A tw**t by Secular African, sent by Matthew Cobb:
There’s now a new question to supplement the old classic, “Why does God hate amputees?”: “Why does God love the Middle East so much?”
Why was God a stay-at-home?
October 20, 2013 • 12:20 pm
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huh? Shouldn’t the circle include lots of the Arabian peninsula?
Good point – Mecca is well outside that little circle.
Not just Mecca; Abraham according to tradition was born in Ur.
That too. 🙂
If the scholarship summarised in Tom Holland’s “In the Shadow of the Sword” is correct, then the original Mecca is inside the circle.
From what I understand (and I have read quite a bit about it), it is the original Mecca with the original Kabaa which was built long before Mohammed was born.
Yeah…Mecca doesn’t count?
Of course Mormons would argue that Jesus and Heavenly Father appeared to Joseph Smith in North America – quite outside the little circle.
Perhaps a more pertinent question would be: If Jesus (Yahweh, the Virgin Mary, etc.) routinely appeared in person to various folks right up until the 1800s (the relatively recent Joseph Smith visitation), why has he been so consistently shy since the invention of still photography and then the video camera?
Stagefright. And a bloated sense of self.
We’ve got CGI now – I sense that the whole cast of characters is poised for a comeback.
Because they are all vampires and cannot be seen in mirrors or photographed, QED
No, it’s because they’re all horribly vain, and the camera adds ten lbs, you know.
Hanging out with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.
Why forget out Yethi????
Oh, come ON now — you know full well that Yethi isn’t real.
That’s one reason why I think of Mormonism as a type of apologetic. Just like other apologetics it replaces past ignorance with present silliness.
According to Tom Holland, Patricia Crone and others—Mo and Islam might have originated in the Israel/Palestine area.
So the circle might be correct!
why does God love the world so much?
Yahweh is like a little boy with a burning glass and Earth is his ant farm.
God is very patient with us. If I were he I would just get mad and blow up the world. But he didn’t, and instead sent Jesus to die.
I love Jesus, and I am sooooo glad that he does love the world.
Why, it increases our faith, of course!
Either it puzzles us and thus forces us to learn how to accept and believe in the face of obstacles thus making us stronger … or it just seems obvious that God would make sure that His revelations took place in a very small area so that they’re less confusing and seem “friendlier” to us when we eventually do encounter them … which we have. God made sure of that.
You have to make sure that the focus is on your own faith. Don’t start looking at this problem objectively or else you’re sunk.
Or could it just be that the people that wrote these books lived there? If there were really one ‘true’ god, it could have easily handed down the book from the sky for all the people of the world to read. That is why the Bible, Torah, Koran etc are all just myths.
Most of my friends are of the ecumenical-spiritual persuasion in that they think ALL holy books are inspired by and point to the same God — details don’t matter. Since their version of God is a very vague and loosey-goosey Higher Power, there’s a certain amount of consistency there.
The problem is that most holy books inspired by God DO think the “details” matter. That’s the whole bloody point of God inspiring them — content. Plus, technically speaking, the belief that the “details don’t matter” is itself a detail. They can’t really stand above the blind and quarreling crowds and claim to see the entire elephant.
(Sastra knows that. She’s writing as if she’s a cognitive-dissonance-burdened faith-head deep in rationalization mode.)
You might not want to ask why god loves the Middle East so much. It’s an invitation for all the crazies to rant on about the apocalypse or some other lunacy.
And why, as Hitch pointed out, did he chose the only people (and country area)in the Near East with no oil reserves?
FWIW, IIRC Israel found oil this year.
In Israel? (Joking.)
The Levant has (AFAIK) the best evidence of the coexistence of Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis. Coincidence?
Not really. The area is a passage between continents, which predicts both species and culture meetings.
– Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens neanderthalensis met as they migrated out of Africa.
– The abrahamic warfare religions surface in archaeology (Dead Sea scrolls) after the first empires in the region had ransacked the passage for nearly a millennium, and especially after the last bronze age empires did so. (The Hellenic conquest for the scrolls, the Roman empire for the first notable divisions.)
Also, I hits me:
– I’m not sure coexistence has been proven.
– Genetic evidence points to many times of coexistence between Hss and Hsn.
– In a similar fashion Asia has both coexistence (with Denisovans) and a correlation between many wars & start up religions. (But this time peaceful religions to prevent, not promote, war.)
And the Lord spake unto Nanook of the Inuit, saying, “Cast thy hook into the water,” and behold three fish forthwith bit the bait, and the fishermen round about said, “Truly, this is something else.” Nanook spake unto them, saying, “Come and walk on the water with me,” and they did, for it was ice.
“for it was ice.”
ROFL!
Also, “Truly, this is something else”.
😀
ditto.
Well spake!
Thank you.
Hilarious!
Only this planet?…theists people are so bloody provincial (credit: Feynman).
“The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert.” (Robert Charles Wilson)
That is an example of why I won’t create a Twitter account. Too many Twerps use it. I just read an article that 36 percent of users do not use their account and 7 percent close their account. Many people couldn’t care less about celebrity doings or nonsense posts like above.
This comment doesn’t make any sense. I think maybe you don’t understand how Twitter works.
Oh, I understand it. Nearly half of people give up on it. I also don’t care what famous people say about their lunch.
Your follow up comment confirms my first impression. If you don’t care about what famous people have for lunch, don’t follow any famous people who tweet about their lunch. There’s much more to twitter than famous people and lunch.
I don’t tweet either…but don’t see how the poster above is a twerp…did you notice the poster’s tweet-name (or whatever)?
50 bucks that a believer will look at the same picture and come to an entirely different conclusion.
Sastra at 5 has one possible angle covered.
Yeah, I think she hit the nail on the head there. 🙂
Awesome. The visual makes the statement so much more impactful.
I like it as well. The naysayers up thread may be correct but, they almost certainly have better geographic knowledge than a christian so can’t be counted when considering the mysterious ways of the doG. And even if the statement isn’t exactly true it is every bit as good as the geography presented in “HIS” book the holey bibel.
I guess she didn’t run this by the Mormons first.
No, look at her original post: she’s talking about the Bible, Qur’an, and Torah. Before I read that carefully, I called the post “Except for the Mormons. . . “
I read it differently Jerry. She says every prophet chosen by God PLUS every action by him in the Bible etc… Either way, her point is well taken.
The Mormons are outside the circle of trust. So they started their own.
Perspective is sin.
Maybe it has something to do with the invention of writing.
I think the Chinese get credit for the earliest writing.
Chinese writing came to be around the same time as cuneiform & linear A and Linear B among others.
A contagious virus has to start somewhere.
bingo
Location. Location. Location!
Not such good connections with the rest of the Earth’s landmasses. Not likely to have happened in Tasmania or even Iceland. Besides, miracles are best in warm climates.
So why didn’t Jesus show up in Death Valley?
God loves oil. Black gold.
Why couldn’t all major cultures have had their own Jesus? Hardly seems fair.
> “Why does God love the Middle East so much?”
‘Tis where Opium poppies grow freely.
Anthropomorphic God(s) [and Hierarchy]
would be entranced by such locality.
imo,
The Abrahamic God may be the most popular at this second in time, but that’s a recent development which will pass and is passing. The most popular belief will eventually be naturalism and atheism.
While Secular African’s statement might not be quite accurate, the broader question is why would an omnipotent God choose such an inefficient means of spreading his truth around the world, when he had better means at his disposal?
I can understand how funny this is to you. After all, it was not that long ago that I would have thought it to be the way the dog intented things.
You may be missing the way to show why it is incredible.
I had told my mother that China had already asked big questions before her son of her Jehovah came on the scene.
Her reply? Look where it got them.
I think we need to give replies that help the casual lurker more than helping each other to a pat on the back for not partaking of the lie. IMHO.
Maybe the location has something to do with chickpeas. Those things make you gassy. 🙂
Or somethin’ in the water? 🙂
“every action by him in the Bible..”?
When God made the Sun stand still for Joshua, that involved either the Sun or the whole Earth. Not to mention the creation and the flood. The writers were in that small circle, not the (reported) actions.
The true ‘gods’ are universal & know no borders or limits – curiosity, questioning, investigation & understanding, leading back to curiosity.
“Why does God love the Middle East so much?”
Ask the Amorites amongst others. Oh wait, you can’t. According to the Bible, God hardened the heart of the king and the Israelites were forced to kill all the men, women and children, in all their cities.
Of course, He also hardened the heart of Pharaoh so He could show off yet another one of His plagues, according to the Bible and there’s no historical evidence for that. Perhaps most of the genocides ordered or facilitated by God were just empty boasting by the writers.
Nasty imaginations, some people.
Hinduism, the oldest religion was born outside the circle
The graphic omits Hong Xiuquan, Jesus Christ’s younger brother.
I was about to offer that one could instead draw a much larger number of much smaller circles, each around the small, ripply pudding-like mass between the ears of a human.
But then again, that’s true for all known scientific discoveries as well!
This reminds me when I was a kid going to a catholic sunday-school, I ask my teacher: why we need to memorize these kingdom legends? we asians have our own sh*ts like that … I got a smack that made me run to a pentecostal church that distribute candies and small thingies (later to bigger regrets) .. thus an atheist born …
And then there’s also the evidence that g0d loves beetles inordinately, in addition to a little patch of the globe.