You might think I’m splitting existential hairs here, but I think there is an important distinction, which is often lost on most believers.

I’m not actually an atheist, and I’m sorry if I’ve been wrong on that point. I’ve just got a lack of personal experience and thus (clearly) a lack of understanding, but I didn’t mean to offend anyone. As for Mark 16 being an invention…the whole Bible is an invention, I’m sure, just like every other holy book out there. When I was a child, that was the first objection I had to the idea of Christianity; I sat there and went, “Wait, how do I even know who really wrote this? The whole thing was written by men, and men lie.” The Noah myth and pretty much all of Genesis couldn’t stand up to even my eight-year-old examination, and from there on out it was just, “Okay, if this and this are false, the rest of it probably isn’t true, either.” What I couldn’t understand was how none of the Christians I knew could see this, since I was just a kid and most of them were adults.

Last year I did a few posts on known alterations to the New Testament. The whole story about Christ’s ascent into heaven is not in the earliest manuscripts (Mark 16, 9-20). Therefore, we know that it is an invention.

I’d like to address one thing you said: “Even atheism is a type of faith; it’s believing that there is no higher power.” Ummm, no.

Atheism is a lack of faith, not just some less popular variety of it. I lack a belief in a god. I do not assert that there is no god, at least in a technical sense. Of course, when I get on a rhetorical roll, I might say something of the sort, but I always reserve the right to be corrected. You might think I’m splitting existential hairs here, but I think there is an important distinction, which is often lost on most believers.

I cannot prove that something does not exist, not even the Flying Spaghetti Monster (all hail his noodly goodness. RAmen). However, I can easily recognize when there is no evidence to support the claim of a given thing’s existence, in this case, God. Despite several thousand years of theological thought, no one has yet to produce an irrefutable proof of a god’s existence. I therefore carry on with my life as if there is no god. And while I’m 99.99% confident there is no god, I cannot rule it out completely. Maybe there is a god after all, and one day before I die, for some inexplicable reason it might deign to reveal itself to everyone in some unmistakable fashion. But I’m not about to hold my breath waiting.

Strangely, though, I’ve had a hard time getting fundies to see the parallels between their fantasy and any other. They really can’t seem to see that it isn’t any more ridiculous to believe in hobbits and elves than it is to believe that Noah’s Flood really happened or that donkeys can talk or that unicorns exist. It’s like trying to talk a schizophrenic out of believing that his dog is talking to him through the shower head.

They just glare at you with that humorless “thous shalt be damned” look.

Take the creation myth in Genesis. I don’t know any Christian who thinks it took literally a week for God to create the Earth. They’re not dumb enough or blind enough to ignore the evidence of science; as my mother-in-law says, who knows how long a “day” is in Heaven. (I like talking religion with her, because she’s very reasonable about it, and if she’s at all judgmental she’s never let on.) Ditto Noah; many, many cultures have a flood myth, and her theory is that there was a fairly sudden climate-shift that devastated a lot of the world. The Noah myth is logically impossible to take literally, because if there was only one pair of everything, it all would have died out in a few generations due to inbreeding. (What were Noah’s sons supposed to do, bugger their mother to have babies?)

Personally, I agree with the movie “Dogma”: faith is better than religion, and it doesn’t matter what you have faith in so long as you have it. Even atheism is a type of faith; it’s believing that there is no higher power. I don’t personally know any atheists, but I do know many agnostics, and people like my mother-in-law, who take the Bible for what it is: a story. It’s possible to have strong spirituality without being a freak about it, and unfortunately these fundies don’t seem to understand that at all.

Also, Sue, I love your Tolkien story. Honestly, I’m kind of surprised nobody’s built a major religion around The Silmarillion; after all, Mormonism and Scientology got off the ground, and they’re far more ridiculously implausible.

Also, interesting fact: Australia recognizes “Jedi” as an official religion. Their censuses (censi? I don’t know) have a space for religion, and if a certain percentage of the population claim the same one, they add it to the registry. If I lived there, I would definitely either put that or Tolkienism, just because.

The reaction was priceless.

Your points are well founded. In fact, elsewhere on his site, Tobin compares the Bible to Homer’s Iliad to give us some perspective on how well or poorly the Bible survived the ravages of antiquity. It gets complicated, because of the different types of manuscripts and how complete they are, but, generally speaking, the Bible is roughly equivalent to the Iliad in terms of surviving copies, completeness, contradictory versions, etc. Tobin explains it all in detail.

So yes, all texts of this antiquity are going to have multiple incomplete copies, with contradictory versions among those that survive. Serious scholarship is required to try to put Humpty back together again.

Or maybe Homer just forgot to include the part that says “This story is 100% true.” That might have made all the difference.