Sunday Bible Study; John 12:24 (KJV, Red Letter Edition)

BLASPHEMY | I awoke particularly early this morning, around 3:00 a.m. In spite of not having gone to sleep until around midnight, I was wide awake and not going back to sleep. Since I was visiting a friend who had a small collection of books, it seemed the perfect companion with my coffee would be some good reading.

Over to the bookshelf I went, I wanted to find something more than the collection of religion-themed books. But, for some reason, I was drawn to a generic marketing book titled “The Seed Principle.” There was no author listed and it seemed to be another mass-produced book distributed to keep crutch-goers paying their “tithes” obediently.

(You know, the old “send me money and Gawd's gonna bless you” tactic used by prosperity-pimps like Joel Osteen and Creflo Dollar – not exactly the kind of works I normally read and still, I was compelled.)

Not understanding why I was even considering reading this woo-woo, I asked my Guides and Guardians why I was spending as much as one irreplaceable second of my life reading this, trusting them anyway, knowing they've never failed me before and something good was coming.

That's when it happened. Picture a block of text on the page standing out clearer and more vivid than the rest of the page. In typical fashion of not understanding the gist of the texts they pretended to work with, the pretenders who put together this particular book made the error of using a quote from the bible, seemingly, just because it contained the word “seed” and in spite of having nothing to do with money or prosperity in general. The quote was from The twelfth chapter of John, verse twenty-four.

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.” Here's the verse itself.

What a wonderful gift, this little line of text. It reveals much. I think, if professional preachers and apologists can use the bible to justify the scam of Christianity, it can also be used to dismantle Christianity, thereby helping at least one more fellow slave escape, hopefully.

Within the referenced verse, we have the words of Jesus himself making a statement which not only seems to be a non-sequitur to the rest of John chapter 12 but also, completely inaccurate.

When a seed is planted, the seed itself does not die. Were a seed to die, there would be no germination. No germination – no plant.

It seems to me, were this Jesus character to be anything more than just another man with anything more than the common knowledge of the era, he would have known this. Personally, with the way this particular chapter flows – as just one example – the whole story strikes me as a reverse-engineered fiction in the first place and Jesus nothing more than a convenient marketing device.

I find it particularly strange how the bible itself lacks any knowledge not available to any human who paid close attention to life. No “god” needed. This one, individual point is enough to demonstrate the bible is not, in fact, “divinely inspired” in any way. Others may try explaining it as "human error" or something "planted by Satan" to distract the faithful. But, before you do, would such an explanation not further demonstrate the bible to be as fallible as fallible can be? "Verily, verily I tell YOU," if we cannot rely upon the words of Jesus himself to be truthful, then WHY continue referring to this book as "infallible? Why?

It is time we humans finally find the courage to stand up in the face of tyrants-in-the-name-of-god once and for all, challenging its so-called infallibility. It is anything but.

And now, I must wonder if those apologists and crusaders will try again to demonstrate the mental acrobatics necessary to explain away this point and continue in their suspension of disbelief - or will I more likely see myself ignored by the devotedly self-deceptive masses, yet again? Bring me your best. I want to understand and invite you to try. If your god is a god and he made the human mind, then surely he would understand why I need evidence and would make it available to people like me.

This post was originally shared on Bubblews.



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Atheism: Hell is No Longer a Threat

Throughout the history of mankind, we have always wanted to understand the mysteries around us of this beautiful world. Before the rise of science, the human mind defaulted to crediting everything to one sort of god or another. This reliance on some mysterious, supernatural entity was the norm for countless centuries of human history.

As of late though, more and more people are no longer accepting this as an answer. We are turning to various forms of science to understand our world. In the process of learning, we've found evidence of processes far more intriguing than anything religion could explain. (If someone needs support of the rise in the numbers of non-believers, visit this page from NPR, or this NBC affiliate. Here's one more.)

Where we once believed our planet to be the center of the universe, astronomy shows us we're really less than a speck of space dust, compared to the entire cosmos. Where we once held onto the belief that goodness only flows from some spiritual deity, biology now shows the human organism has an innate goodness - and that it is essential to the survival of our species.

Where once, any particular religious leader was the highest authority in any given region of the world, archeology proves mankind has had many competing gods. Even today, among any particular religion's followers, there is division. Christianity is credited with 34,000 denominations throughout history. Islam has 72 sects. Religion has - if nothing else - brought about more division than any other factor in history.

Religion held its power over the individual human mind by the power of fear, more than any other factor. In spite of attempted arguments to the contrary, love existed among all belief systems, so nobody's god can lay claim to it exclusively. No, it was a fear of eternal torment in hell which was used to gain followers. Too often, those who refused still were tortured and/or slaughtered as "heretics" or "infidels" - depending on which religion's terminology a person used.

But the various religious leaders are losing their power to kill non-believers, and they are powerless to stop the trend. Daily, more people around the world are coming to realize slaughtering their own is wrong.

For the most part, Christianity lost its carte blanche pass centuries ago, although there still remain pockets of religious persecution by Christians. Islam is losing its power before our very eyes. Ridiculous "honor killings" are prosecuted as the crimes which they are. This is good.

While each of the world's religious leaders is busy decrying others for not being more like them, we atheists notice you all sound the same to us - divisive, superstitious and lacking a philosophical leg to stand on. The threats of hell from any of you sound like the threats of hell from all of you - and we accept none of it from any of you. We've all come to learn that for all of us to survive, only love will work. As was once so eloquently stated anonymously, "Seeing now that the Bible was so wrong about where we came from, how can we trust it to tell us where we're going?"

Some day, as our future generations look through our history, they'll see that humanity finally woke up to the beautiful reality surrounding us all. They'll see the myths of an afterlife were what kept primitive man back for as long as it did. They'll be able to pinpoint the time wherein we finally realized we're all just people - and tribalism, racism and religions were just myths. They'll see we finally realized we need each other and nobody was terrorized into obeying any superstition.

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How an atheist can empathize with the slightly-more-primitive sorts in society, and why they might want to

Being an atheist myself, I once was mad at religion-in-general. It angered me to be in a world where “faith” was considered a virtue, and actual, real-world laws existed (not all, just some), which affect my life, based solely on religious preferences. I was ticked off over the violence, and the fraud committed in the alleged name of (insert relic here). But, no more.

Gone now, are those days of being mad about the religion of others, forcibly being a part of my own reality, since now, I own my own reality (we can haz cookies too) and am the absolute master of all I accept. No more will I, as an atheist, be cruel or crude to the hopelessly mystical/mystified. Such anger is all together too much of a waste of much-needed resources like time and sanity/focus/bearing.

We non-believers might want to consider the predicament most people are in, as well as that of humanity in general, over these last few million years, or so. First off, even if humanity, as a species, has been saying there are no imaginary sky daddies up there for 3,000 years, the realization itself, is still relatively new to most of the world. We've had a million times as many years as a primitive creature, than we've had as a modern, self-aware being, and there will be growing pains.

Over time, even the most religious of people, will come to one day understand that, as they rant they will be ignored. They'll find themselves speaking to only the trees, and their personal shill followers, as the rest of the world merely continues on. There's just no more need to hate the various religions of this planet. They cannot help it.

Imagine being (as your ancestors were) a primitive human, coming into those first few glimmers of self-awareness, tens-of-thousands of years ago. Perhaps during one evening of those all-too-random moments, you notice a particularly pesky, flying insect – and you swat at it. It's ability to maneuver as a response to its tactile senses of the currents of air happen too fast for you primate brain to process, and it appears the bug exists and doesn't exist, all at the same time. A formation of thoughts towards all-things-”spiritual” was actually the best guesses ancient man had at the time towards those things of nature which we could not understand.

Thus this same guessing process happened towards other mysteries as well. Couldn't explain the Sun? God ®. Why do the leaves fall, when it's cold? God®. Where did all of this come from? Obviously, God®. The problem isn't really so much with people having made their best guesses, until they learned better. What causes a problem for those of us who've crawled out of the box is when the guessing mechanism is mis-used by those with a taste for control of others, at various times through history.

From this day forward, I've no desire to attack the people themselves, who've been drawn in by the false security and the optional illusions of God®. But when a false statement is made to, or about me, I'll still respond. I just won't be going at it with a heavy hand. I'm sure those folks at ThinkAtheist are relieved to hear that Dad's not such an angry ass anymore. They win.

It's worth being kinder and gentler to the religious sorts in society. Just because they're following the traditions and customs they couldn't help but be raised up in, doesn't preclude the fact of most of them are the kindest, most well-intentioned people humanity has. Heck, even I can see some of the good things churhes have acheived, regardless of their reasons- or other errors made. Jimi Hendrix had so much right. We're all just misunderstood.

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