Here is some good humor to help ease the tension and lighten the mood around here. These were supplied by J.P. Holding. I have some others that I will post later:
Bible Criticism. - You may be a fundie atheist if...
1. You become upset when a Christian says that not everything in the Bible should be taken literally.
2. You dislike how liberal theists try to interpret the Bible for themselves, while you create your own interpretations of the Bible for yourself: (a) Exodus 34 contains a new set of 10 Commandments; (b) Jesus asked His disciples to slay all His enemies.
3. You have actually calculated, for purposes of "argument by outrage," an estimate of the number of people drowned in The Flood.
4. You can quote from the bible better than most missionaries...at least the parts where someone dies.
5. You label all scholars that actually believe the Bible as "biased fundies" while those who don't believe it are known as "honest" and "accepted scholarship."
6. You insist that the Bible cannot possibly say anything about homosexuality being a sin, because they did not even have a concept of homosexuality at the time the Bible was written...then insist that the Bible says that David and Jonathan were married.
......AND you produce a long list of verses containing the words "children", "touching", and "bowels".
7. You think you have refuted the whole Trilemma because you've added another alternative to it.
8.You dismiss any attempt to harmonize the resurrection accounts by saying "one says A, the other says B, but none say A+B", then go on to offer your own elaborate conspiracy theory of what happened to the Jesus' body, describing A+B+C+D, none of which are said ANYWHERE let alone together.
9. You think that Isaac Asimov was a world-class authority in Biblical Studies.
10. You make a point of referring to Jesus as "Yeshua" and to God as "Yahveh" in order to hint that they are no different from Molech or Baal.
11. You use one,or more,of the following alternate spellings: GOD-"gawd" JESUS-"jeeezus" "jayzus" "jebus" "jeebers" BIBLE-"bibble" "babble" "wholly babble" "buy-bull"
12. You refer to the crucifixion of Jesus as the "cruci-fiction".
13. When a Christian's interpretation of a passage (based on the social/literary context) solves one of your favorite contradictions, it is only their personal interpretation, and can be dismissed as such. But your interpretation (based on a "plain" reading of the text) to arrive at the contradiction in the first place is entirely objective, and is obviously THE correct interpretation.
14. Your only knowledge of The Bible comes from searching 'bible contradictions' in Google.
15. Everytime you don't understand a passage in The Bible, instead of trying to figure it out you blame God for not writing it better.
16. You think that God would have made things a lot clearer for everyone, ranging from the medieval knight to the Chinese peasant, had He inspired His Word in modern English in words and concepts you could understand. You also ask, when told of the scarceness of paper in the ancient world, why God didn't provide enough paper to write a longer story.
17. You adamantly believe that "the Bible says pi equals 3" in 1 Kings 7:23 even though: (1) the verse does not make the slightest reference to the calculation of pi, (2) there are more measurements of the bowl from that verse in subsequent verses, (3) the bowl in question could very likely not have been a "perfect" circle with "perfect" measurements, (4) it's not unusual for ancient peoples using ancient tools (or even modern peoples using modern tools) to use round, easy to remember numbers, (5) asking an online math forum results in a refutation of your belief but you ignore what professional mathematicians plainly say (including that the Bible is not in error in this place) and twist their words to make it appear as if they are backing your assertion in order to continue to justify your belief (not that you ever had any intention of doing otherwise in the first place).
18. You consistently appear on discussion lists demanding that Christians accept your literal interpretation of various scriptural passages just so you can then launch into the usual "argument by outrage" - despite being told over and over that no Bible scholar or school of Christianity shares your particular bizarre literal interpretation.
19. You pontificate about the Bible as if you are an expert in theology, textual criticism, ancient languages & cultures and much more besides, when your knowledge of the Bible is just cut and paste from atheist discussion lists which cut and paste it from atheist websites which cut and paste it from embarrassingly unscholarly rantings by the likes of Messer's Freke & Gandy and Acharya S, etc.
20. You can quote Acharya S, Kersey Graves, John Remsburg, and Earl Doherty more fluently than Laurence Olivier could quote Shakespeare.
21. You create a web site:
http://www.EvilBible.com,and post an Evil Bible Quote of the Day on usenet. The quotes always end with: "What kind of person would get their moral guidance from an ancient book of myths and magic that says it is OK to murder, rape, pillage, and plunder?"
22. You decry Christian missionaries for denying cultural relativism; denouncing their efforts to reform cannibalism, slavery and fear of animist spirits as judgmental intolerance. But your attacks on the Bible merely comprise anguished cries of "how barbaric" rather than reasoned arguments; and ignore all considerations of ritual cleanness, the evils of the Canaanites and the fact that ancient society was always one step from anarchy.
23. You think Secular Humanism actually promotes religious tolerance. Secular Humanism only tolerates religion; it doesn't accept it.
24. You claim to hold no Dogma. Yet, you're just as rigid and stubborn with your beliefs as any Dogmatists.
25. Archaeology continually frustrates your attempts to find errors and contradictions in the Bible, but you continually use the same outdated accusations anyway since you're running out of material.
26. The only reason you go to hear a concert pianist play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata is to complain to him afterwards about the name. Obviously it was chosen as part of a conspiracy to hide the fact that the Bible's mentions of the moon giving light were errors rather than phenomenological language.
27. You visit a planetarium, but afterwards complain bitterly to the director that it uses the Earth as a convenient reference frame, and portrays the Earth as the center of a celestial sphere with the heavenly bodies revolving around it. This, and his use of the words "sunset" and "sunrise", is another part of the conspiracy to legitimize the Bible's use of such language.
28. When you go to bookstores, you move all the Bibles to the "fiction" section.
29. You then proceed to move copies of The DaVinci Code to the "non-fiction" shelves.
30. You insist on capitalizing "atheist".
31. You take the lack of evidence for the Jesus story being a hoax as evidence that Christians got rid of all the evidence.
32. You claim that there is no way a book thousands of years old can be relevant today, but refuse to do the necessary homework to see how it could apply in modern situations, preferring instead to argue that God should have provided an updated version.
33. You respond to arguments about the different points of view in the society of the ancient world by calling ancient people and their way of thinking "stupid".
34. You once heard something about some document in the Catholic Church which says the resurrection never happened. And despite your never having seen it or even met anyone who claims to have seen it (and despite having no idea who wrote it, when they wrote it, or what exactly it says), you're convinced that this document is far more reliable than the Gospels and thus disproves Christianity, and that the church is hiding it so that they can keep the money rolling in.
35. You believe that priests are only in it for the money, despite the fact that they make less than almost anyone else with their level of education.
36. You can't understand why people can't see the logic in your question,"The Lord of the Rings is a book. The Bible is a book. What makes one fiction,and the other true?"
37. And if they say they don't see the logic in that question, they MUST be lying!
38. You think that "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" are more believable than the Bible.
39. You complain that "Christian Apologists warp the definitions of words to make the Bible say what they want it to say." And then you go on to say that in the Bible, "feet" means "genitals" and "thigh" means "fetus".
Linear Mode
