Unapologetic is an important book to engage with, whatever you think of its thesis in the end. And being the metaphilosophy of POR, it is an essential have for any POR shelf or library.Two) God and Horrendous Suffering (2026).
What Loftus has assembled is a huge and excellent series of unique and well-sourced essays by numerous experts that supplements any discussion of the Argument from Evil (AfE). You won’t find the brilliant takes and studies and analyses in here anywhere else in one place. And it’s so good and far-reaching, it’s definitely a must-have for any library or list that you expect to cover the AfE well.Three) The Case against Miracles 2022).
It opens with a professional journal debate on the AfE between John Loftus and Don McIntosh. And then chaper-by-chapter covers every conceivable digression in solid form.
Overall, every chapter has use in boning up on why the AfE is actually a powerful argument with no credible defense yet, all from different angles of methodology and subject. All of it quite good. As with any book I can’t have vetted every fact claim in it, but at my reading, it’s generally solid, and its approaches so diverse and unique that I think God and Horrendous Suffering is an essential appendix to any fullgoing knowledge of AfE. You will get valuable information and fresh perspective from every chapter.
It’s a subject I’ve long been a specialist in, and I can vouch for the fact that there is nothing better in its category.Conclusion:
It contains a lot of great analysis from a plethora of experts, all more than sufficient to make The Case Against Miracles an essential addition to any POR library.
All three of these books get overlooked a lot, which is why I am bringing them back into view.LINK.
But as I don’t research this subject so thoroughly as to know all the best literature on every subject in so vast a heap of tinfoil as the POR, and I think PoR is a really annoying distraction anyway, I won’t be building a recommendations list in it. But if you are interested in building one...the Loftus volumes I just discussed today, plus the two items that are on my Philosophy List (Outsider Test for Faith, and Primer), make a really good—and essential—start.
Dear Dr. Loftus,I am a secondary school student currently researching the historical change in morality and its link to the rise in secularism for a literature project. I recently read your essay about atheist morality and found it very helpful for understanding secular ethical perspectives from a young Christians view. Thank you!I was wondering if you might be willing to answer a few questions about your argument.
This essay is a response to James Sterba's "An Ethics without God that is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution" and thoroughly provides a secular morality in that it argues that the most reasonable ethics are secular systems that don't require a God, gods, or goddesses. Loftus further goes on to defend an atheist morality by appealing to polls that show that there is a common neighborly morality that matters to most people based in facts about who we are as a species, which includes facts about the prehistoric world. Finally, Loftus argues that 'Sterbaian ethics' succeeds in that it is useful for human flourishing.My most recent paper is Assessing McIntosh's Sophisticated Defense of Miracles. Here's the abstract:
In a previous paper Don McIntosh showed an exceptional awareness of the major objections to belief in miracles. In his attempt at a comprehensive rebuttal to them, his first goal was to argue that there are no fixed, exceptionless laws of nature, and thus nothing to prevent reasonable people from accepting miracle reports from reliable witnesses. His second goal was to argue that miracles are best understood as divine activity that merely defies our expectations and so miracles are akin to “signs” and “wonders.” His final goal was to offer a positive case for miracles that doesn’t lean on human testimony, which is generally considered weak as part of a defense of belief in miracles. Here McIntosh defended three categories: (1) miracles of cosmology; (2) miracles of prophecy; and (3) miracles of experience.In this reply John W. Loftus offers a comprehensive rebuttal to McIntosh. Loftus argues that there are regularities of nature on a mega scale that can be described by many essential equations, and that this should be good enough. To deny the existence of the laws of nature raises twin problems. On the one hand, such a denial would open the flood gates to include false miracle claims in the absence of any way to check them against laws of nature. On the other hand, such denial would undercut the basis for belief in biblical miracles since it would concede that biblical authors didn’t require solid evidence for their occurrence. Loftus goes on to argue that this is exactly what we find in the Bible—unevidenced, superstitious miracle stories. Finally, he concludes that McIntosh’s miracles of cosmology are based on a kind of ignorance, as are the alleged Hebrew Bible prophecies of the promised land, and McIntosh’s conclusions from his own personal testimony.
In this paper I canvass a variety of ideas throughout the Christian Bible that make no sense at all. These include God's unembodiment, timelessness, foreknowledge, and human characteristics like longing and tribalism, as well as the idea of divine inspiration, the Trinity, the existence of Satan, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Ascension, Heaven and Hell, punishment for sin, the task of evangelism, and the need for apologetics. These epitomize what Jeremy Bentham famously called nonsense upon stilts.
[The link to Part 1 is here.]
3. The Bible is a mess: flaws, contradictions, and too much bad theology.
How can I say such a thing? From the time they were toddlers, the devout have been taught that the Bible is the revealed word of their god. A gleaming version of it is commonly on church altars. Witnesses in court—and presidents at their inaugurations—place their hands on the Bible to verify that they are taking a sacred oath. But does this reputation prevail when the devout actually read and study the Bible? Determination to read it cover-to-cover often fades once that journey has begun; the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, provide plenty of tedious texts to discourage modern, educated readers.
1. The Arrogance of Theology
I grew up on the very flat prairie of northern Indiana: the land was level to the horizon in all directions. Which meant that we had, on clear nights, a spectacular view of the night sky—with very little light pollution from Chicago, some eighty miles to the north. When I was a teenager in the 1950s, my parents bought me a telescope, about the since of a baseball bat. I was able to locate Saturn with its rings—what a thrill that was! But I came to appreciate that the rotation of the earth is a reality, because while I was viewing the moon, I had to keep moving the telescope because I was on the surface of a rotating planet. When I attended college, I took astronomy courses, because my curiosity was intense: what is out there, who may be out there?
“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.”
Tough question, since there are major disagreements about gospel Jesus
In the article I posted here on 27 March 2026, I commented on the book by Karl and Laura Forehand, Out Into the Desert: Thriving Outside Organized Religion. This devout, evangelical couple had been very active in the churches they served (Karl as pastor), but arrived at the conclusion that the church was wearing them out. So they made their exit, and this book was written to explain the reasons for doing so.
A few days ago, 8 April 2026, Jim Palmer published a long essay titled, Christianity Has a Jesus Problem. He begins the essay with this blunt observation:
The gospels don’t show a holy hero who was a superior moral
Mark Twain is commonly credited with saying that the best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible, but no matter who said it, the devout should be warned that their faith is jeopardized by a careful reading of their scripture. Cherry-picking of feel-good texts by the clergy is done on purpose, to divert attention from Jesus-script that is mediocre and alarming. In my article posted here on 30 January 2026, I discussed ten such supposed “quotes”—today let’s look at ten more.
The Catholic church qualifies for this title
Is it really fair to call Catholicism a cult? Or does this reflect my growing up in a mostly Protestant small town in rural northern Indiana in the 1940s-1950s? We were good friends with the Catholics in town, but we were put off by their claims to be superior Christians—and the excessive pageantry their church is famous for. There are quite a few cults in the broad sweep of Christian brands, e.g., the mega-churches pastored by Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland. But there are well over a billion Catholics in the world.
Let me make the case that their church is a cult—and a dangerous one at that.
It can be a mixture of both
My subtitle today is, in fact, the title of an essay by Hector Avalos in John Loftus’ 2010 anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails. In this essay, Avalos provides a thorough, scathing critique of conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza’s claim that “atheism in Nazi Germany” caused “some 10 million deaths, including that of 6 million Jews.” (p. 368) D’Souza’s observation is part of a broader strategy to blame the holocaust on immoral atheists instead of on Christian beliefs
that have caused so much pain and suffering for hundreds of years. The origins of anti-Semitism can be found in the New Testament itself. In Mark 15 we find the story of Pilate releasing the insurrectionist Barabbas, yielding to the crowd that had been whipped up by the chief priests:
“Pilate spoke to them again, ‘Then what do you wish me to do with the man you call the King of the Jews?’ They shouted back, ‘Crucify him!’ Pilate asked them, ‘Why, what evil has he done?’ But they shouted all the more, ‘Crucify him!’ So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd, released Barabbas for them, and after flogging Jesus he handed him over to be crucified.” (Mark 15:12-15)
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I had mentioned this debate yesterday. Here is my planned opening statement:
My focus is on heinous, hideous, horrific levels of horrendous suffering given the belief in a theistic God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfect good. Unless we focus on that kind of suffering, the kind that seems needless and absolutely inexplicable, we’ll fail to see this problem for what it is. Instead of focusing on bruises, sprained ankles, slaps on the cheek, a clump of hair being pulled out, or sicknesses like colds and the flu, let’s focus instead on people who have been burned alive, boiled alive, and buried alive.
God may well have good reasons to allow for a modest amount of pain since we have physical bodies and we will all die. So we can set aside that kind of suffering as largely uninteresting in this discussion. Horrendous suffering, by contrast, should be our focus. My perspective is a “minimal facts” approach to the problem of suffering. I’m arguing that God should not allow a specific kind of suffering, horrendous suffering. Failing to focus on it is a failure to honestly search for the truth, for when horrendous suffering is our focus, the standard theodicies don’t work.
My contention is that the theistic God probably doesn't exist given the existence of horrendous suffering. Just ask what we would expect to find if we woke up one morning for the very first time. Would we expect to find so much horrendous suffering on this planet? I submit that people would never guess there would be as much horrendous suffering as there is in our world if such a God existed. For it’s clear that God should never allow it. We wouldn’t expect the existence of God since he could prevent it, should prevent it, yet doesn’t prevent it.
Horrendous suffering can never be ignored in guessing about god(s)
Please be aware that a primary role of the clergy is always to promote their own cherished version of the faith, despite the fact that there are thousands of competing denominations, brands, sects, divisions into which Christianity has shattered. Promoting their versions of faith commonly means discouraging curiosity. An elderly Catholic woman once told me that the priests warned children not to think about what they’d learned in catechism. Which is a way of claiming that the priests alone possess Christian truth—in other words, they are paid propagandists for their brand.
It would be so refreshing if devout folks could grasp this reality.
The clergy themselves are to blame
Many times on this blog I have wondered, “Why isn’t membership in the Catholic church down to zero by now?” Are its faithful members just not paying attention? Their church has paid more than four billion dollars in legal settlements for lawsuits involving clergy rape and abuse of children. Can we imagine any greater scandal? However, churches are not empty because Catholic theology promises eternal life, hence even alarming scandals can be dismissed or ignored. Moreover, its clergy have mastered show business. Their churches are magnificent, the rituals and ceremonies are impressive, and the budgets for clergy costumes must be especially excessive. Such razzle-dazzle keeps the congregants in awe: they show up to get their beliefs, their confidence in eternal life, boosted. Years ago I knew a devout Catholic woman who held on to their faith with fierce determination because she wants to see her mother again in heaven.
Close study of the Bible and other ancient texts isn’t helping
My very devout mother was born in southern Indiana in 1905. It was always a puzzle to me that she was not a fundamentalist. I recall vividly that she never watched Billy Graham on TV—she was put off by his dramatic waving of the Bible above his head. She never attended college, but she read voraciously. While my father and I watched TV, she would go to another room in the house to read—especially history, biography. I remember so many books in the house. I’m grateful that her influence had more impact on me than my father’s devotion to TV.
When I was a teenager, she bought the 12-volume Interpreter’s Bible, a product of Protestant theology. I read it too and thought there was nothing unusual about this purchase. She once asked a new pastor at our church about something she’d read in one of the volumes—and he was stunned: “You have the Interpreter’s Bible?” Her non-fundamentalist piety rubbed off on me, and she allowed me to take those 12 hefty volumes with me when I went away to college.
Horrendous suffering can never be ignored to protect god(s)
Not too long ago, a post quoting Bertrand Russell popped up on social media. It was an excerpt from his 1930 essay, Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization? Much of this essay is devoted to demonstrating that the concept of a god who is all-loving, all-powerful, and all-knowing cannot be reconciled with the depth of pain and misery that we see in the world. His conclusion was that it makes no sense at all to believe in such a god. It was in 1927 that he published Why I Am Not a Christian. He also proposed a thought experiment, The Cosmic Teapot, pointing out that if he claimed that there was a tiny teapot orbiting the sun between Earth and Mars—that could not be detected by any telescope—it is an unfalsifiable claim. The analogy is that claims about gods likewise lack reliable, verifiable, objective data, and are thus not to be believed.
The origins of anti-Semitism in this first gospel
These 47 verses of chapter 15 should be read carefully, with curiosity fully engaged. How did the author of Mark’s gospel know—how did he find out about—any of what he depicts here? There is wide consensus among scholars that this gospel was written anonymously after the devastating war in Palestine that included the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. The label Mark was attached to the gospel later, and there has been much discussion of the geographical errors the author made: it would seem he was far removed from scene of his story.
There is far too much mediocre, alarming Jesus-script in the gospels
On social media especially, there is a lot of criticism of Christianity. That is, people who claim to be Christians are accused of not following the teaching of Jesus—who is idealized, credited with a reputation that is not based on what we find in the gospels. Reading the gospels carefully, with critical thinking fully engaged, is not a common practice of the devout. If it were, there would be a lot of alarm and panic.
Ironically, the alarm and panic can be reduced by a stark truth: There is no way whatever to verify any of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the gospels, which is why the term Jesus-script should be used instead of Jesus quotes. As is all too obvious from comparing the four gospels, their authors had different agendas. Claiming that they were all divinely inspired is a phony diversion. The authors created Jesus-script out of their imaginations. And so much of it reflects their obsession with promoting the Jesus cult. There is a list of 292 bad, mediocre, alarming examples of Jesus-script at this website.
Bad News About Christianity has some excellent posts about Christianity’s obsession with death. We have ‘[Christianity and] Necrophilia’, for example. Bad News About Christianity’s post: ‘[Christianity and] Sadomasochism’ is also pertinent to our discussion.
In the above image, we have the Instruments of the Passion portrayed. We have the cockerel that crowed when Peter denied him. We have the basin of water wherewith Pontius Pilate washed his hands of the death of Jesus. We have the seamless garment for which the soldiers involved in the Crucifixion threw dice. We have the torches that the soldiers used when arresting Christ in the Garden of Olives. The portrait of Christ is itself an instrument of the passion; it is Veronica’s veil containing the miraculous imprint of the Holy Face of Jesus.
The Latin captions that go along with this image are interesting:
‘Respice mē! Mē conde animō! Mē pectore servā!’
‘Arma vidēs: hīs mortem peccāta daemōna vīcī.’
‘Haec animō memorī sacra trophaea tenē!’
I would idiomatically translate the above Latin captions into Biblical English as:
‘Look thou at me! Bury thou me in thine heart! Serve thou me with thy soul!’
‘Thou seest the weapons: with these I conquered sin [and] the Devil.’
‘Keep thou these sacred trophies[, mementos of the defeats suffered by death and the Devil by means of my Passion,] in mind!’
I would idiomatically translate the above Latin captions into Modern English as:
‘Look at me! Bury me in your heart! Serve me with your soul!’
‘You see the weapons: with these I conquered sin [and] the Devil.’
‘Keep these sacred trophies[, mementos of the defeats suffered by death and the Devil by means of my Passion,] in mind!’