Writer Jeffrey Tayler penned an opinion piece for Salon this past week, stating that the Bible should be classified as science-fiction.
Tayler cited several “rank absurdities that insult our intelligence and affront our dignity as twenty-first-century, post-Enlightenment humans,” as evidence for his argument, the first of which purports that the conception of Jesus Christ was actually a sexual assault.
Our soi-disant “savior” was born not following intercourse between a man and a woman, but as a result of God “debauching” (to use Thomas Paine’s word) an unconsenting (per Matthew) virgin two millennia ago. (By today’s standards, Mary would be entitled to file sexual assault charges against the Lord, all the more so since He, according to the Bible, must have been at least four thousand years her senior, and occupied a position of authority over her. Imagine the settlement she could get!)
Additionally, Tayler argued that people should be insulted by others, who in 2015, still choose to follow the Bible’s teachings.
Seriously, though, it insults our intelligence to be enjoined to believe, now that we have split the atom, discovered the Higgs Boson, and sent a probe to Pluto, in the veracity of a supernatural account of the origins of our cosmos.
It insults our intelligence to be enjoined to believe, now that we have mapped the human genome and fathomed our manifest kinship to other species of the animal kingdom, that a supernatural being verbally conjured us into existence.
It insults our intelligence that we are expected to believe, even venerate, all the rubbish found in the Bible, a book written — no one disputes — by mere humans. After all, humans have always been self-interested, and given to exaggeration, confabulation and outright lying. Who’s to say that the authors of the Bible didn’t just make it all up?
You can read Tayler’s entire piece over at Salon.
[h/t: News Busters]