One of the common tactics of believers in Young Earth Creationism, and devotees of Answers in Genesis, is to reply to statements about evolution with the question, “Were you there?” Ken Ham has been pushing this approach since at least 1989, and it’s dishonest horseshit, as I’ve explained at length.
It really is a stupid question, but now my eyes have been opened, as Roger Patterson of AiG explains exactly what the question is intended to do.
“Were you there?” is a great question, but it can’t be left at that, as the author describes being taught. The intent of the question is not to simply dismiss a historical claim out of hand, but to point to God as the Creator. The clever skeptic will respond to the question by turning it back on the Christian, asking them if they were there to witness God creating the universe in six days. And that is where we turn the conversation toward God and the hope of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
My mistake to think it was intended as an honest question. It’s not, and they admit it. It is an evangelical gimmick. The whole point is to get the clever skeptic
into an argument, so the believer can witness the gospel of Jesus Christ to them.
I think I now despise the question even more.
“Were you there?” is not intended to ask a question of personal presence, but to point to God, who was there. It is to expose the worldview and the presuppositions through which the past is interpreted. Of course we know that the person promoting the evolutionary views was not there billions or millions of years ago to witness a fish changing slowly into a land-dwelling creature. The question is intended to help the evolutionist recognize that they are making a historical claim apart from any eyewitness testimony. But Christians do have an eyewitness testimony. But a witness is only as good as his character. The witness we point to is the very Creator Himself—the Triune God of the Bible. The Father, Son, and Spirit were involved in the Creation (Genesis 1:1–2; John 1:1–5; Hebrews 1:1–4).
We know that we can trust what God has said because He is a faithful and truthful God who cannot lie or deny His own perfect character (Titus 1:1–3; Hebrews 6:17–18). Further, God has revealed to us through human authors how He created the universe and the world we live in (Genesis 1–2; 2 Peter 1:20–21). We have an eyewitness testimony that explains the historical claims we make about the age of the Earth, the origin of plants and animals, and the first humans to walk the planet.
It really is as inane and shallow as that: they ask the question so that they have an excuse to claim that God was an eyewitness, because the Bible says so. There is also this assumption that we’re unaware when historical claims are made, and that history can’t be trusted, and is lacking in objective evidence. It’s rotten nonsense all the way through.
By the way, if you haven’t read enough Christianist baloney for the day, there’s another amusing statement in the essay:
Natural selection is a real process that we can observe, and there is nothing unbiblical about new species arising through natural selection. The biblical boundary is of one kind of animal or plant changing into another kind—like a fish changing into an amphibian. In fact, the way God has designed bacteria to adapt to varying environments in the fallen world is a testimony of His power over and care for His creation.
Don’t forget that if you’re ever trapped in an argument with a Hambot: they do accept natural selection and speciation (in fact, they promote a kind of bizarre hyperevolution in which the millions of species now on the planet arose from a few thousand pairs of different “kinds” about 4000 years ago). What they do instead is propose a kind of magical barrier that limits the effects of these changes — a barrier which is undefined, for a vague group called a “kind”, which depending on who you talk to, roughly corresponds to the taxonomic rank of family.
I still can’t “believe ” they don’t understand the failure in logic when they say god is good because he said so. And to say that he doesn’t lie because he says he doesn’t lie? The naivete is almost painful. So glad he’s fictional.
No, the clever skeptic will say “Yes. Prove I wasn’t. Also, your God isn’t real.”
But the very existence of that supposed witness is one of the claims that’s in dispute.
Not to mention that many people wouldn’t agree that “the very Creator Himself” as described in the holey babble is of good character to begin with. So even if we granted his existence, what good would his testimony be exactly?
And Honest Jim, the used car salesman is honest ’cause it’s in his fucking name…
They really don’t realise that their whole argument only makes sense when you have already decided that it’s true.
Of course it was never an honest question. Nobody with an IQ larger than his shoe size would think that. But I must admit I never thought they would be this dishonest.
“Were You There When They Crucified the Lord?” No? Well shut the fuck up…
“We know that we can trust what God has said because He is a faithful and truthful God who cannot lie”
Oh… so he’s not omnipotent… ?
But of course he can lie. Didn’t he say to Adam and Eve “Don’t eat this, or you will die”?
@7 Christophe Till
Ah, but did Adam not die 900 years or so later? He just didn’t die immediately. So God spoke the truth… [Alec Guinness] …from a certain point of view. [/Alec Guinness] Also, since God is eternal, 900 years would’ve just flown by from his perspective. Yes, that’s an actual Creationist counter-argument.
I’ve always understood this was never an honest question, which is quite fitting because creationism itself is fundamentally dishonest in the same way. Modern creationism and creationist advocates have always been primarily concerned with demonstrating the primacy of their religion and scriptures above all other modes of thought. Ultimately I haven’t seen an indication that any serious creationist actually cares about puzzling out questions of origins, but are merely consumed with making sure every public thought is bent toward acknowledging their god.
Except when that’s inconvenient. Then it means something else.
Well there you go. According to sources, God is a known liar (Gen 2:16-17) and mass murderer (the entire OT).
I honestly don’t get it. If you admit that small changes can occur in species over time, then by extension these small changes must incrementally add up to larger changes over a long period of time.
I do not understand the cognitive dissonance necessary to believe the former without believing the latter. It doesn’t make any sense.
Careful. Since they are using their deity as an unimpeachable witness to the world’s creation, they will no doubt use the testimony of the disciples as evidenece that the Crucifixion occurred as written. Fundies are slippery SOBs.
The exact quote (KJV) is “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
And Ken Ham is front and center with insisting that when Teh Bible says “day,” it means a 24 hour period.
If they’re not asking to get an answer they should just wear “Ask me about Jesus” buttons instead. It would give people a fair chance to not ask about Jesus and walk away very quickly.
Regarding Biblical inconsistencies: if I were tasked today to write the holy book for a religion I would simply go ask a hundred people ‘What is God’ and compile and edit the 500 resulting answers. Which, apparently, is pretty much what happened ‘back then’, only a bit more editing across a century or two. The ‘holy’ in the title really lowers the bar for quality control; you can get away with a lot…
Evolution is true, therefore no one was there. Period.
@#14 Reginald Selkirk
Hmm. Yeah, no weaseling out of there with an undefined length of time for “day” then, as an OEC would so easily do it. Dunno if anybody ever asked him that (and how he responded to it, if at all).
I’ve always just answered yes.
But of course, these are creationists, so the fact that they accept natural selection in no way prevents them from also rejecting it when it suits their purposes.
So essentially, “we know the evolutionist wasn’t there, but we know God was there, because He said so”.
This could be fun! Imagine the conversation!
Evilutionist: [Explaining evolution]
Creationist: Were you there?
E: What? No, of course I wasn’t.
C: Then how do you know?
E: [Explains how evidence works]
C: Well, God was there, and He says that’s not how it happened.
E: How do you know God was there?
C: Because He said so! In the Bible.
E: Wait, what? Because He said He was there, you just take it on faith that He was in fact there, and that his account is accurate?
C: Yes.
E: Allright. I was there.
C: … No you weren’t.
E: Yes I was. I just said I was.
C: But you weren’t!
E: Prove I wasn’t.
C: You can’t have been!
E: How do you know? Were you there?
Oh, this is going to be fun! I need a creationist to debate.
Yes, exactly! That’s why we have stuff like diseases and multi-drug resistance. It’s just how much God loves and cares for his creation. I’ve been saying this forever and no one believes me: bacteria, not humans, must be God’s chosen critters.
That last quote: the irony of the young earth creationists’ quiet adherence to a belief in something that could be only be described as Super Evolution has always baffled and entertained me. A truly vivid illustration of their idiocy and intellectual dishonesty.
Were you there when God wrote the Bible? How do you know it wasn’t Sir Francis Bacon?
Thumper @20:
I’ll take ‘Things I don’t hear very often for $300, Alex”.
A helpful note:
Some flavors of creationists refer to these “kinds” as “baramins”, and they refer to the so-called study of these things as “baraminology”.
So it you see the terms “baramin” or “baraminology” thrown around, they’re referring to this bogus division of “kinds”.
Moses, burning bush: were you there?
Jesus, resurrection: were you there?
Let there be light: were you there?
The phrase “evangelical gimmick” is practically a redundancy. I’ve been hearing their spiel since about 1974, and it’s gimmicks all the way down. Maybe we should shorten it to one word that rolls more easily off the tongue. Gimmangelikal? Evangiscam? Chrisdada?
Okay, this is clearly not my day for making up new words. Maybe I should pretend to do more work while someone else takes a crack at it…
bacteria, not humans, must be God’s chosen critters.
I think it’s pretty clear god likes black holes a whole lot. Everything else is just a side-show.
What is that picture at the top of PZ’s post? The style looks familiar from some other nasty Christian tracts, and the face of the speaker is pretty recognizable as a cartoon human; but what is that other thing? It looks vaguely human, with maybe a shotgun blast hole in its head? Is that a wide open mouth? Are those streaks supposed to be droplets of blood? Or tears? Tears of despair, or of laughter?
Anyhow, it’s always been clear to me that the question was intended to convey the idea that “you weren’t there, but God/Jesus/Holy Spirit was.” It depends on your definition of “you.” And, as Dan Dennett has said, if you make yourself small enough, you can completely disappear.
I’ve always figured the correct scientific answer is “Yes.” Was I, in the form of a reliable observational system, there? Yes. Without their God, Christians (and especially creationists) consider themselves to be exceedingly small.
“In fact, the way God has designed bacteria to adapt to varying environments in the fallen world is a testimony of His power over and care for His creation.”
In other words, they’ve rejected germ theory and have gone back to the old idea that diseases are God’s judgment?
Since it is so obviously a scripted question, I like going off script. Confuses the hell out of the creationist when you don’t follow their scripts. Almost like they can’t think independently.
Scientismist: it looks like the head of a woman, disembodied and floating at eye level, wearing her hair the way we see women wearing their hair in cowboy movies, with no face, and what may be some kind of necktie-like apparel down below.
That’s my guess anyway. If PZ could tell us where he got it, then you might be able to verify how close I was.
Nerd, I agree. That’s the only way to derail them, and it has the best chance of actually getting the god-botherer to do some thinking of his/her own.
Jesus: Hey, Dad, what are you doing?
God: Admiring that black hole over there, isn’t it wonderful? I was thinking of maybe creating more…
Jesus: Hm. What about Earth? Did you abandon that project for good? I’ve heard some creatures there are still worshiping you and killing themselves in your name, and now they’re bringing about a mass extinction and everything. Sounds like they could use some help with that!
God: ‘Earth’? What ‘Earth’? Oh, you mean that planet I sent you to “die” a while ago? Meh, I lost interest in that. It’s a pretty boring place compared to black holes, don’t you think? *gazes at black hole some more*
Jesus: …
I was there.
Hey, somebody had to sell the nachos.
Raging Bee @ 32:
Thanks for the thought.. but the speaker says “sir”, so after staring at it a bit more, I think that big “hole” in the center is a nose, and the droopy things on either side are a mustache. I think the big nose is a cartoon signal for “aged prof who lectures from notes he hasn’t thought about in decades.” Perfect target for the young fresh-faced Christian.
As long as we’re debating cartoon style… is the speaker supposed to be naked?
Here’s where the cartoon is from (http://www.icr.org/article/670/88/) …. Gee, what a punchline….
@Marcus Ranum(#26):
The answer to all 3 of your questions: “God was”.
The ‘were you there’ question used endlessly by AiG is I believe inspired in part by Job chapter 38 verse 4 (“Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation?”) Patterson refers to God’s ‘eyewitness testimony’ ie the Bible, including Genesis. But his article also states: “there is nothing unbiblical about new species arising through natural selection”. But this ‘eyewitness testimony’ says nothing whatsoever about new species arising. It rather refers to different groupings of animals having being created (in separately batches) according to their kinds – and then it being God’s intention that those land-based animals which survived on the ark should ‘multiply’ on the Earth after the Genesis flood ie be fruitful and recolonize the surface of the devastated planet. This implies no reproductive changes in and diversification of species – just more animals and plants from the originally created species (nor indeed do God’s words quoted in the Bible imply any extinctions these being something AiG are frequently at a loss to deal with since they insist dinosaurs were on the ark and that that happened less than 5,000 years ago). Genesis 8 simply implies that there would be more of the original kinds of animals ie the original ‘fixity of species’ view taken by many Christians in previous centuries. Thus – because natural selection is indeed real – AiG are making the Bible ‘say’ something scientific that it does not explicitly say nor hint at. They feel they have to try to make the Bible address scientific realities that were not known about when the Bible was written. Also the so-called naturalistic ‘lens’ used by science to interpret eg fossils is a good deal more useful than the so-called ‘lens’ of ‘Scripture’ since Scripture knows nothing whatsoever of fossils and how creatures might become fossilised rather than simply rot after death, whereas scientists interpret fossils based on their direct and systematic observations of nature and the information gained from such observations (and any strongly evidence based conclusions are in the frame ie ‘unbiblical’ conclusions are not banned merely for being unbiblical).
I wrote these comments after reading the Patterson article but BEFORE reading the Myers one. If I have a comment on that I’ll make another (hopefully shorter) post.
@scientismist
It’s supposed to be a man, wearing a suit, with a big nose and a moustache. My guess is it’s supposed to represent Einstein. Darwin was busy.
Naw, I wasn’t there. But Satan was, and for just one baby human sacrifice he told me all about it.
For the people who are wondering about that cartoon.
That is a depiction of Einstein. Guess why the has that gigantic snozz.
The cartoon is from the article I linked to as the source for Ken Ham’s 1989 opinion.
The whole notion of a “kind” always interested me. They never define what the hell a kind is, so they can simply throw it all out there, fold their arms, and get all smug.
“Well of course there’s some evolution over time. But only within kind. Duh, stupid evolutionist!”
When called on this nonsense they like to tap dance, and say that wolves and foxes and schnauzers are all “the dog kind,” and that therefore they’re still right. I mean if you’re forever moving the goalpost you can’t ever be wrong, right?
@2:
A less trollish but still clever skeptic would say “no, I wasn’t there, but these fossils and rocks were there, and they all agree on (whatever point you’re making)”
Was I there?
Why, yes. Yes, I was there. Where the hell were you? We waited hours. Your wife was rolling her eyes the whole time, saying, listen, he’s a dink, he always does this, just start without him. And eventually we did. Jerk.
Oh? God was? First off, like that gets you off the hook. The canapé was getting cold, asshole, like you care. Second, no, actually, he wasn’t. Word is: he was out drinking with Lucifer. Mostly muttering into his bourbon about you…
…
(/Yes, fiction. For which no apology will be forthcoming. Seein’ as they started it.)
Ken Ham doesn’t give a fuck about being ridiculed by atheists. He makes his money from Christians who believe every word he tells them.
Ken Holmes, Creationist Detective:
“You say the killer left fingerprints and hair during the crime? Excuse me, where you there? There were no eyewitnesses to testify, so that means your materialist methods are useless. Meanwhile, my invisible informant who never lies tells me that Satan is responsible for this dastardly deed.”
If asked “Were you there” I ask “Are you here”?
AJ Milne, please specify a color and delivery address for your Internet.
Patterson illuminates something I’ve often thought about these folks. They are never debating or arguing, but always “witnessing.” Everything they do is proselytizing. From their perspective there is nothing to discuss because the myths in the Bible, the myths about the Bible, and their reading of it all are indisputable. In addition, it’s a commandment of Jesus (they believe) that they should spread the word, so that’s what they do. The extent to which they create the illusion of debating, it is merely to have the opportunity to preach to you or any one who happens to be around in the hope that they might save a soul, no matter how unlikely. I consider it a complete waste of time to talk about anything with them.
Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable kind of evidence. Not that they actually have eyewitnesses, even.
Sadly, I can’t trust that the idea that God wrote the Bible, or trust some random person’s description of how God was vouching for its authenticity. Because, sadly, I Wasn’t There. ( Hyperskepticism is a fickle beast.)
All this “kind” business drives me nuts. Do they believe there were, say, lions and tigers on the ark? Wolves and foxes? (In which case, a “kind” isn’t like a family. Or do they really believe there was just a pair of doglike things, a pair of catlike things, a pair of mouselike things, and so on? I don’t think they believe this. Then again, I don’t think they know what they believe.
Nightjar @34:
One of my favorite explanations for God’s lack of interest in human affairs came from writer Peter David during his run on the book Fallen Angel:
This is the problem I call the faith differential. Christian creationists have faith that a book written thousands of years ago, by dozens of authors over hundreds of years, edited multiple times by people with an Iron Age understanding of the world, and translated from Hebrew and Greek to Latin and English contains true information about:
1) The origins of Earth and all the life inhabiting it;
2) The nature of the dude-god (always a guy) who supposedly is responsible for why anything exists at all (who just happens to exhibit a surprising number of mental and emotional characteristics in common with most human individuals); and
3) The true purpose of every human’s life, derived from what are apparently direct, unimpeachable eyewitness accounts of the life, death and reincarnation of the dude-god’s virgin-born kid.
And yet you have many of these same individuals (since 40+% of the American public are creationists, and most of them are conservative, patriarchal regressives, there must be significant overlap here) decrying the public’s current treatment of Bill Cosby, because apparently dozens of eyewitness accounts and other evidence of actions committed mere decades ago are simply not enough to conclude that the man probably likes to fuck unconscious women. They can have unshakable faith in some old stories and live their lives according to the beliefs they’ve gotten from them, but it is trivially easy to find examples of them exhibiting hyperskepticism and anti-intellectualism when they don’t like what the evidence says, no matter how solid it is. Why does their faith begin and end with the Bible? Why that book? What makes it so important that it must be literally true, no matter what modern science tells us? And why are they so blinkered by wishful thinking that they will gladly accept scientific evidence that either doesn’t conflict with, or actually supports their pre-existing beliefs, but continue to deny the validity of the results of the same scientific method, when they conflict with those beliefs?
Finally, the size of the faith differential is staggering in Creationists and all religious literalists, but it is present in all religious people. And even irreligious people can require different strengths of evidence depending on how committed they are to their existing beliefs about something (and even descend into hyperskepticism themselves, as evidenced by the MRA movement and gamergaters). Ken Ham is like a disingenuous, dishonest used car salesman: he is willing to do anything – say anything – that might get him a sale. The amount of faith it takes to believe in his version of Christianity is significantly smaller than the amount of faith it takes to rationalise away and ignore all of the evidence that contradicts it, diminishing the massive cognitive dissonance he must experience so that it doesn’t affect him anymore. But he is only the extreme example of something we all can face when we don’t like where the evidence is leading us.
My answer was always, “No. The rocks were, however. Let’s see what they have to say.”
robro #52 wrote:
Maybe. But given that they’ve set the stage for a serious discussion it can also work the other way around. Gleefully turn the topic from evolution to the existence of God: they’re usually nowhere near as prepared for that as they think they are and now they’re out of a technical field where they can bluff and hide. The preaching and witnessing eventually end up being the illusion as the debate they initiated becomes more and more real.
Any movement at all can be counted as a victory, if the other side is really beginning at the very bottom.
Oh, and then there was always the response from forensics: “Most murders aren’t witnessed. Should we release all those people from jail simply because nobody was there to see it?”
When asked, “were you there?”, just slowly raise your eyebrows, bare your teeth and hiss: “Yesssss!”
I thinks it’s pretty likely that most of the common creationist questions have the same intent. If not all.
It may or may not be biblical arrogance but Ham has written on his Facebook page: “Atheists hate us asking “Were you there?” as they know evolution is a belief and that we are teaching people how to think correctly about origins”. No – they are telling people how to DENY things they disagree with regardless of scientific evidence even though they were not there either.
The God of the bible is hardly what one could call a reliable witness!
He gives, like, at least two incompatible versions of every story!
In an essay I once wrote:
Perhaps Yahveh is lying, as he has sometimes done. (1 Kings 22, 2 Chronicles 18, Ezekiel 14:9, 2 Thessalonians 2:11-12.) Perhaps Yahveh is giving bad laws deliberately, as he boasted in Ezekiel 20:25.
The problem I have always had with “the bible is the truth” is that people wrote it. The creationists say those people were inspired or directed by God, but get quite irate if you point out that Mohamed says about the same.
So how do we know which ones were God inspired, and by which God, if any?
@#12 This reminds me of a cat. You can try to point things out to a cat but it’ll just examine the end of your finger. Cats can’t extrapolate. Neither can creationists.
Sometimes, I wonder how the history of the Third Reich would have been written if the Germans had won WW2. Pretty much every time, it comes out looking like the Old Testament.
“The witness we point to is the very Creator Himself”
Unfortunately that creator never talks back when skeptics ask him questions like “How did you do it? Which means did you use? Which procedures did you follow?’
Looks like an imaginary creator.
“We know that we can trust what God has said because He is a faithful and truthful God”
You probably also know that you can trust every single snake oil sales man as soon as he says that he is a faithful and truthful snake oil sales man.
“God has revealed to us through human authors”
Where you there, when that god of yours revealed it through those human authors?
Unfortunately the creacrappers I meet on internet never are stupid enough to pull this one off.
I think he’s confusing God with a narc officer from some 80’s crime show.
True. He has his angels doing the lying for him.
So that’s it. A tactical gimmick to disrupt a science lesson for the purpose of proselytizing. To advertise ignorance and outright lies. No wonder why Dumb Idiot Ham deserves no respect at all.
Okay, thanks for the cite. Wow, that is one badly drawn male professor. That “artist’s” “talent” is at about the same level as his “intellect.”
“The witness we point to is the very Creator Himself”
And what direction are they pointing in? I haven’t seen this witness of theirs in any direction so far…
“We know that we can trust what God has said because He is a faithful and truthful God”
If he created a fake fossil-record conclusively showing an Earth much older than their Bible says it is, then he’s neither faithful nor truthful; and nothing he (allegedly) says can be trusted.
I think an appropriate response — after claiming that “yes”, you were there, as other posters have said — is to just start deadpanning various lines from Sympathy for the Devil.
The thought pattern exposed very nicely here has substantial philosophical backing from Linguistic Philosophy. It’s a school that grew from the latter Wittgenstein that takes the view that philosophical questions are pathological and meaningless. The are dissolved by common sense utterances. The world is what it is and not something else. What matters is common usage and the “word games” that provide the context for that useage. The particularly relevant characteristic is that if one says “honest Joe” with respect to a used car dealer, then Joe is honest. No need to think further. If you fall into the trap of thinking, there is a notion of polymorphism (same words may mean different things in different games) so you assert “it’s complicated” and are again done with thinking.
So if one says God is truthful, the plain meaning is that God is truthful. No need to think further. It has a great appeal partly because is so, well, common sense. What do rocks have to do with “God is truthful”. Clearly a different game, so irrelevant. My observation is that while the Oxford dons who ran with it in through the 50’s are gone, the attractive notion has permeated a lot of thinking beyond religion.
This is a hurried and poor representation of the notions … Gellner, “Words and Things” is an extensive analysis and take down.
quick further thought: the whole fuzzy notion of “kind” seem directly lifted from Linguistic Philosophy as well. There’s probably a thesis in describing the zombi remains of a repurposed philosophy here. Particularly since it’s so focused on the language rather than the moral/spiritual/emotional aspects of other religious approaches.
The claim that the bible is the inerrant word of god is obviously false (and actually, the bible doesn’t even claim that!). There are obvious contradictions. where both stories can’t be true, eg Genesis – this is enough for perjury in courts. Kings 7:23 claims the circumfrence of a fountain is three times its diameter, not pi. Noah’s flood must have been around 2400 BC, but there is no flood story recorded in Egyptian history other than the annual flooding of the Nile. In fact, this was during the Old Kingdom, 2nd to 6th dynasty, when there was a flourishing and uninterrupted civilization building the pyramids; so much for all cultures having that story.
“Where you there?”
“Why yes.”
“Then… Wha!? No you weren’t there you liar!”
“What? You have observational evidence that I wasn’t there?”
This of course would work only in my mind, where Creationists are not immune to logic.
I read Ham’s explanation, of his supposedly “rhetorical” question, “were you there?”, as a form of saying, “somebody did it, *(I agree no one was there)*, so it could only be God. according to your own logic, something did it, who? all I can think of is God did it. QED!”
I simply disregard trying to mumbo-jumbo bible as evidence, and all they rest of the conversation.
I just read his explanation as admitting (surreptitiously) to failure of his imagination to go further than the first conception, no matter how ridiculous.
It’s almost like they have no knowledge about how the Bible was collected, edited, collated, and fought over…by humans who weren’t there.
Why? Once you have accepted natural selection why dig your heels in at an artificial line?
Have the Ham-burgers ever been asked in response if they were there when their favorite deity either ignored or did not see (proving fallability) the serpent in Eden thus condemning man to a state of perpetual ‘sin’; committed infantacide in Egypt; ruined the life of one of his most dedicated believers to win a bet and impress the greatest force of evil in the universe; committed genocide and a literal global mass murder; had to be persuaded by Noah AFTER the flood not to just destroy the planet suggesting that god has no ‘god’s plan’; gave the freed slaves from Egypt a treatise on the treatment of uppity slaves (rather than shunning slavery and creating a charter of basic human rights and freedoms); commandments to kill unbelievers (after demanding Thou Shalt Not do it) and impregnate their enemy’s girl-children? Do these people even ever logic? If a basic premise of doing right and good is to follow those of right and good example, their so-called god is one of the most abhorrent examples of doing right and good in the history of human mythology. People that defend the religion who are aware of these things are insane or really rotten judges of moral character.
@83 McC2lhu is rarer than fish with knees:
Regarding slaves, remember that pharoah was “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” when god “hardened his heart” — not once but several times, all so god can create the plagues.
I like this youtube video that deals with AiG and “kinds”: