Through the letterbox popped something from Portsmouth Christadelphians…
Scepticism about the Bible? I was intrigued. Could this be a local group with a rational outlook when it comes to religious matters? I took a look at their website The Evidence – You Decide.
The answer to my question was no. I’ll explain.
The website starts with a challenge:
The Bible is either
a great hoax or
a message of great relevance and help.
Immediately, they’re removing other options so that they perform a little trick: if they can subsequently remove one of the two choices you’ll be more likely to fall for the message that whatever remains must be the truth. This is a con. Over the rest of the website all they need to do is produce enough weak or anecdotal evidence to support eliminating the hoax option and that will leave them with the “message of great relevance and help” and, by extension, reinforcing the “it must all be true” mantra.
Where are the other options? That it’s just a bunch of stories told by superstitious shepherds that morphed into a religion? That it’s a collection of appropriations from other religious tales and in no way the word of a sky pixie? That it’s a means to control people used throughout history by whoever is in charge? That it undergoes changes in interpretation over the centuries to fit the facts of the time?
The next section is “accurate predictions” and included are a handful of different types of predictions: vague ones that can mean anything, obvious ones that anyone could see would happen, and potentially specific ones. The problem is that the predictions almost universally come from the portion of the Bible that was passed down by word of mouth and not written until long after the events. Further, the accurate predictions all refer to things that already happened absolutely ages ago, conveniently enough. Where’s the prediction about Islamic State? Where’s the prediction about Americans and Russians almost starting nuclear war? Where’s the prediction about what’s going to happen in the next hundred years? This is not evidence of anything other than the gullibility of humans. Many of the techniques used in these sorts of predictions are used these days too by the scam artists who go around calling themselves psychics and mediums (people that the Catholic church itself says are charlatans because a) it’s true and b) they don’t want anyone else muscling in on their territory). Moreover, this section is a great example of cherry picking data. Why doesn’t the site present the “predictions” that didn’t come true?
Skipping over to the “Science & The Bible” we see immediately that Christadelphians are creationists. There’s really nothing more to say about this section since once you know this you also know that they are batshit crazy – completely batshit crazy – but I’ll do so anyway. There’s the usual nonsense about gaps in the fossil record (there aren’t any), problems with transitional forms (there aren’t any), hilarious statements such as “An equally valid explanation of the facts is that life was created” which could just as easily have been “An equally valid explanation of the facts is that life spilled over from a coffee cup in the fairy dimension” or “An equally valid explanation of the facts is that life is merely the erotic dream of King Space Unicorn III”, and the always-fun-to-see remark about some scientists having doubts. The lattermost example of batshit craziness is always a favourite of mine as it typically equates to saying “scientists are wrong and we who have no idea are right, oh, except for this absolutely tiny number of scientists who concur with our fantasies and who just so happen to have absolutely no experience in the field of science which we’re all talking about, e.g. a small handful of unemployed biologists formerly specialising in butterfly mating habits from Uganda disagreeing with the consensus of opinion of the world’s top physicists regarding dark matter theories, oh yeah, they’re definitely right since that’s what I think for some inexplicable reason but all those others who know what they’re talking about and can explain it, well, it’s hard to understand and that means they’re clearly wrong”. Batshit crazy. And morons.
The archaeological section of the site shows where people have written things down on stones in the past. Just like they then started writing things down on paper. This section proves that people wrote things down on stones before they wrote things down on paper. Some of the things written confirm historical records of the existence of various nations or people. None of the things confirm that God created the universe or that God is real or that Jesus raised anyone from the dead etc. But you’re meant to make that leap because there are pictures of stones with writing on them. Not included in this section is any ancient graffiti claiming that Ishmael – probably a popular name at some time in some region – loves shagging sheep. If such graffiti had existed and there’d been a reference to Ishmael being a friend to animals in the Bible you can bet it would have been used to prop up the entire fairytale too.
So, when it comes to The Evidence – You Decide and their question of “Is the Bible really anything special?” I have indeed decided: sleight of hand, parlour tricks, and misdirection as employed by scammers coupled with basic incomprehension usually attributed to poor education equals utter crud. Sorry, Christadelphians, the decision is… no.
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