The scandal of divine negligence
In the face of massive human and animal suffering, Christian apologists offer tired clichés:
· God works in mysterious ways
· God has a larger plan that we cannot see or know about
· To preserve our free will, God chooses not to interfere
Yet no hard evidence is offered to back up these speculations to exonerate God. They are mediocre theological responses to crises in the real world.
This is a helpful post for readers deciding whether to get my anthology on miracles. Be Kind. Please Share. Link to it. Click on the Tag. Thank you!
--On Promoting The Case against Miracles.
Part 1 Miracles and the Abject Failure of Christian Apologetics
1| Miracles and the Challenge of Apologetics, By David Corner
2| God Would Not Perform Miracles, By Matt McCormick
3| Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence, By John W. Loftus
4| Properly Investigating Miracle Claims, By Darren M. Slade
5| Assessing Keener’s Miracles, By Edward T. Babinski
6| The Abject Failure of Christian Apologetics, By John W. Loftus
7| Why Do Christians Believe in Miracles?, By Valerie Tarico
Part 2, Properly Investigating the Miracle of Biblical Revelation
8| Why the Romans Believed the Gospels, By R. G. Price
9| How NT Writers Helped Jesus Fulfill Prophecy, By Robert J. Miller
10| The Prophetic Failure of Christ’s Return, By Robert Conner
11| 5 Inconvenient Truths that Falsify Biblical Revelation, By David Madison
Part 3, Properly Investigating Key Biblical Miracles
12| Evolution is a Fact! By Abby Hafer
13| OT Miracle Genres as Folklore and Legend, By Randall Heskett
14| Science, Miracles and Noah’s Flood, By Clay Farris Naff
15| Jesus Christ: Docetic Demigod, By Robert M. Price
16| Miracles of the Christian Magicians, By Robert Conner
17| Credulity at Cana?, By Evan Fales
18| The Resurrection of Jesus Never Took Place, By John W. Loftus
19| “If we went crazy, it was for God,” Paul’s Christianity, By Robert Conner
Epilogue
About the Contributing Authors
Appendix: "Hume On Proof and Mathematical Probability" by John Loftus
To learn about all 12 of my books I described each one of them for a series in 2022 called 12 Days of Solstice.
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John W. Loftus is a philosopher and counter-apologist credited with 12 critically acclaimed books, including The Case against Miracles, God and Horrendous Suffering, and Varieties of Jesus Mythicism. Please support DC by sharing our posts, or by subscribing, donating, or buying our books at Amazon. Thank you so much!
Too many crutches for faith
I think we all—including devout Christians, by the way—sympathize with doubting Thomas depicted in John 20. The other disciples had told Thomas that the resurrected Jesus had appeared to them, but he was skeptical. He wanted evidence: “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” (John 20:25) So indeed, Jesus showed up again with Thomas present: “Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you, ’” (20:26) and he obliged Thomas’ request for evidence: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (20:27-28)
In the face of massive human and animal suffering, Christian apologists offer tired clichés:
· God works in mysterious ways
· God has a larger plan that we cannot see or know about
· To preserve our free will, God chooses not to interfere
Yet no hard evidence is offered to back up these speculations to exonerate God. They are mediocre theological responses to crises in the real world.
In fact, Christian theology itself undermines any credible concept of a good, competent God. God is watching carefully, i.e., Christianity is totalitarian monotheism.
Nothing we do escapes his notice: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Matthew 12:36-37
Moreover, prayer works because God can even read our minds. Christians believe in, love, worship, and sing songs to this God who pays such close attention to every human being.
Picking the wrong holy hero
These are two of the biggest con jobs pulled off by the church. (1) Convincing its followers that Jesus was (is) the finest, greatest man who ever lived, which is not at all what we find in the gospels. (2) Fooling everyone about the gospels themselves, that they are the greatest story ever told. Anyone who reads them without faith bias can see this isn’t true.
But can the con jobs last forever? Maybe people are catching on. This past Monday, John Loftus posted here the link to James A. Haught’s article, Christianity Is Collapsing, showing the data published by Gallup: “Tall-steeple ‘mainline’ Protestant faiths—once the pillar of WASP respectability—suffered worse, dropping so severely they’re dubbed ‘flatline’ Protestantism. Born-again churches followed. Southern Baptists lost two million members since 2006…Sincere people don’t claim to know supernatural things that nobody can know. They reject religion’s magic claims that lack any evidence.”
In the face of massive human and animal suffering, Christian apologists offer tired clichés:
· God works in mysterious ways
· God has a larger plan that we cannot see or know about
· To preserve our free will, God chooses not to interfere
Yet no hard evidence is offered to back up these speculations to exonerate God. They are mediocre theological responses to crises in the real world.
When a religion is big business—actually a colossal business, with worldwide brand recognition—it’s hard for the CEO to be honest. I’ve always thought it would be smart for Pope Francis to hold a weekly Vatican news conference, to announce the steps taken every week to stop priests from raping children, e.g., this is how many pedophile priests have been handed over to the police; this is how many bishops have been defrocked and excommunicated for covering up the problem, for transferring offending priests to other parishes.
If you use Thomas Paines's The Age of Reason as a required textbook in a Philosophy of Religion course, as I have done for many years, your students will not eagerly devour its contents and shower you with tears of gratitude for providing them with this eye-opening experience of what is really in the book they revere as the inspired Word of God. Nor will they be shamed by the astonishingly detailed knowledge of both the Old and New Testaments that Paine and Jefferson possessed. On the contrary, when such students are required to read The Age of Reason and to discuss it in class, they become (by degrees) irritated, belligerent, and finally downright angry. Inter-Varsity and Campus Crusade for Christ types are the most vocal and the most argumentative. I welcome (and even solicit) their objections. Having heard them out, my response is always the same: “I didn’t write The Age of Reason; Thomas Paine did. Is he wrong? Did he misrepresent what the Bible says? I don’t think so. But don’t take my word for it. Go home and read your own Bibles. Check him out. If you can find a single passage that he has misquoted or manufactured or misinterpreted, write an essay in which you convincingly demonstrate his error(s) and I will give you a grade of “A” for the course and urge you to submit your essay for publication in a reputable philosophical or religious journal with my enthusiastic recommendation.” I have been teaching philosophy for 42 years and during that time no Paine-incensed student has ever submitted such an essay. The reason is clear: The Age of Reason is accurate and his documentation is irrefutable.
Teaser quote: Literature, art, and mythology did not get us any of the things science has--better crops, clean water, chemistry, biology, computers, smartphones, physics, psychology, anthropology, vaccines, cancer cures, heart surgery, antibiotics, MRI, cleaner air, sanitation, lasers, and on and on and on. They produce no knowledge on their own. They are not ways of knowing or discovering anything. They may be enjoyable, moving, and very wonderful emotional past-times-incredibly important aspects of human culture that we have enjoyed for millennia--but that's it. It is no diminishment of their import to the human condition to recognize they are not science, not ways of knowing. LINK.
In the face of massive human and animal suffering, Christian apologists offer tired clichés:
· God works in mysterious ways
· God has a larger plan that we cannot see or know about
· To preserve our free will, God chooses not to interfere
Yet no hard evidence is offered to back up these speculations to exonerate God. They are mediocre theological responses to crises in the real world.
In my article here two weeks ago, Three Christian Gods Missing in Action, and last week, Bluffing, Talking Piffle and Lying About Jesus, I did not discuss Jesus mythicism, i.e., the arguments made by some scholars that Jesus was a mythical figure. Our resident troll, Don Camp, responded at length to the first article, and my rebuttal was the second. When he jumped back in to continue the conversation, he commented, “Everyone here seems to have bought into the Jesus myth myth.” Which can be done, he pointed out, by “writing off the textual evidence for the Jesus event.”
Strange, my topic wasn’t Jesus mythicism, and I doubt very much that “everyone here” at the DC Blog accepts it, but this was Mr. Camp’s attention grabber. He doesn’t seem to grasp that many of us accept that there might have been a Galilean peasant preacher, but whoever and whatever he was has been hopelessly obscured by the layers of myth, folklore, fantasy, and magical thinking piled on by the gospel writers. A real Jesus could have become mythicized. Virgin birth and resurrection, for example, are symptoms of that. In the Wikipedia article on resurrection beliefs in the ancient world, we find this:
The scandal of divine negligence
Christianity is totalitarian monotheism: God is watching carefully.
Nothing we do escapes his notice: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Matthew 12:36-37
Moreover, prayer works because God can even read our minds. Christians believe in, love, worship, and sing songs to this God who pays such close attention to every human being.
John received his Ph.D from Indiana University and his Bachelor of Arts from Calvin College. He taught Philosophy and Ethics at Butler University (Indianapolis, IN), Emory University (Atlanta, GA), California State University, Fresno, Clovis Community College, Monterey Peninsula College, the University of the South (Sewanee, TN), and Grand Valley State College (Allendale MI). He participated in three National Endowment for the Humanities seminars for College Teachers: at the University of Illinois (Urbana, IL), the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas. He presented papers at the American Philosophical Association, various universities in the United States, and at Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom. While at Oxford he also presented several papers to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society. His publications include works in the areas of Ancient Greek Philosophy (focusing on Socrates and Plato), the Philosophy of Religion, Kantian Ethics, and Philosophy and Literature. SOURCE.
How to make a mess defending Christianity
In my article here last week, Three Christian Gods Missing in Action, in which I discussed a few of the more incoherent aspects of Christian theology, I concluded with this paragraph:
“Our request to theologians: please tell us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective data about god(s)—we need to dispel all this incoherence. Theologians themselves, I suspect, also wish they had data. Making things up, century after century, is a chore. And it’s such a nuisance that theologians can’t agree: they argue endlessly about what they’ve made up.”
Christianity is totalitarian monotheism: God is watching carefully.
Nothing we do escapes his notice: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” Matthew 12:36-37
Moreover, prayer works because God can even read our minds. Christians believe in, love, worship, and sing songs to this God who pays such close attention to every human being.
Dr. Joshua Bowen graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 2017, with a Ph.D. in Assyriology. As well as his Ph.D., Josh holds a B.S. in Religion from Liberty University, a Th.M. in the Old Testament from Capital Bible Seminary, and a M.A. in Near Eastern Studies from the Johns Hopkins University.That's some pretty impressive stuff! Josh also hosts the Hebrew Bible and Ancient Near East (HeBANE) podcast, and co-hosts the Digital Hammurabi podcast and YouTube channel with his wife, Megan Lewis. From the title we know he's an atheist and that this is the first of at least two works. Also impressive is that he can explain to the rest of us his scholarly knowledge of the subject at hand! I've downloaded the sample on Amazon and I love it. I've even added his book to my Amazon Wish List. Others are recommending this book as well. It's hot of the press. Go get'cha your copy. Let us know what you think of it!
