Myths

I’ve been reading a lot of Greek mythology lately. I first got into Greek myths when I was in fifth grade, but my parents demanded that I stop reading them so as not to be corrupted by their pagan messages. In my upbringing, everything that was not my parent’s particular brand of Christianity was WRONG. As a result, I wasted a lot of my life believing a lot of bullshit. There’s a very good reason why I have such a strong dislike for religion in general and Christianity in particular.

Followers of a religion do not have to think. In fact, they should not think. All the answers to everything in existence are given to them by their religion. Everything told them by their religion is unquestionably true. Any part of a religion which seems untrue, contradictory or does not make sense must be believed anyway on what Christians call “faith.” Faith is the noun form of the adjective “gullible.”

Faith is an evolutionary survival adaptation. Humans have been wired to believe every optimistic story they hear and convince themselves that life is worthwhile. Without faith, we would all delve into hopelessness and despair and our species wouldn’t last very long. I guess my lack of faith is evidenced in that I am the only person I know who thinks that all humans should stop procreating so that we will die off and return balance and stability to the planet.

The extent of the power of faith is frankly amazing. As demonstrated by the Placebo Effect, faith does work. The Placebo Effect is a phenomenon in which a sick person will be healed about 33% of the time if they simply believe they will be healed. Therefore, if you give a person a tic-tac and tell them it will cure them and they believe it, there’s a 33% chance that the tic-tac actually will cure them. That is why so many healers can make so much money doing stupid stuff like pretending to pull maladies through the skin of gullible people. The self-fulfilling prophecy is another case of faith in action. Faith increases as it proves itself effective, adding fuel to its powers. The degree to which a person with faith will believe the most absurd statement or scenario is without compare. One can point out the most obvious flaws, inconsistencies and impossibilities of a religion ad naseum and a person with faith in that religion will be absolutely unable to even perceive those failings. Beyond refusing to understand anything contrary to their religion, faith actually renders them incapable of understanding.


Let me demonstrate:

In Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there is a story of a great flood which covers the earth. This story was largely plagiarized from the Assyro-Babylonian epic of Atrahasis. According to calculations I made about 15 years ago using the genealogies listed in the book of Genesis, this occurred 930 years after God created Adam: the same year that Adam died (the Islam version of the story varies somewhat but I’m not familiar with it). (Because much of the goal of the Old Testament was to unite various nomadic tribes by giving them a common history and religion, its genealogy is so precise that the only unknown time period in it is how long the Jewish people were supposedly enslaved by the Egyptians. Unsurprisingly, the beginning of the earth according to the Old Testament coincides with the invention of writing.) Assuming a “cubit” (the length from the tip of your finger to your elbow) equals 18 inches, the Hebrew Ark was approximately 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet tall (almost half as long as the Titanic). It was made with a wood frame which was covered with reeds and then coated with tar. Then it was filled with 8 people (Noah was a spry 500 years old), at least 2 of every bird and animal plus extras for food and doused by rain for 40 days, 24 hours a day.

Supposedly enough rain fell to cover the entire planet. But since God apparently didn’t know about most of the planet when the story was written, I’ll grant that only the entire Middle East, which is a desert, needed to be underwater. After floating around for 150 days after the rain stopped, the Ark landed on Mt. Ararat, in Turkey. Mt. Ararat is 16,854 feet high today, but since it is a volcano, it may have been taller of shorter 930 years after the earth and everything in it was created. Irregardless, Mt. Ararat was a tall mountain.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine Mt. Ararat was 15,500 feet high (I use that number because there is a point at that height where many say the Ark landed). At that height, it would have had to have rained almost 400 feet per day, which is about 17 feet an hour or about 3 inches a minute.

According to the internet, Guinness’ book of World Records says that the heaviest recorded rainfall occurred in Guadeloupe in 2005, where 1.5 inches fell in one minute, and the most rain that has ever been recorded falling over a 24 hour period was 6 feet in La Reunion Island. In order to raise the water level of the entire Middle East 3 inches a minute, basically another ocean from outer-space would have had to have landed on it. This would obviously have crushed not only the Ark, but everything else in the region.

Despite the fact that nothing in the entire biblical flood story is remotely believable, millions if not billions of people not only believe it, they insist that it really happened. And because of the phenomenon of “faith,” any attempt to dissuade them from believing such blatant hogwash will largely fall on deaf ears....