My experience with EvilBible.com

Or, "What atheists do when they can't take the heat."

According to their "About Evil Bible.com" section, this website is "a non-profit web site which was developed to promote atheism by revealing the wicked truth about the Bible and religion." It's also one of the most low-quality of all the atheist websites out there. Almost 95% of it is mere argument by outrage, it has many misunderstandings of very simple concepts, and it ignores historical context. The latter of these I decided that I had gotten tired of.

EvilBible (from now on EB) has an article about slavery, of all things. It starts off by saying, "Except for murder, slavery has got to be one of the most immoral things a person can do." Of course, this right here has immediately given us a clue of how Chris (the editor) is completely ignorant of slavery as it was portrayed in the Bible. I immediately joined on the forums to see if he was aware of Christian-Thinktank's response to this issue.

Turns out, an atheist had already posted a link. Of course this atheist said that he disagreed and thought that Glenn Miller was just making the word "slave" sound better, not using documented historical references and using scholars with degrees from Oxford or anything (Ha). Then, of course, Chris B posted a single paragraph and thought that it would disprove the whole thing, and this was agreed to by someone named Garinus. The passage:

Exodus 21, for example, is considered by many to be unparalleled in respect to humanitarianism toward slaves, and we shall return to this in detail below. [Suffice it to mention here that Ex 21.21 restricts the treatment of the slave to be no more severe than what the community/elders could do with a regular, free citizen. This restriction on an owner should make one ponder what in the world the word 'property' might mean in such a context!

That sentence was bold. He then said, "I get a good laugh at that," etc, and then ignored the rest of the article that went onto explain that sentence/passage very well, and assumed the rest of the article wasn't factual and didn't rip his essay to shreds (it does).

Everyone that knows me and has read my material knows that I'm a very sarcastic person. I don't usually go by the wimpy-Western-strawman-Jesus mindset that we should always be nice to people we're debating with, because honestly, a lot of them don't deserve it. However, I threw that behind me for the moment. I tried to be as nice as possible. Chris had a large list of rules posted before you even get to the discussion forum, so I tried to follow them to the best of my ability as well, and I don't see that I've broken any.

I went onto explain what that passage had meant: it was unparalleled in any of the codes of the law of the day. Many others indicated that you could do whatever you felt like to slaves without punishment, but this Bible passage had an unprecedented punishment that was promised for those who beat and killed slaves (execution). Then I stressed the importance of what was later in the passage: the disciplinary measures were the same from slaves to "free" men.

So Chris first immediately denied the second. He said that elders weren't allowed to beat ordinary citizens with a rod. He also said this in direct conflict with historical record and showed to me that he didn't care what historians like Raymond Westbrook would say, but only what he personally feels is right. After challenging him on that point, he tried to clarify by saying "Criminals aren't ordinary citizens." This is, of course, a cop out. The only reason slaves were ever beaten in this manner was because they had done something worthy of punishment, just as these "criminals" had also done.

Then, Chris plays the whole "Slavery is immoral" card, once again ignoring all historical contexts. He fails to understand the passage in which he critiques: Exodus 21:20-21. He assumes that slaves were beaten for no reason whatsoever. In this verse, the master is given the benefit of the doubt if the slave survives for a few days...It is assumed that his actions were disciplinary in nature. If the slave is killed, it's assumed that he was homocidal.

He says he doesn't believe in moral relativism, which is rather odd, because he's an atheist who has no basis for saying how something became objectively wrong. I attempted to point this out and engage in a small discussion about morality. Someone else even asked, "Why is theistic morality safer than ours?" and I tried to explain it in the nicest, clearest way possible. Then Chris B gave me a bunch of links for the philosophy of Consequentialism¹ and I read through the first (which actually wasn't about Consequentialism, but about the supposed Euthyphro dilemma, and of course the article ignored the third option like every other atheistic writing I've ever read about it) and I promised to read the next few later, when I had more time.

I did a couple of other things. I posted a response to his "Jesus Lied," segment, which is essentially a mini-Marshall Brain essay. I told him that those verses were hyperbole. He said, "That's the most overused excuse ever," and I asked him why it wasn't valid...He didn't respond. Then I pointed out an important error in his judgement. He says on his main page, "It always amazes me how many times this God orders the killing of innocent people even after the Ten Commandments said 'Thou shall not kill.'" This misunderstands the commandment. The word for kill was very clearly referring to murdering someone in a predatory way. God enacting judgement is not doing such a thing, therefore he doesn't violate his own commandment. So what happened?

They banned me.

I'm not even joking. I don't think I did anything wrong, but they banned me. I thought I was engaging in intelligent discussion with these people, but apparently not.

I sent Chris an email saying, "What was the reason that I was banned from your Discussion Forums? I don't see that I have broken any of your rules." It has apparently been read, but I have not recieved a response from him. This is incredibly cowardly and is honestly jerky. Any good admin of a website will send a banned member reasons why they have been banned.

Oh, wait. Upon further investigation, I discovered why I was banned. When I told him that 99% of slavery in the Ancient Near East was voluntary, he said that it was a blatant lie and he didn't tolerate liars. What he doesn't realize is that this is a confirmed historical fact.

This is ridiculous.

¹ - Consequentialism doesn't solve Chris's problem at all. What has positive consequences for one group of people will have negative consequences for another. It's impossible to say something's absolutely wrong, in this view.