Bronze-Age Credibility

So let me see if I understand this correctly…

Modern Christianity believes that a particular group of bronze-age sheep herders were right about the biggest, most complex, and most important questions that humanity has ever asked.  They were right about life, the universe, and everything, right?

So why is it that these same people think that that same exact group of bronze-age sheep herders were wrong about pretty much everything else?  Why do they trust them implicitly for the big important questions, but not the smaller, day-to-day life questions with real-world consequences?  Let’s take a look at just a handful of some of the things that the authors of the Bible believed:

  • They believed that slavery was acceptable and practiced it regularly, including being able to sell your own children (Leviticus 25:44-46, Exodus 21:2-6, Exodus 21:7-11, etcetera and ad nauseum).
  • They believed that women should have to marry their rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28-29).
  • They believed that a woman should be completely submissive to whatever male member of the human species her parents (or owner) thrust on her (Genesis 3:16, Numbers 30:3-16, Deuteronomy 21:11-14, etcetera and ad nauseum).
  • They believed that the Earth was an immovable flat disc with 4 pillars and suspended in a massive ocean (1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 104:5, Genesis 1:2, Daniel 4:10-11, Matthew 4:8, Job 38:4, and overwhelmingly confirmed in 1 Enoch).
  • They believed that stars were entities that could fall down to Earth (Daniel 8:10, Matthew 24:29) .
  • They believed that humans had once had lifespans of hundreds of years or more (Genesis 9:29, Genesis 11:10-11, Genesis 25:7, et al).
  • They believed that enough people united together could build a tower to Heaven where they could lay eyes on the Almighty (Genesis 11).
  • They believed that unruly children, homosexuals, witches, atheists, non-Jews, and inhabitants of land they wanted were all deserving of death (Exodus 22:17, Leviticus 20:13, Leviticus 20:27, Exodus 21:15, Proverbs 20:20, Leviticus 20:9 , Leviticus 20:10, Exodus 22:19, Deuteronomy  22:20-2, Deuteronomy 13:7-12, Deuteronomy 17:2-5, Leviticus 24:10-16, Romans 1:24-32, Exodus 31:12-15, et al and ad nauseum).
  • They believed that wearing linen and wool together would anger the all-powerful and perfect creator of the universe (Leviticus 19:19).
  • They believed that they could influence the color patterns of livestock from conception with sticks and tree branches (Genesis 30:37).
  • They believed that bats were birds (Leviticus 11:13-19, Deuteronomy 14:11-18), serpents and donkeys could talk (Genesis 3, Number 22:27-30), dragons and cockatrices were real (Isaiah 51:9, 59:5, 11:8, 14:29), and that giants existed or had existed (2 Samuel 21, 1 Chronicles 20, 1 Samuel 19:5, 1 Samuel 17:25).  Also ghosts (1 Samuel 28), sorcery (Acts 8:9, Deuteronomy 18:10, et al), witchcraft (Micah 5:12, Galatians 5:20, et al), the undead (Matthew 27:51-53), controlling the weather (Matthew 8:26-27, Zechariah 10:1), and parting an entire sea using a spell with verbal, somatic, and material components (Exodus 14 & 15).  Same thing goes for producing water from a stone (Exodus 17:5-7) and the ‘miracles’ of Moses in Egypt (Exodus 4 & 7-12).
  • They believed that really tall people were the descendants of the bastard offspring between humans and angels (Genesis 6:4, Numbers 13:33).
  • They believed that the greatest supernatural forces which existed could be foiled by the fourth most common mineral on Earth:  Iron (Judges 1:19).
  • They believed that they could cure leprosy by killing a bird, putting the bird’s blood on another bird, killing a lamb, wiping the lamb blood on the leper, and killing two doves (Leviticus 14).

Bear in mind that, not only did these people believe these things, they found them so enormously important that, not only they were included in their holiest of sacred texts, they have also been carefully preserved and copied for thousands of years.  And remember that this has nothing whatsoever to do with the involvement of God or Gods, we are only talking about what these people believed.  Their credibility is the object that I am trying to shine a light on, and by extension the credulousness of modern believers.  

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