Monday 27 July 2015

Was The Bible Written By Bronze Age Goat Herders?

Another commonly heard catchphrase that fundie atheists love to bandy about is: "The Bible was written by illiterate Bronze Age goat herders!", which apparently is supposed to mean that it's full of outdated views from idiotic simple people. It's hardly a surprise that this first appeared in one of Richard Dawkins' books "The Greatest Show on Earth," although he did phrase it "Bronze Age desert tribesmen". Besides that being an unjustified, generalistic insult to goat herders or tribesmen, it's completely factually wrong, and raises the question of how illiterates could pen the best selling book in history. (A miracle?)

The Israeli Bronze Age may have lasted from around 3000BC til something like 1000BC, so it could cover a chunk of the Old Testament but hardly all of it, and it's nowhere near the New Testament at all (roughly between 30-95AD). Meanwhile, famous thinkers like Confucius, Lau Tzu, Aristotle, and Plato, lived after 600BC and were coming up with the kind of wisdom we feel is relevant today, but the Bible had included it centuries before.
So when it was written is pretty irrelevant if the content is timeless, and the idea that it was written by morons is clearly nonsense when it can be compared to the greatest philosophers of all time.

So goat herders?

Monday 20 July 2015

What Is a Fundie Atheist?

Fundie Atheist, Militant Atheist, Village Atheist, Folk Atheist, Atheist Troll.

Unfortunately, I and many others sometimes fall into a trap of using the term 'atheist' as shorthand for any/all of the above. Mainly because these guys have the loudest voices, and the moderate, normal non-believers stay polite and respectable like the decent folk that they are.
It's always the minority who ruin it for the majority. But what is a fundie atheist anyway?