Table of Contents
For Robert, James, Kelly,
Mary, and Jane
Chapter One
WHY DO THE HEATHENS RAGE?
Guess what?
Contrary to what anti-religious secularists assert, far more lives have been snuffed out throughout history by faith-hating fanatics than by religious believers.
The total number of people murdered by their own antiJudeo-Christian governments in the twentieth century equals about 170 million.
Were told that four-fifths of American homes have a Bible, so go get it, bellows Penn Jillette of the controversial comedy /magic act Penn & Teller, on their Showtime TV series, Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t!
Really, no kidding! Go get your g*dda*n Bible! If you dont read along with us tonight, youre going to think were making this sh*t up.
And so begins the controversial duos debunking of the holy scriptures of Christianity and Judaisma twenty-eight-minute foul-mouthed harangue exhibiting all the erudition of a biker bar and just about as much sensitivity.
Penn, a towering lumberjack of a man with a ponytail and Norris Skipper goatee, does all the talking in the show while Teller illustrates his points with little magic tricks.
Tonight, were going to take you through the da*n Bible and show you its full of inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and outright impossibilities... that its more fiction than fact, he announces solemnlyand then, thumping his black leather Bible, he adds, You know, being on TV, in a suit, and yelling with this da*n book in my hand.... I look just like one of those evangelical assh*les.
On and on it goes.
Anyone who says that Christianity in general, and the Bible in particular, are not mocked in popular culture has not been watching TV in a while.
Penn and Teller trot out a handful of alleged biblical expertssuch as Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazineto make their case against the Bible.
The more we learn about archaeology and history of biblical times, says Shermer excitedly, the more we realize that most of the stuff in the Bible is fiction.
Want proof?
In the first chapter of Genesis, Shermer points out, Adam and Eve are created at the same time. In the second chapter, Adam is created first.
See? Right off the bat, you know the whole book is a complete fraud. Inconsistencies like that just rattle your faith to the very bone.
Sometimes the Bible is the word of God, explains Penn, sometimes its the word of one man, sometimes its the word of two men. Sometimes the Bible is literal, and sometimes its simply symbolic.
Clearly, this makes it unreliable and a waste of time.
All of this might be merely amusingyet another example of how high you can climb in Hollywood with a high school educationwere it not for the fact that such village-atheist assaults on the Bible are now commonplace in public schools, universities, the media, and even some elite seminaries.
It wouldnt be so bad if these attacks on the Bible represented something genuinely newsomething witty and entertaining on the level of, say, a Nietzsche or a Swinburnebut instead they are merely repetitions of allegations made for about 1,800 years. They are as original as dirtand about as interesting. The problem is, many of these new champions of enlightened reason, standing on high from the pinnacles of academia, dont appear to be aware that their ideas are literally millennia old.
The Bibles enemies
The Bible was not exactly a raging bestseller when it was first published in the centuries after Jesuss death. The Romans didnt particularly like the Jews to begin with, considering them barbaric and quite primitive. In the Jewish Wars of 6670 AD, the Romans put down the Jewish fight for freedom with definitive ferocity: Up to a million Jews were slaughtered and the holy city of Jerusalem (and its world-famous Temple) was razed to the ground.
When Christianity came on the scene, it was viewed as worsea bizarre, superstitious cult whose founder, a wild-eyed Jewish fanatic stirring up trouble, was sensibly put to death. His erstwhile followers were said to meet secretly where they ate human flesh and drank human blood. There were rumors of rampant immorality, even incestuous orgies, as the members of the cult referred to one another as brother and sister. Plainly, as new religions go, this Eastern superstition had little to recommend it when compared with, say, the elevated mystery rites of Isis or Mithra or the Stoics.
Scripture Says
Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying, Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
Psalm 2:13
And then there was their holy book!
If there was anything designed to chase an educated Roman away from Christianity, it was the Christian Bible.
The Christian and Jewish scriptures had to be seen to be believed, they said: A ragtag collection of folktales, strange laws, badly written letters, biographies of wonder-working magiciansall written with no regard to literary style, verbal felicity, or the rules of rhetoric.
To educated Romans raised on the polished elegance of Virgil and Cicero, Ennius and Cato, the Christian writings were positively juvenile, filled with vulgar misspellings, absurd grammatical errors, and ridiculous plots. As the second century Latin Christian apologist Tertullian put it, Men are so far from accepting our Scriptures, no one approaches them unless he is already a Christian. St. Augustine, the greatest theologian of the first millennium of Christianity, was so put off by the Bible he ignored it (and Christianity) for a dozen years.
It is clear to me that the writings of the Christians are a lie, and that your fables are not well-enough constructed to conceal this monstrous fiction, said the second-century anti-Christian polemicist Celsus. I have heard that some of your interpreters... are on to the inconsistencies and, pen in hand, alter the original writings, three, four, and several more times over in order to be able to deny the contradictions in the face of criticism.
Who Said It?
The Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it.
Thomas Huxley
As an example of the absurd stories found in the Christian and Jewish scriptures, Celsus cites the account of Noahs ark:
So too their fantastic storywhich they take from the Jewsconcerning the flood and the building of an enormous ark, and the business about the message being brought back to the survivors of the flood by a dove (or was it an old crow?). This is nothing more than a debased and nonsensical version of the myth of Deucalion, a fact I am sure they would not want to come light.
![McDowell - God-Breathed]: the Undeniable Power and Reliability of Scripture](/uploads/posts/book/219249/thumbs/mcdowell-god-breathed-the-undeniable-power-and.jpg)
