“We trust our clergy”—and that’s enough
In fact, one of the primary roles of the clergy is to divert attention from blunt realities. They don’t want the devout folks under their care to become aware of basic facts that undermine the Christian faith. For example, the turmoil that Jesus studies have been in for decades, based on the very embarrassing truth that the gospels do not qualify as history. Not a single episode in the gospels, not a single Jesus saying, can be verified by the techniques that historians use to write authentic history. The clergy continue to get away with quoting feel-good Bible verses from the pulpit.
The true origins of the faith are never mentioned—and this is of vital importance. In the ancient world in which Christianity arose, there were other major religions that worshipped dying-and-rising gods—and promised eternal life. But it would take serious research and study on the part of laypeople to discover the painful truth that the early Jesus sect borrowed this idea and attached it to Jesus. As Richard Carrier has said in a major article on the context in which Christianity was born: “Jesus is just a late comer to the party.”
The fact that the clergy are in the business of promoting magical thinking is also not noticed. The major example of this is the eucharist: the claim that bread and wine magically become the real body and blood of Jesus—well, at least according to the Catholic church; Protestant churches regard the communion ritual as symbolic. One meme floating about on Facebook makes the point clearly: “You’re in church pretending to eat the flesh and drink the blood of your imaginary friend, but you think I’m crazy for being an atheist!”
A few days ago, 20 April 2026, John Loftus posted here the link to an article that he wrote in 2023, How to Change the Minds of Believers. He opens with this observation:
“After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers…I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang their heads against a wall. I think that it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success, for any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion.”
It’s a good idea to read all ten of Loftus’ tips for getting through to devout believers. He points out this painful reality: “Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees.” Hence the title for my article this week.
In his first tip he mentions the role of early indoctrination, which believers commonly don’t grasp as the tool that their religious brands embrace with determination:
“Given the accidents of when and where we were born, and how we were raised, our religious faith was unthinkingly adopted just as surely as was our nationality and preferred cuisine. So at
least once in their lives, believers should seriously question what they believe. Consider it a rite of passage to adulthood if nothing else.”
Catholics especially should hold their clergy and the bureaucracy accountable for what they’ve done with Mary. They should ask, “What are the sources of your knowledge about Mary?” There is precious little in the New Testament about Mary, aside from the inflated, unverifiable, myth-saturated birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. In the second chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus scolds his mother. The devout should also probe why—on what basis—did Pope Pius XII in 1950 declare that Mary had been taken bodily into heaven. There has been a huge campaign in the church to turn Mary into a goddess on her own, The Queen of Heaven. All of this was created by fantasy theology, unbeknownst to Catholic laity. And it is continually
reinforced by the artworks and huge statues depicting Mary. If there is any curiosity at all about how this extreme exaggeration of Mary came about, “we trust our clergy” is sufficient, since the clergy are reputed to be skilled at prayer and meditation.
Given this blatant violation of common sense, Loftus’ fifth tip is especially important: Get believers to read their Bibles, which is not a common practice.
“The Bible debunks itself. It contains forgeries and borrowed pagan myths, and is inconsistent within itself. It tells a plethora of ancient superstitious tales that don’t make any sense at all. It has a god that evolved from a polytheistic one who lives in the sky above the Earth, who does both good and bad, who makes room for both angels and demons, and who thinks that a god/human blood sacrifice can magically ransom us from the grip of the Devil.”
Loftus’ sixth tip is the recommendation that the devout study the horrors of church history. It’s not a pretty picture:
“Inform believers about the Church. The history of the Church, and of the people claiming to have the alleged Holy Spirit inside of them, reveals a continuous spectacle of atrocities such that its history is a damning indictment upon the god that they profess to believe in.” (emphasis added)
The Inquisition, the burning at the stake of women accused of witchcraft, the severity of the Crusades, the ongoing anti-Semitism fueled by Bible texts, the brutalities of slavery—which is not even mentioned in the Ten Commandments—and the savagery with which native Americans were treated by the invading European Christians after 1492 (see especially, David E. Stannard’s book, American Holocaust: Columbus and The Conquest of the New World). All of these come to mind, as well as the vicious church reaction to thinkers, such as Galileo, who discovered that the Biblical view of the Cosmos is deeply inadequate and flawed.
Loftus’ tenth tip is the one that utterly shatters belief in a good, caring god. Horrendous suffering, he points out,
“…is as close to a refutation of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God as is possible…the best arguments are evidential ones about clearly obvious concrete test cases like the Holocaust, or the massive number of children who suffer from malnutrition and die every year, or the kill or be killed law of predation in the animal world.”
The clergy offer theobabble to divert attention from these realities—for example, “Our god works in mysterious ways”—but often even devout laypeople sense that these don’t work. The 2nd edition of Loftus’ anthology, recently released, God and Horrendous Suffering, provides abundant detail on exactly how and why the concept of god is destroyed by the level of suffering we see around us every day.
When my book Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught was published in 2021, I gifted copies to a couple of proudly pious friends. The response from both was basically the same: “I can’t read that, I’m a Catholic!” So the brick wall is firmly in place, as Loftus said: “Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees.” When the church offers eternal life and the promise that it will help keep you in god’s good favor, why put any of that in danger?
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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