Review: The Museum of the Bible

[Music] welcome to FF refs ask an atheist our Facebook live program where we'll answer common questions about atheism free thinkers and state search separation I'm Annie Laurie Gaylor and I'm Dan Barker Andy Laurie and I are co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation which produces this new weekly show I'm Andrew Seidel a constitutional attorney and FFRF Specter of strategic response now if you have questions for us please email them to ask an atheist at FFRF dot org or post them in the comments below and we are going to get to them later on and this week we're going to talk about the Museum of the Bible that 500 million dollar venture by the family behind the Hobby Lobby company in Andrew and our legal team had tracked the museum for years before it opened ensuring it received no special treatment or public money but last month Dan Andrew and I actually visited the museum we were a masochists in the service of exposing what it's about so today's show was about atheists at the Bible Museum we took one for the secular team and we spent way too many hours at this museum now if there's any place that the Bible does belong it is in a museum but this museum is on a different mission from other types of museums it wants to show that the Bible is relevant that it's influential and that the foundation of well just about everything in the world according to the museum but Andrew you summed up our feelings very nicely in the conclusion of your blog the Museum of the Bible is free but somehow it's still not worth the price of admission given the connections that museum has to the greens that's the family who owns Hobby Lobby their Christian nationalism and the biblical misinformation we've seen we did not have the highest hopes for the museum but I did want to be impressed I wanted to learn something I wanted to be pleasantly surprised by a fair-minded presentation of the facts but with a few notable exceptions however the museum failed to meet even those low expectations well so let's look at some of those exceptions first and Andrew first what what impressed you so one of the things that I actually really enjoyed was they have a working reproduction of the Gutenberg press in the museum now we don't know exactly what the Gutenberg press looked like right this was it was very it was secretive it was intellectual property but they have a working reproduction with the movable type and they were actually printing off pages from the Bible right there in the museum now Dan you need has a few interesting facts you were telling me actually in the museum about the the good because itself Gutenberg wasn't printing the Bible for religious reasons he was doing it for financial reasons he was in debt so he was hiding this press he didn't want anyone to get a hold of it had never been done before and it was probably patterned after like a wine press which is what you see here there looks kind of like a wine press they don't really know he was pretending like they were making candlesticks so they can't explain why all this lead was coming into this building because if the church got ahold of this they would have taken it to make a lot of money and Gutenberg wanted to make the money so the press probably looks something like this at the time and what was interesting is that there was no type he had to hire a scribe a young man to come in and actually physically carve the letters for each of each of the pieces of metal pieces of lead that were printed onto the parchment now they're really that I I like this because this is an enormous technological advance it did revolutionize the world but it wasn't because the book that was being rented it was because of the technology and the museum doesn't really necessarily make that distinction as much as we would have liked to well that's where you made money in those days selling Bibles and selling actually indulgences the Catholic Church the Gutenberg was afraid that the Catholic Church would take this to print indulgences which were like money they could pass them out and make all sorts of money he didn't want that to happen he wanted to make the money fair enough now the second thing that impressed me also relates to the Gutenberg press outside the museum there are these two huge doors you can see that's my wyndi selfie outside that's the best shot that I got at the doors but they are the script from the Bible put huge on like 30-foot tall doors and that was pretty impressive now the good news about that is you don't actually have to go inside the museum to see those you can just see them walking right by and they're not functional doors I asked the staff they actually don't open or close so they're really just there for display well so that were that we were two things and then there was one thing that I think impressed all of us and that is when we walked by a picture of one of our favorite people vashti mccollum and I think we've got a photograph hopefully close-up as well that's the exhibit and then there's a close-up coming up maybe closer than that of vashti mccollum who Dan and I knew we met she was an honorary director of FFRF she won the first decision the landmark decision against religious instruction in the public schools in 1948 and that's a picture of her looking at the newspaper where it hurt the headlines say she won and that's actually it's actually a tops baseball card that the museum has used to collect those as a kid but I have been able to find it anything about these I'm gonna have to write an email to the company I think but actually we have a photograph that same photograph framed and it's on the bookshelf very prominently in the legal way no call here at FFRF and so I was like seeing an old friend Vashti had has died some time ago but her sons are members of our group and the little boy in the case who was being persecuted because he wasn't taking religious instruction Jim is a life member and he's in his 80s he's very youthful however he's still he's a constitutional attorney and he still they keep bringing so why is that picture and card in a Bible Museum well you know it's interesting that they chose that case it wasn't strictly about only the Bible but somebody went through that museum and said you better have something more objective you better talk about controversies a little bit about separation of church and state that was it was a pretty much in the photos it was pretty small the Bible in the Supreme Court I think is what maybe they're thinking that look at the influence of the Bible and history there was actually a Supreme Court case you know it's such an influential book that people had to sue over it Oh baby maybe they're thinking here's a villainous woman I mean she got terrible hate mail before in the Internet it was all by phone calls and mail and horrible horrible mail and feedback for winning this very important case defending the First Amendment so maybe somebody put her in there thinking she's a villains really glad see before we go to the bad stuff there was one other good thing that I liked about the Bible Museum there's a section on was it the second floor or the third floor there's a section on the history of English translations of the Bible and we all read the Bible and so it's it's a historical act that we're doing not that that's true but that mean Bibles were printed Bibles were translated there's a history behind that and I thought that was fascinating the original Tyndale translation and here's a copy of another translation of the Bible and from just from a scholarly perspective I thought that was on the plus side of the Bible Museum so I think we've been very nice so before you you know get up and spend money on a plane ticket to go see this Bible Museum let's talk about the things we didn't like which was a lot of it sure so I actually had really low expectations going in but even so you know I was really excited to see some of the history the old manuscripts that were clinging to existence leather-bound volumes that travel the oceans because even if you don't agree with the message standing in the presence of history really can be all inspiring but not only is there very little in the way of artifacts at least compared to the TV installations and all the modern flim-flam that they had there many of the artifacts in the museum appear to be faked they're they're reproductions they're fact similes and they had labeled on all these different works that they were actually not genuine so that was that was pretty disappointing I was expecting to see something more than that now one of the only original works was Arnold Fryeburg portrait of Washington in prayer at Valley Forge and this was frustrating for me to see because we know that this did not happen yeah we were all frustrated I mean it was I was horrified when we came across this but as you say this this is unload this is an original but it's on loan and they somebody again did go through that and vet it a little bit because as the photograph shows this portrays an imagined moment of Prayer but you know this same portrait is on a stamp has been put on the US stamp and what's the source of it and so the source is parson mason Weems he was a parson he was a religious leader he was known for writing these pamphlets that were really outlandish he wrote one on the evils of masturbation he and this particular story was from the life of Washington that he but it didn't appear until the 17th edition of the life of Washington some something like 28 years after the event supposedly happened cutting down the cherry tree it's the same it's the same book as that and we we know historians who look at this have said no this didn't have there's absolutely no evidence to suggest that this happened and it doesn't have anything to do with the Bible yes a prayer why is it in a Bible museum but it's very iconic and fundamentalist love it anyway it's also interesting because you know how they put that phrase it is an imagined a moment but it's buried very deep within the display there's another plaque next to it that actually talks about the painting first and then that imagine moment is on the second plaque so it's almost like they're relying on the short attention span or the the cursory glance that most people are going to give this to give the impression of this great influence that our first president the man it became our first president prayed at Valley Forge that was what made the Revolutionary War work and the plaque you almost have to kneel down just this little plaque down by the floor you would probably just miss it if you're just breezing through yeah so I think I think it says something about who they believe their audience to be and really the message that they are trying to get across it's if most people are gonna I think in their minds do a superficial pass and say oh look see even Washington Bible yeah and that's gonna be it you stop and think or stop and read all the way through you find out a little bit more than it's even real so now any lorry I know one of the things that really bothered you was the museum co-opting Elizabeth Cady Stanton and I actually have a short video clip of you schooling a tour guide on this very subject now I missed the beginning of the lessons but you did get her to rephrase a few things using the Bible interpreting misinterpreting or perhaps well you can't really hear what I'm saying she's very defensive though I felt so proud to be a part of FFRF at that moment I really enjoyed that because why did you approach do we have a photograph of that that we can show that's Elizabeth Cady Stanton we do we have a picture of Elizabeth Cady with the banner the Bible banner in the back there no well and hopefully we have a that's not a very good picture of me but maybe there's a better picture of this um is there another one come on no okay so there's this let's go back to that picture of Bruce the Elizabeth Cady Stanton because I don't remember the body there it's a it's a verse from the Bible with that's Elizabeth Cady Stanton that's what depicts into psalm 68:11 I believe and then there's this verse the Lord giveth the word that the women that published the the tidings are a mighty host and when I looked up that Bible verse and of course in the King James Version it talks about the company that published there's different versions of it but it has nothing to do with women's right it's all about the obedient people being ready to declare war that the the passage is about the biblical God fomenting a war he's like a general in this yeah and these are the people following the war it has but if you looked at that picture I was I was hoping we had a different picture there you would think Oh Elizabeth Cady Stanton was inspired by the Bible or the to work for women's right to vote or that somehow the Bible endorsed women's suffrage and in fact she would later write the Bible was hurled at us from every side when she was had the gall to ask for women's right to vote in 1848 as an agnostic it was a feminist movement suffrage movement was guided by non-believers and didn't you know she was a critique she wrote a cat reeked of the Bible which they they have a little panel of it the woman's Bible do we have a photo of that we do have a photo of the woman's Bible yes and if you would you know it's there but it a cursory glance again you wouldn't think from that huge picture of her with the Bible behind it that somehow this was promotional of the Bible the purpose of the women's Bible was to say what the Bible said about women and it was almost and of course entirely negative she was the editor of it and there were she had a variety of women contributing you to it and a few of them tried to say well there's some verses in the Bible that are overlooked for example there are positive the original the first verse of the create the first creation story that's mentioned in Genesis has male and female he created he them equally and then but you know only heard the second verse about women coming from Adams room so of course they pointed that out why wouldn't they but the whole purpose of the women's Bible was basically tuka TKE it's sexism they didn't have that word but and of course her contributions to it we're so eloquent in denouncing the Bible and she said in various ways throughout her career that the Bible in the Church of the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation so it's you know what mixed feelings here's it Elizabeth Cady Stanton in the Bible's me Bible museum but it's totally as you say co-opted so that's what you were talking to this docent about well I well the docent was actually I heard her telling somebody in in so many words that the Bible had inspired Elizabeth Cady Stanton to work for women's rights because that's what she took away from that portrait with the Bible banner okay so if you just walked by it the average person's gonna think Oh The Woman's Bible this is with Katy Stan these are good things and in the small print when they had the women's Bible it did quote her correctly there wasn't a deep dive you have to do to get to it so somebody went through there and said you got to be a little more accurate or you're gonna have to put some stuff in that subjective yeah now we found so many problems with this section and with the ride that we're gonna talk about in a minute that we actually wrote a letter and a memo to the Museum of the Bible that people can read it we have a link bitly slash Museum of the Bible MOT B memo so it's very easy for you to go read this we really encourage you to go read it side by side because that you should some other great information in there about Elizabeth Cady Stanton she wrote an essay called the degraded status of women in the Bible she you know I have 75 pages in the anthology I put together women without superstition I call it an Elizabeth Cady Stanton reader just little snippets because she wrote continually her whole life against religion almost everything she wrote about religion was from the point of view of women and how negative religion was almost every speech she gave mentioned the harm of religion to him well you found an article that she wrote for a bicycling magazine in the middle of this bicycle because a lot of the courage you didn't want women on bicycles you know she they really suffered when they started the women's movement from the clerical press she knew who the enemy was and that's one of the sort of the founding pushes for FFRF was related to feminism and exactly the fight against women's reproductive rights so did our letter ask for them to correct this misrepresentation we do ask them to correct a number of misrepresentations including in the Washington revelations ride now this is one of those rides that's sort of virtual reality you're standing on a platform and you're moving around and you're flying over Washington DC to visit these these public monuments with Bible inscriptions but it's really unfair and I actually found a video of the ride on YouTube now we didn't film this video they didn't let you yeah and nor did we put it up on YouTube but it's our use for us to show you a few clips from the video since we are criticizing the ride now this ride and some of the exhibits on the second floor were so bad and so misleading that we wrote that memo to the museum and again really encourage you to go ahead and go read them yeah and you can also find yourself at our website FFF dot or can go to the news release thinking it was March if you can't can't remember the bitly it sits there and Andrew you did a wonderful memo it was a page memo about this rides charge they actually charge extra fee that's a good point yeah it's an eight dollar charge don't don't don't don't waste your time it's all full of misinformation anyway now we're gonna discuss some of the misinformation here but you really ought to go read that memo for yourself so the first one that we're gonna look at is the Gettysburg Address in the Lincoln Memorial [Music] [Music] so this was the one that actually got all of us to kind of look at each other we'd never heard anything about the Gettysburg Address being informed by the Bible and I've only found one scholarly source that mentioned this and it mentioned these verses from John 16 that was the sole scholarly source now that's really hard to read so again you should feel free to go check out this out in the memo but if you go back to that first one Bruce you can you can actually look and there is no overlap between the verses in John 16 and what Lincoln wrote in the Gettysburg Address it was really hard people seen that video might not realize what they were saying so you want to make it clarify yeah they say and they they actually if you they right up on the screen where the Bible verse was coming from he said that the Gettysburg Address quoted from the Bible basic who's in Lincoln took influence from it yeah and again it's it's really hard to prove a negative but there's just there's absolutely no overlap here and I really would encourage people to go read the Gettysburg Address it's 232 words I believe it's very short y'all used to have to memorize and John 16 is one chapter of the Bible is you could do this in a couple minutes but there's really almost no overlap it's it's go ahead it wasn't a typo that didn't I mean John 3:16 well that's what I thought it was it was so bad and there was so little overlap that I thought well maybe they meant John 3:16 so I compared the Gettysburg Address to John 3:16 and the only overlap there maybe is those three words shall not perish should not perish so it's really only two well there you go the Bible says the government by the people of the people for the people shall not perish from this alright yeah I mean it is not biblical absolutely not not especially not the government part of it so to me that was it was it was kind of mind-blowing to see this I don't see it to me it's just completely dishonest yeah I was I was a little bit flavor against it has some of the same words and this time you might say the Bible has the word though a lot of times any document that has the word in it must be from the Bible so there you go and this wasn't the only one that was really terrible the Jefferson Memorial was just as bad let's take a look [Music] in Psalm 145 verses 17 through 19 indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just that his justice cannot sleep so so what are they saying so they said that the ride was informed by Psalm 145 I think is what they said Monument yeah excuse me the memorial was informed by Psalm 145 verses 17 through 19 so you can see the verses right there the first on the top is the verse on the top is Jeffersons and that is from the notes on the state of Virginia which was 1774 I believe and Jefferson's talking about slavery here he's talking about how basically in poetic terms about how America's pension for slavery is going to come back and hurt them in the end basically predicting the Civil War guilty conscience yeah certainly but again if you read the verses that they claim influenced it influenced Jefferson there's there's just no overlap there's I don't see how they can even make this claim in the slightest it well it really dishonest there you go but anybody on that ride would have no reason to doubt the veracity they would just accept it and I think they would they paid $8 to to be lied to and the Washington Monument was also in it featured in the ride [Music] so last day o or praise be to God is carved into the tip of the Washington Monument and then they list a verse from Psalm yeah I see that every time I walk by I see those words inscribed a very really prominent it's on the capstone it's really tiny really difficult to see but that actually that phrase is there and I almost didn't research this when we were looking at it because this is religious yeah it so and it's a Latin phrase surely they just pulled it from the Latin translation of the Bible but if you go look it up this is actually what the verse says it says Alleluia Laudate Dominum those are not the same and domine ohm is not the same as Deus then you know that I mean Deo is God and dominum is large right so they're not not the same at all because there's verses in the Bible that say praise the Lord so there you go yeah and so but that says Davis right yeah oh yeah so it prays to God so it's so different and I again I thought you know maybe they made a typo so I actually searched three different Latin translations all the way through and Lau's Deo doesn't appear in any of them so less that so that inscription does not appear in the Bible that phrase is not from the Bible so another lie another but the elephant in the room here I think is the Washington Monument is an ancient pagan phallic symbol it's not Christian it's not biblical it's not if anything it's praising some ancient pagan pre-christian religion no I mean it's an Egyptian obelisk writ large yeah there you go and that there's more information about where I I kind of did some research on where Lau's Deo may have originated from couldn't find an answer to that but there's some research in the memo about that it was on a coat of arms it appears in Shakespeare but does not appear to be from the Bible and might maybe as a typo should have been a lousy day you think I like that now let's take a trip to hallowed ground let's go look at Arlington Cemetery for a moment at the same time two major inscription reads so this is the Senate at four major butts he was actually a really interesting guy he was a military adviser to two different presidents so this is what they were talking about because we can't hear that yeah this is this is a part of it and on hid and he actually died in the Titanic when the Titanic went down and this is his Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery we've got a rather unfortunate last name but what they what they do here right is they try to make this which is a private memorial seem like it is a government-sponsored government-sponsored Bible verse and cross but if you actually read on it it says that this stone was erected by his brothers it says it right there with a private message on it and it the message is private I think that's the point and people need to take home and actually all of the all of the service members who are currently in our military and have been for years get to choose an emblem of belief that they want to go on their memorial and they can choose a cross or they can there's an atheist marker there's a humanist marker there's a hammer of Thor which I might choose just for the heck of it if it were me there's there's something like 70 different emblems of belief that they can choose from so they're allowed to choose the religion that they want represented the belief they won't represent she's nothing at all they are and in this and in this case they even extract they're on the monument spaghetti monster can we pick the spaghetti - one yet no for that but we have been hearing this I mean I've been hearing this since the 70s with talk show hosts fundamentalist talk show hosts back in the day that would bring up the Arlington Cemetery and private markers as if somehow separation of church and state would mean you couldn't put a private emblem on your own tombstone they do this while you go after crosses or that it yes or that somehow if there is a cross on something then that allows you to put a huge cross up in a park they don't see they're not seeing the distinction between private speech in public speech cemetary comes up but Arlington is a government cemetery it's not a private cemetery at least they could say that but but it's kind of like the forum argument right all right but I mean what if you're buried in a city-owned cemetery sure you still can't put up a but you can see what they're trying to say look here's Arlington and here's the Bible but they don't get it I'm just saying that this is this tone deaf thing about what's private and what's public yeah and they don't even bother to try to go through any of those finer points right they're just presenting this as at the beginning of this ride so actually and we should back up for just a sec because everything we've been talking about is on floor 2 of the museum including the ride and that the whole floor is meant to show the impact of the Bible on America and how America was founded on the biblical principles and how our government needs those to operate and this is this ride is really a part of that message they're trying to show like yeah look look how relevant the Bible is it's on all these government buildings they're really grasping at straws here and the next straw that they grasp at is Union Station [Music] okay so John 8 verse 16 no Johnny anyway the many biblical verses they reference we'll get to that in a second so the union station was authorized by federal law because of its location it's in DC but the design the construction the financing all of that was private so Union Station was a private building at the time that it was constructed they needed permission to build they just needed permission to build so this is this is again this is not a government building but it's being presented as though it is this this huge government influence and it's it's simply not there it just doesn't it doesn't exist there are there are three Bible verses that's there there are many references but it's it's private it's not there many other verses that are not biblical as well absolutely and it absolutely there are on there other than John 8 there are I don't remember if I counted all of them but there are far far more pagan references and pagan imagery that decorate the building and again people can look at the memo for that now Charles W Eliot was the president of Harvard at the time and he actually chose and edited the inscriptions containing this verse and while I was researching the memo I stumbled onto a lecture he gave called the religion of the future and you can check out the memo again for more excerpts but he said that the authority of the Bible as a verbally inspired guide has been greatly impaired he definitely did not think it was a book that should be dogmatically obeyed or treated and i kind of wonder what he would think of the bible but can't we at least agree that there are some Bible verses that make sense the truth shall make you free right yeah yeah we have a we have a bumper sticker that says the truth shall make you free from religion yeah about them and the poet's just at that so but it's so ridiculous because it's a private building with a few Bible verses on it but you would you'd be conned if you went to this ride into thinking this is a governmental building showing that our government space religion mmm yeah so isn't the point you're trying to make is that the cherry-picking cuz DC overall has so much pagan imagery but if you look here and there you can find all here's a little bit of a Bible but if you look at the whole picture it looks more like a Roman or Greek or Egyptian city rather than a Christian one absolutely and we're gonna see some more of that Haggin imagery in a minute and actually listen let's take a look at the part of the video of the ride where they talk about the Library of Congress [Music] there is a statue of st. Paul and implication we might add six verse eight what does the Lord require of you but to do justly to love mercy and to walk humbly with my god [Music] so the ride neglects to mention again the far more massive pagan influences say what they claim no cuz I don't think people can quest an and and one other thing on the on that last slide where they where they talk about Leviticus being on the ceiling there's actually a whole panel painted right next to that about Islam Islam is prominently featured in Charles Eliot who decorated Union Station also chose many of the biblical references here so what is the claim because I can't even remember now they those claims are accurate they do appear they do appear there there's a there's a statue and two Bible verses and there's actually a few more in the Library of Congress but I mean to me the over the overall point is is it really remarkable that quotes from a book appear in a library and it's and again it's just one of many many exactly so to suggest that literature appears in libraries is to state the obvious you know it's not to reveal some hitherto unknown biblical influence and the last one that I think we're gonna do is the Supreme Court [Music] again we can the video that doesn't work here but Dan a few years ago you you put together something that answered one of these chain emails it started did you know and it was all about religious imagery at the Supreme Court especially supposedly the ten commandments that are displayed at the Supreme Court and you wrote this FAQ for our website at which is you can find it and so we've we've already debunked what was on this ride well this FAQ is long and so we can't look at the whole thing but there's meme is still going around did you know that the Ten Commandments is at the US Supreme Court as if it was influencing our laws but if you look at the Supreme Court building there's nothing in the design of the Supreme Court building to indicate that Congress or the architect or the designers or anybody had any special regard for the Ten Commandments the main entrance to the United States Supreme Court has no reference at all to religion or to the Ten Commandments and the sculptor considered many of the statutes including the large ones that are out front do we have a picture of the statutes out front of the No oh we don't okay anyway this sculpture consider them to be allegorical figures in front of the building these tablets are sometimes mistaken for Moses but they're not the contemplation of justice and the authority of law and the Ten Commandments expressly forbid the creation of such graven images so this carved figures that the Supreme Court would be considered a form of idol worship under the Ten Commandments and one of many evidences that American law ignores the authority of the Hebrew Scriptures there are several depictions of tablets with the Roman numerals one through X in the court and they're often mistaken for the Ten Commandments but they're not the official guides if you visit the Supreme Court they say that these Roman numerals on the inner Oak door refer to the ten amendments not the Ten Commandments right the ten amendments of the Bill of Rights although Moses is depicted and you can see this picture here at the Supreme Court he's not the central figure look at he's up there well this is Mohammed that we're looking at now this is Moses and this is inside the Supreme Court this is inside yeah and this so this is Moses and and Mohammed they're off they're not above the justices they're off above the people in the audience when we were there we saw them up above kind of to the our side and Moses is standing among a whole bunch of other allegedly historical law givers such as me knees and Hammurabi and Solomon Solomon was so wise that he could manage 700 wives and 300 concubines Solon and the legendary Lycurgus and Draco and Confucius and Octavian and Justinian and Moses is mixed in with Mohammed and Charlemagne and King John the Crusader Lewis Louis the ninth and Hugo and there's all these other people John Marshall and Napoleon and many allegorical and mythical logs that's very significant mythical and allegorical others including Moses and the goddess famed the Egyptian goddess authority the light of wisdom and so on so and then Mohammed you can see Mohammed here he's depicted on the other side in the Supreme Court directly opposite Moses he's even holding this his so-called holy book which contains Arabic letters from the Quran the museum that we went to didn't make most of these mistakes but it did mention that Moses sculpture is on the back of the Supreme Court on the eastern pediment which is above the door when you walk in do we have a picture of that Eastern pediment there it is this is in the back of Supreme Court not the front and next to Moses our Confucius and so lon and these three law givers if you look closely are flanked by The Tortoise and the hare from Aesop's fables so does anybody think American law is based on Aesop's fables so obviously the fact that Moses appears is not surprising when he's just a small part of a larger gallery of myth in history and fables to do with lawgivers mm-hmm so I think that kind of does it for our portion but we should definitely take question well I know so I think we should go back to our letter we did write the director of the Museum of the Bible is saying that ride needs to come down now until you correct it we even had a reply and this is just we're just scratching the surface in this video too I mean there was so much more that we wrote about it they're very very serious misrepresentation the others they have some letters exerted from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson that were very very poorly chosen yes you went into that in the memo yeah there's one real quick there's one Thomas Jefferson letter that they present as you know you should read the Bible and in it Thomas Jefferson says that separating the good parts of the Bible from the bad parts is like separating diamonds from donkeys oh yeah so he used the word dung here today we would use a different word you know but he said that Bible is mainly a dunghill there are a few diamonds and even we a theist agrees you gotta search through and pick out a few nice things from the Bible so we have a few questions already one is from Arthur done he said maybe you were just looking at the wrong Bibles for the Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln quotes maybe other Bibles have the language and actually I thought of this while I was reading this you know maybe it was in other translations so I checked the other translations they're not there and then I went actually and found Lincoln's personal Bible on the Library of Congress website and looked for the tongue what Bibles Thomas Jefferson owned that he hadn't took a razor to cut up and compared it to those I actually compared it to the page in Lincoln's Bible where they they claimed this influence existed the scan of that page to see maybe he had handwritten notes and none of it was there very thorough debunking job there and those links are in the the memo if people are interested in looking at that fidelity but he might have been thinking those things how do you know what he was actually thinking Andrew it's true I dad now Richard Halasz asks were there any exhibits at the Museum of stuff not in the Bible such as the rapture I thought that's you know I'm trying to remember I I went through some of the stuff that you guys you you did something different than I did well we split up at one point cuz there was so there was a lot to cover I went into the section where they there's sort of a reenactment some of the stuff in the Old Testaments real hokey and then the New Testament but I what was odd about the the Bible Museum is there wasn't a whole lot about Jesus in this section it was the Palestinian or whatever villages but there wasn't depictions of Jesus and it was empty of course so I don't remember that but it's possible well there was a there's a whole children's section in the museum that we haven't talked about which is mostly just very sandy schoolish sunday-school she was sort of these very olds not arcade games but you know like basketball whack-a-mole type things and half the stuff seemed to be broken anyway these enactments of villages reminded me of something you'd see in a children's museum I mean within a children's museum an enactment of a little village it's cute but with all the money they spent and and there's adult aimed at adults I thought it was really tacky yeah it could have been done but better for sure it was like they had too much space and they didn't know what to do with it they had this Bible but what are you gonna do with it so maybe we should also point out it looks like the Museum of the Bible went to some lengths to include Judaism because the Jews are the people of the book you know although I didn't see any Islam but at least they included Judaism I think they were trying to entice and do you remember that one exhibit that was showing the hatred and the censorship of the Bible look how the Bible has been hated and been burned and all that and the display was crystal nacht yes III and I haven't written my blog yet and I have all these photographs of them but stuff like that that was so deeply offensive you would think that the Bible was being persecuted because Jews were being persecuted where in torez were my visions by Christians who later were Nazis who put on their the buckle of their their belt God mutants God with us I mean it was Lutheran's and Catholics killing Jews and Lutheran's and Catholics who were going after she was on Kristallnacht but because Torrez were thrown into the street in the Touro was the you know the the Hebrew Bible was burned that shows hatred to the Bible in culture yeah so there were there were a lot of disturbing things we haven't talked about in there but I don't remember the rapture but even though Jesus seemed to be de-emphasized in this little tour of the New Testament villages on every floor there was a giant of painting shrine to Jesus do you remember and they were just or yeah yeah they were there last installations sure sure so we have another question from Aaron Charleston Aaron asks how much did the tax payers pay for this one we hoped nothing we hope nothing to the best of we've been able to determine nothing so we actually heard about this I think it was back in 2014 or 13 and I wrote an opener a FOIA request so the DC City Council to get all the records possibly relating to the finances because we were very worried there was gonna be public money going to this and we did that a couple times in the interim between the first one and when it opened and none of the records we had suggested there was any public funding at all of this but I do want to say that we can't de emphasize that importance of this placement of the Bible Museum so close to the US Capitol they're trying to make inroads they're trying to be there to show that somehow the Bible is a foundational part of our government when you walk in there's a big display of the names of the major donors to the Bible museum and from what I could see most of them seem to be evangelical conservative Church or Rick Warren's and then prestonwood Baptist out of the Dallas area so it had an evangelical feel to it did not when you walk in you didn't feel like there was this objective museum like you would expect somewhere else it had an agenda feel to it oh I'm looking and they apparently were distressed that they weren't going to be able to charge money because the Smithsonian museums which are so fantastic are all free so they made a decision not to charge money for that entry although that terrible ride yeah they get you and I think they get you on a few other rides I know Kristen yeah and they're asking for money as a donation there's a shop where you can buy all this wonderful beautiful stuff did you see the stuff in the show yes I mean it's like Hobby Lobby in there it's Chinn see it so she sees stuff that you can you know and maybe we should briefly mention hobby lobby's history question about that real quick so we'll do that with this question Daniel hunt asked weren't a bunch of the artifacts from the museum illegally smuggled from the Middle East what happened to thou shalt not steal so that's true Hobby Lobby and the Greens got the Greens got in trouble for buying artifacts that have been smuggled out of Isis controlled territory basically they were funding Isis essentially it was how it was how I remember the story going so that that was a that was a pretty big concern they took them out didn't they and they returned him or something well well the federal government and they ended up settling with the federal government so the I did have to do is ameliorate it in some way I don't remember how exactly they did it but of course Hobby Lobby is the group that's behind the very bad Supreme Court decision attacking the contraceptive mandate in Obamacare we got a very bad decision out of that so they they're very much into entangling religion and government we've tangled with them in the past a tougher up because they developed a Bible curriculum for the schools and Andrew you were working on that in our code yeah it was a Mustang School District in Oklahoma and it was it would encourage people to go to a little research you can find some of the photos that we posted from the curriculum this was one of the worst design curriculums I have ever seen it was it was so blatantly pro-christian and trying to preach and convert children there was absolutely no attempt to be fair-minded in it at all and that that could read to him because of the work that we did was not put in the public schools it's not dead no it's not dead we would need to watch it yeah and and the green family actually the took it to Israel and they've been trying to implement it over there and they're trying to implement it in private schools too but they're apparently they're going to use according to what I can tell they're going to use the Museum of the Bible to try to do another push to implement it yeah I'm sure this is going to be something we'll be troubled by in the future I think so so we have a question this is also from somebody named dan do they mention Camus mckessie to Hutus book apologize if I ruined that name how to make a Negro Christian which is about converting slaves to Christianity to make them more compliant I don't think that was there I do I did take pictures of almost everything and I stopped to go through it well there was an extensive section oh yes and and again whitewashing yeah it was it was more the Bible promotes liberation and all of the abolitionists were and there might be something in the small print that it's correct you know that says something negative and in the same question in the same vein there was a huge exhibit on the introduction of the good news to the American Indians when the ship's came over and of course I'm a member and role member of a Native American tribe and it always bothers me here they came with Bibles in one hand and a gun in the other and 90% of the inhabitants of the continent are gone because of that mainly from disease but also from oppression and turning the natives into slaves manifest destiny yeah looked like we were waiting on the shore for somebody to come and rescue us and in fact the Mayflower Compact had that image please come and help us you know these savages needed the good news of the gospel so you see that when you first go into the impact on culture and I apologize Dan well you weren't there I have a Mayflower descendants a Tudor not a pilgrim but he signed it yeah that's all but that was that was the first part of floor to the impacted if I was on that first part was about the Native Americans yeah yeah and and we need to do a little bit more about that because there's a lot of concern that I have about the impression that someone would walk away from when they go through that I think that's for Dan for your blown probably well okay so we have another question which is from Lauren Solinsky does the Bible use ium talk about the Shroud of Turin because that was debunked using as a fake using radiocarbon dating no I don't remember seeing anything but we didn't get to see the whole yeah I have to go back through my my photographs we didn't get to see it the whole thing I don't remember it but the jury's out on this one remember facsimile of the Shroud of Turin if anything but I don't think she did stay away from it because their fundamentalist bent more than Catholic but I can't remember no I don't recall either I do recall while we were eating there we were serenaded by an acapella group singing Joshua fought the Battle of Jericho which I remember learning in my at public elementary school at the time and being very disturbed later on when I got complaints working here at FFRF because this sings of of genocide right this is this is a song about Joshua killing an entire city of people and it was a little to me it was a little but they were really nice-looking attractive very talented they were great singers good singers singing about genocide it was well that restaurant at the top floor we ate at I asked one of the servers is this a private thing says yeah it has nothing to do and most of them were Filipino and I said well would you hire any atheist here and he said we probably have some atheist working here so it's a totally outside group who's putting on that restaurant at the Bible Museum is still making money on that we were kind of trapped there sure well you eat biblically themed olives from the amount of olives that kind of some fundamentalists idea of Middle Eastern Jews ya know manna from heaven something was named that I believe that might have been the dessert we didn't have it well that touched on the last question we have so I think that that does it for our live questions so I think that that does it I don't recommend it there are so many wonderful museums and you know the African American Museum that's just opened the Native American Museum and all the other musicals just worth your time just walk two blocks to the National Museum of the American Indian and that's worth every penny of the free admission that's made well that's what I that's what I wrote in the blog an atheist visit to the Bible museum but I think it's worth repeating the Museum of the Bible is free but somehow it's still not worth the price of admission and you can stay tuned to the free thought now blog for an atheist visit to the Bible Museum part two that was a tongue twister and an atheist visits the Bible museum part three which will be Dan and Auntie Laurie's individual takes on it yes so we've only scratched that surface and we do encourage you if you go there to have a skeptical eye but again it's not worth the visit but next week's episode of FF refs as Canisius will certainly be worth it dan will be discussing excuse me the top five contradictions in the Bible so please be sure to join us next Wednesday at noon central for another edition of FFRF ask an atheist [Music] [Music] you

Channel: FFRF

Views: 26,840

Rating: 4.7826085 out of 5

Keywords: museum of the bible, the museum of the bible, museum of the bible dc, museum of the bible Washington DC, review museum of the bible, museum of the bible review, museum of the bible video, Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheist, Atheism

Id: dKPN1nWgi6o

Length: 51min 13sec (3073 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/darkcalling]

Quite an enjoyable watch. Hope it saves some people the trouble of going to the place.

As Andrew wrote in their blog post about it here: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/freethoughtnow/atheist-visits-bible-museum-of-the-bible/

The Museum of the Bible is free, but somehow is still not worth the price of admission.

Which very neatly sums up the miseducational mission of places like this.