Halloween is upon us, and that, for me, means it’s zombie-hunting season. This week, I’ve budgeted ample time to watch my favorite zombie movies and play my favorite zombie video games. I’m in such the Halloween spirit that yesterday I made this video:
Few books have had so profound an impact on Judeo-Christian religious thought as Isaiah. It was once assumed by believers that the book was the unified work of a sole author, an eighth-century BC prophet named Isaiah who lived in the Kingdom of Judah. This view is still popular among the Christian and Jewish laity. But the true authorship of Isaiah has been the subject of considerable controversy.
The first to challenge the unity of Isaiah came from Jewish writer Moses Ibn Gekatilla in the second century AD. Modern critical scholarship of the book of Isaiah, however, didn’t begin for another 1,600 years. In 1789, Johann Doederlein argued that chapters 40-66 of Isaiah were actually the work of a post-exilic author—the so-called ‘Deutero (Second) Isaiah.’
Doederlein’s theory that there were at least two authors of the book of Isaiah is now held as a truism by the majority of Bible scholars. (Some posit a ‘Trito (Third) Isaiah’ who wrote chapters 56-66.) I won’t review all of the reasons why scholars reject the unity of Isaiah, but it’s important to briefly discuss a few.
Last week, I challenged Mormons to defend the genocide their god committed in 3 Nephi 8 and 9. Coincidentally, someone also recently challenged Christian apologist extraordinaire Dr. William Lane Craig to defend the genocide his god condoned in Deuteronomy 20, where Yahweh orders the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the neighboring territories. Craig’s response echoes many of the sentiments that were expressed by Mormons at this blog.
Craig first defends the genocide with an appeal to divine command theory. Nixon infamously said that, “When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.” Well, Craig would have us similarly believe that when god perpetrates genocide, that means that it is not immoral.
According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God. Since God doesn’t issue commands to Himself, He has no moral duties to fulfill. He is certainly not subject to the same moral obligations and prohibitions that we are. For example, I have no right to take an innocent life. For me to do so would be murder. But God has no such prohibition. He can give and take life as He chooses.
The Bible gives a categorical commandment that we honor our fathers. This commandment was so important to the Hebrews that they proscribed the death penalty for transgressing it. In Leviticus 20:9, we read: “For every one that curseth his father or his mother shall be surely put to death: he hath cursed his father or his mother; his blood shall be upon him.”
To be clear, it’s not wrong to honor your father (especially today, Father’s Day!). But I’m not so sure every father deserves our unconditional love, respect, and obedience. My father has certainly earned those things from me—a million times over. Other fathers, however, have not.
Steve Wells over at Dwindling In Unbelief has compiled a list of bad father figures in the Bible. You’ll have to check out his full list, but I just wanted to highlight a few examples:
Noah got stumbling drunk and passed out—naked—in his tent. His poor son Ham inadvertently discovered him in this condition. Realizing that Ham saw him naked, Noah curses Ham’s son Canaan and all the descendants thereof to be “servants of servants” (a rather disproportionate response).
Lot, the only “just and righteous man” in Sodom and Gomorrah, volunteered his daughters to be raped by a mob so as to spare his two male guests (angels). Later, his daughters would rape him and bear his children.
Abraham was willing to offer up his son Isaac as a human sacrifice, as you all know.
Jephthah killed and burned his daughter, whose only crime was to greet her father upon his return from battle.
And then of course you have Yahweh, the father figure in the Bible, who drowned millions of his children and (depending on your Christology 
sent his “only begotten Son” on a suicide mission.
Via Debunking Christianity.
This is an admittedly lazy post, and I apologize. But because the semester is winding up, I have less time to devote to this blog. I hope you enjoy the video all the same.
Here are more Bible contradictions, and apologetic responses to them.
I’ve been meaning to post this video for a while, but it’s particularly instructive after the discussion of Biblical inerrantism and the Gospels’ veracity on the last post.
Dan Barker, president of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, has issued a challenge to Christians that is especially relevant today: Explain the Easter story—the story of Christ’s death and resurrection.
Sounds reasonable and easy enough, no? Well, the challenge has proved extraordinarily difficult for those Christians who hold to an inerrantist reading of the Bible. The Gospel accounts about the resurrection contain many discrepancies among them. Here are but a few: