With So Many Flat Tires, How Does Christianity Keep On Going?

Apologists specialize in claiming the tires aren’t flat at all

I can think of at least six Christian tires that have been totally, permanently destroyed. They will be flat forever.  
 
(1)  God is good, loving, and all powerful. Horrendous human and animal suffering—ongoing for millennia—provide abundant evidence that this claim is feeble, indeed ridiculous.
 
(2)  The resurrection of Jesus, that is, god raised Jesus from the dead, thereby rescuing humans—those who believe in it—from eternal punishment. Yet the accounts of Easter morning in the gospels are contradictory and confusing. There are no reports of anyone actually seeing the resurrection happen.
 
(3)  We can be guided and inspired by the god portrayed in the Bible. Anyone who has read the Bible cover-to-cover can see that his claim is baseless. The god described in both the Old and New Testaments is cruel, bad-tempered, vindictive. Apologists deflect attention from this painful truth by quoting feel-good texts…and most churchgoers are none the wiser.

 
(4)  The Bible was divinely inspired—it was imparted to human authors by the Holy Spirit. Yet it’s so easy to see that individual authors did not agree on theology. I have often issued this challenge: read the gospel of Mark, straight through without stopping. Take a break, then do the same with the gospel of John. These two glaringly different portraits of Jesus undermine the claim of divine inspiration. 
 
(5)  The Christian god watches everything that every human does, says, thinks. This claim is based on the biblical concept of the Cosmos: our earth (the Bible authors didn’t even know it is a planet) is just below the heavenly realm where its god resides (above the clouds and below the Moon). Thus this deity is able to spy on, monitor, everybody on earth. But this biblical view has been thoroughly discredited by smart humans who have, for centuries, been searching for facts about reality. Our earth is one of trillions of planets in our galaxy alone, and there are hundreds of billions of galaxies. What are the probabilities? Is a creator god—yet to be discovered by cosmologists—really obsessed with every human, and keeping track of our sins?
 
(6)  We can feel god/Jesus in our hearts, thus we know our Christian religion is the one true faith. When we don’t understand things, we are assured by apologists that god moves in mysterious ways. This is perhaps the worst flat tire of all: theologians, apologists, and clergy have never been able to show us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective data about god(s). Feeling god/Jesus in your hearts falls far short of this requirement. What believers feel in their hearts in only evidence of what they’re feeling. Period. Why would devout Christians accept feelings as proof of their religion, but brush aside such feelings as expressed by Jews, Muslims, and Mormons? John Loftus has famously suggested The Outsider Test of Faith, that is, apply to your own religion the standards by which other religions are said to be false. 
 
These flat tires—and many others as well—have been noticed and discussed by hundreds of serious thinkers since the time of the Enlightenment. Yet the huge ecclesiastical bureaucracy keeps chugging along, even as it has fractured into thousands of different brands that don’t agree on theology. This is a major defect, yet another embarrassing flat tire! 
 
The writings of prominent atheists since the beginning of this century, e.g., Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Dan Barker, Richard Carrier, and John Loftus, have prompted many others to tell their own stories of escape from faith. Earlier this year, I posted articles here about Janice Selbie’s book, Divorcing Religion: A Memoir and Survival Handbook; Frank Lerant’s How I Opened My Mind and Let God Out; Carolyn Shadle’s From Religion to Reason, My Journey. 
 
The Janice Selbie article is here. 
The Frank Lerant article is here.
Carolyn Shadle article is here.
 
I recently came across Bill Zuersher’s 2014 book, Seeing Through Christianity: A Critique of Beliefs and Evidence. He provides a very good example of what can happen when critical thinking skills are brought to the analysis of religious beliefs—especially those of Christianity. As the subtitle indicates, he discusses beliefs, then evidence. He covers 20 beliefs, then 12 claimed areas of evidence. The 20 beliefs include The Fall, Atonement, Afterlife, Trinity and Mystery, The Incarnation. 
 
Zuerscher begins by puncturing Christian bragging that its god so loves the world. This does not make sense when we consider horrendous suffering—the first flat tire I mentioned above. 
 
“If a god were omniscient, he would know about the pointless suffering in the world. If he were omnipotent, he could change it. If he were benevolent, he would want to change it. It appears that a deity with these three qualities does not exist…Christianity exonerates its god by contriving an elaborate story to explain how suffering and death are actually the fault of human beings.” (p. 14, Kindle)
 
In his section on the Atonement, Zuerscher lists six possible ways theologians have understood atonement, noting: “Over the past two thousand years, Christian thinkers have proposed numerous explanations for how atonement works, and even today, consensus is elusive.” (p. 25, Kindle) His conclusion:
 
“… the Christian theories of atonement are incoherent. Moreover, while this discussion has trod into the theological morass, there is a larger point to be observed from a distance. Like the people of many other primitive cultures, Christians believe that a blood sacrifice can win favor with the spirit world…The idea that the ritual slaughter of Jesus was necessary to propitiate a god is a savage step backward in the moral and intellectual development of the human species. It is an idea that, frankly, would embarrass most witch doctors.” (p. 29, Kindle)
 
The promise of an afterlife, or eternal life, is a common theme in religions. It is the ultimate gimmick. Zuerscher makes this perfectly clear: “The true heart of Christianity, as of most religions, is the fact that human beings are terrified of death. Escaping it is the wellspring of the religious imagination.” (p. 31, Kindle) This flight of imagination—this borrowing from other major cults—is one of Christianity’s major flat tires, as Richard Carrier has discussed at length in his March 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan Guys. Get Over It. 
 
Zuerscher’s book is highly readable, 239 pages in the Kindle version, providing a helpful tour of so many of the Christian flat tires. Here are three more choice quotes:
 
“If Jesus had intended to establish a single church with a single message, he failed. The resulting confusion and antagonism, which embroiled Christendom in centuries of internecine bloodshed, is strong evidence that the belief system is nothing more than a human invention.” (p. 82, Kindle)
 
“The obvious question: if Mary’s god could prevent the transmission of original sin for her, why could he not do that for everyone? All of us, not to mention his son, could have been spared the whole incarnation-crucifixion rigmarole.” (p. 58, Kindle)
 
“Given the New Testament’s glaring textual inconsistencies, it is obvious that no deity has bothered to preserve its words over the past two thousand years. It is correspondingly unlikely that a deity ever gave these words to human beings in the first place.” (p. 136, Kindle)
 
But alas, of course, theologians, apologists, and clergy—faithful devotees of the ecclesiastical bureaucracy--do their very best to keep devout followers from thinking critically about the many negatives and improbabilities that disconfirm precious beliefs. They specialize in high drama worship events designed to keep those in the pews immune to, shielded from, dangerous critical thinking.    
 
 
 
 
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also available. 
 
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
 
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.