Dr. Jason Long - Biblical Nonsense: A Review of the Bible for Doubting Christians

Biblical Nonsense

A Review of the Bible
for Doubting Christians

Dr. Jason Long

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Lincoln Shanghai

Biblical Nonsense A Review of the Bible for Doubting Christians

Copyright 2005 by Jason Long

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Contents

To the billions who have died believing in myths

Iprayedfor twenty years but received no answer until Iprayed with my legs.

Frederick Douglass, on escaping slavery

This book is not about enforcing human limitations on the Christian perspective of God. Instead, its about rendering a verdict on the possibility of the Bible being a divinely inspired representation of such an incredible being. If the Bible is, in fact, the word of the universes omnipotent creator, the abilities of this being to alter science and logic would seemingly supersede the legitimate questions posed upon these pages. Thus, in order to derive an unbiased conclusion on such an important matter, we must read the Bible from an impartial perspective and carefully decide if we can truly attribute the book to such a magnificent entity.

If one can successfully demonstrate the accuracy of the Bible, the opinions expressed within this book disintegrate into mere rubbish. If, on the other hand, we can deduce that the possibility of the Bible having a link to this god is exceedingly remote, the book must be able to stand on its own merit to maintain its freely given credibility. If the Bible cannot be self-sufficient in this manner, its not entitled to the aforementioned leniencies of breaking multiple rules set by science and reason. With this balanced paradigm in mind, you should discover one recurring theme while reviewing the upcoming chapters: the link between divinity and the Bible is simply nonexistent. This idea is anything but novel since thousands before me have demonstrated the abundant biblical complications that establish the logical impossibility of a supernatural force ever dictating or influencing it.

People often ask me why I spend a great deal of time denouncing and disproving the Bible. Although I cant offer an exact reason, my passion is probably driven by the salient danger created by Christianity and its subsequent influence on nearly two billion people every day. While the evil forces of certain deceitful religions have somewhat subsided in more recent times, the hatred inadvertently generated by these belief systems remains the greatest threat to humankinds continued existence. In the past 2000 years, Christianity has been guilty of initiating several wars and crusades resulting in thousands of needless deaths, blatantly oppressing women to the point of worthlessness, abhorrently justifying the enslavement of Africans and perpetuating cruelties upon them we would rather just forget, shamelessly driving its followers to hang or burn alleged witches, nearly exterminating the entire Native American population, and inconspicuously robbing billions of people of countless man-hours that could have been much better spent on improving our planet. Someone certainly needs to address these issues, and the book most of the Western world swears by demands a thorough critical analysis.

I was born agnostic, as are all children, but both of my parents were Christian. Naturally, my mom enrolled me in church at a young age because she wanted to do what she felt was best for me. Having also been enrolled in church at a young age, however, shes never had the opportunity to see the religion from an honest and impartial perspective.

By the age of seven, I acquired the typical boyhood interest in dinosaurs. As a result, I wondered how the divine creation of man could have preceded the existence of these creatures. I learned in school and from my outside reading that dinosaurs had been around for millions of years; Adam and Eve, on the other hand, were divinely created during the earths first week only about six thousand years ago. No matter how many scenarios I considered, I couldnt think of a way to resolve this important incongruency. I asked my mom for an answer, but she didnt have one either. Instead, she advised me to ask my Sunday School teacher. The shameless answer I received the following Sunday was, We dont know there were dinosaurs. It was then that I realized the religion had fundamental flaws if it resorted to such claims in order to explain scientific discrepancies. As time went on, however, cognitive dissonance drove me to justify further scientific contradictions as explainable in some way while holding onto the word of absolute truth. Please dont read this book andprejudicially justify the Bibles problems in the same incredulous manner.

A great inspiration struck me while sitting in church one Sunday that made me realize billions of people who didnt accept Jesus as their savior were imminently bound for Hell. Even so, they were over on the other side of the globe thinking the exact same thing but with the roles reversed. However, what if they were right and we were wrong? Exactly who decided that Christianity was true while Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism were demonstrably false; and how did this individual make these determinations? I remember justifying this interesting perplexity by burying my head in the sand and declaring Christianity to be a morally superior religion. Im patently ashamed of ever forming such a notion.

By the age of seventeen, I began composing a list of all the absurd Old Testament rules and regulations that God and Moses suppressed upon us. Soon after, I gained the courage to disregard the Old Testament as fiction due to the cruelty and scientific errors that it relentlessly presents. The Bible was no longer a perfect book, but Jesus and the New Testament were still solid proof of a god to me.

By the age of twenty, I finally undertook an unprejudiced analysis on the prerequisites of entering Heaven. They simply werent fair. If the New Testament is true, so was my original realization that members of other religions are going to Hell because their teachers mentally conditioned them to believe their respective religious systems. These individuals were simply doomed from the beginning;

they had no chance. After I factored in the lack of evidence for any of the events surrounding Jesus, the exception being a handful of contradicting accounts written decades after the alleged events, it was just a little too convenient that God decided the fate of the world in a highly superstitious age void of testable records. Because of this painfully poor choice, no one could know for sure what really happened in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. All the while, he supposedly watches us in total silence as we continue to kill each other over who has the correct religion.

When I was twenty-two, I browsed the increasingly popular Internet out of interest in seeing if there were others who had made similar discoveries. I was amazed to find that there were millions of these freethinking individuals in America alone. Using enlightened rationale in conjunction with the enormous amount of counterevidence, hundreds dedicated their time to freeing others from lives of conditioned thought. In fact, a select few had an understanding of the Bible far beyond what I ever realistically hoped to ascertain. As for the Christian defense of these findings, I could see a lot of straw grasping. Their best representatives, having obtained bogus doctorates from self-accredited paper mills, stretched and twisted biblical text in order to make it fit with their predetermined agendas. Besides, how objective can one honestly remain while analyzing evidence thats contrary to the belief system in which an enormous emotional investment has already been made? After a long childhood journey, the ultimate answer had finally become obvious to me. If you undertake an honest, dispassionate, and emotionless analysis of the Bible, you can easily conclude that its not the word of a supreme being. Contrary to what many Christians would like the world to believe, certain facts cant just be absolute truth.