In this essay I will explain why I am quite sure Yahweh is a work of fiction.
Why would I even consider the notion of Yahweh? There are 60,000 religions are claiming absolute truth and that the others are crap. What is there to single out Yahweh for special consideration? Just that I grew up in a Christian culture and many people tried to sell me the idea. They told me the only legitimate source of information about Yahweh is the bible. They also told me that Yahweh sort of wrote the bible and that it miraculously contains zero errors or inconsistencies of any kind. They claimed if I read the bible, this will be obvious and I would be amazed and convinced this is the work of the creator of the universe and of course then I would do whatever the creator of the universe commanded.
So I decided to read the bible cover to cover. The writing was atrocious. This was the work of third rate hacks, not some infinitely intelligent being. It got worse. I found hundreds of inconsistencies. Every time a story appeared twice the details were all different. This is what you would expect if various people told a story years after the event, but not from a divine being who claimed to write a perfectly consistent book. Perhaps these small errors don’t count for some reason. Then I discovered whacking huge errors, such as there was no record of Moses in Egypt even though he was a member of the royal family. There was not so much as a shard of pottery found from his wandering with over a million people in the Sinai desert. Moses was made up! Similarly King David was made up! These are major figures. Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus. The bible is clearly not inerrant. It therefore loses its claim to divine authorship. It therefore loses all special authority. There is thus no evidence left for the existence of Yahweh. There is no evidence outside the bible.
If you read Noah’s ark to children unfamiliar with the bible the story of Noah’s ark and asked them if it were a story or a historical record, they would tell you a story. In fact it is plagiarised from various poems that predate Genesis where is was presented as fiction. The whole story is impossible for hundreds of reasons. Yet the bible claims this story is literally true. It simply could not be.
If Yahweh created the universe, here are a few things he ought to know:
The catch is whoever wrote the bible knew none of these things. They held patently false views. So how could a deity who created the universe have gotten the bible so badly wrong? The obvious answer is that ordinary bronze age desert dwellers penned the bible then tried to fob it off as the work of a deity. The bible is a forgery. As such, it does not deserve the extreme respect people give to it. There is thus no evidence left for the existence of Yahweh. There is no evidence outside the bible.
Scholars have discovered much of Genesis, much of the dialog of Jesus, most of the plot of the new testament… was plagiarised from earlier documents and earlier religions. In them Jesus was a teaching figure, not a historical figure. Some of the early gospels that Constantine left out made it clear Jesus was not intended to be taken as a real person.
Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.
~ Isaac Asimov (1920-01-02 1992-03-06 age:72) Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer
When I read the bible, I could not believe how it depicted Yahweh as far worse than Hitler. People had told me he was a loving god. But the bible said clearly he was unspeakably evil. He was a bloodthirsty monster whose greatest pleasure was human sacrifice. It seems like I must the first person ever to have read this book cover to cover, or I surely would have heard about this before. Even if this bastard did exist, it would be immoral to worship him.
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous, proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
~ Dr. Richard Dawkins (1941-03-26 age:77), The God Delusion chapter 2, page 31
I also discovered the moral code of the bible was utterly barbaric, totally unsuited for modern use. It was more than preposterous to propose it. People doing so must have never read the entire bible. They have no idea what they are promoting. If they did, they would be horrified. It is the sort of moral code you would expect of Genghis Khan, with stoning to death the punishment for every minor transgression.
When you use science to study the universe, you discover it has an elegance and class. There is nothing petty about it. Yet the bible depicts Yahweh as a terrible flawed tyrant, a spoiled brat. I just can’t believe such a buffoon could have created quantum mechanics.
I also read the Qur’an cover to cover. Christians would be surprised to find it is much better written than the bible. The fact it was written by a single person certainly helped the consistency. Muslims claim its Arabic poetry is better than any human has ever written. This is their proof of its divine origin. I don’t speak Arabic, so I can’t comment. It has far fewer errors and inconsistencies than the bible. Further, they have a rule, that if there is an inconsistency, the later verse trumps. It spends most of its time praising Allah and telling you how sorry you will be if you don’t believe. There are bits of it that I found moving and poetic, verses truly worthy of a creator. There is almost none of that in the bible. Even though they are supposed to be the same deity, Yahweh is a very petty and local god compared with the universal Allah. Because Qur’an stays away from science and history, it does not make so many blunders. Based solely on the quality of its holy book, Islam wins hands down over Christianity. Christians would never know that because they are so closed minded. They just assume they are vastly superior to everyone else.
I find the way Christians behave utterly nauseating. They wallow in kitsch. They think having a closed mind is a virtue. They take endless enjoyment in persecuting others. They are astronomically conceited. They are ecologically irresponsible. They subsist on a diet of junk ideas. They make fools of themselves trying to defend bronze age science as superior to today’s science, as if it was impossible we could have learned anything in 3000 years. They persecute gays for no reason and encourage others to kill them. They are bullies, pushing their crap on others. Even if Yahweh existed, I would want absolutely nothing to do with the Christian community.
The bible is clearly not inerrant. That failing destroys its claim to be a miraculous product of a deity. That destroys the credibility of all evidence that Yahweh is real or that the bible has any authority. Nearly all Christian arguments are based on the assumption that the bible is the word of god. Since it is not the word of god, nearly all Christian arguments are void. If there is a god, it is definitely not Yahweh. When Christians finally cotton onto this they are going to feel so silly. They have been terrified of a fictitious character. What they have been doing is as idiotic as living in terror of Lord Valdemort in Harry Potter. They have been conned into giving 10% of their income to a character in a book. However, this essay does not rule out any of the other postulated 60,000 gods.
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recommend book⇒The Skeptic’s Annotated Bible | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by | Steve Wells | 978-0-9882451-0-5 | hardcover | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| birth | 1951-09-11 age:66 | B00I76ROXK | kindle | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| publisher | SAB Books, LLC | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| published | 2013-02-15 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The book is in the process of being reprinted. You can a get a copy he updates each month on CD directly from the author at SkepticsAnnotatedBible. Steve also wrote Drunk With Blood. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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recommend book⇒The Pagan Christ: recovering the lost light | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by | Tom Harpur | 978-0-88762-195-6 | paperback | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| birth | 1929 2017-01-02 age:87 | 978-0-8027-1449-7 | hardcover | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| publisher | Thomas Allen Publishers | 978-0-88762-829-0 | eBook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| published | 2004 | B00EKOLTOI | kindle | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Tom Harpur was an Anglican theologian. He presents the evidence that Christianity is plagiarized from earlier religions and has no historical basis. The Jesus story is intended to be taken as allegory, not literally. The Jesus cult developed over time, starting with a set of aphorisms and gradually adding details of Jesus’ life, much the way the story of Superman was elaborated. This suggests there was no historical Jesus. amazon.ca is the site mostly likely to have the book in stock since Harpur is a well-known Canadian theologian. You can see a summary on DVD. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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recommend book⇒The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by | Neil Asher Silberman, Israel Finkelstein | 978-0-684-86913-1 | paperback | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| birth | 1950-06-19 age:67 | 978-0-684-86912-4 | hardcover | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| publisher | Touchstone | 978-0-7432-2338-6 | eBook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| published | 2002-06-11 | B000FBJG86 | kindle | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This discusses the consensus of biblical scholars on the veracity of the old testament. It turns out Moses never existed. There was no exodus or wandering in the desert. Israel Finkelstein is a professor of archaeology at Tel Aviv University. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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