I'm an atheist, and every now and then I read books on freethought. Some, such as George Smith's "Atheism: The Case Against God", are pretty good (although Smith, like so many other freethinkers, gives in to the unfortunate-but-difficult-to-resist tendency to be polemical). Some are just so-so. Then there's the occasional one that's really around the bend.
One in that last category is Lloyd Graham's "Deceptions and Myths of the Bible". The cover touts it as an inquiry into the roots of the Old Testament (such as the parts that were cribbed from the Babylonian Genesis), but it isn't, at least not entirely. I've tried a few times to read it, but I've never made it past the section entitled "Premise", because that section ends with this passage (I swear I am not making this up -- you can't make this shit up. Or at least I can't...)
A sun is a planet in the process of becoming. Such is the lord of our solar system today -- a future earth, a forlorn moon. Our earth is now a planet, but it was not always so; it was once a sun. It was not, therefore, cast off from the sun; it is older by trillions of years than the sun: indeed suns are the youngest visible bodies in the universe. Our moon was once a life-bearing planet; it was not, therefore, cast off from the earth or sun; it is older by far than either of these; in fact, moons are the oldest globular bodies in the universe. Our moon is the last remaining member of a solar system when our earth was a sun. Jupiter, with its swarm of moons, was such a system once, a solar family when Jupiter was a sun and its moons were planets. And someday all our planets will be moons about a planet that is now our sun.... In what follows the reader will find these statements fully justified.
If I didn't know better, I'd think that Graham had entered some kind of contest to see how many scientific errors you can cram into one paragraph. Each time I've tried to read the book, I've gotten to this passage on page 25 and had to stop. It's impossible to take someone saying such things seriously.
I've had this book listed for sale on Amazon and Half for almost a year. No takers so far, even though (much to my incredulity) there have been a number of positive reviews of the book on Amazon. OK, OK, so they've read it in full and I haven't, so they're probably better qualified to comment, but even so -- it's hard to imagine anything worthwhile coming after that passage.
Posted by Zathras at November 10, 2004 06:08 PM