Coffee Shop Atheist

This originally began as a Facebook response to this article about gluttony, and how everyone should be ashamed to be gluttonous and go to jesus for the cure for this god-induced shame.

On Shame

Of the list of sins ignored by the church, gluttony is not in my top 10.  My list would include not judging those outside the church, owning a home, getting a divorce, ignoring the old testament, or lying about everything, like the compliation of the old testament, the mythologies therein, their borrowed nature, the authors of the new testament, you know..

Just about everything.

Also, the use of Genesis 3 points out that they were lacking in something, namely contentment, before ‘sin’ entered the world. Ergo, Eden was not perfect, there was already discontent, there were already problems. Also, this was before they knew ‘right’ from ‘wrong,’ casting further doubt on any reason why they should have been expected to know it’s wrong to be dissatisfied as a prisoner of ignorance. Of course since it is a myth shoved in next to genesis 1 where there’ no adam and eve, it makes sense.

Facts vs Magic

Meanwhile fact and evolution explain our indulgence to excess; we were molded in a time where we died in our 20s, and everything was scarce. We are programmed to take as much as we can when it’s available. This was the most effective strategy for our species’ survival, and it makes sense to see barely-non-cave-men and women gorging themselves on something our brains simply tell us to do and gives us endorphins as a reward for previously-rare and important nutrients (sugars and fats) or sexual opportunities.

Meanwhile the article promises that if you content yourself with an imaginary relationship, you will gain happiness and somehow quit being human. This is the great lie of Christianity: that somehow by way of a magical invisible spirit, you can cease to have human desires. Yet we see pastor after pastor repressing these desires and exploding in headlines as sexual miscreants completely opposed to their own words. Yes I’m sure they weren’t true scotsmen.

This only makes sense when the magic isn’t real.

The article says, “Is the desire for excess sinful?” Well.. see.. here’s where I have a big problem with this cult of evil that perpetuates mental slavery and should be fought with as much ferocity as any stalin, hitler, pol pot, or other massively evil thing: Being a human being, having natural tendencies, should never be something for shame.

Breathing should not be shamed. Being upset should not be shamed. Being tired should not be shamed. Being a child who sometimes goes against their parents’ words should not be shamed.

Sexual desire should not be shamed.

Wanting to eat an extra portion of food because our ancestors that didn’t died and didn’t pass on their genes should not be shamed.

Yet, the best way to perpetuate a snake oil plot like this is to make people ashamed repressed husks of their true humanity. And then sell them the lie that your shame will disappear if you just think magical thoughts about a murderous sadistic sociopath that invented hell just in case you don’t love him back. “You can be gluttonous! just be gluttonous about the right thing: thinking about God who loves you and will torture you forever if you don’t love him back teehee”

Only under christianity can a tyrant such as this be adored by so many willfully ignorant Stockholm victims, who look at their repressive dictator as salvation. It makes me sick. Thank you for the reminder today of how insane this cult really is, that can take normally intelligent and kind people and turn them into shaming repressed monsters.

(This is adapted from a facebook post)

Oftentimes, people are confused as to why I don’t believe at all, and one of the most basic reasons is due to the paucity of evidence for many of the events that are put forth as truth in the old testament.  One such event is the Exodus, and I feel it’s important to point out some information that the vast majority of historians and biblical scholars agree on: that every bit of researched archaeological evidence, textual criticism, and ancient history from surrounding peoples points that the Jews were never in Egypt, were Caanites, and invented the exodus as a story for national identity, much like the romans and the Romulus/Remus stories.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Exodus#Origins_of_the_Exodus_story

The wikipedia article has plenty of citations, but here are a few more:

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4191
“Israel itself did not exist until approximately 1100 BCE when various Semitic tribes joined in Canaan to form a single independent kingdom, at least 600 years after the completion of the last of Egypt’s large pyramids. Thus it is not possible for any Israelites to have been in Egypt at the time, either slave or free; as there was not yet any such thing as an Israelite.”

http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Judaism/2004/12/Did-The-Exodus-Really-Happen.aspx?p=1
“Surveys of ancient settlements–pottery remains and so forth–make it clear that there simply was no great influx of people around the time of the Exodus (given variously as between 1500-1200 BCE). Therefore, not the wandering, but the arrival alerts us to the fact that the biblical Exodus is not a literal depiction.”

http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/41055/egypt-unveils-more-proof-that-jews-did-not-build-pyramids/
“No Jews built the pyramids because Jews didn’t exist at the period when the pyramids were built,” Mazar said.

So any findings about the ‘exodus’ are simply confirmation bias, since the event never even occurred. As for the chariot wheels:http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.kr/2008/05/coming-this-fall-exodus-conspiracy-dr.html

“Also, after 3,500 years of water flowing into the Red Sea and carrying sand and silt along with it, that’s the deepest that such a wheel has become buried? It looks like it’s barely beneath the sand. Why is this “gilded wheel” not covered by several feet of silt and sand after 3,500 years? “

I hope this helps shed some light on why some of us withhold our judgement on these stories! And feel free to respond with questions and objections!

If you want to watch a video summary of where the Israelites (and Yaheweh) actually came from, look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlnnWbkMlbg

Mark Driscoll, the perennial bigoted fundamentalist snake in the dirt that he is, has either himself, or by proxy, put up a brief response to the Boston bombing.

This is the sort of insidious ignorance created by a death cult.

“Make no mistake, we are at war: an insane rebellion against our Creator God is the root cause of this murderous action.”

Religion has motivated countless murders and slaughters of innocents. If this is a religiously motivated act of terrorism, it will be due to some people’s belief in a creator god. The same one as Driscoll, in fact.  We can take the sentence and make sense of it by cutting it just so: “God is the root cause of this murderous action.”

“Sin makes no sense, is not rational, nor can be reasoned with.”

Of course not. It is an imaginary crime against an imaginary being with imaginary eternal consequences.  In point of fact, there are no eternal consequences for Christians, and eternal punishment for everyone believing the wrong mythology, meaning rapist/murderer/genocidists can gain eternal bliss, but if their victims curse god because of their perpetrator’s actions, they get eternal torment, under traditional orthodox theology.

“He does so, not by acts of military might or zealous terror, but by swallowing the curse like a bitter pill.”

Some pastors are ignorant liars. Others are willfully ignorant liars, and these are the more morally compromised ones. Mark driscoll knows full well that God (in the literal biblical sense) ordered mass slaughters of Amalekites, Caananites, the entire human race due to flooding, used the babylonians, persians, and assyrians to enact ‘justice’ by slaughtering innocents, and generally made a great bloody mess of things with glee and schoolgirl giddiness that sociopaths have wet dreams about. Yahweh, after being adopted from the Caananite El, was a ceaseless machination of impetulant murderous destruction out of petty jealousy and impotence from his pride, yet Driscoll has the moral paucity to say that this god does not act this way. And we best not forget gentle Jesus, who promises exact excruciating pain on his enemies, with his angels creating a winepress of death.  What a disturbingly incorrect notion of peace.

“He bears the full blast of God’s wrath against all the powers of hell aligned against us.”

Ironically, it was the mythical theology set forth by the Israelites  who required sacrifice, coupled with the mystery cults of the day that bestowed salvation on individual followers through Passions and rising, that enacted this death cult’s existence.  Also, aren’t we talking about the Almighty Creator of the universe that is capable of suspending physics and creating universes through his words? Oh, no, he’s incapable of changing his own rules, correcting his own mistakes, or having the foresight to realize that creating humans with the proclivity to ‘sin’ would mean they would ‘sin.’  What a pathetic idiot for a god this is; I had more planning ability when I was 4, visiting the bathroom without taking a dump my pants.

It’s a good thing he’s in charge and not me. I would have forgiven people who try to do good through empathy, and stopped rapists and murderers and suicide bombers, and not required willful ignorance and ‘faith’ to guarantee relief from eternal conscious torment. I wouldn’t write a book filled with contradictions, loopholes, and stories that have no archaeological evidence, borrow verbatim from other mythologies in the surrounding area, and were written down (or fabricated out of thin air and hallucination) hundreds of years after the fact. I would have provided some logical shred of my existence, instead of operating in a constant state of incompatibility to the law of noncontradiction, bestowing free will on humans to mess up my perfect plan, while maintaining full power over everything, existing as 3 and 1 at the same time, and telling my followers to slaughter everything that comes in their path, remaining unchanging, and change my mind by requesting everyone turn the other cheek, sending spirits of lies to prophets, deliberately hardening Pharaoh’s heart in order to slaughter a few children.

What god doesn’t like infanticide? Not the Abramic one!  I guess that’s the difference between me and God. I don’t like slaughtering children for my perverted egomaniacal masturbation.

“Because our Creator is for shalom, he is against anything that attempts to destroy it.”

It would seem this creator has a bipolar identity crisis, as His M.O. seems to be slaughter everything he’s jealous of.  Again, changing his mind like a whining child is par for the course.

“And though we may not fully understand why God allowed this senseless bombing, we do know, unquestionably, that he cares and his covenantal commitment will not diminished by the flailing death rattle of evil in any form.”

God allowed it because God doesn’t exist.  No being worthy of being called a god would allow the sort of wanton death and destruction we see, unless he were incapable of stopping it, unaware of the evil, or was actually an evil, malevolent, capricious, sadistic fuck of a being.

“Let us grieve and mourn for the weeping city of Boston. But let us do so with hope, knowing Jesus is Lord of creation and the great physician of every wound.”

And this, my friends, is the reason I hate people like Mark Driscoll and the fitlth that spouts from his ignorant, undeserving mind.  Let’s grieve, but forget about that grief; let’s remain blissfully ignorant to the reality that is screaming at us in the face, that there are people and cultures and human beings who, for whatever reason, want to engage in these unempathetic acts of slaughter.  Don’t lets figure out what’s causing this sort of death;

Let’s just look forward to our own slaughter, and the slaughter of those sinful humans around us, for the beginning of their eternal torment, with glee!

As all the other death cults of the world do.

I know many Christians who are amazing people, who love deeply and cherish life and seek to end suffering caused by evil in the world. In fact, tomorrow there is a day of solidarity in which many evangelicals will be absent from social media in solidarity with those trapped in the sexual slave trade.

There was a problem with the blakbirdpie shortcode

The irony of this undertaking is that the Christian scriptures do not provide a sensible basis for the abolition of slavery. They never have, and in the schema of modern fundamentalism they never will, as the scriptures cannot be altered. The only way to make sense of abolition is through metaphoric reinterpretation, cherry picking, and wanton disrespect for the text of the scriptures, all of which run contrary to an interpretation of the scriptures as the revealed truth of God.

To explain this point, I turn to Dr. Richard Furman, who was the founder of Furman University and the first president of the Southern Baptist convention. The convention was originally formed over this theological point, and he gives a very strong defense of slavery itself:

“…for the right of holding slaves is clearly established by the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example. In the Old Testament, the Isrealites were directed to purchase their bond-men and bond-maids of the Heathen nations; except they were of the Canaanites, for these were to be destroyed. And it is declared, that the persons purchased were to be their “bond-men forever;” and an “inheritance for them and their children.” They were not to go out free in the year of jubilee, as the Hebrews, who had been purchased, were: the line being clearly drawn between them.*[See Leviticus XXV. 44, 45, 46, &c.] In example, they are presented to our view as existing in the families of the Hebrews as servants, or slaves, born in the house, or bought with money: so that the children born of slaves are here considered slaves as well as their parents. And to this well known state of things, as to its reason and order, as well as to special privileges, St. Paul appears to refer, when he says, “But I was free born.”
p8]
“…[Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles, who feared not the faces of men, and were ready to lay down their lives in the cause of their God, would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church. If they had done so on a principle of accommodation, in cases where the masters remained heathen, to avoid offences and civil commotion; yet, surely, where both master and servant were Christian, as in the case before us, they would have enforced the law of Christ, and required, that the master should liberate his slave in the first instance. But, instead of this, they let the relationship remain untouched, as being lawful and right, and insist on the relative duties.

[p9]
In proving this subject justifiable by Scriptural authority, its morality is also proved; for the Divine Law never sanctions immoral actions.

[p10]
The Christian golden rule, of doing to others, as we would they should do to us, has been urged as an unanswerable argument against holding slaves. But surely this rule is never to be urged against that order of things, which the Divine government has established; nor do our desires become a standard to us, under this rule, unless they have a due regard to justice, propriety and the general good.

“…Magistrates, husbands, and fathers, have proved tyrants. This does not prove, that magistracy, the husband’s right to govern, and parental authority, are unlawful and wicked. The individual who abuses his authority, and acts with cruelty, must answer for it at the Divine tribunal; and civil authority should interpose to prevent or punish it; but neither civil nor ecclesiastical authority can consistently interfere with the possession and legitimate exercise of a right given by the Divine Law.”

http://eweb.furman.edu/~benson/docs/rcd-fmn1.htm

I will also quickly note that Exodus 21 gives instructions for selling daughters into sex slavery, the very thing that is being railed against.

If any Christians are offended, I praise them for recognizing such a despicable stance for what it is. Please, I implore them to understand that I am not the object of your offense. I am not the culprit in their anger.

I am a mirror of Christian beliefs, Christian scriptures, and what the Christian God has said according to holy texts.

Every Christian I know is better than this, and is capable of making a better moral judgement than God or Richard Furman, and I can only hope that more Christians will realize the other ways that god has been terribly, terribly wrong.

I’m not creating a straw man, and I’m not misrepresenting Christianity at all: I am pointing it out for what it truly is, and the reason Christians are offended is simply because they are better than their God.

And the truth is, they wish I weren’t right.