Religions Thrive on Naïve Ignorance

But also on arrogant and aggressive ignorance

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.”

 

 

But it can only be naïve ignorance that allows devout Christians not to grasp that there is something seriously wrong here: there are so many different brands of Christianity, reflecting profound disagreements about god and Jesus. We’ll never see Southern Baptists negotiating with Roman Catholics to iron out their differences, to merge into one church. The disastrous fracturing of Christianity has its roots in the New Testament itself; the ancient theologians who wrote this charter document couldn’t agree about god and the ways to achieve salvation. 

 

Naïve ignorance plays a role too in allowing the devout to remain unaware of the serious defects of the New Testament. Nor have they tuned in to another reality: thousands of scholars with extreme faith biases devote their careers trying to smooth over—deflect attention away from—the serious defects. To cite but one example: the first gospel written—of those that ended up in the Bible—was the gospel of Mark (but no one knows who the author was), and its primary message is that the kingdom of god will arrive on earth soon; Jesus is presented as an apocalyptic prophet. In Mark 14:62 we read that he promised the people at his trial that they would see him coming on the clouds of heaven.   

 

Mark 13 is one of the worst chapters in the New Testament, reflecting the cult fanaticism of its author, who depicts Jesus in a vindictive, get-even mood. Naïve ignorance allows devout Christians today to overlook this Jesus-script in Mark 13: 

 

“Siblings will betray sibling to death and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all because of my name. But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” (vv. 12-13)

 

“Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now and never will be.” (vv. 17-19)

Why don’t such grim patches of scripture prompt the devout to wonder if their religion might be dead wrong? Why don’t the hundreds of different unreconcilable denominations/brands prompt the same suspicion? It would seem that naïve ignorance has been replaced by arrogant and aggressive ignorance. What is a way out of this mess? 

 

John Loftus has proposed what he calls the outsider test of faith, which he describes fully in his 2013 book, The Outsider Test of Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True. For this to work, devout folks have to agree to think critically about what they believe. In other words, ignore the warning the elderly Catholic woman received from her priests not to think. Thinking about religious beliefs is a usually not a welcome challenge. When Christians find Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses knocking on their doors, their instinct is to just turn the way because “I know that my religious is the right one.” They’re not willing to carefully analyze and critique Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness beliefs—just as they’re not willing to do the same thing with their own beliefs. Which is precisely what The Outsider Test of Faith is all about.

 

Loftus has stated the problem:

 

“…psychological studies overwhelmingly show us that human beings are infected with numerous cognitive biases. These biases lead us to believe and defend what we prefer to believe. They lead us to prefer to believe and defend what was taught to us on Mama’s knees…the Outsider Test of Faith calls upon believers to examine their own religious faith from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of reasonable skepticism they already use to examine the other religious faiths they reject.”  

 

A considerable part of his book addresses the objections that apologists and theologians have raised in an effort to cancel/ridicule the Outsider Test of Faith. Loftus bluntly shuts them down:

 

“Faith is an attitude or feeling whereby believers attribute a higher degree of probability to the evidence than what the evidence calls for. Faith is a cognitive bias that causes believers to overestimate confirming evidence and underestimate disconfirming evidence.”

 

“Christians reject the faiths of other religions precisely because they are faith-based. They just do not understand that their own religion or sect shares that same foundation.”

 

I recommend giving a careful read to an article Loftus posted here on Christmas day, Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son? Among many other things he lists seven items in the Jesus-birth narratives in the gospels that cannot possibly be true. He quotes comedian Bill Burr—before presenting the case as made by serious philosophers:

 

“Everybody else’s religion sounds stupid. The first time I heard the story of Scientology I thought that is the dumbest stuff I have ever heard in my life, while simultaneously believing that a woman who never had sex had a baby that walked on the water, died and came back three days later. Yeah, that made total sense to me! So it just hit me one day. Why doesn’t Scientology make sense and my stuff does? It’s because I heard their story when I was an adult. I heard my story when I was four years old.” 

Loftus makes this very important point: “Reasonable people need sufficient objective evidence to transform the alleged negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified or corroborated eyewitness testimony. But it does not exist.” It cannot be stated often enough: nothing in the gospels—the events depicted, the supposed teaching of Jesus—can be verified by the methods that historians use. Theologians and clergy have never been able to provide reliable, verifiable, objective evidence that the gospels stories are anything other than stories created to promote the Jesus cult. Any devout person who can break away from naïve, arrogant, aggressive ignorance can see that this is the fact of the matter. Please read the gospels carefully, skeptically—free from the agendas pushed by the clergy. 

And try to grasp that worship services are designed to keep the devout impressed with church versions of the truth. The clergy will claim that worship is for the glorification of their god, but please give this some serious thought. Why would a creator god, who created billions of galaxies, get off on being praised and glorified by a species on one tiny planet? This doesn’t make sense. In a comment on this blog a few days ago, Robert Conner called attention to the theatre factor:

“There is no credible, unimpeachable evidence for any part of the Jesus stories and hence no real debate about evidence. Jesusology is speculation all the way down. Christian theology, like Christian preaching, is basically theatre.” 

The Catholic Church has raised theatre to an incredible level—the settings, spectacular costumes, rituals and ceremonies—and television evangelism is fully engaged in trying to outperform the Vatican and its countless churches around the globe. Even the small Methodist Church in which I was raised in rural Indiana in the 1940s and 1950s did its best to provide theatre on Sunday mornings. Maybe it’s all designed to disguise the fact that Christian theology is too farfetched to be taken seriously. Perhaps the clergy themselves have their own unvoiced doubts. 

 

 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

 

His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

 

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.