R-Farmer Wrote:The Bible doesn't claim omnipotence for God either, only that he is very powerful. Powerful enough to create the universe (maybe not that big a flex since it's conceivable that we've already created universes by accident in cyclotrons) and flood the world; that doesn't necessarily mean that he could rearrange the galaxies to spell out 'See, I told you I was ' in English on a whim. Heck, creating the universe and us took him six days, he didn't create everything with a snap of his metaphorical fingers.
That just proves that god (of the Bible) is an archaic idea created by primitive people who knew very little about the world and let alone the universe. People in the ancient past thought that all species of animals could fit on one boat because they knew only a handful of animal species. Similar with the universe - they didn't know about galaxies, and they thought that world was flat. Today we know that the universe is too big for anyone to create it and manipulate it and that we hold no special place in it.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
