They could have prevented this. I saw the signs as a Bernie supporter. We all did. If the DNC refused to nominate Bernie we might lose the general election The polls strongly suggested this. But the democratic party did not care. They nominated Hillary anyway. They were stupid stupid stupid. This morning I am embarrassed to be a Democrat. Let all Hillary supporters in the primaries chime in right now and apologize. Profusely. You were seriously wrong.
I'm being interviewed for a book. So I'll paste my answers here as I answer the questions.
"What is the worst argument for the existence of God you have ever heard?"
There are so many bad ones it's hard to choose. The topper is probably that a private subjective ineffable experience provides objective evidence that the universe was created out of nothing and that one particular god out of thousands created it. The only explanation for why believers think this is a good argument to their sect specific god is because of the delusionary nature of faith, which is the mother of all cognitive biases.
The faithful admit it: They are there on Sunday morning to worship God. A friend of mine once defined himself and his status as a believer. “I am a worshipper,” he said. Why would that be important or appropriate?
Schools are for learning, offices are for business, stadiums are for sports, hospitals for healing, and we all agree that they answer legitimate human needs (even stadiums). Churches, however, are dedicated to that most baffling of human obsessions: getting together frequently to boost God’s ego. When priests raise funds to build churches they always claim that the real purpose is to glorify God, which can only mean that there is a divine ego that must be stroked. My friend the worshipper had gulped the Kool-Aid. He has bought into this peculiar, warped view that our feelings of wonder and awe must be directed at a Supreme Being who isn’t satisfied unless the awe and wonder are directed at him.
One of the best verses in the Old Testament is Psalm 145:8: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”—lot’s of potential for decent religion here. In this verse, “the Lord” is actually a translation of “Yahweh,” and we regret that this sentiment about mercy and love didn’t have more influence on those ancient thinkers who fleshed out the character of Yahweh. This tribal god rampages violently through so much of the Old Testament.
And when the religious bureaucracy took over the forgiveness business, it decreed that Yahweh wasn’t easy to please; animal sacrifice became part of the formula for earning this god’s favor. For centuries animals were slaughtered at the Jerusalem Temple, and the flow of blood was thought essential for getting right with god. Hence the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews could write (9:22): “…without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” The too-full-off himself Jesus of John’s gospel took the ghoulishness to a new level (6:54-55): “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”
I suspect that the blood obsession still haunts the Christian psyche when I read that a vial of Pope John Paul II’s blood toured the U.S. in 2014, to be venerated by the faithful (not worshipped, church officials insisted), especially in the wake of John Paul’s canonization. Apparently, during one of the pope’s many illnesses, one nurse was savvy enough to spirit away a vial of his blood—no dummy she. A pope relic was a big prize; there were Catholic hearts to be set aflutter and coffers to be filled.
David, here are my thoughts as someone only 3 years removed from ministry and deconversion. I will use a metaphor. One day as I was on my job, a man was noticing the work I was doing on his neighbor's property. He wanted me to come over and talk to him which I did. In the course of our conversation I noticed he had this beautiful black lab named, "Bogey." I tried to get Bogey to come to me but he wouldn't. His tongue and tail were wagging furiously. He wanted to come to me, but he couldn't. His owner predictably said, "I have an electric fence," but followed with this zinger, "But his shock collar is NOT on."
This was a moment of enlightenment for me. Bogey could have come to me without being physically shocked. But all the time spent with the shock collar on had done its work. His mind didn't know the difference. The fear, threat, and pain conditioning effectively kept Bogey within the boundaries someone else had set for him. What began as a literal, physical boundary transformed into an imaginary one that was just as confining.
Bogey illustrates myself and many Christians. From the moment of our births, the tight shock collar of Christianity was placed upon us. Tight boundaries were placed all around us with 1000 threats warning us what would happen if we crossed the line. Threats such as be shunned, separated from, disowned, divine chastening in countless forms, being forever labeled an apostate, and of course the omnipresent threat of being "justly" barbecued for 100 trillion years cycle after 100 trillion year cycle in a lake of fire with no food, water, love, or hope. How nice.
The voltage of this collar system was increased every week of our lives through Sunday School, Awana, Youth Group, Revival services, and Sunday morning and evening worship. Many of us went on to attend Christian Bible College where we went to chapel 2-4 times a week and heard devotionals at every event imaginable. All of these sermons contained "applications" which were nothing more than new legislation laced with more threats for disobedience. Over the course of a lifetime, the Christian "conscience" is saddled with hundreds and hundreds (perhaps thousands) of rules and sub-rules all carrying threats of punishment for falling short of perfect obedience. Needless to say, it doesn't take long for the Christian shock collar to become completely central and all-controlling in the minds of those living in its yard.
Christian morality is infantile morality, which is obeying the commands of an authority figure without requiring reasons for the commands. But if reasons are provided for the commands then no commands are needed.
It was about 1970, when I was a graduate student at Boston University School of Theology, that I wrote an essay titled On the Improbability of God. This was not part of any class assignment; I just wanted to get some of thoughts down on paper—and I showed the essay to only one colleague, who was not pleased. Many years later I found out that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing his essay, The Necessity of Atheism. Well, 1970 wasn’t 1811, and I survived my blatant cheekiness. Since I never went to chapel while I attended seminary, I was considered the class eccentric, the contrarian seminarian.
The portrayal of Jesus as an anti-imperialist pervades the scholarly literature of New Testament ethics. However, portraying Jesus as an anti-imperialist actually betrays a pro-imperialist Christian agenda on the part of many New Testament ethicists. Usually, the main evidence cited is Jesus’ resistance to the Roman empire. However, anti-imperialism should properly describe an ideology that is against any empire. Jesus’ endorsement of the Kingdom of God, which is envisioned as an empire, should certainly disqualify him from being an anti-imperialist. In addition, many prominent New Testament ethicists are Euro-Americans with no indigenous ancestry, and so are themselves part of an empire occupying Native American lands.In the near future, I also plan to challenge more thoroughly one of the most important myths in Christian historiography—Constantine the Great (ruled 306-337) was where imperialism began in Christianity. Constantine, therefore, represents a corruption of Jesus’ teachings in this view.
The placement of the start of Christian imperialism in Constantine’s reign has served to deflect attention from the fact that imperialism is inscribed in the New Testament itself. Constantine only put into effect an ideology that was already there from the beginning of Christianity and one that reaches back into what Christians call "The Old Testament."
