>> Atheists, what is your basis for attacking the word of the Bible?
Not an Atheist. I believe in a God. It might even be your God. But I can't stand your Bible or your churches. So I'm happy to field this one. Here goes:
Your Bible claims things which I find morally objectionable are right and proper.
I do not believe it is appropriate to crucify one good man because a million others are wicked.
I do not believe an omnipotent god would need his son's help to forgive the sins of mankind.
I do not believe an all-loving father would punish his finitely rebellious children by burning them infinitely.
I do not believe that the son should inherit his father's "original sin", thus dooming the entire human race for one man's mistake. I'd like my shot at the garden to not eat the magic apple. Then again, were I there I'd ask more questions about the instant I was forbidden from eating it, until I was satisfied about its properties and not so easily deluded by a snake that God must have known about.
Your bible claims things as fact which the evidence God left in the physics of the universe as his signature on creation for us to find flatly contradict.
I do not believe the Earth was created in six days. God has placed evidence of millions of years of history in the ground, and was kind enough to make living creatures prefer a certain isotope of Carbon which makes it easy to find out roughly when they lived.
I do not believe that plants were created before the Sun. The evidence God left in physics suggests that planets form as the remnants of stars being born, and that the Earth was a molten ball of fiery liquid metal for a very long time after the Sun was created. Plants would have to wait.
I do not believe time began 6,000 years ago. While it is possible that God has planted fake evidence to deceive us into believing the universe is older than it is, I see no reason he would prefer this to revealing the truth of his marvelous creation for us to see firsthand. My God does not lie when he hangs cosmic background radiation in the sky as a birthday certificate for the universe.
I do not believe the Sun and Moon and stars orbit the Earth. By watching the position of the stars through the heavens as our seasons change, we notice that they wobble back and forth and rotate at night. We deduced we must be moving, and that perhaps the Sun is fixed in place. Later we discover not even the Sun is fixed in place, and we are all whizzing marvelously at cosmic speeds through an intricate gravitational ballet with trillions of other dancers. Is that not a better creation? Then we used that knowledge to launch a rocket to the Moon, and it was where we thought it would be when we got there.
I do not believe the world is flat. A long time ago, a mathematician studied how the shadows of two distant towers changed. After studying the distance between them and the differences in the lengths of the shadows, he estimated not only the spherical diameter of the Earth but the distance to the Sun, and was nearly correct on both counts.
I do not believe the entire human population comes from two common spontaneously created perfectly formed ancestors. We have too much genetic diversity to account for that limited a gene pool at that period in our history.
I do not believe Jesus was the son of God. God has no need for a son. I find it far more likely that Jesus was Joseph's son, conceived out of wedlock, and that the story of his birth was constructed to avoid death by stoning.
I do not believe Jesus rose from the dead. Dead people stay dead. It's one of the fundamental rules of nature. Maybe they go into a coma for a while and get up later, but the Bible is rather explicit and without doubt on the matter. I find it highly more likely that Jesus stayed dead, his allies moved his body, and claimed to see him still. Or perhaps none of his miracles happened and are the result of the well-defined tradition of further exaggerating a story with every retelling.
However the worst thing I have against the Bible is the thought that we should not use the senses God gave us to interpret the world around us; that we should not use the reason he gave us to seek out the truth it reveals to us; that instead the only path to salvation is by faithfully adhering to the laws written in a book we are not guaranteed to encounter in our lifetimes; that we must surrender ourselves to the name of someone we may never hear about; and that we should be completely closed-minded to any and all evidence that might show us a higher path.
I think Jesus was a great man. I think his lessons on love still apply today. I think if you attribute the beautiful complexities of logic and reason and science to God and abandon the contradictory and outdated book, you will find a much richer and beautiful reality than you could have ever hoped for with blinded eyes and mind.
That sir, is my basis for attacking the Bible.
