Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist?

I'm done writing and editing books, so I'm highlighting each one of them in thirteen separate posts. This time it's Varieties of Jesus Mythicism: Did He Even Exist? [See Tag Below].

Here is the Amazon link to get this "sure to be a classic" book, right here!

You should read the text of my talk at the Global Center for Religious Research eConference on Jesus Mythicism, which includes my Preface at the end of it. 

There were a few challenges in this book. 

Zuckerman: Phil Zuckerman asked me why I chose to co-edit a book with Robert M. Price, a known supporter of Donald Trump. Well actually, Bob choose me to co-write it. After editing an anthology on The Empty Tomb more than a decade ago, he didn't want to do that again. So Bob asked me. He already had most of the authors. What I did was to acquire two additional authors and get it published. He already knew this is the kind of thing I do well from previous anthologies.

My Book, Debating Christianity

I'm done writing and editing books so I've been highlighting each of them.

My last book "Debating Christianity" was skillfully put together by my friend Jonathan Pearce. [See Tag Below]

Required Homework for Christians

Trying to get them to read, study, ponder the Bible

One of the old hymns I recall from my Methodist upbringing is Leaning on the Everlasting Arms, which includes these words: “What a blessedness, what a peace is mine, leaning on the everlasting arms. Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms…” Safe and secure. This security inside the Christian shelter can happen when doubts are denied, when troublesome thoughts are dismissed: “Our priests and preachers must have it right. We believed them when we were toddlers, so why be suspicious now? We’ll keep the faith.” Take it on faith.

The Dangers of Christian Theology

“The violent ideology of Christian nationalism”

If you’re as old as I am—born in 1942—you may remember Dinah Shore singing the famous car commercial on television in the 1950s. The song includes these lyrics: 

 

“See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call, drive your Chevrolet through the USA, America’s the greatest land of all…” 

 

We had no doubt that America was the greatest land, a sentiment that fueled our patriotism at the time. But we didn’t really think about it. As kids we also played “cowboys and Indians”—however, it never dawned on us that it was through massive genocide of native Americans that European descendants took possession of what is now the USA. Nor did we give much thought to the role that slavery played in the unfolding of American history. Slavery impacted how the US constitution was written; it provoked a bloody civil war, and left an ugly legacy of racism, which still poisons our society.

Michael Shermer: "The Non-Magisterium of Religion: Why Faith Is Not a Reliable Method for Determining Moral Values"

Shermer makes this point extremely well, and it's a very important one. Since faith is not a reliable method for determining moral values we must figure it out ourselves. Period. End of story. Don't ask where we get our morals from. We derive them out of the need for other people, our families, friends, communities, counties and our world, without which life on our planet could be chaotic, unstable and miserable. An extremely large part of dysfunction and chaos comes from using faith as a guide to morals. THIS MUST STOP! LINK.

Buddha, Abraham, Jesus and Muhammed: Larger-than-life historic figures or largely legends?

Thank you David Fitzgerald and Valerie Tarico for this informative essay! LINK.

Finally, As Promised, Open Thread!

Tell us what you've been thinking about, researching, or doing lately. Anything you want to share is fine with me. GO!

Dave Warnock Interviewed Me

Mark Mittelberg On 7 More Arrows That Point To The Bible, Part 18

I'm still working through Mark Mittelberg's apologetical book. It's a good one, better than most in that it's a unique, easily accessible one for popular readers, and better than Lee Strobel's type of books. Click on Mark's name below to see where we've been so far. Now on with the show for his chapter 11, where he shares 7 more arrows that point to the Bible as true. No, I'm not going to be comprehensive in responding here.

A Discussion On Meaning, Value, And Purpose

This took place on William Lane Craig's Facebook wall.

John Loftus: There is meaning and value and purpose in life. There just isn't any ultimate meaning and value and purpose for all sentient beings who have existed, or currently exist, or will exist into the distant future.

On the First Easter Morning, Why Didn’t Jesus Knock on Pilate’s Door?

The fruitless search for extraordinary evidence

A few years ago, a Christian friend told me, after attending Easter morning service, that he had been so moved by the scriptural reading, I Corinthians 15, in which the apostle Paul claims that Jesus

 

“…was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have died.” (vv. 4-6)

How to Change the Minds of Believers, by John W. Loftus

How to Change the Minds of Believers by John W. Loftus

 

After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers (my focus in what follows) I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang your heads against a wall. I think it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success. For any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion. Besides, one of the greatest challenges is to change minds, and I like challenges. Plus, I’ve learned a great deal by attempting this important underappreciated task.

The Magisterium of Religion, by Michael Shermer

Michael Shermer recently wrote about his trip to Köln, Germany, where he stood amazed at "the magnificent cathedral in the city center that has defined the region for nearly eight centuries." [Photos included] Shermer says "It is a reminder of the power of faith in a pre-modern world lit only by fire and plagued by poverty, disease, misery, and early death." He really explains what it was like living in the latter Middle Ages, and how science displaced superstitious thinking. Awesome!

On this trip to the Cologne Cathedral I time-traveled back to the latter Middle Ages and into the late Medieval mind to imagine what it must have been like to experience the awe-inspiring magnificence of such a culturally-dominant edifice that literally and figuratively puts all other structures in the shade. Imagine walking into this sanctuary after a long and exhaustive journey from one’s provincial countryside and spartan abode....

To fully feel that world let’s go back to a time when civilization was lit only by fire, centuries ago when populations were sparse and 80 percent of everyone lived in the countryside and were engaged in food production, largely for themselves. Cottage industries were the only ones around in this pre-industrial and highly-stratified society, in which one-third to one-half of everyone lived at subsistence level and were chronically under-employed, underpaid, and undernourished. Food supplies were unpredictable and plagues decimated weakened populations. Read further here.

On Cameron Bertuzzi of "Capturing Christianity" Switching from Evangelicalism to Catholicism.

Evangelical Christians have been bailing ship in the last few decades. They have been moving to "mainstream" versions", "liberal" versions, and Catholic versions. The young ones are a growing group of the "nones" who don't embrace any organized religion at all.

There have been a few intellectual evangelical Christians who became Catholics in recent decades, most notably Francis Beckwith (b. 1960): A philosopher and theologian, he was elected president of the Evangelical Theological Society but converted to Catholicism in 2007.

I did a quick search and found conflicting accounts of the numbers of evangelicals who switched to Catholicism, as opposed to the numbers of Catholics who switched to Evangelicalism, without arriving at a firm conclusion.

Which brings me to Cameron Bertuzzi of the highly popular "Capturing Christianity" apologetics ministry. Ten days ago he announced that he's switching from evangelicalism to Catholicism. It's getting noticed with 76k hits so far.

Who or What Is God? You Go First

And provide the evidence for your answer

Carl Sagan was in high demand as a public speaker, and during the Q&A periods, he reports that a common question was, “Do you believe in God?” His response was to ask a question:

 

“Because the word God means many things to many people, I frequently reply by asking what the questioner means by ‘God.’ To my surprise, this response is often considered puzzling or unexpected: ‘Oh you know, God. Everyone knows who God is.’ Or ‘Well, kind of a force that is stronger than we are and exists everywhere in the universe.’ There are a number of such forces. One of them is called gravity, but it is not often identified with God. And not everyone does know what is meant by ‘God.’ The concept covers a wide range of ideas.” (pp. 181-182, Broca’s Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science)

 

Oh you know, God. We live in a god-saturated culture. God in whom we can trust is on our money; the god whom we are under is in our pledge of allegiance; the Bible—god’s word—is in millions of hotel rooms. There are hundreds of thousands of churches built to the glory of god throughout the country. It’s hardly any wonder that people can say, Oh you know, God.

On Interpreting the Bible:

My conclusion is the Bible says what it says until refuted by reason, morality, and/or science, then it says something other than what it says. No joke!

Paul’s Christianity: Belief in Belief Itself, by John W. Loftus

I was honored to write the Foreword to Robert Conner's excellent new book The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days, which you can get on Amazon.

It was long, so understandedly Conner had to edit it down. Here it is in it's entirety.

Paul’s Christianity: Belief in Belief Itself

Citing plenty of Roman writers familiar with the early Jesus Cult, along with teasing out the true meaning from Christian sources, Robert Conner makes a solid case that “Christianity was a cult from its inception, a toxic brew of apocalyptic delusion, sexual phobias and fixations, with a hierarchy of control of women by men, of slaves by masters, and of society by the church.” It had an “irrational and antisocial nature” to it, and “its destructive features remain a clear and present danger today. Its greatest threat is the core feature of the Christian cult: belief in belief, the conviction that the Christian narrative is literally its own proof.”

To say I agree with Conner is a huge understatement. I love how he writes! Readers will find in his book a great amount of erudition combined with an unmatched use of rhetoric and even hilarity. I am honored and delighted to write this Foreword for another excellent book by him.

Connor says Christianity was nothing more than a cult “in the most pejorative sense of the word.” In the chapters to follow he makes his case, showing that religious cults share with Christianity “several familiar features” like “a fixation on sexual purity, bizarre interpretations of scripture, and often a preoccupation with End Times theology which leads members to interpret events through an apocalyptic lens.”

Darwin, Science, and the Origins of Life itself

Scientists like Darwin discovered evolution as an answer to why there are so many species, including human beings. It undercut the creation accounts in Genesis 1 & 2, Psalms 104, and Job 38-42, which can no longer be taken as straightforward accounts, but are now considered nonhistorical myths. The Bible can no longer be considered as a scientific textbook, to say the very least.

So the question of the origins of life itself is not something to be answered in the Bible. This question is proving to be as elusive as the origins of species. But if it is to be solved, scientists will solve it.

Q. Are we sure the Bible was ever specifically authored as a scientific text book?

A. It offers the pre-scientific mind knowledge about those areas it talks about. In Genesis we learn why people die, why there are rainbows, where rain comes from, and why snakes slither across land. We also learn that stars are hung in the firmament just above the mountains. They teach how the universe originated, which god created it, why women were subservient to men, why there is pain in childbirth, why we live with thorns, why work is hard, and why there are different languages. Just picture this before the rise of science that could dispute it all. God didn't know anything about the universe yet he allegedly created it.

Is It Possible Your Minister/Priest Doesn’t Believe in God?

What might have caused that to happen?

Here’s a sensational headline that would shock the world: Pope Resigns, Issuing a Statement that He No Longer Believes in God. But we’ll never see such a headline because, even if a pope stepped down because of nonbelief, the Vatican hierarchy wouldn’t allow such honesty. Other more palatable reasons would be given. I once asked a prominent Italian television journalist if it could possibly be true that the Vatican clergy really believed the theology-on-steroids that the church promotes, e.g. such wackiness as transubstantiation, the immaculate conception, Mary’s bodily assumption into heaven. He responded, “Oh, maybe half of them do. But don’t forget, it’s a business.”

Who Needs a Higher Power To Overcome Addiction?

My wife Sheila and I feed the homeless once a week. We do so in the parking lot of the rescue mission downtown out of the back of my old Jimmy. We have gotten to know some of the homeless and their stories.

We do it to help those in need. If one of them says anything like "God bless you" or "Thanks be to God", I tell him/her we're just being good. We don't believe in God.

One guy approached me recently and said he bought and read my book Why I Became an Atheist, and that it changed his life. "How so?" I asked. He said he no longer believes in God.

Now you might think this is a bad thing, since believing in God can help people down on their luck. Not so! AA hasn't helped him stay sober, neither has God, his higher power. So depending on God didn't work. He said it makes much better sense to rely on yourself. Relying on God is an excuse when you fail. God will also easily forgive you when you fail, and you know it.

Relying on himself forced him to take ownership of his own life, and decisions.

He's been sober about two months now. What we know is that so far he's doing better than he did when relying on a god.

Praise reason!

"Democracy Is On The Ballot" - Sen. Elizabeth Warren On Why The Stakes Are High In The Midterms

Please watch! Please vote! Please share! I'll be working at a poll station on Tuesday. This should be interesting. Do YOUR part!

Oligarchy: What's Really Wrong With America!

Here are two talks that tell us what's really wrong with the USA:

Christian Theology Can Be Part of the Problem of Evil

The apostle Paul and John Calvin did their fair share of damage          

Christians who are sure that the New Testament reveals a loving god aren’t paying close attention. One of the charter documents of the Christian faith is Paul’s Letter to the Romans. In the opening chapter we find a list of people who deserve to die, because they don’t acknowledge God. The list includes gossips and rebellious children, “…since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct.” (Romans 1:28).  ^“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness…” (Romans 1:18) And there’s more: “...by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.” (Romans 2:5) “…for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.” (Romans 2:8)

Psychic Epistemology: The Special Pleading of William Lane Craig

A new paper of mine was appropriately published at Halloween, over on Internet Infidels.

My focus in this paper is to expose the special pleading of William Lane Craig’s psychic epistemology (or spirit-guided epistemology) as I correctly call it—rather than reformed epistemology as it’s known. I consider this to be an extension of a book of mine, where I offer good advice to the Christian apologist. In part one, after questioning the need for apologetics and warning about the monumental challenges to it, I tell apologists to become honest life-long seekers of the truth, to get a good education in a good field of study, to accept nothing less than sufficient objective evidence, and especially to determine how to know which religion to defend. I offer good solid tongue-in-cheek advice for apologists.[1] LINK.

The Game Is Up: Disillusioned Trump Voters Tell Their Stories (2022)

Must watch! Must share! This is the best approach I've seen to help Trump loyalists question their loyalty to him. Please share with your right-wing friends! "A former GOP congressman, a rising Young Republican; a party-loyal Ohio farmer; a US Army Veteran & hardcore 'MAGA'; and 3 evangelicals recount their evolutions from Trump supporters in 2016 to adamant adversaries in 2020."

Is There Any Place for Bible-god in the Real Cosmos?

All of our god(s) were invented in utter, total isolation

If the Bible is what the devout claim it is, we should be able to trust the information it provides about god, right? Alas, so often—far too often—that’s hard to do. How do modern Christians feel about these two verses, Exodus 29:17-18, i.e., proper worship procedure regarding animal sacrifice:

 

“Then you shall cut the ram into its parts and wash its entrails and its legs and put them with its parts and its head and turn the rest of the ram into smoke on the altar. It is a burnt offering to the LORD; it is a pleasing odor, an offering by fire to the LORD.” 

 

I’m assuming not too many Christians would welcome this kind of smokey ritual on Sunday mornings. The author of this text believed that (1) his god was close enough overhead to smell the smoke from the fire; (2) his god had a sense of smell; (3) his god savored the aroma of burning animal flesh. Of course, this is a sampling of primitive, superstitious religion: one way to get right with a god was animal sacrifice. Another aspect of primitive religion is disguised here by the English translation. The word LORD in all caps is the rendering of the divine name; this god’s name was Yahweh—as reconstructed from four Hebrew consonants (add different vowels and you get Jehovah). Calling on the name of the god is a kind of magic, which survives to this day when Christians say, “…in Jesus’ name we pray.”

On Vampires and Revenants Resurrecting from the Dead

[First published on 10/5/20] Because this is the haunted month of Halloween here's something to spook ya all!

I'm always interested in new angles to argue my case against Christianity. Kris Keys does that in the excellently researched essay below. He argues there is more evidence for the resurrection of Vampires and Revenants than there is for the resurrection of Jesus.

Introductory comments by Kris Keys:

Well this is my first time writing a blog post and little did I know it would be for the website Debunking Christianity!! I find this to be completely hilarious as I am not in of myself militantly opposed to Christianity in of itself; I tend to dislike Evangelicals but that is because I view them as hypocritical and blatantly power hungry but of course this description would not apply to all Christians. As probably the readers of this post have deduced by now I am not a Christian, but I am also not an atheist either. I tend to be rather eclectic in my views. I fancy myself to be broad minded and open to change.

I am a schoolteacher by profession, and I have taught both social studies and science at the high school level. I have dual degrees in both fields. In my not remotely enough spare time I enjoy reading folklore, Medieval history, sociology, anthropology and other subjects. Basically a lot of stuff.  Over the years I have heard the Christian argument for the physical resurrection of Jesus and at one time I found this argument to be convincing, but more and more for many varied reasons I became rather skeptical of it. 

None of this explains though, how this essay came about! Nothing remarkable about it really. I was scrolling through Facebook and I saw John Loftus’s profile. In discussion with him I mentioned that one could use the resurrection argument to demonstrate the existence of vampires and I showed him a response I wrote to a friend of mine on this.  John asked me to do a write up for him.

So here is a write up I never seriously figured I would write up on a blog, one that I never suspected I would write for. So I hope everyone enjoys it. So without further ado, here is my attempt to show that the Christian argument for the resurrection of Jesus would also demonstrate vampires exist. I will leave it up to you dear readers to determine if Jesus rose from the dead and if you need to invest in crucifixes and garlics now; or that perhaps claims of the dead returning bodily just should not be given the benefit of the doubt. You decide.

Abortion: Everything You Need To Know

Directly below are a few links to what our authors have written about abortion.

--Why I Write and Write and Write About the Religious Right, by Teresa Roberts. Commenting on Bob Nononi, a Republican politician from Idaho, who said in a public forum that maybe we should consider the death penalty for women who get an abortion, she unloads the harms of the religious right in general. "Right under our very noses, we are becoming a theocracy and people by in large are refusing to believe it’s happening...The religious right is no longer willing to sit on the sidelines as their cross-eyed cousins once did, talking in tongues, handling snakes, beating their kids and oppressing their women. Watching the rest of Americans live their own lives as they please infuriates them. They're here to tell you that they're no longer a joking matter. They're serious. Dead serious. Furthermore, they're winning which is making them bolder by the minute."

--Why is the Religious Right Obsessed With Abortion?, by Teresa Roberts. She argues: "Abortion has evolved into a single driving issue of such monumental proportions in part because society has become far more secularized than we realize. The shift away from a moral code dictated by churches and enforced by government has caused a great deal of discomfort for individuals and institutions that once wielded so much power over our lives. They are now struggling to reclaim what they perceive as their god given right to determine and enforce the new moral code that defines modern culture. They feel the shifting tide as they continue to lose their tight grip on the reins of society. It has turned them into crusaders, not just for the protection of the unborn but for a return to the glory days when the church had the final and last say over what would be tolerated and what would not."

--Birds of a Fundy Feather, by minister-turned-atheist Joe Holman. In commenting on Eric Rudolph, the famous abortion clinic bomber, Holman argues: "The Christian fundamentalist mindset is dangerous. It devalues life and appreciates one that exists only in fantasy. It enslaves the rational mind, empowering an otherwise conscionable individual to do inhumane things with feelings of integral justification, or at the very least, creates support and sympathy for those who so act."

--Apologist Edward Feser gets into the debate by comparing George Tiller, an abortionist doctor, to Jeffrey Dahmer who killed, dismembered and ate 17 men and boys. Feser says, "Tiller was almost certainly a more evil man than Dahmer was." LINK, with a follow-up LINK.

--In a tongue-in-cheek essay, Why Conservative Christians Should Love Abortion, Franz Kiekeben takes seriously William Lane Craig's arguments that slaughtered innocent children go to heaven, and draws the conclusion that so do aborted fetuses. Hence, "Christian conservatives should be encouraging women to get pregnant for the sole purpose of aborting their fetuses — and doing this as often as they can! They should stop protesting abortion clinics and instead hand out fliers informing women of the religious benefits associated with the practice, and encouraging them to do the godly thing."

--God Loves Abortion, by Jonathan Pearce. "Given the statistics that fetuses die from natural, spontaneous abortions, or miscarriages; abortions that God has the power to stop, and seemingly designed in to the system in the first place, then.... either God is not omnibenevolent; or God does not exist; or embryos are not so sacred and arguments over what defines personhood are called for; or that millions of fetal deaths a year, unknown to humanity, are necessary for a greater good."

--About fifteen years ago I participated in a written debate with an atheist over abortion, which can be found at DC here. I think I laid out a reasonable case for a women's right to abortion.

What You Need To Know about Abortion

[First posted on 4/2019] To help inform everyone on the sanctity of life here's a chapter written by Dr. Ronald A. Lindsay for my anthology Christianity is Not Great: Why Faith Fails. It's a work that details the harms of the Christian faith and why we oppose it. We pick up after Lindsay discusses the messy sanctity of life principle as applied to end of life decisions. [See a previous post which has several essays on abortion and the Christian right found here.]

Abortion and the Original Meaning of the Constitution

Let me explain why originalism is a misleading misinformed bogeyman of conservatives.

I'm Stunned. My Friend Willie Dave Died.

Below you'll watch Willie Dave (David Elie) so full of life, singing his very last Karaoke song Wednesday night. His specialty was imitating songs of Willie Nelson, Bob Dylan, and Frank Sinatra. I especially liked the Sinatra song below. He looks so full of life at the age of 71. Twelve hours later he suffered a heart attack and died! This was a shock to everyone. He was a good friend of mine. We hung out, sang Karaoke together, and camped together with our gals in Florida. He was also a fan of right-wing politics and did some interesting end-times prophecy stuff, which we debated. He was a good man. I loved him. Recently we were texting each other about NFL football, and when we could get together again in Florida.

Each time I watch the video I shed a few tears. You never know. Death awaits us too. He will be missed greatly. My deepest sympathies go out to Ginny, and others. I wish I could do something to help. Maybe writing this tribute will do so. Ginny tells us, "Dave loved life! He woke every morning and prayed. Then he would say, 'Its going to be a great day - I get to spend it with my Ginny.'" Now watch a man full of life singing his last song. See what an amazing fortuitous song it was too!

Keeping the Folks in the Pews in the Dark

What the church doesn’t want them to think about

Worship services are a form of show business, at which some Christian brands excel especially. How much does the Vatican spend every year on its worship costumes alone? But most denominations, while not so extravagant, do their best to “put on the show,” which includes music, liturgy, ritual, props, sets—those stained-glass depictions of Bible stories—and the trained actors, i.e., the clergy. All this is designed to promote the beliefs and doctrines of each denomination. But there are so many different denominations: who is getting Christianity right? Is there any denomination that urges its followers to look beyond the liturgies? What’s behind it all? What are the origins of the beliefs celebrated in liturgies?

New Book Out: "Debating Christianity: Opening Salvos in the Battle with Believers"

Well well now, it looks like someone else put out a book in my name! 😉

Debating Christianity: Opening Salvos in the Battle with Believers.

Step #1: Assume What You Believe is False!

One way to do this, if you really want to know, is to assume what you currently believe is false. That is step #1. Step #2 is to demand the sort of evidence that a judge would allow in court. Step #3 is to produce that evidence or give up what you currently believe. No excuses. No double standards.

There are exceptions, like disputes over beauty, or other subjective preferences, but the exceptions cannot be the rule.

Should We Be Accountable To God?

An apologist asked me this question: "Do you think that if a creator created us that we should be accountable in some way to this creator?" My answer:

No. If a creator exists we have no obligation to him if we are given metaphysically free self-determination. He can impose such a thing on us, but that's something he should negotiate with us. God has no right to command us to do good without providing good reasons for being good. And if those reasons are indeed good ones we should be able to discover them without him having to command them.

No one should be above the law, not even the lawmaker. That's why a kingship model of God in the Bible is offensive, as found in the story of Job, since kings could do whatever they could get away with doing. If a god exists he must be subject to his own laws. "Thou shall not kill, lie or steal" as they apply. By contrast the social contract is a negotiated one. Democracy is a participatory type of government.

If a creator god wants to be praised or thanked he should earn it. Now of course, we would give praise to him and thank him for life. But we should only praise and thank such a god as his creation is a good one, and his deeds in the world are good ones.