This was taken from an atheist blog. Have fun reading it:
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/#gs.4nGnK4E

Similarities to Other Stories

The similarities between the stories and characters in the Bible and those from previous mythologies are both undeniable and well-documented. This would be obvious if it weren’t for early indoctrination of these beliefs into children, which usually makes them unassailable as adults.

In this short piece I’ll attempt to show extraordinary similarities with regard to two of the most important Biblical narratives: the Genesis story and the character of Jesus Christ.

The Book of Genesis’s Flood Story Mirrors The Epic Of Gilgamesh From Hundreds Of Years Earlier
Here are a number of elements that both Gilgamesh and the flood story in Genesis share:
1. God decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds.
2. God knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah.
3. God ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew), and the hero initially complained about the assignment to build the boat.
4. The ark would have many compartments, a single door, be sealed with pitch and would house one of every animal species.
5. A great rain covered the land with water.
6. The ark landed on a mountain in the Middle East.
7. The first two birds returned to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return.
8. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice.
9. The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again.

Keep in mind the level of detail in these similarities. It’s not a matter of just a flood, but specific details: three birds sent out, resisting the call to build the ark, and a single man being chosen by God to build the ark. Then consider that the first story (Gilgamesh) came from Babylon — hundreds of years before the Bible was even written.

Do you honestly think, based on the similarities above, that those who wrote the Genesis story had not heard the Gilgamesh story? And if they had heard it, and they were simply rehashing an old, very popular tale, what does that say about the Bible?

Jesus’s Story is an Obvious Rehashing Of Numerous Previous Characters
Perhaps even more compelling is the story of Christ himself. As it turns out it’s not even remotely original. It is instead nothing more than a collection of bits and pieces from dozens of other stories that came long before. Here are some examples.

1. Asklepios healed the sick, raised the dead, and was known as the savior and redeemer.
2. Hercules was born of a divine father and mortal mother and was known as the savior of the world.
3. Dionysus was literally the “Son of God”, was born of a woman who had not had sex with a man, and was depicted riding a donkey. He was a traveling teacher who performed miracles, and was killed and resurrected, after which time he became immortal.
4. Osiris did the same things. He was born of a virgin, was considered the first true king of the people, and when he died he rose from the grave and went to heaven.
5. Osiris’s son, Horus, was known as the “light of the world”, “The good shepherd”, and “the lamb”. He was also referred to as, “The way, the truth, and the life.” His symbol was a cross-like symbol.
6. Mithra‘s birthday was celebrated on the 25th of December, his birth was witnessed by local shepherds who brought him gifts, had 12 disciples, and when he was done on earth he had a final meal before going up to heaven. On judgment day he’ll return to pass judgment on the living and the dead. The good will go to heaven, and the evil will die in a giant fire. His holiday is on Sunday (he’s the Sun God). His followers called themselves “brothers”, and their leaders “fathers”. They had baptism and a meal ritual where symbolic flesh and blood were eaten. Heaven was in the sky, and hell was below with demons and sinners.
7. Krishna had a miraculous conception that wise men were able to come to because they were guided by a star. After he was born an area ruler tried to have him found and killed. His parents were warned by a divine messenger, however, and they escaped and was met by shepherds. The boy grew up to be the mediator between God and man.
8. Buddha‘s mother was told by an angel that she’d give birth to a holy child destined to be a savior. As a child he teaches the priests in his temple about religion while his parents look for him. He starts his religious career at roughly 30 years of age and is said to have spoken to 12 disciples on his deathbed. One of the disciples is his favorite, and another is a traitor. He and his disciples abstain from wealth and travel around speaking in parables and metaphors. He called himself “the son of man” and was referred to as, “prophet”, “master”, and “Lord”. He healed the sick, cured the blind and deaf, and he walked on water. One of his disciples tried to walk on water as well but sunk because his faith wasn’t strong enough.
9. Apollonius of Tyana (a contemporary of Jesus) performed countless miracles (healing sick and crippled, restored sight, casted out demons, etc.) His birth was of a virgin, foretold by an angel. He knew scripture really well as a child. He was crucified, rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples to prove his power before going to heaven to sit at the right hand of the father. He was known as, “The Son of God”.

The problem, of course, is that these previous narratives existed hundreds to thousands of years before Jesus did.

Unavoidable contradictions
Not only was the Bible taken largely and blatantly from previous stories, but there are contradictions so massive that they defy belief. Here are just a few of them.

1. Noah’s Ark: The story of the Ark is that a pair of every animal on earth was put on the ship. Forgetting for a second the fact that the story came directly from the Epic of Gilgamesh, keep in mind we’re being asked to believe that two 500-year-old people are caring for tens of thousands of animals. And where did they keep the food? How did they keep the poisonous snakes from biting the other animals? And where did they get the polar bears, alligators, and thousands of other animals that that don’t live in the Middle East?

2. The Angel’s Message: In Matthew 1:20 it says the Angel spoke to Joseph. In Luke 1:28 he spoke to Mary. Which was it?

3. Mary’s Virginity: The Hebrew word ‘Almah’, which people took to mean virgin, actually means ‘young woman of marriage age’. And there are plenty of indications that Jesus had brothers and sisters.

4. The Census: The authors of the Bible are trying so hard to get Jesus born in Bethlehem that they craft a story about a census. They say that Joseph had to travel back to his father’s homeland in order to register for it. Can you seriously imagine—in any period let alone then—asking the entire country to travel back their father’s hometown to register for a census? It’s completely impossible. The author of the story put it in there because they needed Jesus born in that city. Plus, historians note that the Romans kept extraordinary records, and there wasn’t even a census at that time. It’s completely fabricated, and for obvious reasons.

5. Jesus and the Family: The Bible says honor your father and mother, yet Jesus says you must hate your father, mother, wife, children, and even your own life to be a disciple, and says to call no man on earth your father. (MT 10:35-37, LK 12:51-53, 14:26, MT 23:9)

6. God and Murder: God says killing is wrong, yet he advocates genocide. (EX 34:11-14, LV 26:7-9)

7. God and Slavery: We all know slavery to be wrong, yet God openly advocates it. (GN 17:12, EX 12:43, EX: 21:1, EX 21:20, EX 21:32, LV 22:10, LV 25:44, LK 7:2, CL 3:22)

8. Jesus’s Heritage: There are two different genealogies for Jesus given in the Bible, and they don’t match. One is curiously given through Joseph, which is strange since he’s not Jesus’s father. Why give a genealogy through someone who isn’t related to you?

9. The Passover: It’s widely understood that God is supposed to be all-seeing and all-knowing. If that’s true, then why did he need people to mark their houses with blood in order to keep from killing their babies inside?

10. Kill Your Son to Prove You Love Me: God told Abraham to kill his son to prove that he loved God. Abraham raised the knife to him, about to do it, and God called it off—pleased that he would have done it. Does that sound like a moral God to you?

This is just a tiny sample of the inconsistencies and moral problems with the Bible. There are far more linked in the notes. But don’t take my word for any of this. Go to the passages. Read the material. It’s all there.

Nagging questions

1. How is Jesus’s crucifixion the ultimate sacrifice if he isn’t dead? He has been immortal since the beginning of time, and he’s still alive and immortal today, so where’s the sacrifice?
2. If Jesus removed our sins with his (see above) “sacrifice”, then how come we still have to avoid sin and accept him as our savior to avoid an eternity in hell? What did it accomplish?
3. Why does the Bible talk constantly about how to manage slaves, how to kill one’s enemies, and how to avoid making God angry, but there’s not much focus at all on seemingly obvious things like, “Thou Shalt Not Harm a Child”?
4. I know the Ark was supposed to be large, but the world currently has an estimated 8,700,000 species of life form. And you needed two of each
5. Forgetting just the numbers problem, how did the species that only exist (and still exist) in South America, and Antartica, and Australia, etc., all make it to the Ark?
6. What’s the direct, non-hand-waving explanation for the suffering and death of roughly 9 million children per year in a world supposedly ruled by a kind and loving God?
7. When Wikipedia can be updated by a random human, for billions of people in mere seconds, why has God left his book filled with stories of slavery, rape, and genocide from thousands of years ago?

The logical conclusion
Many are familiar with Occam’s Razor, which states that, all things being equal, one should not seek complex explanations when more simple ones are available. Few dispute that these other stories predate the Judeo-Christian Bible, or that the Bible is full of massive contradictions, so we really have two main explanations:

God created all these stories and characters thousands of years before the Bible in order to trick people, and then created new stories and characters that were almost exactly the same. But the version that went into the Bible—even with all the contradictions and immoral teachings—is the actual word of God. …OR…

The Bible was created during a time where stories were orally passed down over thousands of years. Stories constantly morphed and changed over time, and the Bible is a collection of these. This is why it has the nearly identical flood story from Gilgamesh, and why Jesus has the same characteristics as Dionysus, Osiris, Horus, Mithra, and Krishna. The contradictions and immorality in the stories are not evidence that God is flawed or evil, but rather that humans invented him, just like the thousands of other gods that we used to but no longer believe in.

If you hadn’t been taught Christianity since you were a young child, which of these two explanations would make the most sense to you?

Note from the author: The goal of this page is not to say God is evil or bad. The point is to show that he is imaginary, created by humans, and to use the blatant reproductions, inconsistencies, and immoral teachings of the Bible to show that the Bible is false, and was written by man. God is not at fault here; there is no reason to believe anything like God exists at all. We simply made it all up because 1) we are afraid of death and, 2) we can use such beliefs to control people.

Hmmm

.

How about miracles performed in the name of Jesus?

Good thread. Too bad believers aren't real big on facts.

Tocynone:
How about miracles performed in the name of Jesus?

only in Nigeria

Anyone who believes that a fictional character who was nailed to the cross in the Middle East died for them in order to wash away their sins and to go prepare a mansion where they will live forever in heaven - is a mentally compromised piece of human dross.

Ofcourse, no offense to the "chosen fraudulent children of Yahweh" - who have been taught & brainwashed to believe that the wealth of the gentiles (non christians) is theirs for the taking.

Little wonder why Nigeria and Afrika as a whole has become the "Urban Monkey Capital" of the world.

January 2019 is fast running to the end and a lot of gullible people are already planning to donate their entire salaries for the month (in the name of first fruit offering) to some "Un-armed Robbers In Suit" in exchange for imaginary blessings, protection & prosperity.

Every family, right from its infancy have been brainwashed to believe that there's an invisible entity in the sky who oversees & directs all the affairs of mankind.

This preconceived & false belief must be purged & defenestrated out of every family in order for our society to thrive.

The very first step to be taken by any serious & determined Government in making Nigeria work & progress is by:

1.) Banning all form of religion. Anybody caught distributing religious materials such as Bibles, Kurans & prayer books should be sentenced to death by firing squad.

2.) Confiscating all the assets (Estates, Guest houses, Schools, Private Jets, Vehicles) and stolen funds from every religious organization and channeling them into building roads, infrastructures & industries.

3.) Sentencing every Pastor, Imam, Prophet to death for brainwashing & indoctrinating our people with false teachings.

Watch & see after a year if Nigeria does not change for good.

How can a single church in Nigeria (e.g Redeem or Winners Chapel) be richer & wealthier than the strongest bank in Nigeria, yet these fraudulent religious organizations do not pay taxes and hire any labour?

When they employ workers, the church deceives them by telling the workers that they are working for God and building up their treasures in Heaven to be harvested when they die, therefore no salaries should be expected of them, whereas the leadership of the church ride in Rolls Royces, Range Rovers & Private Jets and buying chioce properties in highbrow areas like Lekki, Ikoyi, Maitama & Asokoro - with the monies supposedly being collected on behalf of their God?

The day I ever become the President of this Country is the day all these fraudulent Men of God & their gullible followers will know & understand that there are Men living on Earth - who are greater than Yahweh & Mohammed - because Christianity & Islam will go into sudden & abrupt extinction in Nigeria - Yaaasin!

Zoharariel:
Anyone who believes that a fictional character who was nailed to the cross in the Middle East died for them in order to wash away their sins and to go prepare a mansion where they will live forever in heaven - is a mentally compromised piece of human dross.

Ofcourse, no offense to the "chosen fraudulent children of Yahweh" - who have been taught & brainwashed to believe that the wealth of the gentiles (non christians) is theirs for the taking.

Little wonder why Nigeria and Afrika as a whole has become to the "Urban Monkey Capital" of the world.

January 2019 is fast running to the end and a lot of gullible people are already planning to donate their entire salaries for the month (in the name of first fruit offering) to some "Un-armed Robbers In Suit" in exchange for imaginary blessings, protection & prosperity.

Every family, right from its infancy has been brainwashed to believe that there's an invisible entity in the sky who oversees & directs all the affairs of mankind.

This preconceived & false belief must be purged & defenestrated out of every family in order for our society to thrive.

The very first step to be taken by any serious & determined Government in making Nigeria work & progress is by:

1.) Banning all form of religion. Anybody caught distributing religious materials such as Bibles, Kurans & prayer books should be sentenced to death by firing squad.

2.) Confiscating all the assets (Estates, Guest houses, Schools, Private Jets, Vehicles) and stolen funds from every religious organization and channeling them into building roads, infrastructures & industries.

3.) Sentencing every Pastor, Imam, Prophet to death for brainwashing & indoctrinating our people with false teachings.

Watch & see after a year if Nigeria does not change for good.

How can a single church in Nigeria (e.g Redeem or Winners Chapel) be richer & wealthier than the strongest bank in Nigeria, yet these fraudulent religious organizations do not pay taxes and hire any labour?

When they employ workers, the church will deceive them that the workers are working for God and building up their treasures in Heaven to be harvested when they die, therefore no salaries should be expected of them while the leadership of the church ride in Rolls Royces, Range Rovers & Private Jets and buying chioce properties in highbrow areas like Lekki, Ikoyi, Maitama & Asokoro - with the monies supposedly being collected on behalf of their God?

The day I ever become the President of this Country is the day all these fraudulent Men of God & their gullible followers will know & understand that there are Men living on Earth - who are greater than Yahweh & Mohammed - because Christianity & Islam will go into sudden & abrupt extinction in Nigeria - Yaaasin!

The experience was tried by Stalin, I believe, to make the Soviet Union great. You can check to see how it worked out. I think you'll be surprised.

please i need Y'all christians to come debunk all diz wit ur BS...

its always interesting.

The jews are not saying it is not, it is the Romans that added a moronic story of a man God at the end of the Jewish Tanakh that are claiming historical..

TheArranger:
This was taken from an atheist blog. Have fun reading it:
https://danielmiessler.com/blog/the-bible-is-fiction-a-collection-of-evidence/#gs.4nGnK4E

Similarities to Other Stories

The similarities between the stories and characters in the Bible and those from previous mythologies are both undeniable and well-documented. This would be obvious if it weren’t for early indoctrination of these beliefs into children, which usually makes them unassailable as adults.

In this short piece I’ll attempt to show extraordinary similarities with regard to two of the most important Biblical narratives: the Genesis story and the character of Jesus Christ.

The Book of Genesis’s Flood Story Mirrors The Epic Of Gilgamesh From Hundreds Of Years Earlier
Here are a number of elements that both Gilgamesh and the flood story in Genesis share:
1. God decided to send a worldwide flood. This would drown men, women, children, babies and infants, as well as eliminate all of the land animals and birds.
2. God knew of one righteous man, Ut-Napishtim or Noah.
3. God ordered the hero to build a multi-story wooden ark (called a chest or box in the original Hebrew), and the hero initially complained about the assignment to build the boat.
4. The ark would have many compartments, a single door, be sealed with pitch and would house one of every animal species.
5. A great rain covered the land with water.
6. The ark landed on a mountain in the Middle East.
7. The first two birds returned to the ark. The third bird apparently found dry land because it did not return.
8. The hero and his family left the ark, ritually killed an animal, offered it as a sacrifice.
9. The Babylonian gods seemed genuinely sorry for the genocide that they had created. The God of Noah appears to have regretted his actions as well, because he promised never to do it again.

Keep in mind the level of detail in these similarities. It’s not a matter of just a flood, but specific details: three birds sent out, resisting the call to build the ark, and a single man being chosen by God to build the ark. Then consider that the first story (Gilgamesh) came from Babylon — hundreds of years before the Bible was even written.

Do you honestly think, based on the similarities above, that those who wrote the Genesis story had not heard the Gilgamesh story? And if they had heard it, and they were simply rehashing an old, very popular tale, what does that say about the Bible?

Jesus’s Story is an Obvious Rehashing Of Numerous Previous Characters
Perhaps even more compelling is the story of Christ himself. As it turns out it’s not even remotely original. It is instead nothing more than a collection of bits and pieces from dozens of other stories that came long before. Here are some examples.

1. Asklepios healed the sick, raised the dead, and was known as the savior and redeemer.
2. Hercules was born of a divine father and mortal mother and was known as the savior of the world.
3. Dionysus was literally the “Son of God”, was born of a woman who had not had sex with a man, and was depicted riding a donkey. He was a traveling teacher who performed miracles, and was killed and resurrected, after which time he became immortal.
4. Osiris did the same things. He was born of a virgin, was considered the first true king of the people, and when he died he rose from the grave and went to heaven.
5. Osiris’s son, Horus, was known as the “light of the world”, “The good shepherd”, and “the lamb”. He was also referred to as, “The way, the truth, and the life.” His symbol was a cross-like symbol.
6. Mithra‘s birthday was celebrated on the 25th of December, his birth was witnessed by local shepherds who brought him gifts, had 12 disciples, and when he was done on earth he had a final meal before going up to heaven. On judgment day he’ll return to pass judgment on the living and the dead. The good will go to heaven, and the evil will die in a giant fire. His holiday is on Sunday (he’s the Sun God). His followers called themselves “brothers”, and their leaders “fathers”. They had baptism and a meal ritual where symbolic flesh and blood were eaten. Heaven was in the sky, and hell was below with demons and sinners.
7. Krishna had a miraculous conception that wise men were able to come to because they were guided by a star. After he was born an area ruler tried to have him found and killed. His parents were warned by a divine messenger, however, and they escaped and was met by shepherds. The boy grew up to be the mediator between God and man.
8. Buddha‘s mother was told by an angel that she’d give birth to a holy child destined to be a savior. As a child he teaches the priests in his temple about religion while his parents look for him. He starts his religious career at roughly 30 years of age and is said to have spoken to 12 disciples on his deathbed. One of the disciples is his favorite, and another is a traitor. He and his disciples abstain from wealth and travel around speaking in parables and metaphors. He called himself “the son of man” and was referred to as, “prophet”, “master”, and “Lord”. He healed the sick, cured the blind and deaf, and he walked on water. One of his disciples tried to walk on water as well but sunk because his faith wasn’t strong enough.
9. Apollonius of Tyana (a contemporary of Jesus) performed countless miracles (healing sick and crippled, restored sight, casted out demons, etc.) His birth was of a virgin, foretold by an angel. He knew scripture really well as a child. He was crucified, rose from the dead and appeared to his disciples to prove his power before going to heaven to sit at the right hand of the father. He was known as, “The Son of God”.

The problem, of course, is that these previous narratives existed hundreds to thousands of years before Jesus did.

Other Christian apologists - even on this forum - with more interest have dealt with this over the years in the depth that you might want. I'll try to find some links, if you want.

Meantime, I have one rather simple answer: assuming Christians are correct and human history from its beginning to its end is really a war, then the warring sides have an interest in what human beings believe. That would mean that multiple narratives would exist just like you would find in wartime propaganda that seeks to demoralize or inspire one side or the other.

This would mean that in order to confuse those people who may be interested in finding out what the Truth is, the side opposing the Truth would naturally create convincing enough alternatives. It may take work to prove that some of these alternatives are false but it can be done. But that is not really the point. The idea, as the author says at the end, is really to make the Truth seem just as fantastic and wrongheaded as all the other fictions.

So, for someone determined to know the Truth, all that really matters is to note that if there are multiple alternatives all maintaining a general idea even if differing in details, then there may actually be something to the story itself. That is, the Gilgamesh Epic and the biblical Noahic story would naturally lead an honest inquirer to thinking that there must have been something that was known to ancient cultures as a global flood with some kind of miraculous deliverance that preserved the human race and all the world's land animals.

In the same vein, all the stories about a divine person who possessed both divinity and a human nature who saved the world and left disciples to carry on his work and who may have died and resurrected would be interpreted to have some truth in it.

This only makes sense since lies are really independent creations of what reality the specific liar wants to perpetuate. So, it is hard to get multiple lies that actually preserve so much similarity. If each narrative was a complete lie, then it would have far less similarity to the others. But because all of them are seeking to corrupt the same truth, they would all produce versions of the same thing. That sameness then would point to a truth that cannot be assailed even though in all narratives except the true one it would necessarily be distorted in different ways.

TheArranger:
Unavoidable contradictions
Not only was the Bible taken largely and blatantly from previous stories, but there are contradictions so massive that they defy belief. Here are just a few of them.

Interestingly, the following items he wrote out were not contradictions at all. Rather, they are curiosities or incredulities at worst. That is, they are things that human beings are pressed to understand, not things which negate themselves.

TheArranger:
1. Noah’s Ark: The story of the Ark is that a pair of every animal on earth was put on the ship. Forgetting for a second the fact that the story came directly from the Epic of Gilgamesh, keep in mind we’re being asked to believe that two 500-year-old people are caring for tens of thousands of animals. And where did they keep the food? How did they keep the poisonous snakes from biting the other animals? And where did they get the polar bears, alligators, and thousands of other animals that that don’t live in the Middle East?

First, there were eight people, not two.

Second, the very existence of an Ark or a big boat of any sort in that period of human history was itself a curiosity, as very likely was the idea of rainfall too. How much more all these miraculous issues? Consider too that the animals were not rounded up by Noah and his family; rather, they were brought to the Ark. So, if God could not only create the entire universe, complex and wonderful as it is, but also give one man a very detailed description of a specific technology that was neither known nor needed at the time, it is not at all incredulous that He could round up His Own Creatures, fit them with their food miraculously into the Ark and keep them from attacking one another. This is a single narrative. It is impossible to accept any part of it and reject others without creating an insanity. If God could do one of these things, He could do the others.

So, wondering at how any of that could be done at all does not prove that it wasn't done. It just means that we find it hard to believe in God. That is, we don't want to accept Him as God.

TheArranger:
2. The Angel’s Message: In Matthew 1:20 it says the Angel spoke to Joseph. In Luke 1:28 he spoke to Mary. Which was it?

Why could it not have been both? It even makes far more sense that way since the angel prepared Mary for what was going to happen in the latter story and brought Joseph on the program at just the right time too in the former.

TheArranger:
3. Mary’s Virginity: The Hebrew word ‘Almah’, which people took to mean virgin, actually means ‘young woman of marriage age’. And there are plenty of indications that Jesus had brothers and sisters.

This is not a real problem. In Igbo, the word "agbogho" means literally "young woman" but it also connotes an absence of sexual experience. It is assumed that such a young woman is a virgin even though it did not imply an impossibility that she might not be. This is a matter of culture. It is also like when Americans talk about cooking the bird on Thanksgiving. No one mistakes the bird there to mean anything but a turkey. So, a Jew acquainted with his roots reading that part of Isaiah would not have wondered if he may not have meant a virgin.

TheArranger:
4. The Census: The authors of the Bible are trying so hard to get Jesus born in Bethlehem that they craft a story about a census. They say that Joseph had to travel back to his father’s homeland in order to register for it. Can you seriously imagine—in any period let alone then—asking the entire country to travel back their father’s hometown to register for a census? It’s completely impossible. The author of the story put it in there because they needed Jesus born in that city. Plus, historians note that the Romans kept extraordinary records, and there wasn’t even a census at that time. It’s completely fabricated, and for obvious reasons.

It was no more impossible than having everyone go back to wherever they registered to vote during an election. The only difference here is that it was mandatory in the case of the Romans. Given too the power of the Roman military and their impressive civil engineering, superior even to modern engineering in some respects (some of those roads survive till date), these journeys were not as perilous as you might think although, of course, roads are far safer today.

There was a census around 2/1 BC. That was the one that was spoken of. There was no fabrication.

TheArranger:
5. Jesus and the Family: The Bible says honor your father and mother, yet Jesus says you must hate your father, mother, wife, children, and even your own life to be a disciple, and says to call no man on earth your father. (MT 10:35-37, LK 12:51-53, 14:26, MT 23:9)

Not a difficult one to work out if one would be honest. I mean, if you were reading anything but the Bible and someone other than Jesus said that, your assumption would be that the person was speaking of a comparison rather than an absolute. After all, Jesus did teach too that we must love others and He condemned the idea of a man refusing to provide for and honor his parents under the excuse that he had given everything they could benefit from him as a gift to God (Corban).

The Lord Jesus was saying that He must take priority over even our families if we wanted to walk with Him. The reason is rather obvious. If your family is composed of people antagonistic to Faith in Jesus Christ (as is far more often the case than you might think), then the person who will run the Christian race successfully is the one who subordinates their love for their family to their love for Jesus Christ. They wouldn't cease loving their family; they just won't let that love prevent them from faithfully following Jesus Christ.

TheArranger:
6. God and Murder: God says killing is wrong, yet he advocates genocide. (EX 34:11-14, LV 26:7-9)

How is God subject to laws He makes for human beings over whom He rules?

Even so, murder is what God says is wrong, not just killing. He created physical death after all in order to control the evil of human beings.

TheArranger:
7. God and Slavery: We all know slavery to be wrong, yet God openly advocates it. (GN 17:12, EX 12:43, EX: 21:1, EX 21:20, EX 21:32, LV 22:10, LV 25:44, LK 7:2, CL 3:22)

There is a difference between regulating or controlling a situation and advocating it.

TheArranger:
8. Jesus’s Heritage: There are two different genealogies for Jesus given in the Bible, and they don’t match. One is curiously given through Joseph, which is strange since he’s not Jesus’s father. Why give a genealogy through someone who isn’t related to you?

First, each genealogy was for one parent. The one in Matthew was for Joseph. The one in Luke for Mary.

Second, in Jewish culture, an adoptive father was for all intents and purposes a true father. This too is why in Luke Joseph is named as the son of Mary's father although he was only his son-in-law.

TheArranger:
9. The Passover: It’s widely understood that God is supposed to be all-seeing and all-knowing. If that’s true, then why did he need people to mark their houses with blood in order to keep from killing their babies inside?

As with many other things that God did and does, it was for the benefit of us human beings. It was to teach us that His Deliverance is selective on the basis of our free will. Only those who indicate their wish to be saved by Him by doing something that He says that they should do are actually saved.

TheArranger:
10. Kill Your Son to Prove You Love Me: God told Abraham to kill his son to prove that he loved God. Abraham raised the knife to him, about to do it, and God called it off—pleased that he would have done it. Does that sound like a moral God to you?

Just like #9 above, this incident was also to teach something to human beings. Thousands of years later, God the Father offered His Own Son as a Sacrifice to save us from the just consequence of our rebellion against Him. This was what He used Abraham and Isaac to demonstrate to us.

The incident too doubled as a test of Abraham's faith in God. God had promised him that Isaac was going to inherit the promises that He had made to him. Isaac could only do so if he lived. So if God was commanding that his son be sacrificed, then it must be because He would raise him from the dead. Abraham's absolute confidence that God could raise Isaac from the dead and that He would so that His Promises to him would be fulfilled is how he aced that test and won for himself one of the greatest names among believers for all eternity.

TheArranger:
This is just a tiny sample of the inconsistencies and moral problems with the Bible. There are far more linked in the notes. But don’t take my word for any of this. Go to the passages. Read the material. It’s all there.

I totally concur with studying the material for oneself. Would that all Christians actually did and also bothered to ask these questions of the qualified teachers that God has so mercifully given to them.

TheArranger:
Nagging questions

1. How is Jesus’s crucifixion the ultimate sacrifice if he isn’t dead? He has been immortal since the beginning of time, and he’s still alive and immortal today, so where’s the sacrifice?

It is precisely His being alive that means that the Sacrifice was accepted. If it hadn't been, God the Father would not have raised Him from the dead.

The Sacrifice was the spiritual death that the Lord Jesus experienced for three hours in the supernatural darkness that fell while He was on the Cross. What He suffered there is precisely what all rebels will suffer for all eternity in the Lake of Fire (except that His Experience was worse by incalculable orders of magnitude). That Suffering was His Sacrifice for us. It was because He did it willingly and perfectly that the Father was satisfied and pleased to raise Him from the Dead and restore Him to His previous position as God and Ruler over all but this time as a Human Being also.

TheArranger:
2. If Jesus removed our sins with his (see above) “sacrifice”, then how come we still have to avoid sin and accept him as our savior to avoid an eternity in hell? What did it accomplish?

Creating an Ark does not protect anyone who does not get into it. Failing to sign a debt release agreement because of a provision a benefactor has made for a debtor will not release them from their debt. Unless you actually accept the Sacrifice made for your sins, you cannot be saved. The provision for forgiveness and reconciliation is what the Sacrifice accomplished. The rest is up to you and it is a simple choice to accept or reject.

TheArranger:
3. Why does the Bible talk constantly about how to manage slaves, how to kill one’s enemies, and how to avoid making God angry, but there’s not much focus at all on seemingly obvious things like, “Thou Shalt Not Harm a Child”?

Well, if it is obvious, why does there need to be a focus on it?

Regardless, the Law of Moses, the Psalms and Proverbs are peppered with reminders of the preciousness and sacredness of children. In fact, all of the "how to manage slaves", "how to kill one's enemies" and "how to avoid making God angry" is focused on being gentle even if still firm with those who are weaker than us. Without those restraints, Israel would have been just as brutal and cruel as the surrounding nations (note, for example, their behavior during the era of the Judges).

TheArranger:
4. I know the Ark was supposed to be large, but the world currently has an estimated 8,700,000 species of life form. And you needed two of each

Noah was to get seven pairs of some of them too. So, the problem is compounded by that much. Still, there is nothing too hard for the Lord God.

TheArranger:
5. Forgetting just the numbers problem, how did the species that only exist (and still exist) in South America, and Antartica, and Australia, etc., all make it to the Ark?

The only answer that really matters here is that God is able to do anything. He did take more than a million people through the middle of the Red Sea on dry land, so He would not have been daunted by any difficulties.

However, there is little indication in the Bible that human beings and animals at the time existed anywhere outside the area surrounding the Garden of Eden before the Flood. After the Garden was destroyed in the Flood, the human race still lived in the same area until the issue of Babel that led to the dispersal of the nations farther and farther away from each other. Those movements must have been how the animals too were distributed.

TheArranger:
6. What’s the direct, non-hand-waving explanation for the suffering and death of roughly 9 million children per year in a world supposedly ruled by a kind and loving God?

In every single case, God was making sure that all human beings who wanted to be saved would be saved even if it meant taking their lives before the composition of life around them if they grew up prevented them from making that choice that they wanted to make.

That is, all children are automatically saved until they grow up to the age of accountability and choose to reject or ignore the Sacrifice of Jesus Christ. So, when children die, it is always because God is making sure that they will be saved.

TheArranger:
7. When Wikipedia can be updated by a random human, for billions of people in mere seconds, why has God left his book filled with stories of slavery, rape, and genocide from thousands of years ago?

This is one of the inconsistencies of antibiblical arguments. On the one hand, the Bible is criticized for being changed down the ages; and on the other, it is criticized for staying the same and refusing to move with the times. That makes such objections necessarily frivolous.

God wrote the Bible in a way that made sure it catered to all the generations of human beings. Today, its completeness is a blessing to our generation. It accurately documents history so that we know exactly where the human race is coming from and where it is going to. If any of that was changed, we would be left in a state divorced from reality with no way to understand ourselves and the world around us.

TheArranger:
The logical conclusion
Many are familiar with Occam’s Razor, which states that, all things being equal, one should not seek complex explanations when more simple ones are available.

Occam's Razor is a good rule of thumb but it is not an absolute. If it was, much of science would be impossible. Sometimes, the simpler explanations are the misleading ones simply because they discourage energetic pursuit of a more difficult path which would lead to the right explanation.

TheArranger:
Few dispute that these other stories predate the Judeo-Christian Bible, or that the Bible is full of massive contradictions, so we really have two main explanations:

Even if it were true that few dispute these things (and I am not at all agreeing that there are just few), why would that mean that they are true? It is the fallacy of an appeal to popularity to imagine that because the majority holds a certain point of view, that point of view is necessarily right. This is obviously not an absolute law. Sometimes, the majority is correct. Sometimes, they are wrong. Generally, it has nothing to do with the numbers. A universal truth is one regardless of the numbers involved. And these statements here are not universal truths.

TheArranger:
God created all these stories and characters thousands of years before the Bible in order to trick people, and then created new stories and characters that were almost exactly the same. But the version that went into the Bible—even with all the contradictions and immoral teachings—is the actual word of God. …OR…

The Bible was created during a time where stories were orally passed down over thousands of years. Stories constantly morphed and changed over time, and the Bible is a collection of these. This is why it has the nearly identical flood story from Gilgamesh, and why Jesus has the same characteristics as Dionysus, Osiris, Horus, Mithra, and Krishna. The contradictions and immorality in the stories are not evidence that God is flawed or evil, but rather that humans invented him, just like the thousands of other gods that we used to but no longer believe in.

This is a false dilemma founded on a false premise as demonstrated above.

It is entirely possible that the Bible is in every respect true but that multiple narratives exist in order to mask this truth and provide alternatives to those who wish to reject the testimony of the Bible. That is a third option. And it is the true one.

TheArranger:
If you hadn’t been taught Christianity since you were a young child, which of these two explanations would make the most sense to you?

It is hard for me to imagine a scenario where either would have made sense to me. Not unless I insist on following a fanciful imagination.

TheArranger:
Note from the author: The goal of this page is not to say God is evil or bad. The point is to show that he is imaginary, created by humans, and to use the blatant reproductions, inconsistencies, and immoral teachings of the Bible to show that the Bible is false, and was written by man. God is not at fault here; there is no reason to believe anything like God exists at all. We simply made it all up because 1) we are afraid of death and, 2) we can use such beliefs to control people.

That was noted from the beginning.

It is a huge claim to make that there is no reason to believe that a God exists. How do you explain your existence, the universal consciousness of good and evil and death without appeal to any self-existing Entity?

Yes, human beings are afraid of Death. But you have offered no reason to believe that this fear is irrational.

Very true, all philosophical and religious systems including atheism (note how hard many atheists work to get everybody else to conform to their view of life) seek to control people. Christianity, however, is not a religion or a philosophical system. It offers itself as a take-it-or-leave-it relationship with God. You are not forced to accept it and you are not forced to reject it. So, controlling people is not at all the goal of Christianity. This is easily demonstrated in the Bible's own declaration that only a few will be saved since there is no coercion and a relationship with God is harder on human beings (from an unspiritual perspective) in this life than continued enmity against Him.

Ihedinobi3:

let me get this straight, the bible is the right book even if it content was copied from other super stories ?? you worship a god that kills babies to pass a message??.. A god that supports slavery,rape et all?? he even instructed you to kill your child if he/she curse you, to kill your spouse if you didn't meet her a virgin...

the truth is if their is a God then its not the one mentioned in the bible, if he is all loving.

pls don't tell me i'm misquoting the bible or reading it without spirituality cuz Y'all quote diz same bible whenever it suits ur arguement.

The Christian bible isnt what it claims to be, instead its a badly written unauthorised, unethical and unsafe bibliography; a compilation of various religious text from across the globe, the contents of which have been repackaged, directly copied, plagiarised, sexed-up or outrightly fabricated.