(2751) Symptoms of Christianitis

It is well-known that adherence to a false belief system is hazardous to the afflicted and to those who interact with them. The followings lists some of the symptoms of a belief in Christianity:

https://articles.exchristian.net/2002/10/becoming-ex-christian.php

1) Jesus fetish. Those afflicted with Christianity develop an obsessive fixation on a man known as Jesus Christ, an ancient cult leader who they say ‘loves’ them and whose corpse, after he was executed, they believe climbed out of his tomb and ate some food and then went on a space trip into heaven. This man apparently ‘saved’ them from their ‘sins’ when he came back from the dead.

2) Intellectual suicide. Sufferers completely close down their brain and ignore science, logic and reason. Christians, having abandoned their brains, rely on a book, the “Bible”, for answers to everything – including how to handle their sex lives.

3) Anti-social behavior. Christians often retreat from, or condemn the rest of society which they believe is full of ‘sinners.’

4) Paranoia and psychotic delusions. Christians believe that a fearsome monster, which they call ‘Satan’, is at large in the world ‘tempting’ them and trying to drag people off and burn them in his den, know as ‘hell’. This monster, ‘Satan’, is alleged to be red with horns and often carries a pitch fork.

5) Anti-family attitudes. Christianity is very anti-family. Anyone who believes in family values should be appalled at this cult. For instance, the mythical leader of Christianity, Jesus Christ, says the following in the Bible: “If any man come unto me, and hate not his father, and his mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26 “For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.” – Matthew 10:35-6 It is clear that the radical Christian agenda is to destroy the sacred institution of the family and therefore it must not be tolerated.

6) Violence. Christians have been responsible for some of the most horrific acts of violence, murders and genocide in history. The Crusades, where thousands of Muslims were slaughtered, the genocide of South Americans conducted by the Spanish Conquistadors, the murder of MILLIONS of men and women accused of being ‘heretics’ and ‘witches’ in the 16th and 17th century are only a few examples of countless acts of cold blooded sadism conducted in the name of this cult. While the Christians have cut back on their murders in recent years, they still very successfully drive countless numbers of gay youth to suicide.

7) Sexual hang-ups. Christians often suffer from very severe sexual hang-ups, where perfectly natural and enjoyable human feelings are interpreted as ‘evil’ and therefore dangerously repressed. This can lead to very unhealthy inner turmoil and psychological trauma.

8) Hatred and bigotry. Although not surfacing in all cases, symptoms of pathological hatred and bigotry often surface in Christians. It is no coincidence that hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan are fanatical Christians. Although not all Christians are like this, the point is that many are, so therefore the potential for such dangerous and insidious mentalities is inherent in the cult. It is interesting to note that a religion such as Buddhism, which for its widespread influence is the Eastern equivalent of Christianity, although being extremely widespread and diversified has never harbored any hate groups.

Others that can be added to this list are:

9) Invincibility. The idea that the believer can take risks unbecoming a non-believer because their god will protect them, often leading to the final act of the faithful.

10) Superiority. The saved Christian cannot see non-Christians as being on their level, leading to a condescending attitude of supercilious pity.

11) Anti-environmental attitude. The belief that the world will soon end eliminates a sense of stewardship for environmental conservation for future generatiions.

12) Hegemony. Because the Christian assumes that he has a direct connection to God, what he believes to be true and correct in his opinion should apply to the rights and freedoms of all non-Christians.

These 12 symptoms form a constellation of harmful effects related to a belief in Christianity. Beliefs in things that are true do not suffer these problems.

(2752) Personal identity is a mirage

Christian theology depends on the reality of the thing we sense as ‘I,’ a unique identity that, theoretically, can exist in places, realms, or dimensions other than within the current body or brain that it currently resides. Otherwise, it would be impossible for our ‘I’ to experience a heaven or a hell in the afterlife.

But what if the thing we sense as ‘self’ is an illusion that the brain constructs? What if musings such as ‘I could have been born a hundred years ago,’ or ‘I could have been instead a woman/man,’ or ‘I could have been instead an elephant’ are moot points? What if what we call an ‘I’ is simply an illusion- meaning that the Christian concept of an afterlife is itself based on this illusion? The following was taken from:

https://www.livescience.com/55999-is-your-self-just-an-illusion.html

Could our internal sense of personal identity — about which we seem so sure — be an illusion? I asked former parapsychologist, now skeptic, Susan Blackmore.

“There’s no reason to suppose that we have real continuity,” Blackmore said. “Because if you look at what a body and a brain are, there’s no room for a thing called a ‘self’ that sort of sits in there and has experiences. So then, the question becomes, why does it feel that way?”

To Blackmore, we invent that feeling ourselves. “The illusion of continuity is created only when you look for it,” she said. Though all things about us change from moment to moment, when we connect all of our experiential dots, we conjure up our inner sense of self. “So you imagine this kind of continuous stream of consciousness when you’re awake, but actually, it’s not like that at all,” she said. “There are multiple parallel things going on. And every so often, we go, ‘Oh, that’s me,’ and we invent the self-story.

“This so-called ‘me’ is really just another reconstruction,” she continued. “There was an earlier one 30 minutes ago, and there will be others in the future. But they’re really not the same person; they’re just stuff happening in the universe.”

“So there’s no self to die,” she concluded, because there is no self prior to death and “there’s certainly no self to continue after death.”

Sue appears rather cheerful in her inexorable mortality, so I asked if she thinks that “no self” is “good news?”

“I’m smiling because it’s so beautiful when you get it,” she says. “You can let go and just accept that it’s just the universe doing its stuff. It’s not me against the world because there really isn’t any me at all. Death has no sting, because there never was a ‘you’ to die. Every moment is just a new story.”

Some might counter this idea by supposing that God will reconstruct your body in heaven just as it was sometime prior to death. But this clone of you will still not be ‘you.’ See #1375 to understand why this is true. The theory that the sense of self is an illusion elegantly solves the mysteries of ‘why was I born a man/woman, now instead of earlier or later, here rather than there, to these parents instead of those, or why was I born a human instead of another animal, or even perhaps a being on a different planet?’

The experience of ‘I’ is tied to the physical body in which it resides and cannot have existed in any other entity, time, or place. It is a static and confined reality. Seeing this is somewhat analogous to ‘seeing’ the outside of a box that you are currently standing inside of. It is not an easy mental exercise, but once it is perceived, it delivers a delightfully freeing experience as well as a firm conviction that there will be no afterlife and that, by default, Christianity is false.

(2753) Wrath of God on tiny humans

Most people consider babies and small children to be blameless and undeserving of punishment as a result of the actions of their adult guardians. But the Bible sees it differently. The following scriptures recount how God ordered innocent fetuses, babies, and small children to be killed:

1 Samuel 15:3

Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’

Hosea 9:14

Give them, Lord—what will you give them? Give them wombs that miscarry and breasts that are dry.

Hosea 13:16

“The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open.”

Numbers 31:17-18

Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.

2 Kings 15:16

At that time Menahem, starting out from Tirzah, attacked Tiphsah and everyone in the city and its vicinity, because they refused to open their gates. He sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women.

Psalm 137:8

Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

Numbers 5:11-22

(In this scripture, God provides a detailed instruction for how to induce a miscarriage of a woman whose husband suspects her of being unfaithful.)

There can be no defense or contextual arguments to deflect the fact that these Bible verses violate the moral sense of virtually every human alive today. They would result in the arrest and conviction of the perpetrators who would be sent to prison or even given the death penalty. Yet, according to the Bible, they were sanctioned by God. This leaves the following choice for Christians: God is evil or else God does not exist.

(2754) Destroying the Lewis trilemma

Many Christians cite C.S. Lewis’ trilemma (that Jesus was either the Lord, or else he was a liar or a lunatic, and that the latter two are highly improbable) as the most important foundation of their faith. In reality, this argument is spectacularly weak. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/k36cm8/cs_lewiss_liar_lunatic_lord_argument_aka_the/

Formally stated, it even sounds ridiculous:

Premise 1: All statements are either true, lies, or madness.

Premise 2: The statements of Jesus are neither lies nor madness.

Conclusion (3): Therefore, Jesus’ statements are true.

I mean, it’s logically valid in the sense of academic philosophy (follows accepted rules of inferences; premises, if true, would imply the conclusion) but I think the premises are just so obviously mistaken.

Jesus could have been a liar, lunatic, lord, legend, honestly mistaken or just wrong, our account of him could be imperfect in relevant ways (in other words the argument just assumes the reliability of the Bible from the outset), there could have been independent motivations for deifying Jesus (for example, many theological pioneers throughout history and most of the ancient philosophers—Plato, Aristotle— and conquerors—Alexander the great— were said to be born of virgins and or deified by their enthusiastic following), it could be (which is very likely) some combination of these in varying degrees, he could have been a victim of childhood indoctrination (would not be the first time a person was misled by their authority figures in early childhood, imbibing a view of the world with a kind of metaphysics and conception of truth-testing that is amenable to supernatural theorizing), he could have been an unusually socially independent person who just decided to innovate the religious thought in his area despite being wrong (as every novel religion ever created has precedented), some parts mentally unhealthy but some parts indoctrinated and some parts acculturated in the context of first century Judaism, etc, etc.

I also think it’s relevant that one of the more troubling theological complications for the biblical Christian is the fact that Jesus does not even claim to be God or even equivalent to God. Christians have had to squeeze this part out of the Bible with great difficulty based on the extremely weak indications in scripture, which are vague and suspiciously open to interpretation. Many theological ideas have been dismissed for far, far less than that, and yet the most important claim of the Christian Faith rests on exactly that foundation. Take a moment to appreciate the irony. “Christianity” in the sense of following Christ as God, is hardly anywhere to be found in the Bible!

Another note: The “lunatic” part of Lewis’s argument strikes me as especially lazy. He just assumes that if a person were mentally ill they would be incapable of great moral insight or eloquent public speaking, but this is just bad psychology. Mental illness is complicated. This is a bastardization of the findings of clinical psychology, a maturing science of mental disorders with an increasingly firm basis in empirical observations and facts.

One of the more robust of these findings has been that people of every intelligence level—even respectable, articulate, reading, deep-thinking, follower-accumulating, audience-finding, cerebral people—can suffer from one or more mental disorders to varying degrees (even sub-clinically, meaning it would not rise to the level of a professional diagnostic standard but still may have an influence on their thinking and behavior) in ways have a consequential influence on their lives and world views.

A poster recently mentioned psychotic disorders as a possibility, a class of disorders that would include schizophrenia and hallucinatory detachment from the normal everyday empirical testing that we take to, but there are other candidates for explaining the kinds of views and personal claims Jesus may have forwarded. Devin Nash was a Nobel Prize winning economist with a soaring IQ and Ivy League education and yet he had severe schizophrenia, which went unnoticed by everyone who knew him excepting his fairly distant parents. It would have astonished his friends to discover such a thing about what they otherwise would have presumed was a normal, intelligent, academically accomplished and healthy man.

Other examples are available: There is significant evidence that Kant and other political philosophers may have been on the autism spectrum, and that this influenced their thinking substantially in ways that are better appreciated now with the benefit of both hindsight and the tools of clinical psychology and neuroscience.

The other thing to keep in mind is that we also have, in the record of history, literally dozens of examples of cultural innovators with an appetite for unconventionality and opposing the ethical and religious consensus who either claimed divinity or were later described by their followers as God or an agent of God but were, we now assume, devastatingly wrong. Christianity is not as historically special as many Christians assume, and it was by no means inevitable that it would have become the predominant religion (and indeed, it will not continue to be for long and was not for the overwhelming majority of human history in the first place). It was more by accidents of history that it became a major force in religious belief and, for that matter, that you ended up believing it than by supernatural guidance. Also, given only one religion can predominate at a time, it is decidedly uninteresting that Christianity happens to fulfill that role (more nominally than actually, given church attendance data and public opinion polling on specific theological beliefs like an affirmation of the trinity, which is a minority view in American Christianity ironically enough according to Pew Research center).

As can be seen, the Jesus story is actually more of a decalemma (a question of 10 plausible explanations). Reducing it to three conveniently chosen elements is an exercise in intellectual dishonesty, but you will hear Christians mindlessly reciting them as if they have covered all of the bases. It would be like saying the Bible is either totally true or completely false, eliminating all of the nuances that accompany any expression of reality.

(2755) Kettle logic

One of the tell-tale signs that Christianity is false is that it is commonly defended by using a series of internally contradictory arguments, a tactic termed ‘kettle logic.’ The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/k3pvv3/kettle_logic_eg_from_freudian_psychology_kinda/

Kettle logic (la logique du chaudron in the original French) is a rhetorical device wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are inconsistent with each other. Freud relates the story of a man who was accused by his neighbor of having returned a kettle in a damaged condition.

The man replies –

– I returned the kettle undamaged!

– It was already damaged when I borrowed it!

– I never borrowed it in the first place!

As it might apply to apologist arguments about the Bible:

– The Bible is inerrant.

– Any mistakes in the Bible are translation errors.

– Errors in the Bible are not really errors because God deliberately placed them there to test peoples’ faith.

As it might apply to evolution:

– Dinosaurs never existed, Satan put fake fossils in the ground.

– Dinosaurs were too big to get on the Ark.

– There was insufficient food on the Ark for dinosaurs so they died out before the rain stopped.

As it might apply to prayers:

– God answers all prayers as it says in the Bible.

– God replies to prayers with ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘wait.’

– God responds to prayers is such a way as to not make it too obvious, so people will still have to exercise faith.

Wherever kettle logic is being used, it is a good clue that what is being argued for is not true. Christians have been doing this for centuries, and it is actually nothing more sublime than throwing mud against a wall to see what might stick.

(2756) Virgin birth is a minority New Testament opinion

Although most Christians believe that Jesus was born of a virgin, it is a minority opinion of the authors of the New Testament.  And where it is presented, it is mired in fantasy and contradiction. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/11/bible-blunders-bad-theology-part-6.html

Answering this requires serious Bible study that I included on my wish list. It’s worthy of note especially that the apostle Paul knew nothing of virgin birth, and might have resisted the idea; at least he failed to mention it in any of this voluminous epistles. Paul’s obsession was the resurrection of Jesus as disclosed to him in visions (= hallucinations) of the dead man: Believing in the resurrection was the key to salvation. He might have considered it irrelevant that Jesus was miraculously conceived, even if he had heard such a tale; just as the teaching and miracles of Jesus were unimportant to him.

In Mark, the first gospel written, Jesus appears out of nowhere to be baptized—John’s baptism for the remission of sins—at which point a voice from heaven declares him to be God’s son. Virgin birth wasn’t on Mark’s radar either, at all.

 It was Matthew who pulled this belief into Christian theology, and quite clumsily too. He can be credited with one of biggest goofs in the Bible, trying to convince his readers that Isaiah 7:14 was a prediction of Jesus. Israel 7 has nothing whatever to do with a coming messiah—a few hundred years away—and Matthew used the Greek version of Isaiah that mistranslated “young woman” in verse 7 as “virgin.” Matthew excelled at making things up, e.g., the farfetched account of Mary and Joseph fleeing to Egypt to protect the baby Jesus, and his ghoulish story of dead people coming alive at the moment Jesus died, then walking around Jerusalem on Easter morning. Why should we trust Matthew that he got “born of a virgin” right? There are good reasons that I asked the question—and answered it—in an earlier article, “Who the Hell Hired Matthew to Write a Gospel?”

Matthew took just two verses to describe Joseph’s dream in which an angel told him that Mary was pregnant by the holy spirit. Luke couldn’t let it go at that; he wanted to nail it: he reports in eleven verses—not a dream, not a vision—but an angel’s visit to Mary, and their conversation. He also imagined that Mary, who would have been an illiterate teenager, recited the ten-verse Magnificat. Luke devoted two giant chapters to these beginnings of Jesus.

The author of John’s gospel would have none of this. He is, of course, famous for his line, “The word became flesh and lived among us” (1:14), so it is striking that he had no use for virgin birth. His Jesus had been present at creation, was indeed one with God, so perhaps he felt that Jesus arriving on earth through a virgin just wasn’t necessary. Whatever his reasons, he skipped it, just as he omitted Jesus being baptized and instituting the Eucharist at the Last Supper.

The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke—so thoroughly embedded through art, music, and church pageants in the celebration of Christmas—are seldom analyzed critically by laypeople. The failure of Bible study is largely to blame. Scholars—well, those outside evangelical circles—know that these birth narratives fail utterly as history; nor can the Matthew and Luke accounts be reconciled. When Matthew and Luke wrote their stories they had no idea that their gospels would one day be bound together, making comparisons easy—and embarrassing.

So Mark, John, and all of the epistles were unaware of virgin birth—or chose to ignore it; they are the majority opinion.

An author who leaves out the virgin birth of Jesus is tantamount to a biographer who fails to mention that Shirley Temple was a child star in the movies. It is removing an essential element of the man’s pedigree. The fact that the virgin birth is a minority opinion in what is otherwise a biased work of propaganda lets us know that Jesus, assuming he was a real man, was born in the usual way.

(2757) Deifying Mary

Christianity claims to be monotheistic, even though its god is said to be composed of three separate beings. But even if we overlook that duplicity, there is another god that must be reckoned with- Mary, Jesus’ mother. Although it appears that his (step) father died as a mortal man, Jesus’ mother has been posthumously elevated to what can only be considered godhood by the Catholic and some Anglican Churches. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/11/bible-blunders-bad-theology-part-6.html#more

And surely this is a blunder for Christian theology, especially when we see how Mary has been exaggerated. While she remained a minor, seldom-mentioned figure in the New Testament, she became a central figure in a cult of purity. In Matthew 1:25 we read that Joseph had no marital relations with her until after the birth of Jesus, and of course the brothers of Jesus are mentioned in the gospels. But the idea caught on, especially in Catholicism, that she always remained a virgin; those brothers, so Catholic apologists argue, were half-brothers from Joseph’s first marriage! Anything to keep her pure, as if God’s invention of the penis was a dirty but necessary mistake. As tokens of her purity, Mary has been depicted wearing blue and white, with halo.

 She attained the status of saint, dwelling in the spiritual realm with many other saints—along with the angels and demons mentioned in the New Testament.  In 1854, the Catholic Church announced that her soul was free of original sin—how’s that for purity! Her conception in her mother’s womb had been miraculously cleansed of original sin: it had been an Immaculate Conception. How many Catholics have paused their adoration of Mary long enough to ask: How do theologians know what was happening in the womb of a first century Galilean teenager?

 Mary attained status as Queen of Heaven, can be prayed to and puts in appearances around the world. In 1950 the Catholic Church got around to announcing officially that her body had ascended to heaven—just like Jesus did. Mary serves as a female deity, a kindly goddess to balance the wrathful God depicted by Jesus and Paul.

 This theology thrives among those who never ask—who have been taught not to ask—How do you know all this? All this is fueled by theological imagination, and a fair amount of craftiness too, that is, digging for texts that can be construed to support flights of fantasy. Why do people take it seriously?

So Mary was conceived without sin, lived a sinless, virginal life, was taken bodily into heaven, and now hears prayers and makes occasional appearances around the world. If she isn’t a god, what is she? Calling her a saint is simply playing with words. A huge chunk of Christianity is praying to a female god whether they admit it or not.

(2758) Defense of Christianity is unremarkable

If individuals from another planet sat down and listened to apologists for various religions, to see which one stood out as being the most convincing, they would come away thinking that there was no clear distinction- they all seemed to have the same strategy, and no one seemed more plausible than the next. The Christian would seem no more believable than any of the others. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/k4qfzq/the_christian_has_the_burden_of_demonstration/

Every claim the Christian will make will comes down to “faith.” They cannot demonstrate their God is the “real” one. They will appeal to ancient texts or texts considered “holy”, feelings, and faith. This is no different than what a Muslim, Jew, Mormon would do.

The atheist is left feeling confused because these believers of separate faiths have the same demonstration in supporting their deity. Hence why atheist is not convinced.

The burden is on the Christian to demonstrate that their Christian Deity is the real one. The Christian simply cannot do this without looking like a Muslim, Jew etc. This is why those who leave the faith are unconvinced. It is not philosophical arguments, moral arguments that lead people to leave the flock. It is not that they have fallen away and no longer hear the voice of Christ (John 10:27). It not that Satan has cast a veil over their eyes in which the atheist has no strength to tear it in two.

When you line up a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Mormon, Zoroastrian etc, and the atheist is sitting in front of them deciding to listen to the demonstrations, the atheist will be unconvinced of the Muslim’s demonstrations, the Jews, the Mormon etc. The non-believer will sit with his hand on this chin listening to faith, ancient text, testimony, feelings and will be unmoved. Then comes the Christians turn to bring fourth their demonstration. The nonbeliever eagerly awaits because before they lined up the Christian could not stop speaking on the love of Jesus, on the salvation of God. The Christian boasted themselves up to unimaginable heights by claiming that God saved them specifically. Then they step forth and all are eagerly waiting for this outstanding demonstration. Then the Christians takes a deep, confident breath and speaks … .. … “faith, ancient texts, testimony, feelings…” This is why nonbelievers, atheists are unmoved.

The demonstration is on the Christian to show that their God is the real one. They appeal to same things any other individual of a separate faith would appeal to. Thus making them no different and frankly unconvincing.

If Christianity was the one true religion, this hypothetical scenario would look very different. The Christian apologist would be able to point to evidence showing his faith to be far better supported. Its texts would be superior from a scientific, archaeological, and historical perspective, its development would be seamless and consistent from inception to current day, its miracles would be far better attested and confirmed, and its prayers would be shown to be vastly more effective. But this is not what we see. Christianity has no better proof than any other religion, and this reveals that it is very unlikely to be true.

(2759) Virgin birth borrowed from pagan tradition

There are two compelling clues that the virgin birth belief of Christianity is a fable- it didn’t develop until at least 50 years after the death of Jesus, and it was consistent with myths associated with other gods and rulers of its time. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/11/bible-blunders-bad-theology-part-6.html#more

Sometimes a borrowed idea is far more trouble than it’s worth. This is especially the case with virgin birth; attaching this bit of mythology to the Jesus story was a major Bible Blunder.

Christians should be especially curious—and skeptical—about how this happened. Peter Brancazio sums it up pretty well:

“The most reasonable explanation is that the early Christians adapted this belief from the pagan religions of the time. Stories of virgin births or the impregnation of human females by gods abounded in these religions. The prophet Zoroaster, the Persian god Mithra, the Egyptian gods Horus and Osiris were all believed to have been born of virgins. Shortly after his death, the Emperor Augustus was declared to have been the son of a god: the otherwise reliable Roman historian Suetonius, writing in his Lives of the Caesars, described how Augustus’ mother was impregnated by the god Apollo. It seems plausible to believe that the tradition of the virgin birth of Jesus developed as a way of elevating Jesus to a status similar to that of the pagan gods…”  (Brancazio, The Bible from Cover to Cover: How Modern-Day Scholars Read the Scriptures, p. 397)

The virgin birth of Jesus was first documented in the Gospel of Matthew in approximately CE 80. Before this time, Paul and the author of the Gospel of Mark were evidently unaware of this ‘fact.’ When an extraordinary, if not impossible, event emerges as conventional wisdom 50 years after the fact, unknown to those before, copies the myths of contemporary deities, and is presented in competing, contradictory accounts (Matthew vs. Luke), it is possible to state without hesitation that it didn’t happen.

(2760) Debunking the local flood theory

Many scientifically-oriented Christians concede, in the wake of overwhelming evidence, that the Noah flood was actually just a local event that didn’t involve the entire world. They are walking a fine line- not wanting to admit it is purely mythical but also not wanting to subvert their knowledge of science. But a review of the Bible does not allow for this interpretation. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/k5eejg/the_bible_teaches_that_the_flood_was_worldwide/

The Bible literally says it is world-wide, not just local. God says he will destroy all flesh on the earth (Gen 6:17, 7:4), everything not in the Ark died (Gen 7:21-23), Peter says how only Noah and his family survived (1 Peter 3:20), Peter says the world was overflowed with water and perished (2 Peter 3:5-6)

God has all animals come to Noah so he can put them in the ark (Gen 6:20). If it was local, then there is no reason why they needed to go there. Especially considering many of the animals likely came from somewhere that would be past the so-called local flood area.

If it was local, God could just tell Noah to move. There is no reason to build a big boat when he had plenty of time to just leave the area.

“Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.”(Gen 7:20). The mountains were fully covered. This is only possible in a world-wide flood. If it started in only a local area, the water would run-off the side of the mountain immediately when it gets above it. To be 15 cubits (about 25 feet), it would have to cover the entire planet.

He sent out the birds to see if they could find plant life (Gen 8:6-11). If it was just a local flood, there is no reason Noah would even do this.

All of mankind was united 100 years after the flood to build the Tower of Babel. If it was only local, then there would be civilizations all across the globe that would have lived through it, so they would not all be together.

All the rest of the Bible also teaches that it was a real story, not just a metaphor or parable.

Noah is mentioned in genealogies (1 Chronicles 1:4, Luke 3:36). There is no reason that the genealogy would start including fictional characters

It is referred back to, and wouldn’t make sense if it wasn’t real. Jesus mentions it in Matthew 24:38-39 and Luke 17:27. He also uses the example of Lot with Sodom and Gomorrah, which almost all Christians would say is a real story. He, and many other people before the flood, are mentioned in the Hebrews 11 hall of faith chapter (v. 7). Doesn’t make much sense to see the faith of people that weren’t actually real.

This matters because the Bible reinforces throughout its pages that the flood was an actual planet-wide event. Portraying it as a local inundation is not consistent with an objective reading of the flood story itself as well as the many subsequent references. This leaves one of two possibilities- the science is wrong and a worldwide flood actually occurred, or the Bible deceptively presents a myth as being a real event. If the latter, as seems more likely, then it brings into question the entirety of its narrative.

(2761) The Bible is losing its moral relevance

Christians routinely decry the ‘moral decay’ of society and insist that we must return to biblical moral values. This, even when the Bible supports slavery, genocide, spanking of children, killing of homosexuals, and more. But one salient point exposing the best evidence that the Bible is losing its relevance to modern moral values is the way it devalues women in deference to men. Consider the following scriptures:

1 Corinthian­s 11:9 “neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”

1 Corinthian­s 11:6 “For if a woman does not cover her head, she might as well have her hair cut off; but if it is a disgrace for a woman to have her hair cut off or her head shaved, then she should cover her head.”

1 Timothy 2:11 “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission­.”

1 Timothy 2:10-12 “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”

1 Corinthian­s 14:35 “If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgracefu­l for a woman to speak in the church.”

1 Corinthian­s 11:7 “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man.”

1 Corinthian­s 11:5 “But every woman who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head—it is the same as having her head shaved.”

Ephesians 5:22 “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”

Ephesians 5:23 “For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior.”

Ephesians 5:24 “Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything”

Colossians 3:18 “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.”

Obviously, there are still some sects of Christianity where women are willing to assume subservient roles, but, by and large, the world has moved to an assumption of sexual equality. To say to a young woman that she should consult the Bible to learn how she should behave in a future marriage would be laughable.  As the Bible remains statically anchored in Bronze Age ethics, society evolves with time, slowly but surely rendering the Bible irrelevant to modern life.

(2762) COVID-19 religion test case

The global pandemic of 2020 has provided a real-time test of the world’s religions. It is well understood that many factors affect the death rate from COVID-19, but one that should be relevant is the truth or untruth of religions that are predominantly practiced in various countries, assuming that one religion is true to the exclusion of others, and that the deity (deities) associated with that religion hears and answers prayers directed to him (them). Most Christians assume that both of those assumptions apply exclusively to their faith.

The following data looks at seven countries that have a very high percentage of Christians followed by seven that have a very low percentage:

Deaths due to COVID-19 per million residents as of December 2, 2020

source https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-data

Columbia	729
United States	826
Brazil	821
Italy	943
Spain	979
Argentina	866
Mexico	834

 

China	3
Afghanistan	46
Vietnam	1
South Korea	10
Saudi Arabia	170
Japan	17
India	100

Although this does not prove that Christianity is false, it bends the arc of probability in that direction. We would expect Christian countries to have done much better, especially when comparing deaths to total population, because prayers for those sickened by the virus would be the ones that would most affect the death rate (as opposed to the case rate which might be skewed by the high viral transmission rate that occurs in church settings or by the variation in compliance rates of mask wearing and social distancing). This data is counter-intuitive to the belief that Christianity is the one true religion.

(2763) A designed world could be different

Any biologist will tell you that an unguided process of evolution will inevitably lead to a world where living things devour other living things in a cutthroat game of survival. It’s an unavoidable consequence that results in an unfathomable amount of fear, pain, and suffering that is occurring every second of every day.

A world designed by a god could be different. All animals could subsist solely on plants within the context of a kinder and gentler world. There is no physical reason why a planet populated with only plant-eating animals could not exist. The Bible itself hints at such a benevolent setting in its opening verses describing the Garden of Eden before the Fall, as if such a world would be the best possible one.

The fact that we find ourselves on a planet filled with carnivorous animals is a hint that supernatural forces were not involved in designing it. Or at least supernatural forces motivated by compassion. Rather, it is evidence that unguided evolution took place. And when we speak of a lack of design, purpose, compassion, and guidance controlling our planet’s history, we are also suggesting that supernatural beings were most likely not involved in directing the drama.

(2764) Paul discounts churches and human hands

In Acts, Chapter 17, it is seen that Paul (or, more accurately, Luke, the author) fails to perceive the future of Christianity. He is saying that God does not require shrines (aka churches) to be built in his honor nor has any need for humans to serve him- both have become essential elements of contemporary Christianity. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/12/more-bad-examples-in-scripture.html

The second half of Acts 17 describes Paul’s encounters in Athens. He was in a mood to pick fights:

“…he was deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and also in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there.” (vv. 16-17)

He saw an altar to an unknown god, and that was his opening. He was sure about God because—well, of course—he’d had visions and could tell the good people of Athens all they needed to know. But Daleiden called it correctly, “…there has been no shortage of people who declared that they spoke for the gods.” Hence one of the best lines in Acts 17 is verse 18, “Some said, ‘What does this babbler want to say?’”

Paul offered a routine formula about God—it’s routine to us because we’ve heard it forever:

“The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” (vv. 24-25)

But isn’t it strange that Christians have felt compelled to build millions of shrines (aka churches), their “houses of God” to visit the deity, and offer him praises he doesn’t need? This is another clue that Paul had no idea that there would be two thousand years of church history—his Jesus was supposed to arrive on the clouds in the near future. Moreover, countless preachers have urged Christians to serve God who “is not served by human hands.”

Paul jumped to the same conclusion that countless other theologians have: that a creator god must be a personal god, caring about the lives of individual humans:

“While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

The day had been fixed for judgment, which Paul knew for sure because God had raised Jesus from the dead. All of which Paul knew for sure because of his visions. Bad theology piles on in the wake of magical thinking.

This is a type of reverse anachronism, where assumptions are established that eventually over time become unsustainable unbeknownst to the originator of those assumptions. In this case, Paul, or Luke, had a misunderstanding of what was to come and documented this ignorance for the ages.

(2765) Christians are voluntary slaves

Although virtually every Christian will say that they disapprove of slavery, their scriptures as well as their own behavior is in clear support of the concept. The Bible never makes a vigorous case condemning the ownership of humans by other humans, even endorsing it in many places, but, even more disturbing, it promotes a theology that asks its followers to be slaves to a celestial master. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/k7d9ez/how_can_christians_condemn_slavery_when_their_own/

The bible nowhere condemns slavery. Far from tolerating it, the bible condones and supports it. In Lev. 25:44-46, god encourages Moses to enslave the surrounding gentiles. According to Mosaic Law, slaves are chattel property, to be disposed of however their masters see fit (with the exception of Hebrew slaves). In Ex. 20:21-22, masters are allowed to physically chastise slaves, provided they don’t kill them. In Num. 30:17-18, masters could have sex with their slaves whenever they wanted.

In the New Testament, slaves are commanded to obey their masters, regardless of their cruelty (1 Pet. 2:8). In Philemon, Paul forced the runaway slave Onesimus to return to his master. If he had disapproved of slavery, he wouldn’t have sent him back.

Christians are slaves because they have exchanged their individual autonomy and rational moral agency to become the mere playthings of a capricious god. They are commanded to call this god Kyrios, translated Lord or Master. The apostles called themselves and fellow Christians slaves because they acknowledged Jesus as their heavenly Master (i.e. Rom. 1:1, 2 Pet. 1:1, Rev. 1:1 etc., not “servant,” slave, the literal meaning of the Greek doulos). Like Jesus, Roman and Greek slave masters are also kyrioi.

For the Christian, the only alternative to absolute ownership by god, obedience to god and dependence on god is eternal punishment in a fiery hell. This is no different from slaves in ancient Israel and Roman Palestine, who risked corporal punishment for disobedience.

To sum up, Christian condemnation of slavery is inconsistent with biblical teaching and Christian religious dogma. Instead of being antislavery, we have Christians simultaneously condemning and endorsing slavery. If Christians wish to escape this logical contradiction, they must (a.) radically reinterpret what they believe in, (b.) embrace slavery as a divinely sanctioned institution or (c.) reject Christianity altogether.

We think the third option (c.) the best, for the sake of honesty, humanity and rationality.

We also think that a real god would not ask humans to surrender their self-governance, but rather would promote freedom of conscience. The Bible is an artifact of its time, a reflection of the heavy-handed customs of Bronze-Age Jewish culture. The fact that it continues to influence billions of people is an on-going tragedy.

(2766) Jesus exposure dividing line

There is a general consensus among Christians that God would not sentence a person to hell if they didn’t have a reasonable chance to hear and respond to the message of Jesus’ salvific mission to earth. It is commonly thought that such a person would be given a chance after death to accept Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, which, by any measure of reality, is equivalent to giving them a direct path to heaven. But the problem comes when it is time to divide those who got the message from those who didn’t. Wherever the line is drawn it will be arbitrary and unfair. Consider the following fictional scenario:

Two widowed women, Karishma and Nabhitha are living together in a small town in northern India. They have been lifelong Hindus. Neither has heard much about Christianity and in fact, they don’t even know any Christians. One day, Karishma is out shopping for food when two Christian missionaries come to their house. Nabhitha invites them in and entertains them with coffee and khakhras. For 30 minutes they explain to her that believing in Jesus is the only pathway to heaven and that their Hindu gods are not real. She politely listens but does not respond to their invitation to say the sinner’s prayer and be saved. They leave. Later, Karishma returns and Nabhitha tells her of the visit, but doesn’t relay the important salvific message. A few years later, both die. Karishma is welcomed into heaven after she is given a chance to accept Jesus. Nabhitha is sentenced to hell because she rejected Jesus.

Christians will balk at this story and say both women will be OK, but it begs the question: if this doesn’t define the dividing line between those who have from those who haven’t had a reasonable chance to accept Jesus, then where does that line lie? It must exist somewhere, and wherever it lies it will seem arbitrary and unfair.  It will be like saying Mr. X got 457 units of exposure to Christian doctrine while Mr. Y only got 456, but this is where we draw the line- Y to heaven, X to hell.

Now, imagine if Jesus said that if you live a good life you go to heaven, and if you live a bad life you go to hell. This again would create a dividing line problem, but, in the long run, it would deliver a much fairer way to adjudicate the lives of every human, and both Karishma and Nabhitha would be on their way to heaven. But it’s a non-starter- such a definition of salvation would starve the church of the power it craves.

(2767) Abrahamic faiths are equally false

There exists a single point of failure that destroys the authenticity of all three Abrahamic faiths- the lack of evidence for the foundational traditions of the Old Testament. But Christians have found a way around it- to see the lack of evidence as evidence itself. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/k7brcz/christianity_judaism_and_islam_are_all_false_as/

The claim by Christians and Christian missionaries that the Bible is the most historically accurate book is entirely false. Israeli Archaeology had to regretfully tell the world that after thirty-five years of digging on the ancient sites of supposed Biblical events that the vast majority of the contents of the Bible are complete mythology. Many of these archaeologists were Jews and Christians who felt deeply connected to the fantasy stories of the Bible itself and had to painfully come to terms with the understanding that there was no evidence to support what was deeply precious beliefs to them. They bravely told the whole world the honest truth of the matter due to their commitments to academic integrity and truth.

We should applaud these brave researchers for their integrity and strength of character to tell the whole world that there is no evidence to support many of the Bible’s claims. The most important and shocking revelation was that there was no evidence to support the story of Exodus; the Israelites were never slaves to Egypt, there was never a plague that killed the firstborn in Egypt, Egypt has no record of Israelites as slaves, a group of two million Israelites never wandered the desert for forty years and there is not a shred of evidence to support that such an event ever happened, ancient Israelites were polytheists and only gradually became monotheist over the centuries usually due to famine, for a lengthy period of Israelite history the god Yahweh had a Goddess wife named Asherah, and there is no evidence to support that the person known as Prophet Moses ever existed.

The claims by Christian extremists that Egypt must have destroyed all evidence is both fatuous and an argument that essentially states they believe that Exodus and the Bible are true because there is no evidence for it; the thinly veiled nonsense is easy to see-through. They believe it is true, because they have no evidence for it. They are not ready to face the reality about their sacred beliefs and will probably deny it with either lies or try to suggest some Christian apologist Youtuber who has no academic credibility compared to actual archaeologists who spent 35 years researching and excavating the sites of the ancient Israelites.

If Moses didn’t exist, Judaism is false. If the Mosiac Law is false, then Jesus neither fulfilled nor broke the Mosiac Law. If Moses has no evidence of existing and was never a prophet of the Abrahamic God, then Mohammad cannot be a Seal of the Prophets. Therefore, all Abrahamic faiths are equally false.

It’s impossible to build a tall building without a sturdy foundation, and it’s equally impossible to take the claims of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seriously when their seminal traditions are found to be untrue.  And in the wake of this problem, if your sacred beliefs are being buttressed by a conspiracy theory that a massive cover-up of evidence was conducted by nefarious opponents, it might be time to re-evaluate your sense of reality.

(2768) Evaluating God’s existence/characteristics

If we assume that the existence of a singular, universal god is a binary reality, then we can deduce that one and only one of the following four possibilities is true:

1) God does not exist.

2) God exists, but is unaware of life on our planet.

3) God exists, and is aware of life on our planet, but only observes what is happening and does not intervene.

4) God exists, is aware of life on our planet, and chooses to intervene in human affairs.

(There is a fifth possibility but it was relegated from this list so as not to scandalize conventional Christian dogma that God exists outside of time and space. Otherwise, a god might exist but it is located far away, so even if it had extraordinary vision, due to space-time limitations, it could only see what had happened in the past, making it impossible to affect humanity in real time.)

Given a lack of evidence of the supernatural, #1 is the most probable, but we will discount that for this discussion.

#2 goes hand in glove with the potential fifth option- that god is limited by space-time from seeing the entire universe in real time, raising the possibility that it has not yet detected life on this planet. But we will discount this option as well.

That leaves #3 and #4. God is either just an observer, or an intervenor- the former usually termed a deist god, the latter, a god of the type Christians worship (Yahweh).

There are reasons why the #3 observer god is the most likely to exist:

• God would have observed life evolve on Earth for four billion years without intervening- so why do so now, especially after 150,000 years of human evolution?
• If a god did intervene, it is almost certain that it would be done in a way that would be spectacular, such that belief in any made-up gods would immediately be discarded. Since we don’t observe this, it makes the interventionalist god less likely.
• A god would likely exceed human insight and so, by default, would employ the (Star Trek) prime directive, prohibiting interference with the internal and natural development of alien civilizations.
• Given the size and scope of the universe, and the number of potentially habitable planets, it is likely that there are at least millions of civilizations scattered among the hundreds of billions of galaxies, making it unlikely that God would intervene in all of them, and, by extension, any one of them.

Even if we concede the small possibility that God has intervened in human affairs, it still does not mean that Christianity or any other religion is true. In fact, such intervention might not be associated with any religious intent. Perhaps God manipulated evolution at certain times to achieve some desired goal, but has not communicated directly with any individual person. As we might imagine, such a god would have no need to create a religion nor need nor desire worship from humans.

Given the above, it is extraordinarily unlikely that Yahweh, the Christian god, exists. Other possibilities swamp this prospect.

(2769) Mysterious ways defense

Christians often resort to a default meme whenever they are backed into a corner during a debate. It usually takes the form of ‘we can’t understand the mind of god, his ways are mysterious to us.’ This has the effect of rendering useless any further discussion. Although the Christian may feel victorious, he has actually tacitly admitted defeat. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/k8w0i4/god_works_in_mysterious_ways_is_an_authoritarian/

The “God works in mysterious ways” trope is the final refuge of the Christian who can’t wiggle his way out of debate. Since the alleged mysteriousness of god is not an explanation, it’s tantamount to an admission of defeat.

However, this excuse serves a more sinister purpose. By saying god is mysterious, the Christian isn’t just saying god is incomprehensible (which is, by the way, the functional equivalent of asserting his non-existence); he’s also saying that certain avenues of skeptical inquiry aren’t allowed. When it comes to the nature of god, who he is and what he does, human curiosity must be suppressed; if this wasn’t what the Christian actually meant, god’s alleged mysteriousness wouldn’t be offered up as an excuse and skeptical inquiry would be openly welcomed.

Far too many critics of religion focus on the explanatory weakness of “God works in mysterious ways” and not it’s function as a Christian control measure, used by Christians to tell skeptics what to do and what to think.

It should be obvious that if the god being argued for actually existed the use of the ‘mysterious ways’ argument would not be necessary. Only fictional gods are mysterious.

(2770) Christian credibility problem

The response of Christians to the outcome of the 2020 presidential election in the United States has revealed a serious flaw in their ability to recognize reality. Joe Biden won a decisive victory over the incumbent (and [inexplicable] darling of the Christian right) Donald Trump. But the majority of Christians who voted for Trump deluded themselves into believing that 1) there was massive voter fraud, 2) the fraud was all to the advantage of Biden, and 3) that the fraud will be revealed and Trump will end up victorious. As the following points out, if you are deluded about one thing, you might be deluded about something else:

https://www.rawstory.com/2020/12/evangelicals-are-feeding-trumps-s-on-democracy-with-blasphemous-lunacy-and-it-will-destroy-them-columnist/

On Tuesday, writing for The Washington Post, columnist Michael Gerson excoriated the role of the evangelical movement in propping up outgoing President Donald Trump’s delusions about overturning the election — and the danger it poses to the long-term legitimacy and viability of their cultural power.

“President Trump’s naked attempt to overturn a fair election — with key elements of Joe Biden’s victory vouchsafed by Republican state officials, Republican-appointed judges and even the Justice Department — has driven some Trump evangelicals to the edge of blasphemous lunacy,” wrote Gerson.

As evidence, he quoted evangelical talk-radio host Eric Metaxas, who told Trump, “This is a fight for everything. God is with us. Jesus is with us in this fight for liberty,” and said, “Trump will be inaugurated. For the high crimes of trying to throw a U.S. presidential election, many will go to jail. The swamp will be drained. And Lincoln’s prophetic words of ‘a new birth of freedom’ will be fulfilled. Pray.”

The problem for evangelicals, wrote Gerson, is that this is precisely the kind of behavior that has emptied the church pews.

“When prominent Christians affirm absurd political lies with religious fervor, nonbelievers have every reason to think: ‘Maybe Christians are prone to swallowing absurd religious lies as well. Maybe they are simply credulous about everything,’” wrote Gerson. “If we should encounter someone who believes — honestly and adamantly believes — in both the existence of the Easter Bunny and in the resurrection of Christ, it would naturally raise questions about the quality of his or her believing faculties. It would call into question the standard of evidence being applied and muddy the meaning of faith itself.”

“If Christianity were judged entirely by the quality of Christians, it would be a tough sell — and I include myself in the judgment,” wrote Gerson. “Most of us are a jumble of resentments and fears. Most of us can be proud, cruel, foolish and self-deluding.”

If you were to go to a lecture by someone commenting on the history of ancient Egypt, and the lecturer said that he believed that the pyramids were built by space aliens, it would likely cause you to question the truth of any of the other assertions that he had made. Likewise, anybody considering becoming a Christian might now give pause as they witness Christians en masse failing to distinguish reality from fantasy.

(2771) Human suffering

There could be an academic debate questioning whether human suffering would be greater or less if the Christian religion is true versus if it is false. On one hand, it could be argued that the existence of a limitless god would allow for an alleviation of suffering based on answered prayers or independent actions taken by this deity. On the other hand, it could be argued that the Christian doctrine of an eternal hell negates all of these potential ‘gains.’ The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/k9g464/the_christian_worldview_if_true_entails_far_more/

If the irreligious worldview is true, all human suffering is finite. We die and are no more, the suffering eventually ends. However, if the Christian worldview is true and even one human being goes to Hell while every other human is in heaven, on a long enough time scale, the infinite suffering of the one human in Hell will surpass the suffering of all the humans that lived and suffered and died in the irreligious worldview.

So, mathematically speaking, if Christianity is true, the amount of human suffering will be greater than it would be if Christianity is false. This is another deleterious side effect of the spectacular mistake made by early Christians to dream up the sadistically cruel concept of an eternal hell.

(2772) Science denial tactics

Over the past 200 years or so, science has been a thorn in the side of Christianity. Virtually every scientific discovery has been either neutral or damaging to Christian theology. To combat this threat and to wage a ‘war on science,’ Christians have developed tactics that inadvertently expose the weakness of their position. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/12/dont-be-close-minded-to-science.html#more

How can they deny science, you ask? Sean B. Carroll, a professor of molecular biology and genetics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, tells us. An article he read in the journal Pediatrics, titled “Chiropractors and Vaccination: A Historical Perspective” sparked his thoughts. The article traced the roots of anti-vaccination among chiropractors to its founder, Daniel David Palmer, in 1865, and highlighted this same attitude among practitioners in the last few decades. In the 1950s, for instance, many chiropractors denied the science of polio vaccinations, but they were proven wrong when polio was eradicated in the United States because of vaccines. The article went on to offer the six arguments chiropractors have used to deny the science of vaccinations for a century.

After reading it, Carroll saw a general pattern among science deniers. Carroll said, “I could superimpose those arguments entirely upon what I had been reading from the antievolution forces.” The six chiropractic anti-vaccination arguments can be seen as “a general manual of science denialism,” he said. He saw that “to deny a piece of science there was sort of common playbook, a common set of tactics.” In fact, “You could throw any argument at me about evolution, climate change, etc., and it would be in one of these six bins.” Here they are:

1) Use anything to cast some small measure of doubt on the science, no matter how small, disregarding that the probabilities are very high that the science is correct.

2) Question the motives of scientists, saying they are motivated by profit or some other underhanded reason.

3) Magnify any disagreements between scientists by citing gadflies as authorities who represent a tiny minority.

4) Scare the hell out of people by exaggerating the potential harms or risks in accepting the science.

5) Appeal to the value of personal freedom by claiming no one should be compelled to accept the science.

6) Object that the science repudiates some key point of philosophy or theology, which Carroll says is one of the most important tactics of science denialists. On this he quotes creationist Henry Morris, who said, “When science and the Bible differ, science has obviously misinterpreted its data.”10

These are the arguments and tactics of close-minded people who seek to denigrate or deny science. None of these tactics actually do anything of the sort. They are all efforts in argument substitution, where someone substitutes an argument when the evidence shows otherwise. But they aren’t really even legitimate arguments. They are informal fallacies, where rhetoric itself substitutes as argumentation. They’re rhetorical bluffs, or rhetoric without substance. For instance, in denying what I call the evolutionary paradigm (or theory, or fact), many believers object that if evolution is true there can be no morals. Whether that’s the case or not is being debated, of course, but the issue of morality has nothing to do with the objective overwhelming evidence for evolution. Either the evidence is there or it’s not, and it is. So don’t accept the tactics of science deniers if you want to know the truth. Follow the evidence instead.

Yes, follow the evidence, but also follow the money. If you want to know why so many perceived authorities still question the results of science, then follow the money, just like you should follow the evidence. For instance, the John Templeton Foundation aims to denigrate and deny science in the interests of religion by offering academics millions of dollars to find reasons to believe. So anything financially supported by the Templeton Prize should be subjected to intense scrutiny. Lately, the Templeton Foundation has even funded climate change denialists. This, too, has to do with religion, for if there is a god in control of the world and the environment, climate change is nothing to worry about. But then, there shouldn’t have been anything to worry about with polio either. In any case, if you reject the Templeton Foundation’s antiscience view of climate change, you should clearly see its antiscience view with regard to religion in general.

If Christianity was true, science would be its best friend, confirming among other things that the universe was created recently in a supernatural fashion, that life on earth had also emanated from a singular creation event, that the earth was once covered completely under water, that prayers are efficacious, and that, for example, the Shroud of Turin is dated from the 1^st Century. Because science has continued to (indifferently) injure Christianity, these defense tactics have been created for and employed by ministers, apologists, and the faithful in a desperate campaign to sustain their faith.

(2773) Testimonial embellishment

Much of Christianity is supported by personal testimonies, some of which are documented in the gospels and epistles of the New Testament and others that have been written by Christians over the past twenty centuries. The authenticity of these accounts is critical to assessing the truth of Christian claims. In that light, it is instructive to review how the recent testimony of a famous Christian author changed over time:

https://new.exchristian.net/2020/04/christian-apologist-puffs-up-testimony.html#.X9InwdhKhPZ

A film came out in 2012 portraying Josh McDowell as having traveled the world in search of evidence to refute Christianity. Unable to do so, he reluctantly converted. The film was titled,
Undaunted.

McDowell converted in 1959, so let’s start by comparing his earliest written testimonies of his conversion with the expanded multi-part series he composed 39 years later, and again, 48 years later.

In the first edition of Evidence That Demands a Verdict McDowell’s testimony was titled, “I’ve Got a Satisfied Mind,” while in the second edition he rewrote and lengthened it, and titled it, “He Changed My Life.”

Based on those two early versions of his testimony in two of his earliest apologetic works, and based on the date McDowell himself supplies for his conversion he converted when he was a mere sophomore at an unimpressive community college and he converted in a matter of months. Nor was he studying religion or philosophy, but courses in preparation for law school. He says that in college he met a girl at that college with a beautiful smile and he wanted that happiness. He adds, “My new friends challenged me intellectually to examine the claims that Jesus Christ is God’s Son.” But I wonder when McDowell ever found the time and mental composure to rise to that “intellectual challenge.” His conversion took place by his own admission, “Dec. 19, 1959” at the end of the first semester of his college sophomore year. He did not spend years studying the evidence, JUST MONTHS.

Even worse, he admits repeatedly that he was easily distracted and/or had great difficulty concentrating prior to converting: “I hated to be alone… [was] frustrated… empty… circumstances [made me feel either] okay or bad… If my girl loved me, I was on cloud nine; if she broke up with me, I was really down… I had a bad temper… and still have the scars from almost killing a man during my first year in the university… had a lot of hatred… hated my father [who was a wife-beating alcoholic]… had a lot of restlessness in my mind, and I always had to be somewhere, or with someone. I just couldn’t be alone with my own thoughts. My mind seemed like a maze… I used to be constantly on the go because of restlessness… I always had to be occupied. I had to be over my girl’s place or somewhere else in a rap session. I’d walk across campus and my mind was like a whirlwind with conflicts bouncing off the walls. I’d sit down and try to study or cogitate and I couldn’t.” (Evidence That Demands A Verdict, 1st &2nd eds.)

How could Josh thread an intellectual needle if he was in such an unstable frame of mind?

THEN… 39 years after converting (in 1999) his testimony changed to a more intellectual sounding one in which he writes for the first time the following…

“I left the university and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to gather evidence to prove that Christianity is a sham. One day while I was sitting in a library in London, England, I sensed a voice within me saying, ‘Josh, you don’t have a leg to stand on.’ I immediately suppressed it. But just about every day after that I heard the same inner voice. The more I researched, the more I heard this voice. I returned to the United States and to the university, but I couldn’t sleep at night.”

“University?” He was taking legal prep courses at Kellogg Community College, and converted only a few months after bumping into a happy Christian girl there so he must be one heck of a traveler to travel “throughout the United States and Europe” in a few months.

But things grow even less believable when Josh puffs up his story again, this time 48 years after converting. In Josh’s newest retelling, published in 20 parts(!) on his website in 2008, he embellished his tale further by adding travels not just to the U.S. and Europe but to “the Middle East,” and notes the exact time within a half hour when he heard “the voice in the library”:

“The whole reason for writing my first book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict, was to write a book to make an intellectual joke of Christianity – to refute those students and professors I had encountered in the university. I thought that would be easy. I left the university. I traveled throughout the United States, England, and the Middle East. I gathered evidence to write the book. I was sitting in a library in London, England. It was late on a Friday afternoon around 6:00 or 6:30, and something
happened that never happened to me before. It was like a voice spoke to me. Now I don’t normally hear voices, but it was like a voice spoke to me. It said, ‘Josh, you don’t have a leg to stand on.’ I immediately suppressed it. Do you know what was interesting? Almost every single day after that, I heard the voice.” http://joshmcdowell.blogspot.com/2008/01/skeptics-quest-my-testimony-part-13.html

Josh did spend time AFTER he had already converted studying Christianity, gathering together the most fundamentalist apologetic rejoinders he could stuff together between two covers, but he did that AFTER he converted.Josh is now portraying himself as a highly focused and well traveled intellectual researcher prior to converting, having traveled, “throughout the United States, England,” and now he adds, “the Middle East.” But that was absent from his testimonies from 1981-1992: https://web.archive.org/web/20120210220157/http://uncrediblehallq.blogspot.com/2007/10/what-i-know-about-josh-mcdowell.html

Judging by the way Josh’s testimony has changed, I’d say he is living proof of how people change along with their memories. Memory experts also point out that each time we access a memory it undergoes changes.

Josh did spend time AFTER he had already converted studying Christianity, gathering together the most fundamentalist apologetic rejoinders he could stuff together between two covers, but he did that AFTER he converted. He spent 13 years going to libraries working on his earliest apologetic works. And I’m sure his ministry has taken him to places throughout the U.S. Europe, even the Middle East, but there is no evidence he did so BEFORE HE CONVERTED while still a Sophomore studying law in a community college and all in a mere matter of months prior to converting. And whatever work Josh did in libraries even after converting, he left a lot of his “research” to others whom he acknowledged in Evidence That Demands a Verdict.

In fact in Josh’s book, Reasons Skeptics should Consider Christianity, Glenn Morton (an undergrad at the time) ghost wrote the young-earth creationist arguments featured in that volume, not Josh. Mr. Morton later gave up young-earth creationism. But Josh, unlike a Morton, seems to have never developed the brains or inclination to do so but still believed decades later and perhaps today in a young-earth, a literal Adam and Eve, dinosaurs existing besides humans, and probably a literal garden with magical fruit, Flood geology, a literal confusion of tongues at a literal Tower of Babel, and an inerrant Bible that he imagines he has harmonized beyond any difficulty. Just read his website today. Meanwhile the undergrad, Glenn Morton, who ghost wrote large portions of one of Josh’s
books obtained a Ph.D. in geology and debunked young-earth creationist arguments, and came to defend with Michael Behe and Michael Denton (two Discovery Institute leaders) the evidence for common ancestry.

McDowell’s conversion, based on his earliest tellings, appears to have been based far less on his “intellectual” rigor and honesty so much as on his lack of knowledge, lack of emotional stability, lack of concentration, and lack of well thought out convictions of his own. In such a state this flighty community college drop out was easily overwhelmed in a matter of months by a few pro-Christian, even pro-creationist arguments that he “never knew existed.” It was only after his conversion that enrolled at two conservative Christian colleges, the second of which granted him a Master of Divinity Degree during which his thesis critiqued the theology of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

This modern-day example is instructive because we can assume that it would have been much easier to enhance personal testimonies before the dawn of the information age. If Josh McDowell could get away with such subterfuge, then how much more could early Christians have done the same?

(2774) Human arrogance

One of the dead giveaway clues that Christianity is a man-made religion is the mistake it made by fashioning its god with humanlike characteristics, encapsulated by the haughty arrogance that man was made in God’s image. Carl Sagan exposed this hubris with the following quote:

“We seem to crave privilege. Merited not by our works, but by our birth. By the mere fact that, say, we’re humans, and born on earth. We might call it the anthropocentric, the human centered, conceit. This Conceit is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in god’s image. ‘The creator and ruler of the entire universe, looks just like me. My, what a coincidence. How convenient and satisfying.’ The sixth century B.C. Greek philosopher, Xenophanes, understood the arrogance of this perspective, here is what he said. “The Ethiopians make their gods black and snubbed nosed, the Thracians say theirs have blue eyes and red hair. Yes, and if oxen and horses, or lions had hands and could paint with their hands, and produce works of art as men do. Horses would paint the forms of the gods like horses and oxen like oxen’.”

Other than the silliness of humans and god having matching images, it’s never been satisfactorily explained how an omnipotent, omniscient deity should be encumbered by the emotions of anger or jealousy… but there it is, enshrined in their holy book. The immenseness of the universe suggests that intelligent life must exist elsewhere, and it is highly unlikely that it will look or act like humans, making it seem especially preposterous that the universal god looks like us but not them.

(2775) The Bible should have remained a tree

The following warning should be given to every person embarking on a reading of the Bible. For a book supposedly inspired by an infinite intelligence, it contains some crazy shit:

https://freeatheism.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/dear-believer-a-warning-about-the-bible2.pdf

Dear Believer… This book, quite frankly, would have made the world a much better place if it had remained a tree. The bible declares ridiculous things such as the existence of giants (Gen 6:4), talking snakes (Gen 3:1), talking donkeys (Num 22:28), unicorns (Num 23:22KJV), and talking bushes (Exodus 3:1-3). The Bible condones slavery (Lev 25:44-46), and misogyny (1Tim 2:12). It forces rape victims to marry their attackers (Deut 22:28-29). It commands the death penalty for children who backtalk their parents (Deut 21:18-21), people who worship the wrong god (Exodus 22:20), picking up sticks on Sunday (Num 15:32-36), and having homosexual sex (Lev 20:13). We all know none of these crimes warrant being stoned to death, but the Bible disagrees. Jesus is not the loving character you probably think he is, as he tells his disciples to hate their entire family (Luke 14:26).

I don’t believe anything in the Bible to be true, and it’s a good thing, because the book is full of preposterous stories, contradictions, and is dangerously immoral. “Jesus died for my sin,” you say. What sin? I urge you to consider: Is it really acceptable to brutally torture then murder an innocent Jewish man as a means for an omnibenevolent deity to forgive a crime you never committed? Sin is an imaginary disease, invented to sell you an imaginary cure.

The fact that the Bible continues to enjoy a high approval rating is because religious leaders have learned to massage its message, avoid certain parts, discourage investigation, focus on the good parts, and oversell its relevance.  It would be a bit like taking tourists to Jamaica and letting them see only a posh beachside resort, and telling them that the entire island enjoys the same degree of opulence. When one of tourists asks to see other parts of the island, they say, ‘No, this all you need to see, trust us.’

(2776) Six saviors of history

The following chart lists comparative information about six historical savoir-gods, Where similarities exist, it suggests that Christianity copied the theological themes of its time:

https://freeatheism.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/pf-christorigins-broch-0913.pdf

The Origins of Christianity         The chart below provides an insight into what has embarrassed biblical scholars for centuries: Why a man capable of walking on water, healing lepers and raising the dead was never mentioned other than in the Bible and derived writings. History documents a King Herod, but he died two years before Jesus was said to be born. Some scholars of comparative mythologies say nothing Jesus said or did was original: biblical accounts are merely plagiarisms of earlier mythologies.

 

Six Saviors  of History	Horus (Egypt, circa 3400 BCE)	Krishna (India, circa 3228 BCE)	Mithra (Persia, circa 600 BCE)	Prometheus (Greece, 580-490 BCE)	Buddha (Nepal, circa 563 BCE)	Jesus (Bethlehem, circa 7-2 BCE)
Name	“Horus the KRST” (or “Anointed One”)	“Christna” and “Jezeus” (or “Pure Essence”)	“Mithra”	“Prometheus” (or “forethought”)	“Siddhartha Gautama” (also called the “Christ”)	“Jesus the Christ” (or the “Anointed One”)
Infant appellation	”Holy Child”					“Holy Child”
Virgin birth	√ by Isis-Meri		√	√	√ by Maya (“Queen of Heaven”)	√ by Mary
Solar disk/halo	√	√			√	√
Birth announced	√ (by angel)				√	√ (by angel)
Birth date	Dec. 25	July 18 or 21	Dec. 25	Dec. 25	August	Dec. 25
Birth place	cave/manger*			cavern	garden/ under tree	cave/ manger*
Birth announced by a star	√ (in the East)	√			√	√ (in the East)
Angels at birth		√				√
Shepherds at birth	√	√				√
Wise men/Kings at birth	√ (3 kings bearing gifts)	√ (wise men)				√ (3 kings bearing gifts)
Gifts at birth		√ (gold, myrrh frankincense)			√	√ (gold,myrrh  frankincense)
Father, son as 1	√			√		√
Entity	sungod (“Amen-Ra”)	godman	sungod	godman	godman* (“Holy Man”)	godman (“Holy Man”)
“God’s Anointed Son”	√	√ (the “Son of God”)	√ (the “Son of God”)		√ (the “Anointed”)	√ (the “Son of God”)
From Heaven to save mankind	√			√		√
Persecuted by a tyrant who tried to prevent birth	√	√ (thousands of infants ordered slaughtered)				√ (thousands of infants ordered slaughtered)
Traveling teacher	√	√			√	√
Length of reign	1,000 years (millennium)	1,000 years (millennium)				1,000 years (millennium)
Lived, loved poor		√			√	√
Evil serpent	√	√			√	√
Battles enemyDevil/darkness/ evil	√ (enemy was “Set” or “Sata”)	√ (enemy was the “Prince of Evil”)			√ (battles “Prince of Darkness”)	√ (enemy was “Satan”)
Disciples	12 (2 Johns)				12	12 (1 John)
Worked miracles	√	√			√	√
Walked on water	√				√	√
Healed lepers, deaf, blind, sick	√	√				√
Raised the dead	One man (“Elazarus”)	√				One man (“Lazarus”)
Magically fed hoards of people	√ (with a few loaves of bread)				√ (500 men with”basket of cakes”)	√ (with 5 loaves of bread, 2 fish)
Abolished idols	√				√	√
Preached “the Word”	√ (“the Word”)	√ (“Universal Word”)	√ (“the Word”)	√ (“the Word”)	√ (“Sower of the Word”)	√ (“the Word”)
“Kingdom of Righteousness”	√	√			√	√
Transfigured on a mount	√	√			√	√
Gave “Sermon on the mount”	√					√

The Origins of Christianity (Cont’d)                       Due to the many similarities this table is not complete. For example over 50 recorded messiahs centuries before Jesus were said to be 1) of virgin birth, 2) to save mankind, 3) later crucified, and 4) resurrected.

 

Six Saviors  of History	Horus (Egypt, circa 3400 BCE)	Krishna (India, circa 3228 BCE)	Mithra (Persia, circa 600 BCE)	Prometheus (Greece, 580-490 BCE)	Buddha (Nepal, circa 563 BCE)	Jesus (Bethlehem, circa 7-2 BCE)
Carpenter theme	√	√ (dad’s job)		√ (dad’s job)	√	√ (dad’s job)
The “Good Shepherd”	√	√ (“Shepherd God”)			√	√
The “Lion”	√				√	√
The “Lamb”	√				√	√
Fish Symbol	√					√
The “Infinite and Everlasting”	√				√	√
The “Savior”	√	√			√	√
The “Messiah”	√				√	√
“Way,” “Truth”	√	√		√	√	√
The “King of Kings”		√ (“Lord of Lords”)			√ (“God among Gods”)
The “Light”	√				√	√
The “Redeemer”		√			√	√
The “Salvation”	√					√
The “Sin Bearer”		√				√
“Judgment Day”		√				√
Gap in records	√ (18 years)					√ (18 years)
Baptized	√ (at age 30 in a river)	√ (in the river)	√ (at age 30)		√*	√ (at age 30 in a river)
Baptizer	“Anup the Baptizer”-later beheaded					“John the Baptist”-later beheaded
The trinity	√ (In the name of Atum the Father, Horus the Son and Ra the Holy Spirit)	√ (the second entity in the trinity)			√ (In the name of Buddha, the Dharma and the Samgha)	√ (In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit)
Was sacrificed	√		√			√
Last supper					√	√
Identified w/cross	√ (Tat cross)					√
Crucified	√ (on a cross between 2 thieves)	√ (on a cross between 2 thieves)		√ (on a rock/ tree)*	√ (on a cross/ impaled by a cross)*	√ (on a cross between 2 thieves)*
Descent to hell	√ (3 days)			√ (3 days)	√ (3 days)	√ (3 days)
Buried in a tomb	√					√
Resurrected/rose from the dead	√ (after 3 days)	√ (after 3 days)	√	√	√ (as Tathagata-3 days)	√ (after 3 days)
Ascended to heaven	√	√	√		√ (Nirvana)	√
Eternal life	√	√			√	√
Annual birth celebration	√ (about Dec. 25)		√ (called “Christ-mas”)		√ (as Ves-ak, in April or May)	√ (Dec. 25, “Christmas”)
Resurrection celebrated yearly	√ (called “Easter”)		√ (called “Easter”)			√ (called “Easter”)
All-knowing and all-powerful	√	√			√	√
The “Beginning, the Middle and the End”	√	√ (the “First, Last”/ “Alpha, Omega”)				√
nd “2 Coming”	√	√				√
Sacred day			√ Sunday “Lord’s day”)			√ Sunday
Associated book	Book of the Dead		Helio Biblia (Sun Book/ Holy Bible)			Holy Bible
Rebirth of followers’ souls	√	√			√	√

Although Christianity introduced some unique features , by and large, it was a re-hash of existing beliefs and traditions. This reduces the probability of it being the one and only true faith.

(2777) Paradigm shift

Early Christians thought of God inhabiting a celestial sphere above the level of the clouds, but human exploration has destroyed that fantasy and now God is relegated to being outside of space and time, though, somehow, that translates to being everywhere at all times.

But suppose Christians had been more resourceful with positioning their god. It was well known at that time that the moon always presents one face to the earth, so what was on the back side was a big mystery. In fact, it was not until October 7, 1959 that humans got their first view of it from a grainy photo taken by the Soviet probe Luna 3.

Suppose, early Christians had stated that God resides on the far side of the moon along with the angels, and from there he was able to monitor everything happening on earth. This would have been a safe bet at that time knowing that we might never get to see what is back there.  So what would have happened when in the 1960’s we began to get more and clearer pictures of the far side and did not see any evidence of God’s presence? What would have been the response of Christians? In effect, this is what is happening to Christianity today. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/12/christianity-keeps-hitting-new-lows.html#more

Imagine growing up in a religion that caught on, say, during medieval times, and that worships divine beings who reside in vast underground cities on the far side of the moon, and who monitor human thoughts telepathically. But our exploration of the moon so far has failed to reveal any evidence whatever for such cities or divine beings. Hence such beliefs qualify as “irrational” doctrines. Does the Ancient Jesus Mystery Cult offer anything better? It offers a deity that resides somewhere, somehow, in the sky (but also in human hearts—so say the preachers), and who set up a human sacrifice scheme to enable him/her/it to forgive humans for every careless word they utter. So far, no reliable, verifiable, objective evidence has been found for that deity either. And plenty of evidence, in fact, disconfirms it. A lot of folks who have their doubts—but who face extreme pressure to stick with it—end up as mental shipwrecks. They are victims of the “crazy-making” in Christianity.

Why isn’t there an Association of Decent Christians Against Abusive Belief? And another… Devout Christians Against Televangelism? Come on folks, can’t you see the problem? Secularists and humanists have seen it—that’s why there’s a Debunking Christianity Blog, and literally hundreds of other blogs, websites, and podcasts trying to take down delusional religious beliefs. And that’s why the “nones” are on the increase.

Winell & Tarico mention this major shift in human thinking, from The Supernatural Paradigm inherited from the past to The Natural Paradigm, based on “explanations sought within the natural order.”

“This giant change has been going on for hundreds of years, creating enormous conflict. We might call the transition from supernaturalism to naturalism a ‘meta-paradigm’ shift because it is so comprehensive and encompasses many smaller shifts. It is no less than a transformation in the way humans understand the nature of reality.”

The exploration of the far side of the moon is a metaphor for the vanishing occupancy of God in our everyday lives. The paradigm shift is accelerating and it will not stop unless and until God, if real, decides to meddle with the natural world. There are four billion smart phones being carried around ready to film the action.

(2778) Christianity is a totalitarian belief

There are various theories about what a real god, assuming one to exist, would be like.  Many would assume that such a god would not interfere in planetary life, would have no need to reward or punish, and certainly no desire to resurrect dead bodies for any reason whatever. But one characteristic that would seem universal is the concept of freedom of conscience- the idea that living things should be born free to follow their hearts. This is the opposite of Christianity. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/12/christianity-keeps-hitting-new-lows.html#more

Winell & Tarico also reference a 1989 work by Robert Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of Brainwashing in China. Lifton “…identified eight psychological themes associated with destructive mind control” (p. 382); these include loaded language, demands for purity, confessional rituals, and doctrine over person. “Loaded language creates a form of ‘group-speak’ and constricts thinking.” (p. 382) This brings to mind the recitation of creeds during worship services, designed to assure uniformity of belief; the folks in the pews are told precisely what to believe.

 Looking back on this practice—from my own days in the ministry—it is a favored maneuver of totalitarian monotheism and its bureaucrats. Preachers won’t say, “You’re free to believe whatever you want about God, and please get on your cell-phones during my sermon and fact-check everything I say.” That’s not the way religion works; Lifton’s list brings to mind Christopher Hitchens’ devastating critique of this kind of group-think:

 “Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you’re born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you’re dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I’ve been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president. Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He’s not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It’s a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It’s one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!”

 Note especially the words, an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep. Is there any part of this that Christians can reasonably deny describes their faith? How else to explain the constant need to be forgiven, with the help of God’s grace through Jesus Christ? The scheme is all worked out, and Jesus himself said why: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter; for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” (Matthew 12:36-37)

 No pressure there, right?

Most Christians are highly critical of North Korea and yet fail to perceive that they are trapped in an even worse tyrannical situation. The creators of Christianity had no use for individual freedom- their idea was more in line with a concentration camp where you obey, or else.

(2779) World Press Freedom index

The World Press Freedom Index is an annual ranking of countries compiled and published by Reporters Without Borders based upon the organization’s own assessment of the countries’ press freedom records in the previous year. It intends to reflect the degree of freedom that journalists, news organizations, and netizens have in each country, and the efforts made by authorities to respect this freedom.

Press freedom is an indicator of a country’s willingness to accept objective facts that may contradict existing conventional knowledge, and thus its willingness to make appropriate changes. It is a counter indicator of a country that attempts to inculcate its citizens with an authoritative belief system. Below lists the countries with the most press freedom and others of note:

It is of particular note that countries with the highest levels of press freedom are the ones with the lowest levels of religious belief. This correlates with the fact that religion tends to curtail freedom of thought while attempting to shoehorn people into a narrow view of reality. It also reflects religion’s tendency to separate belief from evidence.

(2780) Rod beatings

The Bible is irretrievably mired in an Iron Age ethos that appears brutal compared to the current day. Specifically, corporal punishment was liberally commanded for both significant and trivial offenses. It is likely that these punishment methods were in existence prior to the creation of the scriptures, and quite unlikely that a god, assumed to be highly enlightened, would simply rubber-stamp them into his holy writ. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/kby5d9/the_bible_encourages_literally_beating_your_son/

One problem I have with the Bible is its morality. I come from JW’s and they have this wishy washy approach to the beating your son with a rod scriptures. They, and others, argue that this is figurative, or that the “rod of discipline” can be anything and not a literal rod.

I would argue that the Bible literally commands and encourages parents to beat (not spank, but beat) their son with a rod, a thick short stick.

—The scriptures below were written at a time when criminals were stoned to death and impaled.

–They were written at a time when the Israelites had to be commanded not to burn their own babies alive in fire.

–It was a time when there was a law that sons were to be taken by their parents to be stoned to death if they were rebellious and stubborn. (Deut 21:18-21)

–It was a time when the Israelites were allowed to beat their non-Jewish slaves with rods.  (Ex 20:20,21; 21:20-27)

–In the time these “rod” scriptures were written, violence and beatings were common as punishment.  Paul said he experienced “countless beatings.”  Paul also said “five times I received 40 strokes less one from the Jews, three times I was beaten with rods.” (2 Cor 11:23-25)

Back then these acts of violence were common, relative to today.  There is little reason to say any of this is figurative other than that we may wish it so.

THE ROD SCRIPTURES

PROVERBS 23:13,14 “Do not hold back discipline from the mere boy [naar]. In case you beat him with the rod, he will not die.  With the rod you yourself should beat him, that you may deliver his very soul from Sheol itself.” (Compare Exodus 21:12,20)

PROVERBS 13:24 “The one holding back his rod is hating his son [“benow”, son] but the one loving him is he that does look for him with discipline.”

PROVERBS 22:15 “Foolishness is tied up with the heart of a boy [naar]; the rod of discipline is what will remove it far from him.”

PROVERBS 29:15, 17 “The rod AND reproof are what give wisdom; but a boy [naar] let on the loose will be causing his mother shame. . . . Chastise your son and he will bring you rest and give much pleasure to your soul.” (Here, the rod is differentiated from reproof.)   PROVERBS 19:18 “Chastise your son while there exists hope; and to the putting of him to death do not lift up your soulful desire.” (Compare JER 46:28: “I shall have to chastise you to the proper degree.”) SEE DEUT 21:18-21 ABOUT STONING A SON TO DEATH.  Here in proverbs 19:18 it says to chastise your son rather than desiring him to be put to death, through stoning.

Besides disciplining children by beating them with a rod, the Bible encouraged hitting others with rods as well.

THE ROD AND BEATINGS ARE FOR THE BACK OF FOOLS. PROVERBS 26:3 “A whip for the horse, a halter for the donkey, and a rod for the backs of fools!”

PROVERBS 19:29 “Penalties are prepared for mockers, and beatings for the backs of fools.”

PROVERBS 10:13 “Wisdom is found on the lips of the discerning, but a rod is for the back of him who lacks judgment.”

PROVERBS 18:6 “The lips of one who is stupid enter into quarreling, and his very mouth calls even for strokes.”

PROVERBS 20:30 “Blows and wounds cleanse away evil, and beatings purge the inmost being.”

I am arguing that these were written to be taken literally (not figuratively), that the Bible writer, or perhaps God, wanted and still wants children, to be beaten with a rod.

If God condoned, even commanded, rod beatings, and yet that form of punishment is considered barbarous today, then does that mean that humans have become more moral than God? This is nothing less than a stink bomb polluting the Bible, making it look very much like it was strictly a human product.

(2781) Jesus guilty of Native American slaughter

If we assume Jesus to have been a real person as well as the son of God, then there exists a serious problem that developed approximately 1500 years after he departed earth. Europeans began settling in North, Central, and South America about that time and they did not always attempt to co-exist peacefully with the native population. In fact, over ten million Native Americans were killed in violent attacks along with millions more dying from diseases for which they had no resistance.

So, how is Jesus guilty? By not appearing to the people of the Americas and giving them the opportunity to become Christians. If he had done so, the European settlers would have been impressed to find out that these people also worshiped Jesus and consequently they would have treated them with much greater compassion. Jesus had to have seen this coming and yet did nothing to stop this eventual genocide.

(2782) War between science and religion

Although many religious people attempt to reconcile their religious beliefs with scientific principles, there will always be a conflict because these two ideologies operate with irreconcilably contradictory methods. In the end, only one can win. The following was taken from:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/yes-war-between-science-religion-013715813.html

As the West becomes more and more secular, and the discoveries of evolutionary biology and cosmology shrink the boundaries of faith, the claims that science and religion are compatible grow louder. If you’re a believer who doesn’t want to seem anti-science, what can you do? You must argue that your faith – or any faith – is perfectly compatible with science.

And so one sees claim after claim from believers, religious scientists, prestigious science organizations and even atheists asserting not only that science and religion are compatible, but also that they can actually help each other. This claim is called “accommodationism.”

But I argue that this is misguided: that science and religion are not only in conflict – even at “war” – but also represent incompatible ways of viewing the world.

My argument runs like this. I’ll construe “science” as the set of tools we use to find truth about the universe, with the understanding that these truths are provisional rather than absolute. These tools include observing nature, framing and testing hypotheses, trying your hardest to prove that your hypothesis is wrong to test your confidence that it’s right, doing experiments and above all replicating your and others’ results to increase confidence in your inference.

And I’ll define religion as does philosopher Daniel Dennett: “Social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought.” Of course many religions don’t fit that definition, but the ones whose compatibility with science is touted most often – the Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam – fill the bill.

Next, realize that both religion and science rest on “truth statements” about the universe – claims about reality. The edifice of religion differs from science by additionally dealing with morality, purpose and meaning, but even those areas rest on a foundation of empirical claims. You can hardly call yourself a Christian if you don’t believe in the Resurrection of Christ, a Muslim if you don’t believe the angel Gabriel dictated the Qur’an to Muhammad, or a Mormon if you don’t believe that the angel Moroni showed Joseph Smith the golden plates that became the Book of Mormon. After all, why accept a faith’s authoritative teachings if you reject its truth claims?

Indeed, even the Bible notes this: “But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen: And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.”

Many theologians emphasize religion’s empirical foundations, agreeing with the physicist and Anglican priest John Polkinghorne:

“The question of truth is as central to [religion’s] concern as it is in science. Religious belief can guide one in life or strengthen one at the approach of death, but unless it is actually true it can do neither of these things and so would amount to no more than an illusory exercise in comforting fantasy.”

The conflict between science and faith, then, rests on the methods they use to decide what is true, and what truths result: These are conflicts of both methodology and outcome.

In contrast to the methods of science, religion adjudicates truth not empirically, but via dogma, scripture and authority – in other words, through faith, defined in Hebrews 11 as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” In science, faith without evidence is a vice, while in religion it’s a virtue. Recall what Jesus said to “doubting Thomas,” who insisted in poking his fingers into the resurrected Savior’s wounds: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed.”

And yet, without supporting evidence, Americans believe a number of religious claims: 74 percent of us believe in God, 68 percent in the divinity of Jesus, 68 percent in Heaven, 57 percent in the virgin birth, and 58 percent in the Devil and Hell. Why do they think these are true? Faith.

But different religions make different – and often conflicting – claims, and there’s no way to judge which claims are right. There are over 4,000 religions on this planet, and their “truths” are quite different. (Muslims and Jews, for instance, absolutely reject the Christian belief that Jesus was the son of God.) Indeed, new sects often arise when some believers reject what others see as true. Lutherans split over the truth of evolution, while Unitarians rejected other Protestants’ belief that Jesus was part of God.

And while science has had success after success in understanding the universe, the “method” of using faith has led to no proof of the divine. How many gods are there? What are their natures and moral creeds? Is there an afterlife? Why is there moral and physical evil? There is no one answer to any of these questions. All is mystery, for all rests on faith.

The “war” between science and religion, then, is a conflict about whether you have good reasons for believing what you do: whether you see faith as a vice or a virtue.

Compartmentalizing realms is irrational

So how do the faithful reconcile science and religion? Often they point to the existence of religious scientists, like NIH Director Francis Collins, or to the many religious people who accept science. But I’d argue that this is compartmentalization, not compatibility, for how can you reject the divine in your laboratory but accept that the wine you sip on Sunday is the blood of Jesus?

Others argue that in the past religion promoted science and inspired questions about the universe. But in the past every Westerner was religious, and it’s debatable whether, in the long run, the progress of science has been promoted by religion. Certainly evolutionary biology, my own field, has been held back strongly by creationism, which arises solely from religion.

What is not disputable is that today science is practiced as an atheistic discipline – and largely by atheists. There’s a huge disparity in religiosity between American scientists and Americans as a whole: 64 percent of our elite scientists are atheists or agnostics, compared to only 6 percent of the general population – more than a tenfold difference. Whether this reflects differential attraction of nonbelievers to science or science eroding belief – I suspect both factors operate – the figures are prima facie evidence for a science-religion conflict.

The most common accommodationist argument is Stephen Jay Gould’s thesis of “non-overlapping magisteria.” Religion and science, he argued, don’t conflict because: “Science tries to document the factual character of the natural world, and to develop theories that coordinate and explain these facts. Religion, on the other hand, operates in the equally important, but utterly different, realm of human purposes, meanings and values – subjects that the factual domain of science might illuminate, but can never resolve.”

This fails on both ends. First, religion certainly makes claims about “the factual character of the universe.” In fact, the biggest opponents of non-overlapping magisteria are believers and theologians, many of whom reject the idea that Abrahamic religions are “empty of any claims to historical or scientific facts.”

Nor is religion the sole bailiwick of “purposes, meanings and values,” which of course differ among faiths. There’s a long and distinguished history of philosophy and ethics – extending from Plato, Hume and Kant up to Peter Singer, Derek Parfit and John Rawls in our day – that relies on reason rather than faith as a fount of morality. All serious ethical philosophy is secular ethical philosophy.

In the end, it’s irrational to decide what’s true in your daily life using empirical evidence, but then rely on wishful-thinking and ancient superstitions to judge the “truths” undergirding your faith. This leads to a mind (no matter how scientifically renowned) at war with itself, producing the cognitive dissonance that prompts accommodationism. If you decide to have good reasons for holding any beliefs, then you must choose between faith and reason. And as facts become increasingly important for the welfare of our species and our planet, people should see faith for what it is: not a virtue but a defect.

Science could peacefully co-exist with a specific religion only if that faith posed a deity that does not interfere in the workings of the universe. Otherwise, science would be non-repeatable as a god could, on a whim, violate the physical laws of nature. Because science has yet to observe such a phenomenon, the only two possibilities seem to be a universe without a god, or one with a god who at most only observes what is happening.

(2783) Worship desire

There is a theory that humans created gods not so much because they observed evidence for them as much as they had an innate desire to worship something, as if having something to worship fulfilled some physical or psychological need. The following was taken from:

https://www.atheistrev.com/2012/01/theirs-is-jealous-god.html#more

There are many things that bother me about the sort of god many Christians claim to worship. The image above captures at least one of them fairly well: the absurdity of thinking that a god so powerful, wise, and loving would demand worship from humans and condemn them to eternal punishment for not believing in it. There are plenty of others, but we can stick with this one for now. Doesn’t it seem obvious that only a god created by humans would have such petty desires or a need for veneration?

I suspect that this is indeed obvious to most atheists, but that does not appear to be the case for many religious believers. I can remember at least one conversation I had with a Christian many years ago where I had just made this point and the Christian came back at me with, “I don’t understand why you don’t see the appeal of worship. Wouldn’t you want to be worshipped too?” It seemed to me that he had just made my point for me, and I was dumbfounded when he was oblivious to this. Why would we arrogantly assume that a supernatural being with the characteristics most Christians assign to their god and which exists outside of time or space (and reality) has a mind that functions just like ours? Why would we allow our limited comprehension to restrict the mind of such a being?

Perhaps the answer lies in the need many religious believers seem to have to worship something. If it wasn’t their preferred god, it would be another god. And if it wasn’t another god, it would be something else. They might worship a political leader, for example. Maybe what is really going on here has very little to do with the god they are trying to depict and is more about themselves and their own desires. Maybe they are creating something to worship just to fulfill their desire to worship.

Subjects like this are the kind of threads that quickly lead to the unraveling of the mythology when pulled. Many educated Christians are aware of this, and that’s why they often discourage critical thought and seek to elevate uncritical faith as a substitute. But faith is not an adequate substitute for much of anything. It merely involves abandoning the search for truth in favor of primitive wish fulfillment. We’re better off without it.

The motivation for worship is likely associated with a desire for security, in that the worshiper believes that the object of his worship will be thereby flattered and thus offer protection, so as to preserve the source of this adoration. It makes no sense that a god would demand worship, but it does make sense that humans would believe that worshiping something more powerful than themselves would be a good strategy for staying alive. This suggests that gods are nothing more than artificial constructs made up to achieve this objective.

(2784) Development of the Bible

A study of the way the Bible evolved as it was developed reveals a typical timeline of a human endeavor, not the sort of trajectory that would be expected of a project orchestrated by a divine source. The following is a short summary of the Bible’s history:

http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.com/p/development-of-biblical-canon.html

Development of the Old Testament Canon

1000-50BCE:

The Old Testament (abbreviation “OT”) books are written.

C.200 BCE:

An assemblage of rabbis translates the OT from Hebrew to Greek, the translation is called the “Septuagint” (abbreviation “LXX”). The LXX includes 46 books.

CE 30-100:

Christians use the LXX as their source scriptures. This causes controversy among orthodox Jews since there are only 39 books (not 46) in the original Hebrew.

C.CE 100:

Soon after a council of Jewish rabbis is convened at The Council of Jamniah and decide to include in their canon only the original 39 Hebrew books.

C.CE 400:

Jerome translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin (called the “Vulgate”). Jerome sticks to the original 39 omitting those he deems apocryphal, including Tobit, Judith, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach (Ecclesiasticus), and Baruch. Pope Damassus, unsatisfied, reissues a new translation with all 46 books, thereby reinstating the “apocryphal” (or hidden books) as authentic books of the Bible, leaving the final count of books included in the Vulgate as 46 overall.

C.E. 1536:

Martin Luther translates the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to German. He assumes that, since Jews wrote the OT, theirs is the correct canon; he puts the extra seven books in an appendix and calls them “Apocrypha.”

C.E. 1546:

The Council of Trent reaffirms the canonicity of all 46 books (third time’s a charm).

Development of the New Testament Canon

C.CE 51-125:

Various Christian sects write a variety of works; among them the New Testament (abbreviation “NT”) books are written. The Gospels are written along with other early Christian writings, e.g. the Didache (c. 70), 1 Clement (c. 96), the Epistle of Barnabas (c. 100), the seven letters of Ignatius of Antioch (c. 110), etc.

C.CE 140:

Marcion espouses that there are two different Gods contained in scripture—Yahweh, the cruel God of the OT, and Abba, the kind fatherly deity of the NT. Marcion, being anti-Semitic, eliminates the OT as scriptures and maintains only the ten letters of Paul and two-thirds of Luke’s gospel (deleting all references to Jesus’ “Jewishness”) in the process. Marcion’s NT canon is the first to be compiled, but his arbitrary omissions force the mainstream Church to decide on a core canon. These will become the four Gospels and the letters of Paul of Tarsus.

C.CE 200:

At about this time in Rome, the periphery of the canon is determined. Of the peripheral materials included are the four Gospels, Acts, now 13 letters of Paul (Hebrews is not included); three of the seven general Epistles (1-2 John and Jude), and also the Apocalypse of Peter.

C.E. 313:

In 313 Emperor Constantine proclaims tolerance and recognition of Christianity in the “Edict” of Milan. The following year Constantine goes to war with Licinius who he defeats in 323, becoming sole emperor. Constantine founds a new second capital at Byzantium, which he named Constantinople (now modern day Istanbul). This allows a new dawn of freedom and tolerance for Christianity to flourish.

C.E. 340:

Eusebius devised a threefold classification; noting the accepted, disputed, and rejected books. Eusebius would reluctantly include John’s Revelation, but rejected the Didache, Acts of Paul, the Apocalypse of Peter, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the epistle of Barnabas, while the gospels of Peter, Thomas, and Matthias weren’t even considered for inclusion; mainly because they were incomplete. A full copy of the gospel of Thomas wouldn’t be unearthed until the find at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945 CE; over one thousand and six hundred years later!

C.E. 367:

The earliest extant list of books we see in the NT, as we presently have them, is written by Athanasius, Bishop of Alexandria, as contained in his Easter letter of 367.

C.E. 904:

Prior to his papacy Pope Damasus II, in a letter to a French bishop, lists the NT books in their present number and order.

C.E. 1442:

At the Council of Florence, the entire Church agrees to recognize 27 books of the NT, though does not declare them unalterable.

C.E.1523-26:

William Tyndale begins work on his translation of the Bible into English, following Erasmus’ (1522) Greek edition as well as drawing on the Latin Vulgate and Luther’s 1521 September Testament. Tyndale finalizes his NT in 1526.

C.E. 1536:

In his translation of the Bible from Greek into German, Luther removes four NT books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation) from their original order and repositions them at the end, in an appendix, believing them to be less than canonical. A year earlier, Tyndale is martyred for the crime of having translated the Holy Bible into English.

C.E. 1546:

At the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church reaffirms the complete 27 books of the canon as traditionally accepted.

C.E. 1611:

The King James Version, or Authorized Version, of the Bible would rely directly on Tyndale’s translation. A complete analyze of the Authorized Version in 1998 showed that Tyndale’s words, although unrecognized as its official translator, account for 84% of the NT and 75.8 percent of the OT books which comprise the King James Version—the most influential version of the Bible ever devised.

If a god was intent on developing a book to showcase to humanity its divine message it would be expected that such a god would align ecclesiastical representatives such as to create a coordinated , linear progression of the authorship and selection of books to be included. If it was strictly a human product, the development would be somewhat chaotic. We observe the latter.

(2785) Questions for Christians

Oftentimes, a person will be indoctrinated into the Christian religion in such a way that the person (victim) never considers any thought that runs perpendicular to the conventional dogma of the faith. The following lists questions that should be considered by anyone who has been indoctrinated or who is considering a conversion to Christianity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/kdys09/important_questions_every_christian_should_ask/

Most people tend to believe that the religion they were raised up in happens to be the right one. Isn’t that an awfully big coincidence?

For those who have Christian parents: if you were instead born into another religion like Islam, Hinduism, or Buddhism, do you think you’d still be a Christian?

Or how about if you were raised in a remote community under a different religion with no access to Christianity? How would you come to the faith and be “saved”?

If you think that god would somehow personally make himself known to you in that situation, then what’s the point of having his believers advertise him? Why couldn’t he just introduce himself to every single person and give us each an equal chance to respond?

Some say that god’s existence is self-evident just from looking at the universe (Romans 1:20). But how would we possibly figure out what the creator would be like and what they would want from us just by looking up at space? And how would we even get close to guessing that it’s the Christian god?

So if there’s no way that a civilization with zero knowledge of Jesus could convert to Christianity, how would god judge them? If he sends them to Hell for simply not knowing about Jesus, how would that be fair? If he allows them into heaven under the condition that they were simply good people, then why does the Bible say that that doesn’t cut it (Isa 53:3)? And what about the people who lived before Jesus and who also didn’t have a clue about the Israelite deity, Yahweh? Wouldn’t the same thing apply to them?

But why then does Yahweh condemn ‘pagans’ all around the world with the threat of extermination and hellfire if they had no access to early Judaism? How were they supposed to know that he was the single creator of the universe when he apparently chose to only reveal himself to a small tribe in the Middle East?

Out of the thousands and thousands of interpretations of the universe’s creator(s) that were imagined before and after the Israelites started worshipping Yahweh, how would we objectively prove that they were the only ones that got their interpretation right and that all the countless others got theirs wrong?

Why do the Israelites appear to not even have their own original interpretation, since stories like Earth being created in 7 days, a woman being made out of a man’s rib, and the entire Earth being flooded by a global deluge are literally all found in much more ancient near eastern Sumerian myths, like with the Eridu Genesis, the legend of Enki and Ninhursag, and the Gilgamesh flood? Why go with the remakes?

Many believers think this way: if you believe in god and it turns out that he doesn’t exist, then you lose nothing. But if you don’t believe in god and it turns out that he does exist, you lose everything. First of all, why would a god who demands utter devotion let anyone with this gambling-based mindset into heaven? Second, even if you were to believe for that reason, how would you know which god to choose, let alone the right interpretation of them?

What if Christians are wrong, and Allah is the one true god? Or what if Christians and Muslims are both wrong, and Vishnu, Brahma, and Shiva are the one true godhead? Even with a gambling-based mindset, aren’t your chances of choosing the right god ridiculously slim among all the thousands of possibilities there are? And why not just believe in a number of religions to have the best chance?

Interestingly, many Christians wouldn’t bat an eye at the thought that deities like Vishnu, Zeus, Thor, or Ra don’t exist. But if that’s you, aren’t you technically an atheist towards all those religions? Why have a double standard when it comes to the religion you’re familiar with?

If your response is that you know the god of your religion exists because you’ve somehow had personal experiences with him, then what objectively separates your experiences with those of Muslims or Hindus who think they personally know a different kind of deity?

Not including entirely separate denominations, isn’t it telling that even within one Christian congregation, you’ll find people with all sorts of different ideas on what God thinks about certain matters. Why does each person seem to make god in their own image?

Why would god choose to communicate through an almost 3000-year-old, easily open-to-interpretation book if he knew that it would cause so much chaos and confusion about what exactly he wants? And why would he also leave it up to interpretation to decide which books should actually be considered canon?

Why would god only physically reveal himself to a small group of Israelites in the Middle East instead of to the rest of the world, and then ghost us for the rest of history? Again, why couldn’t he just introduce himself to each person to also reach those who were nowhere near the Middle East? And if he did, then why are there still whole cultures today who have no idea who he and Jesus are?

If god created us for the sole purpose of worshipping him for eternity on top of claiming that he wants that kind of relationship with us, isn’t there an even bigger reason to make sure we fully know him by introducing himself? Isn’t that how relationships work?

Speaking of which, god doesn’t necessarily need worship- he’s god. So isn’t the purpose of it only to stroke his ego?

Why would god force us into the dilemma of either worshipping him for eternity or burning in hell for eternity when we didn’t even necessarily ask to be created? Don’t we really only have one choice?

If you had kids, would you force them to worship you simply because they’re yours? And would you also threaten them with an eternity of torture if they didn’t? Or would you just be a loving parent?

And even if infinite punishment for finite transgressions were somehow a part of god’s perfect “love” and “justice”, would you really be able to repetitively enjoy worshipping at his feet for eternity while at the same time knowing that many of your loved ones and billions of other people were agonizingly roasting in a fiery pit below you?

Still, in this life, most believers worship god and thank him for all that he’s doing in their lives, whether it be helping them with their finances or even putting food on the table. But that would mean that god can somehow have a direct impact on our circumstances. If that’s the case, then what is he doing with the hundreds of millions of people needlessly dying of war, starvation, disease, and disaster all around the world? Why would he specifically help us with small things like savings and dinner if there is so much unimaginable pain and suffering going on elsewhere?

Many people even try to pray for those who are going through that pain and suffering. But why would you have to beg an all-loving, all-powerful god to help those in need? And why doesn’t he?

Why should the people who are going through that pain and suffering, and who will continue to until the day they die, even consider chasing and worshipping a god who refuses to help them and who would have even allowed them to be there in the first place?

If your supposed parents abandoned you, would you want to chase after them under the thought that they loved you, but were maybe just “testing you” or “working in mysterious ways”?

Yet, every once and awhile, you’ll hear a testimony about how god healed someone from cancer (through the doctors of course). But would he choose to save that person over all the other millions of people who die from cancer each year, a huge portion of which are other Christians?

And when you get really sick, do you pray for healing like the Bible says to, or do you go to the doctors?

If, however, the all-powerful god has to “use” the doctors to heal people, then what would he do if there weren’t any around? Do you think he’d miraculously take away cancer without any medical treatment? If you were diagnosed with it, would you trust in prayer alone? And if he can take away cancer without any actual treatment, why has there been zero official cases of such miracles happening (other than in the Bible)?

What’s the point of prayer anyway? Being omniscient, doesn’t god know exactly what his plan is and what he’s going to do, regardless of what we ask for?

On top of that, since god apparently knows how every single event is going to go down, how does he himself have any free will? Doesn’t he know exactly what he has to do tomorrow? And if he’s always known what he has to do and when, how could there be a point where he made all of these decisions?

Paradoxes aside, how is there any way that you can know for sure that the Christian god is working in your life when billions of other people from every other faith know that their gods are working in theirs? For example, what’s the difference between a Christian who believes that Jesus miraculously got rid of his cancer (through the doctors of course) and a Hindu who believes Vishnu got rid of his?

So, since faith is built on belief rather than hard evidence, isn’t it impossible to objectively determine which of the thousands of faiths is true?

Why would god literally rest our eternal fates on whether or not we believe in him, and then leave us little to no truly convincing reasons we should think he exists?

“Being in a relationship” with god is supposed to be the ultimate joy. Imagine being able to talk to the creator of the universe, and then being given the mission to spread his truth with every waking moment. But if that’s what believers claim they have, why do so many act like perfectly normal people- playing sports or video games, maybe watching something on Netflix or Youtube, or doing anything else that makes them happy? Why aren’t they instead only studying and spreading the word like the Bible commands them to?

If you’re that believer, isn’t that a bit selfish? If you truly believed that people were unknowingly being sent to Hell every day for their nonbelief, and that you could save some of them by leading them to Jesus like you’re commanded to, wouldn’t you be scrambling to do anything you could to reach as many people as possible before it’s too late?

So if you’re not doing everything you can to spread the saving Gospel to get people out of everlasting Hellfire, doesn’t that mean that either A, you don’t really care about other people’s eternal fates, B, you’re just using your faith as a post-life retirement plan, or C, you don’t really believe any of this in the first place?

Faith is basically hoping that all of this exists. But doesn’t hoping that god exists also mean that you don’t actually believe for a fact that he does? What kind of “relationship” is that?

If you were going to commit your life to someone, wouldn’t you want to first meet them? Or would you rather have to just imagine them being with you, and attribute the occasional coincidence or happy event to them mysteriously working in your life?

At the end of the day, for believers, do you really think that there’s a good enough reason to hold on to your religion besides just having “faith”, even though there’s no way to objectively prove that yours is the only one that’s true?

Or do you continue to defend it despite all of these problems because you’re afraid of what you’d become without it?

What if, opposite from what you’ve been told, you could be an even better, freer person without religion- without the threat of eternal damnation, and the eyes of a jealous, judgmental god always looming over you? What would your life and mental health look like without these fear-mongering restrictions?

What if you freed yourself to follow the truth wherever it leads, rather than assuming that what you’ve been taught is an absolute, unquestionable fact? What if you allowed yourself to come to your own conclusions about life, and to have your own unique worldview?

What if you simply enjoyed this life for the rare, short treasure that it is instead of expecting another one? What if you stopped looking at people based on whether or not they’re going to make it into heaven according to god’s silly standards, and just appreciated them for who they are?

What if, instead of trying to always please that jealous, judgmental god, you just let yourself be yourself?

And truth be told, if all you really do is occasionally read the Bible, occasionally pray, reluctantly go to church, and then do what you enjoy doing the rest of the time, is that god really the god of every aspect of your life, or is he just the afterthought of the religion that you were given?

It is highly likely that once these questions are considered and answered sincerely, a Christian would reconsider his commitment to the faith, or at least set out on an intellectual journey to reposition, if possible, his faith atop a firmer foundation of logic. These questions expose the soft underbelly of Christianity, revealing the plain truth that its survival is dependent on its followers not being exposed to them.

(2786) Depravity baseline

Christians are anesthetized when reading their own scriptures from seeing how much depravity is documented therein. So the following exercise is eye opening- the hypothetical discovery of a primitive religious sect in an isolated part of the world that promotes familiar themes. Once the veneer of a conditioned response is removed, the problem is clearly perceived. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/12/setting-standard-depravity-baseline-by.html

Written by Dale O’Neal:

To assess the morality of a culture, one must determine the point at which any culture crosses the line from simply bad behavior into rank depravity.  As difficult and subjective as this is, given its importance, attempting to do so would seem to be an essential exercise, especially given the biblical god’s threat of eternal punishment.  While pondering where to begin to answer such a question, I ran across something outside the biblical context that helped me quite a bit by establishing what I refer to as a depravity baseline.  I believe most civilized people will acknowledge this as an acceptable reference point, so comparisons can then be drawn by referring to it.

Some time ago documents were discovered that were prepared by German anthropologist Prof Heinrich Vögler as part of his detailed description of a primitive, cannibalistic tribe that flourished in the jungles of Borneo in the mid-19th century.  Inspired by its warlike god, this violent and ruthless tribe, the Thuluka, either killed off or enslaved most of the other tribes of the northeastern interior of Borneo.  Tales of their savagery were known for some time through the legends of neighboring tribes, but only recently did these particular papers come to light, along with some relics, weapons and ceremonial items, at Prof. Vögler’s family estate in Bavaria.

The Thuluka, like any primitive tribe, had their own tribal god, Mutah, who they believed created the world and chose them above all other tribes to be his people, putting themselves, as primitive tribes do, at the center of the universe.  They took Mutah’s special Salbennungenheit (Prof Vögler’s word – the best translation is probably ‘anointing’) as a mandate to pillage, plunder and destroy all the neighboring tribes to give themselves greater living-space.  They differed from most tribes, however, in the pattern of glorifying their own hatred for their enemies and the brutality they inflicted upon them.  Prof. Vögler documented the simple but effective control-strategies Thuluka chiefs and shamans used on the rest of the tribe.  They enforced absolute loyalty to their god Mutah’ s demands.  The rewards for loyalty could be great while the penalties for disobedience were ruthless, usually death.  And they demonized their enemies to justify exterminating them and taking their land.  They had a great psychological advantage as well, because they were absolutely certain their great god Mutah would intervene directly to give them victory every time.

In these documents, reproduced here with their original numbering, Prof Vögler detailed what he believed was the essence of what inspired the Thuluka to be so warlike.  It would be difficult to find a purer expression of depravity, so I consider it the depravity baseline.

Thuluka Call to Conquer

1   The great war god Natuka will deliver many tribes before you, and you shall defeat them and utterly destroy them and show no mercy to them.

2   You shall consume all the people Mutah delivers to you, and your eye shall not pity them.

3   This is to be done so they do not teach you to perform their detestable practices, because you are a holy people.

4   You shall kill every male among the little ones and every woman who has known a man intimately.  But of all the female children who are virgins, spare them for yourselves.

5   If you desire a beautiful woman among the captives, take her home as a wife for yourself.

6   Some villages you may simply take captive, if they submit to your offer of peace, and take them to your home to serve as forced labor.  However, you are to destroy other nearby villages completely, leaving nothing alive that breathes, human or animal.

7   Their little ones are to be dashed to pieces before the eyes of their parents.

8   Greatly honored will be the warriors who actually seize these little ones and dash them to pieces against a rock.

9   Fearless Thuluka warriors are to plunder all houses and ravish the wives and show no pity for children or women with child.

10 Captured warriors of the enemies are to be thrust through with a spear.  The great day of Mutah is coming, cruel, with fury and burning anger.

11 In my anger I will stomp upon your enemies and trample them and make them drunk in my wrath; their life blood will stain my garments, for vengeance will be in my heart.  I will pour out their life blood on the earth.

12 With plagues and blood I shall enter into judgment with them and cause to fall upon them a torrential rain of hailstones, fire and brimstone.  In this way, I will glorify and justify myself and make my greatness known to all tribes.

13 In that great day the Thuluka faithful will delight in Mutah’s vengeance.  You will celebrate by washing your feet in the blood of the vanquished, and even your dogs will enjoy the feast.

14 You will eat the flesh of mighty men until you are glutted and drink the blood of princes until you are drunk.

15 Then shall the Thuluka praise Mutah for his loving kindness and goodness and compassion to the Thuluka.

16 Mutah will cover the Thuluka faithful in animal skins of righteousness; as the earth causes our seeds to grow, so Mutah will cause righteousness and praise to spout forth from all nations.  Praise be to Mutah.

Thuluka Prayer for Vengeance upon Their Enemies

17 Deliver me from our enemies, O Mutah.  Shatter their teeth in their mouths.

18 Break out the fangs of the young lions, O Mutah.

19 Shorten the lives of their warriors that their children be fatherless and their wives be widowed.  May their children be homeless and have to wander far away from their ruined homes begging for food.  O Mutah, even then may no one extend a hand of kindness to these fatherless children so that they will wither away and cut off all posterity.  May the memory of them be cut off from the earth.

20 Give their children over to famine and may they be thrust through by a spear.  May their women all be childless and widowed and all their men be smitten to death.

21 Pour out your wrath upon the tribes that do not know you.

22 Slay the wicked, O Mutah.  Oh how I hate those who hate you, O Mutah, oh how I loath those who rise up against you.  I hate them with perfect hatred and consider them my enemies.

23 But O Mutah, because of your loving kindness, deal kindly with me, for I am tired and needy.

24 I shall joyfully sing of thy loving kindness in the morning, for you have been my refuge in my day of distress.

Mutah’s Rewards for the Faithful and Punishments for the Disobedient

25 Now it shall be, if you will diligently obey Mutah, being careful to do all his commands, Mutah will set you high above all the tribes of the earth, and all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you if you will obey Mutah.

26 Mutah will command the blessing upon you in your harvests and in all you put your hand to, and he will bless you in the land which Mutah gives to you.

27 So all the people shall see that you are called by the name of Mutah, and they shall be afraid of you.

28 But, if you will not obey Mutah and follow all his commands, then curses shall come upon you and overtake you.

29 Mutah will smite you with fever and with inflammation and with fiery heat and with the knife.

30 Mutah will cause you to be defeated before your enemies.

31 Your carcasses shall be food to all birds of the sky and to the beasts of the earth.

32 Mutah will smite you with boils and with hemorrhoids and with the scab, and with the itch from which you cannot be healed.  Mutah will smite you with madness and with blindness and with bewilderment of heart, and you shall grope at noon as the blind man gropes in darkness.  You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall violate her.

33 Your sons and your daughters shall be given to another people while your eyes shall look on and yearn for them continually, but there shall be nothing you can do.

34 And you shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see.  Mutah will strike you on the knees and the legs with sore boils, from which you cannot be healed, from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head.

35 You shall serve your enemies whom Mutah shall send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness and in the lack of all things; and Mutah will put an iron yoke on your neck until he has destroyed you.

36 You shall eat the offspring of your own body, the flesh of your sons and of your daughters.  The tender man shall be hostile toward his brother and toward the wife he cherishes and toward the rest of his children who remain, so that he will not give even one of them any of the flesh of his children, which he shall eat since he has nothing else left. The tender woman among you shall be hostile toward the husband she cherishes and toward her son and daughter and toward her afterbirth, which issues from between her legs, and toward her children whom she bears; for she shall eat them secretly for lack of anything else.

37 All this will befall you if you are not careful to observe all the words of this law, to fear this honored and awesome name, Mutah.  Mutah will bring extraordinary plagues on you and your descendants, even severe and lasting plagues and miserable and chronic sicknesses.

38 It shall happen that, as Mutah delighted over you to prosper you and multiply you, so Mutah will delight over you to make you perish and destroy you.

39 Your life shall hang in doubt before you, and you shall be in dread night and day, and shall have no assurance of your life.  In the morning you shall say, ‘I wish that it were evening!’ and that evening you shall say, ‘I wish that it were morning!’ because of the dread of your heart and the sight of your eyes.

40 For a fire is kindled in my anger.

41 I will heap misfortunes on them.  I will use my arrows on them.  They shall be wasted by famine, and consumed by plague and bitter destruction; and the teeth of beasts I will send upon them, with the venom of crawling things of the dust.  The knife shall bereave; it shall destroy both young man and virgin, the nurseling along with the man of gray hairs.  I will cleave them in pieces, I will make the memory of them cease from among men.

42 Vengeance is mine, and retribution.

43 I will render vengeance on my adversaries, and I will repay those who hate me.  I will make my arrows drunk with blood, and my sword shall devour flesh, with the blood of the slain and of the captives.

44 Whoever calls another member of the tribe a fool or does not forgive a fellow tribesman shall be burned alive.

45 Mutah’s goal is not to bring peace, but conflict.

46 Mutah anxiously awaits the time when he will cast fire upon the earth.

47 There is no neutral ground.  Whoever is not loyal to Mutah is against Mutah and is his enemy.

Those familiar with the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, no doubt have recognized the true source of this fiction of the Thuluka, Mutah and Prof. Vögler.  This all comes from the Bible itself.  But placing it in a foreign setting helps people lower their sacred shield and overcome their usual deference to things biblical and see these statements for what they are. This biblical material is never emphasized and only rarely sees the light of day because it reveals the primitive, vindictive, barbaric – that is, the utterly human – aspects of the biblical God’s personality.  These aspects are there to be found, however, and this material helps one answer the greatest moral question one about the Bible’s god: “Would the God of the Bible create and enforce eternal punishment?”  If previous violence and threats of violence are indicators of future behavior, then these verses strongly suggest that the Bible’s God would indeed not only tolerate but would even take delight in tormenting his enemies forever.  The corresponding biblical references follow:

 1   Dt.7:2

2   Dt.7:16

3   Dt.20:18; 7:7

4   Num.31:17-18

5   Dt.21:11-12

6   Dt.20,11-15

7   Is.13:16

8   Ps.138:9

9   Is.13:18

10 Is.13:9

11 Is.63:3,4,6

12 Ezek.38:22-23

13 Ps.58:10; 68:23

14 Ezek.39:17-19

15 Is.63:7

16 Is.61:10,11

17 Ps.59:1

18 Ps.58:6

19 Ps.109:8-15

20 Jer.18:21

21 Ps.79:6

22 Ps.139:19-22

23 Ps.109:21,22

24 Ps.59:16

25 Dt.28:1,2

26 Dt.28:8

27 Dt.28:10

28 Dt.28:15

29 Dt.28:22

30 Dt.28:25

31 Dt.28:26

32 Dt.28:25-30

33 Dt.28:32

34 Dt.28:34,35

35 Dt.28:48

36 Dt.28:53-57

37 Dt.28:58-59

38 Dt.28:63

39 Dt.28:66-67

40 Dt.32:22

41 Dt.32:23-26

42 Dt.32:35

43 Dt.32:41-42

44 Mt.5:22; 18:35

45 Mt.10:34

46 Lk.12:49

47 Mt.12:30; Lk.9:50

Christians see their faith through rose-colored glasses. Once the glasses are removed, the depravity is impossible to miss. This exercise is a must for any Christian who has mindlessly sidestepped this issue.

(2787) Proofs of Santa’s existence

Using the same techniques that Christians employ to demonstrate the existence of God it is also possible to prove that Santa Claus is real. The following is taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/kfk2dh/15_arguments_that_prove_santa_exists_and_destroy/

1) Argument from Design

Every Christmas, a bunch of presents appear under my Christmas tree. I looked up pictures of the PS5 I might be getting if I’m nice, and it looks so beautiful that it can’t possibly have been made in a factory. No, the design is so complex and intricate that it must have been made by elves in Santa’s workshop. Therefore, Santa exists.

2) Argument from First Cause

Presents don’t just appear out of nowhere. You can’t just have a bunch of neatly wrapped gifts coming out of nothing. Every present must have a cause, and Santa is the only rational explanation I’ve heard that makes sense. Therefore, the first cause is Santa Claus.

3) Pascal’s Wager

Let’s say you’re a Santa denier, and it turns out you’re wrong. That means you’re in a world where grown-ups have to spend hundreds of dollars every Christmas, going through all kinds of stress, just to please their spoiled, thankless children. What kind of horrible world is that? Now let’s say you’re a Santa believer, and it turns out you’re wrong. That means you live in a wonderful world where a jolly man flies around and delivers free toys to all the boys and girls every year. I think it’s safer to bet on that option. Therefore, Santa exists.

4) Ontological Argument

Let us assume that Santa is a maximally jolly being, the most jolly creature possible. Just imagine his cherry-red nose, his twinkling eyes, his belly shaking like a bowl full of jelly. There’s nothing more jolly than that, right? Let us also assume that it’s theoretically possible for a maximally jolly being to exist. And thirdly, let us assume that it’s better to be jolly and spread joy as a real being in the real world rather than as a made-up fictional character. Would that not be a property of a maximally jolly being? Therefore, Santa exists.

5) Moral Argument

Every year, Santa keeps two lists containing all the children of the world: one for “nice” children, one for “naughty” children. This incentivizes children to be on their best behavior, so they don’t get a lump of coal in their stocking this Christmas. But if Santa doesn’t exist and people stop believing in him, what happens then? Then we have no universal standard of morality! If there is no standard for what is naughty or nice, all is permitted! There’ll be rioting in the streets! Ax murderers breaking down your doors! Maniacs poisoning the water tower! Nuclear armageddon! OH GOD WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! Therefore, Santa exists.

6) Argument from Prayer

Last year, I got a Lego Star Wars X-Wing building kit. I asked for that in a letter specifically addressed to Santa Claus. I even wrote “The North Pole” on the envelope and my dad helped me put it in the mailbox. How could my request have been granted unless Santa exists?

7) Argument from Scripture

Okay, Santa denier, if Santa doesn’t exist, then who are all the elves working for in their workshop up at the North Pole? Who does Mrs. Claus bake cookies for all year? Who said “Rudolph, with your nose so bright, won’t you guide my sleigh tonight” to Rudolph? Dasher, Comet, Cupid, and the rest have all given personal testimonies that Santa exists. Therefore, he does.

8) Argument from Fine Tuning

Did you know that Santa’s body is so fat that it keeps the Earth weighted just enough that it stays in its proper orbit? If he didn’t exist, the Earth would either crash into the Sun or go careening off into space and freeze into a snowball. Thanks to Santa, we’re staying in the exact right spot where we can live and be happy and stuff. No, I won’t give sources.

9) Argument from Incredulity

Are you SERIOUSLY asking me to believe that EVERY SINGLE PARENT on the ENTIRE PLANET just HAPPENS to spend a fat wad of cash on toys EVERY December, and then they just HAPPEN to give it to their kids on the EXACT SAME DAY, EVERY SINGLE YEAR? I simply find that to be too much of a COINCIDENCE to believe. Therefore, Santa exists.

10) Lewis Trilemma

With regards to the story of Santa Claus, you can believe one of three things. One, that Santa is lying, and that he made up the whole story about himself. But what motivation does he have to do that? Two, that he’s a lunatic, some bearded madman who raves about magical floating reindeer. But if he is crazy, then why does he seem so happy and nice in all the cartoons? That leaves us with only one option left: that Santa is being truthful about what he’s saying, and truly brings us presents every year. Yep, there’s no possible fourth option here.

11) Jordan Peterson’s Argument

Do I believe in Santa Claus? Well, it depends what you mean by “believe”. If we examine the metaphysical architecture of belief as a function of Jungian analysis, then we can identify something resembling a Falstaffian archetype as a product of the collective subconscious of various hierarchies. And we must also define what it means to “exist”. If a product of traditional wisdom is so thoroughly intertwined with the hierarchies of pre-Dostoevsky Western society, and this patriarchal archetype functions in bestowing numinous meaning upon the individual and helping to combat the pathological shadow-dragon that lies within the superego, then who are these postmodern neo-Marxists to push an ideology which contends that Santa does not “exist” within these hierarchies? It also depends what you mean by “Santa”…

12) Argument from Conspiracy

It’s all a big cover-up! The government doesn’t want you to see it, but in Area 51, they’re hiding photos of Santa in his sleigh, half-eaten cookies with his DNA on it, even one of Rudolph’s turds! You brainwashed sheeple just go about your life with no idea that the deep state has been hiding Santa’s existence from you. The Illuminati has been sending secret UFOs to spy on your house and spray your Christmas trees with chemicals that will turn you into a soyboy! And the ringleader behind the whole thing?…the half-Reptilian half-cyborg known as BILL GATES!

13) Argument from Personal Experience

I sat on Santa’s lap in the mall once! Well…I know that wasn’t really him. But the real Santa talked to me one time…well, it was while I was high on ayahuasca. But okay, one time I felt really scared, and I just kinda felt like Santa was there. No, I didn’t see anything. Or hear anything. And nothing in particular really changed about my life, but I just kinda felt a little something, y’know?…Are you converted yet?

14) Ad Hominem

You know what? I’m tired of you arrogant Santa-deniers with your “science” that says a reindeer can’t fly. You all just believe this because there’s something wrong with YOU, and you just can’t stand the sight of Christmas cheer or joy. You all just hate the world, and you know what, I hate YOU! I HATE you all so much! You’re all just having a toxic circlejerk! Santa denialism is a religion! That Christmas song you quoted was out of context! You’re all just servants of the Grinch! YOU’RE ALL NAUGHTY AND YOU’LL GET A LUMP OF COAL THIS CHRISTMAS! YOU HEAR ME? COAL! I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

15) Argument from Honesty

My parents told me Santa exists, and I like them. If anyone tells me Santa doesn’t exist, I don’t like them. Therefore, Santa exists.

This tongue-in-cheek example exposes the weakness of the arguments used to ‘prove’ the existence of God. The logic intrinsic to the arguments is so malleable that it can be used to support almost anything, as demonstrated above. It should be obvious that if God actually existed, there would be definite, tangible confirmations of his existence and this Santa parody would have been moot.

(2788) Religion is just another fraudulent product

Capitalistic marketplaces are rife with claims about products that are either completely false or deceitfully exaggerated. State authorities routinely crack down on these fraudulent enterprises usually with a cease and desist order or with a demand for supporting evidence. The idea is to protect consumers from spending money on useless merchandise.

Religion fits this theme to a tee. Specifically, Christianity tells consumers that if you attend their church, pray, and pay a tithe that you will enjoy better health, more success, and an eternal life after you die. None of these promises are supported by evidence, and in fact, the first two are easily debunked by scientific and demographical studies, and the third can be shown to be highly suspect by examining our expanding knowledge of cerebral biology. The following was taken from:

https://valerietarico.com/2020/04/30/religious-claims-should-be-held-to-the-same-standard-as-other-advertising/

A Seattle scientist and entrepreneur named Johnny Stine proclaimed on Facebook that he had developed a vaccine that made him immune to COVID-19. He offered to sell doses to 100 other people for $400 a pop. The State Attorney General Bob Ferguson sent him a cease-and-desist letter, threatening to sue and fine him for “making false or unsupported claims” that might deceive people into thinking that such a vaccine exists.

In recent weeks, the Federal Trade Commission has sent warning letters to other companies making unsubstantiated claims. One recipient touted high doses of Vitamin C or D and stem cells, which they claimed had been “researched and studied in helping in the healing process of COVID-19.” Cannabis companies have been told they cannot claim that their products prevent COVID-19. A Minnesota company was warned about selling soap-shaped pieces of copper that they said would deactivate the virus. A Houston company was told to stop selling a drink they said would fight infection by strengthening the immune system. The director of a California spa is facing charges of fraud because he told clients that hydroxycholoroquine was a “magic bullet” that would cure the novel coronavirus. . . . the list goes on.

The FTC said,

“It is unlawful . . . to advertise that a product can prevent, treat, or cure human disease unless you possess competent and reliable scientific evidence, including, when appropriate, well-controlled human clinical studies, substantiating that the claims are true at the time they are made.”

How then do religious leaders get a free pass? “Making false or unsupported claims” in the absence of “competent and reliable scientific evidence” is exactly what they do to earn a living. It’s their whole business model. And what they do is worse than merely promoting a bogus vaccine or immune booster, because they tout their products as cure-alls for all sorts of physical and mental health problems year after year. Sometimes their products actually kill—as when Christian Scientists convince susceptible believers to pray instead of seeking medical care or when fundamentalist parents try to beat the demons out of their behaviorally-disordered children. But mostly, religious leaders and institutions just bilk money out of vulnerable people who yearn for a little more goodness and health in their lives, leaving them alive but lighter in the pocket.

The scammers who advertise bogus preventives or cures for coronavirus are, for the most part, simply making claims based on insufficient evidence (or sometimes based on none at all). But churches do worse, because we have solid evidence that their products don’t work. Millions of dollars have been spent trying to prove that God heals people in response to prayers, and some of these studies have been fairly well-designed by scientific standards. But they have utterly failed to show consistent and significant healing effects from prayer.

Comparing the lifespans of devout vs secular people similarly fails to show a significant difference in favor of religious people or of one religion in particular beyond the positive benefits of social support. This is true despite the fact that many of the devout spend time daily or weekly for years on end praying (or thanking God) for health and healing. At best, in response to these “intercessory” prayers, their god operates at the margins of statistical significance. That’s pretty pathetic for an all-powerful deity; very pathetic when compared to the clear and dramatic difference made by modern antibiotics and vaccines—or even hand-washing.

So why is it then that secular snake-oil merchants and fraudsters are being reprimanded and threatened for trying to exploit a vulnerable public, but religion-vendors selling equally bogus products somehow have gotten themselves declared “essential businesses?” Worse, they are being allowed to apply for financial relief from funds they never contributed to because money going out of churches into insurance programs like FEMA would violate separation of church and state, but money going into churches out of the same public funds somehow doesn’t.

One difference, of course, is that the religion vendors are themselves victims as well as victimizers. Thanks to an ever-evolving family of mind viruses, they actually believe in the miracle cures they are selling, and many have paid the price. Around the world, some conservative religious institutions have prioritized the health of their religious enterprise (namely growing their congregations) over the health of individual members. Their refusal to stop meeting in person has turned their religious gatherings into disease hubs, sometimes with lethal results for leaders as well as members. But that seems all the more reason to set limits on religious claims of immunity and healing.

The Washington State Attorney General spoke in strong terms about scientist Johnny Stine selling an untested vaccine because Stine’s standing as a public figure made his influence particularly problematic. “I would say anytime someone has the veneer of a professional, a trusted source, a doctor, a scientist, that raises my concern that Washingtonians may think this is a solution to the challenge they are facing right now.”

Did you notice the glaring omission from that list of particularly trusted information sources? Yeah, me too.

Religion is the most successful scam every created. It sells a product that is useless beyond whatever placebo effect it might provide or the benefits of social gatherings that could be accessed without advancing claims of a supernatural benefit. It’s time to blow the whistle and broadcast a consumer warning.

(2789) The Bible is a self-destructive artifact

Christianity is doomed. That’s because it is inseparably linked to a text that is rooted in an ancient view of the world that is increasingly out of step with modern times. There is no need to push this point- the Bible destroys itself. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/12/bible-blunders-bad-theology-part-7.html#more

Indeed so much of the Bible is hard to understand, but there are many texts that go beyond that: they are embarrassingly bad, defying logic and morality. The Gideons might be thankful that most of those billion Bibles have not been read carefully. Priests and preachers might feel the same way, because New Testament is a minefield. It offers a sampling of ancient superstitions, so foreign actually to how most folks today—including Christians—think about the world. The church has had a 2,000-year head start in selling the Bible as “the good book,” and billions of people have bought the hype. But the minefield is still there, and faith stands little chance if people take a close look.

 Of course, there are the feel-good Bible verses that have become so familiar—and that fuel the hype. But let’s review some of the texts that should prompt folks to head for the exit.

 The gospel of Mark is a good place to start. Do Christians really want the Jesus depicted here? In an article I posted here in January 2018, “Getting the Gospels Off on the Wrong Foot,” I said this: “If you accept the Jesus of Mark’s gospel, you are well on the way to full-throttle crazy religion. No slick excuses offered by priests and pastors—none of their pious posturing about ‘our Lord and Savior’—can change that fact.”

 In the fifth chapter, for example, Jesus encounters a mentally ill man, and by a magic spell he transfers the guy’s demons into pigs. Most of us today wouldn’t agree that mental illness is caused by demons, or that a holy man could send them into pigs. That’s a sample of the superstition we find in Mark. Yes, we can chalk this up the naiveté of ancient thinking, and it’s too bad the Word of God didn’t rise above that.

 But we find something even more troubling in Mark 4, an alarming text that should alert Christians that something is amiss. After Jesus has told the Parable of the Sower,

 “When he was alone, those who were around him along with the twelve asked him about the parables. And he said to them, ‘To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand; so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’” (Mark 4:10-12)

Devout scholars have been wringing their hands about this text for a long time. How can it be that Jesus tells parables to prevent people from repenting and being forgiven? On what level does that make sense? But here we seem to have an example of Mark’s agenda slipping into full view. He was writing for those inside the cult, who were privileged to know the secrets of salvation: “To you has been given the mystery of the kingdom of God…” In the broader context of the Synoptic Gospels, parables are usually told to drive home important points (e.g., the Good Samaritan, compassion and generosity), but Mark wanted to let those in the cult know that they were in on a secret, and his parables usually relate to the kingdom.

This is a case where Christians have to face the fact that the gospel writers simply made up Jesus-script as they saw fit. All of the good Jesus-script, and all of the bad Jesus-script too: there is no way to verify anything that the authors ascribed to Jesus.

But Christians really have to study to pick up on something else, Mark’s loose quotation of Isaiah 6:10: “…so that they may not look with their eyes, and listen with their ears, and comprehend with their minds, and turn and be healed.” In Isaiah 6, the prophet wants to know how long the people of Israel will be prevented from repenting, and the vengeful Yahweh is explicit:

 “Until cities lie waste without inhabitant, and houses without people, and the land is utterly desolate; until the Lord sends everyone far away, and vast is the emptiness in the midst of the land. Even if a tenth part remain in it, it will be burned again…” (Isaiah 6:11-13)

 Mark seems to have been influenced by this nasty theology, which explodes into full view in his horrendous chapter 13. These are texts that undermine the common Christian assumption that the New Testament displays a loving God.

Far from it. Mark 4:10-12 is one of many texts that express the extremism and severity that cults usually preach—and these are train wreck verses for thoughtful Christians. Sometimes the cult-centric texts sound nice, for example, Mark 12:30, a command from Jesus: “…you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.” How can a loving God require this level of devotion and subservience? Divine narcissism is fueled by the certainty that worshippers love at this all, all, all, all level.

But what’s the point? Indeed most Christians—at least those who don’t choose monastic seclusion—have families, jobs, hobbies and pastimes that require major commitments of their hearts, souls, minds, and strength; they are not as fanatically obsessed with God as Jesus commands in Mark 12:30. Very few take this text seriously.

And it gets worse. Mark 12:30 is a preamble to train wreck verses in Matthew 10; when Christians read these, why don’t they cancel their memberships?

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (verses 34-36)

And then Jesus the cult fanatic—Matthew’s version—puts the frosting on the cake: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me.”  (verses 37-38)

Luke, however, wasn’t satisfied with even this. He added hate to the formula: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (14:26)

 Not only hatred of family, but hatred of life itself.

 What’s going on here? Christians who idealize Jesus, who have been taught to do so from their earliest memories of enforced religion, certainly must be stumped by these texts, no matter how hard translators try to disguise the meaning, no matter how much apologists engage in endless spinning. Devout folks—especially those who ask what Jesus would do—may run to their pastors for assurance that there’s a “way out,” that somehow these texts can’t mean what they seem to mean.

 The plain truth, however, is that the gospel writers were not embarrassed at all by these texts—for them, they’re not blunders. These propagandists were trying to preserve the early Jesus cult; divided loyalties were not acceptable: “You have to be with us a hundred percent.” Those outside the cult were out of luck, had no claim on salvation. Hence to the man who told Jesus he had to go home to bury his father—before he could sign on to be a disciple—Jesus replied, with no patience: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” (Matthew 8:22)

 Moreover, those who turned their backs on the cult’s message were doomed. In Matthew 10 (again), we read that Jesus sent his disciples out to preach, going from town to town—and too bad for those turned their backs on these door-to-door missionaries: “If anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment than for that town.” (Matthew 10:14-15)

 Try to imagine a modern parallel: as you close your door on annoying Mormons or Jehovah’s Witnesses—whose messages are of no interest—you hear them yelling, “Just you wait, someday your house will burn down!” Sound legit, right? For the gospel writers, old Yahweh was still in charge; with the train wreck verses, it gets harder and harder to make the case for the God of love.

 For quite a while now I have used the term Ancient Jesus Mystery Cult to describe Christianity. Indeed the early followers of Jesus were in competition with other cults in the first century, others that celebrated resurrected gods and knew secret formulas for achieving eternal life. Sacred meals were sometimes part of the package, and the Jesus cult was not to be outdone, especially in the theology imagined by the author of John’s gospel.

 So we come to the final train wreck verses to examine here—perhaps a highpoint of bad theology. The sacred meal proposed by John included Jesus’ body parts. After all, according to John, Jesus had been present at creation; he was “one with the father,” so how could his body not have magical properties? John invented this Jesus script:

 “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 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. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.”  (John 6:53-57)

 This is an extreme—and disgusting—example of magical thinking; making it a “sacrament” adds to the disgrace. When Christians are asked to pretend—to simulate—drinking blood, that’s the time to head for the exit!

 Randel Helms has famously said that the Bible is a self-destructive artifact (The Bible Against Itself, p. i). Yes, we can point to feel-good verses, but they are war with the nasty, scary verses, and can’t rescue Christianity, which is disastrously dragged down by so many train wreck verses. Far too much bad theology has been preserved in the New Testament.

A real god would have orchestrated a timeless document that would continue to inspire and astound later generations rather than one that reflected the relatively crude understandings typical of its time of origin. A religious faith pinned to an anachronistic text will not survive long-term without the chance to amend the text. And unfortunately for Christianity, the self-imposed rules preclude such revisions.

(2790) Belief requirement evolved over time

Early religions did not put an emphasis on faith or belief, but rather set about establishing rules of behavior that were important to the gods. As long as you more or less followed these rules, it didn’t really matter whether you believed in the existence of the rule maker. Then something changed. Belief became the critical element of how a person was to be judged, irrespective of the deeds that were or were not being performed. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/kg91zu/if_any_of_the_revealed_religions_were_true_belief/

‘Faith’ is only mentioned twice in all of the Old Testament. The religions that stretched back towards pre-history, paganism, Hinduism, Judaism, there was no proselytizing, evangelism, or demands for belief. Those gods just existed and you accepted or ignored them at your own peril, and that was that. But when Christianity or Islam or Mormonism came along, it was necessary that you believe, above all else. The only way a new religion could get off the ground was by mandating BELIEF as priority number one.

So why did belief become the most important criterion, more important even that doing good works? The best explanation is that requiring a certain belief brought more power to the clerics running the religions, and also it provided a definite line of separation between those who would, for instance, go to heaven or hell (judging on good works alone would result in a very fuzzy and indistinct dividing line). Although it had its advantages at that time, belief-centered religion is becoming an outmoded concept as the world tends to see a good deed performed by a Hindu as being equal in value to one performed by a Christian.

(2791) Mixed signals

Christianity is rife with confusing and contradictory messages, not the least of which is whether faith by itself is sufficient for salvation or whether you must also do good deeds. The Bible was written over many centuries by people who never acceded to a cohesive strategy, and so, it is a jumble of thoughts and attitudes that inevitable add up to a chaotic mess. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/kgn6za/christianity_doesnt_really_add_up/

In Christianity, there’s all of these conflicting messages that overlap and negate each other, such as “free will” and “God’s Plan.” “God’s Plan” makes it seem as if we are just some clockwork mice wound up and set on a course we can’t change, whereas “free will” makes it seem like we have a choice. Yes, we can be whatever we want, as long as that thing is God’s vocation [the author probably intended to use the word volition]. Yes, we can kill people, as long as God tells us to. (Don’t believe me? Read the Old Testament.) Yes, we can be friends with people, as long as they also believe in God. Yes, God loves us unconditionally, as long as we don’t disagree with him. (again, the Old Testament) Yes, God is impartial and unchanging, unless you read about his teenage mood swings when he flooded the world.

The point is, there are just too many of these conflicts to ignore. Welp, I suppose we just gotta buck up and have faith… yeah right.

Message consistency is the acid test of whether we should consider the Bible to have been the project of an interventionalist god. Evidence to the contrary would be a book with mixed messages, indicating .the lack of a supernatural agency directing its production. And this is what we observe.

(2792) Arguments against Paul’s authority

One of the troubling mysteries of Christianity is why a person unconnected to Jesus became the principal architect of its theology. This person was Paul of Tarsus. He authored a large portion of the New Testament and was the inventor of the idea that Jesus’ death on the cross was a salvific sacrifice providing by itself sufficient remediation for believers to enter heaven. But there are good reasons to conclude that he was a fraud. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/khbova/the_apostle_paul_was_either_a_fraud_or_gravely/

I could write a long essay about why Paul wasn’t who he claimed to be, but these general points should suffice.

• Matthias replaced Judas, not Paul. Paul had no authority as an apostle. He was, at best, a convert. Yet he claimed to be an apostle, and had the audacity to argue with and oppose the original apostles.
• Paul’s claim to apostleship rests solely on his alleged encounter with “Jesus”. Today, if someone today claimed he saw Jesus and Jesus spoke to him and made him an apostle, most Christians would dismiss him as insane or a fraud and reject his claims and writings. So why not apply the same common sense to Paul?
• Paul approved of the killing of Stephen. Jesus warned Christians about those who would KILL Christians. Paul was one of them. It’s delusional to think Jesus would have made an apostle out of someone like Paul.
• Paul who identified as a Roman citizen, also appealed to the pagan Caesar when he was in trouble. He also said “I stand at Caesar’s judgment seat, where I ought to be judged”. Wow. Imagine being handpicked by the resurrected Jesus to be an apostle and then saying Caesar is your boss!
• Paul preached to Ephesus which is in ‘Asia’ and later writes he was rejected by all of Asia. And then later, we read in revelation that Ephesus was praised for testing and rejecting false apostles.

Christianity would be on much firmer ground if Paul’s letters had been written by Jesus or by one of his apostles. Paul’s theory of salvation is not sufficiently confirmed by the books forming the remainder of the New Testament, leading to the suspicion that he was a ‘loose cannon’ developing his own personal religion.

(2793) Arguments against the Trinity

Christianity is a religion that is tied to a static set of scriptures, but nevertheless it has evolved over time, often in contradiction to its scriptures. Now, it is opposed to slavery, misogyny, and other forms of oppression and punishment that remain firmly ensconced in the Bible. Another extra-biblical concept is the Trinity- the idea that God is composed of three ‘persons,’ the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The following discusses why the Bible itself destroys this interpretation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/khx5gp/my_most_thorough_refutation_of_the_trinity_and/

Trinitarians believe 3 persons/members (however you want to word it) make up God. But how is that ANY different than me worshipping my neighbors (mom, dad, baby) but arguing that because I worship them as a FAMILY SINGULAR UNIT, and the family is the ONE God itself, it’s no longer polytheism, even though there are multiple people in the family? Wouldn’t the distinction between monotheism/polytheism become absurdly illusory because you could extinguish any claim of polytheism for any religion, including Hindus who worship millions of idols, by claiming that all the persons in fact make up one God? It seems like semantic trickery (and a bad one at that) to twist the trinity into monotheism. At the end of the day, Christians are worshipping a GROUP of (i.e. multiple) persons who make up god. In other words, whether you worship multiple persons as separate gods, or believe God consists of multiple persons, those are distinctions without meaning–i.e. it’s almost the same thing, polytheism but worded differently. In both instances you worship multiple persons (EVEN IF YOU claim they make up one “entity” to try and cure the obvious problem).

To make matters worse, the Bible seems to make clear that Jesus is distinct from the Father in many different ways that I’ll list here (yes, IK this is where the Christian reader will pipe up and is ready to fire off OTHER verses to explain the following away, but coupled with my previous points just try to consider these in their totality):

Jesus says the father is GREATER, so the father and son are not equal.

Jesus prays to God, refers to God separately throughout the Bible, and even cries out to God.

When Jesus is called good, he asks “why” the speaker calls him that when only God is good. Yes, I’ve heard some ppl try to explain this by saying, he was just asking, “oh, why do you think I’m good?” but I think the context makes clear that he is correcting the speaker. You can disagree but I think my reading is at least fair (and IMO the more natural reading).

Paul says “there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” IDK how you can be more clear that Jesus is not God because it literally says he’s a mediator BETWEEN man and God, and is a man himself.

Bible verse: “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst…” Again makes clear Jesus is a man who God worked THROUGH, but is not God himself. I mean virtually every description of Jesus is in relation to God as a distinct entity acting upon Jesus.

A father cannot be a son unto himself in any other context of all existence– that’s the most illogical part of this all. A father is his own son? What?

Jews and Muslims (the Abrahamic faiths before and after Christianity) reject any concept of the trinity and it’s completely absent from the Old Testament (minus very vague, stretched verses that Jews do not see as such). Jews and Muslims have a similar concept of a transcendent unitarian God. Isn’t it more likely that there was a screw-up in the middle with this whole trinity thing?

Which makes sense because the trinity wasn’t formalized until after Jesus and there were robust debates up until the council of nicea hundreds of years later. Wouldn’t you at least question?

Let’s say you’re still not convinced. You are commanded to not make any graven image of God and you shall (in His words) “take no other god before me.” Now you would argue that when God said no one beside Him that included the trinity (that’s your right). But seeing as it’s literally a central/perhaps the MOST central commandment, wouldn’t you be humble enough to at least be SLIGHTLY concerned of breaking it if the very Jews who come from that tradition, and the Muslims after are telling you you’re doing just that? Surely, the commandment wouldn’t be sooooo central if it were easy to follow/understand. It wouldn’t be hammered into your head if not for the fact that people tend to make excuses for their idolatry. Basically if other monotheists, many of whom follow the exact same verse, see what you’re doing as a violation, wouldn’t you be at least a LITTLE worried you might be committing a major sin?

Finally, given how central the trinity is to Christians (usually), and that Jesus was supposedly introducing this concept that no one before knew of (or at least it wasn’t generally accepted by God-fearing people), wouldn’t he have been more clear and said, “I am God” or “worship me” in no unclear terms? Yet he doesn’t and instead only talks about worshipping God in the third person, and continuing the message from Judaism (which has nothing to do with trinity). This also kind of adds to my point that it seems strange for thousands of years the holiest prophets are praying to a unitarian God, and then suddenly it becomes trinitarian (or is revealed as trinitarian at a distinct moment).

Now, the only way to reconcile all that is to say that Jesus is a chameleon who goes in and out of godhead as he pleases… meaning he’s “god” sometimes, and man sometimes (I’ve heard some Christians claim this, or that when there’s a verse referring to him as man, it’s referring to one aspect of him, but when it seems more like he’s referred to in a godlike way that’s the divine side of him). But that begs the question–if your mind is set on him being divine, he could literally say (as he almost does): I AM NOT GOD, and Christians would still explain that away by other vague verses? It’s a zero sum game at that rate. There’s no way for him to disavow himself of divinity bc every time he does, the Christians will insist he’s only talking about his human self.

Christianity is supposed to be defined by its allegedly divinely-inspired scriptures, but it is obvious that human interpretation beyond what is written is being used to formulate its doctrine. This disconnect is a red flag that reveals a human element that obscures whatever divine influence might exist.

(2794) Anachronistic attitude to sex

There are good reasons to believe that Christianity’s (and other religions’) prohibitive attitude toward sex is at least somewhat due to conditions that existed at that time, but that no longer exist. Before there were treatments for sexually transmitted diseases, promiscuous women (or women victimized by promiscuous males) suffered and died at an alarming rate. Also, such women were often discarded and not cared for because no man could be convinced that he was the father of her child. So these women as mothers also endured higher mortality. The fix was to make sex a sin outside of a definitely-defined bond of one woman to one man, or marriage. Because these health consequences no longer exist for the  most part, it is likely that had Christianity developed today, it would have been much more lenient with regard to sexual matters. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/khaw68/i_thoroughly_believe_that_this_is_the_reason_sex/

When religion was law… back when the “government” was a monarchy that used religious morals to keep people in check… there was no Penicillin! Also, many women died in child birth. Women (even now) are more likely to have symptoms (instead of being asymptomatic) and have complications associated with STD’s if they contract one. Soooooo to keep STD’s from killing your female population (no doctors, homie) and childbirth from killing your female population… oh and women typically stayed home to take care of the kids. So if there’s no daddy, there’s no money and no food for you or your child… you pretty much died. How do we keep people from dying? We tell them sex is a sin! It’s a sin! You’ll go to hell! You’ll be punished! You’ll die!!!! If you have sex out of wedlock, you’ll fucking die and everyone will burn in hell… a horrible painful fiery hell! So now that this shit is outdated, because we have condoms and penicillin, and a woman can work and take care of her offspring without a man… leave your outdated biblically descended slut shaming out of modern day society please. Thank you.

It seems unreasonable to think that a god would see sex as being inherently sinful when it is conducted between two consenting persons for mutual pleasure or relationship bonding.  This is especially true considering that the closest relatives to humans freely use sex in just this manner. What is more likely is that people invented the idea that God scorns promiscuity so that the practical problems of their day could be alleviated.

Christian apologists will claim that God gave the Israelites rules for sexual behavior to protect them because of the dangers that promiscuity posed at that time. But this is a concession admitting that the Bible is not altogether a timeless document, an accusation also attributable to, for example, the Bible’s position on slavery, women’s rights, and charging interest on loans.

So we are left with the question: Is God really opposed to recreational sex, or was he simply providing rules for personal protection? If the former, God is portrayed as a tantalizer giving people bodies that crave sex while largely withholding the opportunity. If the latter, the Bible loses a certain degree of relevancy. But, in the final analysis, it is much more likely that no god was involved in the scriptural restriction of sexual activity, and that it resulted from an effort to preserve community health and to ensure that a man could be assured of his fatherhood and thus incentivize him protect the mother of his offspring.

(2795) Prophecies lack evidential value

Christians often defend their faith by pointing to scriptural prophecies that they claim have come to pass. Most of these cases are debatable as to their specificity, timing, and actual fulfillment. But what is important to note is that, in their mind, prophecies are non-falsifiable.. in the sense that they can be mentally massaged in ways to deny any failures. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/kislhn/theres_no_way_for_the_christian_to_distinguish/

There are several prophecies in the Bible that have failed to come to pass. Here are just a few examples:

• Ezekiel 26 predicts that Nebuchadnezzar would conquer and completely destroy the city of Tyre. This did not happen and Ezekiel even admits as much just a few chapters later in 29:18, with no explanation given as to whythe prediction failed.
• Jeremiah 46 predicts that Nebuchadnezzar would destroy Memphis and Tahpanhes and it specifically says to “prepare baggage for exile.” Needless to say, Memphis was never destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, and neither was Tahpanhes.
• Daniel 11 predicts that Antiochus Epiphanes IV would invade Egypt and conquer it. He would then “pitch his tents” in Israel and “come to his end (die)”. Not only did Antiochus IV not conquer Egypt, he also died in Persia, far away from Israel.

However, when prophecies like the ones above are shown to have failed, typically the responses look something like this:

1. God can change his mind.If a prophecy didn’t happen, it doesn’t mean it was false. It just means it was a conditional prophecy. God changed his course of action.
2. It will be fulfilled later.Prophecies can have a dual fulfillment, or even a partial fulfillment. So if it didn’t happen before, it will happen sometime in the future.
3. It was a metaphor for something/someone else.For example, when prophecies talk about ‘Israel’, this is actually referring to the church. Or when it seems to be referring to Antiochus IV, it’s actually talking about the future Antichrist.

The problem with this is, the above excuses can be made for literally any prophecy in human history.
Pick any failed prophet you like (Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Harold Camping, Pat Robertson, etc). Using the logic of Christian apologetics, none of their predictions were necessarily wrong. Perhaps God was speaking through them but just changed his mind. Or perhaps there was a partial fulfillment and the rest will occur later. Or perhaps we have simply misunderstood the prophecy and it actually refers to something/someone else in the distant future that we know nothing about.

If ANY and ALL prophecies can be defended in this way, then there is no way to distinguish truth from falsehood. The only way to escape this is to establish a consistent standard by which prophecies can be evaluated. Ironically, Deuteronomy 18:22 provides us with one:

“If a prophet speaks in the LORD’s name but his prediction does not happen or come true, you will know that the LORD did not give that message. That prophet has spoken without my authority and need not be feared.”

It is any easy exercise to examine the range of prophecies that have been uttered by Christians over the past century and see that the rate of fulfillment is not statistically separable from random chance. The techniques that Christians use to deny this FACT reveal the flaws in their mentation. Claims that are non-falsifiable do not provide evidence of anything, much less the presence of an almighty celestial deity.

(2796) QAnon post-shadows Christianity

If we define religion as a poorly-evidenced popular belief that spreads by word of mouth, then the nascent QAnon movement is just that. It is a religion that ‘post-shadows’ and utilizes the same gullibility-capturing strategy that fueled the Jesus movement in the First Century. And it is no wonder that QAnon followers are almost unanimously Christian. The following was taken from:

https://www.skeptical-science.com/society-2/qanon-watch-updates-dec-18-2020/

Side Note: As a quick primer on QAnon. It is the belief that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against US president Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal and that he is the chosen one to save us.

In many respects QAnon is a modern complex religious mythology that taps into something similar. It explains the world through a series of myths and legends. Within the Q-verse there are also heroes, hidden supernatural forces, and dark evil that requires people to pour vast amounts of time and energy into it all. It completely consumes those ensnared in a complete fantasy and gives them, not only an explanation for their lot in life, but also a role to play as one of the select few who are an army of light resisting dark evil forces that threaten everything.

It ensnares because it is tantalizing and mesmerizing. It persists by tickling the human mind and meets a need that humans have to feel important and in control of complete and utter chaos and random events.

In other words, QAnon is very much a potent modern religious mythology that has been naturally selected because it is both enticing and psychologically potent.

I should of course also underline the word mythology. None of it is true. To those outside, it all appears to be batshit crazy on steroids. There is a reason for that. That reason is because that is exactly what it is, and yet it is still also fascinating to observe the machinations of it all from the outside.

To anyone wondering how Christianity could have survived if the underlying story was fictional, they need only see what is happening with QAnon, a perfect analog to the group of gullible, mostly undereducated peasants living in First-Century Judea who were enthralled by the fantastic idea that a man-god had roamed the earth and had miraculously risen from the dead. QAnon is the quintessential proof that humans can be persuaded en masse to believe strongly in things that are patently not true.

(2797) Jesus consistently contradicts himself

It would be expected that if Jesus was God and that God oversaw the development of the gospels, that the scriptural statements of Jesus would be precisely consistent. But this is not the case. The following lists 30 instances where Jesus contradicts himself:

http://advocatusatheist.blogspot.com/p/bible-contradictions.html

The fact of the matter is, Jesus contradicted his own teachings on more than one occasion, okay, on a few dozen occasions; in obvious cases such as John 8:14 where he states “Though I bear record of myself, yet my record is true…” which contradicts by what he said previously in John 5:31 stating, “If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.” So which is it? As such they negate each other and make Jesus words imbecilic at best. Here is a continuation of Jesus specific contradictions:

1)  Jesus consistently contradicts himself concerning his Godly status.  “I and my father are one.”  (John 14:28) Also see Philippians 2:5-6. Those verses lead us to believe that he is a part of the trinity and equal to his father being a manifestation of him. Yet, Jesus also made many statements that deny he is the perfect men, much less God incarnate.  Take the following for example: “Why callest thou me good?  There is none good but one, that is God” (Matthew 19:17).  “My father if greater then I.”  (John 14:28)  Also see Matthew 24:26 Clearly, Jesus is denouncing the possibility of him being the Messiah in those three verses.

2)  Jesus said, “Whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire” (Matthew 5:22).  Yet, he himself did so repeatedly, as Matthew 23:17-19 and Luke 11:40 & 12:20 show.  Clearly Jesus should be in danger of hell too?

3)  Does Jesus support peace, or war?  Matthew 5:39  “Resist not evil, but whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”  Also note Matthew 6:38-42 & 26:52 where Jesus teaches non-resistance, Non-violence.  Now read (Luke 22:36-37) Where Jesus commands people to take arms for a coming conflict.  (John 2:15)  Jesus uses a whip to physically drive people out of the temple.

4)  Matthew 15:24  Jesus said, “I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of lsrael,”.  This would of course mean that he is here only to save the Jews.  The scriptures repeatedly back up this notion that Christ is savior to the Jews and not the gentiles (see Romans 16:17, Revelations 14:3-4 & John 10).  The contradiction lies in what Jesus later tells his followers: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

5)  Can we hate our kindred?  Luke 14:26 Jesus says “If any man come unto me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brother, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he can not be my disciple.”  John 3:15  “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.”  Also see Ephesians 6:22, 5:25, & Matthew 15:4

6)  Even many of the staunchest defenders of Jesus admit that his comment in Matthew 10:34 (“I came not to send peace but a sword”) contradicts verses such as Matthew 26:52 (“Put up again thy sword into his place: for all that take the sword shall perish with the sword”).

7)  Deuteronomy 24:1 & 21:10-14 all say that divorce is allowed for the simple reason if a “man no longer delighteth in his wife”.  Yet Jesus comes along and breaks his father’s law by saying in Matthew 5:32 that adultery is the only way one can be divorced.

8)  In Mark 8:35 Jesus said: “…but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s the same shall save it.”  How could Jesus have said this when there was no gospel when he lived?  The gospel did not appear until after his death.

9)  Matthew 6:13 Jesus recites a revised prayer and states, “Don’t bring us into temptation.”  God is the cause of everything, even Satan.  God has been leading people into temptation since the Garden of Eden.  Otherwise, the trees of life and knowledge would have never been there.

10)  Matthew 12:1-8 Jesus thinks it’s okay to break his father’s laws, by breaking the Sabbath day.  He states that he is basically exempt for such fiascoes and that he is Master of the Sabbath.

11)  John 3:17 Jesus contradicts himself when he says, “God didn’t send his son into the world to condemn it, but to save it.” Jesus seems to forget his own stories.

12)  James 4:3  If your prayers are not answered, it’s your own damned fault. This is in direct contradiction to where Jesus says “seek and ye shall find, ask and it shall be known to you.”

13)  “If Jesus bears witness of himself his witness is true” John 8:14, “If I bear witness of myself it is not true.”  John 5:31

14)  “I am with you always, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20), versus “For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always” (Matthew 26:11 , Mark 14:7, John 12:8) and “Ye shall seek me, and shall not find me: and where I am thither ye cannot come” (John 7:34).  Is this the kind of friend one can rely on?

15)  “And he saith unto them, Whosoever shall put away his wife, and marry another, committeth adultery against her” (Mark 10:11 & Luke 6:18), versus “And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery” (Matthew 19:9).  In the book of Matthew, Jesus said a man could put away his wife if one factor– fornication–is involved.  In Mark and Luke he allowed no exceptions.

16)  Jesus is quoted: “Judge not, and ye shall be not judged; condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven” (Luke 6:37 & Matthew 7:1), versus “Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment” (John 7:24).  Jesus stated men are not to judge but, then, allowed it under certain conditions.  As in the case of divorce, he can’t seem to formulate a consistent policy.

17)  “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  Matthew 27:46, (also note the time before crucifixion where Jesus prays for the “cup to passeth over me”) versus “Now is my soul troubled.  And what shall I say?  ‘Father, save me from this hour?’  No, for this purpose I have come to this hour” (John 12:27 RSV). Jesus can’t seem to decide whether or not he wants to die.  One moment he is willing; the next he isn’t.

18)  In Luke 23:30 (“Then shall they begin to say to the mountains, fall on us, and to the hills, cover us”) Jesus quoted Hosea 10:8 (“…and they shall say to the mountains, cover us; and to the hills, fall on us”).  And, like Paul, he often quoted inaccurately.  In this instance, he confused mountains with hills.

19)  “And Jesus answered and said unto them, Elias truly shall first come, and restore all things.  But I say unto you, That Elias is come already, and they know him not, but have done unto him whatsoever they listed.  Likewise shall also the Son of man suffer of them. Then the disciples understood that he spake unto them of John the Baptist” (Matthew 17:11-13).  John the Baptist was beheaded, but Jesus was not.  And what did John the Baptist restore?  Nothing!

20)  We are told salvation is obtained by faith alone (John 3:18 & 36) yet Jesus told a man to follow the Commandments-Matthew 19:16-18 (saving by works)-if he wanted eternal life.

21)  In Luke 12:4 Jesus told his followers to “Be not afraid of them that kill the body.” But Matthew 12:14-16, John 7:1, 8:59, 10:39, 11:53-54, & Mark 1:45 show that Jesus consistently feared death.  Jesus went out of his way to hide, run, and attempt escape from the Roman and Jewish authorities.

22)  Matthew 5:28 says to sin in “your heart” is considered a sin in itself.  The messiah is supposed to be God incarnate, not able to sin, yet in Matthew 4:5 & Luke 4:5-9, Jesus was tempted by Satan in the desert, which is sinning in his heart.  Jesus also took upon all the sins of the world during his crucifixion, so how can it be said that “Jesus was the perfect man without sin”?  This would lead one to believe he was not the Messiah.

23)  Jesus told us to “Love your enemies; bless them that curse you,” but ignored his own advice by repeatedly denouncing his opposition.  Matthew 23:17 (“Ye fools and blind”), Matthew 12:34 (“0 generation of vipers”), and Matthew 23:27 (“. . . hypocrites . . . ye are like unto whited sepulchres. . .”) are excellent examples of hypocrisy.

24)  Did the people of Jesus’ generation see any signs?  (Matthew 12:38-40)  Jesus announced that no signs would be given to that generation except the Resurrection itself.  (Mark 8:12-13)  Jesus announced that no signs would be given to that generation.  (Mark 16:20)  They went out preaching, and the Lord confirmed the word through accompanying signs. (John 20:30)  Jesus provided many wonders and signs. (Acts 2:22)  Jesus provided many wonders and signs.  (Acts 5:12 & 8:13) many signs and wonders were done through the apostles.

25)  Jesus commands the disciples to go into Galilee immediately after the resurrection. Matthew 28:10.  Jesus commands the disciples to “tarry in Jerusalem” immediately after the resurrection.

26)  Matthew 28:18 & John 3:35 both tell that Jesus said he could do anything.  Yet Mark 6:5 says Jesus was not all powerful.

27)  Jesus says in Luke 2:13-14 that he came to bring peace on earth.  Matthew 10:34 Jesus back peddles and says he did not come to bring peace on earth.

28)  Did Christ receive testimony from man?  “Ye sent unto John and he bare witness unto the truth.  But I receive not testimony from man.”  John 5:33-34 “And ye shall also bear witness, because ye have been with me from the beginning.”  John 15:27

29)  Christ laid down his life for his friends.  John 15:13 & 10:11 Christ laid down his life for his enemies.  Romans 5:10

30)  Deuteronomy 23:2 says that bastards can not attend church unto the tenth generation. If Jesus was spawned by Mary and Jehovah as the Bible claims then he is technically a bastard and should not be the leader of the church.

This is certainly not a surprise if four fallible authors working independently, apart from referring to previous gospels, attempt to regurgitate what Jesus said. But it is highly unexpected if Christian claims about Jesus  and the Bible are true.

(2798) Jesus worship is shameful

Christianity works hard to convince people that they are intrinsically pathetic, sinful, inherently selfish, and in need of serious repair. It demands that we worship a man who was none of those things, was perfect, and, in fact, was the individual that created the entire universe. But once the indoctrination is cast aside, it is easy to see the folly of this situation. The following is a slightly edited quote from atheist blogger infidel753:

You are a human, a member of the most intelligent, self-aware, mentally-sophisticated species on this world and possibly any world. You are of the race that tamed mammoths and bacteria, that crafts poetry and mathematics and architecture and vaccines, whose minds pierce the farthest stars and the innards of atoms. There is nothing higher than you ever discovered. It should be shameful for you to bow down to anything, especially to a god that is a figment of the imagination of those who lived thousands of years ago in ignorance and superstition.

It is especially humiliating to see people lavishly pouring out devotion for a man who believed in demons, had no knowledge of germs, didn’t know that North or South America existed, had no written language skills, thought that the story of Noah was factual history, and who believed that the world order was coming to an end within his century. Yes, we are speaking of Jesus of Nazareth, or more precisely Yeshua ben Yosef. For an educated person of the 21^st Century to worship this man is equivalent to a tenured medical doctor prostrating himself in front of a teenage orderly hired for summer work at the hospital and asking him to perform surgery so he can watch and learn.

(2799) Positive atheism

Christian apologists often use the defense that there is no evidence against the existence of God, referring to the concept that it is impossible to prove a negative. While this is generally true, there is a case to be made that positive atheism, the belief that there are no gods, is not an untenable position- it has some merit, as discussed below:

http://www.franzkiekeben.com/blog

I was recently involved in an online discussion in which a reason I hadn’t previously seen was offered for preferring negative to positive atheism. (By negative atheism, I mean the mere lack of belief in any gods, and by positive atheism, the belief that there are no gods. And the fact that one usually needs to explain this is one reason I prefer the traditional terminology.)

There are better and worse reasons for being only a negative atheist. But the one that was argued by my opponent in the discussion was pretty weak — and if it is accepted by others who call themselves atheists, they really should be aware of that.

Briefly, my opponent’s argument was that one should only believe when there is evidence; that there is no evidence that there are no gods; and therefore that to positively disbelieve in such beings is completely unjustified.

I suspect some might accept this argument as a result of thinking of evidence exclusively as direct evidence. One can have direct evidence that there are horses by, for example, seeing some. But one cannot have direct evidence that there are no unicorns by seeing none. This, however, ignores indirect evidence. And there is plenty of that regarding unicorns.

One is justified in positively disbelieving in unicorns when one knows certain things about this supposed creature — for instance, that the earliest reports of it were based on long-horned animals depicted in profile (and as a result showing only one horn), as well as on descriptions of rhinos to ancient Greeks who had never seen them; that the spiral tusks of narwhals were sometimes found on beaches and thought to be unicorn horns; that no unicorn or unicorn skeleton has ever been found (which would be very unlikely, given that it is supposedly a large animal); and so on. All this points to the unicorn being a mythical creature — and as that is by far the most likely conclusion, it is reasonable to hold that unicorns aren’t real.

Similar kinds of things can be said about gods. There is evidence that gods are human inventions, and even reasonable explanations for why human beings invented them. There are things we know about our existence (e.g., that we are evolved, physical entities) that make the existence of beings who are like us in many respects (e.g., having minds much like ours), yet exist in a supernatural realm or have supernatural powers, extremely unlikely at best. There is the fact that no god, and no act of a god, has ever been observed (there are of course supposed exceptions to this, but the best explanations for them do not require positing any deities) — yet for all of the gods that humans have believed in, this absence is as much of a problem as the absence of unicorns is for unicorn belief. Finally (though of course I wouldn’t expect people in general to know this), there is the argument which I made in The Truth about God, that on the traditional meaning of “god”, a god must have libertarian free will — which rules out their existence if libertarian free will is impossible because there is no middle ground between the determined and the random.

Now, one does not have to accept any of these points as conclusive. And one might have other reasons for being a negative atheist. But to claim that positive atheists are mistaken because there is no evidence against the existence of gods is unreasonable.

The logic behind positive atheism is as follows:

1) Claim A is asserted to be true.

2) If Claim A Is true, then Observation B is expected.

3) B is not observed.

4) Therefore Claim A is unlikely to be true.

A positive atheist obviously must concede that it is possible for a god to exist that is determined to hide itself such that it appears not to exist. So it is still impossible to prove that a god does not exist, but, like the unicorn, it can be shown that such a god is extremely unlikely, and for all intents and purposes, this is as good as proving its non-existence.

(2800) Resurrection evidence revisited

Christians are fond of using the alleged martyrdom of Jesus’ followers and the fact that women made the initial discovery as evidence for the truth of Jesus’ resurrection. But as the following reveals, the use of those arguments would not convince Christians of the miracles associated with other religions.

http://www.franzkiekeben.com/blog/previous/3

According to many Christian apologists, we have good evidence for the truth of the resurrection. Two things in particular are usually mentioned: First, that many of the followers of Jesus were willing to risk their lives in order to spread the gospel. And second, that the discovery of the empty tomb was made by women.

That the disciples risked their lives, and in the majority of cases ended up being executed, shows they really believed in Jesus’ resurrection, for who would be willing to take things that far for something they did not believe? That women were the ones who found the empty tomb shows that the story wasn’t made up, since women weren’t trusted as sources of information in those days — and thus, if anyone were making up the story, they would have said it was men who made the discovery.

These arguments are, of course, extremely weak. But rather than criticizing them directly (for that, see for example my book The Truth about God, pp. 68-72), I’d like to pose a question regarding miracle claims in other religions. Let’s take Buddhism and Islam as examples.

Here are some of the claims made about the Buddha:

Immediately after birth, he was able to walk and talk, and in addition, every place he set his foot a lotus flower immediately appeared. Perhaps more amazing, he was able to shoot flames out of one half of his body while water emitted from the other half, then switch halves and repeat. All of which shows, I’m sure we can all agree, that the Buddha was a pretty cool dude. But even these miracles cannot measure up to those of Muhammad.

Some claims made about Muhammad:

The prophet, as everyone knows, flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse (or horse-like animal), then up to heaven and back. Less known is that he could understand the language of animals and that his body did not cast a shadow. Most amazing of all, he once split the moon in two, so that one half was in front of a mountain and the other on the back.

Now, most of these claims are comparable to those made about Jesus, and to the resurrection in particular. My question, then, is this: If you maintain that the above evidence is good enough to show that Jesus rose from the dead, would you accept the same kind of evidence for any of the claims of these other religions? In other words, if it had been women who reported seeing Muhammad flying on a winged horse, or if Buddha’s original followers were willing to die for their belief that lotus flowers bloomed wherever he walked, would that convince you of the truth of those things?

Note that to reply that women didn’t report any of these things, or that followers didn’t die for any of these claims (or did they?) would be beside the point. The question I’m asking has nothing to do with what actually happened. Rather, the question is whether that type of evidence would be sufficient for such claims.

If the “fact” that women discovered the empty tomb, along with the disciples willingness to die for him, is sufficient to show that Jesus came back from the dead, then women reporting Muhammad’s amazing flight, along with his followers willingness to die for that claim, should be sufficient to show that there really once was a flying horse. But would it be?

What this exercise reveals is that Christians are being hypocritical in crediting evidence to support their faith, whereas it is obvious that they would dismiss the same type of evidence that could potentially validate the miracle claims of other religions. But beyond that, and just like the followers of every religion, Christians routinely dismiss other faiths without even looking at the evidence.

Follow this link to #2801