The World's Biggest Lie: A Trial for Truth

By Andrew James McQuinn

MY CASE: The greatest investigation of all time provides the evidence that over six billion people have been lied to by religion. Previous criticisms of religion leverage narrower fields of evidence, such as its evil history, which only proves its wickedness. I will prosecute religion by calling on expert witnesses from historicity, neuroscience, microbiology, astronomy and more, providing the most comprehensive and convincing case against the greatest lie ever.
Revealed is the construction of some of the world's most influential religions, providing the who, why and how they were made, leaving no doubt that all scripture is the word of man with no divine guidance.
I explain how we discovered some of the tools in science relevant to my case, from the Cosmic Distance Ladder, Doppler, speed of light, general star chemistry, physics and life cycles to DNA, element dating and more, so the answers they provide are understood to be true and accurate, from the Big Bang forward to the real Adam or Eve. Neuroscience sheds light on religion's grip and why creationism has not been widely replaced by knowledge. The ancient innocence of creation mythology was harnessed by evil religious dogma, creating a mindset easily led into conspiracy propaganda for hidden agendas. The problems created by the believing mind cannot be understated, from pandemic denial to dangerous political choices.
Dogmatic belief is bringing our world down. Can we intercept our dangerous future?
ONLY if we understand what is TRUE and what is NOT.
Cast your verdict online, for you are the jury.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Sep 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9780228831327

Andrew James McQuinn

From a young age, Andrew James McQuinn was inspired by creating, and spent over 40 years in steel fabrication and industries requiring the trade; he also privately and singlehandedly constructed 2 steel yachts and invented, prototyped and solely produced a back therapy device, authoring its patents for the USA, UK, and Canada, and its manuals and marketing material.Mr. McQuinn's creativity went well beyond the works of a steel artisan, however, as he wrote advertisement for radio; an animal rights newspaper column, 'Paws for Thought'; and without realizing it had become over decades a philosopher of human nature, science and religion. He is driven by an intense interest in nature, from the animal kingdom to astronomy, and our world from both a natural and cultural standpoint, through both lengthy research and first-hand experiences, including extended stays in third-world countries.Regardless of one's credentials, there is no substitute for logic, his strongest asset. Andrew is not limited to one particular narrow area of expertise and he has the uncanny ability to learn to correctly connect the dots of the all-encompassing big picture. He readily admits that his frankness and honesty made him a poor salesman, but with zeal he can win a case for the truth, and has long been a debater and proponent for the Enlightenment.

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The World’s Biggest Lie

A Trial for Truth

Andrew James McQuinn

The World’s Biggest Lie

Copyright © 2021 by Andrew James McQuinn

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-3131-0 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-3130-3 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-3132-7 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1 RELIGION

1. My Personal Journey to Enlightenment

2. Divine Wisdom or Common Knowledge

3. The Construction of Religion

1. Scientology

2. The Christian Evangelical

3. Jehovah’s Witness

4. Mormon (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints)

5. Islam

6. Christianity

7. BC in summary

8. Religions in summary

9. Making the calendar fit the lie

Part 2 SCIENCE

4. Science Reveals Truth

1. Time

2. Distance

3. Nature’s Lego Set

4. The end of time

5. In the beginning

5. Heritage Highway

1. A note on blood evolution

6. DNA Proves Evolution

7. Some Tools of Science

1. Speed of light

2. Doppler effect

3. Determining distances

4. Carbon and argon dating

5. Concluding this evidence

Part 3 THE AMAZING ORGAN

8. The Obstacle of Cognitive Bias

1. The downgrading of miracles

2. Let facts create your bias

3. Conspiracy propaganda bias, politics, and the believer

9. The Common Thread in Belief

1. How to ruin a child’s mind

2. How results show in adults

Part 4 MOVING FORWARD

10. Prophecy or Entropy

11. In Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

In loving memory of my mother:

Joanne Elizabeth McQuinn (London)

Introduction

Primitive innocence answered nature’s mysteries by imagining a loving creator in our image, giving rise to religion that harnessed such naivety, subjugating it under divine law, with the claim of knowing God’s mind. Do we know the mind of God? Which god? I will put such claims on trial, calling on the world’s greatest minds as expert witnesses to provide evidence for my case for truth.

A fair trial must include a cross section of society as its jurors. You are the jury and can cast your personal verdict online. This jury is hopefully made up of believers who believe in a particular god; atheists, who have no belief in the existence of any god; and agnostics, who are undecided if there is a god. In today’s societies influenced by the secular population, freedom from scriptural punishment allows for a healthy, even responsible inquisition to confirm what you know, or affirm a new discovery so that you may be wiser for it regardless of your verdict on my case. For creationists to defend religion in an ever-growing scientific world, with its challenge to belief, they should consider learning about the opposition. Most importantly, whether you defend science or religion or nondenominational spirituality, accurate proven information should be considered before you decide what is actually true. This trial should bring you to a definite conclusion.

What is true and what is not should be important to us all. To question what we already perceive as truth requires a test of one’s biases, a challenge few will submit to. What we passionately hold as truth differs among us and can have great influence in our lives. We cannot all be right even if what we believe makes it feel as if we are. If your faith is worthy of a life commitment, I invite you to test yourself. You will be stronger and more certain so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing and without reproach (James 1:2–5). Explore what is not taught in religions: the evidence of how their doctrines were formed. Claiming to be divine word, the various religions assume the responsibility of being correct. Scripture is claimed as law, so it is of utmost importance to question all of them regardless of whether you have been born into the only correct one by pure luck.

If you are agnostic, as some scientists are (because nobody can disprove the unprovable), you may believe there is a god but not adopt a particular religion, because scripture differs from one religion to another, leaving you confused as to which is correct, if any. This leaves you spiritual but not denominational, like our ancient ancestors who lived before religion came to be. This book intends to lay bare the facts so your decision can be solid.

Faith is used in the absence of evidence. But when evidence is present that opposes belief, what do you choose? Religion promises greater blessings for a leap into faith, rather than evidence-based thought. The question is then raised: Is this religion’s insecure defense to intellectual inquiry? Or is the supernatural beyond man’s comprehension? What is true and what are lies among the claims of science, creationism, or religion? And which religions are valid? And how can we know? How can we know what happens when we die? These timeless mysteries will be laid out for inspection in my case for truth, and your final verdict may surprise you after understanding the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree confirmation presented.

My personal experience with religious belief has been immensely valuable in the search for truth. Revealed in this book is the power of the human mind, our soul, that pilots us through the trials of life that include decisions on where we stand on selecting government, education, and our personal and collective futures.

I will unpack the multifaceted topic of how we got here and how we know what is claimed as fact by calling on the conclusions of many different areas of research: biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, archeology, paleontology, neuroscience, and historicity. The beauty of empirical truths is that they align from all directions and from all sources, related or not, to the same conclusions. They are true whether we believe them or not. Together they answer the largest mystery mankind has ever contemplated: From where did we and everything come?

Did you ever wonder about the missing link in the human evolutionary chain? It’s not missing. Find out where it is, and the most logical conclusion for the real Adam or Eve of Homo sapiens. I use the genius of others to deduce that birth.

We have answers today for the questions many have blindly tried to explain. Here you will find real explanations for these questions. As Carl Sagan once said, The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

PART 1

RELIGION

1

My Personal Journey to Enlightenment

To be a fervid atheist when the vast majority believe in creation by various gods makes me far less common a man. Was I different as a child? I don’t know, but I do remember I only played with toys, cars, trucks, and little men if they were to scale. It was a must. I could not share a patch of dirt for making little roads, shrubs and weeds as trees, and boxes for buildings with someone who would see nothing wrong with having a toy Volkswagen twice the size of a toy loader. Most didn’t seem to care. I could not play with them.

I really don’t have much recollection of what I thought about the immense topic of how everything got here and how the universe and life were formed prior to becoming born again at the age of thirty-three. To begin, you should know some of my personal trials and tribulations. I will keep to what’s pertinent. If you can understand how I felt and some of what I dealt with in that time of life’s decisions, it will shed light on why I changed my perspective and how I can still relate to belief. I will share with you the reasons that led me on this journey to enlightenment from knowing little.

My father was an air force pilot when I was born, in the happy and prosperous postwar ‘50s. He was from a middle-class family that in retrospect seemed more like today’s upper-middle class. This is surprising, considering his father was a processed-meat salesman. My mother’s father had a home-based barber shop, and he also seemed to do very well by today’s standards, with a new car every year or two. My father’s parents belonged to the Anglican Church, and my mother’s parents were Baptists. Against the family grain, my father was atheist. He did very well in school, as did his close friend who later became a Canadian radio astronomer. The friend was also atheist, often competed with my father for the highest marks in school. Later he became an abundant source of clarification to my father’s questions on astronomy learned through reading.

Dad spent a generous amount of time talking to me and my two younger sisters, especially during our teen years. He would tell us about his love of flying and his air force career, and later his civil aviation career, but also about life and friends and education and the future that we create for ourselves, and about making decisions with logic versus emotion. Even with our open communication I never really picked up on how and why he was an atheist, but I knew he was. Maybe the subject was too large for me and required more thought than I was willing to give it. I knew he criticized religious thinking.

Most of my memories of religion from my father’s side of the family are of his older brother Everett. Uncle Ev started out as my father did, with a childhood love of airplanes during WWII from seeing them growling overhead. They romanced the spirited comradeship that went with that scene at that time: the pubs and flight stories depicted in postwar movies that celebrated the air force and the exciting and heroic pilots. My father flew solo at age seventeen at a flying club before joining the Royal Canadian Air Force. He later moved our family to England to join the Royal Air Force, where I began school outside of London. But Ev couldn’t become a pilot due to a hit-and-run accident he suffered as a young boy, relegating him to the life of a meat salesman, like his father. The two brothers remind me of the two brothers in the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, where Ev stays home to take over his father’s tradition, just as James Stewart in the movie remained home to continue his father’s building and loan company, while my father left home to follow his dream as a pilot just like Stewart’s brother became a fighter pilot war hero. Ev became a zealous Christian after marrying the love of his life, a devoted Christian from a family of pious Christians. Later they became evangelical Pentecostal Christians who are very vocal with their hallelujahs and other loud and antic praises to the Lord.

Uncle Ev washed my mouth out with soap on a couple of occasions when I was left with them for a day. I recall running away from him up my grandparents’ stairs toward the bedrooms after I cussed, and him catching me. I would not open my mouth for his ceremonial mouth wash, but he finally pinched my nose closed and grated the soap through my teeth. Soap tastes horrible and sickens the stomach, but it doesn’t stop creative words from bubbling when trying to spit out the suds. I recall my father sternly speaking with Uncle Ev; not necessarily about my mouth washing, but about the strict enforcement of his beliefs on me and my sisters when he had access to us, either by babysitting or at a family function. All I got out of it was that my father didn’t want my uncle’s beliefs forced on us. I was not concerned about who was right or wrong.

I spent more time around my mother’s family and often went to church with them. I wasn’t keen on Sunday school. I think it was more about having enough of school through the week and wanting nothing to do with any kind of classroom structure on the weekends than it was about what was taught. But I do recall thinking some of those biblical stories seemed silly and meant for younger children than me. They were very childish and impossible. I was about seven years old. It seemed odd that adults seemed convinced of their validity. Sometimes I thought they were faking their serious belief of such far-fetched stories so that we would believe them. I also recall asking my mother’s father Hollis who actually wrote the Bible, because I couldn’t believe that words could be burned into the pages by God. How else could the word of God get on these pages? He answered the Gideons. I asked who they were and only remember being told that they were men whom God spoke to. That left me slightly puzzled as to why God needed them to do the writing.

As a young teen, I recall being asked by Hollis to help him with his weekly chores: caretaking the Baptist church they attended. We would do this on a Friday or Saturday evening, and even though the church had little history as a thirty-year-old building, I felt a strong presence of holiness when I stopped to absorb my surroundings and look around at the polished pews, the ornate window art, and the beautiful wood beams. I would often contemplate, in awe, this wonderful feeling of being in the house of God. I remember the skin-tingling sensations and the warm flush down my spine. It was powerful, unforgettable.

As I got into my late teens and early twenties, I only went inside a church for weddings and funerals. In retrospect, this part of my life seems void of spiritual feelings or influential education on nature. Having little knowledge, I clearly remember one night during my late teens while out drinking with friends on a beach that there was no moon in the star-filled night sky! I urgently told them the moon wasn’t there, and they all exclaimed how weird that was. In my enhanced state I thought, Could this be the first time ever? I was filled with a warm fuzzy feeling of awe and cheap wine.

I graduated from one year in college as a welder and steel fabricator, then took a three-month solo jaunt in the Central American country of Belize in the mid ‘70s. I noticed the difference in third-world conditions and apparent education. I married my first wife when I was twenty-three. She was twenty-five. We married in the same United Church my parents were married in. My first wife was from a non-practicing Catholic background. We divorced under irreconcilable differences a few years later in a court of law, but it was the result of adultery on my part. I easily remember the emotional pain and sorrow I felt for hurting Karen. She didn’t deserve to be hurt that way. She was a truly good person and good to me. My burden of guilt stayed with me for many years, even though in desperation I had actually knelt and prayed for forgiveness from God, yet I was not a born-again Christian at the time. This guilt only eased after she forgave me many years later when we unexpectedly met one evening in town. I could see the caring in her eyes. Even with her forgiveness and embrace, the guilt took years to fade away in me, but it did. I must admit that writing these words ignites my conscience and regret forty years later for the sorrow I caused her.

It wasn’t until the downfall of my second marriage that I found the Lord. I had known my new wife from a decade before when I was already married, as she was a friend of my youngest sister. Her name was Karen as well. When we met again years after, she was surprised I was single, and an overnight motorcycle ride with walks on moonlit beaches got us started toward a decade together. As with Karen number one, Karen number two was from a non-practicing Catholic background and family who believe in God but don’t give it much more thought than that. This time I was married by a judge at her parents’ place. The memory is very vague to me, but I think the reason we didn’t marry in a church was as a compromise to my atheist parents yet still honor her parents by marrying in their beautiful home.

Our honeymoon was a drive across Canada from the Atlantic coast to British Columbia, where we finally settled, after a couple of job changes in Dawson Creek, in the little town of Chetwynd, nestled in a valley surrounded by forested hills. From home I had an hour’s drive to work in an open-pit coal mine as a welder in equipment maintenance.

After a year in a rented townhouse, my first house was purchased next door to a small Baptist church. Only a fence separated our thirty-foot distance. I soon got to know and like the church’s minister, Pastor Bill, during my yardwork, when he was doing the same and speaking to me through openings in our high wood-slat fence. This progressed to walking around to the other’s property to talk. I can’t recall telling him my thoughts on God, because I don’t remember my thoughts on God at that time. Likely I believed in the existence of God, but that was all. Religion had nothing to do with my life. I certainly let him know that I wasn’t interested in going to church, and he was OK with that. He never pushed his faith on me and was always a friendly face, someone I felt I could rely on. He told me his Church only concentrated on the Bible as it was meant to be interpreted, so he was reluctant to name his church anything that may infer a special emphasis rather than take the Bible as a whole. That sounded pretty straightforward and honest to me.

Karen wanted children, but I wasn’t ready to be a father, as I was beginning to feel restless in my marriage. We had lived together in sin for a few years before marrying. I had thoughts of eventually finding a way to end it. But since I felt sorry for not giving her a child I finally gave in, helped by the feeling of security from my job and a healthy income. She had bought a pregnancy test, and one day went into the bathroom to take it. I sat in the bedroom thinking that I