Edouard Tahmizian had an interesting discussion with Richard Carrier about the metaphysical impossibility of libertarian free will. Our actions are aimed at fulfilling our desires; but where did our desires come from? Did we choose our desires, or simply discover that we had them? I offer two considerations below.
Okay, I admit it: I was raised in a small town in rural Indiana, which had three Protestant Church—I belonged to the Methodist brand—and one Catholic Church. We got used to being taunted by the Catholic kids: we were going to hell because we weren’t members of their one true church. But mind you, it was a peaceful community; many true friendships developed despite the religious divides. Of course, on our Protestant side of the divide, we believed in our share of nonsense, but the older I got, the more I came to see that the Vatican is a champion at pushing nonsense.
Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899) was a prominent lecturer in post-Civil War America, and he voiced his resistance to Christianity. He was known as the Great Agnostic; this is an excerpt from one of his speeches: “Then I asked myself the question: Is there a supernatural power—an arbitrary mind—an enthroned God—a supreme will that sways the tides and currents of the world—to which all causes bow? I do not deny. I do not know—but I do not believe. I believe that the natural is supreme—that from the infinite chain no link can be lost or broken—that there is no supernatural power that can answer prayer—no power that worship can persuade or change—no power that cares for man.”
It was reported that on the Sunday following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, church attendance in the New York area was higher than usual. Perhaps people were searching for comfort, but my own fantasy was that these folks who showed up at church were there searching for a crucial answer—or to hold god accountable: why hadn’t their all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful deity done something to prevent the attacks? Was his attention captured by crises in other galaxies—or was diverting airplanes beyond his skill-set?
Matthew 7: A good start, then cult severity and bragging
It might be a good idea to compile a list of the Top Ten Bible Texts that Christians Ignore—and, no surprise, these can be found in the gospels, especially in the Jesus-script. The final section of the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 7, includes a classic example of ignored text: “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye but do not notice the log in your own eye?Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye?You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.” (Matthew 7:3-5)
[Dr. Valerie Tarico posted this on 05/25/2007. Enjoy!]
Greetings! John has graciously asked me to join this community of thinkers and scholars, and I am honored to say yes. In a world torn by religous tribalism, what could be more important than re-examining the traditions that have inextricably blended wisdom and community with bigotry and violence.
I will begin, as others have, by posting my deconversion story. Out of a sheer overwhelming lack of time, I am cheating: copying out of my book,The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth, rather than beginning the narrative again from scratch.
Leaving Home.
When I first started having misgivings about my faith, I did what any good Evangelical would: I prayed. I was fifteen at the time, earnest and devout. An eldest daughter with a caretaker’s heart and responsibilities. A good student surrounded by a good family, good friends, and a good church community. Even so, the cognitive changes that beset teenagers—increased ability to introspect, to think critically, and to envision the possible—were giving me trouble.
I met James Aames at the 2025 American Atheists National Convention where I learned of his book. I wish I had thought of such a thing. In it Aames takes believers through the fears they might have--whether real or imagined--that keep them away from rejecting their religious faith. It has 301 pages of good advice using an extremely good approach! It's brilliant! He's allowed me to share the last section in his book, below. Go get it at Amazon!
It’s the religious version of “Always look on the bright side of life”
Once god-is-good, god-is-great has been locked into religious human brains, it can be difficult to grasp the world as it actually is: that is, so much suffering and pain are overlooked or minimized. When the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami killed 225,000 people, a Muslim cleric knew that his god was upholding moral standards: he claimed that European tourists wearing bikinis had prompted his deity to exact revenge. How does this square with the boast that “He’s got the whole world in his hands”? –which is meant to be an affirmation of god’s love. Well, it doesn’t, of course. In recent days we have seen horrendous devastation caused by the powerful earthquake that hit Thailand and Burma. The level of human suffering is staggering. The death toll will be in the thousands, and reconstruction will take years. Was god getting even for something here? No doubt clerics will try to put the best possible spin on this tragedy, to get their god off the hook.
You might wonder what this article has to do with zebras. Spoiler: they
teach us how pain is not necessary for soul building, even if we allow
for the baseless metaphysical projection of souls from the merely
physical psychology of learning. Unlike Bruce
Springsteen, Zebras are literally born to run.
In his blog post entitled My
Paper on Morality without God is finished of March 1, 2025, John W.
Loftus mentions his visit to Notre Dame
University to meet James Sterba. A
photo accompanying his post shows a reprint of Sterba’s article An Ethics without God
That Is Compatible with Darwinian Evolution (Religions2024, 15(7), 781;
doi.org/10.3390/rel15070781). Religions is an Open Access
journal, so Sterba’s paper is free to read online. (Read it now! I’ll
wait.) The paper overlaps considerably with Sterba’s recent book:
Once again cultural anthropologist Dr. David Eller has granted us access to a large amount of text, from his excellent book, Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker, pp. 365-390. If you want to learn about morality this is very good, as is the whole chapter 10, "Of Myths and Morals: Religion, Stories, and the Practice of Living."
On Morality and Religionby David Eller.
There is no doubt much more stress in Western/Christian
cultures on morality than on myth.Again,
Christians would insist that they do not have “myth” but that they definitely
have morality, or even that their religion is
morality above all else. Atheists, often
taking their lead from Christianity and literally “speaking Christian,” tend to
allow themselves to be swept along with Christian thinking on this
subject.Atheists do not much trouble
ourselves with myths (for us, all myths are false by definition, since myths
refer to supernatural/religious beings and we reject the very notion of such
being).But we trouble ourselves very
much with morality, down to trying to prove that we “have morality too” or that
we can “be good without god(s).”
Given the amount of time and energy that Christians and
atheists alike—and not just them but philosophers, politicians, lawyers, and
social scientists—have devoted to the problem of morality, it is remarkable
that so little progress has been made.As the famous early 20th-century moral philosopher G. E.
Moore wrote almost one hundred years ago, morality or ethics “is a subject
about which there has been and still is an immense amount of difference of
opinion….Actions which some
philosophers hold to be generally wrong, others hold to be generally right, and
occurrences which some hold to be evils, others hold to be goods” (1963:
7).Surely any topic that has resisted
progress and agreement for so long must be being approached in the wrong way.
David Eller, as many of you know, is pretty much my favorite scholar/author at this point, next to just a very limited number of others. As a friend he's allowing me to publish the very best, next to none chapter, on what the words atheist and agnosticism mean. It comes from his most recent book, Liberatheism: On Freedom from God(s) [GCRR, 2024], one that I was honored to write the Forword. Enjoy!
Freeing Ourselves (and Others)
From Misunderstandings of
Atheism
“I
do not believe in God and I am not an
atheist,” Albert Camus wrote in his Notebooks
1951–1959.[1]
What are we to make of that statement? Perhaps Camus was being wry and cryptic,
as French philosophers are often wont to be. Maybe “atheist” meant something
different to him or to 1950s-era France. Alternatively, it might have been too
dangerous to avow atheism in that time and place. Or maybe he was just confused
about the word.
If the latter
is the case, then Camus would not be the first or the last to labor under
misconceptions about atheism. Of course, theists are highly likely—and highly
motivated—to get atheism wrong. Since they are not atheists and possibly have
never spoken to one (at least not intentionally and civilly), they really do
not know what we think; they can only see us through their own theistic eyes
and assume that we are the reverse image, or, more perversely, some odd
variation, of their own theism. Then, as sworn and mortal enemies of atheism,
they are driven to portray us in the most unflattering light, to construct a
ridiculous straw man that they can summarily caricature and assassinate. We
need not take their (mis)characterizations of us seriously, except as a public
relations problem.
What about
atheists themselves? Surely they are accurately portraying their position.
Surprisingly and distressingly, too many professional atheist writers and
speakers commit a regular set of errors in describing the nature of atheism.
This is a tremendously damaging tendency, for two reasons. First, we mislead
current and future atheists, who are misinformed by the incautious
pronouncements of prominent atheists. Second, we empower theists and other
critics of atheism who use our words against us: “See, even atheists say that
atheism is X, so we are justified in our criticism and condemnation of the
idea.”
In this chapter,
we will expose and free ourselves from recurring and systematic mistakes in the
atheist literature. We will not repeat or critique “arguments for atheism,”
which have been sufficiently covered, including by me[2]
and are largely cogent and decisive; all but the most hard-headed theists and
religious apologists (who still exist) concede that “the case for god(s)” is
weak at best and lost at worst. Nor will we linger on the New Atheists, who
have been thoroughly examined many times before, including in the previous
chapter where we noted their unexpected and unfortunate turn toward reactionary
social and political attitudes—ironically simultaneously debunking one of the
pillars of Western civilization (i.e. Christianity) and defending Western
civilizational traditions of sexism, racial thinking, and Islamophobia, among
others. The New Atheists are broadly guilty of the common charge of scientism,
not just of crediting science with the solution to all problems but of
equating, as Richard Dawkins does, religion to science (albeit bad science).
For instance, Dawkins wrote in his lauded The
God Delusion that “‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about
the universe,” and Victor Stenger actually put this “god hypothesis” business
in the title of one of his books.[3]
Finally, all of the New Atheists, who are quality scholars on their own turf,
operate with limited (by which I mean Christianity-centric) notions of religion
and god, in which “god” means the Christian or Abrahamic god and “religion”
means Abrahamic monotheism. Any college freshman student of religion knows
better.
Carl Sagan once said, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.” I have encountered so many churchgoers who are satisfied with belief—and they trust that their clergy have taught them correct beliefs. There appears to be so little curiosity about Christian origins, about the complex ancient thought world in which their faith arose. Nor is there much curiosity about how the gospels came to be, and how much they are burdened with flaws, contradictions, and laughable impossibilities. The drama, ceremony, music, and ritual of weekly (or even more often) worship are enough to sustain devotion and commitment. They are happy with believing, not knowing.
I'm not focused on what takes place in atheist organizations. However, I understand that wokeism is a hotly promoted and contested issue for atheists to debate. Here is Jerry Coyne's take on it: LINK. Here is Hemant Mehta's reply: LINK. I'll let my insightful commentors weigh in on this particular debate.
I wasn't going to comment on wokeism until this morning when I read a political piece, gleefully titled, "Woke is dead — let’s make sure it never comes back", a controversial title written by the controversial seasoned journalist Lionel Shriver.
I'm pretty sure the ologarths and audocrats are the gleeful ones. They won the Presidency because they were successful in getting the rest of us to focus on these type of issues rather than on good jobs for all, health care, climate change, free tuition for university students, and so on. Elon Musk, the richest person in history, is now ruling over the rest of us because of this strategy. I'm sure he and other filty rich people will make sure they don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. So whatever else can be said for and against wokeism, I hope it doesn't come up again in the next few presidential elections. Wokeism is where presidential candidates will come to die.
A few months ago, an elderly Catholic women admitted to me that their priests told them not to think about what they learned as children in catechism. But I suspect this is a common approach of clergy everywhere: “Just believe that we know what we’re talking about—after all, we learned all there is to know about god in seminary—and our intense prayers keep us in touch with him.” Especially when eternal life is at stake, why take chances? “Of course, our church, our denomination, has it right.”
In the spirit
of atheist Christmas giving I’d like to make a shameless plug for
donations to this blog, Debunking Christianity, the brainchild of John
W. Loftus, noted atheist author and speaker. As John pointed
out last March, the blog itself is ad-free (although John was not
able to remove ads entirely from the Disqus discussions below
the line). As John says, “I have no institutional support nor am I a
paid employee of any atheist organization.” Which means the burden of
keeping the site afloat financially falls on all of us. I found by
direct empirical testing that it’s super easy to locate and click the
yellow “Donate” button at the bottom of the right-side navigation links
in the large-screen format of this site. So I call upon all my
out-or-closeted atheist / agnostic / freethinker / Nones / fact-based /
reality-curious sisters, brothers, and gender-fluids to donate early and
often, as your circumstances allow, and as the “spirit” moves you.
John has been one of my favorite authors and editors for a while. If
you’re like me, a complete nobody, it’s not every day that one of your
favorite authors asks you to guest-blog. So I’m incredibly flattered and
will always try my hardest to overlink. (I’ll
also try hard to tell jokes, and likely fall short. But seriously,
whenever I use a word that has a technical meaning which might not be
obvious to every human alive, I like to put a link on it. “Overlinking”
refers to documents containing “too many” links, which to me sounds
rather alien, like being “too beautiful” or “too rich”, neither of which
I can imagine nor have approximated.)
Heads up! I'm fairly excited for my upcoming 9,000 worded paper, "Did Virgin Mary Give Birth to the Son of God?" It's to appear on my page at the Secular Web within a couple of weeks. [The following essay was first published in December 2023]
"How the New Testament
Writers Used Prophecy" by John W. Loftus.
One of the major things claimed by the New
Testament in support of Jesus’ life and mission is that Jesus fulfilled Old
Testament prophecy (Luke 24:26–27; Acts 3:17–24). If God cannot predict the
future as time moves farther and farther into the distance, as I questioned
earlier, then neither can any prophet who claims to speak for God. As we will
see with regard to the virgin birth of Jesus, none of the Old Testament
passages in the original Hebrew prophetically applied singularly and
specifically to Jesus. [In chapter 18, "Was Jesus Born of a Virgin in Bethlehem?"]. Early Christian preachers simply went into the Old
Testament looking for verses that would support their view of Jesus. They took
these Old Testament verses out of context and applied them to Jesus in order to
support their views of his life and mission.9
The quest for solid god-evidence has yielded nothing
There’s been a cartoon floating around on Facebook for a while, depicting a Christian woman asking a man, “What’s it like being an atheist?” He replies, “Do you think Zeus is real?” Her answer is “No”—to which he answers, “Like that.” Zeus is one of thousands of gods that have been invented by human beings, and embraced with varying degrees of enthusiasm. It has been so easy to jump to the god-conclusion; in the Book of Acts, chapter 28, we find the story of the apostle Paul arriving on Malta. As he was lighting a fire, a viper landed on his hand, which he shook off into the fire. But the locals were amazed: “They were expecting him to swell up or drop dead, but after they had waited a long time and saw that nothing unusual had happened to him, they changed their minds and began to say that he was a god.” (v. 6)
If you’ve listened to many church sermons, you may have noticed that
they often cite verses from the church’s preferred translation of the
bible, or allude to verses indirectly. If you were to write down all
these verses, over time you’d build up quite the list. But you might
need a lot of sermons before you could reconstruct an entire
bible that way. That’s because many verses in the bible sound a bit
problematic to modern ears, and don’t feature in a lot of
sermons. Instead you might notice that your pastor is like a long-time
touring musical act, well past its hitmaking heyday, which keeps on
playing its hits. What people liked in the past, they can probably like
again. A cynical or perhaps realistic observer might note that the most
important skill for any church pastor is fundraising (“No bucks,
no Buck Rogers”), and some bible verses work better than other
verses for separating the marks I mean congregants
from their money. Among the more successful pastors - in terms of
attracting congregants and extracting money from them - we have Joel Osteen, whose
preaching style, or so I’ve read, leans heavily into “uplifting” and
away from “challenging.” Thus we wouldn’t expect to see successful
pastors like Osteen engaging seriously and frequently with bible
difficulties, as these seem to be bad for business.
[First Published in Nov. 2006] One of the reasons I have rejected Christianity is that I studied the Bible. That's right. I studied the Bible. As I did so, I didn't just read works published by Zondervan or InterVarsity Press. I read the works by Christian scholars from a wide variety of scholarly sources. I didn't read atheist works about the Bible so much as I mainly read scholarly Christian literature. What Christian scholars wrote led me to reject Christianity. For those of you who read my first self-published book in a "Letter to Dr. James Strauss" you know some of the books I read, and almost every book I mentioned (and there were plenty I didn't) was written by a Christian, or someone within the Christian tradition.
Now as we approach the Christmas season, Let's see what Christian scholarship says about the infancy birth narratives. Raymond Brown is the author of the massive 752 page book titled, Birth of the Messiah (updated 1999), and "Gospel Infancy Narrative Research from 1976 to 1986" (CBQ 48: 469–83, 661–80). Here are four points about the contents of Matthew and Luke that Brown mentioned in the Anchor Bible Dictionary (1996) ["Infancy Narratives in the NT Gospels"] (emphasis is mine):
(1) [Brown discusses the agreements between Matthew and Luke’s gospels, but those are obvious and not part of my point]
(2) Matthew and Luke disagree on the following significant points. In chap. 1, the Lucan story of John the Baptist (annunciation to Zechariah by Gabriel, birth, naming, growth) is absent from Matthew. According to Matthew, Jesus’ family live at Bethlehem at the time of the conception and have a house there (2:11); in Luke, they live at Nazareth. In Matthew, Joseph is the chief figure receiving the annunciation, while in Luke, Mary is the chief figure throughout. The Lucan visitation of Mary to Elizabeth and the Magnificat and Benedictus canticles are absent from Matthew. At the time of the annunciation, Mary is detectably pregnant in Matthew, while the annunciation takes place before conception in Luke. In chap. 2 in each gospel, the basic birth and postbirth stories are totally different to the point that the two are not plausibly reconcilable. Matthew describes the star, the magi coming to Herod at Jerusalem and to the family house at Bethlehem, the magi’s avoidance of Herod’s plot, the flight to Egypt, Herod’s slaughter of Bethlehem children, the return from Egypt, and the going to Nazareth for fear of Archelaus. Luke describes the census, birth at a stable(?) in Bethlehem because there was no room at the inn, angels revealing the birth to shepherds, the purification of Mary and the presentation of Jesus in the temple, the roles of Simeon and Anna, and a peaceful return of the family to Nazareth.
(3) None of the significant information found in the infancy narrative of either gospel is attested clearly elsewhere in the NT. In particular, the following items are found only in the infancy narratives. (a) The virginal conception of Jesus, although a minority of scholars have sought to find it implicitly in Gal 4:4 (which lacks reference to a male role), or in Mark 6:3 (son of Mary, not of Joseph), or in John 1:13 (“He who was born . . . not of the will of man”—a very minor textual reading attested in no Gk ms). (b) Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem, although some scholars find it implicitly in John 7:42 by irony. (c) Herodian knowledge of Jesus’ birth and the claim that he was a king. Rather, in Matt 14:1–2, Herod’s son seems to know nothing of Jesus. (d) Wide knowledge of Jesus’ birth, since all Jerusalem was startled (Matt 2:3), and the children of Bethlehem were killed in search of him. Rather, in Matt 13:54–55, no one seems to know of marvelous origins for Jesus. (e) John the Baptist was a relative of Jesus and recognized him before birth (Luke 1:41, 44). Rather, later John the Baptist seems to have no previous knowledge of Jesus and to be puzzled by him (Luke 7:19; John 1:33).
(4) None of the events that might have been “public” find attestation in contemporary history. (a) There is no convincing astronomical evidence identifiable with a star that rose in the East, moved westward, and came to rest over Bethlehem. In Matthew’s story this would have happened before the death of Herod the Great (4 b.c. or [Martin 1980] 1 b.c.). There have been attempts to identify the star with the supernova recorded by the Chinese records in March/April 5 b.c., or with a comet (Halley’s in 12–11 b.c.), or with a planetary conjunction (Jupiter and Saturn in 7 b.c.; Jupiter and Venus in 3 b.c. [Martin 1980]). (b) Even though the Jewish historian Josephus amply documents the brutality in the final years of Herod the Great, neither he nor any other record mentions a massacre of children at Bethlehem. Macrobius’ frequently cited pun (Sat. 2.4.11) on Herod’s ferocity toward his sons is not applicable to the Bethlehem massacre. (c) A census of the whole world (Roman provinces?) under Caesar Augustus never happened, although there were three Augustan censuses of Roman citizens. It is not unlikely that Luke 2:1 should be taken as a free description of Augustus’ empire-cataloguing tendencies. (d) Luke’s implication that Quirinius was governor of Syria and conducted a “first census” (2:2) before Herod’s death (1:5) has no confirmation. Quirinius became legate of Syria in a.d. 6 and at that time conducted a census of Judea, which was coming under direct Roman administration because Archelaus had been deposed (Brown 1977: 547–56; Benoit DBSup 9: 704–15). (e) Although this item differs somewhat from the immediately preceding one, Luke’s idea that the two parents were purified (“their purification according to the Law of Moses”: 2:22) is not supported by a study of Jewish law, whence the attempts of early textual copyists and of modern scholars to substitute “her” for “their” or to interpret the “their” to refer to other than the parents.
A review of the implication of nos. 1–4 explains why the historicity of the infancy narratives has been questioned by so many scholars, even by those who do not a priori rule out the miraculous. Despite efforts stemming from preconceptions of biblical inerrancy or of Marian piety, it is exceedingly doubtful that both accounts can be considered historical. If only one is thought to be historical, the choice usually falls on Luke, sometimes with the contention that “Those who were from the beginning eyewitnesses and ministers of the word” (Luke 1:2) includes Mary who was present at the beginning of Jesus’ life. See Fitzmyer Luke I–IX AB, 294, 298, for the more plausible interpretation that it refers to the disciples-apostles who were eyewitnesses from the beginning of Jesus’ public life (Acts 1:21–22) and were engaged in a preaching ministry of the Word. There is no NT or early Christian claim that Mary was the source of the infancy material, and inaccuracies about the census and purification may mean that Luke’s infancy account cannot be judged globally as more historical than that of Matthew.
-------------------------------- [For Richard Carrier's assessment of the date of the Nativity in Luke see here.]
Hurricanes have been in the news lately, thanks to the United States
getting whacked by hurricanes Helene and Milton in
quick succession. The two hurricanes followed intersecting tracks, with
some areas of the U.S. state of Florida getting grazed or hit by both
storms.
Milton near peak intensity just north of the Yucatán Peninsula on
October 7, image from Wikimedia Commons
