Abstract

Monday, 12 June 2006

Thanks for having such an informative website. I have been open to discussions and readings regarding scriptures which have challenged my Roman Catholic upbringing. Lately, most of the challenges have come from a man at work who challenges modern day Christianity. It’s been pulling me towards the older faith of the Law as given to Moses. Many parts appeal to my curiosity and questioning of contradictions I have noticed. Your website identifies some of them and corroborates what my coworker says. Although, the conclusions are different. I am open to believing in my coworkers account that Jehoshua, as he calls the saviour, was calling the people back to the Torah and away from the traditions of the elders. I even watched with interest, a DVD called A Rood Awakening, which had a man named Rood dressed as an ancient Hebrew talking to a modern day congregation of jews and Christians. He shared time with a Carite Jew, one who believes in the Torah but not in the Oral Law or Talmud as imposed by the Pharasies. All arguments seem well thought out and compelling but without critical debate, its viewed with suspicion and skepticism. What is the truth?

Rood and his friend the Carite, challenge bible text saying there have been some mistranslations from an ancient Hebrew text which has been lost. In it, Jesus says, “Because they (the Pharasees) claim their authority by sitting in the seat of Moses, do as HE says not as they do.” Matthew. This makes much more sense than the word THEY in place of HE, as bibles of today say.

I think by Carite you mean Karaite, who were Jews in what is now Iraq (Babylon) until the middle ages when they faded. They seem to have preserved what were Essene traditions for a thousand years after the Essenes themselves had disappeared (or become Christian) in the west. So the Karaite Jew will have been giving the Judaism of Jesus himself which was different from the Judaism of the Pharisees and the Rabbis who continued the Pharisaic tradition.

Anyway, you’re website has given me food for thought to challenge these teachings. However, let me offer you this argument of Jonah’s story as my coworder has mentioned to me a number of times prior to me visiting your sight. He argues that Jehoshua (Jeho saves), a fitting name, observed the passover meal in 31 AD as the last supper. He was then taken to the Pharasees that night where they sacraficed him like the passover lamb. I think he says this was on a Wednesday. Thursday he gets crucified. Somehow he makes the argument that he is in the ground for 4 portions of a day and 3 nights. What is unique about his argument is that it also accounts for a conflict regarding the sabath. One acct has the sabbath right before and one has one right after. His contention is that there were special sabbatones so that there could have been more than one sabbath day (holiday, day of no work) in the same week. In many ways you make the same arguments that he makes, regarding the saviors name and the lords name, but you arrive at totally different conclusions. The Essenes had a solar calendar that differed from the Pharisaic one which was a lunar solar one more akin to our own. They had intercalated days every quarter to make the normal 30 day month add up over a year to 365. Perhaps these intercalated days were what you speak of, but no one is sure exactly how the Essene solar calendar worked, and, of course, the assumption is that the calendar of the gospels is the normal one. The difference between the two might account for the oddities, the most conspicuous of which is that John has Jesus crucified a day earlier than the synoptic gospels.

Unfortunately, I am not totally clear on that explanation, but I hope one of your knowledge will know better what he is reffering to by these additional Sabbatones.

Another more interesting challenge to your argument that it was all made up by the Persians is this. There have been multiple DNA regression studies that have been published which argue convincingly that the Cohans that have been told were decendents of Aaron, Moses brother, the priestly class, did in fact derive from a single man generations back that estimate to the time of Moses. I’ve read that one myself in Time magazine. There also seem to be claims by looking at the Mitochondrial RNA/DNA that show we all come from the same one mother thousands of years back, Eve. While I am less confident of that, the idea that highly esteemed jews that carry the name Cohain (multiple spellings) that were from the priestly class do hold up to scientific scrutiny as being descended from the same ancestral single father back well before your site claims the fiction was put to paper, seems to poke a rather large hole in your argument.

I am not sure how, and what was all made up by the Persians? The Persians invented Judaism, and Mithraism, the great rival to Christianity, was based on Persian religious beliefs, but westernized. Christianity draws upon Persian religion a lot, but I never said the Persians made it up. The Essenes were much more Persianized in their Judaism than modern Rabbinic Judaism is and Christianity evolved out of Essenism, but Judaism generally in the so-called intertestamental period was most likely to have been much more like Persian religion than it became, when the Rabbis pared it down in response to the repeated Jewish wars and rebellions against Rome, and the challenge from Judaism for gentiles aka Christianity. The Karaites perhaps survived under the Parthian and Sassanid kings because they were Persianized Jews—they followed the original Persianized form of Judaism that Jesus did. When the Moslems took over Persia and threw out the Zoroastrians, the Karaites did not have the same privileges as they had had under the Persians and slowly died off. There is no doubt that the west has ignored the importance of the Persians in the formation of western ideas including Judaism and Christianity, and, if you believe in the war of Good against Evil, as the Persians did, then you will say that the Devil has taken over the originally good religions! It is one of those things that Christians will not consider, and therefore another victory for Old Nick, if you believe that he tries to spoil the Good Creation.

As far as the DNA studies are concerned, you should not be beguiled by newspaper reporting couched in religious terms. It is popular among editors because it sells copy! If you think about it, after a certain number of generations everyone in a restricted country will have the same ancestors. One of the absurdities of the notion that Jesus was the heir of David is that everyone in Judaea probably was too (if it were not for the fact that David is mythical). If David had two children and each of them had two and so on, in 20 generations, the one ancestor could have had a million descendants. In fact, Jews had a duty to be fertile and multiply, and had much bigger families than just two, and a generation was short when girls could marry at twelve (Mary was twelve!). So even allowing for intermarriage of the descendants, after a thousand years, everyone in Judaea except foreigners must have had David as an ancestor. The Cohen line is similar, and the Eve idea is even more distorted because it is based on mitochondrial DNA, so anyone who came from another woman but via a son rather than a daughter would not register. The Cohen DNA study really shows that the Jews remained generally true to their own cultural duties like that of not marrying out, and the priestly line in particular had to maintain its purity. It suggests that mainly they did!

I am searching for the truth and am looking for allies in smart people who can poke holes in anyones arguments. I have accepted the fact that Christianity has allowed pagan beliefs to infiltrate into its culture to the loss of feast days and the seventh day sabbath. I recognize that just as the savior said, “Beware of the leven of the Pharasees..” that we must also beware of the leven of the Catholics, Baptists, Anglicans, Mormons etc. etc.

Well, you seem certain that the Christian Christ was The Saviour, but I cannot see why, or why God should want to have a Saviour who is a human being. An almighty God is quite capable of saving whoever He chooses, however He chooses. All of these religions in which God sends a Saviour or a prophet are just scams, and it ought to be obvious. I say repeatedly that, if God is almighty and our Creator, then He created us with a brain, but these “faiths” all assume that you will not use it, and discourage you from doing so. All of them need the flocks to think the Almighty God is an idiot. Among His almighty powers is omniscience—He knows everything, and so He knows that human beings are easily fooled by imposters pretending to be God, yet believers all believe that He will, even so, turn up on earth incarnated as a man doing just what any imposter would do, claiming to be God, or alternatively, turn up pretending to be a prophet with a direct line to Him, which is almost the same thing. Not only that, but, if you believe that the bible is God’s word, then He says quite clearly that:

1. He cannot be seen face to face, even by top prophets like Moses,
2. and yet happily goes about an apparently normal thirty odd years of infanthood, boyhood and adulthood without burning anyone up at all.

No doubt well aware that he could not appear as anything other than the invisible God, he says as clearly as possible in the Jewish scriptures (Isaiah) that He and only He is the saviour. The insistence of these passages, and the absence of any suggestion that He could and would appear on earth pretending to be a man, make it common sense to anyone with any sense, that God would not appear on earth as a Man, nor depend upon any man as his messenger. He is almighty! Why should He need to depend upon men? Only men, and men who are crooked, could want to change the message to one that God will appear as a man or be represented by one, despite his almighty powers. I have laboured the point enough, but, if you believe that God has a powerful enemy, Satan, quite able to do what God can—as Zoroastrians do—except for one thing, that God can foresee whereas Satan cannot—then you would never accept that God would pretend to be a man for any reason, least of all to save them. It is more likely to be a Satanic trick. In dualist theology, Satan will try all his tricks, but it is up to mankind to ignore them and stick to the good principles. Only God knows the outcome favours the Good, but He requires human help in the sense that humans must ultimately reject wickedness. Anyway, those are the Zoroastrian beginnings of Judaism and Christianity, and are much more sensible, in my view, if you must have a supernatural God.

However, when I recognized that following the Law, had Catholicism accepted it without one jot or tittle changing, then the black plague would not have ravaged Europe (failure to bury waste), and so much fewer death and disease would continue to spread by our doctors not washing their clothes and body in water and waiting until sunset prior to becoming clean. Why just a couple of months ago, the news was talking about how doctors ties are breeding grounds for infectious diseases because nobody every really washes ties and they are often touched. I’m trying to find fault with the Law in the Torah, but as yet, haven’t found anything that is unjust or bad about it. But the ceremonial washing of hands, not entering the homes of gentiles, and other traditions of men, the Pharasees, that dominated the time of the savior, have caused people not to practice the commandments as YHWH told Moses. The jews in Israel today do not practice the Sabbath because they have too many traditions dumped on them by their rabbis that are too afraid to even speak the name of their Elohim because they seem to have seized the authority from him and know that their stolen authority is not glorifying Him or loving him. Just the same has all the churches seemed to have done.

Well that’s your theory, no doubt, but your view of the Law is romantic to say the least. The Law of Moses, as expressed in the Jewish scriptures is full of absurd duties and requirements that no one today could possibly tolerate, and many found them onerous even 2000 years ago, as the bishops of Christianity knew when they favoured abandoning it to win over the many Godfearing gentiles of the Roman empire. If you think you might like the ancient Jewish law, then you must read it. There are some sensible things in it considering it is 2500 years old, but much of it is ritual garbage. The Moslems want a law—Sharia law—to be introduced that is now 1300 years old, and is also oppressive. No omniscient God would want people to stick to laws that are quite unsuitable for their society because society has advanced, and He knew it would advance. An almighty God would have had a better solution. Law is another human solution, and it is wrapped up as being God’s to give people more incentive for obeying it. Eventually it gets oppressive and is dropped. What Christian gives all he has to the poor? That was a Christian requirement stated by God Himself in His human disguise but was dropped by all but a few anchorites within a few decades of the crucifixion. Christians dropped most of what was distinctively Christian, but kept some oppressive Jewish laws even though the Christian God had supposedly abrogated them, according to Mark and Paul.

So I thank you as an objective writer for your opinion. But I am holding to a hypothesis that YHWH does exist and did convey his law as accounted in the Torah. I am looking for ways to show that the Law, His instruction on how to live in a community of people glorifying our creator, is bogus. I’ll keep reading from your site to find something that can disprove that hypothesis, but nothing has yet. In return, I ask for your thoughts on the challenges that I put before you regarding the DNA regression studies and the possiblity of having two sabbath days the week Yehoshua was crucified.

Bogus as God’s law, but not as law. It was, as I just said, considered good law for an agricultural society in the ancient east 2500 years ago. It was the king’s law, but kings said they acted for God, and so the king’s law was God’s law. That people still believe it, indeed even more fervently, tells its own story of human gullibility and idiocy. Human tricksters will not go about saying, “God says use your head! He gave you a brain so use it!” They say instead, “Do not be tempted (by anything that seems sensible)”. Remember, the tradition is that God knows, but Satan does not, so why would God have given us brains if Satan uses them. It is ridiculous. Anyway, I get into the habit of arguing the believers’ incoherence, but I have no need to believe in God, whether He is Yehouah or YHWH or Jarvay or whatever. He is a construct of the human imagination, and nothing more, as even many ancient people knew, but most modern ones seem not to.

Thanks for your reply. You have planted a seed for me to explore Zoroastrians. My current beliefs are fully inline with how you described it. Although I tend to think of Satan as YHWH’s adversary. He seems to be an angle who does not have the same faith and confidence in human kind that God does. I have also done a little exploring of the Nephelim, the fallen ones, that appear in Genesis. To them and their chosen daughters of Eve were born the Men of Renown. The book of Enoch, which was closeted by the early Christians for a few hundred years before being deemed heretical talks more about them. Angles have taken human form throughout the old testement to convey God’s message to people. They always seem to be male in appearance. That has me wondering about all the visions of Mary claiming to be the queen of Heaven. I fully am open to the concept that these visions are not from Mary, mother of Yehoshua. I do believe that he is the savior, but I have often explored and entertained ideas that he is a prophet, an annointed, messiah, but perhaps not God himself. What is clear is that his message resonate with me as a pure one. It brings the compassionate side of God to the forefront that was evident to David and to Moses and Abraham. The bible is full of impressive stories that justify why it is important to live life in a loving way to our neighbor and to God. Look how great a friend Abraham was to let Lot pick which land he wanted for his flocks. Joseph, who forgave his brothers who plotted to kill him. David who was beloved by God. All saught to know God and obey his commandments and walk with him. Soloman did early on but multiplied his wives and let them worship idols.

Christianity and the Pharasitical Rabbi’s of today have corrupted what God told Moses in the Torah. Catholics have statues all throughout their churchs. They dropped the 2nd commandment against idols. The bible never says there are not evil spirits or other gods. I think there are plenty of them. YWHW calls on his people to reject them, to not allow them into their life. The Law, the instruction, is how He showed them the straight and narrow path. ’Do not even carve yourselve an form of anything from the heavens, that moves through the air, on land or beneath the sea.’ Perhaps evil spirits seek out these places to gain power over us. I’m not sure if it goes beyond graven images and carved and sculpted imitations of living things. Somewhere, I’ve not been able to find it again, the bible says why its offensive to god. He doesn’t want us talking to inanimate objects as if they have any life to them. We shouldn’t give our children dolls and action figures, stuffed animals. All those things might be objects that demons can cling to and use to influence humans. Just look at the power that images have on humans. Porn, with the advent of the internet has increased so much as an addiction. Think of the power an alluring woman on a flat screen can have on a man. And that isn’t even forbidden in the commandment. This leeds to the problem that we humans always want to expand the law to new areas and enlarge it to cover everything. The Rabbi’s did this with the oral Torah and the Tulmud. The Karaite, however will say there is only 600 some laws, many of which are only applicable to men, others women, others priests, and others to priests when in the temple. So the number of laws that apply to men are really not burdensome. It was the Pharasees who added the washing of the hands and putting the right shoe on first but not tiening it til the left shoe is on. They prescribe dress rules and on and on. What does it mean to keep the Sabbath holy? Don’t work for profit? Don’t conduct commerse? Can I go for a job or a bike ride that I can’t do all week. Sure. I don’t know where the line is drawn but the Rabbinical Pharsitic jews that dominate the jewish culture of today piled on their traditions that made the law so burdensome that it cannot be followed.

Go back to Adam and Eve. When the snake seduced Eve into eating the fruit of Good and Evil, she said, ’We cannot eat of it or touch it or we will surely die.’ So tempting is it for us humans to put fences around the true law as God told us, so as not to violate what God told us. However, we are warned in Deuteronomy not to add or remove anything from the law. Was it Adam who added ’do not touch the fruit or you will surely die?’ That addition proved costly as when Eve held the fruit and did not die, it made it more tempting to eat.

My point is that all these messages in the bible do hold some clarity and commonality if you look for it. The law is the way we people can show our obedience to our Creator. He created the darkness too. In Job we see that God lets the adversary have his way with humans from time to time, with limits. I’ve asked myself why does God subject us to this. I’ve got an answer. I’m not sure its right, but I have come to a conclusion.

Think of the prodigal son. He is given his inheritance to go off into the world away from God. When he does this, he squanders it and is weighed upon by the wickedness of the world. His life is the absense of his fathers love. So he goes back to his father hopeing to be taken in as a servant. Think how much more this prodigal son’s heart is open and appreciative of his father, after he left with a fortune and returned in ruin. Then look at the heart of his brother that did not leave. His brother is angry that his wonton brother gets a party and he has not gotten anything like that while he stayed. Which son loves his father with all his heart? The son who never deviated, and obeyed all along out of fear? Or the son who went off and suffered at the hand of the adversary to find that life is full of wickedness and lies. How much better it would be to go back as even a servent to my father.

It seems you are asking the same questions I have asked. I don’t know if you entertain the same conclusions I have reached but it is certainly more soothing to put faith into an all powerful, loving God than into a cluster of demons that are selfish and only want to use us up and destroy us. Yehoshua was one prophet that did not profit himself. He didn’t tell all his followers to give all their wealth to the poor. He only told that to the rich man’s son. He challenged that man. Not everyone was heeled. Not everyone was accepted as a disciple. YHWH can see into a man’s heart. His prophet recognized that David’s heart was right when selecting him, the smallest from his impressive brothers. The problem with churches today is they appoint their head priests. YHWH always preferred to raise up judges, prophets and kings from any rank or station. When the Israelites wanted order, a king, this was insulting to YHWH that they would not put their trust in Him.

Take a look at the Persians. Where did they get their beliefs? Perhaps it was the tribes of Israel that left Israel during the Babylonian Empire. Daniel became a great man to those to the East. He prophesized many great things. Perhaps it was his remnant that resulted in the three wise men coming to find the king of kings. Why else was Herod so dismayed that he sought to have all the children killed?

I believe there is wickedness in the world. It comes out of our hearts and maybe from demons. I don’t know why all the laws exist, but none of them seem to burdensome to obey that I have come across.

Circumcision is another weird one. The word is also used, ’circumcise your heart.’ Sacrafice part of you that gives you worldly pleasures that you thirst for. For if you drink you will be thirsty again. Yehoshua (Yeho saves), who comes in the name of the Lord (YHWH), offered a drink that would satisfy ones thirst permanently.

His death is a testament to his purpose. What other worldly leader, maybe Ghandi, gave up his life for his message. He was not seeking to be ruler, king, world power. But with his clarity of message, his words, his miraculous healings, in line with the Torah, fulfillment of the Law, certainly are plausible arguments for him being a/the son of God.

That’s where I stand today, in my belief. And wonder, how can I pay tribute and honor Yehowa (YHWH) in this world. How can I get to know him when so much has been obfuscated by the darkness. How can I discern the truth from lies.

If you like my answers and have more questions, I can try answering them. I think I know why God challenged Abraham to sacrafice his son ISAAC. That was a long time in being answered. But I think I understand it now, thanks to a friend.

I hope you are open to the idea that you have scales over your eyes that may have blinded you from what has been before you always. There are those who seek to blind all of us and turn us away from the light. You sound as though you want to believe in something but have trouble with all the contradictions and lies that are interwoven. What you have said about Zoroastrians does not conflict with my beliefs. Your website suggests Yehosua was an Essene. A Karaite would suggest that He was a Karaite. Perhaps it is because they all lay claim to the Truth that he spoke. Where was it that he lied? Where was it that he sinned? Where was it that he contradicted the Torah?

You put far too much emphasis on a single uncorroborated set of texts to come to proper conclusions. The Jewish scriptures and the Christian New Testament are written by men with their own purposes and not by God. You can believe they are the word of God if you wish but you only have some people’s word for it, and no other evidence. I approach the bible the same way as any historian and scientist would approach any ancient text. it has to be checked against reality. The bible is full of untruths, supposed events that cannot be corroborated anywhere else. You might as well believe the Pink Fairy Book. That too is full of edifying and entertaining stories, and so too is the Yellow fairy Book, the Blue Fairy Book, the Green Fairy Book, and so on. You have to use history to check any book for its truth, otherwise it cannot be relied upon to be more than a fairy book.

The Karaites were Essenes. If you like the Karaite viewpoint, then why not become one of the modern Essenes, or a modern Nazarene. Both have websites that you could use for following up your ideas to decide whether you agree with them or not.

I have no scales on my eyes, but you unfortunately do have. The trouble with people who get religion is that they always think others are at fault and not them. In my opinion, anyone who can believe tall stories without any evidence have scales. I need evidence to believe anything, otherwise I do not believe. That is why I have a brain, and if you believe in God, then you ought to believe that was God’s intention in giving you one. If God is not an idiot, He has the power to find a convincing way to persuade any of us, if He chooses. The ways the religionists say He has chosen make God an idiot. They are obviously wrong, and, if God has not shown us that He wants to save us, then perhaps He doesn’t want to. Perhaps He expects us to stop hanging on to His coat tails and start to help ourselves!

Anyway, good luck in whatever you decide upon, but since you believe in a lot of supernatural fancies , you will have to rid yourself of them before you will start to learn anything useful.

If you don’t believe in God, then do you believe in evil? Why do you think there is good and evil? Why does every generation appear to be wicked and perverse? Do you really think that we randomly came out of muck? Or do you think like the Koran says that we willed ourselves into existance? What was there before the big bang and why did one little planet form life with faces and two arms and two legs rather than ten? Who established the laws of physics? Who started the clock ticking? Which was first, the chicken or the egg? I accept that many a human has tried to obfuscate the truth, the light. Many have taken what was the creators and tried to steal it. There is good and evil. Where does the goodness come from and where does the evil come from?

Why do you need a God to explain evil? In particular, why do you need a good God to explain evil? Is God good or is He evil? If He is good then why does He make evil as He boasts in Isaiah 45:7? The fact is that a good God does not explain evil, it makes it all the more baffling. Do you need a God to make heads different from tails on a coin? Do you need a God to make left left and right right? I do not understand why you believers believe in an unnecessary God. Do you imagine a perfect world is possible? I imagine you do, because heaven is supposedly perfect, but if it is perfect then nothing can happen in it. Any change from perfection must make it less than perfect, so change is impossible in a perfect world. The Zoroastrians knew this 2500 years ago, but today Christians do not know it. God’s perfect creation was static. It was the evil spirit who make motion and started history thus making the world imperfect. Zoroastrianism is more logical than Christianity and Judaism, but pious Christians and Jews cannot think at all. They believe anything.

Do you believe in the normal distribution? If you do, then there is no need to explain good and evil. Events are distributed on the distribution curve, so that some people are born tall, and some small but most somewhere in between. You do not need a God to decide it. Some people are born particularly lucky, and some are born particularly unlucky, but most are somewhere in between. You do not need a God for this either. Bad luck is evil, and good luck is good. Mostly we get a bit of both, but someone might be particularly unlucky and get severely injured or die of a disease, and someone might be lucky and win the lottery or do well on the stock market. Mostly we get bits of good luck and bits of bad luck. Every generation is the same because the law of the normal distribution applies. So, yes we are subject to the random fluctuations of a changing, ever moving world, the normal distribution.

As for physics, there could have been any number of different forms of physics, and we have the one that we have. If we had had some other set of laws we might have been the creatures you speak of with ten legs. You do not get fish swimming about in the desert, and we are the same. Fish need water and without it they would not have been fish, and we have the laws of physics we can enumerate, and without them we would not have been us. Perhaps we would not have been at all. “Who made the laws of physics?” is a biased question that assumes that someone did. Who made God? As for the big bang and time, who knows what the answer is, but that time is eternal is no less stupid than saying that God is, and the evidence for the big bang is looking frail, as cosmologists find more and more problems with the universe expanding too fast, and the need for dark mass and matter.

Making God the answer to every question you cannot answer immediately is the God of the Gaps. God just fills in gaps in human knowledge, particularly for lazy people who cannot stand to think. If God wanted us to know about Him, as an almighty being He could do it with no trouble at all, and would not need idiotic ways of transmitting His message, such as through silly signs and tricks, pretending to be human, or sending crooks to pretend to know God’s brain. If God wants to do these things then He is not good at all, He is evil. He is the Devil. That is why Christians always ignore the disgustingly evil history of Christianity, and pretend it is a history of saints and angels.

All of this is on the website in more detail. I thought you said you were reading it, and found it informative. It is a big website, I know, but Christianity and Judaism is such a mishmash of garbage, it takes a lot of answering. There is tons more to come, if I ever get time.

I studied physics and it really is miraculous the way it fits together. A friend pointed out something like if an electron were slightly more massive or slightly less massive, that atoms wouldn’t work. I forget the specifics but there is some amazing coincidences that hint at a master creator. It’s hard to imagine things just happening that way.

I have read what you write and you sound like a nutcase, not at all like a physicist. Perhaps if you had studied your physics a bit closer, you would have learnt something worthwhile instead of all this pretentious religious gibberish. I explained to you last time that we have the physics that we have because any other physics would have meant that we were not, just as there could have been no fish without water. Then you tell me it is hard to imagine things just happened that way. If they had not happened that way, it would have been harder to imagine because there would have been none of us around to imagine anything. It has nothing to do with God, and entirely to do with the fact that we are here and so the world must have been suitable for us to get here. That is why the electron is so amazingly right in mass for us to be here. You are like a fish saying how amazing it is that there is water for it to swim in. Just how much physics did you study? Anyone who prefers imaginary miracle working fathers outside of Nature to Nature itself has to be bone idle or crazy in my opinion.

The predominant view, I believe, is still that there was a big bang. Time and space in relativity are bound together. Therefore, there is reason to say that there was no time before the big bang.

You are right that the predominant view is that there was a big bang, but the big bang, if that was how the universe began is not at all what the Jewish scriptures describe in Genesis. God’s version of it was pretty poor for the Creator of the Universe. But my point is that there are reasons to think that the big bang is not right anyway. It is based on the supposed expansion of the universe, which extrapolated uniformly back implies a beginning. However, the cosmologists already have altered the notion of uniform expansion because a uniform expansion would not have given us what we observe. Moreover, as I said last time, there are now other problems that have necessitated the postulation of dark matter and now dark energy to make the universe into what we see. The rate of expansion is increasing! Even so, the big bang has been explained using the boundary conditions we observe, and does not need a beginning. It is like the surface of a globe, finite but unbounded.

If you had tried to be a physicist you would realize that the big bang is a hypothesis, and it might not be the right one. Scientists change their hypotheses to fit the data as new data come along. That is why changes were made to the big bang hypothesis but eventually when the changes are getting clumsy, the hypothesis has to be abandoned for a new one. That is where the big bang is now getting. I repeat though, how does an imaginary God explain anything that actually happened. I can imagine anything at all that has the power of this imaginary God. Is that then God or a God? The trouble with you Christians is that you cannot distinguish between reality and imagination. You act as if your dreams really exist. You are immature.

Each religion have some unique claims that seem to offer some special significant indication that they were relayed from the divine creator. For example, I forget where, but only in the new testament is there a reference to before time.

Is this supposed to be convincing? And if there is a mention of before time, how is it any indication of a divine creator and not just someone with an imagination like yours, able to think of impossible things.

I also disagree with your point that something that is perfect cannot change. A seed may be perfect. A sprout may be perfect. A full grown tree may be perfect. You and I may be perfect. I’m not sure what perfect is but to be what we were meant to be. Providence is a concept that suggests history was known in completeness before it occurred. If God transcends time, then he can be everywhere, was and is everywhere in time and before and after time. We only know space time dimensions. Like a 2-D cartoon could only fathom what it encounters on its plane of existance.

You now prove what I said—you cannot distinguish between metaphor and reality. When you speak of anything on earth, in this imperfect world, as being perfect, you are using a metaphor. Christians turned to Platonic ideals to explain perfection because there is no such thing. The seed is not perfect even if you call it that. When something is perfect then it cannot change for the reason I explained—because any change to something already perfect must make it less than perfect. Perfection is the ultimate, and any change from it must lessen the perfection. The Evil Spirit of Zoroastrianism is considered to have lessened the perfection of the original creation by introducing time. Even in Christianity, time is the corrupter, and every Christian looks forward to a life in a perfect uncorruptible heaven when time must cease since that is all that eternity can mean. There can be no time in a perfect world. One of the troubles with you religious parrotters is that you never think about what you are parrotting. It will do for you, and so it will do for everyone else, is your bullying contention. Well, it will not do for me, because it is simplistic garbage for people who cannot get beyond fairy tales. God is the Good Fairy made masculine and written so big that everyone is supposed to be amazed.

I have an idea why God created darkness which you may call evil. I’m not sure about it, but it seems possible. Perhaps he made satan with an inquisitive mind of his own to reason in space time. Satan may have an intellect that is much like our own, but with more knowledge of heaven. God knows even more. So he allows Satan to challenge and reason with him. Satan thus is concerned that God has put too much faith in humans on the Earth. Perhaps he fears that we will destroy Gods creation and have a negative impact on all those in heaven and even God. Satan may love God but fear that God has erred and is in jeopardy.

So Satan tries to prove to God that man is a bad investment. He is allowed to test his theory on Job. Job was not a Jew, but just a man who feared God. Did Satan succeed? Did he prove God to be wrong? In the book of Job, God is vindicated and Job fails. Now who benefitted from the experiment. Well, God won the bet for bragging rights, so to speak with Satan. Satan doesn’t appear to be convinced. Job went through some suffering but benefitted in the end. Further, Job also matured in his love and understanding of God. He was perfect in the begining of the trials, and transformed into a more mature perfection. We don’t know what happened to Satan. He has yet to concede that he was wrong. He still thinks he is right and wants to prove it. There may be others like Satan. Do we really even know that Satan is only an angel? I’m not sure what he is.

I am not sure either, and I do not care what you might imagine him to be. It is pure fantasy on your part, but you seem unable to realize it. Nor do I care about your silly theological theories. It is a futile exercise, but if you really like theorizing, then you could become a physicist or some other type of scientist, and theorize to some purpose. The trouble is, of course, that it requires you to learn a body of knowledge that it seems you just cannot be bothered learning. It is far easier to believe anything you like, and religion lets you do it. Why would an almighty God need to have faith in anything, least of all His own creation? You have faith because you do not know. God is also supposed to be omniscient so He knows what every human being thinks, and knows what Satan thinks and wants too, if he has made him as well. Why then would He want to reason with Him. It would be worse than playing chess with yourself. If God is good, why would he want to harm a man deliberately. That is not good. Satan is a metaphor for the normal distribution, which you must know as a student physicist, or rather for one end of it, the misfortune end. As a poetic personification of misfortune and ill-luck, anyone can accept Satan, but you people think he actually exists. You are like children who believe in Santa Claus.

Another clue as to why a loving, compassionate God may create darkness. Think of the story of the prodigal son. That son took his fortune and left his father and his kingdom to pursue the worldly things. Yet they eventually overtook him, ravaged his fortune and left him destitute. Is not that what all the worldly pleasures and enticements do to everyone. We eat and we get more hungry. We drink and we get more thirsty. We satisfy our lusts and our desires and they return stronger. When we ignore the true god, we get lost chasing the false gods and idols that Satan and his kind set out to ensnare us. They offer us fleeting pleasures to addict us. They enslave us. Maybe Exodus is a lesson on what man is challenged to do in life. Maybe all of us, like the chosen ones, are meant to be enslaved by our passion for the world until we recognize we are enslaved. Then the Lord frees us but its not easy. It involves struggle, sacrafice, rebuilding of confidence and faith, commitment, struggle and eventually freedom and success only to then fall prey to pride and arrogance.

But the prodigal son makes it back. God is so far above us in his understanding, love and compassion, he welcomes him home with a feast that leave most people and his other son, jealous. The son that never left is angry for he and his friends never left and stayed obedient but they never got the fattened calf for a feast. We may all be meant to go through these trials to bring us to the point where we realize how miserable life can be. How full of wickedness and pervisity and iniquity and hypocricy. And then we realize that when we were young and faithfull there was a peace that is worthy of so much, so priceless, that we can give up the worldly things forever to be in the good graces of a compassionate, loving creator.

The son that never left, may have wanted to go. Maybe he was too afraid to leave and always wondered what it would have been like. But the son who left and returned, he may never want to go away again. So who is better now? The one who failed and repented or the one that never failed and matured?

You make more out of a simple parable than is warranted. You just cannot keep your imagination in control, and what is worse, you think that whatever you imagine must be true. That is demented. The prodigal son has a very simple purpose. He stands for those who have sinned, but have repented of their sins. The message is that sincere repentance is as good as a life of righteousness. Those who have sinned but have repented can enter God’s kingdom as surely as those who were always good. That was the whole point of the message of John the Baptist and of Jesus called the Christ. They expected God’s Day of Vengeance as imminent, and wanted sinning Jews to repent and be saved. Those who had always been good were already saved. Nothing more needed to be done for them, but when a sinner repented, there was cause for rejoicing. It is very simple, but you do not get it. The key point is that the Day of God’s Vengeance never came, Jesus waited for it in the Garden of Gethsemane but waited in vain, and he was then judicially murdered as a trouble-making rival to Caesar. But 2000 years on, you all continue to tell the same idiotic story that he was the Son of God, literally!

You are like the prodigal son, Mike. You have ventured far out there. I was there with you not too long ago. But I recognized that there is evil out there away from the light. The darkness has a nice exterior but when you see underneath the veneer, its not real. Its not what it appears. It defiles you and poisons you. I went back.

Your darkness metaphor is the metaphor used by the Essenes, and it comes, before that from Zoroastrianism. Jesus was an Essene, and taught what the Essenes believed, but you think he was a god—a Santa Claus for adults.

You can find the way but only God can turn your heart.

If that is so, He is making no attempt to change mine. What you cannot get is that maybe I am a messenger from God sent to persuade you all that Satan has taken you over in the name of God, and despite the horrific history of Christianity and the sheer incoherence of your beliefs, you will not use your God-given brain to extract yourself from wickedness, and follow the sensible clues before you.

I cannot win your soul. You read and look but do not see. Like the Pharasees. It maybe that you are blind as if there are scales on your eyes.

Regrettably, you are the ones who cannot see, who refuse to see, even when the idiocies of your beliefs and their utter disgusting practice throughout the centuries, and still, are pointed out to you. If you recollect, the Pharisees were the respectable religious believers of the time. You therefore are like the Pharisees, and not me. They were the hypocrites, just as you are. You spout piety while supporting Christian leaders who bomb shit out of defenseless civilians. That is sufficiently wicked for me to resist the charms of Christianity. Christians, like the Pharisees, are supposed to be good, but they have always acted as monsters, and few Christians have ever complained. Christianity is Satanic.

I don’t know anything for sure. I pray for understanding and wisdom and I ponder all the things that you challenge and have thought about. We are much alike. But would not the world and this life be more livable if we saw it as under the protection of a perfect God, loving and kind and compassionate beyond our understanding. He would never weigh us down with more than we can bear, but he will increase the load while we resist his will until we cave and submit to it. Maybe nobody will be lost. Maybe every one will be saved. I don’t know why the bible seems to say that some will not be. Some will be seperated from God and heaven by the lake of fire and will cry from under it. Some will cry out, "Lord, Lord take me" and He will say, "I never knew you." I don’t understand that part yet. Maybe we are given free choice so that we can either choose to stay away from him or to return and go close to him. I don’t fully know or understand but there are many beautiful explanations that I cannot fathom.

I wish you well on your journey in this life. May you be blessed with more gifts and a love to show you the light so that you might be attracted to it and see it when you least expect it.

I have nothing against your having a psychological crutch since you obviously need it. What I object to is:

1. Christians claiming that their faith is not only true but The Truth, when it is manifestly a load of lies from beginning to end,
2. constantly forcing themselves on others through their obligation to missionize, a plain way of spreading the belief with minimum endeavour by the ones who benefit materially from it, the pastors, priests and tele-evangelists of this world,
3. the refusal of Christians to be self-critical in the least way, an absolute necessity for the faith because it simply cannot stand up to any proper critical scrutiny.

So we get a spurious bogus truth spouted at us constantly through every medium available, and from pious freaks unable to think beyond their own eyebrows, all supported by the plethora of millionaire Christians all utterly unconcerned that their own God said the blessed were the poor, and that it was impossible for the rich to get to heaven. That alone tells you, if Christ really were God, that this odious religion has been captured by Satan and defies every teaching of the Christ that he uttered. I suggest you will be my brother in inquiry when you start to inquire.

You treat me like I am a catholic or a christian. Actually, I am neither. I inquire and my beliefs undergo my own scrutiny for consistancy. I studied 4 years of physics at a good institution and did very well. I understand science. Albert Einstein believed in God til the end. He is recognized as the greatest physicist of the last century. I do not assert the big bang happened. I have heard what you say about the universe expanding faster than it should be. I understand the concepts of dark matter, imaginary numbers, relativity, and very generally, string theory. There are dimensions we cannot percieve.

If the universe is so well oiled to produce what it did, that is evidence of a creator. Many scientists use that as their strongest point in believing in one.

Well, with no other information at my disposal other than that someone wants me to believe in God, as someone living in a supposedly Christian society, I assume that the believers trying to persuade me are Christians. If you are not, then OK, fine. You just believe in God. That is up to you, but God is no physical theory, it is an imaginary being who can do anything you care to imagine. It explains nothing, and merely exercises your imagination to no useful purpose. By being a physicist you could use your imagination to some purpose, and dispose of any feeling that you must believe in God in case the universe will collapse without your assistance.

Einstein did not believe in God. People are very fond of repeating this, especially those who believe in God. Einstein believed in Nature. He was a pantheist, if he has to have a label, but not a religious believer at all, as he told people over and over again, but believers only hear what they want to hear.

We hypothesize that there are dimensions we cannot perceive, and I, for one am happy to believe they exist in some sort of reality to help the world go round, but you are going beyond the evidence to say there are such dimensions. No one has yet found a number that answers to the square root of -1 but it does not stop us from using it. Perhaps it is a function of the missing dimensions, who knows, but whether it “exists” or not it lets us think of virtual realities and they help us to understand the reality we experience. As I have said, I am happy that you and the whole of the godfearing community should believe in God if they want to, and find it useful, but there is no evidence God exists, and no one should have the right to foist it on to people who deny it, in a free society. The trouble with belief in God is that it makes people think they are God. It makes people demented.

Perhaps in my writing on job, I should not have used the term “faith” when describing that God had confidence in Job. He knew what would happen but Satan thought he knew also. God did not punish Job. He allowed Satan to abuse him and test him. You must know that from experience, as you sound like an academic, that when a student comes up with an idea themselves, they believe it more readily than when an instructor tells them from the front of the room or in a book. A good instructor plants the seeds, gives all the puzzle pieces and lets the students wrestle with the problem. When the student struggles, it is stressfull. When they solve the puzzle, see the answer, the light bulb of inspiration, then the student knows with confidence what is and what isn’t true.

The trouble with your parallel is that you do not seem to be learning anything. You seem to be parrotting conventional Christian belief, and that simply does not bear intelligent scrutiny. I am academic enough not to think that any God would want to deliberately trick His human creatures, and since he is allegedly almighty, He has every power “imaginable” to make it simple for us. So long as goodness means that we should not unnecessarily torture other human beings, or any other creatures for that matter, then God cannot be good, if He is willing to let a human be tortured for a pub bet. That is effectively what He does in respect of Job. If God is omniscient, then He knew that Job was faithful. He did not need to let him be tortured just to prove a point to Satan who is not omniscient. He knew it would not change Satan’s nature (if he is meant to be the evil spirit). So the troubles piled on to Job were purely gratuitous. The truth is that there is no message in Job other than that you must be faithful to God, and that means to the Church in practice, whatever happens to you. It is an essential part of the scam.

Yehosua spoke in parables. His disciples struggled to understand them. Then when they understood them, they became more enlightened. The Pharasees were blinded to these parables and could make no sense of most of them. Their hearts were closed.

Where did you get this from? What sort of indoctrinated twerp are you? Read the gospels! What is hard to understand about the parables even as they are today, and don’t you think the people living then and in that place would have understood them better than we do? You seem to believe utter twaddle and spout it out like a drunk throwing up. I am always saying that Christians think their God is a moron, when it is plain who is. You are inviting me to believe that God, or the aspect of Him called the Son, personally picked out twelve apostles who were dimwits. And God has foresight. You will believe anything, my friend. Like all Christians, and do not say you are not one, you believe the crap you are fed because priests or pastors have a false reputation, God given no doubt, for telling the truth when they are complete and unabashed liars. The moron God picked out morons as His disciples! Really. When you think a little and relate what we know, even from the rest of the New Testament, it is quite evident that the twelve disciples of Christ had no appreciable role at all in spreading the message of Christianity. The one who spread Christianity was Paul, and he was neither an apostle (except inasmuch as he appointed himself) nor did he know Christ or know much about him. His own letters tell us he had fallen out with the apostles appointed by Christ. Does it occur to you that maybe that was the reason why the people appointed directly and in person by God the Son turned out in Christian tradition to be morons? Of course not. Official Christianity has written the apostles appointed by Christ out of history and has substituted the history of the church founded by Paul. It was utterly different from anything taught by the man who is considered to have been a God, yet all Christians ignore the words of their God and parrot the words of Paul. Paul is the Christian God in fact. The Pharisees did not agree with the tack that Jesus was taking. That is why they did not support him in general, and not because they would not listen to his parables.

The Pharasees corrupted YHWH’s law by adding to it. Their oral tradition, crafted into the Talmud violated the TORAH in its very principle. For in the TORAH, there is a curse upon anyone who adds or takes away from the Law (instruction). The Pharasees additions was a yoke so burdensome that to this day the vast majority of the jews do not even keep the sabbath because the traditions of men (Rabbis) has obfuscated the true Law as YHWH told Moses.

Well you have typical God given clairvoyance about these arcane matters, so I must bow to your supernatural knowledge. My own simpler understanding of it, based on what has come to us through history, is that the Pharisees were not adding to the law. Like Jews generally they considered the law as immutable, but because it was so strictly applied, they devised what they called a wall around the law. Many of the laws of Moses were easy to violate inadvertently, but ignorance of the law is no defence. The additional rules the Pharisees introduced were meant to be easier to understand and to remember, and were meant to prevent anyone from accidentally breaking the proper law of Moses. It might seem crazy to you and me but for them it was better to break a rule that did not matter and get castigated before they broke a law of God and lose any hopes of living in the arms of Abraham. Now read the gospels and you will find that Christ said in a powerful statement that not a jot or tittle of the law would be changed while there was a heaven and earth. Jesus was all in favour of the law of Moses, and no Christian is, but he did not accept that building a wall about it was right to defend it. On the other hand, Jesus was expedient in his attitude to the law. On those occasions when it was not possible to fulfil it for practical reasons, such as when an army was fleeing, as long as the soldier had goodness in his heart, he did not have to follow the letter of the law at that time. Jesus did not abrogate the law at all, he pointed out that there were circumstances when it was impossible to practise the law, and then and only then was it all right to suspend it for the moment. The reason for it seems historically clear. Pious Jews had been murdered while trying to follow the law strictly, such as by not working on a sabbath, and that included fighting. Men were slaughtered by their enemies in the temple.

In the same manner, Christianity has fallen victem to the same temptations that has plagued Israel. They allowed pagan ideas to mix in with the way that YHWH taught us to live. Your website shows Ishtar, Yamuz, Lent, Christmas.. all pagan false god worship that has infiltrated the early believers to where it has corrupted the TORA to where Christians almost never honor the feast days that were to be practiced "forever.’ Christians do not keep holy the Sabbath because the early Roman Catholics around 300 AD moved the day of worship from Saturday, the last day of the week to Sunday, the day of the sun god, the first day of the week. Also, the catholics have dropped the commandment about idols so as to allow many statues of Mary and the saints. Even the vatican has an image of God on the Sistine Chapel.

Well, if you think that the God who made the universe could care a toss about which day was the sabbath, then you know more about God than I do, but I know you know nothing. You just spout. If you had read my website, you will have found the history of Judaism which presents a mountain of evidence that Judaism was founded not by Abraham or Moses as agents of God but by the Persians. Perhaps God was acting through the Persians, doubtless you will know that by your paranormal insight, although, I am still not clear why an almighty has to use anyone to assist Him. The Persians set up the Temple state of Yehud with Jerusalem as the temple city. Before then it was an unimportant hill town, and the whole of its previously history except for a few incidents obtained from Assyrian archives, were invented. It was fiction. Maybe that is why you believe it all.

So I agree with you that christianity has been raided and overran by pagan ideas in much the same way that Israel in ancient times was infiltrated and overrun by pagen ideas.

The whole point of cultural influence is that culture is influenced—by other cultures. In ancient times, a people’s culture was their religion, and all religions have been influenced by others. Now you expect me to accept that God who has made or accepted a changing world, wants some particular religion among many thousands of them to be static and unchanging, in other words, utterly supernatural in a natural world. What is your evidence that God wants the Jewish religion to remain unaltered? The bible? How do you know it has not been altered to say that? No religion has any proof that it is absolutely true because none of them are, and none of them even can be, until the world stops evolving, and then all of them will be. What was this school that taught you physics for four years? I note that you were ashamed to say.

In the old testament, God chose people to whom he revealed himself to. He sent angels to some and spoke to them in their dreams and very few did he speak to in a more direct manner. Very few were without fault. He did not speak to the oldest, the highest ranking, the king or the highest priest. He preferred to rise up judges from the midst of the people. But even then, he did not limit his interactions only to Abraham and his descendants. There were others whos heart’s he hardened or spoke to in dreams. Again, notice how the omniscient chooses to speak to most humans in their dreams so as to leave them with puzzles that they must solve. Would it not make sense for a creator to feed and water his creation so as to mature his crop to his desired end state. There is a parable about the seed sower.

Why do you believe theses ancient fairy stories? If someone came to you with an angelic message today, would you join him in a new religion? Or would you have him certified? You are joking when you say all this, because no one sane could seriously believe it. What prevents an Almighty God from communicating with people with ease, supposing that any such God wants to communicate with us? Any almighty God would not have the least problem in communicating, if that was his purpose. He would not have to use dreams, and, if He did have to for some reason of expediency or whatever, He could make the dream seem like real life, so that the hearer would think it was real, and certainly would not have to confess it was a dream. We are back to the believer’s God, the imbecilic God, the God so hopeless that He needs allegedly wicked men like Judas Iscariot to help Him with His idiotic but supposedly divine plan to save people who do not need saving. These plans and stories and miracles, are all so obviously human contraptions and not divine, that the moronic God is followed only by morons.

We disagree about the meaning of “perfect”. I do not believe that the word implies perfection. A pure circle is perfect. If it is compressed from all sides it becomes a perfect point. If it slides along a center point in one direction it can create a perfect cylinder. If it spins on an axis, it fills the volume of a perfect sphere. A catepillar can be perfect and turn into a perfect moth. Is there a perfect man? One may be perfect for jumping high and another may be perfect for running fast while another is perfect for swimming great distances.

What you start with is the Platonic ideals because there is no such thing as a perfect circle or the other geometric conceptions you mention. You are conjuring with the ideal of a circle, a point, a cylinder and so on. Any one of these that you come across in reality is less than perfect. Perfection is purely imaginary. Christians like Plato’s ideas because they corresponded with heavenly perfection for them, but explained it all much better. When you speak of caterpillars, moths and men, no doubt the Platonist will say the same applies. It is less clear to me because there are many different kinds of caterpillars, moths and men, and not just one ideal one like a circle, etc. So, the caterpillar of the peacock butterfly and the tiger moth cannot have a single ideal type, there can only be a single ideal peacock butterfly caterpillar, and a single perfect tiger moth caterpillar. When it comes to men, you are doing the same. There is no such thing as a perfect man, even in the space of Platonic Forms. There might be a perfect high jumping man, but he will be less perfect for swimming. You have to have a perfect ideal of each. In each case perfection is never realized, any more than the perfect circle is. If there were any such thing as a perfect swimmer, then the records set would never be beaten and swimming sports might as well end. If you are tempted to say that Mark Spitz, or whoever, was perfect, then you are talking metaphorically. He was not perfect. All perfections are ideals. The perfect world is an ideal. If it is perfect then it cannot be surpassed, and I repeat, any change made to perfection must necessarily make it less than perfect. If it could improve it, then it was obviously not perfect in the first place, and if it was just as perfect, then perfection could not be conceived because nothing them could be uniquely perfect. If you were trained as a physicist, perfection is like an energy minimum, say. The minimum is a single point in the immediate space,and any move from it would move the point from the minimum. So, it is quite impossible for the system to remain at the minimum and yet change.

Humans are fallible. We are in the learning phase while alive on this earth. To learn, one must experiment. That often involves making mistakes. Perhaps we will become enlightened and come to love God, but only if we do not know that yet.

Why do you persist in wanting “us” to love God? Why are you not satisfied that you do? This is the manic missionizing of Christians at work. Sorry, of course, you are not one. Perhaps you have simply caught the virus without having the obvious symptoms. You are a carrier! We shall become enlightened when we give up this insane desire to tell everyone else that they must believe our wild and irrational thoughts about our fairy god father.

I believe that the prophets all had a similar message, “You are not following the way YHWH instructed us to live as attested to in the Law, the TORAH”. Besides that, they prophesized. That’s a pretty consistant message throughout the bible up until the end of the Gospels.

You are cracked. How do you know these prophets were:

1. historical,
2. prophesied anything at all,
3. were sent by God, and were not just madmen?

And if these prophets were sent by God, then why did they show such little regard for the first and most important prophet of them all sent by God? What prophecy was correct, and what is your proof? The god of the Christians called the Son and the most important prophet according to the Christians, prophesied that the kingdom of God would come in the lifetimes of his audience. Just in case, your understanding of time is not too sound, that was 2000 years ago, all bar a year or two. Have we been living in heaven for 2000 years, or is that a false prophesy?

I ask you to ponder that if there was a good God and this was his purpose, to raise us up like children to become mature in our capacity to love, then find a fault in the Torah, the old testament. Find me an example and lets discuss it. Let us focus our attention on some specific area and see if we can’t reach consensus among the two of us. Let this be the hypothesis, that God is good and true. That God’s objective is to raise us up as students to the truth but in a way where each student must find the truth through their own struggle. The puzzle pieces are in the bible. How can they be looked upon and understood? By living our own lives, we can read the accounts of others and identify with them. From that we can find insight into what the truth is, who YHWH is, what we are called upon to do.

Are you serious? You think the God of the Hebrews, so called, of the Old Testament is “good and true”. Have you got a different Old Testament from me? The God in it was a monster who told people to kill, and punished them when they did not, accepted the human sacrifice of a young girl, told others they could keep all the captive young girls for themselves, kills 200,000 soldiers when a peace had already been agreed, to cite a few that spring instantly to mind. This is no god I want to identify with. I would not want to let my kids read such horrifying, merciless, racialist claptrap. I shall continue to tell people not to believe it, if they are even remotely human, and instead to read the history of it as part of the ongoing saga of human folly. Best wishes in recovering your sanity.

I graduated from Carnegie Mellon near Pitt. How bout you? And what is a Panthiest, one who believes in many gods? I believe in many spirits, but one supreme God. I think you misunderstand Albert. While he claimed to be not religious, that is totally different from being a nonbeliever. I wonder why you know so much about the bible if you think it is such garbage. At some point you did believe, didn’t you. Now you seem angry for having wasted your time studying it and going in circles to no effect or ill effect. Did it lead you into trouble?

I really do wonder at your arrogance. I ought not to because you are just typical. You are so thoroughly indoctrinated you cannot imagine anyone can not believe. So far as I can remember, I never believed any of these children’s stories. As a child I thought they were weird. I cannot think why any adult would want to believe them. They do not differ from Santa Claus, Snow White and The Emperor’s New Clothes. They were meant to be edifying tales for infants and immature grown ups. No one with a brain cell could believe in them as being true, apart from a possible moral value in some cases. In many other cases they have no moral value, and indeed are disgusting examples for anyone with any sensitivity at all. The trouble is believers ignore the moral value because no Christian has the morality to tell Christian rulers they are not acting as Christians when they blow shit out of people. Christ did not advocate mass murder on the excuse that someone else might be a mass murderer. All of you are spouters, and all of you think you are saved. Luckily you can never be disappointed because you could only find out when you are dead, and despite your delusions, that is final.

As for Einstein, I suggest you read some of what he actually wrote rather than spouting with no foundation that I am mistaken. You are mistaken not me, hard as that might be for you to believe. A pantheist is someone who accepts Nature as God, but Nature is not a man with a big body, like most people’s God. When Einstein spoke of God, he meant Nature, and Nature’s laws, rules and subtle workings, not any image of man. Nature is not trying to save anyone, because the fate of whatever she gives birth to is quite immaterial to her.

Finally, I repeat that I am interested in the bible because I am interested in how anyone could think such a rag-bag assortment of ancient tales could possible be considered to be infallible. Such rag-bags come together in history, and what is interesting about it is how it happened. It was not by accident, and it was not by the finger of God. It can be traced in the aims and objectives of human beings, mostly trying to get and keep control over other human beings.

Carnegie was a Steel manufacturer was he not? From Scotland. I would have thought that he would have paid for a good college that taught people something useful.

There was a time when I did not believe. I have a friend who is an atheist. I can understand the logic to what you say. It is not that difficult. I’ve been in both places.

This confession shows that either you were an atheist for the wrong reasons or you are not too bright. No one who has come to a reasoned position rejecting religious belief could possibly return to it, except perhaps by some terrible trauma. Why in heaven or on earth should an almighty being want to do what you think He does? He sends His vital salvific message by lunatics and in terms that no good God could contemplate, but you abandon all reason to make yourself believe it. I suggest you stick to talking to your fellow dunces. They might appreciate it.

I doesn’t seem very logical that a few priests in Babylon would create a fictitious history of human, week, sinful people to base their priesthood on. Also, it seems striking that 3 thousand years ago, as God told Moses, many of the laws on higine actually would have prevented millions of deaths if not billions, had the Christians decided to accept the law. Strange how a guy 3 thousand years ago or even a little over two thousand years ago, according to you, made that stuff up. They didn’t know about germs then. They didn’t know about blood born viruses. They didn’t know that pigs are the most aerosolizing animal on the earth that will eat anything. They belch and fart a thousand times more gas than cows per weight. Wait til we see how the bird flu infects people. I bet it will be from a violation of the law. But you think some handfull of priests just made all that up.

Look, you obviously have not read, or read very little of what I have to say. Or perhaps you are too stupid to understand it, because you have been brought up on fairy tales. It is perfectly logical that the Persians should want to write a book that obliges the Jews they had planted in Yehud to follow a law. Their enemy was Egypt, a powerful country, and the Jews were essential to their keeping Egypt in control. Read the pages, I am not going through it all again. What is illogical is that an almighty God should want to write such a bag of garbage. That is what you believe, even though it is utterly unbelievable. The reason is that you are shit scared of dying, and you believe the idiocy that by believing it you will live forever. As for all this rubbish about hygiene, what are you talking about? Nobody knew anything about hygiene in those days. Most of the people in the ancient near east did not eat pigs, if that is what you are on about, not just the Jews, but whether that was because of tape worms is a moot point. It would not have been a difficult deduction to make after a few hundred years of experience that pigs gave you tape worms, and that might have been the reason for the taboo on them, but plenty of other people like the Greek and Romans and the Chinese ate pigs and it did not stop them from having mighty empires. The Jews never had one. If it stopped billions of deaths, why are the Jews not the dominant population in the world? Tell me also, since you believe it, why this almighty God wanted to tell only the Jews of these wonderful things, while, according to you, cynically letting billions of people die who were not Jews? The fact that pigs are omnivorous is probably an excellent reason why they actually help empires to grow rather than the opposite. Good quality protein can come from waste and garbage, and build strong people even though some would get tape worm if they ignored their mothers and did not cook the pork properly. That is all that is needed for it to be perfectly good meat, something else that experience, with no need to know anything about germs would have taught them. What is the law against bird flu that you have just made up? Why haven’t you answered the points I have made in previous emails about how monstrous the Jewish god was, or is, if you like.

I agree with you in that a bunch of priests kidnapped the law and held it hostage by claiming to be the divine interpreter. Man has many weeknesses and strives for power. I believe there are many spirits and not all are good. I met a woman who had visions often, while praying before a statue of a woman and clutching to little stones on a chain often praying in a pagan way of repeating the same words until one falls into a trance like hallucinogenic state. I also spoke to multiple witnesses to a priest who had a favor follow him. His favor would cause all graven images of Mary to weep with moisture condensing. Even in the bishops own office this happened.. Now some would have this be a divine miracle. I question the divinity of a spirit that does its works on graven images that are forbidden by the 2nd commandment.

So, for you, you have many reasons to disbelieve. I have many reasons to believe. It also gives me the feeling of satisfaction that makes me not fear death. Freud was an atheist and he feared death. Do you?

No, but you do. It comes to us all, and it will come to you, too. If it scares you witless, then believe what you like to help your terror, but do not try to ram it down the throats of others because it makes you feel better. That is what you believers have always done. You hate to be alone in your madness. You can believe in spirits if you like, but the examples you give are of people who are, like you, deranged. I like to keep clear of them. As for your many reasons to believe, I have yet to hear one. You believe for one reason only—fear.

How do you suppose a group of people in 300 BC knew that if you touched a dead man you were unclean? Take a look at what YHWH told Moses about how to become clean after touching a dead man. Then think how only within the last 6 months has the medical community started to tell doctors to stop wearing ties. 2300 years later, after the TORAH was written and our enlightened and educated profession of medicine has only recently gotten around to warning us about the uncleanliness of touching dead bodies. If you think about it, you know why doctors were recently advised to stop wearing ties, don’t you.

We know about germs now. We know that germs and infection tends to multiply rapidly in a dead body at room temperature. We know that germs spread undetected by our vision. We also have abandoned the idea that sickness is caused by humors. Remember that concept. Some gasseous vapor that carried illness from one person to the next. That was popular before the smart guys came up with the hypothesis regarding little unseen germs. How long ago was that, a couple/few hundred years ago. Did you know that after the renaisance and the enlightenment, there were two hospitals within blocks of each other in Paris? One had a normal maternal mortality rate while the other exceeded 60%. What was the cause of this disparity in new mothers surviving giving birth and leaving the hospital? They brought in a consultant and guess what they saw? The doctors were working on cadavers and going and giving birth. Back and forth they went, without washing their hands. Now is it a surprise that the hospital with the cadavers was the same with the extremely high maternal mortality rate? By todays standards and knowledge, that is not so surprising. We know about germs now. How do you think these priests from 300BC knew about them? That’s right. You don’t believe that YHWH told Moses how to avoid the plagues that troubled Egypt. So you think the writers had some insights, maybe from wars, that touching dead bodies brought about illness. They might have noticed a correlation. Strange how that knowledge was forgotten. Just like it was forgotten how to burry ones solid waste (leading to the plague).

But don’t you think it might be a little bit of a stretch for the writers from 2300 years ago to go on to explain how to become clean after touching a dead body? They talk about washing in water ones entire body and all of their clothes. Then it says one is still unclean until after sunset. Hmmm. Funny coincidence that a tie is a peace of clothing which doesn’t typically ever get washed in water. Well, look at that. We had to wait 2300 years to discover that the priests actually were really onto something. They discovered a way to avoid transmitting germs and disease even before humans had come up with concepts like viruses and infectious germs. Somehow, in the desert, without soap, they came up with a practice that essentially would work today in avoiding so many contagions without nearly the same rigorous research that we have had in the last few hundred years. Yet only in the last 6 months havef doctors been advised to stop wearing ties to work. When will the medical community recognize that they should also not wear cloth belts?

Well, there’s an interesting study to keep you quiet for awhile—uncleanness. What is unclean and why, and where did the idea come from? You can read your own favourite book to find out some things. Turn to Leviticus, a pretty boring book, but it has a lot to say about what was permitted and what was allowed, what it cost you and who you paid. It covers uncleanness in that too, because when you were unclean you had to get cleansed, and that cost you! Now a priest, of course, had to stay particularly clean, otherwise he’d have had nothing to spout on about and no credibility, so they were meticulously clean themselves. They were so clean they could not even stand by a grave. I suppose God knew germs would be creeping from the corpse through the soil and floating into the air to catch them unawares, so that they were unclean and did not know it. Why were some animals clean and others unclean? For Jews, dogs were notoriously unclean, but for most other people in the world they were man’s best friend. I suppose we should go out and shoot all the dogs polluting the world. I guess you cannot like dogs yourself. I personally don’t like them much. They slobber over you too much, and that seems pretty unclean to me, but maybe I’m Jewish and never realized it.

If you read the pages that you cannot seem to get round to, you will find a few relevant facts. First Moses is a myth and was never heard of in history, as opposed to what is claimed in the bible until about 300 BC. So whatever God told him, he did not do it until a thousand years later than the bible claims. Second, cleanness and uncleanness comes from Persia, and the Persians knew all about it long before Moses was invented. The reason some things were clean and others were unclean for the Persians is that some things were created by their God, Ahuramazda (Aaron-Moses, you will notice) while other things were made by the Evil Spirit later called Ahriman, the Persian Devil. Whatever the Devil made was unclean. Now I have no doubt that because people were intellectually no different 2500 years ago from us now, they were quite capable to seeing that death was unpleasant, and that dead bodies in hot weather rapidly turned into a stinking slimy mass if they did not first get eaten up by maggots. That would go into the unclean category for me without needing to know about germs or without having any god to tell me. Poisonous snakes and scorpions seem pretty unpleasant animals, though I have no idea whether they are particularly unhygienic in terms of germs, but they were considered to be unclean by the Persians. Frogs, on the other hand, seem pretty friendly little things to me, albeit slimy, and I built a pond in my garden for them to live and breed in. Persians thought they were unclean, I believe.

The Persians sent colonists into Yehud to set up a temple state, which they did, and they were flattered with the title of being a nation of priests. Now, even the Persians had to bury dead bodies, whether it was unclean or not, so they had specialists to do it, but who could bury the dead when the whole nation are priests? They had to have a cure for it, and invented appropriate rituals. The point about uncleanness is not hygeine but ritual. The ash of a red heifer was the wonder cure. Maybe it is full of antibiotics, or perhaps it has a new anti-bacterial agent that you could discover, if you were intelligent enough.

The fact is that the Jews took up the notion of cleanness and uncleanness from the Persians, but later on, they decided that no other god could be considered as the equal of the Jewish God. It was good for business, but it left the cleanness and uncleanness hanging about with no purpose. The Devil was not allowed to be as creative as the good God, and did not create unclean things. God had to be responsible for them all, so they had to introduce pollution and corruption with a new theory. Anyway, I am doing your study for you. Go away and try studying it yourself. It certainly had nothing to do with God whispering clever things in Moses’s ear, and it has less to do with any direct knowledge of germs, but only that which is pretty obvious in societies before they had undertakers and mortuaries. Even today, in Islam, people have to be buried in less than a day. They had to bury people afore they stank.

Well, they are close. They recommend scrubs, but they don’t prescribe changing them after each time they encounter a "discharge" of blood other bodily fluids.

I hope you catch my point. The bible is full of wisdom and understanding that is hard to think was purely made up. Let me also point out a couple books that you might want to relook at in the old testament. Please look at Job and you will realize that the Lord is not alone. There are adversaries to him. He does not always impede them. Next, in the prophets books and all throughout, we see that God often sites offenses by his people that will cause him to turn away from them. Worshipping idols and other Gods are commonly expressed.

I thought you said you were trying to learn. You are utterly indoctrinated into ancient crap. That must be pretty unclean, I’d say. So the bible has some ancient wisdom in it. Common sense is more the right word, but then so have most ancient religious books. The ancient priests had to do something for their free crusts and carcases. When are you going to face up to the ancient wisdom of the Quran? I just pointed out to you that Moslems still bury their dead within 24 hours. That ought to appeal to someone as obsessed with cleanliness as you. I haven’t the least doubt that someone who can be so easily amazed by ancient wisdom as you would be astonished by the ancient wisdom of the Buddhists, definitely stemming from 600 years BC, or the Hindus from 1200 BC. Indeed, the ancient writings of Ugarit still need to be properly translated, and they must be full of even older wisdom, though you are not the one to translate them because, like all biblicists, you alter things to suit yourselves willy-nilly. In short, biblicists are liars. They have know for years upon years that Moses is a myth, and that Judaism came from Persia, but just like the ancient priests, it gives them too good an income to turn down. You must get in on professional religion. It would suit you.

Now we learn that God is not alone. What then does monotheism mean? And why is dualism, like the Persian religion in which the good God has an equally strong wicked opponent always sneered at by Jews and Christians? If God lets adversaries make human life miserable then He is not good. He is definitely not good for us. Are we praying to Him to ask Him to stop being a cruel pratt? I don’t seriously think He’ll take any notice, do you? Or is this god that does awful things not the good God at all, but is actually the wicked one who has fooled all of you dimwits into worshipping Him, while he laughs up His sleeve? That sounds far more likely to me, but you lot could not countenance it for fear of burning alive for eternity after you are dead! You must have faith, even if you are not certain you have the right god. Naturally, of course, if anyone were to suggest that some other god was the proper god, the wicked one would get upset. So how could he allow you to consider any alternative. And after all of that, as you have actually been worshipping the Devil, and not the proper God, you are for the big drop and the eternal heat anyway. Ha, bloody ha! Dimwits is too kind a word.

Now, the Lord our God and creator never claimed that there were no other gods. He only challenged his people not to worship them and not to practice the behaviors of the other gods, for he admitted to being a jealous God. Also, if you haven’t read the book of Enoch, you should take a look. Enoch was the only human from Genesis that did not die but was taken. Enoch walked with God and was taken. In the book of Enoch, you will find out where the other ungodly spirits came from and find out why they are here on this earth. It is these spirits that take parts of the truth and use it in vain to lead people astray from the true God, YHWH.

Well, the Devil would say that, wouldn’t he?

Lastly, when the people of Israel are led astray, when they deviate from the TORAH with their acceptance of idols, with their made up traditions of men trumping the LAW as YHWH told Moses, the Lord speaks thru the prophet Jeremiah letting them know that he will turn his back on them. Look at Jer 7:18 and Jer 44:17-25. Isn’t it interesting how the words "Queen of Heaven" appear repeatedly here. Strange how the Catholic church with its idols, statues, kneelers placed before these graven images and sculptures has visitations from a female ghost that claims to be the "Mother of God" and the "Queen of Heaven" in Majergoria. Did you know that there are more statues of Mary than any other human being ever to have lived? And did you ever think that maybe the Lord, our God may not have wanted us to ever make an image of himself, or any thing in the air, on the land or underwater so as to prevent us from being deceived when a spirit impersonates that image or hangs around that sculpture waiting to hear our secret prayers.

It is interesting that you don’t like images either. Neither do Moslems, but they actually practise it. More to the point is that the Persians would not let their God Ahuramazda be pictured either, and that was before the state of Yehud had been set up, and so before the Jews were invented. The people who lived in the hill country of Palestine before about 400 BC when the Jews were moved in by the Persians certainly did worship many other gods and, yes, chum, goddesses. Thousands of images of goddesses have been found. They are thought to have been the Teraphim of the bible. Remember Rachel? She was menstruating and hid them under her skirts. They were the equivalent of the pater familias of the Romans. Personal family gods and goddesses. Where was Moses and his good god with his law then? You might as well believe in Micky Mouse as believe all the ancient garbage you do. I say garbage with a sorry heart, in fact, because ancient books like the Jewish scriptures ought to be revered but not in the way that you cracked pots do, but because of the story they can tell about ancient life styles and beliefs. We have better things to believe now, but you are too idle to bother learning them.

I suppose you eschew watching TV, or reading magazines, since you have an Islamic attitude to images. If not you are a hypocrite, but then aren’t you all, and you never seem to notice. Believe me, if there is a post-mortem Judge somewhere, you lot have had it, because no good God can accept hypocrisy. Too bad.

Why do you not believe in evil spirits? Do you really think that the evil of the holocaust was generated by random chaos? Do you really believe there is no source to good and evil?

Of course there is a source to good and evil, as you call it. It is people. Lord Acton, an actual Lord not just an honorary one, said that “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” People who get too much power use it for terrible things, and rarely use it for good things. It is because as soon as anyone gets such power, they think they are God and can do no wrong. They no longer feel guilt and carry on with absolute conviction that they are right. Guess what? We are human, and no one has any monopoly on truth. George Bush thinks he is God because he has too much power, and Americans who think he is God-in-the-White-House encourage him in his delusion. In Blighty, Blair is the same. We have invented democracy to keep power in check, but the powerful, always slowly wheedle their way out of the constraints and make themselves gods. You could do something important, if you actively objected to human beings thinking or acting as if they were God. Instead you just pray, and join up with the madmen themselves. As for the evil of the holocaust, I notice that the holocaust survivors have learnt no lessons. They have just shelled a family having a picnic on a beach. Are you sure that the Hebrew God is the good one? He lets his own chosen people get murdered by the million, then sets them on to innocent Arabs who had lived peacefully in Gaza for centuries themselves. Why need I ask? If the cross or the menorah spouted horns and a tail you’d still think it was God.

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