The Contradictory And Chaotic Gospel Lies Used to Prove the Resurrection

The Gospels can’t even get their post-resurrection stories straight! In fact, they have used lies to cover earlier lies in selling Christianity. (I view both telemarketers and the Gospel writers driven by the same ideology: Sell the product at any cost. Lies are totally OK if it creates a sell / belief!)
Here are a few of the many lies the post-resurrection Gospel stories use:

William Lane Craig and the Kalam Cosmological Argument (#1)

Recently, William Lane Craig has produced a video, based on an essay in a book he and Paul Copan have edited this year (“Come Let Us Reason: New Essays in Christian Apologetics”) entitled “Terrible objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument”. I am yet to read the essay, but I must assume it to broadly follow the line of his video of the lecture “Worst objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument”.

I have a mild obsession with the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) and am potentially one of the internet infidels to which he derogatorily refers in his introduction. What I found in his exposition of these “worst” arguments is that the talk was a fantastic array of straw men, ad hominem, mischaracterisation of cogent arguments, and poor reasoning. I will tell you for why.

A Response to Justin Griffith a Freethought Blogger

You can read our respectful exchange right here. My response follows:

What is the Mission Statement of Freethought Blogs (FtB)?

Before reading any further this present post was prompted by responses to my post In Defense of DJ Grothe. I'm not picking a fight with the FtB but I would really like to know what the mission statement of the mammoth skeptical Freethought Blog is. What unites them? What is it? Most organizations have a mission statement. I think the FtB's should come together to produce one. I would really be interested beyond the fact that they are non-believers. I'm not talking about what they agree about, since they are united about non-belief and the need for diversity, but rather what their agendas are, their goals for being there. However, my guess is that if they produced one it would be so broad of a statement that it would end up being equivalent to something like this:

Elaine Pagels’ The Book of Revelation

The Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, has some of the most dramatic and frightening language in the Bible. In her new book Revelations: Visions, Prophecy and Politics in the Book of Revelation, Elaine Pagels places the Book of Revelation in its historical context and explores where the book's apocalyptic vision of the end of the world comes from. Listen on NPR

Elaine Pagels is Harrington Spear Paine Foundation Professor of Religion at Princeton University and has been called one of the world's most important writers and thinkers on religion and history. She won the National Book Award for her book The Gnostic Gospels. She is also the author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas.
Harry McCall

Jesus the Homosexual: Evidence From the Gospels

Jesus is created / redacted in each of the Gospel author’s mind to give credence to their own story of Jesus which – for them – would have trouble standing on its own merits. Thus in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is the New Moses and his life is set in a Roman Palestine context that mimics Israel in Egypt complete with the killing of the toddlers to Jesus even being taken down to Egypt by his family so – like Moses and the Israelites – Jesus comes out of Egypt.

How are we doing and what do you want?

So John is taking a rest and we wish him very well. He has left you, wisely or not, in our hands (by and large). As any good organisation knows, feedback is vital to providing a great service that people want and which is useful. I don't want to get all corporate on you, but this will hopefully be a useful exercise for us all.

Why Christianity has Contributed to the Development of the Porn Industry

For the most part, Christians have always felt uncomfortable with their sexuality. In this post, I will explain why this is so, and why the attitude Christian society has towards the human body and human sexuality has led to sex being viewed as something "dirty," and that the human body itself is "filthy."
The Christian view that humans are "born sinners" and that the body is filthy, and sex is "dirty" then leads people to act on their so-called "sinful nature"--which has inevitably contributed to the development of the porn industry.

Why was Jesus' tomb not venerated?

Thinking about the tomb, in the context of the last post, it is incredibly suspect that the place of the greatest spiritual and religious significance in the whole world seems not to have been venerated at least not until the 4th century CE onwards). This then prompts these questions:

1) Was Jesus actually buried in a tomb?
2) Was the position of the tomb unknown?

And these sorts of questions lead onto others, such as

3) Did the death of Jesus actually happen as reported?
4) Did the resurrection take place?

So let us look at the veneration of the tomb, or lack thereof.

My New Secular Student Alliance Speakers Bureau Page

Link. My offer only applies to NEW speaking requests and it starts today. I only ask for expenses. There should be no good reason why secular groups around the country wouldn't take advantage of this. I'll do it as my schedule permits.

Are the Differences Between the Christianities Insignificant?

Here at John Loftus' blog Debunking Christianity it's been emphasized many times by blog post authors and commenters alike that there exists no such thing as a Christianity, there being instead many Christianities. In fact there are so many Christianities with so many differences between them that the word "Christian" is useless, even for the purposes of rough outline, as a guide to what someone self-identifying as Christian thinks or believes about their own religion. This includes what they believe about gods, heaven, hell, the Bible, prayer, and miracles. In response Christians have maintained that of course there is variation in belief among the various Christian groups, but the differences are insignificant, subtle alternative interpretations. In this post I'm going to share with you an essay from Harry T. Cook which demonstrates that the differences between those calling themselves Christian are anything but insignificant.

Matthew and the guards at the tomb

In this post, I am going to look at the resurrection account given by Matthew, in particular his addition found in no other Gospel account, that there were guards stationed at the tomb.

According to Matthew, the chief priests were worried that the disciples might steal Jesus’ body to fake a resurrection, so they went to Pilate and got permission to post a guard on the tomb. When Jesus rose from the dead, the guards reported it to the priests, and the priests bribed them to claim that disciples stole the body while they were asleep. Matthew claims that “to this day” Jews report the body as stolen (as opposed to resurrected).

So what is really going on here? This post will investigate the historicity of this claim and conclude that the guards at the tomb, as according to Matthew, were ahistorical.

In Defense of DJ Grothe

Greg Laden, a Freethought Blogger, is calling for the resignation of DJ Grothe who is the President of the James Randi Foundation (JREF) which hosts The Amazing Meeting (TAM) every year. A few other Freethought Bloggers have cooperatively written posts that criticize him. Do you ever wonder why several Freethought Bloggers write on the same topic from time to time? It's because they all share an email where they talk among themselves and ask other Bloggers to chime in. As far as I can tell, what provoked this debate was a post by Ashley Miller after the Women in Secularism Conference, where she wrote:

This is wrong on so many levels

i had to post this. Hat tip to B__e for this one. It makes me feel sick. It is really quite wrong.

God loves abortion!

Or it is necessary for foetuses to die for a greater good. Well that's certainly one of the conclusions that must come from the statistics for natural, spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages; abortions that God has the power to stop, and seemingly designed in to the system in the first place in actualising this biological world.

The statistics for miscarriages are notoriously difficult to assess completely accurately. This is mainly due to the fact that many miscarriages go unreported due to simply not even being known by the mother. 

So why am I writing about this? Well because, statistically, it means that anywhere up to 75% of all pregnancies, of all fertilised eggs, die. This is a staggering number of pregnancy losses (for example, it is estimated that 3 out of 4 eggs that are fertilized do not fuse their DNA correctly, and therefore either do not attempt to implant or fail at implantation - see attached image taken from here). Of course, being exact on these numbers is rather academic. Whether it be 50 million a year in the US or 25 million is irrelevant since both numbers are ridiculously high!

The reason for talking about this is twofold. Firstly, for people who critique abortion on religious grounds, it makes somewhat of a mockery of their arguments. Secondly, again from a religious perspective, it does make God look a little callous. Nay, brutal and unloving.

The Ledge - why aren't there more atheistic films?

So I just received the blu-ray for The Ledge whose description is below. It is probably one of the first films to openly tackle the philosophy of religion and I am looking forward to watching it. However, it got me thinking, what atheistic films are there out there, and why aren't there more films that deal directly with these sorts of issues.

I suppose, in essence, the answer to that could be quite simple - because they don't command decent enough incomes; because the negative press they would get from the Bible Belt might damage the film's chances of making good money, and so on. Indeed, the film (based on a Carl Sagan book) Contact, was unable to remain faithful to Sagan in exploring the science vs religion debate by softening the debate and changing the ending (apparently - I have not seen it). The superb The Invention of Lying by Ricky Gervais had some extraordinarily good scenes (the 10 Commandments scene is one of my favourite all-time scenes) and I would hail it as the first openly atheistic film (and the internet infidels list these as atheistic films). Many others probably have covert undercurrents of exploring such subject matter, but disguise the subtext so as to appeal to the largest audience possible.

Providence Road Baptist Church, N.C. Pastor Charles Worley’s Sermon on Gays and Lesbians

Separation of Church and State . . . Yea, Right!

Yahweh is Proven to be a Pernicious, Lofty, and Fickle God

This is an excerpt from a book that we have written which is near completion, and was inspired by a heated online conversation we had with a well known Christian. In this excerpt, it will be proven that Yahweh, touted as the “ultimate and only true god,” is nothing short of a fickle, and pernicious god, with an added air of loftiness about him when it concerns the subjects of knowledge and wisdom. To prove this, I can show where in the Bible Yahweh views wisdom as being good, and also views it as being bad.

Who Says Our Efforts Aren't Worth it?

Here's another email I received that says otherwise:

Christianity and homosexuality - the inconsistencies of a Christian

I am writing a post in reaction to something about which I was talking with my Christian friend (let’s call him Colin). We were talking about homosexuality and his approach to it given his Christian background. Some points were interesting and some I fundamentally disagreed with. Here are his views:

• As according to the Bible, homosexuality is wrong.
• This morality is grounded in God.
• He is not homophobic and detests that label as it automatically halts any further informed discussion.
• People can have genetic or environmental variables which help to influence a persons likelihood to homosexuality.
• However, to commit to a homosexual act is an act of free will, and thus falls within the moral sphere.
• As a result, it is not necessarily the disposition of being homosexual which is wrong, but the decision to act upon it.
• He has no ‘problem’ with homosexuals and has / has had homosexual friends.

Hopefully I am not building up a straw man of his position, but it does demand some serious unpicking.
Obviously, as a determinist, this is all moot to me, but let me at least give this a good seeing to, so to speak.
To start, this clearly begs the question as to the authenticity of the truth claim of the bible. Can we trust biblical accounts? If not, which ones do we trust and which ones do we accept as being potentially errant? Let us look at the various mentions homosexuality gets:

Bible Believing Fundamentalist Dr. Peter Ruckman, PhD Lectures on the Bible

If Dr. Ruckman makes more sense than his enemies (as noted at end of the video), it’s only because his enemies are Christians! (Even atheists can learn something about the Bible and Christianity with Dr. Ruckman!) .

Hell (literally) makes no sense

In response to John's post, a bit tongue in cheek, I thought I'd post a video I did some time ago about the incoherency of hell. See what you think.

I Have Been to Hell and Back, Literally!

This is true. I have been to hell, literally! Want to see?

Welcome to the World of Christianity

As a Christian, you are now following THE supreme God who created the universe. Here are the absolute truths that make your God special:

Evolution as part of a necessary mechanism (and putting Creationism to bed)

We have had a resurgence in discussing evolution recently, thanks in no small part to the Creationist mental contortions of Creationbabble over on this thread. what this seems to show, to me at any rate, is that Creationists, and any shade of person who disbelieves the theory of evolution, simply does not understand the philosophy behind it.

In short, they just don't get it. Let me explain.