The Bible says the darndest things: the devil

So, I spent, or rather wasted, a minute of my time following a link to a blog post provocatively titled, “Why Did God Make the Devil?” thinking to myself, “Hell, who wouldn’t want to read that?”

William Blake's illustration of Lucifer as presented in John Milton's Paradise Lost

So I hopped on over to A Heart of God Ministries website to learn, or rather re-visited, the story about how Satan and his followers supposedly rebelled from God to establish their own kingdom. It’s  right there in Isaiah 14:

12 How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13 For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.

The blogger says that God didn’t technically create Satan; he created the angel Lucifer, who then betrayed heaven and was subsequently cast down to perdition. Lucifer must have been an influential person — er, spirit — because, as the story goes, he took a third of God’s angels with him. Darn. God sure wasn’t winning the PR campaign, was he?

In any case, from the Christian perspective, this began an epic battle between light (God) and darkness (Satan), with each vying to win the hearts and minds of man. Huh. That’s a cause for pause in and of itself. The mighty forces of God and Satan vying to win man’s affection? That seems rather sophomoric and capricious from the perspective of divine, eternal, powerful beings.

Even on the details of the story Christians can’t agree. Here is a person named Jason A. who commented on the blog post:

Most OT scholars agree that Isaiah 14 is not about Satan. Many, though less than the last group dispute Ezekiel 28. Your interpretation of that in instrumental terms is pretty fanciful and refers better to the setting for jewels(it makes much more logical and exegetical sense). I believe in Satan because Jesus says explicit things about him. It’s dangerous to overhead these OT prophecies who were written about real people, Nebuchadnezzar(Isaiah 14) and the King of Tyre( Ezekiel28)

Whatever the interpretation, the problem with this tale is, as ever, God’s omniscience. Christians can claim that God did not and would not create an evil being like Satan in the beginning. For the story to make any sense whatsoever, Satan needed to rebel as an independent agent bent on wresting power away from the almighty. But here is the rub: if God is all-knowing, he would have known well before he created Lucifer or any of the minions which among them would eventually rebel. So, yes, Yahweh actually created Lucifer knowing in advance that he would try to usurp heaven, just as Yahweh created man with the full knowledge that he would succumb to temptation in the Garden, a temptation orchestrated by — who else? — Lucifer. And this unholy cycle is complete.

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Graham’s plan: mothers locked and loaded

Forgive me for being frank, but after all that’s happened in the last 10 years, it really takes some massive balls or abject stupidity or both to continue to defend the proliferation of semiautomatic and automatic weapons in civil society.

None are bigger than Lindsey Graham’s:

He also tweeted this:

[tweet https://twitter.com/GrahamBlog/status/296677364912508930]

Where to begin with this logic? In Graham’s scenario, a mother is faced with protecting her kids against two intruders. He claims that six bullets might not be enough to fend off the bad guys, so she might need more fire power. Why not gun like an AK-47 or AR-15?

Am I an unreasonable person for saying that in that situation, the 15-round magazine makes sense?

Yes, and not only unreasonably, but a danger to the constituents you serve. You’re telling us that an untrained mother is going to start a firestorm either inside her own home or on her lawn with a semiautomatic weapon and be able to succeed by herself against two armed men a la some kind of female Jack Bauer? You’re telling us she’s going to be able to aim, compensate for the recoil and in a frenzied few seconds have the wherewithal to surgically gun down the perps? Hell, she’s just as likely to shoot her own kids in the crossfire. And if the number of bullets in a pistol is a concern, what’s stopping a parent from keeping two or three clips locked away with the gun just in case.

I mean the excuses and the irrational hoops these people are willing to jump through to defend guns of war around families and young children is not only contemptible but about as psychotic as the crazies behind Columbine, Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook.

The Bible says the darndest things

The killing of innocent children: Psalm 137:9. This sign is slightly misleading. The passage does say “your,” but this Psalm addresses Babylon. In any case, that doesn’t exactly make it any better. Any action, it seems, is permissible so long as the nation of Israel does the killing under Yahweh‘s direction. Is that about right? Just like the commandment against murder in the Ten Commandments only applies among fellow Israelites. Jews in the Bible, of course, can plunder, murder, rape and maim with impunity.

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Freethinker Tweets of the day: Atheism Plus edition

[tweet https://twitter.com/NYBoxTurtle/status/295584191310090242]

Note: This is a truncated quote from this source.

[tweet https://twitter.com/Wad3_W1ls0n/status/295573999109419008]

[tweet https://twitter.com/jaspergregory/status/294496011827675137]

[tweet https://twitter.com/AngrySkepchick/status/294429816093020161]

[tweet https://twitter.com/MaxDecimus13/status/293128645227200512]

[tweet https://twitter.com/RichardReed84/status/293128171832893441]

[tweet https://twitter.com/eightyc/status/293087411376881664]

[tweet https://twitter.com/safeguardnda/status/295398324641603585]

[tweet https://twitter.com/idebunkforme/status/295267305305292800]

[tweet https://twitter.com/idebunkforme/status/295266459913969664]

[tweet https://twitter.com/dougal445/status/295264627095375872]

You might be irrelevant if …

even FOX News won’t pony up the money to retain you:

(Sarah) Palin was a hot property when Roger Ailes landed her in 2009, fresh off her colorful run for vice president, and paid her an annual salary of $1 million. Fox even built Palin a studio at her Wasilla home.

But relations cooled between the two sides, and Palin was appearing on Fox less often—complaining on Facebook one night during the Republican convention that the network had canceled her appearances.

The new contract offered by Fox, say people familiar with the situation, would have provided only a fraction of the million-dollar-a-year salary. It was then, they say, that Palin turned it down and both sides agreed to call it quits.

A friendly announcement was planned for Friday, but a source close to Palin leaked the news in the afternoon to Real Clear Politics, saying the former Alaska governor “decided not to renew the arrangement” and “remains focused on broadening her message of common-sense conservatism.”

The creation of god in man’s image

Without any kind of secret messages, the works of Michaelangelo are masterful. But some researchers have indicated that Michaelangelo may have “built into” his Sistine Chapel paintings some signs that point to a level of cleverness that took hundreds of years to unveil.

Consider this article and his work called “Separation of Light from Darkness” (at right):

At the age of 17 he began dissecting corpses from the church graveyard. Between the years 1508 and 1512 he painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Michelangelo Buonarroti—known by his first name the world over as the singular artistic genius, sculptor and architect—was also an anatomist, a secret he concealed by destroying almost all of his anatomical sketches and notes. Now, 500 years after he drew them, his hidden anatomical illustrations have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, cleverly concealed from the eyes of Pope Julius II and countless religious worshipers, historians, and art lovers for centuries—inside the body of God.

This is the conclusion of Ian Suk and Rafael Tamargo, in their paper in the May 2010 issue of the scientific journalNeurosurgery. Suk and Tamargo are experts in neuroanatomy at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. In 1990, physician Frank Meshberger published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association deciphering Michelangelo’s imagery with the stunning recognition that the depiction in God Creating Adamin the central panel on the ceiling was a perfect anatomical illustration of the human brain in cross section. Meshberger speculates that Michelangelo surrounded God with a shroud representing the human brain to suggest that God was endowing Adam not only with life, but also with supreme human intelligence. Now in another panel The Separation of Light from Darkness (shown at left), Suk and Tamargo have found more. Leading up the center of God’s chest and forming his throat, the researchers have found a precise depiction of the human spinal cord and brain stem.

 Is the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel a 500 year-old puzzle that is only now beginning to be solved? What was Michelangelo saying by construction the voice box of God out of the brain stem of man? Is it a sacrilege or homage?

And then there’s the “The Creation of Adam,” which, if it were interpreted another way, it should have been titled, “The Creation of God:”

We know that Michaelangelo worked with cadavers during one period of his life, so he would have known how the human brain was shaped. The Pope and his religious cohorts most likely would have not, and thus would not have been able to see through the subtle clues in Michaelangel’s work. Here, we see God and the angels almost entirely encapsulated inside a mysterious red shroud or cloak. Given the symbolism of Christianity (the blood of Christ, the moon turning red, etc.), the Pope would have probably agreed with the inclusion of so much red in the right half of the painting. But to modern eyes, it looks like a clean cross-section of a human brain in perfect shape along the exterior. If Michaelangelo wanted to capture God inside an object, why not a blue cloud or some kind of yellow shape to represent the sun (son)? The strength of the piece comes not from the depiction of Adam or God and the angels, but what takes place in the middle: God and man’s fingers nearly touching and the no-man’s land in between that keeps the divine and mortal man worlds apart, so the red blob to the right could simply be extraneous. Presumably God and the angels would certainly be capable of just floating on air without needing to be enshrouded in anything. Michaelangelo, the master that he was, probably would have realized this.

Of course, we don’t know Michaelangelo’s real intentions, but the fact that God and the angels are depicted inside this red portion of the painting, a likeness of the human brain, seems like more than just a coincidence, given what we know about Michaelangelo’s interest in science and his documented disagreements with the Vatican. In this view, the painting takes on this meaning: God and the angels are a whole cloth creation stemming from and encapsulated in the mind of man. If this, indeed, is what Michaelangelo hoped to convey inside the Sistine Chapel — he would have probably been killed for it in his day — we can record him not only as a masterful painter but as a philosopher far ahead of his time.

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