Blind Man's (Religious) Bluff

PLEASE NOTE

There will be no voting—this is for information only. However comments are welcome, as are PMs and email with any questions about this essay. However any comment which is simply "testimony" otherwise known as witnessing. by churchy people, argumentative, or preachy, will be deleted immediately. This is not a forum for debating—most of the facts are from the bible itself and speak for themselves, or from verifiably known history.

The King James Version of the bible is principally used unless noted otherwise As well, I've used Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible which identifies every word in the KJV of the bible as well as where to find them. Other bibles say essentially the same basic things as the KJV, which, where needed or appropriate, I quote from.

My writings were originally intended for lesbians who have been intimidated from birth, shamed, humiliated, pushed to feel guilty, and made to believe that they are an abomination in the sight of the god of the bible, that is, the Old and New Testaments of Judaism and Christianity. They have been made to feel a need to hide their true sense of who and what they are in body and mind. Many have given in and attempted to conform to that "accepted normal" life that society, culture, and especially religion, say that it is how they should live, often with disastrous consequences. This need not be, for even as the bible is said to quote Jesus:

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. (Gospel according to John, chapter 8, verse 32.)

Chapter 1

"In the beginning...", so goes one story, there were established heavens and the earth, and the earth had nowhere to abide for there was no sun for it to keep it in it's place; at least not until a few days later—on the fourth day, to be exact, then on the sixth day, he created man. But, was that really the beginning?

Let's go back a bit.

Those "heavens" and the earth had to be put someplace, and that place had to have room for them. And there had to be order—rules—for things to be put into that place, too. That place could only be "nothing" which we have called "space", and that space had to have a lot of room. The major rule had to be one that held things in place, and that space that held things in it had what we call gravity. Now gravity is an odd thing, and frankly, it is still just a theory, but only because we can't find anything that says "I am gravity". If it did have something we could determine that was gravity, we'd call it "gravitons" just to give it a name (and a good one too). It sort of makes sense of the seeming nothing.

However, that seeming nothing, that theory, is not to be defied by any of us. We dare not jump up out of a window and fly up and up. Nope! For the rule of gravity is to pull, and not just space, but objects in space have this strange thing we call gravity, and that gravity holds large things (like planets), in place by gravity's own property that causes it to pull on things, just as it does where we stand. Uh, we're glued to whatever is solid because gravity binds us there no matter how we may move about. This we know.

We also know that the sun comes up, and the sun goes down. Or do we? No, we're just used to that being said, maybe because we've always said thought that, and maybe because after we learned better, it was how we had said it for ages, and how it seemed to still be no matter that we know better now. Yes, we know better for we still don't try to jump out of a window and hope to keep going up and up.

Now let's go back to that "beginning" we started this out with.

Maybe it should be: "In the beginning, the earth was made to orbit around its star—sun—so it wouldn't wildly wander about the Universe."

Without a star to be a greater gravitational attractant, our planet would be as an orphan wandering through our galaxy as other bodies are thought to have been found doing so. Yes, check out the Internet for orphan planets and you'll see the possibilities. It's all very logical, and it fits with the rules of our Universe lest all heavenly bodies wander aimlessly about. [Extrapolation made from suggestion by Jacob Berkowitz, in The Stardust Revolution, Prometeus Books, 2012, that earth may have a lost sibling, p. 264-65].

So why didn't our bible say this? Maybe because it's not the holy word of any god, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, but of men who made it all up; men who didn't know any better and thought that the earth was the center of everything we see in the skies. There is no way we could have been placed before a sun was created days later. Without a star, or body much larger than our planet, we would have been like the child's game of Whack the Mole wherein when one pops up and is whacked, it comes up elsewhere.

There may or may not be a God, either personal or impersonal, and Jesus may well have existed, but may or may not have said all that is attributed to him. There are too many errors in both the Old and New Testaments for either the God as presented, or of Jesus to be divine as proposed by the bible. Certainly if there is a God, that God would not make errors such as the one above, much less "inspire" any man, or men, to make such errors in His or Her name.

There are many more oddities—and oddities is a very good descriptive word to use for many things in the bible—that have come to light to refute this age old work that is supposed to be holy and true.

Another is the famous: "...for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

People are not dust! We, and all that we call living, are atoms (at the most common level we normally express matter without going into what constitutes an atom). We are mostly made of hydrogen atoms, then oxygen, and lastly carbon—mostly, that is. We also have other atoms, or elements.

Those atoms came together to form various molecules, and molecules formed into cells, and each human body is said to contain trillions of cells (from Life Evolving, by Christian de Duve, Nobel Laureate, p. 10, Oxford University Press, 2002). Again, cells are made of molecules and molecules are made of atoms, therefore we are not "dust", but atoms.

So why these errors? Simple. The bible was made up by men at various times, and like the Pope scaring Galileo and many others, and Fundamentalist preachers still scaring people, those men wrote what they thought, to the best of their known knowledge, what it was that a god would do, or make us up with. They had no idea of atoms, or that the sun exerted sufficient gravitational pull to keep the earth in its orbit. They most likely just wanted to keep their people together as a nation that they'd grown used to. See the books of Ezra, and more, Nehemiah to learn about how the intelligentsia of the Jewish people put together a way of life for that became commonly called Jews.

In other words, without knowing it, they were blind to the verities we now take for granted, namely gravity and atoms, as well as the sun being the center of our solar system. Eventually, there weren't any Jews who knew the truth of the lies that the learned Jews made up, and it grew into an everlasting Zeitgeist, then remade by later "Christians" to be the present Zeitgeist.

In between the times of the creation of the Jewish Laws and other books, and the time of the Christian creation of what Jesus was supposed to have said, was the addition of the Book of Daniel. This book purported to be the writing of a prophet, Daniel, who may or may not have existed during the time of the Babylonian captivity, and into the time of the Persian conquest of Babylon.

A not so close study of this book reveals significant errors more than indicating that it is but a historical novel being passed off as autobiographical of the said prophet, Daniel. The give away(s) are the lack of accuracy of the kings of Babylon, just who was the last king of Babylon, and which King of Persia conquered Babylon, and against which king.

This book, Daniel, is the largest bridge connecting Judaism and Jesus to Christianity, and that by Jesus' words, perhaps put in his mouth by writers of the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, concerning a resurrection. They have Jesus often quoting the so-called prophet, Daniel, and his new theme of a resurrection of the dead.

This "resurrection" was never believed by Jews before Daniel, and was propagated by the Pharisees, and the apostle Paul proclaimed that he was a Pharisee, as well as the end times that Jesus had said quite a few times in the gospels that would occur before his generation passed away.

We can only conclude that this addition to Jewish belief—though not believed by most of the Sadducees and many other Jews—was false since Jesus' coming to power in the time of his generation as he is said to have proclaimed, and as Paul proclaimed also, never occurred as he was quoted as saying that it would.

Chapter 2

Uh, the genealogy, or pedigree of Jesus? I mentioned before that the genealogy in Matthew and Luke conflict. More, according to Giza Vermes in The Nativity (Penguin Books, 2006), there are more than simply disagreements on the line of ancestors, but a very sharp one. Compare the two in Matthew, chapter 1, to Luke, chapter 3, verses 1 through 23, and you'll find a huge difference.

More, Matthew begins with Abraham and goes through Joseph, the husband of Mary who was the mother of Jesus. In verse 17, he states that there are fourteen generations from Abraham to David, then fourteen generations from David to the carrying away to Babylon, and fourteen more generations from there to Jesus. There aren't forty-two, but rather forty-one itemized.

Beside some other discrepancies, in Luke's genealogy it works back from Jesus to Adam and God, and includes many others by far who are not listed in Matthew's gospel. Not only is Solomon given in Matthew, but in Luke, a different son of David, Solomon's brother Nathan, is given as a part of the lineage of Jesus.

There is another genealogy given in I Chronicles, chapter 3 from verse 10 on, that itemizes from Solomon which also gives a differing set of ancestors, but frankly, other than mildly going through it, I opted to end my headache after trying to decipher it for some semblance of order as compared to Matthew and Luke for the Old Testament fathers and sons. Suffice to say that there are differences there too, but interested parties of those will be invited to get their own headaches. Matthew and Luke are bad enough for me.

While we're on Jesus' pedigree, let's look at the nativity again. As above, Matthew's account is far different from Luke's. Aside from all the differences of what did or didn't occur, and when Jesus was born, the one early and indisputable fact is that contrary to Luke's saying in chapter 2 in the earliest verses, that there was a world wide decree that all should be taxed, and Cyrenius [Quirinius] was governor of Syria at this time.

While it seems to be historically verifiable that there was a tax and that it involved Cryrenius [Quirinius], that was true only for the province of Judea which had been taken away from Herod Archelaus and brought under direct rule of Rome. Joseph, however, was not a citizen of Judea, as it is said in verse 4, but of Galilee. Galilee was under the tetrarch Herod Anitpas, and thus not taxed directly by Rome (poll tax: tributum capitis, A History of Israel from Alexander the Great to Bar Kochba, by Henk Jagersma, page 119, Fortress Press, 1986) since it wasn't under Rome's direct control.

Further, this census was in 6-7 CE, and Herod the Great died 4 BCE.

All of this points to the gospels of Matthew and Luke to be very spurious, and not fact filled at all. When we consider these gospel beginnings, if we look at it with an objective eye, we have to wonder how they could have gotten those few items very wrong. Perhaps it was because the gospels were written by those who tried to inspire those who couldn't read or write, and who needed some hope for anything better than the life they were leading. Were these writers so concerned for others as it may seem? We have no idea, but we do know from what we do have before us that they weren't looking to be questioned objectively, or seriously compared the one to the other.

This is why the title of this essay: Blind Man's (Religious) Bluff—the writers, for whatever reason or reasons, weren't actually Matthew or Luke (or either of the other so-called writers of the other gospels), nor were they "inspired" authors as the Catholic Family Connections Bible would have you believe. The question to be asked here is whether the God of the bible, or any god, have inspired men to write so many falsehoods, so many erroneous words? Doubtful, to say the least.

The next question is how it is that Fundamentalists can say with a straight face that the bible is the error free (inerrant) word of God. They either have to be blind or have some hidden agenda that they're not letting people in on. Is it perhaps position, or power, or even money and the easy life it affords. There are many who are profiting more than handsomely from these religious lies. There is a website that gives us the ability to find out just how much some of these preachers have amassed in wealth and just how lavishly they may be living. No, I can't publish a web site's URL as it is against Literotica's rules, but you should be able to easily find it in a web search.

This desire for religious power is a thing of old from the days of ancient Egypt and even before. Superstition and the need to believe in a higher power gave rise to many gods. Even the idea of only one god may have preceded Yahweh from the Old Testament, and that is Ahura Mazda of the Zoroastrian belief. This may indeed have been the origin of the Jewish idea of one god for Zoroastrianism was known and popular in Babylon, having been birthed in nearby eastern Persia.

So much is unknown, even, as we can see, the date of Jesus' birth. Even the Hebrew meaning of words is unsure. According to Dr. Joel M. Hoffman in his book, And God Said (Thomas Dunne Books, St. Martin's Press, 2010):

"If we have a guess about what an ancient Hebrew word means, in the end it will always be a guess. Hopefully it will be an educated guess—one in which we have a lot of confidence, one that is almost certainly correct—but as with any other endeavor, it's hard to know with absolute certainty that we have not made a mistake."

He gives many examples of wrong interpretations and why, but we need no longer digress, though it does lead into more about what all really may have been, though not properly reported.

Going back to Jesus' birth, and the surrounding so-called facts: though we now have seen that a few very important facts were improperly given (out of ignorance or intentionally, such as Herod and Cyrenius [Quirinius] were living at the same time, there comes the question of just how Herod was considered a Jew. Herod was an Idumaean, and back in the time of the Maccabees, when they did finally rule, John Hyrcanus, in his reigh from 135/34 to 104 BCE, according to Henk Jagersma in his book mentioned above, states:

"Great emphasis must be placed here on two of John Hyrcanus' conquests, because they made an important mark on later history. First, Hyrcanus conquered Idumea with its district capital, Marisa. He compelled the Idumaeans to be to be circumcised and to observe Jewish laws, as he did the inhabitants of other conquered areas. As a consequence of this the Idumaeans later thought of themselves as Jews. So the Idumaean Herod could claim to be a Jew, though we know that the Jews themselves, above all the leading circles in Jerusalem, regarded him as inferior."

* * * *

This Jewishness of Herod, and many others who were forced to become Jews is another ticklish thing in the bible. Genesis, chapter 12, is where the whole thing about Jews and Jewishness began. The god of the bible calls out to Abram (later to have his name changed by his god to Abraham), and tells him that he will make a great nation out of him. As part of his promise to Abram, in verse 7, the bible says:

And the Lord appeared unto Abram, and said, Unto thy seed will I give this land: and there builded he an altar unto the Lord, who appeared unto him.

To Abram's (Abraham's) seed, it said. Again in chapter 15, verse 18, the above promise is repeated, once more using the word "seed". In chapter 17, verse 10, the above promise is made a covenant:

This is my covenant, which ye shall keep, between me and you and thy seed after thee; Every man child among you shall be circumcised.

Here again, thy seed is used; not someone else's seed, but those directly from Abram's (Abraham's) lineage.

In Leviticus, chapter 26, verse 12, we're told that their god said:

And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people.

Since this is part of the Law of Moses, Leviticus, god is talking to his Jews. They, from the seed of Abraham, are to be his people.

In Deuteronomy, chapter 4, verse 37, Moses is supposed to be saying to the Jews of the Exodus:

And because he loved thy fathers, therefore he chose their seed after them, and brought thee out in his sight with his mighty power out of Egypt:

Chose their seed, it says, so the Jews can rightly say that they are god's chosen people according to the Old Testament.

And now it gets even more interesting. In chapter 7, verse 3 in Deuteronomyl, which says:

Neither shalt thou make marriages with them: [the nations of Canaan]thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.

A separate people, that is, and later enforced by Ezra as we shall see soon.

This separateness is further stated in Deuteronomy, chapter 14, verses 1 and 2, which say:

Ye are the children of the Lord your God: ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.

For thou art an holy people unto the Lord thy God, and the Lord hath chosen thee to be a peculiar people unto himself above all the nations that are upon the earth.

There it is again: chosen plus they are the children of the Lord, as well as a peculiar people. It doesn't say a separate people...or does it. Let's look at Ezra, chapter 10, verse 11 which says:

Now therefore make confession unto the Lord God of your fathers, and do his pleasure: and separate yourselves from the people of the land, and from the strange wives.

Here Ezra is bringing the Law to the people, and he is saying to not only separate themselves from the people of the land, but also from their foreign—"strange"—wives.

Yet they not only took Idumaea, and other lands such as Ituraea (Jagersma's History mentioned above, page 87), but made them Jews, at least it's assumed in Ituraea's case, and known in Idumaea''s.

Now how can they be a separate, chosen people and be making Jews out of other peoples? And if Ezra quotes the Law of separation, how is it that Deuteronomy, chapter 21, verses 10 through 13 can say give a how—to to do otherwise? See for yourself:

When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive,

And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife;

Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails;

And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife.

I just checked the Catholic Family Connections Bible, and it says the same thing. Now I ask how it is that the Jews are to be a separate people chosen by their god as above, made by Ezra to put away their foreign wives, yet be instructed on how to take a foreign captive to a wive to a Jew?