LESSONS OF ZENITH #002

The youth of my daughter reminds me of my own mortality.  I add the years, like most parents I guess, to her 21st when I will be 57.  My oldest daughter, Piper, has her 13th birthday this year and it looks like I won't be part of it which brings another bunch of unwanted feelings into my life.  The fact that Zen has so many years ahead of her and I'm in at the point of my life when what I am currently doing will probably be what I will do for the rest of my life doesn't make me sad in any way at all.  I would have liked to have been one of the rich or famous, I would have liked to have been a better person than who I am but doesn't everybody?  In the end it doesn't matter what I do or have done it's weather I am happy and those around me have felt the same.  In the case of my eldest daughter there is not much I can do about how she lives her life, it's a case of whether she decides, when she is old enough, that her old man is worthy of her attention.  For my youngest, Zen, it's a case of making sure she gets the best out of life I can give her and my own philosophy in life has a lot to do with both.

  With that in mind, putting Santa and the Tooth Fairy aside, what happens when other kid start to ask

questions of my daughter about whether she believes in god?  I was raised without religion and for the longest time I followed my Grandfathers religion which was Baha'i.  My mother, as far as I'm concerned, has turned as atheist as I am and will not teach my daughter anything as fictional as god.  Come to think of it, my mother has never taught me anything about a god of any kind, it was left up to me to decide what it was I to believe or not believe.  I wasn't circumcised and I would like to think it's because there was no reasonable reason that I should be so good on you Mum.  I may be a complete man when it comes to the whole foreskin debacle, but what is it about my upbringing that got me to believe what I believe now?  Noting.  I can't make it any more clear that that if I tried.  My mother told me noting about religion that I didn't ask about nor the after life or spiritualism or what ever you want.  I'm sure she had some opinions on the subject but they were her opinions and hers alone.  My grandmother, also, never let her personal opinions get in the way of my life's education and I can take a leaf out of both books when it comes to educating Zen.

Some of what I am talking to you about today I have never even thought about until now.  I guess I have been lucky enough to be brought up in a family where your personal belief doesn't change the fact you are part of the family and nobody will take the piss.  Not only should this be part of my philosophy towards my daughter but to all those I come in contact with.  I want to be open and accepting of anything she wants to be part of, but am I going to be bias?  Of course I am.  At least I am in my own mind.  I'm not going to have a good time at all if Zen decides that Christianity, or any other religion for that matter, is her life's path as that will tell me I didn't teach her to be a critical thinker.  I know I'm not the only one to think that religion is the basis for all that is wrong with this world.

It is her life.  It does bring up another question, if she does turn to religion, was I not a good father?  These fears have no ground as yet and I dare not tempt them but on the same token, I can't stop her from becoming a believer.  If she does then her and I have lost nothing.  She may loose some time, time that was occupied by preying and not living life.  But it doesn't actually hurt her.

Or does it?

I can teach her all critical thinking I can but there is that period of any teenagers time of life when nothing an adult says can be taken as truth and where hormones will make her vulnerable to peer pressure.  There are times when she friends will try to introduce the supernatural side of life and she may be quite taken with it but once the questions start to be asked I think those small experimentation in life - like Wicca, will ware off and she will become a more critical thinker who will make me proud.  No doubt I will also be on the other end of her critical thinking and I hope she can teach me a few things.

  Only time will tell.

NOAH AND HIS ARK - PART 1

When I started this blog I figured I would have to read the bible again and I knew if I took it slowly and stopped to think about each verse as it came I would run into some problems.  I understand a lot about the bible as a whole so I had to put my holistic, albeit apologetic, understanding of said book to one side and take each chapter and verse as it comes.  As I started reading, the need for a rant came quickly...

  In Genesis chapters 6 to 9 we read a story about a man named Noah who made an ark because god told him to.  God said that he was, in essence, sick of the human race and all it's evilness so he was going to send a flood to wipe the humans and every other living thing of the face of the earth (paraphrase) except for Noah, his family and two of every kind of animal.  This may be one of the most argued stories of the bible, not only by believers and non believers but by one kind of a Christian and another.  This is the story I want to have a rant about.  

After reading these verses I kind of felt guilty of skim reading so I went back and started to read it again after which I realised I wasn't skim reading it's just written like that.  The complete lack of detail is stunning!  I guess I shouldn't really be surprised because up to that point the rest of Genesis is just as lacking which leaves it all up to liberal amounts of interpretation.  Interpretation is obviously one of the reasons for the myriad sects in Christianity but it begs the question; is the fear of no after-life driving us to ignore the absurdity of this tale?  I think it's a big part of it, for sure. 

If one employs critical thinking whilst trying to follow this biblical drivel it's impossible to read more than a verse without popping a neuron.  To accept the story of Noah and his ark as true one needs to suspend ones disbelief but to use it for one of the best pieces of evidence for the existence of god needs a special kind of denial.  The story is so full of holes it just doesn't float.  I mentioned before that the story itself is lacking in it's description of what actually happened so we don't have much to go on but it doesn't seem to stop people from coming up with wacky ideas about how it really happened.  Hypothesis is the generous word for that kind of behavior, otherwise known as apologetics. 

  So why, given the lack of any basis of fact, are millions of people prepared to believe it to be true?  In short, it's in the bible so it must be true.  If it wasn't true then that could bring other stories of the bible into question and before long the entire book starts to unravel before the believers eyes forcing them to ask the ultimate question... is there really a god?  In the end the head in the sand option wins out.

Lets start by looking at the obvious question; if god made the heavens, the earth, the animals and Adam and Eve how hard would it have been to make people that wouldn't go all evil and murderous enough to make god decide to clean the slate and start again?  What we have to remember is god made man is his image so what does that say about god?  A short tempered, over reactive, genocidal and jealous deity who doesn't seem to be able to create decent humans.  This is of course subjective but logical.
  God has no control over his creations.  The free will card can be played now if you like but that is a retrospective look at this story after reading the rest of the bible; at this point god has not bestowed free will upon the human race.  God has not given any ground rules or punishments or anything, the people are just doing what they do and god is to be blamed for being a bad parent.  There is no right or wrong, no good or bad and god hasn't demanded anything of man and when man dies, he dies.  He doesn't go to heaven and he doesn't go to hell; he just dies as that is gods punishment for eating the fruit of the forbidden tree.  It is what it is but he turns around and gets pissed because in his eyes they are acting like little shits.
  God is supposed to be in control but this just shows him to be an out of control spoiled brat and decides that he will kill not just mankind but every living thing the walks, swims or flies.  I think I would rather die than have to worship such a dick of a god just to live.

The plan is for Noah to build the ark while god gathers all the animals and they would all float off into the sunset together, so lets look at the plans... wait, there are none.  We have to trust that God gave Noah a little more to go on than 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits high.  He is to make it with a roof (duh!) which has an opening underneath of 1 cubit (presumably to let the air circulate so the whole ship doesn't smell like crap).  It had lower, middle and upper decks with 1 cubit windows and a door in the middle.  To investigate the claim of Noah's ark made in the bible we have to assume no supernatural interference in the making otherwise it just falls to special pleading and reality takes a back seat.  My first question is:

What is a cubit?
  A cubit is, obviously, a measurement of length which probably died out with the dinosaurs as I don't think it is used for anything outside of hedging these days.  It was the average length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, around 46 cm or about 18 inches, which means the actual measurement could vary wildly.  Even with just a 1 cm difference on either side the ark could be anything from 135 m (443 ft) to 141 m (462 ft).  We'll work on the 46 cm basis from here.

It's hard to conceptualize the size of the ark so lets look at some comparisons.  Take your average sized high school football field and add another 120 feet and you start to get the idea.  Massive, right?  Absolutely.  It's a huge boat, enormous!
But is it big enough?  Is the size of this monolithic structure going to fit all the different "kinds" of animals in the world?  That question is actually way down on the list and we will get to that soon but first lets find out if building such a massive ship is possible.  God says it is to be made of cypress wood in the NIV (new international version) but the King James calls it gopher wood but we don't really know what that is and cypress is the closest guess so we'll go with that translation, either way it's a shit load of wood that's needed.  Lets look at that:

How much wood was needed?
In short it's around 40,500 square feet of wood.  There are not many places to get this information so it is an approximation only.  This is the basic math from ANSWERBAG "According to the Bible, each side of Noah's Ark was 300 cubits long and 30 cubits high. The square cubits of one side would be 9,000 cubits. Multiplied by two sides, Noah's Ark would take more than 1,800 square cubits, or 3,762 square meters, or 40,500 square feet of wood."  I have no reason to dispute this calculation.
  It took more than 6000 trees to make the HMS Victory, which was 69 m long, it would have taken more than 12000 tress to be cut down and prepped for the making of Noah's ark.  Where on earth did all those trees come from?  I can't tell you where the ark was made nor can I tell you how lush or arid that area was back then but 12000 trees (aprx) is a shit load for a small family to find, cut and process and that brings up the next question - did Noah have more than just his family to help him build the ark?  We'll explore that in part 2 of this series exploring Noah and his ark.

I write this blog because it is a passion of mine to explore the myth of god and along the way even I learn some cool stuff but it takes a lot of time and energy to write this blog.  If you enjoy reading this blog please make a donation by clicking the DONATE button on the right so I can put more time into creating a better blog.

Thank you all

Justin 

GENESIS 9

The ark came to rest, Noah and his family along with every kind of animal walked out of the ark. Noah had a BBQ for god... we read on:

GENESIS 9

GOD'S COVENANT WITH NOAH

1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth.

2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands.

3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.

And man becomes omnivorous .. one would also expect that Noah and his family grew incisors and canines, not to mention a completely reformed digestive system, over night. I'll tell you one thing for free, if they started eating meat they would have single handedly brought extinction to many "kinds" of animals.

4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.

5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.

6 “Whoever sheds human blood,

by humans shall their blood be shed;

for in the image of God

has God made mankind.

7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”

Not eating meat with it's lifeblood still in it is something that I don't think we need to be told to be honest. The next little bit is also a no brainer... if you get killed those shall be killed, if you kill, you shall be killed. If those rules are followed, mate and be happy.

8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him:

9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you

10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth.

11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”

"But I will send the occasional volcanic eruption, tsunami, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, famine and disease."

12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come:

13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth.

14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds,

15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life.

16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”

So, basically god has established a covenant between him and all life; it took nine verses to say that. A rainbow is his reminder because, as we have seen in past chapters, god is so very forgetful.

THE SONS OF NOAH

18 The sons of Noah who came out of the ark were Shem, Ham and Japheth. (Ham was the father of Canaan.)

19 These were the three sons of Noah, and from them came the people who were scattered over the whole earth.

20 Noah, a man of the soil, proceeded to plant a vineyard.

21 When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent.

22 Ham, the father of Canaan, saw his father naked and told his two brothers outside.

23 But Shem and Japheth took a garment and laid it across their shoulders; then they walked in backward and covered their father’s naked body. Their faces were turned the other way so that they would not see their father naked.

Ironic really, no problem with incest but when it comes to looking at their naked Father they shy away.

24 When Noah awoke from his wine and found out what his youngest son had done to him,
25 he said,
“Cursed be Canaan!
The lowest of slaves
will he be to his brothers.”
26 He also said,
“Praise be to the Lord, the God of Shem!
May Canaan be the slave of Shem.
27 May God extend Japheth’s territory;
may Japheth live in the tents of Shem,
and may Canaan be the slave of Japheth.”
28 After the flood Noah lived 350 years.
29 Noah lived a total of 950 years, and then he died.

Talk about taking things to the extreme - all he did was see him naked WTF?

Look out for my complete take down on Noah, the ark and the flood... coming soon!

I write this blog because it is a passion of mine to explore the myth of god and along the way even I learn some cool stuff but it takes a lot of time and energy to write this blog.  If you enjoy reading this blog please make a donation by clicking the DONATE button on the right so I can put more time into creating a better blog.

Thank you all

Justin 

GENESIS 8

The story so far...

God was pissed off with the human race being all evil, murdering, raping, leaving the milk on the kitchen bench and not really behaving themselves at all so he decided to wipe all living things off the face of the earth.  He picked Noah as the most righteous of all the men and told him what he planned to do and got him and his family to build an ark.  Noah then went about building the ark while waiting for all the animals which, miraculously, managed to make their way to where the ark was built and climb aboard along with Noah and his family.  The the door was shut and god send the flood.

GENESIS 8

1 But God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark, and he sent a wind over the earth, and the waters receded.

2 Now the springs of the deep and the floodgates of the heavens had been closed, and the rain had stopped falling from the sky.

3 The water receded steadily from the earth. At the end of the hundred and fifty days the water had gone down,

4 and on the seventeenth day of the seventh month the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat.

5 The waters continued to recede until the tenth month, and on the first day of the tenth month the tops of the mountains became visible.

To remember means you forgot in the first place; what the hell was god doing that was so important he forgot about his flood thing?   Yet one more reason to believe that this god is more than just a little stupid... although he can't be that stupid if he figured out where to put all that excess water after the flood.

6 After forty days Noah opened a window he had made in the ark

7 and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth.

8 Then he sent out a dove to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground.

9 But the dove could find nowhere to perch because there was water over all the surface of the earth; so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark.

10 He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark.

11 When the dove returned to him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth.

12 He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.

The raven was smart, if it found something or not it returned with nothing.  He knew where the food was.   The dove, on the other hand, came back with an olive leaf.  Noah thinks "now fend for himself and we no longer have to feed him" and off he was sent again.  The olive leaf must have been floating around somewhere as you wouldn't expect a tree to produce anything that quickly after being drowned for so long but the dove thought he was being smart. The raven is now laughing... and alive.  The dove starved to death because of his own pride... or something like that. Let's not forget that it takes two to breed; what the hell is the lady dove supposed to do now?   Is a dove a clean animal or an unclean animal?   It has to be a clean animal so there was seven of it's kind which is why there are still doves today.

13 By the first day of the first month of Noah’s six hundred and first year, the water had dried up from the earth. Noah then removed the covering from the ark and saw that the surface of the ground was dry.

14 By the twenty-seventh day of the second month the earth was completely dry.

15 Then God said to Noah,

16 “Come out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and their wives.

17 Bring out every kind of living creature that is with you—the birds, the animals, and all the creatures that move along the ground—so they can multiply on the earth and be fruitful and increase in number on it.”

Fair enough, all he needs to do is open the cage doors and let the animals make their own way out and hope they wont eat each other on the way.  Fortunately it only takes one pair to repopulate the world... wait, what?

18 So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives.

19 All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on land—came out of the ark, one kind after another.

20 Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it.

So let me get this right, god asked Noah to build an ark to save him and the animals because god wants to kill everything and start again.   Let's not talk about the fact that he created everything to start with and could easily do it again.   Now Noah, finding he was in fact saved from the floods, BBQ's some of the animals he was supposed to save to repopulate the earth in the name of god for god?????

21 The Lord smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done. 

God is too polite.  You know at this point he's thinking to himself that he saved the wrong guy.   Bastard! It took a lot to get the animals of the world to that ark!  If god had a wife she would be saying "he is our son dear" and god would be thinking "OK, I guess we can do without the unicorns and they do smell great when roasted..."

22 “As long as the earth endures,

seed time and harvest,

cold and heat,

summer and winter,

day and night

will never cease.”

How nice.

Look out for my complete take down on Noah, the ark and the flood... coming soon!

I write this blog because it is a passion of mine to explore the myth of god and along the way even I learn some cool stuff but it takes a lot of time and energy to write this blog.  If you enjoy reading this blog please make a donation by clicking the DONATE button on the right so I can put more time into creating a better blog.

Thank you all

Justin 

GENESIS 7

This next chapter is the continuation of the story of Noah and his ark and where one has to suspend ones disbelief to accept the story as true and maintain that this is one of the greatest pieces of evidence for the existence of god.  Lets see shall we?

GENESIS 71 The Lord then said to Noah, “Go into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation.

2 Take with you seven pairs of every kind of clean animal, a male and its mate, and one pair of every kind of unclean animal, a male and its mate,

3 and also seven pairs of every kind of bird, male and female, to keep their various kinds alive throughout the earth.

4 Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth for forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made.”

Because Noah didn't take part in all the debauchery, raping and murder, god found him to be righteous (read, religious) and therefore was privileged enough to be the one that captained the boat; I'm not sure that getting burdened with the massive job of getting a sample of every kind of animal in the world is a good thing! Being cooped up on a wooden ship full of animals for forty days and nights doesn't exactly sound like a holiday either but I guess it's better than drowning.

5 And Noah did all that the Lord commanded him.

6 Noah was six hundred years old when the floodwaters came on the earth.

7 And Noah and his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives entered the ark to escape the waters of the flood.

8 Pairs of clean and unclean animals, of birds and of all creatures that move along the ground,

9 male and female, came to Noah and entered the ark, as God had commanded Noah.

10 And after the seven days the floodwaters came on the earth.

OK, so Noah didn't have to go looking for the animals as they came to him which was lucky for Noah as he was getting rather old and he had just built an ark after all. It does beg the question, how did all those animals get there?

11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.

12 And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.

13 On that very day Noah and his sons, Shem, Ham and Japheth, together with his wife and the wives of his three sons, entered the ark.

14 They had with them every wild animal according to its kind, all livestock according to their kinds, every creature that moves along the ground according to its kind and every bird according to its kind, everything with wings.

15 Pairs of all creatures that have the breath of life in them came to Noah and entered the ark.

16 The animals going in were male and female of every living thing, as God had commanded Noah. Then the Lord shut him in.

Now we know where all the water came from at least, from the springs and the heavens. Here I was thinking there may not be enough water to flood the earth, clearly I was wrong. There is obviously enough water below the ground and in the clouds to kill everything on the face of the earth. He's got animals and birds on the ark, what about the fish? I guess the fish can swim and god would make them able to live in a completely different salinity.

17 For forty days the flood kept coming on the earth, and as the waters increased they lifted the ark high above the earth.

18 The waters rose and increased greatly on the earth, and the ark floated on the surface of the water.

19 They rose greatly on the earth, and all the high mountains under the entire heavens were covered.

20 The waters rose and covered the mountains to a depth of more than fifteen cubits.

21 Every living thing that moved on land perished—birds, livestock, wild animals, all the creatures that swarm over the earth, and all mankind.

22 Everything on dry land that had the breath of life in its nostrils died.

23 Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; people and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

24 The waters flooded the earth for a hundred and fifty days.

As there are far too many points to cover here I will dedicate a whole blog entry to the flood and all it's fallacious claims, so for now I'll just let this chapter sink in...

I write this blog because it is a passion of mine to explore the myth of god and along the way even I learn some cool stuff but it takes a lot of time and energy to write this blog. If you enjoy reading this blog please make a donation by clicking the DONATE button on the right so I can put more time into creating a better blog.

Thank you all

Justin