If they listen to the clergy they certainly would!
I have this fantasy about aliens arriving on earth, looking around carefully, and being baffled by so many buildings with steeples or domes, with colored glass windows, filled with images of a man nailed to a cross. “What’s that all about?” they may ask. The devout would respond: “Aren’t those buildings magnificent—especially the grand cathedrals? We go there every Sunday to worship and praise the god who created the cosmos, and who cares about each one of us, and answers our prayers. The man on the cross is actually our god’s son, whose sacrifice enables our god to forgive us. We have awesome ceremonies, with bejeweled cups and plates, during which we eat the flesh and drink the blood of the divine son—to ensure that we will have eternal life.”
“We went through a very similar phase a very long time ago.”
There is evidence that humans are emerging—slowly, painfully—from our phase of gullibility and superstition. And it looks like it will take a long time. Every human is born into a vast bubble of ignorance, but there are humans who are gifted with curiosity, with a passion for learning. A few stand out for their fierce determination to learn. Galileo (1564-1642) was focused on learning about what was going on in the sky, and discovered other planets, and that the earth orbits the sun—not the other way around. This got him into big trouble with the church, and he was sentenced to house arrest.
In the mid-19th century, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, through careful study of nature, proposed that natural selection explains the evolution of species. Just 103 years ago this month (October 1923), Edwin Hubble made one of the most important discoveries in human history; he demonstrated that an impressive swirl of stars—thought by astronomers at the time to be part of our Milly Way Galaxy—is actually the Andromeda Galaxy, about 2.5 million light years away. This discovery dramatically changed our perspective on the cosmos. We now know there are billions of other galaxies.
In more recent times, the Hubble Space Telescope (launched 1990) and the James Webb Space Telescope (launched 2021) have provided major insights into the nature of the cosmos. And, of course, human adventures in space (landing on the moon) and space stations carrying astronauts for months at a time, have made the general public more aware of our place in the cosmos. But how much has all this impacted human awareness—and reduced gullibility and superstition?
I fear that the advent of television has had major negative impact on the improvement of human awareness and intelligence. In 1958 Edward R. Murrow, a broadcast journalist, was skeptical about the impact of television. He warned that television was nothing more “wires and lights in a box” if it didn’t educate and inspire the public. And in the decades since television became so popular world-wide, it has focused heavily on entertainment, e.g., situation comedies (Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett, Mary Tyler Moore), variety shows, cops and lawyers, westerns, quiz shows, talk shows, soap operas, and endless sports broadcasts. It would seem that the mass of humanity is far more eager to be entertained than educated.
When I was a teenager in rural northern Indiana, my father and I would watch TV together—popular shows like Gunsmoke and Perry Mason. While we were doing this, my mother would go to their bedroom to read. She had never gone to college, but read voraciously until dementia destroyed her mind as she approached 90 years old. Her 
frequent question to me was, “What are you doing to improve your mind?” Hence my interest in TV gradually diminished, because my mother had so many books, and kept buying more. Basketball and football were the obsessions of my classmates when I was in high school, but I had no interest in either—among other things, I was the classic 90-pound weakling. It seems to be a quirk of the human mind that bouncing balls are a supreme fascination: basketballs, footballs, baseballs, golf balls, bowling balls, billiard balls—and on and on. Billions of human hours have been devoted to watching these sports, and billions of dollars have been spent building the venues for playing and watching the bouncing balls.
That might also baffle our alien visitors, who have devoted centuries to studying, researching, and exploring the cosmos. How can humans move beyond the gullibility and superstitions that have hindered our grasp of reality?
Improving our minds is one way to do it.
On 12 October 2026, John Loftus published here an excerpt from his 2008 book, Why I Became an Atheist: A Former Preacher Rejects Christianity. He titled this excerpt, The Strange and Superstitious World of the Bible. I recommend this as essential homework: read it carefully, thoroughly.
In this excerpt he describes the superstitions—with plenty of examples—that are found in both the Old and New Testaments. They derive from the superstitions embraced by the many cultures that impacted the Bible authors. He concludes with this statement: “I can legitimately and rationally ask whether I should believe the things claimed in the Bible, if the people in biblical times were superstitious to the core like their neighbors. Why should I believe what they believed? I cannot do so.”
It's also a good idea to buy the book itself.
To close, let’s take a look at one of the major superstitions that still is embraced by Catholic Christians. They accept the claim by their clergy that, during the “miracle” of the Mass, the wine and wafers actually become the blood and body of Christ. This is known as transubstantiation, and it is an embarrassing example of magical thinking. The blood and body of Jesus become magic potions. This idea is based on fake Jesus-script in John 6:57-58:
“Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which the ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
More magical thinking: eat this bread to gain eternal life. But the Catholic church needs to come up with one more miracle here, namely, de-transubstantiation. Because within hours after drinking the wine and eating the wafer, human bodies convert some of the wine and wafer into urine and feces. Thus the blood and body of Jesus end up in the sewers. Why did the Catholic theologians who invent superstitious dogma fail to think of this? This is another clue that divine inspiration is superstition.
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 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:
• Guessing About God (2023)
• 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment