In 2004, the Christian music group BarlowGirl made their debut. Their song “Never Alone” was subsequently released to radio and ended up being the longest-running #1 song on both the Christian Rock and Christian Hit Radio charts, securing “Song of the Year” status for these charts. “Never Alone” was also nominated for a Dove award.
What is interesting about this is that the lyrical content of “Never Alone” is a revealing look at the cognitive dissonance that exists in the minds of believers, and how they deal with it. The popularity of the song shows that there are many believers who resonated with its message.
Let’s take a look at some of the lyrics, which were based on diary entries from one of the writers:
I waited for you today
But you didn't show, no no no
I needed You today
So where did You go?
You told me to call
Said You'd be there
And though I haven't seen You
Are You still there?
For religious people, the standard setting for the giving of thanks is entirely incidental to the meaning of the occasion. The family around the table, the turkey or ham, the football game — all of these are just props and ritual. None is essential to thanking God.
What for a religious person, though, is just the setting of Thanksgiving is for the atheist the entire celebration itself. Family and fun, and marking the change of the seasons, is its only meaning and significance.
I suppose that to a religious person an atheist Thanksgiving must appear a thin thing, lacking reverence and grandeur. But then, again, a person who reveres a grand God must feel diminished in her own eyes. Giving thanks to God must engender in the religious the sense that they are powerless supplicants to a higher reality. Another thing we atheists are happy about, then, is that nothing at all depends on the will of a spirit in the sky.
The quote above is from Mark Mercer, chairman of the Philosophy department at Saint Mary's University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.
We can keep this simple. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus was God incarnate. In John 17, Jesus prayed that his current and future followers would have the kind of unity that he and his heavenly father enjoyed. He requested this so that the world would have a basis to believe that God had sent him.
“I do not ask on behalf of these alone, but for those also who believe in Me through their word; that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me.” John 17:20-21 (NASB)
That was the prayer.What kind of results did the self-proclaimed Son of God get?
I have a confession to make. Over a decade ago, I took my family to a Ken Ham creationism event. My kids were taught that dinosaurs and humans coexisted, a few thousand years ago, and they also learned a magic phrase – one guaranteed to stop evolutionists in their tracks. More on that later.
In a presentation for the adults, Ken talked about how evolution attacks the very foundation of Christianity – the book of Genesis. After all, if Genesis is not literally true, then there was no Adam and Eve, no Fall of mankind through eating a forbidden fruit. No Original Sin. No need for a savior. This is something which I actually agree with Ken on.
One of the oft-used justifications for religion is that it provides moral guidance and personal transformation. Now, a new study led by Volkan Topalli – professor of criminal justice at Georgia State University presents scientific proof that religion helps criminals… helps them justify their crimes, that is!
Almost all of the criminal offenders studied (involved in crimes such as car-jacking, drug-dealing, robbery, and burglary) self-identified as Christians, and professed belief in God.
You’ve heard them over and over - all those clichéd, annoying questions and silly statements that Christians throw in your face. Well, let’s have a little fun at the expense of fundamentalists and translate what they really mean. After all, as the Good Book says: “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.”
"You’ll think differently when you stand before God at the final judgment!"
Translation:
"I really don't have any reasoned rebuttals to your arguments so I will comfort myself by imagining you burning in Hell for all eternity."
I’ve been pondering Pascal’s Wager, and I think that he might
actually have been onto something.Not
in the sense that his wager was valid, of course.
His bet was far too simplistic.Its fatal flaw of assuming that the Christian
god is the only deity which might exist, is glaringly apparent to everyone
except for believers.Philosophers such
as Homer J. Simpson have dissected it:
Okay fellow atheists, can we just admit when we are wrong? I mean, all along we’ve been claiming that the Bible is not a scientific book - that it's the product of superstitious ancient men, not an all-knowing God, and yet here is clear proof that we have been mistaken! In light of this discovery, I have no choice but to relinquish my unbelief.
In this short passage, quietly tucked away in Deuteronomy, is the very key to what so many scientific researchers are pursuing; the secret to extending the human life span.
For the Christian, doubt is a bad thing - a lack of faith, or even worse, outright unbelief. Early on in the Bible, doubt is portrayed in a negative light. The Eden story in Genesis tells of a serpent planting doubt in the mind of Eve - did God really say not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil?
According to the Bible, faith is the “evidence of things unseen” (Hebrews 11:1). Without faith it is impossible to please God (Hebrews 11:6). The writer of the gospel of John has Jesus saying “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29). In other words, God approves of those who believe on the basis of stories they have been told, rather than requiring evidence, as “doubting Thomas” did.
Such credulous acceptance of unverified word-of-mouth claims played an essential role in the rise of Christianity. Miraculous stories abounded in ancient superstitious cultures, providing fertile soil for supernatural beliefs to grow and thrive. Apologists and theologians love to claim that the New Testament stories are based on eyewitness accounts, but let’s face it – it’s not like the early believers could use a phone, or Google, or Snopes to investigate claims. Do we really think that they climbed on a donkey and rode for days to track down and interview sources, to verify the tales they were told? The fact that the people of that time would most likely not be skeptics is the more reason that it is vital weshould scrutinize the biblical claims.
When I was a Christian, I was overly impressed with the writings of C. S. Lewis, and in particular, his ‘trilemma’, as presented in the book Mere Christianity:
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
While I still enjoy Lewis’s writing style, I can now see how he stacked the deck by limiting the options regarding Jesus to Lord, liar, or lunatic. One doesn't have to be much of a detective to see that there are a couple of missing L’s.
According to the famous Whitney Houston song, the greatest love of all is to love oneself. Travelling back in time long before Grammy awards were handed out, we find that Jesus, (according to the Gospel of John), had a different idea:
“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.
John 15:13 (NIV)
The Apostle Paul (not-surprisingly) had his own take on it:
Lately, I've noticed a number of instances of Christian schools (Protestant and Catholic) firing teachers who become pregnant out of wedlock. The schools are the sort that like to micromanage the personal lives of their teachers, as well as their students, and often require teachers to refrain from ‘ungodly’ activities such as pre-marital sex, pornography, and homosexuality. Quite possibly masturbation or reading 50 Shades of Grey might also be firing offenses.
In the case of Cathy Samford, she was engaged to be married and offered to move up the wedding date, so as to remedy her pregnant-out-of-wedlock status, but that simply wasn't good enough the squeaky-clean Pharisees at the Heritage Christian Academy in Rockwall, Texas.
According to Headmaster Dr. Ron Taylor,
"It's not that she's pregnant. The issue here is being an unmarried mother. Everything that we stand for says that we want our teachers, who we consider to be in the ministry, to model what a Christian man or woman should be."
Apparently, what the model Christian man would do is kick the pregnant Ms. Samford - along with her two dependent children from a previous marriage – out on the streets, leaving her with no job or medical care – WWJD – right?
The god of the Bible sure has a lot of self-appointed press agents.
In the Old Testament, Moses and the prophets spent a lot of time talking about what their god hated and loved. They detailed what behavior he expected, the loyalty and sacrifices that he demanded, and the ways he would retaliate if not obeyed. They revealed who god wanted killed, and under what circumstances. Whenever God was upset, feeling betrayed, or benevolent, his spokesmen let be known, as if they were divine mood rings.
In the powerful movie Music Box, Jessica Lange plays Anne,
a lawyer defending her Hungarian-American father against charges of being a war
criminal who tortured Jews in the Holocaust.Anne finds these charges to be unthinkable, given that she knows her
father to be a loving man. Tensions rise as the prosecuting lawyer claims that the
caring father she knows is a carefully-constructed persona which hides the true
nature of his past.Anne manages to secure
evidence which results in the dismissal of the charges against her father, but
the prosecutor urges her to stop living in a fantasy world, and to dig deeper
into her father’s past, to find the truth.Anne finds herself facing a difficult choice:pursue the truth at great personal cost, or settle
for the easy answers and safe world of what she has always thought to be true
The movie serves as a powerful illustration of the mental
trauma which Christians face when they are first confronted with rumors of
unsavory secrets in their family history.Could the loving Heavenly Father which they have known actually be a
brutal and heartless psychopath? Do
they dare stir the dust of doubt by digging around in the ancient archives of
Yahweh, reading what was written about him in old diaries and tattered
documents?
Claim:Christians have no need for a teacher, since the Holy Spirit will teach them.
But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you. But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.1 John 2:27 (ESV)
But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.John 14:26 (ESV)
Now that I've been out of Christianity for a while, one thing that seems very strange to me is the Christian conception of a Heaven in which, day and night, people will be singing songs to God and telling him how great he is. For one thing, wouldn't that get old rather quickly? More importantly though, what kind of person would want people groveling and constantly going on about how awesome you are? I could see a North Korean dictator enjoying that sort of thing (Kim Jong-un certainly does), but normal people? No way! What kind of person needs their self-esteem propped up by that sort of subservient, fawning adulation? Imagine if when your friends were with you, all they did was bow down before you, sing songs in honor of you, and constantly shower you with praise. Wouldn't it make you uncomfortable; embarrassed? Healthy relationships certainly don't work that way.
At a recent atheist meetup, I was talking with a former Muslim, and asked him what had led to his deconversion. He said that he had come to the United States from Pakistan and was working as a taxi driver while attending college. One night, after his shift ended, he asked a fellow driver to give him a ride home. As they were talking, the other driver, in a passing remark, said:
“You know, all religions are man-made.”
There was no discussion on the topic, just that simple statement, but it stuck with him, nagging at his thinking. Approximately two years later, he rejected religion and became an atheist.
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?" Matthew 6:25-30 (ESV)
Really Jesus? Paris Hilton could have come up with something more sensible than that steaming pile! I mean, maybe you were doing that whole new-age guru, Deepak Chopra on Ecstacy thing… Pretty, birdies and flowers… bliss out baby! Sorry to harsh your buzz, but your words ring hollow in countries where sad-eyed children with arms like sticks, are starving to death. Try spouting your platitudes to a desperate mother who doesn’t have enough nutrition in her emaciated body to breast-feed her starving infant. “Life is more than food…”? Uh, no. If you go very long without food, life goes away. It’s called being dead. And clothes? Well, fashion isn’t important in the overall scheme of things, but a warm jacket can be helpful in not freezing to death in the winter.
