I recently happened upon this mini-monstrosity in a used bookstore:

Yes, it’s a little popup book of Bible Heroes! The thing isn’t more than about 4″ x 5″, and it’s only ten pages long.

I read the thing, but it somehow didn’t feel complete. But what was missing? Dialog! That’s it, dialog!

I’m always concerned that people aren’t being given the complete stories, so I took it upon myself to add the word balloons that were obviously missing from these illustrations.

Over the next few days, I will be publishing the corrected versions of the five stories presented in this book. Let’s begin with illustration #1:

One of the best things to do on a lazy Saturday afternoon is to curl up with a good pulp magazine. Here’s a story from the August 1936 issue of Thrilling Mystery (See this recent post for the cover scan to this issue):

The story is called “The Grave Gives Up”, by Jack D’Arcy. Check out that character on the far right in the illustration above. He looks like Freddie Kruger!

Anyway, the story starts out quite promising. Protagonist Gordon Lane is feeling sorry for himself one night, because his girlfriend, Janice, died two weeks earlier in a minor traffic accident. Then suddenly, the phone rings! It’s his girlfriend calling from beyond the grave! She says “Gordon! Come to me! I need you!” Then the line goes dead!

Sweet! A weird menace story! I don’t know what’s going on, but the story is fun so far, so I continue reading.

Gordon jumps in his car to visit Dr. Ramos, who signed Janice’s death certificate. When he gets to Dr. Ramos’ house, here is how the author introduces the doctor:

He was a complete atheist, a crass materialist…

WTF?! An atheist? We’re only two pages into this story, and it’s pretty obvious who the bad guy is going to be. Need someone who is willing to reanimate the dead? Use an atheist! They have no morals!

Anyway, Dr. Ramos (physician, scientist, atheist) tells Gordon that Janice was really dead. Gordon vows to find out what is going on, so he hops back in his car and screeches off to the cemetery.

Wandering through the graveyard (remember, it’s nighttime), he hears a noise coming from a crypt, so he drops in for a visit. He discovers that a bunch of the coffins are opening up and corpses are coming out! He runs out of there and over to the crypt that Janice is in. He opens her coffin, and it’s empty!

Let’s stop and think about this for a minute. Earlier, the author introduced an atheist character, which we know that we will later discover is the evil culprit behind the walking dead. Gordon, the protagonist, is not an atheist. He must be right and proper and moral! So why the hell is this “moral” character breaking open coffins?!

Back to the story. Gordon runs over to the caretaker’s cottage and pounds on the door. The caretaker comes to the door, and it’s that guy in the illustration above! It’s Freddie Kruger! Of course, Gordon doesn’t know this, because it’s almost 50 years before those movies will come out. Gordon turns his back on the caretaker and gets whomped on the head with a blackjack.

When Gordon wakes up, he’s in some sort of chamber beneath the cemetery. A bunch of zombies are digging a hole. Freddie Kruger occasionally smacks them with a whip to keep them moving. Janice is there, a perfect little zombie. And of course, the evil atheist Dr. Ramos is there, holding both a knife and a gun. I guess Dr. Ramos is the belt-and-suspenders type.

Here’s how Dr. Ramos is reintroduced in this scene:

The doctor’s casual atheism, which the village had tolerated, suddenly became a fearful thing to Gordon Lane. It was a black unholiness—a defy to the very God who had created him.

At this point, everything is explained. The zombies aren’t really dead. They’re some of Dr. Ramos’ indigent patients. Nobody would miss them, so he told the authorities that they died. He then gave them Cannabis to “stupefy” them. Once they were stupefied, they were susceptible to his evil hypnotic mind control. He was then able to use them as zombies to dig up some sort of treasure that was supposed to be buried hereabouts.

This is absurd, of course. Everyone knows that pot saps your motivation. All that stoners want to do is sit on the couch, eating Cheetos and watching Brady Bunch reruns. Stoners do not make good workers.

How Janice got involved is when she had her minor car wreck and was taken to Dr. Ramos. He fell in love with her. So he told everyone that she died, then he “stupefied” her with Cannabis and hypnotized her.

Anyway, then there’s a big fight. Dr. Ramos gives the knife to Janice to have her kill Gordon. But because she loves Gordon, a tiny piece of her brain is still awake. This enables Gordon to overpower her long enough to seize the knife and throw it at Dr. Ramos (who shoots but misses). He goes down. His spell over Janice is broken. Oh, happy day!

After a suitable reunion scene between Gordon and Janice, they realize that Dr. Ramos might wake up and be pissed off about the knife that’s sticking out of him. Gordon tells Janice to call the cops while he immobilizes the doc. Janice runs off. Gordon decides that revenge is better than due process, so he takes the doctor’s gun and shoots him with it!

That’s how it ends, folks. I don’t know how Gordon is going to explain how Dr. Ramos ended up dead, since he was still alive and passed out when Janice left.

But look at that ending. The protagonist, who the author assures us throughout the story is a theist, murders the doctor in cold blood! It wasn’t even self defense! The doctor was still passed out on the ground! And they portrayed the atheist as the bad guy!

I was reading the headlines in yet another fundie “news” source, this one is called “The Church Report”, when I came across this headline: “Dobson Clarifies Comments on Harry Potter”.

Usually, when you see a headline like that, it means that somebody was quoted by a newspaper as making a thoroughly insipid comment that caused great embarrassment to the quotee and his followers. This is usually followed by a non-retraction retraction, whereby the person tries to convince us all that what he said isn’t nearly as retarded as it first sounded, and that he actually meant the opposite.

Since James Dobson is one of the most thoroughly evil men alive today, I thought “Wow! He must be trying to tone down some anti-Harry Potter statement he made. Maybe he’s not quite as backward, superstitious, and fearful of the modern world as I had been led to believe. I must read this article!”

The article starts out promising enough:

In what has been called an “error” in a story that appeared last Friday in the Washington Post, Focus on the [Fundie] founder, Dr, James Dobson, acted quickly Monday to make his thoughts clear on the boy wizard.

OK. So far so good. The article is following the standard damage control formula. Dobson must want us to know that he’s not so retarded that he’s afraid of a fictitious wizard in a made-up story of magical events. The article continues:

Dobson, responding to the newspaper article that wrote “Christian parenting guru James Dobson has praised the Potter books,” pointed out that this “is the exact opposite”.

Wh-wh-wh-WHAT?!

In a statement released on the Focus on the Family web site, Dobson went on to say that, “We have spoken out strongly against all of the Harry products.”

Wait! Dobson, you dolt! You’re doing the exact opposite! Your clarification statement is supposed to make you look less extreme, not more!

The statement went on to point out that his rationale for this is related to the “magical character, witches, wizards and goblins in the Harry Potter stories.

Geeeez!! It’s a freaking novel! It’s fiction! The magic in those stories is no more real than Sylvia Browne! Kids aren’t going to read a story about a wizard and then run out and join a coven any more than James Dobson is going to look at a picture of a sheep and want to get frisky with it.

(or at least I hope not. It seems like every week or two another fundie’s secret sex life is exposed. Just to be safe, maybe you’d better lock up your livestock.)

Anyway, the root cause of this crazy view of Harry Potter is that James Dobson and the rest of his ilk live in a very scary place. They (figuratively) hide under their beds, cowering in fear of what Carl Sagan described as the “demon-haunted world”.

Rationalists like me and (hopefully) you, live full, vibrant lives. We know what’s real and what isn’t. There are enough real things that can hurt us, and we fear and avoid those. But it’s a big world full of amazing sights, sounds, tastes, and ideas to discover and explore. We don’t fear our world; we embrace it.

But James Dobson lives in a world of fear. His fundamental belief, the very core idea of his entire life, is the literal and inerrant story told in the Bible. In his worldview, magic and sorcery are real! The Bible tells of people running around causing magical mayhem. Magic is real to him, so of course he wouldn’t want to mess with it, even in play (e.g., Harry Potter).

What a sad, stifling, and scary existence that must be.

I was in the local Barnes & Noble recently. I wandered over to the Religion section to see if there was anything especially alarming that I hadn’t seen yet.

Then I discovered that next to that was a section they call Religious Fiction. Here you’ll find crap like Left Behind and other “inspiring” stories of Armageddon.

I realized that the store was having difficulty keeping their shelves organized. I must help them! So I went over to the Religion section, grabbed a Bible, and refiled it correctly under Religious Fiction.

No need to thank me.

Here’s the second half of my review of Who Was Jesus?, an ebook by Acharya S. The book can be purchased for a “donation” of $5 or more. I enjoyed the book and recommend it.

Chapter 5: Textual Harmonization

Chapter 5 covers the problems Christians have had with “harmonization”, which is the process of reconciling the conflicting versions of the New Testament (NT). Actually, Christians seem to have a lot of problems with harmonization, since they seem to be incapable of living in harmony with non-Christians without starting wars, or at least complaining a lot about being “persecuted”.

The author states:

The difficulty of harmonization is profound, particularly when the many different manuscripts of the New Testament are factored into the puzzle, with upwards of 150,000 “variant readings,” including not only differences in wording but also errors.

150,000 is a lot of variations! In fact, she then quotes from The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible:

It is safe to say that there is not one sentence in the NT in which the [manuscript] tradition is wholly uniform.

That’s right. Not one sentence is completely reliable. How can this be the inerrant word of God?

She further quotes from The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible:

Many thousands of the variants which are found in the [manuscript] of the NT were put there deliberately. They are not merely the result of error or of careless handling of the text. Many were created for theological or dogmatic reasons… It is because the books of the NT are religious books, sacred books, canonical books, that they were changed to conform to what the copyist believed to be the true reading.

Are we to believe that every single copyist was “divinely inspired”? And even if it were true, why are they divinely inspired in so many different directions? To my mind, this completely destroys all of the Bible’s credibility. The best you can do is use these stories as morality tales.

Chapter 6: The Gospel Dates

When were these things written? The book’s author summarizes the current beliefs of various scholars:

• Matthew: 37 to 100 AD
• Mark: 40 to 73 AD
• Luke: 50-100 AD
• John: 65-100 AD

I’m inclined to believe in the later dates, for various reasons that she summarizes in the book. The earlier dates are mostly proposed by Christian apologists (“Christian Apologetics” is a term which I find peculiar. They have not yet begun to apologize for all of the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity!).

Many Christians are convinced that the gospels were written by the evangelists for whom they are named. This, of course, would not be possible if the later dates are correct. She addresses this issue with this interesting fact:

In reality, it was a fairly common practice in ancient times to attribute falsely to one person a book or letter written by another, and this pseudoepigraphical attribution of authorship was especially rampant with religious texts, occurring with several Old Testament figures and Church fathers, for example.

She then gives further evidence that the gospels were written years later by other people. She also mentions briefly that there is new evidence suggesting that the gospels were actually written toward the end of the Second Century C.E.

All of this just further convinces me that these stories lack credibility.

Chapter 7: Extrabiblical Testimony

That’s all we need, extra Bibles! As if the first one didn’t cause enough problems in the world! Actually, this refers to evidence outside the Bible that can shed light upon the credibility of the stories within the Bible.

This chapter of the book won’t be a surprise to anyone who has approached this subject with an open mind. I suspect, however, that it will cause massive cognitive dissonance among the fundies, who will likely be hearing this for the first time. She does an excellent job of summarizing the evidence:

However, when we go looking for material outside of the New Testament that might validate the events described there, we come up empty-handed. In other words, there is no contemporaneous evidence outside of the New Testament to attest to Christ’s advent and ministry—or even his existence.

This fact is singularly astounding, in consideration of the repeated assertions in the gospels that Christ was famed far and wide, drawing great crowds because of his miraculous healings, causing a fracas with the local and imperial authorities, and, upon his death, creating astonishing and awful miracles and wonders the world had never seen before, including not only an earthquake and the darkening of the sun and moon, but also dead people rising from their graves and visiting people in town.

“Brains!!” (Sorry. Back to the book…)

One would think that if all these things happened, someone somewhere would have written about them. But, inspecting the literary, historical and archaeological record produces nothing.

Chapter 8: Who are Elijah and Elisha?

She summarizes the characters of Elijah and Elisha, then presents a table showing the similarities between Elisha and Jesus, concluding with the question:

Considering these numerous, detailed and remarkable correspondences between Elisha (“God saves”) and Jesus (“God saves”), it is fair to ask whether or not the gospel writers had in mind closely reproducing in Jesus the figure of Elisha and/or other Old Testament characters.

Chapter 9: Jesus as Fulfillment of Prophecy

This leads into the issue of whether Jesus is the messiah prophesied in the Old Testament. This chapter summarizes some of the similarities between Jesus and the prophesies. The author concludes:

On the surface of it, if taken literally the New Testament appears to record the advent of the messiah, as prophesied in the Old Testament. However, there may be a different reason for this appearance. In scrutinizing all of the Old Testament “prophecies” that purportedly relate to the coming messiah, it is evident that the gospels were designed in order to show that these scriptures had been fulfilled in Jesus Christ. When these and other [Old Testament] scriptures are studied and seriously considered, therefore, it is logical to ask if they constitute “prophecies” and “prefiguring” of the advent of a historical Jesus Christ—or if they were used as a blueprint in the creation of a fictional messiah.

Chapter 10: Questions about the Gospel Story

This is an excellent chapter. It summarizes some of the many problems with the whole Jesus fable. The author talks briefly about these issues:

• Miracles
• Contradictions
• Errors
• Failed prophecies
• Chronological discrepancies
• Erroneous translations
• Erroneous interpretations
• Lack of character
• Illogic
• Repulsive deeds, sayings, and doctrines

Repeatedly, she uses examples of each of these issues to suggest that much of what the Bible says about Jesus are fictional accounts, designed to “prove” his divinity.

Chapter 11: Conclusion

I like her Conclusion chapter. It does a good job of tying together the evidence presented in earlier chapters. I was predisposed to her thesis from the beginning. I’m sure people with contrary opinions can come up with a few good counter-arguments.

Although this chapter runs more than one page, I’ll leave you with this brief excerpt:

The fact is that, when all the evidence is weighed, it would seem irresponsible and unscientific to merely assume the gospel tale is historical, either in part or as a whole. The most honest perspective would be to approach it as if it is not historical until evidence is presented otherwise.