Why Are the Devout Okay with Demons, Superstitions, and Magical Thinking?

Because they don’t grasp that the gospels are fantasy literature

It seems to me that most of the devout who attend church are not obsessed with studying history and science—nor are they aware of implications of seeing their faith in the context in which it arose. They have been coached/trained not to do so by their religious leaders. But it doesn’t take very much curiosity to detect the signs, the clues, that the gospels are fantasies. Right at the start of Matthew’s gospel—who the author actually was, nobody knows—we find a genealogy demonstrating the Joseph was descended from king David; this pedigree seems to have been an essential credential for Joseph’s son to have qualified as messiah. But then we read that his betrothed, Mary, was made pregnant by the holy spirit. Joseph decided to divorce her quietly, but an angel told him in a dream what had happened—so he changed his mind. The author then quotes a text from Isaiah 7:14—or rather misquotes it, since he was familiar with the Septuagint translation of this text which reads virgin, not a young woman which is in the original text. 

But the author of the gospel apparently didn’t notice the major flaw here: why provide a genealogy to prove Joseph was descended from David—but then claim that Joseph was not the father of Jesus, after all? Maybe he did notice it, but just didn’t care because his specialty was writing fantasy literature. Moreover, Joseph getting a message from an angel in a dream is also a fragment of fantasy. It’s worth noting, by the way, that virgin birth is not mentioned in either Mark or John.

Let’s Be Honest about Why You Are a Christian or a Muslim: Your Forebears Murdered Their Way into Your Mind!!

Richard Carrier comprehensively argued for this. He's right, and backs it up with the facts. What's the best conclusion? Go ahead, think about it. 

An Earlier Draft of "An Atheist Morality without God"

When readers look at my paper, "An Atheist Morality without God", the first thing seen is that I had trouble getting it passed peer review.

Submission received: 2 March 2025/Revised: 22 September 2025 / Accepted: 3 November 2025 / Published: 12 November 2025

One peer reviewer wanted to debate me about the problem of horrendous suffering in my first few paragraphs. I thought what I said was pertinent. But this reviewer was not giving an inch, some criticisms of which were ignorant. Dr. Sterba suggested he or she felt threatened by what I wrote and wasn't going to accept the paper unless I deleted that part, so I did.  

Here is the contested part: 

On God and Horrendous Suffering

When it comes to horrendous suffering I have written several chapters in my books on it, plus edited, God and Horrendous Suffering (2021). The force of this problem is much greater for evangelicals, who believe a perfectly good, all powerful, all knowing theistic God exists, who allegedly inspired the horrific tales in the Bible, including sending people into an eternal conscious torment in hell. That explains why evangelical apologists like William Lane Craig said, “The problem of evil is certainly the greatest obstacle to belief in the existence of God. When I ponder both the extent and depth of suffering in the world, whether due to man’s inhumanity to man or to natural disasters, then I must confess that I find it hard to believe that God exists.”1

Christian philosopher James F. Sennett echoed what Craig said: “By far the most important objection to the faith is the so-called problem of evil—the alleged incompatibility between the existence or extent of evil in the world and the existence of God. I tell my philosophy of religion students that, if they are Christians and the problem of evil does not keep them up at night, then they don’t understand it.”2 The force of this problem is perhaps the greatest for Calvinists who believe in theological determination, as opposed to non-Calvinists who believe in free will.

The Gospel Authors Tried So Hard to Prove Resurrection, Part 2

But the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection fail basic standards

In my article posted here last Friday, I discussed the major flaws in Matthew’s story about dead saints coming alive in their tombs when Jesus died, then wandering in Jerusalem on the first Easter Sunday. Also, I analyzed the account of Jesus raising Lazarus, found only in John 11. Neither of these stories stand up to careful, critical analysis; they both sprang from the imaginations of their authors. 

But what about the gospel depictions of the resurrection of Jesus himself? Are they more to be trusted? Well, unfortunately not. As Robert Conner has pointed out, according to the gospels, nobody actually witnessed the resurrection of Jesus. Let’s take a look at all four, beginning with the first to be written.

What would you recommend for seekers who want answers given the terrible Kathmandu disaster?

 

 

Given the terrible Kathmandu disaster in Nepal, along with the Grand Canyon flash flood, what would you recommend for seekers who want answers? I could list a whole library of references but what of these four?

I would choose this one, a shorter primer can be found here.

An Essay of Mine On God and Horrendous Suffering

An essay of mine appeared in Freedom from Religion Foundation's monthly newsletter. FfRF is the largest atheist organization in America. LINK. It can be found here.

The Gospel Authors Tried So Hard to Prove Resurrection

But they took a totally wrong approach—and failed totally

Whenever an event or episode is reported in only one gospel, we have every right to be suspicious. How did the other gospel authors fail to notice, neglect to report, something that Jesus supposedly did or said? Or something that happened as a consequence of a Jesus-event? The author of Matthew’s gospel states that, when Jesus died on the cross—and this is found only in Matthew:

“The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many.”  Matthew 27:52-53

How does the resurrection of a physical human body—in any way—prove the existence of eternal life? A very obvious question has to be: What happened to these resurrected saints after their wandering about Jerusalem on that first Easter morning? Did they make it back to their tombs and return to being dead? If this was the case, the temporary resurrection of their physical bodies fails to confirm eternal life.

God and Horrendous Suffering, 2nd Edition (2026)

My anthology God and Horrendous Suffering (2026) is my last book. To get a copy of it click here. Other important links you can follow include a written debate I had on this issue with Dr. Don McIntosh at The Secular Web, plus a video on YouTube by Michael Maletin, as narrated by Seth Andrews. It has gained some fantastic blurbs! 

  

With this anthology I have written, co-written, edited, and co-edited enough books on enough topics that, taken as a whole, they can be compared to a small encyclopedia, addressing all of the crucially important issues Christians must face when honestly considering the truth of their faith. 

 

I’m very grateful for the authors who have written chapters for my books, along with those who wrote the forewords and blurbs. I’m also very grateful to my readers for their encouragement over the years, and their recommendations of my books to others.  

 

There are even translations of my books. The one on the left is an Arabic translation of The Case against Miracles--translated as Essays on Miracles. Arabic is a Semitic language (related to Hebrew). The other one is a Persian translation of Why I Became an Atheist, which is an Indo-European language (related to English and French). A Korean translation of a third book is pictured in the comments.

 

 

 The first edition of God and Horrendous Suffering was published in 2021 by the Global Center for Religious Research (GCRR), which was headed up by Darren Slade. We were finalizing  a 2nd edition when he abruptly put a halt to it, defaulting on his contracts with his authors, and releasing them back to us.  [If you're a published author with GRCC you too are released from your book contract!] 

Speaking of Someone Who Deconverted Away From Christianity, Choose Me!

      We are currently speaking of conversion and deconversion stories, yes?  Well, I received this email today:

       Hi, I'm ______. I read mostly books that challenge what I think I know and don't let me off easy. I'm that reader who follows the arguments carefully and sits with the uncomfortable questions. I don't reach out to authors often, maybe twice a year. So when I do, it's because the book made me reevaluate something I assumed was settled.

    Your book, Why I Became an Atheist, did that, specifically the way you systematically walk through your deconstruction without making it sound easy or painless. Most conversion stories or deconversion stories feel dramatic. Yours felt like watching someone do the hard work of thinking honestly, and that honesty made it harder to dismiss. The Outsider Test for Faith is a framework I kept coming back to because it asks a question that's simple to state but brutal to sit with.

      A few of us are doing a reading challenge right now, tracking our most unexpected reads of the year. Yours landed on my list because it wasn't just an argument against belief. It was a case study in intellectual integrity, and I think that's rare in this genre.

      I'm not asking for anything. But I caught the preacher's precision behind the atheist's critique. Most readers will take the arguments and move on. I think you wrote it so they'd have to test their own assumptions the way you tested yours.

   

     Did you intentionally write the book as a form of intellectual autobiography rather than just a polemic, and did that structure emerge from your own process of leaving?

     When you designed The Outsider Test for Faith, were you more focused on exposing cognitive bias in believers, or were you also testing your own former beliefs against the same standard?

I responded as follows: 

 

     Thanks for the kind words, _____. It’s always rewarding to hear that the intellectual weight of my books resonates with readers.

     To your questions: Yes, the autobiographical structure was essential because I needed to demonstrate the actual process of thinking honestly, not just the finished arguments. Regarding the Outsider Test, it is a mirror I judged my beliefs against. I had to apply the same rigorous standard to my own former beliefs as I expected from others; if the test didn't apply to me first, it wouldn't have been a fair test at all.

     Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts,

     John W. Loftus

"I Used to be an Atheist Too, But Now I’m a Christian," by Harry McCall

[This is from one of Harry McCall's posts in the archives. It seems kinda relevant given Joe Schmid's conversion to Catholicism. It's aimed at most *atheist* conversion stories, JWL].

 

From time to time here at D.C. we get the apologetic defense of Christianity from a so called former atheist. It’s not that these former atheist were actively engaged in the study of why God and Christianity, as expressed in the Bible, is not true. But rather these individuals were simply (by default) basically irreligious / nonreligious.

Without having done any objective scholarship (apart from the popular ecclesiastical books, broadcast media, and socializing with people of faith which formed their view of God and Christianity), the world of these former self proclaimed atheists is highly subjective. They may even have felt legitimate in who they claimed to be by the fact that the term “atheist” evokes a stark and sharp reaction from the general religious population. Thus, the real question needs to be raised: Are ALL NON-RELIGIOUS or (better yet) ANTI-RELIGIOUS people atheist? 

Musings On Joe Schmid Who Just Converted to Catholicism. @MajestyofReason

Here's the link to the YouTube video where Joe Schmid reveals he converted to Catholicism. It has 101 thousand views in just three days. [How much revenue does that get?] On Facebook John Hanby said this about Schmid's conversion: "Joe Schmid is proof that no one is safe. He's one of the most brilliant young philosophers in the world. He's written, what, 20? Philosophy of Religion papers. And has been a paradigm of rationality and critical thinking."

So today I want to offer a few general and applicable responses.

First off, this doesn't mean anyone else should become a Catholic just because Schmid did. The main reason is due to the brain's incapacity to come to correct conclusions when there are between 150-180 known cognitive biases, any one of which can affect our cogitations concerning the case for Catholicism. In other words, no one thinks with impeccably pure logic like we might imagine from Star Treck's character Spock. There is always room for doubt. Here's Why Doubt Is The Adult Attitude And How Science Helps Us. Science is going to answer our most important questions if they can be answered at all.

Secondly, let's look at some statistics: In 2009 David Chalmers of the Australian National University and David Bourget of London University, surveyed professional philosophers and others on their philosophical views. The survey was taken by 3226 respondents, including 1803 philosophy faculty members and/or PhDs and 829 philosophy graduate students, which can be seen here. The question that interests me is what philosophers think about God.

God: theism or atheism?
Accept or lean toward: atheism 678 / 931 (72.8%)
Accept or lean toward: theism 136 / 931 (14.6%)
Other 117 / 931 (12.5%)

If we add in the "other" category, which would include New Age beliefs, Deism, and Agnosticism, then upwards to 86% of them are not theists. Among those philosophers who are theists I dare say most of them are probably not card carrying Evangelicals, since this includes Catholics, Muslims, Jews and those who merely accept the philosopher's god.

So much for William Lane Craig's claim that there is a renaissance of Christian philosophy in today's world. *cough* Anthony Gottlieb concludes that among specialists in the philosophy of religion--as opposed to Political Philosophy, Social Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Science and the Philosophy of Language--"Philosophy of religion specialists are more likely to favor theism (72:19)." Link.

The Great Adventure of Reading the Bible, Cover-to-Cover

But right out of the gate, the book of Genesis is a bumpy ride of bad theology

In articles I posted here on 12 July 2026 and 18 July 2026, I described the defective theology to be found just in the first eleven chapters of Genesis. But things don’t improve as we move on to chapter 12, the beginning of the saga of folklore that depicts the wanderings and achievements of the Hebrew people. The careful, thoughtful reader should be curious: how can any of this be verified? Serious scholars have known for a long time that verification is not possible, hence the conclusion—not at all uncommon—that Abraham, Joseph, and Moses are fictional folklore heroes, not people who really lived. Especially when readers are making their way through the tedious genealogies, they should be skeptical: these long lists cannot be verified; they too are part of the folklore.

Visit My "Academia.edu" Papers

I have published papers for Academia.edu, a few of which aren't found elsewhere. Here they are in one Link.

---A Minimal Facts Approach to the Problem of Evil. In my anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering, my focus as an author is on heinous, hideous, horrific levels of horrendous suffering given the belief in a theistic God who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfect good. Unless we focus on that kind of suffering, the kind that seems needless and absolutely inexplicable, we'll fail to see the problem of evil for what it is. Instead of focusing on bruises, sprained ankles, slaps on the cheek, a clump of hair being pulled out, or sicknesses like colds and the flu, let's focus instead on people who have been burned alive, boiled alive, and buried alive. This paper is set to be published in the Freedom from Religion Foundation's next monthly publication!

---Hume's Four Suplemental Arguments Against Miracles. David Hume argued that the prior probability of a miracle is infinitely low because it violates established laws of nature. Consequently, the likelihood of human testimony being mistaken will almost always outweigh the probability of the miracle itself, making it irrational to believe. Often neglected, David Hume offered four additional or supplemental arguments that discussed the "likelihood" and "false positive rate" in Part 2 of Chapter 10 of the Enquiry.

I think David Hume didn't revise or edit his chapter after knowing about Bayes is because he already used the structure of Bayes in his chapter! Plus, in his philosophical proof he already argued against the possibility of human testimony to overcome the laws of nature. After that destruction what else did Hume need to say?

---Preface, Blurbs, Contents and Introduction to "God and Horrendous Suffering" 2nd Edition. This paper contains the Preface, Blurbs, Contents, and Full Introduction to "God and Horrendous Suffering" 2nd Edition.

Six Irrefutable Proofs Jesus Never Existed

This is done very well! What do you think? I know, I know, apologists have their counter-arguments. But it appears to me the facts tell a different story. I co-edited an anthology about this topic! Check it out on Amazon, please!

 

More Examples of Disappointing, Inferior, Even Alarming Jesus-Script

The devout might snap out of it—if they faced these texts honestly

A primary example of the dishonesty of New Testament translators is printing the supposed real words of Jesus in red. Even conservative, evangelical translators know that there is no way at all to verify that Jesus spoke these words. They thrive on the delusion that the words in red were divinely inspired. But that is not how responsible historians operate; they want to know the sources, that is, where did the gospel authors find the contemporary documentation (e.g., letters, diaries and other archival records) by which to verify that these words were spoken by Jesus.

Beware of Cult Fanatics and Propagandists

It’s not hard to spot the craziness

If you live in a small town or big city, chances are there’s a lovely public park where you can have a good time. There may be a space for entertainers to display their talents and provide pleasant diversions. But occasionally this space may be used by religious folks who want to proclaim the message about their one true faith. There’s no harm in hearing what they have to say, right? But anyone who is in touch with the realities of the modern world can quickly identify the weird ideas that are being proclaimed.

Hume's Four Suplemental Arguments Against Miracles Vs Michael Licona

As mentioned in a previous post, David Hume argued that the prior probability of a miracle is infinitely low because it violates established laws of nature. Consequently, the likelihood of human testimony being mistaken will almost always outweigh the probability of the miracle itself, making it irrational to believe.

But what's often neglected is that Hume offered four supplemental arguments that discussed the "likelihood" and "false positive rate" of miracles in Part 2 of Chapter 10 of the Enquiry. This part of Hume's chapter comes after he presented his general disproof of miracles in Part 1. I think Hume didn't revise his chapter after learning about Bayes, because he had already used the structure of Bayes in his chapter! In the first part he presented his philosophical disproof against the abject improbability of human testimony for miracles that must overcome the laws of nature. This burden is made heavier when considering uncorroborated miracle claims for which we cannot interogate the alleged people mentioned in the biblical texts. After that destruction what else did Hume need to say in Part 2? But he had more to say.

Here's an excerpt from my long chapter on miracles in Why I Became an Atheist (2012), titled, Hume's Four Suplemental Arguments Against Miracles. My focus is on Michael Licona's arguments against Hume. I think I could do a better job of this if you combined other chapters I mentioned. If you want to read the whole chapter with endnotes you'll have to get the book. What? You haven't done so yet? ;-)

A.I. On Bayes Theorem Stressing David Hume's Contribution!

"Is Bayes theorem a legitimate tool to evaluate miracles in the Bible?" 

------
Yes, Bayes’ Theorem is a legitimate mathematical and philosophical tool for evaluating biblical miracles. However, because the theorem requires subjective inputs—like the initial probability of a miracle occurring and the reliability of ancient texts—scholars debate how definitively it can prove or disprove specific events. [1, 2, 3]

The Bayesian Formula:

Bayes’ theorem calculates the probability of a hypothesis (H) being true given certain evidence (E).

The Components:

Evaluating miracles using this theorem involves three key factors:

[1] Prior Probability P(M):

Your initial assessment of the likelihood of a miracle occurring before considering the specific evidence. Skeptics often argue this is near zero, while proponents argue it is higher based on the existence of an active, intervening Creator. [1, 3, 4]

Likelihood P(T|M):

The probability that we would have the existing historical records and testimony if the miracle actually happened. [1]

False Positive Rate \(P(T\vert{}\sim M)\):

The probability of getting that same testimony or record even if the miracle did not happen (e.g., due to human error, legend, or deception). [1]

The Debate in Scholarship:

While the method itself is logically sound, applying it to the Bible sparks intense scholarly disagreement: [1, 2]

The Skeptic's View:

Philosopher David Hume argued that the prior probability of a miracle is infinitely low because it violates established laws of nature. Consequently, the likelihood of human testimony being mistaken will almost always outweigh the probability of the miracle itself, making it irrational to believe. [*See Below]

Anselm "Faith Seeking Confirmation"

[First published 5/18/20] I think Anselm's dictum "faith seeking understanding" is to be understood in the history of theology and philosophy to be equivalent to "Faith Seeking Confirmation." If that's how it's historically used then that's what it means. Below is an updated edit from chapter 2 of my my book, Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End.

There is a common theme among St. Anselm's work and the work of other obfuscationist theologians and philosophers that needs to be highlighted. It’s called faith seeking confirmation. We see this in Anselm with regard to his new atonement theory and his ontological argument.

Anselm therefore is exhibit “A” in defense of what atheist philosopher Stephen Law said: “Anything based on faith, no matter how ludicrous, can be made to be consistent with the available evidence, given a little patience and ingenuity.”1 If I could pick one sentence, one aphorism, one proverb that highlights the main reason philosophy of religion (PoR) must end, it’s Law’s. I’ll call it Law’s law of faith.

We Already Use Bayes' Formula

Via John Earman.

I guarantee you that everyone uses Bayes' formula whenever considering new information. We ask ourselves implicitly and/or explicitly what the Pr (probability) is of a new H (hypothesis) given E (evidence) and our K (background knowledge).

That is, when considering a new hypothesis we fact-check it based on the evidence plus our existing background knowledge.  

Of course we do this imperfectly, sometimes woefully so, but we try.

The only question left is when and where should we use the math.