Things you think are in the Bible, but aren't, & what early Christian practice was really like

I'm very fond of Cracked.com. I know - it's a total clickbait site, and it can be quite dickish. But often, the writers really nail an insight or story in a no-nonsense, fact-based way.

Two pieces on the site are particularly awesome to me. One is called "5 Stories Everyone Assumes Are in Bible but Arent." I already knew that these five stories aren't in the Bible, but Cracked does such a good job of breaking it down simply and directly. In summary:

#5. Sodom And Gomorrah Getting Destroyed For Homosexuality (they weren’t, at least not according to scripture)
#4. The Seven Deadly Sins
#3. Purgatory
#2. The Prostitute Mary Magdalene
#1. Satan, The Lone Enemy Of God

It's so much fun correcting a Christian I'm arguing with on these points. "Show me in the Bible where it says that." And they begin to scramble... hilarious. I do the same thing with Muslim friends that say the Koran says dogs are filthy. In fact, it doesn't say that - Sura 18 is a story about a dog that honors canines for their protection and loyalty, and recognizes them as members of the family.

Another Cracked article I like very much: "5 Secret Things You Won't Believe About Early Christianity." And it's true: most of the Christians I know refuse to believe this about early Christian practices, those that took place in the first 300 years after Jesus supposedly was on Earth. In summary:

#5. Women Played A Huge Part In Church History (and were entirely written out)
#4. Early Christians Spent An Unhealthy Amount Of Time Fighting About Dicks
#3. The First Church Services Were More Like Lavish Parties
#2. The New Testament Was Conceived By A Heretic (Marcion of Sinope) Who Thought God Was Also The Devil
#1. Jesus Was A Shapeshifter?

They forgot one of my favorites to bring up to Christian friends: the Nicean Council's prohibition of kneeling on Sundays and during Pentecost. Standing was the normative posture for prayer at the time of the First Council of Nicea, and it still is among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Kneeling was considered most appropriate to penitential prayer, as distinct from the festive nature of Eastertide and its remembrance every Sunday. So, next time you're in church and everyone kneels, start shouting, "Heretics! Apostates!" Good times...

I blame the First Council of Nicaea in 325 BC for solidifying non-Biblical anti-women views as official Christian doctrine, leading to the horrific religion-sanctioned oppression of women that permeates most Christian sects to this day.

Would Cracked dare articles such as "5 Things You've Been Told are in the Koran, But Aren't"? or "Things About Early Islamic Practices That Would Get Them Called Heretics Today"? I wish they would.

The more you know...

The one true religion

This is what it's like for me when someone tells me why they are a Christian or a Muslim:

Picking & choosing morals?

A Tweet I read today:

GodlessAtheist

Pope says atheists pick & choose their morals. Today I will be frowning on child abuse & not having a problem with homosexuality #atheism

And I laughed and laughed...

Even the Dali Lama says we can be good without God.

Where do my morals come from? From my own thoughts, which are much better expressed by Carl Sagan than me, such as in the text that goes along with this magnificent video.

In case you don't want to, or cannot, listen to the video, here is an except of the text read with the video:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

—Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space