Creationism in Crisis - No-One Mourns For The Old Dead Gods of Arabia - Part 2

The landscape of the mustatil; at the time the mustatil was built, the area was likely wetter than it is today.

Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU

Mirrored building at the ancient al Ula Maraya archaeological site, Saudi Arabia

7,000-year-old animal bones, human remains found in enigmatic stone structure in Arabia | Live Science

Archaeologists are uncovering evidence of religious rituals in Norther Arabia, 3000 years before creationists believe Earth and humans were created!

Creationists love to point to the fact that all cultures, ancient and modern, tend to have religion as a central element to the culture, as though that fact somehow proves the locally popular god is real.

Of course, it also points to the fact that we have evolved to 'fail safe' and assume agency where there is none, to naively believe what our parents believe, to accept simplistic answers to complex questions and find it impossible to imagine total oblivion at death.

But, ask a creationists to explain why we should accept the locally popular god is the only real one and all the ancient gods are false, and they will probably cite much of that list as reasons why they had false beliefs, stopping short of going just one god (or one pantheon) further and applying that logic to their own god(s), citing all sorts of nebulous reasons why they believe in their particular god(s).

The team found animal horns from a variety of animals, including cattle and caprines, or animals in the goat family, at the site.

Image credit: Wael Abu-Azizeh et al. 2022/RCU

So, it must be embarrassing to realise that those nebulous reasons were very probably cited by believers in those ancient gods as 'proof' that they existed.

Did the sun not rise in the morning because they had performed the right rituals? Did the crops not fail when they had failed to chant the right prayers in exactly the right way at the right time, or had broken the rules in some other way?

Did the gods not reward them by helping them prevail in battle or punish them for an assumed transgression when they lost a battle?

And could they too not 'look at the trees' and marvel at the wonders their gods had created? And did their priests not also have the power of prophesy and claim they heard the god(s) speaking to them?

One thing we can be sure about is that belief in their god(s) was a strong motivation for rituals associated with life, death and probably animal husbandry, as it is for believers today. The evidence for that is in the artifacts they left behind as discovered by archaeology, such as that currently going on at al Ula in the Ashar Valley in Northern Arabia, where researchers have now discovered evidence of ritual sacrifice and burials in the remains of stone structures known as mustatils, which are believed to have been used for religious purposes.

To add to the embarrassment for creationists, these structures have been dated to about 7,000 years ago, i.e., some 3,000 years before Earth and humans were created!

Regular readers may recall how the archaeological site in Northern Arabia, close to the Fertile Crescent was the subject of a blog post here last March. Now the Royal Commission for AlUla (RCA), set up to investigate the site, has produced an update. It concerns the remain, both animal and human, found in some of the graves associated with the buildings.

As the RCA news release reports:

Growing Up And Losing Faith

I was asked recently if I could explain the process I went through as I became an Atheist, as this might help others going through the same process. Apart from not being sure I have anything much to offer people in this respect because I was very young at the time, this is actually quite difficult for me for another reason.

Rather like a reverse of the parody version of evolution which creationists are taught to attack, where evolution is absurdly presented as a sudden event so that even a child will think it's silly, instead of the gradual process spread over time where one thing leads inevitably to another and several things can happen concurrently, my deconversion was a sudden event, or so it seemed at the time, not a slow, accumulative process, as it seems to have been with many others. But maybe this is because, being very young at the time, I hadn't really realised some sort of process was going on in my mind. So far as I was concerned, one minute I believed in the traditional Christian god, gentle Jesus, meek and mild, the Virgin Mary, wise men, shepherds, and the souls of dead babies riding up to Heaven on sunbeams, and the next, I didn't believe a word of it.

I have related this before in The Light Of Reason so I'll just briefly run through it again then look at what a few other well-known atheists have said on the subject.

Death and Elephants

Pachyderm politics and the powerful female - life - 07 January 2014 - New Scientist

To those who assume that humans are the only species with complex social systems complete with the system of ethics which makes this system work, the above article in New Scientist may come as something of a surprise.

To a creationist who believes humans are a special creation and that our morals were handed down to us by a magic creator, it will come as a shock and will need to be ignored or dismissed in some way to help overcome the inevitable cognitive dissonance.

Old Dead Gods - With Long Forgotten Religions - And No Way To Recover Them

The burial of an adult woman associated with a prone and articulated horse

Photo: S.R.Thompson,
courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia,
belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona,
Rovigo e Vicenza

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)

Joint interment of a dog and a human perinate.

Photo by S.R.Thompson, courtesy of SABAP-VR Soprintendenza archeologia, belle arti e paesaggio per le province di Verona, Rovigo e Vicenza.

Laffranchi Z, Zingale S, Tecchiati U, Amato A, Coia V, Paladin A, et al. (2024)

Some Pre-Roman humans were buried with dogs, horses and other animals | ScienceDaily

I've made the point several time before, but another paper published recently, reinforces it again, that when old gods are forgotten and old religions die, there is nothing on which they can be reconstructed because religions are never founded in verifiable evidence.

Unlike religion, science, which is a description of reality, could be rediscovered if it, or a major branch of it, was somehow wiped from our collective memories and all text books on the subject were wiped clean. And the rediscovered science would be the same as it is today. Atoms would have the same structure and properties, chemistry would do what we know it does today; physics would have the same explanations for the different colours of light, for the way energy is conserved; entropy and the laws of thermodynamics would be the same; and the description of the universe, together with the Big Bang, how suns form and how planets form around them, would be the same.

In fact, we can be as sure as eggs is eggs, that if ever we contact intelligent life from another planet, their science will be the same as ours, although they'll use different words to describe it and their numbering system may well have a different base.

But, expunge every trace of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hindi, Shintoism, etc., and erase everyone’s memory of them, and we would never again know what the followers believed or what they believe their god(s) did or didn't do. We would know no more about the major religions of today than we know about the ancient religions before writing was invented. We have not the slightest idea what inspired the builders of Stonehenge and Silbury Hill in Wiltshire; we don't have a clue what the people who built the oldest existing roofed building in Europe, in Menorca in the Balearic Islands believed or what the Minoans of Crete believed, or even the names of their gods, and, unless someone decodes the language the Minoans wrote, we never will. We only know anything about the Egyptian and Sumerian pantheons because someone learned to read their writing.

And we know nothing about the gods and religion of the people who buried horses and dogs with their dead in Late Iron Age, Northern Italy - the subject of a recent paper in PLOS ONE.

In information from PLoS, cited in Science Daily, the authors explain their findings:

Unreasonable Faith - Robert G. Ingersoll

Why is Robert G. Ingersoll not better known in America, or the rest of the world, for that matter? He wrote and spoke with such power and passion, and regard for truth and honesty above all, that his writing is a joy to read, more lyrical even than that of Thomas Paine and worthy of Christopher Hitchens at his best.

Here he is delivering a 'Thanksgiving Sermon'. This is a cut-down version; the full sermon can be read here.

A THANKSGIVING SERMON.

MANY ages ago our fathers were living in dens and caves. Their bodies, their low foreheads, were covered with hair. They were eating berries, roots, bark and vermin. They were fond of snakes and raw fish. They discovered fire and, probably by accident, learned how to cause it by friction. They found how to warm themselve — to fight the frost and storm. They fashioned clubs and rude weapons of stone with which they killed the larger beasts and now and then each other. Slowly, painfully, almost imperceptibly they advanced. They crawled and stumbled, staggered and struggled toward the light. To them the world was unknown. On every hand was the mysterious, the sinister, the hurtful. The forests were filled with monsters, and the darkness was crowded with ghosts, devils, and fiendish gods.

These poor wretches were the slaves of fear, the sport of dreams.

Superstition News - The USA is Not The Only Country Where a Large Number of People Believe in Magic and Would Welcome a Theocracy

Religion in South and Southeast Asia: Key facts | Pew Research Center

Although post-war Europe has seen major changes in religious affiliation and beliefs with Atheism and acceptance of the scientific view of human origins now the largest demographic by far in many countries, including the UK, the USA continues to be an outlier amongst Western industrial democracies in this regard, with a large number of people believing in magic and the special creation of humans as is, on an Earth that is just a few thousand years old.

Another feature of Western European post-war culture is the presumption that religious freedom comes not from a close association between church and state but by strict secularism, so that many countries that were formerly solidly Catholic or Protestant are increasingly secular. This contrast markedly with American evangelicals, who, whilst not being in the majority in what is also becoming an increasingly secular society, would like nothing more than a theocracy with Christianity even being required to qualify as a 'proper American' and the church being involved in education, the judiciary, the legislature and even the executive, in a Taliban-style theocracy.

As this Pew Research survey shows, American Evangelicals closely resemble South and Southeast Asian Buddhists and Muslims in this respect. The survey is the subject of a report by Jonathan Evans, Kelsey Jo Starr, Manolo Corichi and William Miner and a summary by Jonathan Evans.

It shows that in "three Buddhist-majority countries (Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand) and two Muslim-majority countries (Malaysia and Indonesia), as well as the religiously diverse country of Singapore", religion is an important part of everyday life with both Buddhism and Islam having some similarities in terms of belief, personal and national identity and to what degree it should be involved in politics, laws and customs. In all these measures, religion, regardless of the sect, had a remarkable similarity to Evangelical Christianity in the USA, especially amongst the far-right Christian Nationalists.

Reasons Why Atheists Should Speak Out - Inspiring Words for Rational Thinkers

A short collection of writings, poems and other stuff.

First they came...,

When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
after all I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
after all I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
after all I was not a trade unionist.

[When they came for the Jews and the Romani
I did not speak out;
after all I was not a Jew or a Roma]

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.

Pastor Martin Niemöller (with additional verse by me)

What A Waste Of A Life - Grovelling To God!

What's with this idea that somehow belief in gods gives your life a purpose? What is it that induces otherwise normal people - at least I'll assume they are in the absence of evidence to the contrary (though I concede that these tweets may indeed be that evidence) - to tell the world this sort of thing?

Creationism in Crisis - 30 Thousand Years of European Hominin History

Creationism in Crisis

30 Thousand Years of Continuous European Human History

Depiction of the people of the Ice Age.

Credit: Esteban De Armas/Shutterstock

Artist's impression of life in a Gravettian camp

Source

We thought the first hunter-gatherers in Europe went missing during the last ice age. Now, ancient DNA analysis says otherwise

It's another bad day for Creationism. Close on the news that scientists have reconstructed the last 100 million years of the history of Earth's surface, comes news that a different group of scientists have revealed the last 30,000 years of the history of Homo sapiens in Europe.

Since Creationists are capable of holding to the belief that Earth is only 10,000 years old because ancient Bronze Age nomads who knew no better thought so, despite the fact that the last 100 million years of its history is known in detail, they should have little difficulty in ignoring the evidence that Europeans have a known history stretching back three times longer than they believe Earth has existed. After all, what is a mere 30,000 years when 100 million years can be ignored?

In fact, we know from fossil evidence that early modern human hunter-gatherers spread out of Africa and across Eurasia beginning about 45,000 years ago. The mystery was what happened to them during period between 25,000 and 19,000 years ago when the last Ice Age was at its maximum and much of Europe was under vast ice sheets like that covering Greenland today.

Some authorities believed that European Homo sapiens disappeared during that time, but this recent research shows that they hung on in France and the Iberian Peninsula, to repopulate Europe as the ice sheets retreated north. The evidence is in the traces of their DNA now found in modern Europeans. The scientists who made this discovery have published their work in two papers, one in Nature and the other in Nature, Ecology & Evolution

One of the authors of these papers, Adam B. Rohrlach of the Department of Archaeogenetics, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany and the School of Mathematical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia, has written about the team's research in The Conversation. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency. The original article can be read here.

Old Dead Gods - What Does The Cerne Abbas Giant Depict And When Was It Created?

Aerial view showing the field below the giant and the “herepath” curving up onto Giant Hill from the bottom right,
Cerne Abbas, Dorset, England.

Photo: Pete Harlow, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Cerne Abbas Giant, Cerne Abbas, Dorset, England.

Photo: Ray Gaffney. © National Trust.

Uncovering the mystery of Dorset’s Cerne Giant

The thing about most of the ancient monuments and hill markings like the Uffington White Horse after whom the district of Oxfordshire I live in was named, is that no-one knows what religion the people who made them believed in or how, if indeed it did, their religion inspired (or required) them to create these monuments. I have written extensively about monuments such as Stonehenge, Durrington Walls, Silbury Hill, Avebury Stone Circle and West Kennet Long Barrow as example of how little we know about these ancient people and their religion(s) because these ancient monuments stand as testament to the transient and ephemeral nature of gods and religions on the scale of human history.

Unlike science, which, if some disaster befell humankind and all memory of a major science were expunged from memory, could be reconstructed from basic principles because it describes reality, religions, once lost and forgotten are lost forever because there is nothing substantial upon which to found a rediscovery. The entire edifice of religion is unsupported and insubstantial, being nothing more than collective imaginings and handed-down stories and myths, dependent entirely on faith to sustain them in the absence of evidence.

Lesson from France - Massacre of the Cathars of Carcassonne, or How Christians Settled Theological Differences

Slideshow code developed in collaboration with ChatGPT3 at https://chat.openai.com/

Street below the Cité De Carcassonne with the Citadel on the Hill

We've just spent a day in Carcassonne, in southern France, just north of the Spanish border. It's a place every Christian should visit as a reminder of the blood-soaked history of their religion because Carcassonne was the site of one of the most brutal periods of Catholic history until the conquest of the Americas, the Albigensian Crusade.

The Albigensian crusade was conducted on the orders of Pope Innocent III, surely one of the most misnamed Popes in history; a crusade with the objective of nothing less than a total genocide of the Cathars and their religion.

The technique put into practice many of the methods used to terrorize populations and force them into submission that had been developed in the Crusades against the Moslems of the Eastern Mediterranean, where the method was to promise land to the barons and noblemen who led the armies, and the spoils of looting and pillage to the mobs of mercenaries that comprised to soldiery. There were no provisions for feeding and supplying the rag-taggle mobs as they raged through the countryside, so they had to take wheat they needed from the local populations. Towns and villages were ransacked, and the inhabitants slaughtered as a matter of routine.


And bloodletting was encouraged and glorified, to the extent that one observer recorded enthusiastically how the streets of Jerusalem were ankle-deep in blood when the Christian mob over-ran it.
The origins of Catharism are somewhat obscure, as it contained several different ideas fused into a loose system of beliefs with no central authority, so it tended to vary in different communities. A central idea was the essentially Gnostic belief in two gods - a good god of the spiritual domain and an evil god (Satan) who created the physical world and trapped angels inside human bodies. The creator (evil) god was the god of the Old Testament and the good god was the god of the New Testament, who Jesus was sent to tell us about. Escape from the physical world was through death and a special form of baptism to enable reunion with the god of the spiritual realm.

Like Catholicism does today, Catharism was obsessed with sex and saw sexual intercourse as sinful unless performed in the prescribed manner and pre-blessed by a priest in a special ceremony.

A consequence of their belief that the physical world was the domain of Satan and created by him to keep people away from God, was that everything to do with sexual intercourse was to be avoided because it produces more physical reality and more angels trapped in human bodies, so they were Pescatarians, believing that meat, cheese, milk and eggs were the result of sexual intercourse, but fish spontaneously generated and thus were safe to eat. The general disapproval of sexual intercourse caused some obvious problems for some Cathar communities, but others had found a way round it in a legend that the origins of the battle between good and evil in Heaven was because Satan had seduced one of God's wives (he has two, apparently), or maybe it was God who seduced one of Satan's two wives. This was sufficient evidence that God has sexual intercourse, so doesn't prohibit it.

Faking It At Fatima

Crowd watch the 'miracle of the sun'

Lúcia Santos (left) with her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, 1917

Source: Wikipedia - Our Lady of Fátima

With the approaching 98th anniversary of the supposed miracles of Fatima, Portugal, it's worth looking at this particular example of how the Catholic Church operates and how truth becomes an early victim in its incessant search for spectacles to keep the faithful faithful and the money flowing in.

First a bit about 'miracles' in general.

The Catholic Church is notorious for using 'miracles' to convince its believers that it is the one true church, believing in the one true god and that it has a special relationship with the ruler and creator of the Universe. The problem it has to overcome is the problem of having no evidence whatsoever for that claim, so it needs trickery. Experience has shown that 'miracles' are particular effective on the poor, uneducated and unsophisticated people who make up the bulk of Catholic congregations worldwide.

Miracles are especially useful for the Church because, by definition, there can be no physical contradictory evidence, just as there can be no physical evidence for them, because otherwise they wouldn't be supernatural 'miracles' but perfectly natural events with perfectly natural explanations. 'Faith' fills the gap and renders the lack of evidence a mere inconvenience, even, in some strange way, confirmation.

Spot The Loonies

Here's a good game.

According to Christians, Christians are good people who love others, never judge because they believe that's their god's prerogative, and always try to forgive. Because their god is watching over them, they can be relied upon to always be honest and truthful, and never to try to mislead with misinformation because bearing false witness is a sin and their god sees everything and never forgets. People, being the creation of their perfect god are all of equal worth, obviously.

Atheists, on the other hand, are evil people who have no way of telling right from wrong and so can't be trusted to be honest. Because they don't believe a god created everything, they have no respect for it and give nothing any value beyond its utility value.

So, if Christians are right, it should be easy to guess who said the following.

Give it a try, then hover over the word 'Show' to see who said it.

(If you don't agree with Christians, you may find this easier.)

New York Religions - Trying to Solve the Problems Religions Cause.

Dec 11, 2019. Orthodox Jewish men pass New York City police guarding a Brooklyn synagogue prior to a funeral for Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn who was killed in a shooting at a market in Jersey City, N.J.

Credit: AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

In New York, interfaith coalition makes common cause against rising tide of hate

Concerned by the rising tide of inter-faith tension and hate resulting in violent attacks on members of one faith by members of another, a group of New York's faith organizations have got together to try to solve the problem faiths are causing.

According to a report in Religion News Service:

On April 16, clergy from 20 New York congregations, including Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Christians, met as the Interfaith Security Council held its first meeting to talk about how to share expertise and improve relations with law enforcement.

This was prompted by, amongst other incidents, the mass shooting in Pittsburg, PA, in October 2018, when a gunman attacked worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue, killing 11 people, vandalism at four synagogues in the Riverdale neighbourhood of Bronx, NY, last week, and the killing of Mosche Deutsch, a rabbinical student from Brooklyn in Jersey City, N.J. on Dec 11, 2019. Armed police had to be deployed at the Brooklyn synagogue where his funeral took place.

The Interfaith Security Council is an umbrella organisation bringing together several other religious security organizations, one of which is 67th Precinct Clergy Council of Brooklyn, which supports mostly churches in the borough’s East Flatbush area. It's president, Pastor Gilford Monrose, of Mt. Zion Church of God 7th Day, blamed white supremacists for the escalating level of inter-faith violence with:

More Einstein On Religion

If there is a scientist who religious apologists love to claim agreed with them it's Albert Einstein. Not only has Einstein become, in the popular imagination, the archetype of what the scientifically illiterate imagine to be a scientist (dishevelled, a little bit scatty, even slightly mad (which he wasn't) and absent-minded (again, not true)), but he is acknowledged as one of the all-time greats; a genius by any standard who showed us that reality can be decidedly counter-intuitive. But he has one outstanding quality from a religious apologists point of view: he is dead and so can't refute the claims they make about him and his views on religion.

Fortunately though, he was never shy to state his views when asked and did record them for posterity.

I have previously blogged about this with Albert Einstein On Religion but here is a much more extensive collection of Einstein's recorded religious views. I originally came across this collection in Chapter 22 of Christopher Hitchen's book "The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever", compiled by Miguel Chavez, however the list is almost identical, save for the final two quotes, to one on "The Unofficial Stephen J Gould Archive", to which the bulk of the credit must go.

The list is numbered and tagged for ease of reference. To reference any one of these quotes, simply add a hash (#) followed by the appropriate number (e.g. #22) to the url of this page.

1. "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."

A Big Welcome To New Atheists

So you've finally admitted to yourself that you're an Atheist!

The first thing to understand is that you're not alone; you are part of a very rapidly growing world-wide 'community' of Atheists. I use the term 'community' loosely here because Atheism is not an organised movement. It doesn't commit you to believing in anything in place of gods so there are no dogmas, axioms or tenets of faith (how could there be?). Atheism is not an alternative faith. Atheism is an alternative to faith. It has been said that the only certainty is that there are no certainties.

Origins Of The Exodus Myth

With so many to choose from, it's difficult to decide which of the various folk tales, invented 'histories' and origin myths that have found themselves bound up in the same book and presented as the inerrant word of an omnipotent god is the silliest, but one of them has to be the tale of Hebrew enslavement in Egypt and subsequent escape.

It was obviously written by someone who knew little or nothing of the geography or politics of the time and place the tale was set, so we have the idiotic notion of the 'Israelites' escaping from Egypt by crossing the Red Sea to Sinai - which was also in Egypt. That's like 'escaping' from the USA by crossing the Hudson River from New Jersey to Manhattan or escaping from the UK by crossing the Bristol channel from England to Wales. The author also has the 'slaves' building the Egyptian city of Raamses - which wasn't started until some 120 after the traditional date of the Exodus.

Inspiring Atheists

One of the more condescending arguments used by sufferers from religion, and ranking alongside their claim to hold a monopoly on morality for demonstrably unjustified arrogance, is that without religion we wouldn't have great works of art, music, etc., because only religion can inspire human beings to artistic creativity.

While there can be little doubt that religious subjects were often the subject of great works of art or musical composition - the breath-taking beauty of Handel's Messiah and Van Gough's "The Sower" spring to mind. (Some might struggle to see the religion in Van Gough's works but it absolutely pervades it. Look at the painting on the right. It's one of Vincent van Gough's most profoundly religious paintings, in my opinion).

I'll maybe write a blog about Atheist artists one day. This one is about Atheist composers.

It will probably come as a surprise to religion sufferers who like to pretend their co-superstitionists have a monopoly on artistic creativity that there is an enormous list of Atheist and non-believer composers, and that many of them wrote 'religious' music. Some of them, like Elgar and Mozart lost faith in later life, so whatever religious beliefs may have inspired their earlier works, they clearly never inspired them to remain religious.

Good Job God!

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils c.1826

The Book of Job in the Bible is a curious book. Like the story of Noah and the Flood, its only purpose seems to be to remind us what a capricious, murderous and unpredictable deity Yahweh is, as thought whoever decided to include it in the Bible thought we needed to be frightened of the deity in it and cowed into submission lest we dared to question what the priests were telling us.

Like Noah and the Flood, and much of the Old Testament for that matter, it seems to carry no moral message for mankind, unless the morality being espoused is "Obey without question or suffer the consequences and never take Yahweh for granted", like the lesson taught by a protection racketeer's heavies when they accidentally drop that antique vase or set fire to a shop down the road, just to remind you to show your appreciation for Big Ron's protection. Or maybe the moral is, "Just keep smiling and all will turn out right in the end - and don't ask us why things don't seem to be right just now!", like a rogue trader who's taken your money with no intention of ever delivering.

The book of job is one of the most powerful arguments against God in the atheist arsenal. It proves once and for all that YHWH is not a good god. Even if such a god exists, we surely cannot rely on him to define our morals, to tell us what is good or bad. If holiness is what gods do, then holiness is a terrible thing.

Victor J. Stenger. The New Atheism:
Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.
(Kindle Locations 1587-1589). Kindle Edition.

Like the Flood myth, Job seems to be based heavily on a folk tale rather than someone's idea of real history, although, in the days before writing, there was probably no real distinction between traditional stories and 'history' as both would have been related by story-tellers with a blurred distinction between fact and fiction. Curiously, in another example of the glaring contradictions in the Bible which Christians find so embarrassing they have to pretend not to have noticed them, Job is described as 'perfect', so, presumably, the author of this tale was unaware of the Adam and Eve story when God decreed that everyone was to be a sinner, and therefore definitely not perfect. Another example of authors writing stuff they never imagined at the time would be gathered together with other stories, bound up in a single book and presented as inerrant truth - a problem which plagues the New Testament even more than it does the Old.

Like the Flood and the story of Lot and the 'Cities of the Plain', Job seems to be derived from a volcano god, or at least a god of natural disasters. As we shall see, the killing of Job's flocks of sheep seems to be the work of a volcano god.

The story is that Job was a 'perfect and upright man' who (understandably as things turned out) 'feared God'. He was rich and successful and owned a lot of sheep, and offered sacrifices every day just in case his sons and daughters had got up to anything improper during the previous night's feasting and drinking.

Now the story takes a bit of a strange turn, and one in which the previous banishment of Satan from God's presence seems to have been set aside for the sake of the narrative, or because the author was, yet again, unaware of the other Bible stories. One day, God and 'the sons of God' (who they?) were gathered together when who should turn up but Satan, apparently one of the lads. Satan tells God he's been taking a bit of a look at Earth and God asks what he thinks of Job, like Job is some sort of prize exhibit.

The story seems to be set in time when there were lots of gods and this particular god was the father of them, like the Graeco-Indian god, Dyaus Petar (God the Father) who became Zeus, Jupiter, Dios, Dei and Theos, and God and his sons would regularly gather together in Heaven to watch the humans below.

Satan then taunts God and says Job only fears him because he's protected him and prevented anything bad happening. "I bet he'd soon change his mind if you took away everything he has", say's Satan.

"Rubbish!", says God, who, although he's the supreme ruler of the Universe and accountable to no one, decides he's got to prove himself to Satan by making life unbearable for Job

William Blake, Job's Sons and Daughters Overwhelmed by Satan 1821

Satan 1: God 0.

And there was a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house: And there came a messenger unto Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them: And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans made out three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have carried them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house:

And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord. In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.

Job 1:13-22

Wow! What a class act, eh? When you need a roll-model, look no further than God for how to treat those who love and trust you when they need to prove themselves to one of the lads!

But it gets worse!

A few days later, Satan happens by again and taunts God some more, with, "That was nothing! All you did was take away his property and kill all his children! Hurt him! See what he does then!"

And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me against him, to destroy him without cause.

And Satan answered the Lord, and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse thee to thy face.

And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life. So went Satan forth from the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils from the sole of his foot unto his crown.

Job 2:3-7

So God gave Job to Satan to do whatever he wanted with him, except let him die, no matter how much he wanted to, and Satan, ever the imaginative demon, gave Job a nasty case of the boils.

Satan 2: God 0.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, after Job has been urged by his wife (who then mysteriously seems to disappear from the story) to put a stop to all this by cursing God, and after being mocked by his friends, he still refuses to curse the person responsible for it, so God speaks out of a whirlwind (I'm not making this up!) and Job agrees that God can do whatever he wants, proving the point to Satan, at least to God's satisfaction, so God gives him back everything he had taken away, with a bit extra for his trouble, and gives him some replacement children to make up for those he had killed to win his bet with Satan and they all live happily ever after.

Apart from the disappeared wife, and the murdered children, and the servants (i.e. slaves) who obviously counted for nothing.

So, who won the bet exactly?

At the start of the story, God is benignly watching over a man and his family making a success of their lives and enjoying the rewards for their endeavours; at the end of it, God has shown himself to be a psychopathic bully, quite capable of victimising an innocent man, killing his family and his equally undeserving servants, and making his life a misery to prove himself to one of the lads, like an insecure adolescent trying desperately to one of the gang and having to go through some sort of laddish rite of passage.

And Satan has proved he can make God do whatever he wants him to do because God has a need to prove himself and God shows that, for all practical purposes, he is indistinguishable from a malevolent, evil god, quite capable of inflicting suffering on a capricious whim with no thought for his victims - and so not the omnibenevolent, omnipotent god children are told about in Sunday school and Bible class, and which even some otherwise perfectly rational adults still believe in.

Some giver of morals, eh?

Satan 3: God 0.

But very effective for frightening superstitious people with, as no doubt the Bible's authors intended.

---

On The Eighth Day God Had His Appraisal Interview

Scene: Outside a large office block. Slightly dilapidated sign reads "Universe Constructions, Inc."

Scene moves into austere wood-panelled office. Desk; two chairs: One large, leather with arms; one small wooden, wobbly.

Important-looking man in suit (Zeus) open door for long-haired, youth dressed in white toga and sandals and holding a staff for no apparent good reason. Has a superior looking smirk, and a slight twitch in one eye.

Zeus: Ah! Yahweh. Nice to see you. Take a seat... No! That one is mine. That one, please.

Okay! Now the purpose of this chat is to give you a some feedback on how your probationary period is going, and for you to let us know if you're having any problems. Sort of two-way process keeping everything on track so to speak. The HR department insist on it but we all have our cross to bear, don't we, and the head of HR can get really cross. Ha ha ha!

I like to keep it informal but the important thing is that we are both frank and honest with one another. No elephants in the corner so to speak. Ha ha.