Bible Walks Website

Bible Walks is a guide to archaeological and historical locations in the Holy Land. It includes descriptions, maps, and photographs of hundreds of sites. Many of these sites are well-known, and attract thousands of tourists every year. But if you are looking for "off the beaten path" less-visited locations, you can find many of these here as well.

Some of the locations are identified from uncertain traditions, and therefore may not be the real original sites mentioned in the bible. These include Mary's Well, the Mount of Beatitudes, Job's Spring, Armageddon, the Via Dolorosa, the Holy Sepulcher, and the site of the Last Supper. For example the Via Dolorosa is a supposed path to the site where Jesus was crucified at Golgotha. But in fact the real location of Golgotha itself is uncertain.

One interesting but less-visited location is Mar Saba, a Greek Orthodox monastery in the Judean desert that was built built during the fifth century. It was here that a portion of a letter describing the Secret Gospel of Mark was discovered. There could be other valuable ancient manuscripts and artwork here, but unfortunately there are tight restrictions on public access.

To visit this website, go to Bible Walks. You could spend many hours looking at the maps and photographs.

Is God Imaginary?

According to the author of this website, belief in the Christian God is a delusion, because such a God doesn't exist. The author supports this contention with 50 different independent arguments, or items of evidence. Number 1 on the list is the fact that the vast majority of prayers go unanswered, even though many of them, such as prayers for world piece or famine relief would be of great benefit to humankind. In fact, the author says that "God never answers any prayers," arguing that the rare cases in which they appear to be answered are just coincidences brought about by statistical probabilities.

As another example of the arguments, number 10 is called "Watch the Offering Plate". In this article the author wonders why churches have to take up collections instead of just asking God to give them whatever money they need.
His conclusion is that they have to pass the offering plate because God is imaginary.

Argument number 30 is called "Examine God's sexism". It quotes numerous passages from the bible which say that women should be submissive to men, or even that women must not speak in church. It concludes that a real God would not have allowed such statements to get into the bible, so therefore he doesn't exist.

I won't try to describe all 50 arguments, and in fact didn't take time to read all of them. But the ones I did read do raise some interesting questions. If you want to examine some of the others, go to God Is Imaginary. In addition to the articles, the site also contains a forum, a blog, and some videos.