You might wonder what this article has to do with zebras. Spoiler: they
teach us how pain is not necessary for soul building, even if we allow
for the baseless metaphysical projection of souls from the merely
physical psychology of learning. Unlike Bruce
Springsteen, Zebras are literally born to run.
Zebras! Image from Wikimedia Commons
It's finished, and I'm ready to send my response to Dr. James Sterba's essay on an ethics without God. He had invited me to write a response. It's ready to go. I also visited him at Notre Dame University and enjoyed the tour and our conversations. He's a great guy! pics below:
In earlier articles I’ve mentioned this confession by a devout elderly Catholic—she told it to me herself—but it’s always worth repeating: “Our priests told us never to think about what we had learned in catechism.”It came to mind when I saw a meme on Facebook this week: “Want to join me in church next Sunday?” “Sorry, I’m an atheist. I can’t pretend to have faith in such a misogynistic, homophobic, fear-inducing system.” “I don’t want to think about that.” “That’s why it works.” There is a major disinclination on the part of devout churchgoers to think about the current state of Christianity, the immoral behavior of the church over so many centuries, and the logical fallacies preached from the pulpit.
This is his Chapter 13 from my anthology "The Christian Delusion." Enjoy.
Christianity
Does Not Provide the Basis for Morality by Dr.
David Eller.
Imagine
someone said to you that English provided the only basis for grammar.After you overcame your shock, you would
respond that English is certainly not the only language with a grammar. You
would add that grammar is not limited to language: understood broadly as rules
for combination and transformation, many phenomena have a grammar, from sports
to baking. Nor is grammar the sole or essential component of language: language
also includes sound systems, vocabularies, genres, and styles of speech. And
you would remind the speaker that grammar does not depend on human language at all: some nonhuman
species, including chimps and parrots, can produce grammatical—that is, orderly
and rule-conforming—short sentences. Ultimately, you would want to explain that
English does not “provide a basis” for grammar at all but rather represents one
particular instance of grammar. English grammar is definitely not the only
grammar in the world and even more definitely not the “real” grammar.
The
person who utters a statement like “English provides the only basis for
grammar” either understands very little about English (and language in general)
or grammar, or the person is expressing his or her partisanship about language
(i.e., pro-English)—or, more likely, the speaker is doing both. Thus, the
person who utters a statement like “Christianity provides the only basis for
morality” either understands very little about Christianity (or religion in
general) or morality, or the person is expressing his or her partisanship about
religion (i.e., pro-Christianity)—or, more likely, the speaker is doing both.
But, as a savvy responder, you would answer that Christianity is certainly not
the only religion with morality. You would add that morality is not limited to
religion: understood broadly as standards for behavior, many phenomena have a
morality, from philosophy to business. Nor is morality the sole or essential
component of religion: religion also includes myths, rituals, roles, and
institutions of behavior. And you would remind the speaker that morality does
not depend on human religion at all:
some nonhuman species demonstrate moral—that is, orderly and
standard-conforming—behavior. Ultimately, you would want to explain that
Christianity does not “provide a basis” for morality at all but rather
represents one particular instance of morality.Christian morality is definitely not the only morality in the world and
even more definitely not the “real” morality.
An honest sermon about the gospel of Mark: Chapter 2 Mark 2:1-12 provides a good case study of several things that are wrong with the Bible, despite the fact that the event depicted here ranks as a favorite tale about Jesus. In fact, I fondly remember this story when I heard it as a kid in Sunday school. Jesus is teaching in a house packed with people—so crowded at the door that four fellows carrying a paralyzed man on a stretcher couldn’t get in. They had to make a hole in the roof, so that they could lower the guy in front to Jesus.
This meme popped up on my Facebook feed recently: “When a man creates a god, he can tell you all about him, what he likes and dislikes. That’s how imagination-gods work.” This describes a practice that has gone on for millennia: Humans have indulged in creating, imagining, and describing gods in detail—many thousands of them. The writers of the Bible were committed to this practice, but they disagreed far too much about Bible-god. Hence clergy, theologians and apologists have devoted so much time and energy to diverting attention from the contradictions, making excuses for them, and minimizing the bad consequences. All in the interest of keeping their particular versions of Christianity intact.
Once again cultural anthropologist Dr. David Eller has granted us access to a large amount of text, from his excellent book, Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker, pp. 365-390. If you want to learn about morality this is very good, as is the whole chapter 10, "Of Myths and Morals: Religion, Stories, and the Practice of Living."
On Morality and Religionby David Eller.
There is no doubt much more stress in Western/Christian
cultures on morality than on myth.Again,
Christians would insist that they do not have “myth” but that they definitely
have morality, or even that their religion is
morality above all else. Atheists, often
taking their lead from Christianity and literally “speaking Christian,” tend to
allow themselves to be swept along with Christian thinking on this
subject.Atheists do not much trouble
ourselves with myths (for us, all myths are false by definition, since myths
refer to supernatural/religious beings and we reject the very notion of such
being).But we trouble ourselves very
much with morality, down to trying to prove that we “have morality too” or that
we can “be good without god(s).”
Given the amount of time and energy that Christians and
atheists alike—and not just them but philosophers, politicians, lawyers, and
social scientists—have devoted to the problem of morality, it is remarkable
that so little progress has been made.As the famous early 20th-century moral philosopher G. E.
Moore wrote almost one hundred years ago, morality or ethics “is a subject
about which there has been and still is an immense amount of difference of
opinion….Actions which some
philosophers hold to be generally wrong, others hold to be generally right, and
occurrences which some hold to be evils, others hold to be goods” (1963:
7).Surely any topic that has resisted
progress and agreement for so long must be being approached in the wrong way.
When discussing religion with persons of faith, try to be aware of
their tactic of framing the argument in terms of positive arguments for
their particular faith, rather than in terms of negative arguments
against all competing faiths. This was on display in the
four-way debate video that John W. Loftus posted about the Virgin
Birth. John’s Orthodox Christian interlocutors demanded that John
clearly define what he would consider to be sufficient evidence for
their religious claims. But they did not mention that they must think
that no competing religion has met the same standard of evidence for
them. So they must know what “evidence” is, well enough to conclude that
no other religion has it. Perhaps they have just never thought this
through before.
In this blog post I’ll dig deeper into this dispute about evidence. I
include my own manual transcriptions of the dialogue from the video with
time markers, but transcribing is hard so refer back to the video for
each’s speakers statements in his own words.
Solid teaching, solid truth
I’ll start with a sort of mission statement from the senior opponent
to John in the video:
12:26 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:
“And right now I’m just very very interested in bringing the
knowledge of that [Orthodox] faith to a public that is hungry and
thirsty for solid teaching, solid truth.”
This statement about audience demand sounds plausible enough. It
stands to reason that if Fr. Ivanoff has a job, he must have found an
audience that likes what he has to say. Good for him. A man’s gotta eat.
But I have some questions about what he means by “solid teaching, solid
truth.” Those are rather bold claims. Presumably Fr. Ivanoff is aware
that there are other audiences who are equally hungry for other “solid”
teachings, other “truths.” For example, Fr. Ivanoff seems to hail from
the Orthodox side of the Great Schism of
1054. The folks on the other side, for the past 950+ years, are
Roman Catholics (and by extension, the Protestants who later schismed
off from them like so many proliferating species). I’m pretty sure the
current Pope would say he has “solid teaching, solid truth” as well. Yet
these two equally solid teachings have been in conflict for fully half
of the Christian era. Thus I think it’s fair to ask (a) whether
Fr. Ivanoff views his own teaching as more “solid” and “truthful” than
the Pope’s teachings (I’m guessing he does!), and (b) how he knows
this.
I’d also like to know how comfortable Fr. Ivanoff feels about
worshipping in a Roman Catholic Church.
The clergy know that honesty about the Bible is risky
I was a preacher for nine years, so I do know a thing or two about sermons. And from my perspective now, I will offer my opinion on how honest sermons differ from those intended to keep the folks in the pews believing that Jesus was everything the church has claimed he was. An honest sermon requires that listeners be genuinely curious, and allow themselves to think critically. Preachers, who earn their livings promoting the faith, would prefer that their parishioners trust and accept their interpretations. Please don’t ask questions!
David Eller, as many of you know, is pretty much my favorite scholar/author at this point, next to just a very limited number of others. As a friend he's allowing me to publish the very best, next to none chapter, on what the words atheist and agnosticism mean. It comes from his most recent book, Liberatheism: On Freedom from God(s) [GCRR, 2024], one that I was honored to write the Forword. Enjoy!
Freeing Ourselves (and Others)
From Misunderstandings of
Atheism
“I
do not believe in God and I am not an
atheist,” Albert Camus wrote in his Notebooks
1951–1959.[1]
What are we to make of that statement? Perhaps Camus was being wry and cryptic,
as French philosophers are often wont to be. Maybe “atheist” meant something
different to him or to 1950s-era France. Alternatively, it might have been too
dangerous to avow atheism in that time and place. Or maybe he was just confused
about the word.
If the latter
is the case, then Camus would not be the first or the last to labor under
misconceptions about atheism. Of course, theists are highly likely—and highly
motivated—to get atheism wrong. Since they are not atheists and possibly have
never spoken to one (at least not intentionally and civilly), they really do
not know what we think; they can only see us through their own theistic eyes
and assume that we are the reverse image, or, more perversely, some odd
variation, of their own theism. Then, as sworn and mortal enemies of atheism,
they are driven to portray us in the most unflattering light, to construct a
ridiculous straw man that they can summarily caricature and assassinate. We
need not take their (mis)characterizations of us seriously, except as a public
relations problem.
What about
atheists themselves? Surely they are accurately portraying their position.
Surprisingly and distressingly, too many professional atheist writers and
speakers commit a regular set of errors in describing the nature of atheism.
This is a tremendously damaging tendency, for two reasons. First, we mislead
current and future atheists, who are misinformed by the incautious
pronouncements of prominent atheists. Second, we empower theists and other
critics of atheism who use our words against us: “See, even atheists say that
atheism is X, so we are justified in our criticism and condemnation of the
idea.”
In this chapter,
we will expose and free ourselves from recurring and systematic mistakes in the
atheist literature. We will not repeat or critique “arguments for atheism,”
which have been sufficiently covered, including by me[2]
and are largely cogent and decisive; all but the most hard-headed theists and
religious apologists (who still exist) concede that “the case for god(s)” is
weak at best and lost at worst. Nor will we linger on the New Atheists, who
have been thoroughly examined many times before, including in the previous
chapter where we noted their unexpected and unfortunate turn toward reactionary
social and political attitudes—ironically simultaneously debunking one of the
pillars of Western civilization (i.e. Christianity) and defending Western
civilizational traditions of sexism, racial thinking, and Islamophobia, among
others. The New Atheists are broadly guilty of the common charge of scientism,
not just of crediting science with the solution to all problems but of
equating, as Richard Dawkins does, religion to science (albeit bad science).
For instance, Dawkins wrote in his lauded The
God Delusion that “‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about
the universe,” and Victor Stenger actually put this “god hypothesis” business
in the title of one of his books.[3]
Finally, all of the New Atheists, who are quality scholars on their own turf,
operate with limited (by which I mean Christianity-centric) notions of religion
and god, in which “god” means the Christian or Abrahamic god and “religion”
means Abrahamic monotheism. Any college freshman student of religion knows
better.
Anglican apologetic writer (undeserving of the designation “scholar”) Richard Bauckham in his Jesus and the Eyewitnesses perpetuated the faith-bolstering theory that since Papias and Justin Martyr described earliest gospel texts as ἀπομνημονεύματα, this term implicitly determined their mode and genre as “memoirs of the Apostles,” that is, recorded living memories of Jesus’ original students. Aimed at a predominantly faith-anxious public market, this book with its litany of absurd theories went on to sell countless copies and is to this day held up by pseudo-intellectual believers as grand justification for their indulgence in such tales as presenting reliable footage of first-century supernatural events.
While early Christians did indulge such tales with belief as the pious mechanics of their cultic conversion rite, such was the point of sacred legend through all times and societies, particularly in the Roman Hellenistic world. Bauckham and others would have humankind accept the canonical Gospels (none of the others, mind you) as histories. The Greek term, however, arose as cognate to the common verb ἱστορέω, that is, to conduct a critical inquiry of the evidence. A “history” in antiquity thus was the product of such rigorous research with the aim of presenting true accounts of past ontological events. The problem, however, with those who seek to foist this descriptor onto the canonical Gospels: Nowhere did the early Christians refer to the canonical Gospels as histories or use them in that manner. This term above, moreover, often translated by them as “memoir,” did not indicate or imply the presence of anecdotal memory, be that genuine or fraudulent. Rather, the term denoted how something or someone was to be honored in cultural memory, that is, their social memorabilia or memorialization. This would often include legend and outright myth, what the Germans term a person’s Nachleben. The culture exalted or damned the memory of the Caesars, for instance, either by bestowing on them divinity (divine birth, divine powers, divine ascension, etc) or by lampooning their image, defacing their statues, restriking their numismatic images (i.e, their coins) etc.
Carl Sagan once said, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.” I have encountered so many churchgoers who are satisfied with belief—and they trust that their clergy have taught them correct beliefs. There appears to be so little curiosity about Christian origins, about the complex ancient thought world in which their faith arose. Nor is there much curiosity about how the gospels came to be, and how much they are burdened with flaws, contradictions, and laughable impossibilities. The drama, ceremony, music, and ritual of weekly (or even more often) worship are enough to sustain devotion and commitment. They are happy with believing, not knowing.
Testimony to the high moral standards of many non-believers
One of the surprising developments of our time—or maybe it’s not so surprising—is the marked increase of people who admit that they have no religious affiliation. They have been labeled the “nones.” One factor might be that some churchgoers decided to read the Bible, and discovered just how flawed it is. That it falls far short of being a divinely inspired book; they’ve been fooled by the clergy. Another factor is increased scientific understanding of the world and how it works. In Western Europe, after two world wars that killed up to ninety million people, belief in god has declined sharply. Surely Christianity is also taking a hit because one of the least religious, least moral persons on the planet has been championed by fanatical Christians—and this week returned to the White House. That will certainly cause substantial damage to the faith in the long run.
This final chapter in "Why I Became an Atheist" (2012) provides the reasons why I finally became an atheist after being an evangelical Christian who became a moderate, then a liberal, then a deist who turned agnostic, a journey that took twelve years. LINK
Study, research, and critical thinking are the key
A long time ago I heard it said of someone, “He’s got a mind like concrete: all mixed up and firmly set.” Perhaps the reference was to a fundamentalist, and it certainly applies. In my article here last week, I discussed Janice Slebie’s book, Divorcing Religion: A Memoir and Survival Handbook. She describes the rigid mindset that she was raised to accept and was expected to obey without question. It took a lot of anguish and family crises for her to realize that she had been severely brainwashed. She made her escape, and has devoted her career to helping others who have experienced religious trauma. Selbie’s book is a welcome addition to the publishing boom by atheist/secular/humanist authors in the last two or three decades. The horror of 9/11, a religiously motivated terrorist attack, was a powerful motivator for non-believers to finally step forward to say, “Enough is Enough!”
By Daniel Mocsny:
There is an amusing video on YouTube in which a gentleman makes physical-comedy type of error - he trips on a treadmill at the gym and gets thrown off - and then quickly recovers and carries on nonchalantly, as if to wordlessly declare, "Yeah, I meant to do that."
Religions work like that. The old religions began in the pre-scientific world, in which even many educated people freely commingled empirical claims with fantastical ones.* Most likely, ancient thinkers thought this way because their lived experience showed them the sorts of things that usually happen, and they reasoned in commonsense ways, but they lacked the modern scientific knowledge that we live in a universe governed by physical laws, so they did not appropriately constrain their notions of what could happen.
Fast forward to the modern world, and religions are like the guy who falls off the treadmill while checking out the hot girl in the gym, then tries to cover his error by breaking into a set of pushups, now that he's on the floor. "Yeah, I mean to do that." Religions are festooned with cognitive fossils - embarrassing markers of erroneous pre-scientific thinking - and struggling to paint them as all part of some master plan.
One of the world’s greatest religious spectacles is underway and the numbers are staggering! 400 million people are expected to be there! That's more than the population of the United States! Watch the video below. Believers at this festival worship different gods and are just as devout as the devotees of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Nothing is more destructive of one's own culturally indoctrinated religion than a different one. "If their religion is obviously false and its devotees delusional, then what about mine?" It's like meeting an antimatter twin!
Now is the time to take The Outsider Test for Faith! It challenges adults to doubt their own culturally indoctrinated childhood faith for perhaps the first time, as if they had never heard of that faith before. It calls on them to require of their own religious faith what they already require of the religious faiths that they reject. It forces them to rigorously demand logical consistency with their doctrines, along with sufficient evidence for their faith, just as they already demand of the religions that they reject.
“Please don’t ask me, expect me, to think about it.” Whenever a religion has succeeded in embedding this attitude in the minds of its followers, it has a better chance of enduring and thriving. But humanity is not better off because the refusal to think remains a common response to reality. How many people have done enough study and research to grasp our place in the Cosmos? To understand why evolution is true, and how it works? To know why vaccines play a vital role in combatting disease? To realize why ongoing horrendous suffering—ongoing for thousands of years—destroys the idea that a powerful god so loves the world?
This video above by Michael Maletin is awesome! Be sure to watch it all. At the 24:25 mark my work on horrendous suffering is recommended. Very very cool! Get that book now on Amazon! It's never been less expensive.
I regard Richard Wolff as a modern prophet of sorts. Toward the end of this excellent warning his analysis of the Trump phenomenon and it's dire consequences is spot on.
We know nothing—absolutely nothing—about how and when Jesus was born. The birth narratives in Mathew and Luke have been studied and analyzed ad nauseam by scholars, and there is not a single scrap of history in either of them. With just a little bit of careful study, churchgoers could discover this truth—but they would have to ignore the pleading of clergy and apologists to take the stories at face value. Yet thousands of churches still put on Christmas pageants featuring Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem, the baby Jesus dozing in a manger, surrounded by adoring shepherds and Wise Men. The Wise Men are a most unwelcome addition to the Jesus tradition. It is really not smart to add astrology to the mix of Christian theology, already spoiled by ancient superstitions and magical thinking. We read that astrologers from the East had seen Jesus’ star in the sky—and set off to worship him. This is a boast of the Jesus cult! It was a common belief in the ancient world that the births or accomplishments of important people were accompanied by special signs in the heavens.
This is almost all new and important information to me! If you know something about world politics and economics take a look. Then let me know what you think. It's by Richard D. Wolff, an American economist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's an expert on economic inequality and advocates for ways to empower workers by addressing systemic issues within the economy. This appears to be a few separate videos strung into one.
I'm not focused on what takes place in atheist organizations. However, I understand that wokeism is a hotly promoted and contested issue for atheists to debate. Here is Jerry Coyne's take on it: LINK. Here is Hemant Mehta's reply: LINK. I'll let my insightful commentors weigh in on this particular debate.
I wasn't going to comment on wokeism until this morning when I read a political piece, gleefully titled, "Woke is dead — let’s make sure it never comes back", a controversial title written by the controversial seasoned journalist Lionel Shriver.
I'm pretty sure the ologarths and audocrats are the gleeful ones. They won the Presidency because they were successful in getting the rest of us to focus on these type of issues rather than on good jobs for all, health care, climate change, free tuition for university students, and so on. Elon Musk, the richest person in history, is now ruling over the rest of us because of this strategy. I'm sure he and other filty rich people will make sure they don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. So whatever else can be said for and against wokeism, I hope it doesn't come up again in the next few presidential elections. Wokeism is where presidential candidates will come to die.
I have said it before, the problem with the Bible and the Koran is that they do not just contain some problematic parts, they contain nothing but problematic parts. Every page, almost every paragraph, has to be justified and explained away with some contorted and very flexible logic. There is no systematic way for the apologist to account for all the problems. The apologist has to resort to a different sort of "rationale" to explain away every little and every big problem. One problem is explained as a parable, for another one they say God reveals his truths as he judges the people ready to receive them, and or another part they try to blame bad translation, etc. So they have hundreds of inconsistent and illogical ways of "explaining" things.
The non-believer on the other hand has a systematic and logical way to debunk these books: They are the product of particular people at particular points in time and space, things written by themselves and for themselves at different times and by different people, then later compiled into books. These people wrote things the way their particular culture saw them at the time, and those cultures were very different from today's cultures. What looks bad to us in those books today looks bad because it is bad to us today, not because we are not understanding something, whereas it was not bad to those people back then and they understood it very well the way it was written. These book are obsolete now to say the least. Period.
A few months ago, an elderly Catholic women admitted to me that their priests told them not to think about what they learned as children in catechism. But I suspect this is a common approach of clergy everywhere: “Just believe that we know what we’re talking about—after all, we learned all there is to know about god in seminary—and our intense prayers keep us in touch with him.” Especially when eternal life is at stake, why take chances? “Of course, our church, our denomination, has it right.”
Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary
Truly the Mother of God’s Son?
-- By
John W. Loftus
Catholic
Christians pray the rosary, which is a string of beads representing creeds and
prayers to be recited. Devout Catholics are considered to recite it every
single day. In it the Apostles’ Creed made the cut, which is recited one time.
The Glory Be (Doxology) is recited five times, the Lord’s Prayer is said six
times, but the Hail Mary prayer is recited a whopping 150 times!
As
one who was raised a Catholic I was required to recite these things a number of
times upon visiting the confessional booth, depending on the gravity of my sins.
While the Hail Mary can be dated back to the 13th century, the
current prayer dates to the 16th century:
Hail
Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed
is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners,
now and at the hour of our death. Amen.
Logistics
and Mary the Mother of God.
We
need to start by briefly considering some logistics. Consider first, the
logistics of how a real mother named Mary could conceive of God (or God’s Son).
The
ancients commonly believed that the woman contributes nothing to the physical being
of the baby to be born. They thought the child was only related to the father.
The mother was nothing but a receptacle for the male sperm, which grew to
become a child.
Today,
by contrast, with the advent of genetics, most Christian thinkers try to defend
the virgin birth on the grounds that the humanity of Jesus was derived from
Mary and that his divine nature was derived from God. They do this because they
know something about genetics and know Mary must have contributed the female
egg that made Jesus into a man. But this doesn’t adequately explain how Jesus
is a human being, since for there to be a human being in the first place
minimally requires that a human sperm penetrate a human egg. Until that happens
we do not have the complete chromosomal structure required to have a human
being.
Now
of course, God could conceivably create both the human egg and the sperm from
which to create life inside Mary’s womb. But if it’s a created human life then
it’s not God, who is believed to be eternal, and the creator of everything, who
came to suffer and die to atone for human sins as a sinless God. Other problems
emerge when it comes to the supposed genealogies and fulfilled prophecies.
Nevertheless,
what if God had a body? He did, didn’t he? Sure he did, even though later
Christian theology describes God as a Spirit. God is described as walking and
talking with Adam and Eve, who even tried to hide from him in the trees of the
garden (Genesis 3:8-10). Later on, Jacob prevailed over God in an all night
wrestling match, after which Jacob said, “I saw God face to face, and yet my
life was spared.” God also let Moses see his body, even his backside (Exodus
33). After monotheism arrived God was still seen as having a body. He sat on a
throne (Ezekiel 1; Daniel 7; Matthew 25:31; Revelation 5:1), and he rewarded
the faithful by allowing them to see his face (Matthew 5:8; 18:11; Revelation
22:3-4). The first martyr Stephen saw Jesus “standing at the right hand of God”
(Acts 7:56).
Even at the end of times every eye will see him—and presumably recognize him—riding
on a white horse to do battle with his enemies (Revelation 1:7; 19:11-21).[1]
So
perhaps it isn’t too surprising Mormons still believe God has a body. But if
so, they have to struggle with the virgin conception of Jesus. Was mother Mary
a virgin or not? According to Brigham Young, the second president of the Church
of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Father came down and begat Jesus,
the same as we do now.” Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie agreed, saying, “Christ
was begotten by an immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten
by mortal fathers.” Two Mormon researchers ask us if it “is so disgusting to
suggest God sired a son by sexual intercourse?”[2]
Inquiring minds want to know.[3]
But if God’s son was produced the old-fashioned way, his son Jesus was not conceived
of a virgin after all!
In the spirit
of atheist Christmas giving I’d like to make a shameless plug for
donations to this blog, Debunking Christianity, the brainchild of John
W. Loftus, noted atheist author and speaker. As John pointed
out last March, the blog itself is ad-free (although John was not
able to remove ads entirely from the Disqus discussions below
the line). As John says, “I have no institutional support nor am I a
paid employee of any atheist organization.” Which means the burden of
keeping the site afloat financially falls on all of us. I found by
direct empirical testing that it’s super easy to locate and click the
yellow “Donate” button at the bottom of the right-side navigation links
in the large-screen format of this site. So I call upon all my
out-or-closeted atheist / agnostic / freethinker / Nones / fact-based /
reality-curious sisters, brothers, and gender-fluids to donate early and
often, as your circumstances allow, and as the “spirit” moves you.
John has been one of my favorite authors and editors for a while. If
you’re like me, a complete nobody, it’s not every day that one of your
favorite authors asks you to guest-blog. So I’m incredibly flattered and
will always try my hardest to overlink. (I’ll
also try hard to tell jokes, and likely fall short. But seriously,
whenever I use a word that has a technical meaning which might not be
obvious to every human alive, I like to put a link on it. “Overlinking”
refers to documents containing “too many” links, which to me sounds
rather alien, like being “too beautiful” or “too rich”, neither of which
I can imagine nor have approximated.)
This was a good discussion. Enjoy! Billing: "Father Ivanoff of Eastern Orthodox apologetics fame joins us with master historian and apologist Subdeacon Daniel Kakish as they dialogue with Dr. Robert Price and John Loftus, two of the foremost Atheists in the field. This will be a groundbreaking dialogue!"
I have this fantasy: that (1) suddenly all devout churchgoers will become obsessed with studying the Bible, especially the New Testament, and that (2) they will also be gifted with critical thinking skills. Of course, this would be a nightmare for the clergy, who don’t want to be pestered with hard questions about so much in the Bible: “How does this possibly make sense?” “Why would Jesus have said such a thing?” “Is this really what our god is like?” For centuries, the clergy have promoted an idealized version of Jesus and his god, based on carefully chosen feel-good verses. All that would come to an end if the laity took Bible study seriously, and really applied their minds. So much really bad stuff is in full view.
It’s putting the health of humanity in serious jeopardy
Allow me to begin with a long quote:
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”
In my article of the same title, published here 22 November 2024, I described several ways in which the devout churchgoers manage to ignore basic realities that put their faith in huge jeopardy. Now I want to focus on one of the most damaging aspects of Christian history: the horrible outcomes of being devoted to, obsessed with, Jesus. Especially after the church achieved political power. Let’s look at a few of the consequences, a few of the things that the devout should work hard to bring within their horizons of awareness.
Heads up! I'm fairly excited for my upcoming 9,000 worded paper, "Did Virgin Mary Give Birth to the Son of God?" It's to appear on my page at the Secular Web within a couple of weeks. [The following essay was first published in December 2023]
"How the New Testament
Writers Used Prophecy" by John W. Loftus.
One of the major things claimed by the New
Testament in support of Jesus’ life and mission is that Jesus fulfilled Old
Testament prophecy (Luke 24:26–27; Acts 3:17–24). If God cannot predict the
future as time moves farther and farther into the distance, as I questioned
earlier, then neither can any prophet who claims to speak for God. As we will
see with regard to the virgin birth of Jesus, none of the Old Testament
passages in the original Hebrew prophetically applied singularly and
specifically to Jesus. [In chapter 18, "Was Jesus Born of a Virgin in Bethlehem?"]. Early Christian preachers simply went into the Old
Testament looking for verses that would support their view of Jesus. They took
these Old Testament verses out of context and applied them to Jesus in order to
support their views of his life and mission.9
LINK. It's pretty depressing for reasonable people in the U.S. as many readers will probably agree. For my part, I'm considering living in a different country for awhile. ;-) No, seriously!
The quest for solid god-evidence has yielded nothing
There’s been a cartoon floating around on Facebook for a while, depicting a Christian woman asking a man, “What’s it like being an atheist?” He replies, “Do you think Zeus is real?” Her answer is “No”—to which he answers, “Like that.” Zeus is one of thousands of gods that have been invented by human beings, and embraced with varying degrees of enthusiasm. It has been so easy to jump to the god-conclusion; in the Book of Acts, chapter 28, we find the story of the apostle Paul arriving on Malta. As he was lighting a fire, a viper landed on his hand, which he shook off into the fire. But the locals were amazed: “They were expecting him to swell up or drop dead, but after they had waited a long time and saw that nothing unusual had happened to him, they changed their minds and began to say that he was a god.” (v. 6)
If you’ve listened to many church sermons, you may have noticed that
they often cite verses from the church’s preferred translation of the
bible, or allude to verses indirectly. If you were to write down all
these verses, over time you’d build up quite the list. But you might
need a lot of sermons before you could reconstruct an entire
bible that way. That’s because many verses in the bible sound a bit
problematic to modern ears, and don’t feature in a lot of
sermons. Instead you might notice that your pastor is like a long-time
touring musical act, well past its hitmaking heyday, which keeps on
playing its hits. What people liked in the past, they can probably like
again. A cynical or perhaps realistic observer might note that the most
important skill for any church pastor is fundraising (“No bucks,
no Buck Rogers”), and some bible verses work better than other
verses for separating the marks I mean congregants
from their money. Among the more successful pastors - in terms of
attracting congregants and extracting money from them - we have Joel Osteen, whose
preaching style, or so I’ve read, leans heavily into “uplifting” and
away from “challenging.” Thus we wouldn’t expect to see successful
pastors like Osteen engaging seriously and frequently with bible
difficulties, as these seem to be bad for business.
But its god, like thousands of others, will end up on the scrapheap of history Many years ago I was the pastor of a small church in a small town in Massachusetts. I did the baptisms, marriages, and funerals. When a middle-aged woman in the congregation died, I officiated at the funeral, then at the burial. It was a beautiful day, sunny with a scattering of clouds. I so vividly recall that a sister of the deceased proclaimed, “She’s up there already, pushing the clouds around.” I was struck by the naivete of this comment. Was she just joking? I don’t think so. Here was a woman who apparently accepted the concept of the cosmos embodied in the Bible: we’re down here, and god is up there—somewhere—on his throne above the clouds. And because of this close proximity, the Christian god can keep a close watch on everyone and everything. He knows how many hairs are on our heads, he monitors all of the words we utter, and even knows what every human is thinking (how else would prayer work?) There are Bible verses to back up all of these ideas about god. But human discoveries about the cosmos have moved us far beyond these naivetes.
[First Published in Nov. 2006] One of the reasons I have rejected Christianity is that I studied the Bible. That's right. I studied the Bible. As I did so, I didn't just read works published by Zondervan or InterVarsity Press. I read the works by Christian scholars from a wide variety of scholarly sources. I didn't read atheist works about the Bible so much as I mainly read scholarly Christian literature. What Christian scholars wrote led me to reject Christianity. For those of you who read my first self-published book in a "Letter to Dr. James Strauss" you know some of the books I read, and almost every book I mentioned (and there were plenty I didn't) was written by a Christian, or someone within the Christian tradition.
Now as we approach the Christmas season, Let's see what Christian scholarship says about the infancy birth narratives. Raymond Brown is the author of the massive 752 page book titled, Birth of the Messiah (updated 1999), and "Gospel Infancy Narrative Research from 1976 to 1986" (CBQ 48: 469–83, 661–80). Here are four points about the contents of Matthew and Luke that Brown mentioned in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (1996) ["Infancy Narratives in the NT Gospels"] (emphasis is mine):
(1) [Brown discusses the agreements between Matthew and Luke’s gospels, but those are obvious and not part of my point]
(2) Matthew and Luke disagree on the following significant points. In chap. 1, the Lucan story of John the Baptist (annunciation to Zechariah by Gabriel, birth, naming, growth) is absent from Matthew. According to Matthew, Jesus’ family live at Bethlehem at the time of the conception and have a house there (2:11); in Luke, they live at Nazareth. In Matthew, Joseph is the chief figure receiving the annunciation, while in Luke, Mary is the chief figure throughout. The Lucan visitation of Mary to Elizabeth and the Magnificat and Benedictus canticles are absent from Matthew. At the time of the annunciation, Mary is detectably pregnant in Matthew, while the annunciation takes place before conception in Luke. In chap. 2 in each gospel, the basic birth and postbirth stories are totally different to the point that the two are not plausibly reconcilable. Matthew describes the star, the magi coming to Herod at Jerusalem and to the family house at Bethlehem, the magi’s avoidance of Herod’s plot, the flight to Egypt, Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem children, the return from Egypt, and the going to Nazareth for fear of Archelaus. Luke describes the census, birth at a stable(?) in Bethlehem because there was no room at the inn, angels revealing the birth to shepherds, the purification of Mary and the presentation of Jesus in the temple, the roles of Simeon and Anna, and a peaceful return of the family to Nazareth.
(3) None of the significant information found in the infancy narrative of either gospel is attested clearly elsewhere in the NT. In particular, the following items are found only in the infancy narratives. (a) The virginal conception of Jesus, although a minority of scholars have sought to find it implicitly in Gal 4:4 (which lacks reference to a male role), or in Mark 6:3 (son of Mary, not of Joseph), or in John 1:13 (“He who was born . . . not of the will of man”—a very minor textual reading attested in no Gk ms). (b) Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, although some scholars find it implicitly in John 7:42 by irony. (c) Herodian knowledge of Jesus’ birth and the claim that he was a king. Rather, in Matt 14:1–2, Herod’s son seems to know nothing of Jesus. (d) Wide knowledge of Jesus’ birth, since all Jerusalem was startled (Matt 2:3), and the children of Bethlehem were killed in search of him. Rather, in Matt 13:54–55, no one seems to know of marvelous origins for Jesus. (e) John the Baptist was a relative of Jesus and recognized him before birth (Luke 1:41, 44). Rather, later John the Baptist seems to have no previous knowledge of Jesus and to be puzzled by him (Luke 7:19; John 1:33).
(4) None of the events that might have been “public” find attestation in contemporary history. (a) There is no convincing astronomical evidence identifiable with a star that rose in the East, moved westward, and came to rest over Bethlehem. In Matthew’s story this would have happened before the death of Herod the Great (4 b.c. or [Martin 1980] 1 b.c.). There have been attempts to identify the star with the supernova recorded by the Chinese records in March/April 5 b.c., or with a comet (Halley’s in 12–11 b.c.), or with a planetary conjunction (Jupiter and Saturn in 7 b.c.; Jupiter and Venus in 3 b.c. [Martin 1980]). (b) Even though the Jewish historian Josephus amply documents the brutality in the final years of Herod the Great, neither he nor any other record mentions a massacre of children at Bethlehem. Macrobius’ frequently cited pun (Sat. 2.4.11) on Herod’s ferocity toward his sons is not applicable to the Bethlehem massacre. (c) A census of the whole world (Roman provinces?) under Caesar Augustus never happened, although there were three Augustan censuses of Roman citizens. It is not unlikely that Luke 2:1 should be taken as a free description of Augustus’ empire-cataloguing tendencies. (d) Luke’s implication that Quirinius was governor of Syria and conducted a “first census” (2:2) before Herod’s death (1:5) has no confirmation. Quirinius became legate of Syria in a.d. 6 and at that time conducted a census of Judea, which was coming under direct Roman administration because Archelaus had been deposed (Brown 1977: 547–56; Benoit DBSup 9: 704–15). (e) Although this item differs somewhat from the immediately preceding one, Luke’s idea that the two parents were purified (“their purification according to the Law of Moses”: 2:22) is not supported by a study of Jewish law, whence the attempts of early textual copyists and of modern scholars to substitute “her” for “their” or to interpret the “their” to refer to other than the parents.
A review of the implication of nos. 1–4 explains why the historicity of the infancy narratives has been questioned by so many scholars, even by those who do not a priori rule out the miraculous. Despite efforts stemming from preconceptions of biblical inerrancy or of Marian piety, it is exceedingly doubtful that both accounts can be considered historical. If only one is thought to be historical, the choice usually falls on Luke, sometimes with the contention that “Those who were from the beginning eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2) includes Mary who was present at the beginning of Jesus’ life. See Fitzmyer Luke I–IX AB, 294, 298, for the more plausible interpretation that it refers to the disciples-apostles who were eyewitnesses from the beginning of Jesus’ public life (Acts 1:21–22) and were engaged in a preaching ministry of the Word. There is no NT or early Christian claim that Mary was the source of the infancy material, and inaccuracies about the census and purification may mean that Luke’s infancy account cannot be judged globally as more historical than that of Matthew.
-------------------------------- [For Richard Carrier's assessment of the date of the Nativity in Luke see here.]
Maybe that’s why the devout avoid reading it Mark Twain once stated the dilemma: “It is not the things which I do not understand in theBiblewhich trouble me, but the things which I do understand.” How many of the laity throughout Christendom have made this same troubling discovery? And Twain was also right when he said that “faith is believing in something you know ain’t true.” How many of the faithful just shut their eyes, close their minds, stifle curiosity—and decide to trust what their clergy teach about god? Very few of the clergy, from the pulpit on a Sunday morning, will give this assignment: “Please, every one of you, read the gospel of Mark—all of it—this week. Read it carefully, critically, and write down the questions about it that occur to you. Be brave, even the toughest questions are welcome.”
According
to the English Wikipedia, Daniel Dennett
(March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) “was an American philosopher and
cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of
mind, the philosophy of
science, and the philosophy of
biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary
biology and cognitive
science.” Dennett was and remains well-known in
atheist/freethinking/skeptical circles as one of the so-called “Four
Horsemen” of New
Atheism, alongside Richard
Dawkins, Christopher
Hitchens, and Sam
Harris.
