More Animals - More Bible

Now, I’ve already talked about the bad start of the animal kingdom, but I actually missed something prior. It appears that animals were screwed, even before the snake incident. You see, animals were created directly by God, and everything he does is perfect.

They have no original sin, yet they age, get sick, and die, just like humans. But humans deserve to age and die, because they ate some fruit. Animals don’t have an original sin, so their problems must have been intentionally created by God. Animals must have been created defective. Worst of all, they have no Messiah, so they have no hope of ever escaping their mortal fate.

Now let’s fastforward a couple thousand years. Some horny angels have come to earth and botched things up for everyone. So, God decides to clean house. The troublemaking angels dematerialize and go back to heaven, while God floods the earth, killing almost all of the humans and animals. Once again, the animals find themselves caught up and punished for something that they were not involved in. And, if that’s not bad enough, as soon as Noah gets out of the ark, what does he do with these precious and rare animals? I mean, think about this for a second. The entire world population of animals has dwindled to two of each type, and seven of some special ones. Noah has just spent the last century carefully preparing and caring for them. So, he finally gets out into the squeaky clean earth, and what does he do? That’s right. He butchers a few of them.

Moving forward to the Exodus, we find that Pharaoh and God are involved in a bit of a spitting match. God decides to teach Pharaoh a lesson, so he sends him a bunch of problems. Have you ever stopped to think how many of the plagues affected the animals? Obviously, plague five was devastating to them, because it killed all of the Egyptians livestock, and, of course, plague ten was bad because it killed all firstborn, including the already-dead livestock. But plague two (frogs), three (lice), four (flies), and eight (locusts) made use of members of the animal kingdom to make humans uncomfortable. I don’t expect the lice or the locusts to garner much sympathy, but think of the wee frogs. Even the first plague, turning all water to blood, would have affected animals at least as much as humans. The fish, particularly, would have suffered.

While we’re on the subject of using animal overpopulation to get back at humans, what about the billions of quail that were heaped upon the camp of Israel? Not only were the birds crushingly overpopulated, but they soon died, raising a hell of a stink.

After the flood, God gave all animals to Noah to use as food. He also allowed humans to use animals as slaves, beasts of burden. To top it all off, a bunch of animals got insulted as “unclean”. Of course, being considered unclean exempted them from sacrifice duty, and prevented them from being used as food, so I don’t imagine they minded.

Finally, my mind turns back to my dog and his good fortune for not being God’s dog. There is probably no animal that gets treated by the Bible as poorly as dogs. They are mentioned 25 times in the scriptures, and invariably, they get insulted. They are associated with sinners, they lick up the blood of sinners, they hang out with bad people, they symbolize greed and lack of restraint, and they are used as a euphemism for vicious men and men who mutilate flesh.

So, there you have it folks. If you thought that you have it rough as a human, just be thankful you’re not a dog!

The Bible and Animal Husbandry

My dog just got back from the vet. The bill for checkup, antibiotics, dental work, and minor surgery will be over $600, bringing my total investment into this little doggy to around $1,200. That’s about $300 per pound. But, he is a member of the family. He’s pretty lucky that he’s my family’s dog and not God’s dog. You see, God doesn’t take very good care of his animals, and he certainly would never go to these lengths to see to their well being.

Let’s consider the Bible’s record when it comes to animal husbandry.

Animals get off to a really bad start. Right off the bat, a snake is possessed by Satan in the Garden of Eden, then cursed by God. Now, this doesn’t seem right. The snake in Eden was an innocent party, used by Satan to trick Eve. Yet, Satan continued to live in heaven for thousands of years, with no seeming punishment. The snake, who really had no idea what was going on, was cursed – made to eat dust, and could no longer walk. Well, no sooner did the snakes get cursed, when they looked around and discovered that the cattle were already there. For some reason, cows had already been cursed. They must have pissed off God right after being created. I suspect that they looked down at their clumsy body right after rolling off the creative assembly line and exclaimed, “Yeah…good one.” Then bam! – cursed.

Well, the human race is just getting into gear, when Cain and Abel decide to give a gift to God. One son offers up some grain. This seems like a pretty good gift, since he had worked hard to get it. The other son, Hanibal Lechter, slices up a sheep and burns the fatty pieces, likely laughing maniacally the whole time. For some reason, God decides that the butcher is the better son, thereby sentencing animals to a long future of being killed for no good reason other than to appease God for something that someone else has done. And, of course, some joker will always take things to an extreme, like King Solomon for example. He killed 142,000 animals during a one week sacrificing spree. He must have been one hell of a sinner to require that much carnage to compensate for it.

The Holy Bible and Science - Part 3

This is how the teachers report on behalf of God currently reads.

Thus far, God has failed in his Astronomy and Biology lessons.

He cannot seem to grasp the simple fact that the earth is a sphere and that it is not flat.

He cannot understand the easy factors of biology either.

If God flunks Physics and Mathematics, he won't be accepted into university and it looks as though he'll be working within the window cleaning business (Jehovah's Witness gag).

Physics according to God

And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the book of Jashar? And the sun stood still and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. - Joshua 10:13

The apparent motion of the sun in our sky is actually caused by the rotation of the earth. Do you realise what would happen if the sun "stood still"? The surface of the earth is moving at the rate of just over 1,000 miles per hour at the equator. In order for the sun to appear motionless, we would need to come to a screeching halt, then accelerate rapidly to get back into motion.

The implications of this would be huge. First of all, the laptop on my desk would fly off and crash against the wall or ceiling and it would be while before I could write all these fascinating articles.

Thing is, my broken laptop would be the least of our worries. Imagine that the earth stopped moving. The atmosphere would continue to move, at least until it died down. Visualise the effect of 1,000 mph (1,609 km) winds. By way of comparison, the strongest hurricane ever recorded was Hurricane Camille of 1969, with wind speeds reaching 190 mph (305 km). A tornado can peak at over 300 mph (482 km). Wind speeds of 1,000 mph would have scoured the earth clean of Joshua’s army. In addition to wind, there would certainly be many other implications as well, but it wouldn’t matter, since we’d all be dead, and none of you would have sampled my fine work, which, let's be frank, would be the biggest disaster to have stemmed from God making the sun stand still.

On the subject of physics, God appears to have no understanding of the implications of scale when it comes to surface area and mass (I'll discuss this in more detail in a future article, or you could email me some facts and figures).

Now, the Jehovah's Witness in me has an answer to all of the above. In fact, I can give you a perfect answer as to how God did all things.

Magic!

Now that we've got that monkey off our backs, I'd like to welcome back all the logical readers to their screens so that we can have a proper conversation.

I will say this once and once only. If you believe that God does everything using magic, ergo, not keeping to the laws of physics, biology and the like, that he apparently created in the first place, please leave and don't bother coming back.

Ricky Gervais, whilst speaking to Karl Pilkington, made the following assumption. "The world is full of stupid people". I don't want it to look as though I am poking fun at you, but if you fall into the category of people that believe God could do everything via his Holy Spirit (magic), you fall into the majority group of people unfortunately.

What did God get in his physics examination?

First Name: Jehovah
Last Name: God
Lesson: Physics
Mark: F

Mathematics according to God

And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it about. - 1 Kings 7:23

According to God, the value of pi was 3. God really should have been working with the Greeks, because they knew the real value of pi long before he did.

Every now and then, I go and watch my football team, Tottenham Hotspur, play. White Hart Lane, the stadium in which Spurs (Tottenham Hotspur's nickname) play, draws around 36,000 mad fans to it each and every home game.

Now, imagine if I stood up in the middle of one of these games and made an announcement, do you thing anyone would hear me? Well, it seemed to have worked for Abijah. This guy apparently spoke to 1.2 million people (2 Chronicles 13:3, 4). That’s roughly the population of the state of Hawaii (all islands combined). But, God figured that Abijah could be heard by all those people.

In conclusion, I should mention that the Bible also makes numerous statements that are scientifically correct. For example, it correctly classifies many different types of animals. But then, why shouldn’t it?

The Hebrews were not stupid. My point is that the scientific knowledge displayed in the Bible was right on par with what you would expect from a group of ancient farmers and herdsmen. If anything, God’s scientific knowledge was lower than that of the ancient Greeks, or of my own daughter's.

If the Bible is considered inspired because of its scientific content, then so must the writing of Homer, J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien and especially those of Douglas Adams.

What did God get in his Mathematics examination?

First Name: Jehovah
Last Name: God
Lesson: Mathematics
Mark: F

Expect God Holdings Ltd to make a move in the window cleaner stocks....