The Desperate Embrace of Abusive Religion by the Devout

Clint Heacock’s new book shines a bright light on this reality

The Preface to this book is a grabber. Twelve-year old Clint had arrived home from soccer practice, looking forward to the family dinner. But there was no one home; instead of the usual buzz of activity, nothing. Clint went into a panic: had the Rapture happened, and he was left behind? He wouldn’t get to meet Jesus and go to heaven? I won’t offer a plot spoiler here—where the family actually was—but this incident is a stunning example of abusive religion. Here was a kid who had been told by people he trusted, from his days as a toddler, that Jesus would one day return to collect a select group of true believers for their trip to heaven. And woe to those who weren’t among those selected.

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Taylor Swift Endorses Kamala Harris

Yay! LINK. Her debate with Trump "wasn't even close" says NPR!

McIntosh and Horrendous Suffering

[This article is forthcoming in the Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (Fall 2024) in collaboration with the Trinity Graduate School of Apologetics and Theology. The version presented here is slightly different in formatting from the print version. Used with permission.]

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Why Religion Is Being Held Strictly, Bluntly Accountable

Critical thinking skills have kicked in 

There is perhaps nothing more stunning, more shocking, than clergy who have realized that their religion is false—and decided to tell this truth to the world. There’s the famous cartoon by John Billette depicting a priest getting into costume for worship, and confiding to his assistant: “Every Sunday I’m tempted to tell the congregation that it’s all bullshit, but I’m in too deep now.” John W. Loftus, Dan Barker, and Tim Sledge come to mind: clergy who were in really deep, and found the courage to describe their realization that the Christian religion has far too many flaws. It just doesn’t make sense, and cannot be taken seriously. The three ex-clergy just mentioned have written many books about the shortcoming of their abandoned faiths, but there are others who have published their stories, e.g., Jerry Dewitt, John Compere, Drew Bekius, Kenneth Daniels, Bob Ripley, David Ramsey.  

I describe my own loss of faith in an article I published here last May, How Christianity Disintegrated Right in Front of Me.

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The Obsession of Religion with Eternal Life, the Ultimate Scam

A tale of two deathbeds

A few years ago, a devout Catholic woman told me she was having a tough time finding a new job. Since I was a career coach at the time, I offered to give her a book on effective job search. I was stunned by her response: “I don’t read books. Even when I was in college, I didn’t read books. I passed the tests because I kept very good notes in class.” And she confessed that was very protective of her faith; she didn’t want it damaged in any way, because she was eager to see her mother again in heaven.

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Phil Zuckerman, What Happens When Countries Lose Religion?

Beware Furious Christians on the Warpath to Defend Their Faith

Christian love shatters into denial, rage and hate

By the time my first book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief, was published in 2016, its Facebook page was up and running. I decided to do paid boosts on weekends to promote the book. I selected my preferred target audiences carefully: atheist, agnostic, humanist, secularist— but was surprised to find out that the boost had also appeared on the newsfeeds of devout Christians. This was not a happy event: there was an outbreak of Christian hate as they responded to the ad. I was called all sorts of names and was accused of never having been a real Christian. I was assured that I was going to hell. After a while I discontinued the paid boosts. The biggest irritant, actually, was that not one—not a single one—of the furious Christians chose to engage in any of the ten issues I raised in the book, any one of which is enough to falsify the faith. They were interested in lashing out, not learning.

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"Man is the Measure."

All ethics are made by human beings, many of which are claimed to be given by a God. This means when the ethics of a God are deemed barbaric so also goes that God.

It also means that it's not only possible to have ethics without a God, ethics have always been without a God. 

If Devout Folks Get to Heaven by Using Magic Spells and Potions…

Why bother following the rules?  

We can find many examples of Jesus-script in the gospels that stress good behavior, compassion, carefully following god’s rules—as the ways to make it to heaven. In Matthew 19 we read the story of a rich young man who asked Jesus how he could obtain eternal life. “Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.” (Matt 19:21-22)   I suspect most consumer-driven devout folks would identify with the young man’s grief. An important part of life for them is the accumulation of as much stuff as possible, e.g., cars, houses, flat-screen TVs, a wide assortment of appliances—and saving bundles of cash for fun vacations. That’s life in the modern world. Following Jesus into poverty can be left to those who join monasteries and convents. The devout may not say it out-loud, but their response to Jesus is no thanks!

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Is Ethics without God Possible?

I've been honored to contribute a paper to an online interactive scholarly symposium on ethics without god(s). My major in a PhD program at Marquette Univ. was ethics. 

I also taught Intro to Ethics college classes. My recent  focus has been on the failure of a theistic ethics, but this symposium concerns an atheist ethics. What say you? 

The Author of Mark’s Gospel Created Jesus Fantasies

Matthew, Luke, and John did too, but none of them knew how to write history                                                                      

 

                                                                                                            

One of my favorite challenges to church folks is: Please read Mark’s gospel—all at one sitting. No such nonsense as a chapter-per-day: that’s as much as admitting lack of interest. Leave the TV off for an evening, and really focus on Mark’s gospel. Read the whole thing carefully, thoughtfully; this will take about as much time as watching a movie. Have a notepad handy, to write down items that sound goofy, farfetched—things that just don’t make sense. If ever I could find a devout Christian willing to do this, I’d love to engage him/her in a conversation about the problematic texts. Mark’s gospel is chock full of theological problems—and absurdities. Please, believers, face them head-on!

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Let's Highlight My Magnum Opus, WIBA.

Let's highlight my magnum opus, per a comment by Dr. Jim Sterba, Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame: "I think your book 'Why I Became an Atheist' is unsurpassable." Amazon LINK.

 

Why Isn’t Membership in the Catholic Church Down to ZERO by Now?

Because it exploits magical thinking and has mastered show business

Here we go again, from the Associated Press, 25 July 2024: Missouri lawsuits allege abuse by priests, nuns; archdiocese leader in Omaha among those accused. Here are three excerpts:

“Among those named is Omaha Archbishop George Lucas. A lawsuit filed Wednesday in St. Louis County Circuit Court said the unnamed accuser was 16 when he met Lucas at the now-closed St. Louis Preparatory Seminary in the late 1980s, where Lucas was a priest and dean of education. The lawsuit accused Lucas of sexually abusing the boy multiple times and offering better grades for sexual favors.”

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If We Put It This Way It's Nonsense!

Greg G wrote:

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are known as the Abrahamic religions because the worship the same "God of Abraham". Pat Condell calls them "the death cults of the desert".

The Bible has the story of how Abraham started those religions in Genesis chapters 17 through 22. It started with Abraham mutilated his sex organ by circumcision. Then he did the same to his only son by his baby mama, followed by all of his servants. When his wife produced a son, he almost immediately did it to him. Then he evicted his baby mama and eldest son. Then he tried to kill his younger son on an altar. He did all these things because a voice nobody else could hear told him to them.

Humans who didn't know where the sun went at night invented thousands of god thingies before anybody invented your favorite, and humans invented thousands more after that, all based on a primitive understanding of the universe. But you believe one out of thousands got it right.

They apparently recognized the night sky could help them with sowing and harvesting crops. Before that, it may have helped them anticipate migrations. The patterns of those lights in the sky, that is, the constellations, changed as the year progressed.

But they also noticed certain lights in the night sky that changed positions within the background of the night sky. These were usually interpreted as god thingies.

Solar deities were often noted for their hairiness while lunar deities were hairless and bald. There are Bible stories with pairs of characters, one known for hairiness and the other known for being not hirsute: Jacob (hairless) vs Esau (hirsute), Elijah (hirsute) vs Elisha (bald), Samson (power is his hair) vs Delilah (name is similar to the word for "night").

Your religion began as polytheism, evolved to henotheism, to monotheism, while being celestial during the whole process. Your religion still teaches transubstantiation.

Several years ago, some dude took a communion wafer out of the building instead of eating, them posted it online. Some Catholics accused him of kidnapping Jesus. Where would they get such an idea if not from the teachings of their religion?

When the foundational stories are recognized as absurd at face value, they try to patch them up by making up new beliefs and "deeper meanings".

Catholics now recognize that the transubstantiated crackers look like crackers right down to the atomic level but believe it is still Jesus meat.

Since there are so many conflicting, antithetical religions, most should be dismissed out of hand. Abrahamic religions are easy to dismiss.

Ignorant Amos added:

Otherwise, Mo rode a flying horse on a midnight sky gallop, to visit upon an arch angel to get the second hand news from Allah/Yahweh.

And Joe Smith met the angel Moroni who showed him where the Golden Tablets were hidden, which Joe then deciphered using a magic hat and special spectacles made from two stones called Urim and Thummim.

Must be all true, if it's written in a book, amarite?

Christians Don’t Realize How Much They Disagree with Jesus

Binge reading the gospels has never caught on. 

It would be easy to come up with a couple dozen Jesus quotes from the gospels, and run them by devout church-goers, claiming that a crazy street preacher just said them. The devout would agree, “Wow, what a nut job!” If we then admitted that they are all Jesus quotes, most of these believers (but not all) would not give up on their lord and savior. They’d run to their clergy for explanations. Adoration of their idealized Jesus is so deeply imbedded that accepting any negatives cannot be tolerated. Thus has the church survived—and, of course, failure to read/study the gospels has helped. There is staggering ignorance of the Jesus story. Don’t believe me? Just ask a Christian friend to describe the difference between the Jesus in Mark’s gospel and the Jesus in John’s gospel.

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My Response to Dr. Don McIntosh On Horrendous Suffering

Remember Don McIntosh's response to my article on horrendous suffering, LINK? My response to him on Secular Web just dropped. I accepted a 3,000+ word limit with the agreement this discussion would end with my response. It's an endless debate so why drag on and on? Hopefully readers will get my massive book, God and Horrendous Suffering to learn more. Click here for my response to McIntosh,  then come back to discuss the exchange between us.

A List of Jesus's in the Time of "Jesus"

Thanks to Ignorant Amos (who isn't ignorant) for this list of Jesus's:

Maybe the historical Jesus was a real person, but given the nature of the so-called evidence no one can possibly know objectively.

Or a montage of real people, plural.

In the New Testament alone, there are at least four individuals named Jesus.

The Jesus worshipped, and another three individuals named Jesus, who are Jesus Barabbas, Jesus son of Eliezer, and Jesus called Justus.

Josephus mentions a few Jesuses [Jesus', Jesus's, Jesi?] too.

War
2:566 Jesus, son of Sapphias – Governor of Tiberias.
3:450 Jesus, son of Shapat – Principal head of a band of robbers controlling Tiberias.
4:160 Jesus, son of Gamala – Best esteemed, with Ananus ben Ananus, of High priests.
4:459 Jesus [Joshua] son of Nun.
6:114 Jesus, no patronym – High priest, deserts to Vespasian.
6:300 Jesus, son of Ananus – Common man prophesied destruction of the temple.
6:387 Jesus, son of Thebuthus – One of the priests, desert s to Titus.

Ant.
03:049 (& numerous other instances) Jesus [Joshua] son of Nun (successor of Moses).
11:298 Jesus, (son of Eliashib), brother of John – friend of governor Bagoses.
12:237 Jesus, brother of Onias III – High priest.
15:322 Jesus, son of Phabes – High priest.
17:341 Jesus, the son of Sie – High priest.
18:063 Jesus, no patronym – Condemned to cross by Pilate. He was [the] Christ. [Christian interpolation]
20:200 Jesus, brother of Jacob – Called the Christ.
20:203 Jesus, son of Damneus – High priest.
20:213 Jesus, son of Gamaliel – High priest.
20:234 Jesus, son of Josadek – High priest.

Life
1:066 Jesus, son of Sapphias – Governor of Tiberias.
1:105 Jesus, no patronym – Captain of those robbers in the confines of Ptolemais.
1:178 Jesus, no patronym – Brother of Justus of Tiberias.
1:193 Jesus, son of Gamala – High priest & Josephus’ friend.
1:200 Jesus, no patronym – Galilean at head of a band of 600, sent to depose Josephus.
1:246 Jesus, no patronym – Owned a house big as a castle. Governor of Tiberias?

Apparently, Jesus was the sixth most popular name at the time.

The English name Jesus, from Greek Iēsous, is a rendering of Joshua (Hebrew Yehoshua, later Yeshua), and was not uncommon in Judea at the time of the birth of Jesus. Popular etymology linked the names Yehoshua and Yeshua to the verb meaning "save" and the noun "salvation". The Gospel of Matthew tells of an angel that appeared to Joseph instructing him "to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins".

There's a handy coincidence.

Best Method To Defeat Evangelical Apologists: The Ghost Buster Counter-Apologetics Technique, by Former Evangelical Gary

LINK

The Biggest Christian Scandal Has Its Roots in the New Testament

Anyone who is curious can figure it out 

Chance are, no Catholic priest is going to pause in the middle of his sermon to say, “Oh, by the way, I want everyone here today to go to another church next Sunday. Pick another denomination—Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Pentecostal, whatever—and try to find out if their version of Christianity is better than ours. Is it the right one?” Nor are preachers from any of these other brands going to do this. The devout seem not at all bothered that there are many thousands of conflicting, bickering Christian divisions and sects; these reflect profound disagreements about Jesus, god, the best ways to get to heaven. If we could convene a meeting of theologians from each of the brands, they would never be able to agree—among other reasons, because the theologians who wrote the New Testament didn’t agree either. Even the very earliest Christians were arguing.

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It’s Time to LET GO of the Defective, Deficient Ten Commandments

They could not have been inspired by a good, caring, wise god

I was a teenager in 1956 when the film, The Ten Commandments, was released. I saw it at the cinema in my small town in rural Indiana. I was stunned to see the fiery finger of god—looking a lot like lightning—blast the words of the laws onto the stone tablets. “Yes, that’s the way it must have happened.” Many years later, when I was engaged in serious Bible study, my naivete and gullibility had vanished. I realized that these famous ten commandments don’t set the high standard we had supposed.

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Another Civil War Is Being Bandied About

One historical document that is used to justify another American civil war is the Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson and others. I've discussed what a civil war would look like, HERE. But two facts must be understood about it. First) The Declaration of Independence was a declaration of independence from the rule of a kingship with an abusive tyrant, King George III. They were not declaring their independence from democracy. They were creating a democracy, which is now being threatened by MAGA Republicans with Project 2025. Second) Their list of 27 grievances mentioned some terrible acts by King George that are way above anything the Maga Republicans are citing, HERE.

The Just-So Stories of the Bible

In Dr. David Madison’s insightful article of July 5, 2024, There’s Too Much Evil and Cruelty in the Bible, he wrote:

Very early in my serious study of the Bible I learned about “etiological myths”, that is, stories imagined to explain why things are the way they are. This is the god’s curse on the woman, to explain why childbirth is painful: “I will make your pangs in childbirth exceedingly great; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Genesis 3:16)

This particular etiological myth, or just-so story, with patriarchal sexism thrown in at no extra charge, warrants further comment. How do we know the bible is wrong here? Since not everyone might know the relevant details of human evolution, I’ll expand on that here.

Babies are cute, but their unusually big heads can be deadly to Mom

Giving birth, for humans, is quite unlike giving birth for most if not all other animals that give birth to live young. Imagine, for example, that giving birth were as problematic and temporarily debilitating for a zebra mare as it often is for a human female. Further imagine that a zebra foal were born as helpless as a human child (that is, imagine that zebra younglings were altricial instead of precocial). In that case, the lions that relentlessly pursue zebras would enjoy easy meals,¹ although only for a comparatively brief time of bounty until they quickly hunted zebras to extinction. Because of the way zebras live, by staying constantly one step ahead of lions, they have to be almost uninterruptedly mobile to avoid becoming lion lunch. Zebra mares have to bounce back quickly after giving birth, and zebra foals must be able to run within an hour of being born. Other animals, such as nesting birds, can keep their altricial (i.e., initially helpless) hatchlings somewhat out of reach of predators, relatively safe in their nests, while giving care to them. But the parent birds must remain very fit so they can continue to collect food for their voracious young. Difficult reproduction is not a luxury many other species can afford. Among other things, it’s a testimony to the social power of humans. Humans form complex and powerful communities able to safeguard vulnerable mothers and children from threats that would wipe out many other species. Zebras, in contrast, don’t cooperate with other zebras with the same scale and sophistication as humans. Other species can’t cooperate quite like humans because their brains aren’t big enough to handle the complex computations necessary to make it work. Humans can, so we do; and because we can and do, evolution in due course sees that we must.

Humans no longer knuckle-walk, at least outside of Trump rallies²

Given that birth or egg-laying are rarely life-threatening for other animals, why is giving birth such a problem for humans? The biblical just-so story reflects a profound ignorance of evolutionary theory and fact. (The scientific explanation wouldn’t happen for many centuries after the bible was written.) Everything about a species is a product of how it evolved and continues to evolve. The human line underwent at least two profound changes over the last 4 million to 7 million years since our last common ancestor with the chimpanzees: the switch from quadrupedalism (walking on all fours, knuckle-walking in the case of the other ground-dwelling great apes, although the exact history of that habit isn’t clear) to bipedalism (walking on our two hind feet, thus freeing our grasping hands to get us into more trouble); and the tripling of our encephalization quotient relative to our nearest cousins the chimpanzees. The great encephalization apparently occurred in response to selective pressures for greater intelligence that acted on the human line but did not act in the same way on the chimpanzee line. Exactly what that entailed is a matter of some debate, but to function as a human in any human society you have to be a lot smarter than a chimpanzee. And to get smarter you need a much larger cerebral cortex, which in turn makes you need a larger skull. Which is larger from the get-go, i.e. birth.

As the pre-human and then human neonate skull got larger, fitting it through the human female’s pelvic opening became more difficult. Accordingly the shape of the female pelvis had to adapt, by the brutal method available to evolution: killing off the females in every generation who lagged the trend by having insufficiently roomy hips. But this ran into another difficulty: our upright stance, which works better with narrow hips. You don’t see a lot of elite distance runners with extremely wide hips. And given that humans were generally nomadic until only about 10,000 years ago when some humans started adopting agriculture, anything that compromised mobility ran up against another kind of selection pressure. Thus the hominin genome and then the human genome had to do a juggling act between multiple conflicting needs for several million years - the need for ever-bigger brains, ever-wider hips for the females, and getting around efficiently on two feet. One genome also has to handle all the dimorphism - making sure the males get the traits they need while the females get the traits they need. But in reality, genetic diversity means humans exhibit distributions for many traits (and often the distributions are approximately normal). Therefore some women will be better suited than others to giving birth. This is exactly what you would not expect an omni-God³ to arrange, but which makes a lot more sense in light of mindless and indifferently cruel evolution. See my earlier post, For God So Loved the Whales for more examples of how unintelligently and uncompassionately we are designed. In that post I drew from Abby Hafer’s marvelous book The Not-So-Intelligent Designer: Why Evolution Explains the Human Body and Intelligent Design Does Not which among other godly goofs describes the horrors of pre-technological human childbearing in grisly detail.

We can’t really blame the bible authors for making uninformed guesses about why humans are the way they are. These writers were ancient men who didn’t understand reality very well. They didn’t even know where the Sun goes at night.⁴ But no modern human has a strong excuse⁵ for continuing to be fooled by ancient misconceptions, etiological myths, and just-so-stories. In sharp contrast to the simpler (and typically shorter) lives of the ancients, modern humans mostly lead lives that would be impossible without modern science. To pick just one example, about half of the protein in human bodies today came from the Haber-Bosch process of artificial nitrogen fixation. (Without the resulting artificial fertilizers, perhaps half of the existing human population would have to gradually die, unless humans were to get a whole lot better at recycling the fixed nitrogen present in our own bodily wastes. However, even understanding how to do that safely still requires science that ancient humans did not have, such as the germ theory of disease.) No modern human should reject modern science in favor of biblical just-so stories, but many do, thanks to various psychological and cultural causes.

The universe as revealed by God to ancient Hebrews

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1. As anatomically modern humans spread out of Africa beginning perhaps 70,000 years ago, they took with them newly-developed and novel hunting techniques, the likes of which the megafauna (large animals) outside of Africa had never before seen. Unlike the animals of Africa, which evolved alongside humans and had time to adapt, the largest land species in the rest of the world were practically defenseless. And so paleontologists have mapped a wave of megafaunal extinctions on all the other land masses that humans reached which are suspiciously timed shortly after the first anatomically modern humans arrived in each place - Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, etc.↩︎

2. For any fans of the felon who may take offense, note carefully that I wrote “at least”. Which means I literally made no claim about what happens inside of Trump rallies. For that I defer to Jordan Klepper who has recorded several videos showcasing the towering intellects who flock to such events.↩︎

3. See the John W. Loftus anthology God and Horrendous Suffering, and his eponymous blog post, for more about the problems of trying to square a common Christian understanding of a caring God with the considerably grimmer reality we experience.↩︎

4. For the details of ancient Hebrew cosmology, which lives on in today’s Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament to Christians), see Chapter 4: “Christianity and Cosmology”, by Victor J. Stenger, in the John W. Loftus anthology, Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion. Also see the Wikipedia articles Ancient near eastern cosmology, Firmament, Biblical cosmology, and Jewish cosmology. The history of what self-proclaimed men of God once thought about God’s alleged creation is rather awkward today. This should not instill confidence in the accuracy of divine revelation as a way of knowing.↩︎

5. OK, as we learned from Robert Sapolsky’s book Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, nothing is quite really anyone’s fault. Everything that happens, including everything we do, is fully determined by what happened before. And most of what happened to us before was not under our control. However, contemporary humans living lives of comparative privilege in the developed nations have easy access to the hard-won facts of science, which makes excusing instances of modern willful ignorance (or motivated reasoning) seem harder than excusing the unavoidable ignorance of the ancients. Modern ignorance is also far easier to correct, since we have modern science making its case every day by showering us with technological goodies such as smartphones and vaccines. For some reason smartphones have gotten a better reception - there are some anti-vaxxers, but no similarly organized movement against smartphones. However, not even anti-vaxxers volunteer to have themselves deliberately infected by a resurrected strain of smallpox, a deadly scourge eradicated by the very vaccination technology they disparage. Given that smallpox used to kill a large fraction of humanity, there are probably some anti-vaxxers who are only alive today because of vaccine technology, which saved either them or their ancestors. Unfortunately, science hasn’t yet found a way to impart scientific knowledge to everyone. Humans still have to learn science. Modern humans still learn in much the same way as paleolithic humans once learned - by relying almost entirely on our evolved brains to slowly and painstakingly collect and assimilate new information. We can haul our brains across oceans in fossil-fueled airplanes at nearly the speed of sound (to the detriment of Earth’s habitable climate), but our brains themselves are not materially much better than the brains of cave men, although some modern brains contain some better ideas now. Learning science continues to require years of hard mental work, and humans are differently able or inclined to do the work. It’s similar to learning to play the guitar, for which some people are clearly more talented than others, and which not everyone is equally inclined to pursue. Therefore, while many people consume the material benefits of science, fewer people adopt the scientific habits of mind which yielded the material benefits, such as evidentialism and critical thinking. At the barest minimum, a competent modern human should have some grasp on a philosophy of expertise, understanding that everyone must defer to experts on a vast array of things we don’t all have time or ability to fully master. That doesn’t mean that every expert is always correct, just that experts are more likely to be correct within the scope of their expertise than a non-expert would be on the same subjects. If you subscribe to a belief that requires virtually all the relevant experts to be wrong, such as young Earth creationism, or its political repackaging as intelligent design creationism, you’re way out on a flimsy cognitive limb.↩︎

There’s Too Much Evil and Cruelty in the Bible

Topped off with bad theology and silliness

The first comment on my article here last week was offered by skepticCO, who quoted the apostle Paul in Romans 1:28-32:

“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God decided to show them compassion and love and to do what ought to be done. They were filled with all manner of empathy, love, optimism, hope. They are full of beauty, desire, peace, reverence. They are lovers, teachers, mentors, helpers, inventors. They know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve all that is good, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.”

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On Agnosticism, Deism, and Atheism

Agnosticism is better stated as, "No religious faith is probable but beyond that I don't know."

Deism is best stated as, "Only a god based on good evidence and sound reasoning is the correct deity."

Agnosticism is in agreement with atheism on the major conclusions, and deism is in agreement with atheism on the correct epistemological methodology.

Here's a Good Interview on the Outsider Test and Other issues

Commenting on the Supposed Miracles of Atheism

This meme was posted on Facebook. Here in one comment is a response of mine. Chime in.

These four points lead only to--and hear me clearly--agnosticism (which says I don't know), or deism (which says at best a creator god exists), or perhaps pantheism (which says the ONE has always existed). It does not lead to anything else, much less a conservative interpretation of the Bible. Nonbelievers as a whole, including all non-Christians, take issue with your specific beliefs due to a gross lack of evidence, along with the lack of logical coherence.

Atheists take this critique of your specific faith one step further by concluding that following evidence and logic are the best tools to know the truth. But to be sure, we don't state these four talking points as quoted. We say instead that, "The evidence leads to the probability that..." Or "Following what logic dictates leads to the probability that..."

Nonetheless, your first talking point is accepted by atheists due to the evidence for  evolution. If evolution is true then let's look for the evidence that life came about by the same process, even though discovering it seems harder than discovering evolution itself. This is the motivation that has furthered science from the very beginning. Cheers!

There’s Too Much Evil and Cruelty in Religion

Turning a blind eye has damaged Christianity especially 

On the morning of September 11, 2001, I did my routine walk to work in Manhattan. Soon after I arrived at the office, the terror of the day began. In my diary for that day, I added a quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar at the top of the page, “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”  On the following Sunday, church attendance in the New York/New Jersey area was higher than usual. Apparently worshippers were seeking comfort—or perhaps trying to convince their god that our sins did not deserve such severe punishment. I would like to think that at least some who showed up for church wanted to scold their god for his negligence. He didn’t have the power on 9/11 to divert the aircraft? Or to moderate the rage in the minds of the terrorists? What’s the use of believing in—and worshipping—an all-powerful god if he can’t put his powers to use at crucial moments?

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Presidential Debate

How does one debate someone who throws out too many accusations and lies to refute them all? How? There must be a good strategy to effectively deal with the Gish Gallop on steroids.

Why Would a Cosmos-Creating God Play Games with Humanity?

…and allow many thousands of clergy to pose as the referees? 

The Game: The creator-god lays down many (often cruel, conflicting) rules for human behavior—in different scriptures—but neglects/declines to provide clear evidence that he/she/it even exists. 
 
The Referees: Countless clergy who claim to know the real rules, yet are unable to show their followers clear evidence that their god(s) exist: “Just take our word for it.” And this has gone on for millennia. Look around at the world today: what a mess religion is—because the referees don’t agree.

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The God of Job

God originally had a body (Genesis 3:8-10; 32:20-30; Exodus 33:21-22). He had sons (Genesis 1:26; 6:2; Job 1:1) and lived in the sky above, from which he looked down on the earth below (Job 1:6).[1] No omnipresence here. God needed a servant, Satan, to check on the sincere loyalty of his subjects. God subsequently allowed Job to be put to the test twice by Satan. But there was no need to test Job if God knew he would pass the test, which he did (1:22, 2:22). No omniscience here. If Job was tested for a show, then God is an egomaniac only interested in being praised at the expense of others. What we see here is the only great-making quality God had in those early days, absolute power over his subjects, just like other Mesopotamian kings.[2] He had the power to destroy people at will, including Job’s children and servants (Isaiah 45:7). This is something his subjects should never question. It’s the main point of Job  (chapters 38-42). No omnibenelovence here.

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^[1] See the chapter on biblical cosmology by Edward Babinski in The Christian Delusion (2010). To read about the biblical god see my paper, “Does God Exist? A Definitive Biblical Case” at  https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/does-god-exist-a-definitive-biblical-case/

^[2] Except when it came to iron chariots (Judges 1:19).

Christianity Thrives Because of the Failure of Curiosity

It doesn’t take much curiosity to puncture theology

How does the church get away with its theology games? A church in Texas recently refused entrance to a blind woman and her service dog, as reported in an article published a few days ago by The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta. Falling far short of the compassion of Jesus, church security was worried about the dog, because the worship service included “a live band and flashing lights.” Why are we not surprised? These are tricks of the trade. The clergy have learned how to be dramatists. For a very long time, worship has been entertainment: putting on a show, using razzle-dazzle to give theology as much heft as possible: ceremony, music, costumes, rituals, art, scenery and set design. And it works. Folks go to the churches where they find familiar, cherished reinforcements of their certainties about god and securing eternal life. Just savor the moment and the emotion. The clergy might as well say—as part of this heavenly bargain: “Please don’t think too much about what we’re doing, that might deflate the high you’re feeling.”

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It Was 80-Years Ago This Month: A Hideous Crime

How do Christians explain their god’s negligence? 

Many Christian brands willingly embrace the wrathful god of the Old Testament, and there are plenty of texts in the New Testament as well that endorse this anger: the coming of this god’s kingdom will bring extreme suffering. Other Christian brands downplay this concept of god, preferring to stress their god’s love and compassion. These clergy promote a warmer, fuzzier concept of god, e.g., what a friend we have in Jesus. Your sins will be forgiven if you ask for mercy: god wants to welcome you to eternal life. 
 
Challenges to this view of god are commonly deflected. The clergy don’t want their parishioners to ponder the devastating implications of horrendous suffering. How could a good, caring, powerful god allow the Holocaust to happen? Or the Black Plague? And what a tragic irony that Christian extremism brought so much suffering during the Inquisition, the violent Crusades, and the Thirty Years War.

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Disqus uses Markdown now

Debunking Christianity (DC), the site you’re probably looking at now, is the blog of noted atheist author John W. Loftus, featuring blog posts by him and his stable of guest bloggers. The blog itself runs on the blogging platform Blogger, a content management system for blog sites owned by Google since 2003.

A valuable feature of DC is its lively comment section, featuring a remarkable concentration of educated, well-read, and articulate partipants. (The comment section here is the inverse of a Trump rally crowd.) The comment section runs on Disqus. For many years, the Disqus editor accepted a limited set of HTML tags for formatting text…until one day, perhaps around May 30, 2024, HTML tags simply stopped working. If you suddenly felt like a character in a Franz Kafka novel, you’re not alone. From Wikipedia:

Franz Kafka (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. (…) The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.

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From the Movie "A Million Ways To Die in the West" [2014]

"A Million Ways To Die in the West" 2014 (timestamp 12:49 to 15:09). This is fairly accurate and funny! What an awful era it was to live in! How could people living in it know God would fulfill his promises in the afterlife, when it was so awful in their own lives?

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What is there to live for on the frontier in 1882? Huh?

Look, let me tell you something. We live in a terrible place and time. The American West is a disgusting, awful, dirty, dangerous place.

Look around you. Everything out here that's not you, wants to kill you. Outlaws, angry drunk people, scorned hookers, hungry animals, diseases, major and minor injuries, Indians, the weather.

You can get killed just going to the bathroom. I take my life in my hands every time I walk out to my outhouse. There's rattlesnakes all in the grass out there. And even if I make it, you know what can kill me? Cholera. You know cholera? The latest offering in the frontier's disease-of-the-month club.

And even if you survive all those things, you know what else can kill you? The doctor can kill you. I had a cold a couple of years ago. I went in there. You know what he said to me? He goes, "Oh, you need an ear nail." A nail in my ear! That is modern medicine for you. "Yeah, Doc, I have a fever of 102." "Oh, you need a donkey kickin'."

You know our pastor has shot two people? Our pastor. Honest to God. Shot a guy in a duel and then went back and killed the guy's teenage son because he was afraid he would kill him out of revenge.

Wait, how do you know that? Because he did a whole sermon about it! A lesson about seeing things through.

By the way, see those guys over there? The guys who work in the silver mines? See what they're eating? Ribs doused in hot sauce. They eat hot spicy foods every meal of the day. Do you know why? Because their palates are so completely dulled from inhaling poisoned gas, 12 hours a day, down in the mines. That's all they can taste.

You know what that kind of diet does to your guts? Constipation, cramps, dyspepsia, liver disease, kidney disease, hemorrhoids, bowel inflammation. They literally die from their own farts.

That, my friends, is the American West. A disgusting, awful, dirty cesspool of despair.

What a Shame: the Writings of a Crank Got Into the Bible

Please stop calling him “saint” Paul

One particular Christian cult has dedicated itself to putting Bibles in motel/hotel rooms; by one estimate they’ve distributed more than a billion Bibles over the decades. The idea is to put the Word of God within easy reach, right there in the drawer beside the bed. This probably worked better in the era before every motel/hotel room had a TV—and when many travelers had their laptop computers and cell phones. But picking up the Bible and reading a few verses or chapters doesn’t solve the problem of figuring out the meaning of the texts. Christianity has shattered into so many warring brands because there is so much difference of opinion about meaning.

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I Forgot to Mention Paul Copan Recommended My Book

This is no big deal really, but it does get one closer to a recommendation by William Lane Craig, since Copan and Craig are pretty close friends. You see, I had sent Paul some book files of God and Horrendous Suffering for a recommendation, and he said he was still convinced God is good. I said that's not the point, and I sent him the recommendation by Chad Meister, author/ co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Problem of Evil. Meister wrote this blurb:

The most pressing challenge to belief in God today is undoubtedly the problem of pain. One only needs to read the provocative array of essays in this volume of leading atheists and other non-theists to see why this is such an ongoing problem for those of us who believe that God is real. Whatever one’s beliefs or worldview, and whether one agrees or disagrees, I commend all seekers of truth to read and reflect on this significant work that John Loftus has so skillfully edited.

So Paul said this:

How Christianity Disintegrated Right in Front of Me

While I was in seminary!

When I was growing up, missing church on Sunday was unthinkable. My mother was devout, and this had a major impact on my world view. But she was gifted with intense curiosity—born and raised in Indiana, she had somehow escaped being a fundamentalist—and was a voracious reader. When I was a teenager, she bought the 12-Volume Interpreter’s Bible, a product of liberal Protestant scholarship. Because I read the scriptures with this kind of guidance, taking the Bible literally wasn’t something I was coached to do. But doubting the existence of God wasn’t on the horizon for me at that time. My mother allowed me to take the Interpreter’s Bible with me to college, and during those four years my interest intensified: I decided the ministry ought to be my career.

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The Cherished So-Called Evidence for God Hits Brick Walls

This is not hard to figure out

But you do have to think about what is claimed as evidence for god(s). Does the evidence hold up to careful, critical analysis? What is the evidence usually cited? At the end of the 1942 film, Casablanca, Captain Louis Renault utters the famous line, “Round up all the usual suspects.” So let’s review the usual evidence-for-god(s) suspects, starting with…
 
Scripture/Revelation
 
The problem is that devout theologians/clergy have never been able to agree on which scriptures, which portions of scriptures, actually qualify as divinely inspired word-of-a-god. Once the New Testament had become the Christian scripture, the Old Testament was downgraded, especially since it includes so much god-generated brutality. It’s still in the Christian Bible, but much of it can be dismissed with “Oh, that’s in the Old Testament…” And it’s no surprise that Jewish theologians don’t give divine ranking to the New Testament. Nor are Christians about to add the Qur’an to their Bible, though it is considered the supremely divine word of Allah. You mean the Muslim theologians have it all wrong? And it would be hard to find any Jewish, Christian, or Muslim theologians who doesn’t think The Book of Mormon is a joke. It’ll never happen that these thousands of devout theologians from different brands will come to an agreement.

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The Desperate Desire to Know What Jesus Actually Taught

But we can’t get there from here

Most of the devout would have no clue what I’m talking about, i.e., that we have no way of knowing what Jesus actually taught. Their holy gospels, inspired by a god, are chock full of the words of Jesus. So can’t they just pick up their Bible and read the wisdom of Jesus? But New Testament scholars—many of whom are devout believers—know that the gospels present major problems for historians. Not the least of which is identifying/verifying what Jesus actually taught.

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Revised Edition of God & Horrendus Suffering

We're working on the chapters to this book now. To read about it click here!

A Handy Concise Guide, Part 2: Why the New Testament Is a Disaster

Two major things it got really wrong

By really wrong I mean that these New Testament errors have caused unspeakable horrors, so much suffering and death. The authors had no clue that their texts would have such disastrous impact on history. After all, they expected history would soon end, upon the arrival of Jesus on the clouds: the new kingdom of their god would prevail, the Romans would be vanquished. As the apostle Paul put it in I Thessalonians 4:17: after the dead are raised, “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”
 
A generous helping of fantasy, indeed.

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Published: Don McIntosh's Article In Response to Mine On "God and Horrendous Suffering."

Volume 2, Issue 1 (Spring 2024) of the Trinity Journal of Natural & Philosophical Theology has just been published. Included is the response by Editor-in-Chief Don McIntosh, titled, “Horrendous Evil and Christian Theism: A Reply to John Loftus” (pp. 25-44). 

With his permission I'm publishing it in its entirety below. This isn't the first time I've published a paper by a Christian philosopher, or apologist. Just click on the Tag "Christian Scholars" below to see some others. Comment as you will. Don will be reading and may respond.

If you remember, my previous article was published in an earlier issue in the TJNPT, and can be read at The Secular Web, along with a video of it on YouTube.  

I will write a response to his response which will be published at The Secular Web. 

 

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Three Big Items the Clergy Don’t Want the Faithful to Think About

It’s just far too dangerous

ONE: What is humanity’s place/status in the cosmos?
 
It was in 1950 that Pope Pius XII declared the dogma of the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. We may be tempted to wonder if he was out of his mind, but no: he was very much in his mind as it had been shaped by Catholic devotion as a child. His mother had her children worship daily at a Mary shrine in their home. Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) was born in 1876, just twenty-two years after Pope Pius IX declared in 1854 the dogma of Mary’s Immaculate Conception—that is she had been conceived without original sin. Catholic devotion to this female goddess had been enhanced and encouraged for a long time. Pius XII made precisely this point in the lengthy document (48 points) explaining Mary’s bodily assumption to heaven, Munificentissimus Deus. It’s a tedious read, a labyrinth of theobabble.

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A New Printing of My Book!

I just received a copy of my massive refutation of Christianity with 536 pages to it. The book to the right was too small. The middle one was okay as it goes. The left one is best, using thicker paper. It's almost 1/8th of an inch thicker. I like it! Go getcha one!