Ask An Atheist

This week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy texts comes from listener Mark from Kent, WA. This week, we’re steering away from the usual sources like the Bible or the Qur’an and we’re talking about the Raelians.

Wait. Who?

The Raelians are an atheistic, creationist UFO cult. Yeah. The short of it is that they’re essentially intelligent design proponentists, who have substituted a race of aliens that they call the Elohim in place of the standard Abrahamic deity.  So, basically science fiction instead of fantasy.

This is from “The Message Given to Me by Extraterrestrials” (later republished at “Intelligent Design: Message from the Designers”) by Claude Vorilhon, the founder of the Raelians.

Page 105, Chapter 7, Paragraph 2:

My face seems to be in the open air, but really it is protected by an invisible shield composed of repellant rays inside which I breathe different air from you.

So basically, according to the Raelians, we’re all living in a rip off of a Keanu Reeves movie.

This week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy texts comes from listener Christoph from Germany, we look at the religion of Zoroastrianism, a religion that predates both Christianity and Islam.

It has an odd definition of evil. Today’s passage comes from the Avesta, Zoroastrianism’s sacred text

In this week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy texts, we look at the Bible’s poor grasp of simple facts.

Often, people excuse the Bible for saying things that its authors’ contemporaries could not have possibly known, given their limited Iron Age knowledge. This week, we look at not just one, but two passages that the authors had little excuse to get dead wrong. Even in the days of yore.

Deuteronomy 14:11-18, New International Version:

¹¹ You may eat any clean bird. ¹² But these you may not eat: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, ¹³ the red kite, the black kite, any kind of falcon, ¹⁴ any kind of raven, ¹⁵ the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, ¹⁶ the little owl, the great owl, the white owl, ¹⁷ the desert owl, the osprey, the cormorant, ¹⁸ the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.

Where to start…. Well, first of all rabbit don’t chew cud. That is to say, they don’t regurgitate food out of their stomach and re-chew it as cows do. It boggles the mind that a people who live in greater proximity to animals and work with them on a daily basis could ever get this one wrong.

The funniest thing that keeps popping into my mind is the image of a fundamentalist who can’t handle reality not playing along with his beliefs to the degrees that he forces a rabbit to chew cud via the Heimlich Maneuver. “Eat it! EAT IT!”

And you don’t have to think look hard to realize that a bat isn’t a bird. It’s got fur, not feathers. Its wings don’t look anything like the wings of a bird. Now I don’t expect a group of merchants and shepherds of thousands of years ago using the Linnaean classification system, but c’mon!

My brain hurts.

If you have a passage of holy scripture that you find funny, scary or just plain weird, send it our way. Whether it’s from the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, or even Dianetics, click on the big, red, shiny button at the top of the page and we may even read it on the show!

In this week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy texts, we look at the Bible’s take on child discipline.

While it’s often held up as a beacon of wisdom and morality, the Bible’s take on parenting is neither wise nor moral.

Yeah.

We often say on our show that we’re grateful that the vast majority of Christians and Jews don’t take their god at his word. Most religious believers don’t own slaves or kill unruly children or rile up mobs against members of other religions. Who could possibly rationalize this sort of barbarism? Well, sadly, more than one person can find a way.

This is just another way that religion can skew your morality and how truly ethical people don’t get their ethics from the New or Old Testaments.

If you have a passage of holy scripture that you find funny, scary or just plain weird, send it our way. Whether it’s from the Bible, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, or even Dianetics, click on the big, red, shiny button at the top of the page and we may even read it on the show!

In this week’s look at the funny, the scary and just plain weird passages in humanity’s holy text, is a look at the Bible’s views on the institution of slavery. This week, we look at not just one, but three passage from the New Testament:

⁵ Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.

1 Timothy 6:1-2, New International Version:

¹ All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name and our teaching may not be slandered. ² Those who have believing masters should not show them disrespect just because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should serve them even better because their masters are dear to them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare^[a] of their slaves.

Luke 12:47-48, New International Version:

⁴⁷ “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. ⁴⁸ But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.

It’s not an unusual thing for atheists and skeptics who point out many of the truly horrific stories, arguments and prescriptions in the Bible to have a Christian move the goalposts on them.

“Oh, that’s the just the Old Testament! That doesn’t count anymore!”

These are from the New Testament. The last one is even from the Gospel of Luke. It’s clear that the moral system of the Christian Bible has no problem whatsoever with the institution of slavery. In fact, it seems to expect that even a Christian can and will own another human being as a piece of property, have them work without pay, and even beat them when they disobey an order.

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