About My Recent Anthology, "Christianity in the Light of Science"

0 comments
I had missed this announcement of my book by Hemant Mehta: Christianity is Incompatible With the Universe As We Know It. Enjoy with an excerpt by the late Victor Stenger.

The Atheist Alliance of America Press Release Was Picked Up By CNBC, Among Others!

0 comments
As announced earlier I'm a board member of Atheist Alliance of America (AAoA). This is super fantastic!

The Pope’s Blood on Tour

0 comments
One of the best verses in the Old Testament is Psalm 145:8: “The Lord is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”—lot’s of potential for decent religion here. In this verse, “the Lord” is actually a translation of “Yahweh,” and we regret that this sentiment about mercy and love didn’t have more influence on those ancient thinkers who fleshed out the character of Yahweh. This tribal god rampages violently through so much of the Old Testament.

And when the religious bureaucracy took over the forgiveness business, it decreed that Yahweh wasn’t easy to please; animal sacrifice became part of the formula for earning this god’s favor. For centuries animals were slaughtered at the Jerusalem Temple, and the flow of blood was thought essential for getting right with god. Hence the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews could write (9:22): “…without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” The too-full-off himself Jesus of John’s gospel took the ghoulishness to a new level (6:54-55): “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.”

I suspect that the blood obsession still haunts the Christian psyche when I read that a vial of Pope John Paul II’s blood toured the U.S. in 2014, to be venerated by the faithful (not worshipped, church officials insisted), especially in the wake of John Paul’s canonization. Apparently, during one of the pope’s many illnesses, one nurse was savvy enough to spirit away a vial of his blood—no dummy she. A pope relic was a big prize; there were Catholic hearts to be set aflutter and coffers to be filled.

"Believers are simply not interested in asking the right questions or in accepting evidence based answers." --John W. Loftus

0 comments

The Shock Collar of Christianity, by Joe

0 comments
David, here are my thoughts as someone only 3 years removed from ministry and deconversion. I will use a metaphor. One day as I was on my job, a man was noticing the work I was doing on his neighbor's property. He wanted me to come over and talk to him which I did. In the course of our conversation I noticed he had this beautiful black lab named, "Bogey." I tried to get Bogey to come to me but he wouldn't. His tongue and tail were wagging furiously. He wanted to come to me, but he couldn't. His owner predictably said, "I have an electric fence," but followed with this zinger, "But his shock collar is NOT on."

This was a moment of enlightenment for me. Bogey could have come to me without being physically shocked. But all the time spent with the shock collar on had done its work. His mind didn't know the difference. The fear, threat, and pain conditioning effectively kept Bogey within the boundaries someone else had set for him. What began as a literal, physical boundary transformed into an imaginary one that was just as confining.

Bogey illustrates myself and many Christians. From the moment of our births, the tight shock collar of Christianity was placed upon us. Tight boundaries were placed all around us with 1000 threats warning us what would happen if we crossed the line. Threats such as be shunned, separated from, disowned, divine chastening in countless forms, being forever labeled an apostate, and of course the omnipresent threat of being "justly" barbecued for 100 trillion years cycle after 100 trillion year cycle in a lake of fire with no food, water, love, or hope. How nice.

The voltage of this collar system was increased every week of our lives through Sunday School, Awana, Youth Group, Revival services, and Sunday morning and evening worship. Many of us went on to attend Christian Bible College where we went to chapel 2-4 times a week and heard devotionals at every event imaginable. All of these sermons contained "applications" which were nothing more than new legislation laced with more threats for disobedience. Over the course of a lifetime, the Christian "conscience" is saddled with hundreds and hundreds (perhaps thousands) of rules and sub-rules all carrying threats of punishment for falling short of perfect obedience. Needless to say, it doesn't take long for the Christian shock collar to become completely central and all-controlling in the minds of those living in its yard.

Here's How Insiders Tell Which Religion is True

0 comments


Andrew J. Whittemore: In short,

Q: How can I tell which one to accept?
A: You have to accept one before you can tell.
Believers are simply not interested in asking the right questions or in accepting evidence based answers.

Discuss: "Christians Have An Infantile Morality"

0 comments
Christian morality is infantile morality, which is obeying the commands of an authority figure without requiring reasons for the commands. But if reasons are provided for the commands then no commands are needed.

My God's Bigger Than Your God

0 comments

What I Got Away With On My Way to Atheism

0 comments
It was about 1970, when I was a graduate student at Boston University School of Theology, that I wrote an essay titled On the Improbability of God. This was not part of any class assignment; I just wanted to get some of thoughts down on paper—and I showed the essay to only one colleague, who was not pleased. Many years later I found out that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been expelled from Oxford in 1811 for writing his essay, The Necessity of Atheism. Well, 1970 wasn’t 1811, and I survived my blatant cheekiness. Since I never went to chapel while I attended seminary, I was considered the class eccentric, the contrarian seminarian.

Jesus Was Not Against Imperialism

0 comments
The Bible & Interpretation online magazine has published a new essay adapted from The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics and titled “Jesus Was Not Against Imperialism: New Testament Ethics as an Imperialist Project.” Here is the abstract:
The portrayal of Jesus as an anti-imperialist pervades the scholarly literature of New Testament ethics. However, portraying Jesus as an anti-imperialist actually betrays a pro-imperialist Christian agenda on the part of many New Testament ethicists. Usually, the main evidence cited is Jesus’ resistance to the Roman empire. However, anti-imperialism should properly describe an ideology that is against any empire. Jesus’ endorsement of the Kingdom of God, which is envisioned as an empire, should certainly disqualify him from being an anti-imperialist. In addition, many prominent New Testament ethicists are Euro-Americans with no indigenous ancestry, and so are themselves part of an empire occupying Native American lands.
In the near future, I also plan to challenge more thoroughly one of the most important myths in Christian historiography—Constantine the Great (ruled 306-337) was where imperialism began in Christianity. Constantine, therefore, represents a corruption of Jesus’ teachings in this view.
The placement of the start of Christian imperialism in Constantine’s reign has served to deflect attention from the fact that imperialism is inscribed in the New Testament itself. Constantine only put into effect an ideology that was already there from the beginning of Christianity and one that reaches back into what Christians call "The Old Testament."

The Processed Word of God

0 comments
I suspect that many of us–well, those of us of a certain age–have an image of Billy Graham etched in our minds: the patriarch of TV evangelism standing in the pulpit and holding the Bible aloft as the very Word of God. However, few of those in Billy’s audiences, few of those who gaze reverently at the Bible on the altar every Sunday at church, realize that the richly bound, revered book isn’t the real thing. It is the processed word of God.

What do I mean by that? Can’t we just pick up the Bible, open it and read God’s Word? No, it’s not that simple–even if you believe that the Bible is God’s Word. Everything we see on the pages of any modern Bible is the product of countless hands and minds that were involved after the original authors wrote the books in it. So there are many uncertainties that stand between the reader and the original Bible authors and texts. It’s processed material.
For example, the earliest Greek manuscripts were written with no separation between the words and no punctuation, which can lead to confusion. Someone later made the word separations and added the punctuation.
There is a complex history of manuscript copying and recopying–and an enormous number of scribal errors to deal with. There is also the matter of translation, the meaning of words, and which manuscripts to rely upon. These issues required thousands of decisions–some informed, others not. All divisions into chapters and verses came later. Some Bibles print the words of Jesus in red, which may give the impression that these are the very words of Jesus, which is misleading. We are reading English translations of Greek manuscripts that purport to record words spoken by Jesus in Aramaic, perhaps a generation or two earlier. Was a stenographer present? It is false advertising to print the (supposed) words of Jesus in red.
And now we are confronted with many contemporary translations that attempt modernization and paraphrasing of the text, which allow the biases, prejudices, and agendas of the translators to have a voice–and there have been blatant, egregious distortions. Beware: The translators are commonly conservative theologians who do have their own agendas.
It is a theological affirmation that the Bible is the Word of God. But even if you do believe that, it is important to remember that the modern Bible you hold in your hands is the product of ongoing adjustment and manipulation over the centuries. Some of the pious handlers of the “holy text” have been competent and conscientious, but far too many have not been.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library

0 comments
“What do you think about the upheaval in Jesus studies?”

THIS IS THE QUESTION I WOULD so much like to pose to my Christian friends—to be met, I am sure, in most instances–with blank stares. “What upheaval?” Because they are not paying attention. In fact, the Jesus question has been removed from the exclusive domain of Bible scholars and ecclesiastical functionaries. Most New Testament scholars have been, and remain, committed to the Jesus faith. These are the folks who, in the words of one observer, “...still write books manufacturing and manicuring Jesus to look like they do.” Secular observers decided that this biased community could no longer be trusted to provide honest answers on who and what Jesus was. So you will find plenty of titles on this list by secular analysts who have opened up Jesus studies as never before—and exposed its faulty methodologies and conclusions, e.g., Richard Carrier, Robert Price, David Fitzgerald.

Of course, it’s not just Jesus; theism in general and Christianity in particular have been subjected to penetrating, withering critique. As I point out in the Introduction of my book, we are experiencing—and have been for some twenty years—an unprecedented atheist publishing surge. This has never happened before. Ever. There are about 250 titles on this list (click below). Some of the titles predate 2000; I have included them because they are classics in the deconstruction of Christianity, e.g. H. L. Mencken’s Treatise on the Gods (1932) and Charles Guignebert’s Jesus (1935). Not all of the authors cited here are atheists, but one thing that they do have in common is their conviction that the Christian brand of theism—no matter how successful it has been—has been falsified.

An Atheist Is An Agnostic Is An Atheist Is An Agnostic! Why Every Agnostic Should Become An Atheist

0 comments
We need a consistent definition of agnosticism that makes sense, so in what follows I offer one. We also need to recognize that all religion is localized religion, and as such, there is no such thing as religion but religions, just as there is no such thing as Christianity but Christianities.

Thomas Huxley invented the word "agnosticism" who defined it like this:
Agnosticism is not a creed but a method, the essence of which lies in the vigorous application of a single principle... do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable. LINK.
But Bertrand Russell suggested a different definition:
An atheist, like a Christian, holds that we can know whether or not there is a God. The Christian holds that we can know there is a God; the atheist, that we can know there is not. The Agnostic suspends judgment, saying that there are not sufficient grounds either for affirmation or for denial. At the same time, an Agnostic may hold that the existence of God, though not impossible, is very improbable; he may even hold it so improbable that it is not worth considering in practice. In that case, he is not far removed from atheism. LINK.

Another God Before Us?

0 comments
An Evil Maker?

Those who insist that there must have been a creator don’t get to arbitrarily decide the nature of the creator, based on cherished theological traditions. It just cannot be that the problematic god of the Bible is the only candidate for The Maker of the Cosmos. So it’s not all that radical to urge Christians to consider other gods that may have created the Cosmos. It’s a bit narrow-minded to be exclusive on this issue. For the sake of argument, perhaps we might consider that a god indeed may have kicked things off. But, even so, we’d still have to be open-mindedness about what kind of god that was.

While a good god is considered a self-evident truth by Christians, nothing about the Cosmos mandates this conclusion. Joseph Daleiden has observed that, given the state of the world, it would be easier to prove a Devil than a god.[1] Is there anything that rules out an evil god as Creator? In fact—and how embarrassing is this for Christians?—many of them already believe in an evil god; those of the evangelical variety take Satan very seriously. As does Pope Francis, who employs a staff of exorcists. And Justice Scalia, good Catholic that he was, stingingly rebuked people who denied the reality of the devil. Jesus spoke of Satan (he even spoke to Satan), so what more could the Bible-believer want to prove Satan’s existence?

Throughout Western history Christians have credited Satan with enormous havoc and evil, positioning him as their god’s adversary and as a cunning, irresistible tempter of humans. Christians may protest that Satan is not a god, but that’s splitting hairs. They’re convinced that Satan is a being who can stand up to and hold his own against their god. That is de facto acknowledgment that Satan has supernatural powers; he must enjoy some rank as a god. So why would it be such a stretch to believe that the chief god of the Cosmos is evil—perhaps none other than Satan himself? Or that the Satan who gets so much airtime in the New Testament is his deputy?

Frankly, the seriously defective god of the Bible would be a major disappointment as the Creator Deity. He is overtly and covertly evil, camouflaging his evil with talk of love. But an aggressively evil god would have to be a possibility.

This is an excerpt from David Madison’s book, 10 Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, pp. 124-125

------

[1] Joseph Daleiden, The Final Superstition: A Critical Evaluation of the Judeo-Christian Legacy (Prometheus Books, 1994), p. 136. 


My Blurb for Dr. David Madison's Book

0 comments
“If it looks and sounds like a fairy tale, it’s a fairy tale” (p. 184). So says David Madison, a biblically trained scholar, in an unequaled, educational, and entertaining counter-apologetics book that exposes ten of the toughest problems for the Christian faith as unworthy of thinking adults. Madison expertly presents a cumulative case against Christianity, which is the best way to compel childlike believers to abandon their make believe fantasies. While it’s written for pastors and their fleeced flock in the pew stalls, Christian philosophers should definitely pay heed since most of them are biblically illiterate, mindlessly defending the wacky doctrines derived from unevidenced ancient pre-scientific fairy tales. LINK.
As noted before we're pleased that Dr. Madison now writes for us here at Debunking Christianity.

The Gospel of John: Jesus on Steroids

0 comments
Theology Smothers History [by Dr. David Madison, a new team member here at DC.]

When I turn to the gospel of John, I always think of a famous insult that grew out of the bitter feud between Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellmann, which probably has never been equaled in the history of American letters. McCarthy said of Hellmann, during a TV interview with Dick Cavett in 1980, “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

Maybe it’s not fair to say that every word John wrote was a lie, but why is it so tempting to say so? Indeed, Richard Carrier has remarked that John’s gospel is “a complete fabrication, of no historical value in discerning the historicity of Jesus.” [1] Carrier is blunt in pointing out, for example, that Lazarus is a character invented by John to play the role of Beloved Disciple (wholly unknown in the other three gospels): “John has clearly ‘inserted’ this figure into these stories he inherited from the Synoptics, and then claimed this new character as his ‘source’ who saw all these things (John. 21:24). In plain terms, that’s simply a lie.” [2]

As is the case with all theologians, John was confident that he wrote the truth, but his mind was riveted to a twisted extreme theology. More kindly it could be said that John wrote every word “under the influence”; he was inebriated by his exaggerated concept of Christ. The quote, “write drunk, edit sober” has gone viral as a Hemingway witticism, but sleuths have tracked it down to novelist Peter De Vries, one of whose characters (in the 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben) says: “Sometimes I write drunk and revise sober, and sometimes I write sober and revise drunk. But you have to have both elements in creation.”

John shows his sober side by providing a well-structured gospel, even though it is lopsided (chapters 1-12 cover three years, chapters 13-19 are about one day), but he was drunk on bad theology. He went far beyond the tales of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in his portrait of Jesus, which is saying a lot because these earlier three operated with heavy theological biases of their own. John wrote drunk in creating a leading man who was egregiously egotistical. It would be hard to come up with another character, fictional or otherwise, who is so full of himself.

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. His book, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, was published by Tellectual Press in August 2016.

[1] Richard Carrier, On the Historicity of Jesus, p. 505.
[2] Ibid., p.505.

Faith is the Mother of All Cognitive Biases

0 comments

Is Life Really Absurd for the Atheist?

0 comments
In an interesting essay Taylor Carr argued, "Our condition is absurd whether God exists or not." I just happened to come across it while looking into existentialism again, having taught it as a philosophy instructor. His whipping boy is William Lane Craig with his contention that life is absurd without God. He contends "Craig under-appreciates the weight of absurdity - namely that he neglects a full treatment of the subject as it has been articulated in Camus, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard" since "absurdity of this sort does not undermine atheism, but recommends it, in that it reveals the absurdity of even life with God." For Craig's limited view of absurdity is
more of a mindset than a reality. It is a problem to be cured. The life of the atheist is absurd only in that she does not acknowledge God, and so has no claim to ultimate significance, purpose, and value. Absurdity on this view is practically a placeholder for irrationality. Craig says of the godless perspective that it is "utterly without reason." The absurd life is living with the irrational belief that we inhabit a godless universe.
By contrast Carr informs us "For Camus, the absurd is fundamental to who we are. Our consciousness is what separates us from the world, what gives rise to absurdity."
Camus finds significance only in accepting life on its own terms, which has everything to do with acknowledging its absurdity. In The Myth of Sisyphus (where Sisyphus is condemned to roll a rock uphill for eternity), Camus describes the absurd feeling as being divorced from one's life. We encounter a tragic divide between our desires for reality and reality as it really is, perhaps most of all in those humbling conscious moments of suffering and trauma. The desires we have for unity, purpose, and order clash with our experiences of a world that seems not to care about us, our dreams, or our plans. The absurdist finds herself a stranger adrift in a foreign world with no lights or illusions, unable to remember where she has come from and unaware of where she is heading. If she denies the absurd, she lives an inauthentic life, as if the world is so little different from her desires that the incongruities presented to her are not really incongruities at all.
Carr explains that
Camus' point is not just that the world has no seemingly in-built meaning to it, but that we, as the conscious and reasoning creatures we are, do not even belong to this world. The human condition is uniquely human in that we are consciously separated from the world in which we live. The same cognition that allows us to reason also isolates us from the rest of the universe...Seeing our condition as it is, seeing the absurdity of life, is not antithetical to happiness, it is, for Camus, paramount to happiness.

This Is What Indoctrination Looks Like!

0 comments
Football season and I'm loving it. Take a look at these Packer fans. They're raising their children to root for the Packers. This is what indoctrination looks like folks, only it's fun and harmless compared to some other types of indoctrination. Go Colts!

I Was On Dogma Debate with David Smalley

0 comments
My segment appears at the 50:35 mark. Enjoy. Link

All You Need to Know About Street Epistemology

0 comments

What's The Best Counter-Apologetics Book?

0 comments
I don't claim to know. Some people think they know though. Christians have been writing Apologetics books for a long long time that cover most all of the crucial issues. Atheist scholars have focused on writing single issue types of works. Very few atheist scholars (if any) have written a book covering most all the crucial issues. This one does that. In fact it's quite comprehensive covering issues not usually discussed. Do you have it in your library for reference? It is, after all, a reference work of 536 pages.

Daily Devotional 2: Road Rage Without Cars Or a Road

0 comments
I could write a daily devotional, well, advice for the day anyway. I now have a title in mind! So here's some more advice: Don't judge others based solely on one or two actions, or you'll probably judge them unfairly.

At a concert I went to there was a table in front of us where some guy was being a jerk by being rude.

When one guy got up from the table the jerk sat in his seat, which had a better view. So this guy's girlfriend, I'm supposing, got angry and went over to the jerk and got in his face, telling him in no uncertain terms to get out of that seat. Even jerks don't want to mess with an angry woman in front others. So begrudgingly jerk-guy moved back to his own seat. Her boyfriend once again claimed his seat.

She wasn't done with the jerk though. She left and came back. Then in a few minutes two police officers appeared, who were there to monitor the crowd. One reached into the back pocket of the jerk who was sitting down, and pulled out a small bottle of liquor from his back pocket. Then they unceremoniously escorted the jerk out of the place. For in these venues you cannot bring your own drinks. You have to buy them at the concession stand. She ratted him out, I'm sure of it. Payback is...shitty.

Some people behave badly under certain circumstances. Over-all that jerk may be a nice guy with family and friends who like him a great deal. The same goes for the girlfriend. What I witnessed was road rage, without cars, or a road. Who among us can say we haven't had a little bit of road rage? We're told road rage is fairly rampant right now. People have it. Lots of us on occasion. YOU have probably had it, and lived to tell the story!

We should not judge people based solely on one or two incidents, apart from serious heinous crimes which have no excuses in our society. While it's certainly a piece of who someone is, people are almost always more than any one particular incident. To judge someone from such a limited knowledge base is to be unfair with them. They may turn out to be as we judge them, but we can't say until we know them better.

Don't judge others based solely on one or two actions, or you'll probably judge them unfairly.

Somewhat along the same lines read what David Smalley wrote: What’s Killing The Atheist Movement? Thoughts?

An Update On William Lane Craig's Policy Not To Debate Me

0 comments
A friend emailed reasonablefaith.org:

I'd love to watch Dr Craig debate John W Loftus. Do you know if he has any plans to?

Best,

Joshua

The response from the Executive Director at Reasonable Faith is below:

Faith is Superfluous and Unnecessary

0 comments
If faith is involved in everything we claim to know then some things we know have very little faith involved, while other things we claim to know are heavily saturated in faith. Faith would be superfluous at that point and unnecessary. For we could say it differently, saying that some things we know have a very high degree of probability to them, while other things we claim to know have a very low degree of probability to them. Faith represents nothing except the acknowledgement that someone is believing something that has a low degree of probability to it and yet calling it knowledge. If we thought exclusively in terms of the probabilities then by depending on faith for knowledge whenever the probabilities are low is an abdication of intellectual responsibility.

Hemant Mehta's take down of David Barton the liar:

0 comments
LINK. I mentioned a related case in an early comment.

To Have Faith Is To Lack Evidence. It's To Pretend To Know Something You Don't Actually Know!

0 comments
John Appleton, an educated and respectful Christian on Facebook said, "For me to believe [that Jesus didn't exist] takes more faith than to believe that Jesus is who he said he was."

I want readers to think about how the word "faith" functions in his sentence, irrespective of the issue being discussed. Tacitly John acknowledges the word has to do with the lack of evidence. Norman Geisler's book "I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist" does the same thing. Don't tell me faith is trusting God's Word, or God. The way the word is typically used is to be uttered whenever there is a lack of evidence. If faith is trust then I don't have any reason to trust faith anyway.

Faith is a cognitive bias to be avoided if anyone wants to know the truth.

0 comments
Here's a discussion starter for the above quotation:

My Latest Book "Unapologetic" Is Going To Print Today!

0 comments
My new book is being sent off to be printed today! The following clip from "The Wrath of Khan" expresses my thoughts as I ponder its impact:



No violence is intended. It's purely metaphorical. We do battle against ideas though. It should be available by the 1st of November. Various online bookstores will have it along with an ebook and maybe an audible version. Below are all the blurbs received for it:

Quote of the Day, by Robert G. Ingersoll

0 comments
Most nations, at the time the Old Testament was written, believed in slavery, polygamy, wars of extermination, and religious persecution; and it is not wonderful that the book contained nothing contrary to such belief. The fact that it was in exact accord with the morality of its time proves that it was not the product of any being superior to man.

“The inspired writers” upheld or established slavery, countenanced polygamy, commanded wars of extermination, and ordered the slaughter of women and babes. In these respects they were precisely like the uninspired savages by whom they were surrounded.

They also taught and commanded religious persecution as a duty, and visited the most trivial offences with the punishment of death. In these particulars they were in exact accord with their barbarian neighbors.

They were utterly ignorant of geology and astronomy, and knew no more of what had happened than of what would happen; and, so far as accuracy is concerned, their history and prophecy were about equal; in other words, they were just as ignorant as those who lived and died in nature’s night.