The Ten Commandments

How well do you know the ten commandments? I bet you know it less than you think you do. The ones that spring to mind for most people are those that read something like, "thou shalt not kill", "though shalt not steal" or "thou shalt not worship any other god."  These are usually referred to as the commandments engraved on stone tablets, brought down by Moses from the mountains to be placed in the Ark of the Covenant. They are also commonly referenced from Exodus, chapter 20, or a similar version from Deuteronomy 5.

This is wrong.  The 10 commandments that are commonly referred to (i.e. don't kill, etc, etc) are not the ones written on the stone tablets.  They are in fact statutes spoken by God to to his people gathered at the bottom of Mount Sinai. Note that the number ten is never actually mentioned in the scriptures. There are really 11 if you want to be precise, though some would group 2 together. I won't argue over semantics. These well known statutes are:

1. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 
3. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
4. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
5. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work. But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates, for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
6. Honour thy father and thy mother: that thy days may be long upon the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee.
7. Thou shalt not kill.
8. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
9. Thou shalt not steal.
10. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
11. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbour's.

God then carries on to inform Moses on what kind of alter he wants and then informs him of several judgements which include how to keep slaves and how to beat them.  He also goes on to inform Moses (for pages and pages) on how he should build nice things for him. These are not the commandments that God felt special enough to be permanently etched in stone.

It's not till Exodus 31:18 that Moses gets the stone tablets. But then when goes back down the mountain, his followers are worshiping a golden calf (It seems it only takes 40 days and 40 nights to forget a god who separates waters, burns mountains and generally gets pretty angry when you don't worship him, and him alone). So Moses naturally threw a temper tantrum, smashed the stones and ordered the slaughter of 3000 men. So much for the statute, "Thou shalt not kill."

Take two! Moses gets new tablets with the same writings in Exodus 34.  Apart from the usual insecure rulings of not worshiping any other gods or images, they are nothing like the ones most people think of.  Here they are, fresh from the King James Bible. I could have shortened them but I'd rather portray them as being untampered with:

1. Take heed to thyself, lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land whither thou goest, lest it be for a snare in the midst of thee: But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God: Lest thou make a covenant with the inhabitants of the land, and they go a whoring after their gods, and do sacrifice unto their gods, and one call thee, and thou eat of his sacrifice; And thou take of their daughters unto thy sons, and their daughters go a whoring after their gods, and make thy sons go a whoring after their gods.
2. Thou shalt make thee no molten gods.
3. The feast of unleavened bread shalt thou keep. Seven days thou shalt eat unleavened bread, as I commanded thee, in the time of the month Abib: for in the month Abib thou camest out from Egypt.
4. All that openeth the matrix is mine; and every firstling among thy cattle, whether ox or sheep, that is male. But the firstling of an ass thou shalt redeem with a lamb: and if thou redeem him not, then shalt thou break his neck. All the firstborn of thy sons thou shalt redeem. And none shall appear before me empty.
5. Six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest: in earing time and in harvest thou shalt rest.
6. And thou shalt observe the feast of weeks, of the firstfruits of wheat harvest, and the feast of ingathering at the year's end.
7. Thrice in the year shall all your men children appear before the Lord GOD, the God of Israel. For I will cast out the nations before thee, and enlarge thy borders: neither shall any man desire thy land, when thou shalt go up to appear before the LORD thy God thrice in the year.
8. Thou shalt not offer the blood of my sacrifice with leaven; neither shall the sacrifice of the feast of the passover be left unto the morning.
9. The first of the firstfruits of thy land thou shalt bring unto the house of the LORD thy God. 
10. Thou shalt not seethe a kid in his mother's milk.

This is what God deemed so important that they had to be written in stone. Commandments not about any moral behaviour, but about giving him his due and making him feel special. Why is it that these seem to be passed over? Why is it that everybody thinks it's the statutes that are the commandments? Maybe it's because we recognise not boiling a young goat (a kid) in it's mother's milk as a rather silly law to give, not to mention the others.

But the point of this article isn't to try to poopoo the commandments. Some will just remain adamant that the chapter 20 ones are the real ones to them. And I'm not trying to debate the point of them either. What I'm trying to get at is how little Christians actually know their own faith. How cherry picking is abundant in the faith. You will often hear a evangelist giving you some verse from the bible that they consider to be of use and completely gloss over any text that may be detrimental to their preachings or that just sound plain silly. The commandments are just a prime example.

And I just feel so sorry for Indiana Jones.  He went through all that effort for that??? 

So please, everyone, read the bible. If you're open minded it will only show you why two to four thousand year old text, written in the bronze / iron ages cannot be used for any kind of moral guidance. It also demonstrates just how silly the religion is. It's no different to Scientology or any other weird cult out there. You can read the King James bible for free online at http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org or even download an iPhone app called KJV.

Sources:

http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org

Becoming an atheist

In my last article (why I became an atheist)I discussed my journey from Christian to atheist with the sole reason of finally starting to think about and question the faith.  I didn't really explain what kind of questions I asked myself and the answers I found. In the end it only really took one question... where is the evidence that my religion is true?  Of course the answer I found was a resounding none! But that wasn't quite enough because somehow, since becoming an atheist, I find myself rather interested in religion. I've learned a lot (mostly about Christianity) and continue to do so as it's really quite fascinating how rife religion is around the world, and in so many different forms throughout history. How mankind can be drawn into myths on par with stories written about gods and demi-gods like Hercules, Odin, Ra and so on, and how it has affected cultures and civilizations is worthy of investigation.

What is an atheist?
Before I move onto some of the things I learnt that helped me to transition, I feel I should explain what an atheist is, as this is often misunderstood.  An atheist is someone that doesn't believe in gods. That's it. It's not a belief or a religion on it's own. Rather it's a lack of belief. There is no doctrine, or set of rules or secret handshake. I've often heard it referred to by the faithful as a religion or faith. If that were the case then it would be impossible NOT to have a religion. As an atheist (or more accurately an Agnostic Atheist) I don't assert that there is no god. I simply can't believe in it without good reason.

Evidence.

I haven't found one shred of it, and no, pretty sunsets and the the bible are not evidence. A book written by multiple and mostly anonymous authors thousands of years ago. It is of no more use as evidence than the Goblet of Fire would be to prove the existence of Harry Potter, so quoting bible versus to an atheist will get you nothing but a sigh and rolling eyes. In fact, I would say that the bible is probably one of the atheist's best tools in a debate. Learning more about it has only helped to affirm my conviction that the existence of any kind of personal god is extrememly unlikely. It contradicts itself over and over, is vague and open to any kind of interpretation, has a very loose moral grounding (don't get me started on the 10 commandments), is bigoted and misogynistic and to be frank, is just plain silly. I've just recently found that it has a talking donkey as well as a snake. Anyway, I'm ranting on about the bible when I'm supposed to be talking about evidence, but I needed something to put her seeing as there is none.

So many religions.
There must be some reason why religion is so rife around the world. It probably stems from a desire to know about the workings of the world and the universe in a primitive time before the scientific method was developed. I'm sure it has other reasons as well. It's helped to keep slaves and women in place. It's helped the powerful maintain their power. It's helped the righteous get rich off the blood of heathens and heretics. But whatever the reason is, it worked, and not just in one culture. You can look at a map and pretty much divide geographic locations by religion, rather than borders. If you're in the US, you're probably Christian. In India you'd be Hindu. In Iraq, Islam and so on. And that's today. Going back in time we get more. It seems that a person's faith isn't a matter of which god exists, but where you were born. If a god existed, would he be that stupid in his method of passing on his word (or he just doesn't care)? How may sacred texts are there? How many creation stories, rites and traditions are there in the world. How would you convince someone that your religion is for real, when all the others profess the same thing. Again, it comes down to evidence. How can you demonstrate the truth of something without it?  Click here for a map of the world separated by faith.

Bible stories.
I touched on this above. Now you can take the bible literally, i.e. Eve was really made from Adam's rib and they were the first humans, even though their kids mixed with other tribes, The entire world was flooded and Noah somehow managed to take 2 of every animal on a boat higher than Everest, where the air would be too cold and thin for survival. Or you can pick and choose the stories you want to believe and call the "silly" ones metaphors. There's a problem with each. If I'm to believe the former, I need evidence. I would expect a planet wide flood to leave some form of evidence, but there is none. As for the latter opinion of the bible... if you are to pick and choose, how are you going to convince me, or even yourself, which of the stories to believe. You are simply picking the bits you like and leaving the ones you don't. Why even have a book? I could go on and on about things the bible says, how it contradicts itself and how it certainly CANNOT be used for any kind of moral grounding, but that will be an entire article on its own.

These are the main points that helped me to realise that blind faith is not something to aspire to and started opening my eyes, not just to the truth, but to all the harm that has been wrought on this world by religion.  Harm that doesn't only include the obvious such as war and inquisitions, but harm in holding back human progress and well being. Promoting a way of thinking that is gullible and prone to believing in anything without evidence. Segregation of societies and more. Oh, and wishing for the end of the world to come soon can never be a good thing either. How can you be of any benefit to humanity if you just want it to end and then condone sending people to hell just because they don't believe in a superstition.

I would propose that living in a world where blind faith does not reign supreme would be a wondrous thing. Aside from all the other benefits, there would be no more shutting off the senses from the natural world. We would continue to look at the marvels of the universe and through science and curiosity, unravel those mysteries... creating our own purpose and destiny day by day. We can increase our knowledge and intellect rather than covering our eyes and saying, "God did it and I don't need to know anything more than that!" Is it any wonder that countries that are non-secular and governed by religion seem to be the most backward? Could there be something to the countries that are mostly secular being more peaceful and and healthy to live, with lower crime and abortion rates?

Think about it.

Why I became an atheist

As a kid growing up in South Africa, I dreamed of being many things ( I always was a bit of a dreamer).  I wanted to be a vet, I wanted to be in the navy (what little boy doesn't want to blow things up) and I wanted to be a scientist, even though I didn't really understand what the scientific method was. I was just interested in bugs and again, in blowing things up. Perhaps a more surprising career path I dreamed up for myself was that of a priest. I didn't really know all the ins and outs of the job description and I was to young to know or care what celibacy was, but it meant becoming a soldier of God, and I thought that was pretty cool.

I often wonder if I lived in South Africa, would I still be religious to certain degree. I was pretty much surrounded by it.  It was in school, in the hymns we sang. It was in Sunday school where we learnt about things like Noah and the floods (via noodle art). It was on the lips of family and friends. I remember sitting in a christian show of some sort and getting up because I felt the presence of the lord, which I think was just a breeze from an open door wafting up my shorts. I remember being read the book of revelations and being told how anyone that was somehow imprinted with the number 666 would be damned, as if that was a good thing. As if the end of the world was something to look forward to.

That's not to say I lived in a fanatic or very religious environment. Far from it. If I had said that I didn't believe in God and didn't want to go to Sunday school, I'm pretty sure my parents would have said OK and that would have been that, but the thought never crossed my mind. It was just the way things were and I went with the flow.

Come the mid nineties, my family and I packed up and moved to the UK.  At this stage I guess you could say that I was a lazy Christian.  I believed... but never went to church or read the bible frequently (but let's face it, how many Christians do). I just accepted it and didn't think about it or question it too much, which is what I believe is the glue that holds regions together, but more on that later.  I would just say the occasional quiet prayer while in bed, say happy birthday to Jesus on Christmas day and put on the sad face when remembering the crucifixion at Easter, after scoffing my face with chocolate eggs of course. Things continued like this for years, though there was a brief time in my life where I became a Mormon.  Don't ask. It only lasted 2 weeks anyway... which was around the time they told me I couldn't even drink non-alcoholic beer as I should stay away from the appearance of evil. This was the actual answer given to me when I asked about this at the church and I remember thinking how stupid this was. I had friends who drank beer. Two weeks ago I drank beer. We weren't doing anything evil! So I had a hard look at myself and this Mormon mumbo jumbo and decided I would get drunk at the next church event and be done with the whole thing... which was fun.

From then on the path to non-belief was a very gradual curve. From my mid teens through university to about thirty years old, I went from believing in the bible stories, to believing the bible was mostly metaphors and a general guide to being agnostic. There must be a god out there somewhere, and the bible was just an attempt for us to understand him.  But again, and here's the thing, I still didn't think about it very much.  I didn't question it. If I had stopped to really think about of this, I would have opened my eyes and become an atheist much earlier. But the ideas of 'faith is a virtue', 'don't be a doubting Thomas', 'the lord's ways are mysterious', etc, just seemed to have seeped into my psyche. Without even thinking about it... I didn't think about it.

It wasn't until fairly recently, with the help of the internet and YouTube, that I did start to question. All these new earth creationists out there just seemed so ridiculous to me. It piqued my interest and I found out about people like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens. When I watched a documentary by Dawkins, based on the God Delusion, well that was when the flood gates opened. He and others like Dawkins, didn't convince me to become atheist. They just reminded me of my critical faculties. Once I started thinking about it properly, it didn't take long and I became an atheist overnight.

So why does it matter? Did it affect my life in any major way? Does it affect yours? Is religion not beneficial to society? What about morality? These are all things I pondered when I became an atheist and let me tell you, I'm so glad I left all that dogma behind. The world is even a richer and more wondrous place now that I'm free to use my intellect beyond, "God dunnit." For those of you who would like to know why I think religion is harmful, how each new scientific discovery makes the need for a god seem less and less likely and how you can be just as good and moral (more so even) with an atheistic world view, well that's a topic for my next post. I think I've waffled on a bit too much on this one already anyway :)

Amen.

Click here for my next article on Becoming an atheist which delves a little into the actual questions I asked of myself and Christianity.

How did life on Earth begin?

Lately I’ve been quite interested in some research pioneered by the likes of Jack Szostak at Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and that’s the field of Abiogenesis, how life started.  Of course Evolution very successfully explains how we got to be here from simpler organisms, but how did the very first organism come to be? And is it really that difficult for life to begin? Are we really that unique in the universe?  Earth is old... about 4.5 billion years old.  That’s plenty of time for life to take hold, given a chance.  Now if life were a strange event, one that is very unlikely, you wouldn’t expect to see it begin to soon in the history of the Earth, yet that’s exactly what we do see.  Amazingly the earliest record of life is from about 3.5 billion years ago.  Fossils created by early sulphur metabolising, single celled organisms.  The existence of such fossils are very special, particularly because the chances of them forming are so small, and for such small organisms to leave evidence of their existence is a rare thing.  And these organisms are already specialised and so must be evolved from some even simpler organism.  So we know that life must have begun even before then, which would very early in the diary of the world.  So maybe the formation of simple life is not a rare event and the universe is teeming with it.

If there are so many billions of galaxies, and within them so may billions of stars, each with up to a dozen planets and hundreds of moons and life began on one of these insignificant specks of dust... then surely it would be inconceivable that it didn’t exist in rather many more places, from simple bacteria like organisms to civilisations from Hollywood.  We know now that Mars once much like earth. It had a rotating Iron core, an atmosphere beneficial to life and liquid, running water on the surface.  Will we find evidence for life there? Or perhaps on Jupiter’s moon Europa which shows evidence of liquid water beneath a vast ocean of ice. If in the decades to come, we find life it will be one of the most astonishing discoveries in our history.

But again... how would it get there in the first place? While we may never know for certain how it began here in our own corner of the Milky Way, we are starting to get good ideas of how it could have emerged.

So what do we need for life? We are composed of DNA, the blueprint of every single living organism on the planet. Possibly the most complicated molecule ever discovered. How could such a wondrous molecule come to be?  Well, it seems it’s not that hard, given time and a mixture of the right environments.  DNA needs smaller organic molecules with which to build itself.  These would include Amino Acids and it seems that the universe has a habit of creating these for us, without needing life in the first place. A famous (to the creationists out there... infamous) experiment conducted by Stanley Miller and Harold Urey in 1952 shows just how easily amino acids can be created in the “primordial soup” of the early Earth, by running a simple experiment and applying a source of heat or power, which certainly would have been abundant in the early earth.  Another way that Amino Acids could have arisen on Earth is via Panspermia; Organic molecules, or even lifeforms, from space.  Sounds a bit sci-fi, but it has been proven that there is an abundance of these chemicals out there.  In 2004, dust was collected from the tail of a comet by the space probe, Stardust.  Amino acids were found even there, and only more accounts have been recorded since then.

But modern DNA needs much more than just a soup of Amino Acids to form.  We have complex machinery in our cells in the form of DNA polymerases, that will use a template strand of DNA to join the Amino Acid counterparts to form a copy, the essence of replication.  But the first organisms wouldn’t have had this kind of machinery.  Difficult to do without it.  However, DNA has a lesser know little brother called RNA (Ribonucleic acid) that can also replicate and is a somewhat simpler chemical, and one that can replicate itself without the requirement of complex machinery.  It’s entirely plausible that early life would have been a kind of RNA based life-form.  Scientists have already created RNA strands, although not yet with all the standard amino acids, so it is a work in progress.

Then there is also the work that the afore-mentioned Jack Szostak specialises in and that’s the formation of membranes and proto cells. Early life would have single cells and would have needed a kind of membrane.  Jack and his team have shown how a fatty acid membrane (nothing like the complex phospholipid bilayer membranes with the complex protein gates of today) could have formed and done the task of containing the genetic code as well as assisting in consumption and reproduction.

So it seems that understanding the origin of life is well within our grasp, and our understanding is only improving every year.  This is a very brief summary of some of the research I’ve read about. If anyone is interested I’ve posted some sources below to help whet your whistle.

Some sources:

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/ames/news/releases/2002/02_33AR.html 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/08/18/dust-collected-from-comet-contains-a-key-ingredient-of-life/ 

http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/tis2/index.php/component/content/article/51.html 

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/117/3046/528.full.pdf?ijkey=93fc8f1a80600c1cece478e70ae889e3386cf117&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha 

Videos:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E14UGprN2uk    (Part 1. Watch the rest as well.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OwSARYTK7w 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yet1xkAv_HY   (By Carl Sagan... or is it Agent Smith?)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdNaP5BYaeU 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHff3-VR0jc&feature=fvst 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhUIIONM6A0

Diagram of Miller & Urey experiment