Dan Lambert Doesn't Think Bayesian Analysis Helps When It Comes to History

Timothy and Lydia McGrew use a Bayesian analysis (or inference) to establish the resurrection of Jesus by a percentage of over 99%. Richard Swinburne uses it to establish that if God exists then Jesus was bodily resurrected from the grave by a percentage of 97%. However, by definition, even any given mundane (or ordinary, as opposed to an extraordinary) historical event is a unique one-of-a-kind event. And the events leading up to it, and follow it, are also unique one-of-a-kind events. So when looking to see if any given event took place in the past the historian must calculate the probability of the whole series of events, the ones that came before and after the event in question, even though all of them are unique one-of-a-kind events. How does one assign probabilities to them all when they are all dependent on each other? In one sense they are all improbable for that reason. To see this from a different perspective, consider an observer before any event takes place. All events in the future have an extremely low probability to them. No one could have predicted yesterday that I would be typing these very words today, you see. In any case, here is Lambert on Facebook taking about this subject:

Why Hasn't There Been Any Sightings of Nessie In the Last Year?

In the past, before there were any cameras at all, travelers through the forests and sailors on the seas would hear noises and see glimpses of animals in the moonlit night. There are some frightening noises one would hear. With the wind or a falling branch their imaginations could run wild. Wolves passing by in the forest could be thought of as scary beasts. A crashing wave could be thought of as a sea monster attacking the ship. The people back then simply didn't know otherwise. So there were believed to be a whole host of mythical beasts in the world. The Griffin is one of them. For these people the world out there contained unimaginable beasts. Good paintings and the camera eliminated them one by one. The camera never captured them on film. So there was less reason to think they existed. But not all of them were put to rest, and others surfaced.

How to Debate a Christian Apologist, by Victor Stenger

LINK.

Sean Carroll & William Lane Craig Debate Naturalism vs. Theism

FFRF Educates Bible Illiterate Tony Perkins

Dan Barker and Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, sent a letter yesterday to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council responding to comments by Perkins about a press release from the Freedom From Religion Foundation that critiqued violence and sexism in the bible. Perkins accused Gaylor of not having read the bible and claimed “that’s not in the bible” during an appearance on Fox News Feb. 25 with Megyn Kelly. Barker and Gaylor’s response can be read here.

Jersey Flight: Christianity Broke My Heart

Meet the Amazing TAMers: John Loftus Part 2

"Here it Comes" I Sent The Manuscript To Prometheus Books Today

This clip from "The Wrath of Khan" expresses my thoughts as I ponder the impact of our new anthology, "Christianity is Not Great: How Faith Fails."



No violence is intended. It's purely metaphorical. We do battle against ideas though. ;-)

Prometheus Books is the premier atheist publisher of our generation and I'm happy to be a PB author/editor. Below is the official description of the book and finalized Table of Contents:

Professor Paul K. Moser Thinks Natural Theology is "In Big Trouble"

Paul Moser has a very impressive resume, and unlike some others he is a joy discussing the issues that divide us. Here is our discussion on Facebook about natural theology and what he has left, once he rejects it. Enjoy.

Meet the Amazing TAMers: John Loftus Part 1

Professor Dan Lambert Again In Discussion With Me

On Facebook Joshua Tongol quoted me, where I had written:

My goal is to force Christians to think about what they would believe if the Bible itself was undermined as a source of divine truth.” —John Loftus

Now enters Dan Lambert:

The Cannibal Dreams of the Puppet Minister

Ronald William Brown had a dream .  He wasn’t content with just doing a Christian children’s TV puppet show, and warning about the evils of porn. 

He wasn’t satisfied by working with the puppet ministry of Gulf Coast Church of Largo, Florida for 15 years.  He wanted more than just picking kids up for church in a van.  He longed for something more fulfilling than living in a trailer park, and running his Puppets Plus business.  To fulfill his dream, Ronald Brown wanted to kidnap, sexually abuse, murder, and cannibalize a child - a boy from his church!  

Founder of World's Largest Megachurch Convicted of Embezzling $12 Million

The founding pastor of the world's largest Pentecostal congregation has been sentenced to three years in prison for embezzling 13 billion won (US$12 million) in church funds. LINK. Up until David Cho's conviction Christians would have held him up as a model pastor of a model church and a good Christian. Now he'll be denounced as not a true Christian at all. "He doesn't represent true Christianity" they'll say. Then what does? No really, what does? ;-)

Quote of the Day, From Randy Pitkin on Facebook

For discussion:

Miracles don't happen today, God doesn't change, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever. Therefore, miracles NEVER happened. Case closed, move along, nothing to see here.

A House of Cards Built on Faith: Without a Historical “Old Testament” How Can Judaism, Christianity and Islam Have Any Credibility?

People who accept religion (especially those in the Judao-Christian-Islamic belief systems) do so emotionally (as if they have found absolute truth) only to be made into doctrinal mental slaves. Without context, the Biblical Scriptures they deemed to be their foundation of authority, they tend to mentally focus all their energy on theology while their scholars continually assure them there was (at least one time) a pure uncorrupted text (or texts) generally known as the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) as we find expressed in this typical Doctrinal Statement on The Scripture:

“We believe that the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are verbally and plenarily inspired of God, are inerrant in the original writings, and are the infallible authority in all matters of faith and conduct (II Timothy 3:16).” (Emphases mine)

Quote of the Day, by Jamie Fanol

I have written before that even among the very best Christian apologists there is a woeful, and perhaps even culpable ignorance about what atheism means. I also offered a solution to this ignorance. Perhaps Christians perfer to be ignorant because as Fanol said on Facebook:

If Christians understood atheists and how we use reason they probably would become atheists!

Faith Is A Slippery Pig" f/Peter Boghossian

See below:

Trying to Understand The Mind of the Christian Apologist is Like Trying to Understand the Mind of a Serial Killer!

I have spent my years online, and in my books, trying to reason with Christian apologists in front of the watching world (whoever watches anyway). It is my specialty. And yet today I feel like I am no better at understanding the mind of the apologist than when I began. Just how badly does the faith virus infect otherwise reasonable people? They cannot even understand what we're saying. They don't even try. They are in defensive mode. They only hear what they want to hear when the evidence of what we're saying should be clear enough. My goal is to break through to them, so I am forced to understand them. It's like trying to understand the mind of a serial killer. I cannot begin to understand such a person. It appears I cannot understand the mind of the apologist either, even though I was once one. How do I break through to them? I feel that if anyone can do this I can. But I admit I can't. The virus of the mind is that strong. It's very maddening. It is the most difficult challenge I have ever undertaken. [I wouldn't be surprised in the least if one of them copied this post and inserted the word atheist in it.]

Former Pastor Bruce Gerencser on "Why I Stopped Believing"

Bruce answers this question. His answer is very well-stated. I adjure you to take a look. He says:

The hardest decision I ever made in my life was the day in late November of 2008 when I finally admitted to myself, I am no longer a Christian, I no longer believe in the Christian God, I no longer believe the Bible is the Word of God. At that moment, everything I had spent my life doing was gone. In a sense I had an atheist version of a born-again experience. For the past five years, I have continued to read, study, and write. I am still very much a work in progress. My understanding of religion and its cultural and sociological context continues to grow. Now that I am free from the constraints of religion, I am free to wander the path of life wherever it may lead. LINK.

Dr. Randal Rauser is a Liar! A Liar For Jesus. There is No Escaping this.

Previously I have hesitated to say Christian apologists are liars. I have excused them because of their delusion. No More. Randal Rauser is a bald faced liar for Jesus. We have no more reason to trust anything he says, anything in defense of his ridiculous faith, none. Lest he delete his post I'll reproduce it below with a link. First the title:

Loftus admits Boghossian doesn’t care 
about truth. I call that bogusian!

 Liar! I did no such thing. Here is what Rauser said, see for yourselves:

The Next Wave of Evangelicals Will Accept Theistic Evolution

Ronald E. Olson's new book, Death Before the Fall: Biblical Literalism and the Problem of Animal Suffering, is more evidence the next wave of evangelicals will accept theistic evolution.I've written about this phenomenon before: The New Evangelical Orthodoxy, Relativism, and the Amnesia of It All.

A Forum This Weekend Featuring a Debate Between Sean Carroll vs William Lane Craig Will Be Streamed Live

The topic will be: God and Cosmology: The Existence of God in Light of Contemporary Cosmology. LINK. This should be good.

Atheism Sighting: HBO's True Detective.

Existential bleakness runs deep in HBO’s excellent new Louisiana noir crime drama, where damaged cops investigate a murder marked by cultic overtones.  I found this scene to be fascinating, between a cop who believes that religion is useful and necessary, and one who thinks that “If the common good’s gotta make up fairy tales, then it’s not good for anybody.”  (NSFW language throughout.)

Great back-and-forth verbal jousting between the two viewpoints.  You will have had these conversations many times with believers. 

“If the only thing keeping a person decent is the expectation of divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of shit.”

“What’s it say about life… Hmm?  You gotta get together to tell yourself stories that violate every law of the universe, just to get through the goddamn day.  What’s that say about your reality, Marty?”

Lesson One for Randal Rauser On How to Properly Exegete the Bible or Any Other Book

The hermeneutics required to understand any book are the same. They teach hermeneutics in first year Bible College classes. Randal Rauser must have skipped out on that class or flunked it. Here is a link to several of these college level texts. Rather than rehearse this whole discipline of learning let me highlight just a few questions reasonable people must first ask in order to properly understand a text, any text. We must ask basic questions like, "Who is the intended audience?" "What is the main point of the text?" and "What does the author take for granted?" Here is a listing of others written for college students.

How to Deconvert / Deprogram a Christian with Two Simple Demands

1. Demand textual proof that any verse of the Old Testament was written before 200 BCE. (There's 23,145 verses to prove them right or wrong.)

2. Demand historical proof (apart from using the New Testament to prove the New Testament) that Jesus Christ existed. (Let's see absolute truth prove itself.)