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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