Careful what you believe

I caught part of Exodus Decoded last night on Discovery. I never would have known it was on if my husband wouldn't have told me about it.

It looked promising, as far at intellectual honesty goes. Then it went down the tubes, so to speak. If you look at the above link, at the bottom of the page you'll find the criticisms, and there are more, just Google it. Yes, I know, people can and will critique anything, but when you make a claim like the first born slept in beds while everyone else slept on roofs while explaining how the 10th plague could have been caused by carbon dioxide poisoning, and then I find out there is no archeological evidence that this is true, you tend to make me highly skeptical of your other claims. It also makes me wonder what the hell you were thinking by making a claim like that with no supporting evidence.

I felt the same way about The God Who Wasn't There and Zeitgeist. I feel the same way about anything I watch/read that is making claims about religion or science. Research it yourself, don't just take the word of the filmmaker/author that it's true or you'll end up believing a lot of false information.

I don't take the claims of the Bible at face value and believe them just because they are supposedly authoritative, why on earth would I take the claims made in a movie or tv show as such without properly researching them? If you want to disbelieve the Bible, there are plenty of perfectly good, sound reasons for doing so without twisting history and blatantly making shit up in order to convince others to do so.

Edit: Here are some of the natural explanations that could be used to explain the plagues. A lot of this is the same stuff covered in Exodus Decoded. But, remember there is a Wiki disclaimer that there might be unverified claims in there.

As an atheist, I think there probably are perfectly natural explanations for the plagues, people just didn't know what those explanations were at the time and they thought a deity caused them. I believe this because it is much more likely that natural phenomena happen for reasons that can be explained scientifically, than it is that a deity does anything.

Think about it. Remember when Katrina hit and people were running around saying it was the xian God's retribution for sin? If you have a solid understanding of hurricanes and weather patterns then you can understand what happened very well, without postulating a deity for which there is no evidence.