After publishing Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed in late 2018 I have become increasingly engaged in the field of biblical studies and Christian origins. The subject of mythicism is a complex one that is fraught with problems, as is the entire subject of Christian origins, because of the vast array of competing claims in the field, some of which are of dubious academic quality. Nevertheless, I believe that the field is maturing and has reached a point of growing consensus around a model for Christian origins without the existence of a human Jesus.
[Written by Teresa Roberts] Growing up in a genuine American cult, I soon learned that my body created a problem for the men in the church. Even as a young girl, I was expected to dress modestly and conduct myself in a way that would become a woman of god — with shamefacedness and sobriety. Except for my neck, hands and head, all else must be covered. Bare skin, even the shape of my body beneath my clothes could be used by the devil to cause a man to sin. According to the brethren, sexual thoughts were as bad as sexual deeds. If I shirked my duty as the sexual gate keeper, I could be the cause of god sending men's souls to hell. Of course, I'd end up in the burning lake of fire, too, as a great seductress.
Here is the first review of my anthology "The Case against Miracles"! Thanks so much Dr. Karen Garst! LINK. She wrote:
In a book much shorter than the Bible itself, Loftus has marshalled all the key arguments to prove that people should seriously doubt all religious miracle claims. This book should be required reading in all seminaries.
"All it would take is for you to be born a Shiite. That's the easy part. Indoctrination brings with it the certainty of faith. What would it take to change your mind? I'll tell you. Reject testimonial evidence coming from the past and seek instead sufficient objective evidence. People lie, they misrepresent the truth, they tell tales and spread propaganda. But the objective evidence doesn't lie. Treat your own indoctrinated faith just as you treat the religions you reject. It's the only way to know which religion is true, if there is one. It's the only way to eliminate a whole host of cognitive biases that keep you inside your delusions. [Here's a list of the top 12 to avoid.] Photo Link. Click on the pic to enlarge:
We all have different perspectives on this issue and mine are not meant to tell others what to do, but are merely for consideration. I suspect how we deal with believers depends on factors like 1) how much religion has hurt us, 2) how much we know about the religion under examination, as well as 3) what we think of the apologists we are dealing with, 4) the kind of venue in which the discussion is taking place (i.e., person to person, comedy, lecture, online blog, podcast, vblog, or book), 5) the nature of our target audience, and 6) whether we think staunch believers can be convinced and consequently whether our goal is to convince them, or to convince others who are on their way out, or already out the door.
The supreme killer text in the New Testament—the one that wipes out the story that Jesus rose from the dead—is a gift to us from the author of Matthew’s gospel. This is worth noting as Easter is upon us, but I wonder how many believers notice this text; or, for that matter, how many have done even a little due diligence on the gospel accounts of Easter morning.
My colleague at the Debunking Christianity Blog, Robert Conner, has offered a solid analysis in this book, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story—and his sharp wit as well:
“I've long suspected that what the majority of people know about Christianity derives from its major holidays. They get their religion from Christmas cards and Easter imagery—thinking the Easter Bunny was one of the twelve apostles and candy eggs were on the menu at the Last Supper.” (Conner, Debunking Christianity Blog, 16 November 2018)
I received a recent comment about my forthcoming anthology against miracles: "I’m eagerly looking forward to this book even though, after Hume, I’m not sure what more needs to be said."
This is nice to hear! I think it's my best anthology yet, but then I've thought that about each one as they were published. Probably no one is more eager to see this book published than me, as I've put so many many hours into it. Still, it's a legitimate issue as to why such a book is needed at all, especially after Hume's arguments.
I agree with you about David Hume. He's regarded as the most important English speaking philosopher, except that there are some powerful objections against what he wrote against miracles, even coming from atheists themselves. Since Christians keep writing books in defense of miracles as if Hume never wrote a thing, they need answered. This is a book that defends Hume and responds to specific miracle claims in the bible and in today's world. There hasn't been a book length treatment of miracles like this written by atheists in, I don't know, forever, and it's long overdue. Actually, it's Hume plus Strauss plus Darwin equals the destruction of Christianity and religions in general.
David Hume's influence over others is towering, and rightly so. In 1748 he wrote a pioneering chapter of objections against miracles in his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (chapter 10). This changed the course of theology, since he had a great influence on Friedrich Schleiermacher, considered to be the father of modern theology.
David Friedrich Strauss in turn was greatly influenced by Friedrich Schleiermacher at the University of Tübingen (1825-1831), who regularly attended his life of Jesus lectures. In 1835–36, at the age of 27, Strauss published his magnum opus--a mammoth of a work--titled The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, 2 vols. In it he denied the historical value of the Gospels and rejected their supernatural claims, describing them as historical myths.
Then in 1859 Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species was published which destroyed the Christianity believed at that time, along with others that were built on the rubble afterward. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on "David Hume" says, "Charles Darwin regarded his work as a central influence on the theory of evolution." Bet you didn't know that!
"We can't be certain how the Arabs became Muslim", says researcher Tom Holland. Fascinating! Was Mohammad ("the Praised One") originally Jesus? Was Islam originally a non-trinitarian Christian sect that rejected the need for an atonement on the cross? The evidence from coins don't lie. People do. This is extremely interesting and new to me. Makes sense. The first video is by the Atheistic Republic, who got me thinking. The others back it up.
...you were born somewhere else in the world. You might even pay to have bad karma removed! Which shows corruption abounds. So let me put it to you, to the degree there is corruption in a religious organization then to that same degree it's not from a caring god or a supernatural power. If so, say goodbye to all religions! For more religion photos of the week, see this LINK.
There are countless memes going around that ridicule talking snakes and donkeys, the ark full of animals, and a woman created from a rib. Who really cares about any of these? Any more than we care about fables describing floating axes, the sun standing still, or bears mauling boys who ridiculed a prophet. Aside from those who insist that the Bible is inerrant, ordinary devout folks don’t get too bent out of shape by the folklore.
But the ordinary devout folks also somehow manage to evade the grimmer, weirder ‘important’ teachings of the New Testament. If churchgoers spent as much time reading the Bible—really digging in—as they do watching movies, there would be more discomfort than they bargained for—and maybe quite a few would take their pastor aside to whisper, “Hey, Rev, this Bible chapter is really freaking me out.” Or do they just shrug their shoulders? They want to love their Jesus. It’s up to the minister to understand ‘all that Bible stuff.’
When I hear someone say that a god is responsible for something that happened or a decision that they've made, I cringe. Most things about religion have become cringe worthy to me. The more I explore the deeply entrenched mythologies of my own culture, the harder it becomes for me to take much of what humans do seriously. Little by little, I've realized that when it comes to our world view, most people simply embrace the one they've inherited. Religion is easy to pick on, however, because it's so full of blatant fairy tales. Yet, it's equally difficult to dispel, because the religious are such elitists. To break through their privileged exterior takes a sledge hammer, blow torch and chainsaw. They're not only blind to reason but they honestly seem to believe that they have a personal connection to the most powerful being in the universe.
All you had to do is be born into a different family and religious culture. That means you'll be going to hell too, if you don't confess Jesus as Lord and Savior! So wouldn't you wish you would treat your inherited Jewish religion as if you were an outsider, a nonbeliever, in hopes you might find the religion of Jesus before you die? Then you should test the religion you were actually born in with fairness and no double standards. For more religion photos of the week See this LINK.
In a shift that stands to impact both religion and politics, survey data suggests that the percentage of Americans who don’t affiliate with any specific religious tradition is now roughly the same as those who identify as evangelical or Catholic.
According to newly released General Social Survey data analyzed by Ryan P. Burge of Eastern Illinois University, Americans claiming “no religion” — sometimes referred to as “nones” because of how they answer the question “what is your religious tradition?” — now represent about 23.1 percent of the population, up from 21.6 percent in 2016. People claiming evangelicalism, by contrast, now represent 22.5 percent of Americans, a slight dip from 23.9 percent in 2016.
That makes the two groups statistically tied with Catholics (23 percent) as the largest religious — or nonreligious — groupings in the country.
“Nones have been on the march for a long time now,” Burge said. “It’s been a constant, steady increase for 20 years now. If the trend line kept up, we knew this was going to happen.” LINK.
“God inhabits eternity, outside of time and space.” So a pastor friend once told me, perhaps without realizing how much hard work was required for theologians to make God sound so good; they’ve been at it for centuries, redesigning God endlessly: an endless quest for respectability.
It’s just a fact, however, that the god who rampages through both the Old and New Testaments is a nasty-tempered tribal deity. Those who protest this assessment would do well to remember the story of Noah: “drown ‘em all” was old Yahweh’s approach to cleaning up sin—and getting even. And when Jesus ‘returns’ there’ll be a repeat—so Jesus himself promised (Matthew 24:38-39).
The story that Evangelicals find so convincing and delicious is this: Strobel, a tough-as-nails atheist journalist and his atheist family are out to dinner when his daughter is saved from choking to death by an evangelical nurse who felt called by God to go to the restaurant that night. Strobel’s wife converts, and Strobel sets out to prove her wrong, using the same strategy that made him a fearsome investigative journalist. He lines up scholars and theologians and confronts them with the hardest possible questions about their faith—and comes away convinced that the Evangelical view of the Bible and Jesus is true. He accepts Jesus as his savior and proceeds to lay out those persuasive interviews in his book, which goes on, as I said, to become a religion best-seller.
The problem, according to author and religion critic David Fitzgerald (and others), is that key parts of this story are distorted at best and fabricated at worst.
I posted this quote on Facebook from a recent CSI episode:
"People lie. The only thing we
can count on is the evidence."
This should be obvious and non-controversial, right? The evidence never lies. Only people do. But Christian apologist David Marshall felt threatened by the quote. Listen up, when apologists feel threatened by talk of evidence it should alert the rest of us they're not being honest about the truth. He responded:
It takes ignorance to defend the Christian faith; ignorance of science. I'd rest my case here but it'll flare up again and again since this is so important for faith.
Another principle which I advocate is to read between the lines. Ask yourselves what the opponents of Jesus and Paul said in response. Were the Pharisees that bad as a people? After all, they were the people's party. What arguments did most Jews have against the resurrection claim? They were there, they believed in God, they knew their OT prophecies, yet they didn't believe. What did early Christians say in response to Paul? What did they think of him, and why? Do you think these opponents were convinced by the sheer logic of what Paul said? If not, how did Paul's Christianity come to dominate?
Last time around, I wrote about Gray’s claim that religion isn’t meant as “a theory that tries to explain the universe,” but is instead “an attempt to find meaning in events.” And I pointed out one rather obvious problem with this claim — namely, that many do believe in religion as a way of explaining things. But even if Gray were right about the meaning of religion, there would be a problem with his view.
The way he sees it, religion gives us insights into the human condition. In this, it performs much the same function as certain works of fiction. The myth of the forbidden fruit, for example, teaches us, according to Gray, about the “ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom” — which he tells us is more realistic than the myth found in Greek philosophy “that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected.”
One of the reasons that the Bible cannot be taken seriously as a word from God—from any god, let alone a benevolent, caring creator—is that it includes so much trash. Christian apologists know this very well; they’ve written thousands of books, and preached countless sermons, making excuses, doing their best to sweep the trash under the rug. Well, maybe not sermons so much: preachers don’t like to draw attention to alarming Bible embarrassments.
It’s easy to avoid the landmines in Leviticus or the Book of Revelation: just ignore them. Not too many laypeople—outside of diehard evangelical Bible fanatics—bother with the less-trafficked books. Stand outside any church as people are filing out and ask, “Don’t you just love the prophet Ezekiel?” Yet, despite lack of interest about what’s actually in it, they dutifully carry their Bibles; what could surpass this holy artifact?
When life gets difficult, really difficult, it's better if you didn't believe in a god. Take it from me. I've been on both sides of the fence. When someone loses a 10 year old son to leukemia, or a daughter to a car accident, or a spouse who goes missing and is never found again, AND you pray for comfort or peace or a solution, which falls on deaf divine ears, I'm telling you it's better not to believe. For your pain is doubled at that point. The first pain is the suffering from the loss itself. The second pain is feeling abandoned by your god.
Over the years believing minds will convince themselves the loss was for the best, when they eventually ignore what should've been the case but was robbed by death. Or they'll read the obfuscations of some apologists who say Jesus carried them through their sufferings, or that he suffered with them. What does that even mean when one stops to actually think about it? But even by believing standards most of their petitionary prayers go without being divinely answered the way they were prayed. So it stands to reason believers are constantly, more often than not, disappointed from the lack of divine help, to say the least.
Me? Not so much...never to be exact! I never have to worry about any lack of divine help, and I never have to get frustrated over it either. In other words, I never have the added pain that comes from the lack of divine guidance, help, or comfort. Ever! So from my perspective, I say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me...and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” [Matthew 11:28-30; NIV] Now do you understand?
“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.” ― George Carlin
I was born with a vivid imagination. It was both a blessing and a curse. As a child, I wrote plays, stories, poems, songs and loved to pretend. Role playing was my favorite pastime. I could get into character better than any other child I knew. Until quite late in life, well past preteen, I dreaded growing up. The real world didn't hold the same allure and fascination of my pretend world. Unlike many of my peers, "adulting" didn't seem all that appealing to me. Whereas they were anxious, even excited, to date, get their first jobs and mimic the grownups in their lives, I was skeptical. The real world looked a bit grim and the faces of most of the adults that I knew were often work worn, worried, anxious or depressed.
Since humans began to walk upright, thousands of religions have come and gone. Many hundreds of gods have fallen out of favor: even many Christians themselves can’t stand the nasty god who stalks the Old Testament, although—hint, hint—it’s the same god in the New Testament. Christianity is now so splintered—the faithful have quarreled endlessly about it—even its most devout followers can’t agree on what True Christianity is. Millions of the faithful are holed up in their own defensive denominations, clinging to fragments of the faith they hold dear.
So what’s the point? Dan Barker has mentioned the elephant in the room: “I did not want to lose my faith, but I became painfully aware that Christianity has no case. I discovered there is no evidence for Christianity. And I also found out, to my astonishment, that there is no need for it.” (Losing Faith in Faith)
Hypothesis: Since Bayes Theorem (i.e., the math, the equation, the formula) cannot help bring us to a consensus concerning something accepted on faith, or assess specific miracles and theistic based religions, and because it is ripe for abuse in the hands of Christian apologists who dress up their delusion with undeserved respectability, it should be abandoned for better alternative methods, by people who really want to know the truth.
This is not a case of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There is no miracle baby to be found in the dirty bathwater. Bayes is used by people in this debate who wish to look superior than others. It's a rite of passage into a specific club of intellectuals who like the status of being considered above the rest of us. But it solves nothing, clarifies nothing, and will be thrust into the dustbin of elite faddishness as one after another intellectual wannabe comes up with their own calculations without reaching a consensus between believers and non-believers on the inputs or the resulting probabilities. As philosopher Godfrey-Smith put it, “The probabilities” in Bayes’ Theorem “that are more controversial are the prior probabilities of hypotheses, like P(h).” He asks, “What could this number possibly be measuring?” He says, we cannot “make sense of prior probabilities” [Theory and Reality: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 205]. He is dead on in the area I'm arguing, faith-based claims of virgin birthed deities and resurrections from the dead. And while I'm at it, gods themselves, who are supposed to exponentially increase the prior probabilities.
Bayes is a mathematical wasteland when applies to these issues. The only merit it offers is the discussion of the evidence and the ensuing arguments in defense of the inputs, which could be done without the math. So atheist apologists who argue for the use of Bayes Theorem in an area with no promise or hope of a consensus, are merely arguing for their own special status in these debates, and dividing people unnecessarily between Bayes users and non-Bayes users. The most extreme case of this is atheist apologist Richard Carrier, who thinks the rest of us are ignorant, stupid, and irrational to disagree. This only makes him feel relevant by arguing for his own irrelevancy. This is not to throw a bone at Christian apologists. I think Carrier is brilliant and has already dealt some significant death blows to the Christian faith. But on this issue his brilliancy, and undeserved superior ego, has led him to defend an irrelevant wasteland, a dead end, one that has no promise of accomplishing or solving anything.
The better tools? Science; requiring sufficient collaborative objective evidence commensurate with the type of claim; requiring claimants to shoulder the burden of proof; arguing from inference to the best explanation; using the standard of the Outsider Test for Faith; ridicule (after all, we know faith-based arguments are special pleading all the way down), and more. Carrier will respond just as believers do when it comes to their faith-based doctrines, by forcing these tools into the grid of Bayes Theorem and calling me a doofus another dozen times or more. So let's see this in practice, a friend comes up to you and says his wife gave birth to a deity. You say show me some objective evidence. We don't need Bayes at all there, do you see? I can understand why Bayesian reasoning without the math is much better when it comes to more complicated issues, but at rock bottom it's all about the evidence, just as apologist Vincent Torley was convinced by it, even though he had previously done his own Bayesian calculations. I see no reason why hammering home the lack of objective evidence won't work as well, or better than using Bayesian math. Bayes is probably worse off in terms of convincing others, for the only people who would slough through it are far less likely to be convinced by it. I've written a book on why responding to fundamentalist arguments in kind gives their beliefs a certain undeserved respectability. So my arguments against the use of Bayes are rooted there, but not found exclusively there. For as you can see I have other arguments that Bayes just doesn't help us (i.e., the math, the equation, the formula). [See Tag for more]
The title is a response to two posts Richard Carrier wrote here, and recently here. If anyone disagrees with Carrier we're irrational, ignorant, foolish, and now with a newly released super-bad description, doofus/doofuses.
I would like to catalog the variety of responses apologists and atheists have toward Bayes, but I won't. What I do know is apart from the people he mentions who "don't understand Bayes" he should also include David Hume, Apologist Michael Licona and Dan Lambert. One wonders if anyone could have argued for anything before Bayes given Carrier's praise. Pffft. What I know is that those who use Bayes come up with wildly different results with regard to the resurrection of Jesus.
--Apologist Richard Swinburne calculates the probability of the bodily resurrection of Jesus, given the existence of a god, is 97%. Swinburne should run that past a peer-review panel including Muslims Jews and Hindu's to see how that goes over. ;-) We know from a historian's perspective that's utterly idiotic!
--Apologist Vincent Torley calculated that "there’s about a 60-65% chance that Jesus rose from the dead." Of course, that was before he read Michael Alter's book on the resurrection, which I recommended, that had no math in it at all! How could this happen without Bayes? Oh my! But it did. Apparently the shear evidence Alter presented was enough. Wow! Who would have thunk it.
--Apologists Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew calculated the odds of the resurrection of Jesus to be 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. *Silence* *Awe* *Respect* Christians must revere them for coming up with the highest calculation any intellectual *cough* has done so far. Can anyone do better here? They need to go see a doctor and get some meds, quickly. Richard Carrier thinks Bayes helps. Okay then. Please tell us how such a useful tool can produce these wide diverse results. Tools are supposed to help. But even among apologists themselves it does no such thing. Carrier says Bayes helps us clarify where we disagree and by how much. Really? We already know this! Dressing up a delusion in math is still a delusion. Responding in kind only gives a delusion an undeserved respectability. This is a major point of mine in Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. Who's the doofus again?
[Update on 11/18/19: This Introduction has been significantly lengthened].
I finally submitted the digital book files to my publisher Hypatia Press, an imprint of Ockham Publishing out of the UK. David G. McAffe is the editor. It has been seven months since I started working on it. Getting authors, working with them, and writing my own chapters while on the road for the last two months has wore me out. I'm glad that hard phase is over. I'm told it should be published by September or October, just in time for year end holiday shopping. How good is it? Well, I consider it the best anthology yet, and they've all been good! You can see the chapter contents right here. To whet your appetites my Introduction is below:
After publishing Deciphering the Gospels Proves Jesus Never Existed in late 2018 I have become increasingly engaged in the field of biblical studies and Christian origins. The subject of mythicism is a complex one that is fraught with problems, as is the entire subject of Christian origins, because of the vast array of competing claims in the field, some of which are of dubious academic quality. Nevertheless, I believe that the field is maturing and has reached a point of growing consensus around a model for Christian origins without the existence of a human Jesus. 
