Going to Amsterdam.
I'm off to Amsterdam for three days today. I'm treating it as a social event as much as a poker trip this time ... that is unless I feel up to playing a satellite for the ?3,000 event and get in. I did it two years ago and got in on the first attempt.
Sadly, I only lasted about three hours, as I got low-stacked and having found a flop of A K 10 to suit my A K, discovered that my sole opponent had the Q J to send me home. Last year I didn't bother.
One of the pleasures of the Amsterdam trip for me is the chance to meet my American friend Joe Reinhardt. He lives in Florida but comes over to Amsterdam every year for this trip. It is he who inspired me to be better informed about atheism and to see it as a positive choice. He knows the bible back-to-front and can argue any issue from both sides using biblical quotations. When he first mentioned this, I challenged him to think of one verse that supported homosexuality. To this he replied
`Nothing that entereth the man shall defile him'.
And there's really no answer to that!
A couple of months ago, I got involved in a discussion about the horrors of the New Testament on Vicky Coren's website forum. I mentioned that in the book of Revelations, Jesus promises to murder children (Chapter 2 verse 23, in the message to Thyatira, concerning Jezebel). It's one of the dirty secrets of Christianity that you won't hear about on Songs of Praise.
Afterwards, I wondered how Christians who have actually read the bible accept this and I did a search for "Jezebel of Thyatira" on Google. I found this Australian site, which had the courage to mention the verse about killing her children. Most religious sites I looked at didn't confront the issue at all.
http://members.datafast.net.au/sggram/f571.htm
The site says that the children are not 'of the flesh' but her 'spiritual children'. It goes on to say that God would never kill children for the sins of their parents. I spluttered when I read that because it happens many times in the bible. In fact I would go as far as to say that the punishment of the innocent for the crimes of the guilty is the basic theme of both Testaments. I wrote to Joe to see what he though of this `spiritual children' explanation. Below I show my questions and his answers.
1) What is a spiritual child?
Hi, David. I haven't the faintest idea.
2) Where on earth does this Aussie crackpot get the idea from, apart from the need to save face?
The raw materials for religion are simply a vivid imagination.
3) Even if you can prove it's a metaphor, isn't it in very poor taste?
It is in poor taste, but the real clincher is having the apologist explain how we can reliably discern the allusion from the literal. Since there is no reliable way to do this, the book is by definition unreliable based on the apologists' own argument.
4) How does he get away with claiming that children are never killed for the sins of their parents? Were all the children saved in the flood? What about the killing of the first-born in Egypt?
There are many other examples, the slaughter of the Midianites, in Numbers, or this one,
1 Samuel 15:3 Now go, attack the Amalekites...Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.
This was retribution for something the Amalekites did 400 years prior to the slaughter.
5) Do these people think we are stupid?
They think we are sheep.
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I'm going to write about the dark side of the new Testament in the run up to Christmas. There are things in it that will totally shock most people. The true message of Christ's own words is the polar opposite of what most people think it to be. You may be horrified!
I'm also aware that I `owe' my readers a long piece about Iraq. I must apologise for this and again stress that I mainly write on this site when I have something more important I should be doing. I'm afraid that blogging has been light lately due to the total lack of anything more important to avoid.
Wish me luck!