Atheism Central for Secondary Schools

What is it about the Bible that makes believers believe? Why is it that so many otherwise rational, educated people cling to blind, irrational faith in Adam and Eve, Satan, the angel Gabriel, Noah and the Flood, Jehovah and Jesus, Three Wise Men, the Virgin Mary, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? None of these is any more credible than what they properly regard as myths, things like Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Zeus, Hercules, Paul Bunyan, and the Wicked Witch of the West. So why do people insist on making a distinction between the two lists and declare the former to be truth, without proof and on the basis of 'faith' alone, and the latter to be just fairy tales?

Douglas Rankin

A few tasters:

JOHN 3:16 (QJV) "For GodFather - that's me - loved the world so much that he sent down his only GodSon - that's me - to be born of a virgin fucked by His Holy spook - that's me, again - and devised a really neat scheme to save people from their sins. He will arrange to have me - yeah, his only son - tortured unmercifully and put to a hideously gruesome death as atonement for evil he himself created. And when it's all over, if you simply believe that it all happened, you get to move in with me and kind-hearted GodFather - forever!"

EZEKIEL 23:20 (QJV) "There she had the hots for lovers whose dicks were as big as donkeys' dongs and who could shoot off huge spurts of semen just like stallions."

Douglas Rankin says this is "My favorite absolutely outrageous verse."

MALACHI 2:3 (QJV) "I will smear faeces on your faces in retaliation for your shitty offerings, and then I'll haul you away with the rest of the pile of shit!"

Here the omnibenevolent Deity gets his jollies spreading dung on people's faces.

Why did I spend ten years of my life writing a satirical parody of the so-called "Holy Bible"? Was it a waste of time? Does it serve no other purpose than to make mockery of the original? Actually, one my many motives was to show that all versions of scripture in whatever time and form they appear are nothing more than human stories written by humans. There is nothing about any writing found in any scriptures of any religion of any people in any language that can be demonstrated as so unique as to furnish indisputable evidence of divine extraterrestrial origin.

So, what is it about the Bible that makes believers believe? Why is it that so many rational, educated people cling to blind irrational faith in Adam and Eve, Satan, Noah and the Flood, Jehovah and Jesus, Three Wise Men, and the Virgin Mary? Are these any more credible than myths such as Santa Claus, Zeus, Hercules, or the Tooth Fairy? Yet, most people insist on making a distinction between the two lists and declare the former to be truth and the latter to be harmless fairy tales.

All humanity is intrigued by the unexplained and fascinated by stories and rituals created to deal with the unknown. While language evolves over generations in all cultures, older vocabulary underpinning such ancient fables and stories remains recognizable to some extent. Even as a very small child not yet able to read, I had no difficulty understanding 'thee', 'thy', 'thou', 'shalt', 'believeth', 'goeth', and other quaint words in Old English read to me from the King James Version of the Bible. Antiquated words and expressions written in "holy books" - though no longer used in everyday conversation, except by priests, shamans, rabbis, or preachers - take on a mystical mumbo-jumbo, hocus-pocus, abracadabra quality that mesmerizes people into believing that there must be truth in such ancient blathering.

Many people passionately believe many absolutely impossible things that should be held up for ridicule so as to bring such people to their senses, and as I see it, blindly believing the impossible things written in the "Holy Bible" is the core of their problem. However, whenever I held up for ridicule obvious flaws in selected parts, verses, and passages, frowning faces and pouting lips urged me to read the entire Bible. "Don't take it out of context," my friends chided. And so I did read the whole thing - many, many times. I found it to be extremely ambiguous and open to as many interpretations as there are readers. Surely, I thought, an omnipotent god should be able to convey a clear message that could be understood in the same way by all mankind in all times. Surely, no all-powerful god would trust his word to writers whose identities and qualifications are unknown, but who we are asked to believe wrote down everything inerrantly for all time. And so, to blunt accusations that I take things "out of context", I created a "new translation" of the whole thing. A general audience, including teenagers and youth, to whom a humorous treatment would appeal is my target - not the religious scholarly establishment. Yet, biblical scholars - most of whom I've discovered are Bible scholars strictly in the academic rather than the religious sense - who might chance to read Queen Jane's Version will recognize that a great deal of research and scholarship went into the effort. For example, Strong's Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible helped me uncover hidden or obscure meanings behind the choice of English words used in the King James translation of Hebrew and Greek texts. The words 'foot' and 'horn', I learned, are sometimes used as euphemisms for 'penis' or 'phallus'. 'Uncovering her nakedness' or 'seeing his nakedness' were delicate ways of translating Hebrew terms that actually meant 'having sexual intercourse'. Hebrew nouns and verbs translated as 'love' into English often times connoted far more sensuality in their original form than mere platonic love.

When Abraham commanded his servant in Genesis 24:2 to "put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh", he was actually ordering the slave to make a symbolic gesture that in today's English might be translated as "squeeze my balls gently, please, as a sign that you swear to do this". The ancient custom of holding on to another man's testicles while swearing an oath explains the origin of our words 'testimony' and 'testament'.

Sometimes the King James Version uses four letter words whose meanings are not so elusive. The word 'piss' appears about eight times, for example. No need there for me to substitute any other word that could possibly be plainer or funnier! And so, I reasoned, if the translators of the King James Version could get away with the use of 'piss' without censorship, then Queen Jane's Version could justifiably use 'fuck' to translate into plain language those sexual situations obscured in the Bible by quaint word usage. "Adam knew Eve" makes no sense in terms of modern usage of the verb "to know" since he obviously was well acquainted with the world's only other human. "Adam fucked Eve" is a more accurate translation, and it was easy to find many appropriate places to use that as well as other four letter words.

I strongly urge teenagers and young people in general who may be reading this to be cautious and skeptical of any religion's claims. Now and perhaps for the remainder of your life you may often be bombarded by religious myth, proselytized by well-meaning friends, and persuaded to accept impossible things without evidence. I challenge you to resist being swept up into the charming lure and false comfort of religion. Learn to live life for life rather than for death. Live for reality rather than for mind-crippling myth. Life can be beautiful, and if you live life fully, one lifetime is enough.

Douglas A. Rankin