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.
Christianity is true. The short answer is this: We need sufficient objective evidence that can transform the negligible amount of human testimony found in the Bible into verified eyewitness testimony. But it does not exist. Given the extraordinary nature of the miracle tales in the Bible, this requirement means the past has to be changed and that can’t be done. Let's explore this.No surprise, given the mess their religion is in
1. Christians can’t agree on who is right, what god wants
When Christians are off to church on a Sunday morning, they might have to drive past a few churches of other denominations. Apparently it never crosses their minds to stop at one of these—after all, “We’re all Christians, aren’t we?” But that’s exactly the problem: Christians have never been able to agree on what Christianity is. They’ve been fighting about this for centuries; the Catholic/Protestant divide is especially pronounced. We can be sure Catholics won’t stop at Protestant churches, and Protestants—with contempt and ridicule for the Vatican—wouldn’t think of stopping at a Catholic church.
An atheist that has made me a better theist is John W. Loftus. For atheistic books, it’s hard to top John. John is fierce, brutal, and ruthless in his critique of Christianity. This is what we need. We need our faith battered and hammered. If it can survive this battery and hammering and shine through, then you have further conviction for being a devout believer. It is my firm conviction that a seasoned Protestant debater would be devoured alive by John.
People have asked me if I intend to continue debating John. The answer is a strong and firm: YES. I will continue to demolish my friend in debate after debate until the day he is sat down in Mass as a believer. That would make it all worth it in the end. LINK
And it’s a go-to book for sustaining ignorance and intolerance
In my article here last week, I discussed six Bible texts that qualify as dealbreakers: upon analyzing these carefully, believers would be justified in saying, “Enough already,” and head for the exit. The cumulative impact of these six—and many more—should put traditional belief in the gutter. The feel-good Bible verses preached from the pulpit fall far short of cancelling the far too many terribly bad Bible texts.
The worst nightmare becomes even more obvious when we step back and take a look at the big picture. There is no way the Bible meets the high standards that we would expect in a book written/dictated by a wise, perfect god. For a close look at this problem, check out Valerie Tarico’s article published in January 2018: Why Is the Bible So Badly Written?
The reality is that I see no significant relationship between one's personal life and the ideas he argues for much at all. The arguments should stand on their own merit. If we dismiss a person's argument because his personal life is a mess then we should dismiss a great many people's arguments for the same reason.I know people will disagree, so let's hear it in the comments. Is a disagreement on this issue, the one where Price's chapter is included despite vehemently disagreeing with his socio-politics, an issue in which he also should be cancelled as an author?
In Acts 8:9-13, the Apostle Philip encounters The Amazing Simon in Samaria. Simon enthralled the people but Philip baptized Simon, Simon followed Philip, and was amazed by the signs and miracles he saw.
In Acts 13:4-12, Barnabas and Paul, aka Saul, traveled to Cyprus and met proconsul Sergius Paulus who had a Jewish magician friend named Bar-Jesus, aka Elymas, who opposed Barnabas and Paul. Paul temporarily blinded Elymas.
In Acts 24, Paul is brought to trial before Felix the governor. After speaking with Paul, Felix decided to wait a few days until Lysias came. Lysias was the Roman tribune who took Paul into custody.
When Paul was brought back, Felix had his Jewish wife, Drusilla, with him.
Now let's play Bingo with Acts and Antiquities of the Jews.
Antiquities of the Jews 20.7.2 [excerpt] (20.142-144a) While Felix was procurator of Judea, he saw this Drusilla, and fell in love with her; for she did indeed exceed all other women in beauty; and he sent to her a person whose name was Simon one of his friends; a Jew he was, and by birth a Cypriot, and one who pretended to be a magician, and endeavored to persuade her to forsake her present husband, and marry him; and promised, that if she would not refuse him, he would make her a happy woman. Acts 8:9 (NRSV) 9 Now a certain man named Simon had previously practiced magic in the city and amazed the people of Samaria, saying that he was someone great. Acts 13:4, 6-8 (NRSV) 4 So, being sent out by the Holy Spirit, they went down to Seleucia; and from there they sailed to Cyprus.
6 When they had gone through the whole island as far as Paphos, they met a certain magician, a Jewish false prophet, named Bar-Jesus. 7 He was with the proconsul, Sergius Paulus, an intelligent man, who summoned Barnabas and Saul and wanted to hear the word of God. 8 But the magician Elymas (for that is the translation of his name) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul away from the faith.Acts 24:24 (NRSV) 24 Some days later when Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was Jewish, he sent for Paul and heard him speak concerning faith in Christ Jesus.
Dealbreakers in the Bible
Based on my own experience—I was pastor of churches for nine years, and have authored two books critical of Christianity—I’m pretty sure of this: devout folks don’t want to think too much about issues that can undermine their faith. Which means that reading the Bible is almost a No-No. Because there is so much in scripture that should prompt educated people to say, “Well, that can’t be right.” There are so many deal-breaker texts, just in the gospels. So in this Pop-Quiz for Christians I want to focus on some of these really embarrassing texts. How can the faithful read, study, reflect seriously on these patches of scripture—and not head for the exit?
John you say in that article “Since there’s no good reason to believe the virgin birth myth, there’s no good reason to believe the resurrection myth, either, since the claim of Jesus’ resurrection is told in those same Gospels. If the one is to be dismissed, so should the other.[13]” John, if someone has already demonstrated good evidence for the existence of a theistic God, then you cannot rule out the truth of a virgin birth off hand. Certainly, if God can do the big miracle, He can do the little miracles. I noticed that when you attack the historical evidence for the resurrection , you do it indirectly not directly…saying if we can’t believe the miracle of the virgin birth, then we can’t believe the resurrection. But then you only accept the proof of a virgin birth that could be shown in the laboratory! Is that realistic? Can we not know some things to be true even if it’s not proven in the laboratory? I think your standard to determine truth as only those things that can be proven scientifically is too one sided! How do you prove the philosophy of scientism? Furthermore, if miracles are possible, a virgin birth is possible.I responded as follows:
As a Christian apologist, I can say that there is no intellectual objection to Christianity more daunting than the problem of horrendous suffering. In this important new book, John Loftus has gathered a diverse collection of voices that seek to build a comprehensive, multi-pronged critique of Christianity based on this most difficult problem. No Christian apologist can afford to ignore it. -- Dr. Randal Rauser, Professor of Historical Theology, Taylor Seminary.Rauser also asked me to debate him on the topic, God of Genocide: A Debate on Biblical Violence, of which I only have my opening statement, which I find is pretty good. I wish him well, and hope that sometime in the future his spirit guide (which is in his head, and there alone) will tell him he's defending nonsense.
The ongoing scandal of god’s negligence
It’s not a stretch to say that the Bible is one of Christian theology’s biggest burdens. It portrays a god that theologians have worked so hard to modify and refine; the very rough edges have to be knocked off. Among many other negatives, the Christian god is a terror-and-guilt specialist, because nothing you say or think escapes his notice. This is Jesus-script in Matthew 12:36-37: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” The apostle Paul also had an opinion on god getting even: “…on the day when, according to my gospel, God through Christ Jesus judges the secret thoughts of all” (Romans 2:16)—after all, how else would prayer work if god doesn’t know your secret thoughts? Hence devout Christians are confident that their god closely monitors every human being—all eight billion of us.
Bible scholars often have suspicions of interpolations but do not go as far as taking them out of the Bible unless they have old, reliable manuscripts that omit the passage. Here are some passages that were in the King James Version but have been removed, or in the case of popular passages, they are noted as missing in the most reliable old Bibles.
We live at an exciting juncture of history. The traditional triumphant understanding of the church, known as “Christendom,” is crumbling. Out of its rubble is rising a grass-roots global movement of people who are captivated by the vision of a Jesus-looking God raising up a Jesus-looking people to transform the world in a Jesus-kind of way. And as this new kingdom wine is bursting the old wineskins of Christendom, believers and skeptics alike are being forced to rethink everything they thought they knew about the Christian faith and life. LINK.In a way, I hope he succeeds. If he suceeds more evangelicals will be brought closer to the truth, closer to those us who don't believe at all. I've written about this phenomena before. See my posts Honest Evangelical Scholarship is a Ruse. There is No Such Thing!; and also The New Evangelical Orthodoxy, Relativism, and the Amnesia of It All.
They just say NO to their Lord and Savior
A few years ago, a devout Catholic woman was kind enough to read an early version of a chapter that ended up in my 2016 book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief. Her willingness differed from the response I got from other churchgoers—those who refused because they were Christians; they were afraid that their faith might be damaged (i.e., I don’t want to think about it). In the chapter she read I discussed Jesus-script about his coming on the clouds to bring god’s kingdom. I was surprised—but not surprised—by her reaction: “I didn’t know Jesus is supposed to come back.” How could she not know this? —because it’s right there in Jesus-script: this would be the finale of his story, his eventual triumph, initiating the kingdom. I was not surprised, however, because I have yet to meet a Catholic who has been encouraged to read the Bible. As I’ve often pointed out, the gospels are a minefield, and the clergy want to avoid having to defend them. This minefield includes 292 not-so-great Jesus quotes—well, that’s my tally, and the list can be found on the website for my book, Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught.
John W. Loftus hardly. We all try to rationalize our own belief systems first and seldom try to rationalize belief systems which we seldom (if ever) encounter. That's not a double standard. This is, perhaps, the lamest objection I've seen from you yet. 🙄But David Pallmann, you say what an alcoholic says who claims we are all alcoholics. For surely I just introduced you to the multifaceted number of religions you reject, but refuse to consider, even after learning about them. This is another exercise in hypocritical excuse making.
#1 On Willful Disbelief: Can we control our thought? Can we tell what we are going to think tomorrow? Can we stop thinking? Is belief the result of that which to us is evidence, or is it a product of the will? Can the scales in which reason weighs evidence be turned by the will? Why then should evidence be weighed? If it all depends on the will, what is evidence? Is there any opportunity of being dishonest in the formation of an opinion? Must not the man who forms the opinion know what it is? He cannot knowingly cheat himself. He cannot be deceived with dice that he loads. He cannot play unfairly at solitaire without knowing that he has lost the game. He cannot knowingly weigh with false scales and believe in the correctness of the result.
The Bible quotes Jesus with having said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” The Christians say that it is the duty of every person to read, to understand, and to believe this revelation – that a man should use his reason; but if he honestly concludes that the Bible is not a revelation from God, and dies with that conclusion in his mind, he will be tormented forever. They say,” Read,” and then add: “Believe, or be damned.” Suppose then I read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, “The book is not true.” If this is the honest result, if the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book. The brain thinks without asking our consent; we believe, or disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of him who watches. There is no opportunity of being honest or dishonest in the formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entirely independent of desire. We must believe, or we must doubt, in spite of what we wish. --From Col. Ingersoll to Mr. Gladstone
How does religion get away with it? It relies on the ignorance, gullibility and, yes, the complacency of those are committed to piety. And the consequences can be calamitous. In an article I posted here in January, Humanity’s Urgent Need to Outgrow Religion, I mentioned the plan to spend big bucks to build what amounts to a theme-park at the supposed site of Jesus’ baptism—but the developers have been careful not to call it a theme park. It’s a scam, a prank, a joke, because nobody knows where Jesus was baptized, in fact the gospel of John omits any mention of Jesus setting foot in the River Jordan. Yes, John the Baptist is there, but mainly to announce that Jesus is the “lamb of God who takes way the sins of the world.”
But a baptism theme-park is a minor offense. We keep being hit with news about the cruelties, crimes, and abuses done in Jesus’ name. Three headlines of recent vintage illustrate the ongoing problem.
A high quotient of fake news
The red flags in scripture are all over the place, and easy to spot. By this I mean story elements that alert readers to be suspicious. If we came across these in a Disney fantasy or in Harry Potter story, we’d say, “Very entertaining, but not to be taken seriously.” There are so many red flags in the gospels, and they show up in the first chapters of each. In Mark, a voice from the sky tells Jesus, “You are my beloved son”—right after his baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus had sins? A god yelling from the sky doesn’t sound at all like a real-world event.
Let's explore the relationship between Paul and James. First, calibrate your sarcasm detectors for Paul's attitude regarding circumcision.
Galatians 5:11-12 NIV
11 Brothers and sisters, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished. 12 As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves!
This book is full of shit. God's shit. The Bible is full of it. Two billion or so Christians are ignorant of it. Hopefully this ingeniously conceived book by Schneider will get their attention. He hopes, like I do, that by throwing this shit against the wall of an indoctrinated brain, some of it will stick. But don't be deceived, it's a well-written, well-informed book, concerning 75 well-informed choices of the shit we see in the Bible.You can get it on Amazon.
Deceptive translators don’t want readers to see the problems
There has been a meme floating about on the Internet: “If you ever feel worthless, remember, there are people with theology degrees.” These degrees are granted by a huge variety of religious schools, ranging from fundamentalist Protestant to Vatican-loyal Catholic. So among those holding these degrees—what else would we expect?—there is substantial disagreement regarding what god is like, how he/she/it expects people to behave, how he/she/it wants to be worshipped. This is one of the reasons Christianity has splintered into thousands of quarreling brands.
It’s a cult!
With well more than two billion followers, Christianity ranks as humanity’s biggest religion, and thus to many it also qualifies as one of the great religions of the world. Look at all it has going for it: 2,000 years of momentum, churches in every city and town—in the countries where it predominates—as well as massive cathedrals that draw vast crowds. From my own experience, I can say that those in London, Paris, Milan, Rome, and Barcelona are indeed magnificent. Some of the great composers have set Christian stories and rituals to music, e.g., Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi. A massive propaganda engine promotes the faith as well: Sunday school, catechism, and professional apologists whose primary goal is to explain away the incoherencies that sabotage Christian theology, i.e., its many claims about god are in jarring conflict, and cannot, in truth, be reconciled. But the apologists are slick enough to make it look good.
Thank you, John Loftus, for the invitation and opportunity to express some of my ideas.
Dr. Steve Mason has said on a couple of MythVision Podcasts that some of the epistles have passages that seem to be responding to something that has been asked or stated here and uses a telephone analogy to describe it here. He makes a point that this lends authenticity to the epistle, but we can only guess what has prompted the response. This article attempts to show that Paul and James were interacting in that way.
They just say NO to their Lord and Savior
When you’ve been nurtured on ideas since early childhood—they’re a source of comfort and derive from adults whom you trust—it can be hard to see that some of the ideas may be truly weird. This is especially true of the gospels, which remain, for far too many of the faithful, unexplored territory. There may be passing familiarity with gospel stories, based on texts read from the pulpit and heard in ritual. Of course, Christian children’s books have played a major role in making the best Jesus-script well-known, e.g., in the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37), and “God so loved the world…” (John 3:16, may or may not be Jesus-script: there was no punctuation in the Greek manuscripts.)
My message to you is this: pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important: what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self-deception. Perhaps it always has.Since we’re alive we must make choices, even if they are determined ones. So why not make those choices good ones, even though those choices are determined ones? At the time we choose we don’t know which ones are determined to be. So the fact that they are determined doesn’t affect which choices we make. Live then, as if it’s all up to us, knowing it’s not up to us. It doesn’t change how we should live by knowing that our choices are determined.
― Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good grounds for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones. — Bertrand Russell, “An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish” (1943).
In my critique of the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies (BICS) essay competition on the “best” evidence for life after death and my response to the summer and winter commentaries on it, I made reference to striking similarities between the arguments made by Christian fundamentalists and survival researchers (i.e., those who purport to investigate survival of bodily death scientifically). In this three-part guest post, I’d like to highlight or elaborate on fifteen or so examples of how those at the forefront of “scientific” research into an afterlife—or in BICS’ framing, the survival of human consciousness after death—have consistently used fallacious arguments that mirror parallel arguments prominent among fundamentalist Christians.
Rise above the credulity expected in Sunday School
For many, many people, reading the gospels eyes-wide-open for the first time can prompt serious doubt—and their departure from the Christian faith. It’s awfully hard to divest the gospels of that aura of holiness promoted by the church: the gospels are the greatest story ever told—their authors were inspired by God himself. It’s not uncommon for congregations to stand when the ritual includes a reading from the gospels.
But an adult mentality can kick in, i.e., the assumption that I can “spot a fairy tale when I see one.” For example, eleven verses into Mark, chapter 1, we read that a “voice came from heaven” announcing to Jesus—at his baptism—that he was God’s son. But very few of us believe that gods make announcements from the sky. In Matthew, chapter 1, verse 20, we’re told that an angel of the lord tells Joseph in a dream that Mary is pregnant by the holy spirit. Most of us have weird dreams from time to time, but we don’t believe they’re messages from a god.
