Reasons to Lose Faith - Suffer Little Children - How The Bible Promotes Child Abuse

Arrest for witchcraft (1866) by John Pettie. NGV

CC BY-NC

‘Witches’ are still killed all over the world. Pardoning past victims could end the practice

A promotional poster for Liberty Gospel Church with Helen Ukpabio, a modern 'witchfinder'(Lady Apostle Helen Ukpabio/Facebook)

You might think that enlightened Humanism had sufficiently civilised Christianity to put a stop to the Medieval sport of burning old ladies alive because someone had accused them of witchcraft and 'God sez' they should be killed, but think again. According to a UN report, the practice is still widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India and Southeast Asia, where an estimated 20,000 people across 60 countries were victims of abuse and summary killing between 2009 and 2019,⁴ although the true figure is likely to be much higher because such instance often go unreported.

The report is the UN Human Rights Council report entitled, Study on the situation of the violations and abuses of human rights rooted in harmful practices related to accusations of witchcraft and ritual attacks, as well as stigmatization(pdf). It paints a shocking picture of what Biblical, mainly, but now wholly, Christian, beliefs and invocations can lead to amongst those who have swallowed the missionary lie that the Bible is the inerrant word of God which should be followed to the letter to achieve 'salvation' from the horrors that the missionaries has told them await those who fail to carry it out.

The problem is that the belief in Biblical inerrancy and a mind-reading, ever watchful god can make people think the barbarity in the Old Testament especially, is the will of God and 'moral' in some arbitrary definition of morality as "what God sez!"

And 'God sez, Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. (Exodus 22: 18)

And running throughout the Bible is a belief in evil spirits and a world running on magic in which magic words, signs and thoughts can cause bad things to happen. The result is horrendous abuse of vulnerable people and especially of women and children, as the UN report states:

Creationism in Crisis - "No! No! My God Is A Little God, And I Want Him To Stays That Way "

Webb Unlocks Secrets of One of the Most Distant Galaxies Ever Seen - NASA Science

Continuing a series showing how much more impressive the Universe is than religion's prophets ever thought it was.

How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just detected one of the most distant galaxies ever seen. Because the velocity of light through space is a finite quantity, this means that the radiation detected by the JWST left the galaxy when the Universe itself was only about 430 million years old, in other words about 13.4 billion years ago.

To put that into miles means calculating the distance light travels in a year and multiplying that by 13.4 billion. In one year, light will travel just over 16 billion miles, so the object the JWST has detected is about 214.4 trillion miles away, and, if it's still there, it will now be at least 13.4 billion years old - which is a really long time compared to the age the authors of the Abrahamic holy books thought.

To put that in perspective: here is how the Christian Bible describes the Universe:

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 3-18

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Gen 1:3-10

[…]

And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

Gen 1:14-18

And here is how the scientists at NASA using the JWST and the Hubble Space Telescope describe just a tiny portion of the universe

Looking deeply into space and time, two teams using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have studied the exceptionally luminous galaxy GN-z11, which existed when our 13.8 billion-year-old universe was only about 430 million years old.

Initially detected with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, this galaxy — one of the youngest and most distant ever observed — is so bright that it is challenging scientists to understand why. Now, GN-z11 is giving up some of its secrets.

Vigorous Black Hole Is Most Distant Ever Found

A team studying GN-z11 with Webb found the first clear evidence that the galaxy is hosting a central, supermassive black hole that is rapidly accreting matter. Their finding makes this the farthest active supermassive black hole spotted to date.

“We found extremely dense gas that is common in the vicinity of supermassive black holes accreting gas,” explained principal investigator Roberto Maiolino of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute of Cosmology at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. “These were the first clear signatures that GN-z11 is hosting a black hole that is gobbling matter.”

Using Webb, the team also found indications of ionized chemical elements typically observed near accreting supermassive black holes. Additionally, they discovered a very powerful wind being expelled by the galaxy. Such high-velocity winds are typically driven by processes associated with vigorously accreting supermassive black holes.

“Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) has revealed an extended component, tracing the host galaxy, and a central, compact source whose colors are consistent with those of an accretion disk surrounding a black hole,” said investigator Hannah Übler, also of the Cavendish Laboratory and the Kavli Institute.

Together, this evidence shows that GN-z11 hosts a 2-million-solar-mass, supermassive black hole in a very active phase of consuming matter, which is why it's so luminous.

Pristine Gas Clump in GN-z11’s Halo Intrigues Researchers

A second team, also led by Maiolino, used Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) to find a gaseous clump of helium in the halo surrounding GN-z11.

“The fact that we don't see anything else beyond helium suggests that this clump must be fairly pristine,” said Maiolino. “This is something that was expected by theory and simulations in the vicinity of particularly massive galaxies from these epochs — that there should be pockets of pristine gas surviving in the halo, and these may collapse and form Population III star clusters.”

Finding the never-before-seen Population III stars — the first generation of stars formed almost entirely from hydrogen and helium — is one of the most important goals of modern astrophysics. These stars are anticipated to be very massive, very luminous, and very hot. Their expected signature is the presence of ionized helium and the absence of chemical elements heavier than helium.

The formation of the first stars and galaxies marks a fundamental shift in cosmic history, during which the universe evolved from a dark and relatively simple state into the highly structured and complex environment we see today.

In future Webb observations, Maiolino, Übler, and their team will explore GN-z11 in greater depth, and they hope to strengthen the case for the Population III stars that may be forming in its halo.

The research on the pristine gas clump in GN-z11’s halo has been accepted for publication by Astronomy & Astrophysics. The results of the study of GN-z11’s black hole were published in the journal Nature on January 17, 2024. The data was obtained as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES), a joint project between the NIRCam and NIRSpec teams.

But it's not fair to blame the authors of the Bible for getting it so hopelessly wrong. They were doing their best with what little knowledge they had.

Bible Blunders - How Bronze Age Goat-Herders Described The Universe - And How It Really Is

N79, a star-forming region in the Large Megallanic Cloud

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, O. Nayak, M. Meixner

The Universe as described in Genesis 1: 6-18

Galactic Genesis: Webb Space Telescope Reveals Massive Star-Forming Complex

If you asked any 6-year-old to draw a picture of what they thought the world with the sky, sun, moon and stars would look like if you could stand outside it, chances are they would come up with something not massively different to the way it is described in Genesis:

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good …

Genesis 1:6-10

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth.

Genesis 1:16-18

And it gets even more laughable when you read in Daniel:

Therefore the he goat waxed very great: and when he was strong, the great horn was broken; and for it came up four notable ones toward the four winds of heaven. And out of one of them came forth a little horn, which waxed exceeding great, toward the south, and toward the east, and toward the pleasant land. DANI And it waxed great, even to the host of heaven; and it cast down some of the host and of the stars to the ground, and stamped upon them.

Daniel 8:8-10

And it doesn't get any better in the New Testament, where the authors also though Jesus would believe the stars would fall to Earth when they broke loose.

Immediately after the tribulation of those days shall the sun be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken.

Matthew 24:29
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken.

Mark 13:25
(Quoting Jesus)

And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.

Revelation 6:13

Creationism in Crisis - How Panic Is Causing Creationist Frauds To Expose Their Dishonesty On Amazon

Why would someone lie to you about the contents of a book?

Like those who lie to you about science, their problem is not that they think it is wrong; their problem is that they think it is right, but they don't want you to think otherwise because they don't want you to be informed. They have an agenda that requires you to remain ignorant and believing falsehoods.

These are frauds who understand how knowledge empowers and sets you free, so they need you to remain captive and weak probably because their income and power depends on it.

This was never better illustrated than by the barrage of lies and disinformation with which the creation industry is trying to stop you reading my books. It is so important to them that you don't read these books that expose them as frauds and conmen that they are willing to sacrifice their personal integrity to try to fool you into not reading them. The fact that they are willing to bear false witness to you for their own self-interest, should tell you that their pretense of piety is part of their agenda, since a devout Christian would believe that bearing false witness is a sin. These are frauds using religion as an excuse for their behaviour.

I suppose I should be flattered in a way, that they are so afraid you'll read these books because of the irrefutable arguments they present and the examples I used that they need to go to these lengths to retain their control of their cult members and recruit more ignorant dupes into it.

Two of my books that are causing consternation in creationist cult circles are, The Unintelligent Designer: Refuting the Intelligent Design Hoax, and The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good.

An indication of this consternation is the number of misleading and downright dishonest 'reviews' that Amazon are allowing to remain on these books.

The following is an all-too-typical examples, written by someone who calls him or herself 'The Professor' and who purports to be a University professor who has written numerous books, although he/she neglects to say what chair he/she holds at what university or give the tile of any of these 'numerous books'. We just have to take their word for it.

However, the veracity of their word can best be judged by the content of the 'review' of The Malevolent Designer. For some reason, the title of the book in their 'review' is followed by Unintelligent Design in parenthesis, so it's not even clear which book is being 'reviewed' here.

The 'review' read:

Creationism in Crisis - How We Can Tell The Bible Is Not The Work Of The God Described in It

A creator god would not have got so much wrong when it tried to describe the world it had created and described is as though it knew no more than a parochial Bronze Age pastoralist who knew almost nothing and had to rely on guess-work and folkloric superstitions from the fearful infancy of our species.

A picture is worth a thousand words:

The universe from descriptions of it in the Bible.

And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Genesis 1: 6-10.

How the Universe really is, as revealed by science:

Creationism in Crisis - Humans Were Walking About in North America 10-13,000 Years Before Creationists Think Humans Were Created

Human footprints beside an ancient lake in New Mexico more than 20,000 years ago.

National Park Service

Study confirms age of oldest fossil human footprints in the Americas | Bournemouth University

10,000 years ago, according to the Bronze Age Canaanite creation myths in the Bible, a magic man in the sky created humans without ancestors, and either before or afterwards, according to the two different versions, he created all the animals too. And animals and humans went forth and multiplied to populate Earth.

White Sands footprints

Bennett, et al (2021)

A few thousand years later, in a fit of pique, because his 'perfect' design hadn't turned out the way he intended, he murdered almost everything in a genocidal flood and Earth had to be repopulated from just eight humans and either two or six of the other animal species (again depending on the version) after the humans had sacrificed one of every species as a thank you for the genocide, Earth was again repopulated from these impossibly narrow genetic bottlenecks.

Creationists also insist that all sedimentary rocks were deposited in their mythical genocidal flood.

Some people still believe that myth to be accurate history, despite all the evidence against it and the fact that there is no evidence for it, save only for the origin myths in a book which, as science discovers more, is becoming increasingly 'allegorical/metaphorical' in order to avoid admitting it's just plain wrong.

One piece of evidence was revealed in 2021, by researchers from Bournemouth University, UK, the US National Park Service, U.S. Geological Survey, Cornell University, USA and the University of Arizona, USA., which showed that humans were leaving footprints in mud at the edge of a lake in what is now White Sands National Park in New Mexico, North America, 10-13,000 years before Earth was created according to the ancient origin myths.

Creationism in Crisis - Fijian Folk Tale Has Nothing About a Global Flood or The God Who Allegedly Caused It!

Nabukelevu (Mount Washington)

Jaejay77 via Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0

Nabukelevu, Kadav, Fiji.
Eruption remembered in riddles and fantastical oral traditions.

A dramatic volcano eruption changed lives in Fiji 2,500 years ago. 100 generations have kept the story alive

2,500 years ago, just 1,500 years after creationists believe the human population of the world had been reduced to just 8 people in a genocidal flood, there was a volcanic eruption on one end of the island of Kadavu in the south of the group of Pacific islands now known as the Fijian Islands.

The people who were already living there, having presumably migrated there from the Middle East in just 1,500 years, remembered the details of the eruption and passed them on, complete with the local gods to whom they attributed the events, not in writing, but encoded in riddles and a symbolic oral tradition which "included fantastic beings flying through the sky, fighting each another furiously and noisily, drinking the ocean dry, and throwing giant spears with force enough to leave massive holes in rocky headlands", according to research by a group of scientists including Professor Patrick Nunn of the University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia.

Curiously, if the Bible tales of a global flood had been true, people to whom a local volcanic eruption was such an important event in their history that they remembered it in such an elaborate way, regarded a genocidal global flood as not worth a mention, and the god who allegedly caused it as unworthy of inclusion in their pantheon.

This is the ludicrously unlikely scenario that creationists have to try to rationalise in order to avoid considering that their favourite Bronze Age fairy tales are anything other than literal truths.

The research which has decoded the Fijian oral traditions is the subject of an article by Professor Nunn in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism in Crisis - A Continuous Culture in Central America for 11,000 Years. No Evidence of a Genocidal Flood

The El Gigante rock shelter in western Honduras.

Photo Credit: Alejandro Figueroa

Macrobotanical remains from El Gigante.

Photo Credit: Thomas Harper

Lessons in sustainability, evolution and human adaptation — courtesy of the Holocene | The Current

The thing about creationists claims of a global genocidal flood with just eight survivors, is that there is no evidence that such a flood ever occurred and what evidence there is all points to it never having happened.

If creationism were based on evidence, those two demonstrable facts should at least cause them to do the unthinkable and consider being wrong. However, considering being wrong is such an existential threat to creationists that it is something that must never even be contemplated.

So, what are these demonstrable facts?

• The evidence that should be there is of course the global layer of silt containing a jumble of fossils from disconnected land masses than would be the inevitable result of such a flood with no land barriers to how far debris could float. Creationists also claim that extinct orders such as dinosaurs were living at the time of the flood, so the predicted jumble of fossils should contain extinct and extant species in haphazard order.
  
  But that's not what we see.
• The evidence that should not be there is of course archaeological evidence of continuous cultures which pre-dated the supposed flood 4,000 years ago and continues in an unbroken sequence through the time of the alleged flood and up to modern times. The culture should have been destroyed along with the evidence for it in a catastrophic global flood, of course.
  
  But that's what we see.

Normally, having inevitable predictions from a hypothesis refuted is a reason to abandon the hypothesis, but creationists are not normal people, at least in their use of logical deduction. To a creationist, the conclusion is sacred, so facts must be ignored.
Evidence of the latter fact, which shouldn't be there but is, was the subject of a recent paper on PLOS ONE a couple of days ago. It concerns the stratified layers of the remains of food plants in a the 'El Gigante' rock shelter in Honduras, Central America, going back to 11,000 years. The site was recently nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Not only does this show a pattern of continuous occupation but it also records the dynamic nature of hunter-gatherer societies and the adaptations to climate and environmental change.

Of course, the scientists were interested in what this tells us about how the local culture evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers and what lessons can be learned of relevance to today's society. The refutation of the creationist flood myth was purely incidental, like the other frequent scientific refutations of creationism, where the revealed facts speak for themselves.

The international research team included scientists from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB).

A UCSB news release explains the discovery and its significance:

Creationism in Crisis - That's Blown It! Bone Flutes from 8,000 Years Before Earth Was Created!

Creationism in Crisis

That's Blown It! Bone Flutes from 8,000 Years Before Earth Was Created!

The first prehistoric wind instruments discovered in the Levant | CNRS

This is beginning to look like another bad week for creationist frauds.

Close on the news that archaeologists have discovered how agriculturalists and pastoralists migrated into what is now Morocco, thousands of years before Earth was created by magic out of nothing, according to what they tell their dupes, comes news that a Franco-Israeli team have unearthed musical instruments that are some three time older than creationist fools are told Earth is.

The normal creationist tactic for coping with the cognitive dissonance the scientific evidence keeps on producing in their minds, is to:

• Ignore it and hope it'll go away if ignored for long enough.
• Dismiss it as a conspiracy - the scientists are lying because they want to turn you away from God (Oops! gave away the fact that creationism is religion, not science, there, but needs must...!)
• Claim the dating methods are wrong so the flutes must be much younger.
• Claim that 'historical science' is all speculation because no-one was there to see it - aka. the "My great grandparents never had sex. Prove me wrong!", argument.
• Assert that the facts must be wrong because they don't agree with the Bible narrative, which must be true because it says it is in the Bible.
• Shout at it and stamp their foot to make the facts behave and comply with their requirements.

Sadly for creationists though, none of those tactics have worked, and the evidence is still that people in the Middle East were making musical instruments 12,000 years ago. Even more embarrassingly for creationists who believe humans have always believed in their god and are all descended from a couple it created without ancestors and from a handful of related survivors of a genocidal flood a few thousand years ago, there is evidence that these Bronze Age people, like the Egyptian, Indians and Chinese (to name but a few) had a religion that appears to have had nothing to do with the religion of the Bible. The flutes may have had some ceremonial role in that early religion.

To add insult to injury, this discovery was made in the part of the world where creationists like to image the tales in the Bible were set and yet the Bible has no mention of people having a religion involving birds and rituals involving bone flutes. It's exactly like the authors knew nothing of their own history.

The findings are described in a news release from Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS):

Malevolent Designer News - How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

Malevolent Designer News

How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'

The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century.

Credit: Ya’akov Billig

Early toilets reveal dysentery in Old Testament Jerusalem | University of Cambridge

Giardia duodenalis

Any caring, omni-benevolent, omniscient god would have warned his chosen people about the need for good hygiene in the form of sanitation and the importance of hand-washing, because it would have told them about germ theory and how to avoid catching the parasites it had designed to cause, amongst other things, debilitating diarrhoea.

But not so the god of the Old Testament.

The evidence just discovered by scientists working at Cambridge University, in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority, is that a particularly nasty parasite, Giardia duodenalis, which causes an intractable form of dysentery, was rife in Iron Age Judah.

There is, of course, no mention of this in the Bible, not any hint about how to avoid it with good hygiene and sanitation. It's just like the authors of the Bible were as ignorant as the Late Bronze age/Early Iron age people who lived in Judea at the time. There are extra-biblical Babylonian references to diarrhoea affecting the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. One example reads: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, setu has gotten him". The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhoea was sà si-sá.

Some texts also included recommended incantations to increase the chances of recovery, showing that they believed magic spells would help control the cause.

But if we listen to the childish fantasies of creationists, we should conclude that this was deliberate, because an omniscient creator would know precisely what the microorganisms it designs will do and creates them for that purpose. Leaving humans ignorant was all part of the plan to allow the parasites to make them suffer, apparently.

How did the Cambridge-led scientists make this discovery? A press release gives the details:

Creationism in Crisis - So What 'Kind' is This Strange Thing?

Creationism in Crisis

So What 'Kind' is This Strange Thing?

George, Emma E., et al.(2023)

Evolutionary oddball has seven genomes inside a single cell | New Scientist

The Bible that creationists turn to for a source of scientific information, is of course, as hopelessly muddled and simplistic about biology as it is about cosmology, morality and medicine. For example, this is how it tries to classify the birds that it is forbidden to eat under the irrational food taboos it mandates for believers:

And these are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, and the vulture, and the kite after his kind; every raven after his kind; and the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind; the little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the cormorant; and the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat.

Leviticus 11:13-19

Not surprisingly, and not just because of the hilarious gaff of including 'the bat' in a list of birds, and the muddle over the different 'kinds' of owl, biologists soon realised how hopelessly inadequate the Biblical notion of 'kinds' is as a means of classifying biological taxons, so had the devise the modern classification system.

And, presumably because the authors didn't realise that plants are alive because they don't breath like vertebrates do, there is no attempt to classify plants. In fact, the author's show their muddle over plants by this strange piece from Genesis:

Then God said, 'Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it. ' And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it.

Genesis 1:11-12

Clearly the Bible's authors thought there were only angiosperms (the most advances plants) since they are the only ones mentioned. Incidentally, more of their muddle is illustrated by the fact that this creation of green plants occurs before the sun is created, showing the authors knew nothing of photosynthesis.

And of course, there is no hint that the authors were even aware of single-celled micro-organisms, otherwise they might have mentioned germ theory, of which there is not a single word. Imaging how many lives could have been saved and how much suffering would have been avoided if God had thought to mention bacteria and viruses and how to avoid being infected by them, assuming it didn't know what it had created them for in the first place...

But that's an aside. The real muddle comes with the authors attempt to come up with a classification system, as Bible-literalist creationists assume that's what they were trying to do.

So, here is a curveball inadvertently thrown to creationists by researchers led by Emma E. George, now of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Integrative Oceanography Division, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA, when working at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

Her team have discovered single-celled algae that are not single organisms at all, but a complex community of seven different organisms, each with its own genome, and each playing a part in a complex relationship within the algal cell body.

Figure 3
Microscopy of Cryptomonas gyropyrenoidosa SAG 25.80 with bacterial endosymbionts.

(A) DIC; (B) DAPI; (C) FISH-M. polyxenophila probe; (D) FISH-G. numerosa probe; (E) overlay of (C) and (D); (F) endosymbionts clustered in the host cytoplasm, including endosymbionts with virus-like particles (Sv); (G) endosymbiont with virus-like particles within the bacterial cytoplasm and attached to the bacterial cell’s surface (arrowhead); and (H) bacterial endosymbionts and a membrane-like structure (i.e., putative autolysosome vacuole) that potentially contains virus-like particles (arrowhead). See also Figures S4A and S4C and Table S2.

George, Emma E., et al.(2023)

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff The Bible's Scientifically illiterate Authors Never Imagined

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff The Bible's Scientifically illiterate Authors Never Imagined

Figure 1: Illustration of gravitational lensing by a galaxy. Light from a more distant and reddish galaxy is bent by a more nearby and bluish galaxy, which acts like a natural cosmic telescope to magnify the more distant galaxy. In this instance, multiple images of the reddish galaxy are created, forming a reddish ring-like feature referred to as an Einstein ring around the bluish galaxy.

Image credit: ALMA, L Calcada, Y. Hezaveh et al.

Howe the authors of Genesis saw the Universe

HKU Astrophysicists Reveal the Nature of Dark Matter through the Study of Crinkles in Spacetime - All News - Media - HKU

Back in the bronze Age, in the days that Christopher Hitchens described as 'the fearful infancy of our species', before we had even invented the wheel and isolated tribes still thought Earth was flat, the best explanation they could think of for where everything came from was the result of some magic spells cast by an invisible magician who lived above the sky. Agency in all things and magic, were assumed to be behind everything, just as they are today by creationists.

So, imagine these ignorant hill farmers, who thought stars were hanging from a dome over a flat Earth, struggling to come to terms with concepts such as deep space where celestial bodies are millions of light years apart and most of it is composed of invisible matter?

Magic and agency in all things
(Bible moralisée, French, 13th century)

How on Earth were these simple, ignorant people going to guess at an accurate description of the cosmos and its origins?

They weren’t of course. The best they could do was to describe a world which ran on magic and give magical explanations for everything they didn't understand, confident that those who were going to read their guesses were equally ignorant.

Contrast that situation about 3000 years ago with today's astrophysicist trying to make sense of what can be observed.

Having abandoned magic and supernatural agency as an explanation for anything, about 200 years ago, modern scientists have to rely on what can be observed, either directly or indirectly, and one of their observations is that the Universe has far more mass in it than can be accounted for by observation of that which can be seen. In other words, the observable universe has a lot of stuff that can't be seen but which is giving it mass.

How then do we know about it? Because we now understand the relationship between mass and gravity, so we can observe dark matter indirectly by observing the effect its gravity has on things we can see, such as galaxies.

You wouldn't expect the simple-minded hill farmers who wrote Genesis to have any inkling that such substance even existed, let alone come up with an explanation of what this 'dark matter' is, other than the product of magic words, of course.

This is why there is no mention, not even the tiniest hint, of dark matter in the Bible, or even that the universe is as massive as it is. In the ignorant minds of the authors, 'stars' (whether galaxies or suns) were points of light stuck on the underside of the dome that kept the water above the sky out. Of course, you wouldn't expect scientifically illiterate and ignorant people to describe and explain the origins of dark matter, but you WOULD expect any creator god who filled the Universe with dark matter to be able to describe and explain it.

Creationism in Crisis - Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

A view of Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies from the James Webb Telescope.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI

Creationism in Crisis

Stuff the Authors of Genesis Never Even Guessed At

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope

New map of the universe’s cosmic growth supports Einstein’s theory of gravity

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), Chile

It has been said that, like the Qur'an, if the Bible were discovered for the first time today, we could date it accurately by the scientific ignorance in it.

There is no hint of knowledge about Germ Theory, electricity, atoms, photosynthesis, thermodynamics, relativity, quantum mechanics, gravity, or dark matter and dark energy, anywhere in the Bible, unless you stretch the meanings of words beyond breaking point and add things that are not there.

It's as though the authors knew no more than the little that was already known at the time and didn't realise that much of what they thought they knew was fundamentally wrong. But you would expect a creator god who wanted us to believe it knew everything and most importantly, had a vital message for mankind, would have included something new and even something useful - like electricity or antibiotics, for example, but it couldn't even describe the scientific method, let alone a null hypothesis or the need for controls in an experiment.

So, it took until the early part of the 20th century for a scientist to discover that matter and energy are interchangeable because they are different aspects of the same thing, and so why planets orbit suns and Earth has enough gravity to stop us and the atmosphere floating off into space. Einstein’s discovery of Relativity is now a fundamental of cosmology and theoretical astrophysics.

Icons of Feminism - Mary Woolstencraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine

Icons of Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft and Rejection of Religious Doctrine.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, c. 1797

Source: Wikipedia

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Keenan, 1787

Mary Wollstonecraft: an introduction to the mother of first-wave feminism

Reading this account of the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the first 'radical' feminists, by Bridget Cotter, Lecturer in Social Sciences, University of Westminster, UK, one of the things that stands out most vividly is the religious inspiration for the repression and subjugation of women in Victorian England, and how much of that religion is now seen as wrong and antisocial by the vast majority of decent people.

Far from providing society with a fixed moral framework, religion has served to hold back moral development as society evolves, only to have to reluctantly acceded to the new standards when the tension becomes irresistible.

One of the great crimes of religion, or rather the clerics who control it, is the theft of control of social ethics by a clique who knew they would lose control if they allowed the people too much freedom to think for themselves.

If we give all men the vote, where will it all end? Women demanding the same?!"

"If we give way on feminism, where will it all end? Women priests?!"

"If we give way on contraception, where will it all end? Sexually liberated women?!"

“If we give way on same-sex marriage, or allow gays to become priests, Where will it all end?

… Etc, etc, etc.

Because she challenged these imposed social norms and questioned the authority of those who sought to impose them on us, Mary Wollstonecraft was considered a dangerous revolutionary. Ironically she was opposed most vigorously by the same church that proudly, but wrongly, proclaims its founder as a dangerous revolutionary who challenged authority and the prevailing social norms and cultural ethics.

And today, much of what Mary Wollstonecraft campaigned for is taken for granted as right and proper in most civilised countries.

Bridget Cotter's article in The Conversation is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license. The original can be read here.

Creationism in Crisis - How the Bible Narrative Misled 19th Century Palaeontologists

Creationism in Crisis

How the Bible Narrative Misled 19th Century Palaeontologists

Reconstruction of the ceremonial burial

Credit: Natalia Klimczak
© National Museum of Wales

Paviland Cave (Goat’s Hole), Gower Peninsula

Red Lady of Paviland: the story of a 33,000 year-old-skeleton – and the calls for it to return to Wales

The significance of the discovery of human remains in a Welsh cave almost exactly 200 years ago to the day, on 18 January, 1823, was entirely missed because the Oxford University Palaeontologist, William Buckland, was also an Anglican priest who believed the Bible to be the inerrant word of a creator god and so literal history.

Today, this is something only believed by scientifically illiterate Creationists and those made too afraid by childhood indoctrination to question it or acknowledge the evidence to the contrary.

After changing his mind several times, Buckland concluded on scant evidence that the skeletal remains were that of a female prostitute who had drowned in the Biblical flood and whose body had got washed into the cave along with the other animal remains found there, because this was the only way he could think of to fit the facts into the Bible narrative.

In fact, the body is that of a man of about 25-28, who died about 33,000 years ago and so is the earliest example of a ceremonial burial in Western Europe. In taking the remains, together with the artifacts found with them, back to Oxford and failing to recognise their cultural significance to Wales, he so deprived Wales of a cultural icon.

The story of how the Bible, or rather the mistaken belief that the Bible is literal history, mislead 19th Century palaeontologists is told by Ffion Reynolds, Honorary Research Fellow, and Jacqui Mulville, Professor in Bioarchaeology and Head of Archaeology and Conservation, both of Cardiff University, in an article in The Conversation. The article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency.

Creationism in Crisis - Multiple Origins of Mesopotamian People

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe -

Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, Johann Wenzel Peter (1745-1829), Vatican Museum

Upper Mesopotamia, the fusion center of Neolithic cultures | Gazette Hacettepe

My last blog post dealt with how human cultures evolved by a process which, while maybe not being identical with Darwinian evolution by natural selection, is closely analogous to it, and how it reflected diverse origins in diverse populations affected by wide environmental differences across the range of human habitation.

This is in complete contrast to the narrow culture assumed in the Bible where there is no attempt to explain human cultural origins or even any awareness that it is something to be explained, just as the origin of living creatures and even the Earth itself needed to be explained, albeit with the naïve guesses of people ignorant of science and little or no understanding of biology, geology or cosmology.

This post should disturb Creationists even further because it flies in the face of anything the Bible implies about human origins. Bible literalist Creationists must believe that all humans are derived ultimately from a single couple, magically created in a 'garden' somewhere in the Middle East.

Bible scholars traditionally place this 'Garden of Eden' somewhere in Mesopotamia, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, citing:

The LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters. The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold. (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.) The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush. The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Ashur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Genesis 2: 9-14:

The problem for Creationists is that a team of Turkish researchers from Hacettepe University and Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey have just shown that the people living in that area between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago had a genetic and cultural makeup that indicates multiple origins from across the 'Fertile Crescent' and that the area was a melting pot and fusion centre, rather than an origin. This conclusion came from an analysis of the DNA extracted from the remains of 13 individuals together with cultural artifacts excavated at Çayönü Hill in the Ergani district of Diyarbakır between 8,500-7,500 BC.

Çayönü Hill, Ergani district of Diyarbakır, Iraq.

As the Hacettepe University news release explains:

Çayönü Hill was first discovered in 1963 by Halet Çambel and Robert J. Braidwood. The excavations that Prof. Dr. Çambel started systematically in 1968 were continued with a break from time to time. During the excavations conducted under the direction of Prof. Dr. Aslı Erim Özdoğan, it was determined that the first settlement in the region started approximately 12,000 years ago and that the region was inhabited until 6,000 years ago. During this long settlement, Çayönü Hill hosted different cultures. Archaeological remains show that the region has a dynamic cultural structure and that the architectural structures have changed over time. In addition, anthropological studies revealed that early examples of various modifications applied to the body, such as artificial skull shaping and trepanation, existed in this culture.

Researchers set out to understand the genetic makeup of people with this dynamic cultural structure. It is known that DNA molecules in human remains exposed to high temperatures due to climatic conditions throughout Mesopotamia are very difficult to preserve. Therefore, in ancient DNA studies carried out to date, the region was only represented by the genome of a single individual from the Boncuklu Tarla excavation site. Dr. Lecturer Füsun Özer stated that under these conditions, Çayönü individuals had a higher level of DNA preservation than expected and continued: “We scanned 33 skeletons from Çayönü Hill, dated between 10,500 and 9,500 years ago, for DNA conservation. Of these, 13 individuals had enough DNA molecules to allow genome analysis. In this region, it was surprising for us to get close to 40 percent success from such old individuals.”

This study, carried out in Upper Mesopotamia, in the northernmost part of the Fertile Crescent, the center of domestication of plants and animals, revealed that the region was a center of attraction during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic Period, and people from the surrounding geographies mingled in the region. The genetic makeup of the people of the region bears traces from the eastern and western sides of the Fertile Crescent.

The central location of Upper Mesopotamia in Southwest Asia is also reflected in the gene pool of the society. The demographic patterns of the Central Anatolian Neolithic societies in the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, represented by the Zagros Neolithic societies, appear as a mixture in this region.

Dr. Ezgi Altınışık, first-author Human-G Laboratory
Department of Anthropology
Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara, Turkey.

Although genetic diversity is observed to be high, no major change is observed in the genetic structure of the population during the 1,000 years examined. Despite this, the fact that a two-year-old girl is genetically closer to the communities living on the eastern side of the Fertile Crescent reveals that people from outside came to Çayönü and could live in this village. The etching mark found on the parietal bone of this girl presents the first example of the tradition still practiced today. Prof. Dr. Yılmaz Selim Erdal, one of the research team, stated that cauterization as a treatment tool is a common practice in Anatolia, and the Çayönü example is one of the oldest examples of this practice. This specimen, with traces of infection on its inner surface, indicates that it was probably treated with a method including magical-ritual application in order to eliminate the negativities caused by the infection. Erdal stated that, together with the trepanation sample found in Çayönü, these data indicate that Mesopotamia had a very dynamic and somewhat complex cultural dynamic in the Neolithic Age.

Another important finding from the study was to determine kinship relationships in Early Neolithic communities. In the Early Neolithic Period, it was a common tradition to bury the dead in the floors of houses in and around Anatolia. The kinship analyzes [sic] revealed that the individuals buried in the same house in Çayönü were mostly close relatives. Prof. Dr. Mehmet Somel from the Department of Biological Sciences at Middle East Technical University said that they interpreted these results as the social structure of society being organized within the framework of biological kinship. It is seen that this family-centered burial tradition observed in Early Neolithic communities has changed over time, and in some settlements from the Late Neolithic period such as Çatalhöyük, social ties besides biological kinship play a role in burial in the same place.

Finally, researchers sought to analyze how Upper Mesopotamian peoples influenced surrounding communities in later periods. Archaeological studies indicated that Upper Mesopotamia culturally influenced Anatolia during the Late Neolithic period. Genetic analyzes [sic] also revealed that some of the ancestors of people who lived in Central Anatolia (Çatalhöyük) and Marmara (Barcın Höyük) 1,000 years after Çayönü came from Upper Mesopotamia. This shows that people of relatively distant geographies interact not only with the exchange of ideas from afar, but also with human movement.

Fig. 1. Spatiotemporal distribution of the samples and the population structure of Neolithic Southwest Asia.
(A) Timeline of ancient Southwest Asian individuals used in the analyses. Colored horizontal bars at the bottom represent the subperiods of the Neolithic Era in Southwest Asia. (B) The map shows EP and Neolithic populations from Southwest Asia. Shaded areas mark PPN period cultural zones (referred to as the Aceramic period in C Anatolia). (C) Çayönü building types and their approximate dates of use, considered as evidence for Çayönü’s cultural openness and ingenuity. Modified from (112). (D) The first two dimensions of the MDS plot of genetic distances. The MDS summarizes the genetic distance matrix among ancient genomes calculated as (1 − outgroup f3) values. Outgroup f3-statistics were calculated as f3(Yoruba; individual1, individual2). The labels represent the following sites: Anatolia EP: Pınarbaşı; Anatolia PPN: Boncuklu and Aşıklı Höyük; Anatolia PN: Çatalhöyük and Barcın Höyük; Levant EP: Natufian; Levant PPN: Ain’ Ghazal, Kfar HaHoresh, Motza, and Ba’ja; C Zagros N (Central Zagros Neolithic): Ganj Dareh, Tepe Abdul, and Wezmeh Cave; S Caucasus EP (South Caucasus EP): Kotias and Satsurblia. See note S5 for a definition of “Anatolia.” PPNA, Pre-pottery Neolithic A; PPNB, Pre-pottery Neolithic B; PPNC, Pre-pottery Neolithic C.

Altınışık, N. Ezgi; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Aydoğan, Ayça, et al. (2022)

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Open access. (CC BY 4.0)

Details are given in the abstract to the team's open access paper publish in Science Advances:

Abstract

Upper Mesopotamia played a key role in the Neolithic Transition in Southwest Asia through marked innovations in symbolism, technology, and diet. We present 13 ancient genomes (c. 8500 to 7500 cal BCE) from Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çayönü in the Tigris basin together with bioarchaeological and material culture data. Our findings reveal that Çayönü was a genetically diverse population, carrying mixed ancestry from western and eastern Fertile Crescent, and that the community received immigrants. Our results further suggest that the community was organized along biological family lines. We document bodily interventions such as head shaping and cauterization among the individuals examined, reflecting Çayönü’s cultural ingenuity. Last, we identify Upper Mesopotamia as the likely source of eastern gene flow into Neolithic Anatolia, in line with material culture evidence. We hypothesize that Upper Mesopotamia’s cultural dynamism during the Neolithic Transition was the product not only of its fertile lands but also of its interregional demographic connections.

Altınışık, N. Ezgi; Kazancı, Duygu Deniz; Aydoğan, Ayça, et al. (2022) A genomic snapshot of demographic and cultural dynamism in Upper Mesopotamia during the Neolithic Transition
Science Advances; 8(44), eabo3609. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abo3609

Copyright: © 2022 The authors.
Published by American Association for the Advancement of Science. Open access
Reprinted under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)

It probably wasn't the intention of the researchers to refute the Bible so comprehensively, yet they did so, simply by revealing the truth, as is so often the case with scientific discoveries.

Not only was there never a founding couple (as though that idea ever carried any merit) but the people in the area at the time in which the tale was set had multiple origins from much earlier populations and cultures. Of course, the Bible's authors were entirely ignorant of the facts and the evolutionary history of the people about whom they wrote, and simply made up stories to explain the unknown - and of course, as with so much else, got it hopelessly wrong.

And of course, without Adam and Eve, there was no original sin, no need for salvation and redemption and no need for Jesus, and yet the hideous superstition of vicarious redemption through a human blood sacrifice, and the need to be reconciled with an irascible god to avoid eternal torture, is still used by parasitic priests and imams to control and terrorise ignorant and superstitious people and to justify their demand to be allowed to make laws governing the rest of us and run society in their interest.

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Evolution News - Earliest Vertebrate Heart From 380 Million Years Ago.

We found the oldest ever vertebrate fossil heart. It tells a 380 million-year-old story of how our bodies evolved

Although they probably don’t realise it, the function of the heart is as good evidence as it gets that the Bible wasn't written or inspired by the god described in it. No such omnipotent creator god would have assumed the heart was the seat of emotions when in fact it's simply a muscular pump for circulating blood around the body. Such silly mistakes are understandable if the Bible was written by ignorant people who lacked even basis science, of course, but not for any alleged creator of all life, including mammalian.

So, news that scientists have discovered the earliest fossil record of a mammalian heart from 380 million years ago, will come as a shock to Bible literalist creationists, if for no other reason than that it refutes the childish notion that the Universe was created by a creator god just a few thousand years ago, and the same creator created the human heart as the seat of emotion.

And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God. For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.

Mark 11: 22-23

The scientists who made the discovery have published their findings in the journal, Science and have written about them in The Conversation. Their article is reprinted here, formatted for stylistic consistency, under a Creative Commons licence. The original article can be read here.

The Biblical Myth of the Destruction of the Cities of the Plain Could Be Based on a Real Event

BIBLICAL BURNING - Ancient city could have been destroyed by cosmic airburst | News Services | ECU

Professor Mitra's analysis of soot samples from Tall el-Hammam supports the research team’s theory that the city was destroyed by a high-temperature fire that the civilization at the time did not have the capability to generate.

It is common for ancient myths and legends to be based on a real event, embroidered over time and give a mystical spin, especially in oral traditions, to play to the beliefs and prejudices of the time. However, when that real events is discovered, just like the filling of all the other gaps in knowledge on which religions depend, the cause is invariably something natural and not requiring magic or supernatural entities in the explanation.

Location of Tall el-Hammam. (a) Photo of the southern Levant, looking north, showing the Dead Sea, the site location (TeH), and nearby countries. The Dead Sea Rift, the fault line marking a major tectonic plate boundary, runs through the area. Source of base image: NASA, Space Shuttle. “The Sinai Peninsula and the Dead Sea Rift”. Photo: sts109-708-024, taken 12/16/2009. From the NASA Langley Research Center Atmospheric Science Data Center (nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/astronauts_eyes/sts109-708-024.html). Modified by the authors using Adobe Photoshop CC2014 (adobe.com/products/photoshop.html). (b) West-southwest-facing view of the upper tall showing locations of the palace and temple behind the curve of the upper tall. The Dead Sea is in the background to the left.

Source: Bunch, T.E. et al (2021)

This could well be the case with the tales of the destruction of the 'Cities of the Plain', Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, which may have been flattened, not by a god raining down fire and brimstone, but by a natural, though thankfully uncommon, cosmological event - a meteorite strike.

Who really discovered the Americas?

Seven times people discovered the Americas – and how they got there

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) is shown holding a globe in a detail from a painting by Peter Johann Nepomuk Geiger in the throne room of Miramare castle in Italy

It's almost axiomatic that Americans tend to be as clueless about their history as they are about geography and science. And of course, into this gap, fundamentalist Christians have inserted their favourite myths and presented them as facts. Even the recent 'history' is more mythology than fact.

One of the things that really grates with me is the insistence that America was discovered by Christopher Columbus, even having a national day named after him. Most Americans could probably make a guess about where he landed - probbly somewhere between Florida and Cape Cod.

The truth is, however, that Christopher Columbus, or Cristobal Colon to give him his proper, Genoese name, not only never set foot on the North American mainland, he may not even have seen it from afar, unless one of the ‘islands’ he reported seeing was the Isthmus of Panama, as seems possible. He made his first landfall, on 12 Oct, 1492, on the Island of San Salvador in the Bahamas, then known by the inhabitants as Guanahani. He main explorations were of the Islands of Cuba and Hispaniola.

John Cabot (1450-c.1500).

The first European (as distinct from Scandinavian) to land on the North American mainland, was the Venetian, John Cabot, in 1497, sailing under the patronage of Henry VII of England.

The other irritating myth is that Columbus set out to prove Earth isn't flat. In fact, it was generally known by then (1492) that Earth was a spheroid, the Greeks having calculated its circumference as 40,000 Km; what he set out to prove was that going west was a quicker route to the East Indies (and it's lucratice spice trade), than sailing round Africa and across the Indian Ocean or taking the overland 'Silk Road' across Central Asia and down through China. He got his sums badly wrong and calculated that Japan would be about 2,400 miles due West instead of closer to 11,000 miles, so he was lucky the Americas were in the way, because he didn’t have supplies for a voyage of that distance.

When he made landfall, he assumed he had missed Japan and China by sailing too far south and had landed in the East Indies, hence the Native Americans were called ‘Indios’.

But Columbus was far from being the first to discover the Americas; in fact he was the last of at least seven different peoples to discover the Americas.

Columbus landing on Guanahani Island, now known as San Salvador, in the Bahamas, 1492.

In the following article, reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative commons license, reformatted for stylistic consistency, Nicholas R. Longrich, Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath, tells how these different peoples got there and what impact they had if any. The original article can be read here.

It's worth noting, as you read this, just how little it coincides with the supposed history of humanity as described in the Bible and how there is no evidence whatsoever to support the fanciful mythology invented by the convicted con artist, Joseph Smith when he made up the 'Book of Mormon' as a ploy to trick his neighbours into giving him their farms, and their wives.

Another Bible Blooper Exposed by Science.

One more clue to the Moon’s origin | ETH Zurich

There are several theories about the origin of the moon. The discovery of noble gases in lunar meteorites brings us one step closer to understanding its origin.

Image: Adobe Stock

Creationists and members of other Bible literalist cults regard the description of the formation of the cosmos and then Earth in the opening chapter of Genesis as the bast available description of reality, notwithstanding that it describes Earth as having a dome over it from which the creator god hung the moon as a lamp, so we would know it is night time.

And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.

And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.

Genesis 1:16-19

The problem these cultists have is that science continually and consistently proves this, and much else in the Bible, wrong - which is embarrassing for words of the supposed creator of it. Sadly, for them, it can't even be passed off as an allegory or a metaphor - the usual excuse when the Bible describes something that isn't so - because there is nothing that can be represented as a firmament to which the sun and moon are fixed, and the moon can't even be represented as a lamp, since a lamp has its own light, and the moon doesn't. Nor is the moon only visible at night, so if its purpose really was to tell us when it is night time, the putative creator couldn't even get that right!