Here, here. I’ve never understood, and probably will never understand, this recent rush to applaud the bible as a great work of literature, whilst simultaneously deriding the concepts within it. The simple fact is that even as literature it’s naff. Good literature – say, Dickens or Shakespeare, is at least coherent; not a claim the bible could make. I’d be interested to see if the apparent trend towards not doing nativity plays is not so much political correctness, but simply because the story is so damnably dire.

I was just about to settle in with a slice of chocolate cake, fresh from the oven, and a DVD of Laura (1944), when I noticed that a new Carnival of the Godless had come online. While skimming the essays therein collected, I left a comment at John Wils…

Of course, the virgin birth itself falls into the same category. It’s supposed to fulfill the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14, but the Hebrew word translated “virgin” in that verse doesn’t actually mean virgin — and even if you try to cook up some way in which it does, Matthew’s interpretation still doesn’t make sense, because in Isaiah 7, the prophet is trying to convince his king that he knows what he’s prophesying about, and you don’t do that by announcing that something will happen seven centuries later. Read on to Isaiah 8 to find out that the prophecy was fulfilled by Isaiah’s own son, anyway. . . .

I’ve grown used to theists making a big to-do about people not knowing their Scripture, but what bothers me more is when atheists accept these sorts of polls as evidence that people are “culturally illiterate,” or ignorant of some grand knowledge base we supposedly need to understand European history, art and whatnot. First of all, name one king who based his divine right of kingship upon the claim that Jesus and John the Baptist were first cousins once removed!