F Rosa Rubicondior

Sunday 16 December 2012

Rosa's Laws Of Religion.

Rosa's Laws of Theodynamics.

The Zeroth Law of Theodynamics

If two religions are both in equilibrium with a third religion, they will all claim to support freedom of speech and conscience.

First Law of Theodynamics

Gods can be created out of nothing and will disappear without trace.

Second Law of Theodynamics

In an open system, religions tend to disorder and form an ever-increasing number of sects.

Third Law of Theodynamics

Gods disappear completely when the number of believers in them reaches zero.

Rosa's Laws of Theological Relativity.

Saturday 15 December 2012

Inspiring Atheists - Visual Art

The things the godly say:
  • Inspiration comes from religion.
  • Without religion we would not have human culture, particularly the arts such as music and the visual arts.
  • Only God can inspire humans to create beauty and appreciation of it is a spiritual thing, implying a non-material world of pure, beautiful thought.

That's the religious propaganda, as the exponents of superstition lay claim to something else for which they have no entitlement. I have previously shown how some of the western world's top composers were Atheists and yet produced some of the great classics of Western music, often with religious themes.

Here I'll do the same with the visual arts, one of my great passions in life:

ArtistWork

Henri Matisse

(31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954)

Henri Matisse, 1913

I don't know whether I believe in God or not. I think, really, I'm some sort of Buddhist. But the essential thing is to put oneself in a frame of mind which is close to that of prayer.

"Henri Matisse"
Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture.

Woman with a Hat, 1905.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
The Dance (Second Version), 1910
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia
The Luxembourg Gardens, 1901
The Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

Pablo Picasso

(25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973)


Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.

Pablo Picasso
One of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.

Child With a Dove, 1901
National Gallery, London, UK
Boy With a Pipe, 1905
Private Collection
Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907),
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Guernica, 1937
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain

Vincent van Gogh

(30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890)

Self-portrait, 1889
Courtauld Institute Galleries, London.

When I have a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out and paint the stars.

Vincent van Gogh
Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died aged 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found).

A religious zealot in his younger days, working as a missionary amongst poor miners in Belgium, but he questioned and then lost his faith when disgusted by the perceived hypocrisy of his theologian uncle and tutor, Johannes Stricker. He turned instead to art.

The Church in Auvers, 1890
Musée d'Orsay, Paris
Pietà (after Delacroix), 1889
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Starry Night, Saint-Rémy, 1889
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Irises, 1889
J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California

Eugène Delacroix

(26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863)

Self Portrait, c.1837
Louvre Museum, Paris

French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school.

If one considered life as a simple loan, one would perhaps be less exacting. We possess actually nothing; everything goes through us.

Eugène Delacroix
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modelled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic.

Massacre at Chios, 1824
Louvre Museum, Paris
Greece on the Ruins of Missolonghi, 1826
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux
Liberty Leading the People,1830
Louvre Museum, Paris
Orphan Girl at the Cemetery, 1823
Louvre Museum, Paris

Claude Monet

(14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926)

Self Portrait, 1886
Private Collection

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her, I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Claude Monet
A founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant)



Water Lilies, 1906
Art Institute of Chicago
Poplars at the Epte, c.1900
National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, UK
Impression Soleil levant, 1872
Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris
Woman with a Parasol - Madame Monet and Her Son, 1875
National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA

Antony Gormley

(born 30 August 1950)


We are still bloody animals. We are still fixated on a Darwinian kind of drive pattern. We don't understand that the moment of enough was a long time ago already. It's really weird that with all our technology, with all our instruments, with all our intelligence, still we're really basic. Injustices continue as if we were just animals and our predatory nature and our territorial nature are stronger drives than the intellectual determinants or whatever the soul part of the human being is.

Antony Gormley
British sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998, Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and Event Horizon, a multi-part site installation which premiered in London in 2007, around Madison Square in New York City, in 2010 and in São Paulo, in 2012.

Another Place, 1997
Crosby Beach, Merseyside, UK
Angel of the North, 1998
Low Fell, Gatehead, Tyne and Wear, UK
Quantum Cloud, 1999
London, UK

Franz Marc

(February 8, 1880 – March 4, 1916)

Franz Mark, 1910; August Macke
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie,
Berlin, Germany

German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.

I understand well that you speak as easily of death as of something which doesn't frighten you. I feel precisely the same. In this war, you can try it out on yourself - an opportunity life seldom offers one...nothing is more calming than the prospect of the peace of death...the one thing common to all. It leads us back into normal "being". The space between birth and death is an exception, in which there is much to fear and suffer. The only true, constant, philosophical comfort is the awareness that this exceptional condition will pass and that "I-conciousness" which is always restless, always piquant, in all seriousness inaccessible, will again sink back into its wonderful peace before birth... whoever strives for purity and knowledge, to him death always comes as a savior.

Franz Marc, 1916
Following the lead of his family, Marc studied theology intensely. The family contemplated both the spiritual essence of Christianity and its cultural responsibilities. Marc was sufficiently moved by the background and his confirmation in 1894 that, for the next five years, his goal was to become a priest. But he mingled with his theological studies the Romantic literature of both England and Germany. Finally, near the end of 1898, Marc gave up his goal of becoming a priest to study philosophy at University of Munich. But suddenly, in 1900, the ethical, high-minded youth turned to art.

Der Blaue Reiter was founded in Munich in 1911 by Marc and Kandinsky after they resigned from the Neue Künstlervereinigung München due to their differences of opinion with other members of the association. Marc and Kandinsky shared similar ideas on art: both believed that true art should possess a spiritual dimension. Kandinsky's views are outlined in his text Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which first appeared in 1911. For Marc the spiritual aspect of art was perhaps more concerned with representing the inner soul of a being; Kandinsky represented the spiritual by abstract means. Both felt that much of the art of their day lacked any such dimension and thus hoped that Der Blaue Reiter would create a spiritual revolution in art. In addition to Marc and Kandinsky, other members of the group included Macke, Münter, von Jawlensky, the Austrian artist Alfred Kubin, and the Swiss artist Paul Klee. Their work was not united by a particular style but by common objectives in their artistic production.

After mobilization of the German Army during World War I, the government identified notable artists to be withdrawn from combat to protect them. Marc was on the list, but before orders for reassignment could reach him, he was struck in the head and killed instantly by a shell splinter during the Battle of Verdun in 1916.

Foxes, 1913,
Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf, Germany
The Fate of the Animals, 1913
Kunstmuseum, Basel, Germany
Deer in the Woods II, 1912
Horse in a Landscape, 1910
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany
The Enchanted Mill, 1913
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

There are, of course, very many more Atheist artists than this small sample. I will add more as time allows.





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Saturday 8 December 2012

Christmas! Which Christmas?

Which version of the nativity tale is your favourite?

Forget for a moment that the European midwinter festival which originally (and still does) celebrated the mid-winter solstice when the sun at midday is at its lowest and the day is the shortest; when the sun begins to return and holds out the promise of summer and the promise of the green shoots of spring and fresh food rather than the frugality of winter and the fear that the stores or food and fuel were not enough to see us through. A festival celebrating the great continuing natural cycle of birth, growth, maturity and death.

Forget all that and pretend, as Christians do, that the festival they plagiarised and claim for themselves is really about the birth of Jesus and celebrates a real birthday on 25th December. Which of the two different versions in the 'inerrant Bible' is the one being celebrated?

Two different versions? How can this be?

Surely everyone knows the traditional Christian Nativity. We see our children acting it out in practically every school in the country and it is depicted on myriads of Christmas cards, sheets of wrapping paper, adverts, displays in churches and shopping centres throughout the land.


The Official Story

Mary and Jesus have to travel to Bethlehem for a census but find no room in the inn, so they're put up in a stable. There Mary gives birth to Jesus and the family are visited by wise men from the east led by a star and bearing gold, frankincense and myrrh, and some shepherds who have been told about it by an angel. Then they have to travel to Egypt to escape being killed by evil King Herod who has ordered every child below the age of two to be killed. They stay in Egypt until Herod dies then they go home to Nazareth, where Jesus grows up.
The problem is, neither of the Bible accounts contain all those elements.

Let's do what Bart D. Ehrman recommends when reading the Bible. Instead of reading the 'gospels' of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and the writings of Paul and others in sequence as narratives, read them in parallel so you get a horizontal view of the 'history', rather than separate vertical ones.

Fortunately, only two of the 'Gospels' mention the origins of Jesus. Neither the author of Mark nor that of John saw fit to mention the virgin birth or Bethlehem and open with Jesus as an adult. Paul also ignores Jesus's birth as do the other New Testament writers, which is interesting in itself, but from our point of view it means we only have two accounts to compare.

First I'll go through the narratives then line up the summaries:

Matthew's Tale
VersesNotes
Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

When Herod the king had heard these things, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him. And when he had gathered all the chief priests and scribes of the people together, he demanded of them where Christ should be born. And they said unto him, In Bethlehem of Judaea: for thus it is written by the prophet, And thou Bethlehem, in the land of Juda, art not the least among the princes of Juda: for out of thee shall come a Governor, that shall rule my people Israel.

Then Herod, when he had privily called the wise men, enquired of them diligently what time the star appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem, and said, Go and search diligently for the young child; and when ye have found him, bring me word again, that I may come and worship him also.
Matthew 2:1-8
This all happens when Herod was King of Judea which Roman records show must have been before 4 BCE, when Herod is known to have died.

Who these 'wise men' are we are never told. The hint is that they were astrologers.

Note: they were not led to Herod by the star only saying that they had seen 'his' star in the east. It's not until they leave Herod that the star guides them to Bethlehem and stands over the house where Joseph and Mary seem to live with the child Jesus (as though a star can stand over a particular house!)

The 'prophesy' which 'Matthew' alludes to is "But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting." (Micah 5:2) which, in the context in which it appears in Micah, takes a stretch to make it fit but Matthew is keen make sure everyone knows that Jesus is the Jewish Messiah and so tries to make his story look like the fulfilment of ancient Jewish prophesies.
When they had heard the king, they departed; and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great joy. And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.

And being warned of God in a dream that they should not return to Herod, they departed into their own country another way.

Matthew 2:9-12
Here then is where the 'wise men' find Jesus as a 'young child' (not a baby!) and he is in a house. Nowhere does 'Matthew' say this happened soon after the birth of Jesus! There is nothing to suggest this is a 'nativity' story. We get another clue about this in a moment.

Strangely, the 'wise men' are warned not to return to Herod, though they appear not to have told Joseph and Mary the reason for this.
And when they were departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeareth to Joseph in a dream, saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and flee into Egypt, and be thou there until I bring thee word: for Herod will seek the young child to destroy him.

When he arose, he took the young child and his mother by night, and departed into Egypt: And was there until the death of Herod: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken of the Lord by the prophet, saying, Out of Egypt have I called my son.

Matthew 2:13-15
So Matthew gets Jesus into Egypt so another prophesy can be fulfiled. This time he delves into Hosea to find the one he wants: "When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt." (Hosea 11:1). An even bigger stretch than the Micah 'prophesy'. Talk about taking random Bible quotes out of context!

But the device Matthew uses to get Jesus into Egypt is even more far-fetched...
Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet, saying, In Rama was there a voice heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted, because they are not.

But when Herod was dead, behold, an angel of the Lord appeareth in a dream to Joseph in Egypt, Saying, Arise, and take the young child and his mother, and go into the land of Israel: for they are dead which sought the young child's life.

Matthew 2:16-20
So, Herod orders the destruction of all the children under two years old according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men. The wise men told Herod that the child had been born up to two years earlier! Clearly, Matthew is not describing the birth of Jesus but something he wants us to believe happened when Jesus was a young child, so that the ancient Jewish prophesies would be fulfilled. The reason he never mentions a baby is because his tale isn't about one; it's about fitting the hero of his tale into the pre-conceived mould of a prophesied Jewish Messiah.

Oh! And there's another 'prophesy' handily fulfilled, this time by Jeremiah: Thus saith the Lord; A voice was heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping; Rahel weeping for her children refused to be comforted for her children, because they were not. (Jeremiah 31:15)

Curiously though, none of the other apostles mention this mass slaughter and Luke claims John the Baptist was six months older than Jesus but sees no reason to explain how he escaped the slaughter. No other historian mentions it either, not even Christians' favourite Jewish historian, Josephus. It's almost as though it never happened so far as anyone except Matthew is concerned.

Let's not be too concerned about the likelihood of Herod believing the ancient prophesies given by Yahweh to the Jewish prophets, but deciding to give up the chance of eternal life and salvation and just try to get the earthly manifestation of Yahweh killed. Like so often with Matthew, you need to suspend rational thinking to believe him.

That just leaves the problem of getting Jesus into Nazareth, which is where he is supposed to have come from, when his birth was 'prophesied' to be in Bethlehem...
And he arose, and took the young child and his mother, and came into the land of Israel. But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.

Matthew 2:21-23
It's a shame the same message which told him Herod was dead didn't tell him about Archelaus but it all turned out well in the end.

The interesting thing here is that Joseph, Mary and Jesus are apparently going back to Bethlehem where they lived until fleeing to Egypt. They only decide to go to Nazareth, where Jesus is to grow up, when Judea turns out to be too dangerous.

Lastly, so desperate is Matthew to show that everything was prophesied that he appears to have found a prophesy here that none of the 'prophets' he alludes to saw fit to record anywhere. No where in the Old Testament is it recorded that any prophet ever said He shall be called a Nazarene. Maybe Matthew just assumed it must have been prophesied so thought he must have overlooked it, or, like so many modern Christian apologists, he relied on his readers taking his word for it and not actually checking.

Luke's Tale
VersesNotes
And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria.) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.

And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:) To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.

Luke 2:1-5
Here we need to believe the the entire Roman Empire was to do something totally unprecedented: every male was to take his family to the town or village one of his ancestors from 1000 years earlier had lived in. Imagine the disruption!

And how on earth could everyone do that? Do you know which town or village any of your ancestors lived in in 1012? Which ancestor of the trillion or so would you pick and how would the authorities know you had the right one? (For more on this see The Ancestor's Likely Tale).

But more to the point perhaps is why on earth would Caesar order such a thing? Why would the Romans want to know how many people were currently not in their home towns but in the home town of a remote ancestor from 1000 years earlier?

But of course, Luke needs to emphasise that Jesus, a Nazarene, was 'of the house of David' and was born in Bethlehem, because that's what the prophesies say. What else would compel a husband to take his heavily pregnant wife on such a journey if it wasn't the direct orders of the Emperor himself, and why else would the Emperor give such an order?

Well, there was a census of sorts in 6 CE, if the Judeo-Roman historian Josephus is to be believed, so what better device than a real event, even if it needed to be stretched beyond breaking point. 'Luke' was probably writing this stuff when no one would remember the actual census but might have heard of it.

At least 'Luke' gives us a clue to the date: Cyrenius was governor of Syria between 6 CE and 12 CE, so he is firmly setting the birth of Jesus between 6 and 12 CE.
And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.

And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. And it came to pass, as the angels were gone away from them into heaven, the shepherds said one to another, Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass, which the Lord hath made known unto us.

And they came with haste, and found Mary, and Joseph, and the babe lying in a manger. And when they had seen it, they made known abroad the saying which was told them concerning this child. And all they that heard it wondered at those things which were told them by the shepherds. But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart. And the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things that they had heard and seen, as it was told unto them.

Luke 2:6-20
Here then we have the full Inn, and the manger (no lowing cattle though and not explicitly in a stable for that matter!) about which Matthew is totally silent.

But, how to show that this was indeed the Messiah and how to explain how Luke knew about it? Cue angels, and shepherds who alone are selected to be given the great news and told that the sign would be a swaddled babe in a manger, which of course they duly find, so the world gets to know about it (or rather the author of Luke gets to know about it) because Mary, not being one to boast, is keeping mum.
And when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb.

And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord;) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtledoves, or two young pigeons.

And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ.

And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, Then took he him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.

And Joseph and his mother marvelled at those things which were spoken of him. And Simeon blessed them, and said unto Mary his mother, Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.

And there was one Anna, a prophetess, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Aser: she was of a great age, and had lived with an husband seven years from her virginity; And she was a widow of about fourscore and four years, which departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day. And she coming in that instant gave thanks likewise unto the Lord, and spake of him to all them that looked for redemption in Jerusalem.

And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth.

Luke 2:21-39
So Mary and Joseph remain in Bethlehem where Jesus is circumcised and named after eight days and until Mary has waited long enough after the birth of a male child to be purified according to Jewish tradition (40 days).

Even though she was allegedly free from sin and had given birth to a parthenogenically conceived child who was also free from sin, she still needed a ritual period of purification, apparently.

Moving on...

Having gone to the Temple in Jerusalem to sacrifice obligatory doves (why would the birth of God need a sacrifice to er... God?) and there being told yet again by a couple of holy relics that Jesus was a special child, as though angels, shepherds and a virgin birth weren't enough, they went back home to Nazareth.

To summarise these and put them side by side then:
MatthewLuke

  1. Jesus is living in a house in Bethlehem where Mary and Joseph live, some time before 4 BCE.
  2. Some wise men come to see him, having read of his birth in the stars a couple of years earlier and inadvertently tip Herod off about the supposed prophesy of a new Governor being born having been fulfilled.
  3. Herod orders the killing of all boys under the age of two just to make sure he has the right one. No one else notices this.
  4. To escape this killing, Joseph and Mary take the child into exile in Egypt until Herod is dead, when they try to return to their home in Bethlehem.
  5. But Judea is still too dangerous so, instead of staying in Egypt, they go to Nazareth, where they could have gone in the first place because apparently the King of Judea's writ doesn't extend there.

  1. Jesus is born in a stable in Bethlehem some time between 6 and 12 CE because his parents had to go there 'for a census'.
  2. Some shepherds are told about him by an angel and go to see him, then tell people about him. Mary decides to keep quiet about it. We aren't told whether Joseph told anyone or not.
  3. After 8 days Jesus is circumcised and named.
  4. After 40 days, when Mary is 'pure' again, the family take Jesus to the Temple in Jerusalem to have some doves sacrificed.
  5. While there a couple of old people tell Joseph and Mary that Jesus is the Saviour.
  6. Then they go home to Nazareth

So how can these two accounts be reconciled and woven into one single narrative of the birth of Jesus? In fact, are they both intended to be accounts of the birth of Jesus? That latter question is not at all answered by the Bible and never does Matthew claim he is writing about the birth of Jesus. All Matthew is bending over backwards to do is to show how Jesus's life fulfilled some ancient Jewish prophesies.

The Rest on the Flight into Egypt; Orazio Gentileschi
Firstly and very clearly, a major stumbling block here to reconciling these into a single narrative is the mutually exclusive birth dates. Jesus could not have been born when Herod was alive when his parents had gone to Bethlehem for the census ordered by Caesar when Cyrenius was governor of Syria, simply because Herod died ten years before Cyrenius became governor.

So, the story of birth in a stable followed by flight into exile in Egypt cannot both have the reasons ascribed to them by Matthew and Luke.

Secondly, there is no way to reconcile the account of the family remaining in Bethlehem for 40 days until Mary's purification, then travelling to the temple in Jerusalem, and from there directly home to Nazareth, with Matthew's account of exile in Egypt and then only going to Nazareth when returning home to Bethlehem was still too dangerous, if Matthew's story is an account of the birth of Jesus.

One way round this would be to assume that Luke's account is of the birth of Jesus while Matthew was relating events when Jesus was about two years old, after the family had moved from Nazareth and were now living in Bethlehem. We are given the distinct impression by Matthew that the 'child' was about two years old and that the wise men were visiting a child they had been told about after his birth.

Unfortunately, this places the events Matthew is describing in about 8 CE, some twelve years after the death of Herod. It also flatly contradicts the story about Jesus spending his childhood in Nazareth - the basis for the title 'Jesus of Nazareth'.

But, if we accept Matthew's account of Herod's genocide and ignore the fact that historians failed to notice it, the whole of Luke is rendered implausible since it places the birth of Jesus at some time before 6 BCE, twelve years or more before the earliest possible date of the census under Cyrenius.

Quite clearly then, save inventing a different King Herod who lived at about 12 CE, there is no way to reconcile these two accounts and so synthesise the traditional Nativity celebrated throughout Western Christendom. There are really only three ways to explain this flagrant conflict in the Bible:
Have a great Yule!
  1. They are both made up by the Gospel authors.
  2. One or the other was made up by someone who didn't know the truth but was pretending he did.
  3. They represent different traditional versions of a Messiah myth, artificially attached to the Jesus myth by the Gospels' authors.
And we haven't even considered the complete absence of any hint of an actual date, or even a season, by which we can place it anywhere near to mid-winter.

Sorry Christians, but your plagiarisation of Yule just isn't supported even by your 'inerrant' contradictory book of gospel truths. Like the rest of your holy book, it is the errant work of men. In this case, not very imaginative ones and ones who were less concerned with truth and honesty than in pushing their own agenda - a tradition carried on by the priesthood and apologists for Christianity to this day.





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Friday 7 December 2012

Fundamentalists Should Have Sex Like Rabbits

Moment of Ovulation
Creationists really have got their knickers in a knot over sex, especially when they insist the only purpose of sex is procreation and that doing it for pleasure or as a social activity is somehow sinful, something to be ashamed of, and not what their assumed intelligent designer designed us for.

If this were so, and if we had been intelligently designed, there would be a link between ovulation (egg production) in women and intercourse, and not to an almost complete disconnect between sexual activity and ovulation. As it is, women ovulate every 28-30 days on average whether or not that have had sex. Even virgins and sexually inactive women produce a monthly egg or two. Unless they are pregnant or breast-feeding a baby, healthy women normally ovulate every month from the age of puberty until the menopause, usually between forty-five and fifty-five years of age - some thirty to forty years.

Whether or not they become pregnant will depend entirely on if and when they have sex and if a live sperm happens to come across a viable egg in the right place in her reproductive plumbing.

An intelligent designer who intended sex to be only for procreation would have designed this process so that women only had sex when they were sure to get pregnant and that every instance of intercourse resulted in pregnancy. It's not as though such a system hasn't been designed. If you believe in this intelligent designer you will believe it designed the process so I'm afraid you are hooked on your own logic here.

Ironically, one of the best examples of sexual activity being designed to ensure pregnancy, thus ensuring its purpose is exactly what religious people insist sex is for, is to be found in the very mammal frequently cited as an example of promiscuity - the rabbit.

My first job as a school-leaver many years ago was as a laboratory technician in Prof Geoffrey Harris's Neuroendocrinology Research Unit in Oxford. One of the things we were investigating was hormonal control of ovulation, using rabbits. Prof. Harris had discovered that the hormone which causes the ovary to shed its eggs is produced by the pituitary gland in response to 'releasing factors' (we were trying to find out exactly what they were) which are produced by special nerves in the stalk attaching the pituitary to the brain. These 'releasing factors' are transported to the pituitary gland in blood by a microscopic 'portal system' of small blood vessels which ensures they are concentrated and delivered to the front lobe of the pituitary where they cause the pituitary to produce 'lutenising hormone' into the blood, which, when it reaches the ovaries, causes an egg to ripen and be shed.

One drawback to using rabbits is that you have to be careful how you pick them up, otherwise you can induce them to ovulate - which is not what we wanted as we were trying to induce this with hormones.

The reason we were using rabbits is because they are spontaneous ovulators, that is, they don't have an oestrus cycle but ovulate when mated. In rabbits, there is a simple reflex system which is initiated by mating, either by direct stimulation of the vagina, or even by a male mounting and attempting to mate - and this is where we needed to be careful. If you stroke a female rabbit's back, or her hind quarters, you can simulate the act of a male mounting her and cause her to ovulate, so you need to pick them up by the scruff of the neck and keep contact to a minimum.

So, in rabbits, which have sex like rabbits - duh! sex is for procreation and the system ensures a high degree of success, where most sex acts lead to pregnancy.

So, Creationists, if your 'intelligent designer' designed this system in rabbits, why didn't it use the same system in humans where all the components are present and just need to be set up correctly to work the way you claim it intended them to work?

In fact, this system has probably been switched off in humans and in at least our close cousins, the bonobo, because sex for pleasure and for other than procreation is so beneficial in terms of pair-bonding and social interaction and where sexual activity continues well past the menopause where is can have no procreational purpose whatsoever.

Of course, Darwinian Evolution has no problem at all explaining these differences. With both humans and rabbits the respective system used produces more surviving descendants given the long, slow childhood of human children which benefits from a pair-bond between parents, compared to the short period of maturity in rabbits which are independent of their mother in a few weeks, sexually mature and in a few months and in whose nurturing fathers play no part at all.

If the religious views of Creationists were sincere, and they knew what they were talking about, they should be advocating humans behave like rabbits when it comes to sex. At least that might go some way to filling the rows of empty pews most European priests are seeing most Sundays nowadays.

This is of course just one of the problems Christians and Muslims have with trying to shoe-horn reality into the primitive superstitions of misogynistic and sex-obsessed Bronze Age tribal leaders who believed in a flat earth, magic, talking snakes and that rain is water dripping through holes in the canopy over the earth from which the sun and moon are hanging.


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Sunday 2 December 2012

No God In The Bible

Prof. Bart D. Ehrman
Reading Bart D. Ehrman's excellent and very readable book, Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible, I was struck by the following:
At about the time I started to doubt that God had inspired the words of the Bible, I began to be influenced by Bible courses taught from a historical-critical perspective. I started seeing discrepancies in the text. I saw that some of the books of the Bible were at odds with one another. I became convinced by the arguments that some of the books were not written by the authors for whom they were named. And I began to see that many of the traditional Christian doctrines that I had long held to be beyond question, such as the doctrines of the divinity of Christ and of the Trinity, were not present in the earliest traditions of the New Testament but had developed over time and had moved away from the original teachings of Jesus and his apostles.

These realizations had a profound impact on my faith, as I think they did on that of many of my fellow seminarians at the time and continue to have on many seminarians today. Unlike most of my seminarian friends, though, I did not revert to a devotional approach to the Bible the day after I graduated with my master’s of divinity degree. Instead I devoted myself even more wholeheartedly to learning more about the Bible from a historical perspective, and about the Christian faith that I had thought was taught by the Bible. I had started seminary as a born-again fundamentalist; by the time I graduated I was moving toward a liberal form of evangelical Christianity, one that still saw the Bible as conveying important teachings of God to his people, but also as a book filled with human perspectives and mistakes.[my emphasis]

Ehrman, Bart D. (2009-02-20).
Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them) (p. 16).
Harper Collins, Inc. Kindle Edition.
What struck me most was not the fact that so many seminarians promptly put aside all they've learned about the history of the Bible, which casts so much doubt on it's authenticity, and revert to the simple devotional approach they took to college with them. I have come to be totally unsurprised by the intellectual dishonesty which underpins much of theology and especially in those who make, or intend to make, a living selling it to mostly theologically unsophisticated people. What struck me was the final sentence, emphasised above.

What a useful device that must be in the hands of 'liberal' evangelists now freed from the constraint of having to defend the entire Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God. They can now trawl through it, discarding all the bits they don't agree with or know are going to be hard to sell, or which may give rise to awkward and embarrassing questions, as human perspectives and mistakes. They can now pick out the parts they want to sell, to support whatever political objective they have or to justify whatever currently needs to be justified as the 'will of God', by declaring them to be important teachings of God to his people.

It's a striking parallel with another theological device used in respect of science. With the above approach, 'God's message' is assumed to reside in anything which can't be dismissed as a human 'mistake' either by historical analysis or by finding it so repulsive that no one could imagine a benevolent, loving god, like the Christian one supposedly is, saying it or commanding it. With science, theology assumes God sits in the gaps in science until proved otherwise, whereupon God's importance is no less diminished and it's presence no less diminished for having to occupy fewer and smaller gaps.

What theology doesn't do, which would be the intellectually honest thing to do, is first establish the existence of the god in question before it gets the default credit for everything until proved otherwise. God is simply assumed without question or fuss and an entire 'philosophy', together with its employment opportunities and comfortable income, is built on an unsubstantiated assumption which is in practice carefully ring-fenced and exempted from serious questioning.

Just as there has never been any reason to conclude a scientific investigation with the answer that a god must have done it, and just as there has never been a need to include anything supernatural in any scientific explanation of any phenomenon, so there should be no need to include a god in any explanation of the Bible.

With no evidence for any gods, no need to include them in any explanation of anything and no justification for sitting them in any gaps or assigning responsibility to them for words in any book, and with so much accumulating evidence that none were involved in either place, the most intellectually honest - the most vicarious explanation and the explanation with fewest entities and least complexity - is that there are no gods.

Putting gods in gaps and attributing words in books to them has no more validity than doing the same with fairies, hobgoblins or pink unicorns. Fun for children maybe, but we really should have grown out of that by the age of about twelve. And we certainly shouldn't be giving money to those who do it for a living.


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Hard Questions For Christians

It's obvious from watching the daily interchanges between Christians and non-believers in social media like Twitter and Reddit that there are several question which any but the most stupid Christians simply will not answer, not even to say they don't know the answer.

It seems what they crave more than anything is certainty. Anything, even thinking of how to answer some questions, will not be permitted if it would introduce the slightest uncertainty. Either that, or they know the question exposes an invalid assumption, even a lie, in their faith.

The closer you get to the heart of their 'faith' the more defensive they become and the less likely you are to get an honest answer without having to wade through torrents of prevarication and diversionary tactics, often descending into abuse, condescension, indignation and accusations of persecution, or excuses to break off the conversation and offers to "agree to disagree".
  1. Why is 'nothing' assumed to be the default state of existence?

    This underpins the KCA and yet there appears to be no logic behind the assumption. If anything, the assumption is completely devoid of logic. What possible logical argument can be made to arrive at the conclusion that 'nothing' can exist? The idea is logically absurd.

    But even if you can somehow show that 'nothing' has any logical meaning in terms of existence, how can you then determine any of its characteristics, such as what can come from it?

    And yet religious apologists glibly trot out the article of faith that 'you can't get something from nothing' or 'nothing can come from nothing', then promptly abandon that argument by declaring that something can come from nothing but only if their god made of nothing and which came from nothing says the right magic spells.

    It's not hard to understand why Christians won't answer this one. What's hard to understand is why they persist in using an argument which they know is so flawed they are embarrassed by it and yet claim to be doing it in defence of a god of truth.
  2. What is your god made of if nothing existed before it created everything?

    If you get any response to this it won't ever answer the question; it will simply assert that the god in question is eternal and exists outside space and time. This of course intentionally sidesteps the question completely. Yet the same faith insists that the only logical explanation for the existence of anything is that it must have been caused, "because everything that begins to exist must have a cause". Behind this claim lies an assumption that there is a set of things which don't begin to exist and yet the faithful can never say how they determined what should be in that set and why it should be restricted to only their favourite god.

    Obviously those who rely on this, the KCA, realise they are trying to get away with invalid assumptions that:
    1. Everything must have begun to exist.
    2. Therefore, everything needs a cause.
    3. My god is exempt from this but nothing else is, but somehow this doesn't invalidate assumptions a & b.
    4. There is no inconsistency in applying my 'logic' to your argument but declaring my argument exempt from it.

    And even if you manage to wade through that, you'll be no closer to knowing what the god being promoted is made from, even though it must be more complex than the universe it is claimed to have created to contain enough information to create it and keep it all under control, even before it starts monitoring your thoughts, listening to the constant babble of prayers and deciding which deserve to be answered, keeping a check on your sex life and whether you touch your genitalia and enjoy it, or if you are responsible for a man becoming sexually aroused because he caught a glimpse of your face, breasts or bottom.
  3. If complexity must be intelligently designed, who or what intelligently designed your god's complexity?

    This is the 'Teleological Argument' or 'Argument From Design' which, so far as biological systems are concerned, was refuted comprehensively by Darwin and Wallace in 1859. It can also be refuted by simple logical deduction.

    In order to have the knowledge and understanding to create a universe and all living species on earth, a perfect creator must necessarily be more complex than the universe it creates. In order to monitor and observe it, and thereby exercise some control over it, it must be able to hold a perfect conceptual model of the universe to be able to see and plan change. This model must include the god itself in the model, complete with a model of itself, ad infinitum, otherwise there will be a point at which its knowledge is imperfect.

    This means the creator must be infinitely complex. So, if complexity needs a creator, there must be another infinitely more complex creator, and another infinitely more complex than that one.... and so ad infinitum. An infinity of increasingly more complex infinitely complex creators and requiring a concept of larger and smaller infinities.

    This is probably as close as you can come to a position so logically absurd as to not warrant even considering, so rendering the entire 'complexity must be designed' argument absurd. Like the KCA, an example of a theological argument which its proponents need immediately to try to abandon to try to make it work. A form of special pleading so common in theology where their small god has to be granted special privilege to compete with the big boys of science and normal grown up logic.

    A veritable triumph of theological argument that! It results in the god being defended and promoted as infinitely wise and powerful, being reduced to an inadequate little god which needs affirmative action to compete on an equal footing with science and maths, and for the humans it allegedly created being required not to use the intelligence it allegedly endowed them with for anything other than making excuses for its inadequacies. Its followers claim it created us to worship it and wonder at its power and majesty, yet they insist we treat it like a handicapped child - which of course, being unintelligently designed by inadequate people, it very probably would be - if it were real.

    So, as with the KCA, it's not hard to understand why Christians won't answer the question but not why they use an argument they know to be false to defend a god they claim is a god of truth and honesty from whom they get their 'good' morals.
  4. Assuming you are right and the only way to explain everything is to invoke a supernatural explanation, how did you conclude that your god was the only possible supernatural one which could do it?

    There will of course never be an answer to this question because any Christian with an IQ higher than a plank will know there is no way to answer it. There is no way to investigate the supernatural to determine the range of possibilities and to eliminate all the others bar one.

    Nor is it possible to make any comparisons between all the different possible supernatural explanations.

    You will get a response of sorts, though. You will get an assertion that theirs is the only god, so no others need be considered but they will never explain why other than with a passage from a book they have learned to chant when faced with that cognitive dissonance, rather like a protective mantra. They will never explain why the logic by which they conclude that all other hypothetical gods are false should not apply to their god.

    The reason they won't answer this question is, again, because the answer is frankly embarrassing. It's almost invariably because they've learned to avoid the question and so have never really thought about it, preferring to just assume that someone else must have done the work at some point and that's why their family and so many other people in their culture believe it.

    In effect, they are too embarrassed to admit they've just taken someone else's word for it and can't now admit they could be wrong. It's our old friends, intellectual indolence and ignorant parochial arrogance to the rescue.
  5. If you get your knowledge of right and wrong from the Bible, how can you tell it wasn't written by Satan?

    This question often evokes an abusive response but never an answer. I have been asking it repeatedly on Twitter, and in a blog, How Do You Know Satan Didn't Write The Bible?, for over a year now. In that time the blog has had 13937 hits at the time of writing. No one has yet given a coherent answer.

    Of course, this strikes at the heart of a central tenet of Christian faith - that there are no objective morals without a god to hand them down (and that therefore Christians are morally superior since they have the one true god therefore the one true moral code).

    And yet they are unable to resolve the paradox of therefore not knowing if their faith (and the morals that come with it) is the work of an evil being intending to deceive, or those of a good being wishing them well.

    In actual fact, of course, almost without exception, Christians will have worked out ways to explain away the obviously wrong things commanded by their god in the Bible and to take only the good stuff, such as it is. Clearly, they are applying an external standard of morality when they now reject the endorsement of slavery, selling daughters, forcing a rape victim to marry the rapist and, increasingly, the inferior position of women in the Bible. The reason Christians, on the whole, don't any longer behave like the god of the Bible is because they now know better.

    So, to answer this question honestly would necessitate them admitting that the Bible is not the word of a perfect, and perfectly moral, god, from which their claim to power and authority is derived. Rather than give up that they would rather abandon intellectual honesty and personal integrity, yet, in doing so, they reveal to the rest of the world that their 'faith' is being used as an excuse for something they are not owning up to, probably understandably so.
  6. If your god has always known all your decisions since before it created you, can you make different ones?

    Stated more simply, this question could be, "If your god knows what you will have for breakfast tomorrow, can you choose something else instead?"

    Like the previous question, I have been asking it for well over a year on Twitter in one form or another and on a blog, On Omniscience And Freewill, for over two years, and have still to receive a sensible answer. The few attempts to answer it have invariably been muddled and contradictory, arguing that there is some way in which a god can not know your actual choices yet still know what you would choose, or that omniscience merely means knowing the entire range of possible choices. Even one attempt to argue that the god can choose to forget what it knows so it both knows and doesn't know simultaneously.

    Of course the simple logic is that if you can surprise a god, that god isn't omniscient, and if you can't surprise that god, you don't have free will.

    The reason most 'sensible' Christians refuse to answer this question is because it destroys the very foundation of their religion - the notion of original sin and the need for redemption through Jesus. If man doesn't have free will then everything is preordained and there was no original sin, merely the fulfilment of predestination. The notion of an omniscient god also renders that god powerless, constrained by its own inerrant knowledge of the future. If there is freewill then the Christian god isn't omniscient and so has no moral authority by which to judge us.

    Refusal to contemplate this paradox at the heart of their faith shows us that Christians are only too aware that their 'faith' is based on a lie. From that simple observation we can conclude that the Christian 'faith' is not something they actually believe to be true but something which has a mere utility value; an excuse and something to threaten and control others with.
  7. What is the purpose of prayer?

    Praying Hands. Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528)
    You would think that, since they spend so much time allegedly praying, Christians would be able to answer this question easily and succinctly, but not a bit of it. I have been asking this on Twitter and in a blog, Can Someone Explain The Purpose Of Prayer, Please? for about nine months, and no coherent answers.

    The problem is with the Christian god's alleged omniscience, omnibenevolence and inerrancy. If it already knows what's happening, then the purpose of prayer can't be to inform it. If it is omnibenevolent then it will have already ensured that that which does the most good is being done. There is no point in asking it to stop something undesirable from happening or to make something desirable happen, because it will always have been aware of these things and will have prevented them if they are not in the prayer's interest. It will already be aware of any declarations of adoration or gratitude and it will be aware of any insincerity, so the purpose of prayer can't be to fool it.

    None of this is hard to work out so most Christians will be aware of it - which is why they won't ever answer the question honestly. Clearly, they either know the real purpose of prayer has nothing to do with its stated function, or they don't believe their god is omniscient and or omnibenevolent.

    In fact, it looks for all the world as though it is fear of their god which is driving them and prayer is an attempt to mollify and pacify it, like the actions of pagans in trying to pacify a volcano or earthquake god. Not surprisingly, none of them are going to own up to that.
A formative influence on my undergraduate self was the response of a respected elder statesmen of the Oxford Zoology Department when an American visitor had just publicly disproved his favourite theory. The old man strode to the front of the lecture hall, shook the American warmly by the hand and declared in ringing, emotional tones: “My dear fellow, I wish to thank you. I have been wrong these fifteen years.” And we clapped our hands red.
Richard Dawkins, 1996
Just a few very simple questions and yet they provoke the most extraordinary response in Christians. To be fair, it's not just Christians who panic at these or similar questions. Muslims are also especially prone to it and readily resort to abuse and threatened or actual violence rather than answer them.

It's quite astounding how the need to handle uncomfortable cognitive dissonance can provoke such a spectacular and revealing response in religious people. Imagine a scientist being confronted with simple questions which show his theory to be wrong. The sensible thing to do would be to thank his questioner for correcting his error and to change or abandon his theory. To do anything else would earn the justified opprobrium of his colleagues and reduce his standing immeasurably in the scientific community.

Christians, on the other hand, gain kudos for their creativity and skill at avoiding the embarrassing questions and finding ways to blame the questioner.

Christian apologists earn their living inventing new ways to avoid the obvious and wave it aside.





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