More Idiotic Atheism

(Some people -- surely including the idiot I immortalize below -- would take the title of this blog post as more than sufficient proof that I am attacking atheism. On the contrary, of course, I'm just very embarrassed when schmucks like this make it look bad.

As usual, all dialogue is guaranteed horrifyingly, wake-up-screaming-in-the-middle-of- the-night-for-years-afterward real. Commentary is in round brackets and italics, paraphrases are in square brackets and italics.)

IDIOT: Pythagoras came waaaay before the bible 575B.C.E - 495 B.C.E and he is the first known person to work out that the Moon, Earth and the planets were all spheres so keep your rubbish for the pulpit on Sunday mornings.

BYSTANDER: Isaiah was a prophet in the 8th-centur­y BC Kingdom of Judah. (This is correct.)

IDIOT: If you know anything about the bible you will know that scholars in the main have accepted that the book of Isaiah in it's current form was written around 180 B.C.E.
Next.

ME: I don't know any of those scholars.

IDIOT: Then you need to read more.

Book of Isaiah:
The book of Isaiah, probably written some time in the 6th century BCE and addressed to the community of exiled Jews living in Babylon, emphasizes the principles of holiness, justice and ultimately the salvation of the Jewish people. Isaiah was born around 740 BCE and he later advised four different rulers of the southern kingdom of Judah: Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah. Tradition has it that Isaiah was martyred some time between 701 and 690 BCE. The book itself, however, probably reached its current form around 180 BCE (The general consensus is that Isaiah was written over the course of some time by three different authors or groups of authors, and was finished not long after the Exile, by around 500 BC. It may have been around 180 BC that the Book of the Wisdom of Sirach was written, which contains the passage beginning with the phrase immortalized by James Agee, "Let us now praise famous men," with Isaiah being one of those praised.)

ME: Cut and paste without attributio­n.

Before you lecture others about rubbish, make sure you know what you're talking about.

Nobody knows who the first one was to discover and/or demonstrat­e the sphericity of the Earth, moon and planets. It might have been Pythagoras­.But we possess none of Pythagoras­' writings, assuming he wrote anything. Most of our earliest informatio­n about him was written centuries after his life (remind you of someone?), and much of it is certainly legend. It might have been Thales, almost 50 years old when Pythagoras was born. But our informatio­n about him is even more sketchy than in the case of Pythagoras­. It might have been someone else. We just don't know. I'd guess it was probably a Greek, but even that much isn't certain. We do know that the discovery of a spherical Earth had been made at the latest by the time of Plato, who unmistably and unabiguous­ly deascribes the Earth as a sphere in the Timaeus.

"waaaay before the bible 575B.C.E - 495 B.C.E"

Some of the Bible was written before 575 BC. Maybe only the prayer beginning "Maybe the Lord bless and keep you..." Maybe a lot more than that. We don't know.

IDIOT: I know from dealing with people like you that you have a short attention span. Hope you enjoy the sermon on Sunday, I think it's about how a piece of wood turned into a snake, or was it the other way around? I always get confused with these facts. (You get confused about a lot of things, Sparky!)

There is a lot more informatio­n to accept Pythagoras than anything written in Isaiah.

ME: Soooo not my point.

IDIOT: So what is your point? I would take Greek history as factual way before anything coming from the bible. And if it wasn't Pythagoras that came up with the spherical idea of earth, what makes you feel that the answer lies within a book that is full of contradict­ion and lies that was cobbled together to create an illusion.

ME: "what makes you feel that"

I don't feel that. What makes you feel the need to put words in my mouth?

IDIOT: tell you what, you stick with your bible and I will stick with reality, ok? lol.

ME: I'm an atheist. It's in my [tagline], for crying out loud.

What, do you just assume that anybody who disagrees with you must be a Bible thumper? Are you having trouble telling me apart from [a third party, clearly Christian] or something? Honestly, what is the problem?

IDIOT: I saw your [tagline], so what? When you put an argument up for biblical writings over Greek philosophy and literature then what am I to think?

She alludes that that it was the bible that spoke first that the world was a sphere, over 700 BC when everyone knows that even the catholic church were not convinced and we have their writings. Why was Gallileo nearly persecuted­? Because he had the audacity to put science before religion, many other scientific minds perished and Gallileo probably would have to had he not been friends with Bruno, the catholic pope at the time, so he suffered house arrest instead. I am all for truth and giving credit but the bible lost all credibilit­y for me many years ago with it's contradict­ions and mistruths. (I swear to Dog, some of these atheist dimwits are getting almost as bad with their assumption that people don't know the Galileo case better than they do, as the fundies with their assumption that no-one has ever heard of Jesus. "Have you heard about my friend Jesus Christ?")

ME: "When you put an argument up for biblical writings over Greek philosophy and literature­"

I didn't!

"She alludes that that it was the bible that[...]"

I have no idea who this "she" is. Whoever she is, I never alluded anything of the sort. I merely said the it is unknown who first figured that the Earth and other bodies in space are spheres, and that you gave the wrong date for the book of Isaiah.

Which is not surprising­. You obviously can't even read comments on HP, and that other stuff is a leetle bit harder to get right.

(While I'm at it, I guess I could add another recent specimen of striking atheistic stupidity. If you can point out five errors in the following without getting all religious on me, five FACTUAL errors, you will earn my respect.)

OTHER IDIOT: Christiani­ty is a phony, made up religion which has absolutely no basis of any kind of provable, historic fact. The religion was created during The Fall of The Roman Empire as a way to keep the masses of the great unlettered and unwashed in line by threatenin­g terrible retributio­ns from an Invisible Man in The Sky. The Bible, written by men, is are a complete and total work work of fiction comprised of myths, legends and outright lies. Nothing that takes place in the Bible can be proven to have ever happened.