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?

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.

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.

---

^[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.”

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.

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.

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?

‐----------

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.