Bible Timeline with World History

For those who want to see a timeline of biblical and world history together, here’s The Amazing Bible Timeline with World History.

I mention this subject infrequently, as I don’t want to disparage anyone’s religion, but I occasionally want to point out that people who believe that the Earth, the heavens, and humankind were put here at the same time, a bit more than 6000 years ago, carry a huge and unnecessary burden. In particular, they need to reject essentially everything we know about cosmology, astrophysics, astronomy, geology, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, and a great deal of biology.

I’m not a religious person, but if I were, I would be much happier interpreting the stories in the Old Testament figuratively. OK, so there was an angry God who demanded that people acted a certain way, and punished severely those who strayed.  And in fact, we can learn a great deal by studying this.

Now, some people try to get around the scientific discrepancies by suggesting that a biblical “day” at the beginning of time was much longer than 24 hours, and once that adjustment is made, everything’s fine, but there are all sorts of problems with that, e.g., all the evidence that the Earth is ~20,000 times older than humankind.

In any case, once that’s all put to bed, Christians can still believe everything in the New Testament, e.g., the divinity of Christ and Mary, without forcing themselves to swallow hard pills, e.g., that dinosaur bones, ancient human artifacts, and stars in the closest galaxy (Andromeda, 2.57 million light-years from us) all came into being around 4000 BCE, when, in fact, there were human civilizations with 40,000 inhabitants who had built three-story buildings, operated potter’s wheels, and domesticated horses and chickens.