http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9J1_VLxJfM

This is most uncomfortable stuff if your religious experience has been limited to the warm fuzzy of “god is love” and the fatalism of “god will provide.”

If you believe in the Old Testament as divine truth, you believe in talking snakes, talking donkeys, chariots of fire, bushes which burn without being consumed (belying the definition of “burning”), and a man surviving for days in the belly of a fish.  I prefer to have a rational view of the world where such things are relegated to fantasy books and films where they belong.

there are many and famous intelligent people who are alcoholics; this doesn’t motivate me to go out and start a drinking regimen.

I totally understand what you are saying as I had the same original feelings. I didn’t grow up in a Christian home or ever read the Bible seriously until later in life, and then it was some of the same responses you express here is what I had. Obviously too short a space to get into a discussion here (if you ever seriously wanted to talk more, always feel free to contact me). 

I can say that it isn’t just blind irrational faith for someone like myself to believe in the inspiration of the Bible or that God exists. You have to define (inspiration” as that does not mean every word is to be taken literally in how you interpret it). But there are rational intelligent people who do believe in God and the Bible such as Kevin Kelly who is the founder of Wired Magazine (and he is public about his faith and the church he is part of in San Francisco) or  Dr. Francis Collins who is a physician and geneticist and founder of the Human Genome Project which I imagine you have heard of. Francis has a web site based on science and faith you may find interesting  http://www.biologos.org   Or Peter Hitchens, who is a journalist, and was an atheist like his brother Christopher Hitchens was. But he became a Christian and is public about it. 

Anyway, I raise up these three here as there are rational thinkers who do have reasons for belief. You can also watch debates with someone like Bart Erhman (I have a professor friend who debated him recently about his view of the Bible  and it is on DVD and I would be happy to send you a copy if you are interested). Someone like Bart Erhman has arguments that aren’t all that solid as he claims when you hear counter-arguments by other scholars. I have watched several debates with Bart Erhman and without truly being bias, Bart does not come out on top each time by any means when he is faced with scholars who know what Bart is talking about from an academic level. I have all his books too as I love reading all types of thinking out there. 

I do totally appreciate varying viewpoints and I do understand what you are saying.  But do know there are people who hold beliefs in God and the Bible and have studied and thought through these types of issues that aren’t just taking it all at surface value or can’t intelligently wrestle with things in the Bible or have to accept things blindly at all. 

Thank you for taking the time to express your thoughts on what I wrote. I take your words very seriously and don’t just brush off people who may not agree with me as not being valid. Thank you!

Dan

That’s where an analysis of these Wednesday-Weird bible verses must inevitably lead.

There are no gods. There is no supernatural. There is no after-life. Morality comes from man, and this is our one shot at existence.

Deal with it.

“8 O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction, happy is he who repays you for what you have done to us- 9 he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.”
–Psalm 137, verses 8 & 9 by god’s favorite foreskin harvister King David.

My favorite aspect of the story, though, is the reason Gawd turned against Saul.

It was because Saul was insufficiently thorough in his gawd-ordered genocide.

“Now go and strike Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.”

“But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them: but everything that was despised and worthless, that they destroyed utterly.”

“Then came the word of the LORD unto Samuel, saying, It grieves me that I have set up Saul to be king: for he has turned back from following me, and has not performed my commandments. And it grieved Samuel; and he cried unto the LORD all night.”

No wonder there are so many Christians.