THE SEVEN MIGHTY BLOWS TO TRADITIONAL BELIEFS

The free thought community owes an enormous debt of gratitude to small publishing companies such as the Flatwoods Free Press, for such companies offer crucially important free thought literature that mainstream publishers dare not touch.  A wealth of information is herein available for those willing to look.

A.J. Mattill, Jr., a frequent contributor to The American Rationalist magazine, originally wrote The Seven Mighty Blows as a 39 page booklet in 1986.  The present volume is a greatly enlarged edition, covering 262 pages.  It is a thought provoking tour-de-force of biblical criticism, broad in scope, and devastatingly thorough.

Mattill’s Seven Blows are: the Astronomical Blow, the Biological Blow, the Archaeological Blow, the Geological Blow, the Biblical Criticism Blow, he Apocalyptic Blow, and the World Religions Blow.    While this categorization may appear at first to be random, the author’s system blends scientific evidence with theological absurdity and allows the Bible to disprove itself.  It is obvious why even reading a Bible was considered a capital offense for centuries;  Mattill’s exegetics reduce the foundations of the Bible to so much literary rubble.

For example, his Apocalyptic Blow, which examines the end times, utterly destroys any confidence one might have in biblical eschatology.  The New Testament writers were convinced that they were living in the end times, and their scriptures reflect it.  To cite but one example, Mark 13:30 has Jesus telling his disciples: “Verily I say unto you , this generation shall not pass away, until all these things be accomplished.”  The King’s English aside, it is obvious that Jesus was speaking to his immediate followers, not to the six billion people two thousand years in the future.  Modern day doomsayers who claim otherwise simply do not understand their Bible’s history—or else are being purposefully dishonest.

One may, upon reflection, come up with a number of other “blows” that could destroy traditional beliefs.  A Historical Blow could show that no “God” has ever appeared to a large group of people, and a Mythological Blow could elaborate on how the Bible is indebted to the mythologies of earlier “pagan” beliefs and offers very little original material of its own.
Nonetheless, Mattill’s Seven Blows are more than sufficient.  One wonders, after reading the text, how any believer could still maintain their faith.  But then, how many of them would even bother to read biblical critiques in the first place?