No matter how much the devout want it to be real
It is not commonly grasped that Christianity is soundly falsified by a few verses in Acts 1 that describe Jesus’ ascension to heaven:
“…as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.’” (vv. 9-11)
Based on our knowledge of the Cosmos—in stark contrast to what the Bible authors believed—we know that this cannot possibly have happened. Above the earth’s atmosphere, there is the cold, radiation-
filled void that we know as outer space. The Bible authors had no clue that earth was one planet among many that orbit our sun. The blunt truth is that Jesus disappearing this way from the earth is a cover-up: the New Testament lies about what happened to Jesus at the end. His resurrected body cannot have escaped the planet, so either he’s still
walking around—or he died again. We are entitled to ask what happened to Lazarus: how long was it before he died again? (See John 11) And what happened to all the dead people in their tombs who came alive at moment Jesus died on the cross—then toured Jerusalem on Eastern morning? (see Matthew 27:51-52) Did they just head back to their tombs, to resume being dead?
Chances are not many churchgoers today give much thought to these fabrications—and they keep tucked away in their minds the Bible view of the Cosmos, despite the true scope of the universe that has been revealed by astronomers and increasingly sophisticated telescopes.
If we were to ask the devout to describe our place in the cosmos, how many of them would be up to the task? Could they list the planets in our solar system, in order of distance from the sun? Do they know that our sun orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy—taking about 230 million years for just one orbit? Do they know about Edwin Hubble’s discovery in 1923, one of most important insights in human history? Namely, that the Andromeda galaxy is 2.5 million light years away from our galaxy, not inside it? Are they aware that the Hubble Space Telescope, in December 1995, was aimed at a very tiny portion of the sky—and that the photographic plate revealed almost 3,000 galaxies? Of course, the church stands to gain when such knowledge, such understanding, hasn’t reached most of the folks in the pews. It was in 1950 that Pope Pius XII proclaimed the dogma that the Virgin Mary had been bodily assumed into heaven—just like her son. He was counting on the ignorance of Catholic laity about the reality of the earth’s place in the Cosmos.
That is—as the Bible would have us believe (and as Pius XII hoped the faithful would accept)—we’re down here on earth, and Yahweh is above the clouds in his spiritual realm, on his throne. It’s a place where the bodies of Jesus and Mary could go to, and god—in his abode above the clouds—is in a position to carefully monitor every human. When people are locked into this frame of mind, there’s no reason to doubt that prayer is a way of communicating with the Christian god. But the laity are not encouraged to think critically about prayer.
There are three primary reasons for suspecting that prayer is a fantasy exercise.
The following three items are among many that I discuss in detail in
my new book—a collaboration with author and publisher Tim Sledge:
Everything You Need to Know About Prayer, But May Not Want to Admit.
It is available as Paperback, Kindle, and Audible.
One: We reside on an extremely tiny speck in the Cosmos: How are we NOT lost in space?
Over many millennia, humans have imagined/invented gods who pay close attention to our deeds and thoughts. Because humans assumed that our habitat was the center of divine attention, which is the attitude we find in the Bible. But now we know there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, with trillions of planets—and we can only guess at how many life-forms there may be scattered across the light-years. It should be noted as well, that since the spectacular discoveries about the Cosmos have been made, cosmologists have not detected a creator deity that matches in any way whatever the one depicted in the Christian scriptures—supposedly all knowing, all powerful, and obsessed with human behavior—which theologians have been redefining endlessly over the centuries. And the theologians themselves have failed to show us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective data about gods. Billions of the laity—thanks to brainwashing at an early age—have accepted their speculations, guesswork and fantasies.
In view of these realities, what are the probabilities that such a creator deity pays careful attention to life forms on trillions of planets? What are the chances that he/she/it wants to help humans find parking spaces—or that it cares about those in the trauma/distress of illnesses, especially since horrible diseases happen to be part of his intelligent design?
Given the very low probabilities, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that prayer is talking to yourself.
Two: By what mechanisms do the thoughts bouncing around inside our skulls escape to reach a god?
A recent article published by The Onion was titled: Report: 32% of Prayers Deflected Off Passing Satellites. It includes this sentence:
“Of the remaining prayers, research confirms 64 percent fail to make it past the stratosphere because they aren’t prayed hard enough, 94 percent of those with enough momentum are swallowed by a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy…”
If nothing else, this bit of satire should prompt curiosity about how prayers manage to get from human heads to god. Christians don’t seem to object to the affirmation in Romans 2:16. In this text the apostle Paul stated: “…on the day when, according to my gospel, God through Christ Jesus judges the secret thoughts of all.” Paul was certain that his god was able to monitor human brain activity—although he may not have realized what a “brain” is. But how does that work? The clergy are so fond of claiming that “god works in mysterious ways,” but this has become a cliché to cover a wide range of things we don’t understand about god. However, for us to accept that a divine being knows what each and every human being is thinking, at any time of the day or night, we need an explanation: how is this possible? “Well, our god knows everything”—also fails as an explanation. It’s no more than a cliché too, which the devout accept because they’ve heard it since they were toddlers. No, this won’t do: Please, clergy and theologians, tell us exactly how our thoughts escape our heads to be heard and understood by a creator deity—who might be settling major problems in distant galaxies. Don’t forget, our tiny planet is lost in space.
Three: There is overwhelming evidence that prayers are not heard by god(s).
This reality has been summed up well by Darrell W. Ray, in his book The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture:
“It took two world wars for Europeans to realize that the prayers of millions of people were not answered. It doesn’t take much intelligence to see that the god isn’t working too well when 92 million people died in two world wars, or to see the complicity and cooperation of the Pope, Lutheran clergy and Christians with Hitler during WWII.” (p. 75)
There was one horrendous event that illustrates the inattention of god especially. On 10 June 1944, just a few days after the Allied landing at Normandy, German soldiers assaulted a small village in France, Oradour-sur-Glane. Their goal was to murder everyone. The men were herded into barns, which were set on fire. The woman and children—452 of them—were packed into the church, then machine-gunned and firebombed. Only one woman managed to escape. This happened in a church. Was god not in a mood to hear their prayers that day? (See especially, Sarah Farmer, Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane)
Of course, the Holocaust—one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in human history—makes us extremely skeptical that prayer works in any way. As one stinging meme has put it: “How did you sleep last night? Like God during the Holocaust.”
Such realities are commonly ignored by the faithful, who embrace confirmation bias. That is, they know their prayers have been answered when a cancer patient they pray for beats the disease. “See, prayer works!” Their cherished assumptions are confirmed. But the cancer patient in the next bed, whom no one prayed for, dies. What does that tell you about god? If a creator god has the power to cure one cancer patient, why doesn’t he/she/it eliminate cancer from the planet altogether?
There are far too many things about prayer that the devout do not want to admit, that they decline to think about. Because to do so would jeopardize their religion instilled during formative years.
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 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:
· Guessing About God (2023),
· Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available.
· Everything You Need to Know About Prayer But May Not Want to Admit (2025)
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.
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