Here is a post from an ex-Christian called B__e who has been ruminating on this for a whiile. See what you think:

Ten Commandments or Ten Suggestions?

By B__e

I have sometimes heard that the Bible has the Ten Commandments and not the “Ten Suggestions.”  I’m not so sure that Yahweh thinks so based on the Scriptures themselves, since He appears to break or flout them all.  You be the judge…

1.       You shall have no other gods before me.

Deuteronomy 6:4 reads:  “Hear, O Israel: Th...

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I am writing a post in reaction to something about which I was talking with my Christian friend (let’s call him Colin). We were talking about homosexuality and his approach to it given his Christian background. Some points were interesting and some I fundamentally disagreed with. Here are his views:

 

• As according to the Bible, homosexuality is wrong.
• This morality is grounded in God.
• He is not homophobic and detests that label as it automatically halts any further informed discu...

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I thought, as I was reading through Free Will? again for a reprint, that it was worth posting this. It is still, to me, a really powerful argument against the sort of God we all know and love....

Of hardening of hearts

 

Normally, there are two ways of seeing theological determinism. Firstly, the soft type, called soft theological determinism, allows for humans to have free will, even though God knows what they are going to do. The hard type means that humans do not have any free will, and G...

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Courtesy Unreasonable Faith

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In “Does the New Testament Imitate Homer?”, Dennis MacDonald seeks to show how Luke / Acts imitates Homer. Luke, he claims very convincingly, uses mimesis –the copying  / imitating previous works for a variety of reasons – by imitating the works of Homer. This then calls into question the factual historicity of the events accounted.

 

MacDonald show in the introduction how Luke quite obviously uses mimesis with regards to the Old Testament. Over to the author:

 

 

“To illustra...

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Here are some notes I made from Tim Callahan's "The Secret origin of the Bible" a few years back. Excuse the note form and any spelling / syntax errors. It's still interesting reading and shows how clearly the account is mythological. Samson makes no sense as a stand alone tale, and has no allegorical or symbolic meaning at all, begging the question as to why it's in the bible at all, if not a story lifted from a nearby culture and adopted to Yahweh.

Why is Samson myth?

 

Samson is clearly m...

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I have always maintained that the Flood myth in the bible is dependent upon the earlier Mesopotamian Gilgamesh as a source. Tablet XI (http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/mesopotamian/gilgamesh/tab11.htm) shows clearly that the two stories are so similar as to be beyond chance. This explicitly illustrates how the biblical narrative cannot, in any realistic sense, be anything like the truth. This quote from Cyrus Gordon sums it up (Cyrus H. Gordon and Gary A. Rendsburg, The Bible and the Ancie...

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The Jews definitely thought Yahweh was one god amongst many, and an inferior one at that. I~ have already touched on this in the forum, but it has now been lost.

 

In Deut 32:7-9 we have evidence that Yahweh was one of many gods.

 

"Remember the days of old,
         Consider the years of all generations.
         ^(O)Ask your father, and he will inform you,
         Your elders, and they will tell you. 
    ⁸"^(P)When the Most High gave the nations their inheritance,
         When He separ...

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