Love Thy Sister

Growing up as a Christian, I remember hearing preachers 
lament that people didn't read the Bible enough. That "God's 
word" should be venerated more and that people should 
know what was in "the book", because it was God's instructions 
to man concerning what he expected from man. I agree that 
people should read "the book" and know what is in it, because 
if they do and are honest with themselves they will find that the 
Bible is a book that is a 100% human production--with mind-
numbing absurdities and contradictions and unimaginable 
viciousness attributed to their allegedly omnibenevolent god. 

Number 11 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:

by Farrell Till

In previous trips to the Twilight Zone, we looked at some of the strange laws of the people who lived there. One of their strangest was known as the "Levirate law." This was a law that prohibited a widow without a son from marrying until she had given her brothers-in-law a chance to succeed where their brother had failed. As the humorist Dave Barry often says in his column, I am not making this up. This was an actual law that the inscrutable Yahweh had given to his chosen ones: "If brothers dwell together and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married to a stranger outside the family; her husband's brother shall go in to her, take her as his wife, and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her. And it shall be that the firstborn son which she bears will succeed to the name of his dead brother, that his name may not be blotted out of Israel" (Deut. 25:5-6). Nothing was said, of course, about whether the widow had given birth to daughters before her husband died, because in the Twilight Zone females just didn't count. The deceased husband had to have produced a son and if not, the widow had to give her brothers-in-law a shot (no pun intended) at it.

Scooping and Copping

Number 10 of 17 in the *Twilight Zone* series:

by Farrell Till

The Twilight Zone, where the children of Israel lived and worshiped their god Yahweh, was indeed a strange place. Perhaps the only thing stranger than this god was the legal system that he imposed on his "chosen people." On our last journey, we learned that Yahweh abhorred anything that was blemished, and so he had ordered all people with physical handicaps to distance themselves from the tabernacle altar, lest they profane Yahweh's holy sanctuary with their presence. Even blemished animals, especially those with crushed testicles, would profane Yahweh's altar if they were offered as sacrifices.

What Third-Day Prophecy?

The New Testament has both Jesus and Paul claiming that the Old Testament prophesied that the Christ would be resurrected from the dead on the third day. The problem for inerrantists is that no such prophecy can be found in the Old Testament. Farrell  Till covers this problem and others. From *The Skeptical Review*, March-April 1996:

By Farrell Till 

New Testament writers claimed that the resurrection of Jesus was prophesied in the Old Testament. The weakness of this claim is apparent in the fact that none of these writers ever cited an Old Testament prophecy whose face-value meaning was so obvious that no reasonable person could deny that the prophets were indeed predicting that the Messiah would rise from the dead. The best they could do was distort a statement in Psalm 16:8-11 to try to make it mean something that the psalmist never intended:

I have set Yahweh always before me; because He is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore, my heart is glad, and my glory rejoices. My flesh also will rest in hope. For you will not leave my soul in Sheol, nor will You allow Your Holy One to see corruption. You will show me the path of life; in Your presence is fullness of joy: at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Pardon my ignorance, but if there is a clear cut prediction of a resurrection in this passage, I simply cannot see it. Yet the apostle Peter, in a sermon that Luke put into his mouth, quoted this scripture on the day of Pentecost and said that it was a prophecy of the Messiah's resurrection. "Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day. Therefore, *being a prophet,* and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body, according to the flesh, He would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne, he, *foreseeing this,* spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that His soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption" (Acts 2:29-31).

What About Casualty Numbers?

The following article is from the 1995 / January-February issue of  *The Skeptical Review*:

by Farrell Till

William Sierichs' article [See previous article on this blog published yesterday, 5-5-18] on biblical armies should convince any objective reader that Yahweh's inspired writers had a penchant for hyperbole. If the great armies of fairly modern times, such as those that fought in the Napoleonic wars, numbered only in the tens of thousands, what reasonable person can believe that tiny Israel and its neighboring nations could have fielded armies that numbered in the hundreds of thousands? Obviously, then, biblical writers were prone to exaggeration.

Those Amazing Biblical Numbers: Taking Stock of the Armies of Ancient Israel

The following article is from the 1995 / January-February issue of  *The Skeptical Review*:

by William Sierichs, Jr

The survival of ancient Israel must have often been in doubt, since armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands repeatedly attacked the nascent state. The Israelites once stood off an Egyptian army of a million. Miraculously, for several centuries, Israel survived attacks by armies larger than those commanded by Napoleon, Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the generals of the American Civil War, and even the massive forces of Prussia and France in 1870.

Quotes

God says do what you wish, but make the wrong choice and you will be tortured for eternity in hell. That's not free will. It's like a man telling his girlfriend, do what you wish, but if you choose to leave me, I will track you down and blow your brains out. When a man says this we call him a psychopath. When god says the same we call him "loving" and build churches in his honor. ~William C. Easttom II