Salvation Quantified.

Dear human,

Did you know that before you were saved by grace by the Son of God himself people once had to sacrifice other species of animals to atone for their sins? Did you know these animals had to be perfect, with no blemishes? It's not easy to find an animal like a lamb or goat that had no imperfections. You see we all have sinned, or so we've been told by our fathers and their fathers and their fathers before there were cars and smart phones and twitter.

The Great Mind "before" the cosmos, behind the curtain of all things known or unknown, the Omniscient, Omnipresent, The Beginning and the End... the Alpha and Omega who created every molecule, every quantum soup, every wave, every particle, every human laugh, every sunset, every swirling galaxy, every point of light in space, all life on Earth,  every human mind and eye, every something over nothing ...

... really needed goat's blood at one point.

I know it seems barbaric and outdated. I know. I know... you may be reading that last part confused in an age of (let the understatement of the year begin...) taken-for-granted science with hyper-advances in communication and innovation, when technology is growing before your very eyes exponentially. Information is getting to sources as like never before. It has been said the internet is where religion goes to die. This is happening.

I'm not done.

Dear human,

Did you know that this Uncaused Cause. This Prime Mover. The Creator of all. Almighty God or I Am that I Am had a son that is also himself? Did you know, dear human that all that you know, everything you can ever imagine is known by this perfect God/Son? He created everything, giving us the story in his divinely inspired words penned by mere men, .. manly godly men, scribes of old that made some serious copying mistakes, but be encouraged because basically this perfect Deity (God and Son) got his points across (sort of).

Yahweh, Jehovah, the Lord sent his perfect Son. The good news is coming... Be of good cheer! He sent his Son/(himself) to die for you for everything you ever did that was wrong, for "original sin". Let me tell you about original sin. It began when the first representative hominid of our species ate a forbidden magic fruit from a tree that would give him the knowledge of morality that only God/and His Son possessed. This is in the first book of God's Word. Did you know that this first book, Genesis is Hebraic poetry so either way you know that whether metaphor or realty it's ultimately about magic. Because of this original sin God/(himself) sent his perfect Son/(himself) to appease himself(his Son) for the earliest known homo sapien representative eating that magic fruit (poetically).

this is the complexity of the gospel. Here's the simplicity of the gospel:

Jesus (the Son of God/the Father) was made by himself/(His Father) to become God in ape (homo sapien) flesh. The Lord came down to Earth and was sacrificed like all those animals mentioned before, without blemish, to satisfy himself/(His Father) for the cosmic rule of the blood of things. The Romans nailed poor Jesus to a cross (a torture device) and the weight of the world's sin was put on his poor body (the human part that could feel pain). Poor Jesus (the human part of him) was heavy with the sin of all humanity. Poor Jesus shed his righteous blood, the ultimate atonement, (better than all the goat's blood put together).

The good news is Jesus did all of this for you. He did all this for every human that will ever live. If only we believe in him and accept him into our hearts we will be forever spared from the flames of hell. Oh, right.. hell .. I should mention that. So the Unmoved Mover, the Prime Primer, the Ultimate Champion created a place of forever flame. Think the worst parts of the holocaust but with it lasting forever. This is your introduction to Hell. If you deny Christ you will be sent here when you die. You rejected the gospel. The skepticism, the doubt won and you fell for the fallen angel - Lucifer (the snake I failed to mention in that human origins story of magical fruits and "first humans" that tempted Eve) It's all poetry though.. It's probably over your head. Anyways, what I failed to mention is that that human part of you (that part of you that feels pain - those nerves) THAT survives into the afterlife with you in Hell. So you will burn forever, basically if you reject this story.

You may be a skeptic (sinner), you may be a Christian reading this (sinner saved by *see above). Either way you may be asking what happened after Jesus (Father/Son) died?! I mean a God/Son/Himself cannot just die and save all humanity according to the blood rules. You would be right to ask that. Here's the thing... you HAVE to rise from the dead if you are a perfect Unmoved Mover, Cosmic Creator-Mind, I Am to or else come on.. you're just another guy saying shit without backing it up. So in 3 days Jesus rose from the dead (conquering death btw) and yada yada yada ... talking to people .. then going up to heaven (where the element Au - Gold exists in street form) to sit on the right hand side of God/Himself. (in reality, hang on.. doing the math.. he hasn't left the Milky Way galaxy)

What happened though in those three days with humanity's salvation? Think about this. My friend recently wrote me regarding this very detail - Do you ever wonder about exactly when people became accountable to the gospel? . I think we should really look into the math here. Jesus died (the human part) on day 1 we can assume safely I suppose. Though a death on day 2 would be something to delve into theologically. Day 1 - Day 4 there is zero accountability (the old blood law with unblemished lambs, goats etc has ended and the new blood law has not yet begun since Jesus has not yet arisen). When Jesus finally rises on day 4 where is the accountability still? It's in limbo state because Jesus hasn't even begun talking to his disciples to get the ball rolling with the gospel. So... there surely was someone in the human race who was around and died in this time frame - what of their restless souls? Do the math.. they are the remainder. Christianity's error bar I suppose.

Keep in focus Hell. A very REAL supernatural place with a chemical combustion and gnashing of enamel. From day 2 of the Son of God/Himself death to the decades it took for the gospel to spread is a real black hole of "where the fuck did my soul go?!?!"

Dear human,

I know you know this is all ridiculous baggage from past uncultured culture.

Dear human,

I know you know that these things can weigh on your brain and your emotions and your very core. I know you were taught these things in this slice of your existence- the size of nothing in a cosmos of everything. Maybe you were never indoctrinated with these mythical stories presented as truth growing up, but you came into the "good news" of the gospel when things around you .... well, were utter shit. Or your heart was "tugged" in a youth camp or someone showed you unwarranted kindness that explained reasons for said kindness as their Savior, Jesus' goodness. I understand tapping into the empathy, the hope, the love, Awe, the sheer emotion and elation. It can still happen with human contact. THIS is the key. We are the very answers we've been waiting for. We are growing into ourselves and growing into our own minds. Evolution take time for apes with large brains. There is no Uncaused Prime Mover, Creator, Lord, Allah, Yahweh, I AM, Jehovah, Son/God/Ghost. There is only us (for what we know for now). You are conscious. You are human and you are not alone. Find us.. we are many.

Jesus: The Original Ant Man. (A Blog Short)

<sup>Matthew 14: 22-33

22</sup> Immediately Jesus made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead of him to the other side, while he dismissed the crowd. ²³ After he had dismissed them, he went up on a mountainside by himself to pray. Later that night, he was there alone, ²⁴ and the boat was already a considerable distance from land, buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it.
²⁵ Shortly before dawn Jesus went out to them, walking on the lake. ²⁶ When the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost,” they said, and cried out in fear.
²⁷ But Jesus immediately said to them: “Take courage! It is I. Don’t be afraid.”
²⁸ “Lord, if it’s you,” Peter replied, “tell me to come to you on the water.”
²⁹ “Come,” he said.
Then Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. ³⁰ But when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, “Lord, save me!”
³¹ Immediately Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. “You of little faith,” he said, “why did you doubt?”
³² And when they climbed into the boat, the wind died down. ³³ Then those who were in the boat 
worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

As many of you know I don't believe in God, his son, miracles, or ghosts so this story loses all power from when I was a child and believed it to be a true historical account. Plus it loses all power when I've seen a man walk on the moon in my lifetime (at least on TV). As mentioned before one of the funnest thing in the world to do is to try to scientifically understand what is going on with all these miracles in the Bible. The all-powerful, all-knowing Mind behind the cosmos who actually created the law of surface tension would obviously be using this law of nature when himself/his son walked on water as told in this story. 

Oh, just to clarify, for those believers that could be reading this right now (doubtfully but hopefully) if you are thinking - God is the author of the natural world thus he can on the spot change, bend, recreate laws of natural at his will during these miracles... to this I would offer a few more thoughts: if there was a scientist at the time that could physically study the mechanics of "what was going on" when Jesus walked on water then THAT would be a new constructable framework for a scientific understanding of what is happening in nature at that moment. So, I will let you use the "God is the author of all nature thus does with it what he wills" idea you may be clinging too - but I get to call it what it actually is - MAGIC. If you are an adult reading this and use that idea - you believe in magic. OK. you better own that shit. Now, don't you shy away from "magic-talk" because it sounds childish!

I have another hypothesis. I haven't explored to see if anyone has ever written about this, nor have I even really thought this through before spewing out this silly blog, but who's to say Jesus didn't become the original Ant Man when he walked on water? Nice try Paul Rudd, you are too late! God/Jesus is all powerful after all, could he not have shrunk down to the size of a water-walking bug (or sometimes called "water striders")? Once down to this size he could have easily walked on water with ease using natural surface tension of water laws. This would be a greater miracle than just walking on water wouldn't it?- (since no skeptic was there to verify if he really didn't have something just below the surface. Remember and repeat often a good rule of thumb: Extraordinary claims = Extraordinary evidence.)

Ah, you might come back at my crazy hypothesis - No Magog, the disciples saw him walking on water from very far away! However, let me get my Christian apologetics chops wet here! Look, in the account of the miracle in Matthew it's simply just saying that the disciples saw him .. nothing about seeing him from far away. They don't mention his tiny size and how many things does the Bible leave out that would be rather important or helpful for us to know in 2015! So much, right? They think it's a ghost in Matthews account. I guess technically they were right, but more accurately put it was a Father/Son/HolyGHOST walking on water that night! But who says ghosts can't be the size of small water spiders?! We have yet to construct a working scientific theoretical framework for ghostology yet. OK you might say - what about Jesus reaching out his hand to catch Peter?! Well, clearly this is the time in which Jesus turns to normal size. Duh.

Maybe this is a stretch, but if a donkey and snake can talk a full sized man can live inside of a whale for a few days and survive I think it's a pretty valid hypothesis. Who wants to join me in my quest to understand the tiny ghost/father-god-lamb-son-Mind? Any takers? Also, remember according to these accounts what do we see is the lesson - never DOUBT! Skepticism is the enemy of all constructed philosophies or religions without evidence to support them. Let that shit go.

Marvel's Ant Man Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWdKf3MneyI

Water Strider Bugs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerridae

How Cosmology Can Fill That "God"-Shaped Hole In Your Heart

 
I was driving to the university I attend today when a particular song came on through my CD player. It's called "Let It Carry You" by Jose Gonzalez off of his newest album called "Vestiges and Claws". These lyrics hit me as the vocals and music climaxed during them:

Let it carry you away and dissolve into the foam... of things near of things gone... to remind our restless souls of the beauty of being here at all.

After this beautiful song ended I quickly found on YouTube the Richard Dawkins video titled "We Are Going To Die" and seamlessly added to my "spiritual" moment of elation I was experiencing.

I had all the characteristics of a "spiritual" experience (chills, hairs standing on end, overjoyed, awe, wonder, rapture, heightened emotional connection, transcendence- an almost out-of-body floating experience). Do I believe in spirits if we are using the term to mean "supernatural beings"? .. Nope. Do I like to use the word "spiritual" or "soul"? .. not really because of all the religious baggage but i have no problem doing it with a disclaimer of course. Does it take away from my elevated "spiritual" experience to not believe in the supernatural realm or in a god? Nope.

Once Christopher Hitchens offered up a challenge to anyone in the audience at many of his debates. He said, "I challenge you to find one good or noble thing which cannot be accomplished without religion." There is nothing the religious have that we don't. Nothing is off limits to the atheist - EVEN SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE! - as demonstrated by my account above. You could line up my experience with a religious experience many people have had in church (in fact religious experience I even had in my past when I was a Christian) and physiological effects would be mirror images of each other. I wrote a blog a few years back called "The Spirit Among Us All" comparing elation at sporting events to charismatic worship services in churches. These experience are identical if you merely drop out the context.

There is a completely valid argument that could be made that Christianity or any religion offers us nothing original. We don't need their moral laws (despite what we've heard by some New Christians recently that atheist's "feet are planted firmly in mid air" when it comes to a basis for our morality). This is an easy argument to eviscerate from multiple angles. Don't even stress, friends. Of course I would suggest firstly and correctly the God I read about in the Old Testament is immoral. One merely need eyes to read for this conclusion. You've heard it all before - slavery, genocide, homophobia, bigotry, sexism, racist, etc. My morals (baseless apparently as they are) are far more superior than that of the god of the Old Testament. I would even point out that many of the New Christians have a much higher morality themselves (even with all their awkward anti-gay talk while still trying to love their gay neighbors - comical to watch in real time by the way) than the God of the Old Testament.

So, that's one thing - this old theological argument handled without much brain power at all. The other angle is that this quest of definitive objectivity is a red herring. There is no reason for us to think that complete objectivity is even possible. In Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be a Bat?" he writes, "It may be more accurate to think of objectivity as a direction in which the understanding can travel." New Christians seem to always require definitive end points with absolutes. One major problem as pointed out in Nagel's essay- many beings here on Earth have subjective conscious experiences observing the universe. New Christians love to use god as "the get out of philosophical arguments for free" card all of the time in these debates. Theology is really just bad/lazy philosophy, isn't it? What's the answer to morality? God. What's the answer to the beginning of the universe? - God. What's the answer to free will? - God. (I'm still a little confused on how this makes sense- adding another agent to understanding"free will" seems to needlessly complicate things and go against free will doesn't it?). What's the meaning of life? - God. What's evolution by natural selection really? - God's way of changing life over time. and so on and so on. Science is just a tool to explain all of god's creation. What a terribly sad way to view scientific inquiry. It sucks the awe, wonder, and most importantly MYSTERY right out of doing science!

In reality, Good Philosophy saved our "souls". Science saved our "souls". (*See below my brief thoughts and links on what I mean when I use soul-talk.) We have reasons to be filled with joy every day of our lives. Listen to the Dawkins' speech to get a better reason why than I can type in that last sentence. Reality, consciousness, this cosmos, our planet, life is spell-bounding in it's stark beauty and the cosmos is also spell-bounding in its nightmarish destruction and utter disregard to human life (and clearly other animal life too when 99% of all species that have ever existed have went extinct). Rearrange the way you view the world and it will open your eyes to all kinds of wonderful things. It is heartbreaking to realize many New Christians are still wandering around inside the bubble under the spell of religion. They comment on this piece of reality (through the lens of "the gospel") or they observe that piece of reality (through the lens of the God of the Bible). They cannot be free from it. We've all heard the faithful Christians say (and I did as well when I was one) they have been "set free" when they accepted Jesus in their heart but how is one free when it's mandatory to be a "slave to Christ"? Even in Romans 6:18 (NIV) it says "You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness."No, being a slave to anything does not equal freedom. True freedom comes from freedom of the mind (letting go of ALL dogma/rules in ancient books). Atheists are free in this regard.

I have never felt more free than I have as an atheist. It's really true, because I feel like I've graduated to a newer level (a more educated level) of my picture of the cosmos. This picture of the universe is coming at me via raw information and what I can conclude through my subjective conscious experience about the cosmos I'm encased in as it is encased in me (via the molecules that make up my body). Cosmology can fill that "god"-shaped hole the shitty Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline sung about years ago. Carl Sagan is akin to a priest to us secularists. The priest of cosmology, if there ever was such a thing. He had this amazing way of connecting that awe and wonder based in emotion to the tediousness and dryness of science and mathematics. We have Neil deGrasse Tyson now filling Sagan's shoes quite well, though he will never be Carl. We miss Carl deeply. He was a great science communicator and knew how to make science poetic. Richard Dawkins is also a beautiful science writer. Rewatch Sagan's Pale Blue Dot again on YouTube. It's one of the most profound powerful poetic things I've ever heard as a human being. We are unbelievably lucky to be alive today. And you are all so unbelievably lucky to have reached the end of this amazing blog post.

Jose Gonzalez "Let It Carry You":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV0fnQCdXmk

Richard Dawkins: "We Are Going to Die":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOXMjCnKwb4

*I mentioned "the soul" as part of a lyric of a Jose Gonzalez song... As you can imagine I don't believe in souls as in the soul (ghost organ) many religious believe in. I am pretty confident that neither does Jose Gonzalez. His lyrics are pro-reason over superstition and religion. Can we that don't believe in souls use soul-talk? Yes. Here's how:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuwEJhrliGU

Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like To Be a Bat":
http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

My blog "The Spirit Among Us All":
http://godsaiditibelieveitthatsettlesit.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-spirit-among-us-all.html

Audio Adrenaline's "God-Shaped Hole" (WARNING: This is a terrible fucking song)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzCvkFwRfvE

Carl Sagan "Pale Blue Dot":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PN5JJDh78I

Science Saved My Soul:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6w2M50_Xdk

I Don't Believe in Hell and You Don't Either, My Christian Friends!

One of the more obvious observations to make about the New Christians is their cognitive dissonance with this idea of hell. Of course the Bible is such a pieced-together, contradictory, non-unifying book taken to fit the context of whoever decides to use it to their advantage. We would expect with this book to get a million different narratives. We have the doctrine of hell and I recall hell very much growing up. As I've mentioned before, as a child I watched in church-related activities horror films of the "End Times" and heard countless sermons on the burning flesh and gnashing of teeth that is synonymous with hell as a destination for those that are not "saved". The terror one can feel as a child with these baseless threats can be traumatizing. Maybe the New Christians realize this and that's why their sermons don't have quite that same "fear-based" punch to the child-gut they used to.

Many New Christians feel the need to bend and stretch their worldviews to fit with a more progress (frankly healthier) modern society we are so lucky enough to live in. This is a good thing but many of the fundamentalist within Christianity despise the "watering down" of fear-based sermons or softening on stances like homosexual rights. I stand with the New Christians that ignore verses in the Bible that seem obvious to most fundamentalists or Biblical literalists that promote bigotry, homophobia, sexism, racism, and fear. We want a better society as a whole and the best way to do that is to reform religions and make them more secular and cultural rather than dogmatic. Religions of the future will hopefully resemble something more evolved, better adapted for a healthy society overall and not just blind adherence to a Bronze Age rulebook.

To date many of my New Christian friends (those that try to modernize that old-time religion for a younger generation, and research and vastly growing worldviews like atheism and agnosticism) have never approached me either via email, by phone, or in person about their concern of my eternal damnation in hell. Why? I have asked at least one of my New Christian friends. His answer was essentially - what's the point? I know all the usual Christian narratives that involve hell being for those that reject god and I don't accept that as true. My New Christian friend said he respected me enough to expect me to have my intellect (not just my heart - aka emotions) bring me to Christ once again.

I have another suggestion... My New Christian friends do not actually believe in a literal hell. God's so evasive you see, the God most of the New Christians argue for is a deistic god - a simple debate between the "god or no god" question, using various methods to try and prove that - to this date none are successful by the way, obviously you may have figured that out by now if you've been paying close enough attention. The distance on the bridge that would connect a deistic God or Godlike-notion to the God of the Bible or any other "holy" text is insurmountable. All one has to do is take a few hours reading the Bible or the Koran and seeing that THIS god is unbelievable and could not exist.

Take what that piece of shit Duck Dynasty guy Phil Robertson said recently about atheists. Fantasizing about raping, murdering, beheading, and dismembering an atheist in front of his atheist family. Someone that would do that to an atheist could on his death bed say that magical prayer that gets you into heaven (AKA accepting Jesus death and resurrection in your heart blah blah) and they would be forever spared from the lake of fire and be in the presence of the almighty, all-loving creator of the cosmos. At the same time the atheist that just had his penis severed off in front of his recently raped wife and children gets to then suffer some more in hell! Yay!... Oh and like forever too! Seems fair. Of course this absurd loophole is what you get when you try to square a circle logically with barbaric superstitious doctrines... but I've heard a few New Christians say that Sam Harris is the one that is being so laughably ridiculous when trying to give a scientific basis for morality!

Please. Look at your logically-contorted worldview first before nitpicking.

Don't get me started on peaceful, loving people like Gandhi burning in hell for picking the wrong god and/or religion.

So my dear New Christian friends - I offer that you do not actually believe in a hell. May I suggest a more watered-down easier liberal version of the doctrine of hell in your holy book... Maybe hell is a representation? (sort of like the genetically and biologically not possible "first two humans" Adam and Eve). Maybe hell could just represent a sort of nothingness like the Jehovah Witnesses think. Maybe they got that one right, no? Maybe hell is just NOT getting to go to heaven (which as Christopher Hitchens rightly points out sounds like a celestial North Korea which sounds fucking awful doesn't it?!).

New Christians, unlike the pastors and traveling evangelists that scared my delicate psyche growing up telling me stories of burning forever in a lake of fire I must reiterate that you do not actually believe in hell. I am a proud atheist and i know for sure you do not /actually/ believe I will spend eternity burning. Not just because many of the New Christians reading this are close friends and maybe even some family members that know overall I'm a decent guy that does his best to treat others fairly, love more than hate my fellow human being (otherwise known as humanism). No, it's not JUST because you feel it quite uncomfortable to tell someone you care about that he will writhe in pain from a burning sensation that will literally never end (apparently we have skin in the afterlife). It's because it's a clear example of your cognitive dissonance, it's a clear example of paying lip service only to the doctrine of hell in your antiquated superstition.

We can simply accept that this cosmos is all that there ever was, is, or could be as far as we know and the natural world has natural laws that govern the way it operates. Our species (or kind if you prefer ;) have figured out many of these natural laws, some we haven't yet I'm sure, but what you have to ask yourself is if you need to be intellectually immature and malformed or have a scientifically sound view of reality and this cosmos.

OK here's an atheist's altar call... Now bow your heads and close your eyes - Just kidding.. but you do have a choice right now.. not between heaven or hell or some false dichotomy between Jesus or nothing, but a real choice between REALITY or MAGIC. Do you want to accept that a supernatural Male Being (Father/Son/and Spirit all in one) decided to magically POOF our species into existence millions of years ago after dinosaurs ruled the Earth for 65 million years? Or do you want to accept the scientific fact that we like all other species of animals connected to the evolutionary tree of life are another species of animal.

You have got to let go of this "special creation" juvenile mental thought-turd. Maybe you are scared if you accept the fact of human evolution you will become a communist or that nihilism is all that there is in exchange. No! Please stop that! It's not true and it's certainly insulting to our intelligence because we are smart enough to differentiate between psychology, anthropology, and sociology with the evolutionary sciences and human biology. In 2015 in a technologically advanced, industrialized, free nation there is zero excuse for you siding with MAGIC over reality! We know magic isn't real. Teenagers and some children have figured this out already. Fairy tales die as one turns into an adult. Right? Well, they should and there is no excuse for grown men and women to think supernatural MAGIC is an actual answer to ANY QUESTION!!! Do yourself a favor and let go of this notion of mystical, magical afterlife destinations like heaven and hell and grow up enough to face the highly more accurate choice of "what it was like" before you were born is "what it is like" after you die. Just nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. Choose nothing because you choose to use your brain that NO god gave to you.

BIBLE STUDY #1.: Thoughts On "The Fall" & "The Tower of Babel" Bible Stories

 

Genesis 3 New International Version (NIV)

The Fall

3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

² The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, ³ but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
⁴ “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. ⁵ “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
⁶ When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. ⁷ Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
⁸ Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. ⁹ But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
¹⁰ He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
¹¹ And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
¹² The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
¹³ Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
¹⁴ So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,

“Cursed are you above all livestock
    and all wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
    and you will eat dust
    all the days of your life.
¹⁵ And I will put enmity
    between you and the woman,
    and between your offspring^[a] and hers;
he will crush^[b] your head,
    and you will strike his heel.”

¹⁶ To the woman he said,

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
    with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

¹⁷ To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat from it,’

“Cursed is the ground because of you;
    through painful toil you will eat food from it
    all the days of your life.
¹⁸ It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
    and you will eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your brow
    you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
    since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
    and to dust you will return.”

²⁰ Adam^[c] named his wife Eve,^[d] because she would become the mother of all the living.

²¹ The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. ²² And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” ²³ So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. ²⁴ After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side^[e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
-------------------------------

Let's have a basic discussion about morality here since this is the source in which we (even us atheists) derive all of our morality from. This is the fall. This is where man fell from God's good graces. 

Lesson One: What's the first thing we can notice here as I've highlighted in bold the important bits? God is against us KNOWING things. OK we can't say he is against us knowing all things of course but we can say that God is against us KNOWING good and evil, for by eating from the forbidden Tree of KNOWLEDGE of Good and Evil you will die. 

Lesson Two: God's morality is baseless. We cannot "be like him" by knowing of the "good and evil". So god's morality. - the perfect moral lawgiver who holds the keys to all morality will not let us KNOW it. What?

Lesson Three: The first moral lesson - PUT SOME CLOTHES ON! As we see in most religions that have ever been invented throughout human history - God hates nudity. There is always an obsession with sexual purity. Why this is? Someone tell me please!

Lesson Four: God punishes the vessel. From what I have always been told the snake in this story was Satan. So Satan possessed this poor serpent (one of the first of the species since creation I would imagine) but God punishes the possessed snake and all of his relatives. Why? Oh and also *See my blog post about proof of other species of animals besides humans having souls.

Lesson Five: After laying the smack down (AKA the Fall of Mankind) on the representative selected pair of early hominids Adam and Eve and the species of snake unlucky enough to be possessed by the devil the perfect Moral Lawgiver shows His craftier side and fashions Adam and Eve cute little animal skin matching outfits because exposed genitalia that he literally just created is icky.

I am not a Biblical scholar but apparently in the beginning there were all sorts of magical trees granting perfect moral knowledge (which again, first lesson - cover up your junk!!) and eternal life. Makes one wonder what the hell are these magic trees doing on this newly created Earth. Was there something before nothing? Did God take these magical trees originally grown in heaven down to his new Earth just to fuck with his newly created species of primate? We'll never know!

I think there is one main lesson we should all take away from this Bible passage of "the fall of mankind" and I think it is obvious when reading this Scripture passage. The lesson is that the billions of years prior to mankind's creation where literal monsters roamed the Earth shredding every other living thing for millions of years followed by a nightmarish landscape of unimaginable volcanic activity that made all the oceans stagnant death pools and made methane burp which caused the entire planet to smell like rotten eggs, overall ending in the death of 99% of all living species of god's creation  - ALL due to Eve eating that fruit because a possessed snake talked her into it. I think that much should be clear.

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Genesis 11 New International Version (NIV)

The Tower of Babel

11 Now the whole world had one language and a common speech. ² As people moved eastward,^[a] they found a plain in Shinar^[b] and settled there.

³ They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.” They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar. ⁴ Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”
⁵ But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower the people were building. ⁶ The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”
⁸ So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. ⁹ That is why it was called Babel^[c]—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.

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In the first chapter, if one was reading this passage from Scripture for the first time you might think - Oh how nice! Everyone getting a long and speaking one language. I mean it's a tad socialist for my taste but nonetheless uplifting. However, as you read on it gets weirder and these lessons seem obvious.

Lesson One: Never come together to build cities or towers within that city. God disapproves of most urban areas right off the bat here and just human ingenuity overall.

Lesson Two: Our Perfect Moral Lawgiver contradicts himself in the New Testament (Philippians 4:13) and says nothing is impossible through shared language and culture. So, it's not just his Son that strengthens you that allows all things to be possible BUT apparently it's sharing a language and culture. 

Lesson Three: God is the God of confusion. Another deep moral lesson for our Bible study today. God loves confusion. Apparently the entire cast (God, Son, Holy Ghost) came down to confuse their language. What a weird sight that would have been. What does that look like exactly?

 Lesson Four: AGAIN DON'T BUILD CITIES!

To sum up our two lessons here we see God hates human progress, loves confusion, despises nudity of one species of hairless ape (because all the animals are freaking still walking around without pants on!) and god originally didn't want his chosen creation to KNOW anything about good and evil. This my friends is the basis for all morality we see today! Remember that!

 

The Case Against the Resurrection by New Testament Scholar Bart D. Ehrman

Happy Easter!

A Naturalist's Holy Trinity

The Sun - (The Father.)

Without our local star which we call the Sun life would not have evolved on planet Earth. The energy the Earth receives from the Sun drives all living processes and our climate. We owe everything, all of life as we know it on this planet, to our Holy Father - The Sun. Are there other Sun-gods out there? Of course. We know that now. Polytheistic is an understatement. There are more Sun-gods in our universe then there are grains of sand on our shores. We have clusters of sun-gods. These gods are common as far as we know they are the creators of all living organisms.

Jupiter - (The Son.)

Our Savior, Jupiter. The Son in our naturalist holy trinity protects our planet, and our species to this day by preventing most comets from reaching the inner Solar System. Jupiter, the Son had a hand in creating all life on this planet by perturbing many asteroids into our planet as the early Earth was forming. This brought the necessary chemistry for life on Earth. Water from some of these comets more than likely built our oceans over billions of years.

The Moon - (The Holy Ghost.)

This Holy Ghost orb in the night sky in all her majesty graces us with her presence each night. Reflecting our Father Star’s light. Evidence shows that the Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago out of the debris projected into orbit by an immense collision between our smaller early Earth and another planetoid about the size of Mars. The Moon affects the Earth's climate by stabilizing Earth's tilt, which keeps seasonality from going into extremes. The tides of our oceans caused by the Moon probably created the environment in which sea animals evolved to land animals, which millions of years later evolved into humans. Our species owes it's existence to the 3rd part of our natural Holy Trinity!

In Conclusion: The Statement of (the opposite of)Faith:

If we are to worship let's worship what we know to be true. We know due to a great deal of evidence that these planetary bodies are creators of life. A naturalist view of the cosmos makes sense when looking at the natural cosmos in which we are inclosed. There are things we do not know about the cosmos. Is the universe all that is or was or ever will be? I don't know. And you don't either, but for now.. it's enough to say the cosmos is all that we know. If we must pay reverence let's pay reverence to our actual creators. These natural spherical gods, wielding creative powers with deep bonds of chemistry and energy.

Sources:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn27230-wrecking-ball-jupiter-paved-way-for-earth.html#.VRMUhmZ7Z74

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAPK0Xspz9c

http://sservi.nasa.gov/articles/nasa-scientist-jen-heldmann-describes-how-the-earths-moon-was-formed/

The First Easter and the Original Walking Dead

As I write this hordes of the faithful are pouring into the Catholic church around the corner from where I live for "Good Friday". This is the day long ago that Jesus died on the cross for all of our sins … as the legend goes. Set aside the knowledge that genetics and evolutionary biology give evidence that there is no such thing as the "first two humans" (Adam and Eve). It follows that without an Adam and Eve there was no talking snake, no "Original Sin", or no “Fall of Mankind”.

Jesus wasn’t the only one that rose from the grave Easter Sunday! If you will turn in your Bibles with me now to Matthew 27:52-53 we read in God's Word (KJV),

52. And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose,

53. And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

*Also, as you digest the Word set aside in your mind what we know from historians - that messiahs were commonplace in the time of Jesus. Menahem and Simon son of Giora are two examples. Here’s a full list:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_messiah_claimants

Most importantly from this passage of Scripture is how much MORE amazing these risen saints are than Jesus. These men that rose from their graves on the same day Jesus rose from his grave were dead MUCH longer than just three days. So the take away from this is that we should be celebrating Zombie-Saint Day over Easter (one man’s resurrection a measly three days after he died). The greater miracle obviously lies with the more extraordinary – the rising zombie saints! Hallelujah! They have all risen! (well maybe not ALL of them... that's excessive)

If we are to believe that rising from the dead is evidence (or required) for claims of being the son of God … well, Jesus has a lot of celestial brothers then! Or we could just admit that even if there were proof that Jesus rose from the dead that would still not prove that he was the Son of God. So throw the holy baby out with the bath water here, my Christian friends.

So join me this Sunday in worshiping the more miraculous, more magical, more incredible, more supernatural, more extraordinary Risen Beings - These precious saints of old that rose from the dead on this same day years ago, stealing Jesus’ thunder with their more impressive resurrection! The original walking dead! - they walked among the living giving witness to God’s glory. 

On this Easter Sunday let's celebrate together this beautiful message of grace from our Lord expressed through raising his son/(himself/and a ghost?) from the dead...

… and a bunch of other random saints as well.huh?

Amen.