Bible-Quoting Billboards for the Atheist Crowd

Awesome! I love this, man. Absolutely love it. Ever since my Bible Lit class, I’ve been shocked at the bullshit in Deuteronomy, about the “Curse of Destruction.”

Not to be a party pooper, but there is a lot of disagreement as to the authorship of 1st Timothy. It has traditionally been attributed to Paul, but is now widely believed by many scholars to be a forgery, written at some time after Paul’s death by someone using his name in order to push their own theology and agenda.

Not that this really makes much of a difference anyway, as the evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians believe Paul wrote it, and it did get included in the Bible when it was canonized 1600 years ago, so it is still considered “God’s Holy Word” by most Christians. A billboard like this would still have a lot of impact on your average Christian Sunday churchgoer that never bothers to read their own Bible.

I, for one, would love to see these kinds of billboards going up all over the country. I have even thought about posting some of these verses and the many others like them on my Facebook page in order to counter all the feel good passages posted there regularly by my Christian friends and family. I don’t think I would get all that many “likes”, do you?

@Steve, well, most Christians would say it is by Paul, but it is most definitely a Pseudographia (or a forgery)

gets people thinking. brilliant! and just in time for easter.

Ezekiel 21:33 does exist in the Hebrew text.

Ezekiel 21:1 In Hebrew texts 21:1-32 is numbered 21:6-37.

NIV says: I will deliver you into the hands of brutal men,
men skilled in destruction.
You will be fuel for the fire,
your blood will be shed in your land,
you will be remembered no more;
for I the LORD have spoken.’”

One of my favorites has to be Ezekiel 23:19-21

Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. 21 So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.

Infinite justice and infinite love, or something.

Oh, and happy Easter!

[godbotherer]But, you’re taking them out of context!![/godbotherer]

Doesn’t matter which book, which chapter which verse, which author; if it is in the Bible, Christians should consider it the word of God, else, why would he endorse it? Oh right, because they can pick and choose.

I think that would get more attention than the “you KNOW it’s a myth” billboards, and be even more unassailable. What can any Christian complain about? It’s right there in the Bible!

PioneerCynthia Says:
Or my personal favorite:
All fat belongs to the LORD. Leviticus 3:17

And I have about 50lbs of his valuable property. I am very willing to give it back to him anytime!!

I’d add

Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.

— God
Gen 22:2

I hate to rain on the parade, but these are computer-generated. You can tell they are photos of the same three or four billboards, but with different text on them. It’s a shame, because it would’ve been really cool to see billboards like these.

Interesting. Most of these are things that people in the Bible said, not God. Atheists like to read the Bible out of context. It can be fun, but it’s no good. But if you want to think you have something here, go ahead. It means nothing to anyone who likes to think.

@David Moss: Look at the first sentence of the post… “These billboards weren’t put up by atheists. In fact, they don’t even exist.”

The only ‘context’ for the bible is as an ancient, obsolete document whose morals were pretty medicore even for its own time. If this were so I and probably a great number of people on this site would gladly look the other way. But as the considerable majority view it as the inerrant word of an omniscient and omnipotent deity, it’s becomes fair game to show what the bible actually contains.

Yes they are great…to bad they can’t get up on billboards. Some day it will happen.

Awesome. I am now trying to decide how believers would respond.

No doubt they’d erect their own with their favorite verses, including the “only a fool says there is no god,” or some other such crap.

Oooh! Maybe we should put up some with Jesus’ likeness and a quote bubble coming out of his mouth. Underneath, the text would read, “What Jesus said about homosexuality.” And of course the bubble would be empty. This could be done for any number of topics the fundies like to pretend mattered to god.

Or, a set of quotation marks with only space in between, and the text underneath: “What the 10 Commandments say about homosexuality.”

If god hated gays so much, why didn’t he forbid homosexuality in the 10 C’s? Or have his beloved murdered son say something–ANYTHING–about it?

I’m jaded. As I age, celebrating the absurd and evil in the bible seems old, like shooting fish in a barrel. Still the good work must continue.

@Steve Thanks for the awesome You Tube video… had me laughing out loud.

General comment – love these billboard ideas and wished I had the money to actually display them. Another idea along this line could be the production of video games that “take the Christian bible seriously” and present scenes from the Old Testament in which the player can take an active role: collecting foreskins, animal sacrifice, the genocide for non-believers, killing men for having sex with other men, killing people for working on the Sabbath… Given the violent nature of secular video games, on what ground could Christians object?

-Sheldrake

Its hard to complain about violence in the Koran after reading those Bible passages.

I love it. I think it’s much better than the über-irritating “You KNOW it’s a myth” billboards. Of course you have to think of the target audience. In this case I see it as less about closeted atheists (though I think they’d love it) and more about doubting Christians who are already very uncomfortable with the nastier bits of their religion. Confronting them with the manifest evil in the book they’re already uncomfortable with could work quite well.

I wouldn’t mind contributing to this if someone wants to make it happen.

I too would support this with a donation if a group comes forward to make this happen.

As for “taking the bible out of context”, since these billboards are very much like ones that already exist where there are quotes from “god” but they are completely fabricated ones such as: “Meet me at church on Sunday before the game. ~God or “Keep using my name in vain and I’ll make rush hour longer. ~God” So it’s perfectly OK to completely make stuff up that god supposedly said but to quote correctly a passage from the bible is wrong??? Do explain.

…by completely fabricated…I do mean to say that they do not exist in the bible. It’s all a fabrication to me regardless.

Hmmm fair enough I suppose. The passages are of course pretty rough. But it is bit moronic really – and I’m sure you guys are a little more intelligent than this – to expect people from 2000-3000 years ago to have modern systems of thought equal to ours. How about some more modern thought on the matter. God is a progression of the development of humanity. It is probably worth noting that some of the biblical atrocities are totally revolutionary in context of its time period – but abhorrent when viewed 3000 years later.

E.g. in the Bible Abraham is told to sacrifice his son to appease a God (there were many at the time and this practice was common across cultures) – and this God says “Do not sacrifice your son. I will provide”. Sounds dumb to us right. But at the time having one of these Gods/demons/spirits provide for you was unheard of. The bible is a list of totally revolutionary ideas that fly in the face of the society and cultural evolution at the time. It ALWAYS needs to be looked in historical and spiritual context. People always slag the apostle Paul off for his writings on slavery and womanhood. Yeah of course when we look at it now he looks like a belligerent tosser. Flick it back and look at the way slaves, women and children were treated at the time and you have a man who is teaching things unheard of and he is tantamount to a feminist. The first feminist even? Is the bible perfect?- not at a glance. But if you approach it negatively you’ll get negative stuff. Approach it positively and you’ll get positive stuff. It’s expectation theory. It should always be noted that not all Christians are fundamentalist nutters that love to hear about bears eating bald people. Some of us love to love for no other reason than that’s what we should do. Christianity was never meant to be a religion – we are to be spiritual and this is the ultimate angle of the Bible 🙂

@bren
So the bible is not the word of god? Tell me something I don’t allready know.

The passages are of course pretty rough. But it is bit moronic really

I agree that quoting anything from the bible and believing it to be true is extremely moronic.

@Susan

Let’s see some quotes from Stalin or Pol Pot.

Good idea, let’s show people what happens to a country when Free Thinking is not allowed. Or how dumb it is to teach docterine in schools, instead of real subjects.

And while you are busy taking quotes out of their literary and historical context, how about mangling some Shakespeare?

Also good idea, the whole context of the bible is that is writen in ancient times, and it has nothing to do with reality.
And as the bible is a work of fiction, it should absolutely be sharing the same section as Shakespear.

Jesus says to love your enemy and bless those who curse you. Why not put that on a billboard? Also the culture was much different in the Old testament days. I find old testament verses like this troubling even offensive and horrible. Jesus however was nothing of the like. So who are you trying to expose, Jews, or Christians? Or as friendly atheists that want to discredit the belief in God Himself then are you also creating billboards to expose other religions,maybe using verses from the Koran? To be friendly, one must be fair. Thanks.

What about these texts placing God in a positive light?

Exodus 22:21 (King James Version)

21Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Proverbs 14:31 (King James Version)

31He that oppresseth the poor reproacheth his Maker: but he that honoureth him hath mercy on the poor.

Isaiah 1:17 (King James Version)

17Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow.

And there are tons of others in the new testament.

How about some verses from the Qu’ran, and other religions too?

ok i know this was four months ago man, but if you can’t rely on the bible to tell you about God, then how the fuck do you know ANYTHING ABOUT GOD AT ALL? How do you know that the bible wasn’t actually written by Satan, and the actual God is, like, a three-headed mongoose or something who wants you to rape and pillage and who knows what else? Or that he’s a teapot orbiting the gas giant Saturn? of course you’re going to say something like, “I just know, I feel God’s love!” or something like that, but so do most of the people on the planet who are not Christians and “know” just as firmly that their version of a god is correct. if you really think the bible is fallible and that it can’t be trusted, you need to SERIOUSLY re-evaluate your belief system, because you’ve developed through whatever experiences a serious cognitive bias, your neural structures are deeply entrenched in belief, and now any evidence you see to the contrary just reinforces your belief, and you’re trapped in ignorance. free yourself, man.