What Is It with Christians and Violence?

Christian soldiers, please give it a rest

A few days ago a Christian posted this comment on my book’s Facebook page: “I don't care if you're an atheist. Why should you care if I'm a Christian?‬‬” I responded, “Is it REALLY that hard to figure out?” and I provided the link to Richard Carrier’s recent article, “What’s the Harm? Why Religious Belief Is Always Bad.”

Within seconds—there had not been enough time for him to read the article—he responded, with no interest whatever in discussing the issue he had raised: “What a small and narrow-minded person you must be. You think you can paint millions of people with one tiny brush.‪ But you've got your own little cult, right here. And you're raking in the profits. Good for you!‬‬”‬‬‬‬‬‬‬

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Why Would We Reject God?

There are quite a few believers out there who argue that the existence of a Creator is obvious to all, and that the only reason atheists deny this is because they don’t want to submit to his authority. For those in this theistic camp — those who, as one might say, don this particular religious attire — God is evident from the world he created. As Romans 1:20 puts it, “his eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been understood and seen through the things he has made.” Furthermore, this supposedly explains why belief in some god or other is found in every human society.

Atheists, however, reject the Creator because they don’t want there to be divine judgement; they want the freedom to do as they please. Thus, they cannot accept the idea of a higher power with moral demands on them.

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Just a Sober Reminder About Our Intellectual Obligations

Don Camp?

Just a sober reminder. These photos could have been of you, if you were born in a different place. Like them, you too would be just as sure your religion is the one true one. You too would special plead your case and not realize that's all you do. You too would scoff at the intellectual requirement to subject your faith to the same standards you use when dismissing other religions. You too would do everything you could to dismiss that requirement by calling on atheists to do the same thing, even though that red herring does nothing to alleviate your own intellectual obligations.

My Major Objection With Bayes Theorem

I've written a lot about Bayes Theorem, where I've laid out some of its problems. [See TAG below]. The major objection I have with believers who use Bayes Theorem to evaluate ancient miracle claims of faith, is that by doing so it disingenuously gives them the appearance of proving these miracles to be true, since after all, the math shows it, stupid! This is how William Lane Craig used it in his March 2006 debate on the resurrection of Jesus with Bart Ehrman, saying,

In calculating the probability of Jesus’ resurrection, the only factor he (Ehrman) considers is the intrinsic probability of the resurrection alone [Pr(R/B)]. He just ignores all of the other factors. And that’s just mathematically fallacious. The probability of the resurrection could still be very high even though the Pr(R/B) alone is terribly low. Specifically, Dr. Ehrman just ignores the crucial factors of the probability of the naturalistic alternatives to the resurrection. [Transcript PDF, page 16]

Who can argue against the math, right? Ehrman had a bit of difficulty but he still did well in that debate.

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When God Is Nowhere to Be Found

Apologists bluff, evade, and pretend

Waffling is an art form among the academic crowd committed to defending the Christian faith at all costs. When presented with an unanswerable question, they pretend it’s the wrong question, and wander down a trail of pathetic excuses.

This is the Put-Up-or-Shut Up challenge that apologists run away from:

Please tell us where we can find reliable, verifiable data about God, and all devout theists must agree: “Yes, this is where the reliable, verifiable data can be found.”

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Why Apologetics Books? Reviewing Mittelberg's "Confident Faith" Part 2

Mark Mittelberg is a bestselling author, sought-after speaker, and the Executive Director of the Center for Strategic Evangelism, in partnership with Houston Baptist University. He wrote the book Confident Faith: Building a Firm Foundation for Your Belief (2013)—which won the Outreach Magazine's 2014 apologetics book of the year award. Yet, it appears his book has been flying under the atheist radar—so far. I aim to rectify that with a few posts offering my thoughts and criticisms of it.

Mark begins by telling us what he aims to do. Is this an investigative book giving the pros and cons of Christianity, letting reader decide? No, of course not. It's a polemical book. Does it aim to convince nonbelievers and people of different faiths? Again, no, not primarily anyway. As the subtitle says, it aims to build "a firm foundation for your belief (i.e., your Christian belief)." I know publishers have a big influence on the titles of books. Yet Mark says he's writing mainly for Christians, and only secondarily for others. He says, "if you're a Christian, how certain are you that your faith is based on reliable information--that it's really true? This book will help you answer that question. And if you believe something other than Christianity, how can you test your beliefs if they square with reality? We'll address that issue too." (p. xi)

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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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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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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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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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Mattapult Explains What We Think of Faith

In responding to Christian apologist David Marshall who asserted I should say: "By faith, Christians mean 'holding to and trusting in what you have good reason to think is true, in the face of difficulties.' But in practice they don't live up to their own standards." That's not what I want to say. I said "Faith is an irrational leap over the need for evidence" and stand by it. It's because Christians like Alvin Plantinga and others say this. I also say "Faith is an irrational leap over the evidence." That's because it best describes what Christian do. Mattapult explains:

How can I believe that what they do is not important, but what they call it is important?

Let's look at a few examples: Don Camp says that if you pray a lot, and look for times when your prayers seem to be answered, then obviously "God" is answering them. That is a counting-the-hits fallacy.

Realist1234 seems to think babies being killed by "God" is ok, because "God" is perfectly moral and will even things out sometime in the future.

Vincent Torley often argues that philosophy answers empirical questions. Enough said.

When confronted with these fallacies, the rational approach would be to re-evaluate the evidence.

Then there's the Ken Hamm's of the world, and the Westboro Baptist Church, Evangelicals, Mormons, and so on. Not only do they experience difficulties -- as you suggest -- they cannot even convince each other their god is the right one, and the others are wrong. With so many different conceptions of god, how can we believe they are all taking a rational look at the evidence?

We know geographic coincidences, indoctrination, and emotional manipulation play important roles in their belief systems. How is the belief guaranteed to be rational when there's such heavy irrational influences?

When the behaviors differ so drastically from the definition, how can the definition be right?

To say the word "faith" is to say fideism or faithism, they have the same exact meaning. That's what we're saying, despite their claims to the contrary.

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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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]

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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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.

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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Is the Church really filled with hypocrites? No.

But the apostle Paul noticed a few…

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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.

David Marshall Not Only Lies, He's Mastered the Art Of Mischaracterization

Somebody Please Stop ME!! David Marshall has dogged my steps on at least a weekly basis for several years now. I don't do that with him. I have hardly ever commented on his blog and have not reviewed any of his books [Edit: Correction, I reviewed one of them, see comments below for explanation]. If it wasn't for the fact that Marshall dogs my steps (which means he thinks what I do is important), and that Christians believe whatever a person with a doctorate says about my books without reading them to know for themselves, and that Marshall somehow has earned a doctorate and asserts without being fully informed that they are bad, I could have saved 100's of hours by not responding to him. He's relentless and indefatigable. Surely he'll consider that a compliment. He's also stubborn, which can be a compliment. But he's also ignorant, deluded and even a liar for Jesus. He's like the proverbial sophomore in college, who has gained just enough knowledge to be overly confident in his intellectual acumen, but still ignorant and not know it. Or, someone who knows just enough to be dangerous. I dislike having to deal with the likes of him. But I must do so.

This is to preface what David Marshall is doing once again, reviewing my recently released book, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist.He's doing it on his blog and getting almost everything wrong. He did get it right that I wrote the book though. *Whew*

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