Heavenly Knowledge from a Dead God.

Let’s face it, sometimes fundamentalist Christians can be quite dishonest  and this is not an accusation. I’m just stating a fact.

Knowledge kills ignorance and superstition. That’s a fact, and the Christian God only survives because of these pillars. To topple the pillar of ignorance and superstition is to topple God. Ignorance and superstition hold God in his altar in heaven. Ignorance and superstition bind our mind to think. You have to stop thinking in order to worship God. But why?

The answer is faith.

Faith expands when reason is chained.

Faith in Jesus, theological insights, and spiritual gifts are to substitute knowledge, disputation, and philosophy as the basis for truth. In effect, faith is to replace proof, hope is to replace work, and trust is to replace evidence. People have to rely on forces and supernatural beings beyond their control rather than their own talents and abilities. That’s the game plan. A person who knows his own talent cannot be subjugated by kings and priests. Religion is the only way to do it.

Notice the following Biblical verses:

1 COR. 3:18-19 "Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God”

COL. 2:8 RSV "See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ"

2 TIM. 2:16-17 "Avoid such godless chatter, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will eat its way like gangrene"

1 TIM. 6:20 "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called...."

2 TIM. 2:14 RSV "Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to avoid disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers"

ROM. 14:1 RSV "As for the man who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not for disputes over opinions"

The sample Bible verses just show how terrified the Bible god and his Christ on science, inquiries and philosophy.

Now, it is important to any sensible society that truth is discovered through the interchange of ideas in an open forum. Knowledge is power so to speak and any advancing civilization knows that. Yet, Christians are repeatedly cautioned to avoid  other points of view and shun the exchange of ideas through dialogue. They are told to run away from non-biblical ideas because the latter are not only wrong and will lead believers astray, but it possessed by those with less than honorable motives. Christian beliefs are not to be open to questions and doubts. The question is why. Is God afraid to face facts? Is there a truth in the issue of “The God of the Gaps” where God is being pushed further away when new discoveries are found?

The truth of the matter is that faith will not withstand intellectual scrutiny. Fundamentalism and fanaticism have been always opposed to progress and the advancement of human knowledge in particular. As Robert Ingersoll has once said, "When religion becomes scientific, it ceases to be religion and becomes science. Religion is not intellectual--it is emotional. It does not appeal to the reason. The founder of a religion has always said, 'Let him that hath ears to hear, hear!' No founder has said: 'Let him that hath brains to think, think!". Ambrose Bierce probably encapsulated the concept as well as anyone when he defined faith as "belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel."

The Christians accuse non-believers of “worldly knowledge”. Knowledge that supposes to be foolishness to God. Hmmmm…well let see what kind of knowledge this God has to offer.

• Some fowls are four-footed (Lev. 11:20-21);

• Some creeping insects have four legs. (Lev. 11:22-23);

• Hares chew the cud (Lev. 11:6);

• Conies chew the cud (Lev. 11:5);

• Camels don't divide the hoof (Lev. 11:4);

• The earth was formed out of and by means of water (2 Peter 3:5 RSV);

• The earth rest on pillars (1 Sam. 2:8);

• The earth won't be moved (1Chron. 16:30);

• A hare does not divide the hoof (Deut. 14:7);

• The rainbow is not as old as rain and sunshine (Gen. 9:13);

• A mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds and grows into the greatest of all shrubs (Matt. 13:31-32 RSV);

• Turtles have voices (Song of Sol. 2:12);

• The earth has ends or edges (Job 37:3);

• The earth has four corners (Isa. 11:12, Rev. 7:1);

• Some 4-legged animals fly (Lev. 11:21);

• The world's language didn't evolve but appeared suddenly (Gen. 11:6-9);

• A fetus can understand speech (Luke 1:44).

• That salt loses its saltiness

The Bible also says that the following mythical creatures exist

• cockatrices (Jer. 8:17, Isa. 11:8 59:5),

• unicorns (Deut. 33:17, Psalms 22:21. 29:6, Job 39:9-10),

• satyrs (Isa. 34:14, 13:21)

• fiery serpents (Num. 21:6),

• flying serpents (Isa. 14:29, 30:6).

The Christian God and its adherents seem fearful of inquiry, fearful of freedom, fearful of knowledge – indeed, fearful of anything except its own repetitious propaganda. Yet reading the Bible give us a hopelessly ignorant God rather than an omniscient character. Sickness for example, does not result from sin being punish. Even the most righteous person can feel ill. Nor does cure come from prayers (See: James 5:13-15). Today, diseases are known to be caused by virus, bacteria and fungi and it is a common knowledge that these diseases can be cured by antibiotics, chemotherapy and surgery. Even the Roman Catholic Pope knows it, that’s why he goes to a hospital whenever he feels ill. 

Quite the opposite from the Judeo-Christian sacred book, the ancient Chinese have already catalogued different herbal plants to be used for different illness, however reading the Bible, one cannot even find a good medicine against tooth ache. Ancient civilizations have already thought about medicine, yet we find that the Bible god is too unaware of these matters.

Just read Mark 5:8 and 9:25. Jesus still believes that mental illnesses are the result of demon possession. Talk about an omniscient God, huh? It was highly documented that the Egyptians and ancient Peruvians have already been performing cranial surgery even before Jesus walks on Earth. In the year 1800’s people believed that smallpox was a punishment from God. They even oppose the creation of a vaccine against smallpox. Yet today science has eradicated smallpox from the face of this planet. An act never accomplished by God. If God’s heavenly knowledge hasn't accomplished anything, then what good is it for? 

Today “Acts of God” are now called “natural disaster”. We now can predict such phenomena like earthquakes and hurricane with remarkable accuracy. A feat never achieved by these so-called prophets of God.

The Bible believed that the Earth was in the center of the Universe, Naturally, Earth was God’s footstool. Yet because of Copernicus and Galileo, Earth could no longer be envisioned as the center of the Universe and in December 28, 1991, 3 days after Jesus’ birthday, The Vatican officially admitted that God, the Church and the Bible have been wrong and Galileo was right! With physics and astronomy, human has conquered the moon and have send robot space probes to other planets and even outside our own galaxy. Medicine and biology have eradicated some diseases that were present at Jesus time. We can now cure leprosy without relying to magic, miracles and useless prayers. What does theology make in the advancement of humankind?

Even God’s kingdom in heaven was kicked out. Up there is no heaven beyond the heavens. Our embrace of the vastness of the Cosmos have removed God from the sky and in our human consciousness. God became a vanished image, unlike the days when the Bible speaks of his power and wrath.

Charles Darwin’s discovery showed us that there is no ultimate destiny. That man is just the same as other animals on this planet. It seems  God is nothing more but a superlative image of man created by humans. There is nothing special about him. Freud and Jung exposed the neurotic element of religion and that God is nothing more but a fantasized fatherly figure. The destruction of God was total and complete. Today the so-called miracles of the Bible were no more, No more talking snakes, no more people turning into pillars of salt, the Red Sea will never open up to let the Hebrew cross a dry land, no more water changing into wine and no more Lazarus to resurrect. The God of the Christians, the Bible god, who was the source of their value, the definer of their sense of right or wrong, the creator of their universe, the eternal king of the kingdom they have dream was simply no more.

Now all we have are noisy Christian Fundies: souls that still cling from the remnants of this mythology. They are the devotees that will reject everything just to defend their departed deity. They refuse neither to listen nor to enter debates. With great vehemence, they will deny the knowledge that caused their god to perish.

This is what kind of knowledge Christians has to offer, the so-called “heavenly knowledge” that have done nothing so far; a knowledge that is wasted from the endless discussion to prove something without proof. Knowledge that was built from assumptions and assurances, that hides from scrutiny and inquiry. What’s amusing is Christians still insists on calling this “knowledge." 

I choose a better knowledge, one that was founded from deep scrutiny and scientific inquiry. I choose the knowledge of this world, the knowledge that is empirical and reachable. The knowledge that I choose has better and tangible results: This “worldly” knowledge that exterminated god.