INDEX



Who was David's father - a response to a Christian apologetic critique


I received a critical email which attempted to refute my page on the multiple sources of the story of David and Goliath ... According to the apologetic argument, I paraphrased Saul, having him say, 'who is that young man' when actually the literal quote was, 'who was the young man's father.' It prompted the following response...

Normally I do not respond to emails dealing with Christian apologetics, however this time I thought I might. Now your email dealt with a paraphrase ('who are you' Saul asked David, and the apologetic criticism of this passage was that Saul actually said 'whose son are you,' a different question.) Now if you examine the matter this critique turns out to be a Christian apologetic quibble, since, Saul already knew David's father, actually requested the presence of David as a harp player by inquiring of his father, Jesse, and thus the question 'whose son are you' is as out of place as the paraphrase of the question 'who are you.' Furthermore, this is only the first of many problems in these passages, which, like so many other Bible passages, has been spun together out of disparate sources. For example, Saul sends David out to battle Goliath, and David rejects the armour, so it would be pretty hard to mistake the identity of his personal harp player, nor can one explain how after all this time, Saul would be a little at a loss to know both who his harp player was, and who his father, Jesse was. We can see the signs of two disparate sources here in that David is a 'brave warrrior and a mighty man of war' and then in the story where Saul obviously does not know who he is, David is 'just a kid, not a warrior.' 'That same day, David entered into the service of Saul' and then we are told that this little boy became 'commander of the fighting forces', a story that might seem credible when it referred, in the original unedited source, to a 'brave mighty warrior' and not a boy whose family Saul does not know, and in spite of a little editorial commentary introduced into the story, a boy with whom Saul is unfamiliar until he comes to his attention as a giant killer. The story about 'David going back and forth to feed the sheep' is a bit of editorial stitching to help paste these two sources together into one.

1 Samuel 16
18 One of the young men answered, "Behold, I have seen a son of Jesse the Bethlehemite, who is skilful in playing, a man of valor, a man of war, prudent in speech, and a man of good presence; and the LORD is with him."
19 Therefore Saul sent messengers to Jesse, and said, "Send me David your son, who is with the sheep."
20 And Jesse took an ass laden with bread, and a skin of wine and a kid, and sent them by David his son to Saul.
21 And David came to Saul, and entered his service. And Saul loved him greatly, and he became his armor-bearer.
22 And Saul sent to Jesse, saying, "Let David remain in my service, for he has found favor in my sight."
23 And whenever the evil spirit from God was upon Saul, David took the lyre and played it with his hand; so Saul was refreshed, and was well, and the evil spirit departed from him.


1 Samuel 17
15 but David went back and forth from Saul to feed his father’s sheep at Bethlehem.


1 Samuel 17
32 And David said to Saul, "Let no man’s heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine."
33 And Saul said to David, "You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth."


1 Samuel 17
32 And David said to Saul, "Let no man’s heart fail because of him; your servant will go and fight with this Philistine."
33 And Saul said to David, "You are not able to go against this Philistine to fight with him; for you are but a youth, and he has been a man of war from his youth."
34 But David said to Saul, "Your servant used to keep sheep for his father; and when there came a lion, or a bear, and took a lamb from the flock,
35 I went after him and smote him and delivered it out of his mouth; and if he arose against me, I caught him by his beard, and smote him and killed him.
36 Your servant has killed both lions and bears; and this uncircumcised Philistine shall be like one of them, seeing he has defied the armies of the living God."
37 And David said, "The LORD who delivered me from the paw of the lion and from the paw of the bear, will deliver me from the hand of this Philistine." And Saul said to David, "Go, and the LORD be with you!"
38 Then Saul clothed David with his armor; he put a helmet of bronze on his head, and clothed him with a coat of mail.
39 And David girded his sword over his armor, and he tried in vain to go, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, "I cannot go with these; for I am not used to them." And David put them off.
40 ¶ Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the brook, and put them in his shepherd’s bag or wallet; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine.


1 Samuel 17
57 And as David returned from the slaughter of the Philistine, Abner took him, and brought him before Saul with the head of the Philistine in his hand.
58 And Saul said to him, "Whose son are you, young man?" And David answered, "I am the son of your servant Jesse the Bethlehemite."


As for your apologetic argument that 'the Israelites were at least of average intelligence' this might be the case, but apparently their priests and Levites were smarter than they were.

There are many examples of the failure of apologetics to make the Bible into a type of prop for an authoritarian political system (the drive to create conformity in a type of theocratic autocratic state the real drive behind trying to impute some type of extraordinary authority to the Bible). I have in fact read these 'Bible difficulty' books and have noticed that they really stretch and strain to offer implausible explanations and when that is not on, they simply avoid dealing with the more difficult 'difficulties'. As one good example you can consider the condemnation of the entire animal sacrifice system of the Levites embedded in the seventh and eight chapters of Jeremiah, and compare the contradictory, and difficult passages written by the Levites to justify this cow sacrificing cult. Personally I think Jeremiah makes perfect sense here, while the Levite doctrine of killing a cow so some god can sniff the 'soothing odor' of a roast beef is just plainly ridiculous. You will find Jeremiah deliberately mistranslated in the NIV simply because Christian dogma has been built on the foundations of this cow sacrificing religion, and thus such criticism is unwelcome (even if it makes sense).

The relevant difficult passages (dealt with by mistranslation by the NIV translators, just one example among others by the way)...

Jeremiah rejects the Moses Myth and Leviticus

Behold, my anger and my wrath shall be poured out on this place, on man, and on animal, and on the trees of the field, and on the fruit of the ground; and it shall burn, and shall not be quenched. "Burn your whole offerings and eat the flesh yourselves, for when I brought your ancestors out of Egypt, I gave them no instructions or commands, concerning whole offerings and sacrifice. But they did not listen, they paid no heed, and proceeded ahead with their own plans with the most stubbornly wicked and evil hearts...Now truth has perished from their lips. It is no longer heard in the land...How can you say, 'We are wise, for we have the Torah, when, actually, the lying pen of the scribes has had it falsified. Their leaders are dismayed, for they have been trapped and snared, but they rejected the Word of YAHWEH, so what kind of wisdom did they have...

Hark, the cry of the daughter of my people from the length and breadth of the land: "Is Yahweh not with her? Is her God not in her?" "Why have they provoked me to anger with their graven images, and with their foreign idols?" "The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved." ... They bend their tongue like a bow; falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land; for they proceed from evil to evil, and they do not know me, says Yahweh ... Every one deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they commit iniquity and are too weary to repent. Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, says Yahweh.

These passages are taken from the anti-Torah polemic in Jeremiah (starting at about verse 20 in chapter seven, jumping up to verse 8 in chapter eight, the most explicit condemnation of the Torah, usually papered over in apologetic books by condemning 'legalism' rather than the Bible, although, if you read the quotation in context, you realize that it means what it says - forgery in the law of God - you can make note of the condemnations of the burning stake - also found in Leviticus, and put it all into context...

The 'difficult passages' are found throughout the Torah, but as an example of one from Leviticus, never dealt with in apologetic books, or in commentaries, which often fall silent and skip over these verses in Jeremiah...

"This is the portion of Aaron and of his sons from the offerings made by fire to YAHWEH, consecrated to them on the day they were presented to serve as priests of the LORD; YAHWEH commanded this to be given them by the people of Israel, on the day that they were anointed; It is their due forever throughout their generations. This is the law of the burnt offering, of the cereal offering, of the sin offering, of the guilt offering, of the consecration, and of the peace offerings, which YAHWEH commanded Moses on Mount Sinai, on the day that he commanded the people of Israel to bring their offerings to YAHWEH, in the wilderness of Sinai." (Leviticus 7:35)

Another really good example of this sort of thing is Hosea's condemnation of both the book of Kings and the book of Judges, another difficulty best avoided, which explains why it usually is...

http://www.awitness.org/lostmess/dueling.html

http://www.awitness.org/lostmess/ramah.html

this tradition of rejecting the Torah and attacking the Bible is not confined to these two prophets but, before the church became totalitarian, and obssessed with social control, was actually part of the earliest traditions of the church.

http://www.awitness.org/contrabib/torah/etrad.html

However the problems with the Bible do not begin and end with 'Bible difficulties' in the form of conflicting source materials (which undermine all attempts to use the Bible to reestablish the old feudal relationships for which the Bible was the principle ideological source). We are told to extoll genocide and murder, racism, hatred. Jesus Christ is portrayed as a Son of Sam type character whose tortures go far beyond whatever might be done by Hitler or Ghengis Khan (a simple bullet in the head might do, but might not inspire the kind of slavish servitude that Christian doctrines were intended to inspire.)

One might expect this feudal landlord to experience his own violence, and for a very good long time, on the grounds that one should only dish out to others what one wishes to experience oneself, but in the power relationship extolled by the Christian religion over the ages, there are the powerful, who torture and murder and lord it over others, and then there are the obedient, worshipful serfs who watch their step, and 'obey, obey, obey'.

The relationship between the torturous doctrines of Christianity and the torturous practices of the feudal state are obvious, and in the same way, the actual purpose of something as brutal as Christian doctrine, and the violence, not to mention the heroic priesthood, celebrated in the Bible is just as obvious, and can be understood by understanding its function. Jesus Christ, as presented by theology, a murderer of 'unsaved family members' (who did not partake of the Leviticus cow cult sacrifice), the vicious punishments and brutal tortures, all of this resembles the behavior of a sociopath, and sadly, a sociopath was set up on the highest heights as the object of veneration of generations, which, as I suggested before, tells you something about the kind of sociopaths who were actually always running this place in the past. Their artificial distinctions between 'the lords, barons, and aristocrats', who were real rich, and benefited from the labor of masses of peasants, and the lowly serf all mirror the types of distinctions created and celebrated by Christian doctrines of overlordship, for very obvious reasons, and the torturous legacy of the doctrines of Christian theology mirror their conduct, the massive endless warring and slaughtering and the tortures and the crushing of dissent and freedom of thought which has been the norm throughout the blood stained history of the human race.

To expect such a corrupt and rotten system to produce a truly decent theology would be to much to ask, since the system produces the theology that suits the system and acts to prop up that very system, as one would expect, and given the sociopathic nature of the icon at the very center of historical Christian dogmatism, as the system actually did...

The type of social relationship that the feudal 'lordship' ideology of the Christian encourages is best revealed when we understand not only the type of 'Ceasarhood' and the feudal social relationships that were the supporting seed bed where Christian theology developed but also certain events more contemporary with our own time. For example, the bedrock of support for Adolph Hitler was the Protestant Christians in teh beginning, until Hitler signed an agreement promising Catholic schools with the Vatican, after which time he had the unqualified support of the Catholics as well. Hitler received only 6 per cent of the vote in such cosmopolitan centers as Berlin, but swept the Bible belt, and it was the Bible belt that gave Hitler his one third of the vote (which was the most he ever managed to get using democratic methods). Hitler promised to uphold 'family values' (with his slogan, for women, being 'Children, Kitchen, Church') and also promised to crack down on the 'unreligious behavior' of the citizens of such places as Berlin. His iron fist was regarded by the Pope at the time, according to Vatican sources, as being 'the right arm of God,' and as I like to say, when we consider how so many Bishops and ministers and even the Pope were confused enough to consider one of this centuries most atrocious trolls to be the 'right arm of God' it does not come as any great surprise when we realize that they also got more than a few trolls confused with the right arm of God in that priestly creation we know of as the Bible as well (see the critique delivered by Hosea above, of just one of these trolls, named Jehu, whose tyranny and mass murders were celebrated by confused priestly writers only to be condemned by prophets, who apparently could still think straight, as their endless condemnations of priests so clearly demonstrates...) So the point then is that it is impossible to support the dogma of a totalitarian 'kingdom', of torture and brutality and iron fists, without having the 'kingdom of heaven come down among you', which is the whole point of the exercise after all, whether it be thousands of years of feudal autocratic rule or the rise of the equally troll like Nazis. And even today the Republican party is not far enough to the extreme right for many churches, who continue to admire and long for tyranny, the direct result of Christian dogma, and the associated false dogmas concerning the 'perfection of the Bible' - which is obviously confused and morally corrupt, but thus the perfect prop for a confused and morally corrupted system, which produces gods and idols in its own twisted image, and the legacy of which is still with us today...




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The Great Depression - George Bush versus Albert Einstein on economic policy



Principles of Evolution: A Study in the Evolution of Bedbugs


A couple of years ago my bedroom was invaded by bedbugs. There were two variant genetic lines. One type of bedbug was an enlongated, thin, tubular insect, and the second genetic line was a flat, perfectly circular insect. The result of the cross breeding of these two genetically distinct variants was the production of a bedbug with charcteristics of both, an enlongated, flat bedbug with a central bulge (such that the shape of the bedbug was somewhere between 'long' and 'circular'). The long skinny bedbugs were such strange and unfamiliar looking insects that at first I did not recognize them as being bedbugs, and considered them to be a seperate species of insect. However, as the photographs of bedbugs above indicate, enlongated and skinny bedbugs are not uncommon, and the photographs also show the variants that are produced by genetic combinations that result in an insect somewhere in between 'circular' and 'enlongated'.

Therefore it is my hypothesis that evolution occurs by means of the transfer of dominate genes, with the production of such dominant genes being the product of 'biological algorithms', a genetic software program that brings physical characteristics into harmony with behavior, such that when behavior changes, and a conflict then exists, this acts as a trigger and causes the release of dominant genes. The result is rapid evolution of species. The bedbug is a relatively new insect, not the product of millions of years of evolution but rather an insect that is evolving in real time. The newly emerging dominant form of the insect is the flat, round ciruclar insect, well adapted to living in human bedrooms (it is flat, rather than tubular, thus allowing it to hide in the smallest cracks, living a stealthy lifestyle, and it is round, which gives the insect a maximum storage capacity such that it must endanger itself only a few times a month by emerging to feed.

Other examples of rapid evolution include the development of long legs in an invasive species of toad in Australia. As the toads move into the mountainous regions of Australia, and their behvaior changes, making them 'climbing toads', over the course of just a couple of decades the toads in the highlands have grown long legs specially adapted to climbing. It is worth noting here that the toads are poisonous, and are a successful invasive species because they have no natural predators in Australia, and so it would not be the case that the toads with long legs were 'the fittest survivors', because all the toads are survivors, and therefore predation does not explain the rapid emergence and spread of such well adapted, long legged toads. Once again we see evidence for the existence of biological algorithms and the rapid spread of dominant genes through a population, which once introduced proceed to overwhelm the older genes which are being replaced (making toad long legged and a bed bug round and flat).


A Theological Experiment

My interest in pursuing the Unified Field Theory is spurred on by my need to discover the theoretical explanation of a new form of propulsion (as explained on this page: Why the Unified Field Theory?). The experiment involving the bedbugs came out of nowhere.

I also believe that it is possible to justify theological propositions using experimental methods. If a thing is an objective truth then it can be verified and proven true by means of experimentation. Such a theological proposition is of more value than a ‘divine revelation’, since such revelations depend upon nothing more than establishing authority figures which requires the creation of artificial hierarchies, for the only reason why I might be encouraged to believe an authority figure who orders me to believe unsubstantiated opinions is if I could somehow be convinced that this authority possessed a mind that was somehow superior to mine, and thus was fit to express opinions as though opinions were unquestionable facts and thus worthy of being elevated to the status of absolute dogma.

There is a self evident human inequality which is visibly apparent. Some people are ‘beautiful’ and thus are the true elite on this planet, and some people are not. It is this sexual inequality and the degeneration that follows upon beauty that is the true driving force behind all the evil that happens on earth. The need for ruthless oppression and the pursuit of wealth and the consequent creation of suffering and poverty which must follow upon this practice is for the purpose of creating an artificial alpha elite.

The true elites are the young and the beautiful. The artificial elite are the rich and the wealthy. The elite aging rich artificial alpha male has no good looks, for he is physically degenerate, but he will be found escorting beauty because he has a beautiful wallet. If he loses his wallet he will be found at home with all the other unattractive aged beta males sitting in a rocking chair watching reruns of Bonanza. No money, no sex. It is for this reason that the alpha males are found to be so ruthless and so violent in pursuit of their goal. The alpha male has fallen. The beta male has arisen and now the whole planet is full of ruinous destruction for it.

We see in religion a confused and contradictory reaction to this reality. On the one hand religion preaches a sexless heaven where castration and the clitorectomy create ‘pure spirits’. Muslims throw women under sacks. On the other hand religion supports hierarchy and is the prop of the elite alpha male. It is for this reason that religion is incoherent when it comes to speaking about sex.

Now we see this same principle at work in all of nature. Guppies dance and show off their colorful tails and the guppy who dances with the most colorful tail is the sexually successful guppy. Therefore it is the doctrine of the ruthless oppressor which teaches that the solution to human sexual violence is to be found in castration and the creation of pure ghosts. This would be equivalent to damning an aardvark for having the ‘sinful aardvark nature’ or prosecuting an anteater for the high crime of ‘ant genocide’.

Therefore it was my theological hypothesis that the correct solution to this problem is to give every guppy a beautiful colorful tail. I compare this solution to the classic religious solution which is to cut off every tail since having a tail is ‘sinful’. If having a tail is sinful then God must be sinful for no human being has any choice in deciding whether or not they would be born with a colorful tail, or whether they would not.

When I was young I was a beautiful guppy with a lovely tail. So everyone seemed to think. I am older now. My nose became very badly sunburned and destroyed. It seemed good to me to test my hypothesis by using these ‘biological algorithms’ to correct this problem. I healed half my nose as you can see by the line separating the still very dark patch on the side in the photograph below.





I documented my experiment on these pages. one two t hree four fi ve six


I have confirmed to my own satisfaction that my theological proposition is correct and that religious dogma is erroneous, being based as it was upon nothing more than ‘divine revelation’ which is just a form of opinionated speculation. For the time being I am not continuing this experiment, for I must wait until the weather on this planet improves, and the dark clouds of ruthless oppression break letting a little sun shine come through so that I can show the world the truth about God, by showing people how God goes about giving an old guppy back his beautiful colorful tail.


Until then I will have to sit on the sidelines, while all my scientific breakthroughs are deliberately ignored, while I wonder to myself what ever in the world could be wrong with the human race, because what this all will prove at the end of it all is that there definitely was something wrong with the people on this planet.