothing at all to prove his belief is correct, accurate, or true. He simply believes it because he wants it to be true. As I stated earlier, would Dr. Pooler give that same latitude to someone of a different faith, or even a different denomination within Christianity? If they stated they believed it because they want it to be true, would that make it true? If Deborah Mitchell rejects it, does that make her belief or lack of belief false? As Stephen Roberts once wrote: “I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.” Dr. Pooler, I dismiss yours.

 

Safe for the Little Ears?

In my hometown, there is a popular Christian radio station that uses the phrase “Safe for the little ears” on its bumper stickers and promotional material. The intent is to encourage the belief that, unlike other stations that carry, say, Howard Stern, a wannabe clone of his, or utilize DJs who read questionable material or play provocative songs during their broadcasts, this station is ‘safe’ for even children to listen to, anytime, since all their programming is Christian-oriented music and life-lessons taken from the bible. Their programming is not to my taste but I do listen on occasion just to see how they try to spin bible verses and bible stories to fit their ‘god-is-good-and-the-bible-won’t-offend-anyone’ approach. Apparently, they haven’t read enough of the bible to know it is anything but ‘safe for the little ears’.

They often read or paraphrase biblical quotes between the songs, but I notice they always play it safe by cherry-picking the verses they use (just like most Christians cherry-pick the parts of Christianity they ascribe to). I wonder how many parents would approve of their ‘little ones’ hearing these straight from the bible:

Genesis 19:30-36: And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters. And the firstborn said unto the younger, our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father. And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose. Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father. 

Deuteronomy 22:28-29: If a man is caught in the act of raping a young woman who is not engaged, he must pay fifty pieces of silver to her father.Then he must marry the young woman because he violated her, and he will never be allowed to divorce her. (This sounds reasonable and fair, doesn’t it? When this is explained to a child, they’d fully agree, wouldn’t they?)

Numbers 15:32-35: And while the children of Israel were in the wilderness, they found a man that gathered sticks upon the Sabbath day. And they that found him gathering sticks brought him unto Moses and Aaron, and unto all the congregation. And they put him in ward, because it was not declared what should be done to him. And the LORD said unto Moses, The man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones without the camp. And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses.

Ezekiel 23:20 For she doted upon their paramours, whose flesh is as the flesh of asses, and whose issue is like the issue of horses.(This must have been really important, to include it in the bible. How would you explain this to your kids, mom and dad?)

Ezekiel 9:6 Slay utterly old and young, both maids, and little children, and women…

Numbers 31:17-18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourself every girl who has never slept with a man.

Judges 4:21 But Jael, Heber's wife, picked up a tent peg and a hammer and went quietly to him while he lay fast asleep, exhausted. She drove the peg through his temple into the ground, and he died.

2 Kings18:27 But Rabshakeh said unto them, Hath my master sent me to thy master, and to thee, to speak these words? hath he not sent me to the men which sit on the wall, that they may eat their own dung, and drink their own piss with you?

2 Kings2:23-24 And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head. And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them. 

Psalms 137:9 Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Or Judges 19:22-30 Where a Levite gives his concubine to a mob, she is raped all night, dies, he then takes her body home, cuts it up into 12 pieces and sends it all around Israel…. Judges 11:30-40 where Jephthah kills his daughter after promising to sacrifice the first thing that comes out of his house.

And every child has probably heard, or seen the Hollywood version on TV, of Moses going up Mount Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Moses then comes down with the stone tablets, one of which we’re told states “Thou shalt not kill”, but he discovers that the Israelites have fashioned a golden calf statue. To punish the people, Moses gathers a group of men and takes the following action, according to Exodus 32:27 "Then he said to them, "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.' “The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. “

So... one minute we have God carving into stone, "Thou shalt not kill." Then the next minute we have God telling each man to strap a sword to his side and lay waste to thousands, not even giving any clue how to tell the guilty from the innocent, just kill at random. Wouldn't you expect the almighty ruler of the universe to be slightly more consistent than this? 3,000 dead people is a lot of commandment breaking. But god is okay with ‘do as I say, even if it breaks a commandment I just gave you, but you can never do this on your own.’

And in case the kids get the idea that God’s son Jesus was simply meek and mild, let them hear how he thought discipline should be meted out regarding slaves: Luke 12:47-48 And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he that knew not, and did commit things worthy of stripes, shall be beaten with few stripes. (Yes, lash, whip, and inflict considerable pain on those you own, even if they had no idea they had done something wrong.)

Those are just a few of the more ‘popular' vicious stories in the bible, but they are by no means all. The bible is filled with violence, immoral teachings, and harmful passages that demand revenge and death. How would Christian parents explain them to their children if the “Safe for the little ears” radio announcers read those verses? Would those parents understand what morals they were teaching? Because promoting Christianity is nothing more than a socially acceptable form of preaching hate, bigotry, ignorance, superstition and intolerance. What child needs to learn those lessons?

If the bible is considered ‘safe for the little ears’, I’d just as soon read to my children Fifty Shades of Grey.

When massacres occur, god is behind it?

           

          On Friday, December 14, 2012, a tragedy occurred in Newtown Connecticut where twenty children and six adults were killed in a shooting rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School. The echoes from the gunfire had barely stopped when the kooks came out to air their impressions on what happened. One group in particular, certain Christians, conveyed the strangest explanations or rationalizations that I have ever heard. God BLESS Sandy Hook? Not since airliners were crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in September 2001 have there been so many Christian enlightenments and justifications to explain what happened, and why it happened. In a nutshell…god did it.                 
          
                I all but choked on the coffee I was sipping as I listened to one radio talk show and heard a woman, who identified herself as a God-fearing Christian, claim that God saw he needed twenty new angels (apparently He wasn’t aware of the shortage prior to casting His gaze around paradise) and set in motion the events that led to the slaughter.
                For even a second, do you consider it in good taste the implication of what she is suggesting? That God looked around, saw he had twenty fewer angels than he needed to be worshipped or entertained by, (Never mind the six adults, I guess) and sent a mentally unstable man into an elementary school to mow down 6 to 7 year old children?

Now that the killing has stopped, it's time to get on our knees to thank God, or ask God why it happened...and never get a response.

 But of course, other Christian callers quickly hastened to add their own beliefs that God didn’t know this was coming and He was simply making something good out of a bad situation by turning adolescent murder victims into instant angels. (Like making lemonade when you are handed a lemon.) They didn’t stop to think “Why would god work this way?” As the great Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote over 2400 years ago:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but is not able?  Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?  Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?  Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?  Then why call him God?

Why don’t Christians consider this when tragedies occur?

                On another talk show, a caller suggested that because secularists had forced god out of the schools, this is what would inevitably happen. When kids can’t pray Christian prayers in the classroom, when bibles are banned from the library, and when thanking God and Jesus at ceremonies and graduations is prohibited, then we reap what we sow…ergo, mentally unstable, heavy-armed, young, white males will automatically begin thinning out the human herd with gunfire. This caller said that God has turned His back on us because we turned our backs on Him. These kinds of Christians believe that God knows these acts will happen and, if not causing them, simply allows them to happen. I don’t see any difference between the two. It’s an act of malevolence either way.

              Do they really believe God thinks this is reasonable? Killing, or allowing to be killed, children who have done nothing to offend Him, and that they should die in such a horrific manner? What the hell kind of Christian sits around thinking this pile of garbage up? Of course, throughout the Christian bible, God DOES kill children without batting a holy eyelash. For example, God killed children in the tenth plague of Egypt. Their deaths were senseless because there were peaceful alternatives that could have accomplished His goal of getting the Hebrews released by Pharaoh and out of slavery.  When you kill children to accomplish a goal, and that goal could have been achieved without killing them, then their deaths were senseless because they weren't key to reaching that goal. The Proverb about babies being ripped from their mother’s womb certainly sounds like killing innocent kids is part of god’s plan. Also, the great flood in Genesis that only Noah and his seven family members escaped from is another classic example showing that babies and adolescents are not exempt from god's wrath. God doesn’t mind killing children at all. It just has to be for the right reasons. I deliberately didn’t seek any information about how the lunatic fringe at the Westboro Baptist Church would interpret this because I was certain they would blame the whole situation on gays. They most likely insist that, since the U.S. allows homosexuality to exist in our society, God sent this gunman into the school to bring us back to God (their version anyway) in a most shocking manner, by killing children. Homosexuality = murdering kids. WBC has perfected the non sequitur.

                After the massacre, area churches opened their doors for special services in order to make people feel better by telling God what he should do. God apparently didn't know this would happen.

                 If Christians are saying their God allowed these kids to be killed because Americans don’t have the Ten Commandments plastered everywhere, don’t go to church as frequently as they should, don’t pray enough, allow homosexuality, alcohol drinking, and even bowling on Sunday, then they are just as bad as that god they worship, if not worse. Blaming an invisible, nebulous, mysterious supernatural creature is delusional and amounts to passing the buck. However, human beings thinking it up, believing it, insisting others should believe it, and act on it as well, is nothing short of evil...man-made evil.
                God-fearing Christians...if this is the kind of god you believe in, you should be fearful. The rest of us just think you're nuts.

The Big Difference

                What does the future hold? How does one's vision of the future impact the way they live their life? Beliefs influence how one reacts and how they interact with others. Belief systems seem to boil down to one of two types of world views.

                One system sees a better tomorrow with true human harmony being a reachable goal, even though it may still be distant today. It will be a time when people can, and will, work with each other and find a just, lasting, and symbiotic way to make life better for all who exist here. If we can cooperate in space, at the far reaches of the planet, in technology, health care, finances, and communication; then we can equally cooperate in human progress and in human understanding. We all have more in common than we have that differentiates us. There isn’t a short term solution. It will require a long term commitment on our part. However, we have proven that we have the capability, the reasoning, and the desire to make things better, for ourselves and for those around us. Wouldn’t it be nice if it turned out we’re all only separated by something like the six degrees of Kevin Bacon?

                The other belief dictates that mankind is naturally evil and sinful. In this country, the predominant belief system is christianity, but it could just as easily apply to islam or judaism. Those who follow the christian belief hope, pray, and work for the biblical Armageddon to happen in their lifetime. They believe Jesus will then come tearing out of the sky to save some of the remaining human beings who will live for a thousand years with Jesus in control of Earth. Finally, for reasons not very clear, the devil (a supernatural being who was thrown into a pit when Jesus came back) will be let loose to destroy things on Earth again. And then, everyone who ever lived on this planet will be tried by God where a vast majority of them will be judged unworthy of anything but damnation, and thrown in a lake of fire for all eternity.

                Does this sound like the design of an intelligent supernatural being that transcends time and space?  Yet, this is the love and mercy of the Christian god, according to their bible, and it is the core of the Christian belief. Defenders of Christianity will try to explain that god doesn’t send people to hell (or the lake of fire); they send themselves to hell (or the lake of fire). Really? Is it any different than this scenario?

The Robber says                                                                               God says

“Give me your money, or I’ll shoot you!”                                   “Worship me, or burn in hell forever!”

People have free will.                                                                    People have free will.                   

They can choose to obey the robber's                                       They can choose to obey God's
commands, or not.                                                                        commands, or not.

So Robbers do not kill people.                                                  So God does not send people to hell.

People choose to die by                                                               People send themselves there, by         
choosing to disobey the robber.                                                choosing to disobey god.
               

Would you excuse and pardon the robber for murdering his victim in this case?

            But the ultimate problem is this; the Christian sees a bleak future that requires a supernatural event to change it, but they don’t explain how or why it will happen as they claim, except to repeat passages from their bible, as if that clarifies everything. You just have to believe, you just have to have faith, you just have to worship their god and trust that he will make everything right.

                The offer to worship the Christian god is not a choice, it is an ultimatum. The whole idea is based on a threat. That’s what terrorists do. That’s what the recent christmas holiday represents; not the birth of a child, but the birth of a method to threaten you with unimaginable horror. In its most concise form, it is ‘Worship me or go to hell forever’ which is no different than pointing a loaded gun at your head and saying “Do as I say, or I’ll pull this trigger.”

                I choose to believe in a very different future for the human race. I do not, for example, believe we’re on auto-pilot destined for total destruction, nor do I believe a supernatural event will occur that will resolve, temporarily, the apparently ghastly conditions we humans have created on Earth. I am certain that humans, with all their flaws and faults, will continue to progress and build toward a better future. There will be set backs and miscues, but we are aiming in the right direction. As long as we don't get sidetracked by allowing religion, ANY religion, to divert our course, we will continue to lay down the building blocks that will lead to a much grander and more equitable future for us and our descendants.

  It’s time for the human race to rise above these two thousand year old superstitions, and throw off the fear, the belief in a forsaken future, and faith in an unseen, unknowable supernatural force. We no longer need to be scared of the 'monster under the bed', because it was never there to begin with; nor do we need magical, invisible friends whom we converse one-sidely with (in prayer). The bible was written as a means of controlling people. In it, we’re condemned as being inherently sinful by the very being that, it is claimed, authored the bible, and we owe that being our lives in perpetuity. Of course, the message of the bible is then touted as the only salvation available, again according to that supernatural being that supposedly authored it. When other religions try to use the same argument with their own holy book, do you believe their claims are true?

The future is far too important to leave to interpretations that are no different from reading Tarot cards, tea leaves, or the entrails of a slaughtered sheep. I choose the vision that does not treat human beings as unworthy and must ultimately be saved by an undefinable supernatural source. We are superior to that and our eventual growth away from religion will only make our lives and our future that much better. The day when humankind’s belief in the supernatural is just a quaint memory, and a footnote in a history book, can’t come soon enough.