Tag Archives: Noah

Devious Types

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Those OT people are what we call types. It is a kind of prophecy. But what it does is demonstrate that such a person is what Israel needed. Jesus was the antitype. Donald J Camp

Sure, provided there’s a supernatural entity overseeing the process. But is there?

Types and antitypes are the creation of theologians in the Middle Ages who sought to explain why Jesus embodies so much ancient Jewish folklore. It’s used today by Christians to assert that Jesus fulfils millions upon millions of prophecies from Jewish scriptures.

But does he really?

As Ark has shown us, the Moses story was created by plagiarising much older myths to construct him and his history. Now either the characters in this process were ‘types’ of Moses, he their ‘antitype’, or these earlier stories were plagiarised by Jewish writers to create Moses and his story.

Which is it? The first explanation is that all the similarities between Sargo/Inanna and Moses were engineered by a deity (or perhaps even Satan) with nothing better to do but to guide the typological process over centuries. The second requires only that human writers recognised a good story when they heard it and plundered it mercilessly for their own ends. A busy-body God or conniving writers with a religious-political agenda? It’s a tough call.

Jump forward a few centuries and lo and behold the same stories crop up again. This time, God has finally brought forth the man everyone has been waiting for. And, it turns out, there were clues to him all along in earlier characters and stories.

Either this or the creators of this character – Jesus the Christ – modelled him on those older fictional heroes, just like the rabbis who wrote about Moses years earlier. These new writers plagiarised stories of Moses, Abraham, Noah, Jonah and David (most of these largely plagiarised themselves), and made their hero do much the same things they did, but better.

So which is more likely? The divine manipulation of a middle Eastern tribe’s history and folklore forcing it to point to a Messiah who would bear no relation to that anticipated by the Jews? Or a total fabrication by clever writers who followed in the footsteps of earlier writers who also stole stories from older sources and recycled them as their own?

Don’t be fooled by fancy terms like types and antitypes. What does Occam’s razor tell you?

Pest Control

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I used to pride myself on how patient I could be. I’m finding recently however that I’m becoming far less so. Not with everyone, I hasten to add, but with religionists, Evangelical Christians in particular.

As I mentioned last time, they have infested my Facebook feed with their inane Jesus-Loves-You Amen BS and now I find they’ve practically taken over a science page I occasionally read called From Quarks and Quasars, a sometimes sensationalist site that collects together science posts from other legitimate sources. It recently published an item called ‘Earth Was Once Entirely A Water World, New Research Shows’, prompting 5.2k comments. Many of these were from cranks trying to show how the finding verifies the biblical flood story, despite the fact the article makes it clear it is talking about something that occurred 3-4 billion years ago. Certified genius Dennis Mears offers this comment (all grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors in the original):

Of coarse it was !! but we don’t need “ new research “ to know what every culture on earth has talked about in their history for thousands of years . We can simply read genesis and learn about it in detail

while Scotty Johnson wades in (pun intended) with:

It’s called the flood, it’s recorded in Genesis in the Bible, Noah and the Ark, kids have been learning about it in Sunday School for years. Scientists should study the Bible first, maybe they wouldn’t be surprised when they discover something.

It’s down to astute reader Gene Steiner, catching the original article’s reference to 3-4 billion years, to correct it:

(In) Genesis 7:24 the great flood covered the whole earth, even the highest mountains; and the waters remained on the earth for 150 days…. Not billions of years ago, but 4500 or so years ago during the NOAHIC GLOBAL FLOOD! We knew that all the time!

This is the line subsequent commenters take up until we get to Tobie Schalkwyk, who offers the insight that the water-covered Earth is the same as mentioned in Genesis 1:

1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And on it goes for thousands more comments. The photo at the top of this post was also shoved on somewhere along the line.

It is the purveyors of this sort of crap that I no longer have any patience for. I want to call them out for their tomfoolery. It’s the same with commenters (Arnold and Don on this blog, Marley1312/Aussiestockman on Gary’s, Revival Fires on Bruce’s) who think atheist sites exist only to provide a forum for their brainless theobabble and Bible-bashing. They can’t be argued with, such is the depth of their ignorance and need to inject Jesus into everything. They bring out the worst in me: snark, bad language and name calling (as you can tell from this very post). I don’t want to stoop to this level, nor is it good for my blood pressure, and so feel compelled to leave them to it. I avoid reading comments and sometimes actually abandon sites I like to read because of the infestations of religious gobbledegook.

I know it infuriates some of you too, but what to do? Let the epidemic spread or resist it? What do you advise?