On August 6, 1945 the United States Air Force detonated a nuclear weapon over the city of Hiroshima. 140,000 people died in the blast, many of whom were immediately vaporized into their constituent atoms, leaving no remains at all. Yet a majority of Christians in the US believe that those victims of the bombing will one day be made whole and stand in judgment before God. A majority of Christian Americans believe in a God so powerful he can reconstruct the exact DNA and protein sequences of each of those bodies, in exactly the form they were in at the moment before they died in that blast.
Yet a sizable number of commenters on this blog seem to believe this powerful God, who is keeping track of the DNA sequences of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the certainty of a future resurrection at some date uncertain, is unwilling to heal a girl of diabetes, or meningitis. They believe he can't even make the common cold go away, or clear up a horrendous case of warts. This incongruity is rarely pointed out, and making it more explicit is what I will try to do in this post.
Christianity is based on the belief that a man, Jesus, lived and died. Christians to some degree or another also believe that this man was divine, most believing that he was the God of the universe in human flesh. In addition, most Christians further argue that this man's life was sinless, and that by his death, Christians can escape the consequences of their sin. Most also assert that his resurrection is the evidence for a future resurrection of all mankind. Thus, most Christians believe that God will, at some point, bring all the dead humans who have ever existed back to life.
Thus, when we discuss issues about prayer and healing, the assertion that God can do nothing about sickness, suffering and pain on earth is a perfectly reasonable assertion to make if there were no future resurrection. For instance, a Deist can hold to this position with no logical contortions. Certain Jews such as the Sadducees could reasonably hold to this, since again, they do not believe the human exists again after his death.
For the bulk of believers though, and here I mean those who accept Jesus' resurrection as a historical fact and those who believe in a future resurrection, the inaction of God in the face of suffering has to be deliberate. For Christian believers, the argument that God is somehow hamstrung from acting to heal the sick flies directly in the face of the miracles of Jesus. Even after Jesus' death, the Bible is full of stories of wondrous healings on the part of the apostles, none of whom felt it was necessary to hold back from helping the sick because it would leave them without free will.
The modern concept of free will is not mentioned in the Bible. It's an ex post facto justification for the modern finding that faith healing doesn't happen. Even medieval Christians firmly believed God healed the sick. The relic of the "one true cross" was determined to be such because it had the power to heal the sick when it touched them. There was no begging for the wonders of free will to be manifest in the lives of those supposedly healed by it. In France, the touch of the king was believed to heal scrofula, and this was due to the king's proximity to the deity, yet nobody in France complained that the king was violating the free will of those who were healed.
No. This free will defense is weak tea, the only leftovers of a warmed-up, thrice picked-over last meal. But again, think of the victims of Hiroshima. They are spread throughout the ecosystem now after they were thrown up into the atmosphere by the cloud of gas that flew up from the city. Yet their free will had nothing to do with their vaporization. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. My explanation for the facts is simple: the victims of Hiroshima, and all other people who ever died, are dead now, and will remain so. My explanation fits all available facts.
Some Christians may adopt the idea that the resurrection will not be one of bodies, but only one of spirit. I applaud them for this, but then the conundrum of Christianity grows even deeper. For if the resurrection of the dead does not entail the reconstruction of their bodies, why was it necessary for Jesus to be resurrected at all? After all, sacrifices given by the Israelites prior to Jesus were of animals, and God did not need to resurrect those sacrificed animals for the deaths to be atoning. In fact, the bodily resurrection of Jesus makes the atonement suspect, for all Jesus really did was experience the absence of cellular activity for something like 36 hours. Is this really such torture?
To hold the position that the cessation of cellular activity in a man-god for 36 hours is an adequate recompense for all the evil mankind has done over roughly 150,000 years of history -- including Hiroshima, the Holocaust, the pogroms of the medieval era, the countless genocides, petty violences, rapes, murders, infanticides and slavery of human existence -- is one of the silliest beliefs I've ever heard. It sits up there with flat-earthism, phrenology and young earth creationism.
So the Christian believer is presented with a quandary and I suspect their lack of unanimity in the face of this quandary is the single best evidence for the essential vacuum at the core of this system of belief. For if there were a cogent explanation, one that was satisfactory to all, Christianity would at least be unanimous in accepting it. This suggests to me that if I ask questions of Christians, their answers to these questions should be the same, since the same divinity that remembers the exact sequence of DNA in the victims of Hiroshima could certainly make the followers of his One True Religion aware of the truth of it. Yet the answers to the following questions are probably as varied as the answers to questions about taste in food, clothes, or film, but I will ask them anyway:
1. Is it the position of Christians that all humans will be resurrected bodily at some future time by God?
2. Is it their position that God has the power to do this phenomenal act of healing, but cannot heal the children who are dying because their parents are praying for their life, or rid someone of a crippling, deforming disease because to do so would harm their free will?
3. If so, why were Jesus and the apostles, the "one true cross" relic and the king of France able to heal without violating free will? If not, why do we have no evidence that God does any healing at all?
4. Finally, if Jesus' death were necessary for the atonement of man's sin, what purpose was his bodily resurrection? Specifically why was it necessary for his atonement to include a resurrection when sacrificial animals, who were sacrificed under the rules God gave to the Israelites, were not resurrected but were eaten?
Eheffa asks an important question: "If the Christian belief system is false or based on fabricated source documents - how exactly under your current set of suppositions with the Bible as the only authoritative admissible evidence, would you ever be able to detect the falsity of that belief system?"
A very ignorant person. There's no other way to describe this...
There are several conceptions among Christians about the belief in hell, all of them but one involve punishment, and even the annihilationist view doesn’t rule it out, since we’re not told the manner in which the unsaved are annihilated.
I amazes me how hard it is to make Christians see the truth of this horrible belief, since it should be obvious. The belief in hell developed during the Hellenistic intertestamental period. There was the idea of a fiery judgment (1 En. 10:13; 48:8–10; 100:7–9; 2 Bar. 85:13), in a fiery lake or abyss (1 En. 18:9–16; 90:24–27; 103:7–8; 2 En. 40:12; 2 Bar. 59:5–12; 1QH 3). Just take a look at I Enoch 48:8-9: “For in the day of their anxiety and trouble their souls shall not be saved; and they shall be in subjection to those whom I have chosen. I will cast them like hay into the fire, and like lead into the water. Thus shall they burn in the presence of the righteous, and sink in the presence of the holy; nor shall a tenth part of them be found.”
Are the writings from that period inspired? Doesn’t it make better sense to see that these ideas were adopted in the New Testament just like ideas about witch hunts were adopted then discarded in early modern Europe? We are children of our times. During those times people believed in hell. And this is what we find in the New Testament.
The truth is that most traditionalists don’t actually take what the New Testament says literally in our modern era, but creationist Henry M. Morris and Martin E. Clark do. They wrote, “So far as we can tell from Scripture, the present hell, Hades, is somewhere in the heart of earth itself….The Biblical descriptions are quite matter-of-fact. The writers certainly themselves believed hell to be real and geographically ‘beneath’ the earth’s surface.” [The Bible Has the Answer: Revised and Expanded (El Cajon: Creation Life Publishers, 1987), p. 312].
But theists today reject such a notion since the rise of modern geology, which shows otherwise. In fact theists have continually reinterpreted what the Bible says about such topics as hell, women, slavery, inquisitions, and witch hunts in the light of more and more knowledge. In today's world there are many liberal Christians who claim no one will end up in hell at all!
The belief in hell requires the assumption of retributive punishment, in that people should get what they deserve. But such a notion is being rejected by ethicists in today’s world. Basically the only people who still accept such a notion are those who still believe in hell. Psychologists have repeatedly shown how people are not evil so much as they may be sick. We may have a Freudian death wish, is all. Our environment and our genetic makeup dictate who we are and what we do to an overwhelming degree. And the more that a person knows about these influences the more of a love/pity he has for these sick people. Sociologists have shown that what we believe is based on when and where we are born, too. Geneticists are showing that whether we are prone to act out homosexual desires, and addictions like alcoholism, is in our genes. There can be no wrathful God, period, and therefore there can be no punishment in hell, however conceived.
This is especially true since we do not know that we are rejecting God by our choices. No one would consciously disobey God if he knew that hell awaits him when he dies…no one, unless he couldn't avoid it. The oft quoted phrase that “ignorance of the law is no excuse” implies that we can know what that law is, but the evidence of billions upon billions of non-Christians down through the centuries conclusively shows otherwise. Where is the evidence for such a claim?
John McTaggart has argued convincingly against the traditional view of hell. Since there is no empirical evidence for it, the only way we would know it exists is if God reveals this to us. However, the concept of hell is just too vile and repulsive for us to believe, so this calls into question anything of importance that such a God might reveal to us. Since a God who would consign people to hell cannot be trusted, we would have no good reason to trust that he is telling us the truth about anything important. So on the one hand there is no reason or evidence to believe in hell, and on the other hand there would be no reason to trust what God would say if he revealed it to us. [John McTaggart, Some Dogmas of Religion (London, 1906), section 177].
Christians will also claim that the unsaved will rather be in hell than in heaven too. But this is another ludicrous claim. If hell is painful then who in her right mind would enjoy being there? If however, hell is where we prefer to be then how is that to be considered punishment? Besides, once we arrive in hell we would immediately believe the gospel and feel anguish that we didn’t accept it. So in hell everyone will be believers. At that point the residents of hell should be great candidates for heaven and desire nothing else. In fact, because of the logic of this many theologians have argued for a second chance for these believers, the belief in purgatory being just one example. And if believers retort that heaven will be more painful for the unsaved than hell, then how does that make any sense? Even believers themselves argue there will be gradations to their reward in heaven, with some in the “nosebleed” section, just as there will be gradations of punishment in hell for the unsaved (Dante's Universe as one example). But why? Either Jesus washed away all of your sins or he didn’t? If he did, then why are there different rewards? Any lack of obedience from a believer on earth is a sin (sins of "ommission" or "missing the mark"), and yet all sins supposedly have been washed away…all of them. But if those sins are not forgiven and believers are correct about what we'll find in the afterlife, then just as there will be unsaved people in hell who prefer to be there, then there will be some believers in heaven who may not enjoy it there and prefer hell, or at least have periods where they would like to be there. Why not?
Beyond these things the belief that God was so vainglorious that even though life was perfect for him without any want whatsoever, he decided to create this world anyway, knowing in advance that by doing so he would have to punish billions (“the many”) in hell in order to gain a few believers by his side, which he never needed or couldn’t have even wanted in the first place!
The belief is hell is morally repugnant, superstitious, indefensible, barbaric, and contrary to democratic free thinking people since it demands people are punished for what they believe or don't believe. People who defend it are ignorant of a whole host of things, from understanding intertestamental literature, to science, geology, the history of Biblical interpretation, to sociology, psychology, and ethical understandings about punishment.
So what does it take to believe in hell? A very ignorant person. There's no other way to describe it. None.
This is the start of a series of articles intended to debunk Genesis 1-11 and Romans 5. They will be an overview that come from notes from several courses I have taken over the past months. I intend to provide links to starting points to enable those interested to pursue what I call a "Serious Bible Study". It will show the means, motive and opportunity for the development of Judaism and Christianity in the Ancient World.
I recommend scrolling to the bottom of the article and opening the image in a separate window so you can look at it as you read.
Migration of humans out of Africa starting after the last ice age from 130,000 to 90,000 BCE(1) ensured robust populations in the Near East and South Asia. The natural cognitive algorithms enabling self-preservation, pleasure and novelty seeking account for the survival of the individual. The natural algorithms that develop from self-preservation and fostering offspring provide a means for early humans to prefer to stay in groups. Over the course of thousands of years development of new albeit primitive technologies and the naturally occurring algorithm of mutual self-interest(2) fostered trade between these populations and primitive "economies" to develop. Of course there were battles over various things but people seek comfort more than uncertainty which ensured the mutual survival of groups.
Generally people traveled over land at the end of the last ice age, the sea levels were about 130 meters (400 feet)(3) lower that what they are now. This caused the distance between coasts to be significantly less and caused land bridges to appear. The gap in the Red Sea between present day Djibouti and Yemen was smaller as was the distance from the coast of present day Oman to Pakistan and more importantly, the Indus Valley. Along the coast from Djibouti and Somalia are the regularly occurring Monsoon winds which change direction twice a year(4). Not only could people travel from Ethiopia and Somalia across lower half of the Saudi Arabian Peninsula through present day Yemen and Oman, to get to the Indus Valley, once the sailboat was developed in the fourth millennium BCE (4000-3000 BCE)(5), they could travel by sailboat from port to port along the coast of present day Yemen and Oman to the Indus Valley, and down the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. It also facilitated easier travel along the Nile in Egypt and the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia. While it is not clear where the technology for the sail originated, it is clear that its use was common in the third Millennium BCE (3000 - 2000 BCE) in Mesopotamia, Egypt and in Asia Minor and facilitated a "World Economy"(6) between the regions. The self-esteem, greed and competition between kings ensured that technology changed hands and improved. Once the Ancients began traversing the oceans, they must have been shocked by the size, grace and water spouts of the Whales which are indigenous in those areas(7)(8)(9). The fear of the sea and the stories of those whales naturally led to the inclusion of them in their Creation Stories(10).
Just as technology is traded, so are ideas. Ideas lead to beliefs and beliefs lead to religion. The blending of ideas is common, it leads to similar characteristics between cultures and when the blending of ideas involves beliefs and faiths, it is called "Syncretism"(11). Evidence of the battles of the early Jews to resist syncretism appears in old testament scripture, and other forms of historical evidence are abundant. It is a fact of life that people trade everything, including ideas, and it is a means to more successful outcomes.
The civilizations affected by this technology and "world economy" are Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley the east coast of the Mediterranean, Asia Minor (Turkey) and Greece. It makes a triangle of interconnectedness along the waterways and land. Some of the founding Gods of those civilizations were, in Egypt Ptah and Atum, in the Indus Valley Hiranyagarbha or Prajapati, Brahma, Indra, Varuna and Vishnu, Purusha Sukta, In Mesopotamia Marduk, Asia Minor had El and Greece had Zeus(12). As one goes through reading the names of the Gods and stories, one notices striking similarities in the names that appear in the myths.
Canaan, Palestine, Israel and Judah were enclosed in this triangle of interconnectedness, and that brings us to Genesis 1. To be continued.....
For the references, Wikipedia is used liberally because while academics don't consider wikipedia difinitive or acceptable as a source they do consider it generally good enough for quick reference.
Guy P. Harrison is the author of the soon to be released book, 50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God. He submitted the following essay to DC which was originally published in Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 25, No. 1:
Where Are the Moral Believers?
Satan exists, say hundreds of millions of Christians around the world. But he is evil, so they reject him as a supernatural being worthy of worship. They do not pray to him for help in landing a new job or overcoming an illness, and they do not follow his instructions. Because of moral failings, this god of sorts is denied their love and obedience. But why do they only judge the devil? Why don’t believers scrutinize all gods in this way?
Pointing out examples of the Jewish/Christian god committing, commanding, or condoning slavery, violence, and sexism—as described in the Torah and Bible—is a favorite pastime for many atheists. Yes, it may be no better than a grown-up version of pulling the wings off of flies, but it is undeniably fun to watch a believer squirm trying to explain how slavery and stoning were somehow OK in “Bible times.” It is even more entertaining to watch smoke rise from the ears of the devout as they attempt to defend the “God of love” for his genocidal rampages.
Some atheists ridicule such exchanges, and they have a valid point. Arguing over a god’s moral character is a lot like debating the aerodynamic qualities of Santa’s sleigh. Still, there may be a real benefit to enlightening believers about the character of their gods. If pursued, it should be done only to challenge a believer’s loyalty to a god, however, not to make the case for nonexistence. After all, a god does not have to be nice in order to be real. Strangely, this pattern of belief coupled with morally based disobedience is virtually nonexistent when it comes to the popular gods. We just don’t see millions of believers in the Jewish/Christian/Islamic god, for example, shunning him solely for his moral crimes. There are no large organizations campaigning against religion from the moral high ground rather than the perspective of disbelief. There are few, if any, anti-god books written by theologians who still believe in a god. Rebellion need not be tied to nonbelief, so where are the righteous rebels who stand against gods who have done great evil? Where are the moral believers?
Fear of hell or some other divine punishment for refusing to follow a god does not seem to be an adequate explanation, not when one considers history’s long roll call of courageous heroes. Across cultures and across centuries, good people have suffered banishment, imprisonment, torture, and execution because they refused to bow down before evil human leaders. It seems likely that a significant number of believers would rebel in the same way, if they faced up to the serious faults and crimes attributed to their gods. Fear of torture and execution in the present (in reality) must be at least somewhat comparable to fear of a god’s wrath in some vague afterlife to come (in belief).
Most Christians are probably good people with a reasonable grasp of right and wrong. They know, for example, that it is wrong to kill children. (“At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon . . . there was a loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead” [Exodus 12:29, New International Version].) They also are likely to agree that it is wrong to punish children for the crimes of their fathers. (“He punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation” [Exodus 34:7, NIV].) But they are loyal to a god who has done these things.
Why aren’t millions of believers saying, “Yes, I know my god is real because the universe is intelligently designed and I believe that the [Bible, Koran, or Torah] describes him accurately. However, based on the actions of this god. I cannot follow or worship him because I am a decent human being.”
I have long believed that religion will be educated out of humankind eventually. It may take many centuries, but it seems probable. After all, polls show that belief goes down as education goes up. And most of the extremely smart and educated people (such as elite scientists) already don’t believe in gods. But what if it never happens? What if educational levels do not continue to rise as they have over the last few thousand years? Or what if the cosmos is just too big, too complex, and too scary for most people to ever accept rational explanations and lingering mysteries? If so, eroding believers’ loyalty to their gods and encouraging greater respect for basic morality may be the way to go.
Militant atheists who are concerned with the proliferation of RMDs (Religions of Mass Destruction) may be missing an important point here. After all, it is not gods who inflict so much ignorance, hate, and violence upon the world. (Gods almost surely do not exist, remember?) The source of trouble, indeed, may be belief itself, but the direct cause of the many problems we are all burdened with is that so many people try to please gods by following their orders and their example. Consider the fact that millions of people believe in ghosts, but no one worships them in tax-free buildings under the guidance of trained professionals. Ghosts are just not respected in the way gods are. Therefore, the concept of ghosts is not pushing evolution out of classrooms or motivating people to strap bombs around their torsos. With ghosts, it’s mostly just a case of gullible people wasting a bit of space in their skulls with nonsense and causing relatively little harm to the world.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the gods lost their grip on humankind and fell to the status of mere ghosts, no longer able to command vast armies of believers? Even if millions still believed them to be real, it would be a vast improvement. Imagine if the gods were condemned to roam forever in fantasyland with no one willing to follow them. While this might not make for an atheist’s paradise, it would at least be a far better world, one where believers no longer work to please divisive and violent gods at the expense of all humanity.
I would like to propose another blog topic. How did God intend for our world to be? I think we can all agree that God did not WANT Adam and Eve to sin. So what would our world be like if they didn't, and presumably, this would be the state that god wanted the world to be in. Would we all be a bunch of naked, sinless, not knowing good and evil living in a wonderful garden happy go lucky skipping child-like clowns? Did god intend on Adam and Eve reproducing before the fall, or was it just going to be those two? What would life be like, right now in the year 2008 (some 6000 years later :)) if Adam and Eve had never sinned? I'm actually very curious to get some christian opinions on this.
In Richard Bauckham's book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, the author tries to show the power of testimony and why it is necessary for telling what happened when it comes to the unique events in the life of Jesus. So he uses Holocaust testimonies as examples. Here is page 497 in his book:
Bauckham writes:
The passage concerns perhaps the most unbelievably inhuman feature of the destruction of Jews in Auschwitz: the cremation of small children alive. I quote first another report of this before turning to Wiesel's account:
The other gas chambers were full of the adults and therefore the children were not gassed, but just burned alive. There were several thousand of them. When one of the SS sort of had pity upon the children, he would take a child and beat the head against a stone before putting it on the pile of fire and wood, so that the child lost consciousness. However, the regular way they did it was by just throwing the children onto the pile. They would put a sheet of wood there, then sprinkle the whole thing with petrol, then wood again, and petrol and wood, and petrol - then they placed the children there. Then the whole thing was lighted. [From L.L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies (Yale University Press, 1991), pp. 54-55].
Wiesel's reference to this way of killing children is in one of the most famous passages of Night. The young Wiesel and his father arrive in Auschwitz:
Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load -little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it - saw it with my own eyes ... those children in the flames. (Is it not surprising that I could not sleep after that? Sleep had fled from my eyes.) ...
I pinched my face. Was I still alive? Was I awake? I could not believe it.
How could it be possible for them to burn people, children, and for the world to keep silent? It was a nightmare ....
Isn't it strange that Bauckham uses these stories to make a point about testimonies of God's love in Jesus and utterly fails to see in them the horrible nature of God's impotence to help these children? What's with it, Christian?
These stories force Christians to do what theologian John Roth said when trying to justify God's purported ways with us: "No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children."
April 21, 2008, the headlines read:
Orthodox groups clash in Church of the Holy Sepulchre,
Christians fist fight at Jerusalem's Holy Sepulchre,
Police breaks off clash at Church of Holy Sepulchre,
Priests exchange blows over religious rights,
And about 180 other headlines...[just visit google news and enter "church of the holy sepulchre"]
For stories about previous brawls at that "holy site" keep reading. There's also some interesting related news and opinion. (Paul Manata and Victor Reppert may want to take note; or better yet, J.P. Holding and James White; or J.P. Holding and Steve Hays)...
EARLIER FIGHT AT HOLY SITE
Six Christian denominations jealously guard their rights at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, so when one denomination moved a chair into a spot claimed by another, it was a declaration of war (a violation of the “status quo” law as enshrined in a 1757 Ottoman declaration). About eleven monks were taken to hospital after being hit by rocks, metal rods and chairs that they threw at each other.
Christian monks from rival denominations [Ethiopians and Egyptian Copts] have been warring for more than a century over the roof of the shrine which the Ethiopians call the “House of Sultan Solomon” because they believe the biblical King Solomon gave it as a gift to the Queen of Sheba. The Ethiopians lost control of the roof during an epidemic in the 19th century which enabled the Copts to take over. But in 1970, during a brief absence by Coptic priests from a rooftop chapel, the Ethiopian clerics returned and have been squatting there ever since. An Ethiopian monk huddles in the corner of the chapel day and night to guard the squatters’ claim. The Egyptian monk, who has been living with them on the roof since the 1970 takeover to assert the Copts’ rights, decided to move his chair out of the sun during a hot Jerusalem day. “They (the Ethiopians) teased him,” said Father Afrayim, an Egyptian Coptic monk at the next door Coptic monastery. “They poked him and brought some women who came behind him and pinched him,” he said. Each side accuses the other of throwing the first blow in the fist-fight and stone throwing that ensued. Police eventually broke up the brawl but by all accounts many of the protagonists were already wounded.
Reuters, July 29, 2002
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ANOTHER FIGHT AT HOLY SITE
Greek Orthodox and Catholic Franciscan priests got into a fist fight at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, Christianity’s holiest shrine, after arguing over whether a door in the basilica should be closed during a procession. Dozens of people, including several Israeli police officers, were slightly hurt in the brawl at the shrine, built over the spot where tradition says Jesus was crucified and buried. Four priests were detained, police spokesman Shmulik Ben-Ruby said. Custody of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is shared by several denominations that jealously guard territory and responsibilities under a fragile deal hammered out over the last centuries. Any perceived encroachment on one group’s turf can lead to vicious feuds, sometimes lasting hundreds of years.
Monday’s fight broke out during a procession of hundreds of Greek Orthodox worshippers... Church officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that at one point, the procession passed a Roman Catholic chapel, and priests from both sides started arguing over whether the door to the chapel should be open or closed. Club-wielding Israeli riot police broke up the fight…
In 2003, Israeli police threatened to limit the number of worshippers allowed to attend an Easter ceremony if the denominations did not agree on whom would lead the ceremony… But a year earlier, the Greek patriarch and Armenian clergyman designated to enter the tomb exchanged blows after a dispute over who would be first to exit the chamber.
CATHOLIC MARCHERS TURN ON GLASTONBURY PAGANS
Local pagans were pelted with salt and branded witches who “would burn in hell” during a procession organised by Youth 2000, a conservative Catholic lay group. The Magick Box, a pagan shop on the route of the march, was also singled out and attacked. Maya Pinder, the owner of the shop, said: “We’ve had to hear comments such as ‘burn the witches’, we’ve had salt thrown in our faces and at our shop, people were openly saying they were ‘cleansing Glastonbury of paganism.’ It was as if we had returned to the dark ages. This is hugely damaging to Glastonbury… it is hard enough to trade in Glastonbury as it is, if you were to take away the pagan element it would be a dead town.” The Somerset town is known for having a large population of resident and visiting pagans.
The archdruid of Glastonbury, Dreow Bennett, said: “To call the behavior of some of their members medieval would be an understatement. I personally witnessed the owner of the Magick Box being confronted by one of their associates and being referred to as a bloody bitch and being told ‘you will burn in hell.’”
Father Kevin Knox-Lecky of St Mary’s church said that after meeting representatives of the pagan community he had decided not to invite Youth 2000 to the town again. He said: “A family appeared who we don’t know, who were very destructive not only in the town and to the pagan community, but were also swearing at our parishioners as well.” He said the majority of Catholics taking part in the procession had been well-behaved and respectful of the pagans. The retreat was organised last week to mark the 467th anniversary of the beheading of the last abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Richard Whiting, and fellow martyrs. Youth 2000 describes itself as “an independent, international initiative that helps young adults aged 16-35 plug back into God at the heart of the Roman Catholic Church.” It was set up 10 years ago by a disenchanted Catholic barrister who wanted a return to the traditional teachings of the church for young people.
Charlie Conner, the managing director of Youth 2000, said: “There were several incidents that happened that same weekend that were linked to people who had come to Glastonbury for the retreat. This was in direct contravention of the general spirit of Youth 2000 and its express instructions. The young man who was fined was not in fact registered on the retreat, although he did attempt to attend it. Youth 2000 does not condone or encourage this kind of behaviour from anyone. We fully agree that differences on matters of faith cannot and should not be resolved by any kind of harassment.”
A spokesman for Avon and Somerset police confirmed a youth had been arrested at Magick Box on suspicion of causing harassment, alarm or distress. Two women were also given cautions and warned about their future conduct.
Thair Shaikh, “Catholic marchers turn on Glastonbury pagans,” The Guardian, UK, Nov. 4, 2006 www.guardian.co.uk
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MARK TWAIN’S EXPERIMENT
Consider my experiment. In an hour I taught a cat and a dog to be friends. I put them in a cage. In another hour I taught them to be friends with a rabbit. In the course of two days I was able to add a fox, a goose, a squirrel and some doves. Finally a monkey. They lived together in peace; even affectionately. Next, in another cage I confined an Irish Catholic from Tipperary, and as soon as he seemed tame I added a Scotch Presbyterian from Aberdeen. Next a Turk [Muslim] from Constantinople; a Greek Orthodox Christian from Crete [Greece]; a Methodist from the wilds of Arkansas; a Buddhist from China; a Brahmin [Hindu priest] from Benares. Finally, a Salvation Army Colonel from Wapping. Then I stayed away two whole days. When I came back to note results, the cage of animals was all right, but in the other there was but a chaos of gory odds and ends of turbans and fezzes and plaids and bones and flesh--not a specimen left alive. These Reasoning Animals had disagreed on a theological detail and carried the matter to a Higher Court.
Man is the only animal that has religion, even the True Religion--several of them.
Mark Twain, “Man’s Place in the Animal World,” 1896
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A VERSION OF MARK TWAIN’S EXPERIMENT
In the middle of the 20th century in the eastern European country of Rumania (that was communist at the time), anyone whom the government considered “anti-communist” was imprisoned. In one case ministers of different religions were imprisoned together in the same close quarters:
“In the hour which the priests’ room had set aside for prayer, Catholics collected in one corner, the Orthodox occupied another, the Unitarians a third. The Jehovah’s Witnesses had a nest on the upper bunks; the Calvinists assembled down below. Twice a day, our various services were held: but among all these ancient worshippers I could scarcely find two men of different sects to say one ‘Our Father’ together. Far from fostering mutual understanding, our common plight made for conflict. Catholics could not forgive the Orthodox hierarchy for collaborating with Communism. Christians of minority beliefs disagreed about ‘rights.’ Disputes arose over every point of doctrine. And while discussion was normally conducted with genteel malice, as learnt in seminaries on wet Sunday afternoons, sometimes tempers flared.” [Rev. Richard Wurmbrand, In God’s Underground (London : W. H. Allen, 1968), p.218, 232)]
Their “quarrels...came to a halt” only after loudspeakers were put in their cells that blared communist slogans day and night, and they were forced to attend lectures advocating communism. That was when the priests and ministers “learned that all our denominations could be reduced to two: the first is hatred, which makes ritual and dogma a pretext for attacking others; the second is love, in which men of all kinds realize their oneness and brotherhood before God.” But if the communists had not added those blaring speakers and forced them to attend lectures, would the pastors and priests have all joined together against their common enemy and “learned” how to avoid “disputing over every point of doctrine?”
E.T.B.
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“EQUUSTENTIALISM” BY EMO PHILIPS
(Excerpts from his 1985 comedy CD for Epic Records, E=MO2)
Emo: I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!”
Jumper: “Why shouldn’t I?” he said.
Emo: “Well, there’s so much to live for!”
Jumper: “Like what?”
Emo: “Well...are you religious or an atheist?”
Jumper: “Religious.”
Emo: “Me too! Are you a Christian, Jew, or something else?”
Jumper: “A Christian.”
Emo: “Me too! Protestant or Catholic?”
Jumper: “Protestant.”
Emo: “Me too! What franchise?”
Jumper: “Baptist.”
Emo: “Wow! Me too! Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?”
Jumper: “Northern Baptist.”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Eastern Region?”
Jumper: “Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region.”
Emo: “Me too! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?”
Jumper: He said, “Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.”
Emo: And I said, “Die, heretic!” And pushed him off the bridge.
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But if you will recall the history of our civil troubles, you will see half the nation bathe itself, out of piety, in the blood of the other half, and violate the fundamental feelings of humanity in order to sustain the cause of God: as though it were necessary to cease to be a man in order to prove oneself religious!
Denis Diderot (1713-1784), cited in Against the Faith by Jim Herrick
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Men have gone to war and cut each other’s throat because they could not agree as to what was to become of them after their throats were cut.
Walter Parker Stacy (1884-1951)
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There’s a tendency [in religion] to declare that there is more backsliding around than the national toboggan championships, that heresy must be torn out root and branch, and even arm and leg and eye and tongue, that it’s time to wipe the slate clean. Blood is generally considered very efficient for this purpose.
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
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Religious tolerance has developed more as a consequence of the impotence of religions to impose their dogmas on each other than as a consequence of spiritual humility.
Sidney Hook, The Partisan Review, March, 1950
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The only reason the Protestants and Catholics have given up the idea of universal domination is because they’ve realized they can’t get away with it.
W. H. Auden, in Alan Arisen, ed., The Table-Talk of W. H. Auden (1990), quoted from Jonathon Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Cynical Quotations
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EVERYONE’S A SKEPTIC
(ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE’S RELIGION)
Millions of Hindus pray over statues of Shiva’s penis. Do you think there’s an invisible Shiva who wants his penis prayed over--or are you a skeptic?
Mormons say that Jesus came to America after his resurrection. Do you agree--or are you a doubter?
Florida’s Santeria worshipers sacrifice dogs, goats, chickens, etc., and toss their bodies into waterways. Do you think Santeria gods want animals killed--or are you skeptical?
Muslim suicide bombers who blow themselves up in Israel are taught that “martyrs” go instantly to a paradise full of lovely female houri nymphs. Do you think the dead bombers are in heaven with houris--or are you a doubter?
Unification Church members think Jesus visited Master Moon and told him to convert all people as “Moonies.” Do you believe this sacred tenet of the Unification Church?
Jehovah’s Witnesses say that, any day now, Satan will come out of the earth with an army of demons, and Jesus will come out of the sky with an army of angels, and the Battle of Armageddon will kill everyone on earth except Jehovah’s Witnesses. Do you believe this solemn teaching of their church?
Aztecs skinned maidens and cut out human hearts for a feathered serpent god. What’s your stand on invisible feathered serpents? Aha!--just as I suspected, you don’t believe.
Catholics are taught that the communion wafer and wine magically become the actual body and blood of Jesus during chants and bell-ringing. Do you believe in the “real presence”--or are you a disbeliever?
Faith-healer Ernest Angley says he has the power, described in the Bible, to “discern spirits,” which enables him to see demons inside sick people, and see angels hovering at his revivals. Do you believe this religious assertion?
The Bible says people who work on the Sabbath (Saturday) must be killed: “Whosoever doeth any work in the Sabbath day, he shall surely be put to death” (Exodus 31:15). Should we execute such people--or do you doubt this scripture?
At a golden temple in West Virginia, saffron-robed worshipers think they’ll become one with Lord Krishna if they chant “Hare Krishna” enough. Do you agree--or do you doubt it?
Members of the “Heaven’s Gate” commune said they could “shed their containers” (their bodies) and be transported to a UFO behind the Hale-Bopp Comet. Do you think they’re now on that UFO--or are you a skeptic?
During the witch hunts, inquisitor priests tortured thousands of women into confessing that they blighted crops, had sex with Satan, etc. then burned them for it. Do you think the church was right to enforce the Bible’s command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18)--or do you doubt this scripture?
Members of Spiritualist churches say they talk with the dead during worship services. Do you think they actually communicate with spirits of deceased people?
Millions of American Pentecostals spout “the unknown tongue,” a spontaneous outpouring of sounds. They say it is the Holy Ghost, the third god of the Trinity, speaking through them. Do you believe this sacred tenet of many Americans?
Scientologists say each human has a soul which is a “Thetan” that came from another planet. Do you believe their doctrine--or doubt it?
Ancient Greeks thought a multitude of gods lived on Mt. Olympus--and some of today’s New Agers think invisible Lemurians live inside Mt. Shasta. What’s your position on mountain gods--belief or disbelief?
In the mountains of West Virginia, some people obey Christ’s farewell command that true believers “shall take up serpents” (Mark 16:18). They pick up rattlers at church services. Do you believe this scripture, or not?
India’s Thugs thought the many-armed goddess Kali wanted them to strangle human sacrifices. Do you think there’s an invisible goddess who wants people strangled--or are you a disbeliever?
Tibet’s Buddhists say that when an old Lama dies, his spirit enters a baby boy being born somewhere. So they remain leaderless for a dozen years or more, then they find a pubescent boy who seems to have knowledge of the old Lama’s private life, and they anoint the boy as the new Lama (actually the old Lama in a new body). Do you think that dying Lamas fly into new babies, or not?
In China in the 1850s, a Christian convert said God appeared to him, told him he was Jesus’s younger brother, and commanded him to “destroy demons.” He raised an army of believers who waged the “Taiping Rebellion” that killed 20 million people. Do you think he was Christ’s brother--or do you doubt it?
James A. Haught, “Everyone’s a Skeptic--About Other Religions” [Originally delivered as a talk to Campus Freethought Alliance, Marshall University, Huntington, WV, July 12, 1998] http://www.infidels.org/secular_web/feature/1998/skeptic.html
Warning! Read this first! What you are about to see is not an internet prank or a hoax, but is very, very real and VERY, VERY disturbing! Prepare yourself!
In 34 years of life, I don't know that I've seen anything that actually outclasses this in terms of producing horribly unsettling feelings. Worse than blood, guts, or violence from a Hollywood horror flick, and worse than anything that's been shown as an alien virus from outer space invading a human body is Dede's (a.k.a. "Tree man's") condition. This poor man suffers from the typical HPV virus that so many of us get and have without even knowing it. But unlike our bodies, Dede’s body doesn’t have the genetic requirements to fight it off. The result is his freakish appearance as the virus hijacks his cells.
This guy was an Indonesian fisherman whose wife left him because of this condition. He lost his job and even sold himself as a circus freak for a while, but the ridicule became too much. And that's not all; the guy can't work, bathe, take care of his teenage daughters, or do anything without the support and assistance of his family.
He's been begging for help – any help – and when the doctors in his homeland could do nothing, he was out of luck. Then, finally, help came in the form of a skin doctor from the U.S. who volunteered to help him. But still, there are no guarantees. He will never have a normal body, even with the help of modern science, though he might be able to use his hands again.
My question is, what can those who believe in a divine Creator possibly say to this? What was God thinking when he created this man? Where was Jesus and his grace? What would this man have done had he been born in a time before modern medicine? How could he have had any quality of life at all, much less a prognosis for improvement?
It's seeing things like this that never fails to reaffirm my atheist convictions. If seeing children dying from cancer is not enough, if seeing gross bone deformities and massive, out-of-control tumors isn’t enough, just getting a gander at this poor guy is a one-way-ticket to heathen-ville U.S.A. Nope, it's safe to say that no compassionate deity would have allowed such a terrible thing. Our bodies would not be so poorly designed that cells go crazy like this had we been created by a heavenly tailor.
But I wonder what kind of quibbling our Christian readers will offer us when they see this? What excuses for the Almighty will they give us for this genetic monstrosity? And the really sad part is, Christians believe that if this man chose to kill himself to get out of a life of misery and ridicule, he would go straight to hell, having his own blood on his hands. So he’d suffer not only in this life, but in the one to come. I really am glad I'm an atheist!
ScienceDaily.com A team of scientists has unraveled how the brain actually unconsciously prepares our decisions. Even several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain. (Thanks to Scott.)
So what does this mean for passages such as Matthew 5:21? "You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.' But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to his brother, 'Raca,' is answerable to the Sanhedrin. But anyone who says, 'You fool!' will be in danger of the fire of hell.
In light of this research, that seems extreme. How is one accountable for "Flash" Anger? How does one prevent "Flash" Anger? If a large percentage of your action or decision is prepared in the "background" how much of that are we in control of? I'll stipulate that we have the final choice, but how we feel about it is quite another thing. The brain is like a modular unit. Its made up of modular circuitry that have processes that run in background of which we are not aware. Any poor performance in any one of those circuits could cause us to do something or feel someway we wouldn't normally. For example lack of sleep and the resultant crabbiness that accompanies it. It seems extreme to put our fates in the hands of a three pound meatball that is so easily influenced to operate outside of "specifications"
Excerpts from the article.
This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.
More than 20 years ago the American brain scientist Benjamin Libet found a brain signal, the so-called "readiness-potential" that occurred a fraction of a second before a conscious decision. Libet’s experiments were highly controversial and sparked a huge debate. Many scientists argued that if our decisions are prepared unconsciously by the brain, then our feeling of "free will" must be an illusion. In this view, it is the brain that makes the decision, not a person’s conscious mind. Libet’s experiments were particularly controversial because he found only a brief time delay between brain activity and the conscious decision.
In contrast, Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts -- even up to 7 seconds ahead of time -- how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."
When I first started this blog in January '06 I wanted to choose a title that best described what I intended to accomplish that would also grab people's attention, so I chose the present title, Debunking Christianity. It has done it's work well. When you see it listed on another blog or website it grabs your attention. It has increased our traffic.
This title also best describes my goals. My goals are negative ones. I do not intend to defend atheism, per se, even though I am an atheist, but to argue against evangelical Christianity, which is the most obnoxious type of that faith held by the majority who are so cocksure of their views. I'm merely claiming that their type of Christianiy is a delusion, something every non-Christian and liberal Christian can agree with me about. This is my niche, and I hope I'm doing this well. To those who disagree with these goals I respond that by having narrow goals of this type I can better achieve them. Larger goals are harder to achieve, because the larger the claim is the harder it is to defend. My goals allow me to focus on one thing and to do it well. My primary goal is to knock conservative Christians off of center...to make them question their beliefs. Where they end up after this is not my immediate concern. There are other sites and other books that can take up where I leave off. But I'm doing the hard work, not that debunking evangelical Christianity itself is difficult, but that getting Christians to acknowledge that their faith is delusionary is indeed difficult. And I've been willing to take the barbs thrown my way (not with pleasure) for this purpose.
Then I began inviting people on DC who shared these same goals, and we have developed quite a nice list of contributors, beginning with exbeliever. Some contributors merely wanted to post their deconversion stories, while others have come and gone for various reasons, and I thank them all for their contributions.
But the title of this blog also leads to some confusions. One confusion is that it sounds offensive. It sounds as if we are hostile to Christian people themselves. It sounds like a personal attack. But we're not at all hostile to Christian people, unless provoked, and I have been provoked quite a bit simply because this blog exists. We try our best to be cordial and polite, although this is difficult to do in the midst of these type of debates, especially when dealing with a belief system we think is akin to Holocaust deniers and Flat Earth Society members. It's hard not to ridicule what we think has no evidence for it, but we try really hard not to so.
The title may also lead Christians to think we are ignorant, since skeptics have tried to debunk Christianity for millenia to no avail. Some Christians have shown up here, read one post, and blasted us without seeing the depth of our arguments. They in turn soon realize that we do know what we're talking about. No one can say all that he knows in one post. So because we leave out something, a Christian might retort with a Bible passage as if we've never considered that before. It doesn't take long for that Christian to see we have considered it and rejected something about it.
The title also sounds as if we are hostile toward the Christian faith, so it provokes hostility in return. Well, in some real sense we are a bit hostile to Christianity. We think it causes harm in many ways, yes. But even though this is true in varying degrees, we try to dispassionately argue against it. We are testing our arguments against what Christians can throw at us, and we have learned a few things in our debates. I personally love to learn from others no matter what they believe, and I do. No one has a corner on the truth. We admit this. If we are wrong show us, that's all we ask, although we no more think we are wrong then others who disagree.
As former insiders to the Christian faith we reject it with the same confidence that Christians reject the faiths of all other religions, even other branches of Christianity. The rejection is the easy part. We all do it. My claim is that agnosticism is the default position, which merely claims "I don't know". Anyone moving off the default position has the burden of proof, for in doing so that person is making a positive knowledge claim. When I argue for atheism I too am making a positive knowledge claim that must bear its own burden of proof. But I also claim moving from agnosticism to atheism is a very small step when compared to moving up the ladder to a full blown evangelical Baptist Christianity (as but one denomination among many), past pantheism, panentheism, deism, theism, Christianity, and evangelical Christianity itself.
Repeatedly when discussing the posts on this blog, the last refuge of the theist is that without a God, there can be no objective morals. If all we are is bags of chemicals or, in my favorite Star Trek quote, "Ugly, ugly bags of mostly water," then what is the source of our morality? How can we be objective when we are accusing the fictive God of immorality?
Jim Holman, not to be confused with Joe Holman, asks at one point:
It seems to me that the concept of morality depends on all sorts of metaphysical concepts that would have no place in a strictly scientific worldview. These include concepts such as a "person" who has "free will" to do things both "good" and "evil." It depends on the idea that actions can be "right" or "wrong."
But in a scientific worldview, where everything is ultimately reduced to physical components, electrical and chemical interactions, and so on, how would any of these metaphysical concepts have a place?
To me the key answer is in checking what our premises are. Concepts exist in brains. They don't exist anywhere else. So any explanation of metaphysical concepts has to understand that they exist in brains and manifest themselves in the world as communication from one brain to other brains.
When I tell you I have a car, you know what I mean. This is true even though the myriad varieties of car make it very unlikely that the car you are imagining as "car" when I talk to you about my car is actually what my car is. When we walk outside to get in my car, you then change your concept of "my car" to fit the data that looking at my greenish, dusty Mazda 3 hatchback impresses on your brain. If you are blind, you don't make that transition until you get in the car.
Once we start driving I then have a plethora of driving choices I can make. The rules regarding driving are sometimes quite detailed and sometimes quite vague, but they are generally agreed upon within one locality and violations of the local rules regarding driving are frequently commented on by other drivers and occasionally result in punishment ranging from citation to jailing and sometimes to execution.
The rules regarding driving are indeed and in every way objective. They are man-made and they don't relate to anything of any cosmic significance. I drive within a lane that is painted on the road not because it is made of Plexiglas that will destroy my car if I run into it, but because that lane is objectively painted there so it can be my space on the road and other drivers agree to accept it as if it is real. However, I am a fool if I regard the lanes as always real. If one night, on an open road, I see a person stumbling across the street and fail to swerve out of his way because I was obeying the objective facts of the lanes on the road, I am not driving well. In fact I am criminally culpable.
We allow several groups of drivers and other road users to break the rules when they are following instructions or responding to other crises, and we rarely see those who enforce the laws of the road being punished for violations that they punish others for. Yet this does nothing to make the rules of the road any less objective. Just because their enforcement is subjective it does not follow that the rules are.
Therefore, cars exist, traffic rules are objective, and they are all man-made and work not because of some universal proper way they must function but because there are a limited number of ways to utilize the variables that come with driving. We obey the traffic laws and regard things like intersections and lanes as "real" because failing to do so is harmful to us and harmful to others. Intersections and lanes exist objectively, yet they are totally man-made.
In just the same way, people exist, morals are objective, and they are all man-made and work not because of some universal directive but because there are a limited number of ways to make a successful society. We obey the social customs, folkways and moral codes of our society because failing to do so is harmful to us and harmful to others. This doesn't require natural selection. It only requires a group of like beings who view each other as possibly helpful.
Now the objection I imagine that will come from a theist is that traffic laws are simply a subspecies of morality and that Yahweh not only gave us universal objective morals and instructions on what fabrics can and cannot be mixed, but he also planned out the objective rules of traffic laws before the foundations of the earth had been laid.
Yet I think this fails too, because of the variation of rules throughout the world and according to local custom. Traffic laws are in no way universal, even though they are objective, and the only ones that are somewhat universal are those that safeguard people from violence deliberately inflicted with a vehicle, and this again has obviously positive benefits for any society that chooses to enshrine it in law.
Brothers Christopher and Peter Hitchens debate the Iraq War and religion at an event organized by the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies with the support of the Center for Inquiry of Michigan, and the Interfaith Dialogue Association. There are fourteen parts; just keep looking for the next one. On Part 5 the debate turns to religion.
To keep you up to date on the debate between Arminian Reppert and Calvinist Paul Manata which I previously reported about here, Reppert throws a knockout blow, which Manata doesn't realize because he's numbed by his faith. So all he can do is attempt a feeble reply. When will Calvinists like Manata ever understand how morally bankrupt their theology is and that it creates atheists?
(Revised: added a poll at the end just for fun) Since most people in the world (some of them Christians) don't believe in Adam and Eve based on the conclusions resulting from scientific disciplines such as Anthropology, Paleontology, Archeology, and Biology from now on I will disqualify it as a datum in any discussion I have on this site. That means that I will no longer accept the historicity of Adam and Eve as a premise supporting any conclusions, I will dismiss it out of hand and I encourage this viewpoint from others.
In my view, to entertain or even to discuss the historicity of Adam and Eve is irrelevant. They have already been shown to be infinitesimally unlikely by fields such as Anthropology, Paleontology, Archeology, and Biology. In my view it is a sensible position to commit to the view point that Adam and Eve are folklore until the introduction of new information warrants reconsideration. In my view to recognize the possibility of the existence of Adam and Eve as a premise in a discussion is to give it the appearance that it is a real consideration and worthy of discussion. I say that it is no more worthy of discussion than a flat earth or the existence of Leprechauns.
Logically, using the same criteria to support the existence of Adam and Eve, one could argue for the existence of Leprechauns. To concede that the existence of Adam and Eve is a possibility is to prevent the discussion from going forward toward a resolution because the insistence of the opponent to disregard the conclusion of the disciplines of Anthropology, Paleontology, Archeology, and Biology is counter to the most widely held viewpoint in the world and is irrational in the face of sound reasoning. If another Christian doesn't believe it why should I give it the benefit of doubt? Why should I allow it as a premise in any discussion?
Now an apologist may accuse me of appealing to authority and the bandwagon fallacy. However, those are labels for a fallacious reasoning scheme. To apply that label to my process of reasoning in this case necessitates showing that my presumption about the validity of the conclusions drawn from those disciplines is flawed and/or that the viewpoint of the majority is based on the underlying fallacy of the conclusions drawn from those disciplines. It necessitates discrediting the conclusions of those disciplines. That is an uphill battle if there ever was one. In both cases I am insulated from the charge of fallacy.
In my view, the persistence of groundless beliefs such as Adam and Eve is due to the tolerance of them in discussion by those that know they are groundless. We can still tolerate other viewpoints until those viewpoints begin to intrude or become harmful in the practical and pragmatic business of day to day life. Discussants need to make the same commitment to discourage and challenge the use of inaccurate information in their personal lives that they do in other areas of their lives.
Now how does this relate to Us and God? How do we know that God has a mind? How do I know that you have a mind? How do I know that I am not a brain in a vat? As interesting and as fun as all these questions are to think about I want to look at it more pragmatically.
That's cool. I know what I mean, but do you? What does that mean? It depends on context doesn't it? This is the problem of other minds. I don't know if you've understood what I mean. I would know if you've understood what I mean if I could put the thoughts in your head exactly the way they should be but I can't. I have to tell you.
So now I'm planning a project and I have to describe to these people what the specifications are going to be. I am going to try to use the principle of clarity and minimize as much uncertainty as I can. I use email but someone always misunderstands what I mean. They take their misunderstanding of what I mean and shoot off an email to some other people pretty soon, the project is off track. I draw a picture, scan it, and send it in the next email. This works better but there is always some information missing or some information that will get interpreted in a way that I didn't expect. It would be so much better if they could read my mind. It would be so much better if I could just download the electrochemical state in my head and pass it on to them to upload. But the problem is that they would still be missing information unless I passed onto them the whole configuration of my brain, because they don't have my memories or resultant heuristic algorithms that I have acquired over time.
The truth is, it is a 'miracle' if this project turns out as planned and on schedule and within budget because people can't read minds and, regardless of their best efforts, can only understand what they have a foundational knowledge about.
Since this is the case and is a source of my frustration, either I am the only one this happens to, or it is a symptom of human cognition.
Since this is the case, it is silly for me to expect that generating text is going to keep this project on track. It is silly for me to use terms and examples that my associates don't have a foundational knowledge of. It would be better if I could just impart this knowledge into them with no chance of mistake or misinterpretation.
The only way I could do that is to be God. But we know that Gods don't work that way. But I bet they would if they were real.
Looks to me this choice of his is a forced one, as William James wrote about. It seems to be an agonizing one for him. Agnosticism isn't an option for him. Okay. But there are two other options for him. I want to offer them up here.
One option is Christian atheism, or secular Christianity. This theological view was the one that hit the cover of Time magazine in the ‘60’s. It stems from things Nietzsche said that Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about during WWII in the face of Hitler, which in turn was developed into a theology by Gabriel Vahanian, Paul van Buren, William Hamilton and Thomas J. J. Altizer. You can Google these theologians to read more. Today Don Cupitt in his book Taking Leave of God is a modern defender of this view.
The second option is to protest the lack of evidence and the lack of a caring God by proclaiming yourself an atheist, even though you aren’t sure he doesn’t exist. Theologian John Roth has developed a “Theodicy of Protest” to deal with the problem of evil which can be seen in a chapter for the book edited by Stephen T. Davis, called Encountering Evil: Live Options in Theodicy (John Knox Press, 1981). Roth protests the evil in the world by attempting to shame God into doing what is right. Likewise, Kirby can protest the lack of evidence and the lack of a caring God by proclaiming himself an atheist. I do that. Why not?
You know it’s a crazy world if a sci-fi hero like Captain Kirk can weigh in on real-life philosophical issues and be right. Well, it must be a crazy world then because we have at least one such example. Get your trekkie shoes on as we gaze into the vault of 1989’s Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Sybok are on the surface of a distant world called Nimbus III beyond “The Great Barrier,” where the ambitious Vulcan half-brother of Spock named Sybok has forcefully led them on a quest to find ultimate universal truth and meaning—a.k.a. the search for Eden and God. Moments after their arrival, they are met by a Father Time-ish being who, incidentally, couldn’t have looked more like Caucasian humanity’s version of God if all the artists in the world tried to get him to…but I digress.
This sagely-looking, incorporeal being of obviously great presence and power learns of the starship that brought them to his world. He informs them that he has been imprisoned in this distant world for an eternity, unable to reach the rest of the galaxy, and that the Enterprise would be his means of travel beyond it. But the red flag of skepticism had already been raised in the mind of Kirk, who boldly asked: “What does God need with a starship?”
Now, the situation becomes especially tense. McCoy says, “Jim, what are you doing?” Kirk says, “I'm asking a question.” The so-called “God” says, “Who is this creature?” Kirk asks, “Who am I? Don't you know? Aren't you God?” Comically, Sybok remarks, “He has his doubts.” “God” asks, “You doubt me?” Kirk says, “I seek proof.” McCoy says, “Jim! You don't ask the Almighty for his ID!” “God” tells Kirk, “Then here is the proof you seek.” At this point, Kirk is struck by a bolt of energy and knocked to the ground.
Despite the brutal nature of this “God” emerging in such a terrifying fashion, the planted seeds of doubt begin to grow into what would be considered by any god a tree of heresy. Kirk asks, “Why is God angry?” Even Sybok, the kooky believer of the bunch, is now compelled to ask, “Why? Why have you done this to my friend?” Coldly and bluntly, “God” says, “He doubts me.” But that evil, heretical Kirk had already spread the disease of disbelief. Spock reminds “God,” “You have not answered his question. What does God need with a starship?” So “God” hits Spock with lightning as well, and then it addresses McCoy: “Do you doubt me?” And at this point, even emotional, sentimental, non-reasoning McCoy is forced to go with his mind: “I doubt any God who inflicts pain for his own pleasure.”
Now this perceived “God” and the God of the Bible should do lunch sometime. They have lots in common, don’t they? In any other context, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart judging by their actions and attitudes. For instance, they both believe they are the final authority and should be obeyed without question. They both prefer human instrumentality to get their will done (even though they shouldn’t), they both use torture to enforce their demands, and they both hate the living hell out of skeptics! As with just about every god there ever was, doubt is the most damnable of all offenses. Make no mistake about it—asking the Alpha-and-Omega probing questions will get your ass struck down! This tendency describes the God of the Bible to a “T”.
But that’s not what I’m hitting at here. I’m honing in on the question asked by Kirk: “What does God need with a starship?” The question is priceless in that no matter what theistic concept is under investigation, it is the mere asking of the “need” question that leads to the unraveling of theism. Ask a lot of questions and you’ll be called an annoying kid, ask a few more questions and you’ll be called a UFOologist or a new-ager, but ask too many questions and you’ll end up an atheist! You have been warned! But again, I digress.
The gods have always hated questions as badly as they hate the questioners. To question God is to totally rob him of all power whatsoever because when you begin to question him, you naturally undercut his authority as you take on the role of one asking a subservient to give an account of himself to a superior. And when God’s authority is undercut, not only is his power rendered inert, his afflicting guilt can’t get to you either, nor can his tug at your pocketbook. So the logic of inquiry and God just don’t line up, much like Air Traffic Control scoping for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
Now God doesn’t “need” anything. He can’t need anything, being that he’s omnipotent as the fully self-sufficient prime mover and sustainer of the cosmos. And Christians will fully agree. God doesn’t need to have children sacrificed to him by having babies thrown to the hungry crocs of the Nile. God doesn’t need to have the still-beating heart ripped out of a young Aztec man’s chest and held up to the sun as a means to preserve or sustain the universe and “feed” God. God doesn’t need to be clothed or bathed or groomed. He doesn’t need a W-2 booklet for tax time, he doesn’t need Febreaze air freshener, he doesn’t need patio furniture, and he doesn’t need Limewire. He just doesn’t.
But Christians don’t go far enough. It’s not enough to look down on the pagan gods and goddesses of old and talk up how inferior they are for having typically carnal (and often conjugal) needs. They need to look down on their own God as well. Christians gloat in the supposed superiority of their own deity, but their gloating is as short-lived as an Oprah trim-down. The God of Christianity is, in fact, guilty of the very same absurdity of having unjustifiable needs as any pagan god ever was. To be forthrightly logical about it, if God exists, he can’t want anything at all – nothing – because to want is to have a lack of something, which is to have a need. And as we have already seen, a God cannot “have needs,” like I do at the moment (Ohhh Belindaaaaa? Where are you, hun? I’m a comin’ for ya!) Well, for yet a third time, I digress!
What application does this have for the Christian? It means that God doesn’t need a starship for the same reason that he doesn’t need a temple, a church, a mosque, a synagogue, or a shrine. And God doesn’t need worshippers, and therefore, a universe to house them. It means that even if an omnimax deity like the God of the scriptures existed, that being would have no desire to create us or anything else at all. Nope, God doesn’t need solar systems or planetary bodies, and he doesn’t need fleshly flattery in the form of blubbering blood-bags to tell him he’s so, so, so, so, so, sooooo worthy. He would know that already and wouldn’t have a complex about it, causing him to fixate on himself so much with the neurotic narcissism of a throat-slashing serial killer.
And God wouldn’t need or want a son. The idea of a god having a son doesn’t even make sense on the face of it. That is, it makes about as much sense as a god who ejaculates to make a son (if you can imagine that?!) Nope, God wouldn’t have a son and he certainly wouldn’t have a virgin-born son, and he wouldn’t have his son brutally killed and then raised to life again for the purpose of setting up a death-glorifying, cannibalistic cult where beings who are infinitely less powerful than he sit around and eat the flesh of his dead/resurrected little boy, and then proceed to clamor on about how junior’s the greatest thing since sliced bread (well, actually before sliced bread!)
Now God may not need anything, but it is definitely an understandable mistake for Christians to think that he wants things. Talking about a God creating a people to be tokens of his glory or sending disciples on a mission to do “his will” is understandable. I mean, we collect keepsakes and send people to the store for us. We build houses and make plans, and so it should come as no surprise when the gods we create in our image “do things” just as we do. That’s why the gods get angry just like we do and command to have the heads of their enemies placed on sticks to face the sky until the evening so that their fierce anger will be turned away (Numbers 25:4).
But that’s another problem; a god can’t be angry anymore than a god can need or want a thing, because getting angry can only happen when a being is limited in power and unable to rectify a situation or is put in an edgy predicament of some sort. But you can’t put the great “I Am” in a predicament, and so to say that he can get angry (or become jealous, or regretful, or embarrassed, or amused) makes no clear sense. We’re dealing with the classic anthropomorphic problem here—you can’t take the emotions found in limited beings and expect them to fit beings who transcend all limits. This tells us that the gods were made in our image and not the other way around.
So no, God wouldn’t need a starship, but he also wouldn’t need us.
The religious right has launched yet another wave of efforts this spring to get creationism into science classes. Their new strategy is to talk about academic freedom, "teaching the controversy" and allowing all ideas to be weighed on their merits. They allege that “big science” is keeping dissent out of the laboratory and out of the classroom. It’s all so Orwellian that it’s positively dizzying. Please help the public understand that their controversy is manufactured. After reading this article, please weigh in at MySpace and Manufactroversy.NewsLadder.net as well as in the comments here at Debunking Christianity.
Biblical creationism, repositioned as creation science and most recently intelligent design has lost the contest of ideas on all counts: the rules, the criteria and the judging. It doesn't follow the scientific method; it doesn't allow us to explain, predict, and control better; and the jury of relevant experts (aka biologists) keeps returning the same verdict.
Now the creationists have taken a new approach that they hope will help them achieve their goal of teaching religious beliefs in our schools as science. That approach can be summed up in one simple word: whining.
One week from today, the new movie, Expelled, attempts to turn creationist complaints into mainstream media. Featuring Ben Stein, one of the conservative right's biggest whiners, the film makes several plaintive appeals: There's a conspiracy among big government and big science, and it's not fair! All we ask is for our perspective to get equal time! (Read: we lost, so let's split the prize.) All we want is for teachers to "teach the controversy"! This is all about academic freedom. Americans like freedom, right?
The whiners actually have spent millions of dollars on the movie, and even more on the marketing of it. You have to give them credit: by bundling Creationism with freedom, they have created a sophisticated strategy. Of course, Americans like freedom! More importantly, both democracy and scientific progress depend on intellectual freedom -- the freedom to ask questions and, unencumbered by ideology, to follow the answers where they lead. After centuries of heresy trials and book burnings, for biblical creationists to position themselves as the champions of academic freedom is a brilliant Orwellian move.
University of Washington professor, Leah Ceccarelli has pointed out that their "teach the controversy" strategy depends on a very specific sleight of hand: blurring the difference between scientific controversy and manufactured controversy or Manufactroversy. You can say you first heard it here, well, if you haven't heard it already on MySpace or Facebook: Manufactroversy -- a made up word for a made up controversy. There's even a new website, Manufactroversy.NewsLadder.net that aggregates articles and blog posts about this manufactroversy and some other pretty famous ones as well.
Scientific controversy exists only when the jury of relevant experts is out on whether a new finding meets the standard of evidence. The debate and evidence gathering still are in process. A manufactroversy is when someone motivated by profit or ideology fosters confusion in the public mind long after scientists have moved on to the next set of questions. Think tobacco and lung cancer. Think Exxon and global warming. Now think Ben Stein and evolution.
The fact is, there is no scientific controversy about evolution, just like there is no scientific controversy about whether tobacco causes lung cancer or whether human activity causes global warming. However, in all three examples, someone powerful and well established loses out when and if the scientific mountain of evidence becomes common knowledge and widely accepted.
The tobacco industry in the 1960's wasn't anxious to part with its profits just like the oil companies of the 1990's had no desire to walk away from theirs. So they manufactured controversies, paying scientists to publish papers they knew would distort the issue.
In the case of creationism, the a vast preponderance of evidence, conflicts with traditional mythos. What possible explanation but that the scientists are colluding, corrupt, and biased. But, of course, they're not. The proponents of intelligent design can't gain credibility among hard scientists because their evidence is pathetic. So what do they do? Follow in the footsteps of the tobacco and oil companies and spend millions in an effort to create public doubt. They plea for their side to be told, they imagine vast conspiracies and they cry out for fair play, but the reality is much simpler.
The mountain of evidence supporting mainstream biological science is overwhelming. The paltry evidence for "insurmountable gaps" and "irreducible complexity" is actually shrinking. Evolution should be taught as science and creationism, in its many guises, as religion, including the rich pre-scientific stories about origins from many cultures and traditions. So why not just ignore the whiners and hope they will go away? Because they won't until we force them to stop their marketing of religious beliefs as science. We're still fighting the tobacco industry to this day. Oil companies still fund global warming deniers.
Besides, how long has it been since the famous Scopes trial? How long have creationists been talking about "Darwinism" as if no one but Darwin had noticed the fossil record or the DNA code in the last 100 years? It does get tiresome, responding to their ever evolving anti-evolutionary rhetoric. But we need to expose the bizarre supernaturalist agenda behind all the sudden whining about academic freedom. And somebody needs to gently remind Stein and his creationist cronies that they haven't been expelled from school, they flunked.
In a major article my friend Paul Copan argues that the God of the Old Testament is not a moral monster. I haven't yet taken the time to read all of it, but I'm sure it's the best answer from an evangelical perspective. If it fails, and I think it does, then Christians should reject such a God. As you get the chance, tell me what you think.
This is a kind of commentary and overview of my observations after participating here for a year.
Reasoning is a discipline. There are several heuristics you can use for reasoning that speed up the process, but the process depends on the quality of detail and evidence you introduce into the process. I solve problems for a living. My bread and butter depends on how well I provide solutions to other peoples problems. I became an atheist after I started using the tools that contribute to my success to my personal philosophy. My religion.
Stephen Toulmin, Richard D. Rieke and G. Thomas Goodnight all talk about spheres of influence or reasoning. The concept goes that there are schemes of reasoning that are more successful depending on the field they are applied in. For example you don't use the same reasoning schemes in critiquing art that you use to convict criminals or determine a drug is safe for use. However, there have been plenty of artists and writers that have discovered and investigated, in their own way, concepts that have been incorporated into science. The most notable ones are that Natural Philosophy has a relationship to Science, the exploration in literature of Human Behavior and Psychology has a relationship to modern day Cognitive Sciences. Artists discovered the Golden Ratio as a perspective that just "looked good" and it was later described in mathematical terms and has a relationship to Architecture.
Religion is and always has been a philosophy about life. A way of thinking about life. This is what it has in common with art, music, law, medicine and science. Dealing with the questions of life. Since all these disciplines share this commonality, and since we know there is overlap, the principle of science can be used to investigate religion.
Christianity depends on the Bible. What is the bible? It is scripture. Where did this scripture come from? That is the question. It says it came from God. But applying the principles of Science, Law and Medicine to this question necessitates another form of validation, or another form of ID. Something to verify that it is what it says it is.
This is where looking at the details comes in. Looking at where these scriptures came from. Tracing the source. Doing this will take you from textual criticism, to sociology, to psychology, to biology, to paleontology, to archeology, to philosophy and not in that order.
Most of the arguments that Christian use here are some kind misrepresentation or misunderstanding of the world. They are referred to commonly as "straw man" arguments. Their philosophy is outdated, needs an upgrade, it doesn't represent an accurate picture of the world. They need new information. Decision making depends on new information. People should change their minds according to assessment of new information. It shouldn't be discouraged or looked at as being indecisive or wishy-washy, it should be demanded! It should be a virtue!
Solving peoples problems requires looking at the details and following the evidence. It requires suspending the tendency to follow authority, tradition and personal bias and instead use logic and inference. We should depend less on authority, consensus and tradition and more on principle, inference and strong criteria for evidence.
In my mind, to Debunk Christianity, or Break the Spell, requires people to follow George Santanaya's advice and don't forget the lessons of the past. Learn about the past, learn about where we came from, find out where those Virtues first appeared, find out where that "let your light shine" came from, find out which god was the first to die and go to hell and come back and have a son, how most of the kings in antiquity were sons of gods or gods incarnate or somehow related to gods.
People need to take the principles they use in the practical application of living their lives and apply it to their religion. When this is done, it brings to light how silly eternal punishment is compared to rehabilitation or just scrapping everything and starting over. How silly it is punish other people for the 'sins' of another group. How silly a human sacrifice is, or just a sacrifice to appease a god is. How silly it is to depend on premises that have no precedent and then create a philosophy of life around it. Just try to plan and execute a project using premises without precedent, and see how successful you are.
Here are some hints to Debunk Christianity. Apply your practical principles to your religion. And do your homework. Find your heritage.
Look up syncretism, sumeria, mesopotamia, ancient egypt, indus valley, harrapas, the axial age, greece, minoans, phoenicians, canaanites, hittites, fertile crescent, hellenism, Byzantium, trade between the indus valley, sumeria and mesopotamia, and follow the water, and pay attention to ancient peoples whos culture and religion idealize life as a journey. Key word "Journey" as in spiritual and economic and trade. Learn about World History between 40,000 bce and 500 ce. Learn about what was important to those people. Learn about their religions.
You will find, the Devil is in the Details, but so is your solution.
