All of our god(s) were invented in utter, total isolation
If the Bible is what the devout claim it is, we should be able to trust the information it provides about god, right? Alas, so often—far too often—that’s hard to do. How do modern Christians feel about these two verses, Exodus 29:17-18, i.e., proper worship procedure regarding animal sacrifice:
“Then you shall cut the ram into its parts and wash its entrails and its legs and put them with its parts and its head and turn the rest of the ram into smoke on the altar. It is a burnt offering to the LORD; it is a pleasing odor, an offering by fire to the LORD.”
I’m assuming not too many Christians would welcome this kind of smokey ritual on Sunday mornings. The author of this text believed that (1) his god was close enough overhead to smell the smoke from the fire; (2) his god had a sense of smell; (3) his god savored the aroma of burning animal flesh. Of course, this is a sampling of primitive, superstitious religion: one way to get right with a god was animal sacrifice. Another aspect of primitive religion is disguised here by the English translation. The word LORD in all caps is the rendering of the divine name; this god’s name was Yahweh—as reconstructed from four Hebrew consonants (add different vowels and you get Jehovah). Calling on the name of the god is a kind of magic, which survives to this day when Christians say, “…in Jesus’ name we pray.”
[First published on 10/5/20] Because this is the haunted month of Halloween
here's something to spook ya all!
I'm always interested in new angles to argue my case against Christianity. Kris Keys does that in the excellently researched essay below. He argues there is more evidence for the resurrection of Vampires and Revenants than there is for the resurrection of Jesus.
Introductory comments by Kris Keys:
Well this is my first time writing a blog post and little did I know it would be for the website Debunking Christianity!! I find this to be completely hilarious as I am not in of myself militantly opposed to Christianity in of itself; I tend to dislike Evangelicals but that is because I view them as hypocritical and blatantly power hungry but of course this description would not apply to all Christians. As probably the readers of this post have deduced by now I am not a Christian, but I am also not an atheist either. I tend to be rather eclectic in my views. I fancy myself to be broad minded and open to change.
I am a schoolteacher by profession, and I have taught both social studies and science at the high school level. I have dual degrees in both fields. In my not remotely enough spare time I enjoy reading folklore, Medieval history, sociology, anthropology and other subjects. Basically a lot of stuff. Over the years I have heard the Christian argument for the physical resurrection of Jesus and at one time I found this argument to be convincing, but more and more for many varied reasons I became rather skeptical of it.
None of this explains though, how this essay came about! Nothing remarkable about it really. I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw John Loftus’s profile. In discussion with him I mentioned that one could use the resurrection argument to demonstrate the existence of vampires and I showed him a response I wrote to a friend of mine on this. John asked me to do a write up for him.
So here is a write up I never seriously figured I would write up on a blog, one that I never suspected I would write for. So I hope everyone enjoys it. So without further ado, here is my attempt to show that the Christian argument for the resurrection of Jesus would also demonstrate vampires exist. I will leave it up to you dear readers to determine if Jesus rose from the dead and if you need to invest in crucifixes and garlics now; or that perhaps claims of the dead returning bodily just should not be given the benefit of the doubt. You decide.
Let me explain why originalism is a misleading misinformed bogeyman of conservatives.
What the church doesn’t want them to think about
Worship services are a form of show business, at which some Christian brands excel especially. How much does the Vatican spend every year on its worship costumes alone? But most denominations, while not so extravagant, do their best to “put on the show,” which includes music, liturgy, ritual, props, sets—those stained-glass depictions of Bible stories—and the trained actors, i.e., the clergy. All this is designed to promote the beliefs and doctrines of each denomination. But there are so many different denominations: who is getting Christianity right? Is there any denomination that urges its followers to look beyond the liturgies? What’s behind it all? What are the origins of the beliefs celebrated in liturgies?
Mainstream experts mostly already agree the miraculous Jesus didn’t exist, but what about a merely human Jesus? This anthology usefully exhibits the full gamut of doubting even that, from the absurd to the sound. Some contributions are not credible, but some are worth considering, and several are brilliant, indeed required reading for anyone exploring the subject. The book will be absolutely necessary for any future Jesus mythicist scholar. - Dr. Richard Carrier, peer-reviewed author of On the Historicity of Jesus.Having previously been called a "doofus" when it comes to Bayes Theorem, I know the sting of a review by Carrier. In my defense I myself had a peer-reviewed paper published on Bayes Theorem at Internet Infidels, where the vice-President said it was one of the best papers he ever had the pleasure of reading and approving! Carrier still has not responded to it, but if he does, he may overwhelm me with words and links galore, burying me in so much work I won't be able to respond to it all, if I do. Yet, I'm sure I have basically refuted his case. No, Bayes is not the tool for assessing miraculous claims, which by their very nature are impossible to take place in the natural world, by means of the natural world. I have argued that Bayes cannot and should not be applied to claims which are nonsense, and that miraculous claims in the ancient Biblical past are all nonsense! They are all nonsense because there is absolutely no credible evidence for any of them. Lately I offered some additional thoughts on Bayes.
The Elephant in Richard Carrier’s Room: A Lesson for NT Scholarship
By Joseph Atwill
Richard Carrier has written a critique of two of the parallels I discussed in the chapter I wrote for "Varieties of Jesus Mythicism." SOURCE I wish to respond.
A personal, loving, competent god is out of the question
When we study episodes of colossal suffering in human history, we have to wonder: “How did belief in a good, powerful god survive these experiences?” The masses of people affected would have been more than justified in telling their priests to get lost. “The theology you’ve been peddling is all wrong.” The Black Plague of the 14th century, which brought horrible suffering and death to perhaps a third of the population from India to England, should have meant the end of personal theism, i.e., belief that a loving god manages the world, indeed, keeps close tabs on every person on earth. Unfortunately, critical thinking was not a common commodity at that time, so the church got away with preaching that human sin was the cause of the plague; god was getting even. This is stunningly bad theology, the embrace of supernatural evil, as Dan Barker has put it: the loving god had disappeared.
...except those who are okay with supernatural evil
I was a Bible nerd even in my high school days, and continued to be one in college, when I made the decision to go to seminary. What a thrill that was: to study the Bible and God at the graduate level. But early in my seminary years I learned a troubling lesson—from my theology professors themselves: it is impossible to come up with a coherent theology of the Bible. For the simple reason that the Bible’s ideas about god are an incoherent, uncomplimentary mess. Theologians themselves know that there are a thousand and one embarrassing Bible verses, so many of them relating to what Bible god is like and wants. This is one of the reasons that Christianity itself has fractured into thousands of different brands: so many disagreements about its god.