Crusading Against Athens

By John M. Reed

Crusading Against Athens is a concise critique of the supposed inerrancy
of the Bible. Written from an insiders point of view, the ambition of this
book is aimed at being an everymans guide, for a laymens understanding, of
the fallacies inherent to Theism in general and of Christianity specifi cally.
Inside this expos youll learn:
That the Bible actually supports the practice of abortion!
The real etymological origins of the word Sin.
Why Jesus couldnt be the Messiah, according to the Bibles very own criteria!
Proof that the Bible is unequivocally man-made!
Once you take a rational journey of discovery with Crusading Against
Athens, you the reader will begin a skeptical odyssey that will both enlighten
and liberate your mind to embrace natural commonsense.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781465336408

John M. Reed

John M Reed is a Deist, who was formally a Southern Baptist fundamentalist Christian that once believed the Bible was inerrant. The author’s favorite pastimes include reading about history, physics, religion, and the paranormal. He met his future wife, Bonnie, while they were both in the Army, and they have one son also named John. The Reeds currently reside in Nevada.

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Copyright © 2011 by John M. Reed.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011912073

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4653-3639-2

ISBN: Softcover 978-1-4653-3638-5

ISBN: Ebook 978-1-4653-3640-8

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DEDICATION

To my father who inspired me.

To my wife who supported me.

To my son who motivated me.

Contents

Overture for Athens

The Epicurean Paradox

The Perdition of Wisdom

Praying for Perdition

Evidence of Perdition

Absurdities of Perdition

Discourse on Perdition

Consequences of Perdition

The Moral Mendacity of the Bible

Women in the Bible

Abortion in the Bible

Homosexuality in the Bible

Slavery in the Bible

Original Sin in the Bible

Synopsis on Morality in the Bible

Family Values for the Ethically Challenged

Understanding the Prophecy Matrix

Messianic Prophecies

Contradictory Prophecies

Apocalyptic Prophecies

Synopsis of the Matrix

Searching for Divine Synchronicity

Old Testament Contradictions

New Testament Contradictions

The New Testament Contradicting the Old

Biblical Mythology versus Reality

Old Testament Absurdities

New Testament Absurdities

Historical Contradictions in the Bible

Questioning Divine Synchronicity

Wagering on Theistic Dissonance

Pascal’s Wager

The Two Pillars of Dissonance

Reviewing the Detritus of Cathodoxy

The Third Pillar of Dissonance

Theism Validates Hypocrisy

The Twilight of Theism

Defending the Ramparts of Athens

The Jerusalem Schema

Ad Hominem Diversions

Inquisition of a Heretic

The Vicissitudes of Life

Opus Deism

Lexicon

Overture for Athens

Theism is the irrational belief in so called ‘divine’ revelation (the founding concept behind all revealed religions), while simultaneously discarding the commonsense need for an evidentiary criterion that should otherwise verify the authoritative claim of any given religion. Deism is the philosophical optimism that one can provisionally believe in the possibility of a Creator, through the evidence of his creation, but not through any of the falsely assumed ‘divine revelations’ which have been redundantly, and tragically exploited, throughout Mankind’s history under the fallible influence of credulous believers.

I used to be a born-again, Southern Baptist fundamentalist Christian, from the age of eleven in 1979, until 1991 when I was twenty-three. Gradually over the decade between 1991 and 2001 I experienced the slow, yet inevitable erosion, of my Christian worldview due to the nagging doubts I harbored intellectually about my faith. The internal conflict I struggled with was centered on my desire for a reasoned justification for believing, that was also in accordance with commonsense. Eventually, my apologetic search for a justified faith led me to a contrary truth from what I had initially expected to discover. This book is the result of my Socratic focus in pursuing truth; regardless of how much the emotional consequence’s eventually ended up costing me personally. The most psychologically frustrating barrier I encountered in my quest for truth was the complete absence of accountability from my fellow believers, in answering the many questions I had about the Bible. I wasted years of patient effort in trying to receive answers from family and friends that I originally hoped would’ve both rehabilitated, and vindicated, my vanishing faith. Obviously, because of this book I’ve written, I was never successively presented with the decisive answers that could’ve persuaded me to remain in the Christian fold. Thankfully, in the end, I discovered the philosophy of Deism which happily nurtures a symbiotic relationship between the mind, and the heart, that’s conducive to both reason and metaphysical hope.

I’ve spent three decades researching various topics such as history, archaeology, astronomy, biological sciences, and theological exegesis, primarily motivated in the beginning by my desire for an apologetic defense of Christianity. As I was progressively losing my faith, I increasingly realized that the more I researched the fallible human origins of the Bible the more I wanted to find one concise and superlative book, which comprehensively demonstrated the countless problems associated with thinking that the Bible is the inerrant ‘Word of God’. This book (that you the reader will hopefully accept as rationally persuasive) is my attempt to fill in that void, to provide the intellectual answers to all the Christians out there who have asked the same questions that I did, and have experienced the same frustrations that I myself encountered. I’ve written the book that I never found, and which I myself would have wanted to have read ten years ago. A book with this singular purpose in mind; providing a guideline of recovery from the mental, emotional, and spiritual damage that revelatory religion in general, and the Bible specifically, have done to generations of people for centuries.

Throughout this book there will be words that I use that are obscure and only understood in the cloistered world of academia. I therefore provided a helpful lexicon to help supplement my message. For a better understanding of abstract phrases that are used, I would suggest looking them up on the internet. In a very real sense, you the reader would then be an active co-researcher of your own enlightenment.

In my book, I use a dating nomenclature that’s typically used by most modern historians. The older classification of the division of time into A.D. and B.C. is an acquiescence to a Christian worldview of the supposed historical importance of one man’s existence. The use of C.E. (Common Era) and B.C.E. (Before Common Era) instead of Anno Domini and Before Christ helps to avoid the verbal baggage associated with a religiously egocentric worldview.

I decided to use the King James Version of the Bible for quoting scriptural verses, because the KJV is the most popularly owned Bible in the western world. Another reason for using the KJV is that it precedes the modern translations that tried to clean up the more embarrassing verses that used poor word phraseology. The disconcerting need for modern translations of the Bible, illustrates the human desire for a divine synchronicity in the scriptures; otherwise, why would there be a need for corrective translations? The older KJV translation of the Bible succinctly underscores the thesis of this book; the Bible is an undeniably fallible and humanly authored book, which consequently demonstrates the absence of a divine origin.

Throughout the scope of my book, I will use the distinctively Biblical name of Yahweh, whenever I’m specifically addressing the Biblical God or whenever I’ve used derisive and sardonic language in my discourse of him. Other Deists would sincerely and emphatically agree with me, that a benevolent Creator does not deserve the offensive connotation of being erroneously associated with the Bible.

The choice of title for this book reflects the concern that I and other fellow Deists have for the future welfare of the human race. Athens was an ancient center of scientific inquiry, philosophical and analytical reasoning, and the nurturing of curiosity in the search for wisdom. Religion, as symbolized by Jerusalem, is in a constant state of war with Athens. A crusade is a war of the cross, and in the name of the cross Jerusalem desires the downfall of Athens. The modern world can no longer afford the psychological delusions that are erroneously derived from the archaic gods of three millennia ago. In the nuclear world of the 21st century, humanity needs the wisdom of Athens, rather than the crusading irrationality of Jerusalem.

The Epicurean Paradox

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

The Perdition of Wisdom

The Oxford American Dictionary defines faith as: 1.complete trust or confidence. 2. firm belief, especially without logical proof. 3. a system of religious belief. The same dictionary defines wisdom as: 1. state of being wise. 2. experience and knowledge together with the power of applying them. 3. sagacity; prudence, commonsense. Faith and wisdom are by definition, mutually exclusive. The word ‘perdition’ is synonymous with hell and punishment; and perdition is exactly the hellish condition of intellectual, emotional, and psychological punishment, which is the inevitable consequence of wisdom being trumped by faith. Most people actually live there lives in accordance with prudent wisdom and make decisions based on commonsense, even when they say that they are faithful and trusting in the Lord. Consequently, credulous faith is conveniently ignored by ‘most’ believers, if their faith becomes an obstacle to exerting the sagacious priority of their own self-interest.

Religious faith requires the suspension of commonsense, so that credulity can effectively influence an otherwise rational human being. There are many consequences that detrimentally develop from persecuting wisdom, so what is the ensuing result that emerges from the faith-based perdition of wisdom? The answer is in the following condition, which is the pernicious tyranny of validating faith as a fallacious virtue and the primitive human effort to answer the objective reality of existence, from the standpoint of ignorance. The Bible is a reflection of this humanly inspired and archaic motivation to provide authoritative answers, so that a certainty about life could be ascertained, so as to dispel the uncertainty of ignorance. Yet a faith-based search for wisdom is in fact a nullification of the precursors for discovering wisdom, as I will thus demonstrate throughout the remainder of my chapter.

Praying for Perdition

Here are some simple questions for you to reflect on. Do you pray that only God can clothe you and feed you, or do you instead go out into the world and work for a living? When you cross the road do you pray that only God will protect you, or do you for your own safety, look both ways so that you don’t get run over by a car? If you have cancer do you rely solely on God to heal you, or do you seek the assistance of a qualified doctor? With few exceptions, most people will choose the commonsense approach over the faith-based one. It is the natural human instinct to use deductive reasoning so that we stay alive, rather than relying on wishful thinking to ‘heavenly’ protect us. That is essentially the problem with credulous faith; you are required to abandon commonsense, so you can believe in the wish that your religion of choice is the correct one, even without logical proof.

Wisdom liberates the mind, while faith enslaves it. There was a time before modern medicine, when demons were thought to cause illness. In Matt 12:22 the Bible says: Then was brought unto him one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and he healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake, and saw. So was it possession, or nature that made the man blind and mute? Your answer depends on whether your mind is liberated enough to reason, or alternatively enslaved by self-inflicted credulity.

A good example of when faith is sustained by credulity is the reliance on coincidence in the assumption of any answered prayer. Christians, who pray for the healing of whatever ailment, will universally assume that their prayers were answered if they happen to recover. Yet no clinical study ever conducted, has ever shown that Christians have a higher statistical rate of surviving any terminal illness than anyone else. If any given illness has a twenty percent survivability rate, then naturally it follows that twenty percent of Christians will also live through it; if however you’re one of the eighty percent of Christians who happens to die from the illness, then an absence of healing is sanctimoniously excused as simply God calling you home. This is the con-game of ambiguity that praying believers delude themselves with. A true test of prayer would be if you eliminated all ambiguity so that coincidence wasn’t an issue. Once coincidence is no longer a factor, then a so called ‘answered’ prayer can be objectively evaluated. So how do you eliminate ambiguity? Pray for something selfless, yet obviously impossible. The objective veracity of your prayer would then require a demonstrative miracle of Biblical proportions to occur.

Can prayer be scientifically tested? The actual process of individually praying and observing the results aren’t conducive for an observational conclusion. Praying for an amputated limb to regenerate completely would be unambiguous, but if the limb didn’t grow back at all that still doesn’t empirically prove that specific prayers for healing are never effective in every instance. Certainly a positive answer to such a prayer would dispel any doubts that a miraculous event had occurred, but a negative response isn’t a compelling case for an indictment against praying. The best approach for being able to logically prove the efficacy of praying, would be if an observation were to be made of an entire belief-system. Christians as a group should display more statistical evidence for unusual incidents of paranormal healings than any other religion on the planet. The obvious reason for this declamatory allegation against Christianity is that a profoundly inerrant religious belief, ought to display a collective net result of unambiguously answered prayers.

The point that should be kept in mind is that collectively, the Christian religion is a belief-system that can be scientifically observed for signs of the objective veracity of faith healing. All societal groups are subject to collectively valid scientific conclusions. By group analysis of the results of prayer, an observer can measure the statistical preponderance of answered prayer, rather than the individual process of praying. You can’t put God in a laboratory, but you can observe inferentially the end results of his influence.

To illustrate this point, you could pray to Osiris (an Egyptian god) for whatever your needs are. For the rest of your life you could credulously maintain a sincere belief in this god, yet no unambiguous answers free of coincidences would ever occur. Since almost no one today believes in the existence of Osiris, it’s not very difficult for most people to come to the valid conclusion that a sincere belief in Egyptian gods is synonymous with either being foolish or insane. In other words, a collective value judgment is made as to the veracity of Egyptian religious beliefs, and the typical judgment is made that the Egyptians were in error concerning their faith. Christianity isn’t uniquely sheltered from (nor should it be categorized as immune to) critical exegetical analysis. If an Egyptian religious belief can be intellectually evaluated, then it’s only fair to apply the same logical standard to your own faith. It’s always easier to be dishonestly atheistic towards anyone else’s revelation, while at the same time remaining hypocritically credulous concerning one’s own wishful beliefs.

What if instead of praying for something impossible, you prayed for something obtainable, for instance praying that your favorite football team wins the upcoming game at the expense of their rivals? What you’d actually be doing is praying against other human beings, rather than for your team. Your prayer would in fact be a curse against your rivals so that they lose, rather than the flawed notion of a blessing for your team. The football players in the NFL, who profess faith in Jesus and then pray for their side to win, are failing to be Christ-like followers of Jesus. Whatever happened to the benevolent proposition elucidated by Jesus in Matt 5:44: But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you . . . So should God choose your team over another? Are you exclusively entitled, that God should answer your frivolous request? Should your freewill preclude God’s divine governance over destiny?

When you make prayer requests (as in the previous example) you’re telling God that you don’t trust in his ability to decide the outcome of fate. Most people treat God like a genie who grants freewill wishes, while at the same time saying that God has a ‘plan’. There is a problem with thinking that both views (individual freewill and God’s plan) are symbiotic; God couldn’t allow for the simultaneous exercise of both, because the two agendas would cancel each other out. The platitude that Yahweh ‘has a plan’, as an answer for the terrible events that happen in life; is the easy and vapid explanation that Christians give for tragedies that occur. If, hypothetically speaking, the fifteen year old daughter of a Christian man was raped; maybe he’d have enough faith to witness to the rapist, treating the incident as an opportunity for redemption of the assailant. Maybe he’d even view what happened as Yahweh’s will being carried out, so that out of tragedy something good would result, as in the rapist’s salvation. Even if theoretically the father’s rationalization were somehow accurate, the fact remains that his daughter’s permission to be raped wasn’t ascertained. Nor was her volitional acquiescence consulted by Yahweh. Therefore, the heinous act she was savagely used for (as a witness of Yahweh’s will being done) totally disregarded her freewill in the matter, so that a greater destiny wouldn’t be subsequently compromised. Thus, the daughter’s freewill was both subordinate to, and irrelevant to the requirement that Yahweh’s will be done. The moral obfuscation of such rationalizing, demonstrates the double standard that is necessary so that the Biblical God can be exonerated from the reality of his indifference in not answering prayers of deliverance. In the previous scenario, the heartfelt prayers of the girl being violated (that Yahweh would deliver her from the rapist) would have to be ignored so that Yahweh’s divine plan of salvation for the rapist could succeed.

So there in lies the problem with Yahweh’s ineffable ‘plan’; no amount of praying could ever be efficacious, because freewill would irrevocably alter any preconceived plan. All the terrible incidents that happen such as child molestation, murder, disease, car accidents, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, war and terrorism and so on are all a part of the plan. Once you are convinced of the idea that Yahweh ‘has a plan’, then any praying becomes meaningless because whatever happens was meant to happen, whether you wanted it to happen or not.

Even at the risk of sounding redundant, I still want to reiterate the salient point that praying is a contrary act of individual freewill, in opposition to a divinely scripted plan. A Christian who prays is also a Christian who is displaying their lack of faith in Yahweh’s plan. Praying becomes an act of defiance against the authority of Yahweh, and questions the wisdom of his decisions. Whatever you pray for (other than giving thanks) is an attempt to change Yahweh’s plan. You can’t have it both ways, either Yahweh has a plan and every moment in life is scripted; or there’s such a thing as freewill, and therefore no excuses for Yahweh (because of his alleged omnipotence) in not answering selfless prayers for safety or healing.

Evidence of Perdition

Faith will always short circuit reasoning by demanding belief without proof. All the founders of every religion will claim divine revelation as their inspiration for what they said God told them. This may be their testimonial, but a testimonial (even when it’s written down for posterity) is not synonymous with evidence. Moses claimed he talked to a burning bush, but how could we ourselves know that he did? Mohammed said that he ascended to heaven on a flying horse, but how could we ever actually know that he did it? Joseph Smith supposedly conversed with an Angel called Moroni, which along with the magic rock of translation in his hat, sounds comedically close to being moronic.

Whatever these men and any other founders of other religions have supposedly testified to or written, in the end no one who follows these pied pipers of faith is ever actually following God, but are in actuality following what another human being claims to have happened. How could it be any