"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
God Is Laughing at You
When writing my last article 'The Gods Must Be Crazy,' I knew I would come under attack for daring to assault the sacred cow of religion, but I never could have imagined what proof people would present as evidence to my being wrong. Most of the responses were quite affable, which I found very surprising. The only explanation to this that I could conceive is, Anarchist-Theists are a hell of a lot more rational and pleasant than are Statist-Theists.
What I did find amusing, however, was the type of proof most people were sending me to back up their argument. It was almost all from the Bible. I received quote after quote, and passage after passage stating where 'god' said this, and 'Jesus' said that. It never occurred to me that people would not make the connection that, if I did not believe in 'god,' then it would stand to reason that I also did not believe in the 'Bible.' I thought this to be common sense!
To most of these people I posed the question, 'Do you believe the Bible is 100% accurate?' To which an overwhelming majority retorted with 'Yes, I do!' This for me is where belief in the Bible goes from faith to lunacy. There are so many contradictions and falsities in the Bible that, for someone to accept 100% of it as fact is a psychosis. Don't think, don't question, just believe!
I thought maybe we should look at some of these beliefs and see just how factual they were. My favorite absurdity in the Bible has to be Noah's Ark. We are supposed to believe that Noah, a man of very simple means, built an Ark large enough to house all of the species on the planet. Of course, this would have to be doubled because he would need the male and female of each species. I decided to do a little research to find out just how many this would be, and this is what I discovered.
By best estimates, there are between 10 million and 50 million different species on Earth. That would mean Noah would have had to build an ark large enough to house between 20 million and 100 million species. Now I will admit that I am by no means a rocket scientist, but logic would tell me that this would be impossible, even by 'god' standards. Don't think, don't question, just believe!
Now this in itself should be enough to disprove this nonsense, but when you factor in many of the other considerations, it really ends up in the twilight zone. How did Noah manage to gather all of the species, from all over the world? Where did he get all of the food; they didn't all eat the same things? What about the different climates that would be needed for different species? Can polar bears, which require a cold climate, coexist with elephants, which require a warm climate? What about all the waste that would have been produced? Why didn't the carnivores eat the herbivores? What happened when some of them became sick? After nearly a year at sea, how did he manage to put them all back in their respective places? Don't think, don't question, just believe!
As foolish as all of this is, there is also no evidence any of this ever happened. Just as with Moses spending 40 years in the desert with three million Jews, there is not one shred of evidence to support this. If millions of people had been in the desert for that many years, would there not have been some archaeological evidence to support this? Don't think, don't question, just believe!
I like to think that I am a rational, logical person. I cannot accept things on faith alone, I need evidence as well. So before you get your Bibles out and start typing an e-mail explaining where 'god' explains all of this, please remember, I do not believe in the Bible.
There is no question that government and religion have a lot in common. Both of them require two things to work: faith and gullibility. Although some may buy the guise, my mind is not for rent, to any god or government. As for the rest of you, don't think, don't question, just believe!