In 1971 a NASA space orbiter named Mariner 9 discovered that the canals on Mars were illusory. This discovery strongly disconfirmed the claim that there was intelligent life on that planet. Before this discovery many people claimed they encountered Martians. Afterward, Martians stopped visiting us and aliens started visiting us from Venus. Then after the surface of Venus was found to be hot enough to melt lead Venusians stopped visiting us too. Now they come from far more distant places in our universe. What best explains this? It’s because there were never any Martians or Venusians who visited earth.



When we examine the messages from UFO’s they have always been fashionable to the particular time period. None of them conveyed any new scientific information even though they should be far more advanced than us. Before the Cold War was over the messages warned of nuclear war, then later they warned us about the degradation of our environment. Carl Sagan, in his masterful treatment of this phenomena in his book, The Demon Haunted World , asked why UFO’s didn’t warn us about ozone depletion in the 1950’s, or about the HIV virus in the 1970’s, “when it might really have done some good?...Can it be that aliens know only as much as those who report their presence?” (p. 101).



Now apply this same critical thinking to the Bible and it's God. You don’t believe Martians or Venusians visited earth. Why? Because we discovered some facts about these planets (yes, I know we’ve discovered water on Mars). You also don’t believe they visited us because the messages these aliens supposedly communicated were not the kind we would expect, offering us nothing new and ever changing with the times.



That’s why you shouldn’t believe God of the Bible.



First, when we discovered the gods didn't live in the mountains believers then proposed they lived in the sky. As we gradually discovered how huge the sky was, the God of faith got bigger too, until believers claimed he lived in an entirely different realm.



Second, Christian, why didn't your God tell us that drinking polluted water would kill us, as would lead poisoning. Why didn’t he tell us which poisonous plants and creatures would kill us if we ate them or they bit us? Many people, mostly children, had to die in every part of the globe because your god was too busy telling us how to use our penises.



Where in the Bible can we find your god telling us how to discover penicillin, or a vaccine for tuberculosis, or polio. Some basic information during the Bubonic Plague would have been helpful, such as information about quarantining people. And with god’s help scientists today could’ve created a vaccine for the world-wide Spanish Influenza outbreak of 1918 which killed an estimated 50 million people.



But no. We find none of this in the so-called message from God in the Bible, and that’s only the beginning.



Come on now. Can you actually believe that an omniscient perfectly good being told us more about using our penises than some of this other information, things that the ancients just didn’t know? You don’t believe in Martians. Why do you believe in the biblical God?



The ONLY explanation that fits the data is that Christians are delusional.



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First posted 12/30/10