This one is rather pedestrian, sorry to say — just another bible-thumper. I looked at some of his links, and he seems to be a bible-code-thumper, so even sillier. But his claim to have a scientific map of hell caught my attention.
“The Old Testament is a false history of the world. It should not be trusted” – Charles Darwin
Archaeology proves the man Jesus quoted on hell is 18 for 18 – http://www.bibleisaiah.com
“I gradually came to disbelieve in Christianity” – Charles Darwin
“He who does not believe in the Son of God is condemned already” – John 3:18
“Hell from beneath. Everlasting burnings” – Isaiah
http://www.bibleisaiah.com/hell_testimonies.htmA Scientific Map of Hell:
http://www.formerthings.com/map_of_hell.htm“Go! and warn people so they do not come here. I am tormented in this flame!
Please! give me just one drop of water to cool my tongue” – Luke 16
Here it is.
Not particularly good: he just grabbed an image of the structure of the Earth and slapped some labels and Bible verses on it, trying to claim that the Bible predicted these details.
Unfortunately, if you bother to look up those verses, they don’t say what he claims they do. They aren’t about geology at all! You will be disappointed to learn that Psalm 47 doesn’t actually say anything about magnetic fields — it’s a little poem praising god, who owns the “kings (alternative translation: shields) of the earth”.
Daniel 4 doesn’t actually say the interior of the earth contains a band of iron. It’s about a dream of a tree by Nebuchadnezzar, that gets cut down and its roots bound with bands of iron. Why not have a label attached to a random part of the image with the word “TREE” on it?
You get the idea. It’s word salad slapped on to an irrelevant scientific diagram, by a guy obsessed with Hell.
Sorry, everyone. But 90% of my ranty email is this degree of tedious.
This is no map of hell. I see my old neighborhood NOWHERE.
Unless it’s what he’s calling “the pit.”
looking at that image salad, I was momentary befuddled by the use of “pit” so frequently therein. To me “pit” is synonymous with a hole in the ground, i.e. nothingness. Then I realized that “pit” is also the word used for that big honkin seed in the middle of peaches, cherries, etc. So, “fruit of the Earth” must be taken literally, not metaphorically? That the Earth itself is a huge honkin fuit with a pit at its center?
pfft.
I’m always amazed how frequently people will come up with some bizarro concept that “proves” everyone’s got it wrong, and is therefore the only right thinker in the universe, etc, etc. However tedious such email deluges become, this piece is one of those gems, worth preserving as example of delusional thinking.
Dante is laughing in his grave or he would be.
This is the kind of religious thinker that other people prefer to pretend doesn’t exist. The kind that really does think Hell is underground and that Heaven is up in the puffy clouds over our heads. No True Believer would believe such nonsense, of course. Non-overlapping magisteria, Heaven is an alternate supernatural dimension and so is Hell, and neither have any connection to sky or the underground except as mere metaphors, and surely no person thinks otherwise! Of course not, nosiree, how dishonest of you to insist otherwise.
Ah, that would be Yggdrasil, something completely different!
If Hell is Earth’s core, then we owe Satan for the magnetic field that protects all life against the solar wind. Which comes from the Sun, of course, which for a long time was considered God. Hmm.
So literally Galileo:
https://blogs.stsci.edu/livio/2012/12/04/galileo%E2%80%99s-journey-to-hell-and-back/
But yes, today it’s ridiculous. I love Heilbron’s sarcastic statement in his biography: “[still looking for the exact quote] All this is perfectly reasonable”
Equivocation is one hell of a drug.
This is pretty much the level of one of those xtian school science fair exhibits. I wonder if his mom helped him finish it.
PZ:
I wonder-do you have an estimate of the amount of email you receive on a daily basis?
Also wondering when you have time to read all the that mail…
Hey, “shields” rhymes with “fields”. And the are both sort of flat things that take up area. Sort of. So I’m convinced.
Out of curiosity, did Darwin ever say this? And in what context? Just curious.
You know, even if this guy’s version of a god actually exists, I still wouldn’t worship the sadistic fucker.
There is an aspect of this sort of view of hell that I found illogical at a young age. I recall getting into a bit of trouble as a child in Catholic school for these sorts of thoughts. But hell is always conceived of as some thing/place that is awful from a human physical sense – fire, brimstone and whatever.
As a child I was struck that when you die, your body goes to dust – dust onto dust. Ok that is not quite it either, but… It was obvious, that a spirit/soul was not physical so not impacted by such physical torments.
My youthful concerns were met with dismissal or further rationalizations – and derision that I was nervy enough to even ask – such thoughts and questions were not appropriate.
This is still one of the basic experiences that taught me that religion was nothing more than a manipulative story telling exercise by some people to control others. It was an easy extension to realize that god was nothing more than a part of that religious story to exercise control.
George Rieck @ 13:
I ran into the same response (multiple times) when I was in catholic school. A common response, I’m afraid. The notion that shades had no corporality meant that all those methods of torture were meaningless struck me as well (and many others, I’m sure).
Nowadays, there’s a tendency to describe hell as the anguish of being eternally separated from god, which doesn’t strike me as hellish at all.
woozy, Wikipedia has a quote here that may be the source:
*lightbulb moment*
I had never noticed. Outside the English language, it’s unequivocally a hole in the ground…
Good to see your email is working, your RSS feed has been broken for over a week now.
(parenthetically: I’d never thought of that either. I think that sense of “pit” isn’t even all that common in English, it’s more a USAnian thing? (as far as I can think, fruit has either seeds, pips or a stone) /parenthesis).
opposablethumbs @ 18:
More than likely, although I’ve only used pit to denote a hole in the ground. Fruit has seeds.
Wiktionary claims the two definitions of “pit” have different etymologies.
I think of a pit as relating to the seed and its shell in a fruit that has only one seed — cherry, apricot, peach, almonds, etc.
@15
Thank you. That’s interesting. But as quoted it *is* a bit of a butchering of what Darwin actually said. At least to my ears, it is. Don’t you think? I guess it doesn’t really matter.
Man, I thought this was gonna have a sweet map of Hell I could nick for use in an upcoming high-level AD&D campaign! You had me all excited! You need a better class of cranks, PZ.
@ woozy #21
I think so. I also think that it does matter. As I sometimes tell my fundie friends “If you’re presenting yourself as a purveyor of truth, then be sure what you say is true.”
Never referred to an avocado pit as a seed.
Nice to know that the prime meridian of Hell goes through Sydney, Australia though. Must be the famous Mardi Gras.
@23
Well, in both the actual Darwin quote and the way it was butchered we have Darwin describing the bible as a ” false history of the world” and that it “not be trusted”. So I wasn’t sure to what extent I should be pissed at the butchering as the stated concepts were there in both versions. I guess the answer is plenty. As butchered, it sounds as though Darwin is actively and specifically attacking the bible for the sake of denegating it, whereas in actuality he is discussing the method of relying upon the bible as authority and only indirectly refering to the bible itself.
I guess it does matter.
In any event, it simply was not an accurate quote, and that’s always an issue.
I think of them as seeds when I intend to plant them and pits when I don’t.
Janine:
I was taught to call a large, single seed a stone, rather than a pit.
I’ve heard of peach pits but I was never clear whether it referred to the big hard seed in the center, or the cavity in which the seed was found.
Regardless, it is just a pun that might make sense in English. It doesn’t make sense in the original language.
For Isaiah, http://biblehub.com/hebrew/953.htm
For Revelation, http://biblehub.com/greek/5421.htm
Viewing the word, in English, as a possible allusion to a fruit’s “pit” is clever, but it is word play that only makes sense purely in English, and doesn’t have much credibility when looking at the original words used in the original languages.
@anteprepro: Recall that some Christian radicals believe that the King James translation was divinely inspired to correct errors that existed in all older texts. If the originator of this diagram is of that variety, then this linguistic quirk is not an issue to him.
Of course, that viewpoint does imply one of three possibilities:
1. That 16th-century English is the official language of God.
2. That the official language of God, whatever it is, shares this particular linguistic quirk with English.
3. That Hell is more correctly likened to the seed of a fruit than to a hole in the ground.
I believe that that the first possibility is the most common interpretation among KJV-only sects. However, the third possibility would have some interesting consequences. It could suggest that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was a peach tree, rather than the more common interpretation of it being an apple tree. Or it could mean that seeds are evil, which would result in some interesting new interpretations of all the parables involving seeds in the gospels.
Quote David Marjanović @ 16, regarding “pit”:
What does that even mean? Outside the English language, “pit” doesn’t necessarily mean anything at all. It certainly doesn’t mean anything in Japanese; you can’t even say it with Japanese phonemes. Checking on Google translate, we see that in Javanese, it means “bicycle”; in Afrikaans, “wick”; in Galician, “chest”.
fakeemailaddress @ 30:
The consensus in modern times is that the tree was most likely a pomegranate, which leaves everyone in a bit of a quandary when it comes to seeds, eh? ;)
Tualha @ 31:
It means that in other languages (outside of English), whatever the word for pit is, the meaning is basically a hole in the ground, not a word to denote a seed of any kind.
a3kr0n @ 17:
The feed is fine. The problem is an invisible nonsense character that showed up in the Hume post in the bits in the blockquotes (I had to view the source in Notepad for the character to show up). Probably some PDF formatting that somehow got converted to a nonsense character when copied. Some readers and browsers just ignore the character and keep on trucking, others freak out and send an error (or just stop loading the feed at all, which is the case for my RSS Bandit). Once that post gets bumped out of the feed, your reader should start loading it up again.
@ fakeemailaddress #30:
In Chinese metaphysics, the peach imparts eternal life to the gods. Peaches of Immortality™ impart longevity and hidden wisdom to us mere mortals. Pretty much perfect for the fruit of Genesis. More so, as the peach is also symbol of the vagina. Pic.
@ Tualha #31
In Afrikaans, “perskepit” refers to to the pit of a peach. Literally: “peach pit”.
Theophontes @ 35:
Peaches are sensual to the touch, too. A wonderfully evil fruit.
This crap right here is my berserk button. I am still so completely fucked up from Catholic hellfire pornography as a little girl.
These people…I can only forgive them because their skulls are clearly completely empty. They are moral Dunning-Kruger cases, who lack not only empathy but basic humanity, having deliberately sacrificed it on the Molech-alter of Yahweh for false certainty and smug superiority.
They are the kind who only learn through pain or other threats to their self-interest. Would heaven that every single one of these brimstone fetishists could have ten minutes in their beloved Hell, and either stop being such callous assholes and/or die of horror, fear, and pain…
What makes me laugh is that the creator of that diagram has plucked words and phrases from the Bible, entirely devoid of context, and thinks that somehow proves something.
I can do that too! Look:
All straight from the email, showing what the writer really believes.
@ George Rieck #13 and Caine #14
I sporadically attended a Christian youth group around the age of 11 – 13 and remember asking one of the leader-people “If ghosts are souls, and souls are ghosts, then why does hell hurt? Fire can’t hurt ghosts.” He irritably snapped something about souls not being ghosts.
I also remember asking him or the other guy, on different occasions, “How did they fit all the animals on one boat?”, “If heaven’s in the sky, why haven’t airplanes found it yet?”, “Why was God such a dick to Abraham?”, “If God made everything, and he knows how everything is going to turn out, why did he make the Devil?”, and, along a similar vein as the last one, “Why did he put the tree there, then?”.
Younger me could be a right irritating little sod. Full of questions.
Quoth Caine @ 33:
In other words, if you take the English word “pit”, in the sense of “hole in the ground”, and translate it to any other language, you get a word meaning “hole in the ground”. Well, gollllly! I certainly wouldn’t have expected that!
If your point is to say that in most other languages, the word for “hole in the ground” does not have any alternative meanings, well, that is not terribly surprising either. English is large, it contains multitudes. It is like the Mississippi, rich with the input of many tributaries.
LOL! Wonderfully apropos xkcd. GOOMHR.
It’s an American English definition of the word, but I think somewhat archaic. In a fruit with a large, single seed, such as a cherry or peach, that seed is known as a pit.
Seeing as American English didn’t exist at the time of the first translations of the Bible into English, I think that the argument that “pit” literally refers to the Earth’s core is a non-starter.
“Recall that some Christian radicals believe that the King James translation was divinely inspired to correct errors that existed in all older texts.”
As comforting as some fundagelicals might find such thinking, we have today numerous manuscripts discovered since 1611 which are superior to those upon which the KJV is based.
Caine:
Plus, they look kind of arse-like.
Thumper:
Religious classes may superficially have the appearance of education, but what they try to impart seems to me more like unlearning. Kids are inquisitive, they question fearlessly, they think through what they are told and reach more-or-less logical conclusions. These are traits which need to be unlearned in order to make good little Christians!
Which psalm mentioned magnets again, and how does that work?
Sorry for the confusion about “it” – I mean that hell is described as a hole in the ground and not as a seed or core.
(I wonder, BTW, if the German word Pfütze, “puddle”, is replated to pit in the sense of “hole in the ground”. The sound correspondences would be regular.)
…”and you know what?” “People rising from the bottom to the top” “has got to stop.” “We have” “the bravery” “to bring” “back” “slavery”…
– David Cameron
If you tell them that, they’ll simply deny it. And then they’ll refuse to consider your arguments. :-|
since “pit” seems to have derailed this thread onto peaches:
I gotta say, This is just peachykeen!!!
—
seriously: the mention of peaches in Chinese mythology leads me to wonder if that is derivative of our use of “peach” in that metaphorical sense (above). Umm, whether Peaches of Immortality is *metaphor*, and not _descriptive_ of an actual (mythical) fruit to provide immortality. My mytho-fu is absent so i got no idea, just throwin a w.a.g. out there.
Peaches do look arse-like. There’s a poem about that, from Afghanistan, where gay was acceptable a couple hundred years ago. “There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach, and alas, I cannot swim.”
Tualha:
It wasn’t my point, it was Marjanovic’s. I was just explaining the fucking obvious.
@Moggie #44
I was lucky enough to avoid any serious religious education, except in the sense it was used in UK comprehensives (public schools, for USAmericans) which really is just education about religion. This youth group normally involved a section of us all sat in a circle discussing things, which reasonably often touched on Xian mythology. At this stage I wasn’t even being deliberately mocking; I am and always have been insatiably curious, and merely asked the questions which popped into my head.
Quoth Caine @ 49:
Evidently not too obvious, as Marjanović actually meant something else entirely. And it became your point when you wrote your comment.
In Chinese metaphysics, the peach imparts eternal life to the gods
Frozen peaches?
Peaches that freeze aging?
I want some of that Freeze Peach!
A ?former commenter has now confirmed this with a lengthy quote from an etymological dictionary. Better yet, the word is a loan from Latin puteus into an ancestor of Proto-West Germanic.