₦airaland Forum

olabowale:
@Mazaje: I have many children calling me Dad! But only two are sired by me. So these two bear my family name. The rest bear the family names of the people who sired them, who mounted or overshadowed their mothers. Am I truly the father of the other children who were sired by others? Absolutely not.

If I claim therefore that I sired the children, apart from mine two, then I must have not really meant it in the true nature of how human understands it. The children do know that am not truly their father. If their mothers are not my wives just before they took in, then I have performed illegal sex acts or for sure, those who claim that am their father among them, along with their mother who planted such idea into their heads have not told us the truth. Considering that I did not mount or overshadow any of the mothers! I can not see how it can be humanly possible.

Many, is more than 1. But when it is in the context of today's Children of Israel population of over 13 M, worldwide, the many must be insignificant! By an large, the Kennessett of Isael has no Christian Jewish member! The Jews have only One God. The Jews don't have more than that. They may say that they believe in jest, which many reform jews do, but they will never claim that God is more than 1!

Hurt could mean disappointed. Allah is disappointed in the children of Adam, who are able to do for others, in a way of seeking the pleasure of God, or for God's sake, but refuse to do so. Thats what is meant by hurt here. Not that there is a need for soothing or dressing up a wound, because of the hurt. Allah is Greater and Holier than that. It is His way of telling believers, you are obligated, from the sustenance that you have to care for the less fortunate, for Allah's sake. God is free of all needs.

Kai olabowale don't teach me nonsense keep your delusions to your self. what the heck are you even saying? its always the jews and the christains abi? they are they misguided ones who need allah's mercy abi? keep on deluding your self. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Moslems and christains don come high-jack the thread dey argue with each other. . . . . . . . .

Na today even during the medieval ages people taight that jesus was coming soon. . . . . . . . why should i believe that jesus's coming is true when he says that stars will fall from the sky when the time comes, science has shown and proven that stars can not and will never fall.

donnie:
In 1 John 5: 11-14 'the bible says, he that hath the son hath life (ZOE). . . i write unto you you that ye may know that ye have eternal life. . .'
The word Zoe was translated as eternal life.

Zoe is the life and nature of God. The very life that makes God God.
The bible also tells us. . . NOW are we the sons of God . . . (not in the sweet bye and bye but NOW).
Please can somebody tell these satan's agents that we are to cooked for them and their deceit?

davidylan you don buy market ohhh  , you are now an insidious agent of satan simply because you do not agree with pastor chris understanding and interpretation  of the bible. chie no be small thing ohhh, agent of satan gabadaya? kai wannan kam baban magana che.

ejighikeme:
As simple as any thing.After the fall of the first man(Adam),man lost the glory and image of God and man was casted away from the presence of God , man lost his fellowship with God, so He (God) was looking for a means of bringing man back to himself because HE never wanted man to perish so He gave His ONLY BEGOTTEN SON(the only son He has,not that they are many and He decided to spare one but one and only one son) as a ransom to reclaim man to Himself.

what do you mean when you say that man was casted away from god? god has been with the jews through out the old testament if you read your bible, commading them to pillage, kill, maim, destroy and enslave non jews so i dont understand what you are talking about man being casted away from the presence of god, moses was with god, so was job, noah, issac, jacob etc. god does'nt want man to perish you said, are you for real . the same god ordered the death and destruction of so many innocent people in the bible for no reason at all in most cases and you are here talking about him not wanting people to perish. reclaim man to him self you said, are you talking about when man dies or while man is still alive? if god really wanted to reclaim man to him self things would have been like they were during the time of adam and eve in the garden of eden according to the bible where there was no sin, death and destruction, but even after the personal sacrifice by god of himself sin continues to exist, even after god has destroyed the whole of hummanity according to the story myth of noah. the hebrew god scarificed himself yet nothing is yet to happen to sin and disobidence that supposedly took man away from god. man continues to sin and nothing has changed, by the way if i may ask do animals sin? does a lion commit sin when he takes away the baby of an antelop and feeds on it in the jungle? does a spider commit sin when it entraps a fly with its web and eats him for lunch? does a hawk commit sin when it takes away a helpless chick from it mother and serves the chick to her own chicks? what is sin?

Bastage:
You've got it in one, brother.

They are exactly the same god.

Christianity used the Old Testament god to sell it's new religion to it's prospective followers and Islam did exactly the same.
The difference is that the Christian god adapted and changed whereas the Islamic and Judaic god did not.

you have said it all. the biblical god changed with humanity while allah and the jewish god are still lagging behind.

ejighikeme:
Bible is a book written by people under the leading of the Holy spirit, that is they are inspired by the holy spirit.It is not like other secular books with edition,God's words remain the same,it can only be translated but not edited.The holy bible [b]says that the canal man cannot understand the things of the spirit,[/b]so the problem we are having is the interpretation of the words.Therefore one should allow the holy spirit to interpret the words.

Carnal mind abi. . . . . . . . . . . . . . can you use the holy spirit to explain or justify all the killings, enslavement and looting that were commanded by the hebrew god and his footsoldiers(prophets) in the old testament? or can you use the holy spirit to explain all the scientific and historical errors that were being recorded in the bible?

fox news is garbage, only redneck republicans watch their shows(lies). with people like shawn hannity, bill, ann coultler spewing lies all day long ahhh.

More rubbish and jargons from the bible. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Since I couldn’t think of a way to categorize so many of the biblical absurdities that I wanted to include, we’ll just take a blitzkrieg approach at covering them. Abraham has a picnic with God (Genesis 18:1-. Lot’s wife is turned into salt for looking at the destruction of a city (Genesis 19:26). Jacob wrestles with God and defeats him (Genesis 32:24-30). God becomes a burning bush while talking with Moses (Exodus 3:3-4) and has intentions to murder Moses’ son because he wasn’t circumcised (Exodus 4:24-26). God will kill Aaron if he goes to minister without wearing a golden bell and blue pomegranates (Exodus 28:31-35). God says that we can purify a person with leprosy by killing a bird, putting the bird’s blood on another bird, killing a lamb, wiping the lamb blood on the leper, and killing two doves (Leviticus 14) why does god hate sick people, women that are menstrating or women that have given birth?. A storm is stopped because Jonah is tossed into the sea (Jonah 1:15). God says that he will eat some people like a lion (Hosea 13:. God stands on a wall and hangs a plumb line in front of Amos (Amos 7:7-. This people-eating god decides to reveal himself to Amos via a plumb line demonstration but not to all the people currently killing each other over who is holding his true book!

God says that Joshua’s army can destroy the city walls of Jericho by marching around them and blowing horns (Joshua 6). Wine makes God/Gods happy, or at least that’s what the vine says (Judges 9:13). Samson claims his strength originates from his long hair (Judges 16:17). David buys Saul’s daughter with two hundred foreskins (1 Samuel 18:27) this is very ridiculious and absurd to say the least. People who don’t believe in a god fail to do anything good (Psalms 14:1, 53:1). People are cured from their illnesses by touching Paul’s handkerchiefs and aprons (Acts 19:12). It’s wrong for christains to take a dispute into court (1 Corinthians 6:6-7).Anyone who doesn’t confess Christ is an antichrist who deceives others (2 John 1:7). If you don’t repent your sins, Jesus will attack you with the sword in his mouth (Revelation 2:16). As a way of discerning people, the righteous eat all they want while the wicked don’t have anything to eat (Proverbs 13:25). What correlation does eating have with faith? Are Ethiopians wicked? Is that why God allows thousands of them to die every day?

some more myths and jargons from the bible . . . . . . . Two additional stories in Genesis seem relevant to about every topic we cover: Noah and Babel. During Noah’s flood, God kills almost the entire world population of humans and animals because the people are evil. Why would an omniscient god lack the common sense to get his creation right the first time so that he isn’t required to redo everything? Afterwards, he promises to never do it again because humans are evil (Genesis 8:21). As stated before, God admits that the flood solved nothing. Several years later, groups of people assemble to build a tower so that they can see God in Heaven. Since God doesn’t like this seemingly impossible idea of people spotting him, he confuses their language to cease construction on the tower (Genesis 11:1-. The people may not have realized that God didn’t actually live on top of a dome over the earth, but God should have been aware of this information for obvious reasons. We’ve looked deep into space with telescopes, but God didn’t stop us on those endeavors. Why would he think that these primitive people could see him? Is this when he moved from the earth’s dome to the outer boundaries of the universe? What about all the other authors who claim to have caught a glimpse of God? The Tower of Babel myth is definitely one of the most absurd stories ever told. Even so, a good portion of the world still ignorantly accepts it as truth. That’s a shame, too.

Later in Genesis, God asks himself if he should hide his plans for destroying Sodom from Abraham (Genesis 18:17). Why would God not know what he’s going to do, and how could Abraham’s knowledge of the matter have any possible outcome on God’s ultimate decision to exercise his infinite power? On the other hand, perhaps God has good reason to worry since its has already been established that he isn’t all-knowing or all-powerful as the Bible claims.

When God is preparing to go on another murdering spree, he tells the people of Israel to smear blood on their doors so that he’ll know which homes are occupied by his chosen people (Exodus 12:13). With this directive completed, he’s free to kill all the Egyptian firstborn male children without accidentally harming an Israelite, but why does he need blood on the doors to serve as a reminder if he knows everything? Jonah, like Cain before him, was able to leave the presence of God (Jonah 1:3). According to Zephaniah, God will search through Jerusalem with lamps and find people who scoff at him (1:12). Why would God need lamps to see in the dark? Judges 1:19 says that God was with the men of Judah in a battle, yet they couldn’t drive out the enemies because the other side was riding upon chariots of iron. If God is with someone, shouldn’t this person be able to do the miracles that every other God-accompanied individual performs? Honestly, did authors bother to proofread their work centuries ago?

davidylan:
Because in that singular instant, you confirmed the fact that you were a liar whose words are not to be trusted. I reproduce your post on daniel's vision again.

Daniel speaks of a vision he recieved from god concerning a giant goat’s horn knocking the stars from the sky down to the ground where the goat “stamped upon them”(stars) (Daniel 8:8-9). Passing comment on the vision, we can also be decidedly certain that Daniel believed stars were tiny lights hanging above the earth.

- We cannot be "decidedly certain" because Daniel made it clear from the begining he was describing a vision not reality.

(science has explained and proved that daniel's position and assertion are false) Otherwise, how could his monstrous goat stamp upon them?

- Because Daniel's goat was not a real goat neither was he positing that he could stamp on stars in real life. It was a vision stupid.

(if you understand the study of the universe and stars you will know that a star is like a sun and the center of a whole solar system which is much more bigger than the earth) More importantly, how could someone divinely inspired write something so blatantly preposterous?

- Daniel knew that, that was why he FIRST told you that he saw it in a VISION.

With all these lies, its not hard to figure out why you're largely ignored.

Lies? ohh because you tried in explaing one of so many things i wrote you claim that i have been largley ignored. ohhh nice one keep on deluding your self and finding excuse to run away from false hood and lies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . anyway that what all you bible apologist are good at cutting and running, in the other thread instead of tacking the topic head on you resulted to calling us hypocrites and advissing that we equally go against the moslems, what have moslems got to do with the evil acts of the hebrew god? na you sabi sha . . . . . . . .

here are some false assertions in the bible regarding animals, In the beginning, when God allegedly created the animals, they were designed to consume plants rather than meat (Genesis 1:30). Even so, there’s certainly no reason to believe that the ancestors of present-day predators survived off an herbivore diet. The food chain is in harmony because of the fluctuations occurring due to a rising and falling cycle of predator and prey populations. Withdrawing that relationship would throw the chain into unknown chaos. Furthermore, we have fossil records of these animals purported to be herbivores. Their equipped teeth were intended to initiate and facilitate the digestion of meat, not plants. Six thousand years ago, just like today, many species could not survive solely on plants. In addition, parasites require blood from living hosts. Blood is neither a plant nor a meat. Suggesting that parasites also made their daily meals from plants is increasingly absurd. Science demonstrates that it’s impossible for some species to survive on plants, yet the erroneous Bible claims this testable statement isn’t true. Do Christians expect everyone to believe that the Bible is correct regardless of what it says?

The prophet Isaiah informs us that a cockatrice, a mythical creature able to kill its victim with a casual glance, will arise from a serpent (Isaiah 14:29). What tangible evidence do we have to believe that a creature with this incredible ability has ever existed? Again, the Bible provides stories that sound like something straight out of a fairy tale. While some animals are certainly capable of killing their prey by biting or strangling them, a look has no anticipated scientific capacity to kill another creature. While there may be some type of alternative mechanism of action for the attack, such as venom sprayed through the eyes, it wouldn’t be due to the act of looking. The cockatrice, unicorn, and dragon are examples of mythical creatures in the Bible that fail to leave any reliable evidence for their existence.

In John’s Revelation dream, which is conveyed to be an imminent and realistic future event, he sees crown-wearing locusts with faces of men, hair of women, teeth of lions, tails of scorpions, and wings sounding like chariots. These locusts also adorn iron breastplates in preparation for battle (9:7-10). Draw your own conclusions.

davidylan:
he isnt any worse than the one in the quran. I don't see you telling the muslims that.

hypocrisy is truly a disease. I don't blame you . . .

So now its the muslims that are they problem abi? its the moslem that are responsible for all the killing and atrocities that were commited and carried out by the manovalent hebrew god in the old testament abi? keep on grasping at straws. Visit www.kanoonline.com and see my post on the religious section i have been banned there uncountable times for my attack on the equally evil, dangerous and manovalent allah, stop talking about things you don't know. by the way what is the difference between allah and the god of the old testament? The answer is nada, they are both the same. I know you find those killings and bloodshed lurid and difficult to comphrehend, instead you try to blame allah(who is no better) and moslems for all the evil deeds of the hebrew god that were recorded in the bible.

davidylan:
though hypocrite, you claimed it was a vision and then promptly went ahead to berate Daniel for making scientifically innacurate statements like a goat bringing down the stars. You forgot that was all part of the vision not meant to be taken literarily?

I don't intend to explain anything to you you clearly did not understand my whole post.  but why are you hell bent on talking about the daniels vision why not talk about the fact that jesus said that stars will fall from the sky/heaven? i am berating the people that wrote the tower of bable myth, and the plagerized noah ark and the writers of all this evil and hate that is in the bible like Instead of directly murdering people or using his followers to execute similar commands, the apparently insatiable God( that has killed so many people for no good reason) begins sending animals to kill those who displease him. On one occasion, he has a lion kill a man because he refuses to hit someone (1 Kings 20:35). God sends his lions out again to kill a group of people who were new to Samaria. The reason for this atrocity is their lack of worship, even though they were never informed of the proper worship methods (2 Kings 17:24-26). However, this supposedly insignificant detail didn’t halt God from killing them. He had to have known that he would eventually murder this party, but instead of properly instructing them, God just kills them. There’s not even a miniscule resemblance of justice in the Hebrew god.

In an exploit of inconceivable irrationality, God sends forth two bears to kill forty-two children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24). Why would the omnibenevolent God feel the necessity to have two bears viciously maul little children for acting like…children? This is supposed to be the same “wonderful” and “loving” God who promises us eternal life, but an entity capable of these inane activities could certainly change his mind and banish all of his worshippers to Hell. Christians never have to justify such passages because, of course, they never read them!

Udyro:
if u know why human cells deteriorate and start decaying after 70 - 80 years and eventually stop functioning, showing the person is dead, u wont doubt the existence of the God of the Bible.

your quote is a waste of page, try someting else.

What about the god of the koran? why is'nt he god?

Bastage:
I can only assume you're joking with both comments.

If you've read the Old Testament you see a god who encourages the Hebrews to destroy cities, kill every man there and take away and rape every woman. Damn girl, he even advocates the killing of children. So he's not a murderer? Those are the acts of a "sane" god? You want the passages, no problem, I can post them. There are a lot of them though so I'll just give you a few.

The problem is that christains do not read the bible, they only cherry pick what ever the want, the old testament god is the worst creature you can ever think of. here are some of his atrocities and evil deeds.

In the meeting among Moses, Aaron, and the Pharaoh, God doesn’t want his Israelites to go free without a fight. Instead, God instructs Moses and Aaron on exactly what steps to take so that the Pharaoh will initially become too stubborn to allow the people to leave. Obviously, God only wants an excuse to “bring forth [his] armies” against Egypt in order to punish the entire country for the decisions of one man to hold his chosen people as slaves (Exodus 7:1-14).

The plagues that God carried out against Egypt as a result of the Pharaoh’s decision were turning the river to blood; sending an abundance of frogs, lice, locusts, and flies; killing every cow belonging to the people; inflicting boils upon all the citizens; creating a hailstorm to destroy their crops; instituting three days of darkness; and killing the firstborn male child in every household across the country. The darkness, boils, frogs, lice, locusts, and flies were quite punishing, but they wouldn’t necessarily ruin anyone’s life. The cattle slaughter, river of blood, and downpour of hail ruined the Egyptians’ sole water and food sources. Worst of all, God once again feels the necessity to eradicate thousands more innocent babies, children, and animals because one man was too stubborn to free his slaves.

God’s episodes of murdering innocent individuals for the faults of their leaders, fathers, or other ancestors are not uncommon in the Old Testament. Jephthah asks for God’s assistance in killing the children of Ammon and promises him the first person out of his house upon his return as a burnt sacrifice if he will agree to aid with the massacre. God concurs and lethally delivers the children of Ammon into Jephthah’s hands. When Jephthah returns, his daughter, an only child, makes her way outside to welcome him home. Two months later, Jephthah regretfully fulfills his promise by burning his daughter as a sacrifice to God (Judges 11:29-39). Why would God allow a man to offer an innocent person as a reward unless God also intended for certain people to be mere possessions?

While David is King, he decides to conduct a census: a horrendous sin in God’s eyes. As punishment for his poor decision, he is to select among seven years of famine, three months of fleeing from his enemies, and three days of pestilence. Unable to choose from the offered catastrophes, God picks the three days of pestilence that result in the deaths of 70,000 men. Women and children weren’t mentioned, not that the Bible considered them to have any real value in the first place. Again, God murders enough people to fill a sizable city for the “sin” of one man. David subsequently cries out to God and asks him why he wants to murder innocent people who had nothing to do with the decision to execute a census. Of course God doesn’t provide an impossible answer for this sensible question, but his reasons scarcely seem morally or ethically justifiable (2 Samuel 24:10-17)

Instead of directly murdering people or using his followers to execute similar commands, the apparently insatiable God begins sending animals to kill those who displease him. On one occasion, he has a lion kill a man because he refuses to hit someone (1 Kings 20:35). God sends his lions out again to kill a group of people who were new to Samaria. The reason for this atrocity is their lack of worship, even though they were never informed of the proper worship methods (2 Kings 17:24-26). However, this supposedly insignificant detail didn’t halt God from killing them. He had to have known that he would eventually murder this party, but instead of properly instructing them, God just kills them. There’s not even a miniscule resemblance of justice in the Hebrew god.

In an exploit of inconceivable irrationality, God sends forth two bears to kill forty-two children for making fun of Elisha’s bald head (2 Kings 2:23-24). Why would the omnibenevolent God feel the necessity to have two bears viciously maul little children for acting like…children? This is supposed to be the same “wonderful” and “loving” God who promises us eternal life, but an entity capable of these inane activities could certainly change his mind and banish all of his worshippers to Hell. Christians never have to justify such passages because, of course, they never read them!

There are soooooooo many others these are just a few. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

davidylan:
Mazaje is not someone i'D consider wise. He thinks by posting tomes of incredulous mumbo jumbo he has made us see reason.

I think the person "grasping at straws" here is indeed you. The argument "if He is God why didnt He send Himself to the whole world AT ONCE" is frankly stupid and suggestive of someone just looking for excuses where there is none. The bible is frankly clear about WHY God chose to come in thatfashion.
When i was a child i also used to wonder . . . why did Christ not just come and overthrow the Roman empire that was colonising Israel at that time?

Eventually i understood the reason, it had been in the bible all along . . . if God had come to the whole world AT ONCE as foolish people like Mazaje like to say, it would have made nonsense of the NEED for "he that believeth . . ." because everyone would have had no choice but to believe.
Salvation is not by force, it is a matter of choice and faith . . . faith that what Christ has promised He is able to perform . . . that was why He chose to come in the form of a lowly child in a manger.

The only mumbo jumbo is the tower of babel story, the noah's ark plagarised myth and all the wild and unjustified killings that were carried out by the hebrew god and his footsoldiers in the bible. That is what we call mumbo jumbo not what i outlined.

So now its all about he that believeth ok nice but the same bible says go and make diciples of all nations, why are you now talking about he that believeth and espousing the idea that salvation is not by force? if salvation is not by force when then did the hebrew god commanded his people to kill so many just because they were'nt worshipping him in the bible? salvation is not by force but killing people by force simple because they do not believe or worship the hebrew god is ok according to the bible(old testament) ko? na you sabi sha. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

the bible says that god created adam and eve in his own image but why is it that he dislike women so much in the old testament? here are some examples One other mistreatment by omission should come to mind upon completion of reading the Pentateuch: the failure to mention the explicit impermissibility of sexual relations between fathers and daughters. The only such instance that comes to mind is the record of Lot’s daughters getting him drunk to become pregnant by him (Genesis 19:30-38). However, the author tells the story using disturbingly tranquil commentary. Had God considered this a reprehensible act, one would assume that it would be noted in some way for its distastefulness. In fact, Moses provides a long list of people with whom we are not to have sexual contact in Leviticus 20:10-21, but noticeably absent from this list is the debauchery of a father with his daughter. We also know from previous analyses that daughters are the sole property of their fathers. Finally, we can safely assume that these father-daughter relationships existed thousands of years ago, as they secretly do now. The omission of this regulation can only lead to the conclusion that it was permissible, or at least somewhat condonable, for a father to rape his daughters.

The books of prophecy, Isaiah through Malachi, have the most vivid images of God tormenting women. Some examples of God’s actions not previously covered include the giving away of people’s wives (Jeremiah 8:10), justifying a woman being raped (Jeremiah 13:22), making men “become as women” (Jeremiah 50:37), denouncing menstruation (Ezekiel 18:6), telling Hosea to acquire a wife that he knew would be purchased (Hosea 3:1-2), aborting children in their mothers’ wombs (Hosea 9:11-12 and 13:16), ridiculing an army by labeling them women (Nahum 3:13), and taking part in a war concluding with women being raped (Zechariah 11:4). Again, I don’t feel there’s any reason to worry over such matters because none of this will ever happen due to direct intervention by the fictitious version of God depicted in the Old Testament.

The historical books, Joshua through Esther, begin the popular trend of multiple-wife lifestyles. Among those who have several wives and/or concubines are Gideon, Elkanah, David, Rehoboam, Abijah, and Solomon, who I believe is the winner with 700 wives and 300 concubines. Even so, divinely inspired biblical authors wholeheartedly claim that God looks upon these men favorably. Would we expect God to view these individuals in a positive light if this lifestyle was displeasing to the almighty?

We find several more cruelties perpetrated against women in these historical books. Such atrocities include a woman given away as a prize (Judges 1:12-13); a woman offered as a sacrifice (Judges 11:29-39); married daughters given to other people (Judges 15:2); rape, murder, and mutilation by a mob; (Judges 19:22-30); abduction of virgins (Judges 21:7-23); purchasing of wives (Ruth 4:10 and 1 Samuel 18:25-27); and God punishing David by allowing his son to sleep with his wives and concubines, an act for which the women were later imprisoned (2 Samuel 12:11-12, 16:22, 20:3). This are the words of men who later saw that the image they created of that evil and spiteful god will not be accepted world wide because people were better educated and exposed, they then came up with a new god which they created in their own image and called him jesus. they came up with better and more humane laws etc in the new testament.

davidylan:
Mazaje, as regards the Daniel vision, it were better you didnt even respond because you were caught in a very BLATANT LIE. What a shame.

you keep on underscoring the meaning/interpretation of the vision, i clearly stated that it was a vision didnt I? and that is the premise of my assertion, keep on grabing at straws, thats what most of you do when you are caught believeing that book of fables. out of all what i wrote and posted all you can challange are those that you feel you can explain away. jesus said that a day will come when stars will fall, that is a lie, stars do not and cannot fall simple. what have you got to say about the myth of the tower of bable , the plagarised story of the noah's ark or the assertion that blindness , leprosy and seizures are all spirits? Christains always say thatThe Bible is the word of God. Since God/people inspired by God wrote the Bible, we know that it contains only truthful accounts(which it does'nt). Since the truthful accounts are inspired by God, we know that the Bible is God’s word.” In other words, the Bible is the word of God because the Bible says so. If you can’t spot the enormous gaping hole in this argument, I’m afraid that I’m not doing you much help. The Qur’an says Muhammad is Allah’s prophet, but that doesn’t make it a fact. There must be good evidence to support these claims. The bible is purely the word/tradition of men simple and has no divine inspiration if not how can the following natural human charactersitics be despised by a God that created people in his own image?

let me give you an example as we all know menstruation is a natural occurrence in the lives of most women. However, the God of the Pentateuch despises this biologically necessary bodily process and gives instructions on how to deal with these treacherous circumstances. During menstruation, God deems the woman unclean. No one shall have any contact with her for seven days or until the bleeding stops. God deems anyone or anything she touches unclean. If she touches another person, God deems that person unclean until he bathes. In fact, the same goes for anyone who touches something that she previously touched (Leviticus 15:19-30). All this uncleanliness is resolved by needlessly killing two doves. Admittedly, there are similar laws for male ejaculation, but men can actually suppress these events to some extent.

Childbirth is another natural event that God deems foul. If a woman gives birth to a boy, she will be unclean for seven days while she undergoes the same ritual for her menstrual period. She must then be purified for thirty-three days and barred from entering worship during this time. If she produces a girl, the sentence of solitary confinement is doubled to fourteen and sixty-six days, respectively (Leviticus 12:1-5). In addition to God unfairly designating women as filthy individuals following childbirth, this passage heavily insinuates that girls are dirtier than boys because it punishes a woman more harshly for giving birth to a female child. Is this the word of a god or the word of 1st century normads that have no respect for women at that time?

The bible is the word of men(priest, rulers, phylosophers,criminals,politicians etc) it is not the word of any god but hmm it could be because god is imaginary.

If you’ve elected to read the preceding selections in this manuscript, you will have noticed that I often refer to the first five books of the Bible as the Pentateuch. In Greek, the term simply means “five volumes.” Scholars often refer to Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy using this collective term because many of our predecessors erroneously assumed for over 2000 years that Moses personally wrote the books. Knowledge gained through modern scholarship and research, however, allows us to ascertain the logical impossibility of this scenario being true. More than likely, the Pentateuch is the work of several individuals, all of whom lived well after the stories they present and had varying oral traditions of how those events unfolded. Because of this societal concoction, the earliest recorded history of the Jews is afflicted with oft-erratic variance.

In order to consider an extraordinary event for inclusion in the modern canon of actual history, we must either have remaining evidence indicating what took place or obtain a record from a reliable eyewitness who documented the occurrence. We generally accept common daily events as fact because we know that these occasions are consistent and inconsequential in the grand scheme of human history. Extraordinary events on the level of those Moses allegedly recorded in the Pentateuch, on the other hand, should be thoroughly scrutinized before canonizing them as fact.

Two major biblical events that we should expect to be reasonably consistent with coexisting historical records and modern archaeological discoveries are the Exodus and Conquests. As you will see, however, these two hypothetical milestones have little, if any, substantiating support. If we are to ignore this contrary finding and just accept whatever the Bible says as truth, it isn’t fair to confine ourselves to the accounts of only one religion. Thus, we would have to accept any and all religious claims, regardless of their absurdity. To avoid such a logical disaster, we must reasonably pursue evidence for claims made by all beliefs in order to determine which, if any, has the most reliability as the correct religion. Christianity cannot simply trump other religions because it’s the one in which the most faith has been placed. Awarding any belief system with this favorable and prejudicial judgment should be an obvious act of intellectual dishonesty. Besides, if Christianity is the one true religion, it should have no trouble in avoiding claims that are disprovable by scientific and investigative scrutiny.

For our study of who initiated the history of the Jews, there’s no better place to start than the beginning. Thus, this chapter will discuss the following: how the Pentateuch came into existence, the standard reasons why Christians still maintain that Moses scribed it, why Christians desperately cling to traditional authorship claims, the contrast in writing styles among the multiple authors, and key pieces of information allowing scholars to debunk the traditional dates placed on the writings.



If Moses Didn’t Write The Books Of Moses…

Before we delve into much detail of how we know who wrote what in the early Old Testament, you should have an understanding of the different components combined to form the five books of the Pentateuch. This “document hypothesis” states that there were probably four authors and an editor responsible for the compilation. Since it’s currently impossible to determine their hypothetical identities, we commonly refer to them as J, E, P, D, and R for the reasons we’ll now discuss.

J received his name because he consistently uses JHWH as the unpronounceable name of God. Issues relating to humanity are the primary focus of his writing. J even extends this humanity-based focus by portraying a uniquely human interpretation of God. This author is compassionate and shows none of the bias against women discussed in Why Women And The Bible Don’t Mix. Seeing as how J wrote a complete historical record of the Israelites from a Judean perspective, he probably resided within the Southern Kingdom of Judea. Based on clues found within his text, historians typically place a 950-750 BCE date on the work, which is about 500-700 years following the death of Moses.

E, whose primary focus is morality, acquired his name because he consistently uses Elohim as the name of God. E commonly emphasized the second born sons of families because they were of historical and personal interest to the North for symbolic reasons. Since E left us with a complete account of the Israelites from the perspective of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, historians generally believe that this was his domicile. Thus, we already have two independent accounts of early Middle Eastern history. Since the split of Israel took place no earlier than 950 BCE, it’s exceedingly unlikely that such a contrasting influence would appear in his work before that time. Consequently, estimated dates for the E document range from 900-700 BCE.

P obtained his name because he was almost certainly a priest. He identifies Aaron, the first High Priest, as his spiritual ancestor. His manuscripts include rituals, laws, sins, chronologies, genealogies, and other subjects of definite interest to a priest. In sharp contrast to J, P doesn’t attribute any human qualities to God. The Hebrew terms equivalent to mercy, grace, and repentance don’t appear once in P’s work, while they’re plentiful in the compositions of J and E. Furthermore, P is often cold and harsh with his writing unlike the more pleasant E. These interpretations and attitudes are what we would expect from a traditional church leader. He doesn’t include any mythical details, such as the ludicrous claims of talking animals, likely interpolated into history by J and E as a result of popular urban legends. As he was seemingly aware of the books of prophecy, while J and E never gave this indication, P probably wrote his share much later around 700-650 BCE.

D received his name because he was the author of Deuteronomy. It’s a good possibility that D wrote many of the historical books as well. It’s an even better possibility that he wrote the book of Jeremiah, which contains several carbon copies of statements made in the book of Deuteronomy. If this is the case, the author could be Jeremiah’s scribe, Baruch, or Jeremiah himself. D most certainly lived in Israel during a very spiritual era, the same era in which the likely author claimed to have discovered the book. Evidence for the document hypothesis indicates that the person compiling the Pentateuch tacked the author’s work onto the end of the compilation. Thus, we would expect it to have been created after, not in concurrent conflict with, the other three circulating versions of Jewish history. It then follows that the author probably finished it shortly before its “discovery” in 622 BCE.

We designate the individual responsible for combining the four accounts into one collection as R because he’s the redactor (editor). The process finally came to a conclusion some time around 500-434 BCE, but may have begun as early as the Babylonian Exile of 587-539 BCE. R also adds bits and pieces of commentary to make necessary transitions between the passages. The scholarly community consensually believes this redactor is the biblical priest Ezra.

To illustrate the document hypothesis, we’ll take a detailed look at the first eight chapters of Genesis. You may find it helpful to locate and follow along in a Bible before proceeding further.

One creation story scribed by P appears from Genesis 1:1-2:3. Notice that the first half of 2:4 doesn’t maintain the flow and seems to segue into the second creation account found in 2:4-2:25. That’s likely the redactor making a transition between P’s and J’s creation stories. J continues to the end of the fourth chapter with some recollections of stories centered on Adam and his children. Chapter 5 then hastily jumps in with some genealogy from P or R, but verse 29, written by J, seems recklessly tossed into the mix.

At the commencement of chapter six, J regains control and supplies a few verses set in the time immediately prior to Noah’s flood. This account abruptly stops following 6:8, and P’s story of Noah begins with his lineage. Furthermore, this section by P is an obvious repetition of the days before the flood, provided earlier in the chapter by J. Genesis 7:1 seems to pick right back up where J left off at 6:8. Genesis 7:6, written by P, appears haphazardly thrown in because it interrupts a cohesive story told by J. Verses 7:7, 7:10, 7:12, 7:17-20, and 7:22-23 tell one full story of the flood (J) while 7:8-9, 7:11, 7:13-16, 7:21, and 7:24 tell another (P). In chapter eight, J likely recorded verses 2, 3, 6, 8-12, the last part of 13, and 20-22, while the remaining verses stand alone as another complete story by the author P. If you happen to be carefully reading the texts in their native Hebrew language, you may even notice the contrasting writing styles of the two authors beginning to emerge.



How And Why Was The Pentateuch Combined?

This part, we cannot say for certain. It’s speculated that a number of Israelites fled south into Judea with the E document in hand when the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom in 722 BCE. Consequently, the J document would now coexist with the E document in this society prior to their combination. Around this time, P likely became a widespread alternative priestly version of the J and E records. With these three variant interpretations, no doubt would come arguing factions. R then saw the need, or perhaps was elected, to combine the contrasting accounts into a single cohesive document agreeable to all parties. Not wishing to eliminate any essential parts of the respective documents, R would then combine the contrasting stories into one quasi-harmonious account and do the best he could to avoid contradictions, inconsistencies, and repetitions. Because the D document doesn’t step on the toes of the other three histories, the redactor likely tacked Deuteronomy onto the end for this reason. By 434 BCE, the redactor had certainly compiled the modern version of the Pentateuch.

There’s nothing novel about forming multiple author theories for the Moses biography. The first known hypothesis was proposed nearly a thousand years ago when it was discovered that a list of kings in the Pentateuch included some who apparently reigned following Moses’ death. Although the suggestion that Moses didn’t write this passage seems to bathe in common sense, the churches of the Middle Ages weren’t exactly known for embracing such heretical theories. Centuries later, biblical scholars began to propose that prophets and editors may have had limited involvement in the compilation. Scholars fortunate enough to live during the age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century concluded that different authors recorded the passages conspicuously appearing twice because one writer would use the name JHWH and the other would use the name Elohim when referring to the same god. Triplet passages, the beginning of the P discovery, were soon uncovered in the years to come. Later still, historians determined Deuteronomy has a style distinct from the ones found in the four preceding books. Presently, we have a four author and one editor hypothesis. This will no doubt undergo alteration as well if subsequent research provides further evidence relevant to the authorship issue. On the other hand, regardless of what evidence researchers discover, the Christian community may indefinitely hold onto a Moses authorship.

While we’re certainly not fully able to explain the origins of the Old Testament with 100% accuracy, we can conclude with great certainty that the Pentateuch is a set of conflicting passages scribed 500-3500 years after the events it purports. Ask yourself how much oral tradition can change in a few years; then consider the subsequent alteration of details after 3500 years. Of course, this proposal assumes that an omniscient deity offered no input to this particular set of writers. Since we should be unanimous in deciding that a “wonderful” and “loving” God would have no part in the orders of rape, slavery, and the various other acts of extreme brutality contained within the Old Testament, we should also decide that these hundredth-hand stories were highly unlikely to be scientifically or historically accurate. Similarly, we see the inclusion of ridiculous fallacies in the form of Adam and Noah working unpaid overtime at discrediting their own reliability. Furthermore, we have upcoming archaeological evidence indicating that the Exodus and Conquests didn’t unfold the way they were recorded, if at all. Thus, we can certainly challenge the existence, or at least question the true nature, of the people on whom the authors based these stories.

There’s ample reason why Christians feel the absolute necessity for Moses to have been the sole author of the Pentateuch. First, we have inclusions of several passages indicating Moses did a lot of the writing. For example, “And it came to pass, when Moses had made an end of writing the words of this law in a book…” (Deuteronomy 31:24). There are also several biblical passages outside the Pentateuch insinuating that Moses was responsible for its compilation. Paul demonstrated his conviction that Moses was an author when he said, “For Moses describeth the righteousness which is of the law” (Romans 10:5). Even Jesus implies that Moses wrote the books: “All things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses” (Luke 24:44). However, there’s no passage in the Pentateuch directly implicating Moses as the one and only author of the present compilation. I also fail to recognize any quotes concretely indicating that the New Testament characters were certain of Moses’ solitary authorship. The contemporaneous belief of the New Testament authors may have very well been that Moses only provided a foundation for the Old Testament writings.

For the past 2000 years, the church has merely gone on assumptions when making the attribution of the Pentateuch to Moses. In fact, there wouldn’t be any additional errors in the Bible if someone completely debunked the traditional hypothesis. The importance of the authorship question lies with determining the credibility and reliability of the authors, not with demonstrating an additional biblical mistake.



Evidence Clearly Pointing Away From Moses

The best evidence we have supporting the position that Moses didn’t write the entire Pentateuch is the description of his death and burial in the last chapter of Deuteronomy. Almost all Christians will make this small concession by admitting that Joshua may have finished the works, but some actually believe that God told Moses what to write beforehand. Nevertheless, the possibility of a second author for the final chapter isn’t exactly destructive to the traditional author hypothesis. The more critical discoveries arise from the widespread presence of contradictions and inconsistencies contained within repetitions of stories, such as the creation and flood. A single author would have known better than to write a certain passage, only to contradict it a few sentences later. However, these variations are, indeed, present and lead us to believe that the traditional single author hypothesis is completely discountable. Examples of these contradictions can be found in the next chapter.

The inclusion of city names and tribes yet to exist at the time of Moses’ death, approximately 1450 BCE, is equally devastating to the traditional Mosaic authorship claim. Genesis 11:31 says that the Chaldees lived in the city of Ur during the life of Abraham, but historical records tell us that the Chaldees didn’t even exist as a tribe until well after Moses was dead. In addition, they didn’t become a prominent enough group to occupy a city until the sixth century BCE.

Genesis 14:14 mentions the city of Dan, but the city didn’t acquire this name until it was seized one thousand years later via conquest. Genesis 37:25 mentions traders with spicery, balm, and myrrh, but these weren’t the primary trade products of the region until the eighth century BCE. Isaac visits King Abimelech of Gerar in Genesis 26:1, but Gerar didn’t exist until after Isaac’s death and wouldn’t have been powerful enough to require a King until the eighth century BCE. Genesis 36:31 says that there were “kings that reigned in the land of Edom,” but there’s no extrabiblical record of Kings in Edom until the eighth century BCE. Exodus 13:17 details Moses’ apprehension toward entering the land of the Philistines in Canaan, but there’s zero evidence that indicates the Philistines occupied Canaan until the thirteenth century BCE. In addition, they couldn’t have sufficiently organized in threatening numbers until a few hundred years later.

Moses references Palestine in Exodus 15:14, the only known mention of that name for hundreds of years. In Deuteronomy 3:11, Moses also mentions the city of Rabbath and Og’s location within the city, but no one outside of Rabbath could have held this information until it was conquered hundreds of years later. Jacob is called a wandering Aramean in Deuteronomy 26:5, but the Arameans didn’t have contact with the Israelites until the ninth century BCE. Some particular names mentioned in Genesis 14 and 25 (Chedorlaomer, Kadesh, Sheba, Tema, Nebaioth, and Adbeel) are consistent with names of people recorded by the Assyrians as living during the sixth through eighth centuries BCE, not a thousand years prior. The writers never provide the names of Egyptian Pharaohs even though Moses would have readily known this bit of information.

The Pentateuch authors claim that many of the leading Genesis characters, such as Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph, rode camels. However, there’s no archaeological evidence indicating that anyone domesticated these animals earlier than 1200 BCE. Again, this was hundreds or thousands of years after the deaths of these alleged biblical camel riders. Furthermore, no known person trained camels to carry people and other heavy loads until many years later.

Someone making these aforementioned claims in 1500 BCE would have had no ability to appreciate this futuristic information and no reason to present the information in a fashion identifiable only to a specific group of people living in a specific region during an arbitrary future time period. On the other hand, someone in 500 BCE would have had access to this information but lacked a way to know that the stories presented were historically invalid. Not only do these facts indicate a more recent authorship, they also suggest fabrications or alterations of actual events. Finally, many of the passages state that certain aspects of the Hebrew society are still the same “unto this day” (e.g. Genesis 26:33). This wording greatly implies that the complete record was finished well after the purported events took place.



The Exodus: Timeline Inconsistencies

Now let’s turn to the particular account of the Exodus and consider the possibility of such a magnificent event taking place. First, we should recognize the plethora of peculiarities concerning the approximate time that the authors say the enslavement and subsequent Exodus took place. We arrive at the aforementioned 1500 BCE estimate for the Exodus because the three different chronologies used to date it differ by about 150 years but tend to center around the designated 1500 BCE date. We commonly use the most accepted and latest possible date of 1447 BCE because it’s the easiest to derive.

1 Kings 6:1 says that Solomon’s fourth year as ruler was concurrent with the 480th anniversary of the Exodus. Given that Solomon began his first year of rule in 970 BCE, his fourth year as ruler would have been in 967 BCE. Consequently, the Exodus must have taken place 480 years prior in 1447 BCE. Establishing the exact date isn’t as important as obtaining a period to which the events must be bound in order to compare it to established historical events.

According to the Bible, the Israelite slaves were used to build the Egyptian cities of Pithom and Raamses (Exodus 1:11). Since the Exodus took place no later than 1447 BCE, the Israelites would have at least had to start construction on Raamses by that time in order for the story to remain reliable. In a great setback to Christian apologists, there wasn’t even a Pharaoh named Raamses until 1320 BCE, 127 years after the Exodus. For an additional dagger in the heart of biblical inerrancy, consider Egypt’s own records. These archaeological findings state that Egypt’s own people built the city and not until it came via order of Raamses II who reigned from 1279-1213 BCE. A Hebrew writing a story of his origins several hundred years after all these events had long played out would have had no way of determining when Raamses was constructed without committing to a thorough investigation of Egypt’s historical records. Needless to say, the author didn’t have such access and made a poor guess on when the city was actually built.



The Exodus: A Valid Counterargument From Silence

Upon the Israelites’ alleged escape from their forced construction duties, Moses parts the Red Sea so that they can cross and escape from the pursuing Egyptians (Exodus 14). This was supposed to be the last that Egypt would see of them, and it was as far as the Bible is concerned. Moses seemingly marches his people straight through the other Egyptian regions without contest because the author was no doubt ignorant of the soldiers stationed in the surrounding cities. As you might have subsequently guessed, there are no Egyptian reports of such a massive group crossing these outposts.

The story then purports Moses leading the Israelites into the vast wilderness for forty years of aimless wandering. According to the biblical account, Moses freed 600,000 men in addition to the safely presumed multitude of women and children. If we assume only one wife for each man and only one child for every other couple, which is a very low estimate, there’s a total of one and a half million escapees in addition to the “mixed multitude…of flocks, and herds, even very much cattle” (Exodus 12:37-41). After forty years, the count probably swelled to three million, a number in agreement with many religious Jewish sources.

Since we have millions of mouths to contend with, let’s look at the problem of finding something to feed them. We’ll assume that the Israelites were always proximate to a large water source unless stated otherwise. An average individual requires at least a half pound of food per day to meet typical nourishment requirements. In order to just barely survive, we’ll assume that the Israelites had half that amount over the course of forty years. If each person ate a quarter pound of food every twenty-four hours, the entire camp would need 375 tons of sustenance every day. While we know that they primarily survived off manna, a dried plant material (Numbers 11:6-9), it’s ludicrous to believe that they could obtain this much nourishment day after day without supernatural intervention. From what we’ve learned about this god’s true lack of interaction with the people on earth, such unsubstantiated circumstances were highly unlikely to have ever taken place.

Considering that the Bible provides some precise locations of the events surrounding the desert journey, archaeological evidence of three million people wandering around in a confined area for forty years shouldn’t be too difficult to locate. In fact, we know that the Israelites were in Kadesh-barnea for most of their long journey (Deuteronomy 1:19). However, not one piece of evidence of an Israeli encampment or occupancy has ever arisen from the multitude of undertaken excavations. In contrast, civilizations with populations less than three million over their entire time of existence have left behind considerable amounts of remains that inform us of their cultural facets. Furthermore, archaeologists weren’t necessarily looking for any evidence from these people; they casually stumbled upon the initial discoveries due to the sufficient number of artifacts large groups tend to leave behind. Asserting that unfound archaeological evidence exists for an Exodus is an absurdly difficult position to defend.

Similarly, we have no evidence for three million people invading the land of Canaan and destroying the inhabitants’ possessions forty years after the Exodus (Numbers 33:50-54). Archaeological findings in the form of bodies, waste products, documents, and clothing tell us that the population of Canaan was never greater than 100,000. Thus, we can reasonably dismiss the possibility of a group in excess of one million ever conquering and inhabiting the region.

Fortunately, the Egyptians were much less fond of including hyperbole in their historical records. Of the thousands of fourteenth century BCE Egyptian records uncovered at el-Amarna and Boghazkoy detailing the governments, armies, religions, trade routes, and everyday lives of the people living in the region, none pay any respect to the millions of Israelites allegedly moving about like nomads in Kadesh-barnea. In fact, we don’t posses a single mention of Israel made prior to the creation of the 1207 BCE Merneptah Stele. The inscriptions on this essential historical artifact inform us that Pharaoh Merneptah had recently entered Canaan and easily defeated the Israelites. Curiously, just seventy-eight years earlier, Pharaoh Raamses recorded his army as numbering only 37,000. Although Egypt is widely acknowledged to have been the most powerful country in the world at that time, how could an army the size of a small city go on the offensive and defeat three million inhabitants in a region with nearly one million men of fighting age? If Merneptah did defeat the enormous Israeli army, why didn’t he acknowledge such a remarkable, unrivaled victory in his writings, and why does the Bible neglect to mention this humiliating defeat?



The Exodus: Bogus Solutions

Because attempts to justify the number of Israelites have consistently fallen flat, apologists have often sought a way around this perplexity. Sound familiar? The Hebrew word used to describe thousands is eleph. In a couple of the five hundred or so instances in which the Old Testament authors utilize the term, it meant an army or clan. If this was one of those highly unusual cases, apologists could claim that Moses freed six hundred families instead of six hundred thousand men. This gives us roughly 1500 people escaping from Egypt. Even if we allow the convenience of the word just happening to mean something else at the whim of the apologist, the tale still has unanswered problems. The archaeological evidence and Egyptian historical records for this smaller group of people are still absent. More importantly, there are no longer enough of them to invade and take the land of Canaan. When one difficulty is resolved, another takes its place.

As a way of solving the Egyptian silence, Bible defenders have proposed that the records did include the Israelites’ stay in their country. A writer named Manetho of the third century BCE wrote that, according to some mythical books, a group of people known as the Hyksos invaded Egyptian land and took over the leadership for five hundred years before Pharaoh Ahmose ejected them in 1570 BCE. Some apologists looking for any loophole claim that the Hyksos are a reference to the Israelites. However, several reasons why this isn’t the case should already be painfully obvious. The dates are way off; the Israelites didn’t invade Egypt; they didn’t stay five hundred years; and Ahmose didn’t run them off. While the stories are in no way congruent, the Egyptian tale may help explain the provenience of the biblical legend.

Another difficult aspect of the accord for an apologist to defend would be the Israelites’ total lack of faith in their god’s abilities. After God frees his people from captivity and performs all the plague miracles to ensure their freedom, they still don’t trust him. Since they think that they’re going to die when the Pharaoh decides to chase after them, they complain about the method used to release them from Egyptian custody. Consequently, God has Moses part the sea in order for them to cross and lure the Egyptians into their watery graves. Just a few days later, they complain about an onset of dehydration. Consequently, God provides them with water. Forty days following that incident, the people complain about having no meat. Consequently, God sends them a multitude of quail. A while later, the Israelites once again think that they’re going to dehydrate even though God provided them with water on the previous occasion. Consequently, God provides them with water once again. When the people complain again about not having any meat, the divinely delivered quail fly in once more. Later still, people start complaining about having no land to call their own. When God is about to provide them with some land, they doubt that they can defeat the multitude of inhabitants to obtain it. Instead, they all desire to return to Egypt as slaves rather than fighting and dying in the wilderness.

The Israelites obviously have zero faith in God even though he performs unbelievable miracles for them on a consistent basis. Why, then, are they so skeptical of a god who has provided them with so many blessings in the past? Why would they later turn their backs on such a powerful confederate? It doesn’t make any sense for the Israelites to be so thoroughly convinced that they were going to die when the supernatural interventions of God save them time after time after time. This is another great reason why the story is probably an exceedingly ridiculous fable with an intended moral, much like the repeated enslavement story discussed in the previous chapter.



The Conquests

As I mentioned in The Flat Earth Society, God grants Joshua’s request to make the sun cease its motion so that he can defeat his enemies in the daylight. Since no society with astronomers recorded this unique event, the ball really started to roll on determining the legitimacy of events claimed in the conquest accounts of the Pentateuch and historical books. Subsequent thorough scientific analyses turn up some very interesting facts relevant to these biblical endeavors.

The size of the army Joshua used to conquer his enemies is astonishing even by today’s standards. As I alluded to earlier, the greatest nations of the era had no more than 50,000 soldiers serving simultaneously. The military that Joshua claims to be under his command, however, even outnumbers the current United States Army. While there was an astounding amount of soldiers numbering in the hundreds of thousands during Joshua’s conquests, there were over one and a half million enlisted by the time David was King. Such an outlandishly sized army could have easily conquered the entire ancient world unopposed if the enlisted men so desired. However, there’s no contemporaneous record of an existing force even a tenth of that size. In addition, the population problem arises once again because the Israelites could not have possibly grown to this size over such a short amount of time when you necessarily take the subpar living conditions of the era into consideration.

The consensus of archaeological findings, such as the nearly exhaustive collection of proposals reviewed by William Stiebing in 1989, points away from Moses or Joshua ever conquering the cities claimed by the Bible. We know that the conquests directed by Moses had to have taken place during the time that he and Joshua lived concurrently (approximately 1550-1450 BCE), while the conquests following the Pentateuch must have taken place between Moses’ death and the lifetimes of his various successors (approximately 1450-1200 BCE). Of the four cities that the Israelites take via force in Numbers 21 (Arad, Hormah, Heshbon, and Dibon), none exhibit any clear evidence that they were occupied during the required period. Areor’s remnants, another city claimed to have been conquered while Moses was still alive, offer no credence to the claim that the city was occupied any earlier than two hundred years following the alleged victory (Deuteronomy 2:36).

Although Joshua’s most famous battle takes place in Jericho long after the death of Moses, there’s overwhelming archaeological evidence that suggests the city was destroyed before Moses would have even been born (Joshua 6). Likewise, impartial archaeologists aren’t ready to conclude that the cities of Ai, Gibeon, and Hebron had occupants at the same time that this so-called historical book claims they were destroyed (Joshua 7, 9, and 10, respectively).

Occupational eras of the remaining cities will vary according to different sources, possibly putting their demise around the time of Joshua’s conquests. However, the fallacies presented about the other cities demonstrate the need to seriously question the Bible when attempting to place an accurate date on those remaining towns. Even if future findings confirm the dates provided by the Bible, there’s no evidence that any “Joshua” was doing all the conquering.

Unless there’s compelling evidence to the contrary, we should always give reliability and precedence to correspondence written at the time of the event rather than propagandistic records compiled hundreds of years afterwards. You should realize by now that the Bible is anything but compelling evidence. The blatant signs of a more modern authorship, the lack of documented eyewitnesses, and the obvious embellishments clearly indicate that we should take the aforementioned accounts with a handful of salt.



The Significance Of Moses’ Absence

Since Moses didn’t write the outlandish stories found within the Pentateuch, we must consider the fact we only know of his existence through oral tradition a millennium in the making. With this in mind, could he have been a legend based on a real person? Is it possible that he’s a complete work of fiction?

The Law of Moses, supposedly handed down by God himself in Exodus, is probably patterned after the Code of Hammurabi, which was written well before 2000 BCE. This date places the code’s origins several centuries prior to Moses’ trek up Mt. Sinai. Both codes of conduct contain similar guidelines along with similar punishments in lieu of following the established rules (murder, theft, perjury, adultery, etc.) Simply put, several moral codes existed in the Middle East prior to these unoriginal directions from Moses.

Aspects of Moses’ birth are likely to be a copy of King Sargon of Agade’s early years as well. Like Moses, Sargon was also said to have been placed into a basket on a river as a baby. The important difference is that Sargon’s story was purported a thousand years prior to the same affair Moses allegedly endured as a child (Exodus 2). Is it possible that the original tellers of the story could have based the legend of Moses on this historical figure? Minor details like these add up to further challenge the legitimacy of Moses’ existence, and we should not honestly dismiss such parallels as mere coincidences.



Implications Of A Fabricated History

If no “Moses” or any other individual from the contemporaneous era wrote anything in the Pentateuch, how do we really know that God carried out and ordered all the monstrous deeds preserved in those books? We can’t be certain of the records for two simple reasons: the stories are utterly ridiculous, and we can scarcely consider hundredth-hand accounts to be reliable. That’s why we must analyze the veracity of even the simplest of claims made in the books of Moses to render a verdict on their proper place in history.

The truth is that Moses couldn’t have realistically written the books, and we have no reason to believe that he was an actual historical figure. Because the majority of the Old Testament was critically inaccurate in its detail, we cannot conclude that the events contained within are factual and accurate without further evidence. Since the required evidence is completely absent, we should only conclude that the books from Genesis to Job are mythological or greatly exaggerated legends.

The balance of the Old Testament is nothing but songs and prophecies of a god no longer in contact with anyone but a handful of prophets who, as we will see in A Different Future, also display a total lack of credibility. By the time the Israelites had a compiled history of their origins, no one ever claims that God had such liberal verbal and visual contact with anyone. All of a sudden, God seemingly ceases to exist from the observable world, a world in which no supernatural events take place. No known Hebrew authors make extraordinary claims in the multi-century span between the documentation of these events and the beginning of the Common Era. In fact, the Israelites existed pretty much as we do now: living normal lives and never recording any verifiably miraculous acts.



How It Came To Be

One man under the divine inspiration of God didn’t write the Pentateuch; it was the product of several different perspectives of a common legacy passed down by fallible oral tradition for hundreds of years. When we analyze the texts, we clearly observe the Pentateuch as a convolution of several works from different authors with interpolated segues to signal subject transitions. Considering these observations, we cannot possibly anticipate the Pentateuch to be 100% accurate in its detail.

Following the Assyrian invasion and Babylonian Exile, conditions were certainly indicative of a rising necessity for a cohesive religious society. Perhaps these tales arose from the necessity to instill fear into the hearts of Israel’s stronger enemies. Consequently, it would be very likely that these bits of propaganda were intended to be nothing more than methods of keeping superstitious enemies at bay so that such forces wouldn’t overrun the demonstrably inferior and ill-equipped Israelites.

Exaggerated oral traditions and urban legends during this highly superstitious era no doubt played a large role in forming the first draft of the Old Testament. The seemingly countless number of horrible acts carried out by God, recorded in the Old Testament, and discussed in the previous three chapters of this book weren’t the result of angry divine interactions. Instead, these tales of unfathomably enormous armies and insanely angry deities were undoubtedly the product of a vivid human imagination. Thus, we cannot reasonably attribute the earliest writings of the Bible to an omniscient deity, much less the “wonderful” and “loving” Christian god. In short, the historical account left by the Hebrews is a problematic report filled with wild, unsubstantiated, ridiculous, and extraordinary claims without a shred of evidence to back it up.

Let me still repeat the bible is the work of men trying to understand nature and the way things are, they coin things up and claim that a god told them to do so, when seeking revenge, an excuse to fight their enemies or when ever they want to steal or take away things that do not belong to them they invoke god, they come up with the god idea to commit evil and run away with it. Since God commits scores of violent acts randomly throughout the Old Testament, let’s look at a few examples. After delivering the Amorites into the hands of Joshua, he sends down a hailstorm in order to kill a large portion of the people who flee from battle (Joshua 10:8-11). God assists in the war between Barak and Sisera by surrounding Sisera’s army and forcing them to dismount from their chariots. Because of his intervention, Sisera’s entire army faces imminent death at the hands of Barak (Judges 4:14-15). God causes the Midianites to kill one another (Judges 7:22-23). He confuses the Philistines and causes them to kill one another (1 Samuel 14:20-23). He inflicts a number of people with blindness because Elisha asks him to do so (2 Kings 6:18). He causes a seven-year famine without specifying a reason (2 Kings 8:1). God kills Jeroboam because he’s the leader of the enemies (2 Chronicles 13:20). He kills Nabal without specifying a reason, but it’s probably because David desires his wife and other belongings (1 Samuel 25:38). God sends an angel to kill 185,000 men in an Assyrian camp because they’re enemies of his people (2 Kings 19:31-35). He plagues Azariah, a man labeled as a good King, with leprosy for the remainder of his life because he allows people to burn incense in a location displeasing to God (2 Kings 15:1-5). This is another great example of an overbearing punishment for breaking an asinine law. Some of our fellow humans were obviously destined to meet death early in life without any chance of redemption in God’s eyes.

      Counting just the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the Red Sea incident, the ark gazers, the plagues, the census, and the battles in which God directly participated, I estimate that this terrible creature claims to have murdered one to two million people. Regrettably, we still haven’t discussed any of the instances in which God orders his people to kill others or when he “delivers armies” into the hands of the Israelites to be annihilated in battle. By this point in our discussion, God has already joined the elite company of Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Zedong as the largest mass murderers in history.

When God wished certain people dead thousands of years ago, he was never confined to his own omnipotent powers. You might even agree that God was at his worst when he recruited others to assist with the scores of slaughters in the Old Testament. As initially difficult as it might be to accept, God often provided his followers with orders leading to outcomes even more horrific than before. This section will discuss the specific commands given by God and the consistently tragic results that follow. Try to keep everything in perspective. These aren’t numbers; they’re human beings.

      Recall the setting of God dishing out a plague over the golden calf worship. Immediately prior to the plague inflicted upon his people, God had ordered Moses and his loyal followers to “slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour.” Three thousand men died at the hands of their peers in addition to those killed by the second punishment (Exodus 32:26-28).

      Later on, a group of followers from Moses’ camp observes a man gathering sticks on the Sabbath. Since such a despicable act was illegal in those days, they escort him back to Moses and inquire how they should handle the incident. Moses answers them by declaring that God is proclaiming, “the man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones.” Following what they gullibly assume are God’s commands, Moses’ cult members take him outside the camp and stone him to death for picking up sticks on a day that he wasn’t permitted to do any work (Numbers 15:32-36). As you will soon realize, God encourages the Israelites to beat their slaves and rape women captured in warfare; picking up sticks on the Sabbath, however, will anger him enough to warrant a death sentence. Astounding!

      God advises Moses on a number of matters related to his appointed leadership. He is to cast any menstruating or leprous person out of the camp because God doesn’t want to be around those “dirty” people when he descends for a visit (Numbers 5:1-3). In other words, God wants no association with those who are more likely to need assistance, medical or otherwise. God also orders Moses to drive out the inhabitants of Canaan before destroying their possessions (Numbers 33:50-52). However, he should offer the people of distant cities a chance to become his slaves before killing them. If they refuse, the Israelites have the duty to kill the men and take the remaining people as plunder for themselves. In the cities that God delivers as inheritances, Moses should “save alive nothing that breatheth” because the helpless victims were taught to worship other gods (Deuteronomy 20:13-18).

      In two subsequent pillages, God delivers Sihon, King of Heshbon, into the hands of Moses at the battle of Jahaz. The Israelites murder him; conquer all of his cities; and murder every man, woman, and child residing within those cities per God’s instructions (Deuteronomy 2:32-35). Likewise, God delivers Og, King of Bashan, into the hands of Moses at the battle of Edrei. The Israelites faithfully obey their orders by murdering all the inhabitants so that they could acquire the land (Deuteronomy 3:1-4). This noble god orders Moses to kill anything that moves, and as the incredible list of wars in the Old Testament takes place, God’s followers would continue to do exactly as their unimaginably harsh leader commands them.

      When Joshua informs the Israelites of God’s decision to deliver the city of Jericho over to them, they topple its walls and kill every living thing in the city, except for a single harlot on espionage missions, before burning it to the ground (Joshua 6:16-24). Afterwards, God orders Joshua to infiltrate the city of Ai because he’s delivered it in likewise fashion. The Israelites also set Ai on fire and kill the 12,000 inhabitants running for their lives. The King of Ai is taken prisoner and later hanged (Joshua 8:19-29). Following the victories at Jericho and Ai, God commands Joshua to go on an unbelievable killing spree. The Israelites subsequently murder all the men, women, and children in Makkedah, Libnah, Lachish (along with the King of Gezer and his armies assisting Lachish), Eglon, Hebron, and Debir. Not a single life was spared during these invasions (Joshua 10:28-40). is this a loving, merciful and just god that orders his men to carry out all these evil things? why do people believe and accept all the lurid evil activities in the bible? i would'nt like to associate my self with that kind of person talkless of that kind of god.

science remains the greatest enemy of the hebrew god and his foot soldiers the writers of  Matthew also believes that blindness is a result of the devil’s inhabitance (12:22). Again, you don’t need the unverifiable nature of this wild claim explained to you. Damage to the optic nerve or detachment of the retina usually causes blindness. No devils or demons have ever demonstrated their involvement in this impairment. the writer of Luke purports that a woman’s crippled nature is also due to possession by a devil (13:11). While there are multitudes of unfortunate factors that can cripple a person, spiritual possession has never proven to be one of them. Luke and Matthew commit an additional medical error when they claim that devils and spirits cause seizures (9:39 and 17:15, respectively). Suffice to say, devils, demons, evil spirits, or any other fiendish creatures have never been known to cause seizures. These violent neurological events are the result of some physiological abnormality, such as a brain tumor, or an imbalance in electrical activity. When radical epilepsy manifestations are observed, however, it’s certainly understandable how a person with limited knowledge of human physiology could leap to the erroneous and fantastic conclusion that a demon might have possessed the individual in question. The Hebrew god once again fails to distinguish himself from the countless other ancient gods because his writers weren’t the least bit scientifically believable

When God is preparing to go on another murdering spree, he tells the people of Israel to smear blood on their doors so that he’ll know which homes are occupied by his chosen people (Exodus 12:13) (and people still believe he is all knowing lol). With this directive completed, he’s free to kill all the Egyptian firstborn male children without accidentally harming an Israelite, but why does he need blood on the doors to serve as a reminder if he knows everything? Jonah, like Cain before him, was able to leave the presence of God (Jonah 1:3). According to Zephaniah, God will search through Jerusalem with candles(lamps) and find people who scoff at him (1:12). Why would God need candles(lamps) to see? who writes this stuff? God needing candles(lamps) an all knowing and all powerful God needing candles(lamps) the story reeks of myth to me. Judges 1:19 says that God was with the men of Judah in a battle, yet they couldn’t drive out the enemies because the other side was riding upon chariots of iron. If God is with someone, shouldn’t this person be able to do the miracles that every other God-accompanied individual performs? Honestly, did authors bother to proofread their work centuries ago?

davidylan:
Again permit me because i love to call a spade a spade. This is a most foolish argument.
1. In the first sentence you correctly say that what Daniel saw was a VISION not a reality.
2. It is 110% certain that Daniel did not take his vision LITERARILY to mean a goat would be large enough to knock stars to the ground. Verse 15 And it came to pass, when I, even I Daniel, had seen the vision, and sought for the meaning, then, behold, there stood before me as the appearance of a man.

- In essence, Daniel knew what he saw was simply a symbol and not a scientific reality.

If you bothered to read the interpretation of that dream, the goat symbolises a King, the horns other Kings who grew out of the first kingdom, the stars symbolise people, nations, kingdoms.

It is more than evident that the person who has a serious problem here is not Daniel but you. It is simply a problem of hypocrisy, selective readiing and blatant lying.
Daniel wasnt talking of the physical stars and Sun, you're the one forcing it into the narrative to bring out a very stupid point. Shame on you . . . even if you disagree with the bible, try not to lie.

This is why i love christains they always have a way of explaining away things the way they see fit(thats the reason why there are over 30,000 sects of the religion each fightng against each other while using and reading the same ambigious bible) if they can't then they tell us that god behaves in a mysterious way, science and history still remains your worst enemy even jesus has no knowledge about the stars else why will he make this assertion in Mark 13:25(stars can not and will never fall from the sky). you said shame on me right the shame is on you for believeing stupid and meaningless fable written by 1st century men that have no knowledge of what is going on let me give you Another embarrassing tale of biblical nonsense is the construction of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. According to the bogus legend, everyone on earth spoke the same language when the erection of the tower began. Because the people of earth had a great desire to catch a glimpse of God, they built this supposed tower intending to breach the sky. As God didn’t like the possibility of people spotting him, he confused their languages to prevent the architects from understanding one another. Unable to continue construction, everyone with different languages went separate ways.

      This story is unfeasible for many reasons. The first problem with the incredulous account is the incongruency of the common language theme. We know that many different languages existed centuries before the story’s setting around 2500-2000 BCE(China and india were pretty much in exsistance at that time just to mention a few civilazations that were already existing). Not only that, but another Pentateuch author had said Noah’s sons separated according to their own tongues in the previous chapter (Genesis 10). At the very least, we have a major timeline discrepancy in need of an acceptable resolution. Furthermore, the notion that nineteenth century man had the architectural knowledge to build a tower even a mile high is ridiculous. To fathom that a group of ignorant ancient Hebrews could make an equivalent accomplishment is ludicrous.

      Interestingly, no divine inspiration is available as a possible excuse for the illogical story because God wasn’t siding with his people on this occasion! If he didn’t wish for the people to see him, he wouldn’t have provided the means for them to do so. Of course, the most obvious blunder is God’s supposed fear of us actually reaching him in the sky. To suggest that an omniscient god would destroy a building because he felt he was in danger of humans catching a glimpse of him is an equally ludicrous proposal. The aspects of this story once again go back to the ancient Hebrew belief that God eternally resided on top of a dome covering the earth. Since an omniscient deity would know that the people could not possibly reach him, he would not have stopped the tower’s construction for the specific reason provided by the Bible. The story cries of a myth.

davidylan:
permit me but your question is very foolish. Your response to justcool's clear explanation is even worse.
If Christ had come to China, you'D ask why He wasnt sent to Africa. If Christ came to Ghana, you'D ask why He wasnt sent to the Jews. In essence, with the stupid . . . God can never win. Would it have made more sense if Christ had divided Himself into billions and sent Himself to every tribe at once?

Ok lets look at another scenario . . . millions of Nigerians living in Nigeria will NEVER see their Yar Adua face to face . . . does that mean he is president only to those who can see and talk to him?

Read justcool's post again, it made tons of sense (even just the first 5 sentences was enough) . . . read it without a closed mind which is simply waiting to entrench your flawed position.

you are just grasping at staws in trying to make a nonsense argumet sound reasonable, for god so loved the world it says, i am using the characteritics of your so called god to explain the senario, your god claims he is almighty and all powe full and can do all things why then did he have to send himself to the middle east? if he is that all powerful and all knowing he will send himself to the whole world at once which i believe an all powerful being should be able to do. sending himself to the middle east is nothing but a man made creation. i repeat the god of the bible is the way the jews/christains use to understand things and explain away things they just dont understand. here is another example

in Genesis, Jacob successfully alters the color patterns on lambs and goats so that he could differentiate the stronger ones from the weaker ones. He purportedly accomplished this feat by placing peeled tree branches in front of the mating livestock (Genesis 30:37-39). Following his absurd achievement, an angel of God visits him in a dream and praises him for his work in genetics (Genesis 31:11-12). As someone with a thorough background in human physiology, I hold the opinion that this is easily the single most embarrassing error contained between the Bible’s covers. Peeled branches have absolutely no effect on an organism’s appearance; DNA does. As an extremely quick summary of the topic, the general rule is that half of an offspring’s DNA comes from each parent with the more dominant type being physically expressed. The specific genes in the DNA sequence are the determining factor for the animals’ colors. Of course, such advanced understanding was way beyond the scope of the ancient Hebrew. Divine inspiration obviously doesn’t resonate from this passage either.

The story of Moses relaying God’s commands to the people also drops the ball when you consider which animals the almighty deemed unclean. He says hares are not clean enough to eat because they chew their cud (Leviticus 11:6 and Deuteronomy 14:7). I’m not sure where he gets this impression because it’s the exact opposite of reality. The obvious solution to this problem is that no all-knowing deity told Moses anything of the sort.

justcool:
@mazaje
The answer to your question is very simple.
I will give you an analogy. If America sends a professor to Nigeria to teach Nigerians rocket science. The professor will have to go to a top Nigerian university, where their are people knowledgeable enough to understand him. There he will stay and teach; and prepare the Nigerian students for a carrier in rocket science. These graduates of rocket science will the disperse to other Nigerian universities and spread their knowledge.
America cannot divide their professor into thousands in-order to send them to every school in Nigeria; Neither will America send thousands of their professors to Nigeria. This is definitely not an effective way because it will depreciate Americas number of professors, and besides Nigeria may not be able to provide for all the professors in America. Therefore the only right thing for America to do is to send one. Why send millions when one can do the job?
The primary and secondary school students in Nigeria will have to wait till they are mature enough to enter university and learn this rocket science.
In this case, eventhough America did not send a professor to each school in Nigeria, the fact remains that America sent a professor to Nigeria. All the newspaper headlines will read: "America sends a professor to Nigeria." This is called generalization; it is a figure of speech.

This is a coarse analogy though.

Now apply this analogy to the mission of Jesus.
Jesus alone was sufficient to fulfill His mission. And the only right place for Him to be born is among the Jews who were the most spiritually developed at that time. Hence the Jews stood a better ground to understand Jesus, because the Jews had for a long time prior to the birth of Jesus, sought God. The Jews were the only people mature enough to understand Jesus, because the Jews were already familiar with the WILL OF GOD which Jesus came to explain to the world, i.e, the Jews already had the ten commandments. An understanding of the ten commandments is like a prerequisite for a better understanding of the message of Jesus. Because the ten commandments and the message of Jesus issued from the same source--GOD. One can also say that the message of Jesus is an enlightenment of the ten commandments because Jesus threw more light in the understanding of the ten commandments.

Out of the Jews, Jesus chose a few that He instructed particularly and permitted them to spread the knowledge to the rest of the world. As the rest of the world matured spiritually, God allowed the message to reach them. Just as one has to mature in school(Pass from secondary school) before he/she could be taught calculus.

Also among the Jew at that time were the only people who's priority was to do the will of God. The only one God, WHOM they call JEHOVAH. Majority of the rest of the world still worshiped elemental forces like Jupiter, Venus and etc. It will be impossible for them to understand the message of Jesus which was based on the knowledge of the only one and True God. If Jesus had gone to other parts of the world and spoke of the divinity only one God instead the worship of many gods, the people will kill Him the same day that He opened His mouth just as they did to many prophets.

Among the Jews, He was able teach His Message for three years before they killed Him.


Besides middle east is a part of the world. Therefore somebody who goes from Heaven to the middle east, goes to the world(generally speaking). Sometimes when I am travelling back to Nigeria, I simply tell my friends here that I am travelling back to Africa. This is correct, eventhough I am not travelling to every part of Africa.

Therefore whichever way you look at it, it is right to say that God sent His son to the world, since the middle east is a part of the world.

i don't even know how to respond to all the make belief analogy you just posted here. are you for real? what do you mean by the jews being the only people that know god and have the ten commandments? it says that for god so love the world that he gave his only begotten son, i will rephrase it and say for the god of the jews/christains so loved the jews/christains that they believed he sent his son jesus to the middle east not to the entire world.

you said jews were the only people familiar with the will of god which jesus came to teach, lol i thought the same muderous, vindictive, blood loving and slavery espousing god in the old testament is the same jesus that came into the world, by the way what are you saying here? the biblical god is just the way the jews/christains use to understand and explain away things that they really have no or little understanding about. while allah is what the arabs use to understand the world and explain things they have little or no knowledge about. as you stated in your post zues, bangal, ahproditee etc were all gods that people used to express them selves and explain away what they have little or no knowledge of, let me give you and example from the bible so that you can understand better what i am saying.

Daniel speaks of a vision he recieved from god concerning a giant goat’s horn knocking the stars from the sky down to the ground where the goat “stamped upon them”(stars) (Daniel 8:8-9). Passing comment on the vision, we can also be decidedly certain that Daniel believed stars were tiny lights hanging above the earth.(science has explained and proved that daniel's position and assertion are false) Otherwise, how could his monstrous goat stamp upon them?(if you understand the study of the universe and stars you will know that a star is like a sun and the center of a whole solar system which is much more bigger than the earth) More importantly, how could someone divinely inspired write something so blatantly preposterous? In the New Testament, Matthew and Mark both record Jesus foretelling of an era when the stars shall “fall from heaven” (24:29 and 13:25, respectively, how can stars fall from heaven?). Jesus, a supposedly perfect human being who was supposedly the only son of a supposedly perfect god, wasn’t immune to scientific ignorance either.

For god so loved the world that he sent/gave his son to the middle east?(is the middle east the whole world? ) why didnt he send him to china, indai, the americas or africa?

Bastage:
There is a big difference between reading the Bible as the Word of God and taking everything within it's pages literally.

One has to realise that there are many, many things that cannot be taken literally and that these things need examining. For example, it is a book of politics and a book of history and one must always take those things in context.

I give you an example: In Leviticus, God forbids the eating of many food-stuffs. The vast majority of these are things that are poisonous when left unrefridgerated - ie: Pork, shellfish, etc. For the early Hebrews, who were a nomadic desert tribe, the last thing they needed on the eve of a battle was a dose of food poisoning so it made sense to steer well clear of them. As an army that needed to conquer territory and cities, it simply could not take the chance so it was therefore banned. This has transferred down the line and the Jews and the Muslims who live in warm climates still practice the ritual of not eating these foods. Evidentally, the fact that they now have fridges seems to have slipped their minds.

To those who take the Bible literally, they think that these foods are banned simply because God stated so. They don't look for a reasoning behind the rule and therefore are unable to accept that times change and mankind moves on. They don't question but follow blindly. They are stuck in the past and therefore they keep God stuck in the past. And unfortunately, this causes a hell of a lot of the problems we see in the world today.


Actually, it has more editions than any other book - from the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic it was originally written in, right down to the present day editions. Not only that, but it has been translated into more languages than any other book.

the keep god in the past abi? abi they now created a new god in their own image. . . . . . . . .

Pepeye:
@ kunle
It’s obvious from your post that you aren’t a Christian and are not yet a member of the body of Christ (church)

The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God Psalm 14-1
So understandably we are in two parallel worlds

All I can tell you is to accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour

Believer’s Loverworld; Building a happier world with Love

Much Love

Can you see the hypocrisy here? he raised very valid and legitimate questions, but instead of explaining and providing answers to his questions you decided to attack him personally? why did your pastor accept stolen funds? every sensible person i believe will return the stolen funds after it has become public knowledge but why did'nt your pastor return it? what happier world are you building with love? does nigeria seem like a happy place to you with all the things that are going on therein( most of your church ministarial activities takes place in nigeria)? so are now insinuating that any body that criticizes your pastor has not accepted jesus christ as his lord and saviour just listen to your self. wonders shall never end.

Tell us which pastors are good then. is the pope a good person or the head of the nigeria catholic church? what about the leader of the anglican church is he a good person too? is the leader of the white garment church a good person? what about the leader of the methodist church or the assmblies of god, deeper life, seven day adventist, mormons and all the uncountable denominations(religions) we have in nigeria? who is a true pastor/man of god? what the heck are you saying? are'nt they all the same? who amongst them is not corrupt? keep on deluding yourself. All religions were created out of the fear of the many and the cleverness of a few.

Rumours are going around that her last child with down syndrome is actually her daughters child, if that is true then all i can say is These self rightoeus christain(racist) rethugs. gaddam i dislike most of them.

whats up Chrisbenogor, you come up as a very interesting, astute and open minded individual who is extensively knowlegeble about religion(christainity and its various sects) Pls i will like you to read this book and tell me how feel about it( You might have come across it though) if you have'nt i highly recommend it because its an excellant read.


http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter5.html

whats up Chrisbenogor, you come up as a very interesting, astute and open minded individual who is extensively knowlegeble about religion(christainity and its various sects) Pls i will like you to read this book and tell me how feel about it( You might have come across it though) if you have'nt i highly recommend it because its an excellant read.


http://www.biblicalnonsense.com/chapter5.html

Action no dey that kind church so why people no go run?

all religions have been business since their inception.