My Engaging Debate with Paul Moser

Almost every time I have engaged Dr. Paul K. Moser on Facebook, he has berated me as being below him. This time was different, probably because it was noted that Dr. James Sennett had highly praised my first book, WIBA. 

Moser denigrated Dr. Daniel Dennett in this meme. It prompted a good discussion, starting with this response by Mark J. Mathews:

Richard Carrier and John Loftus express the same sentiment in their platforms. I'm also willing to engage their evidence for God's non-existence, if it's such a slam dunk. In fact, I'd be willing to resign my ministry tomorrow.

Okay, I thought. I'll respond. If Paul Moser reads and considers everything I said and linked to, I would think his faith took a hit. Two days ago I had posted my initial statement. Here's the rest of the engaging story:

Those First Copy-Cat Christian Theologians

The imagined, invented Jesus of the New Testament 

The huge faith bureaucracy—aka the church—is guilty of many sins, but one of its major failings is deception. It specializes in diverting the attention of its faithful followers from what has been learned about Christian origins. Perhaps the greatest irony in this exercise in cheating is that major discoveries about Christian origins—including the unreliability of the gospel accounts of Jesus—have been made by devout scholars who had set out to prove that the gospels tell the true story of their lord and savior. 

 

But as professionally trained historians examined the gospels, it became clear that these documents fail to qualify as history. In 1835, David Friedrich Strauss published Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined), in which he argued that the miracle elements in Jesus stories were mythical. In 1933, Charles Guignebert published another major study, titled simply Jesus, in which he wrote: “It was not the essence of Jesus that interested in the authors of our gospels, it was the essence of Christ, as their faith pictured him. They are exclusively interested, not in reporting what they know, but in proving what they believe” (p. 53). He labeled the gospels “propaganda texts.”

The God of Miracles in the Bible Does Not Exist!

There is no objective evidence for a god who did the miracles as reported in the Bible. Here is a good introduction to my book on it.

Accordingly, we can simply dismiss such claims and a god who reportedly did them, as I argued in a peer reviewed paper published by Internet Infidels.

For needed background information click on my name at Internet Infidels.

I hope this helps in your search for the truth! It should at least be interesting for you. If my readers know of anyone who thinks otherwise, and I mean anyone, please send them here! Cheers!

What Motivates an Atheist to be a Good Person?

Every Monday morning I'm posting submitted essays, excerpts from my books, and some of the best posts of the past. This post today is one of the first ones I made to this blog back in 2006. Enjoy!

Many Christians will claim that atheists simply do not have an ultimate motivation for being good. What motivates an atheist to be a good and kind person? Why should we act morally? J.P. Moreland believes atheists can and in fact do good moral deeds, “But what I’m arguing,” he says, “is, What would be the point? Why should I do these things if they are not satisfying to me or if they are not in my interests? [Does God Exist: The Great Debate (Thomas Nelson, 1990), pp. 118].

C. Stephen Layman argues in a similar fashion. He points out that the main difference between secular and religious moral views are that “the only goods available from a secular perspective are earthly goods,” whereas a religious perspective “recognizes these earthly goods as good, but it insists that there are non-earthly or transcendent goods.” Secular ethics, he says, must pay for the individual here on earth. “By way of contrast with the secular view, it is not difficult to see how morality might pay if there is a God of the Christian type.” [The Shape of the Good: Christian Reflections on the Foundations of Ethics (Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1991)].

They’re Picking on Religion, So Onward Christian Soldiers

But a few Standards of Honesty are in order

While I was in the process of writing my 2016 book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Belief, I set up a Facebook page to promote it. When the book was published, I did weekly paid boosts to help sales. I specified the target markets, e.g.. atheists, secular, humanist. Even so—don’t ask me how—my boosts showed up on Christian Facebook pages. What horrible reactions! None of the enraged Christians showed the least interest in engaging in the issues I raised. It was all hate and hasty conclusions, e.g., you were never a real Christian, you’re a terrible person, you’re going to hell. I eventually gave up on the paid boosts. So I guess the Christians won that round.

Trump is a God—Just Not the One That Christians Believe, by David Eller

Loki, the Norseman Trickster Chaos god

Beginning today, and every Monday morning that follows, I'll be posting submitted essays, excerpts from my books, and some of the best posts of the past. Today is a post by Professor David Eller. He's no stranger to readers of my books. He's one of our best and important scholars on religion. 

So as the author of an excellent book on Donald Trump, I asked him to write something for us all to ponder, especially in light of being a twice impeached one-term multiple indicted president. Dr. Eller sent me this:

 

-----------

 

Trump’s greatest trick is convincing Christians he is not a trickster.

 

The slavish and really obscene worship of Donald Trump by his misguided acolytes is incomprehensible from a purely political or personal perspective: Americans do not typically grovel at the feet of politicians or erect golden-calf images of them, and Trump is obviously a more despicable person than most would-be leaders. 

 

However, as others have commented, Trump’s Svengali hold on his “base” makes more sense from a religious viewpoint: Christians and conservatives, who have been programmed to genuflect to power and who see him as a perfectly-flawed suffering servant display the same unquestioning commitment to him and his untruths as they do to their god and its untruth.

I Plan On Monday Posts

My plan is to post excerpts from my books on Mondays. This will include excerpts from all of the authors too. I must resist the urge to revise most everything I wrote! Okay now, OPEN THREAD!

Is the Death of Christian Belief Coming Soon?

Cheap knockoff superstitions are taking over

This really is a puzzle: why haven’t decent devout believers—by the millions—founded an organization called Christians Against Televangelism? They should be so appalled/enraged that televangelists have turned the faith into a showbusiness money-grab, enabling so many of them to become multi-millionaires. They’ve reimagined Jesus as big business, exploiting magical thinking found in the New Testament: believe in Jesus to get eternal life. This turned out to be a major made-for-TV gimmick. 

 

But televangelism is actually the crass culmination of the church’s centuries-long embrace of show business. Millions of churches have been built, the theatres—the stages—for performances. Among these are the spectacular cathedrals, with magnificent stained glass, paintings and sculptures. No one has been able to surpass the Catholic church, in terms of costuming, props, and ritual. All this makes it so easy to get away with magical thinking.

Absolutely Amazing!! Watch as a Hawk catches my squirrel friend and I save him from certain death!!

LINK!! [Please subscribe to my YouTube channel.]

Can Christianity Survive—With So Many Problems and Scandals?

2,000 years of momentum probably can’t save it

Surely the clergy, those most in tune with God, must be the happiest people on the planet: they enjoy a personal relationship with their creator, nurtured through years of prayer and pious study. How can their constant refrain not be, “This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it”? (Psalm 118:24) But this doesn’t seem to be the way things are working out. A few weeks ago I published an article here titled, The Morale of Christian Clergy Is Taking a Big Hit, 

based partially on a study that many clergy aren’t doing so well. Then I came across this article, United Methodist pastors feel worse and worry more than a decade ago:

“A survey of 1,200 United Methodist clergy found that half have trouble sleeping, a third feel depressed and isolated, half are obese, and three-quarters are worried about money...[they] feel worse and worry more than they did a decade ago.”

I suspect that the vulnerability of Christianity might be a contributing factor—and its weaknesses had not been so openly discussed just a decade ago, although that discussion had been stimulated in 2001 with the publication of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Sam Harris followed in 2004 with The End of Faith, and Christopher Hitchens in 2009 with God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Never before had the Christian faith been critiqued so publicly, so devastatingly—and other secular authors have been encouraged to add their insights. There are now well more than five hundred books—most published since 1999—that explain, in detail, the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. And, of course, the Internet has provided a platform for atheist/secular thinkers to spread the word that belief in god(s) is hard to justify.

Aesop's Fables in the New Testament

It can be interesting to try to work out the sources used by the New Testament authors. Here are some examples from both the author of Matthew and the author of Luke-Acts that ultimately come from Aesop's Fables.

The first is about a fisherman and his flute. Matthew and Luke have matching words and phrases in a Jesus parable with children singing the song of the Aesop's fisherman to their friends.

The Fisherman Piping A Fisherman who could play the flute went down one day to the sea-shore with his nets and his flute; and, taking his stand on a projecting rock, began to play a tune, thinking that the music would bring the fish jumping out of the sea. He went on playing for some time, but not a fish appeared: so at last he threw down his flute and cast his net into the sea, and made a great haul of fish. When they were landed and he saw them leaping about on the shore, he cried, "You rascals! you wouldn't dance when I piped: but now I've stopped, you can do nothing else!" Comment: This fable is mentioned in Histories of Herodotus, written around 430 BCE.

Matthew 11:16-17 ESV 16 "But to what shall I compare [ομοιωσω] this generation? It is like children [παιδιοις] sitting [καθημενοις] in the marketplaces and calling to their playmates, 17 "'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not [ηυλησαμεν υμιν και ουκ ωρχησασθε εθρηνησαμεν και ουκ] mourn.' Luke 7:31-32 ESV 31 "To what then shall I compare [ομοιωσω] the people of this generation, and what are they like? 32 They are like children [παιδιοις] sitting [καθημενοις] in the marketplace and calling to one another, "'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not [ηυλησαμεν υμιν και ουκ ωρχησασθε εθρηνησαμεν και ουκ] weep.'

The next example is a parable in the form of a joke where two examples set the expectation and the third reverses the expectation. The third expectation is like the Aesop's Miser who buried his treasure so that it was useless.

“My overdosing on religion was becoming a serious problem”

It’s a problem for the world as well

When Christopher Hitchens died in December 2011, a volcano of Christian hate erupted. Devout folks who’d never heard of him suddenly found out that he’d written a book (2009) titled, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. They spewed rage and invective on social media, savoring the idea that Hitchens was suffering—and would suffer forever—in the fires of hell. “Love your enemy” (Jesus-script, Matthew 5:44) has probably rarely been so widely ignored. Ironically, their fury probably drove sales of the book—which even now, fourteen years later, has a high Amazon sales ranking. 

 

It is my suspicion that most of these outraged folks are also unaware of the extensive role religion has played in poisoning the human experience. The gospel of John fueled anti-Semitism, no doubt inspiring Martin Luther’s murderous rage against the Jews, which in turn helped provide the Nazi rationale for the Holocaust. The Crusades were religion-motivated wars. Slavery was easily championed by good Christians who took their Bibles seriously. Our democracy is in jeopardy because obsessive-compulsive believers want to impose their understanding of god on everyone. The evidence of religious poison is on the news every day.

Trying to Make a Horrible Jesus Quote Look Good

But wishful thinking and tortured logic can’t make it happen

The high-profile, very wealthy televangelists—Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen come to mind—make us wonder if they really do believe in Jesus. They have played major roles in turning Jesus into big business. Their lifestyles don’t seem compatible with the ancient preacher portrayed in the gospels. Jesus, so we’re told, championed the poor and condemned the rich, e.g., Mark 10:25 (KJV): “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Luke 6:20 (NRSVUE): “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.” Matthew 19:21 (KJV): “Jesus said unto him, ‘If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven, and come and follow me.’”

 

So pardon our suspicion that Copeland and Osteen—and many others—are phonies. They’re in it for the money.

Daniel Mocsny On Facts and Trump's Big Lie

I'd love to find a planet where people agree on facts! As evidence that Earth is not that planet, a recent poll found that 63% of Republican Party members in the USA continue to believe Trump's Big Lie that he won the 2020 election. There's a phenomenon in psychology called denialism, a person's choice to deny reality as a way to avoid a psychologically uncomfortable truth. There is also disinformation propagated by various individuals and organized groups with the aim of confusing people about the facts. For example, the disinformation campaign funded by fossil fuel companies and conservative think tanks has sown profound confusion about the facts of climate science, much as the Tobacco Institute earlier pioneered the same FLICC model to dupe people into doubting the health hazards of tobacco use. (FLICC: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible / inconsistent expectations (demanding an impossible standard of proof from the other side while requiring little or no standard from one's own side), cherry picking, conspiracy ideation. I'd like to squeeze in a letter T for tribalism / team loyalty, but that would wreck the acronym.)

Religionists and denialists use similar methods, and are sometimes the same people. I suspect Trump's appeal to America's Christians is due to the preparatory work most of them received via religious indoctrination. They acquired the habit of trusting the verbal pronouncements of their team's authorities without evidence or fact-checking. All Trump had to do was move into the cognitive house already built.

Testing our Tolerance for Tedious God-Talk

Why would a good, wise god put up with it?

The authors of the four New Testament gospels had a simple goal: to promote belief in the Christ they worshipped. Scholar Charles Guignebert, in his 1935 classic work Jesus, wrote: 

 

“It was not the essence of Jesus that interested the authors of our Gospels, it was the essence of Christ, as their faith pictured him. They are exclusively interested, not in reporting what they know, but in proving what they believe.” 

 

In other words, they were not historians, but propagandists. In fact, intensive critical study of the gospels has demonstrated that these documents do not qualify as history. Their authors don’t identify their sources, but it’s even worse than that. Matthew and Luke copied major portions of Mark’s gospel without mentioning that’s what they’d done, i.e., they plagiarized—and changed Mark’s text to suit their own agendas.

Daniel Mocsny On Faith and the Ontological Argument

As an example, suppose a street vendor offers to sell me a Rolex watch for $50. A check online shows Rolex watches selling for $12,000 and up (way up). By coincidence, the street vendor's "Rolex" comes with no kind of certification. Instead the street vendor says "Trust me." The vendor provides no other evidence of authenticity. I would have to take the vendor on faith, since I have no evidence that the "Rolex" is real.

A watch whose authenticity I must take on faith is less perfect than a watch whose authenticity carries a bit more heft, such as appraisals by multiple independent experts (who don't stand to benefit from the sale, and who stand to lose if they can be shown to be wrong), along with a certificate of authenticity from a credible organization that has an incentive to be honest (such as being sued for damages if it issues false certificates). In the event of a dispute, I could probably get a court of law to rule on the authenticity of an expensive watch.

While I would never actually buy a Rolex when a $20 digital watch keeps time well enough, this example shows how something I can verify as genuine to a high probability beats something I have to take entirely on faith.

You can see where I'm going with this. A God whose only evidence is the preacher's command to "trust me" is less perfect than any God (or, perhaps, any thing) that doesn't require faith. Especially when the preacher or vendor who says "trust me" stands to gain if I do.

Thus if I imagine a perfect God, in line with the Ontological Argument, I imagine a God who doesn't require me to rely on faith.

Papias and Earliest Gospel Traditions

In the first 2-3 centuries of the Christian religion, we observe astonishing creative diversity. As this essay reveals, this diversity characterized the movement(s) from the beginning, even in the the initial decades of Christian story-telling. When we read Papias (preserved in fragmentary form in Eusebius, EH 3.39), we find a messy description of earliest cultic "gospel" traditions. Circa 100 C.E., he composed a (since lost) five-book work titled Guide to the Master’s Sayings. Assuming his achieved prominence within nascent Christian communities even to undertake such a project and have it survive and quoted for centuries, we may surmise that Papias’s proximal acquaintance with these early story-telling communities began quite a bit prior to his published work, that is, in the late first century. 

The Eccentric, Inflated, Dangerous Theology of John’s Gospel

Read it and weep—and get over it

Here’s a book title that would dumbfound many devout churchgoers: This Tragic Gospel: How John Corrupted the Heart of Christianity. The author, Dr. Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr., states that the author of John intended his gospel to replace the earlier gospels (p. 180), and he refers to the “howling conflict between Mark and John…” (p. 13) Burton Mack wrote: “What a somersault, turning the page between Luke’s life of Jesus and the Gospel of John” (p. 175, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth). Peter Brancazio notes that John’s gospel “will come as an astonishing surprise. Here the reader will encounter a radically different portrait of Jesus, both in terms of his message and his person” (p. 373, The Bible from Cover to Cover: How Modern-Day Scholars Read the Bible).

Magical Thinking Is Christianity’s Biggest Mistake

There are plenty of other mistakes as well

If I were asked to debate a flat-earther, Holocaust denier, or someone who is convinced the moon landings were faked, I would decline the invitation. Nor would I debate an astrologer, the local store-front medium who tells futures using a crystal ball, or anyone who believes in chem-trails. All of these folks have been groomed in one way or another, by various kooks and quacks. 

 

They haven’t done/ refuse to do /don’t know how to do the study/research to find out how wrong they are.

I'm Taking a Break. I'll Be Back!

I have some important things to do. So I'll be away for up to a month. You can continue to expect Dr. Madison's excellent Friday postings though!

I ask our readers to do the single most important thing to increase our readership while I'm away. If there are some posts of ours you like, link to them on Twitter, Facebook, and especially Reddit, like r/atheism, r/DebateReligion, or r/DebateAnAtheist.

I now declare this to be an open thread! Enjoy.

Asking for EVIDENCE for God: Why Is that So Hard to Grasp?

Sentiments about Jesus do not qualify

According to the devout, evidence for their god is so obvious, “I feel Jesus in my heart!” “Just open the Bible, it’s right there.” “People all over the world have seen visions of the Virgin Mary.” “Every day I receive guidance from my god in prayer.” “The holy spirit fills me with joy during Sunday worship.” 

 

Please note these claims are usually made by people who have been groomed from a very young age to accept what they’re been told by preachers and priests. Or maybe they converted to Christianity as adults—which is no surprise, since the marketing of Jesus is a multi-billion-dollar business. There are thousands of churches ready to welcome converts into their grooming communities.

New Book Just Published: Guessing About God, By David Madison

I am pleased to announce that my new book, Guessing About God, as of today, is available on Amazon, Kindle and paperback.  

 

Paperback: Here is the link.

 

Kindle: Here is the link.

 

This book is the product of a very fruitful, rewarding collaboration with Tim Sledge, author of Goodbye Jesus and Four Disturbing Questions with One Simple Answer. 

 

Guessing About God is Volume 1 in a reissue of my 2016 book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief, covering three problems:

Here Is How We Do the Ontological Argument Correctly!

"Overall, I can conceive of a being than which is greater than the being in the Bible." --Jake Johnson on Facebook.

Open Thread On July 4th. Bring the Fireworks!

Not that any thread left to itself doesn't end up discussing anything and everything! ;-)

I'm busy right now so don't send any comments for me to respond to.

Get ready, get set, GO!

On Thanking God for Cruel Randomness, by Rob J. Hyndman

What follows comes from an online book by Rob J. Hyndman, titled Unbelievable. He says of himself: "I was a Christian for nearly 30 years, and was well-known as a writer and Bible teacher within the Christadelphian community. I gave up Christianity when I no longer thought that there was sufficient evidence to support belief in the Bible. This is a personal memoir describing my journey of deconversion....In this book, I reflect on how I was fooled, and why I changed my mind."

On Thanking God for Cruel Randomness

The practice of thanking God for safety and protection, for food and drink, for health and well-being, or for any other “blessings”, might appear to be a commendable habit, but it is actually deeply troubling because of what it implies.

A miraculously intervening God is an unjust capricious God, sparing some and saving others, apparently on a whim.

If God really was selecting people to protect on the basis of some bigger picture, then you would not expect the number of people who are killed in various ways to be subject to the rules of probability. However, I can predict with remarkable accuracy the road toll each year, the number of people who will be struck by lightning, the number of people who will be killed by shark attacks, and so on. Each of these causes of death has a certain rate of occurrence that is quite predictable.

It is not just the number of deaths that is predictable, it is the whole probability distribution of deaths that is predictable. If you know the average number of deaths by car accidents in a city, then it is possible to calculate all the percentiles for that city. For example, you can estimate the numbers of deaths that would be exceeded only once every ten years. When you do this for many cities, you find that the 1-in-10-year extremes are exceeded in approximately 10% of cities each year. This is exactly what you would expect if the world was random, but not what you would expect if anyone was in control.

Car accidents, diseases, and industrial accidents all follow the same probability distribution, known as the “Poisson distribution”. The Poisson probability distribution is based on the assumption that accidents happen randomly. It is simply not possible for tragedies to appear to follow the Poisson probability distribution while actually being controlled by God. Any interventions of God that interfere in the random processes would be detectable. If they are not detectable, then they are random and God is not involved.

If we accept that the world is random, and that bad things happen to everyone by chance, where does that leave God? Either he does not exist, or he has no power, or he does not care. Whichever of those answers you prefer, God does not deserve our thanks. LINK.