Don Camp Knows His Indoctrinating Catechism Fairly Well. Now He Should Think Through It!

Don Camp has roosted here at DC for some time now. I wonder what his motivation is. I hope he's here to test his faith against the evidence, but of that I can't say. He's a former teacher/professor of literature classes and his comments are respectful and polite. His arguments are always a brand of special pleading though, which he cannot see. What he's doing is spitting out the catechism he was taught at an early age, by mindlessly quote-mining from the Bible and/or the catechism theology built on it. He knows his catechism well even if he has never thought through it. Let's see if an atheist can make him think about it. Take a good look at what he said:

In the end, it is not what you believe that is crucial but who you believe. A person may believe all the doctrine he is taught as a kid in a Christian home and still not be a believer because he is not trusting in the person or the mercy of God.

Surely you have heard this said before. I said it. Every ex-Christian has probably said it. So Camp tells us nothing we haven't considered before. Nothing. Yet he may think it's profound. It's not profound at all. It's a mess of words intended to confuse truly inquiring minds and obfuscate (or hide) the truth from minds like Camp himself--who mindlessly wrote them!

Where do Camp's words come from? Is Camp plagiarizing someone else? No. Yet the exact words he used above are not found in the Bible either. In fact, there isn't a quote that comes close to saying this, nor is this the only thing we find stressed in the New Testament. Oh sure, belief is stressed, but so are two other things. First, in the epistles we find that if anyone teaches false doctrine or believes it, they are doomed to hell. Christians derive their doctrines from the gospels, just as surely as they do the epistles. So doctrine is stressed. Second, in the gospels obedience is stressed by Jesus. In the epistles obedience is stressed too. Paul demands it as an apostle.

So once again, where did Camp get these words? Well, I'm here to tell you it's in the catechisms we all grew up on when being indoctrinated by our parents in Sunday School, and catechism classes. Other than that I don't know where they originated from. Surely not from Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Luther or Zwingli. Do they make sense? No.

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The Brain of the Believer Is Deceiving Its Host. Why It Does It. And What It Takes To Be An Honest Seeker Of Truth.

This time, boys and girls, I want to highlight what we see over and over and over again from Christian apologists and wannabe apologists alike without exception. Every single analogy offered in defense of a crucial tenet of faith is disanalogous to the very point being defended. Every. Single. One. Without. Exception. I could write a booklet highlighting them. When seen for the false analogies they really are, all they got is special pleading. So combining a whole lot of false analogies disguised as analogies gets them nothing.

Harold Newman asked Don Camp how we go about verifying his "personal experience with God" claim? "This one is especially puzzling to me because we haven't established that God exists, and you cannot have experiences with something that doesn't exist."

Don Camp:

We can establish that God exists in the very same way that we can be reasonably sure that there was a mouse in my kitchen. But, as you say, not 100%.

If we add the reasonableness of God's existence to the subjective experience of him, I who have that subjective experience can be more than intellectually convinced convinced of the probability; I can be personally convinced.

That is like my experience with the mouse. My report is reasonable based on the investigation and reasoning done. It is probable there was a mouse. My experience seeing the mouse makes it a personal reality.

And I can be reasonably sure that I did not hallucinate the mouse. If I alone had the experience of seeing the mouse, that might still be a possibility. But If others, many others, also see the mouse in my kitchen, the likelihood that we all are hallucinating is minimal.

The DC commenters have already taken Camp to task on this, but let me highlight what's wrong with it. First off mice exist. We have seen plenty of them to know. We can verify the existence of this mouse with objective evidence that would convince everyone; mouse droppings, eaten food, noises in the walls, and/or with our eyes. Again, we can verify the existence of this mouse with objective evidence that would convince everyone. There is no such evidence that convinces everyone Don Camp's sect specific god exists. That's because there is no observable god, unlike mice. Point. Get. The. The proper analogy is not a verifiable mouse. The proper analogy is to substitute Hobbits, Goblins, Unicorns, or gods like Zeus, Thor, Ra or Odin. Those invisible non-verifiable concepts do not admit of evidence that would convince every reasonable person. Let's compare comparables if we want to be honest with the available facts.

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And the Beat Goes On: More Bluffing and Lying for Jesus

The misfortune of a flat learning curve  

In my article here two weeks ago, Three Christian Gods Missing in Action, and last week, Bluffing, Talking Piffle and Lying About Jesus, I did not discuss Jesus mythicism, i.e., the arguments made by some scholars that Jesus was a mythical figure. Our resident troll, Don Camp, responded at length to the first article, and my rebuttal was the second. When he jumped back in to continue the conversation, he commented, “Everyone here seems to have bought into the Jesus myth myth.” Which can be done, he pointed out, by “writing off the textual evidence for the Jesus event.” 

 

Strange, my topic wasn’t Jesus mythicism, and I doubt very much that “everyone here” at the DC Blog accepts it, but this was Mr. Camp’s attention grabber. He doesn’t seem to grasp that many of us accept that there might have been a Galilean peasant preacher, but whoever and whatever he was has been hopelessly obscured by the layers of myth, folklore, fantasy, and magical thinking piled on by the gospel writers. A real Jesus could have become mythicized. Virgin birth and resurrection, for example, are symptoms of that. In the Wikipedia article on resurrection beliefs in the ancient world, we find this:

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Don Camp is Our Gullible/Deluded/Anti-Intellectual Person of the Day!

Don Camp has been commenting here for a few months. He's on a mission to save readers from hell. He's the answer man, always doing what he can to show why we are wrong. But if there was ever a gullible/deluded/anti-intellectual person then he is it. The special pleading word salad he makes out of pure bullshit is bizarre to behold. I cannot stomach it. Since he really thinks he has reasonable answers to the questions posed of him, I want others to see what faith does to an otherwise intelligent mind. It makes people stupid. I've argued this in one of my top ten favorite chapters, chapter 3, "Christianity is Wildly Improbable", for my anthology The End of Christianity. Camp is another example of this phenomenon. He proclaims he has psychic abilities to hear "voices" from "the other side"! He doesn't even know that's what he's doing, but he is. I've written about this psychic connection in the writings of Alvin Plantinga, in another one of my top ten favorite chapters, chapter 5, "Accept Nothing Less Than Sufficient Objective Evidence", for my book How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice From an Atheist.

You must read this to see it for yourselves, below:

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Faith-Based Puzzle Solving Vs Examining Evidence Objectively

I have to admit it, of all the Christian visitors here at DC, Don Camp has been one of the best. He's polite and has more knowledge than most others who have commented here. And he's indefatigable. I had to limit him to ten comments a day lest he hijack my blog, for no other reason than that I cannot engage him as often as he requires. Did I say he's indefatigable? I challenged him to read my magnum opus, and he's doing just that, skipping some chapters and reading others thoroughly. He's also patiently taking the time to write responses to what I wrote on his blog.

I cannot shake him folks. Yet he's just as delusional as others who are not as knowledgeable or indefatigable or polite. One might ask why I'm highlighting him here, since it grants him more credibility that he deserves. So let me tell you why. I don't know. ;-) Maybe it's because he's likeable. Maybe it's because he can help make my case stronger, especially by articulating it better. Maybe it's because he might be reachable. Maybe it's because atheists who comment here might help him see the truth. Maybe he can be used as a test case in how apologists special plead their case when defending the indefensible. How about ALL OF THE ABOVE!

Camp recently wrote two posts on Moses and the Exodus that are instructive. Here is my best response. It probably won't work, but here goes anyway.

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Quote of the Day by Dr. Hector Avalos, Chiding Pop Christian Apologists For Pretending To Know Things They Don't Know

Don Camp has roosted here at DC, viewing himself as an apologist whose primary goal is not to learn from us but rather to dismantle our arguments against his faith. He's posted so often I limited his comments to ten per day. What Camp should tell us is why his god was so incompetent he enlisted apologists like him to set us all straight. Enter Dr. Hector Avalos. Camp had strewn together a lame response to a video Dr. Avalos made, so Hector responded here. Undeterred, Camp thought he could respond further. So Hector chided him in a letter below, which also serves as a warning to other pop Christian apologists and professional apologists as well.

Dr. Peter Boghossian has defined faith as "pretending to know things you don't know." It's a stipulative definition, one that's polemical in nature yet accurate from the perspective of atheists and skeptics. No, we emphatically do not have to use a word such as "faith" in the same way Christians use it, when the concept behind it is the debate itself. Although, if faith is trust, as they say, there is no reason to trust faith. Anyway, just like the sophists in the days of Socrates, who pretended to know things they didn't know, most all apologists for Christianity do likewise (otherwise they wouldn't be apologists). By contrast Boghossian wants us to practice the intellectual virtue of authenticity, whereby we admit we don't know something if we legitimately don't know it. No one can know everything. So apologists who are pretending are not authentic people. The question is why anyone would take seriously the pontifications of an inauthentic person? The lack of authenticity, all by itself, should tell us such a person is indoctrinated, brainwashed and delusional.

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The Use and Abuse of the Amarna Letters by Christian Apologists: A Response to Don Camp

Pharaoh Akhenaten, founder of Amarna

Don Camp, a blogger who often comments on DC, has written a critique of a video lecture, “How Archaeology Killed Biblical History,” that I presented in Minnetonka, Minnesota for the Minnesota Atheists on October 21, 2007. 

Camp objects principally to some of my statements about the lack of historical and archaeological evidence for the Exodus. Camp appeals to the famous Amarna letters, which date from the middle to late 1300s BCE, to refute some of the claims I make in the video lecture.

Camp purports to present a researched post with footnotes. In particular, Camp appeals to this website to document his claims about the Amarna letters.

For the sake of clarity and brevity, I will address the main points of Camp’s blog post with two principal questions:

I. Does archaeology support the large numbers of people mentioned in Exodus 12:37, which claims that 600,000 men on foot were part of the Exodus? (Approximately at 17:06 in my video lecture).

II. Does the Amarna correspondence, dated to the mid-late 1300s BCE, support the historical claims of the Bible concerning the conquest of Hazor and Shechem by the Israelites?       

I will explain why Camp not only misunderstands the Amarna correspondence, but also why he lacks a proper understanding of both the Bible and archaeology when he makes his case. On a broader level, this essay explains why we cannot use the Amarna correspondence to confirm the Exodus or Conquest narratives.

[Click Here for PDF version of complete article]

Don Camp On How His God Has Foreknowledge. It's Because His God is Imaginary!

I've challenged this unrepentant believer to read my magnum opus. He is, and he's commenting on it. He thinks of himself as equal to the task of answering my doubts and others here. Can he? He's reading my chapter on prophecy, where I ask how his god has the required foreknowledge to predict the future of human free willed agents with certainty. I examine four different models and Camp defends one. Here's Camp:

Theological. God decrees everything that happens, he can know the future of every human action, since humans don't have the freedom to do otherwise. "Such a theology creates atheists. It, more than anything else, is what motivates me to attempt to demolish the Christian faith." - Loftus

God is outside time. If God is outside of time he would have no problems predicting future human actions since human actions are not actually in the future. God would merely be seeing the present from his perspective. “We have on hand no acceptable concept of atemporal causation, i.e., of what it is for a timeless cause to produce a temporal effect.” - Davis. “If God is truly timeless,” Hasker says, “so that temporal determinations of ‘before’ and ‘after’ do not apply to him, then how can God act in time, as Scriptures say that he does? - Hasker

The Inferential View. On this view, God figures out from the range of options which choices we will make. "If the history of an empire or nation is already part of the divine plan, how can God hold the leaders, and indeed the peoples themselves, accountable for their actions?" then their thoughts and actions are so preordained as to render them devoid of free will. - Callahan. "How, for instance, can anyone living in the year 2000, God or otherwise, innately know what someone will do on January 1, 2050? So the bottom line for me is that if there is no known mechanism or reason given for how a God in time can foreknow future truly free human actions, then I have reasons to reject that God can foreknow such actions." - Loftus

The Innate View. On this view, God has innate comprehensive knowledge of the future. He just “sees it” because he is omniscient. But this isn't an explanation at all.

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How NOT to Convince Us About God

A favorite theological scam

I never, ever visit Christian websites or blogs to advocate atheism; I don’t invade the online space of any religion. I’ve always thought this would be a waste of time and keystrokes—but moreover, it would be bad manners: it would be like walking into a church on a Sunday morning to argue with the preacher. Bad manners. I don’t want to be a troll.

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Bluffing, Talking Piffle and Lying for Jesus

 How to make a mess defending Christianity 

In my article here last week, Three Christian Gods Missing in Action, in which I discussed a few of the more incoherent aspects of Christian theology, I concluded with this paragraph:

“Our request to theologians: please tell us where we can find reliable, verifiable, objective data about god(s)—we need to dispel all this incoherence. Theologians themselves, I suspect, also wish they had data. Making things up, century after century, is a chore. And it’s such a nuisance that theologians can’t agree: they argue endlessly about what they’ve made up.”

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Case Studies In What It Takes To Believe: Don Camp

Don Camp has roosted here at DC, making unsubstantiated faith-based claims. He tried making the case that faith is trust, then he provided an historical example by asking why we should not trust William Bradford's journal. Even if we're not familiar with his example, anyone can apprehend his point. He wrote:

My point about William Bradford was that we have reports of the history of Plymouth Plantation from only a few people, the primary one being William Bradford. Can we actually know anything without trusting Bradford's account - having faith in his report?

My second question is whether that is real knowledge since the basic evidence would be the journal of William Bradford.

Final question is how we might test the reliability of Bradford's account.

I ask my readers to answer his questions since they are so easy to do with reference to the Gospels and Camp's god. Have at it. I see he's respectful but there are major differences between these two cases, something he just cannot see because faith blinds him. School him but try being respectful if you can. For my part it's simply unbelievable that this is what it takes to believe in the gospels and/or in Camp's god.

Where Was God When This Happened? Part 10

The scandal of divine negligence

Christianity is totalitarian monotheism: God is watching carefully.

Nothing we do escapes his notice: “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.” Matthew 12:36-37

Moreover, prayer works because God can even read our minds. Christians believe in, love, worship, and sing songs to this God who pays such close attention to every human being.

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Why Do Atheists Bother?

Joelyn:

Part of the problem with Evangelical religious beliefs is that some want to make parts of it public policy (e.g., eliminate marriage equality, reproductive rights, etc.)

Frankly, I couldn't care less about any one's religious delusion as long as they are law abiding, do no harm to minors (deny health care based on faith healing) and don't want to impose via public policies their religious strictures on my personal life. So as long Christian apologists enter the public square chewing on their religious delusions, I'll be right there chewing back. Why not? If they can compete in the marketplace of ideas, that's their problem not mine. Cheers!

Wayne Thompson:

Well said! It’s not simply because they knock on our doors with an invitation to church. They vote (which is their right as much as ours, of course). But, they also have PACs which pressure elected officials to get their religious-based agendas through Congress, even though the churches are not taxed like the rest of us.

When millions of delusional people think that an imaginary superman in the sky is in charge of everything, how can they be expected to take issues like Climate Change seriously or even try to understand it? After all, Climate Change wasn’t mentioned in their Bronze Age instructional manual, so why should they believe it? The Evangelical vote was largely responsible for why the world is now having to deal with a President Trump. These are the kinds of outcomes you get when people don’t base their beliefs upon evidence and use reason in making their decisions.

Don Camp (a Christian):

So, what has that to do with you?

I honestly don't get the new atheists' anger. So you don't believe. Okay. So you don't like people knocking on your door with an invitation to church. Say no thank you politely. What's the big deal?

Herald Newman:

It has everything to do with [us]. Delusioned people, who believe nonsense, are making the world a worse place because of that nonsense! I have every right to fight nonsense when it spills over into my life!

Found here. Enjoy.

Christians Do Not Have a Superior Foundation for Morality!

Christians claim that atheists have no foundation for morality, and that they do. Christians claim atheists have no motivation for being good people, and that they do. Christians claim they have moral superiority because of these two beliefs..

What can we make of this? It’s difficult to convince them otherwise, and I’ve tried here, and I’ve tried there. At the risk of beating my head against the wall, let me try one more time.

Statistics show that atheists make up the lowest number of people in prison per percentage of the population. Statistics also show that atheists have the lowest divorce rate per percentage of the population, especially when compared to conservative Christians. Moreover, it cannot be shown that Christians are more charitable than atheists when we look closely at the data.

Ddisregarding this data Christians think they live better lives because they alone have the Holy Spirit living in them. If this claim were true we should expect then to live better lives. But I believe Christians are deluded about this, since the evidence doesn’t show their claim to be true. It’s no different than the Christians who visit us here at DC who cannot bring themselves to believe we are former Christians. What gives? They reject ordinary evidence and personal testimonies to the contrary even though they turn around and accept extraordinary ancient personal testimonies of miracles in the Bible. They need to come to grips with the fact that these ancient Biblical testimonies are reported through the poor medium of history, which must cross over Lessing’s broad ugly ditch.

Christians always have an out. They claim that the above statistics do not represent true Christians. But when I ask them who the true Christians are, they are all divided into denominational groups which are intellectually supported by scholars who claim their particular group represents true Christianity. If you look at the above link on divorce rates it’s all broken down into denominations. Which one represents yours? None of them are significantly better than atheists with regard to divorce rates.

Conservative Christians will claim that it’s not denominational standing but whether or not someone believes the Bible. But I still find people who believe the Bible is inerrant who disagree with each other. Come on now!? Even Jehovah’s Witnesses claim the Bible is inerrant.

The truth is that it was Bible believing Christians who defended slavery in the South! This is a historical fact! The issue of slavery in the South was clearly the easiest moral question for the Christian God to condemn, if he exists and if he truly is the author of the Bible!

Furthermore, if Christians really believed the Bible they wouldn’t let women speak in their churches (I Cor, 14:34), for the man would be the domineering patriarchal head of the house in which a wife is to “obey” her husband just like Sarah obeyed Abraham (I Peter 3: 6), even to the point of lying to save his life by having sex with another man (Genesis 12: 10-16) and by letting him sleep with another woman so he could have a child (Genesis 16). [I am old enough to remember when women had to say the words “to love and to obey” at their weddings!]

Christians have just learned to interpret these kinds of things differently down through the ages, that’s all. According to Sam Harris they cherry-pick their morals from the Bible, and I think that’s true. They claim they wouldn’t do what previous generations of Christians did. Take for instance the great Angelic Doctor, Thomas Aquinas, who taught that heretics should be killed because they are a leavening influence in society. So Christians did that in the Spanish Inquisition and witch trials. Today's Christians think that past Christians got it wrong. Christians today claim they wouldn’t have done that. But this is what I call chronological snobbery. We are all children of our times, as Voltaire said…all of us. And our morals have all developed together over time with the advancement of a better understanding of who we are as human beings in a society.

Christians will retreat to the claim that the whole reason atheists and skeptics are not mass murderers is because they don't live consistently with their beliefs. Christians will claim that the morality of atheists is a borrowed one from the Christian society they were all raised in that taught them what is right and what is wrong. But this is the most ridiculous claim of all.

Michael Shermer asks the Christian one simple question: “What would you do if there were no God? Would you commit robbery, rape, and murder, or would you continue being a good and moral person? Either way the question is a debate stopper. If the answer is that you would soon turn to robbery, rape, or murder, then this is a moral indictment of your character, indicating you are not to be trusted because if, for any reason, you were to turn away from your belief in God, your true immoral nature would emerge…If the answer is that you would continue being good and moral, then apparently you can be good without God. QED.” [Michael Shermer, The Science of Good and Evil, pp. 154-155].

Let me say that anyone who tries to show that no society can be a good society without Christianity needs a history lesson. Such a person needs to study some of the great societies of the past, like Greece during the golden ages, or the Roman Empire, or several of the dynasties in ancient China, or the Islamic Empire under Muhammad, or the historic Japanese culture. None of these societies were Christian ones, but they were great societies by all standards of history. It won't prove anything to argue that there was corruption in every one of these societies to some degree, for this is true of any ancient or modern society, even Biblical Judaism and Christian America.

If Christians want to maintain that a Christian society is a better society, then just let them volunteer to go back in time to medieval Christianity and see if they like it. Probably all Christians today would be branded as heretics and persecuted or burned to death. And if today’s Christians will say that medieval Christianity doesn’t represent true Christianity, which Christian society does truly represent true Christianity? Even in the first few years of the early church there was corruption. There was sin in the camp (Acts 5); grumbling about food (Acts 6); and a major dispute that threatened to split the church (Acts 10-11, 15; Galatians 2). Then there were the constant disputes among these Christians over a very wide assortment of issues (I & II Corinthians). I could go on and talk of Calvin’s Geneva, the Crusades, or any period in the history of America too, including black slavery, the Salem witchcraft trials, Manifest Destiny, and our treatment of women and minorities, to mention just a few.

Christian inclusivist scholar, Charles Kimball, argues that certain tendencies within religions cause evil. “Religious structures and doctrines can be used almost like weapons.” (p. 32). Religion becomes evil, according to Kimball, whenever religion: 1) has absolute truth claims; 2) demands blind obedience; 3) tries to establish the ideal society; 4) utilizes the end justifies any means when defending their group identity; or 5) when they see themselves in a holy war. He says, “A strong case can be made that the history of Christianity contains considerably more violence and destruction than that of most other major religions.” (p. 27) [When Religion Becomes Evil (Harper, 2002)].

I just don’t see where a Christian society is a better one. And even if Christianity was the main motivator in starting most all early American universities, most all of our hospitals and many food kitchens, and the like, these things still would have been started anyway, if for no reason other than necessity. It just so happened to be that Christianity is the dominant religion in America for a couple of centuries, that’s all. Besides, these things were probably not started by Christian churches out of altruism, or any desire for a better society, but as a way for those churches to convert people. After all, who are most vulnerable to the Christian message? They are the sick (hospitals), the poor (food kitchens) and young people leaving home for the first time to enter universities, which were mostly started to train preachers.

Christians will retort that atheists have their Lenin's and Stalin's. Yes that's correct. But what point does that prove? It doesn't prove anything to me. Why? Because I don't believe it was their atheism which caused them to kill millions of people. Most dictators who fear for their lives will kill people in order to make their subjects fearful of them. Besides, there are power hungry people and killers out there no matter what a person believes. The history of the church proves this.

The real question is whether Christians have a superior foundation for morality and I've just briefly shown they don't. I mean, really now, what good does it do for Christians to claim they have a foundation for morality when they cannot tell us how we should behave and they cannot live better lives than the rest of us? What good does it mean to claim they have a superior foundation for morality when they don't actually follow the Bible as was originally intended by the writers of the Bible? It means nothing at all. Such a claim as theirs is completely empty.

Christians will finally retort that atheists cannot say anything is evil. They will claim that whatever happens is part of the evolutionary process of things where the fittest survive, and as such skeptics have no right to denounce any evil behavior. But this is a separate question from the one I've just dealt with. It's a red herring from this particular discussion. What does this have to do with whether Christians have a superior foundation for morality? If they don't have a superior morality, then they don't. And until they accept this fact we cannot go forward to discuss the next question about the nature of good and evil in our society and how we actually determine good and evil. I've already argued that today's Christians don't get their morality from the Bible. That's my major point here. Do they or don't they? That is the question. And the answer is that they do not. They gain their moral notions just like the rest of us do, except that they are hamstrung by having to fit that morality inside the pages of the Bible, and they have an ill-founded confidence in what they think is moral that can lead them to do great harm to others in the name of their God.

But if the answer is that Christians don't get their morality from the Bible and that their moral foundations are not superior ones, then the very next question is to understand where we actually get our moral notions from, and at that point I'd just recommend to them Michael Shermer's book. The short answer to this specific question is that since we are part of nature we have a right to say what kind of society we want live in, and it's a better society when people get along and treat one another with dignity and respect in a democratic form of government where eveyone has the right to speak their mind and to work toward goals that produce a better social environment for our familes and for our future children. It's better for us. It's better for our children. It's better for our nation. It's better financially. It's better socially. It's better for people as a whole. This is obvious! What other reasons are needed?

All Apologetics is Diversionary

I've argued all apologetics is special pleading, and I stand by that. All apologetics is also diversionary, intended to distract attention from something more important. I recently said "Subjective private religious experiences prove nothing." Don Camp says of it,

I don't know why this is such a startling observation. It is virtually a truism. If we broadened it some to subjective private experiences prove nothing, it would still be a truism. And since subjective and private are redundant, subjective experiences prove nothing is really enough. The fact is every experience is subjective.

Boom! Just like that we are no longer talking about religious experiences. Now we're talking about subjective experiences in general. Next we're told every experience is subjective and apparently of equal evidential value to the person having the experience. Don goes on to say he needs to personally experience God as the proof of his reasonings, just as he would doubt that a UFO landed in someone's backyard until he personally saw the UFO land and touched the alien who came out of it. LINK.

What does this have to do with believing the religious tale that a virgin gave birth to a "demi-god" in the ancient superstitious pre-scientific past (as one Christian belief of many)? What kind of religious experience could prove this took place? What does Don say about those who claim to experience God who fail to believe a virgin gave birth to a "demi-god" in the ancient world? How can two people have the same religious experience yet come away with totally different theological conclusions (not mere details, mind you)? How reliable are religious experiences if they can do that? Why aren't the tools of the historian good enough to know what happened in the past, such that believers need these religious experiences? What exactly is this religious experience? We know what it means to see, taste, touch, hear and smell. What specifically does it mean to experience God? Why is it people who claim to experience God always conclude he agrees with them about everything? Those are the issues he's trying to divert our attention away from. Get us thinking about something else whenever possible because there isn't a good answer to the questions posed of him.

The One True Faith: Just How Many of Them Can There Be?

If only we had a way to test them all…

In the small, rural mid-western town where I grew up—and long before my arrival—the Christian souls had been sorted into Protestant and Catholic camps; I was in the former. Naturally, this was well after the eras of armed combat, so folks got along quite well despite the religious chasm. There were frictions, of course: Protestant kids were taunted by Catholic kids that they were going to hell: only followers of the Pope had the lock on heaven. But the insults were returned; one Protestant woman, whose nephew had become engaged to a Catholic woman, with wedding to be in her church, refused to attend because she had no intention of “setting foot in that heathen temple.”

If there was anything that both camps shared it was certainty. We knew that we were right, and those on the other side were wrong. And they knew that they were right, and we were wrong. This certainty was guaranteed by faith.

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Can PZ Myers Change His Ways? Should He?

I've been critical of PZ Myers for five principled reasons: 1) he doesn't understand the mind of the believer, 2) he treats people who disagree as if they are morons, 3) he's a divisive force within the ranks of atheism, 4) he panders to the younger baser type atheist audience, and 5) he doesn't much value the contributions of people like me who deal with Christians on their own terms. I don't understand his motivations. He may like the power and the money that come from having a large audience. Or, it just may be his personality. He may be an ideologue by nature, an extremist, the type of person who can usually make a big difference. Can he change his ways? Should he? That's the question here. One thing is sure, more atheists are speaking out against him and his ways. John Draper, an important Canadian atheist blogger known as the Cobourg Atheist, recently said of him:

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Don Camp On Nature's God and Sectarian Faith

Camp:

From the time humans became humans we have looked at nature around us and at the heavens and have come to the conclusion that there is something or Someone behind the beauty and order we see there. That has been true of primitive American Indians, tribes in Africa and in India. Show me one primitive people who have not come to that conclusion. Show me one primitive atheist tribe. It is true of many of the greatest thinkers of our modern era. I've listed many here over the months. So, no arguing God from nature is not special pleading. It is based on very real and measured evidence.

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Christian “Truth” in Shreds: Epic Takedown 6

Are you satisfied with an image of Jesus on a potato chip?

For a very long time, Christianity has depended on amateur and professional excuse-makers to keep it going. It makes claims about reality—that there is a good, all-powerful god keeping watch over everything—but even the most devout Christians don’t have to look far to see so much that disconfirms this belief. Hence excuses are needed to keep the faith, to protect Christianity from buckling and crumbling. Believers are desperate for excuses because there is so much emotional investment in believing.

 

The amateurs come up with excuses based on naïve concepts learned in Sunday school, e.g., a mother of two young children died suddenly because “god needed her in heaven”—or simply because god works in mysterious ways; the conclusion that god is absent cannot be seriously entertained. Of course, there are those who abandon the faith because they are appalled by such excuses.

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A Excerpt from "Christianity is Not Great" On Prosecuting Accused Witches

What grates on me a bit (sorry) are people who comment here who haven't read my books. I have a good guess they haven't because commenters don't usually refer to them when they would greatly contribute to the discussion. But what grates on me much more are believers who don't think very deeply, who act as know-it-all's about everything regardless of the discipline with a quick Google search to any face-saving way to avoid the truth, written by others who don't think very deeply, who act like know it all's looking for any face-saving way to avoid the truth. Take Don Camp, PLEASE! He's here again (has he ever left?). This time he's an expert on the Salem Witch Trials:

God has placed people in the position of his agents for justice n the world. We have the God-mandated responsibility to stop injustice. That is you me and everyone else.

And that is what happened.

There were twenty witches tried and executed in Salem in 1692-1693. Higher courts finally made those trails illegal. The system that God had established worked.

Camp never considers what might result had the witch trials been divinely averted. He only looks to the potential good that came from them, if one can say that. Listen up, eventually anyone can find something good in any event, no matter how horrendous. The problem is the very sufferings of a tragedy and what might have happened if they had never happened. Looking for the any good result due to rosy god-glasses is not treating events dispassionately with objectivity ('tis typical of believers who seek understanding of their faith, per Anselm). Eventually someone who looses an arm might find something good that came of it, but the real question is whether an amputee's life would have been better had the arm never been severed in the first place, and my bet is every amputee would rather have the arm back.

Don again:

The problem in Salem and elsewhere was not the command but the question who is a witch. As it turned out the people of Salem were wrong about what a witch was. They were wrong about how to detect a witch. They were wrong about how God would have us deal with witches in the era of Jesus and the gospel.

Here's the excerpt from my chapter on the witch hunts. I think it helps the discussion a bit:

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