Hi John, I've been an atheist for over one year now, and both your books were a major influence to deconvert me from Christianity, WIBA and The Christian Delusion. I am also a regular reader of your blog, so thanks a million for helping to open my eyes, the truth has set me free! Keep up the good work. -- David Sapo via email, with permission.
Almost everything in the Bible reads like a product of its time and culture. The ancient Israelites just borrowed their gods from the Canaanites (El, Asheroth, and Baal all used to be on the same team), then made El the primary (and later, only) god, merged him with another god, Yahweh, and developed an entire religious and ritualistic system around these plagiarizations. Centuries later, the gospel writers drew on these same OT fabrications while borrowing extensively from their time and culture, incorporating god-man resurrection stories (i.e. Romulus) to create the Jesus narrative. If you start your epistemology with the Bible, you've built your foundation on falsehoods. Ignorance is bliss. Willful ignorance is faith.
Had Constantine established some religion other than Christianity -- say, Mithraism -- we would no doubt be celebrating the Tauroctony every spring and the birth of Mithras at the winter solstice. And if Mithraic scholars were to unearth copies of Mark or Luke from the Judean desert, the scrolls would be treated as cultic mystery stories of purely historical interest. Religion is as contingent and mutable as any other human cultural invention.
Do you think someone of another faith-- say a Mormon-- could look at their faith the way you (an outsider) would and still maintain that faith? Or would they not really be seeing it as the outsider does? What would it take for you to accept their faith? Do you have that kind of evidence for your own supernatural beliefs? Do you think the reincarnationist has the kind of evidence you'd require to believe in reincarnation? Do you think you should have the same kind of evidence to believe whatever you believe happens after death that you'd require to believe in reincarnation?
To paraphrase Orwell, one has to be a theologian to believe things like this: no ordinary man could be such a fool...It is apologetics: the practice of making stuff up post facto to buttress what you already know must be true. And, at bottom—and despite all the intellectual gymnastics of Dr. Plantinga—it all comes down to revelation, to what a particular group of people happens to find amenable as a "basic belief."
It's not that science has ever been wrong... it's that religion has never been right. Science has an error correcting mechanism; faith does not. That's why there is one science-- and it's the same for everybody no matter what they believe.
It's said that organizing atheists is like herding cats. We're implicitly compared to believers, who have acknowledged leaders, authoritative texts, and formal organizations. The reason usually advanced to account for this phenomenon is that we atheists are generally rather individualistic and thus reluctant to follow someone else's lead on such matters. But there's another reason which I've never seen presented in the context of explaining the herding-cats idea: atheism is much too broad a concept under which to seek to organize. The proper comparison is not to individual religious sects but to theists as a whole.
