Dear Stupid People,

I know I shouldn't let other people's idiocy bother me so much, but there comes a point where I can no longer just watch another human being say really, really, really, REALLY moronic things without keeping my mouth shut and saying something about it.

This thing about people making up brand new “gender identities” that are unconnected to anything in reality has reached epic proportions of dumb.

Seriously.

Have you heard about this shit?

From what I can tell, it all started with people who were honestly suffering trying to get together to help each other get through things, and to help those of us lucky to not have their problems understand what they were going through. Unfortunately, what it has evolved into is a clown-show. Its now a complete joke. Its an echo-chamber where people whose only real shared problem could be charitably described – and recognized as such by anyone with a working brain – as “social ineptitude.”

These sad people sit in on discussions of equal rights for homosexuals and transgendered people, learning the lingo and the common arguments and that that carefully garnered intel and turn it to their own purposes. They quote famous human rights activists way, way out of context to add that elusive whiff of legitimacy to a situation that couldn't be less legitimate if its parents hadn't been married when it was born. They act as if their “fight for equality” was morally and factually equal to the fight to end racism, transphobia, homophobia, class discrimination, or sexism. They worm their way into discussions of actual, real issues and then cleverly turn statements that were originally designed to protect true victims who are at risk of losing their jobs and lives to their own benefit.

I'm talking about the so-called “otherkin” and “otakukin.”

In case you're unaware, otherkin and otakukin are people who “identify” as animals or anime characters, respectively.

No, really. They do that.

No, I'm not joking. I promise, I'm not joking. This is actually a thing.

They really do “identify” as animals and anime characters.

Now, I'm a pretty open-minded guy. My basic philosophy is that you can do, say, or believe what you want as long as what you are doing, saying, and believing doesn't hurt anyone else and as long as you aren't shoving your actions, statements, and beliefs in other people's faces when they don't want you to do so. But this shit is just too stupid for me to let go.

According to these people, the lack of widespread acceptance of “otherkin” and “otakukin” is contributing to an environment of mass oppression. Mass oppression? Really? So these people are losing their jobs and being beaten up and murdered and raped because they think they're a chinchilla trapped in a human body? Because they think they are actually the human incarnation of Shinji Ikari? No? None of that is actually happening? No one's actually being killed or beaten or forced out of their jobs? Then what, I ask, is actually going on that could possibly qualify as “mass oppression?”

What's that you say? People are listening to these people say that they are actually animals or anime characters and are laughing at them instead of just accepting it? People are being mean on the internet and not just believing these people out of hand? That's your so-called “mass oppression?”

Are you kidding me, here?

In addition to these weirdos, a new form of personal delusion has popped up onto the landscape. You've all no doubt heard of transgender, but have you heard of transabled? How about transethnic?

No?

Well, if you've got a few hours free and a lot of booze handy, try googling the term “transabled oppression” or “transethnic oppression” and then sit back and prepare to be entertained.

Transabled people are – apparently – disabled people who were unfortunate enough to be born in perfectly functional bodies. They “identity” as being blind, deaf, paraplegic, quadriplegic, and so on despite not having been any of those things a day in their lives. They talk a lot about how hard it is to go through life in a perfectly healthy body.

Transethnic people, on the other hand, are basically people who “identify” as being part of a different ethnicity. In the 90s we called people like that “weeaboos,” except these jokers take it up to 11. The weeaboos just acted like they weren't white or Asian or whatever. These people really do believe they are truly of another ethnicity.

Quick digression: I thought that “transethnicity” was a sick joke until a friend sent me a link to a blog by a white man who “identifies” as a black woman. He apparently claims that he is “oppressed” by other black women who have the gall to actually question his self-proclaimed “identity”.

And then there's the “demi-sexuals.” Apparently, these are people who are sexually attracted to people they are in love with. Yeah, really. They claim that this is a real sexual orientation and that they are being oppressed. How are they being oppressed? I have no idea.

I find the very idea of these people offensive. I feel that they are mocking the very real pain and the very real struggle of disabled people and ethnic minorities to find an equal place in our society. And the greedy appropriation of the “trans experience” just so they can claim to be marginalized is disgusting to me. What these people claim to “suffer” is nothing compared to what actual trans people go through on a daily basis. They are not going to be denied a job, they are not going to be denied housing, they are not going to be forced to be who they aren't, they are not going to be subject to violence because they are “transfat” or “transblind” or “transasian” of whatever.

“Trans” is short for “transitioning.” These people aren't transitioning. They're appropriating.

These yahoos have even come up with a special term for those of us who have too much common sense and too much compassion for the struggle of real transgender people to buy into their nonsense. They call us “singlets.” Apparently, all of us who walk around refusing to buy into their nonsense enjoy “cisprivilege.” People who are actually disabled apparently enjoy “cisability privilege”, while actually people of color enjoy “cisethnic privilege.”

Well isn't that special.

This might be the height of arrogant bullshit. These people just need to stop. Right now. Just stop. If they had any real idea how hard it was to live with a disability, to be denied employment or housing because of their gender identity, to be treated as less than human because of their skin color, would they really be clamoring to be a part of it?

As a straight white man who “identifies” as the gender he was born into I can't speak for those groups, but I can tell you that living with a disability is hard! I'm in pain pretty much 24-7-365. I have vertigo spells of various intensity every ten or twelve minutes, some of which last just moments, while others last minutes. I have trouble walking, tire easily, and sometimes can't remember what I want to remember. And I got off lucky! This is not something that should be reduced to a punchline so that someone can pretend that they are oppressed.

As for the so-called “demi-sexuals”, you assholes need to stop blogging about coming out as demi-sexual to your parents as if it was such a fucking hardship. Do you really believe that, in a heteronormative world, that your mom and dad are going to have a hissy fit because you enjoy the most normal, vanilla form of sexual attraction on the planet? Really? You're not oppressed, you're vanilla. I don't remember ever seeing a news article about a “demi-sexual” who was murdered for being “demi,” or thrown out of their apartment, or fired from their job.

And finally, let me direct my eye to you people who claim to be “transfat”. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I don't care if you weigh a thousand tons on the inside, on the outside you're still just a skinny asshole. You still get to walk into any clothing store you want and buy your clothes with ease. You can go into a restaurant to eat without having people snicker over your size and how much you're eating. You can go to a grocery store without people staring at what's in your cart and making jokes. When you go to a doctor, you don't have him constantly warning you of the heart attack you're going to have at any moment even if everything else about you is healthy and normal.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

I wish these people were a put on. I really do. But the more I read about these idiots, the more I realize that they are deadly serious. It disgusts me to a point that its impossible for me to actually describe. Being marginalized because of a disability or your sexuality or your ethnicity is horrible and affects your life in real and painful ways.

Again, I can't speak for people of color or the transgedered, but I can tell you that “disabled” is not just a label you wear for shits and giggles. Its something you struggle with from the moment you open your eyes in the morning until the moment you fall asleep at night. It means that you often die earlier from the stress of just living than you might if you were healthy. This isn't some cutesy game where you pretend to be suffering, claiming to be oppressed and engaging in fake outrage over how the rest of the world refuses to accept you.

Stop. Just stop.

Let's Take a Look at Noah's Flood

According to the Book of Genesis, the global flood took place when Noah was 600 years old. Now, if you assume, as the Christians do, that the world was created in 4004 BCE, this would place the flood at about 2400 BCE, give or take a decade or two. In other words, right about the same time that the pyramids were being constructed on the plains of Giza. In other places around the world, the dynastic civil war was settling just which one of four brothers would be king of the Akkadians in Mesopotamia, the first Great Kingdom was forming up to rule what would later be known as Korea, and the city of Lothal was being founded in India.

Lots of things happening, in other words. And in -- well, in wherever the Noah story was supposed to be taking place, the entire world got covered with water as it rained for forty days and forty nights.

I’ve always found it hilarious that the Christians claim the entire world was drowned under water, but the Greeks, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Chinese, Koreans, Olmecs, Celts and so on were all going about their business without noticing that they were supposed to be drowning under mountains and mountains of rainwater. You’d think they could hardly have missed such a thing, but apparently, they did.

Historical records from all those other civilizations show that at no time were their civilizations suddenly wiped off the face of the map by a global flood, or a slow repopulation afterward. Nowhere in the world is there any evidence of such an event. Not archeological evidence, not geological evidence, not historical evidence. Nothing indicates that a flood wiped out the world and drowned all the people on it except one eight-person family.

But “no evidence it ever happened” is only one of the multitudinous reasons to not think the flood of Noah, as described in the Book of Genesis, is actually true. Take, for instance, the problem of the boat itself. The Bible describes Noah’s Ark as being “300 cubits by 50 cubits by 40 cubits,” which translates to approximately 450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet tall. Were this for real, the ark was four times as large as the largest wooden ship built by any civilization in the history of the world, and certainly out-sizes any other ship built by any other ancient civilization that existed during the second millennium BCE.

The stresses navigating the open ocean place on large wooden ships were severe, and the larger the ship, the greater the stresses. There is a reason why the ships built by Bronze Age civilizations were much smaller than those built by post-Dark Age civilizations. To be blunt, the technical advances later civilizations developed to enable a large wooden ship to survive ocean travel just did not exist in the Bronze Age.

In point of fact, no ship the size and weight that we are discussing was known to have been built and successfully sailed until the year 1900 CE. These ships, built as I note in 1900, were nine-masted schooners some 300-feet long (150 feet shorter than the ark). They were so long they visibly undulated with waves and required large diagonal braces made of steel -- a substance unheard of in 2400 BCE, a time when bronze was the new big thing when it came to metal -- to keep it from breaking in half. And even with these reinforcements, the stress regularly caused gaps in the ship’s hull; these schooners would leak like sieves and required constant bailing with automated pumps that ran -- quite literally -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And even with all this, these overs-sized schooners were never taken out of sight of land, because if taken out onto the open sea they’d be battered to pieces by oceanic waves. They were used for coastal traffic only.

The fact that these large transport ships had so many problems was one reason why the world’s navies turned to steel ships during the last years of the 19th Century and the years prior to World War I. And this was only 116 years ago, as I write this on January 17, 2016, folks.

Think about it. We’re supposed to believe that a ship 4000 years ahead of its time was built by Noah -- a man who was not a nautical engineer but a shepherd and farmer -- and survived the open seas during a catastrophic, raging flood. We’re supposed to believe that this 600-year old farmer solved engineering problems, all by himself and without the use of modern metallurgy, construction techniques, or physics knowledge, that every navy in the world could not manage to beat 4000 years later. And then, after the flood, the knowledge of how to build these super-ships was apparently forgotten because no other ship of this type would be built, ever.

So that’s the lack of evidence and the implausibility of the ship itself. Let’s consider the live cargo of the ark for just a moment. If we accept the most generous version of the Noah story, Noah was commanded by God to carry seven of every “clean” animal and two of every “unclean” animal on the ark along with himself and his family. But there was only so much space within the hull of the boat, and if you look at the list of known animal species, even restricting it to just two -- much less seven -- means that the boat would be carrying an awful lot of animals. (And it just gets worse if -- as logic dictates we do -- we include not just the animals that exist today but every species of animal known to have gone extinct between 2400 BCE and present day.) Its obvious that even in a boat with some 1,518,750 cubic feet of space (450 feet long by 75 feet wide by 45 feet tall, remember) the ark would simply not have enough space for all the animals.

Some creationists have gotten around this by arguing that Noah didn’t take two (or seven) of every species, but rather seven (or two) of every “kind.” And, they argue, after the flood the “kinds” would then vary and produce all the new species we see today.

I’m not kidding. That’s what they say. Let me quote from The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications by Henry Morris and John Whitcomb: “For all practical purposes, one could say that, at the outside, there was need for no more than 35,000 individual vertebrate animals on the ark. The total number of so-called species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians listed in Mayr is 17,600, but undoubtably the number of original kinds was less than this.” (The Biblical Record and its Scientific Implications, Whitcomb and Morris, 1961, p.69)

Thus, according to creationists, Noah didn’t have to make room for a pair of lions, a pair of tigers, a pair of leopards -- and so on -- on his boat. All he needed was one pair of a “cat kind” and things would be fine. (For now, we’ll ignore all the problems regarding the subject of “kinds.” I’ve got an entire other essay in the works on that subject.)

There are multiple problems with the creationist view. For example, its often assumed that aquatic animals like otters and seals and dolphins -- being aquatic -- wouldn’t be endangered by the flood since, you know, aquatic! Thus, they wouldn't need space on the ark. Unfortunately, if enough fresh water were to fall on the earth to cover it past the top of the tallest mountains, the salt-content of the oceans would be so diluted that no marine organism, be it fish, plant, mammal, or bird, would be able to live in it. Very few salt water animals can survive fresh water. Such creatures swell up, suffer tissue damage, and die when forced to abide in fresh water for two long.

“No problem,” say creationists. “The fountains of the deep must have sprewed sufficient salt to keep the salinity high enough for marine animals to survive.”

That just reverses the problem, though. Fresh water animals that have to abide in salt water dehydrate and die as the fresh water is leeched from their tissues by the salinity differential. Some creationists have tried to have it both ways by arguing that there were pockets of fresh water and pockets of salt water that were somehow kept from intermixing. How this took place while the churning flood waters were utterly destroying the surface of the earth is something creationists never explain. Whitcomb and Morris speculated that, “All fish must be adaptable to at least a certain range of salinities”, but don’t actually provide any evidence that this is so, or even give examples of what sort of fish qualify.

In any case, anyone with a home aquarium and no qualms about slaughtering your fish can disprove this nonsense. Just add a cupful of salt to your freshwater tank -- or a cupful of fresh water to your saltwater tank, whichever you have -- every morning in order to raise and lower the salinity. Then see what this does to your fish.

Anyway, back to the problem of space on the ark. Not only isn’t there enough room for the animals, there’s also the problem of food for each of these beasts and for Noah’s family. Large herbivores -- elephants, for example -- eat about 350 pounds of vegetable matter a day. Large carnivores -- tigers, for example -- eat about 75 pounds of meat per day. In addition to storage space, the food has to be kept fresh and edible for over a year -- and remember, modern refrigeration technology is the product of the late 19th Century. Naturally creationists have no explanation for these problems.

They also can’t explain what the animals ate after the flood. According to the creationists, there were two “cat kind” animals, two “antelope kinds”, and so on. Presumably, the cats got really, really hungry while on the boat, to the point that its entirely conceivable that the first thing they did when they got off the damned thing was immediately pounce on the antelopes and chow down. Thus, antelope kind would have ended in 2400 BCE, and we wouldn’t have gazelles, sprinkboks, oryxes, and so on today.

Now, its possible that the cats didn’t eat the antelopes, but rather ate the antelopes offspring. Okay, that’s a good thought. That would have taken care of the cats for about a week. Then what? Unless we were to assume that antelopes had a baby a week for a year, we have to assume that the cats -- and for the purposes of this argument, we’ll ignore the wolves, the wolverines, and the other predators -- either ate all the antelopes within the first day or else starved to death. And the same goes for the snake kind, the frog kind, the anteater kind, the owl kind, and so on. Obviously, creationists know little to nothing about the relationship between predators and prey.

Since they cannot admit the entire story of the flood is implausible, they have to try and present some explanation. And they do. They present the same old explanation they use for everything.

“God did it.”

Definitions

I've got a question I need answered.  To whit:  why aren't you supposed to ever apply the standard social-justice terminology to traditionally oppressed groups?


Seriously, doing this freaks people out.  You want to make a Social Justice Warrior completely lose their shit all over you, suggest that (for example) women enjoy privilege.  Try it, I dare you.  I double dare you.


I recently had a Social Justice Warrior tell me that when people talk about "privilege" they aren't telling the people who have it that they should feel guilty or ashamed of themselves.  Privilege, she said, means "making my fears, concerns, and troubles less important than your annoyance over me talking about my experiences."  If this definition is for real, then that sounds like something that a woman can do just as well as a man.


Let me give you a for instance.


I've heard a lot of men talk about how scared they are of living their lives alone, but how simultaneously they are utterly terrified of asking women out because -- let's be honest -- there are horrible consequences to getting the entire "dating" thing wrong.  I understand their pain, and most men I know also understand their pain.  Dating is scary.  Men are expected to do all the heavy lifting.  They are supposed to ask the woman out, choose an activity for the date the woman would be interested in, pay for everything, and all the while act in such a way that's appealing but not threatening just so there's a chance at a second date.


But I've also heard women say that these men's feelings aren't about fear and loneliness, but rather about how the men in question think they own womens' bodies and that they are owed sex by women and that the real problem isn't fear of rejection.  Instead, if you can't get a date its because you're a misogynistic creep who secretly hates women because women won't give them sex.  Now, call me crazy, but that sounds precisely like the women who say this are making the fears, concerns, and troubles of these men less important than the womens' annoyance over the men talking about their experiences..


I'm not sure if that definition is for real.  Could be.  Might not be.  There have to be as many totally innocuous and unobjectionable definitions of "privilege" as there are people in this country.  But every one of these definitions shares something in common:  if you take them at their face value, the possibility of a woman showing privilege to a man is so certain that its not even worth arguing over.  But if you ever mention this possibility, then you've earned yourself a one-way trip to a condescending lecture about how the idea of female privilege is insane.  You'll immediately be painted with the "woman-hating misogynist" brush while you are told just how absolutely wrong and dangerous you are for even thinking the phrase "female privilege", because all "female privilege" really is, is a condition common to misogynists known as "whiney male syndrome."  Because mentioning "female privilege" is a form of victim blaming, don't you know.  If you're lucky, you'll even have someone tell you that you, your neck beard, and your fedora deserve to die in a fire.


The entire subject is the proverbial exposed nerve of the Social Justice movement.


For further confirmation of the idea that privilege is being used as a weapon, watch the ongoing knife-fight between different social justice groups as they debate, with almost berserk ferocity, which groups do or do not have privilege over other groups.


If you really want to have some fun, ask a Social Justice Warrior whether transwomen have male privilege.  From what I have garnered, the argument goes something like this:  transwomen are more privileged than cis women because they have male privilege carried over from that time in their lives when they presented as a man.  And they also simultaneously apparently have less privilege than cis women because they are transexual.  Depending on who you ask, of course.  (There is a similar argument going on involving transmen.)


The important thing to notice while watching these fights is that every individual group is trying their hardest to prove that they absolutely and without a doubt are less privileged than any of the other groups.  And the transwoman argument is one of thousands of similar vicious, destructive fights going on right now in which everyone involved is insisting that they are the least privileged individual on the planet as if their lives depended on it.


Again, if the concept of privilege is all about how you shouldn't be making someone else's fears, concerns, and troubles less important than your annoyance over them talking about their experiences. -- but definitely not something you should feel shame or guilt over -- why are all the groups who participate in these arguments so desperate to prove that, whatever else, they don't have privilege at all?


The very same thing happens when the subject isn't social justice, but rather racism.  We all know that everyone is a little bit racist in some way or another, because racism is holding an unconscious bias against one ethnic group or another and everyone -- and I mean everyone -- holds these biases.  The point is to acknowledge them, be aware of them, and always resist acting on them.  Its understandable if you don't like people from Group X -- just don't let that dislike affect your treatment of them.


People of color are, naturally, part of the "everyone" I mentioned, and they use the same sort of in-group identification as every other group of humans on the planet.  But they can't be racist.  I know this because I've been told repeatedly by people who say things like, "When white people complain about racism, they're actually just complaining about losing their white privilege."  I've also been told that anyone who points out that a person of color is being racist "doesn't understand the term."


Generally, the term "institutional racism" will be trotted out.  If a person of color attacks a white person solely because the victim is white, that might be unfortunate, it might even be motivated by hatred, but it will not be an act of racism because racism has to be "institutional" to be real.


I can't argue with these people.  Literally.  When I try I find myself so gobstopped that I cannot be rational.  Look:  there is no disputing the definition of words.  If you say racism is actually a rare type of fairy who lives under toadstools, drinks the morning dew for breakfast, and farts rainbows, then all I can do is point you to the dictionary and tell you that, sorry, but the rest of the world disagrees with you.  I've had people tell me that "the dictionary is wrong" and how "no one uses the word racism correctly."


Sorry, but as Huey Long said, "That's the biggest pile of hog turds I've ever seen in my life."


Think about it.  The definition of the word found in all major dictionaries, the overwhelming majority of common usages of the word, and pretty much every sociologist on the planet all define the word "racism" the same way, but here comes the Social Justice Warrior who insists with amazing conviction that the way those dictionaries and most people, and all those sociologists define the word are wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong and that the word must be defined specifically in a way that excludes all ethnic groups save one:  white people!


No.  One cannot change the definitions of words just to make those words fit your dogma.  If your dogma doesn't fit the definitions, then your dogma is horse shit.


Why are they so insistent anyway?  Why is it required that you include the word "institutional" when you talk about racism, instead of just use the original, commonly used definition?  Why can't people who want to talk about the inherent structural racism of society make up their own word, thus ending the confusion?  Why not just admit that the entire argument is pointless and that we -- by which I mean all human beings -- should try not being dicks to one another for once regardless of which word you use to describe being mean to one another?


And how come this sort of bullshit redefinition happens with every single Social Justice buzzword?  Why is the internet clogged with blog posts and magazine articles and think pieces proclaiming that black people simply cannot be racist against white people, or why women cannot have privilege?  That there is no such thing as cisphobia, and that you should be ashamed to even think the word misandry.  This phenomenon is utterly unique to the realm of social justice, as far as I know.


Why?


We shouldn't be arguing over what words mean.  Its stupid.  We should be trying to solve the problems the words were coined to describe in the first place.  If we did that, we might actually get something done for a change.

Let's Talk About Christian Apologetics

Okay, let's start out with a quick explanation of just what Christian Apologetics is.  In a nutshell, Christian Apologetics is when someone defends the Christian religion by coming up with explanations for problems with Christian belief and Christian doctrine that rational thought and skeptical analysis bring up when such thought and analysis are leveled at Christianity.  The word "apologetics" has its roots in the Greek word apologia, meaning "a speech made in defense."  In Ancient Greece, it referred to a defense made during a trial.  After the accusation, the defendant was allowed to refute the charges against him with a reply to the accusation.  Up until the 1700s, the word "apologetics" was used to indicate any sort of intellectual defense made against accusations.  Right around the middle of the 18th Century, however, the word started to be applied only to the defense of religious doctrine and belief, and it is that narrower definition that continues to be used to this day.  Christian Apologetics is specifically the defense of Christianity.

So in a nutshell, that's Christian Apologetics.

The one thing to always keep in mind when discussing Christian Apologetics is that its basically made up nonsense.  The apologist relies on logical fallacy and semantic games to make his point, and counts on the general ignorance of science and the need of most unthinking Christians to have an easy answer to the "blasphemous" accusations made by the skeptical about their religion.  Supposedly, Christian Apologetics is based on "evidence," but the truth is that most of the so-called evidence is nothing more than personal opinion on the part of whatever "scholar" produced it in the first place.  (And producing this supposed "evidence" is a multi-billion dollar a year industry).

Two favorites of the apologist are Lee Strobel and his book The Case For Christ, and Josh McDowell and his book Evidence That Demands a Verdict.  It should be noted that both of these men are ministers.  Neither pretends to any scientific impartiality, objectivism, or unbiased opinions.  Oh sure, both make claims to objectivity, and claim to be looking at Christianity from the viewpoint of scholarly truth, but in practice they are as biased in favor of their own religion as any other believer, and are willing to make the most befuddling leaps of faith (pun intended) to support that religion as they find necessary.  The truth is, both men are snake oil salesmen selling a con game to the gullible.

But then, conning the gullible is the basic essence of religion.

Christian Apologists have nothing to support their personal opinions other than more personal opinion.  They have no access to documents written by Jesus (because no such documents exist), no museums full of Jesus artifacts (because no such artifacts exist), no supporting documents by other writers (because none such documents exist).  In short, they have nothing to support their words but logical fallacy, supposition, guesswork, and -- to put it bluntly -- their own ability to convince people that what they are saying isn't just a big pile of bullshit.  What they do have, though, is faith.  And its faith that not only keeps the pile of bullshit from falling over on itself, its what convinces the gullible to actually buy into it.

The primary source of the so-called "proof" that Apologists use to convince the general public that their arguments are sound that their storybook hero is real is the storybook itself.  The Bible is given the special privilege by these people of being able to confirm the truth of itself.  Unique among all other historical documents, Christians hold that the Bible is "historically reliable" simply because the Bible itself says that it is true.  Yes, that's right.  The Bible is true because the Bible says that it is true.  That's a handy little concession, isn't it?  Now, is there any sort of actual justification for this belief?  Does the Bible give accurate chronologies and verifiable facts about people, places, and things contained within it?  Are there avenues of research that clearly show that the Bible is accurate when it comes to the things it says?

Not at all.  Like any fictional story, the Bible describes a series of unlikely events using a plethora of characters and a mass of completely unverifiable fictional details to tell its story.  Oh sure, the setting for the story, Roman-ruled Judaea, was a real-enough place.  First Century Palestine certainly existed (you can, after all, hop a plane to Israel and visit the ruins).  But that said, fictional stories set in real-world locations do not cease to be fictional.

The central question is this:  Did a Jewish Carpenter walk on water, raise the dead, piss off the authorities, get crucified, and somehow get resurrected and taken up to heaven, just like the Bible describes?  Unfortunately for Christians, the only evidence -- the Biblical "facts", legends, history, and the vast number of "witnesses" -- we have saying that such a person really lived and did all those things are other characters in the same story giving testimony that the Jewish Carpenter in question actually existed.

As Dr. Kenneth Humphreys once put it, "This is rather like proving the existence of Batman by quoting the words of Robin the Boy Wonder."

Think about it.  As evidence of the "divine birth" of Jesus, we have the Book of Luke's testimony of the shepherds and the angels (Luke 2).  Never mind that Luke was written between 90 and 105 years after the supposed birth of Jesus.  The writer of Luke steps forward as a witness to dialogue quoted verbatim.  Jesus turning water into wine?  Well, we've got the writer of the Book of John as our key (and in fact, only) witness, writing his story nearly 140 years after the fact.  And who do we have to vouch for the resurrection?  Evidence for the "risen Christ" actually comes from Paul's testimony of "500 witnesses", none of whom are actually identified, the sightings of 12 apostles, and himself (1 Corinthians 15).  Of course, Paul's testimony contradicts the Book of Matthew, which only has two unidentified women and eleven of the twelve apostles.  The Book of Mark raises Matthews tally to three women and names them (Mary Magdalene, Mary the Mother of James, and Salome), two random passers-by, and the eleven apostles.  The stories don't even match up, but we are expected to take them as if they were unshakable truths, written in stone.  Sure.  Pull the other one.  The entire core belief of Christianity -- the resurrected savior -- rests on just under five hundred self-contradictory words written over a period of 180 years in an ancient and thoroughly discredited book.  Perhaps the writers of the Bible simply expected people to believe as they were told and never question anything.

In addition to the argument that the Bible is true because it says it is true, Apologetics also cite early Christian scholars as evidence.  No, I don't mean they cite the works of these early Christian fathers, they cite the existence of such people.  The supposed lives of these men are used as evidence supporting Christianity, not just what they put down on paper.  For example, Ignatius of Antioch, who lived some time between 50 AD and 115 AD (we're not sure, precisely) has become the lynchpin of the Roman Catholic claim to world mastery.  According to the story, Ignatius was martyred when Emperor Trajan (a man for whom an astonishingly large amount of historical records exist, and who was, in truth, a relatively benign and harmless man as far as Roman Emperors go) took offense to the man for some unexplained reason, and rather than having him tried and executed in Antioch sentenced him to be killed by wild beasts in the Colliseum of Rome.  (This is doubly odd, given that, if that's what Trajan wanted to happen, Antioch had a Colliseum of its own that they could have used.)

We are asked to believe that the Emperor, who was at the time assembling his armies for the coming war with Parthia, took time out of his war preparations to assign an entire battalion of soldiers to bring bring Ignatius to Rome by way of a long and circuitous land-route that gave Ignatius the opportunity to meet and greet notable Christians nearly every step of his way.  Supposedly along this four month long journey, Ignatius wrote fifteen letters to various individuals, including the Virgin Mary and a Christian bishop who wasn't even born by the time Ignatius supposedly died.  Miraculous!

Of course, the importance of these supposed letters is not to supply historical accuracy to the story, but to bolster Catholic doctrine.  Ignatius's letters are filled to the brim with Fourth Century orthodoxy, telling the faithful how they are supposed to live their lives under the benign rule of the Church, how they are supposed to follow the doctrine supplied by the church, and how they are supposed to live their lives as good Christians.  Note I saidFourth Century orthodoxy.  Coming from the supposed pen of a Second Century martyr.  Amazing how that happens.  In addition, Ignatius is used as the "connecting authority" between the early so-called "Christian Jews" and the first true Christians.  (The first Roman bishop to identify himself as "Pope", Anicetus (who reigned over the church between 156 and 166 CE) -- did so supposedly after being named as such by Ignatius.  Similarly, Clements, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus are all used in a similar manner to Ignatius, as if the fact that they existed at all validates Christian doctrine, as if, somehow, the fact that a person living in the Second or Third Century somehow proves that a person in the First Century actually existed.

The problem with this being that evidence of belief is not evidence of fact.  If the fact that lots of people believe something means that the belief is automatically true, then that would validate the Hindu gods a lot better than the Christian one, given that Hinduism pre-dates Christianity by three thousand years.

Then there's the "sheer quantity of documentation" argument.  It goes something like "There is only one manuscript copy of Caesar's Gallic Wars and that dates to the Tenth Century.  In contrast there are twenty thousand manuscripts of the gospels in various languages, dating from the Sixth through Twelfth Centuries.  Doesn't that PROVE the correctness of the New Testament?"  Uh, no, it doesn't.  A lie repeated a hundred times does not stop being a lie, and a truth told only once does not stop being a truth.  But what this does show is how few Christian manuscripts -- or even scraps of Christian manuscripts -- managed to survive from before Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Whole libraries full of ancient wisdom and learning -- Pagan wisdom and learning -- were burned to the ground by Christians.  For centuries, by order of the Christian church, the only approved literature was the Bible.  Everything else was forbidden and destroyed.

And modern Christian Apologists have the brass balls to claim that this self-generated lack of documentation for anything other than Christianity is proof of their own religion.  That's sort of like a Nazi saying that the lack of Jewish art is proof of the supremacy of the Nazi cause.

The Apologetics argument that really gets my goat is the one where the Christian asks, "Why would the apostles of Christ have suffered and died for a fake religion?"  Are you kidding me with this nonsense?  Seriously?  People "suffer and die" because they are told lies every single day.  Tell me, Mr. Christian, if suffering and dying for your faith is evidence of the truth of that faith, does that mean the terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 go immediately to heaven, as the Koran said they would?  Even better, one early Christian king in what would become Germany is known to have tortured and murdered nearly ten thousand pagan Germans in an effort to force them to convert to Christianity.  Does the fact that they suffered and died prove the existence of Wotan and Thunor?

And that's ignoring the fact that there is precisely zero evidence that the "apostles of Christ" actually even existed, much less were tortured and murdered by the Romans.  At least not until the Christians started turning its attention to burning heretics at the stake.  Paul, for example, never refers to the execution of a single apostle.  Not once.  Though of course that does nothing to diminish the often repeated story of how the Emperor Nero "put Christians to the torch" in a pogram for which no historical evidence exists at all.  Religious-inspired murder proves nothing.

Now, normally, we could all just sit back and laugh at the gullible rubes who get conned into believing this nonsense.  Problem is, this is as rational as some Christians ever get.  And these people vote.

The thought of a truly Christian government in the United States scares me like no other nightmare scares me.