Have you ever heard Gary Habermas, Michael Licona or William Lane Craig defend the resurrection of Jesus in a debate by saying that the resurrection is the best explanation for the “minimal facts” about Jesus? The lists of minimal facts that they use are typically agreed to by their opponents during the debates. Minimal facts […]
Hello America, today is yet another day that we can say, “Days without presidential embarrassment…..FUCKING ZERO! And counting. I had hoped to be a holdout to encourage folks to give him a chance, but he is proving himself a 1% asshole just like the rest of the Washington ilk! I am in the middle of the teeter totter. I balance myself in the middle while the angry children on the Left and Right try to knock each other in the dirt. My ass doesn’t end up there because I have found the mathematical perfect position of balance between two warring and extreme knee-jerk factions, none of them right but full of emotional conflict.
My position is to examine all of the facts and examine ways to solve complex problems, the Left and Right positions are examples of how children quarrel over a toy ending in the weakest one sustaining an injury while the winner gloats over the show of blood. It is very strange how the sociopathic Darwinist takes the position of peacemaker and caregiver of wounds in the midst of supposed normal folk who lust for blood at the enemy’s expense. I usually attempt to lead the religious zealot to the climate change believer and try to broker a peace and mutual understanding between them, me, the social Darwinist who believes that Eugenics wasn’t all bad and that death row inmates and lifers should face mandatory sterilization, believes that mediation could result in rational outcomes and the betterment of mankind in general…DUH!
The Donald is fucking irrational and deluded. He is busy not connecting with the majority of us as he stated he would! He is busy still fucking off at Mar-a-lago at our expense and fucking the local economy by causing a shutdown of all of the airport businesses due to restrictions related to Airforce One flying in their area of operations. Every commercial aircraft is grounded while The Donald’s plane is in the area! This is causing businesses to go bankrupt and the economy to take a downturn which is contrary to the message that he sent during his campaign of restoring the middle class. He isn’t for restoring the middle class, he doesn’t even install middle class friendly people to his cabinet. He elects those who have a strong dislike for those not in their country club and those who hob-knob with the 1%. You see, these assholes are not the 1%, not Donald, not his acolytes or his sycophantic fucktards. The 1% is unknown to us and multi-generational. These people operate above Donald and Bill Gates. These are the Billionaires that we know. The 1% operate above the law and don’t give a shit about the feeble every-day problems of the rich and the poor, they just pit them against each other to create a smoke screen for the constant fleecing.
The Donald was an answer to nothing that was supposed to be an answer to politics as usual. Now we have uncertainty and erratic bullshit over any balanced decision making resulting in a worry over whether or not Donald will kill us all. This dick cannot just shoot off his mouth and expect people to accept him as anything but ridiculous! Our President must respond with diplomacy and measured rhetoric before dropping a big assed bomb on any opponent. It’s like a chess game, not getting punched and reacting. This shit is gonna get us into something that the American people cannot extract themselves from for at least a decade, so pay attention people! Get the net and start being as afraid of this asshole’s policies as any other fair and balanced person!
I am on alert and am reasoning with the people that I can reason with. I am pissed about bullshit and complacency and ignorance and am well against it and need to warn others of the Donald’s idiocies. This fuck needs to NOT have 4 years of fucking us all. The Left needs to GIVE us a candidate like Sanders that we can use to fix certain things and veto others. Fix it and socialize education Goddammit! Get yer ass in gear! Donald is a loser!
I find myself coming back to my writing more and more as I realize that it comforts me and allows me to actually be my true self. There are no employers, no friends with religion, no other influential assholes here that harsh my literary mellow or try to squash my opinions with their idiotic outrage. When I write I go to my creative happy place and with a lack of worry, create what I believe to be some pretty cool and edgy prose on the foibles and frets of mankind, and how easily fixable most of it all is if people weren’t such complete dunces most of the time.
As a healthcare professional, I am somehow required by the law of man to passionately give a shit about humanity and strive for the betterment of these creatures above all else, even though they fuck themselves on a constant basis. I care, I do actually have a conscience, but the limits therein create a line that about 90% of humanity crosses on a daily basis with all of their petty infighting and, ‘I don’t give a shit about any problems but my own,’ attitudes. These people annoy me to no end and cause me to be very aware of an almost sociopathic quality to my personality that I am apologizing for quite rarely these days, but there are those whose opinions greatly matter to me over all others. The ones that matter discuss things sanely and fairly, without harsh judgment to those that they disagree with, without totally denying peer-reviewed demonstrable evidence, without masking their assholery in in pseudo-educated unsubstantiated circumlocutions tainted by holier-than-thou bullshit. These people are very few and far between and are always greater than an arms length away, making them very difficult to reach.
I used to consider my self a humanist, and maybe I am one, more so than I actually think. I believe that doing the best for the human race is the greatest gift that you can actually give it, so being a bit harsh, but adhering to logic will save the race without giving in to pseudo-morality and bullshit pandering to completely fucktardish thinking. Therefor I must now put forward my basic thoughts about humanity and it’s failings.
I believe in a swift death penalty only with irrefutable evidence. There is no room if conviction was done upon race and socioeconomic standing. If genetic evidence is present or a camera shows the crime in question, then convict and execute immediately as the gavel falls. Why? Not because of, ‘an eye for an eye,’ but because we have too many rats in the maze and it is showing the scientific signs of breaking down in real time as we speak. The animal condition of overpopulation is the real problem behind most of our difficulties on the planet Earth and less human beings is the answer. Religion will say different and knee-jerk liberalism will also defend the weakest, but the reality is that if you have a defective brake pad, then you wouldn’t install it on your car. So if this is the case, why do we keep death-row inmates alive and why do we keep those too disabled to contribute, alive when the system is the entity paying for their survival? This is a logical call, not a knee-jerk call! Asshole liberals will say that this is, ‘draconian,’ until the population reaches it’s breaking point when too many rats are in the maze, and then where are the liberal sentiments when these assholes are just trying to shore up their supplies by eliminating the needy?
I just believe in pre-empting the inevitable, the mass extermination of those not deemed worthy by the current government. We need to think and act upon forcing birth control on Medicaid recipients creating multiple children and using welfare as a career. The system needs to enact a free college and trade school system for these people while taking them and instructing them that they need to get a trade or a career, or forever be banned from the welfare system as complete flotsam. The system needs to be focused on being a necessary part of the village instead of a burden. People need to be trained for needed skills and plugged into the system as needs arise, and discouraged from getting worthless degrees that they, ‘dreamed of,’ getting because these fucking fields are goddamned pipe dream fields not populated by those based in reality. Yes, I understand the 1% and I get the bullshit that is going around, but I also believe that if society allows you to say what you want, then rise against the 1% and demand a better deal! This is possible because the status quo relies on the majority NOT rising up with guns and assassinating the minority! So get this shit together if you are unhappy with the current state of jobs and the minimum wage and be willing to risk your piece of the American pie to make the changes that you want, because if the Government is allowed to make those changes, you are probably not going to be quite satisfied with their incarnation of YOUR wishes. My father-in-law is very accustomed to using the word, “Draconian,” to describe anything that he disagrees with, ie, ALL things not extremely liberal, but given the problem with overpopulation, I hope that liberals get the net and realize that when people in industrialized countries begin fighting over resources, you a see the altruistic liberal vanish in a heartbeat when they miss a few meals.
The truth of the matter is that human beings need to start embracing some of their similarities to other animals, because it is unnatural and against what we are intrinsically as mammals to try to deny ourselves. We pontificate about unnatural things that we think elevate us and make us better as beings but ignore the fact that in the animal world there are no freebies and everyone contributes, or those that do not get nothing, THAT is natural and good! It is advanced thinking to assist a person or a family in temporary need, but it is unnatural to create a strata of flotsam who constantly graze on the labor of the working people while sitting on their subhuman asses. Things need to change that allow for socialized education and assistance programs for retraining if a person is injured, but if the person does not want these things and is abide, they need to be denied any tax dollars from those that work for a living. If this confederacy of dunces resort to crime, than force them to labor for 10 hrs a day and give them three meals a day and a cot, AND NO CONJUGAL VISITS! These slope-browed idiots should be mandatorily sterilized so that they cannot repopulate the trailer park!
You see, there is a serious need for people who are hardwired to do the right thing no matter how hard the decisions may be. I see these things in black and white and realize that half of our people have deluded themselves into thinking that all of this altruistic save-everyone bullshit is advanced thinking, much to the detriment of the ENTIRE planet, it’s climate, and it’s renewable resources that are rapidly dwindling. Most of these positions are due to liberal and far right religious folly, religion being the cancer upon humanity that seeks to fill the pews by restricting birth control and encouraging Latin men to essentially force their wives into maternal servitude and early death. These are just a few things that humanity uses to pump up the volume of an already overpopulated species! Yes, I know that poor Muslim countries do this as well and the 90% of their people follow it hook, line and sinker, or stinker, just like most of the majority of human beings. We have people like the ducking Fuggars who view the vagina as God’s sacred clown car, the more that comes from it, the better, until we are shoulder-to-shoulder and literally spiriting our neighbors away in the middle of the night to carve ’em up ala Terminus style and save ’em in ‘th big freezer until maw needs a shank fer the fucking stew!
The world needs a shake-up in the leadership, and not one that ignores the coming problems. It needs forward-thinking social Darwinists able to make decisions that are sensible and animal for the good of the producers/survivors, for the hunters that put meat on the table and keep the village psycho from running rampant! Liberal idiocy aside, these things are gonna happen and I would LOVE people to get on the bandwagon and support sensibility rather than support the free-love freebie snowflake shit happening today. I WANT green energy NOW! I want free college and trade school NOW! I want sustainable solutions to save the planet like fucking yesterday, but I am NOT a knee-jerk liberal and I think that the far right are insane. People need to, ‘be willing to break a few eggs.’ The reality of the matter is that people need to return to the days when hard choices were something you just had to make, instead of turfing it to someone with more guts and sticking their heads in the sand! I always say that I notice how 99% of self-made people are NEVER extreme liberals because they are too used to making tough choices and working for stuff instead of getting it for free, and I mean that. Without a frame of reference, a person should NEVER speak of something of which he/she has no experience. It’s like a career poor person telling you that money can’t buy you happiness. Has this person ever had money? No! Keep your mouth shut unless you have demonstrable evidence! Many of those without experience will pontificate on things that they know nothing of and they usually make themselves look like fools. These people usually are not those who have made hard choices that ended in their success or the success of others. Hard choices have to be made by people with guts who can look you in the eye after sacrificing something to save countless others.
I have gone on long enough. As I have said before, I am a social Darwinist who believes that the salvation of the human race relies on us going back to embracing the fact that we are animals and returning to a village lifestyle, where those who don’t contribute are given a job and if they can’t hack it, they receive NO benefit.
A wooden rib that is part of a ship based on the story of Noah’s ark is raised into place in Williamstown, Ky., on Thursday, June 25, 2015. The Ark Encounter will be a religious tourist attraction when it opens next year. (AP Photo/Dylan Lovan) (The Associated Press)
WILLIAMSTOWN, Ky. – In a rolling Kentucky pasture, the first few wooden ribs of a giant Noah’s ark tourist attraction have begun to sprout up.
For now, there’s only a foundation, some concrete pillars and the ribs. But the Christian ministry building the ark says the public will be awe-struck by the size of the 510-foot-long ship when it’s finished next year.
“This is going to be huge attraction just for the structure itself,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Kentucky-based group, Answers in Genesis.
On Thursday, journalists were allowed to tour the site for the first time — following a hard rainfall, as it turned out.
The religious theme park project that was announced nearly five years ago is still afloat, after hitting a stretch of rough waters. The ministry had to break the project into phases after private funding stalled a few years ago due to a soft economy. The ark is the first phase, and plans for other attractions at the site were put on hold.
Answers in Genesis says it will pour nearly $90 million of private donations and bond funding into the attraction, which will be called the Ark Encounter. So far, Ham said, about $70 million has been raised.
The Christian group says it has researched the Noah story to determine the size of the boat. In the Bible account, the ark was built by Noah to carry pairs of all the earth’s animals as the world was destroyed by a flood.
“Most people don’t really understand the size of the ark, and we’re going to answer questions like, how could he fit all the animals on board,” Ham said at the construction site Thursday.
Ham’s ministry opened the Creation Museum in 2007 a few miles from here. It has drawn criticism from science educators for exhibits that challenge evolution and promote a view that the earth is about 6,000 years old.
TV star and educator Bill Nye, who suggests the tourist-friendly ark could divert young people away from science, debated Ham on evolution at a widely-seen event at the Creation Museum last year. Nye said if Noah’s ark had actually been built, it would have been destroyed by the sea.
The big boat project took another hit last year when the state of Kentucky withdrew a tourism sales tax incentive that would have meant about $18 million for the attraction after it is up and running.
State officials said in December that tax incentives shouldn’t be used to “fund religious indoctrination.” Answers in Genesis disagreed and filed a federal lawsuit to get back into the incentive program, saying they should not be excluded because of their religious beliefs. The state has asked a judge to dismiss the suit, and a hearing is scheduled for next week.
Ham said the ark attraction is meant to reach more people “with God’s word.”
“But we’re not forcing people to come here, they come of their own free will,” Ham said. “And when they come here and go through, we’re not going to be forcing them to believe our message, we don’t do that. They’re going to have a great experience regardless of whether they agree with us or not.”
-Ken Ham, the complete idiot who believes that Tinkerbell really CAN fly, said the the exhibit, based on the complete bullshit myth that all of the fucking animals in the world came to a wooden ship of their own free will, will inspire single-celled organisms to further believe in misogynistic assholish bigotry and will, in the future, completely crush the Supreme Court and those meddlesome gays once and for all. Ham was also witnessed talking to his own dick and shoving flowers into his own pee hole…..
Washington (CNN)In a landmark opinion, the Supreme Court ruled Friday that states cannot ban same-sex marriage, establishing a new civil right and handing gay rights advocates a victory that until very recently would have seemed unthinkable.
The 5-4 ruling had Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority with the four liberal justices. Each of the four conservative justices wrote their own dissent.
The far-reaching decision settles one of the major civil rights fights of this era — one that has rapidly evolved in the minds of the American pubic and its leaders, including President Barack Obama. He struggled publicly with the issue and ultimately embraced same-sex marriage in the months before his 2012 re-election.
“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” Kennedy wrote. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than they once were.”
In a dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia blasted the Court’s “threat to American democracy.”
“The substance of today’s decree is not of immense personal importance to me,” he wrote. “But what really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch.”
The relevant cases were argued earlier this year. Attorney John Bursch, serving as Michigan’s Special Assistant Attorney General, defended four states’ bans on gay marriage before the Court, arguing that the case was not about how to define marriage, but rather about who gets to decide the question.
The case came before the Supreme Court after several lower courts overturned state bans on gay marriage. A federal appeals court had previously ruled in favor of the state bans, with Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals writing a majority opinion in line with the rationale that the issue should be decided through the political process, not the courts.
Fourteen couples and two widowers challenged the bans. Attorneys Mary Bonauto and Doug Hallward-Driemeier presented their case before the Court, arguing that the freedom to marry is a fundamental right for all people and should not be left to popular vote.
Three years after President Barack Obama first voiced his support for gay couples’ right to marry, his administration supported the same sex couples at the Supreme Court.
4 things we learned about John Roberts
“Gay and lesbian people are equal,” Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices at the oral arguments earlier this year. “It is simply untenable — untenable — to suggest that they can be denied the right of equal participation in an institution of marriage, or that they can be required to wait until the majority decides that it is ready to treat gay and lesbian people as equals.
The same-sex couples who challenged gay marriage bans in Michigan, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio were just a few of the estimated 650,000 same-sex couples in the United States, 125,000 of whom are raising children.
The challenges included same-sex couples who wanted to marry, those who sought to have their lawful out-of-state marriage recognized, as well as those who wanted to amend a birth or death certificate with their marriage status.
By the numbers: Same-sex marriage
The lead plaintiff in the case is Jim Obergefell who married his spouse John Arthur in 2013 months before Arthur died.
The couple, who lived in Ohio, had to travel to Maryland aboard a medical jet to get married when Arthur became gravely ill. And when Arthur died, Obergefell began to fight to be recognized as Arthur’s spouse on his death certificate.
Map: Where same-sex marriage is recognized in the U.S.
The plaintiffs from Michigan are April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, two Detroit-area nurses who are also foster parents. They took to the courts after they took in four special-needs newborns who were either abandoned or surrendered at birth, but could not jointly adopt the children because Michigan’s adoption code requires that couples be married to adopt.
Sgt. Ijpe Dekoe and Thomas Kostura became plaintiffs in the gay marriage case after they moved to Tennessee from New York.
The pair had married in New York in 2011, but Dekoe’s position in the Army took the couple to Tennessee, which banned gay marriage and refused to recognize gay marriages performed in other states.
–SCOTUS has finally stepped in where others were afraid to tread and FUCK Antonin Scalia and his dissent! Finally a sweeping tribute to freedom and a definite slap in the face to conservative cousin-fucking Duggerites!
Joel Osteen recently reported the theft of $600,000 from the safe in his church, but the theft wasn’t the only information of interest revealed. After finding out that this large chunk of money was from just one weekend of Osteen’s collected church donations, jaws dropped around the nation.
According to News Max on March 18, it didn’t take long for folks on the outside to do the math. Based on Osteen’s reported amount of money in this theft, it appears his Lakewood Church takes in an estimated $32 million a year, but some say that is a very low estimate. Calculator keys were punched around the nation taking the $600,000 for Olsteen’s weekend donation collection and multiplying this by the 52 weeks in a year.
Many consider this a conservative estimate of donations this church receives, as March is just an average month with no holidays for the church. The spirit of giving around the Christmas holidays has to net this church more than the average week. Then there’s Easter and other holidays, not to mention the weekdays. The amount reported taken from the church was only for their take over a weekend.
Osteen’s church released a statement at the time of the theft last week saying:
“It is important to note this was not an electronic data breach, but was instead limited to donations made in the services on March 8 and 9, 2014. You were not affected if you put your offering in a drop box, you gave online or through other electronic means, or you made a bookstore purchase.”
If you combine the stolen money with what Osteen’s church rakes in from “other electronic means” and from the folks who give “online,” this amount must be astronomical. The “electronic” and “online” donations were an undisclosed amount of money that wasn’t included in the money stolen. Putting all this together you are more than likely talking about a substantial amount of money, much more than the estimate of $32 million each year.
With Osteen’s best selling books, his TV work and the tours around the world, Osteen and his church are more than likely reaping rewards that are unimaginable.
If you think about it, this heist got the sum of money that you’d expect to hear was raked in from a casino heist! It seems that the reported theft of the money in Osteen’s church last week opened a new can of worms. It’s the church’s astronomical donations that should really be the headlines here. What happened to the days of the poor boxes filled with change?
-Funny how stupid people can be huh? 99.99% of these people are taking an 84 Billion dollar a year tax break on their backs and have been for some time!
RIP Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011
The 20 Best Christopher Hitchens Quotes
December 16, 2011 by Daniel Florien 246 Comments
Christopher Hitchens has a lot of quote-worthy material, but here are 20 of my personal favorites:
“What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof.”
The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more.
―The Portable Atheist
By trying to adjust to the findings that it once tried so viciously to ban and repress, religion has only succeeded in restating the same questions that undermined it in earlier epochs. What kind of designer or creator is so wasteful and capricious and approximate? What kind of designer or creator is so cruel and indifferent? And—most of all—what kind of designer or creator only chooses to “reveal” himself to semi-stupefied peasants in desert regions?
―The Portable Atheist
The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.
―God Is Not Great
What happens to the faith healer and the shaman when any poor citizen can see the full effect of drugs or surgeries, administered without ceremonies or mystifications? Roughly the same thing as happens to the rainmaker when the climatologist turns up, or to the diviner from the heavens when schoolteachers get hold of elementary telescopes.
―God Is Not Great
Religion looks forward to the destruction of the world…. Perhaps half aware that its unsupported arguments are not entirely persuasive, and perhaps uneasy about its own greedy accumulation of temporal power and wealth, religion has never ceased to proclaim the Apocalypse and the day of judgment.
―God Is Not Great
Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody—not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms—had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion.
―God Is Not Great
The Bible may, indeed does, contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.
―God Is Not Great
If god really wanted people to be free of [wicked thoughts], he should have taken more care to invent a different species.
―God Is Not Great
Is it too modern to notice that there is nothing [in the ten commandments] about the protection of children from cruelty, nothing about rape, nothing about slavery, and nothing about genocide? Or is it too exactingly “in context” to notice that some of these very offenses are about to be positively recommended?
―God Is Not Great
Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important. Where once it used to be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard—or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have made.
Sometimes, true, it will artfully concede them. But this is to offer itself the choice between irrelevance and obstruction, impotence or outright reaction, and, given this choice, it is programmed to select the worse of the two.
Meanwhile, confronted with undreamed-of vistas inside our own evolving cortex, in the farthest reaches of the known universe, and in proteins and acids which constitute our nature, religion offers either annihilation in the name of god, or else the false promise that if we take a knife to our foreskins, or pray in the right direction, or ingest pieces of wafer, we shall be “saved.”
―God Is Not Great
Human decency is not derived from religion. It precedes it.
―God Is Not Great
Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.
―God Is Not Great
Religion is man-made. Even the men who made it cannot agree on what their prophets or redeemers or gurus actually said or did.
―God Is Not Great
If religious instruction were not allowed until the child had attained the age of reason, we would be living in a quite different world.
―God Is Not Great
I try to deny myself any illusions or delusions, and I think that this perhaps entitles me to try and deny the same to others, at least as long as they refuse to keep their fantasies to themselves.
―Hitch-22
Faith is the surrender of the mind; it’s the surrender of reason, it’s the surrender of the only thing that makes us different from other mammals. It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason, our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something, that is the sinister thing to me. Of all the supposed virtues, faith must be the most overrated.
Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.
Take the risk of thinking for yourself, much more happiness, truth, beauty, and wisdom will come to you that way.
Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you.
–I am reminded every day of why I have such high regards for the late great Christopher Hitchens. He was one to shun foolish PC crap, yet champion the rights of everyone as long as they were trying to play well with others. In this day and age, we are constantly reminded of why we need in-your-face, unafraid intellectuals such as Hitchens to bring people back to their senses. I will never abandon his wariness of anything religious due to it’s ability to take believing in mythology too far and create false morality around it! I LOVE Hitch and his honesty, even though there are areas in which he and I would have most likely strongly disagreed. He might have well told me to piss of as he did some of his best friends due to political differences. I actually LIKE a person who is not afraid to tell a close friend that he thinks that he is fucked up in thinking a certain way! THAT is a person in which you can invest trust! That is a man who will not sell you out, an honest man. GAWD bless you hitch, and may Jeebus keep you in the eternal cheese pit of the Christentatious!
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Kassig is the fifth Western hostage ISIS apparently beheaded
He converted to Islam during his captivity and also went by the name Adbul Rahman Kassig
He was a former U.S. soldier who became a medical worker
He wanted to help the victims of war and was captured in Syria a year ago
(CNN) — American aid worker and former soldier Peter Kassig was beheaded by ISIS terrorists, the White House confirmed Sunday, hours after a video claiming to show the victim surfaced online.
ISIS held Kassig as a hostage and in previous communications had threatened his life.
The video shows the aftermath of a beheading in which the victim is not clearly recognizable.
President Barack Obama confirmed the 26-year-old’s beheading, saying Kassig “was taken from us in an act of pure evil by a terrorist group that the world rightly associates with inhumanity.”
Kassig, who converted to Islam in captivity, also went by the name Abdul-Rahman Kassig.
Kassig: ‘Able to share a bit of hope’ Obama: Beheading was ‘act of pure evil’ How is this ISIS video different? ISIS reportedly beheads Peter Kassig
He first traveled to the Middle East as a U.S. soldier and returned as a medical worker, feeling compelled to help victims of war.
He did aid work in Syria, where he was captured. He was held hostage for over a year.
“We are heartbroken to learn that our son, Abdul-Rahman Peter Kassig, has lost his life as a result of his love for the Syrian people and his desire to ease their suffering,” Kassig’s parents, Ed and Paula, said in a statement.
The parents released a previously unpublished audio recording of their son, recorded by a journalist before Kassig was taken captive.
“You know we would have a chance here to make up for a lot wrong that we did in this part of the world if we stepped in, in the right way,” Peter Kassig says in the recording. “If we just as a country did what other people helped me to do in that hospital. How much did I impact the political situation inside Syria? None. How much did I impact the political situation back home? None. But what I did do is that over period of time in that hospital I was able to share a little bit of hope and comfort with some people.”
The Kassig family expressed heartbreak over the beheadings of the other Westerners who came before their son, and asked for prayers for the safe return of other captives.
“While ISIL revels in the slaughter of innocents, including Muslims, and is bent only on sowing death and destruction, Abdul-Rahman was a humanitarian who worked to save the lives of Syrians injured and dispossessed by the Syrian conflict,” Obama said.
ISIL is another term for the group ISIS, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which calls itself simply the Islamic State.
The video
A familiar figure appeared in Sunday’s beheading video, dressed in all black and speaking with what sounds like an English accent.
A man fitting the same description appeared in previous videos of the apparent beheadings of other Westerners.
But this recording is different from previously released ones. It is longer, almost 16 minutes, and does not include a statement by the victim, as previous ones had.
And it is utterly brutal, showing in graphic detail the beheadings of other men, whom militants claim are pilots for the Syrian government.
The narration spends much time on ISIS’ history and the figure taunts Obama, saying he will have to return troops to Iraq in greater numbers than before.
And for the first time in such a video, the speaker names the place where he is standing with the victim — in the town of Dabiq in Aleppo province, Syria.
The fifth Westerner
Kassig is the fifth Westerner whom ISIS claims to have beheaded via video messages.
The first was U.S. journalist James Foley. A video of his killing was posted online in mid-August, just over a week after Obama approved “targeted airstrikes” against ISIS.
In early September, ISIS released a video showing the beheading of U.S. journalist Steven Sotloff. Sotloff’s apparent killer spoke in what sounded like the same British accent as the man who purportedly killed Foley.
Less than two weeks later, ISIS announced in a video the apparent killing of British aid worker David Haines.
And on October 3, ISIS released a video showing the apparent beheading of hostage Alan Henning.
Secretary of State John Kerry praised Kassig’s compassion and reiterated the goal of defeating ISIS.
“This was a young man who traveled to one of the world’s most dangerous places to care for the innocent victims of a bloody conflict, and fearlessly dedicated himself to helping those in need,” Kerry said. “There can be no greater contrast than that between Abdul-Rahman’s generosity of spirit and the pernicious evil of ISIL.”
Plea for mercy
Kassig’s life was threatened on the video that showed Henning’s killing.
A week after its release, Kassig’s family released a YouTube video of their own, asking his captors to show mercy and free him.
Kassig’s mother, Paula, addressed her son in the video. “We are so very proud of you and the work you have done to bring humanitarian aid to the Syrian people,” she said.
The couple noted they were releasing the video on the day of Islam’s Eid al-Adha, or the Festival of Sacrifice, when Muslims slaughter lambs, goats, sheep and cattle and distribute the meat to the poor and their families.
A native of Indiana, Peter Kassig founded Special Emergency Response and Assistance, a nongovernmental organization aiding Syrians fleeing the civil war there.
From 2012, he delivered food and medical supplies within and outside Syria and provided trauma care and training, his family said.
Soldier, helper, captive
Kassig’s journey began when he joined the U.S. Army Rangers in 2006 and deployed to Iraq in 2007. He was honorably discharged for medical reasons after a brief tour and returned to the United States to study political science and train for 1,500-meter races. But something wasn’t right.
“I was going to school with kids who look the same, were the same age as me, but we weren’t the same,” he said in an interview with CNN in 2012. “I wanted more of a challenge, a sense of purpose.”
In 2010, Kassig took time off and began his certification as an emergency medical technician.
In the two years that followed, he fell in love, got married and quickly divorced. Devastated and heartbroken, he went back to school, but he couldn’t shake his depression.
“I needed a game changer,” he said.
He eventually traveled to Lebanon and founded SERA to deliver food and medical supplies to swelling refugee camps.
On October 1, 2013, he was “detained” on his way to Deir Ezzor in eastern Syria, his family said.
“Peter really believed that an individual can make a difference in the world through their love and compassion and intelligence,” said Margaret Brabant, Kassig’s college adviser and a professor at Butler Univeristy in Indianapolis. “… That is the message that I think Peter would want me to convey.”
-I do not believe what my government and other U.S agencies say regarding the quagmire that they have created in the Middle East, I just know that it has been done for the personal gain of the oligarchy and does not benefit the worker in the trenches. The primitives of those nations have mobilized against the poor hapless idiots stupid enough to sign their names on the line to defend elitism and will continue to behead the victims of the rich. Islam is not a religion of peace, as we forward-thinkers know, and has been stirred to action due to the greed of modern nations. Had we stayed out of these cesspools, the inhabitants would still be battling among themselves. Had we turned quickly to green energy and disarmed the oligarchs, there would be no oil sheiks today, they would have melted back into the desert to practice their atrocities on each other.
Religion poisons EVERYTHING and needs to be swept away for good. Unfortunately, I believe that our flawed greedy race will take itself out sooner than any dirty bomb or plague. The poor bastard above who put himself at risk to accomplish nothing in a complete toilet of a nation gets my pat on the back for being a great but misguided fellow. One can pontificate forever about the humanitarian aspect of what this guy did, but they can’t deny that many of these people have ended up in shallow graves without their goddamned heads. Consciously wading into these shitholes actually does no good at all and usually results in getting tortured an killed with all of your efforts being wiped away by your enemy. Aid workers build schools and Muslims blow them up which equates to pounding sand in a rathole. This poor bastard even converted to his captors’ ancient mythological poison and still got fucked in the process and there is still now one less aid worker alive to care for those who will go back and get killed anyway.
I can get behind causes, but I sure as Hell won’t commit suicide to do so.
Bible Atrocities
Many in the religious culture insist that the God and the Holy Bible provide the foundation for all morality.
With that in mind, take a moment to browse some specific examples of God-endorsed atrocities. Then, ask yourself (honestly) how you would feel about these accounts of rape, incest, slavery, torture and infanticide if the acts had been perpetrated by a human being: Hitler, Stalin, Hussein, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.
Doesn’t your moral code require you to denounce these acts as horrific and monstrous? Do you hold God to a different standard simply because “He is God, and he can do whatever he wants?”
Think about it. Even if Yahweh existed, would he be truly worthy of our praise and allegiance? Or is the truly moral person obligated to shun and denounce this petty, jealous, cruel and murderous tyrant?
Genesis
Exodus
Leviticus
Numbers
Deuteronomy
Joshua
Judges
Samuel
1 Samuel
2 Samuel
1 Kings
2 Kings
2 Chronicles
Isaiah
Jeremiah
Ezra
Job 1
Job 2
Ezekiel
Hosea
Matthew
Mark
Luke
John
Acts
Romans
Ephesians
Hebrews
1 Peter
Revelation
Genesis
GENESIS 34:13 Shechem had premarital sex with Jacob’s daughter Dinah, which angered Jacob’s sons. Shechem and his father, Hamor, agreed to circumcision for the men in the city in order for Shechem to marry Dinah and make Jacob’s other daughters eligible for the men of the city. Three days later, while the men were still enduring the pain of circumcision, Jacob’s sons attacked the unsuspecting city, killing Shechem and Hamor with swords, looting the city, seizing the flocks, herds, possessions and wealth, plundering the houses and carrying off their women and children.
GENESIS 6 & 7 Unhappy with the wickedness of man, God killed every living thing on the planet except Noah’s family. Men, women, infants and animals drowned in unimaginable terror and agony.
GENESIS 19:6- In Sodom, Lot’s home was assaulted by a homosexual mob seeking to have relations with two angels. Lot volunteered his virgin daughters to the crowd, saying “you can do what you like with them” as long as the guests are left alone. After offering his children to be raped, Lot was then appointed by God as worthy of rescue from Sodom’s destruction.
GENESIS 19:26: God, still unfazed by the proposed rape of Lot’s virgin daughters, turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt for the heinous crime of looking over her shoulder.
GENESIS 38: 8-10 – Onan was instructed by Judah to lay with his brother’s wife to produce offspring for his brother (who was put to death by God for wickedness). Onan slept with his brother’s wife but “spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother” (NIV). God found this wicked, so God killed him.
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Exodus
EXODUS 2:12 Moses saw an Egyptian beating up a Hebrew. He looked around, saw no witnesses, killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.
EXODUS 7:2-4 God hardened Pharaoh’s heart and planned his “mighty acts of judgment.
EXODUS 7:20-21 God turned the Nile river to blood. The fish died, and the water was undrinkable.
EXODUS 8: 6-7 God sent a plague of frogs which covered the land.
EXODUS 8:16 God sent a plague of gnats.
EXODUS 8:24 God sent a swarm of flies.
EXODUS 9:5 God killed all of the Egyptian livestock with a plague.
EXODUS 9:10 God sent a plague of festering boils on the people and animals.
EXODUS 9:22-25 God sent a hail storm to Egypt, striking man and animal, stripping the land.
EXODUS 12: 29 God killed the first-born in every Egyptian home that wasn’t marked with lamb’s blood.
EXODUS 17:13 Moses held out the staff of God, allowing Joshua to kill the Amalekites.
EXODUS 21:20-21 According to God’s law, it was wrong to beat a slave to the point of death. But if the slave survived and got back up within a few days, the beating wasn’t punishable, because the slave was the property of the master. (God endorsed slavery and the beating of slaves.)
EXODUS 32:27 After seeing the golden calf, God commanded the Levites, “Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.” 3,000 were slaughtered, and God was pleased.
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Leviticus
LEVITICUS 26:7-8 God rewarded obedience with assurances that enemies would all die by the sword.
LEVITICUS 26:22 God warned that, if the people didn’t listen to Him, he would send wild animals to rob parents of their children, destroy cattle and leave the roads deserted.
LEVITICUS 26:27-29 God threatened hostility, punishing people for their sins “seven times over,” making them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters.
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Numbers
NUMBERS 12:9-14 God was displeased with Miriam, so he struck her with leprosy and banished her from the camp for seven days.
NUMBERS 15:32-36 A man gathered sticks for a fire on the Sabbath. By God’s command, he was stoned to death.
NUMBERS 16:27-33 The men were rebellious, so God caused the earth to open and swallow up the men, wives and children.
NUMBERS 16:35 A fire from God killed 250 men.
NUMBER 16:48 A plague from God killed 14,700
NUMBERS 21:3 The Lord gave the Canaanites over to Israel, who “completely destroyed them and their towns.”
NUMBERS 21:6 God sent venomous snakes, which bit and killed many Israelites.
NUMBERS 21:35 With God’s approval, the Israelites went into the city of Og, killed the king, his sons, the army (leaving no survivors) and took over the land.
NUMBERS 25:4 God told Moses to kill the leaders of Shittim and expose their bodies in broad daylight.
NUMBERS 25:8 Phinehas, son of Aaron the priest, killed an Israelite man and Midianite woman with a spear, plunging the spear “into the woman’s body.”
NUMBERS 25:9 A plague from God killed 24,000.
NUMBERS 31:9 Under God’s command, the Israelites captured the Midianite women and children, and “they took all the plunder and spoils.”
NUMBERS 31:17-18 God commanded Moses to kill all of the male Midianite children and “kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.” The virgins were presumably raped. (NOTE: How could the soldiers know which women were virgins?)
NUMBERS 31:31-40 God divided the plunder to the soldiers, the priest, the Israelites and for tribute to the Lord. 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 virgin women.
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Deuteronomy
DEUTERONOMY 2:33-34 Under God’s leadership, the Israelites utterly destroyed the men, women and children of Sihon. “…we left no survivors.”
DEUTERONOMY 3:6 Under God’s leadership, the Israelites destroyed the men, women and children of Og. They plundered the livestock and possessions.
DEUTERONOMY 7:2 God told the Israelites, regarding their enemies, to “destroy them totally. Make no treaty with them, and show them no mercy.”
DEUTERONOMY 20:13-14 God laid down the rules for battle, instructing the slaughter of all of the men. Women, children, livestock and possessions could be taken as “plunder for yourselves.”
DEUTERONOMY 20:16 “…in the cities of the nations the LORD your god is giving you as an inheritance, do not leave alive anything that breathes.”
DEUTERONOMY 21:10-13 According to God’s law, if an Israelite soldier was at war with an enemy, and he saw a beautiful woman that he found attractive, he could capture her to be his wife. She must then shave her head, trim her nails and discard the clothing she was wearing when captured. She could mourn her father and mother for a month. If the soldier wasn’t pleased with her for any reason, he could “let her go wherever she wishes.”
DEUTERONOMY 28:53 God’s punishment for disobedience included eating “the fruit of the womb, the flesh of the sons and daughters the LORD your God has given you.”
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Joshua
JOSHUA 6:21-27 Under God’s direction, Joshua destroyed the entire city of Jericho…men, women, teenagers and infants…with the edge of the sword. The soldiers then pillaged the silver, gold, bronze and iron for God and burned the city.
JOSHUA 7:19-26 Achan took a robe and some money from the plunder. Joshua and the Israelites took Achan, the loot, his sons, daughters, cattle, donkeys , sheep and possessions to the Valley of Achor, where all were stoned and burned.
JOSHUA 8:22-25 God helped Joshua battle and slaughter 12,000 men and women in the city of Ai. None escaped.
JOSHUA 10:10-27 God helped Joshua slaughter the Gibeonites.
JOSHUA 10;28 With God’s approval, Joshua put the city of Makkedah” to the sword and totally destroyed everyone in it. He left no survivors.”
JOSHUA 10:30 The Lord gave the city of Libnah to Joshua. Everyone in the city was “put to the sword.”
JOSHUA 10:32-33 God gave his approval as Joshua killed every man, woman and child in Lachish with the sword.
JOSHUA 10:34-35 Everyone in the city of Eglon was killed by the sword of Joshua and his army.
JOSHUA 10:36-37 God approved as Joshua killed the king of Hebron, its villages and every citizen. “They left no survivors.”
JOSHUA 10:38-39 Joshua took Israel’s army to attack Debir. They killed everyone.
JOSHUA 11:6 God commanded Joshua to defeat the enemy at the Waters of Merom. “You are to hamstring their horses and burn their chariots.”
JOSHUA 11:8-15 Joshua’s army, under God’s command, did not spare “anyone that breathed.”
JOSHUA 11:20 “For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses.”
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Judges
JUDGES 1:4 God gave the Canaanites and Perizzites into the hands of Judah. 10,000 enemy killed.
JUDGES 1:6 Adoni-Bezek (of the Canaanites) fled, but Judah’s army chased him down and sliced off his thumbs and big toes.
JUDGES 1:8 God approved the attack by Judah on Jerusalem. Judah’s army killed and set the city aflame.
JUDGES 1:17 With God’s approval, Judah and Simeon utterly destroyed the Canaanites who inhabited Zephath.
JUDGES 3:29 The Lord delivered the Moabites into the hands of the Israelites. “At that time they struck down about then thousand Moabites, all vigorous and strong; not a man escaped.”
JUDGES 4:21 Jael drove a tent stakes through the head of Sisera.
JUDGES 7:19-25 Under God’s direction, the Gideons defeated the Midianites. They killed and decapitated their princes and delivered the heads to Gideon.
JUDGES 8:15-21 Gideon punisheed the men of Succoth with desert thorns and briers. He then “pulled down the tower of Peniel and killed the men of the town.”
JUDGES 9:5 Abimalech murdered his own brothers.
JUDGES 9:45 Abimalech and his men killed everyone in the city. Then he scattered salt over it.
JUDGES 9:53-54 Abimelech was laying siege to the city of Thebez when a woman cracked his head with a stone. “Hurredly, he called to his armor-bearer, ‘Draw your sword and kill me, so that they can’t say “a woman killed him”.’ So his servant ran him through, and he died.”
JUDGES 11:29-39 Jepthah sacrificed his beloved daughter as a burnt offering after God gave him victory in battle.
JUDGES 15:15 Samson killed 1,000 men with the jawbone of an ass.
JUDGES 16:27-30 God helped Samson pull down the pillars of the temple, killing 3,000.
JUDGES 18:27 The Danies went on to Laish, against a peaceful and unsuspecting people. They attacked them with the sword and burned down their city.
JUDGES 19:22-29 A traveler from Bethlehem, his concubine and servant stayed as guests of an old man in Gibeah. Wicked men of the city surrounded the house, demanding to have sex with the male guest. The old homeowner offered his virgin daughter and the concubine, imploring the mob to “do to them whatever you wish.” The concubine was raped and died. The traveler put her dead body on his donkey, went home, took a knife, and hacked her into twelve pieces. He then sent the pieces to each of the twelve tribes of Israel.
JUDGES 20:43-48 The Israelites killed 25,000 men. 600 men fled to the desert. The Israelites went and put everyone in the towns “to the sword, including the animals and everything else they found.” Then they burned the towns down.
JUDGES 21:10-12 The assembly killed every male and non-virgin female in Jabesh Gilead. They found 400 virgins to bring back for themselves.
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Samuel
1 SAMUEL 4:10 The Philistines killed 30,000 Israelite soldiers.
1 SAMUEL 5:6-9 As punishment for stealing the Ark of the Covenant, God afflicted the Philistines with tumors in their “secret parts.”
1 SAMUEL 6:19 Some of the men of Beth Shemesh looked into the Ark. God punished them by killing all 70 of them.
1 SAMUEL 7:7-11 God helped Samuel’s men kill the Philistines, “slaughtering them along the way to a point below Beth Car.”
1 SAMUEL 11:11 Under God’s blessing, Saul and his army slaughtered the Ammonites “until the heat of the day.”
1 SAMUEL 14:31 Jonathan and his men slaughtered the Philistines and “pounced on the plunder,” eating meat with blood in it. God supported the slaughter of men but was displeased at the eating of unclean meat. So Saul built an altar to the Lord.
1 SAMUEL 15:7-8 God commanded Saul to attack the Amalekites and “totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
1 SAMUEL 15:33 “Samuel put Agag to death before the Lord at Gilgal.”
1 SAMUEL 18:27 David and his men killed 200 Philistines, presenting their foreskins to the king to win Michal in marriage.
1 SAMUEL 30:17 David killed all but 400 Amalekites, who escaped.
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2 Samuel
2 SAMUEL 2:23 Abner thrust the butt of his spear through Asahel’s stomach.
2 SAMUEL 3:30 As revenge for Asahel’s death, Joab and Abishai killed Abner.
2 SAMUEL 4:7-8 Ish-bosheth was lying on the bed in his bedroom. Recab and Baanah went into the room, stabbed and killed him. They decapitated him and took the head to David at Hebron. David was not pleased that an innocent man has been murdered.
2 SAMUEL 4:12 David punished Rechan and Baanah by killing them, chopping off their hands and feet and hanging their bodies by the pool at Hebron.
2 SAMUEL 6:6-7 The oxen carrying the Ark of God stumbled, and Uzzah reached out to steady it. God punished his “irreverent act” by killing him where he stood.
2 SAMUEL 6:22-23 Michal mocked David for exposing himself to slave girls. Michal was punished by God, who made her barren of children for the rest of her life. (Also note the contradiction in 2 Samuel 21:8, where Michal is said to NOT be barren, but instead has five children.)
2 SAMUEL 8:1-18 David’s acts included killing 2 out of 3 Moabite soliders, hamstringing 6,900 chariot horses, killing 22,000 Syrians, and striking down 18,000 Edomites in the Valley of Salt. Verse 6 says “…The Lord gave David victory wherever he went.”
2 SAMUEL 10:18 David killed 700 charioteers and 40,000 Aramean foot soldiers.
2 SAMUEL 11:14-27 David coveted Uriah’s wife. So he had him killed in battle so David could have Bathsheba for himself.
2 SAMUEL 12:1 For David’s murder of Uriah, God killed David’s child.
2 SAMUEL 13:1-15 David’s son, Amnon, fell in love with his own sister, Tamar, a virgin. She protested his advances, (verse 14) “but he refused to listen to her, and since he was stronger than she, he raped her.” Afterward, Amnon hated her and cast her out of the room.
2 SAMUEL 13:28-29 Tamar’s brother Absalom ordered his men to get Amnon drunk, then kill him for raping his sister.
2 SAMUEL 18:6-7 David’s army slaughtered 20,000 men in the forest of Ephraim.
2 SAMUEL 18:15 Joab took 3 javelins and plunged them into Absalom’s heart. Ten other men struck and killed him.
2 SAMUEL 20:10-12 Joab plunged a dagger into Amasa’s belly, spilling his intestines onto the ground. Amasa died, wallowing in his blood inthe middle of the road.
2 SAMUEL 24:15 God sent a plague on Israel to punish David for sin. 70,000 people died.
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1 Kings
1 KINGS 2:24-25 Solomon killed Adonijah.
1 KINGS 2:29-34 Solomon killed Joab.
1 KINGS 13-15-24 A prophet lied to a man, telling him it was fine to eat bread and drink water in a place the Lord had previously told him not to. The deceived man ate and drank there. God sent a lion to kill him, “and his body was thrown down on the road.”
1 KINGS 20:29-30 The Israelites fought the Syrians. Enemy body count for a single day = 100,000. A wall fell on the 27,000 remaining people.
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2 Kings
2 KINGS 1:10-12 Elijah called down fire from heaven. 50 men were consumed by the flames.
2 KINGS 2:23-24 – 42 Fourty-two children made fun of Elisha on the roadside because he was bald. Elisha cursed them. Two bears came out of the woods and mauled them to death.
2 KINGS 5:27 Elisha cursed Gehazi and his descendants, forever, with leprosy.
2 KINGS 6:18-19 The enemy came toward Elisha, and he prayed to God, “Strike these people with blindness.” God made them blind. Elisha then tricked them and led them to Samaria, where God opened their eyes again.
2 KINGS 6:29 A woman cried out to the king of Israel, lamenting a great famine. She was upset because she had agreed to cook her son and eat him, but after the deed, another woman had refused to do the same.
2 KINGS 9:24 Jehu tricked Joram, then murdered him with a bow and arrow, piercing his heart.
2 KINGS 9:27 Jehu ordered his men to kill Ahaziah, king of Judah.
2 KINGS 9:30-37 Jehu had Jezebel killed. Horses trampled her and her blood splattered the wall. Dogs ate her flesh and her remains were called “refuse” (trash).
2 KINGS 10:7 Jehu had Ahab’s 70 sons beheaded. He then sent the heads to their grieving father.
2 KINGS 10:14 Jehu ordered the death of Ahab’s family…42 people.
2 KINGS 10:17 According to God’s word (spoken to Elijah), Jehu went to Samaria and “killed all who were left there of Ahab’s family; he destroyed them…”
2 KINGS 10:19-27 Jehu trapped the Baal worshippers in the temple. He then told the guards, “Go in and kill them; let no one escape.” They slaughtered the worshippers and burned down the temple, using it as a latrine from that day forward.
2 KINGS 11:1 Athaliah destroyed the royal family.
2 KINGS 14:5 Amaziah executeed the officials who murdered his father.
2 KINGS 14:3-5 God was unhappy with Azariah, even though he had done what was right in the eyes of the Lord. The high places had not been removed, and God was jealous of their sacrifices on that altar. So God afflicted Azariah with leprosy as punishment.
2 KINGS 15:16 Menahem attacked the city of Tiphsah. He destroyed the town and “ripped open all of the pregnant women.”
2 KINGS 19:35 An angel of the Lord killed 185,000 men in the Assyrian camp.
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2 Chronicles
2 CHRONICLES 13:17 God delivered the Israelites to Abijah and Judah. 500,000 enemy dead.
2 CHRONICLES 21:4 Jehoram killed all of his brothers, and some of the princes of Israel…put to death by sword.
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Isaiah
ISAIAH 13:15 Isaiah saw a prophecy regarding Babylon. “Whoever is captured will be thrust through; all who are caught will fall by the sword. Their infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be looted and their wives ravished.”
ISAIAH 13:18 God’s punishment for Babylon was further described. “Their bows will strike down the young men; they will have no mercy on infants, nor will they look with compassion on children.”
ISAIAH 14:21-23 “Prepare a place to slaughter his sons for the sins of their forefathers; they are not to rise to inherit the land and cover the earth with their cities. ‘I will rise up against them,’ declares the Lord Almighty.”
ISAIAH 49:26 God’s punishment on those who came against Israel. “I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh; they will be be drunk on their own blood, as with wine. Then all mankind will know that I, the Lord, am your Savior…”
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Jeremiah
JEREMIAH 16:4 The word of the Lord about the children born in this land says “They will die of deadly diseases. They will not be mourned or buried but will be like refuse lying on the ground. They will perish by sword and famine, and their dead bodies will become food for the birds of the air and the bests of the earth.” Back to top ↑
Ezra
EZRA 6:12-13 Darius’ decree said that, if anyone changed his edict, “a beam is to be pulled from his house and he is to be lifted up and impaled on it.” Then the house was to be demolished.
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Job
JOB 1 To prove a point, God gave Satan permission to torment Job and test his righteousness. Job’s children were killed. Job’s possessions were destroyed. Job tore his clothes and shaved his head from grief.
JOB 2 God allows Satan to smite Job’s body with horrible boils “from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head.” Job scraped his afflicted skin with a piece of broken pottery. His wife tells Job to “Curse God and die.” Job’s friends found him unrecognizable. This is how God treats his beloved children. Back to top ↑
Ezekiel
EZEKIEL 20:26 Israel rebelled, and God’s punishment was sobering. “I let them become defiled through their gifts- the sacrifice of every firstborn- that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord.”
EZEKIEL 23:34 God said that prostitutes would drink a cup of scorn and tear their breasts.
EZEKIEL 23:45-47 God punished adultery. “…Bring a mob against them and give them over to terror and plunder. The mob will stone them and cut them down with their swords; they will kill their sons and daughters and burn down their houses.”
Hosea
HOSEA 13:16 Because Israel had rebelled, a wind from the Lord would blow in. They “will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, and their pregnant women ripped open.”
(Most of our focus has been on the Old Testament, but we’ve thrown in afew New Testament zingers just to quell the “Law VS Grace” crowd.)
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Matthew
MATTHEW 5:17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” Jesus endorses the mass murder, rape, slavery, torture and incest written about in the Old Testament.
MATTHEW 8:12 Jesus warned of eternal torture in hell, “into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
MATTHEW 10:35-36 Following Jesus meant the possibility of turning a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, etc. “…a man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.”
MATTHEW 11:21-24 The cities of Korazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum were not impressed with Jesus’ great works, so Jesus said “Woe to you” and cursed them to a fate more unbearable than that of Sodom.
MATTHEW 8:21 A man sought to follow Jesus, but he wanted to bury his recently deceased father before he went. Jesus replied, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” Jesus ignored the man’s grief.
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Mark
MARK 4:10 In Jesus’ parable of the sower, he told his disciples that he spoke to others in parables so they’d remain confused…”otherwise they might turn and be forgiven.”
MARK 7:10 Jesus taught that any child who cursed his parents should be killed according to Old Testament law.
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Luke
LUKE 8:32-33 Jesus cast demons out of a naked man and into a large herd of pigs. They fell over a cliff to their death. The town asked Jesus to leave.
LUKE 12:47 Jesus warned that a servant of God who does not heed his master will be “beaten with many blows.”
LUKE 19:26 In the parable of the ten minas, the master (God) said of those who chose not to follow him, “…bring them here and kill them in front of me.”
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John
JOHN 6:53-66 Jesus said to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Despite the metaphorical tone, many disciples were uncomfortable with the idea and chose to walk away.
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Acts
ACTS 5:1-9 Ananias lied about the money he’d made on sold property, keeping some for himself. God killed him, then killed his wife for being in on it.
Romans
ROMANS 1:26-27 Paul said that homosexuals deserve death.
Ephesians
EPHESIANS 1:4-5 Despite all of Jesus’ instructions to accept him as savior, Jesus also says God “predestined” those will be saved according to His pleasure.
Hebrews
HEBREWS 12:20 God said that animals must be stoned to death if they lay foot upon Mt. Zion.
1 Peter
1 PETER 1:20 Despite God’s failed experiment in the Garden of Eden, the mass execution of Noah’s flood and the final solution of Christ’s sacrifice, Jesus was predestined to be crucified all along. “He was chosen before the creation of the world,”
Revelation
REVELATION 6:8 In the End Times, God gives Death permission to slaughter 25% of the earth’s population by “sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.”
If the irresistible temptation to fashion Jesus in one’s own image persists today, nearly 2,000 years after the crucifixion, it must have been even more tempting for the gospel writers, translators, and scribes who reproduced “the words of God” to do the same.
The gospel according to Bill O’Reilly gives us the tea party Jesus, an insurrectionist obsessed with government and taxation. As Selina O’Grady wrote in her causticGuardian review:
[Bill O’Reilly] created a Tea Party son of God. Jesus, the little guy, is an enemy of the big corrupt tax-oppressing Roman empire, which is itself just a version of Washington, only even more venal and sexually depraved. This Jesus is a tax-liberating rebel who incurs the wrath of the Jewish and Roman powers by threatening their joint fleecing of the people. As a member of the populist right, he is not, of course, in favour of redistribution: Bill O’Reilly’s Jesus does not tell the rich to give away their money to the poor.
The four canonical gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were written 30 to 70 or more years after the crucifixion — and, according to biblical scholars, most likely authored by converts who did not witness the events they retold based on oral transmission. Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman reminds us that no one has ever seen an original copy of the Christian Bible, or a first copy of the original. Early copies were created one at a time by scribes, who may have heard different versions of the stories or even just bits and pieces. These editions were then copied by other scribes or translated from Aramaic and Hebrew into Coptic and Greek and then into Latin. The loose process of reproduction opened an immense opportunity for differing interpretations of words and phrases, outright errors (not all scribes were scholars, and some may have been scoundrels), and the infusion of personal perspectives and ideologies.
Imagine if Bill O’Reilly were the first scribe to translate the gospels. His ideology surely would have compromised or edited the “words of God,” giving today’s right-wing conservatives even greater license for their orgy of wealth and war on the poor. Expand that scenario to an army of Bill O’Reilly scribes down through the ages, with different languages, ideologies and prejudices, and we can begin to appreciate the hazards of thinking of the gospels as history remembered rather than history storied.
The four canonical gospels themselves raise a red flag, since they offer many different versions of the “words of God.” For example, did Mary, Joseph, and Jesus flee to Egypt after Jesus’ birth, as told in the gospel of Mathew, or did Mary go to the temple in Jerusalem for the Jewish purification ritual 30 days after giving birth, as prescribed in the Torah and reported in Luke’s gospel? In this version the family returned to Nazareth without a side trip to Egypt. The gospel of John says the Last Supper was two days before Passover, but the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) place it on the traditional eve of Passover. During the arrest of Jesus in Gethsemane Garden, did Judas identify Jesus with a kiss, as described in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, or did Jesus identify himself (twice, with no kiss), in accordance with the gospel of John? And as Bart Ehrman notes:
In Matthew, Jesus comes into being when he is conceived, or born, of a virgin; in John, Jesus is the incarnate Word of God who was with God in the beginning and through whom the universe was made. In Matthew, there is not a word about Jesus being God; in John, that’s precisely who he is. In Matthew, Jesus teaches about the coming kingdom of God and almost never about himself (and never that he is divine); in John, Jesus teaches almost exclusively about himself, especially his divinity. In Matthew, Jesus refuses to perform miracles in order to prove his identity; in John, that is practically the only reason he does miracles.
What about other gospels? By the end of the first century, there were scores of Christian sects. In second-century Rome four major splinter groups, with vastly different theologies and views on Jesus, were fiercely competing for dominance. Each group had its own leaders, texts, and gospels. In early Christianity more than 50 other gospels existed, with many different accounts of Jesus and his teachings. In the fourth century, after the Council of Nicaea established a unified Catholic Church, the four canonical gospels were sanctioned for the New Testament. Since it’s well known that history is written by the winners, the 27 books of the New Testament became the official “words of God.” Other gospels were banned or burned or just faded into oblivion, since copying them was forbidden. But then serendipitously in modern times, a trove of the early alternative gospels were recovered from Middle East caves and the Egyptian desert; they challenge the accuracy of the church-sanctioned gospels.
Despite the contradictions and skepticism about the historicity of the New Testament, in one sense it contains the “facts” — that is, the “functional facts,” the scriptures that have framed the way Christians have thought about Jesus, Christianity, and Jews since the fourth century. Stop Christians on the street and ask them about the alternative gospels — the gospels of Philip, Thomas, Mary Magdalene, and others — and watch the puzzled looks. The populace only know the four canonical gospels — and for many, only superficially, if at all, considering the “scandalous” rate of biblical illiteracy that has been reported.
That may explain why so many miss the thoroughly Jewish Jesus of the canonical gospels. Jesus’ dedication to Judaism could not be denied or erased from the gospels without undermining Christianity, which based its authenticity on Jewish ancestry and Jewish prophesy.
On one count, Bill O’Reilly gets a high grade. His Jesus is thoroughly Jewish. Unlike the curves injected into the canonical gospels, Bill’s Jesus remains Rabbi Jesus, revered to the end by his exclusively Jewish followers. Jesus’ conflict is clearly with the Jewish leadership, not with his fellow Jews or spiritual Jewish theology. Even as Jesus is condemned to death, O’Reilly comments, “It is not the Jewish Pilgrims who want Jesus dead nor most of the residents of Jerusalem [Jews]. No, it is a small handful of men who enrich themselves through the Temple.”
In contrast, the gospel writers, in their effort to establish the new religion of Christianity, inserted contradictory tidbits of anti-Semitism, suggesting Jesus had broken with Judaism. Not surprisingly, the gospel of John, the last of the canonical gospel to be penned, is the most anti-Semitic. It was written after the brutal Roman war with Jews that led to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E. Converts to Christianity were then primarily Roman pagans. There was no currency in connecting Jesus to Judaism, but great value in casting him falsely in opposition to Judaism — and making the Romans the good guys.
Those who continue to believe that Jesus was anything but a dedicated Jew or insist that he launched the new religion of Christianity must explain why he didn’t play the Christian card when he was facing death for blasphemy against Judaism.
The Sanhedrin, the ruling body of Judaism that condemned Jesus, only had authority over Jewish affairs. If Jesus had defected from Judaism and believed he was launching a new religion, why didn’t he say that in his defense to escape the jurisdiction of the Sanhedrin? If he had taken that route and the Romans still wanted him out of the way (as believed by Bill O’Reilly, Reza Aslan and others), we wouldn’t have been saddled with the debate about who killed Jesus, a debate that spans centuries and continues today. It would have been clear that the Romans did it. And hundreds of thousands of Jews who were slaughtered as “Christ killers” would have been spared. Of course, Jesus couldn’t play the Christian card because there was no Christianity at the time, and Jesus had no intention of starting a new religion. In his mind and the minds of his followers, as noted in Killing Jesus, he was Rabbi Jesus till the end.
Just as an added note, the same argument pertains to Paul, who is almost universally credited with establishing the separate religion of Christianity. Yet he too was charged with blasphemy against Judaism by the Sanhedrin and faced death. If Paul, in his mind, had started a new religion and had rejected Judaism, why didn’t he play the Christian card? Paul had an even more persuasive argument than Jesus:
Sanhedrin: I worship Jesus Christ whom you reject. I’m no longer a Jew, I’m a Christian. You have no authority over me as the leader of a religion other than Judaism. Governor Felix (the Roman prefect): I’m a Roman Citizen — born a Roman citizen — and I proclaim I’m a Christian not a Jew. If the Sanhedrin could indict non Jews for blasphemy they would indict you and all Romans. Would you tolerate that? You must release me according Roman law.
Would Felix have any option other than releasing Paul, especially since the Romans had no argument with him (Acts 28:16-18)? Yet Paul allows the charge of blasphemy of a Jew against Judaism to stand — without challenging it. In doing so he squanders five years at the height of his ministry (it’s now almost 30 years after the crucifixion) with arrest, imprisonment, transport to Rome for his trial, and several years of house arrest in Rome before he is executed — as a Jew. Why?
One obvious explanation stands out. In Paul’s mind his brand of Jewish Christianity was the new Judaism open to everyone. But after his passing, that vision was lost. The converted Roman pagans picked up the Christian baton. This group, having no ties to Judaism, sought increasingly to distance Christianity from Judaism; thus the separate religion was firmly launched.
Unfortunately, the gospels and later parts of the New Testament do not take up or even mention why neither Jesus nor Paul played the Christian card. I wish Bill O’Reilly had. It’s a serious issue that can’t be casually dismissed!
Bernard Starr is a psychologist, journalist, and college professor. He is the author ofJesus Uncensored: Restoring the Authentic Jew and the organizer of the art exhibit “Putting Judaism Back in the Picture: Toward Healing the Christian Jewish Divide.”
-This article explains exactly what atheists have been saying about the Bible for years. The author meant the article for a different reason, but I think it is a great historical starting point for new atheists. I tend to go with, the Bible is the work of men and couldn’t possibly be inspired by the divine unless the divine is completely retarded.
hitchens67 Atheism WOW!! Logic and reason campaign 