Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
in This Happened to Me·
3 min read
Lost and Found
I found my soulmate when I lost my religion
It’s not the silliest part of growing up Adventist, though it might be the most counter-productive. If you manage to make it through twelve years of parochial school without ending up like Ann and Mitt Romney, you are expected to find a spouse at church instead. Don’t worry, though. The whole community will help you find one!
Perhaps no one told them the majority of people married at 19 are divorced by 29.
Source: “Should You Marry Your High School Sweetheart?” Slate, 29 Aug 12
I can’t tell you how many unsolicited dating tips I received from the members of my church before I left.
“Have you ever noticed what a nice lady Sara is?”
“You and Katie have so much in common!”
“Vanessa would be lucky to have someone like you in her life.”
It’s hard to even know where begin on the problems here, but I feel like the biggest was the “good Christian girls” themselves. Sure, they were ‘nice’, but only in the same way as a new beige carpet: Clean, unobtrusive, and easy to walk all over!
She looks like a nice date, right? Someone you could really spend the rest of your life with….
It seems that growing up evangelical does that to women. A little girl can only be told “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” so many times before she starts believing it. It’s sad, and it’s something I would like to help change. But I wasn’t going change it by marrying one of them!
But, at the same time, I was afraid of ending up alone if I came out as an atheist. My fear wasn’t helped when I set up a godless OkCupid account. My old OkCupid account, which I had set years ago to “Christian and somewhat serious about it”, continued to receive four or five unsolicited messages a week. My new account, despite being nearly identical in every other way, was lucky to get one.
But one message, when it’s from the right person, is all you need. For me, that one message went like this:
Hello there! This is the first message I’ve sent in a few years, so I’m a bit rusty at it. However, you seem like a super friendly person, so… How goes it?
And so began Day 1 of the greatest adventure of my life. Within a week, I knew I had found the person I wanted to share all of my tomorrows with.
As I am writing, Day 421 of our greatest adventure is about to start. I don’t know what it’s going to bring, but I know that the last four hundred and twenty have been the happiest of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world.
If you’ve outgrown Jesus and the Tooth Fairy, but are afraid of ending up alone if you out yourself as a non-believer, consider this. I met dozens, possibly even hundreds of Christian girls in the years leading up to when I left the church. But it wasn’t until I made the choice to leave religion behind that I finally found the girl of my dreams.
There is someone out there living good without god, just waiting to meet you. You two could be perfect for each other, but you’ll never meet if you both stay in the closet. So, what’s holding you back?
Ditch the ‘soul’. Go find your soulmate.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Incredibly Credulous
—
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
Refuting the Central Point
—
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
Eating Humble Pie
—
Being right starts with admitting you’re wrong.
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Published October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
This Happened to Me
Life is made of stories.
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
in This Happened to Me·
3 min read
Lost and Found
I found my soulmate when I lost my religion
It’s not the silliest part of growing up Adventist, though it might be the most counter-productive. If you manage to make it through twelve years of parochial school without ending up like Ann and Mitt Romney, you are expected to find a spouse at church instead. Don’t worry, though. The whole community will help you find one!
Perhaps no one told them the majority of people married at 19 are divorced by 29.
Source: “Should You Marry Your High School Sweetheart?” Slate, 29 Aug 12
I can’t tell you how many unsolicited dating tips I received from the members of my church before I left.
“Have you ever noticed what a nice lady Sara is?”
“You and Katie have so much in common!”
“Vanessa would be lucky to have someone like you in her life.”
It’s hard to even know where begin on the problems here, but I feel like the biggest was the “good Christian girls” themselves. Sure, they were ‘nice’, but only in the same way as a new beige carpet: Clean, unobtrusive, and easy to walk all over!
She looks like a nice date, right? Someone you could really spend the rest of your life with….
It seems that growing up evangelical does that to women. A little girl can only be told “your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you” so many times before she starts believing it. It’s sad, and it’s something I would like to help change. But I wasn’t going change it by marrying one of them!
But, at the same time, I was afraid of ending up alone if I came out as an atheist. My fear wasn’t helped when I set up a godless OkCupid account. My old OkCupid account, which I had set years ago to “Christian and somewhat serious about it”, continued to receive four or five unsolicited messages a week. My new account, despite being nearly identical in every other way, was lucky to get one.
But one message, when it’s from the right person, is all you need. For me, that one message went like this:
Hello there! This is the first message I’ve sent in a few years, so I’m a bit rusty at it. However, you seem like a super friendly person, so… How goes it?
And so began Day 1 of the greatest adventure of my life. Within a week, I knew I had found the person I wanted to share all of my tomorrows with.
As I am writing, Day 421 of our greatest adventure is about to start. I don’t know what it’s going to bring, but I know that the last four hundred and twenty have been the happiest of my life. I wouldn’t trade them for anything in the world.
If you’ve outgrown Jesus and the Tooth Fairy, but are afraid of ending up alone if you out yourself as a non-believer, consider this. I met dozens, possibly even hundreds of Christian girls in the years leading up to when I left the church. But it wasn’t until I made the choice to leave religion behind that I finally found the girl of my dreams.
There is someone out there living good without god, just waiting to meet you. You two could be perfect for each other, but you’ll never meet if you both stay in the closet. So, what’s holding you back?
Ditch the ‘soul’. Go find your soulmate.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Incredibly Credulous
—
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
Refuting the Central Point
—
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
Eating Humble Pie
—
Being right starts with admitting you’re wrong.
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Published October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
This Happened to Me
Life is made of stories.
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
Anna Langova / PublicDomainPictures.net
Anna Langova / PublicDomainPictures.net
in Better Humans·
10 min read
Refuting the Central Point
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
The longest chess game ever won was 237 moves. The last 116 ½ of these consisted of the same three pieces circling the board, and it only ended there because white resigned!
Discussing religion can sometimes feel like the world’s longest chess game. But in debate, there is nothing stopping you from going straight for the King.
Enter Mr. Paul Graham. Perhaps it shouldn’t have been necessary, but he is the man who reminded the internet that providing a counter-argument is a better rebuttal than calling someone ‘gay’.
Paul Graham and the Disagreement Hierarchy
But there is also something better than a counter-argument, and that is a refutation. Whereas a counter argument shows why a contradictory statement could be true, a rebuttal shows why the original claim itself is false. But we need to be careful about the kind of refutations we offer.
If someone claimed that the U.S. President was a evil green alien, and I refuted the claim that he was green, that still leaves the heart of their message standing.
Instead, we have to refute the central point. Find the heart of the argument, the strongest part, the part that is most important to everyone involved. Refute that Obama is an evil alien, and no one really cares if he’s green or not.
Or *is* he an evil green alien? BadPaintingsOfBarack Obama.com
Today, I would like to do exactly that. I would like to bypass the creation stories, the exodus from Egypt, the sojourns of Abraham, the debaucheries of David, Noah’s flood, the idea of a ‘firmament’, and just about everything else Biblical literalists enjoy arguing about. Instead, I’m going straight for the King, the central point of the Evangelical and Fundamentalist tradition of Biblical Literalism. The story of Jesus.
The Gospels cannot be taken literally.
The Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) are the books of the Bible that tell the story of Jesus. The accounts are rife with contradictions and historical inaccuracies, and what I am about to give is anything but a full accounting. But the five below are more than enough to blow Biblical Literalism out of the water.
“Jesus about to open a can of Whoop-Ass on ya’ll!”
1. John contradicts all of the other gospels.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are known as the ‘synoptic’ gospels, because they provide the same general outline, or ‘synopsis’, of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The gospel according to John, however, deviates from this narrative.
For some of these contradictions, Biblical Literalists have quick apologies. Take, for example, the story of the Cleansing of the Temple. Jesus enters Herod’s Temple, the greatest Jewish monument ever built, and starts threatening the priestly caste and their underlings with physical violence. Admittedly, he had a good reason. Just like the religious leaders of today, they were money-grubbing scumbags who exploited the ignorance of the masses to turn a profit.
In John, this happens at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In the synoptic gospels, it happens at the very end.
Some people get around this contradiction by claiming that the event happened twice. For these people, I have a question. If someone came into your church with a whip, turned over your collections, and called your pastor a greedy sleaze-bucket, would you really let him back in to do it a second time?
And even if you would, some contradictions are much harder to dismiss. In John, Jesus’ crucifixion happens while people are still getting ready for Passover, while in the other gospels, Jesus isn’t crucified until after the Passover celebration has already occurred. Again, there are apologists who try to smooth over this contradiction, but their intellectual honesty suffers for it.
Baby Jesus is hungry… For your SOUL!
(andrewmalone / Flickr)
2. Matthew contradicts Luke
While of course there are contradictions throughout, one needs look no further than the first two chapters to see that Matthew and Luke are incompatible. The Bible gives not one, but two Christmas stories, and the two are mutually exclusive.
According to Matthew, Jesus is born during the reign of Herod the Great, builder of Herod’s Temple. According to Luke, Jesus is born during the governorship of Quinrinius, a Roman general in charge of Syria. But these men were not co-regents over the land of Israel. Nor did they rule in succession, with the possibility of Jesus’ birth sometime near the transition. Rather, Herod the Great had been dead ten years before Quinrinius was appointed.
Either Jesus’ birth really was miraculous—as the only decade-long labor in history—or one of these accounts is mistaken.
Other contradictions in the Christmas stories include the genealogies of Joseph, the place where Mary and Joseph lived before Jesus’ birth, and where the Holy Family lived afterwards. Read ‘em and weep.
3. Matthew and Luke both contradict history.
Matthew opens his story of the Magi (the “Three Kings” of the Christmas carol) with a new star announcing Jesus’ birth. Yet, despite much searching, this star has never been found. There would have been a rather spectacular conjunction of Jupiter and Venus a few years later, but this occurred only after Herod’s death. A faint comet is recorded in Chinese records closer to the right time, but it would have been in the wrong part of the sky to lead observers from the east to Jerusalem. If the Magi had followed it, they might have gone to India instead!
Moreover, Matthew claims that the star stopped in the sky over Bethlehem, something neither planets nor comets do. Had this been observed, it would have been the biggest astrological news of the millennium. Yet no astronomical record anywhere gives it mention. More likely, this story was told in the tradition of associating the birth of deified rulers with signs in the heavens, much like the story of a star announcing the birth of Augustus in 63 BC.
Ever the propagator of pious fiction, Matthew goes on to embellish the story with a gory ending, the Slaughter of the Innocents. This is not a historical contradiction, so to speak, but an otherwise unsubstantiated story based on a dubious interpretation of two bits of old Jewish poetry. I encourage you to read the originals, in Jeremiah 31 and Hosea 11, and see if they strike you as messianic prophecy.
The story in Matthew has almost as much historical basis as the Scott Glenn movie.
Luke does little better with his facts than Matthew does. Quinrinius, Roman governor of Syria, did conduct a census of Judea. This caused quite a stir, because the Jewish scriptures specifically forbid census taking. However, this was not part of a larger world census. The Romans were meticulous about their census taking, and there was no world-wide census during the reign of Augustus.
4. Matthew and Luke both contradict Mark.
In the many contradictions between Matthew and Luke, mainline and liberal Christians often use Mark as an arbiter, assigning historicity to whichever of the two Mark corroborates. Unfortunately, even this approach can lead to hot water. Sometimes, neither Matthew nor Luke agree with Mark!
After Jesus was arrested, the story goes that he was tried before a Jewish religious tribunal known as the Great Sanhedrin. Matthew says that the members of the tribunal were already gathered before Jesus’ arrest, Mark says that the tribunal gathered after Jesus’ arrest, and Luke says that the tribunal didn’t gather till the next day. Which story are we to believe?
None of these people had anything better to do than try Jesus three separate times.
To smooth over this contradiction, many Biblical literalists have suggested that the Great Sanhedrin must have met three times! But even if the most important Jewish leaders really had nothing else to do that day, doesn’t it stand to reason that at least one of the gospel writers would have mentioned the multiple meetings?
5. Mark contradicts a laundry list of geographic, cultural, and literary ‘knowns’.
After all of this, Matthew, Luke, and John have been thoroughly discredited as the literal, inerrant, and infallible Word of God. But what about Mark? So far, we have shown that it contradicts all of the other gospels, but couldn’t that be because the others were wrong, and Mark was right?
Unfortunately, no. Mark reads a bit like “Fifty Shades of Grey”, a novel set in a part of the world the author has obviously never visited.
How are you getting on? That sure is a smart rucksack! I will collect you for tea and crumpets at seven. Laters, baby!
First, some geography. Remember the story of the demon pigs? It’s in Mark 5 if you’ve forgotten. Mark says that the story happens in the land of the Gerasenes, on the shores of Lake Galilee. But there’s a problem. We know where Gerasa is, and it’s not on the shores of Lake Galilee. It was founded in 331 BCE by Alexander the Great, about halfway between Lake Galilee and the Dead Sea, and it hasn’t moved since. Some Biblical literalists try to correct this error by saying that Mark actually meant the land of the Gadarenes, about five miles from the lake, and simply got the two confused. But if you have to ret-con your scriptures, they’re not infallible, are they?
In Mark 7, Jesus goes from Tyre to the Lake of Galilee, passing through Sidon on his way. Except that Sidon is well north of Tyre, and the Lake of Galilee is well south. There doesn’t appear to be any narrative point here, just some bad navigation. Either Jesus got lost and walked 60 miles out of his way, or Mark was mistaken.
In chapter 10, Mark seems to think that Capernaum, Jesus’ main drag, and Judea, are across the Jordan river from each other. In reality,both are on the west side of the Jordan. Some literalists suggest that crossing the river was necessary to avoid walking through Samaria, but that would require two crossings, not the one recorded in the book, and makes Jesus out to be racist against Samaritans.
There are others, including the well-known walk-to-Jericho problem in Mark 11, but I think I’ve made my point.
Mark also makes some cultural mistakes that suggest that not only was the author a gentile, he probably hadn’t met many Jews. Among these, he assumed that all Jews washed their hands before meals (they didn’t) and that the Great Sanhedrin would meet on a holy day like Passover (they wouldn’t).
Maybe Jesus liked to mash it up. Mark certainly did!
(Sue Teller Mashes it Up)
Finally, Mark contains some interesting mixed metaphors. In several places, Mark cites Jesus as mixing quotes from different Jewish sources. Perhaps this isn’t in error. Maybe Jesus just liked a good mash-up. But what certainly is an error is Mark’s introduction. Mark mixes up quotes from two or three different books of Hebrew scripture, but only cites one of them.
Again, the Biblical literalists are quick on the defense. Perhaps the books were written on the same scroll, and Mark mistakenly thought they were the same book. But there it is. Inerrant means free from mistakes. Infallible means incapable of being mistaken. If Mark made a mistake, he can’t be either one.
What does it mean?
Anyone can take an honest look at the story of Jesus, as presented in the first four books of the New Testament, and see that it is full of contradictions and historical inaccuracies. But what should we make of it?
Well, it doesn’t mean that Jesus never existed, or that he wasn’t a good person. There are people who believe those things, but I will let them speak for themselves. What I’ve shared here is the proof that the Bible is not literal, infallible, or inerrant. It might, and I believe it does, record many historical events. But we can’t trust something to be true simply because it falls between “In the Beginning,” and “Amen.”
There was a time when written material was scarce, and people assumed that anything important enough to be written down had to be true. In fact, the word “scripture” simply means, “something written down.”
But this isn’t the world we live in any longer. There is a wealth of knowledge to be had, and we can’t let ancient superstitions keep us from having it.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Incredibly Credulous
—
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
Serious Problems with Luke’s Census
—
from ‘God, Reason, and the Evangelicals’
·on www.webpages.uidaho.edu →
#WithoutReligion
—
I found my soulmate by losing my religion
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Updated October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
Better Humans
Intelligent Ideas for Upgrading Yourself
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio, Oronce Fine, 1531
Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio, Oronce Fine, 1531
in Better Humans·
5 min read
Incredibly Credulous
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
One interesting facet of growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church was the pyramid schemes. Amway’s pots and pans were well-represented in the kitchens of my childhood. One particularly vivid pyramid-scheme memory is of the family friend who took her dying mother on tour across America. Her ailing mom acted the part of the stooge while our friend sold you not only the new miracle cure, Xango Juice, but also a fantastic business opportunity. For a one-time registration fee, you could sell Xango Juice yourself!
Adventism, of course, has no monopoly on affinity fraud. But the sheer scale of the issue in the Adventist church makes a person wonder. From the $40 million Davenport scandal in the 80s, in which pastors who recruited their local members to “invest” received kickbacks, to the $3 million “rice export” scam two years ago in Florida, there seems to be no end to what Adventists will believe.
Which leads me to this gem of absolute credulity.
The Finaeus Map, or, How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love the Crazy
This was shared on Facebook by an Adventist pastor who lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. Rather ironic, as that half of the Pacific Ocean and most of North America are missing from this map.
Reading the caption, I discovered that this map shows global warming to be a hoax and disproves evolution. This magical power lies in the fact that it shows Terra Australis, referred to in the post as Antarctica, “before it had ice.” Antarctica must have been ice-free when the map was made, because “the mountains and coastline of Antarctica were not discovered until very recently with the use of ground penetrating radar.” This contradicts the “evolutionists” who “believe the continent has been covered by a mile thick ice sheet for millions of years.”
I am going to leave aside the idea that an ice-free Antarctica five hundred, or even five thousand, years ago would present a problem for the anthropogenic climate change model or the theory of evolution. Let’s assume that if someone can prove there was no ice in Antarctica 500 to 5,000 years ago, these are both dead in the water.
That said, has anyone actually looked at this map?!
If I gave you a map that covered the town you lived in, but also another town you were unfamiliar with, how would you judge how accurate that map was? You could just look at the part of the map you know. If they do a good job mapping your hometown, it would be fair to assume that the part of the map showing towns you don’t know is also accurate.
Not only is my hometown missing from this map, so is most of the continent it rests on.
Most of North America, most of the Pacific Ocean, part of the Indian Ocean, all of Australia, and the tip of South America are gone. Siberia stretches right around to Greenland, and Mexico is attached to China. You could not use this map to prove that Europe is north of Africa. It happens to be true, but we don’t know that just because this map says so.
As for “Antarctica” itself, even a casual glance should tell you it is mapped two or three times larger than it should be. And a careful inspection will show you that the coastline doesn’t match that of Antarctica either. In real life, Antarctica barely crosses the Antarctic Circle. In the Finaeus map, “Antarctica” reaches nearly to the Tropic of Capricorn. In the real world, the Tropic of Capricorn passes through São Paulo, Brazil. That’s a difference of nearly 3,000 miles, further than the distance from LA to NYC.
Yet here we have an Adventist pastor, a man in a place of spiritual authority, who has dozens of not hundreds of parishioners who respect his word as second to the Word of God, promulgating the idea that this map can tell us something about what Antarctica looked like three hundred years before humans ever set foot there. And people are praising God for this wonderful discovery.
I would like to say this is the most ridiculous thing I have heard from an Adventist all year, or even just this week. Unfortunately, neither of those statements would be true.
Just the day before, I was involved in a heated discussion as to whether or not a woman who was found by a physician to be pregnant, but whose husband was in another country, had cheated on her spouse. I was of the opinion that this represented marital infidelity. This was not well received, as that particular story is well known among Adventists and is widely regarded as a miracle. No, I am not referring to the virgin birth of Jesus. This reputed “miracle” occurred in 1943. The evidence of the miracle is that the pregnant mother told her son, who later became an important Adventist theologian. Most Adventists accept it at that.
I have never been a member of a church other than the Seventh-day Adventist church, so I am unable to say with any certainty that Adventists are more gullible than the average Christian. But really, do we need to compare to an average to know there is a problem here?
In the end, I feel that many Adventists, and Christians in general, consider humility to be accepting any word from an authority. Whether it’s the pastor who says global warming is a hoax, the theologian who considers his mother’s pregnancy a miracle, or the family friend selling Xango juice, we feel like we would be out of place to question these claims for ourselves.
But I believe that true humility is understanding that our gut feelings can be wrong, and so can the gut feelings of a trusted friend. Only science can tell us if Xango juice cures cancer. Only science can tell us who the father is. And only science can tell us whether or not Antarctica was frozen over the past 500 to 5,000 years. Of course, I could be wrong. But there is more than just a gut feeling behind my belief that we shouldn’t trust gut feelings.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Currents of Change Roil Seventh-Day Adventists
—
Grass-roots revolts, financial controversies hit growing church.
·on articles.latimes.com →
Adventist Today
—
When the Flock Gets Fleeced: “You can’t lose. They have a gold mine in South America that will produce enough gold to cover any money investors put in. It’s a sure fire deal.”
·on www.atoday.org →
Refuting the Central Point
—
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Updated October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
Better Humans
Intelligent Ideas for Upgrading Yourself
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio, Oronce Fine, 1531
Nova Universi Orbis Descriptio, Oronce Fine, 1531
in Better Humans·
5 min read
Incredibly Credulous
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
One interesting facet of growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church was the pyramid schemes. Amway’s pots and pans were well-represented in the kitchens of my childhood. One particularly vivid pyramid-scheme memory is of the family friend who took her dying mother on tour across America. Her ailing mom acted the part of the stooge while our friend sold you not only the new miracle cure, Xango Juice, but also a fantastic business opportunity. For a one-time registration fee, you could sell Xango Juice yourself!
Adventism, of course, has no monopoly on affinity fraud. But the sheer scale of the issue in the Adventist church makes a person wonder. From the $40 million Davenport scandal in the 80s, in which pastors who recruited their local members to “invest” received kickbacks, to the $3 million “rice export” scam two years ago in Florida, there seems to be no end to what Adventists will believe.
Which leads me to this gem of absolute credulity.
The Finaeus Map, or, How I Learned to Stop Thinking and Love the Crazy
This was shared on Facebook by an Adventist pastor who lives and works in the Pacific Northwest. Rather ironic, as that half of the Pacific Ocean and most of North America are missing from this map.
Reading the caption, I discovered that this map shows global warming to be a hoax and disproves evolution. This magical power lies in the fact that it shows Terra Australis, referred to in the post as Antarctica, “before it had ice.” Antarctica must have been ice-free when the map was made, because “the mountains and coastline of Antarctica were not discovered until very recently with the use of ground penetrating radar.” This contradicts the “evolutionists” who “believe the continent has been covered by a mile thick ice sheet for millions of years.”
I am going to leave aside the idea that an ice-free Antarctica five hundred, or even five thousand, years ago would present a problem for the anthropogenic climate change model or the theory of evolution. Let’s assume that if someone can prove there was no ice in Antarctica 500 to 5,000 years ago, these are both dead in the water.
That said, has anyone actually looked at this map?!
If I gave you a map that covered the town you lived in, but also another town you were unfamiliar with, how would you judge how accurate that map was? You could just look at the part of the map you know. If they do a good job mapping your hometown, it would be fair to assume that the part of the map showing towns you don’t know is also accurate.
Not only is my hometown missing from this map, so is most of the continent it rests on.
Most of North America, most of the Pacific Ocean, part of the Indian Ocean, all of Australia, and the tip of South America are gone. Siberia stretches right around to Greenland, and Mexico is attached to China. You could not use this map to prove that Europe is north of Africa. It happens to be true, but we don’t know that just because this map says so.
As for “Antarctica” itself, even a casual glance should tell you it is mapped two or three times larger than it should be. And a careful inspection will show you that the coastline doesn’t match that of Antarctica either. In real life, Antarctica barely crosses the Antarctic Circle. In the Finaeus map, “Antarctica” reaches nearly to the Tropic of Capricorn. In the real world, the Tropic of Capricorn passes through São Paulo, Brazil. That’s a difference of nearly 3,000 miles, further than the distance from LA to NYC.
Yet here we have an Adventist pastor, a man in a place of spiritual authority, who has dozens of not hundreds of parishioners who respect his word as second to the Word of God, promulgating the idea that this map can tell us something about what Antarctica looked like three hundred years before humans ever set foot there. And people are praising God for this wonderful discovery.
I would like to say this is the most ridiculous thing I have heard from an Adventist all year, or even just this week. Unfortunately, neither of those statements would be true.
Just the day before, I was involved in a heated discussion as to whether or not a woman who was found by a physician to be pregnant, but whose husband was in another country, had cheated on her spouse. I was of the opinion that this represented marital infidelity. This was not well received, as that particular story is well known among Adventists and is widely regarded as a miracle. No, I am not referring to the virgin birth of Jesus. This reputed “miracle” occurred in 1943. The evidence of the miracle is that the pregnant mother told her son, who later became an important Adventist theologian. Most Adventists accept it at that.
I have never been a member of a church other than the Seventh-day Adventist church, so I am unable to say with any certainty that Adventists are more gullible than the average Christian. But really, do we need to compare to an average to know there is a problem here?
In the end, I feel that many Adventists, and Christians in general, consider humility to be accepting any word from an authority. Whether it’s the pastor who says global warming is a hoax, the theologian who considers his mother’s pregnancy a miracle, or the family friend selling Xango juice, we feel like we would be out of place to question these claims for ourselves.
But I believe that true humility is understanding that our gut feelings can be wrong, and so can the gut feelings of a trusted friend. Only science can tell us if Xango juice cures cancer. Only science can tell us who the father is. And only science can tell us whether or not Antarctica was frozen over the past 500 to 5,000 years. Of course, I could be wrong. But there is more than just a gut feeling behind my belief that we shouldn’t trust gut feelings.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Currents of Change Roil Seventh-Day Adventists
—
Grass-roots revolts, financial controversies hit growing church.
·on articles.latimes.com →
Adventist Today
—
When the Flock Gets Fleeced: “You can’t lose. They have a gold mine in South America that will produce enough gold to cover any money investors put in. It’s a sure fire deal.”
·on www.atoday.org →
Refuting the Central Point
—
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Updated October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
Better Humans
Intelligent Ideas for Upgrading Yourself
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
George GrimmHowell/PublicDomainPictures.net
George GrimmHowell/PublicDomainPictures.net
in Better Humans·
2 min read
Eating Humble Pie
Being right starts with admitting you’re wrong.
The way we understand things can change. Not only is that the meaning of ‘Humble Pie’, it’s also the origin. Once upon a time, it was called numble pie. Eventually, a numble became an umble. Somewhere along the line, a silent ‘h’ was added, and a few generations later, the ‘h’ began to be pronounced.
When languages change, there’s no right or wrong. If you’re understood, you’re golden. But in real life, truth matters. That’s why, I’m here to say, I’ve been wrong.
My name is Tom, and I’m here for some Humble Pie.
Why are we here? Where are we going? How can we be good to each other? There was a time when I bought into easy answers. Like a house built on the sand, now I have to start again, building my worldview from the ground up. This time, on better foundations.
Some things I’ll discover. Others I will likely have to build for myself. It’s my journey, but I hope you’ll come along. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that I don’t have all the answers. With any luck, I’ll be able to find a few of them. And if I can’t, well, I already know how to eat Humble Pie.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Incredibly Credulous
—
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
Refuting the Central Point
—
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Updated October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
Better Humans
Intelligent Ideas for Upgrading Yourself
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
·
George GrimmHowell/PublicDomainPictures.net
George GrimmHowell/PublicDomainPictures.net
in Better Humans·
2 min read
Eating Humble Pie
Being right starts with admitting you’re wrong.
The way we understand things can change. Not only is that the meaning of ‘Humble Pie’, it’s also the origin. Once upon a time, it was called numble pie. Eventually, a numble became an umble. Somewhere along the line, a silent ‘h’ was added, and a few generations later, the ‘h’ began to be pronounced.
When languages change, there’s no right or wrong. If you’re understood, you’re golden. But in real life, truth matters. That’s why, I’m here to say, I’ve been wrong.
My name is Tom, and I’m here for some Humble Pie.
Why are we here? Where are we going? How can we be good to each other? There was a time when I bought into easy answers. Like a house built on the sand, now I have to start again, building my worldview from the ground up. This time, on better foundations.
Some things I’ll discover. Others I will likely have to build for myself. It’s my journey, but I hope you’ll come along. If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that I don’t have all the answers. With any luck, I’ll be able to find a few of them. And if I can’t, well, I already know how to eat Humble Pie.
Follow Medium.com/humble-pie or @TomKHumble for new posts three times a week
+
Further Reading
Incredibly Credulous
—
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
Refuting the Central Point
—
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
Suggest a link
Recommend
Written by
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Updated October 2, 2013
Follow
Published in
Better Humans
Intelligent Ideas for Upgrading Yourself
Read next
The Part of Entrepreneurship No One Wants to Talk About
It’s not all fame and glory.
Andrew Torba
· 4 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Most Recommended more
Lost and Found
I found my soulmate when I lost my religion
in This Happened to Me
· 3 min read
Latest more
Lost and Found
I found my soulmate when I lost my religion
in This Happened to Me
· 3 min read
Refuting the Central Point
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
in Better Humans
· 10 min read
Incredibly Credulous
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
in Better Humans
· 5 min read
Eating Humble Pie
Being right starts with admitting you’re wrong.
in Better Humans
· 2 min read
Collections more
Follow
I.M.H.O.
5048 posts
Follow
Going Godless
4 posts
Follow
Humble Pie
4 posts
Recommended by Tom K. Humble more
Chelsea Manning and the Arab Spring
in Republic of Tunisia
· 8 min read
How I Learned I Was Pro-Choice by Secretly Aborting My Friend’s Baby
in Human Parts
· 12 min read
365 Days of Baristas Spelling My Name Wrong
in False Medium
· 2 min read
Medium site navigation
Tom K. Humble
Blogging about Life, Death, and Being Humble
Most Recommended more
Lost and Found
I found my soulmate when I lost my religion
in This Happened to Me
· 3 min read
Latest more
Lost and Found
I found my soulmate when I lost my religion
in This Happened to Me
· 3 min read
Refuting the Central Point
Why we can’t take the Gospels as gospel
in Better Humans
· 10 min read
Incredibly Credulous
Some people will believe anything. We call these people ‘Adventists’.
in Better Humans
· 5 min read
Eating Humble Pie
Being right starts with admitting you’re wrong.
in Better Humans
· 2 min read
Collections more
Follow
I.M.H.O.
5048 posts
Follow
Going Godless
4 posts
Follow
Humble Pie
4 posts
Recommended by Tom K. Humble more
Chelsea Manning and the Arab Spring
in Republic of Tunisia
· 8 min read
How I Learned I Was Pro-Choice by Secretly Aborting My Friend’s Baby
in Human Parts
· 12 min read
365 Days of Baristas Spelling My Name Wrong
in False Medium
· 2 min read
No comments:
Post a Comment