No humble people they! Ask them. They'll answer all your questions. They know-it-all about quantum mechanics, able to reject scientists (with a single bound) who have theories opposed to their god concept, while siding with those who support it. Doing this must mean they know as much as the scientists in these fields do! Unlike the wise Socrates who admitted he was not wise, they claim they're wise, thereby making themselves out as fools. Not the fools Paul the Apostle spoke of, who rejected the wisdom of the world, but the kind of fools Peter Boghossian wrote of, who pretend to know that which they don't know. They reject evolution, or the clear implications of evolution, which means they know as much as evolutionary scientists do, and/or theologians! They know as much as biblical scholars do, since they're able to take sides in their disputes (and tell us who wins but not why, except to mindlessly quote--mine from them). They can even read the ancient biblical languages and know which translations are best! They know as much as philosophers who debate god-concepts. They know as much as archaeologists, astronomers, historians, ethicists, cultural anthropologists, geologists, cosmologists, and so on, and so on, because they can tell which scholars are right in every discipline that touches on their faith. And guess what? Surprise! They always judge which of these scholars are correct based on their previously adopted faith with its sectarian interpretation of an ancient pre-scientific book, written mainly by anonymous people! This is either truly amazing or utterly ignorant! It's what you get by pretending to know that which you don't know, rather than practicing the virtue of authenticity. Defending the Christian faith requires special pleading. We already knew that. It's also an exercise lacking the virtue of authenticity, the antonyms of which are found online, with words like, counterfeit, fake, concocted, deceptive, delusory, disingenuous, inauthentic and misleading. "Liars for Jesus" seems to be a phrase that fits. [Hence the tag below].
A common criticism of atheism is that we atheists “just want to sin.” Dinesh D’Souza, for example, said that “the perennial appeal of atheism” is that it “liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity,” while Lee Strobel claimed that prior to becoming a Christian, he had a strong motivation for remaining an atheist — namely, a “self-serving and immoral lifestyle” that he would have to give up if he ever became a follower of Jesus.
Examining empirically defensible "nothings"
The question, "why is there something instead of nothing?" is popping up again here at Debunking Christianity. Let's explore what "nothing" might really mean...
People wonder why I debunk Christianity and think Christians are ignorant to believe without objective evidence. It's because as believers they lack the ability to be reasonable about many other life questions. If they live their whole lives without objective evidence then they'll believe a lot of other things without it.
The two women co-hosts in this video are stupid. And they are perpetrating a myth about atheists that is both false and dangerous.
If reality is a good indication of god's nature and, being good, we would like to emulate god's nature:
-God does nothing as people starve to death, therefore we shouldn't be charitable.
-God does nothing as people die of diseases, therefore we should get rid of medicine.
-God does nothing as crimes are committed, therefore we should abolish the police.
-God does nothing as houses burn, therefore we should abolish the fire department.
If god's nature is something we should strive to copy, it seems apathy is our best bet.
It’s a common claim that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. In particular, those who accept some form of the Divine Command Theory (DCT) tend to say this. It’s not true, of course — but given what their theory implies, it is rather ironic that proponents of DCT claim such a thing.
Q & A from Loftus the magnificent. ;-) [Once again, why not?]
Q. My Christian faith will never succumb to the religion of atheism. Why can't you see there is just no evidence for it?
A. Your big mistake is in thinking the alternative to your sect-specific Christian faith is atheism, and that atheism is just as religious as your faith. This is most emphatically not the case. Atheists do not believe in supernatural beings or forces, so it's a denial of religion. If one can be religious yet deny the supernatural, the word "religious" loses any significant meaning. To say atheism is a religion is to assert by fiat, without evidence, that everyone is religious regardless of what they claim. We might as well return the favor and say everyone is an atheist, if that's the language game you wish to play.
More to the point, there are many alternatives to your faith, such as other Christianities, other non-Christian religious faiths, and the many other tribal religious faiths in different geographical locations.
That there are so many diverse religious faiths held by intelligent, and educated people, who cannot convince other religious people, leads some of us to back out of the whole religious scene by doubting them all. We are called atheists. We merely try to convince religious believers they should doubt religion as a whole like we've done, precisely because we've learned religion itself is a cultural by-product of an ancient primitive era that lingers on in our own era.
Q & A from Loftus the magnificent. ;-)
Q. Why don't you discuss the origins of suffering in the world that created situations like we saw with the Las Vegas massacre?
A. I do indeed do that. But as a caring parent would you ever seek to justify why your children were hurt because of someone else's actions? I very much doubt you would seek to do this, ever.
Q & A from Loftus the magnificent. ;-)
Q. You say theism doesn't raise the probability that Jesus was raised from the dead. Why not? At least with theism believers hold to a miracle working god even if they disagree over which god exists.
A. Every atheist I know of, or have heard from, says they are open to the evidence that a miracle took place. In fact, I think atheists are more willing to consider the evidence of a miracle than theists who reject a different theist's miracle claim. Let's take the resurrection as our example. I'm not that open to the evidence because I've spent a lifetime looking for it and finding none exists (that is, nothing that counts as objective evidence). But I'm more open to it than Muslims and Jews. The reason is because of what faith does to the minds of believers. Faith deludes them into believing their faith is certain. Being certain their faith is correct, they are less likely to consider any evidence that Jesus arose from the dead, whereas atheists are at least willing to consider it (some more than others, of course).
My heart goes out to the victims and families of the Las Vegas massacre, those who were not able to dodge the shooter's bullets, and those traumatized by the thought it could have been them. My younger brother lives in Vegas and his favorite musician is Jason Aldean. He didn't go to the concert. *Whew* It was good news to learn he dodged that bullet! No, I do not think god saved him. No, I do not think his life has some special purpose because he didn't go. Sometimes shit happens. Sometimes good happens.
But what would have been so wrong for a good all-powerful god to end the shooter's life with a heart attack just before shooting his first bullet? Then everyone would have dodged their bullets. This, my friends, is the problem of suffering that most believers are blithely unaware and unconcerned about.
Believers are now praying for the families of the victims and others affected. But if their god did nothing to help anyone beforehand it makes no sense to think their god will help them afterward! That's what deluded people do because of the need to believe against all evidence to the contrary. If it's possible for them to ever see that faith causes them to ignore objective evidence to the contrary, this is their best chance.
To be open-minded means being open to any objective evidence that could change your mind. Being open-minded means being open to the consensus of scientists who agree evolution is a fact, along with all that it implies. Being open-minded means thinking like a scientist, by seeking to disconfirm your feelings and intuitions by objective evidence to the contrary.
I cannot agree to disagree if it means allowing feelings and intuitions to determine what we think is true. They are notoriously wrong, yet they deceive nearly every person on the planet.
To anyone who disagrees I have a feeling you are dead wrong. Try to dispute my feeling without using any objective evidence. Then you will see how utterly unreliable subjective feelings can be when it comes to knowing anything objective about the universe we live in, how it operates, and where it came from. You'll clearly see that subjective feelings and intuitions immunize the brain from knowing the truth about the universe we live in.
Believers will ask, "Is objective evidence the grand arbiter of truth? Do you you have any objective evidence to support this claim or is it just a feeling??" The answer is simple and easy. There is overwhelming objective evidence that requiring objective evidence is the best and probably only way to know anything about the nature of nature, its workings and origins.
"God only exists as a fictional character. He is a dummy, and religionists put words into his mouth. Therefore, it is easy to show that God created evolution or anything else. All you have to do is say so and it magically becomes true."
Theism does not increase the odds that Jesus was raised from the dead, since one can be a theist and still think the evidence is insufficient to believe. Jews and Muslims reject the resurrection hypothesis just as surely as atheists and agnostics do.
The advance of the anti-science, anti-democracy barbarians
My shift to atheism got a boost when I was in seminary. Classes in theology especially stirred up doubts—the last thing that was supposed to happen. The Ecclesiastical-Academic Complex (as Hector Avalos puts it) exists to manufacture clergy, those legions of preacher-apologists who can help folks in the pews outmaneuver their doubts.
But in my coursework I discovered that theology was longwinded on what God was like, but short of breath on epistemology: where can we find reliable, verifiable data about God? Well, that was asking too much: “We rely on prayer, revelation, intuition, the holy spirit speaking to us.” Really? You expect to get away with that forever?
The Bible is the CLAIM, not evidence.
Roy Moore, the controversial former Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, famous for his refusal to remove the Ten Commandments monument from the Alabama Judicial Building, is now a nominee for the U.S. Senate. In case some here aren’t all that familiar with him, here are some of his views:
How do believers know there's a god? Because of supposed miracles. Yet miracles are impossible in the natural world without a supernatural god (i.e., a natural explanation is required when there is no god). Therefore believers have to presuppose god to verify miracles. Presupposing a god to justify unverifiable miracles--which in turn provides the reason for believing in god--is what we mean by the delusion of faith (i.e., pretending to know things you don't know). Apologists can try to claim they're not presuppositionalists all they want, but they are preuppositionalists nonetheless.
A few items that the cherry-pickers don't pick
On a recent post here I asked how the apostle Paul could possibly have known that there are “spiritual” bodies; this claim, of course, is yet another clue that his grip on reality was shaky at best (and I
do exclude his hallucinations of the risen Jesus as a source of data). But a Christian apologist had a simple answer: that God had told him. Silly me, why didn’t I think of that? But let’s play Spot-the-Flaw: “My advice to believers who are sure they felt a god or heard a god’s voice is to be skeptical and remember that believers have been hearing those same whispers from many gods for many centuries.” (Guy Harrison,
50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God)
Split-brain patients are individuals who have had the corpus callosum (which connects the right and left hemispheres of the brain) severed. This causes the individual to have two centers of both perceptual and motor activity. Each side of the brain may give a different answer to the same question.
In the video clip below, neurologist V. S. Ramachandran discusses a split-brain individual whose right hemisphere believed in God and whose left hemisphere did not.
The batshit crazy theology of the apostle Paul: four texts
John Loftus has displayed his skill at backhanded compliments with his comment that “…it takes a great deal of intelligence to defend Christian theism, because Christianity cannot be defended without a great deal of mental contortionism” (
The End of Christianity, p. 92).
Apologists do indeed rise to the occasion. They have a broad menu of absurdities to choose from, but their ultimate challenge must be the writing of the apostle Paul.
Of course, Paul has a lot going for him: the high drama of his Damascus Road conversion (we find three versions of this episode in the Book of Acts—but Paul never mentions it in his letters); nothing could hold him back from preaching the gospel: “Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits…” (II Corinthians 11:24-26)
And of course, he got to be a “saint”—which tarnishes that coin considerably.
Loftus’s observation that faith makes smart people say stupid things reminded me of two instances I’d previously come across. The first involves Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project and the author of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. As some here may already know, Collins, a geneticist and defender of evolutionary theory, “knelt in the dewy grass… and surrendered to Jesus Christ” as a result of seeing “a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall” while hiking in the Cascade Mountains. That he considers a purely emotional reaction like that as a reason for accepting the claims of Christianity shows just how unscientific a scientist can be. (How would he respond to someone who denied evolution based on nothing more than emotion?)
I once taught a hermeneutics class for a Christian college using a book titled "How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth." In a comment to a friend recently, I wish I would have taught them to do this:
Here's how you should read the Bible. You need to read it as if you're listening in on a phone conversation where you cannot hear the person on the other end. You know they're saying something, so you have to reconstruct it from listening to the person you can hear.
Think of it this way. In all my days debating the Bible no one wins any debate with just a comment or two. Yet this is what we repeatedly see in the gospels in the case of Jesus. He always wins all of his debates with just a comment or two. In a few cases we read where his opponents walk off grumbling, so they were obviously not convinced. From this we know the gospels don't tell us the whole story. What is their story? We must reconstruct it. What would they have said in response? I think in many, if not most cases, I know. The same goes for all of the epistles, including Paul's authentic ones. When Paul argues against others who claim to be Christians you can bet they had their responses. What were they? In many cases I think I know. Can you do this? Have you ever tried? You realize these were smart people who had intelligent answers, right?
Look at the OT in the same way when it my comes to the prophets who denounced people. You realize there were other prophets who said different things and who denounced each other, don't you? How would people living in those times know which ones to believe? It would be very difficult for them. How do you know that the prophets who eventually won out were the true prophets of the true god?
When it comes to the destruction of whole peoples and the slaughtering of their babies, what would these people say to such a holy war? Have you ever seen the need for a complete genocide? Do you know any people worthy of nothing but slaughter?
Rinse. Repeat. Rinse. Repeat.
My main point is that it was not obvious to the people of that day which god is the "real" one. The "real" god or gods surfaced later as more people grew to believe in them (just as some religious groups are larger than others, the largest one being the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages) who were retrospectively written back into what you now read in the Bible.
Robert Conner wrote something recently that prompted me to write this.
The Ten Well-Founded "Presuppositions" of Atheism:
1. We require sufficient objective empirical evidence before we will accept any claims of divine revelation.
2. We accept the general principle that any specific miraculous claim must overcome the strong presumption that it didn't occur based on the overwhelming cumulative evidence that miracles have not occurred.
3. We accept the view that believers must shoulder the burden of proof as outsiders to show their faith is objectively true, given that learning a religion as an uncritical child from one's parents in a religious culture is a notoriously unreliable way to know which religion is true, if there is one.
4. We accept the results of scientific clinical studies that have shown petitionary prayers work no better than chance, and reject personal antecdotal unconfirmed stories told by believers.
5. We accept that the laws of nature in the ancient pre-scientific world were the same as they are now, so we have a very strong presumption against accepting miraculous claims in the ancient superstitious world prior to the rise of modern science and the modern world.
6. We accept that which is objectively probable, and reject that which is merely possible.
7. We reject any and all double standards and special pleadings from religionists when they argue for their faith over the faiths of others.
8. We accept the overwhelming consensus of scientists as the surest guarantee of what is true, over any and all claims by religious leaders, scholars and their holy books.
9. We proportion what we conclude based on the strength of the objective evidence.
10. We accept the approach of methodological naturalism in assessing miraculous claims, whereby we seek out natural explanations for any and all events in question, given that doing so is the best and only way to know the truth in the midst of so many religious frauds, fakes, liars and hucksters.
In reference to God's goodness in the face of hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Jose, a Christian asked me this question:
Q: "Why is God obligated to help someone who rejects Him?"
A: Who is obligated to help someone who suffers? The person who cares the most, who also has the most power or financial ability, has the greatest obligation to help a person who suffers, especially if that person's life depends on it, and especially if it demands so little from the helper.
So God has the greatest obligation to help the ones who suffer.
If someone only helps others based on tit for tat, where helping others has strings attached, then that person isn't a giving person at all. Hell, the worse person in the world can abide by that.
Of all the beings who could alleviate this suffering God could have had the greatest impact by stopping the hurricane dead in it's tracks before it materialized. No one would know he did anything, should he want to keep hidden from us.
If a god supposedly created the universe with its laws then s/he could even perform a perpetual miracle and keep all hurricanes away from us. But s/he's either lazy, uncaring, powerless, or doesn't even exist.
If you want to see the kind of faith the biblical god demands then look no further than the story of Job.
Job's story is fallaciously being used to offer comfort to believers in the midst of the terrible suffering caused by hurricances Harvey, Irma and Jose. "God knows what he's doing" they say, "even if we don't understand his mysterious ways, because his ways are loving and kind."
The lesson however, isn't about God's love or kindness toward us. It's not meant to provide any comfort to us either. The real lesson is that god reserves the right to bring as much suffering into our lives as he wants, even to kill us, for whatever reason he wants, and we are not to question why. We are to have blind unquestioning faith that he has the right to mistreat us at will. He can do whatever the hell he wants to us simply because he's GOD. We're simply to take what he dishes out. It doesn't matter if we're good or not either. This lesson is missed by almost all believers.
