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2011-09-19
Superfluous senseless stupidity is showcased in Exodus 8:16-19. God tells Moses to tell Aaron to hold out his rod to smite the dust into lice for plague número tres. As the lice (modern translations call them gnats) form from the dust, they cover all of the people and animals. Pharaoh turns to his sorcerers and tells them to produce lice too, but, unable to, they concede that it must be the finger of God that creates them.
Which is utterly ridiculous. Let’s say you’re a sorcerer working in Pharaoh’s employ and in walks a man claiming to be a prophet. Pharaoh asks the man to display a miracle to prove he is the prophet of his desert deity, and the man turns a rod into a snake. You are thoroughly unimpressed. You know that this is a simple trick used by charlatans and liars to impress the ignorant. Calling the so-called prophet out, you also turn your rod into a snake. The next day the man turns water into blood, a simple trick of chemistry to learned as a boy which you are able to easily duplicate. Then, the prophet causes frogs to appear out of thin air, which you are easily able to reproduce. You now realize that this man is simply regurgitating the old tricks of the trade. But the next day he makes lice appear and you’re not quite sure how he did it. Do you, A: believe that this is simply a new trick that you have yet to learn, or B: believe that he is in direct contact with an all-powerful deity from another dimension and has been given the power to wield horrifically powerful magic? Silly, no?
The word usage here is kind of quaint. Aaron smote the dust into lice. It’s as if the lifeless dust was somehow cursed into becoming a living organic arthropod! How is that being smote? Sure, in ancient times lice would be considered inferior to dust because dust is benign while lice are parasites, and even the less enlightened people of today view them solely as pests, but like all living things, they serve a very important role in the ecosystem. They’re much more important than dust, so if anything, dust should be so lucky as to become lice.
Also, it’s funny how Creationists claim that living things can’t possibly come from non-living things. They even appropriate Louis Pasteur’s evidence against spontaneous generation as proof that abiogenesis can’t exist. Yet, they never seem to have a problem accepting that God spontaneously generated lice from dust (which is precisely the thing that Pasteur’s experiments demonstrate can’t happen). Verses like this betray those who claim the bible is supernaturally privy to scientific knowledge. Spontaneous generation was a stumbling block in our race to understand the world, yet they still want to believe that fully formed organisms develop from the dust.
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