While we’re waiting for the Big News, here’s a nice pair of tw**ts (is that obscene?):
I say unto you, pestilence comes not from evil spirits or sin but creatures too small for man to see & numbering more than the desert sands.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) May 19, 2017
https://twitter.com/1stClown/status/865615525208109056
h/t: Barry
I say verily, do not proceed on foot with haste if thou wields a sharp implement especially for renting papyrus asunder.
😀
And the wise man sayeth, pray in this hand and shit in the other and see which one gets full first.
To be a pedant, telling people what to do without explaining why is likely to lead to behavior like crapping in the river then rinsing your hands in the water you just crapped in.
Even that would have been an improvement for most people’s lives.
Hilarious! This would make a great new trend.
How about Romans 8:28: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who have the most money and power, and those who have been called according to how loud they shout their outrage.
Galatians 5:22-23: But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law…unless you’re one of those gross gay people.
John 10:10: The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come to do the same, and inspire others to do it for me.
But the fishes of the sea and the birds of the air cried out in their agony, “Oh God we need proteins and amino acids, and in thy wisdom thou hast made nitrogen the commonest element of the air, yet given us not the power to fix it”. And God saw their pain, and created nitrogen-fixing bacteria, Rhizobium and Anabaena he created them both. And to lentils and chick-peas and all their kind, he gave the power of nodulation. And God saw that it was not really very good, but probably OK as a workaround.
+1
+1
Very good.
(Sigh…html).
[snicker]
If we clubbed together, do you think that we’d able to get G*d a round tuit?
But how would we deliver it?
‘All things are made of atoms — little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.’
Feynman (i.e., God)
Would have been helpful with any provincial ancient religious text.
Actually…it’s not particles; it’s waves. What superficially looks like a pointlike electron (or any other) particle is actually a wave in the electron (etc.) field. The fields are coupled, and a God diagram…er…Feynman diagram…can help you understand the interactions of those fields.
…but that’s just so much useless gobbledygook until you’ve got some really advanced technology, like particle accelerators.
A much better physics introduction would be on entropy. It’s a statistical count of the microscopic states that are macroscopically indistinguishable. What you think of as energy is really a state of low entropy — as it must be, since energy is never created nor destroyed. Time, too, is entirely a function of entropy.
Add a bit of Newton to that, and you’re golden….
Cheers,
b&
Believe only in proportion to the strength of the evidence. If the evidence can’t be independently verified, it can’t be trusted. When in doubt, stay in doubt. The rest you can derive from this starting point.
…but, then, of course, it wouldn’t be religion, but science….
Cheers,
b&
…. and then He set upon populating the land with animals, the skies with birds and nasty little insects that laid their eggs inside the bodies of other species so their young could eat them from the inside out.
I wonder if Christian fundamentalists hold that the “nasty little insects” weren’t made until after the sinning of Adam and Eve.
If we turn over enough rocks, I’m sure we can find a fundy eejit who does hold that opinion.
Poor rocks, having such unstable footing. Does nobody think of the rocks?
Apart from you?
I will admit to occasionally beating rocks with a hammer, for my self-gratification and to free the specimens (mineral, fossil, structural)
Some Christian fundamentalists have seriously told me such things.
Then they would lying would they not, it was all over in six days according to the good book. ID’ners might have different take, but that would confirm what we suspect if HE/SHE was real, HE/SHE is an evil little bustard.
“Washeth thou thine hands after thee takest a dump.”
And some instructions for making soap…
Also, don’t let waste get into your drinking water…
The bible, as it is, is about as useless a collection of how tos one could possibly assemble.
I know the argument has been made that various deities didn’t share advanced knowledge because their minions would have been too ignorant to understand. But if god or Jesus existed, and really knew stuff, they could have just said wash your hands and cover your mouth when you cough or sneeze. After all, god said don’t eat pork, and people are still suffering with no understanding why.
Let me guess … the g*d that said that was a pig?
Deuteronomy 23
12 Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself. 13 As part of your equipment have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement. 14 For the Lord your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you. Your camp must be holy, so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you.
So, hygiene rules:
1. Don’t take a dump in the camp
2. Cover up your stinky crap
3. Don’t make The Big Dude angry
You could also be reading from the first army manual.
Maybe so: after all the translation for some passages is “lord of hosts” – which took me until adulthood to realize it meant “lord of armies”, not “lord of persons whose place it is for a party” or whatever.
Cleansing of hands is a requirement more for purification of worshippers before they enter the temple or perform religious rites such as prayers.
If anyone here has lived on a farm, one sees what happens to animals that don’t/can’t cleanse defecating and urinating apparatus. Pretty grungy actually and prone to making sores. Cleansing hands is not sufficient (especially if there’s no cat tails, leaves or TP and you’re using your s**t hand for wiping..
Not to be picky, but it should be “after thou takest a dump”, not “after thee takest a dump” “thou” is the subject form.
The Bible did instruct people to wash hands before eating, which probably saved lives (assuming the water was clean)
But not to wash hands before preparing someone else’s food. Which will have cost a good few lives too.
Call that one a draw?
Leads me to wonder how many hospital patient infections are caused by visitors who can’t be troubled to wash their hands after going to the restroom (or can’t be troubled to use the visitor restroom instead of the patient’s restroom).
I’ve never seen a hospital with separate toilets for visitors and patients. But I’m not an experienced hospital visitor.
But yeh, I can see it being a potential problem. Though every toilet in every hospital I have seen has reminder signs all over the place. You’d have to be pretty dense (or visually impaired, seriously) to not see them.
The whole thing should really read: Wash thou thy hands after thou hast taken a dump – if an individual is being addressed; if a group is being addressed then the plural form should be used: Wash your hands after you have taken a dump. I must say it annoys me when people try to write in Early Modern English but can’t be bothered to get it right. (I know there are more important things to get annoyed about.)
Did Monty Python get this right?
Is it accurate enough if I count to Pi?
Outside Illinois, or Indiana, or whichever the benighted state was.
Not quite. ‘Shalt is correct for second person, but for third person it should be ‘shall’ (‘Three shall be the number…’)
Jesus clearly tells people not to wash their hands before eating in Mark 7:1-8. Yes, I know, what he’s actually saying is that it’s pointless to follow the Jewish purity laws. So he was right about that, at least.
In the beginning, God created a state of extremely low entropy.
Actually maybe it would be a little to much information for what people knew by the time. In the bible (leviticus, i think) you can read some excerpts that tell you not to touch dead bodies, secretions,and stuff like that.
But in Mark, 7, Jesus tell people not to wash their hands . Contraditions…
The Church(es) actually taught that washing is a sign of worldly vanity and attachment to the needs of the flesh. Dirt and self mortification were seen as marks of devoutness. During the plagues, groups of penitents would go from village to village scourging themselves and inadvertently actually spreading the plague
Commandment 11:
You shall hold thy smartphone in landscape mode when shooting videos!
+∞
“Thou shalt not own slaves.”
“Thou shalt not beat thy children.”
“Oh, and there are no such things as witches, so don’t kill anyone for this nonexistent crime.”
Thou shalt not rape.
Thou shalt not be lazy by stealing labour from others (slaves)! Simply share and work together. Amen.
Some of the taboos and practices in the bible were likely inspired by health issues.
Not eating pork or certain other foods(trichinosis and food poisoning).
Not having indiscriminate sex (STD’s).
Circumcision (likely to help prevent infection back then).
I think if god really existed he would have written(with his own hand); “I’m god and i wrote this”, instead of having a bunch of fallible, crooked and unreliable humans scribble things on scrolls, and then hundreds of years later having other groups of the same decide what should be what god meant to say, and then putting different versions in different books depending on what each religious sect believed that god said. That would have done it.
The second tweet gets it wrong. It should be “after thou takest a dump”. Thou is the nominative case pronoun.
If the Bible wanted scientific accuracy the first command it would give would be to discount all accounts of mythical super beings and magics. That would also be the last.
rz
Thou shalt not kill those who worship other gods, or no gods. Be excellent to each other.