(801) Why did Jesus leave the Earth so quickly?

This is a question that has perplexed theologians for decades.  Why didn’t Jesus remain on the Earth and continue to enlighten and guide the world in accordance with God’s moral directives?  Some will say that he needed to travel to other planets and die there for the sins of aliens.  Others will say he left so that faith would be required to believe in him, rather than hard evidence.

These might be plausible theories, but what is more questionable and less explainable is why he left so quickly so as to leave so many of his fellow Jews in a state of non-acceptance of his messiahship. The very people that his ministry was focused on ended up rejecting him and considering him to be a failed prophet.  Doesn’t it seem like a compassionate Jesus would have stayed around long enough to convince his fellow Jews, his CHOSEN PEOPLE, that he was actually the son of God, or God himself, so that they would not be left in an erroneous state of unbelief for the next 20+ centuries?  By proving his resurrection to his countrymen, he could have bridged the Jewish-Christian divide once and for all.

Additionally,  why did he leave so soon without clearly identifying the tenets, doctrines, and rules for the new religion of Christianity? If he had done so, we would have exactly one denomination of Christianity instead of over 38,000, and it would have prevented the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of people who believed something different from their tormentors.

The answer to this question is the one that requires the least amount of rationalization.  Jesus did not rise from the dead, and the myths that evolved saying he did would not have had much acceptance if it was claimed that he spent a long time post-resurrection on the earth.   Getting Jesus off the planet quickly was essential to sell the believability of the story.  Otherwise there would have been questions about why so few had seen him.  All myths require a quick and complete withdrawal of the ‘evidence.’

(802) God is responsible for sending people to Hell

Christians will often claim that God does not send people to Hell, but rather they send themselves by refusing the free gift of salvation.  They use the analogy of a someone stranded in the water, being thrown a life preserver, but deciding not to use it, and so they drown.

This is a flawed analogy.  To make it more accurate, it is dark outside and the person on the boat has two life preservers.  One is just a regular version, but the other one has a light attached to it.  He throws the unlighted preserver into the water, but the drowning person cannot see it and therefore drowns.  Is the person on the boat morally responsible for the death of the victim?

Now, of course, the person on the boat is God.  He has two life preservers- the regular one which represents the current state of evidence he has provided the world regarding his existence and the path to salvation, and the ‘lighted’ one that that represents the concrete indisputable evidence that he could provide- kind of like when Jesus was working miracles and rising from the dead.

God elects to throw the unlighted preserver and watches as billions of people drown and are sent to their punishment.  Is God morally responsible for sending these people to Hell?  Yes, indeed, he is.

(803) Failure to heal paralysis

In John 14:12-13, Jesus made this promise:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father.  Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.”

In Matthew 9:1-8, Jesus healed a paralyzed man:

Jesus stepped into a boat, crossed over and came to his own town. Some men brought to him a paralyzed man, lying on a mat. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the man, “Take heart, son; your sins are forgiven.”

At this, some of the teachers of the law said to themselves, “This fellow is blaspheming!”

Knowing their thoughts, Jesus said, “Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your hearts? Which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? But I want you to know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins.” So he said to the paralyzed man, “Get up, take your mat and go home.” Then the man got up and went home. When the crowd saw this, they were filled with awe; and they praised God, who had given such authority to man.

Since there has never been a verified case of paralysis being cured by faith healing, and the fact that, for the most part, prayers to heal paralyzed victims are not even attempted, there is no rational way to remedy this contradiction. According to scripture, faithful prayers should be sufficient to cure paraplegics and quadriplegics, just like Jesus did.  This is proof that, at the least, biblical scripture is flawed, and at the most, evidence that the entire story of Jesus is a fable.

(804) What is the overall result of 2000 years of prayers?

Christianity claims that faithful followers have a direct connection to a benevolent, loving, and all-powerful god who has promised to hear and answer prayers.  So after 2000 years, what is the overall result of this propitious situation?  The following is taken from:

http://new.exchristian.net/2015/11/were-on-our-own.html

And yet, according to recent polls, there are at least 2.4 billion practicing Christians on this planet. Most of them, we must presume, spend a portion of their life praying. Praying for what? For peace. For goodwill. For the intervention of their God. Most of these Christians, we must presume, have petitioned their God about the current situation on Earth (as they have presumably been doing for at least 2,000 years). And their God (who allegedly said that when his believers ask anything in his name, it will be done) either doesn’t listen, or doesn’t care. But that wouldn’t make any sense. If he doesn’t care, then these believers are wrong about his love anyway and the whole point is moot. If he doesn’t listen, why did he lie to them when he said their prayers mattered? And neither can these Christians claim that their God has answered their prayers. There is no peace on Earth. There is no salvation. Reality is dark, and it’s getting darker. No one is answering any prayers (and the recovery of lost items or the finding of a parking space—these things don’t count; not when such bigger matters are being ignored).

Where is the God of the parking spaces and the greeting cards when 150 human beings are being senselessly butchered in the name of religion?So where is this God? Where is the God of the parking spaces and the greeting cards when 150 human beings are being senselessly butchered in the name of religion? Where is the net result of 2.4 billion prayers? Where is the result of 2,000 years worth of prayer? If this God existed and deigned to answer prayer, this planet would be completely different. But look around. Look for those answers. There are none.

We are on our own, people. There is no God out there. It’s time to finally come to terms with that, as a species. It’s time to stop praying and start taking matters into our own hands. The only ones who can save the humans are the humans. We must be our own salvation.

This is the argument of cumulative effect- if billions of people have prayed for the same things over twenty centuries to an actual, righteous, loving god who promised to deliver their petitions, the world would look VERY different than it does today.  This represents overwhelming evidence that Christianity is false.

(805) Jude cites non-canonical source

Any claim of biblical inerrancy is refuted by a reference made in the New Testament Book of Jude to the Book of Enoch, a book which was determined in the Third Century to be ‘not inspired by God’ and removed from the Bible.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/paul_carlson/nt_contradictions.html

Jude 14 contains a prophecy of Enoch. Thus, if the Book of Jude is the Word of God, then the writings of “Enoch” from which Jude quotes, are also the Word of God. The Book of Enoch was used in the early church until at least the third century – Clement, Irenaeus and Tertullian were familiar with it. However, as church doctrine began to solidify, the Book of Enoch became an embarrassment to the church and in a short period of time it became the Lost Book of Enoch. A complete manuscript of the Book of Enoch was discovered in Ethiopia in 1768. Since then, portions of at least eight separate copies have been found among the Dead Sea scrolls. It is easy to see why the church had to get rid of Enoch – not only does it contain fantastic imagery (some of which was borrowed by the Book of Revelation), but it also contradicts church doctrine on several points (and, since it is obviously the work of several writers, it also contradicts itself).

The following describes the Jude reference to Enoch:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Enoch

Enoch is referred to as a historical person and prophet, and quoted, in Jude 1:14–15:

And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.

Compare this with Enoch 1:9, translated from the Ethiopic (found also in Qumran scroll 4Q204=4QEnoch^c ar, col I 16–18):

And behold! He cometh with ten thousands of His Saints To execute judgment upon all, And to destroy all the ungodly: And to convict all flesh Of all the works of their ungodliness which they have ungodly committed, And of all the hard things which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

The reason this is important is that it shows that the identification of what is and what is not scripture was a political process that changed with time.  Enoch was considered scripture and then was later discarded, but the reference in the Book of Jude remained.  If Enoch was not inspired then it would follow that Jude was also not inspired because of its faulty reference. Thus, the Book of Jude should have been removed from the Bible.

(806) Calling the disciples

There can only be one way that Jesus collected his disciples and if the gospel writers were being inspired by the Holy Spirit to write an accurate history, it would be expected that their stories would match.  They do not.  The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/paul_carlson/nt_contradictions.html

1. In Matthew 4:18-22 and Mark 1:16-20, Peter and Andrew are casting nets into the sea. Jesus calls out to them and they leave their nets and follow him. Jesus then goes on a little further and sees James and John mending their nets with their father. He calls to them and they leave their father and follow him.

2. In Luke 5:1-11, Jesus asks Peter to take him out in Peter’s boat so Jesus can preach to the multitude. James and John are in another boat. When Jesus finishes preaching, he tells Peter how to catch a great quantity of fish (John 21:3-6 incorporates this story in a post- resurrection appearance). After Peter catches the fish, he and James and John are so impressed that after they bring their boats to shore they leave everything and follow Jesus.

3. In John 1:35-42, Andrew hears John the Baptist call Jesus the Lamb of God. Andrew then stays with Jesus for the remainder of the day and then goes to get his brother Peter and brings him to meet Jesus.

If the gospel authors were simply making up stories about Jesus, we would expect to see variations in the way the story was told.  That is exactly what is seen in these examples.

(807) The parable of the shiny car

To most Christians, Christianity is like a shiny car that sits in their garage.  It looks gorgeous, and they often go to gaze at its beauty. As long as that’s all they do, everything is great.  But there is one caveat- do not look under the hood! The car has no engine!

Christianity looks lovely from the outside, but once you look at the history of how it came into existence, the way it changed over time, and the numerous scriptural contradictions, the ‘car’ no longer looks fine and in fact no longer looks like a car at all, but just a mirage.  It will never look the same again.

Fortunately, for most Christians, they never ‘look under the hood,’ so they can maintain their fantasy. The church encourages this lack of investigation by discouraging independent study of the Bible, sermons that do not address the theological difficulties,  and recitations from only the good parts of scripture. The aphorism ‘ignorance is bliss’ applies here in spades.

For those who have ‘looked under the hood,’ dealing with those who haven’t can be frustrating.  It is like the kid who sees Mom and Dad placing toys under the Christmas tree and eating the cookies, but having to deal with brothers and sisters who continue to insist that Santa is real and who dispute your eyewitness testimony.

Yes, it is possible to refute Christianity to a 100% certainly level, but it takes courage, effort, and a clear mind.  The evidence is there and it’s sufficient for one to be certain.  A reasonably informed atheist is much more sure that he is right than even the most fervent Christian.

(808) Jesus admits he is just a messenger and a sacrificial lamb

Jesus is usually portrayed by Christians as being one-third of the Trinity, and as being co-equal to the Father and the Holy Spirit.  But a scripture in the Gospel of John seems to contradict that characterization:

John 12:47-50

“If anyone hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge that person. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; the very words I have spoken will condemn them at the last day. For I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me to say all that I have spoken. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say.”

This is most likely just a made up verse by the author of John, but what it shows is that even at the time that John was written, about 60 years after Jesus’s death, the theology of his divine status was not fully complete. There are hints of Jesus’s relegated status in other gospels, such as Mark 10:18

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good–except God alone.”

But what John wrote in 12:47-50 goes to the heart of the problem for Christianity as Jesus is admitting that he is just saying what the Father has told him to say, a definite sign of subservience.  He also states that he is not to judge anyone, but rather to save everyone, presumably by dying on the cross.  So he is just a messenger and a human sacrificial ‘lamb.’  That hardly makes Jesus seem like the revered god that Christians worship.

(809) The Bible is stuck in the Iron Age, needs to be updated

The standard Christian theological position is that the Bible is a timeless document, no less true or relevant today than when it was first written.  But when it comes to issues such as the treatment of disease and psychological maladies, forms of punishments for crimes, and issues such as slavery, homosexuality, divorce, legalities, and resource management, it is noticeably outdated.

Another area that the Bible lags modern society is women’s rights. The following is taken from:

http://johnpavlovitz.com/2016/01/18/1o-things-this-christian-doesnt-believe-about-the-bible/

The Old and New Testaments were written predominantly, if not exclusively by men during a time when women were essentially marital property, with their status and moral worth often linked to marriage and to childbearing. These stories by the very nature of the context of their creation, carry cultural biases that need to be considered and challenged today, especially regarding the role of women in ministry leadership and gender roles in general, where the Bible has too often been an impediment to progress.

The Bible was written during the Iron Age and is tailored for that age, but so much has changed since then.  The problem for Christianity is that the Bible has been taken as an inspired document that is ultimately relevant for all time.  This is a fatal problem for any theological or philosophical movement- when the leader dies or when the inspired writings come to an end, the enterprise becomes increasingly irrelevant with time.

The only way for Christianity to be a truly up-to-date religion and one that still applies to our modern society would be for God to provide continued revelation.  And it would have to be done in a non-controversial manner, such that it wouldn’t be confused with human authorship.  But, for some reason, God stopped the process of providing revelation some 1900 years ago. Some might argue that there have been many great Christian thinkers and writers over that time span, but what they have offered is highly contradictory to each other, and there is no firm agreement as to what God might approve or disapprove.

The Bible needs to be updated, but there is no process available to make that happen that wouldn’t receive stultifying resistance.  So Christianity remains stuck defending Iron Age values in an information-age world that is swiftly leaving it behind.

(810) The signs of the end times are no longer valid

The events leading up to the end of the age have always intrigued Christians, trying to guess when Jesus will return. The problem is that the signs have already occurred, and many, many times over, making them totally impotent harbingers of what is to come.

Matthew 24:3-8

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to him privately. “Tell us,” they said, “when will this happen, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?”

Jesus answered: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, claiming, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and will deceive many. You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.

To be quite clear, all of these things have happened, and have been happening without pause ever since the time that Jesus allegedly made this statement.  Anybody living during the past 2000 years could claim that the signs of the end were happening in their lifetime, and indeed, there’s never been a generation that didn’t see their’s as the last.

So, the bottom line is this. There are no valid signs anymore. Jesus wasted his time making this prediction.  It is now totally meaningless.  A true god would have foreseen the vapidity of such a redundant prognostication.

(811) Jesus was copied from Inanna The Queen of Heaven

You can’t deny certain coincidences. They happen every day, but should you trust them? There are many coincidences that scream suspicion and have the appearance of being something more than mere chance.

One such coincidence is The Queen of Heaven. The Queen of Heaven had many names (Isis, Anat, Inanna, Astarte, Hera and others). Specifically Inanna in this case. She is even mentioned in the Bible.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inanna

Jeremiah 7:18:

“The children gather wood, the fathers light the fire, and the women knead the dough and make cakes of bread for the Queen of Heaven. They pour out drink offerings to other gods to provoke me to anger.”

Although there are differences, there are many important similarities between Inanna and Jesus.  Inanna was worshiped 2000 years before Jesus was, so Inanna couldn’t have copied Jesus, but those who created the myth of Jesus quite easily could have copied from the story of Inanna.

As written in The Ascension Of Isaiah chapters 6-11:

http://www.pseudepigrapha.com/pseudepigrapha/AscensionOfIsaiah.html

As Dr. Richard Carrier writes in his book On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason To Doubt.

https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494/ref=nodl_?ie=UTF8&tag=richardcarrier-20

“We have even more reason than that to be suspicious here. For the initial story told of Jesus in The Ascension Of Isaiah sounds a lot like the story of another descending and ascending, dying and rising god, originating over a thousand years before the christian era. In the descent of Inanna, we are given a similarly repetitious account of a goddess (Inanna, variously otherwise known as Ishtar, or Astarte), the very ‘Queen of Heaven’ (and daughter of God), who descends from ‘the great above’. Thus ‘abandoning Heaven’ she descends from outer space all the way past Earth into the realm of the dead below, fully intending to be killed there and then resurrected three days later. Just like in The Ascension Of Isaiah, the narrative relates her plans in advance to ensure this, and then relates how it happens exactly to plan. And like the ‘Jesus’ figure in The Ascension Of Isaiah, Inanna is crucified (nailed up) and most notably not on Earth, but in a non-earthly realm (the sub-world, in accordance with Sumerian lore of the time), and not by people, but by demons–and their godly overlords, who happen to be the gods of death, yet another coincidence with the ascension (and like the narrative that ends up in the Gospels, Inanna is also humiliated and condemned to death in a kangaroo court).”

For a further breakdown of similarities:

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/185455

Considering the similarities between the story of Inanna and the story of Jesus, that Inanna was worshiped around the same time as Christianity, and that other gods such as Zalmoxis, Dyonysus and Romulus were also very similar to Jesus, the evidence of Christianity being a plagiarized faith is overwhelming.

Christianity is just another religion that is copied from multiple other religions and made up gods, and there are too many ‘coincidences’ to deny this fact.

(812) Human embryonic comparison to other animals

Christianity’s legitimacy rests on the concept that humans are the special creation of God, made for a unique and separate purpose. This is why it employs a robust apologetic industry to question the theory of evolution.  There are many proofs of evolution, but perhaps the best visual demonstration is the comparison of embryonic humans to the embryos of other animals, as shown below:

http://www.edencsd.org/Page/1496

This visual comparison forcefully refutes the concept that humans are a separate creation of God, and therefore it delivers the truthfulness of Christianity into a state of considerable dubiety.

(813) The backfire of the designer argument

Christian apologists often use the argument that the complexity of the universe proves that there must have been a designer and constructor who could have brought it all into existence.  This, of course, has been refuted scientifically by demonstrating that all of the observed complexity came about by way of natural forces over a vast amount of time (13,700,000,000 years).

Scientifically literate Christians acknowledge this fact, but hang on to the concept that the origin of the universe, the Big Bang, must have been triggered by a supernatural force or being, preferentially the God of Christianity.  Science has yet to confidently refute this hypothesis, but even if it is conceded that God sparked the Big Bang, it reveals another hypothesis that is infinitely more improbable.

Christianity must deal with the creation of God.  Obviously, no Christian will say that God was designed by a higher order designer. Most likely, they will claim that God has always existed. This brings up some logical issues, such as why God waited an infinite amount of time before creating the universe.  Even if he has created an infinite number of universes going back in time, there had to be a time before he created the first one, and given that he has always existed, this would still mean he waited an infinite amount of time before creating the first universe.

But an even stronger objection exists- God must be the most intricately complex structure in the universe, with unlimited powers of perception and instant manipulation throughout a vast universe that is approximately 270,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles across, and yet with the ability to see all that is happening in real time (despite the speed of light restriction) and even to be able to read the minds of people saying silent prayers.  The idea that such a god existed for all time, without any designer or period of development, or somehow just came into being is spectacularly preposterous. The improbability of this being true exceeds the atheistic assumption by many orders of magnitude.  Christians should abandon the designer argument immediately.

(814) Jesus thought dumbness was caused by a demon

In Matthew 9:32-33, we read:

While they were going out, a man who was demon-possessed and could not talk was brought to Jesus.  And when the demon was driven out, the man who had been mute spoke. The crowd was amazed and said, “Nothing like this has ever been seen in Israel.”

This piece of nonsense brought to you courtesy of the Bible indicates Jesus believed that dumbness was caused by a demon, or at least that was the thinking of the person who wrote this fictional story.  We now know that dumbness is almost exclusively caused by deafness, the inability to hear sounds and to learn to mimic them vocally. It has nothing to do with an evil spirit.

How should a scientifically-literate Christian react to this verse? At the very least, it should be an embarrassment- that this supposedly timeless, divinely inspired book presents such an erroneous, antiquated idea about a serious condition that afflicts approximately 70 million people worldwide.

This is proof that the gospel was not inspired by a supernatural deity or spirit, but rather was the creation of a human constrained by the limited knowledge of the Iron Age.

(815) Faith healers avoid hospitals

Christian faith healers, such as Ernest Angley and Morris Cerullo, ply their trade in big churches and stadiums, where mostly able-bodied people attend to have their minor maladies healed.  These sessions are produced as a televised spectacle, with the afflicted person being prayed for and then pushed back into the arms of a ‘catcher’ as they are ‘slain in the spirit.’   Although some psychosomatic conditions might be alleviated by these methods, actual physical ailments are never permanently resolved.

If these faith healers could actually do what they claim, they would enter hospitals on a regular basis curing people with cancer, heart disease, etc.  But notice that they don’t. Why is that?  Because hospitals are staffed with medical professionals who can accurately assess the health conditions of their patients and determine whether any actual healing has taken place.  A charlatan faith healer knows to avoid that kind of situation.

On a broader topic, if faith healing had any merit at all, (in other words if what Jesus promised was true), every hospital would have faith healing wings with highly paid faith healers on the staff.  The absence of this is prime evidence that Jesus was wrong and Christianity is not true.

(816) Proof the Bible is not inerrant

Many, though not all, Christians claim that the Bible is inerrant.  It is understandable why they would believe this, because if the Bible is actually inspired by God, who is perfect, then the scriptures he inspired must also be perfect. God, in that sense, would not only direct the composition of the original manuscripts, but would also police the copying and translating that would occur later.

There are many examples of where the Bible is not perfect, with thousands of contradictions that are well known to skeptics and liberal Christians, though apologists bend over backwards to squirm out of each and every one.  But one passage in the Book of Ezra is the most unassailable example of a biblical mistake.

Ezra 1:7-11

Moreover, King Cyrus brought out the articles belonging to the temple of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem and had placed in the temple of his god. Cyrus king of Persia had them brought by Mithredath the treasurer, who counted them out to Sheshbazzar the prince of Judah.

This was the inventory:

In all, there were 5,400 articles of gold and of silver. Sheshbazzar brought all these along with the exiles when they came up from Babylon to Jerusalem.

The inventory totals 2, 499 items, not 5,400. This is not a trivial error.  And the Christian apologist argument that the itemized inventory was simply a partial list of what existed falls flat because of the line item ‘other articles’ that would include everything not specifically listed above.

Conservative Christians are right about this- if the Bible has any errors at all, it reduces it to a status somewhat below that of a divinely-inspired book, and opens it up to controversy, criticism, and uncertainty that effectively clouds all of its contents. The firewall for these Christians is to claim that the Bible is perfect.  Ezra shows that claim is false.

(817) Physics demonstrates that there is no free will

Christianity is dependent on the concept that each human being is free to direct his thoughts and actions in a manner of his own choosing.  Otherwise, God’s reward/punishment scheme would be unfair.  Our current understanding of the workings of the human brain has revealed that free will is an illusion- we operate more or less like inanimate machines without any capability to alter the course of our decisions.  The following is taken from:

 http://www.humantruth.info/free_will.html#Determinism

Free will is an illusion. Our amazingly, wonderfully complex brains are comprised of various cognitive systems cycling amongst themselves and generating our thoughts, consciousness, choices and behavior. These systems and their effects all result from the mechanical, inorganic laws of physics, over which we have no control.

Consciousness is presented to us as a result of our neurons, our brains, our senses. When we lose these, we lose consciousness. These systems are governed and controlled by neurochemicals, hormones, ionization, impulses: in short, by biochemistry. Biochemistry is in turn merely a type of chemistry, and when we look at the molecules and atoms that make up our chemistry, they obey the laws of physics.

Balls bouncing around a pool table have no free will. The basic chemicals that make up our bodies and minds have no free will. Neurons fire when they should fire, according to their electrochemical properties. They don’t randomly fire: They fire when they’re stimulated to fire by other neurons or by environmental inputs. Stimulation results from a constant biochemical cycle. These natural cycles determine our states of mind and our choices. Through a long and complicated series of cause and effect, our choices are made. As such, all our ‘choices’ are ultimately the result of impersonal and mechanical forces. There is no “free will force” that causes neurons to fire some times and not at others. They fire in accordance with the rules of physics, firmly beyond our control but not beyond our appreciation. These facts are proclaimed also by none other than the foremost physicist Albert Einstein:

“I do not at all believe in human freedom in the philosophical sense. Everybody acts not only under external compulsion but also in accordance with inner necessity.”

More from the same source:

If an omnipotent and omniscient being created the universe at time=0, do we have free will? The answer is no, of course, and the proof follows: God is omnipotent. It can do any (logical) thing. It is a requirement of omnipotency that it also must be omniscient – it knows everything. If it can do anything, then in an instant it can look at the position of everything in the universe and know everything. No problem so far.

When it created the universe, or life, it knew full well what it was doing. Every event that affects a persons have already been laid down and foreseen (and therefore instigated) by this God. It is these events that affect a person’s character, etc, and therefore what choice they will make.

Let us presume a person has two choices to make: He can go to heaven or hell. The crux of the matter balances on him doing whatever act is required to get him into heaven. Life revolves around many points so let us consider the exact moment of truth, for this man, when he can finally make the right choice and get to heaven.

How does he decide? It depends entirely on all the information he had gathered through his life and on the current state of his body and memory. All these things were not his doing, not his devising and not his choice, yet the choice he finally makes depends on them. It is for this reason that God has already made the man’s choice for him.

God, in setting the seeds for the universe, knew full well, in omniscience, which factors that it was setting would affect this poor man’s outcome. When setting up a certain atom, molecule, object, etc, it could foresee the exact consequences. I.e., this slight change here will mean that this event happens slightly differently and the man will experience a slightly difference occurrence and therefore make the right choice. Depending on whether God aligns the object one way or another, the man will make the right or wrong choice.

The theists refutations, the hardest ones to immediately overcome is: “God knows what choice he will make, but leaves it up to the man to make it” – we have already refuted this one, by explaining the way that God has already set up the circumstances of the person’s life which dictate his decisions. Causality refutes free will – God’s omnipotent sovereignty contradicts free will.

“We still have a choice, though, whether to do the right thing or not” – this is about the final line for the theist. A stake on your conscience, perhaps. It is wrong, because the person’s very perception of right and wrong is a result of the circumstances already projected by God. Also, the question of whether the man makes the right decision or not is decided by the same causality-bound things.

The situation is not resolvable: If an omnipotent being created life then we have no free will.

This add another level to the unfairness of the Christian faith. The first level is the fact that we are born into widely varying circumstances, all the way from an evangelical Christian home to an atheist home or one based on another religion.  But even if we were all born into the same initial circumstances, Christianity would still not be fair because our actions, thoughts, and decisions are not being controlled by a will that is free to act independently of external influences.  The image of billiard balls hitting each other in a random fashion after a break is an accurate model of how our brains work in a chaotic world.  The balls move with seeming purpose but they are really just reacting mindlessly to the forces being placed on them.

So, Christianity is an unfair system of judging humans because of disparate initial conditions as well as a brain structure that does not possess independent free will.  Most likely all of this escaped the perception of the Iron Age people who created this religion.

(818) Snake handling

There are a few Christian cults that take literally a scripture in the Book of Mark suggesting that handling poisonous snakes without injury is a sign of faith.  Most Christians laughingly dismiss this practice (even though it is explicitly endorsed by their Bible), but what they don’t realize is that it underscores evidence that Christianity is false. The following is taken from:

https://sites.google.com/site/weirdbeliefs/

The worship services of some American churches regularly include a ritual called snake handling, in which members of the congregation pick up poisonous snakes, often raising them into the air and sometimes even allowing them to crawl on their bodies. The most commonly-used types of snake are rattlesnakes and copperheads, both of which can be caught wild in the forests of the southern United States. Participation in the ritual is voluntary, and some worshipers may remain in their seats and just watch. In addition to snake handling, the services normally include praying, singing, and speaking in tongues.

Members of these churches believe that snakes are demons in bodily form, and that handling them demonstrates God’s power to protect true believers from the forces of evil. Unfortunately, more than 100 deaths from snakebites in religious services have been documented in the United States. As a result of these deaths, six southeastern states have passed laws against snake handling. But this hasn’t stopped the practice, because most of the churches are located in remote rural areas where people tend to live by their own rules. Many of the bitten people believe that God will heal them and don’t seek medical help, so that some cases may not be reported.

Snake handlers say that they are following instructions from the bible, particularly a verse at Mark 16:18 which says that believers “shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them” [King James Version]. In fact, in addition to snake handling, some members of these churches regularly drink poison (usually strychnine) during worship services. If someone is bitten by a snake, or gets sick from poison, other church members may attribute it to the person’s lack of faith and failure to receive the Holy Spirit.

The total number of these churches isn’t known, but is probably less than 100 congregations. Many of them require their members to follow strict dress codes, including the stipulation that women must not use any cosmetics and must always wear ankle-length dresses. Most of the ministers also preach against the use of alcohol and tobacco.

Some ministers and church leaders own small collections of snakes which they keep in cages at their homes and carry to the services in small boxes. The snakes are not drugged before they are handled.

Christian scholars have known for a long time that Mark 16: 9-20 is a forgery that was not included in the original manuscripts of this gospel.  So, not only do we not know who wrote Mark, but we doubly don’t know who added the extra verses or the motivation of this person to do so.  Most Christians will say that these 12 verses were not inspired by God, that they were included by mistake, but that none of this casts aspersions on the authenticity of their faith.

This is where logic wins an argument over faith.  Because Christianity insisted that its God is all-seeing and all-powerful, it must admit that God witnessed the unauthorized inclusion of these verses and just let it happen, knowing full well that it would not only promote a dangerous and meaningless practice to perpetuate for centuries, but also that these fake verses would be an enduring embarrassment to the faith and degrade its authenticity.   This presents a challenge to apologists who, once again, can only guess at why such a ridiculous situation developed in the first place.

(819) Jesus condemns most Christians

There are many scriptures that are uncomfortable for Christians, and these are most often avoided at all costs, rarely heard in church or Bible studies, and uneasily re-interpreted by apologists.  One of the best examples of this is found in Luke 6:20-26;

Looking at his disciples, he said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God.Blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied. Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man.

“Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.

If Christianity is true then it should show productive results with respect to morality and overall standards of honesty. More to the point, if any religion was true at all then we would expect to see evidence of that religion’s influence having an impact at spreading morals and decency in general.

Instead we have the opposite. The ten least corrupt countries in the world are the ones that have the least religious populations. This evidence demonstrates that secular influence, not religion and definitely not Christianity, is what helps countries to be moral and just.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/01/27/464586586/what-were-the-least-and-most-corrupt-countries-in-2015

The list of the ten least corrupt countries:

2. Finland
3. Sweden
4. New Zealand
5. Netherlands
6. Norway
7. Switzerland
8. Singapore
9. Canada
10. Germany

In conclusion, Christianity is not generating higher standards of honesty, suggesting that it has no power to shape people’s lives.

(848) Christian Bible made sense….for its time

If you lived over a thousand years ago, the Bible would have made a lot of sense and seemed compatible with everything you knew.  It would have been the principal source to answer your questions and satisfy your yearnings.  But that was then, and now is now.  The following was taken from:

The Christian bible was written at a time when the Earth was presumed flat, communities and cultures were extremely insular (that is, knowledge was contained), and there was no concept of Western medicine as we now know it.  Stars were not known to be suns like our own, and the Earth was thought to be the center of the Universe — our world, the only thing that existed; us, the purpose of existence.  Under these circumstances, the Christian bible seems truly believable.  There was no knowledge of physics to explain the big bang and the formation of the Earth; there was no knowledge of peoples living in areas unknown who had their own systems of belief; there was no knowledge of the true causes of suffering, life and death.  Under these circumstances, the answers offered by the Christian bible actually seem quite reasonable — everything was created by an all-powerful being, the ruler ofeverything, and this creator obviously is closest to human beings, as they are the rulers of the Earth, and hence he created humans in his image.

However, it is now 2010.  What is more likely: That the Christian faith is the one true faith, amongst countless others, though its source and primary document is over a thousand years old and was written by men who would not pass a 5th grade biology/ethics/physics/history class?  Or that the Christian faith is like all of the other religious faiths, possibly well-intentioned but ignorantly-conceived explanations of existence that should be absolutely irrelevant in today’s modern age and, as Sam Harris puts it, worthy of placement on the scrapheap of mythology?

The death knell has rung for Christianity, although most people do not realize it yet.  The evidence provided by scriptural scholarship is now wholly sufficient to prove that the Bible is mainly myth and fiction. It will just take time for this to sink in to the general public.

(849) Dan Barker’s challenge

Dan Barker is an American atheist activist who served as a Christian preacher and musician for 19 years.  He has issued the following challenge:

http://www.coppit.org/god/arguments.php

The conditions of the challenge are simple and reasonable. In each of the four Gospels, begin at Easter morning and read to the end of the book: Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20-21. Also read Acts 1:3-12 and Paul’s tiny version of the story in 1 Corinthians 15:3-8. These 165 verses can be read in a few moments. Then, without omitting a single detail from these separate accounts, write a simple, chronological narrative of the events between the resurrection and the ascension: what happened first, second, and so on; who said what, when; and where these things happened.

Since the gospels do not always give precise times of day, it is permissible to make educated guesses. The narrative does not have to pretend to present a perfect picture–it only needs to give at least one plausible account of all of the facts. Additional explanation of the narrative may be set apart in parentheses. The important condition to the challenge, however, is that not one single biblical detail be omitted.

No one has been able to respond to this challenge.

Most Christians do not understand the issue of plausibility.  When you have a set of facts that are all assumed to be true (in this case because biblical scripture is supposedly inspired by a celestial deity), there should be at least one plausible scenario that would incorporate all of the facts.  When it is impossible to construct any plausible scenarios, this proves that some of the facts must be false. In the case of the resurrection to ascension period, a plausible scenario cannot even be constructed by leaving out many of the facts- they are literally all over the board.  This is a dramatic demonstration of a fabled myth created by many uninspired hands.

(850) The fallacy of feeling God’s presence

When confronted with contradictory evidence regarding the authenticity of their faith, many Christians will counter with the statement that they have felt God’s or Jesus’s presence personally in their lives, and that this constitutes to them solid confirmation of God’s existence.

However, easily observed evidence shows this to be a logical fallacy. Although Christians report a personal experience with Yahweh or Jesus, Muslims report the same and no less intense experience with Allah.  Hindus report the same with Vishnu or other of their gods.  If Yahweh is the true god and all others are false, it would be expected that Christians would report a much stronger personal feeling of connection to their god.  That is, there should be an easily seen difference between the personal feelings of people worshiping an actual god versus those who are praying to an imaginary being.

The following was taken from:

http://new.exchristian.net/2012/03/leap-of-faith-is-for-losers.html

Further, nearly 50 billion people were born and died before Christ was born. If Christianity is the “one true religion,” then every one of those 50 billion (except for the few atheists and agnostics) was in a false religion, WHILE BEING CONVINCED THAT THEIR LEAP OF FAITH WAS A SUCCESS. You see, history proves that it is very, very easy to leap into a false religion. In fact, it’s practically effortless. Throughout history, at least 90 billion or so have done it.

Most of those who make that leap of faith do so because they feel something inside themselves that convinces them they are in touch with a god. For many, this feeling is even taken as proof. For example, the noted apologist William Lane Craig has written, “No Amount of Evidence Could Ever Convince Me I’m Wrong!” (Because, he says, of the “testimony of the Holy Ghost” within him.)

But let me tell you a story which exposes the fatal flaw of that argument. Once, I believed with utter conviction that there was a god. I felt his presence so thoroughly that I often prayed or spoke to him, and I just knew that he was watching my every move. This condition lasted for many years. However, while I once felt with utter conviction that there was a god, now I don’t feel it, and I don’t believe in any gods.

Now, obviously, the world didn’t change; only my feelings changed. And it’s just as obvious that this inner certainty that I felt was absolutely useless as evidence on the question of the existence of a god. I also know of many others who once “felt” the reality of a god but no longer do. Thus, I am not just describing a failing of mine, but a facet of the human condition.

The across-the-board similarity of all religious people feeling the presence of their god or gods leads to a conclusion that either all of these gods actually exist or that none of them exist.  The latter possibility is by far the more likely.

(851) God cares less about conversion than do Christians

The previously interventionalist god has gone silent and seems to be indifferent about trying to convince people that they should worship him.  Meanwhile, Christians are eager and willing to go to great lengths involving personal hardship to do so.  The following is a quote by John W. Loftus:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2010/07/reality-check-what-must-be-case-if_06.html

That although it’s claimed God got the attention of Abraham, Moses, the Pharaoh, Gideon, Mary, Joseph, and Saul (who became Paul) and that he knows how to get the attention of anyone and everyone, there is no objective evidence he’s trying to get the attention of the billions of people who don’t believe. In fact, Christians are much more concerned than God is that non-believers are converted. Just compare the lengths to which Christians will go in order to convert non-believers, with a God who has the means to convert everyone and yet does nothing to help them do this. If you say God is helping to convert non-believers then tell us how to objectively know God is actually doing this.

It is obvious that if the Christian god exists, he is not doing all he can or even anything at all to try to enlighten people to become Christians.   It is being left up to missionaries who seem to be intent on doing what God does not see as a priority.

(852) What if Jesus came today?

Suppose Jesus didn’t come 2000 years ago but instead shows up today in Jerusalem and proclaims that he is the savior of the Jews. He gathers some followers and moves around the Holy Land preaching the coming of the end of the world. How would he be received? Most likely as a crazy person.

He would be driving a bus along with his followers going from city to city.  He would claim to work miracles, but people with cell phone cameras everywhere would be taking videos, so any fake miracles would easily be refuted.  On the other, any real miracles would be recorded and verified.

Instead of relying on ancient, re-edited, non eye-witness accounts of what Jesus said, we would have videos of him speaking and sermons on live television, eliminating any ambiguity of what he was saying. We would have interviews where questions could be asked and answered.

It would be an international news story, not one that was confined to a tiny spot of the world 2000 years ago. He would not be casting out demons, but rather just healing people, or better yet delivering new science for the betterment of our medical services.

When it came time for his execution, there would be an international outrage and a concerted effort to save him.  But since his death would be essential to mankind’s salvation, he would be put to death anyway, and despite the fact that Israel has not executed anyone since 1962.  His death would be by hanging, and henceforth Christians would wear necklaces with little ropes hanging from them.

One thing is clear- if Jesus is for real, he should have come now, so that we could have adequate evidence of his divinity and an uncontested and accurate account of his doctrine.  However, if he is not for real, coming today would have been impossible.  It just would not have worked, and the myth could never have been sold in our modern information age.

Therefore, the fact that he ‘came’ when he did is enough to raise high suspicion that it’s all just make believe.

(853) If the Jews didn’t believe, why should we?

We must look at the events of Christianity down a long tunnel of time, depending on non-eyewitness accounts, written in foreign lands, in foreign languages, and subjected to countless edits and unauthorized revisions.  On the other hand, the Jews of Jerusalem, Judea, and Galilee were physically there when all of the action was taking place.  It’s interesting to see how they reacted to the miracles, resurrection, and ascension.  The following is taken from:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2011/02/problem-of-miracles.html

Even if we agree with the Jews of Jesus’ day that Yahweh exists and he does miracles this still does very little if anything to lead us in today’s world to think Yahweh raised Jesus from the dead. Because a completely overwhelming number of Jews in Jesus’ day did not think Yahweh did this particular miracle in this particular case. If they were there, and if they knew their Scriptures, and if they believed in Yahweh, and if they believed in miracles, but they didn’t believe God raised Jesus from the dead THEN WHY SHOULD I believe? WHY SHOULD WE?

This is an extremely difficult point for Christian apologists to refute. Why should we exercise faith when the eyewitnesses who were there refused to become Christians?

(854) God’s failure to communicate led to massive bloodshed

The history of Christianity is littered with atrocities leveled at those of other faiths, especially Muslims.  But the bloodshed between Christians was even more impressive, and most of it was due to sometimes very slight differences in doctrinal beliefs- such as whether a wafer was literally the body of Jesus.

The following site describes the history of Christians persecuting heretics:

http://www.heretication.info/_heretics.html

For many centuries, the crime of heresy was punishable by death. In fact, as early as the second century, there was enough of an orthodoxy of Christian dogma, that torture and killings of those who refused to acquiesce were already beginning.

Why did this happen? Was it inevitable?  The answer to these questions is ‘no.’  This happened because God failed to communicate better. He failed to set the record straight in an unambiguous fashion.  He failed to spell out and define these important doctrinal points.

Of course, God was not really to blame, because this was all made up…..by humans.  If a god had been involved, the truths would have been defined to a tee and all of this carnage would have been avoided.

(855) Atheist attacks increase Christians’ faith

To explain the persistence of Christian belief in a scientific information age, in the face of powerful evidence that the Bible is full of inconsistencies, myth, outdated rules, and ungodly atrocities. there are two mechanisms at work- childhood indoctrination and a tendency for Christians to bolster their faith when presented with arguments against it.

The following is taken from:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/barrierbreaker/why-strong-arguments-from-atheists-tend-to-increase-a-christians-faith/

And that’s why, when presented with contradictory evidence, belief perseverance can actually make Christians more, not less, confident they are right. It might be part of why the most stubborn Christian demographic in the United States — the category that is bleeding the fewest adherents in today’s increasingly nonreligious world — is Christian evangelicals. The more they are given evidence against Christianity, the more (just like that biased article I clung to in the above example), they may cling to the actual words of the Bible, so that arguments against them increase, as opposed to decrease, their faith.

https://ed.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/self_defense.pdf

Although people of all ideological orientations are vulnerable to this bias, it is especially strong in people who have an indoctrinated and socially supported belief system.  This is why so many well-educated Christians disbelieve in evolution, despite hearing all of the overwhelming evidence.

Many Christians will believe even more strongly after reading the arguments presented on this website.  It is this malfunction of the human brain that allows an obviously false belief system to persist despite being surrounded by an ocean of information refuting it.  It is also a good explanation for how Christianity remains a dominant faith, rather than ascribing that fact to any actual truth that might underlay it.

(856) Lies taught to Christian women

The Bible discriminates broadly against women, showing that it’s not the work of a god but rather that of misogynistic men. Christianity teaches many lies to women. The following is a list of ten such lies taken from:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/removingthefigleaf/2016/01/10-things-youre-taught-growing-up-as-a-christian-woman/

1. You were created from and for man.
2. You are to be submissive to men, especially in church and in your marriage.
3. Since you are a less sexual being than a man, you are responsible for making it easier for the men in your life to maintain pure thoughts.
4. Your sexual purity is your worth.
5. Each sexual partner you have before marriage takes a piece of your heart that you can never get back, and if you give away too much of your heart you will eventually have nothing left to give.
6. Within marriage, denying sex to your husband is sinful.
7. It’s weird for women to masturbate.
8. Women who seek out sex with multiple partners are sluts and probably have daddy issues.
9. It is actually better if a man doesn’t marry a woman at all, but if he burns with lust then he’ll have to settle for marriage even though it’ll get in the way of him serving god to the best of his ability.
10. If you really think about it, everything that is wrong with the world is because of women.

Misogyny begins in the third chapter of the Bible and continues to the very end.  There is no possibility that a god who created the universe would view men and women as unequals, though it is hardly surprising that the Iron Age men who wrote the Bible had beliefs along that line.

It is not just scripture but also the way in which it has been used by church leaders to ingrain women with a sense of inferiority.  A true god would never have allowed his true faith to cause this injustice.

(857) First and Second Peter are forgeries

The books of 1 Peter and 2 Peter both claim to be written by the Apostle Peter, the right hand man of Jesus during his ministry. There are many reasons to conclude that this is false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorship_of_the_Petrine_epistles

These two books are written in highly literate Greek, a language that would be unknown to Peter, who spoke in Aramaic.   Additionally, only about 3% of the First Century population of Palestine, where Peter lived, had the ability to write in Aramaic and many fewer in Greek.  Peter was a fisherman and not a member of the schooled aristocracy that tended to comprise the literate population that lived mostly in urban areas.  As further evidence of Peter’s inability to write, the following was written in Acts 4:13:

When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.

To make matters worse, the writing style and composition of 2 Peter differs so much from 1 Peter that biblical scholars concede that they were not written by the same person.

The message of truth in these two books is hypocritical because it is written by a person who is lying about his own identity.  If the Bible were being constructed today, 1 Peter and 2 Peter would be left out.

(858) The double standard of Christian faith claims

Christians have accepted and ultimately defend what they believe using a double standard, one for the their own faith and a different one for all other faiths.

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/03/platos-cave-allegory-and-faith.html

They accept as truth the miracle claims and historical events of Christianity while dismissing the similar and just as believable claims of every other religion.  The method they use to deny belief in other religions is to use science, logic, and critical thinking- that is, exactly what they don’t use to judge their own religion. And they do this without even realizing what they are doing.  It takes a dispassionate observer to see this in action, and it often looks like two children arguing over who has the better father.  Neither child of course can judge this question objectively, much less even know very much about the other child’s father in the first place.

And very few Christians know much of anything about other religions.  They are for the most part satisfied to blindly believe what they have been trained to believe and to dismiss anything different that anyone else believes.  Thus, Christianity is populated by uninformed hypocrites who claim that ‘their father is the best.’  The Christian god, if he is real, is to blame for this situation by failing to  provide evidence sufficient to show that Christianity is the most authentic faith.

(859) Christians defend God as if he can’t do it himself

John Loftus wrote an interesting article about what would happen if Christians went on strike and quite trying to convert non-believers. The conclusions reached by this thought experiment are very thought provoking.  Here is an excerpt:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2012/05/what-would-happen-if-christians-went-on.html

If Christians went on strike there should be no cause for concern. If God is really inside the Christian faith then it cannot fail. The theme of the book of Revelation is about God’s victory in the end. So the faith response is to relax since this is assured. “Be still and know that I am God,” believers are told. Actually, the Hebrew is better translated, “Cease, and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10). Even if believers didn’t do anything the victory is assured. So don’t be frustrated. Don’t lose any sleep over it either. God is winning and will win in the end. After all, Jesus reportedly said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:30). Imagine that, me, offering devotional advice!

It seems to me believers feel they must comment in order to keep others from being persuaded by what I write. “Oh” they say to themselves, “I must say something lest others be led astray.” That’s because they don’t believe God can keep people away from my arguments. They don’t believe God can give believers an extra jolt of the God juice, or that he is able to answer a prayer in a spectacular way in order to mitigate my arguments, or that God can speak to believers in dreams, or audibly, or visibly appear to them at night, if needed. They simply do not believe God could blind people from sites like mine. They don’t believe God could change the search engine hits so that susceptible believers would not find skeptical sites like mine. They do not believe God could keep any thought of reading something by a skeptic out of the minds of susceptible believers. They do not believe God can take away enough critical thinking skills that even if susceptible believers did find skeptical sites like mine they would not be led astray.

Believers act and talk as if God isn’t helping them at all, as if God doesn’t care to do anything if they don’t do it themselves. They really do not believe the Parable of the Lost Sheep applies to God, that he will do everything he can to shepherd his sheep. Christians claim to “pray as if it’s all up to God, but act as if it’s all up to us.” Yet, that’s not what I see. Many Christians simply do not believe God does anything to help at all. No, I cannot convince them of this, I know. But having been on the other side and seeing what I have seen for six years of Blogging, this is my informed opinion. It’s what I see on a daily basis. Christians act and talk as if God doesn’t do anything at all to help them. Not only this but they do not think prayers to God will work either.

Christians really do not believe. That’s my conclusion. They can’t. The way they comment here to defend their God against every argument I make proves it. It proves to me they don’t believe God can defend himself. They don’t believe their God will take the necessary steps to defeat arguments against his existence and his plan of salvation. It proves to me that God needs human beings to do this work because he doesn’t exist at all.

In so many ways, Christians behave in a manner that suggests that their god does not exist.  We see it when they get sick, when they need a lawyer, when they buy insurance, etc., and one other way we see it is when they feel compelled to vigorously defend their faith and try to suppress any information that runs counter to their beliefs.  It suggests that their god is powerless to do this himself.

(860) Lying undermines the credibility of Christianity

One of the best ways to evaluate the credibility of the Bible and Christianity is general is to observe how honest Christians have been in recent times in reporting events and apparent miracles.  The result is not impressive.

We have many faked discoveries of Noah’s Ark.  We have many faked analyses of the Shroud of Turin. We have the fake ‘miracles’ at Lourdes.  We have many fake apparitions of the Virgin Mary. Just recently we had the fabricated authentication of a miracle healing by Mother Theresa. We have the fake ‘incorruptible’ corpses of Christian saints.  We have the faked victims of stigmata, or bloody wounds on hands and feet to mimic Jesus on the cross.  We have the fake crying statues of Mary. We have the fake flying escapades of Joseph of Cupertino.  We have the numerous fake ‘miracle of the sun’ events at Fatima, along with the fake transfiguration of silver into gold.  We have the fake ‘healing’ services of evangelical preachers.  We have the fake exorcisms still performed in the Catholic Church.

So here is the problem.  If all of these alleged miracles are being faked in an information age, and yet still believed by millions of unquestioning, gullible, non-critical thinking Christians, how can we have any confidence in the miracles reported in the Bible, at at time before any reliable reporting or fact checking was possible?  The answer is we can’t.  The current history of deceit is an overwhelming reason to discount every miracle contained in the Bible.

(861) The Christian god is a loser

The Christian god is a loser. Let’s count the ways:

1.  He created a universe that is quite messy, with exploding stars, colliding planets and asteroids, black holes, and lifeless planets. In other words, his creation does not look like it was intelligently designed.
2. He committed many atrocities, including genocide, killing women, children, animals, and whatever.  His problem with anger management went unabated.
3. He failed to prevent the Holocaust, enough said.
4. He does nothing to prevent natural disasters, despite supposedly having the power to do so.
5. He doesn’t answer any prayers- and that is correct, any.
6. He fails to communicate in any verifiable manner.
7. He authored a book full of contradictions, forgeries, editing errors, and confusing doctrines that left everyone arguing about it for centuries and killing each other over it.
8. He allows 17,000 children to die every day, even though he has the ability to save every one of them.
9. He allows many false religions to flourish and deceive people away from the ‘truth.’
10. His son failed to educate people about the causes of disease, later resulting in devastating plagues, and instead cast out imaginary demons.
11. He promoted torture, slavery, misogyny, and homophobia.
12. He son reneged on his promise to return.
13. He prepared a place to punish people after they died…forever.
14. He made everything look like he doesn’t exist, just to make sure lots of smart people disbelieve, so he can send them to Hell.
15. He used his own son as a human sacrifice.

This is the god that Christians worship.  He is a loser. He deserves no worship, but rather disdain, condemnation, contempt, and derision. But then, considering that he is imaginary, maybe what he really deserves is a permanent dismissal.

(862) Minds of Christians are more closed than atheists

Christians often assert that atheists are just as close-minded as they are, and that atheism is just another religion.  But this is a false equivalency. The following is taken from:

http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-definitive-answer-to-who-has-closed.html

What closes their [Christians] minds? Well, an ancient pre-scientific superstitious set of canonized sacred writings, as interpreted by one’s trusted exegetes in today’s world. Are they open to other pre-scientific sacred writings? No, not any more than atheists and agnostics are open to accepting them. In fact, despite the results of science they will usually mindlessly quote-mine from the Bible as having a much higher authority than empirical evidence. Just think of the many young earth creationists there are, as represented by Ken Ham’s Creation Museum. While more informed Christians see this with regard to Ken Ham creationists, we atheists and agnostics see the same thing when it comes to their own theologies based on the Bible. Most Christians are even sure that their ancient superstitious set of sacred writings, as interpreted by one’s trusted exegetes in today’s world, have a higher authority over the results of science and the scientific method for investigating truth claims. They will even attack science and the scientific method without having anything to replace them, except private subjective experience, which is absolutely nothing by comparison. [If there is no scientific method then would someone please, please, tell me how science has produced a massive amount of knowledge without one?]

So the question of who is close-minded can be settled quite easily. Who is open to the results of science and the scientific method for investigating truth claims? People who have DO (doxastic openness} are. People who have DC (doxastic closure) are not. It just so happens that people who accept the results of science and the scientific method do not think there is enough evidence to believe. It didn’t have to turn out this way. It just did. If a deity exists he could have produced this evidence. It just doesn’t exist.

The atheist’s mind is more open than the Christian’s, although that’s not to say that atheists don’t have a bias or tend to filter information as well.  It’s just that the degree to which they do it is less than a typical Christian. That means that their analysis of the truth is more likely to be accurate.

(863) Redundant genealogies

The gospels of Matthew and Luke provide genealogies connecting King David to Jesus, which was necessary to qualify Jesus as the messiah according to Jewish scripture.  But when the legend of Jesus’s virgin birth was introduced, it made the genealogies redundant because it rendered Jesus not directly related to David.

The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/paul_carlson/nt_contradictions.html

Both the genealogies of Matthew and Luke show that Joseph was a direct descendant of King David. But if Joseph is not Jesus’ father, then Joseph’s genealogies are meaningless as far as Jesus is concerned, and one has to wonder why Matthew and Luke included them in their gospels. The answer, of course, is that the genealogies originally said that Jesus was the son of Joseph and thus Jesus fulfilled the messianic requirement of being a direct descendant of King David.

Long after Matthew and Luke wrote the genealogies the church invented (or more likely borrowed from the mystery religions) the doctrine of the virgin birth. Although the virgin birth could be accommodated by inserting a few words into the genealogies to break the physical link between Joseph and Jesus, those same insertions also broke the physical link between David and Jesus.

The church had now created two major problems: 1) to explain away the existence of two genealogies of Joseph, now rendered meaningless, and 2) to explain how Jesus was a descendant of David.

The apostle Paul says that Jesus “was born of the seed of David” (Romans 1:3). Here the word “seed” is literally in the Greek “sperma.” This same Greek word is translated in other verses as “descendant(s)” or “offspring.” The point is that the Messiah had to be a physical descendant of King David through the male line. That Jesus had to be a physical descendant of David means that even if Joseph had legally adopted Jesus (as some apologists have suggested), Jesus would still not qualify as Messiah if he had been born of a virgin – seed from the line of David was required.

Women did not count in reckoning descent for the simple reason that it was then believed that the complete human was present in the man’s sperm (the woman’s egg being discovered in 1827). The woman’s womb was just the soil in which the seed was planted. Just as there was barren soil that could not produce crops, so also the Bible speaks of barren wombs that could not produce children.

This is the reason that although there are many male genealogies in the Bible, there are no female genealogies. This also eliminates the possibility put forward by some apologists that Jesus could be of the “seed of David” through Mary.

The virgin birth might have made the new faith more palatable to people following pagan religions, but it also created a critical contradiction that made Jesus ineligible to be the Jewish messiah.  It was a solution that created a bigger problem than what it solved.

(864) Allowing belief in an imminent end to the world

It is uncertain if Jesus actually made statements about the world coming to a quick ending, within the lifetime of those who were listening.  It might have been just an insincere ploy by others to get people to give away their possessions and devote time to the church. But the effect it has had on Christians for the past 2000 years is hard to calculate.  Bad things happen when people erroneously think the end is near.  The following is taken from Bertrand Russell :

I am concerned with Christ as he appears in the Gospels, taking the Gospel narrative as it stands, and there one does find some things that do not seem to be very wise. For one thing, he certainly thought his second coming would occur in clouds of glory before the death of all the people who were living at that time. There are a great many texts that prove that. He says, for instance, “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Israel till the Son of Man comes into his kingdom”; and there are a lot of places where it is quite clear that he believed his second coming would happen during the lifetime of many then living. That was the belief of his earlier followers, and it was the basis of a good deal of his moral teaching.

When He said, “Take no thought for the morrow,” and things of that sort, it was very largely because He thought the second coming was going to be very soon, and that all ordinary mundane affairs did not count. I have, as a matter of fact, known some Christians who did believe the second coming was imminent. I knew a parson who frightened his congregation terribly by telling them the second coming was very imminent indeed, but they were much consoled when they found that he was planting trees in his garden.

The early Christians really did believe it, and they did abstain from such things as planting trees in their gardens, because they did accept from Christ the belief that the second coming was imminent. In this respect, clearly He was not so wise as some other people have been, and He certainly was not superlatively wise.

The crux of this argument is that whether or not the scriptures are reliable on this matter, it happened under God’s watch as his ‘one true religion’ was forming.  For twenty centuries, Christians have consistently believed that the end is near, so it didn’t make a lot of sense to worry about any long-term projects, or to worry much about their children’s or grandchildren’s future.  In today’s world, it means not taking heed of such issues as pollution or global climate change.  If the Christian god is real, then he is to blame for this situation; but actually, given the facts, this strongly suggests that he is not real.

(865) Problems with the story of Judas

Judas, one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, supposedly betrayed Jesus to the Roman authorities, later felt remorse, and killed himself. But when you delve into the scriptures, some crucial inconsistencies emerge.  The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/paul_carlson/nt_contradictions.html

a. In Matthew 27:5 Judas hangs himself.

b. In Acts 1:18 he bursts open and his insides spill out.

c. According to the apostle Paul, neither of the above is true. Paul says Jesus appeared to “the twelve” after his resurrection. Mark 14:20 makes it clear that Judas was one of the twelve.

d. In Matthew 19:28, Jesus tells the twelve disciples, including Judas, that when Jesus rules from his throne, they will sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

The problem with ‘a’ and ‘b’ is not trivial, despite many Christians who say it it.  The two causes of death are mutually exclusive and subject only to desperate attempts of rationalization.  Either Mark or Acts is correct, or neither one is, but both are not.

The problem with ‘c’ is that it indicates that Paul was uninformed about Judas’s betrayal and death.  Here is what he said in 1 Corinthians 15:3-5:

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance : that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve.

This appearance was well before the apostles selected Matthias to replace Judas, so Paul should have written the Eleven.

The problem with ‘d’ is that it appears to show Jesus unaware that Judas will eventually betray him, although later he makes that very prediction.

Matthew 19:28:

Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, at the renewal of all things, when the Son of Man sits on his glorious throne, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel.

It is reasonable to expect that a book inspired by the supernatural Holy Spirit would get straight the stories surrounding Judas.  On the other hand, an evolving myth would be expected to create these types of discrepancies.

(866) Brown dwarf stars

Brown dwarfs are failed stars that have a mass of approximately 15 to 75 times the mass of Jupiter, but are not large enough to create a sufficient core temperature to fuse hydrogen atoms.  Therefore they do not produce thermonuclear energy. Current estimates indicate that there are more then 70 billion brown dwarfs in the Milky Way galaxy, or about 10 for every human alive today.

The principal thing that this indicates is that the universe is not intelligently designed, as no architect or engineer would create so many meaningless, purposeless, impotent celestial bodies. It is however, exactly what would be predicted under the model of an expanding universe acting solely due to natural forces following a big bang explosion.  In that model, hydrogen collects to form every size of orb from as small as Jupiter to as large as a red giant, such as Betelgeuse, which has a diameter approximately 1,000 times that of the sun.

In a universe designed by a god, whether from scratch or by directing the long-term formation of stars and planets after a big bang, we would expect to see every feature to a have an integral purpose and to exhibit a full function of its potential.  This leaves no room for billions of failed stars.

(867) God is pleased by the slaying of an interracial couple

If anyone wants to figure out if the god described in the Old Testament is an actual celestial deity, who is all-knowing, wise, and infinitely just, they need look no further than this scripture, Numbers 25:6-13:

Then an Israelite man brought into the camp a Midianite woman right before the eyes of Moses and the whole assembly of Israel while they were weeping at the entrance to the tent of meeting. When Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, saw this, he left the assembly, took a spear in his hand and followed the Israelite into the tent. He drove the spear into both of them, right through the Israelite man and into the woman’s stomach. Then the plague against the Israelites was stopped; but those who died in the plague numbered 24,000.

The Lord said to Moses, “Phinehas son of Eleazar, the son of Aaron, the priest, has turned my anger away from the Israelites. Since he was as zealous for my honor among them as I am, I did not put an end to them in my zeal. Therefore tell him I am making my covenant of peace with him. He and his descendants will have a covenant of a lasting priesthood, because he was zealous for the honor of his God and made atonement for the Israelites.”

In this episode, the god that Christians worship rewards Phinehas with a priesthood covenant for killing an interracial couple and he is so pleased by this homicide that he also ‘mercifully ‘ stops a plague at 24,000 dead.

This scripture, along with many similar ones, has been used to defend bans on interracial marriage.  Christians predicted that God would smite the United States after the 1967 Loving vs. Virginia Supreme Court decision striking down state bans on interracial marriage.  They were 100% wrong.  And the Bible is wrong in this instance as well, once again trying to paint God as the parochial godfather of Medieval mores.

It doesn’t take a lot of thinking to realize that the god of the Israelites, the same one that Christianity adopted, is a sick fantasy dreamed up by people who lived in a backwards, ignorant, and highly superstitious time.

(868) Evidence we do not survive death

Christianity and other religions offer a reward of an afterlife, usually in very appealing circumstances, and usually as an eternal state of being.  At the times that these ideas were being incorporated into doctrine, very little was known about the workings of the brain. In fact, many people of the time thought that the brain was just a heat exchanger and that the mind was immaterial. What we have learned since makes the prospect of life after death very, very improbable.

The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_augustine/immortality.html

Barry Beyerstein points out that the view “that consciousness is inseparable from the functioning of individual brains remains the cornerstone of physiological psychology” (Beyerstein 44). This is due, he says, to “the theory’s parsimony and research productivity, the range of phenomena accounted for, and the lack of credible counter-evidence” (45).

Beyerstein lists five main types of empirical evidence which support the dependence of consciousness on the brain. First, phylogenetic evidence refers to the evolutionary relationship between the complexity of the brain and a species’ cognitive traits (Beyerstein 45). Corliss Lamont sums up this evidence: “We find that the greater the size of the brain and its cerebral cortex in relation to the animal body and the greater their complexity, the higher and more versatile the form of life” (Lamont 63). Second, the developmental evidence for mind-brain dependence is that mental abilities emerge with the development of the brain; failure in brain development prevents mental development (Beyerstein 45). Third, clinical evidence consists of cases of brain damage that result from accidents, toxins, diseases, and malnutrition that often result in irreversible losses of mental functioning (45). If the mind could exist independently of the brain, why couldn’t the mind compensate for lost faculties when brain cells die after brain damage? (46). Fourth, the strongest empirical evidence for mind-brain dependence is derived from experiments in neuroscience. Mental states are correlated with brain states; electrical or chemical stimulation of the human brain invokes perceptions, memories, desires, and other mental states (45). Finally, the experiential evidence for mind-brain dependence consists of the effects of several different types of drugs which predictably affect mental states (45).

We now know that our thoughts and memories can only exist within the dynamic operation of the material neurons in the brain. When these neurons are damaged, we lose various capabilities depending on the location of the injury. When all of the neurons die after death, we lose all consciousness and enter an eternal state of awareness no different than being under general anesthesia.  We go back to what it was like before we were born.  Christianity is selling snake oil.

(869) Wedding at Cana problems

In the second chapter of John, a story is told about a wedding ceremony that took place at Cana in Galilee.  Supposedly this occurred three days after Jesus was baptized although the Book of Mark would have had Jesus in the wilderness being tempted by Satan during this time.  But even more problematic is that none of the previously written gospels mention this story, even though the disciples attended it along with Jesus and his mother, and it was the first demonstration of Jesus’s divinity (by turning water into wine).  Here is the story in John (2:1-12):

On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.”

“Woman, why do you involve me?” Jesus replied. “My hour has not yet come.”

His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons.

Jesus said to the servants, “Fill the jars with water”; so they filled them to the brim.

Then he told them, “Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.”

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

After this he went down to Capernaum with his mother and brothers and his disciples. There they stayed for a few days.

It is likely that the author of John made up this story to portray Jesus as a divine figure because turning water into wine was a typical means of establishing divinity in pagan traditions.  Certainly, if it had happened, being such a seminal moment in Jesus’s ministry, it would have been reported by Mark, Matthew, and Luke.

Certain elements of the story make no sense.  Mary, the mother of Jesus, was an invited guest, but she seems to take charge after the wine runs out by giving orders to the servants.  Jesus declares that his time has not yet come (presumably to start performing miracles) but then he performs a miracle anyway.  Jesus needs to start with water in the jars- he can’t make wine from nothing? But he made the universe from nothing?  The servants have no problem filling wine jars with water just because some stranger told them to do so.  Then, of course, we have the obligatory statement by the banquet master that Jesus’s wine is the best.

This story is a favorite of Christians, but a rational examination of the facts indicates that it almost certainly fictional.

(870) Romulus is plagiarized for stories of Jesus 

Of all the many parallels of Christianity and the similarities that can’t be denied about the deities that were worshiped and believed in 2000 years ago and many years prior, nothing  stands out more than the Roman god Romulus.

For the best and most detailed research on the Romulus/Jesus parallels, Dr. Richard Carrier summarized it in his book On The Historicity of Jesus: Why We Have Reason To Doubt.

http://www.sheffieldphoenix.com/showbook.asp?bkid=264

He writes…

“But when taken altogether the Romulus and Jesus death-and-resurrection narratives contain all of the following parallels;

1 . The hero is the son of God.
2. His death is accompanied by prodigies.
3. The land is covered in darkness.
4. The hero’s corpse goes missing.
5. The hero receives a new immortal body, superior to the one he had.
6. His resurrection body has on occasion a bright and shining appearance.
7. After his resurrection he meets with a follower on a road from the city.
8. A speech is given from a summit or high place prior to ascending.
9. An inspired message of resurrection or ‘translation to heaven’ is delivered to a witness.
10. There is a ‘great commission’ (an instruction to future followers).
11 . The hero physically ascends to heaven in his new divine body.
12. He is taken up into a cloud.
13. There is an explicit role given to eyewitness testimony (even naming the witnesses).
14. Witnesses are frightened by his appearance and/or disappearance.
15. Some witnesses flee.
16. Claims are made of ‘dubious alternative accounts’ (which claims were obviously fabricated for Romulus, there never having been a true
account to begin with).
17. All of this occurs outside of a nearby (but central) city.
18. His followers are initially in sorrow over the hero’s death.
19. But his post-resurrection story leads to eventual belief, homage and
rejoicing.
20. The hero is deified and cult subsequently paid to him (in the same manner as a god).”

https://atheistforums.org/thread-29605.html

It is ironic that Christians believe the existence of Romulus to be untrue and they are right to think so, but they need to acknowledge that if they accept all of these qualities of Romulus as untrue, then they must also acknowledge that these identical factors about Jesus might also not be true.

The many similarities could not be a co-incidence, it is too highly unlikely and if one copied the other then it would have to be the deity that was second, which was Jesus, who was said to have been crucified in around 30-33 AD. The story of Romulus is over 700 years older than the belief in Joshua (Jesus), or his crucifixion.

As with everything about Christianity, this is just another demonstration of plagiarism that shows Christianity to be an unoriginal collection of myths, fables and ancient stories depicting other peoples’ gods and messiahs that people wished were theirs. This demonstrates with probable certainty that Christianity is a false religion.

(871) Ease of creating scripture

Suppose you are a scholar living around 90 AD and want to write a gospel of Jesus.  You don’t know anything about Jesus, but you have copies of the gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke to use as source material.

Much of what you write is copied from the previous gospels, although you make small changes in style and editing, sometimes inserting subtle changes in the order and progression of events and in the dialogue.  However,  you want your story to stand out in some way, so you decide to invent a pleasant story to make Jesus seem even more spectacular than he’s been presented previously.  Here is the new material you add to your gospel:

Andrew 12: 10-24

The next day, Jesus and his disciples entered Kursi on the east coast of the Sea of Galilee.  Jesus commanded his disciples to say nothing to anyone as he was fatigued from the previous day’s travel and large crowds.  But as they entered the city, a man who walked with a limp recognized him and said, “Master, I saw your great works in Capernaum, Lord, I beseech you, not for me, but my mother, please come to heal her and forgive her sins.”

Jesus was moved by the man’s faith and said, “Very well, take me to her.”  The man’s mother was born without legs and had to be carried about, but yet she bore two healthy sons.  Jesus took pity on the woman, but commended her, “Woman, you have taken what the Lord has given you and made the most of it, blessed are those who receive little, and yet give much.”  The woman replied, “Sir, or master, I have been blessed all of my life with a good and faithful husband and two fine sons, there is nothing more I could ask of God.”

But the sons responded, “Lord, she is too humble to ask for anything, but we know you have your Father’s favor and can do great things, please in all humbleness, may you heal her and make her whole?”

Jesus was moved by the faith and dignity of this family and began to shed tears.  The room became completely silent and Jesus cried out, “Father, not for me, but for your glory take this woman, full of faith and charity, in your hands so that she might be at peace and be made whole.”  Jesus then took both of his hands, bringing them over the woman’s body, covered her with a blanket, and then said a prayer, “with this touch, thou shalt be made whole.”  He then commanded the sons to remove the blanket.  When the woman became uncovered, she was seen to be fully formed.  Everyone gasped with astonishment and began to praise Jesus.  The sons helped the mother up and she took the first steps of her life. Jesus told the sons to find her new clothes and shoes.

As Jesus left the house, he commanded the disciples to tell no one of what they had seen.  Because of the commotion, Jesus left the city and stayed overnight two miles away.  On the way he told the disciples to take two tarps they found along the way, for it began to rain.

There is every reason to believe that if your gospel had been placed in the Bible that people today would believe that this was a true, factual story in the life of Jesus. Who could refute its truth?  Yet it was just made up because you wanted your gospel story to be more compelling than the previous ones.  This is exactly what happened over the decades following Jesus’s ministry.  We see it in the gospels as they chronologically became more sensational.

Also note the subtlety of adding two unnecessary elements to the story above- the first son having a limp and the rain at the end. These gratuitous details are a means of making a fictional story seem more real, and it was a technique used time and again by the gospel writers.

(872) Disciples just got up and left?

The way that the gospels describe the manner in which Jesus calls his disciple lacks any sense of realism. Here are some examples from the Gospel of Mark:

Mark 1:16-20

As Jesus walked beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” At once they left their nets and followed him.

When he had gone a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John in a boat, preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him.

Mark 2:13-14

Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them.  As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

To put this in a modern-day application, suppose you are at work at a construction site.  A man walks by who seems to be someone special and he tells you to follow him.  As if in a hypnotic spell, you simply leave your job site and walk away with the man, saying nothing to your boss, or informing your family or friends.  And you don’t come back for at least one year.

Christian apologists will say that Mark was being characteristically brief with his details and that the actual situation probably involved more negotiation and logistical workings.  This may be true, but it is also true that this type of haste in writing style is indicative of someone writing fiction by over-simplifying a complicated scenario. A person departing suddenly leaves a gaping hole in a community where peoples’ lives and livelihoods are intimately interconnected, and it’s unlikely that a divinely-inspired writer would have glossed over that fact.

(873) God’s nature is inconsistent

The way God is portrayed in the Bible leaves any critical-thinking wondering about the core nature of God. The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/michael_martin/xtianity_absurd.html

In some places God is described as merciful (Ps 86:5, 100:5, 103:8, 106:1, 136:2, 145:8-9; Joel 2:13; Mic 7:18; Jas 5:11), and in other places as lacking mercy; (De 7:2, 16, 20:16-17; Jos 6:21, 10:11, 19, 40, 11:6-20; Isa 6:19, 15:3; Na 1:2; Jer 13:14; Mt 8:12, 13:42, 50, 25:30, 41, 46; Mk 3:29; 2Th 1:8-9; Re 14:9-11, 21:8).

In some places as a being who repents and changes His mind (Ge 6:6; Ex 32:14; 1Sa 2:30-31, 15:11,35; 2Sa 24:16; 2Ki 20: 1-6; Ps 106:45; Jer 42:10; Am 7:3; Jon 3:10), in other places as a being who never repents and changes His mind (Nu 23:19; ISa 15:29, Eze 24:14; Mal 3:6; Jas 1:17).

In some places as a being who deceives and causes confusion and evil (Ge 11:7; Jg 9:23; 1Sa 16:14; La 3:38; 1Ki 22:22-23; Isa 45:7; Am 3:6; Jer18:11, 20:7; Eze 20:25; 2 Th 2:11), and in other places as a being who never does (De 32:4; Ps 25:8, 100:5, 145:9; ICo 14:33).

in some places as someone who punishes children for their parents’ wrong doing (Ge 9:22-25; Ex 20:5, 34:7; Nu 14:18; De 5:9; 2Sa 12:14; Isa 14:21, 65:6-7), and in other places as one who never does (De 24:16; 2Ch 25:4; Eze 18:20).

There is a saying that applies here:  ‘too many cooks spoil the broth.’ In the Bible, God is described by too many people each with their own ideas about his nature.  What results is a confusing skein of contradictions.  A book that was inspired by an actual god would be consistent in all matters.  What we see is the opposite of that.

(874) Religion becoming extinct in nine nations

A study reported by the BBC claims that religion may become extinct in nine nations.  The following is taken from:

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-12811197

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

The important thing to note is that the nine nations cited are all first world, affluent, and highly educated countries.  The fact that religion is dying in countries of this caliber, and not, for instance, in countries of lower prominence is compelling evidence that religion is not a product of reality, but rather a reflection of man’s pre-scientific superstitions. In this model, the focus of religion’s extinction would begin in countries similar to those cited above. In a model assuming that religions hold absolute truth, the opposite would occur, with it becoming stronger in the most enlightened and cultured countries.

(875) God is obsessed with trivial things

Primitive men living in a pre-scientific age would be mired in the small details of life, but a god who governs the entire universe would most likely be focused more on the big picture.  The following is taken from:

http://www.freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Bible_reviews

The entity that created and sustains the entire universe, including: super-giant stars, super-massive black holes, countless galaxies, neutron stars, red giants, super-nova, hyper-nova, stupendous physical, biological, chemical, geological phenomena, huge terrestrial and gaseous planets, and so on and so on, was obsessed with:

burning flesh, circumcision, sexual practices, Semitic rituals, pig meat, reciting tedious and elaborate lists of family names, incest, oxen goring men needing to be punished, the eating of blood and fat, the eating of shellfish, bodily discharges, beard trimming practices, hair length, crushed testicles, eunuchs, cloth garments … the list is much longer and includes: a man who refuses to impregnate his widowed sister-in-law is put to death by The Lord [GE 38:8-10].

Any person with a modicum of common sense, unconstrained intelligence, or intellectual integrity can see that the silly trivial inanities described in the Old Testament cannot be the workings of a universal god.  They are instead a good list of what people in a primitive era thought was important.  This is a dead give-away that the God of the Jews and Christians does not exist.

(876) Harry Potter and Christian hypocrisy

Many Christians are concerned about the growing popularity of the Harry Potter books and movies among young people, citing the glorification of the occult as potentially misleading children away from ‘proper’ beliefs.   The following is taken from:

http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/harrypotter.html

Potter has caused quite a stir in many nations, with several Australian Christian schools supporting a banning of the books. “Dr. Chas. Gullo of the Christian Outreach College, a private school in Queensland state, said he read one chapter from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and was exposed to four murders. “It was pretty gory,” Gullo said in Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper.” [23] Rev. Robert Frisken of Christian Community Schools Ltd in Australia says: “The ordinary person is typified as being bad because they have no (magic) powers, and heroes are the people who are using the occult. Good finds itself in the occult, which is an inversion of morality for many Christian people” [24] Even many non-Christian parents have been concerned due to the greatly heightened fear that their younger children have after reading Potter’s books. [25]

While some practicing Wiccans flatly deny any link between Potter’s world and theirs [26], the evidence is undeniably clear that Potter promotes an interest in magic and the occult. Parents, whether Christian or not, must take an active role in what their children are being exposed to and determine what is appropriate. Christians especially should be guided by God’s Word, the Bible.

These are the same Christians who defend the Bible as being the foremost, ultimate, and final authority on morality, telling us what is right and what is wrong, and providing the absolute guidepost to know the difference between good and evil.

So while Harry Potter dabbles in the occult, the Bible traipses its tiptoes through mass genocide, turning a woman into a pillar of salt, murder of women and children, child sacrifice, polygamy, incest, beating slaves, smiting people with plagues, taking virgins as sex slaves, forced marriage to a woman’s rapist, punishing children for their father’s deeds, butchering animals as a sacrifice, selling daughters and offering them up to rapists, sending bears to maul children, ripping open pregnant women, and sending good people to Hell to be tortured forever in a lake of fire.

Now, which book, Harry Potter or the Bible- which book, do I ask, should we be concerned about children reading?

(877) Paul says Jesus is only in outer space

What Christians are unaware of but should be aware, is that Paul never mentions Jesus as being an actual man, or that Jesus ever set foot on Earth, or that Jesus ever was anything more than a vision.

But let’s be clear here, we’re only talking about the seven genuine and authentic letters of Paul, even though we know that these seven letters have been altered slightly over the past 1900 plus years.

As Richard Carrier explains in his slideshow

http://www.richardcarrier.info/Historicity_of_Jesus.pdf

Galatians 1:11-12

I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin.  I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.

This immediately raises the following questions:

– He got a revelation from Jesus?

– How?

– How often did Jesus appear to Paul?

Well the answer is of course that Paul (according to his words) talked to Jesus while Jesus was in outer space and Paul was on the road to Damascus. He never actually met him, but claims that the scriptures themselves revealed Jesus to him.

Paul uses the archaeologically unproven and untrue Old Testament to make points in his epistles. This is the equivalent of someone using the book The Hobbit, to say that Gandalf the Grey is communicating with them through verses of the book.

1 Corinthians 15:1-8

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand.  By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures,  that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures,  and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

Some issues to consider:

– Paul uses the Old Testament to tell people how to think and act (not a good guideline)

– Several people claimed to have visions of Jesus, but there is nothing indicating that anyone actually met Jesus, or that he was even a real person, or anything more than something people claimed, like people today who claim to speak in tongues.

– Jesus died in outer space as believed by Paul and many others of that time.

– Jesus was believed to have lived and died in “outer space” meaning in “the 7 Heavens”, which was what people believed at that time.

Seven Heavens – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Heaven in Judaism – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

– Paul’s words of “The twelve” are his words, but don’t refer to anything like the disciples, or who and what “the twelve” even means (it’s meaningless).

– Nothing that indicates anything about Jesus being on Earth and getting buried, but as Philo writes, he believed in a deity in Jesus tradition, called “The Logos” who lived in outer space.

– Paul took this Jewish tradition of The Logos and superimposed it with the high priest mentioned in scripture who he interpreted as a celestial being.

As in Zechariah 6:11-13 which was written 600 years before Paul, or Christianity:

Then take silver and gold, and make crowns, and set them upon the head of JOSHUA the son of Josedech, the high priest And speak unto him, saying, Thus speaketh the LORD of hosts, saying, Behold the man whose name is The BRANCH; and he shall grow up out of his place, and he shall build the temple of the LORD:  Even he shall build the temple of the LORD; and he shall bear the glory, and shall sit and rule upon his throne; and he shall be a priest upon his throne: and the counsel of peace shall be between them both.

But there is no definite evidence that Paul, or anyone else ever met Jesus, that Jesus was human, or ever set foot on Earth.

1 Corinthians 11:23

For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread.

As shown, there is no evidence that Jesus was ever on Earth and that he wasn’t killed by demons in space (according to belief). This conclusively demonstrates that if Paul himself never wrote about a human Jesus (over 20 years BEFORE the Gospel of Mark) then we can safely conclude that there is nothing to prove there is any truth to Jesus ever existing.  A case can be made that he was just another mythical being, no different than Zeus, or Thor, somewhere up in the sky, somewhere in outer space.

Though Professor Ehrman has written several books that are of very high quality, with amazing content that annihilates the New Testament and a lot of the Old Testament and exposes several flaws in the logic, truth, and reasoning of Christianity, he has been the “go to guy” for Christians to assert that Jesus HAD TO have been an  historical person.

Christians will constantly state in various words “that Ehrman is himself an agnostic atheist historian, who insists that Jesus did exist and was a real historical person and that all Jesus mythicists (people who say that Jesus never existed) are not to be listened to, or taken seriously and could never get a job at any university or school teaching religious history anywhere.”

Another thing he has said in the past is that there are barely any mythicists with degrees and proper credentials. In fact he is only aware of about three. Since the release of Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist in 2012, he has been told how wrong he was. He has been given the names of multiple accomplished scholars who stand by their work that they acknowledge to their better judgement and understanding (with evidence) that Jesus (the Jewish man crucified on the cross by Pontius Pilate) did not exist.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11543839-did-jesus-exist?from_search=true

These scholars all acknowledge that there could in fact have been a Jesus that the gospels copy the name from (Joshua) since Joshua was a very popular name then. A man named Joshua probably was killed by the Romans around 30 AD (maybe even several men by the same name), but there is no evidence to prove that he existed; in fact, there is considerable evidence that the historical Jesus of the gospel probably did not exist.

In Professor Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist, he makes several arguments and claims of evidence for the historical Jesus, but some of the mythicists that Ehrman attacked in his book confronted him and stated that much of the content was fallacious, inaccurate, or untrue. Many other scholarly people came forward and said the same things to confront Bart about his mistakes.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17818336-bart-ehrman-and-the-quest-of-the-historical-jesus-of-nazareth?from_search=true

Dr. Richard Carrier responded and exchanged with Professor Ehrman shortly after the release of his book and documented this discussion in its entirety online for anyone to research and evaluate the arguments and evidence for themselves.

http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/1794

Professor Ehrman mostly ignored what Dr. Carrier said and did not respond, but the exchange was quite revealing. People can come to their own conclusions reading this exchange about whether or not Jesus was historical, or divine, or non-existent, but for Christians to use Ehrman’s book Did Jesus Exist as evidence FOR the existence of an historical Jesus is something that they might not want to waste their time on.

When a Christian attempts to defend Christianity and Jesus and by saying that “Bart Ehrman, an atheist scholar who is one of the best in the world, says Jesus existed and he wrote an entire book on it full of evidence that you should read”,  show them the arguments against him and the fallacies he has committed and if that doesn’t seem to work, then you should also show them Ehrman’s latest book that came out in 2014, How Jesus Became God: The Exhaltation Of A Preacher from Galilee. 

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20149192-how-jesus-became-god?from_search=true

What Professor Ehrman says in this new book CONTRADICTS what he said in his book Did Jesus Exist. He even admits that his views on many things have changed. Without coming right out and saying it though and without so much as an apology, he says his views and opinions have changed, but he doesn’t mention that some of those views are about the points he attacked mythicists for regarding the content of their arguments and evidence.

“The most startling feature of this new book is that in it Ehrman has now completely reversed a position he took against me in Did Jesus Exist (as is well known, I published a detailed critique of that awful book). He now admits that from the very earliest recorded history, indeed even earlier than that, even possibly their very first year, Christians regarded Jesus as a pre-existent divine being. That this was not a later development first encountered in the Gospel of John, for example. “The idea that Jesus is God is not an invention of modern times…it was the view of the very earliest Christians soon after Jesus’s death” (p. 3). Because, “soon after Jesus’s death, the belief in his resurrection led some of his followers to say he was God” (p. 83). Ehrman concludes that at least “some Christians were saying that Jesus was a preexistent being (a ‘later’ view) even before Paul began to write in the 50s–well before our earliest gospel was written” (p. 235), in fact, he admits, “it must have been remarkably early in the Christian tradition,” because “it was in place well before Paul’s letters” and thus did not originate in the time of the gospel of John as has commonly been insisted (p. 276).”

For highly recommended books that finely and thoroughly detail everything that could be known and relevant on Jesus and Christianity, Dr. Carrier has written many books on the subjects that are peer reviewed, well written, well researched, with a tremendously thorough collection of citations and references to back up and support everything he says in its entirety.

http://www.richardcarrier.info/BooksbyRichardCarrier.html#PH

In summary, Christians CANNOT use Bart Ehrman as evidence for the existence of Jesus. As more evidence comes to light, the trend among objective scholars is to assert that Jesus was probably mythical.

(892) Important events mentioned in only one gospel

Although it is possible for three of the gospels to leave out an important event that is reported in the remaining fourth gospel, it raises suspicion that the ‘fourth’ author was exercising poetic license in his reporting of the events. The following significant events are discussed in only one of the four gospels:

• Pre-existence of Christ (John)
• Birth of John the Baptist (Luke)
• Annunciation (Luke)
• Visitation of Mary (Luke)
• Annunciation of the shepherds (Luke)
• Adoration of the shepherds (Luke)
• Circumcision of Jesus (Luke)
• Infant Jesus in the temple (Luke)
• Star of Bethlehem (Matthew)
• Adoration of the Magi (Matthew)
• Flight into Egypt (Matthew)
• Massacre of the innocents (Matthew)
• Herod’s death (Matthew)
• Child Jesus found in the temple (Luke)
• Marriage at Cana (John)
• Jesus and Nicodemus (John)
• First Temple cleansing (John)
• Growing seed parable (Mark)
• Miraculous catch of fishes (Luke)
• Young man from Nain (Luke)
• Two debtors parable (Luke)
• Seventy-two new disciples (Luke)
• Discourse on ostentation (Matthew)
• Parable of good Samaritan (Luke)
• Jesus at home of Martha and Mary (Luke)
• Friend at midnight parable (Luke)
• Rich fool parable (Luke)
• Samaritan woman at the well (John)
• Discourse on holiness sermon (Matthew)
• Test of a good person sermon (Matthew)
• Two blind men at Galilee miracle (Matthew)
• Exorcising a mute miracle (Matthew)
• Command to bring a sword (Matthew)
• Paralytic at Bethesda miracle (John)
• Lord of the Sabbath (Matthew)
• Barren fig tree parable (Luke)
• Infirm woman miracle (Luke)
• Parable of the pearl (Matthew)
• Drawing in the net parable (Matthew)
• Hidden treasure parable (Matthew)
• Deaf mute at Decapolis miracle (Mark)
• Blind man of Bethsaida miracle (Mark)
• Coin in fish’s mouth miracle (Matthew)
• Bread of life discourse (John)
• Man with dropsy miracle (Luke)
• Counting the cost parable (Luke)
• Unforgiving servant parable (Matthew)
• Lost coin parable (Luke)
• Prodigal son parable (Luke)
• Unjust steward parable (Luke)
• Rich man and Lazarus parable (Luke)
• Cleansing ten lepers parable (Luke)
• Unjust judge parable (Luke)
• Pharisees and the publican parable (Luke)
• Woman taken in adultery (John)
• Workers in the vineyard parable (Matthew)
• Blind man at birth miracle (John)
• Raising of Lazarus from the dead (John)
• Jesus and Zacchaeus (Luke)
• Two sons parable (Matthew)
• Ten virgins parable (Matthew)
• Sheep and goats parable (Matthew)
• Grain of wheat sermon (John)
• Promising a paraclete sermon (John)
• Healing ear of a servant (Luke)
• Blood curse on Jews (Matthew)
• Doubting Thomas (John)
• Catch of 153 fish (John)

https://thechurchoftruth.wordpress.com/key-episodes-in-the-canonical-gospels/

This is just a partial list of events presented in only one gospel.  The question that must be asked is ‘if the Holy Spirit was inspiring these men, why did only one of them receive and document so many of the seminal events in Jesus’s life?’  Of course, this is exactly what you would expect if four men, writing independently except for what they may have copied from each other, would produce. It is strong evidence that much of the gospel stories are fictional.

(893) Michael the Archangel plagiarized by Jesus

Though the Book of Daniel is fiction in its entirety, one thing that is undeniable is that it paved the way to the belief in Jesus and Christianity (based on being similar to Jesus).

This fictional character written in the Book of Daniel was Michael “the archangel” (yes, the one from the just as fictional John Travolta movie).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_(1996_film)

Daniel 12:1

AND at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.

Everything about Michael the archangel was fictional and was written around 167 BCE, but here is the problem- 200 years later people didn’t know it was fiction (and still don’t). For that matter people didn’t know that 99.9% of the Bible is fiction except for a few irrelevant names of a few people and places.  Historically and archaeologically, scholars do have evidence that the entire book of Daniel is fiction and that has become a general consensus.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/chris_sandoval/daniel.html

Afterall, what Daniel 9:24-27 shows us, suggests to the reader the basic sum of a close duplicate of Christianity:

Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy.

Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times.

And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.

And he shall confirm the covenant with many for one week: and in the midst of the week he shall cause the sacrifice and the oblation to cease, and for the overspreading of abominations he shall make it desolate, even until the consummation, and that determined shall be poured upon the desolate.”

– We have “the Messiah The Prince” (Michael) being a parallel to Jesus (the Messiah king)

– Michael makes himself the sacrifice to atone for peoples sins when the end times happen (sounds familiar?)

Then Daniel 12:10-13 continues it’s parallel to Christianity, which happened 200 years before Christianity was Christianity.

Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried; but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.

And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that maketh desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.

Blessed is he that waiteth, and cometh to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.

But go thou thy way till the end be: for thou shalt rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.

These verses in Daniel  sound precisely like Christianity. So if Christians attempt to say that the Jewish people didn’t already have a belief in archangel messiahs sacrificing themselves and coming back from the dead, so that people could have an afterlife and get rewarded or punished, then show them the Book of Daniel to put that to rest.

Again, Dr. Richard Carrier talks about this in great detail, including other messiahs and archangels believed before Christianity was invented, in his book On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt (element 5 in the book).

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21964522-on-the-historicity-of-jesus

This supports one of the main points of mythicism, which is that pre-common era people believed in a celestial archangel deity messiah, from which Christianity evolved.

The Bible itself is so plagiarized that it plagiarizes itself. It’s too much of a coincidence that Daniel’s Michael and Paul’s Jesus are so similar. This is another reason that leans toward Christianity being a false religion.

(894) Atheist quotes bring clarity

Sometimes, all it takes is a singular, clear, focused idea to understand the folly of religion.  The following quotes each have that pedigree- they make us realize that Christianity, and religion in general, is a phantom wrapped in a fairy tale:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/44vfa1/20_of_my_favorite_atheismrelated_quotes/

1. It’s a strange myth that atheists have nothing to live for. It’s the opposite. We have nothing to die for. We have everything to live for. -Ricky Gervais
2. What’s ‘God’? Well, you know when you want something really bad and you close your eyes and you wish for it? God’s the guy that ignores you. -From the movie The Island
3. When you need something to believe in, start with yourself. -Unknown
4. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. -Christopher Hitchens
5. Eternal suffering awaits anyone who questions God’s infinite love. -Bill Hicks
6. The supernatural is the natural not yet understood. -Elbert Hubbard
7. Morality is doing right, no matter what you are told. Religion is doing what you’re told, no matter what is right. -Unknown
8. Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. -Steven Weinberg
9. Your religious beliefs typically depend on the community in which you were raised or live. The spiritual experiences of people in ancient Greece, medieval Japan or 21st-century Saudi Arabia do not lead to belief in Christianity. It seems, therefore, that religious belief very likely tracks not truth but social conditioning. -Gary Gutting
10. How thoughtful of God to arrange matters so that, wherever you happen to be born, the local religion always turns out to be the true one. -Richard Dawkins
11. But why, in any case, do we so readily accept the idea that the one thing you must do if you want to please God is believe in him? What’s so special about believing? Isn’t it just as likely that God would reward kindness, or generosity, or humility? Or sincerity? What if God is a scientist who regards honest seeking after truth as the supreme virtue? -Richard Dawkins
12. Creationists eagerly seek a gap in present-day knowledge or understanding. If an apparent gap is found, it is assumed that God, by default, must fill it. [But] gaps shrink as science advances, and God is threatened with eventually having nothing to do and nowhere to hide. -Richard Dawkins
13. If God can’t prove he exists, what makes you think you can? -John Willow
14. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. -Carl Sagan
15. Science adjusts its views based on what’s observed. Faith is the denial of observation so that belief can be preserved. -Tim Minchin
16. What kind of God creates beings that are incapable of understanding him and then makes understanding him the criteria upon which they’re gonna base their salvation? -Matt Dillahunty
17. How is it that you use reason as a path to truth in every endeavor of your life, and then when it comes to the ultimate truth, the most important truth, you’re saying that faith is required? -Matt Dillahunty
18. (From God’s perspective) Books you think I wrote are way too thick. Who needs a thousand metaphors to figure out you shouldn’t be a dick? And I don’t watch you when you sleep. Surprisingly I don’t use my omnipotence to be a fucking creep. -Bo Burnham
19. Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do! And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever ’til the end of time…but he loves you! -George Carlin
20. I tried to believe that there is a God, who created each of us in his own image and likeness, loves us very much, and keeps a close eye on things. I really tried to believe that, but I gotta tell you, the longer you live, the more you look around, the more you realize, something is fucked up. -George Carlin

If Christianity was real, we wouldn’t have the intellectual luxury of making the types of statements that are listed above.  It’s truth would permeate our core existence and its denial would require a surrender of our faculties rather the free exercise of them.

(895) In God we Trust?

“In God we trust” is the official motto of the United States. It was adopted as the nation’s motto in 1956 as an alternative or replacement to the unofficial motto of E pluribus unum, meaning ‘out of many, one.’

But what does it mean to trust god?  Trust implies having the confidence that someone else will act in a certain favorable way such that you do not need to enforce that behavior, or perhaps even monitor it.

When used in the United States, ‘In God we Trust’ refers 99.9% of the time to the Christian god, Yahweh, who is, of course, the old Hebrew tribal war god who evolved to became the only true god, the maker of time and space and the entire universe.  So how does that trust in this god stack up?:

Do we trust God to keep us safe from natural disasters?  No, we anticipate them and prepare for them.

Do we trust God  to keep us safe from terrorists?  No, we employ extensive intelligence and countermeasures.

Do we trust God to keep us safe from plagues?  No, we use vaccines and isolation techniques to prevent the spread of them.

Do we trust God to prevent our citizens from being harmed by transportation accidents?  No, we employ an accident investigation team to investigate them and propose remedies.

Do we trust God to keep our population healthy? No, we use an extensive medical delivery system.

Do we trust God to keep our citizens safe from crime? No, we have an elaborate police system for that purpose.

So, what do we trust God to do?  ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.  And why is this?  Because God doesn’t do anything, he is just a figment of peoples’ imaginations.  When you distill it down, it is as obvious as the proverbial elephant in the room.

Devising the slogan ‘In God we Trust’ and then not trusting him for anything is a tell-tale sign that you are just dealing in the world of words, not the world of reality.

(896) What Christianity lacks

For what it possesses, Christianity lacks several attributes that are listed here:

Logic, facts, evidence, science, common sense, proof, reasoning, probability, thinking, intelligence, feasibility, confirmation, wisdom, likelihood, knowledge, rationality, realism, plausibility, intellect, open mindedness, analysis, induction, deduction, logistics, brainpower, coherence , saneness, consistency, congruity, enlightenment, sensibility, legitimacy, authenticity, predictability, believability, and foresight.

If Christianity was true, it would be logical, it would have facts on its side, plenty of confirming evidence, would make common sense, be amenable to reason, etc.  The standard by which Christians judge the reality of their faith is set way too low.  We are dealing with a claim of vast and unlimited supernatural powers, a potency that exceeds our ability to imagine, and yet we are dealing with a religion that cannot even distinguish itself from countless other Bronze Age myths.  What Christianity claims versus what it delivers is like comparing an elephant to a flea.

(897) Probability that Christianity is true

We must analyze a set of factors to determine a realistic probability that Christianity is a true religion.

• The probability that a god was needed to cause the big bang- set this to 0.5 as we have no way of knowing this. (Pbb = 0.5)
• The probability that this god survived the blast- once again set this to 0.5 for the same reason. (Psb = 0.5)
• The probability that God has the ability to see everything in the universe in real time- this seems very unlikely given our current knowledge of physics, but we cannot discount the possibility, so let’s set that at 0.05. (Pse = 0.05)
• The probability that God can manipulate events at all locations at will, this is quite different from being able to see what is happening. We can see things happening at a distance but we have no way to control what we are seeing. The same may be true of a god.  Let’s set this to 0.05 as well.  (Pme = 0.05)
• The probability that God waited 14 billion years to create beings in his own image- this seems quite unlikely if humans were such an important part of his plan, so let’s make this 0.01. (Pw14 = 0.01)
• The probability that God waited 100,000 years + to contact humans after they became a unique species and began to develop their own erroneous ideas of gods- this seems quite unlikely as well, so the best guess is around 0.01 also. (Pw100,000 = 0.01)
• The probability that God would chose to reveal himself only to one small backward tribe in a very remote spot of the Earth, and avoid revealing himself to more advanced civilizations in places such as China where a reliable system of record-keeping had already been established- this is a very unlikely move by a god, so let’s set this to 0.005. (Prbt = 0.005)
• The probability that God would suddenly change his method of salvation by sacrificing his son as a means of sin forgiveness- this is well beyond a realistic expectation for a divine personage, so let’s set this to 0.01. (Pss = 0.01)

So, the probability that Christianity is true can be calculated by multiplying each of these factors together, such that the probability that Christianity is true (Pct) is:

Pct = (0.5)(0.5)(0.05)(0.05)(0.01)(0.01)(0.005)(0.01)

= 3.13 X 10 (-12)

or 1 in 319,488,817,891.

Yeah, that seems about right.

(898) Christian god flunks four question test

The truth or non-truth of the Christian god hangs on the answer to four logical questions, all of which would be answered ‘yes’ if he was real.  The following is taken from:

http://new.exchristian.net/2015/07/does-god-exist-i-think-we-can-do-better.html

To my mind, the likelihood that the Bible God exists depends on the answer to four questions:

1. Do claims about this God pass the tests of not contradicting each other and not contradicting external evidence?
2. Is the Bible’s God the best and most likely explanation for the design and function of nature?
3. Is the Bible’s God the best and most likely explanation for the biblical record and Christian history?
4. Is the Bible’s God the best and most likely explanation for humanity’s long and enduring quest for God or our profound experience of His presence in our lives?

I think that the answer to all four of these questions is no:

• No because many of the claims made about God in the Bible contradict either each other or external evidence.
• No because we have better explanations for natural phenomena.
• No because we can explain the biblical record without recourse to God.
• And no because we can do the same for our own experience of God.

All of these “no” answers make the existence of the Christian God highly unlikely.

These four questions distill down the essence of how to judge the likelihood of the existence of a god.  In this test, the Christian god fails to satisfy any of the questions is an uncontroversial fashion, leaving a level of ambiguity well beyond what would be expected of an actual supernatural deity.

(899) Christian dominance more to do with military might

Many Christians point to the rapid spread and global dominance of Christianity as evidence of its truthfulness. But a truthful examination of history paints a different picture. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/44zqc2/why_did_christianity_become_popular_and_why_does/

There was a long struggle for religious dominance over the Roman Empire, and it was a near thing. Had events gone differently Christianity probably would have remained an obscure cult on par with Zoroastrianism. But once Christianity was installed at the highest levels of Roman government it was then spread by force throughout the Empire with Roman armies being accompanied by Christian missionaries who put all those who refused to convert to the sword.

Christianity’s dominance had as much to do with military might as anything else. Once installed by fiat, the church enforced doctrinal purity with a zealotry equal to that of Muslim clerics. Heresy was punished by torture and death until the Enlightenment robbed the Church of its temporal power.

History does not back up what Christians would like to believe. Christianity is the most dominant religion in the world, but it got there not because of its truthfulness, but because it enjoyed a surreptitious confluence of historical events.

(900) Gospels mostly silent on the ascension of Jesus

The critical elements of Jesus’s life are his birth, his ministry, his crucifixion, his resurrection, and his ascension into heaven.  The final element, his ascension, is strangely and suspiciously downplayed in the gospels.

The Gospel of Mark ends at Mark 16:8, if we discount the forged ending, and says nothing of Jesus after he resurrected. The Gospel of Matthew simply ends without any discussion of how Jesus left the world. The Gospel of John, even considering the forged final Chapter 21, says nothing about Jesus ascending into heaven.  Only in the Gospel of Luke is the ascension mentioned, and it is only a very brief description:

Luke 24:50-53

When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.

This is the only gospel account of Jesus ascending to heaven.  The only other Biblical account is in Acts, written by the same author as Luke.

Acts 1:9-11

After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.

They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

So, in the entire New Testament, only one person, a non-eyewitness, writes anything about how Jesus left the planet.  And he suspiciously adds a new detail the second time he writes about it (the angel’s proclamation).

The important point to take from this is that the historical truth of Jesus’s ascension is highly dubious.  What this indicates is the likelihood that Jesus’s resurrection was seen primarily as a spiritual event, not of flesh and blood, such that the ascension was more or less superfluous.  Otherwise each of the gospels would have described in considerable detail how the physical -bodied Jesus had left them to go to his Father- it would have been a seminal, psychologically important event worthy of a detailed account.

(901) Violence more common in the Bible than the Quran

A recent study of the percentage of violent passages in the New and Old Testament versus the Quran indicated that the Bible was more violent.  The following was taken from:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/violence-more-common-in-bible-than-quran-text-analysis-reveals-a6863381.html

An analysis into whether the Quran is more violent than the Bible found killing and destruction occur more frequently in the Christian texts than the Islamic.

Investigating whether the Quran really is more violent than its Judeo-Christian counterparts, software engineer Tom Anderson processed the text of the Holy books to find which contained the most violence.

In a blog post, Mr Anderson explains: “The project was inspired by the ongoing public debate around whether or not terrorism connected with Islamic fundamentalism reflects something inherently and distinctly violent about Islam compared to other major religions.”

Using text analytics software he had developed, named Odin Text, he analysed both the New International Version of both the Old and New Testaments as well as an English-language version of the Quran from 1957.

It took just two minutes for his software to read and analyse the three books.

By categorising words into eight emotions – Joy, Anticipation, Anger, Disgust, Sadness, Surprise, Fear/Anxiety and Trust – the analysis found the Bible scored higher for anger and much lower for trust than the Quran.

Further analysis found the Old Testament was more violent than the New Testament, and more than twice as violent as the Quran.

Mr Anderson summarises: “Of the three texts, the content in the Old Testament appears to be the most violent.

“Killing and destruction are referenced slightly more often in the New Testament (2.8%) than in the Quran (2.1%), but the Old Testament clearly leads—more than twice that of the Quran—in mentions of destruction and killing (5.3%).”

This is a revealing comparison because most Christians believe that the Islamic texts are much more violent than their own.  Although recent history suggests that Christians are more peaceful than Muslims, this was certainly not always the case, and it was often the more offensive parts of the Bible that gave inquisitors ‘permission’ to slaughter millions of ‘infidels.’  The bottom line is that any holy scriptures that advocate for violence are most likely not the ‘word of God’ but rather a reflection of the bellicose personalities of the men who wrote them.

(902) Catholic Church and condoms

It has been scientifically proven that condom use helps to prevent unwanted pregnancies as well as the spread of HIV-AIDS and all other sexually-transmitted diseases.  Also, the use of a condom does not result in the process of fertilization, does not involve the killing of a zygote, and therefore it doesn’t infringe on the sensibilities of devout Christians who believe that life begins at conception.

So why has the Catholic Church historically, and to this day, prohibited its members from using condoms?  The best answer is that it is rooted in their Medieval concept that sex was invented by God for the sole purpose of procreation.  As if to say that God is in the business of enforcing sexual frustration by providing humans with strong sexual urges only to prevent them from enjoying them.

This is a testament to the inflexibility of religion in the face of changing times and new evidence.  It also points out the fact that the predominant denomination of the Christian religion is on the wrong side of basic humanity, decency, and compassion, instead clinging tenaciously to a rigid idealistic standard.  The condom prohibition has resulted in a public health crisis in sub-Saharan Africa involving AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea , and other preventable diseases.

Why would God stand by and watch this happen?  Wouldn’t he change the minds of popes and cardinals to address this crisis and stem the tide of embarrassment his church is suffering over this issue?  Wouldn’t he act to help prevent more people from being ravaged and killed by these sexual diseases?  The answers to these three questions is ‘he wouldn’t, he would, and he would’ -IF HE EXISTED.

(903) The kingdom moves to the heavens

It is highly likely that Jesus, along with all of the other messiah figures roaming the Holy Land in the First Century, was preaching the coming of an earthly kingdom of the Jews, to be established in Jerusalem.  The first priority was to become free of Roman rule. However, after many frustrating setbacks, the followers of Jesus eventually resolved that the new kingdom was actually in the heavens. The following is taken from:

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/jesus.html

The legend of Jesus may also have a political aspect. The Jews of Palestine never accepted the rule of Rome. Their prophets were telling them that a “fifth kingdom” was coming (the previous ones being the occupations by Assyrians, Medes, Persians and Greeks), and it would be a Jewish kingdom, created by a messiah imbued with divine powers. For some or most of Jesus’ followers, Jesus may have been identified with that messiah. The Jews then fought three bloody wars against the Romans, each one with “messianic” fervor. They lost all three and the third one ended with the Romans banning Jews from Jerusalem. Then it became impossible to deny that the Romans, not the Jews, were the fifth kingdom. Jesus was obviously not the messiah that prophets had predicted would free the Jews from external domination. No wonder most Jews made fun of Christians and even today do not recognize Jesus as the messiah.

The historian Josephus chronicles the events of the first century. The Jews believed in the prophecy that one of them (the messiah) was destined by god to rule over the entire world. Therefore they kept revolting against the Romans. As the Romans kept winning, that belief moved further and further in time. But the Jews who fought the Romans in 66 and then again in 132 probably did so because 1. they were opposed to accepting Roman rule (i.e., Herod and the Herodians) over Palestine (that had been ruled by the Maccabeans) and 2. they were convinced that one of them (the messiah) was meant to rule over the world (not the Roman emperor). Jesus’ blood relatives (the “disposyny/desposini”) were probably among the leaders of the rebellions. In 136 emperor Hadrian definitely crushed the Jewish resistance and forbad Jews from ever entering Jerusalem again. That is the time when the “gnostic” attitude is born: instead of interpreting Jesus as the messiah, some Jews started interpreting his message as a message of knowledge (of love, fraternity, piety, etc). And the kingdom moved to the heavens.

It is likely that Jesus was working to establish an earthly kingdom, but time and circumstances eventually led his followers to give up on that ideal and instead await a heavenly kingdom. The oral traditions and scriptures surrounding Jesus were then fashioned for that purpose.  Given these facts, it is not surprising that the Jews by and large abandoned belief that Jesus was the messiah.

(904) Christianity became clothed with paganism

After the Emperor Constantine and the Romans took over Christianity in the Fourth Century, they reworked it in the fashion of the existing pagan religions.  Eventually, it became virtually indistinguishable in almost all respects.  The following is taken from:

http://www.badnewsaboutchristianity.com/bd0_ideas.htm#inheritances

No sooner had Constantine the Great abolished the superstitions of his ancestors than magnificent churches were erected everywhere for Christians. These churches, which were richly adorned with pictures and images, bore a striking resemblance to the Pagan temples, both in their outward and inward form. The rights and institutions by which the Greeks and Romans and other nations had formerly testified their veneration for fictitious deities were now adopted, with some slight alterations, by Christian bishops in the service of the true God. Hence it happened that in the third and fourth centuries the religion of the Greeks and Romans differed very little in its external appearance from that of the Christians. They had both a most pompous and splendid ritual, gorgeous robes, mitres, tiaras, wax-tapers, croziers, processions, lustrations, images, and gold and silver vases; and many such circumstances were equally to be seen in heathen temples and Christian churches*.

Bishops adopted not only the shepherd’s crook carried by the Egyptian god Osiris but also his crown. This crown was used for example by the Bishop of Rome, and became a prototype papal tiara. Many familiar Christian concepts are pagan ideas only slightly disguised. The clerical tonsure seems to have been borrowed from the priests of Isis. As so often, Christians seem to have synthesised a number of existing practices. The tonsure also seems to have been used as part of an old Roman ceremony of adoption. (Trainee priests abandoned their own families and were adopted into the family of their bishops, and trainee monks into the family of their abbots)

This should be a cause of concern for believing Christians. Christianity was not a Roman religion and its focus was in Jerusalem, not Rome.  When Rome appropriated the faith and used it to blanket their empire, they distorted it in ways that left it significantly changed from its original foundation.  Jewish Christianity died, Roman Christianity lives on today.

(905) Noah and Atrahasis

Every scientifically literate person who is not brainwashed knows without doubt that the story of Noah and the Ark is fiction.  But what is important in this discussion is whether it was also a story that was borrowed from another tradition unrelated to the Jewish religion.  If this is the case then we can deduce that the Old Testament was not altogether inspired by the Jewish god, Yahweh, but was a document that was plagiarized from other sources.

Although it is possible that Yahweh would impart a fictional tale to his chosen people to explain in understandable terms how the earth was purged and re-populated, it would be a completely different situation if the tale was merely stolen from some other civilization. In the later case, it renders the argument for Yahweh’s existence and the legitimacy of the Old Testament to be a harder sale.  And this is just the situation with the story of Noah.  The following is taken from:

http://www.christianitydisproved.com/bible.html

The Old Testament writings from Abraham to Solomon were not solely a brilliant product of the imagination. “Just as Egypt, India and China, Crete, Greece and Rome, the Germans and the Celts, inherited and restyled the civilizing legacy of the nuclear Near East, so too the authors of the Book of Genesis” (Campbell, 1962, p. 130).

Compare the Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis with the Old Testament Flood myth:

In the Epic of Atrahasis, the god Enlil becomes angry with mankind, Enlil convinces the other gods to destroy mankind with a flood but the god Enki favours Atrahasis telling him to build an ark; this allows Atrahasis to survive the flood with his family whilst saving a quantity of animals (Frymer-Kensky, 1977; Jones, 2005).

The Old Testament Flood myth was not solely a brilliant product of the imagination; no imagination is required when you’re plagiarising other myths.

If someone presented you a holy scripture that they wrote and said was inspired by God, but you found out that they had stolen a lengthy passage from Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, would that make you more or less likely to believe it was true? Therein lies the problem with the inclusion of the plagiarized story of Noah’s flood in Genesis Chapters 7 and 8.

(906) Mary Magdalene and the seven demons

In Mark 16:9 we read:

When Jesus rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons.

This is repeated in one other gospel:

Luke 8:1-2

After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out.

Christians assert that the gospels were inspired by God, being the veritable ‘Word of God.’  If this this true, then demons must be actual beings populating our world.  And if this one woman had seven of them in her body, then there must be a very large number of demons in our presence.  Also, because a definite number of demons, seven, were cast out, then the ability to count them must mean they have unique identities or else present themselves in a manner to make it easy to distinguish them in a crowd. But we no longer need to posit demons to explain anything that’s happening, so, by applying Occam’s Razor, we can safely assume that they don’t exist.

The only way out of this problem for a Christian is to admit that the gospel authors were mistaken, but that opens a Pandora’s Box, suggesting that this error, based on the ignorance and superstitions of the time, is just the tip of the iceberg.

(907) Thou shalt (not?) kill

For one of the most blatant contradictions in scripture, consider the following:

Exodus 32:19-29

When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”

“Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.

Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’ ” The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”

According this piece of savage fiction, Moses has just returned from the mountain carrying the Ten Commandment on two stone tablets. One of those commandment was “Do not kill.”  So what does the Lord command?- to kill, kill your brothers, friends, and neighbors. And not only that, but afterward the Lord ‘blessed’ them for breaking the commandment.

As a side, note two other interesting features.  The magical calf that forms from burning articles of gold.  And the reference to the ‘God of Israel,’ apparently he had not yet graduated to be the one and only god of the universe.

(908) Christianity proves the concept of evolution by evolving from other religions

Though many Christians and even the Vatican believe in evolution, many Christians still do not, even though two particular Christians of the highest rankings in the academic chain of knowledge and achievement in biology acknowledge evolution to be true.

One of these Christians is Francis Collins:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Collins

And the other is Ken R. Miller:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_R._Miller

Evolution of course is a contradiction to Christianity having truth, since so much of the Bible is based on Genesis, with Adam and Eve, Noah’s Ark, and Cain and Abel. The fact of evolution quite thoroughly throws all of that out the window.

Yet here we are with these two Christians (with Collins actually even being an evangelist) who are being unbiased and simply acknowledging scientific facts and truth, based on undeniable evidence.

Another demonstration of evolution is how Christianity and several countless other religions evolved from other religions, using natural selection in a sense.

Through the centuries and millennia, religions would (metaphorically speaking) breed with other religions and their surroundings and then customs and beliefs would be accepted or rejected and some new ones would be created. New religions evolved and were created and thrived, while old religions would just die off over time and be replaced.

A name for this method of evolution of religions is called “cultural syncretism” As Dr. Richard Carrier explains in Element 11 in his book On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason To Doubt:

(Read more about this and other factors involved in this in element 11 of the book.)

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21964522-on-the-historicity-of-jesus

 “Notably all the mystery religions were products of the same sort of cultural syncretism. The Eleusnian were a syncretism of Levantine and Hellenistic elements; The mysteries of Attis and Cybele were a syncretism of Phrygian and Hellenistic elements; the mysteries of Jupiter Dolichenus were a syncretism of Anatolian and Hellenistic elements; Mithraism was a syncretism of Persian and Hellenistic elements; the mysteries of Isis and Osiris were a syncretism of Egyptian and Hellenistic elements. Christianity is simply a continuation of the same trend: a syncretism of Jewish and Hellenistic elements. Each of these cults is unique and different from all the others in nearly every detail- but it’s the general features they all share in common that reflect the overall fad that produced them in the first place, the very features that made them popular and successful within Greco-Roman culture.”

Evolution is shown in multiple ways to be true besides just religion. It is shown socially, it is shown academically, it is shown environmentally. Another form of evolution is the effectiveness of lies and what works best for these lies to be accepted.

Christianity is just another example of religions evolving and adapting their lies and changing and altering themselves in order to be believed. Nothing though whatsoever involves Christianity evolving because of anything it says having any truth, or any real evidence

(909) Devil blamed for Christianity’s plagiarism 

In the early years of Christianity, critics mocked the new faith by pointing out that it had simply adopted many of the elements of the pre-existing pagan religions, such as the virgin birth, the guiding star, the last supper, and the death and resurrection of a savior god.  One of defenses offered by Christian apologists was the rather bizarre claim that the Devil knew that Christianity was coming so he made sure that the pagan religions took on some of the same elements of what was to come in Christianity.  In this way, he was setting up the illusion that Christianity stole these things from the pagans.  The following is taken from:

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/jesus.html

Several early Christian writers such as Justin and Tertullian felt that they had to defend Christianity from such accusations. Early Christian literature is full of references to pagan legends and myths as work of the Devil for the simple reason that Christians adopted the very same legends and myths and the only explanation would be that the Devil was playing a prank on them by pretending that those legends and myths had existed before Jesus.

This, of course, stretches credulity to the breaking point, but that is often what must be done to defend a fable.

(910) Science causes Christians to make up things

A thousand years ago, no Christians doubted the story of the Garden of Eden, the tower of Babel, or the Noah’s flood.  But as science became more sophisticated, it became evident that these stories were fictional.  As a result, Christians had to start rationalizing the contradictions between their beliefs and the growing weight of scientific evidence.  The result was a band-aid approach- to make up all sort of excuses and guesses designed to cautiously admit some of the science but never to doubt the intrinsic claims of their faith.  The following was taken from:

http://www.theaunicornist.com/2012/10/why-christianity-is-bullshit-part-2.html

Why is this a big deal? There’s always the view that the Bible doesn’t have to be literally true, and that it doesn’t have to be inerrant. I think most Christians hold just such a view. Over at the Christian blog Wide as the Waters, Jack Hudson wrote a post where he talked about the historicity of the Old Testament. He makes an important claim:

There were no archeological controversies over ancient Greek or Roman religious beliefs because they were never understood to be historical in nature – they didn’t pretend to be. We don’t talk about Hindu archeology or Buddhist archeology because those religions are not reliant upon historical facts. None of these religions even pretends to be the product of a set of events that occurred in a particular time and place in history; only vague references to certain individuals whose actual existence is unimportant to the belief system. Biblical belief however is definitively set in a particular places and times and concerns certain individuals. [link]

In other words, just make shit up. I sincerely wonder how Christians can do this to themselves. When the facts reveal their theology as untenable, they don’t reject their theology – they just alter it with speculative nonsense to placate their cognitive dissonance. Why spend so much effort rationalizing beliefs for which there is no evidence?

Christianity bending to science instead of science aligning itself to Christianity is extremely solid evidence that Christianity is false.

(911) Societal changes suggest Christianity is false

If Christianity is true, then we are not putting anywhere near enough emphasis on it.  We should be spending much more money and resources to get as many people saved as possible.  Because we are talking about the eternal fate of people, getting them saved should take immense priority over getting them educated, having jobs, adequate health care, etc.

But if Christianity is false, then we are suffering a needless drain our our time and resources that should be used in other ways.  The following was taken from:

http://americanhumanist.org/humanism/Some_Reasons_Why_Humanists_Reject_the_Bible

If the Humanist view of the Bible is correct, millions of Bible-believers and churchgoers are wasting much time, money, and energy. Humanity’s condition could be greatly improved if those resources were used for solving the world’s problems instead of worshiping a nonexistent God.

Moreover, because so many people have been told the Bible is the “Good Book,” biblical teachings shape the attitudes of millions on numerous subjects. When the subjects involve governmental issues, all of society can be affected when Bible-believers express their views in the political arena.

Anyone who becomes politically active can soon discover that Bible teachings influence the opinions of many Americans on issues involving nuclear war, overpopulation, conservation, women’s rights, gay rights, racial equality, corporal punishment of children, church-state separation, sex education, science, abortion, contraception, censorship, capital punishment, and other subjects.

When people view the Bible as the word of a just and omniscient God, and attempt to have society’s laws and social practices reflect biblical teachings, serious error and harm will occur if the Bible was actually written by fallible humans who lived in an unenlightened era.

In that case, the Bible would not be a guidebook for attaining human happiness and well-being. It would instead perpetuate the ideas of an ignorant and superstitious past – and prevent humanity from rising to a higher level.

There seems to be no middle ground here.  Either we are slacking off disastrously by not adequately supporting Christian evangelism or we are wasting precious human and economic capital chasing a fantasy down a rabbit hole.  Therefore, as a planet in need and for the sake of humanity, we must resolve this issue with a strong degree of confidence and re-direct our efforts accordingly.

So which way is society trending?  If you look at world history over the past several centuries in predominantly Christian countries, there has been a sea change in how resources are being expended, with much greater emphasis on providing for peoples’ welfare in this life, and a concomitant decrease in emphasizing their eternal fate. This provides back door evidence that Christianity is false, because if it was true, evidence would have been building up to support it from science, increased personal observations of phenomena, and faster and more reliable communications.  Countries are becoming more secular precisely because evidence is building that Christianity is false.

(912) The fallacy of dismissing the Old Testament

When confronted with the spectacular brutality of the Old Testament, many Christians respond by saying that Jesus superseded the Old Testament and that it does not represent the face of Christianity.  Setting aside for the moment that this attitude flies in the face of reality or even the purported words of Jesus, agreeing with the premise leads Christianity down an even more sordid path. The following is taken from:

http://americanhumanist.org/humanism/Some_Reasons_Why_Humanists_Reject_the_Bible

In the New Testament, God became far worse in regard to imposing excessively severe punishments. It would be hard to imagine anything more cruel and disproportionate than punishing people with eternal torture for mere disbelief that Jesus was the son of God.

The inability to believe that proposition harms no one, and it has been disbelieved by some of the greatest benefactors of humanity. Nonetheless, God promises to punish them and all other nonbelievers with the most horrible pain conceivable.

Yes, the Old Testament god was a brute, but at least he just killed people who mercifully became unconscious after he murdered them.  But the New Testament god became the heinous tyrant who saw fit to punish dead people, and not just with a degree of separation, but to an actual place of physical punishment, a sentence that he promised would never end.  Any Christian who says, ‘that’s just the Old Testament’ is not playing with a full deck of cards.

(913) What Christianity doesn’t want to see

Our world is populated by private interests that tacitly root against advancements that would be wonderfully favorable for mankind. For instance, hospitals and doctors would not want an inexpensive preventive cure for cancer and heart disease to be developed.  Such would be a wonderful boon to society, but a devastating economic blow to the medical profession. Likewise, lawyers would not want to see a dramatic reduction in divorce rates, or automobile body shops would not want to see all cars outfitted with automatic collision avoidance technology.  These are just a few examples, but it points out the fact that significant segments of society don’t want to see dramatic improvements that would overall be great for the world.

In a like manner, there are many ‘good’ things that Christianity as whole, does not want to see:

• It doesn’t want to see everyone going to college, a known killer of sectarian belief.
• It doesn’t want people to become more familiar with the Bible, becoming aware of the myriad problems and contradictions.
• It doesn’t want science to advance any further, finding more evidence for evolution or perhaps the non-deistic mechanism of the universe’s creation.
• It doesn’t want people to become more knowledgeable about the origins and evolution of Christianity.
• It doesn’t want school children to be taught critical thinking skills.

If Christianity was true, all of these things would enhance, not degrade, faith, and they would be aggressively promoted by Christian leaders.  The fact that instead they are feared and stifled is a tell tale sign that Christianity is false.

(914) God forbids Christmas trees

It is well known that Christianity took on many of the pagan symbols that existed long before Jesus roamed the earth.   But what is little known is that God specifically denigrated one particular symbol- the Christmas tree.

Jeremiah 10: 1-5

Hear what the Lord says to you, people of Israel. This is what the Lord says: “Do not learn the ways of the nations or be terrified by signs in the heavens, though the nations are terrified by them. For the practices of the peoples are worthless; they cut a tree out of the forest, and a craftsman shapes it with his chisel. They adorn it with silver and gold; they fasten it with hammer and nails so it will not totter. Like a scarecrow in a cucumber field, their idols cannot speak; they must be carried because they cannot walk. Do not fear them; they can do no harm nor can they do any good.”

Robert Sapolsky had become an atheist at the age of 14, from a state of being highly religious. He set out on a scientific and psychological searching mission to find out how and why people believe religion, beyond simple childhood  indoctrination, but also the effects and the needs of the human mind.

What he established is that all religion is based upon and believed upon obsessive-compulsive disorders that are created and established from what is called ‘schizotypal behavior’.

In a brief summary:

“Of course, from a neurobiological perspective, meta-magical talk shares a remarkable fit with schizotypal disorder,” he says, noting that schizotypal disorder is not schizophrenia. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, people with schizotypal disorder may be unusually superstitious or preoccupied with paranormal phenomena that are outside the norms of their subculture.

Ritual rings true:

Another domain of religiosity Sapolsky has studied is its ritualistic aspect. He says there are basically four types of rituals: self-cleansing, food preparation and other preparations devoted to everyday living, entering and leaving places, and numerology and symmetry. “All of them are astonishingly close fits to OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder]. It’s a good match.”

That doesn’t mean practitioners can necessarily be diagnosed with OCD, he adds, although many people with that condition find comfort in the rituals that are part of many religions. “When you look at where religions come from,” he says, “my guess is that charismatic OCD individuals were involved in the inception of these [rituals]. They were highly influential people who stepped into the breach at the right time.”

For centuries, theologians have warned followers to be on the lookout for scrupulosity, “which,” says Sapolsky, “was probably their term for OCD.” He says that St. Ignatius of Loyola, and Mohammed himself, warned of becoming overly constrained by rules for their own sake.”

For his video lecture on this, detailing his findings and examples of the ‘how’s and ‘why’s’ of religious belief, watch here:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=4WwAQqWUkpI

Dr. Sapolsky demonstrates that religion is based on the simple NEED to believe based on the NEED to believe. Not for everyone, but for the people who believe their particular religion and WHY they need to believe it.

He provides a very compelling case that religions like Christianity are not based on any truth (which we know because there is no evidence) but on belief and induced psychological necessity to believe.

Dr. Richard Carrier, in his book On The Historicity Of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason For Doubt, provides similar evidence and examples in Element 15 of his book that also puts together a very compelling case for the psychological motivation of belief.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21964522-on-the-historicity-of-jesus

More information from Carrier:

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15934

In the words of Carl Sagan:

“You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe”

(922) Jesus was mentally abused

No one can be certain if Jesus was a real person, but if he was, there’s an interesting theory to explain what happened before the story was buried under mountains of myth.  It is possible that Mary had sex with another man, either consensual or not, while she was betrothed (not yet fully married) to Joseph.  Because Jewish Law required that a bride determined not to be virgin at her wedding be stoned to death, Mary had nothing to lose by claiming that she was visited by an angel and told that she would bear a son as a virgin. The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/kiosk/article/jesus-was-real-and-mentally-abused-by-his-parents-894.html

So what makes Jesus’ birth so different? The tragedy of it. One woman’s lie led to the breakdown of her husband who believed his hallucinatory dream that god had sent an angel to confirm his wife’s assertion that she hadn’t cheated. This led to the raising of a child by parents who filled his head with grandiose ideas of his apparent relation to the almighty creator god. He was told this to the point that he believed it and was willing to either trick thousands into sharing the view or honestly convinced them through his own lunacy. He was, in the end, brutally tortured and murdered over the course of a couple of days, all the while asking his “father” to forgive his murderers. That is either serious dedication to his role—or serious insanity as a result of a mentally abusive upbringing. The latter seems most reasonable.

This theory explains how Jesus could have been brainwashed to consider himself to be the son of God and the liberator or messiah of the Jewish people.   Now some will say how could Mary have been sure that it would be a boy, not a girl, at which point her story would have been falsified?  This is true, but luck was slightly on her side, a 51/49 proposition, on getting a boy.  And, as stated above, she had literally nothing to lose.

If this theory is correct, then it can be argued that Jesus was mentally abused as a child because he was burdened by the extremely impossible standard of being perfect, the son of God, a sinless celestial man-God, a prophet, and a savior for his people.

(923) Dr. Charles Templeton

Charles Bradley Templeton (October 7, 1915 – June 7, 2001) was a Canadian cartoonist, evangelist, agnostic, politician,newspaper editor, inventor, broadcaster and author.  His history is perhaps one of the most compelling examples of how studying and analyzing scripture and church history can destroy the faith of an earnest believer.  It is also an example of how curiosity and faith do not mix.

The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/nahigian.html

One striking example is Dr. Charles Templeton. Never heard of him? No surprise. But you have heard of Billy Graham, right? Templeton was Graham’s best friend and original preaching partner.

Few now recall that when Graham was just starting in the revivalism circuit, he was half of a team. Chuck Templeton and Billy Graham, fondly called the “Golddust Twins,” quickly grew famous for their deep faith and charismatic preaching. But Templeton, unlike Graham, was curious; he wanted to explore the philosophical foundation of Christianity, the historical evidence for it – “to get some buttressing,” he said. So he applied for seminarian studies at Princeton. That was in the early 1940’s. By 1949, Templeton had become an agnostic and secular humanist.

The following is taken from:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Templeton

In 1945 Templeton and Torrey Johnson of Chicago, Illinois met with a number of youth leaders from around the United States at Winona Lake, Indiana. Their agenda was to form a working group that would become an organization known as Youth for Christ which was born in 1946. Torrey Johnson was elected as its first president and Billy Graham was hired as the first full-time evangelist. Shortly afterward, Graham and Templeton made an evangelistic tour of western Europe, frequently rooming together, and holding crusades in England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden and other countries.

At one time the United Church of Canada heartily endorsed Templeton’s evangelism, but came to feel a degree of discomfort with mass evangelistic crusades as its own evangelical Protestantism began to settle into a theologically and socially more liberal stream. In 1948, Templeton attended Princeton Theological Seminary. Templeton hosted a weekly religious television show on CBS, Look Up and Live, in the early 1950s. In 1957, after a long struggle with doubt, Templeton declared himself an agnostic. His public pronouncement of his loss of faith caused a backlash from the evangelical community.

Curiosity.  Templeton had it, Graham didn’t.  When Templeton acquired the knowledge that Billy Graham never learned, he left the faith.  This is a template for almost every agnostic and atheist who once believed in Christianity.   It simple cannot stand up to objectively applied curiosity.

(924) Christian God laid bare by Mark Twain

The famous agnostic novelist Mark Twain was especially critical of Christianity.  In the following quote he summed up the reasons why no one should worship this deity:

“…a God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell–mouths mercy, and invented hell–mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man’s acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!”

This cutting logic is unassailable and yet so many Christians overlook its obviousness.

(925) Society is most wicked when religious belief is strongest

There can be no question that during the Middle Ages, more people believed in Christianity, and they believed it with more intensity and fervor than Christians today.  According to most Christian apologists, that should mean that the society at that time should have been more compassionate, forgiving, gentle, and loving than what we are experiencing in today’s much more secular world.  The following is a quote by Bertrand Russell:

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell0.htm

As I said before, I do not think that the real reason that people accept religion has anything to do with argumentation. They accept religion on emotional grounds. One is often told that it is a very wrong thing to attack religion, because religion makes men virtuous. So I am told; I have not noticed it. You know, of course, the parody of that argument in Samuel Butler’s book, Erewhon Revisited. You will remember that in Erewhon there is a certain Higgs who arrives in a remote country, and after spending some time there he escapes from that country in a balloon. Twenty years later he comes back to that country and finds a new religion in which he is worshipped under the name of the “Sun Child”; and it is said that he ascended into heaven. He finds that the feast of the Ascension is about to be celebrated, and he hears Professors Hanky and Panky say to each other that they never set eyes on the man Higgs, and they hope they never will; but they are the High Priests of the religion of the Sun Child. He is very indignant, and he comes up to them, and he says: “I am going to expose all this humbug and tell the people of Erewhon that it was only I, the man Higgs, and I went up in a balloon.” He was told, “You must not do that, because all the morals of this country are bound round this myth, and if they once know that you did not ascend into heaven they will all become wicked”; and so he is persuaded of that and he goes quietly away.

That is the idea — that we should all be wicked if we did not hold to the Christian religion. It seems to me that the people who have held to it have been for the most part extremely wicked. You find this curious fact, that the more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs. In the so-called Ages of faith, when men really did believe the Christian religion in all its completeness, there was the Inquisition, with all its tortures; there were millions of unfortunate women burned as witches; and there was every kind of cruelty practiced upon all sorts of people in the name of religion.

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress of humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or ever mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.

Despite what many Christians say about the increasing depravity of our world as it becomes less religious (as if same-sex marriage is on the same scale as torturing witches),  morality has actually improved greatly with many more accommodations for minorities, people on the fringes, children’s welfare, women’s equality, people with handicaps, and the impressive improvements in the ethical treatment of animals. In fact, the case can be made that morality is directly proportional to the disbelief in supernatural beings.

(926) Paul writes about apostles, not disciples

One of the biggest misinterpretations Christians have is that when Paul talks about people being ‘apostles’ they erroneously think he is talking about the ‘disciples’.

Let’s not confuse the two. There are several points that need to be understood to see how and why this is not the case.

A) Only the four gospels talk about ‘disciples’ of Jesus.

B) The gospels are fictitious books based on the following five factors:

 – Plagiarism

– Political motivation and agenda

– Fiction

– Allegory (a story in which people, things or happenings have a symbolic meaning)

– Evolving stories that writers would push to the limits of what people would believe

C) When Paul says “apostle” he only says “apostle,” not “disciple.”

D) The definition Paul meant by ‘apostle’ was ‘messenger of God’ or ‘someone who had a vision of God’

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostle_(Christian)

As Paul himself says in 1 Corinthians 9:1

“AM I not an apostle? am I not free? have I not seen Jesus Christ our Lord? are not ye my work in the Lord?”

 E) The word ‘disciple’ was intended to mean the twelve followers of Jesus while he was supposedly alive but only according to the Gospel books.

F) Paul never talks about the ‘disciples’ at all.

G) He mentions “the twelve” in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8 and then separately mentions ‘the apostles.’

– He lists the apostles AFTER everything else;

1 Corinthians 15:5-8

  “And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:

After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.

After that, he was seen of James; then of all the apostles.”

 – Whatever ‘the twelve’ is, or was, we’ll never know

H) The  “12 disciples” documented in the Gospels is either copied from 1 Corinthians 15 because of “the twelve” reference, or was completely made up.

I) We can’t forget that Paul appears ignorant  of almost everything the gospels claim.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamined/2012/12/what-did-paul-know-about-jesus-not-much/

Which is  additional evidence of the following:

– Jesus not existing at all

– The strongest cases of mythicism being true

– Jesus not being divine in any way, whether he was a historical person or not

So the bottom line here is that the gospels are nonsense, Paul’s letters are nonsense, the Old Testament has been completely debunked by science, history and archaeology, so it is also nonsense and this would mean that Christianity is nonsense as well.

Paul’s letters don’t support the Gospels and the Gospels don’t support Paul’s letters, in fact they contradict each other and the gospels also contradict the other gospels.

When The epistles are mentioned we don’t mean the 13 confirmed forgeries, just the 7 authentic letters of Paul that we know were actually written by Paul but nevertheless still contain some forgeries.

For more on the forgeries:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/13/half-of-new-testament-forged-bible-scholar-says/

and also:

http://richardcarrier.blogspot.ca/2011/06/pauline-interpolations.html?m=1

https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/15934

So the fact that Paul never refers to the disciples adds weight to the possibility that they never actually existed, at least not as described in the gospels.  It also raises the possibility that Paul’s reference to “the twelve” is a reflection of his pagan background, the twelve being  a reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac.  This would be consistent with Paul seeing Jesus as only a celestial being. Then when Mark wrote the first gospel about 20 years after Paul wrote 1 Corinthians, he took Paul’s ‘twelve’ reference to be actual humans who followed Jesus, rather than the 12 constellations of the zodiac.

(927) Early atheism was rooted out by political force

A recent study conducted by Prof Tim Whitmarsh has concluded that there was a large presence of atheism starting about 500 years before the time of Jesus.  Then, state-sponsored religions, such as Roman Catholicism, stamped out all pockets of atheism during the Middle Ages, using such tactics as holy tribunals and inquisitions.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/religion/12157896/In-the-beginning…-was-atheism.html

As can be seen, the geographical distribution of the visions closely correlates with areas of concentrated Roman Catholic populations-note the large number of apparitions in Italy, France, Belgium, and Ireland, but virtually none in England.  Also, most of the sightings in the United State are in the heavily Catholic Northeast corridor. Now some will claim that Mary only decides to appear before Catholics, but that would seem to be somewhat unfair and unsportsmanlike.

Also note that the frequency of the apparitions goes through distinct phases, with a very quiet phase from 1725 to 1825, but then a resurgence during the millennial fever in advance of the year 2000 (Y2K) phenomenon.

What this data shows is that religious experience is a reflection of peoples’ ingrained beliefs, hopes, and expectations, and not an externally applied stimulus being applied by supernatural beings. People see Mary because they want to see Mary. Religion is an internal experience.

(929) Magical thinking repels reason

When someone crosses the divide of seeing the world as being supernatural rather than natural, all bets are off when trying to use logic, reason, history, science, or whatever to convince them of the errors of their beliefs.  It engenders the following kinds of rationalizations:

• God placed evidence for evolution and the age of the universe as a test of faith.
• The water for Noah’s flood was delivered and then removed by God.
• God miraculously gathered the animals for Noah’s Ark and then re-distributed them after the flood.
• All of the edits and interpolations of the Bible were choreographed by God, so it remains his perfect word.
• God deliberately hides himself because he honors faith over rationality.

Once a person is convinced that there is an all-seeing, all-knowing, all-powerful god, then the church owns your mind and can convince you of almost everything.  No matter what question you throw at them, they can simply play the ‘magic’ card and get out of any difficult quandary.  The default is always ‘God is mysterious and we cannot know his ways.’

Christianity has used this deceitful device effectively, limiting the minds and curiosity of its followers, and perpetuating itself even into a scientific age.  Those who have broken free can see that the world outside the bubble is much more wondrous and beautiful.

(930) Christianity maintains a set of fictions

A belief system that fails to stand on reliable evidence must create a set of fictions to sustain its believability with its followers.  And such it is with Christianity.  The following website provides a list of some of the fictions accepted by most Christians without reservation:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/michael_reynolds/mcgrath-theology.html#irreconcilability

These considerations, and the evidence of McGrath’s textbook, suggest that the purpose of teaching Christian theology is to maintain a set of fictions, such as:

• Christianity was founded by Jesus of Nazareth.
• Christianity promulgates doctrines taught by Jesus.
• These doctrines have been maintained and disseminated in the form intended by Jesus, first by the Apostles and then by the Christian Church.
• The New Testament is the set of books initially and solely accepted by Christians as divinely inspired.
• The texts of the New Testament have been preserved in an essentially unchanged form since they were written.
• Although incidents of disharmony and ill will have occurred within the Church, they have been exceptions, not the rule.
• The spread of Christianity was the result of peaceful proselyting.
• The institution of Christianity opposes and rejects violence.
• The institution of Christianity is opposed to war and promotes peace.

To these can be added a set of social fictions that the Church adopted in response to the Enlightenment:

• The institution of Christianity promotes justice.
• The institution of Christianity seeks to eliminate poverty.
• The institution of Christianity opposes authoritarian government.
• The institution of Christianity promotes education (the impartation of knowledge, as distinct from indoctrination).

Each of these assertions can be refuted by objective evidence that would be sufficient to convince any impartial person.  Christianity is a testament to how to control the minds of gullible people.

(931) The Bible makes a provably false claim

That the Bible contains a lot of fiction is no secret to educated people, but much of its fiction is hidden behind the wall of time and historical uncertainty.  That is not the case with the story of creation in Genesis or the story of the sun remaining stationary in Joshua. The following is a solid argument refuting the latter.

http://infidels.org/library/modern/shlomi_tal/sinai.html

…I have an example from none other than the Hebrew Bible (the TaNaKh, which the Christians call the Old Testament) itself. Joshua 10:13 says that the sun stood in the half (=middle) of the sky and did not hasten to set for about a whole day. Now, I should like to reflect on Joshua’s miracle. It is not given the same emphasis and prominence as the Sinai Covenant, but numerically it should be. Whereas the revelation at Sinai was allegedly witnessed by only one nation, the miracle of Joshua 10 must have been witnessed by the entirety of humanity worldwide. It should be perfectly clear that if the sun stays in its place a whole day (actually the earth, but let us leave this nice piece of Bible errancy), then the whole world is affected. In no part of the world could this miracle have gone unnoticed. It would have been recorded everywhere, or at least in all cultures having a writing system and astronomical awareness.

In the case of this worldwide miracle, not only do we find no recording whatsoever in any book outside the Bible, but we find evidence against the miracle. The Egyptians and the Babylonians had writing systems and astronomical reckoning, yet they left no trace of the event in their writings. Furthermore, the Egyptian pyramids are aligned with the stars exactly as though the suspension of cosmic affairs never took place [2]. The evidence can be explained either by the implausible hypothesis (and unsupported by scripture) that the cosmic order was later restored to what it had been before the miracle, or by the simpler and more likely hypothesis that it never took place. So it is that we have a public, worldwide miracle which all of humankind supposedly witnessed but most probably did not happen at all. Rabbi Gottlieb’s empirical challenge of producing a public story which did not take place is thus answered, and there is no room here even for a numerical dispute, for the miracle of Joshua 10 is the most public miracle that could ever be imagined in the world.

The author of Joshua probably didn’t realize that his story made a claim that could be categorically proven false by a future civilization. Beyond just the failure of any other society to notice this astronomical event, to stop the sun in the sky would have required the earth to stop spinning (unknown in that day), so the havoc it would have spawned would likely have extinguished much of the Earth’s life and caused devastating earthquakes, volcanoes, and deadly tsunamis.  This is a good lesson to the authors of holy texts- ‘Keep your ‘miracles’ local!”

(932) Jesus’s twin brother Jude

Even if we had reliable evidence that Jesus was historical (which we don’t), and even if the resurrection stories in the Gospels were based on rough eyewitness oral stories that were passed on 30-60ish years later, from some apocalyptic prophet’s crucifixion (even though all the eyewitnesses were dead ), the whole resurrection story could have had a totally plausible explanation. That plausible explanation could have involved Jesus’s twin brother Jude.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jude_(brother_of_Jesus)

As Bart Ehrman explains in his debate with William Lane Craig:

http://www.philvaz.com/apologetics/p96.htm#EhrmanSecond

 “Let me give you another explanation, just off the top of my head from last night, sitting around thinking about it. You know we have traditions from Syriac Christianity that Jesus’ brothers, who are mentioned in the Gospel of Mark, one of whom was named Jude, was particularly close to Jesus and that one of these brothers, Jude, otherwise known as Judas Thomas, was Jesus’ twin brother. Now I’m not saying this is right, but that is what Syrian Christians thought in the second and third centuries, that Jesus had a twin brother. How could he have had a twin brother? Well, I don’t know how he could have a twin brother, but that’s what the Syrian Christians said. In fact, we have interesting stories about Jesus and his twin brother in a book called the Acts of Thomas, in which Jesus and his twin brother are identical twins. They look just alike, and every now and then Jesus comes down from heaven and confuses people: when they’ve just seen Thomas leave the room, there he is again, and they don’t understand. Well, it’s because it’s his twin brother showing up.

Suppose Jesus had a twin brother — nothing implausible! People have twins. After Jesus’ death, Judas Thomas and all others connected with Jesus went into hiding, and he escaped from Judea. Some years later one of Jesus’ followers saw Judas Thomas at a distance, and they thought it was Jesus. Others reported similar sightings. Word spread that Jesus was no longer dead. The body in the tomb by that time had decomposed beyond recognition. The story became more widely accepted that Jesus had been raised from the dead, and in the oral traditions more stories started up and told about the event, including stories about them discovering an empty tomb. That’s an alternative explanation. It’s highly unlikely. I don’t buy it for a second, but it’s more likely than the idea that God raised Jesus from the dead because it doesn’t appeal to the supernatural, which historians have no access to.”

 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zRcZHUcFchI

(1 hour 14 minute 45 second mark)

So, even if we didn’t have evidence that the Gospels are fiction, and even if we didn’t acknowledge that there is no credible evidence for the existence of Jesus, there are multiple scenarios that show how things could have happened without magic or any sort of divine interference.  The identical twin brother theory is just one of many plausible natural explanations for the belief in Jesus’s resurrection.

(933) Christianity fades as parishioners become better educated than clergy

In centuries past, the clergy were sometimes the only persons in the community that possessed education beyond primary schooling. They were esteemed and considered to be more reliable purveyors of truth for that reason.  But over the past century, the tables have turned and often the people in the pews have educational superiority, especially in the sciences, over their preacher.  They also have a more balanced, broad ranging education as opposed to the focused and highly biased information supplied to the clergy.

The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/historical/vincent_runyon/left_ministry.html#c8

Did I hear you say that the clergy are well educated and therefore not in the same category with the fortune tellers and other quacks who claim to do business with the supernatural powers? Ah yes there is the rub. Your pastor has been to school true, but he has never been taught to think. He is a parrot. Forgive him. He can’t think for himself. His thinking has been warped because he has been indoctrinated with religious superstition. His education has been slanted. He has been told what to believe. It ha s been poured into him through a funnel. When he is graduated he is a beautiful bird who wears a colorful robe on Sundays and repeats the same lingo week after week. A moron could do just as well.

Actually the educational level of the average clergyman has always been low though slightly higher than the people in the pews. There are of course exceptions. His little education formerly never mattered as long as the people in the pews were ignorant bu t it matters now because church members today are getting higher education and they can be greatly bored by a 2×4 preacher who does not know what he is talking about. Some denominations have higher standards than others, but mark you, thousands of ministers have had no college education.

Many take non-accredited home study courses of required reading, designed to make them full fledged shouting robots. Some of these non-schooled clergymen when not too lazy to stick their noses in books do pick up a degree of culture and if they possess either literary or oratorical ability are able to put on a good show. Ministers of the literary type produce some brilliant essays. These essays if stripped of meaningless pious phrases would be worth listening to. Many of these men are creative and original. It is too bad they are confined to a mental cage. They should be on the lecture platform speaking their wisdom secularly. In my humble opinion all the good that is done in the name of religion could be done just as well if not better secularly. For diversion I attend the movies once a week. I have perhaps learned more good moral lessons from selected movies than from any other source in life. You do not need to go to church if you are a sincere seeker after that which is good. You can find it in books, in plays, in forums, in lectures, in night schools, in art galleries and music academies. You can waste your time in church. On Sundays both radio and television offer their best educational programs. Relax and listen to them. Improve yourself. The people in the pews are often fooled by the gift of gab of their pseudo-educated pastors who are nothing but ventriloquists’ dummies speaking their pieces. Some of the pulpiteers in the nicer sections of the city dispense discourses that are polished with a little more veneer than the emotional sermons of the shouting ranting revivalists more often found in the poorer sections of town. This is how many people are fooled. The better class of trade must be taken care of.

It is no coincidence that wherever people attain a well-balanced education that includes an unbiased view of science that they become less religious.  And when such people hear unscientific ideas in their church sermons, they tend to leave and never come back. This is what is happening to modern Christianity- the people in the pews have become more intellectual than their preachers, and given that Christianity thrives better on straight-jacketed dogma rather than critical analytical thinking, the recipe is in place for its eventual demise. For centuries, Christianity succeeded in keeping their followers uneducated so that their spokespersons could funnel their minds into believing the accepted dogma, but those days are gone, and the correlation of education to unbelief hints rather strongly that Christianity as a whole is a myth.

(934) Christianity is Flavian vanity

Independent thinkers have long wondered how a religion born in a region of Jewish civilization that was occupied by the brutal and supremely hated Romans could have so many features that are neutral or complimentary of the Romans.  There is literally nothing in Christianity that reflects any animosity toward the Romans except the generally ubiquitous dislike of the tax collectors.   Even when Herod massacres babies in the Gospel of Matthew, we never see Jesus or the authors themselves condemning such a heinous act. Herod is innocent of Jesus’s death, the Roman centurion has more faith than any Jew, and Jesus implores people to pay their taxes to Rome. The answer to this quandary is perhaps answered by the theory that Christianity was primarly the invention of the Roman Flavian family. The following is taken from:

http://postflaviana.org/introduction-flavian-origins-theory-christianity/

In Caesar’s Messiah, Joseph Atwill showed that the Flavian Caesars, Vespasian and Titus, invented Christianity, more or less in the form we know it today. Remarkably, the emperors left behind a veiled confession (or boast) of their work, embedded in the Gospels and the works of Josephus. The religion was invented as wartime propaganda, primarily targeted at Hellenistic Jews of the Diaspora, and also at the Gentiles (who were being approached by Jewish evangelists.) This covert act of psychological warfare was successful beyond the Romans’ wildest dreams: even today, the dominant view is that Christianity arose in humble circumstances, and grew to massive proportions while being driven by a variety of philosophical and religious trends, if not by God himself. However, as Atwill pointed out:

… as Christianity describes its origins, it was not only supernatural but also historically illogical. Christianity, a movement that encouraged pacifism and obedience to Rome, claims to have emerged from a nation engaged in a century-long struggle with Rome. An analogy to Christianity’s purported origins might be a cult established by Polish Jews during World War II that set up its headquarters in Berlin and encouraged its members to pay taxes to the Third Reich (29).

When Atwill published Caesar’s Messiah, he was concerned that his work not be seen as anti-Christian, but rather that it would help Christians as well as others to see how Christianity was manipulated by its elite creators for their own benefits. However, Atwill would be horrified if his work should ever be misused as a tool for those who would perpetuate the cycle of religious hate and revenge perpetrated by some of the various sects of Christianity as well as other religions. On the contrary, his hope is that humanity, by understanding the origins of these ancient wounds and ancient hatreds, can learn to overcome them — and that the people (regardless of their ethnic background or religious beliefs) can achieve the benefits of a more functional democracy that transcends the cycle of violence and genocide.

Although Atwill’s work is often (and rightly) seen as strikingly original, it should also be seen within the context of the theory of the Roman origins of the New Testament, which has much deeper roots. Bruno Bauer suggested as early as the 1840‘s that the New Testament is characteristically Hellenistic and Roman, rather than Judean. Abelard Reuchlin[ii] and Cliff Carrington[iii] speculated that the Flavian emperors (Vespasian, Titus and Domitian) might have been specifically responsible.

Atwill’s contribution to the Flavian Origins theory was his discovery of a carefully constructed literary subtext that links the New Testament and the works of Josephus into a comic typological and theological system. Within this system, the Biblical Jesus is seen as both prophesying and foreshadowing the true arrival of the messianic “Son of Man” in the military campaign of the Emperor Titus and his destruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. Atwill was baffled as to why this subtext had gone un-noticed for so long, even though, as he pointed out, “the works that reveal their satire—the New Testament and the histories of Josephus—are perhaps the most scrutinized books in literature” (10).

Modern scholarship is beginning to uncover the truth that Christianity, at least how it came to be presented to the world after the Jewish-Roman wars of circa 70 AD, is primarily a modification of the previous Roman pagan religions, recast for consumption by the balance of the empire’s subjects.  Jewish Christianity is dead, Roman Christianity is all that remains.

(935) Christianity is the ultimate conspiracy theory

Michael Coren, a Toronto Sun columnist, a radio and Christian Television talk show host, and a British-Canadian convert to Catholicism, stated that non-theists are buying into a great conspiracy theory about the naturalistic origins of Christianity.  But this argument can be turned on its head. In reality, Christianity has spawned the world’s most elaborate conspiracy of all time.  The following rebuttal by Philip Kucher to Coren’s argument is taken from:

http://infidels.org/kiosk/article/christianity-the-ultimate-conspiracy-theory-770.html

But clearly something has gone very wrong with Coren’s argument, since Christianity is itself the ultimate wild conspiracy theory. Just look at the ingredients of Christian theism: There are invisible, spiritual agents, such as God, Satan, and their minions, who control or sustain everything that happens in the universe. There’s a war between absolute good and evil, but the primary actors in this struggle are hidden from outsiders such as mere creatures on Earth. God operates from his vantage in heaven, while Satan plots from his smoke-filled layer in hell, conspiring with his fellow overreaching rebels to rule the world. Some people are blessed by God and guided by guardian angels, while others are possessed by demons. These angels and demons themselves are undetectable, and there’s no piece of evidence which could possibly show that there are no such spiritual forces. Reason, science, and all the tools of rational discourse are too limited, so a special mode of knowledge, called faith, is needed to discern the truth. Denying that the spirit world exists is a sign either of weak faith or of having been tricked by evil spirits into thinking that only nature exists. But there is some evidence in support of this fantastic narrative! Behold, parchments written thousands of years ago tell of the spirit world, some people hear voices in their head, and everything is obviously designed for a purpose.

The Christian belief system is evidently motivated by the most colossal conspiracy theory ever to have been imagined and swallowed whole by great masses of gullible humanity. Coren rants about secular conspiracy theories, and fails to see that his own religion–supposedly the cure for conspiratorial thinking–is itself based on the granddaddy of all conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theorists learn to compartmentalize their beliefs, to swaddle their worldview in self-perpetuating delusions, to think in terms of loose associations, and to mistake coincidences for revelations, from the example of religious faith. Since Christianity shares some of its wild assumptions with theism more broadly construed, including the belief in a personal, supernatural creator of the universe, Coren fails to appreciate that most people ever born, being theists of one sort or another, have thereby been shameless conspiracy theorists. But let’s focus on Christianity and on Coren’s particular blind spot.

When asked why aliens abduct not famous people, but only obscure farmers out in the middle of nowhere, the conspiracy theorist’s reply is that aliens work in mysterious ways. Likewise, when asked why God helps a football player score a touchdown, rather than a starving child find a morsel to eat, the Christian’s answer is that it’s rude even to suppose anyone could fathom God’s plan. The conspiracy theorist thinks in a connect-the-dots fashion, pouncing on an assortment of facts such as the sundry affiliations of powerful persons, and weaving a farfetched story of what could just possibly explain the pattern. Likewise, the early Christian sought to explain Jesus’s execution, by reading the tea leaves of scripture, pointing to passages with some imagined prophetic relevance, and telling an elaborate, comforting story: Jesus was really God, you see, and he wanted to be crucified; this was all part of God’s grand design. It was all foretold by the prophets, so it’s not so strange to think that the creator of the universe had a human child who had to be sacrificed so that God’s wrath could be spent on himself, and God could then overlook everyone’s sins and welcome some rational animals he made into his home after they die. It’s realistic to assume that the creator of the laws of quantum mechanics, of laws which are so alien to human thinking that the mathematical formulations of them can’t even be adequately translated into any natural language, could fit perfectly well into a human laborer from Galilee. It’s not farfetched to think that God, the primary cause of everything in the universe, had special control over the writing of a handful of books or that even after a person’s body dies, the person’s essence lives on in some other dimension. There’s no fantasy involved in affirming that the ultimate source of black holes and of dark matter shares human ideals or that Mother Mary’s egg was fertilized by a ghost. None of this is “infantile nonsense.”

A  conspiracy theory can be defined as a theory that explains an event or situation as the result of a secret plan by usually powerful people or groups. In the case of Christianity, the powerful people were the Romans and the event that was explained and turned into a colossal world-shaping religion was the alleged execution of an obscure itinerant Jewish preacher.

(936) Why would God command worship from angels and humans?

Christianity rests on the illusive theory that an all-powerful god created angels as well as humans and expects, no actually demands, that these creatures worship him, supposedly to bathe his vulnerable ego.   But when you think about this, it would be like creating a virtual person on a computer and programming it to praise yourself.  How much gratification could this actually bring? The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/kiosk/article/christianity-mdash-an-irreverent-history-830.html

If you are mean-spirited or just plain skeptical, you might ask this question: “Why would an infinite God desire adoration from a being that He himself created?” These beings, whether angelic or human, are infinitesimal when compared to God. Would a human being want a bacterium to worship him? Of course not; that’s ridiculous. Would a human being be offended if a bacterium didn’t believe in humans? I wouldn’t be offended, but that’s just me. Bear in mind that the difference between Man and God is infinite, while the difference between Man and a bacterium is large, but finite.

Once again, we are faced with a logical fallacy-infusing a god with a human emotion, the desire to be praised, but not understanding the fact that such praise would be meaningless in the context of Christianity.  The assumption of an omniscient and all-powerful god leads to a logical dead end, to nonsensical situations, and a lot of head-scratching rationalizations.  Christianity would make much more sense if it had conceded that its god was not unlimited. At the very least, that would have allowed for much of the evil and suffering in the world to make some logical sense.  And then God would not know in advance whether the people he was making would ultimately worship him- at least that would make it a more ‘sporting’ adventure for him.

(937) Bible explains how animals got stripes

The Bible doesn’t give out much scientific information, but at least in one area, the origin of striped animals, it relieves the burden of scientists and tells us exactly how this happened.

Genesis 30:37-39

Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted.

This is a lesson for any couple planning to have sex to avoid doing so in the presence of striped curtains or speckled wallpaper.  Seriously, this is in the Bible that otherwise intelligent people carry around and revere as being the most perfect and insightful book ever written. But over and over, it reveals itself as a primitive Iron Age document written by people who had no clue about the world in which they lived. If it’s really the word of God, then God must be pretty stupid.

(938) Skeptics outperform believers in evaluating arguments, logic tests and vocabulary tests

A recent study at the University of Chicago has shown that people of the same background who believe in psychic phenomena scored lower than skeptics when it comes to analytical and logical capabilities.  The study controlled for years of education and academic performance.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/what-believing-in-psychics-and-clairvoyants-says-about-you-a6878926.html

The psychologists concluded: “Our cognitive testing showed that there were no consistent group differences on tasks of episodic memory distortion, autobiographical memory distortion, or working memory capacity, but skeptics consistently outperformed believers on several tasks tapping analytical or logical thinking as well as vocabulary.”

Although this study was looking specifically at belief in psychic powers, it is undeniable that it relates as well to religious belief since both involve paranormal activity and departures from the nominal physical laws of the universe.  What this study infers, confirming what has been anecdotally assumed, is that Christians may be just as smart as atheists but they are lacking several attributes involving the ability to analyze and coalesce disparate sources of information, to study and evaluate arguments, and to think logically. One other is also obvious- they lack the same degree of curiosity about how their beliefs came about.

A more logical thinker is more likely to arrive at the truth of any question, leading to the conclusion that, more often than not, skeptics are right.

(939) Did the women tell anyone about the empty tomb?

There is a glaring discrepancy in the gospels concerning the actions of the women who first identify that Jesus’s tomb is empty. It is described at this website:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/ken_daniels/why.html#Location

When viewed from a historical-critical perspective, there are numerous other examples of such apparent alterations in the gospel, reflecting the particular motives of the authors within the context of the early church. This is likely the case in the very next verse:

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid (Mark 16:8).

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples(Matthew 24:8).

It is generally recognized (even by the conservative translators of the New International Version) that the second half of Mark 16 (after verse 8) constitutes a much later scribal addition to the original text. So “They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid” is how it all ends according to Mark, who may have been explaining why no one had yet heard of the empty tomb up until the time of Mark’s writing. Notice how Matthew skips on from the word afraid in Mark, fleshing it out into a positive account that is at odds with Mark’s: “afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples.” Matthew, writing later than Mark, after the story has had more time to spread and progress, turns Mark’s abrupt ending into a full-fledged Resurrection account.

Mark’s abrupt ending at 16:8 and the fact that he says that the women did not tell anyone about the empty tomb is an historically significant flag that there is something strange about the resurrection belief.  Mark wrote the original gospel and it is rather inconceivable that he would have left out any references to Jesus’s post-resurrection appearances or the disciples reaction to the empty tomb.  By saying the women told no one, it leaves open an explanation for what at that time might have been an absence of belief in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Long before Mark wrote his gospel, Paul had written many letters that seem to point to Jesus’s resurrection as being spiritual in nature, including his appearances afterwards that were in the context of visions.  Putting these two facts together suggests that Jesus did not actually resurrect in his physical body and that the empty tomb was not a part of the doctrine of the earliest Christians (though Mark was then trying to introduce it with a plausible explanation for why it hadn’t become conventional knowledge).

This raises the theory that Jesus’s resurrection was first seen as being just the resurrection of his soul, but then over several decades it evolved to include a bodily resurrection as well.

(940) Biblical unity requires no supernatural explanation

Christians often claim that the Bible shows evidence that is was guided by God because despite the many hundreds of years over which it was written it still maintains a distinct unity of message and purpose. This is an easily disputable fact, but even if it is conceded, it is equally easy to explain it without resort to the supernatural. The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/ken_daniels/why.html#Unity

As a Christian I often heard one variant or another of the following argument in favor of biblical inspiration:

By any standards, the Bible is a remarkable document. It was written over the course of many years by dozens of men from diverse walks of life—men in different countries and educated at various levels. Yet, despite all these differences, the Bible presents a consistent message from beginning to end. Why? Christians believe it is because the authors wrote the Bible as they were led by God. This amazing consistency is evidence the Bible is of a supernatural nature (Howse 2005, 191).

However, given the long, convoluted, and nonunanimous process by which the scriptural canon was selected, any unity to be found among its composite books does not demand a supernatural explanation. Despite evangelical scholar F. F. Bruce’s insistence to the contrary (“There is a unity that binds the whole together. An anthology is compiled by an anthologist, but no anthologist compiled the Bible” (Howse 2005, 191)), the Bible as we currently know it was in fact compiled by men.

It was not compiled by a single person on a single occasion. In fact, no one denies that its individual books were carefully considered for inclusion in the canon by various groups of men who debated the matter over a period of several hundred years. Nor does anyone deny that there were disagreements among various Christian scholars about which books to include or exclude. The books that now constitute our Protestant Bible were successively weeded out from a much larger corpus of religious material. Books that had not reached a certain level of prominence within the religious community or whose teachings diverged significantly from established theology were simply ignored. Others that were only marginally at odds with the orthodoxy of the day were hotly debated, some becoming part of the deuterocanonical or apocryphal literature.

The claim that the Bible displays supernatural unity fails for the following reasons: (a) the sixty-six books of the Protestant Bible were not the only Jewish books written in their time; (b) each successive writer generally drew from earlier accepted writings and traditions; and (c) a human selection process existed to guarantee some degree of unity among the selected texts. (The differing canons of the Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox churches alone should give pause to those who hold to the perfect unity of the Bible. Which Bible is the truly unified one?)

What is more, the level of unity of the biblical text assumed in this claim cannot be taken for granted; indeed, it appears to depend on the eye of the beholder. Muslims will tell us it is not a unified book, as will liberal Christians, atheists, and Hindus—virtually anyone who is not a conservative Christian. Even the latter will acknowledge there are differences in the teachings of various books of the Bible but will insist they are a unified whole when understood using the correct hermeneutic.

The Bible is not unified, it is distractedly contradictory on hundreds of points, and any unity that it displays is easily attributed to the efforts of humans to make it so.

(941) Embellished stories propagate faster

Imagine you are telling a story about how you witnessed a helicopter make a hard landing, but that it was not heavily damaged and all aboard were safe and uninjured.  How much would anyone repeat your story to others? Not much.  But let’s suppose a few years later you tell the story with a little more drama, and you say you saw a helicopter on fire that turned a somersault and crashed and all aboard were killed except a tiny baby that crawled out of the wreckage and miraculously survived.  Now that story will get some legs!

This is what happened with the stories surrounding Jesus.  And a good example of one such embellishment is described at this website:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/ken_daniels/why.html#Unity

In his book The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man, Robert Price goes beyond simply listing discrepancies in the text (as I have done above) and seeks to uncover the reasons for the variants and the processes by which they arose. In taking this approach, we gain glimpses into the theological agenda of the authors and of the communities in which they wrote. These fascinating glimpses are unfortunately off the table for conservative scholarship because of an unwillingness to countenance any personal human agenda or evolving theology on the part of the authors. Take, for example:

Similarly, when the later gospel has a seemingly more theologically sophisticated version of a saying or story than its source and predecessor, we may conclude that the later version is the creation of the evangelist … Take the important story of Peter’s confession of Jesus’ messianic identity at Caesarea Philippi. Our earliest version has Jesus solicit Peter’s opinion, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29). Luke modifies the title accorded Jesus: “You are the Christ of God” (9:20), a simple clarification: the anointed of God. Matthew wants a beefier Christology, so his Peter says a mouthful: “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (16:16). Merely “the Christ” is no longer good enough. Matthew piles on the theology: Jesus is also Son of God, and not just of some pagan Gentile god but “the living God,” the God of Israel … Whatever is going on here, we can be sure of one thing: in the original circumstance, Peter did not say something like, “You are the Christ, the Holy One and Son of the Living God,” with each evangelist picking and choosing whatever verbal fragments he liked best … There is a clear development from a “lower” Christology to a “higher” one. Thus, if any version is most likely to be historical, it is surely the earliest and simplest, the least theologized (Price 2003, 12-13).

The principle that stories generally grow in the telling is not one that Price or his critical allies invented for the purpose of casting doubt on the objectivity of the biblical authors. It is a well-established phenomenon that we can observe time and again throughout history and in contemporary experience. A story that is a little more adorned than the original, all else being equal, stands a better chance of being noticed and propagated than one that reports the bare facts. And traditions are more likely to acquire new features over time than to lose them.

This is a parallel to evolution’s ‘survival of the fittest,’ except here we are dealing with ‘survival of the most dramatic.’  The Bible is a compilation of the more dramatized stories that survived countless re-tellings.

(942) What should be true if Christianity is false

Perhaps the best way to evaluate the truth of any assertion is to examine what we would expect to see if it is false.  The following website give as good list of these expectations as they pertain to Christianity:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/ken_daniels/why.html#Unity

If you have reservations about your faith but lack confidence to act on your doubts, I would encourage you to start by placing your toe in what from the outside looks like an icy pool of disbelief. Ask yourself, “What if the Christian gospel is untrue? What would the world be like?” Start a checklist like the following and surprise yourself with how many items you can check off. I found all of these things to be true during my deconversion process, helping to confirm I was onto something. As you stick your toe in that icy water, see whether these hold true for you as well; you might find the water to be strangely warmer than expected. If the Christian faith is untrue, then:

• It will make no difference whether or not I pray to be healthy, to be safe, or to find a lost item, despite Jesus’ unconditional promise to grant me what I ask when I pray in his name (John 14:13-14). If I stop praying, good and bad things will happen to me on average at the same rate as when I prayed.
• If I renounce my faith, I will not be subject to “swift destruction” as 2 Peter 2:1 threatens. (Note: if this biblical threat is baseless in this life for millions of apostates like me, we ought have no fear of the biblical threats of hellfire in the next life!)
• I will find it no more difficult to control my passions as a skeptic than as a believer.
• I will begin to notice a similar mix of goodness and depravity in unbelievers as I observe in Christians. Believers and unbelievers will appear to have the same basic nature, with no apparent supernatural ability to be good conferred to the faithful.
• I will observe no appreciable difference between the fortune and misfortune that befall Christians and non-Christians having a similar culture, work ethic, and lifestyle. Evangelicals will experience no better health or safety on the road than Mormons, even though evangelicals believe Mormons pray to a false god.
• I will come to recognize that if Christianity is not divinely ordained, the following musthold true (note: this is not to say that these prove Christianity untrue, but only that they must be true if Christianity is untrue, which should at least temper our faith):
• No miracles would be publicly or scientifically verifiable or reproducible on demand when calling on Jesus. (And believers would make up excuses as to why this should be the case, while placing the blame on the skeptics who call attention to this.)
• The books of the Bible would have to have been written, selected and compiled by men, not written in the stars, for example, where they would have been immune from forgery. (And believers would offer arbitrary reasons for this situation, like, “God works through humans to accomplish his will”; or “God doesn’t want to be too pushy or hit us over the head.”)
• The biblical manuscripts would have been subject to copyist errors like all other handwritten human manuscripts and would not have been kept from alteration over time. There would be multiple divergent copies, and it would be difficult to determine which ones are most faithful to the original. (Note: what is the point of making inerrant originals if they are not to be kept inerrant for later recipients?)
• There would be significant differences of opinion on various topics among the biblical authors (whether or not they could be made by later apologists to agree).
• There would be no unmistakable signs of supernatural inspiration in the Bible: no clear or detailed prophecies whose fulfillment can be positively ascertained to have happened without fabrication or whose fulfillment we can witness in our time, and no scientific insight ahead of its time (for example, that germs, rather than demons, cause disease; or that the earth revolves around the sun, which is an ordinary star; or that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old).
• Believers who rely on guidance for their future based on the Bible or the Holy Spirit would be no less prone to making mistakes as nonbelievers who carefully but humanely weigh their options before making decisions.
• Believers would be no less likely to perish in an airplane crash than their fellow unbelieving passengers, despite the many promises of protection in the Psalms, and despite the New Testament doctrine of guardian angels.
• Those who curse God would be no more likely to face a premature death than those who don’t, contrary to the supposition of Job’s wife, who enjoined her suffering husband to “curse God and die” (Job 2:9).
• I would come to understand that in a natural universe, the following facts would have to be true, and the evidence would confirm each fact:
• The universe would have to be enormous enough and contain enough stars and planets to allow at least one planet (the earth, and possibly many others) to have the right conditions to support conscious life. If ours were the only planet, and it just happened to have all the right conditions to support life, this would demand an explanation. As it is, the fortuitous placement of the earth at just the right distance from our star (the sun), for example, requires no explanation other than that there are billions of other planets in the universe, boosting the chances that at least one (the earth) should find itself if the right position. Note that until the 1990’s it was an open question whether there existed other planets outside our solar system. This was a naturalistic presumption that has been recently borne out by the evidence; under theism, there was no reason to presume that other solar systems and planets should exist. (Using this as an analogy, could the same be true of multiple universes to explain the fine-tuning of our physical laws? It’s difficult to say, but it certainly has not been ruled out.)
• The universe would have to be old enough to have allowed life to evolve, not over thousands of years, but over billions of years. As it is, evidence from the IMAP satellite has pegged the age of the universe at about 13.7 billion years. We have witnessed supernova explosions up to 10 billion light years away, meaning they occurred some 10 billion years ago.
• If conscious life developed naturalistically, it would have to be bound to a physical frame and a physical brain following physical laws. This could be true under theism, but we could also just as well be spirits without the need to eat and eliminate waste. Our minds could be spiritual, but as it is, all our mental faculties are traceable to particular regions of our physical brain, just as naturalism would demand.

In short, ask yourself the following questions as you place your toe in the water (which should be getting increasingly warm and comfortable): Is there any empirically verifiable difference between the world we observe and the world we would expect if the Christian god did not exist? And is there any satisfactory apologetic rejoinder to this state of affairs other than the suggestion that God doesn’t want the evidence to be too obvious for fear that we would forfeit the free will he wishes us to enjoy (an approach that could at the same time validate all other religions, no matter how far removed from reality)? Does the apologist not have a better strategy than to heap blame and guilt on the doubter for failing to appreciate the evidence that the apologist finds satisfactory (but which looks for all the world like empty salesmanship to the doubter)?

With evidence this strong against Christianity, it is very difficult to see how a god could send people to Hell for not believing.

(943) Book of Revelation pollutes the New Testament

Christians will often defend their faith against the ubiquitous brutality in the Old Testament by saying that all of that doesn’t count anymore because Jesus came to the earth and offered a new covenant with mankind.  That’s a feeble argument, but even if it is accepted, they still have to defend the Book of Revelation, the final book in the New Testament, which contains some of the most repugnant, inhumane, and malicious passages in the Bible, even when compared with the Old Testament.  The following was taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/keith_gilmour/revelation.html

This brings us, then, to perhaps the most insidious feature of this text [in Revelation]–the nauseatingly sadistic ill-will that pervades the entire book. Here “do to others as you would have them do to you” appears to have been replaced by ‘do to others as they have done to you’–and double it (18:6) whilst “love your neighbor” gives way to ‘avoid your neighbor’ (2:14-15) and “love for enemies” has been supplanted by an expectation of the very worst for one’s enemies. Those without the “seal of God” on their foreheads are, John enthusiastically informs us, to be tortured by the above-mentioned scorpion-like locusts for five months–the merciful release of death to be kept just out of reach (9:3-6, 10)–whilst those who “worship the beast” (surely a reference to emperor worshipers) are to be “tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb” (14:10-11). Elsewhere, we find this author well-nigh salivating over the idea that these unfortunate souls will soon be gnawing their tongues in agony (16:10) as they are scorched with fire (16:8) and ravaged by hungry birds (19:21) before finally being thrown alive into the lake of fire and sulphur (19:20) where, we are told, torments continue “day and night forever and ever” (20:10). This “lake” is, of course, the eventual fate not just of the devil, the beast, and the false prophet, but (according to John) anyone whose name is absent from “the book of life”–and this appears to include all those guilty of such monstrous crimes as cowardice, unbelief, fornication and lying (21:8).

Again, what makes all this so very pernicious is the fact that Christianity has elevated John’s Revelation into a “sacred text” by including it in the New Testament canon. This has afforded divine legitimation to the cruelties contained within it, frequently cultivating a callous indifference towards (and often an outright enthusiasm for) the sufferings of “out-group” members everywhere whilst lumbering us with a tyrannical warrior god–a powerful “record keeper” desirous of unceasing worship. As John Sweet notes in his 1979 study, “there is a spirit in Revelation which is at home in the Old Testament but hardly in the New; what can be found in small deposits elsewhere in the New Testament crops up here in lethal concentration. These excesses might be excused as the product of the author’s personal situation and psychology–an outburst, as Jung put it, in one striving for perfection. But the picture of God in Revelation cannot so easily be excused if it endorses and propagates such a spirit.”

This all points out the colossal mistake of including this book in the New Testament. It belongs nowhere but in a volume of sadistic Iron Age porn.  It essentially repudiates all that Jesus was supposedly trying to teach.

(944) Speaking in tongues is just gibberish

Pentecostal Christians take two Biblical verses to heart and apply them to their worship services, practicing one of the ‘gifts of the spirit:’ – ‘speaking in tongues.’

Mark 16:17-18

“And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well.”

Acts 2:1-4

When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.

The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/joe_nickell/miracles.html

Speaking in tongues known in psychological jargon as glossolalia is an ancient practice, mentioned in the New Testament (Acts 2:1-4), and recurring in Christian revivals through the ages. Modern analysis, however shows that it is actually “linguistic nonsense.” A professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Toronto, William T. Samarin, conducted an exhaustive five-year study of the phenomenon on several continents and concluded:

Glossolalia consists of strings of meaningless syllables made up of sounds taken from those familiar to the speaker and put together more or less haphazardly. The speaker controls the rhythm, volume, speed and inflection of his speech so that the sounds emerge as pseudolanguage in the form of words and sentences.

Glossolalia is language-like because the speaker unconsciously wants it to be language-like. Yet in spite of superficial similarities, glossolalia fundamentally is not language.

Samarin also noted that according to more than half of the glossolalists he studied, it was easier to speak in tongues than in ordinary language. “You don’t have to think just let the words flow. One minister said he could ‘go on forever: it’s just like drumming.'”

The fact that one of the spiritual gifts guaranteed by the Bible is nothing more than a delusion is further evidence that Christianity is false.

(945) The evolutionary tree of religion

At the following website, a map is shown charting the evolution of the world’s religions over approximately the past 50,000 years:

http://www.worldreligionnews.com/religion-news/christianity/evolutionary-tree-religion-map-simon-e-davies

It would be illuminating for every religious person to study this chart and see how their faith fits in and how tiny a portion of the whole it occupies.  It should be sobering to realize that at least all but one of these branches is purely made up nonsense following a false god or supernatural being.  Indeed, at most, one is true.  But for Christians, their presumptive true religion doesn’t even begin until about 3,000 years ago, long after hundreds of other religions were already flourishing. When seen in this light, the argument that Christianity is the one true religion becomes a much harder sale.

(946) The Bible does not mention the brain

One way to decipher if the Bible is a product of an all-knowing god is to examine its catalog of knowledge to see if it contains any information that would have been otherwise unknown to the people of the time.  One of those pieces of information that was generally unknown was that the human mind resides in the brain.  Most people of the time thought that the heart was the seat of the mind, and many considered the brain to be nothing more than a heat exchanger.  The following was taken from:

https://etb-biblical-errancy.blogspot.com/2012/04/does-bible-speak-of-brain.html

Does the Bible or the witless Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz mention the brain more frequently? If your answer was the scarecrow, you are right. The Bible mentions a number of key human organs, such as the heart, blood, bowels, liver, and kidneys, but never mentions the most important organ of all, the brain. This is not unusual, of course, unless you happen to view the Bible as an inspired scientific textbook, in which case it would appear to be missing a bit of vital information.

Of course, it is easy to see how a merely human observer could overlook the brain. It lies hidden behind a hard bony shell and, even when exposed, maintains a noiseless, placid appearance. Compare the heart, which beats faster in reaction to anger, love, joy, physical exertion, etc. Add to this the fact that the heart lies near the center of the body and you arrive at the ancient conception that it was the primary seat of one’s emotions, moral direction (or misdirection), and according to some, our decision making ability. Indeed, how could early human observers have avoided being impressed by the pounding heart and racing blood?

“Science” in biblical times was based on apparent , not literal, truths. The earth appeared to be the flat, firm foundation of creation. The heavens appeared to be stretched out above the earth like a tent or canopy. The heart, bowels, and kidneys (and not the brain) appeared to be intimately linked with one’s emotions, morality, and decision-making processes. Even ancient creation accounts (Egyptian, Sumerian, Babylonian, Hebrew, etc.) reflected this attitude toward “science.” They thought that God (or the gods) had created all of the animals and plants as they then appeared and that their offspring would not appear any different no matter how many generations should pass. Thus, for the ancient Hebrews, crude “scientific” theories, based on superficial appearances, dictated the Hebrew view of reality and their subsequent figures of speech.

If the scriptures had been inspired by a limitless god, it would be expected to have positively identified the brain as the seat of emotions, knowledge, thinking, and consciousness.  It’s failure to do so makes it look like a human created project.

(947)  Christian apologists agree that Jesus made a mistake

Skeptics have long pointed out that Jesus was mistaken when he promised those within the sound of his voice that he would return for the final judgement within the lifetime of those same people (their generation).  However, it is another thing for Christian apologists to agree on this matter. The following is taken from:

http://infidels.org/kiosk/article/the-lowdown-on-gods-showdown-86.html

C. S. Lewis, the evangelical Christian apologist, agreed that Jesus made a mistake in predicting that his generation would live to see the coming of the Son of Man in final judgment:

The answer of the theologians is that the God-Man was omniscient as God, and ignorant as Man. This, no doubt, is true, though it cannot be imagined. Nor indeed can the unconsciousness of Christ in sleep be imagined, not the twilight of reason in his infancy; still less his merely organic life in his mother’s womb. [24]

Christian theologian, Dewey M. Beegle, reached the same conclusion as Johnson and Lewis:

Most conservatives reject the plain meaning of the passage, “This generation shall not pass away until all these things take place,” because it means admitting that Jesus was mistaken about the time. The issue is intensified because Jesus added, “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” [Mat 24:35; Mk 13:31; Lk 21:33]. All attempts to reinterpret “generation” are armchair approaches to solve our difficulty in understanding the passage. As [previously] noted, the clear-cut testimony of the rest of the New Testament is that the disciples, Paul, and the early church understood Jesus literally. If Jesus really referred to events more than 2000 years in the future, then he was playing word games with his disciples. When we look at the problem honestly there are two basic options: either Jesus was leading his disciples to think something different from what he had in mind, or he was mistaken. The latter is far more preferable because it was done in innocence and shows his true humanity. [25]

Of course if we admit Jesus to have been in error on a very important factual and doctrinal claim like the near end of the world, then we must at least potentially think twice about his other teachings. Matthew Tindal (1657?-1733) was a famous deist who published at the age of seventy-three the first volume of a critique of Christianity that took note of many of the same passages we have examined above. We may estimate the impact of Volume One from the 150 replies that sought to counter it, including those from Bishops Butler and Berkeley. Tindal’s conclusion concerning this particular matter merits repeating:

If Jesus and his apostles, for whatever motives, were mistaken in a matter of this consequence, how could I be certain that any one of them may not be mistaken in any other matter? If they were not inspired in what they said in their writings concerning the then coming of Christ; how could they be inspired in those arguments they built on a foundation far from being so?

This is a critical problem for Christianity.  Either Jesus, who was supposedly God himself, made a mistake or else was deliberating misleading us, or the authors of the Bible made mistakes even though Christians believe they were essentially dictating words directly from God.

The only other explanation is that God changed his mind and decided to let things go on for another 2,000 years at least, or God died, became distratcted, or became incapacitated in some manner. None of these scenarios bode well for Christianity.

(948) Moses mistakes human biology

In Numbers Chapter 31 God instructs Moses to take vengeance on the pagan MIdianites.  Moses then makes the following command to his army after they have killed all of the Midianite men:

Numbers 31:13-18

Moses, Eleazar the priest and all the leaders of the community went to meet them outside the camp. Moses was angry with the officers of the army—the commanders of thousands and commanders of hundreds—who returned from the battle.

“Have you allowed all the women to live?” he asked them. “They were the ones who followed Balaam’s advice and enticed the Israelites to be unfaithful to the Lord in the Peor incident, so that a plague struck the Lord’s people. 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.

It is apparent that Moses, despite his direct association with the almighty God, has the mistaken idea that men’s semen contains the entire blueprint for making a child.  He didn’t realize that the use of the Midianite women as brood mares will result in children with 50% pagan genetic inheritance.  Therefore, God’s command to take vengeance on the Midianites will not be completely accomplished, as much Midianite blood will remain and contaminate the ethnicity of his ‘chosen’ people.  This is another example of the Bible reflecting the ignorance of its time rather than the brilliance of an all-knowing supernatural god.

(949) Kissing Hank’s Ass

Sometimes the easiest way to see the absurdity of Christianity is to see it as a story that is relatable to our regular world.  The following story at the website does just that:

http://www.rationalskepticism.org/general-faith/kissing-hank-s-ass-t42786.html

[the video version is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy7JaQWwhF8&app=desktop]

This is a quite well known story that doesn’t seem to have had much attention here – it’s been referred to a couple of times for sure, but I thought it deserved a thread of its own, to go ‘on the record’ as it were.Kissing Hank’s Ass

This is Christianity distilled down to its core, revealing how asinine and ridiculous it really is.

(950) Time

This is not so much about the 2000-year delay in Jesus’s return, in a crucial contradiction of his own promise, but it is more about looking into the future.  What we can assume is that if Jesus fails to return for the next one million years, and assuming humans can survive that time frame, it is doubtful that there will be Christians alive then expecting Jesus to return at any moment. In fact, there probably wouldn’t be any Christians left at that time.

What this means is that each day that passes lessens the likelihood of Jesus’s return. Time is on the side of the skeptics, and they enjoy an ever growing confidence that they have the correct model of reality.

(951) Book of Jonah foists three myths

The Bible is full of fables, but the Book of Jonah gets extra credit for dishing out three whoppers.  The following is taken from:

http://www.mythencyclopedia.com/Iz-Le/Jonah.html

The book of Jonah in the Bible tells the story of a prophet who was commanded by the Hebrew god Yahweh to go to the city of Nineveh and preach so that the people there might be saved. Jonah, however, did not feel they deserved salvation and boarded a ship going in the other direction. When a huge storm came up, he admitted it was caused by his disobedience to Yahweh. The crew threw Jonah into the sea, where a great fish swallowed him. The fish spat him onto land three days later, and Jonah went to Nineveh.