August 22, 2009, 10:26 am by dc-agape.

John Chapter 5:16 – 47

Jesus has a lot to say in this section about himself, YHWH, and the Word of God.  Four sections are noticeably important to an Atheist as I read this.  One deals with freewill, deals with human testimony and two deals with questionable translation of the Old Testament.  Freewill is a subject that is hotly debated amongst the various “denominations” of Christendom.  I will provide one more of the verses that is central to the hypothesis of freewill.  Human testimony is clearly neither looked for nor desirable to Jesus or the leaders of the first Church.  Finally, Jesus takes two verses out of context claiming that Moses meant more than what he actually said.  Hindsight is 20/20 but making things fit to the “present” conditions is not prophetic it is call self-fulfilling prophecy.  We do it all the time with people like Nostradamus.

The verse that is of interest to the freewill hypothesis (or lack of) is this:

John 5:21 for just as the Father raises the dead and gives them life, even so the Son gives life to whom he is pleased to give it.

Notice that Jesus chooses you will receive life.  This of course means that either action is required to “justify” salvation or Jesus arbitrarily gives life to those he chooses.  Since many Christians debate the action part of salvation, this leaves the arbitrary nature of Jesus’ “giving life” the upper hand.  Hence, predestination is indicated by this verse.

On the topic of human testimony, Jesus is quite clear.  Even John’s testimony is not strong enough for Jesus.  In fact, the Moses goes went even further:

Deut 17:6 On the testimony of two or three witnesses a man shall be put to death, but no one shall be put to death on the testimony of only one person.

If this works of death should it not also work for life?  Yet we only have one man’s testimony: Jesus!  Everyone else that testifies about life is only repeating Jesus’ testimony.  And when it comes to that, Jesus uses the Old Testament and numerous people from the OT.  But all of these are based on one man’s testimony: Moses!  So the entire religion, both Judaism and Christianity are based on one man’s testimony.  Should we take one man’s testimony as proof?

But let us look closer at the testimony that Jesus uses to self-prophecy about himself.  Both verse come from the Pentateuch:

Gen 3:15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”

This was a curse on a talking snake, for YHWH punished the physical nature of all snakes.  If the physical creature we call snakes was not responsible for Eve’s actions, why would a just YHWH punish an innocent creature?  But to go further, Jesus has as of yet not crushed Satan.  So Jesus has not fulfilled his own prophecy about himself to this day.  By Christian standards Satan still exists.  If anything, when Jesus used this verse, it testifies against him not for him.

Deut 18:15 The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers.  You must listen to him.

This was a prophecy about all the prophets, not just Jesus.  And Jesus was not “like Moses”; Moses did not claim to be the Son of Man.  Yet Jesus did make that claim, so the two are not alike.  But many prophets, just like Moses, did arise thorough out Jewish history.  So here is an example of Jesus taking the Scriptures out of context to make them fulfill prophecy about himself.

Now if you want to say that these are not the right verses that Jesus was referring to, go right ahead.  But which verses was he using then; he does not bother to inform us, the present readers of his words and his testimony from the Word of God.  How can we trust his words if we cannot verify them?  Remember Acts 17:11-12?  If you cannot examine the Scriptures to see if what Jesus said was true, how can we believe?

Posted in Gospel of John, Freewill, Readings | Print | 3 Comments »

August 22, 2009, 10:05 am by dc-agape.

Genesis 31:22-55

I want to recap what happened in the last post.  I am doing this so that Laban’s point of view is very clear.  Jacob has left Laban in the middle of the night.  In the process he has left without saying goodbye, and taken Laban’s daughters and grandsons with him.  Worst of all, Jacob is Laban’s best laborer and has earned most of Laban’s herds.  Laban has lost everything when Jacob leaves, because we also know that Rachel stole Laban’s family idols.  Laban does not know where Jacob is taking his family, Laban does not know where his idols are, and Laban does know that all his chances to recover any livestock have disappeared. 

So after 20 years, Jacob will live for 147 years, was a small price to pay for 4 wives, 13 children, and all the herds of goat and sheep.  But he is still afraid of Laban, and he still does not trust YHWH to keep him safe.  After 3 days Laban finds out that Jacob has left and races after Jacob.  The most important thing to Laban is:

Gen 31:26-28 Then Laban said to Jacob, “What have you done? You’ve deceived me, and you’ve carried off my daughters like captives in war.  Why did you run of secretly and deceived me?  Why didn’t you tell me, so I could send you away with joy and singing to the music of tambourines and harps?  You didn’t even let me kiss my grandchildren and my daughters good-by.  You have done a foolish thing.

This is Laban’s reason for chasing after Jacob, but the missing household idols were important as well.  Rachel hides them by using deception, which causes more uneasy between Jacob and Laban.  Then Jacob goes into a diatribe about how hard he has worked for Laban.  He also repeats the lie about his wages changing 10 times.  From chapter 29, we know that his wages for marriage to Rachel was changed from 7 years to 14 years.  But his wages for the livestock was negotiated from the moment the 14 years was complete. 

They end the meeting with making a covenant that will protect each others property and family.  With the addition that Laban requests that YHWH make sure that Jacob does not remarry or mistreat either of Laban’s daughters.

From an atheist point of view, this story has a few morals.  First, deception causes more harm than it protects the person doing the deceiving.  The deception that Jacob did to Laban was painful to Laban.  He almost did not get to say good-bye to his family.  The deception that Rachel did to both Jacob and Laban nearly started the feuding again between the two men.  A second moral is the value of family.  No matter how much Laban was unhappy about the loss of his livestock to Jacob, he still loved his daughters and grandchildren and wanted to see them one last time.  It even leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the patriarch of the chosen people did not recognize this fact!  But the most important moral to an atheist is the ridiculousness of religious traditions.  Rachel was able to deceive her own father by using his religious fear of his daughter’s menstrual period!  If that superstitions was not so powerful, Laban would have check the saddle that Rachel was sitting on and the story would have been very different.  Jacob would have to decide if his promise to kill the violator would be honored!  Rachel is no better a role model than Abraham or Jacob.  She lies, dishonors her father, and worships household idols!

Posted in Genesis, Readings | Print | No Comments »

August 22, 2009, 7:47 am by dc-agape.

I was going to post on the topic of how the teachings of Jesus and Pauline Christianity have enough differences that it is a source of why some people turn away from modern Christianity.  But from recent posts from BJ Olson I have determined that I am missing a crucial step between that post and the present.  Confidence is another reason that needs to be discussed.  I mean in the mathematical definition of percent confidence and the margin of error.

I have chosen the NIV Translation to read from for numerous reasons, but % confidence is one of them.  More of my reasons for this decision can be read here (my second post).  But maybe I should discuss what % confidence means.  Four levels of confidence occur.  I will briefly cover each one.

At the highest level of confidence is the 99.9% level.  This one is that almost on evidence is supported that disagrees with the hypothesis.  Gravity, the speed of light, the existence of sub-atomic particles, and other Theories of Science are at this level of confidence.  You now see that 100% confidence does not exist, it cannot exist.  If it existed humans would have tested every possible condition for the theory/hypothesis not to exist!  To say the least, religion (in all forms) does not reach this level of confidence.

The next highest level of confidence is the 99% level.  There would seem to be little difference between these two levels.  But in actuality there is a very large difference.  In fact, it is a ten-fold difference in confidence.  Many drugs on the market today use this level of confidence before the FDA allows the drug to be sold to the public.  To say the least, 99% confidence level is rigorously tested before anyone accepts it.  And, as with pharmaceuticals, the manufacturer is not the one that calculates the results…their own bias would influence the result (the desire to sell the product).  But this same level of confidence allows errors to occur 10 times as often. 

The next level of confidence is the 95% level.  This is the acceptable “gold standard” of most statistical data.  Pharmaceuticals need to prove that they are less than this level is reached in the effectiveness and safety of a new drug.  The state of Utah even explains this concept with great detail.  Robert Niles explains this quite well:

“Don’t overlook the fact that the margin of error is a 95 percent confidence interval, either.  That means that for every 20 times you repeat the poll, statistics say that one time you’ll get an answer that is completely off the wall.”

Anything below the 95% confidence level is what remains.  It is also considered to have a lot of uncertainty.  Just as the change from 99.9% to 99% increases the odds by a factor of 10 of error occurring, at the 90% level that increase is again 10 fold.  This means that at 90% confidence the chance of an error occurring is one in 10 tries. 

How does this relate to Atheism and religions?  It’s simple actually.  And an example is the Synoptic Problem.   Is there any reason to believe that one hypothesis is more likely to be correct than another?  No, each has strong reasoning and weak reasoning.  If you have up to nine different competing theories that means that only 1 in 9 is correct.  One out of the nine correlates to 61% confidence.  True you can weight a specific hypothesis, but will your criteria be for that weight?  Will you use your personal feelings?  That’s not good enough!  And “YHWH told me” indicates that you need to be on medication, because he did not tell everyone that.  In fact, “YHWH told me” is no better than a “gut feeling”.  Many people believe that the War in Iraq was a “YHWH told us to” scenario.  Was it?  Is war ever a “Christian” thing to do? 

I choose the NIV because of the larger a population the higher the percent confidence.  The NIV Committee on the Translation of the Bible held over 100 people from at least 13 denomination and five countries.  As a result this is the largest body to evaluate the translation of the Bible ever used.  It eliminates (or at least minimizes) the likely hood of personal bias.  One bias out of 100 people makes a confidence level of 98%.  Too say the least that is an acceptable risk that bias has taken place.  Of course, other bias can occur but this is off-set by the fact that more than 100 people were actually involved in the translation of the NIV.  Can any other Bible give that level of confidence?  The King James certainly cannot. 

Personal experience can also not be used for the reasons of confidence levels.  How confident are you that someone has told you the full truth?  That they have not left out even one iota of their own doubt, their own misgivings?  Sure they have remembered the events “clearly”, but does that mean that their memory is perfect?  Or was their memory influenced by the events prior to and after the event?  This of course, is why a single testimony is insufficient in the court of law!  Why should it be enough in religion?  Everyone seeing the same miracle works, if there is no natural explanation…but then we would have records of this happening.  Instead, when a miracle is investigated we find scams, miss-directions, and hopeful thinking.  That does not mean that miracles don’t happen (confident levels, remember) but it does limit the chance and the source!  How confident is the source of a “said” miracle?  Can we be certain that it is YHWH?  How certain? 

When you add that every religion believes in miracles and personal experiences, the confidence level drops even lower.  Which one is right?  Are any of them right?  How do we know, with any confidence which supernatural being is responsible?  There hinges the Atheist argument.   How confident are you and how can you prove your confidence level?  Atheism is the lack of belief (actual definition).  If certainty cannot be provided to a level of confidence that minimizes mistakes, then trust has not been developed, or worse trust is lost.

PS – One must prove the existence of their claim, for one cannot prove a non-existence.  Those making the claim that supernatural forces exist must not only prove the existence but must make the percent confidence level high enough that error does not exist.

Posted in My Beliefs, Inerrancy - My Ass, Becoming an atheist | Print | 7 Comments »