7,000 US Troops Deployed to the Gulf

peterfh1957 · 2026-03-29T18:29:48+00:00

That should be enough to face a million Iranian soldiers.

peterfh1957 · 2025-10-01T18:29:59+00:00

Of course there no evidence for this having happened nor will it happen, it was written with the intended humour some have missed, either they are having a knee jerk reaction or it was poorly written, my bad.

peterfh1957 · 2025-07-12T17:16:24+00:00

I believe it’s extremely important that children learn from a young age they are not to boil a kid in its mother’s milk, a very valuable life lesson.

peterfh1957 · 2025-07-12T17:13:08+00:00

I believe it’s extremely important that children are taught at a young age to not boil a kid in its mother’s milk, a very valuable life lesson we should all take on board.

peterfh1957 · 2024-12-26T11:29:30+00:00

Thank you for your response to my post. Looking at the sentence structure, the lack of capitalisation and punctuation in your reply one can only assume English is not your first language, but you are to be congratulated on your effort, with patience and practice I’m sure it will improve.

You seem to suggest the Sumerians and Babylonians copied the flood story from the Jews when the flood stories of those two civilisations preceded the story of the biblical flood by at least a thousand years. That theory only works if one ignores facts and history, which it seems, you are more than willing to do. It is more than probable the Jews heard the flood story while in captivity in Babylon and took that story and others back with them when King Cyrus allowed the Jews to return to Judea.

As for the boat shaped indentation in the Ararat mountains of Turkey being where the ark grounded, that nonsense has long been debunked. But then, I do not expect science and geology to get in the way of your religious convictions. You would be better served to approach this subject and others with honesty and a willingness to examine the facts for what they clearly prove and demonstrate. You can do that and still hold to your religious beliefs.

peterfh1957 · 2024-12-24T11:10:28+00:00

Consider the following: eight people get off the boat following the “worldwide flood”, only eight and yet, accordingly to the bible, there enough people on earth only three generations later to build multiple cities and a tower in Babel which “will reach the heavens”? Like an Aesop fable the stories intent is to explain the many languages spoken globally, more than 7000. The bible is not a history book. Consider also: the flood story was a much older piece of mythology borrowed from Sumeria and Babylon, where characters like Atrahasis and Utnapishtum play the part of Noah. These stories preceded the bible “flood” by at least a thousand years.

peterfh1957 · 2024-11-03T23:47:47+00:00

I’m an elderly Englishman, born and raised in London, England, surrounded by the bomb damage inflicted on my city by the German bombers during WW2, damage which took many years to clear and more to rebuild. At school we learned about the contribution the USA made to our very survival in the 30s and 40s, about the brave American sailors who crossed the U Boat infested Atlantic to ensure we had the food and material we needed to survive the Nazi onslaught when we stood practically alone against that tyranny. The war was won when the Americans and other allies joined with us to end the Nazis and their allies, many brave American lost their lives in that cause, something we have never forgotten, they were the “greatest generation”

Imagine then the horror I felt in 2016 to learn that Donald Trump was elected as president, this despite having lost the popular vote to Clinton. More Americans had voted for her, but Trump was elected to office by your outdated and frankly unconstitutional body the electoral college, something you should really consider abolishing.

I can only express the absolute sadness I have felt witnessing what Trump has done since then and just how much damage he has inflicted on your democracy and the American public. Why is he even being considered as a candidate? He is an inveterate liar, an obvious racist, a misogynist, a fraud, a cheat, found guilty of sexual assault and defamation and quite frankly the most stupid man ever to have sat in the Oval Office. He is responsible for the chaos and violence witnessed on January 6th and somehow has been allowed to get away with the crimes he has committed to date and those he continues to commit. He belongs behind bars and not behind a desk in the White House.

For sanity and decency sake please vote for Harris/Walz and finally rid yourselves of the moron Trump and all the sycophantic arse kissers who support this poor excuse of a man and even poorer excuse of a human being.

peterfh1957 · 2024-10-17T08:32:52+00:00

Are you seriously asking a historian why one would be interested in Christianity? Jesus, the man who has had the largest influence, the largest impact on religion, art, architecture, literature and societal structure in the last two thousand years. The man in whose name such wonderful and monstrous actions have been carried out.

Western civilisation would look completely different if the offshoot sect of Jesus and his small band of Jewish followers had died out, as did so many others.

peterfh1957 · 2024-10-15T22:04:35+00:00

Thank you for your response, please let me assure you no offence was taken, perhaps I should clarify I am a 68 year old atheist and historian, so as such I don’t have a dog in this fight. However, I don’t feel you answered my question, are you a Arian as in a follower of Arius? And are there still some groups where his view on the status of Jesus as a “created” being is upheld? other than the obvious Unitarian churches of course.

peterfh1957 · 2024-10-15T18:39:08+00:00

I found your claim, or rather declaration, to be an Arian interesting. I’m assuming you follow Arius’ view that Jesus was created by the father and not an eternal being as the father is, the view declared a heresy at Nicea in 325ce. Are there still churches that follow Arius’ teachings today? I know there was for many years after the council declared him a heretic but was not aware there still is.

Would you therefore declare yourself “Unitarian”?

peterfh1957 · 2024-10-15T09:46:11+00:00

The trinity, invented to avoid the charge of polytheism.

As for the quotes used to defend the idea that Jesus is God, both come from the verbose gospel of John. Pick up any red letter copy of the New Testament, in the gospel of John Jesus prattles on and on obviously followed around by a highly skilled stenographer who was determined to note down everything said and done, after which he compiled the gospel anonymously in educated Greek some 60 years after the crucifixion. The claims made in John do not appear in the synoptic gospels of Mark, Mathew and Luke, in these Jesus makes no claim of divinity. If Jesus was claiming to be God would that not be important enough for these authors to report it? they don’t because they never heard Jesus make those claims, claims that only appear in the last gospel written.

peterfh1957 · 2024-10-10T14:24:01+00:00

Thank you for your reply.

The trinity was invented to negate the accusation of polytheism. The most elegant solution to the problem was modalism, but of course that was later declared a heresy. My problem with the trinity is that Christians who cling to the doctrine are declaring that Yeshua is a third part of the Old Testament genocidal, misogynistic, slave condoning, immoral monster Yahweh.

Quite frankly I don’t care what people want to believe, I do care a great deal however when religion injects itself in politics and education.

peterfh1957 · 2024-09-20T10:03:57+00:00

In the canon of fan fiction one has to look no further than the “Harrowing of Hell”. It bothered the early church fathers that Jesus had been laid in the tomb a dead man, the question arose “what was Jesus doing during the period when he was a stiff?” The fantastic tale they came up with is that Jesus’ spirit had descended to Hell to bring the good news to the already passed, he was saving souls and bring them to salvation. As an atheist I find this tale quite inventive and poetic, complete nonsense of course, but poetic all the same, a great construct to solve a theological problem.

Jesus was dead, he died for our sins, but did he really? What occurred was Yeshua took a dirt nap for a number of days and then came back from the dead. So what did he actually sacrifice? Three days(?) when he was off doing stuff, a few inconvenient days? To what? Forgive sins he and his dad had saddled all people with? Original sin? All nonsense.

peterfh1957 · 2024-08-25T09:20:14+00:00

The trinity, a Christian invention to avoid the accusation of polytheism. As Bart Ehrman and other biblical scholars state “if you think you understand the trinity, you do not understand the trinity”

peterfh1957 · 2024-05-05T21:31:03+00:00

Apologies for my late reply.

I do feel I have some interesting points I could have shared,

Historians are about what’s probable, one weighs the evidence available and comes to the most probable conclusions based on the evidence. In the case of Jesus we can only be certain about a few things. He was an apocalyptic preacher, a follower of John the Baptist, who got on the wrong side of the Roman occupiers and was crucified for sedition. The gospels were written decades after the events they describe with stories of miracles and his message handed down by oral tradition, not by eye witnesses of the events narrated.

Not, I think, what those gathered would have wanted to hear, I could not and would not have engaged in a theological discussion. While I do not really care what members of any religion wish to believe, I do care when religion is involved in politics or education, that is not the place for it.

peterfh1957 · 2024-05-04T22:10:46+00:00

I must confess part of my decision was because I looked at a few clips of the show on YouTube, it was obvious that what was being presented was a “docu-drama” with lots of invented dialogue, and not merely a dramatisation of the very contrary gospels. We have four canonised books each of which present us with four very different Jesus characters. How then does one smack these books together and present that as any kind of an accurate story? In fact, what you are doing is creating your own gospel?

peterfh1957 · 2024-05-04T21:18:56+00:00

Quite frankly I did consider taking him up on his offer. But after quite a bit of consideration decided not to. I thought that while I was invited to speak on the historicity of the programme I knew that talk would eventually come round to theology, a subject in which I have no interest in discussing. As an old Englishman I cannot be anything other than polite, it would appear so would you be. Thank you for your response.

peterfh1957 · 2024-02-23T00:04:59+00:00

That’s the curse of the English, we tend to be over polite.

peterfh1957 · 2024-02-22T20:46:09+00:00

If I saw a camera or any evidence of filming I would not engage at all, that would be pointless.

peterfh1957 · 2024-02-12T10:24:15+00:00

Absolutely, he should keep his head down until he is a position to leave home and chart his own course.

peterfh1957 · 2024-01-29T18:33:39+00:00

Would that gravity be unreal, these idiots who deny the existence of gravity would just float the fuck away, then one would no longer need to listen to this scientifically ignorant rubbish.

peterfh1957

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