There’s been a large volcanic eruption in Tonga recently and we still don’t know the extent of the damage, but given the extent of the explosion, the damage will be pretty extensive. One thing we do know though, is that the Tongan community have been getting stuck in to clean up and stuck in to praying for relief and the safety of their families. The Tongans are almost all very religious, as are most Pacifika peoples.

They pray in much the same way the yanks go straight to prayers for the latest mass shooting, or anything. The yanks love to pray, and think apparently, you know, thoughts and prayers. 

To whom or what though? This is one thing that bugs me more than almost anything else on an ongoing basis. Largely because the idea of praying to a deity of any sort is so utterly ridiculous. For so many reasons. Yet so many people in the world lay claim to a faith of some sort. Ridiculous how? Let me count the ways…

For starters, before we even look at a bible, I looked up how many ‘Christians’ there are in the world, the internet assures me there are about 2.38 billion, about half of which are Catholics. But hang on, the Catholics aren’t Christians, Christians hate Catholics. Christians think all Catholics are going to hell for being Idol worshippers. Catholicism is as different to Christianity as Islam is. They start with the same god and prophets but diverge from there. They believe different things. There are about 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, a huge majority of whom are illiterate and have never actually read the Quran, they’ve only got the world of their Imams to go on and their Imams are splintered between Sunni and Shia, who hate each other to death.

Speaking of reading. The Bible! Have you read the Bible? No, most people haven’t, I have, because I like to read things and what with it being so globally influential, I gave it a read. It’s literally insane. Have a read of just the first 20 pages. Have a read of just the first page. It falls over on the first couple of pages. 

Basically, the God creates the earth, then a heaven, we all know the story about God creating everything in the first 6 days then having a lie down on the 7^th because it was tired. We know that the God created man in its own image and that is a concept throughout the bible. God being something about man sized that can walk along side or stand before some of the main bible characters.

Christians will often tell you one of the best reasons for not being bad, is that you might get to sit next to the God in heaven. They have this fundamental image of the God, being maybe a bit bigger and more powerful than man, well, powerful enough to have created the entire universe and be in charge of what happens within it. That’s why they pray to the god, to ask it to make something better, or to look after something or someone.

So, a man-sized god, controls everything in the universe, which is about 93 billion light years across, with trillions of stars and galaxies, where there must be billions of planets just like ours, does it look in on those?

I’ll come back to the Bible soon though. So, here we have devout people, praying fervently to a God for relief of some sort. Yet the God caused the very thing they are now praying for relief from surely? That’s in the Christians own logic. The God is all seeing, all knowing and all powerful apparently. Yet it didn’t prevent the volcano, or the mass shooting, or the extermination of 6 million people in the Holocaust. Apparently, the will of God is a mysterious thing. Really?

Here’s my take on that. Let’s suppose the God is all knowing and all powerful as Christians suggest. So, if it is, and it knew the Volcano was going to erupt, but chose to do nothing about it, allowing the carnage to unfold, then it’s an evil god surely? If it didn’t know, or couldn’t prevent the carnage, then it’s impotent. Either way, this isn’t something to be praying to, it either doesn’t know, doesn’t care, or likes causing harm and death rather than preventing it.

Going back to the bible, the good book as it’s often referred to. I’m pretty sure I’ve never read anything less good. Seriously, just read the first 20 pages or so. On page one, day four of the creation, God invents the universe. He started with Earth first! Then the 93 billion light years wide universe on day four.

So, outrageous is this nonsense you might think, yeah nah, this is rubbish, I’m stopping here. Clearly this book is bollocks. Well, it is, but keep going for a bit. You’ll be treated to the following. Talking snakes, murder, rape, slavery, genocide, pedophilia, torture, incest, child abuse, more genocide, angels, brutality, more slavery, more rape and more murder and crimes against humanity. That’s literally just the first 20 pages.

If you read the first 20 pages, you’ll also get the bit about the ark. Where we all know the God wiped out everyone and everything on earth, except two of every animal and Noah, his wife, his 3 sons and their wives. So, all animal, reptile, insect and birdlife on earth and food to feed them for the next 9 months or so, on a vessel about the size of a Navy Frigate. Right?

Well no, Sunday schools across the world taught/teach that there were two of every animal, yet the bible quite clearly says, on page 7 or so, that the pair, was male and female, and Noah was to fetch 7 pairs of everything, so that would be 14 of all the animals on earth. (Except for the nasty unclean, cloven-hoofed ones, they only took a pair each of them). I have yet to meet or speak to a Christian who has noticed the 7 pairs bit. 

I mean just for fun, lets extrapolate that out a bit. Even given the ridiculousness of millions of wild and domestic creatures living together and housed, fed, watered, (I’m assuming the ark didn’t have a desalination plant) and toileted, in a vessel the size of a navy frigate for 9 months. Imagine the food required just for the Elephants, Hippo’s, Rhino’s and Buffalo, that would be in the region of 1200 tons of food, just for those 4 creatures, based upon an average of how much they eat a day. It’s insane!

But wait, there’s more. So, after the flood, and when the waters receded. Our 8 humans remaining on earth and the several million wild creatures are released from the ark the size of a Navy frigate, with nothing else to eat and nowhere to live. It seems they all just wandered off happily and spread out over the surface of the earth, rather than the animals and humans quickly being dispatched by the thousands of predator species among them. I’m assuming including to New Zealand where all our flightless birds and lizards must have walked back to, to wait for the Maori, then the Pakeha descendants of the 8 Hebrews who disembarked the Ark on Mt Ararat in Turkey, to turn up and make them almost or entirely extinct.

Have I mentioned how insane this is? Read the first 20 pages, the person who wrote it was clearly on drugs. In fact, read the last book of the bible as well. Then you’ll know they were on drugs. (As an aside. Noah was 600 years old when the rain started and he lived to 950 years old.)

So, here we are in a world, where billions of people are praying to an inconceivable god, described in a book so ridiculous, you’d swear the author was on drugs. A book the majority of the faithful haven’t actually read, because so many millions can’t read. Instead, they get read bits of it by snake oil salesmen who charge them 10% of their entire income or earnings for the pleasure, to make him rich off their ignorance.

The Bible also says that it’s easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But somehow, the multi-millionaire pastors of the large Christian congregations, haven’t read that bit, or maybe it doesn’t apply to them because they read bits of the bible out loud, to remind people how grateful they should be for having a psychopathic, impotent imaginary master of the universe looking over them.

These pastors are hypocrites, liars and thieves. Take the Bishop Brian Tamaki for example, he’s not a bishop, he just calls himself a bishop, or an apostle, these are self awarded honorific’s. He enriches himself off the gullibility of his cult. His church can only be described as a cult because it’s all about the Tamaki’s rather than Jesus or god. Jesus would think Brian Tamaki was a piece of shit and beyond salvation.

In all his media coverage, I’ve never actually heard Brian Tamaki talk about Jesus, he’s simply inciting civil unrest to get media coverage for himself and hopefully more followers for his cult so he can make more money off them to buy some more property and Harley Davidson’s. He is a thoroughly repugnant human being, yet apparently a ‘man of god’. That speaks volumes of the merits of the men of god, before we even start thinking about Catholic Priests.

I said on a social media post recently that we should burn down every single Catholic Church in the world, imprison all the pedophile priests and sell all the church’s treasure to pay off third world debt. It was removed for going against ‘community guidelines’. Amazing.

Speaking earlier about Jesus, as we’re talking about the ridiculous. Jesus, God made himself into Jesus, to come to earth get himself killed, to convince himself to forgive humans for being human. People gather in churches to celebrate this nonsense then go home and eat some chocolate because the pagans believed in the easter bunny.

It’s hypocritical bullshit on a global scale. Christmas is even worse, the earlier pagan sun related, winter and yule festivals predating the Romans were appropriated by the then Pope Julius into 25th of December being Christmas in the year 340AD. The BC/AD calendar was put in place in 525AD by a Monk. The only reason Christianity exists is because of the whim of Roman Emperor, Constantine.

So, no, I don’t think praying to a god is going to deliver any relief to the suffering Tongans. I’m just glad science, humanity and search and rescue are on the way to make things better for the Tongans, to bring much needed relief, water, shelter and food in this extremely trying time. It’s called Humanitarian Aid, not God’s Gift.