The Bible Naked, the Greatest Fraud Ever Told

PREFACE

The Emperor Has No Clothes

The purpose of this book is not to try to disprove the existence of a god. That would be impossible, as the existence of a god or gods cannot be proved or disproved. Scientists have found a part of the brain where religion is centered. The site is enlarged in religious fanatics. There had to be a reason for the fact that most people believe in some kind of god. It takes a brave person to face the realities of this dog-eat-dog world without the comfort of knowing that there is a reason for all this.

However, people who think they believe in the Bible believe in a mythical book much nicer than the real thing. You don't find a loving god in the Bible. By using the Bible itself, I will endeavor to show that it is not an infallible book written, dictated, or inspired by God. When a priest or preacher tells you every word in the Bible is true, you can tell him that he is blowing smoke up his ass. (I plan to use a few three-and four-letter Anglo-Saxon words to emphasize different points.)

What qualifications do I have to write this book? I don’t have a Ph.D. after my name and I'm not a trained Biblical scholar. You don’t have to be a genius to see that the Bible is full of errors, absurdities, lies, contradictions, false prophecies, immorality, etc. If a nebbish like me can see them just by reading the Bible with an open mind, then everyone who has an ounce of intelligence can see them if they haven’t been brainwashed by society and their minds are not impervious to facts and logic.

Even when I was 15 and went through the gut-wrenching decision that there was no god, thereby risking eternal damnation in Hell, I still believed the Bible was factually true. When I was 31, I saw a book on a friend’s coffee table that pointed out some of the errors. This inspired me to read the Bible as a book rather than as a holy icon. It was so simple to find the errors when I read the Bible with an open mind. You would have to be an idiot to not see the errors. Believers don’t dare to question it or they would not have their eternal life.

I am not anti-religion. My father never could have beaten his alcoholism without it. It gives hope to people in difficult positions such as prison and war. I am just against how they can use the Bible to justify their own bigotry. You have to be very brave to face this dangerous and immoral world without something to hold on to. Some people say that even though they may not have the correct religion, God will recognize all good people and they will also be in Heaven. If that is true, why follow a religion at all? Just be good.

The Bible was not meant to be holy at first. It started out as a collection of literature (fiction and non-fiction), history, and the laws of a savage, nomadic collection of tribes. Later, first the Jews made it into a venerated, holy object and then all the various versions of the Christian faith followed suit. Even the Muslims consider it a holly book.

The Bible isn’t a history book in the modern sense. For the most part, the authors who wrote the books in the Bible didn’t date anything, and they seldom took credit for their own work but used the name of a famous prophet to give their work more credence. The authors also mixed fiction and fact. I think that some of the authors of the Bible would be shocked if they knew that their little stories would someday be thought to come from God.

Many of the names and histories were thought to have been telescoped in time. An example Isaac Asimov gave in his book Asimov's Guide to the Bible, George Washington crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the Mayflower, discovered America, conquered Mexico, built Washington, DC, and became the first President of the United States.

As very few people could write, most of the stories were passed down by oral tradition and later put down by temple scribes. Religion was more important than facts, and the stories were written to support religious views.

Even today in our Sunday schools, many of the Biblical stories are cleaned up for modern tastes. They never mention all the inconsistencies, vulgarities, translation errors, forgeries, questionable morality, errors, contradictions, debauchery, mass murders, child abuse, abuse of women, slavery, genocide, false prophecies, and impossibilities, For example, we don’t teach our kids that King David was an adulterer, murderer, and traitor.

I don’t see how any sane person who has read it could call it a Good Book. If Intelligent Design, a.k.a. Creation Science, is to be taught in school science classes, then talking donkeys and snakes, unicorns, dragons, and cherubim should be taught in biology.

The early Israelites were a loose confederation of nomadic, Semitic, barbarian tribes. The number twelve came from the signs of the zodiac and the twelve moon cycles, but we don’t know how many tribes there really were with some being wiped out and others forming. They fought against each other and against the neighboring tribes (like we still do today). The Israelites were not even Hebrew, but borrowed the language from their neighbors whom they conquered, murdered, enslaved, and engaged in intermarriage with.

They eventually jelled together briefly into two countries under the rule of first Saul, then David, and after him, his son Solomon. After Solomon, they split into the Southern Kingdom of Judah, and the Northern Kingdom of Israel. The Northern Kingdom was eventually conquered by the Assyrians and disappeared through assimilation. That is why they are called Jews (Judah) today, rather than Israelites. The country of Israel today should have been called Judah. Archaeologists have determined that the Israelite civilization only lasted a few hundred years and that their story in the Old Testament (OT) is highly exaggerated.

Many Christians think that the OT is not relevant anymore because the New Testament (NT) superseded it. Wrong! The NT is based upon the OT, especially the Gospel of Matthew. Matthew quotes many passages in the OT that are supposed to prove that Jesus is the Messiah. The quotes are a bit of a stretch as you'll find out reading this book, but that's beside the point. Jesus is also supposed to have said that he did not come to supersede the OT but to fulfill it. He can't fulfill it unless it is recognized as the word of God.

If Jesus has always been from the beginning of time as he says, why isn't the Trinity in the OT? What is the Holy Spirit? If he is part of the God thing, why isn't he in the OT also? Is God a being or a committee of three and are they equal? Is JC a real son or a being made by the Father God? Why isn't a mother god mentioned? Does God have any other children? Inquiring minds want to know.

It is astounding that a book so flawed could have changed world so much. Even the Muslim religion is based on the OT. I would say that Christianity based on the Bible is the worst thing that ever happened to the human race except for the fact that if we didn't have it, something even worse might have taken its place. Christianity is what made the European countries we have today. Our most important Founding Fathers were Deist, not Christians. They believed in a god but not a personal god who you could talk to and ask for favors.

The Bible is a very interesting book to read, whether or not you believe in it as a religious document. I hope you enjoy my versions. — Sam Warren

Chapter 1: Before Genesis

The word Genesis means creation or beginning and is related to the word generate. Its Hebrew name is bereshith (I think that it is pronounced something like bear shit). And the Jewish scholars and scribes while in exile in Babylon did create a fine fable, mixing in oral history, assorted old documents, Samarian and Babylonian myths, and historical fiction surpassing even Aesop's Fables for durability.

If you are a real Christian, you have to believe in the Adam and Eve myth. Without it, you don't have original sin. Without original sin, there is no reason for JC to be nailed up on the cross.

The creation myth wasn’t even Hebrew, but was plagiarized from an early Samarian myth, modified by the Babylonians and then co-opted by the Jews for their Yahveh god only without the polytheism and human sacrifices. However, there are still traces of polytheism left in. Yahveh was a patriarchal tribal war-god who wanted blood sacrifices, including human. He was one of many gods at that time, most of them were matriarchal.

In the beginning God created Heaven and earth. Actually some people think that we created God. Most of you are familiar with the Creation story – the seven days, the rib, talking snake, apple, etc. But did you know that there are three versions of the creation? One was written by the northern tribes of Israel and the second by the southern tribes of Judah. The problem was solved by combining then into a third version. Unlike today, accuracy in reporting was not all that important. Facts were never allowed to ruin a good story. So you will sometimes find two or more versions of the same story. The fundies (fundamentalist) say they believe in the creation story but don’t say which one. And you can't believe in both because they don't match.

The Hebrew word for God is Elohim which means gods (plural). Early Jewish scribes are thought to have edited out most of the mentions of polytheism but some still remain. One example is (Genesis 3:22) Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil ... Another is (Genesis 11:7) ...let us go down and there confound their language...

The first five books of the Bible (bible is another word for book) are called The Pentateuch and are also called The Book of the Law by the Jews and were supposed to have been written by Moses. That would have been very difficult as not only was Moses’ own death recorded in them, there are different styles of writing. It might surprise you to learn that most of the books of the Pentateuch were reverse plagiarism. The books were given the name of famous prophets to give them more cachet and we will never know who really started the oral version or who wrote them down with additional modifications.

There were three sets of documents used to put together the first part of the Old Testament. The E Documents were completed in about 750 BCE (before common era). It gets its name because God was called Elohim in Hebrew.

The J Documents were written by scribes in the Southern Kingdom in about 500 BCE. It gets its name from Jehovah, also a word for God, and was compiled by the Southern Kingdom. The P Document, also called the Priestly Document, was created by the priests and scribes of the Northern Kingdom during the Babylonian exile of their intelligentsia. The P document was compiled by combining the E and J Documents plus some other documents that were just lying around and, Bingo!, you’ve got the start of a world-class best seller.

You will find as you read this book, that God evolves from a physical, superman kind of war-god, limited by tribe and territory with a body and who lives somewhere up in the sky, into a modern, spiritual god who lives in another dimension called Heaven and sends us to Hell if we believe gays should be allowed to marry.

In Sunday school I was told that no one knew where the Garden of Eden was. But it is not the Garden of Eden but the Garden in Eden. Eden is a place mentioned in other parts of the OT and is located in modern Iraq. Some of our soldiers probably have been killed in the Garden. The three rivers mentioned in Genesis were in Babylon and two are in present-day Iraq. Some scholars believe the third river just dried up and disappeared.

The final version of Genesis was written in Babylon by the Jews who were moved there when Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judah and had the educated upper class moved there. Israel, conquered earlier, were thought to have been assimilated and were never heard from again.

In the Hebrew Bible (the Tora) Satan is not necessary a bad guy and is not a fallen angel. He is God's prosecutor and does what God tells him to do. The book of Job is an example. He is called the advisory or the accuser – sort of prosecuting attorney. God even says that he is responsible for everything, including evil.

Chapter 2: Genesis – The Beginning

On a dark and stormy night in year one, about 6,000 years ago, everything was created by a mysterious creature in outer space. No one knew where he came from. But we know that he was male. He is reputed to have fathered a son but there is no mention of a wife.

There's one thing I would like someone to explain to me. How can God be male if there is no female? If there is a female god, it must mean that there are two gods in addition to JC and the Holy Spook. And how can a god have a son? If he was not procreated, that has to mean that he is another god, not a son of a god. Maybe he was adopted.

(Ch 1) In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth. In this case, Heaven means inner and outer space, not the Heaven with angels. In our creation myth (every religion has its own version) there are two different versions. In the first account, God did the following in six days.

Version One:

* Made light.

* Divided light from darkness.

* Made the evening and the morning.

* Divided Heaven from the water.

* Land appeared out of the water.

* He made the plants grow.

* Created light again for days and seasons.

* Created light for the third time.

* Created live creatures.

* Created fish and birds.

* Created cattle and more creatures.

* Created man and woman at the same time out of clay. Does that mean that we are related to bricks?

* Took the seventh day off.

In this version, there is no Garden in Eden, apple, or snake. In the next version, there are a lot of different things. People try to combine them into one version, but they don't fit. That never stopped them from trying. In the Samarian story they copied it from, the snake was not Satan as he hadn't been invented yet. Their god was the snake. Gods of competing religions became the devils of the new religion.

The reason that Satan is sometimes pictured with horns, tail and hooves is that the word devil is a translation of a word that means white goat. Goats are considered lustful animals and sex was thought as the original sin. Anything that good has to be sinful.

Version Number Two:

(Ch 2) This is what God did in the second version:

* Created the Heavens and the Earth at one time.

* Created plants.

* Created rain.

* Made man from dirt. Then he breathed into his nose to make him come alive. You notice that there is no mention of stem cells being human.

* Made the Garden in Eden.

* Created more plants including the Tree of Life and the Tree of Good and Evil.

* Made rivers.

* Made gold, bdellium and onyx..What about lead, iron, aluminum, etc.?

* Decides to make the man a wife.

* Makes more living creatures and gives Adam his name. (Adam is the Hebrew word for man)

* Makes a woman out of Adam's rib.

* Eve doesn't even have a name until they first fornicate and had Cain. (Eve is he Hebrew word for woman)

* Establishes the hierarchy of father, mother, and wife.

* There are no days and God doesn't take any time off.

Adam's First Wife

The creation myth was initially a Samarian and Babylonian epic that predates by centuries the Jewish version. That might explain why the Garden was in Babylon instead of Israel. To explain the inconsistency of having the first woman created twice, a Jewish myth, not written down in the OT it is stated that Adam’s first wife, Lilith, was made an equal and Adam didn’t like it. He wanted to be in total control, so she left him and became a demon. This happens to a lot of guys with ex-wives.

She was supposed to be responsible for the death of children. The word, Lullaby, means, Lilith go bye or get the hell out of here and leave my baby alone. There are numerous variations. One has her stealing the semen from wet dreams, getting herself pregnant, and then killing the baby to avenge herself on males. She was the first women’s libber.

Adam & Eve

Adam and Eve didn’t get their names until the second version. Adam in Hebrew means mankind, and Eve means womankind. Later they were used as proper names. Most of the names in the OT are also names of tribes. It can get confusing as often you don’t know if you are reading about a person or a tribe. In addition, many of the names used were not the correct names of the time, but names used during the Jews' exile in Babylon. This is additional proof that the stories were written at that time.

The second version of the creation is more interesting and is the one usually taught in Sunday school. In this version, man was created first, then animals, and then Adam had his rib yanked out and made into a woman – a much more interesting and visual story. I remember as a kid counting my ribs to see if one was missing. As Eve was not made equal to Adam, she was to serve men. God just couldn’t leave well enough alone, and men have been in trouble ever since.

God gave the first male life by breathing into him. That's where we get the term, the breath of life. You weren't alive until you were breathing. None of this life starts at conception or even when two stem cells get together. Later when the Bible condemns a man for causing a woman to abort a fetus, it is not because he killed the fetus but because children were considered property. They could even be sold into slavery. This is used to justify anti-abortion. Christians – read your Bible.

One thing I wonder about, if we (that is, men) were made in the image of God, does that mean that God has genitals, intact or circumcised? And if so, why? And if he had a son who was with him at the beginning, was there a mother god? Inquiring minds want to know.

I assume God gets tired just like we humans as he had to rest on the seventh day. I wonder what God does on his day off. The Hebrews didn't even have a seven-day a week until they copied it from the Babylonians. NT

It was very nice of God to let us pick which story we would believe, but it weakens the case for having the Bible as being the absolutely, infallible word of God. This was just a story some Samarian parent made up to tell his kid when he asked, Where did we all come from, Daddy? Sort of like storks bringing babies.

In the bit about the tree of knowledge of good and evil, (second version in Chapter 2) God put the tree right out in the open where no one could miss it and told the new humans, who did not know good from evil yet, not to eat its fruit. This would be like putting a pound of hamburger in front of your dog and telling him not to eat it. What kind of person, much less a god, would put something in front of his innocent babies, who didn’t even know evil, just to tempt them – especially if he was to know the outcome in advance and had programmed them to fail?

To make it worse, he had a smooth-talking snake telling this innocent girl, who a few hours ago was only a rib, that it was OK to eat this forbidden fruit. How was she to know who to believe? After all, the snake was one of God’s creations. And, programmed like a good wife, she shares the fruit with her husband. Most husbands will eat whatever their wives put in front of them.

The punishment was not just a swat on the fanny – oh, no. It was original sin with eternal damnation. Even though Adam was supposed to be the man of the house, it was Eve who got most of the blame and the brunt of the punishment. The punishment for her sin was a lifetime of blood and pain, especially in childbirth. And all this suffering was passed on from generation-to-generation to children who weren’t aware of what sin they were being punished for.

The man’s punishment, besides having to work for a living, was to sacrifice his first-born son and later to livestock, in the fire so God could smell the smoke and forgive him. Later on, the men didn’t even have to do this because God had his son bleed to death on a cross to replace all the other blood sacrifices. However, women still have to bleed. The only thing that his death accomplished is that a lot of sheep didn't have to be sacrificed.

Blood was considered the life force because when you bleed the blood from an animal or human, it dies. This is why the Hebrews were forbidden to eat or drink blood and why it had to be spilled to make a sacrifice.

Now the fundies say that this was because God gave us free will. They couldn’t have gotten this from the Bible. If God and his prophets already know what is going to happen in the future, then where is the free will? No matter what it is or what we do or who we pray to, it’s going to happen. So God set the whole thing up and is responsible for it or he isn’t as all-powerful as they say. You can’t have it both ways. God could be all-powerful or all-good, but not both.

After they ate the apple (or whatever fruit it really was), all of a sudden they found themselves naked and covered themselves with fig leaves, the first fashion statement. God just happened to be walking by – hello! A walking God on two feet just going for a stroll in his new garden? Does that mean you could be walking down the street, pass God, and not even know it? They must have had different kinds of gods in those days.

This reminds me of one day when I was walking through Balboa Park in San Diego. I saw an artist hard at work on a portrait. I asked him, Who are you painting?

He told me, I’m painting a picture of God.

That’s crazy. No one knows what God looks like.

They will when I’m done, he replied.

That first bite sure caused a lot of pain and suffering in the world if it ever happened. The Church says that this bite was the original sin and blood had to be sacrificed for it. They say God had to have his own son killed for it. He must not be a very powerful God if he created a whole universe but could not save his own son in the process.

After that, God threw the couple out of his garden and put a flaming sword and some cherubim (plural for cherub) at the gate so they could not sneak back in. What a father! All that they walked out with were their fig leaves. You know what cherubs are, don't you. They are those little flying babies with wings, bow and arrows, and teeny tiny weenies.

Many other cultures of that period had their creatures that were made up of parts of other creatures. The Assyrians had one with the body of a bull and the head of a man. The cherubim may have been copied from them. The Hebrew legend shows them as human with wings, and thought them to be a higher order of angels. This is the reason we picture angels with wings. The Egyptians had their sphinx and the Greeks their centaurs and Pan, a lusty half goat and half man. So far no one has been able to find the skeletons of such creatures.

Now what happened to the garden? Did it just go to seed? If God made it disappear, why did he need the flaming sword and cherubim to protect it?

Cain and Abel

(Ch 4) Like in the movie, The Blue Lagoon, the innocent humans found out about sex and made good use of it. Their sons Cain and Abel were born. If there were any daughters, the authors didn’t think it worth mentioning. Even with the limited number of people in those days, Cain was famous for his farm produce while Abel was a hunter.

During this period of history, hunter/gathers were changing into farmers/herdsmen. This could have been a story demonstrating this in oral history. Once they became farmers, they had more control over their lives.

God was hungry and asked the brothers to each whip up something to sacrifice to him. Cain made a delicious vegetarian stew while Abel sacrificed a choice piece of meat to God. God didn’t have to worry about his cholesterol.

Cain should have known better. Didn’t he know that all male gods are carnivores? Have you ever heard of anyone sacrificing a tomato? So God said, What the hell are you giving me this rabbit food for? But he told Abel how much he enjoyed the steak. I took it down to Satan and had him barbeque it for me.

Cain had a nasty temper and told Abel, Yo man, what do you mean trying to show me up in front of the man? and he pulled out a shiv and stuck it in his brother. With only three men in the world at that time, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to find out who did the dirty deed.

There were no courts or jails yet so God told Cain he had to be banished. Although there were not many people in the world, God made the world’s first tattoo on Cain’s head that said, Don’t Kill Me by Order of God. But some chicks like tattooed men and Cain had no trouble finding a woman and starting a family. As there were no other females around that we know of, he must have gotten it on with a sister who was never mentioned. As there were no priests around to tie the knot, not only was their relationship incestuous, they were also living in sin.

Actually, it was not certain if Adam and Eve were the only humans created by God. The words Adam and Eve translate to mean mankind and womankind. We don’t know if these other people, if they existed, were in the Garden or on the outside.

Cain’s first kid was named Enoch. The Bible said that Enoch built a city. You remember what I said about tribes and people mixing up names. With Cain estranged from his family and Abel dead, it must have been a very small city. The rest of the chapter is rather boring with a lot of begetting and begottening. Even old Eve popped out another son they named Seth.

(Ch 5) This chapter is rather dull unless you are into genealogy. It is a compilation of who begat whom (males only) and ends with Noah and his three sons. Each person lived for an incredibly long time. Of course, that is absolutely impossible, even with today’s modern medical science. But when dealing with holy writ, anything is possible – even the impossible. Faith is what allows you to believe in the impossible.

Methuselah

Methuselah was supposed to have lived almost a thousand years. If you use the time-line that some of the Christians use, it is likely that Methuselah drowned during the flood. Archeologists have never found skeletons of people nearly that old. The reason for all that longevity was because the stories were first told orally from memory, passing down from generation-to-generation with each generation trying to top the other before the stories finally got written down. As it was oral history, I would imagine that each story-teller add a few more years to Methuselah each time they told it.

Using this genealogy, religious leaders have estimated the world to be only about 5,000 to 6,000 years old. God probably buried all those dinosaur bones just to test our faith. I failed the test. There are museum built by fundamentalists that show docudramas of men and dinosaurs together.

Angel Baby

(Ch 6) Now here was something I bet that your Sunday school teachers didn’t tell you. Did you know that angels came down in the flesh and interbred with humans? I guess that the human chicks were a lot hotter than angel chicks. The angel chicks must have been too pure and holier than thou and wouldn’t put out. See, there is sex after death – something to look forward to.

Their earthly bastards were all giants. You know what that means don’t you? If Noah had some of their DNA, we all might have some angel DNA in our gene pool. Or maybe the fathers were bad angels who were kicked out of Heaven and we all have a little devil in all of us. That could explain a lot.

Noah and the Flood

Anyone who reads the Babylonian story, Gilgamesh can readily see that the flood myth was initially a Samarian and Babylonian epic that predates the Jewish version by almost two millennium. Scholars think the flood story came from a real flood and the story was passed down and modified. Some even think that it might even have been a giant tsunami that swept up the Euphrates River. Others think that it came from a time when the ocean broke through the Biospheres straits into the Black Sea.

But of course what really happened was that God saw his creation getting out of control and he just lost it. He told his angels OK, so I made a mistake. Only my son Jesus is perfect. I’ll just drown them all like a litter of kittens and start over again. I’ll just keep one family as breeding stock and start over again.

But how could they sin more than we do today? I guess God just got used to all this sin or we would be living with the fishes today.

(Ch 7) The water was supposed to be 15 cubits deep, but that wouldn’t even come close to covering the summit of Mt. Everest. And can you imagine a magic ship big enough to hold two of all the millions of kinds of creatures, including their food, which, except for the herbivores, were each other?

Then there was the matter of refrigeration for the penguins and polar bears. How did they keep the fresh water fish separate from the salt water fish? Only a fundamentalist of the hundreds of Christian faiths could believe all this – and they do. They say God can do anything. If that's true, why go to all the trouble of making a flood?

A few years ago, The History Channel TV presented, The Search for the Ark. It was supposed to be a balanced view, but it was paid for by a religious group. A friend of mine, Bill Lindley (now deceased), the former associate editor of the Truth Seeker magazine, was invited to give the secular view. The producers promised that Bill would be given a chance to tell the scientific view of the myth. When they edited the tape, all Bill was able to say was, Scientists view the story of Noah and the Ark as a myth . . .

Then he was cut off and some Christian pseudo-scientist from a Baptist college came on and said there was proof