Ignorant mortals probably wrote the Bible.

The year is 2009. Nearly 2 billion people on our planet have organized their lives around the claim that the Bible is so profound that it is acceptable to arrange one's life around it to the exclusion of other books. Am I the only one that sees a problem with this? Given the breadth and profusion of human knowledge over the past few hundred years this almost seems to be miraculous in itself. It is certainly true to say that the authors of the Bible could write extraordinarily well, however this does not negate the fact that they didn't know what a germ or an atom was. The Bible is a very long book, it contains pages and pages on how to kill people, how to beat slaves, and detailed instructions on how to sacrifice a wide variety of animals. At no place in the Bible does God care to mention DNA, relativity or disease, the very principles of infectious disease. As though this weren't odd enough for some strange reason that surpasses human understanding God decided to make Shakespeare a better writer than himself. "Take a moment to imagine how good a book could be if it were written by the Creator of the universe. Such a book could contain a chapter on mathematics that, after two thousand years of continuous use, would still be the richest source of mathematical insight the earth has ever seen. Instead, the Bible contains some very obvious mathematical errors. In two places, for instance, the Good Book gives the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter as simply 3 (1 Kings 7: 23-26 and 2 Chronicles 4: 2-5). We now refer to this constant relation with the Greek letter p. While the decimal expansion of p runs to infinity-3.1415926535 . . .-we can calculate it to any degree of accuracy we like. Centuries before the oldest books of the Bible were written, both the Egyptians and Babylonians approximated p to a few decimal places. And yet the Bible-whether inerrant or divinely inspired-offers us an approximation that is terrible even by the standards of the ancient world. Needless to say, many religious people have found ingenious ways of rationalizing this. And yet, these rationalizations cannot conceal the obvious deficiency of the Bible as a source of mathematical insight. It is absolutely true to say that, if Archimedes had written a chapter of the Bible, the text would bear much greater evidence of the author's "omniscience.""- Sam Harris (Reply to a Christian) seventh paragraph Here is what we now know about our world. The universe is far older, larger and more magnificent than either the Bible or Koran suggest. We know for a fact that the Universe is approximately 14 billion years old and that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old. Humans evolved from non-human ancestors along a continuum with all other forms of life on Earth. Many Christians will scoff at the notion of common ancestry by saying things like Evolution is only a theory and not a fact. Such sentiments are born out of a serious misunderstanding of the word theory when it is used in a scientific context. In science there are facts, which must be explained by reference to other facts. These larger explanatory models are theories. Gravity like evolution is a theory and a fact that is not likely to be overturned even if we were to witness a rock falling upwards. If you doubt that evolution is true then you may as well doubt that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The fact that there are some scientists who proclaim the failures of Darwinism does not in the slightest suggest that there is an actual debate in the scientific community on whether or not evolution is true. So, where does all of this leave us? Unless it can be demonstrated that it is highly plausible that Jesus was the Son of God then the resolution will remain affirmed. Considering what Christians believe the burden will be upon my opponent to demonstrate why the divinity of Jesus is highly plausible. If, for instance, I claimed to be the son of God the burden would be upon me or any of my followers to spell out why this is so. The burden would not be placed upon the skeptic or the rational person that doubted whether or not I was God. Sources http://evolution.berkeley.edu... http://www.scientificamerican.com... http://www.secularhumanism.org... ===== Slavery ===== The Bible (Ephesians 6:5, 1 Timothy 6:1-4) St. Paul even admonishes slaves to serve their masters well-and to serve their Christian masters especially well. "When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not please the man who bought her, he may allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. And if the slave girl's owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave girl, but he must treat her as his daughter. If he himself marries her and then takes another wife, he may not reduce her food or clothing or fail to sleep with her as his wife. If he fails in any of these three ways, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment." (Exodus 21:7-11 NLT) The Bible (Exodous.21:20-21) – Slaves can be beaten so long as they don't immediately die after the process. ============= Animal sacrifices ============= The Bible (Lev.chs 3; 7:11-21, cf.ch. 7:22-27; Ex.29:20-28; Deut.12:7, 18, 1 Sam 2:15-17) ========================= Crimes that carry the death penalty ========================= Homosexual men were to be executed. (Lev 20:13) False prophets are to be killed by their own parents. (Zech 13:3) Witches should be killed. (Ex 22:18) Anyone working on the Sabbath is to be killed. (Ex 35:2) Stubborn children were to be stoned, and the stoning was to be instigated by their parents. (Duet 21:18-21) The list is long and it is preposterous. If I dedicated my time to writing all of them down I would be busy for quite a while.