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.
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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.

-------------------------------------

 
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.

--------------------------------------

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.

My Last Blog (or not)

This is my last blog. It will be a long winded rant about religion and then I would like to offer the new me - a completely different person. I no longer want to waste a single ounce of brain power towards religion in any capacity. I realize my family (who are still religious, some more than others, as some are also more preachy about it than others) will still drive me to mention it from time to time, but I really want to focus in on other subjects for my future writing endeavors. I want to write about subject matter that actually has substance - politics, current events, social constructs, ethics, art, philosophy, and science. At the end of this last religious blog I will direct you towards some of my newest writing pieces and plans for the future. So let me begin here. I will show you how I came to this conclusion on never writing about religion again.

I do not have children. I am certainly at that age where I should start thinking about having a child, but what I tell people who ask is that my reasoning for not having children is money and sustainability. If everyone lived like an American we would need five planet Earths to sustain the consumption and use of natural resources. I do enough damage to the environment, one of the most sustainable things a human can do in 2015 is to not breed more human beings. This may sound a bit sinister or even extreme to some of you, but despite how it makes you feel it doesn't take away from the fact that it is absolutely true.

We have to start thinking about living sustainably if our species is going to survive in the upcoming centuries. We all helped create this mess with our comfortable lifestyles so it's up to us to fix this mess. It isn't the fault of the poor people of Bangladesh that must flee their home as climate change forces sea levels to rise in the upcoming decades. Climate change is a rich people problem that poor people will suffer first and foremost. The poor will suffer deeply for a problem they had no hand in creating. Ah, God is good isn't he? And fair! Blessed are the poor.

When I was a child I was taught that many social, cultural, and religious rules were extremely important. Don't lie, cheat, steal, have sex before marriage. As some of these are important for mental and societal health (not the sex before marriage thing of course) we need to raise children with an understanding through science that they and the rest of their family are responsible for living sustainable. Lowering our families' carbon footprints should be much more important than not saying a cuss word or attending Sunday school because it's based off something verifiably real about our world and our future.

We also should teach our children it isn't enough to just bring your carbon footprint down to zero to live sustainably, but we need to contribute to our local biosphere and habitat. Just as it is not enough, in my opinion to simply NOT be a racist or a bigot, but we should all be an anti-racist or anti-bigot, fighting along side those who are being persecuted to help the cause of freedom for everyone despite their race or sexual orientation. We need to be active in our environmentalism and teach this to children over fairy tales of talking snakes and donkeys. It's time to grow the fuck up, people! Stop being afraid of a godless universe and then projecting this fear onto your children as if you are teaching them something real. Adults are the worst. Tell children anything and they will soak it up. It isn't the fault of children, it's their parents who need to wise up.

My theist friend Dan just wrote a blog called, "What is the gospel?" (I will post the link below) where he begins with a conversation with his son about "Adam" sinning. I can write hundreds of ranting blogs about how pathetic it is to indoctrinate children with unverified nonsense from ancient pieced-together books as real events in history, but I will abstain. This is exactly how we get Creationism 101 disguised as Biology 101 threatening many of our  U.S. public school classrooms.

Dan writes that his kid says, - Dad, I wish Adam wouldn't have sinned by eating that forbidden fruit. Of course my theist friend agrees. The rest of the blog Dan goes on to talk about the "true" story of Adam and Eve. I once wrote Dan about this "true" story and how genetics and evolutionary biology tell us there was no first of any species... including our own species! He offered up no explanation really, but a vague picture of "Adam" being a representation of the first human. When I followed this logic asking him the simple question - If science tells us Adam must have had a father, was Adam's father sinless? He ignored the question completely, then simply said he did not know. Funny how those that are so certain of the entire narrative of the Bible that starts with Adam fall and ends with Jesus death and resurrection are so quick to brush off the problem of "no actual Adam existed or could have existed". I guess I can amend Genesis with this prequel concept (I call movie rights!):

And on the 6th day God created man - and it was good, BUT this "First Man's" father was better than good. We could say he was great even! Then of course, Adam's grandfather was the shit! Holy as I'll (God) get out! and so on...  Genesis 0:1-3

I asked another Christian friend who offered a more nuanced explanation of possibilities. Apparently one theory from Biblical apologists is that "Adam" was a group of the "first of our species with culture". Even though we should all know that human culture and speciation do not work this way within one generation, we have to sort of set that aside. What of that generation pre-Adam tribe representative group of "first humans" then? Apparently they were sinless then since sin started with "Adam"? Again, no answer. Again we have people/peoples before the "first human" (whatever that means since apparently we can't take that literal there) who were clearly sinless. What then?

All this and what hangs in the balance? As nonbelievers (or some of us that may believe in a different religion with a different god) we are doomed to hell for not believing in the Jesus story (which directly hinges on the "Adam story".) So clarity is paramount but of course we have the most murky picture of human origins via the Bible. Oh well, hope you like lakes of fire! If atheism is wrong, guess what, you still don't burn forever; so which world view is more attractive to you? This should be obvious by now if you are paying attention.

No. If I had a child I would not indoctrinate them, especially with religion. I would not tell them that there is no such thing as a God or Gods either. I would give them a comparative religion run down, treating each religion equally and also introducing them to what it means to not believe in any of these religions. I want my child to come to his own conclusions naturally. Of course I will still be an atheist more than likely and I will still do atheisty things around him/her, but it will be up to them to decide. I will not judge if he/she chooses to be a Muslim or Christian. I will love them and support them til my dying day... Of course in the afterlife I will bitch like a motherfucker about how dumb they were if they do choose one of these many religions.

If I had a kid I would tell them that they were an animal. (sorry dad!) Not just an animal but one species among many other species of animals on this planet - with a long, rich history of life (99% of which are all dead and gone forever). I would show them the importance of caring for life and how precious it is. Why is it so precious? Maybe because it's rare? Not on this planet obviously, but out there in space. We have yet to find it out there though it's almost a mathematical certainty that there is life elsewhere in the cosmos since it is unfathomably vast.

I've been a bad son to my parents. I am like your grumpy Republican racist aunt, uncle, or grandpa that sends you all those "Obama is a dirty communist Muslim negro"chain emails - but in reverse. I constantly hound most of you reading this with email rants of social issues, politics, science policy, and religion. That's what this blog is essentially - long rants with bad punctuation and sentence structure. I am that crazy preachy annoying Republican relative except I'm a left-leaning - atheist American instead. I have been told many times by other family members that I should probably just stop sending emails with links on these things to other family members who do not read it. Not only do they not read it but they probably instantly delete anything I send them. This is why I never get responses from family members when I finally send a personal email with pictures of a vacation or whatever. Plus, I don't have any social media which makes me as good as dead online.

This is part of the losing battle I'm fighting. I surely won't change my conservative Christian family members' minds on any of this. It is deeply hardwired in them, attached to identity and personal journey stories of their entire lives. As Fox News watchin' Americans of course it's patriotic since the 50's to be this way! It's tribal, it's been in the family. It's small town and it's race based from time to time. It's a spell that most likely will never be broken with education or life experience. I will lose this battle with people who don't want to even play this game. It is already happened. It's pointless to continue.

I will be honest here in my last blog. A lot of the reason for me doing this, any of this, is to convince the ones I love most (my family and friends) that they are wrong and their beliefs prop up this cognitive bias-based feedback loop, echo chamber where they cannot see through to the facts - to the real world. Science education will give you this, but science is hard to grasp, to do, and to understand. I still can't get my father to watch the new Cosmos series that I lent him months ago. Our brains are not hardwired to understand deep time. No wonder so many Christians like my father think the earth is 6,000 years old - because the Bible said it, he believes it, and that settles it. This is how my quasi-liberal intelligent theist friend Dan does not think common descent is true. This is how some of my other friends can play these games of Christian apologists - these mind-contortions of logic that defy anything that makes a single bit of sense if you stop and simply use common sense and deductive reasoning.

It is circular reasoning at it's best, and we all know this. They know it, but "God said it, I believe it, that settles it" logic applies in times like these. We have to fight against this any time we see the ugly stupidity of religious barbarism peak it's deformed head through the cracks of public life. We want to live in a healthy society. We have enough problems with gun violence, healthcare, wealth gap in this country without allowing superstitious woo-talk, unfounded nonsense. Keep that shit locked away from children, my "place holder" children even! Never shy away from discussing these tough subjects of religion with your family members. If I have a kid I will talk about anything. period. We are a species that thrived off of communication and language. Use that! Some of the biggest problems with my childhood and especially teenage years and beyond have been a lack of communication because it makes one person feel uncomfortable. Confrontation with respect when deserved is healthy. Use that!

I have been uselessly trying to converse with my theist friend Dan about evolution for years. And it is time to give up too. I lost this one as well. He finally wrote me a very direct email saying he would copy and paste what he said over and over again if I ask him to discuss evolution ever again. He basically said he does not see a threat to Christianity by accepting evolution (again, this is not what I ever want to discuss with him. I have only ever wanted to merely discuss reasons why it's one of the most valid scientific theories ever). He also mentioned that he does not feel compelled to swallow the Darwinian metanarrative hook, line, and sinker (whatever the fuck that means. If common descent is part of the metanarrative than we have a issue here. This appears to be a dodge to try and keep things vague instead of focus in on specific problems with common descent). Then he expresses what he feels is the uselessness of two non-scientists bantering back and forth on something they are not experts in. I may not be a scientist now or yet but I have had classes in these things where he has not.

Though taking a step back from all of this, maybe he's right. Maybe it is useless. I am beating a dead horse here. I enjoyed talking with my Christian friend because he was unlike the family members I grew up with that refuse to discuss any of this, to work it out logically and reasonably. Dan isn't like those people. He is old school sure - he doesn't accept parts of known scientific theories and believes in heaven and hell still, but he at least will have respectful conversations and kindly disagree. It's civil and enjoyable. A few of us are even having a book discussion via google docs (2 theists/2 atheists) on Reza Aslan's book "Zealot". It's productive at times and helpful to revisit some of these older Jewish myths and history, but my response back to Dan sums up how I felt after reading that email he sent back to me letting me know he does not want to discuss evolution with me any more.

Religion to me is far in my rear view mirror now. I not only don't believe the Christian story or that the Bible is the infallible Word of God, but I don't believe in any god or gods in any of the religions throughout human history. I believe in a completely indifferent universe because attributing any anthropic attributes to the cosmos is nonsensical. The Cosmos doesn't "care" or "want" or whatever just as my book shelf doesn't care about me. I have grown up, intellectually and philosophically (some may argue with this. I can think of one person for sure! * Refer to my red letter correction comment a few blogs back). Being proactive with science writing and education would be my dream and the direction I want to head towards for the rest of my cosmically meaningless life. I don't expect the anti-theist movement and/or the New Atheist movement to win the battle over the New Christians and apologists. Religion is just way to intertwined with emotions and traditions to completely disappear. We can try to educate people to think critically and to try to shed as much bias as possible when making sense of our world, but we are hardwired for conspiracies. We are apt to keep some part of religion functioning within our modern societies for years to come. Hopefully it's the good part of religion. The humanitarian part of religion. I hope we can come together to help people and other species of animals to make their life a little better and minimize suffering as much as possible. I hope we can live more sustainably and be responsible for our actions because we do not live in a vacuum. We are not the only species that lives on this planet. We share it with a wide array of beautiful creatures great and small, let's stop acting like arrogant assholes.

Goodbye for now. This is my last blog... on religion. This entire blog is about the anti-theist in all of us, but it's coming to an end after 2 full years. Eh, what's two years? I'll see you.

ATHEIST-4-LIFE, BITCHES!!!

Here are some related links:

Dan's blog "What is the Gospel?":
http://www.theolatte.com/2014/11/what-is-the-gospel-2/

We need 5 Earth's to sustain us if everyone on this planet lived like an American:
http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/3_times_sustainable
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN/page/footprint_basics_overview/

My new article from Best of Las Vegas:
http://bestoflasvegas.com/news/know-where-it-grows-guide-farmers-markets

My friend Forrest's movie staring me :) "In the Penal Colony":
http://vimeo.com/85180339

Whats happening for me in the near future:

There will be a handful of blogs I will finally finish if I get the time. The main one I am referring to is a book review of my friend Dan's book "Jesus or Nothing". I am about half way through it. I may have to revisit the book since it's been so long since I read it and refer to my notes. You can obviously image it's a blunt critique but he is a published author and for that - much respect! So keep an eye out for this blog at some point randomly.

 I am doing other writing projects. I'm involved full time in school now so I will have very little time to do much creative writing, but I am outlining a book of short stories and a screenplay. I'm involved helping with short films with my friend Forrest Rice, as well. I do from time to time write short article for local Vegas papers. I'll post a link below with one of them. The next article will be in the January 25th 2015 issue of the Las Vegas Review Journal - "Best of Las Vegas". It's on fossils beds!

"Know Where It Grows" Best of Las Vegas article I wrote recently:
http://bestoflasvegas.com/news/know-where-it-grows-guide-farmers-markets

***And my final post here will be a picture from my past. This is from my yearbook from the Christian school I attended as a kid. You like my award?

God is Pro-Choice, Pro-Abortion and/or supports killing babies.

Hosea 9:11-16

Numbers 5:11-21

Numbers 31:17

Hosea 13:16

2 Kings 15:16

1 Samuel 15:3

Psalms 135:8 & 136:10

Just Me and My Dad: Rage Against a Father

When I was younger I remember a Bernstein Bears book called "Just Me and My Dad". There is a picture I could not find anywhere in my computer of my brother and I intently listening to my dad reading us this book. We were so happy. He was so happy. But...

This blog entry will have no sentiment.

This is not the blog entry where I talk about the good things between my father and I, and this isn't the blog entry where I perfectly sum up my father and his religion. I don't know how to put that together into something comprehensible.

Here it is: My father doesn't understand the way planet Earth works. When I say I do not know much in biology, paleontology, genetics, anthropology, climate science, geology, comparative anatomy I am being truthful and honest. When I say my father doesn't know any of these scientific fields I am being loose with the word "know". My father does not know a single sentence from a single textbook supporting scientific theories that he outright rejects. There is no time to be respectful and polite in this post, as we sometimes are obliged to do with friends and family. Human life is just too short.

I have spent some time explaining to you about my father and how he thinks. I finally spoke with him the other day about evolution and the age of the earth. This is just a few things of what my father thinks:

Evolution is a mass delusion just like "flat earth theory" was centuries ago. Yes, it's all a lie.

A guy in church once told him a dinosaur footprint was found along side a human footprint so humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time in history.

The Earth is young not old.

The Bible is to be taken word for word as literal truth and this is how he gets all these "truth" nuggets.

I began my discussion with him the other day talking about the amazing fact that we have a host of bacteria living in our guts and how this is so fascinating that the human body is it's own ecosystem.

He replied that it's amazing that some atheists out there think there is no Designer to this beautiful design in nature.

I paused, frozen a bit, stumbled over my words as I attempted to present the Unintelligent Designer theory. I couldn't believe this was happening. I have never told my dad I accepted evolution. I talked to him about all the imperfections in nature like how humans are the only mammals that have the same tube to communicate and eat, thus a vast majority of our species have choked to death.

"Let me stop you right there before you continue..." my dad said. "I do not think humans are animals."

And I rest my case.

I did rest for a brief moment then tried to bring us back to a common vocabulary. Where do you go from here?

There is no way of convincing someone who once told me that our Sun is NOT a star that humans are not a part of the animal kingdom. Biology is dead right from the start apparently according to my father.

I realized at that moment that the very soft spot that made my dad react so abruptly was the very thing that made me transition to an atheist. To look at a human as part of the animal kingdom is opening the door to naturalism. There is more to these mysteries of life than "God did it" or magic. We have explanations for so many things that I was never taught growing up in my Christian science classes. Biblical literalism is laughable when you know the slightest amount of science.

My father argued with me about soft tissue found in dinosaur bones (thus the Earth is young) and Noah's ark being real and dating methods of course are unreliable. My father's church is watching what I can only imagine is a young Earth creationist response/reaction to the recent Cosmos series with Neil deGrasse Tyson on Fox in his church every Wednesday night. Each Wednesday night they watch and discuss this: http://www.icr.org/article/unlocking-mysteries-genesis/

Yep.

I don't want to tell you why the Earth is not 6,000 years old or why Darwin was not wrong. I want to tell you what I feel about my father. I think he is afraid to learn. There is something terribly dark and (dare I say) "evil" about being content with living without knowing, and knowingly doing so. People make stupid "truth" statements all the time about how the world works, "the moon landing was faked", "9/11 was an inside job", "that little boy went to heaven and back", "Islam is the only true religion", "crystals heal your ailments", "my dream means something", " in my past life I was...", "Oh, your astrology sign is this that's why your like this", and so on... We are not taught to think critically from birth. This is something that needs to change for the survival of our species, in my opinion. Hyper-Capitalism mixed with non-critical thinking could be a lethal blow to our species, at least those of us so lucky to live in developed parts of this planet.

I realized something once again today. Life is one day. one hour. one minute. one second. right now. There is nothing more. We cannot fill the human deep-search for "meaning" with religion or woo. We can't fill it with New Age anything or self improvement whatever. We can fill it with /Truth/ and the biggest truth I know is that I am an ape and I am peculiarly alive and conscious (comprised of subatomic particles/waves like everything else that evolve over time) on a rock hurling through space. I know this better than I can know most things. And THAT is a total mind-gasm! No need for fairy tales to bask in the mystery of .. how do I eloquently say,... "what the fuck is happening?" I think I may get a red letter criticism from my philosopher friend on this blog entry as well. We shall see.

My father is deep in the Unknown. And I was there too. He raised me there from childhood. I was "saved" when I was 5. Then 7, then 8 then 9, then 12. I kept getting "saved" over and over when I was a child. Not because I loved Jesus and I really REALLY wanted to make sure I spent eternity with Him in heaven. It was that I was terrified of 1. dying and burning forever in hell. and 2. being "left behind" when the rapture happened and then of course getting my head cut off at some point by the AntiChrist one-world government or dying from some plague.

In conversation with New Christian friends I am reminded that a lot of what we do whether theistic or atheistic is based off of emotion and of course most of this can be traced back to our upbringing and our reaction to it, even as adults. There is truth to this, but I want to remind my New Christian friends that this new hip modern Christianity is nothing but Christianity with out the hell-fire and brimstone (you know cause that shit is awkward!), so I really loathe this idea that Christianity is so past barbarism yet some of my New Christian friends knowingly think I will fucking burn forever. No! it's not my strict legalistic past that scars me .. it's the Christian Dogma that at least my father had the guts to tell me straight up-- if you don't believe in Jesus you are going to burn forever, son! The Christian dogma of hell for the unbeliever is the issue here. So New Christians can stop pretending to be my friends when they know I will burn forever, I mean come on!

My father had good qualities, but his deep ignorance in naturalism and all of it's laws and any of it's brilliant scientific theories kept me in the dark. The school I grew up in was drastically unequipped to teach it's students in the natural sciences. My family isn't all kept in the dark, however. I have family members that are nonbelievers, soon to be doctors and some are realists, but my immediate family has been in the dark, so to speak all my life. Simply put: Religion has destroyed my family's intellect. There are ways the world actually works my family has no conceptual clue about. We are all flawed, and I admit my ignorance, but being content and even confident about a worldview that is completely unfounded, unhealthy, and uniformed is not acceptable.

As radical Islam marches through the Middle East (beheading infidels and committing the brave act of shooting little girls in the face who want to educate themselves) and Middle Age-like Christianity (with it's barbaric ideas of scientific ideas about the world) chokes Middle America it's best to cling to the evidence, the facts, the science. It's best to be a skeptic always in everything. Stop being so goddamn gullible! The death throws of religion are wild and violent in 2014 (*See ISIS) . These things will end. Sooner or later apes will grow up. Sooner or later we'll be another extinct species like the 99% of all other species that have ever lived on this rock in this irrelevant point of the cosmos. We are in that stage and it's happening quicker than you may think, quicker than I can see in my personal life.

So Yes, dad. We are animals. we are apes. Our Sun is a fucking star and it's time you grew up with the rest of us apes and accepted this world the way it actually is and swallow the Truth about what we actually do already know. Some of us that have hope still can fight this tendency to be cowards and ignorant and those that do not accept all scientific knowledge because the comfort blanket of their barbaric superstition is too entangled in their lives.

This is my rant about just me (ape) and my dad (ape) .. and here are some related links.

"Just Me and My Dad"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxs65G56FeQ

Don't buy this: Unlocking the Mysteries of Genesis:
http://store.icr.org/Unlocking-the-Mysteries-of-Genesis/productinfo/DUTMG/

"Unlocking the Mysteries of Genesis" trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYzppTgGKu8