EVANGELICAL BAD FAITH V:

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Robert Conner

(magicinchristianity@gmail.com)

Forget what they told you. You want the truth, follow the money. -- Roxanne Bland

I regard the sincerity of evangelical true believers in general as a truism and I doubt that many of their numerous critics would disagree. After all, why would anyone knowingly pour money into an empire of fraud? The question forced on me and (I suspect) many others is how to account for the one or two percent of evangelicals who should know better. Although the motivations of the evangelical horde are a constant topic of speculation among sociologists, political wonks, and psychologists, Levine raises a crucial question: “Who benefits from the study of the historical Jesus—to what end is the effort focused?” Helpfully, she also notes, “Politics and theology need not be mutually exclusive …”[I]

The Ten Well-Founded "Presuppositions" of Atheism

Robert Conner wrote something recently that prompted me to write this.

The Ten Well-Founded "Presuppositions" of Atheism:

1. We require sufficient objective empirical evidence before we will accept any claims of divine revelation.

2. We accept the general principle that any specific miraculous claim must overcome the strong presumption that it didn't occur based on the overwhelming cumulative evidence that miracles have not occurred.

3. We accept the view that believers must shoulder the burden of proof as outsiders to show their faith is objectively true, given that learning a religion as an uncritical child from one's parents in a religious culture is a notoriously unreliable way to know which religion is true, if there is one.

4. We accept the results of scientific clinical studies that have shown petitionary prayers work no better than chance, and reject personal antecdotal unconfirmed stories told by believers.

5. We accept that the laws of nature in the ancient pre-scientific world were the same as they are now, so we have a very strong presumption against accepting miraculous claims in the ancient superstitious world prior to the rise of modern science and the modern world.

6. We accept that which is objectively probable, and reject that which is merely possible.

7. We reject any and all double standards and special pleadings from religionists when they argue for their faith over the faiths of others.

8. We accept the overwhelming consensus of scientists as the surest guarantee of what is true, over any and all claims by religious leaders, scholars and their holy books.

9. We proportion what we conclude based on the strength of the objective evidence.

10. We accept the approach of methodological naturalism in assessing miraculous claims, whereby we seek out natural explanations for any and all events in question, given that doing so is the best and only way to know the truth in the midst of so many religious frauds, fakes, liars and hucksters.

Don Camp is Our Gullible/Deluded/Anti-Intellectual Person of the Day!

Don Camp has been commenting here for a few months. He's on a mission to save readers from hell. He's the answer man, always doing what he can to show why we are wrong. But if there was ever a gullible/deluded/anti-intellectual person then he is it. The special pleading word salad he makes out of pure bullshit is bizarre to behold. I cannot stomach it. Since he really thinks he has reasonable answers to the questions posed of him, I want others to see what faith does to an otherwise intelligent mind. It makes people stupid. I've argued this in one of my top ten favorite chapters, chapter 3, "Christianity is Wildly Improbable", for my anthology The End of Christianity. Camp is another example of this phenomenon. He proclaims he has psychic abilities to hear "voices" from "the other side"! He doesn't even know that's what he's doing, but he is. I've written about this psychic connection in the writings of Alvin Plantinga, in another one of my top ten favorite chapters, chapter 5, "Accept Nothing Less Than Sufficient Objective Evidence", for my book How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice From an Atheist.

You must read this to see it for yourselves, below:

Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects him?, Part 2

In reference to God's goodness in the face of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, a Christian asked me this question:

Q: "Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects Him?"

Dr. Abby Hafer responds, author of The Not-So-Intelligent Designer:

The same reason a parent is obliged to help her children, even when they reject her. Parents bring their children into the world. According to this person's world view, God brought humans (and animals, and plants) into the world. Human parents have this very obligation toward their children--to keep helping them, even when they reject you. And by and large, parents do this. So--is God actually *less* moral, dutiful, strong and self-controlled than your average mother?

EVANGELICAL BAD FAITH IV:

STORYTELLING CHIMPS

Robert Conner

(magicinchristianity @gmail.com)

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (“wise man”). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee. - Terry Pratchett

Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects him?

In reference to God's goodness in the face of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, a Christian asked me this question:

Q: "Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects Him?"

A: Who is obligated to help someone who suffers? The person who cares the most, who also has the most power or financial ability, has the greatest obligation to help a person who suffers, especially if that person's life depends on it, and especially if it demands so little from the helper.

So God has the greatest obligation to help the ones who suffer.

If someone only helps others based on tit for tat, where helping others has strings attached, then that person isn't a giving person at all. Hell, the worse person in the world can abide by that.

Of all the beings who could alleviate this suffering God could have had the greatest impact by stopping the hurricane dead in it's tracks before it materialized. No one would know he did anything, should he want to keep hidden from us.

If a god supposedly created the universe with its laws then s/he could even perform a perpetual miracle and keep all hurricanes away from us. But s/he's either lazy, uncaring, powerless, or doesn't even exist.

Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Jose, and God's Love in the Book of Job

If you want to see the kind of faith the biblical god demands then look no further than the story of Job.

Job's story is fallaciously being used to offer comfort to believers in the midst of the terrible suffering caused by hurricances Harvey, Irma and Jose. "God knows what he's doing" they say, "even if we don't understand his mysterious ways, because his ways are loving and kind."

The lesson however, isn't about God's love or kindness toward us. It's not meant to provide any comfort to us either. The real lesson is that god reserves the right to bring as much suffering into our lives as he wants, even to kill us, for whatever reason he wants, and we are not to question why. We are to have blind unquestioning faith that he has the right to mistreat us at will. He can do whatever the hell he wants to us simply because he's GOD. We're simply to take what he dishes out. It doesn't matter if we're good or not either. This lesson is missed by almost all believers.

EVANGELICAL BAD FAITH III:

WHISPERING SPIRITS

Robert Conner

(magicinchristianity@gmail.com)

That the whisperings of a “Holy Spirit” would take precedence over evidence and its coherent analysis is quite literally unimaginable in any discipline other than evangelical Jesus Studies. Picture, if you can, the reaction should an academic historian reveal that his interpretation is being guided by the urging of a personal daemon. The ne plus ultra example of this epistemological whackadoodle is William Lane Craig, a Southern Baptist “analytic philosopher”—yes, you’ve just seen “Southern Baptist” and “analytic philosopher” used in the same sentence—who is on record as stating, “Should a conflict arise between the witness of the Holy Spirit to the fundamental truth of the Christian faith and beliefs based on argument and evidence, then it is the former which must take precedence over the later, not vice versa.”[i]

If a god is punishing sinners with hurricanes then climate change deniers are sinners.

The most powerful storm ever recorded in the Atlantic is headed straight for the beach houses of deniers Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and the Koch brothers. LINK.

If a god is punishing sinners with hurricanes shouldn't we expect that s/he could target sinners better than using the equivalent of a nuclear warhead? My mom, Sheila's sister, her best friend and many good people are in the path of hurricane Irma. Even the American military is better than a god, for they can target combatants with little or no collateral damage.

Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up...Oh, Wait…

A review of David Fitzgerald’s Jesus: Mything in Action

Christians Aren’t Going to Blow the Whistle

A famous atheist once railed at me for giving a damn about the “Jesus Question”—that is, whether or not Jesus existed. It’s not a relevant issue—so he said, and it’s a waste of time to devote any energy to it. Really? Since about two billion people are obsessed with Jesus, it doesn’t hurt to find out if their obsession is warranted—especially if we suspect that something isn’t quite right. Religiously-biased scholars, as it turns out, have done their best to maintain a cover-up—of course, they don’t call it that; so okay, they’ve been sincere, pursuing their agenda without guile. But they have been covering up: the case for Jesus is deeply, sadly flawed.

EVANGELICAL BAD FAITH II:

BEGINNING TO DOUBT

Robert Conner

(magicinchristianity@gmail.com)

To the dismay of the true believer it may be pointed out that disbelief in the resurrection begins in the New Testament itself and it begins even before the composition of the gospels. The earliest statement of Christian resurrection belief includes this flat denial of Jesus’ bodily resurrection by Christians: “But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead?”[i] Or to quote Michael Goulder’s literal translation of anastasij nekrwn ouk estin, “there is no upstanding of corpses.”[ii] “Surely the very fact that Paul placed a lengthy list of eyewitnesses of the appearances of the risen Jesus at the very beginning of the whole discussion is most easily explained by the suggestion that the apostle feared some of his addressees entertained doubts on this matter.”[iii] “[Paul] wants to insist as vigorously as possible, no doubt for theological and apologetic reasons [emphasis added], that Jesus actually was raised from the dead and that he was seen by a particular group of people who were divinely appointed as witnesses to the resurrection.”[iv]

Can You Be Good Without God?, an Essay by Dr. Brandon Winthrow

This fantastic essay was written by my friend Brandon Winthrow. It reveals that most people think atheists like myself are more likely to be serial killers than others, even though that's far far from the truth. I want people who know an atheist to realize this is nothing but propaganda, meant to marginalize and dehumanize us merely because our existence threatens the certitude of religious faith. Denounce it for us whenever you can. Thank you! LINK.

EVANGELICAL BAD FAITH: PART ONE

EVANGELICAL BAD FAITH:

PART ONE

Robert Conner

(magicinchristianity@gmail.com)

“Bad faith,” defined as the refusal to confront or acknowledge facts or choices, is the bedrock of Anglo-American apologetic Christian scholarship, the walking, talking incarnation of the phoniness, dissembling, evasion and casuistry of bad faith argumentation. Members of the Jesus Studies guild increasingly recognize that evangelicals in particular appear genetically incapable of sustaining any rational argument based on probability or coherent textual interrogation and nowhere are these disabilities more apparent than in the fundamentalist defense of the historicity of the resurrection. In point of fact, the Evangelical Resurrection Industrial Complex (ERIC) has churned out scores of scholarly tomes, hundreds of erudite disquisitions in professional journals, dissertations and commentaries, as well as debates and conferences beyond numbering, and the tsunami of dishonest verbiage shows no sign of receding. Fear not, however. I have no intention of dragging the reader through the miasma left in the wake of this fetid inundation. I wish only to suggest that evangelicals have permanently disqualified themselves from rational discourse and can henceforth be left to natter among themselves.

Why Conservative Christians Should Love Abortion

A couple of years ago, I published a blog post showing that if one accepts the explanations offered by apologists like William Lane Craig for some of the terrible things Yahweh commands, then one should want there to be as many abortions as possible. Since these explanations — or excuses — recently came up in the comments section here, I decided to re-publish that post. The conclusion is of course not meant to be taken seriously, but it does follow (with a few minor assumptions that would be unreasonable to deny) from the screwed-up views of these apologists.

Richard Carrier and Bayes' Theorem, One More Time

Richard Carrier and I may have found a partial agreement when it comes to the use of Bayes' Theorem (but maybe not).

Take this scenario:

It is impossible that as of this very moment all green highway signs will verbally discuss current events with us, if we stop to talk with them.

There are three ways to deal with this in Bayesian terms.

“God Can Do Anything”

As a sort-of follow up to my previous post, one more comment related to the problem of evil:

According to some believers, God can do anything – and that means literally anything. He can make square circles, married bachelors, and even non-Catholic Popes! In these people's opinion, to say that God is omnipotent is to say that logical impossibility is no obstacle to his power.

The Christian Knack for Insulting Our Intelligence

Why in the world do they believe such things?

Sometimes even Sunday school kids have the presence of mind to ask, “But where did God come from?” To which the assurance is always given, “Well, God has always been there.” But rarely do the kids—or even the adults—ever ask, “But how do you know that?” How do you KNOW that about God? Without the evidence it’s just another assumption—one of so many that derail religious thinking. Bertrand Russell punctured this lazy conjecture when he pointed out that it’s just as easy to believe in a universe that has always existed—as it is to believe in a god that has been around, uncreated, forever.

God Didn't Give a Damn When He Unleashed Hurricane Harvey on Houston

I've said this before when it came to Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. If there is an omnipotent God then he could have snapped his fingers to stop hurricane Harvey from materializing at all. If this requires a perpetual miracle to keep the earth in its proper place around the sun, or whatever, then so what? Aren't lives more important? Plus, if Harvey didn't happen then God could remain hidden, for some mysterious reason. We would never know he intervened. It's not asking God to alleviate all suffering, only the most horrendus kinds. It's obvious that if he's omnipotent he just doesn't give a damn. Christians are now boasting how they're helping victims, but the one who cares the very least is the God who could"ve stopped it but didn't.

Next time you say "God is good" think Harvey, Houston and Osteen!

Next time you say "God is good" think Harvey, Houston and Osteen!

Does the Matrix Possibility Mean Anything Can Happen?

Kingasaurus asked the million dollar question about assigning 0% Bayesian prior probabilities to claims:

John, isn't there a non-zero chance that we're all living in the Matrix and the programming could always be changed so that pigs do fly and amputated arms are "magically" re-attached?

Wouldn't this make the possibility of absolutely anything and everything non-zero?

Great question!

Kingasaurus, those type of scenarios are literally a dime a dozen. Did you see the "Men in Black" movie where a a cat wears a charm which is another whole universe? I could be nothing but brains in a vat. A demon might be deceiving me. The whole universe might be growing larger every second, or smaller, along with us in it. I've written about a few of them before. Technically they are all mathematical possibilities, but they not only cancel each other out, they're to be regarded by those of us living in this reality as impossibilities.

The Parameters of Bayes' Theorem, Part 2

I've been debating the uses and abuses of Bayesian quantitative analysis on Facebook with my atheist friends. What started it all was a recent comment I made about Bart Ehrman's debate against William Lane Craig, where Craig used Bayes to argue against Ehrman. This is what I wrote:

I've mostly been persuaded by Louise Antony and Dan Lambert that Bayesian analysis doesn't help when it comes to historical one-of-a-kind events, especially of the miraculous kind! If correct, Christians are using this math illegitimately. We must not follow suit. If correct, this kind of analysis of "miraculous" historical events is faddish and will pass.

Second, while it's technically true that every claim, no matter how bizarre, has a nonzero probability to it, some claims can be said to be so far out of bounds the most accurate thing we can say is that such an event is impossible. This is something mathematician James Lindsay has persuaded me about. To continue to act and speak as if a certain miracle has a degree of probability to it, out of the numerous multitudes believed to have taken place, is a misuse of normal language. So when Ehrman says the miracle of the resurrection is impossible, he's correct. What other word are we to use? When does a 99.9999% improbability (or some other higher than high percent) become a possibility?

Possibilities count if an omniscient omnipotent god exists, you see. We encourage the mind of the believer to continue believing if we grant it's possible, when everything we know says it's impossible. We should avoid Bayesian analysis in historical events and stick to normal language and say it truthfully as Ehrman does, that it's impossible. Yep, impossible. The reason Christians use Bayesian math is because they can force us into admitting miraculous events are possible, and that's all they need to keep on believing. Get it?

Third, to go on to compare other bizarre alternative explanations of the resurrection hypothesis (aliens, seriously?) is an exercise in futility, since bizarre stories are by definition bizarre. Even owning an interstellar spacecraft is far more reasonable in this day than an impossible event, by far!. Are we really going to stoop so low that we have to argue the resurrection hypothesis has less explanatory power than alien interference, before we've made our point? Nonbelieving scholars have adopted this Christian language game in response to the dominance of Christianity in academia. This must stop. The best explanation of the data, BTW, is Richard C. Miller's.

Fourth, there are no posteriors that can make an impossible event (see above) a probable one. Ehrman was correct even if he fails to understand Bayesian math. In other words, Ehrman doesn't have to know Bayes Theorem to know it's impossible that Jesus raised up from the dead. He's a historian. A good one. And he's absolutely correct. So why are some nonbelieveing scholars nitpicking him to death on this issue when he's right? Or, are we saying only philosophers of religion who have been trained in this Christian language game can properly reject the resurrection hypothesis? Surely we don't want to say that. Otherwise, let these philosophers reign too. ;-)

Since that initial comment I've been in a debate about Bayes for most of this month on Facebook. To set the record straight, I was initially wrong to say "it's technically true that every claim, no matter how bizarre, has a nonzero probability to it." More on that in a moment.

Dr. William Zingrone's New Book Is Awesome!

I met Professor Zingrone at Gateway to Reason a few weeks ago. He has a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology and teaches at Murray State University, KY. He's agreed to let me quote from pages 87-88 and 92-94 of his book, The Arrogance of Religious Thought: Information Kills Religion. It's from his 7th chapter on child indoctrination. Keep in mind this comes from a professor of Developmental Psychology!! I want my readers to see what an informed firebrand atheist sounds like. He is on fire. He's informed. He's passionate. And he takes no prisoners. He blogs at the site "we are done" Dispatches from the New Enlightenment.

Save the Children

Somebody has to tell them. We can’t keep quiet. Stridency is in order here. Tell the believers they have been hosed. They were sold a bill of goods as defenseless kids, and that's the only reason they uphold religious myths and negative judgments of out-groups. Why for example, is condemning others to eternal gruesome pain in some Omnipotent Prick’s never-ending medieval torture chamber politically correct? Why is it considered a normal facet of religion? Why is it allowed, unchecked, unchallenged? Why do we fill kid’s heads with these medieval fantasies? No more. All this from the religion of love: “God loves you, But, if you don’t believe what I believe, what we believe, or believe it in just the same way we do at our church… you will burn forever and deservedly so!” Religions convince kids this is real, normal, accepted. You wouldn’t buy it for a minute as an adult. That's why religions go for kids. It is reprehensible. What a crock. Nobody in a believer's immediate circle, even if they might think for a moment that condemning others is reprehensible as hell, (pun intended) dares to tell them, or even dares to think it for more than a moment.

But we non-believers can tell them, should tell them. Daily. Refute it. Constantly. Stridently. It is up to us. And we are telling everyone, and at unprecedented levels in the past decade since the beginning of the New Enlightenment. Never before has the skeptical freethinking non-believer community come out so strong, so vocal, so visible as in the past decade. But a generation ago, folks like Madalyn Murray O’Hair were doing it all on their own, ostracized, hated, and on the fringe. The vast majority of atheists were in the closet. You wouldn’t dare bring up atheism in mixed company, and if you did you were immediately associated with those dastardly commies: Chairman Mao, Khrushchev, Stalin and Lenin. Atheists were monsters that persecuted Xians and took away prayer and Bible reading in our schools. Now, non-belief and the critique of religion is mainstream and everywhere. We can now do more to reverse the damaging effects of child indoctrination on eternal damnation and all the other arrogant thoughts they have been conned into.

Once, while in downtown Chicago I got close to a kid in a street corner demonstration who was holding up a sign typical of Xian evangelists street preacher groups that said "Fornicators and Faggots Burn in Hell", or words to that effect, and patted him on the shoulder and nicely said “It’s all bullshit, pal.” I said it kindly. I was as nice to this late adolescent as I would be with any other human as they deserve respect, but I was not in the least bit respectful of the often cruel, religious ideas he was displaying, which deserve none. Somebody has to tell them. Every seed you plant can be another nagging twinge of cognitive dissonance. The religious aren’t stupid, merely hosed. And the hosing started when they were young: captive, vulnerable, trusting and unsuspecting.Religion just gets in the way. At best, it is a harmless diversion if kept to one’s self, but most often it is the prime if not only source of misogyny, homophobia, science denial, and division left in the modern world, at worst the world’s main source of xenophobia, dehumanization, and horrific violence toward women and non-believers. We don’t need this shit. Tell believers, at the risk of not being PC, tell them. They were coerced into it as unquestioning children or vulnerable adolescents. It is not their fault. You wouldn’t let your friends drive drunk, tell them not to try to run the world deluded by blind adherence to whatever brand of bullshit they were taught as children. Don't let your friends drive Xian or Muslim either.

Don't miss the rest below:

Making Deals with God…

So how’s that working out for you?

On the Facebook page that I maintain for my book—and for the promotion of atheism in general—Christians sometimes drop by, commonly to make angry comments. My own policy on Facebook, by the way, is that I never go onto Christian pages or sites to advocate atheism—ever. To me that smacks of bad manners…akin to me walking into a church on Sunday morning to argue with the preacher.

One comment that falls into the God’ll-getcha-for-that category was offered by a Stuart C. “So, let's see what the author does when he needs YHWH's intervention when he gets an aggressive cancer.” I suspect that even the most dim-witted believers can sense that Stuart is on thin ice here. We’ve all known devout Christians who have succumbed to cancers, despite prayer marathons to get YHWH to pay attention.

A New Argument from Evil

The problem of evil is well known: How can there be an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly good god if there is evil? The kind of reply most theists give is also familiar to most: Evil is not incompatible with God provided there is some reason for allowing that evil – for instance, in order to prevent something even worse happening. It is only gratuitous evil – evil for which there is no moral justification – that would pose a problem. And most theists appear to be confident that one cannot show that gratuitous evil exists. No matter what example one brings up – whether it’s that of a disease, a war, some natural disaster, or what have you – they think there is some possible explanation as to why God might allow it.

I think it’s actually pretty easy to show that there is gratuitous evil, however.

Science Brought Us the 2017 Solar Eclipse Experience, and so much more!