(5351) Religion is dying

The following essay explores the ways in which religion is losing its foothold in society, leading to the logical inference that this wouldn’t be happening if at least one religion was factually true:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8k8JaAP-ZE

Imagine walking through a busy city today, New York, Tokyo, Berlin, or even parts of the Middle East. Look around and you will see modern skyscrapers, electric vehicles, digital screens, and people glued to their smartphones. But there is something else that is quietly changing in the background. Something older than any building, any technology, any political system, and that is religion.

Religion once the backbone of civilization is slowly fading. Not everywhere, not all at once, but undeniably and steadily, religion is dying. Now that may sound like a bold claim, but let us take a closer look at what is happening around the world.

Start with the numbers. According to Pew Research in Gallup, belief in God is declining in almost every developed country. In the United States, once known as a deeply religious nation, the number of people identifying as religiously unaffiliated has exploded over the last two decades. In the early 2000s, about 8% of Americans identified as having no religion. Today, that number is over 30%. In countries like Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Japan, and the Czech Republic, religion has already lost its majority influence.

Churches are being sold and converted into cafes, museums, homes, or even nightclubs. And it is not just the west. Even in parts of Latin America and the Middle East, younger generations are walking away from organized religion.

So what is driving this shift? Why are more and more people choosing to live without religion? There is no single answer. It is a combination of things. education, access to information, global communication, science, and the rising value of individual freedom.

Let us unpack this. First, education. As access to education increases, especially in science and critical thinking, people begin to ask harder questions. They start examining the stories they were taught as children. Questions like, why are there so many religions? Why do they contradict each other? Why do they all claim to be the absolute truth? And more importantly, why does belief require faith instead of evidence?

Science in particular has played a huge role. Before we understood germs, people believed diseases were punishments from gods. Before astronomy, they believed the sun and stars revolved around earth. Today, we understand evolution, biology, neuroscience, and physics. We no longer need supernatural explanations for things we can study, measure, and understand. As knowledge expands, the need for magical thinking shrinks.

Next is the internet. For the first time in history, people across the globe have access to almost unlimited information. A teenager in a conservative religious town can now read about the Big Bang, the history of the Bible, or the philosophy of atheism all on their phone. They can hear other perspectives. They can talk to people from different cultures and this exposure breaks the monopoly of religion. It makes it harder for religious institutions to control the narrative.

Another factor is the growing desire for personal freedom. Religion, especially organized religion, often comes with strict rules. What to eat, who to love, how to dress, what to think. For many, especially young people, these rules feel outdated, unfair, or even harmful. When religion starts dictating someone’s identity, their sexuality, their relationships, their beliefs, it begins to lose its appeal. People today value authenticity and autonomy. They want to live truthfully, not according to ancient texts written in a different era for a different society.

But perhaps the most powerful reason religion is dying is because many people have simply stopped finding it meaningful. For centuries, religion offered comfort. It answered big questions. Why are we here? What happens after we die? What is good and evil? But now we can explore these questions through philosophy, psychology, and science without supernatural claims. We can find community in social spaces, empathy through shared human experiences, and purpose in our passions. You do not need to believe in a god to love your family, help your neighbor, or feel awe when you look at the stars. Morality, wonder, and purpose do not require religion. They are part of being human.

Now, let us not ignore the social side of this change. There are still places where religion is deeply woven into culture and identity. In many communities, religion provides structure, a sense of belonging, and emotional support. But even in those areas, the cracks are forming.

In Iran, for example, a country governed by Islamic law, there has been a silent revolution. According to surveys conducted outside the country, a growing number of Iranians no longer believe in Islam. Many young people see the strict religious regime not as a path to morality, but as a tool of control. In India, many people are questioning the politicization of religion. In Pakistan, Indonesia, and parts of Africa, secular voices are slowly growing despite risk and resistance. The trend is clear. The more religion becomes tied to power and control, the more people begin to resist it.

There is also a growing realization that religion does not always lead to peace. History shows us wars fought in the name of gods, persecution of minorities, and the suppression of women and marginalized groups. Even today, religious extremism continues to divide societies. When people see this, the violence, the discrimination, the hypocrisy, many begin to question whether religion truly represents goodness or just authority.

Let us not forget the countless scandals involving religious institutions. From financial corruption to sexual abuse, the moral authority of religious leaders has been deeply undermined. When those claiming divine guidance act in profoundly immoral ways, people lose trust not just in the individuals but in the entire belief system they represent.

You might wonder, will religion disappear entirely? Probably not, at least not in our lifetime. Religion is deeply emotional. It offers comfort during grief, hope and despair, and rituals that many find meaningful. It is tied to tradition, family, and identity. For many, it is more than belief. It is a way of life and that is okay. The point is not to force religion out. It is to recognize that more and more people are simply choosing to walk away on their own terms.

The shift is not from one religion to another. It is from religion to none. It is people saying, “I do not know what happens after death, but I am okay with not knowing.” Or, “I do not believe in a higher power, but I still care about living a good life.” That is a big cultural change and it is happening all around us.

There is also an important rise in secular spirituality. People are meditating, practicing mindfulness, appreciating nature, connecting with others all without invoking the supernatural. This shows that you do not need religious belief to have depth, meaning or peace of mind. You can be spiritual without being religious. In a way, religion is being replaced not by atheism alone, but by curiosity, by compassion, by human connection.

People are building their own moral frameworks. They are creating communities based on shared values rather than shared beliefs. And these new communities often embrace diversity, tolerance, and open dialogue. Things that dogmatic religion has historically struggled with.

To sum it up, religion is dying not because someone is attacking it, but because people are evolving beyond it. Minds are opening, questions are being asked, and in many cases, the answers that religion once gave are no longer enough.

People want truth, they want honesty, they want freedom. And when those things conflict with religion, many are choosing to walk away, not out of rebellion, but out of integrity. Religion is not disappearing overnight. But make no mistake, the decline is real. The world is changing. Belief is changing. And in that change, there is a powerful opportunity to build a future grounded not in fear, not in guilt, not in blind obedience, but in reason, compassion, and shared humanity.

Maybe the death of religion is not something to fear. Maybe it is the start of something better.

Humanity is evolving in a way that accounts for a better understanding of reality, given advances in science and the ever-increasing ease of access to information. If a certain religion was true, this trend would lead to an increasing level of belief in that faith. But if all religions are false, then what we are observing is exactly what would happen.

(5352) Revelation is not what Christians think

The Book of Revelation is the most enigmatic work in the Bible. It has spawned countless interpretations, depending on the agenda of the interpreter. But one thing is certain- it is not a prophecy about a distant ‘end times.’ It is grounded in its own time, and is a rather brutal screed against the ruthlessness of the Roman Empire in the early 2^nd Century. The following was taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm773msViLE

The book of Revelation is one of the strangest and most terrifying books in the entire Bible. It speaks of beasts with seven heads, dragons in the sky, oceans turning to blood, stars falling from heaven, and a final war between good and evil that will destroy the world. For centuries, preachers have used this book to instill fear in believers, claiming that it predicts the end of time and the second coming of Christ.

Yet, when we take a closer and more rational look, the so-called prophecy begins to look less like divine prediction and more like the wild imagination of a desperate man living in a chaotic time. The author of Revelation is said to be John, exiled to the island of Patmos. The church claims that he received these visions directly from God.

But what do we really know about this John? Historians debate whether he was the same John who wrote the Gospel of John. Most likely, he was not. The style, language, and theology of Revelation are completely different. Even early Christian scholars notice this. The Greek used in Revelation is far less polished, suggesting it was written by someone with little education, unlike the author of the Gospel. This alone raises questions about the church’s claim that the same man wrote both.

When John wrote Revelation, the Roman Empire was in full power. Christians were being persecuted and the world felt like it was falling apart. In those days, it was common for oppressed people to write symbolic texts predicting their enemy’s downfall. Revelation fits that mold perfectly. It is full of coded language with beasts representing emperors and dragons representing political powers.

It was never a prediction about the far future. It was a desperate cry of a persecuted person hoping that Rome would collapse and that justice would soon come. When seen in this context, revelation becomes a piece of political protest literature, not divine prophecy. Let us think about this rationally. If revelation was truly a prophecy inspired by a perfect God, why is it so confusing, inconsistent, and filled with symbols no one can agree on?

For 2,000 years, believers have been trying to decode it. Some said the world would end in the year 1000. Then again in 1844. Then in 1914, then in 2000. Every generation has been told, “This is it. The end times are here.” And yet the world keeps going. If even one prophecy from Revelation had come true in the way it is described, believers might have a case, but none of it has ever matched reality. The sun has not turned black. The stars have not fallen. No seven-headed dragon has appeared in the sky. The world has not ended.

The mark of the beast has been applied to everything from barcodes to credit cards to microchips. And every time people have been wrong. Revelation also claims that Jesus will return soon. The author writes that the events must soon take place, but soon for whom? It has been almost 2,000 years. How long does soon mean to a divine being? If God truly wanted to communicate a message to humanity, would he use riddles and metaphors that confuse everyone for two millennia?

If the fate of souls depends on understanding these words, would a loving deity really make them so vague and symbolic? That sounds more like a human writer trying to sound mysterious and important rather than an all- knowing God speaking clearly to mankind.

In modern times, people often interpret revelation to fit whatever crisis is happening. During the Cold War, Christians said the beast represented communism. During the pandemic, they said the vaccines or global elites were the beast. Every generation simply rewrites the symbols to fit their fears.

This alone shows that the book is not a prophecy, but a flexible story that can be molded to suit any age. Real prophecy would not need reinterpretation. It would be specific, clear, and verifiable. Consider how people use revelation to manipulate others. Fear of the end times keeps many believers obedient to their churches. They are told that if they question, they might not be saved when the rapture comes.

Entire industries profit from this fear. Books, movies, and TV preachers make millions predicting the end of the world. Every failed prediction is excused with, “We misread the signs.” But how many times can someone be wrong before we admit the whole thing was nonsense from the start?

Now, think about how Revelation describes God’s so-called justice. It speaks of rivers of blood, plagues, scorching heat, and people screaming for mercy while God refuses to stop their suffering. This is not love. This is sadism. If a human being acted like the God of revelation, we would call him a psychopath. Yet, believers call this divine justice. The book paints a picture of billions being slaughtered simply for not believing the right story. How can eternal torture or mass destruction be called good?

Morality is turned upside down in Revelation. The hero becomes the monster and destruction becomes mercy. Many Christians avoid reading Revelation altogether because it is disturbing. Even priests and pastors rarely preach from it except to scare people during certain times. That is because it clashes with the image of a loving God that they prefer to present. The Jesus of the Gospels says, “Love your enemies.” But the Jesus of Revelation comes back as a warrior soaked in blood.

How can the same being preach love in one book and massacre the world in another? If the Bible is inspired by a single perfect mind, why are its messages so drastically different?

There’s also a psychological side to this. When people feel powerless, they often imagine that the world will soon end and justice will be served by a higher force. Revelation plays on that deep human emotion. It gives the oppressed a fantasy that one day the powerful will burn and they will rule the world beside their savior.

This psychological comfort is the real reason the book was written. It satisfies an emotional need, not a divine plan. We see similar things in other religions. Ancient Persians had apocalyptic prophecies about the end of time. Norse mythology spoke of Ragnarok, the final battle between gods. Islam speaks of the day of judgment where the world ends in chaos.

Every culture has its own version of Revelation which tells us something important. People invent apocalypses to make sense of their suffering and to imagine a future where justice finally wins. It is not revelation. It is wishful thinking. Even the imagery of beasts, dragons, and plagues can be explained by the times.

Ancient writers used vivid metaphors to describe politics. A beast with seven heads likely referred to Rome, which famously sits on seven hills. The number 666 probably referred to Emperor Nero, whose name numerically fits that code in Hebrew. So, the entire book may be a disguised protest against Rome. John could not directly criticize the empire without being executed, so he wrapped his rebellion in religious language.

Once again, human motive explains everything. There is no need to imagine supernatural visions or divine prophecy when political fear and creativity provide the answer. Now let us think logically. If revelation was truly from God, why does it only make sense when interpreted through human history?

Why did early Christians have to fight for centuries to even include it in the Bible? Many church leaders wanted to leave it out because it was too strange and unhelpful. It was only added because some believed its symbolism could be used to inspire fear and loyalty.

Imagine that. God’s supposed final message nearly being thrown out by his own followers. That alone should make any thinking person pause. Throughout history, revelation has inspired more harm than good. It fueled witch hunts, holy wars, and cults. The idea of end times has made people abandon their families, sell their homes, and wait for an apocalypse that never comes.

From the Millerites in the 1800s to modern doomsday preachers, the story repeats. People waste their lives waiting for something that was never going to happen. That is not divine wisdom. That is mass psychological manipulation.

Some might say, “But maybe revelation is symbolic. Maybe it just teaches that good will win over evil. But even then, what kind of message is hidden behind rivers of blood and burning cities? If the lesson is moral, then it could have been told simply. Why bury it in nightmare imagery and violent visions that have caused confusion for centuries?

Would an all loving creator need to communicate through horror stories that traumatize children and drive adults into fear? That seems far more human than divine. In reality, the book of Revelation tells us more about the human mind than about God.

It shows how people in times of fear create elaborate fantasies of cosmic justice. It shows how symbolism and metaphor can evolve into dogma and terror. It shows how a single text written by one frightened man on a lonely island can be turned into an eternal weapon of fear by religious institutions.

And here is an interesting point. If Revelation was truly divinely inspired, then it must have come from the same source that inspired Genesis. But in Genesis, God says that creation was good. The world was made perfect. Yet in Revelation, the same world is destroyed in flames. Either God changed his mind or different humans with different agendas wrote these stories.

The contradiction is clear. When we move deeper into the text, we begin to notice something else. Revelation borrows heavily from earlier Jewish apocalyptic writings. The book of Daniel, for example, has beasts rising from the sea, symbolic numbers, and predictions of empires falling. Revelation copies these same patterns almost word for word in some places. This shows that John was not inventing anything new. He was simply reusing an old storytelling formula that his audience already understood. In other words, revelation is not revelation at all. It is an imitation of older myths dressed in Christian clothing.

Now imagine for a moment that the same kind of text appeared today. Suppose someone living in exile under political oppression started writing about visions of nuclear fire, monstrous rulers, and a hero descending from the sky. People would call him a conspiracy theorist or a delusional mystic. But because Revelation was written almost 2,000 years ago, people give it sacred status.

Time turns fantasy into faith. The distance of history makes irrational ideas look holy. Modern psychology gives us another layer of understanding. When the brain is under extreme stress, sensory deprivation or trauma, it can produce vivid hallucinations.

Jon was exiled on a small island, probably isolated, hungry, and frightened. It would not be surprising if he saw visions. People in such conditions often experience auditory and visual hallucinations that feel real. So his revelation could have been a psychological episode, not a divine one.

Many mystics across history have described similar visions. Muslims claim Muhammad saw an angel in a cave. Hindus claim Arjuna saw Krishna reveal the universe in his true form. And shamans report visions after fasting. The human mind can create powerful experiences that feel transcendent. The pattern is universal and human, not divine.

Religious institutions later took these experiences and turned them into unquestionable truth. They demanded people believe the visions literally even though the visions might have been the result of isolation, hunger or mental illness. In ancient times, hallucinations were seen as divine communication because people had no understanding of psychology or neurology.

Today, we know that the brain is capable of producing entire realities when under pressure. That is the most likely explanation for Revelation’s bizarre imagery. If we were to apply reason, we would see how unlikely it is that an all powerful being would communicate such an important message through such confusing symbols.

The goal of Revelation should be clarity, not chaos. Yet, the book of Revelation has produced nothing but endless confusion. Entire denominations have been built on different interpretations. Some think it describes literal future events. Others say it is symbolic. Some take the numbers as dates, others as metaphors.

For a divine message, it has certainly caused an extraordinary amount of disagreement. If a teacher gave instructions to a class and every student walked away with a different understanding, the problem would not be with the students. It would be with the teacher. The contradictions are endless.

Revelation speaks of peace after destruction, but also eternal torment for those who are not chosen. It claims that evil will be destroyed. Yet, it also describes evil as part of God’s plan. If God planned everything, then even Satan’s rebellion must have been his will.

So, how can rebellion exist in a perfect creation? Revelation never answers that. Instead, it distracts readers with thunder, lightning, and angels. It is like a magician using spectacle to keep the audience from noticing the logic falling apart.

Let us also look at how Revelation has influenced history. It has done immense damage. The Crusades were fueled partly by apocalyptic thinking, the belief that reclaiming Jerusalem would fulfill prophecy. Later, European colonizers saw themselves as soldiers of the end times, spreading Christianity to prepare the world for Christ’s return. In America, millions of people still believe that the world will end soon.

They support wars in the Middle East because they think conflict there will fulfill biblical prophecy. Some even welcome environmental collapse because they see it as a sign of Jesus coming back. This is not harmless faith. It is dangerous thinking that shapes real world policies. The book’s imagery has kept humanity trapped in fear instead of encouraging progress.

And then there are the cults. The Heaven’s Gate group believed Revelation predicted aliens coming to take them to heaven. They ended up committing mass suicide. The branch Davidians of Waco, Texas believed the same. Their leader, David Koresh, said he was the lamb of God from revelation. Dozens died.

These tragedies come from the same root, the belief that revelation is literal truth. When people take symbolic fantasy as divine command, the result is disaster. It is strange that a loving God would include a book in his holy scripture that drives so many to paranoia, hatred, and violence. The simplest explanation is that it was never divine in the first place. It was a human product of fear, anger, and imagination.

Even the imagery of heaven in Revelation sounds less like paradise and more like ancient propaganda. Streets of gold, pearly gates, and jeweled walls. It mirrors the wealth and power of earthly kings. In ancient times, people equated gold and jewels with divinity because they symbolized power. So John imagined heaven as a cosmic empire, not as a moral or spiritual state. It reflects the human desire for grandeur, not divine truth.

A truly enlightened God would not need gold or thrones or armies of angels. Those are human symbols of power, not signs of a perfect being. Now let us think of morality again. Revelation celebrates mass death. The righteous cheer while others burn. That is not justice. That is vengeance. It is the same primitive idea found in every tribal religion. The idea that our side will win and theirs will burn. A truly moral message would not glorify destruction. It would promote understanding, forgiveness, and coexistence.

But Revelation offers none of that. It offers punishment and domination. The meek inherit nothing. The conqueror does. Believers often try to soften revelation by saying it is just symbolic. It is about spiritual victory. But if that were true, then the text has failed miserably to communicate that message since millions have taken it literally.

If God truly wanted to teach moral or spiritual truth, why use a book that leads so many into fanaticism? Why not speak plainly like in the sermon on the mount instead of through monsters and blood? The difference between the teachings of Jesus and the message of revelation is like night and day. One speaks of compassion and peace, the other of slaughter and fear.

When we step back and remove the religious frame, Revelation looks exactly like many other apocalyptic works of its time. The Jewish Book of Enoch, the Cibiline oracles, and the Dead Sea

Scrolls all contain similar visions of divine judgment and cosmic battles. Revelation was simply one more entry in a long tradition of end of the world literature. The only reason it gained special status is because the early church found it useful to control followers through fear. It created a sense of urgency. Obey now or face eternal fire. That kind of fear is powerful. People will give money, follow rules, and silence their doubts when they believe the end is near.

What makes this even more ironic is that Jesus himself, if he existed, told his followers that some of you standing here will not taste death before the Son of Man comes. That means even Jesus expected the end within his generation. 2,000 years later, we are still waiting. Clearly, both Jesus and the author of Revelation were wrong. The world did not end then, and it is not ending now.

Humanity continues to move forward, not toward divine judgment, but toward greater understanding of the universe. Science, not scripture, has given us real revelations. We have discovered the age of the earth, the origins of life, the vastness of the cosmos, and the laws that govern reality. None of these things required angels or beasts or apocalyptic visions. They required curiosity, evidence, and reason.

That is what real Revelation looks like. Knowledge that enlightens the mind, not fear that darkens it. If we truly wish to find meaning, it will not be in a book written by frightened men describing imaginary wars between heaven and hell. It will be in the wonder of existence itself, in the galaxies, in the atoms, in the human capacity for thought and compassion. That is where truth lives, not in the pages of revelation.

The tragedy is that millions still read this ancient text as a literal script for the future. They look for signs in every earthquake and war believing they are living in the last days. But every generation has thought the same thing and every generation has been wrong. The sun rises, the earth spins, and humanity continues. The only apocalypse is the one in people’s minds, the fear of death, the desire for justice, and the hope for meaning. Revelation turns those feelings into cosmic theater. But it is still just a mirror reflecting human emotion, not divine truth.

If Revelation were a prophecy, it would have come true by now. The fact that it has not, even after 20 centuries, is the clearest proof that it is not prophecy at all. It is the recorded nightmare of a man in exile, misunderstood by history and weaponized by religion. It should be read not as a guide to the future, but as a warning of what fear and superstition can do when combined with authority.

In the end, the book of Revelation reveals nothing about God and everything about us. It shows our capacity for fear, our hunger for justice, and our tendency to turn imagination into dogma. And perhaps that is the only revelation worth remembering. Not the beasts or the dragons, but the truth that the real apocalypse is ignorance itself. Because once reason wakes up, fear dies. And when fear dies, revelation loses all its power.

The Book of Revelation should have been excluded from the Bible, but as mentioned above, church leaders likely saw it as being a powerful means of controlling their flocks, by instilling awe and fear. The questions should be asked: Would an omnipotent god communicate in this manner to humanity, or is this just the effulgent emission of a deranged man?

(5353) False use of prophecy in the Gospel of John

It is well established that the authors of the New Testament vigorously mined Old Testament texts in a desperate attempt to demonstrate that Jesus was prophecized therein. A good example is discussed below, where the author of John engineered a bogus prophecy:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1ok00ah/john_193136_is_a_false_prophecy/

The Gospel of John’s literary style is the most unique of the accounts in the New Testament. Most scholars agree it was the last submitted in the Bible and is not one of the synoptic Gospels based on how it is narrated. What I wanted to demonstrate in this post is how John poorly utilizes interpretation of the Tanakh and purposely take it’s verses out of context to apply to Jesus. In John 19:31- 36 it reads:

33 But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. 34 Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. 35 (He who saw this has testified so that you also may believe. His testimony is true, and he knows[a] that he tells the truth, so that you also may continue[b] to believe.) 36 These things occurred so that the scripture might be fulfilled, “None of his bones shall be broken.”

John is quoting Exodus 12:43-46 and Numbers 9:12

When both passages are read in context they say

43 The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “This is the ordinance for the Passover: no foreigner shall eat of it, 44 but any slave who has been purchased may eat of it after he has been circumcised; 45 no bound or hired servant may eat of it. 46 It shall be eaten in one house; you shall not take any of the animal outside the house, and you shall not break any of its bones.

9 The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, 10 “Speak to the Israelites, saying: Anyone of you or your descendants who is unclean through touching a corpse or is away on a journey shall still keep the Passover to the Lord. 11 In the second month on the fourteenth day, at twilight,[c] they shall keep it; they shall eat it with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. 12 They shall leave none of it until morning nor break a bone of it; according to all the statute for the Passover they shall keep it.

There are no prophecies in either of these passages- it’s just basic instructions God is giving Moses of how to manage the Passover Lamb. So when the Gospel of John was inventing his book he merely grasped text from the Tanakh and loosely applied it to Jesus in the New Testament regardless if it made sense or not.

It should be obvious that if any of the Old Testament authors had received divine prophetic messages predicting the exploits of a future Jesus, it would be…well, obvious.

(5354) Why would God be interested in us?

In biblical times, it was thought that the earth was at the center of the universe and that everything else, the moon and the stars, were just tiny points of light. So, it was natural to think that humans were the featured creation of a god. But today, that picture is radically different and the ancient assumptions no longer carry weight. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1omahmb/thought_why_would_god_be_interested_in_us_anyway/

There are roughly eight billion people on Earth right now, as well as quintillions of other beings (animals and such). That’s a lot of stuff to pay attention to. But our planet is only one of many. The Milky Way alone has hundreds of billions of stars and probably a similar number of planets.

Then you remember that our galaxy is just one of many hundreds of billions of galaxies in the universe. The estimate (which I had to Google) is that there are probably about 100 sextillion planets in the observable universe. If even a tiny fraction of those planets contained life, that’s still billions of planets, potentially millions of civilizations, and a number of living beings so massive that there probably isn’t even a number to describe it.

And then there’s the fact that planets aren’t the only interesting things out there. Black holes, supernovas, pulsars, nebulae, galactic collisions and other incredible phenomena that we haven’t even discovered yet.

My point is, with all of this amazing stuff happening all over the universe, why would God care about us at all? Theists love to say, “God is watching you,” but why would he bother? Right now, somewhere in the universe, any number of amazing things are happening, but God is just going to ignore all of that in favour of watching me on Sunday to see if I go to church or not? He could be observing the development of new life on any number of planets, watching as new stars are formed and old stars explode or collapse into black holes, but he’s just going to forget about all of that and spend a few hours spying on my date to check if my partner is a man or a woman? I don’t see what’s so interesting about that.

But many theists claim that God is omniscient and omnipresent. He can observe everything, everywhere, all at the same time. Okay, fine, let’s look at this another way.

The human body has hundreds of billions of microorganisms living in it at any given moment. Do you spend your time thinking about what these organisms are doing? At any point, do you wonder what one specific bacterium is doing? Do you feel the urge to shove a microscope in your mouth and have a look? Maybe if you’re a microbiologist, but I’m willing to bet that 99% of the time, most of us don’t give it a single thought. After all, why would we? These beings are so tiny and numerous that we can’t even see them without special technology. Most of the time they don’t hurt us or affect us in any adverse way, so why would we spend so much time wondering about them?

This is how I imagine a being as powerful as God would feel about us. God is said to have created the entire universe and everything in it, a universe so ludicrously huge that if you travelled at 100 times the speed of light, it would still take you nearly a billion years to get from one end to the other. A universe that is filled with more stuff that we could possibly imagine. And that’s not even factoring in the whole multiverse theory that quantum physics puts forth.

A being capable of creating all of that would likely exist on a level so far above us that we could not even begin to comprehend its true nature. A being like that, an infinitely powerful being that is coterminous with all of time, space and reality, would surely have more important things to think about than us, a small handful of creatures on one tiny rock in one tiny corner of a ridiculously big universe.

Like I said, with all the stuff going on in the universe (or multiverse), why would God even spare a passing thought for us?

Given the scale of the universe, it seems unlikely that a god would be concerned if a person was skipping church to go fishing. But that is the preposterous assumption that is endemic to Christian theology. It is safe to assume that if there is a god, it is not that obsessed with human beings.

(5355) Outside space and time

Given the lack of any empirical evidence for God, Christians will often retreat to the idea that he exists outside of space and time. The following refutes this logic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1omrtyz/the_god_exists_outside_space_and_time_argument_is/

People often say, “God exists outside of space and time.” At first, it sounds deep and mysterious, like some higher truth beyond human understanding. But when you stop to actually analyze it, the idea completely collapses. it is incoherent.

To exist means to be, and being only makes sense within a framework that allows for location, duration, and relation. Space defines where something is, and time defines when something is. Remove both, and you no longer have a meaningful concept of existence. If something cannot be located, cannot endure, cannot interact or change, what does it mean to say it exists? Saying something exists “outside space and time” is like saying there is a triangle with no sides. It sounds grammatical, but it describes nothing. Time is a dimension of spacetime, so to exist outside of time would require being outside of space as well. That would place God entirely outside the universe, making any interaction with it impossible.

Some people respond that “to be” does not necessarily mean “to be somewhere.” But that objection only works if existence has some other coherent context in which being can occur. We have no example, logical or empirical, of any form of existence that is not embedded in relations of some kind. Even the most abstract things, like numbers or laws of physics, exist as relationships between defined entities within logical or physical structures. A being completely “outside” all frameworks would not even be meaningfully distinct from nothing at all. The only way something can exist without a physical location is as a concept within a mind.

Others try to say that physics might show time is not fundamental. But when physicists like Carlo Rovelli talk about time being emergent, they do not mean time ceases to exist or that things can exist “beyond time.” They mean that time, as we perceive it, may arise from deeper physical processes. Those processes still have structure, interaction, and relation. Even in “timeless” quantum models, there are still definable states and correlations. That is not “outside of time and space”; it is still a description within a physical, lawful reality. Invoking physics to support the idea of a spaceless, timeless deity completely misunderstands what physics means by “timeless.”

Causation itself makes the “outside of time” claim impossible. To create something requires sequence: there must be a before (without the creation) and an after (with the creation). Cause and effect depend on temporal order. Without time, there is no “before,” “after,” “change,” or “action.” If a god exists outside time, it cannot create, decide, or act in any way. To create the universe, that god would have to already be in a framework where events occur. Therefore, a being that creates cannot be outside time, and a being truly outside time cannot create.

Even if we entertain the poetic claim that God experiences all of time simultaneously, that only hides the contradiction rather than solving it. To experience all of time still requires the capacity for awareness and distinction, which are forms of relation and change. A being that is truly timeless cannot experience anything, because experience presupposes difference between states, and difference presupposes time. You cannot coherently have an entity that both exists outside time and yet somehow thinks, knows, feels, or acts.

If something is outside space and time, it also cannot interact with anything within them. Every form of influence, whether energy, information, or force, depends on relations in spacetime. If this god interacts with the world, then by that very interaction, it is part of the same framework. If it does not interact, then it is indistinguishable from nonexistence. There is no middle ground.

Some will argue that “you simply cannot comprehend God” or that “it’s beyond human understanding.” But that is not a defense. It is a way of declaring an incoherent statement off-limits to analysis. If you cannot even conceive what you mean by “exists outside space and time,” then you are not describing something mysterious, you are describing nothing at all. That same logic would allow any claim, no matter how absurd. I could say that a rock I found outside of space and time created the universe and that it is beyond your comprehension to understand how. If that kind of reasoning is allowed, everything becomes true and nothing means anything. It is not profound; it is intellectual chaos.

Einstein often spoke of God as a kind of cosmic mathematician, a metaphor for the deep order and intelligibility of the universe. When he said “God does not play dice,” he was expressing his conviction that nature follows consistent laws, not randomness. That idea actually reinforces the point: Einstein’s “God” was part of the lawful structure of reality, not something existing outside of space and time.

The problem with the “outside space and time” argument is that it pretends to explain existence by invoking something that, by its own definition, cannot possibly explain or interact with anything. It is not an argument; it is a retreat from argument. It takes the unknown, wraps it in mysticism, and calls it solved. If you let that logic stand, you could justify any claim whatsoever. “A banana outside time made the cosmos” has the same explanatory value as “God outside time did.” Both are equally unfalsifiable, equally meaningless.

The bottom line is simple: existence without space, time, or relation is not a higher form of existence. It is the absence of existence. A concept that cannot, even in principle, act, change, relate, or be located is a concept that describes nothing.

If God exists, he exists in space and time and must be located somewhere in the universe. But if that is the case, then he must be limited to the constraints of that fact, meaning that he can only view the earth in the past due to the non-infinite speed of light. This, in itself, eliminates the concept of omnipotence.

(5356) How Roman emperors invented Christianity

Although the theory that the Roman emperors invented Christianity is well established in academia, it is also somewhat controversial. As usual, the truth is a compromise between competing positions.

But there are good reasons to support this thesis. The longest running sect of Christianity is literally known as Roman Catholicism, and the fact that Latin is the go to default language, and that the Roman Emperor Constantine basically legalized Christianity so the empire would be the ones to control the narrative of the religion instead of any supposed prophets, then yes the Christianity we know of today that has permeated all the way to modern times was invented by the Roman emperors.

The following is the conclusion of the cited paper:

CREATING CHRIST How Roman Emperors Invented Christianity By James S. Valliant & C. W. Fahy

https://classautonomy.info/creating-christ-how-roman-emperors-invented-christianity/

In the New Testament we read exhortations to obey the Roman government as the appointed agents of God, to pay one’s taxes, and even to honor the emperor himself. We also see the earliest Christian leaders laying the foundations for the authority structure of the Church, with an endorsement of Church hierarchy coming even from Jesus long before such developments seem credible. We are presented with benevolent Roman centurions, even as Paul’s mission uniformly receives official protection from Roman governors, clerks and officials—including sympathy from the Praetorian Guard of Caesar himself. According to Christ, the faith of one centurion exceeded that of any contemporary Jew.

Paul refers to his contacts as those in “Caesar’s household” so casually in his correspondence to the Philippians it must have some basis in fact. Indeed, Paul’s contacts reach the highest level of imperial servants and Roman aristocrats, including associates of Vespasian and Titus who had achieved their imperial office by conquering the messianic Jews and becoming Jewish messiahs and Roman man-gods. This same family of Roman emperors produced a 1 st Century “pope.”

Most of the New Testament was composed during their reign. Their family tomb became the first Christian catacomb. Their family symbol was Christianity’s first icon: the anchor. The founder of the Flavian dynasty, Vespasian, presented himself as “the New Serapis” and performed healing miracles identical to Christ’s, syncretizing pagan elements of a mystery religion with his own status as the Jewish Messiah. Vespasian advertised himself as the father of universal peace, a new Pax Romana. And he was a monarch born to humble circumstances. Both his ascension to the throne and his death were portended by a star.

Jesus, too, was a Jewish messiah, a divine “monarch” born into humble circumstances, and his birth was heralded by a star. Both Vespasian and his son, Titus, were worshiped as savior gods in the East while they lived, and they were worshiped as official state gods in the city of Rome itself long after their deaths. The Gospels, no matter who wrote them, would have been ideal prophetic demonstrations of their divinity and messianic status as Roman Jewish Messiahs. The cult of Emperor Titus praised his beneficence with propaganda extolling his charity and fatherly love for the masses.

Within only a few decades of his death, after his brother Domitian was assassinated, his dolphin-and-anchor motif became the predominant symbol of Christianity. The Gospels systematically, even melodramatically, absolve the Roman Empire of any culpability for the death of Jesus, laying the blame exclusively on the Jewish people with such a heavy hand that it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic retribution. The Flavians’ own historian, Josephus, favorably portrays New Testament protagonists who are associated with the Flavians.

The New Testament expresses inordinate sympathy for Titus’s own Jewish friends. Though he became an object of shame to his own people, Christians to this day enthusiastically cite Josephus as frequently as any Church father. As Jesus explains in the Gospels, he is himself the replacement of the Temple that Titus would destroy: he was the ultimate sacrifice, the complete Atonement for the sins of the People, and the final reconciliation of man with God.

If Christianity was an organic development from Judaism, the product of an evolutionary process, one would expect that the most culturally alienating aspects of the mother religion, such as male circumcision, strict Sabbath observance and Kosher diet, would have disappeared slowly, one-by-one, over a period of time. We have seen how fiercely the first Christians fought for these traditions against Paul. It was those very aspects of Judaism for which the rebels were fighting, the features of their culture that created problems of intermarriage, inter-employment, and even made having lunch with Gentiles a source of heated conflict.

In the work of Paul and the authors of the Gospels, however, we see all of these aspects of Judaism swept aside suddenly, stridently, simultaneously. And we see it all happening among a group of messianic Jews, the group least amenable to any modifications of the Torah. More than that: they were done away with at the same time pagan elements and ideas were introduced, transforming the faith into a kind of Mystery Cult that worshiped a man-god. And all of this radical revision is done all at once in the work of Paul on the eve of the Jewish War and in the Gospels immediately after that war. Again, if the New Testament is Flavian propaganda, what would the evidence look like other than what we have? It is remarkable just how much evidence still exists, from such a wide spectrum of sources, to support this revolutionary conclusion.

Dead Sea Scrolls) and the Romans’ need to defeat the militant exclusivity that opposed their comparatively pluralistic empire. The Jews’ rebellion from Rome sealed their fate. After their brutal treatment by the Romans, theirs was a culture in Diaspora for another two millennia. The Jewish people had already spread far and wide across the Middle East following the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in the late 6 th Century BCE and, later, in response to the Mediterranean-wide trade opened up by the Pax Romana. The final legal exclusion of Jews from Jerusalem would be ordered by Hadrian in the 2 nd Century, following the Bar Kochba revolt, thus making permanent their status as global exiles until the creation of the state of Israel in the 20 th Century.

As we have seen from reports of 1st Century disturbances in the city of Rome, messianic Judaism posed a serious problem not just in Judea but throughout the Empire, including at its very heart. The Romans realized that a military opposition to the Jewish conflict would not be enough. They would need an ideological campaign, as well. With Christianity, the Romans engineered what they must have thought was the perfect strategy—a demonstration that the Jewish “messiah” did not embody the national or cultural independence of the Jews at all, but was, in fact, a pro-Roman, peace-loving, tax-paying, transnational Hellenistic philosopher of the Platonic and Stoic schools who offered a mystery cult-like salvation to all people of all nations. And they added to this Roman vision of “Christ” that the Jews themselves, failing to recognize his true nature as the Messiah, killed him and thus merited their divine punishment at the hands of the Romans. As radical and new as this hypothesis may seem, it actually reflects insights as old as New Testament scholarship itself.

Though there were previous translations of Josephus’s writings, when William Whiston, in the 17th Century, first translated the collected works of Josephus into English he set the standard, until recent decades. Whiston was a famous man. He had succeeded his mentor, Sir Isaac Newton, as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, though he later lost this position because of his theological views. Whiston thought Flavius Josephus to be a secret Christian. Whiston did not think Josephus was a Trinitarian Christian, however, as were most Christians in Whiston’s day. Instead, he believed Josephus must have been a Christian like himself: that is, one who denied that Jesus was one aspect of a single pre-existent divine Trinity.

Rather, he believed that Jesus was merely a divine human being created by and subordinate to God the Father. And he, to be sure, did not question the authenticity of Flavius Josephus’s Testimonium. Still, Whiston believed that Josephus, the in-house historian of the Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, was a Christian. In addition, Bruno Bauer, a student of the 19 th Century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel and a teacher of Karl Marx, also recognized that most of the New Testament embodied a Hellenized and Roman worldview instead of a Jewish one. Bruno Bauer was an anti-Semite, to be sure, revealing the dark side of acknowledging the intrinsic anti-Semitism in the New Testament.

Well known in his lifetime but almost completely forgotten today, Bauer had debated one of the fathers of critical Bible studies, David Strauss, who helped shape the entire field of Bible scholarship with his book, Life of Jesus.

Strauss’s book has been available in English editions since 1846. As a result, in so many ways, Strauss set the stage for all Biblical scholarship since. However, at the turn of the 20th Century, Albert Schweitzer wrote that: [Bruno] Bauer’s ‘Criticism of the Gospel History’ is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognize, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.

Bauer’s work on Christianity is no longer in print like Strauss’s, and it has never been translated into English. The famous philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once called Bauer “my entire reading public.” Nietzsche himself, of course, a notoriously harsh critic of Christian morality, derided the doctrine of Jesus as a “slave morality” that appeals to weakness, cowardice, and submissiveness in contrast to the life-affirming virtues of the pagans. Whether the consistent Christian advice of submission to authority is a virtue or not on a philosophical level, Nietzsche’s insight can now be seen in a new light. And by this same light, even critics of Marxism can re-evaluate the assertion of Bauer’s other student, Karl Marx, who famously called religion “the opium of the people.”

We must imagine the historical reality that after winning their war with the Jews, a conflict that may have taken more than a million lives, the Romans found themselves the owners of tens of thousands of Jewish slaves. Many if not most of these slaves were messianic Jews. Titus alone took many thousands of his own Jewish slaves to Rome to build his triumphal arch, his famous baths, and the Colosseum itself, where so many of their countrymen would later be sacrificed for entertainment.

The Romans needed to opiate these former radicals and recondition them to life as Roman slaves in the wake of their defeat. And the New Testament was precise in this regard. This new form of Judaism repeatedly commands slaves to obey their masters—even cruel and harsh masters—just as it commands free men to obey the Roman state as God’s agent on earth. So effective was this Roman formula it outlasted their empire, and it would supply kings with a divine right of absolute rule over their subjects for the next 16 centuries as well as conferring masters with a “right” to own their slaves.

Europeans are not only still driving on roads Romans built, they are still worshipping a god Romans created in order to legitimize the rule of monarchs they are still honoring. Romans were ruthless and pragmatic conquerors. They dealt with the Jews as they had dealt with other conquered foreigners—by absorbing elements of their culture and adapting it to their own practical purposes in service of the Empire. It was their instinct and custom to syncretize the religious source of conflict into a cultural justification for both their military incursion and their imperial rule.

The Romans did it before with the Greeks—even as Alexander the Great’s generals had done it before them with conquered Egyptian and Persian nations. It would be far more surprising had the Romans not attempted to do this in the aftermath of the Jewish War, especially considering how instrumental religion was in that particular conflict. If not for the existence of Christianity, we would need to ask where was the typical Roman response to cultural conflict during the Jewish War? As its first symbols reveal, Christianity was already syncretizing with the ancient pagan world.

The pagan iconography chosen by the Emperor Titus is reflected in Christian symbolism all the way to the Emperor Constantine more than two centuries later, when the prominent symbol of Christianity finally changed. Signaled by Constantine’s famous revelation in the sky over a desperate battle that led the way to his victory, the symbol for Christianity from that point forward would shift… to the Cross. And so, with the administration of Emperor Constantine and his official instatement of Christianity, the last symbolic link to the Flavian cult was buried.

Flavian connections to Christianity became more and more awkward as time passed. By the 4th Century it became necessary to replace the old Flavian symbols entirely. Dolphins would still adorn Christian sites for some time to come, including panels at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Among Constantine’s favorite gifts to churches were silver and gold ornaments in the shape of dolphins. But the dolphin-and-anchor motif coined by Titus was finally retired as Christianity was officially rebranded under the sign of the Cross. None of the Flavian temples remain. Like most pagan temples, they have been ground to rubble and lost to history. And yet, though documents and monuments can be tampered with and destroyed, coins, minted in the millions by the Roman propaganda machine, have survived the last 19 centuries.

The last links to that past, scattered and buried under layers of time, still bear witness to the truth. Yet most of the evidence has been there all along. By merely taking at face value the New Testament, Josephus, Suetonius, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Eusebius, Dio Cassius and all the rest we have considered, we were able to predict what kind of symbol we would find on the other side of Titus’s coin and, conversely, whose face was behind the symbol of Jesus Christ. The witnesses from this time speak a deafening truth in unison with no need for tortured interpretations or speculative somersaults.

They tell us what Christianity was when it was invented through the events, politics, people and relationships they reveal. There may have lived a man named Jesus, but there remains today no historical evidence that he did. And there need not have existed such a man in order to explain everything that has been passed down to us about him. There is no part of him that is not prophesied by others or prophetic of others, and no aspect of him that is not symbolic, political, syncretized or borrowed from other men or gods. There is no doubt that the Romans had a motivation to create such a convenient “man-god” who would be scorned and mocked as a “King of the Jews” while predicting a glorious return when the Jews would be vanquished and their Temple destroyed, just as Titus would in fact do.

Attempting to adapt and conform the hostile Jewish religion to Roman culture would have been their standard practice. Thirty years ago, while researching the origins of Christianity, the possibility of a Roman provenance for the New Testament leaped out at us when we noticed that Jesus’s apocalyptic vision nearly quoted Josephus’s historical account of that prophecy’s fulfillment 40 years later. When we discovered that the Gospels and Josephus’s accounts were written during the same period of time, the possibilities became all the more compelling. When this glaring coincidence was combined with the political implications of the Gospels’ ideology, the evidence quickly implied a revolutionary hypothesis about Christianity’s origin. Yet it took three decades of painstaking research to confirm it—in ways that were ever more predictable and increasingly astonishing.

As traditional assumptions about Christian origins were challenged by impossible contradictions and coincidences at every turn, we never found any solid evidence to contradict the emerging theory we were testing. Pieces of the mosaic continued to fall into place as an entirely new picture was filled in. If we were right, we assumed from the very beginning that at some point we would find a Flavian coin that would confirm our suspicions an complete that picture. We did not discover that final evidence until the very end of that long and thorough examination of the evidence, when the Internet finally made the scattered catalog of Roman coinage globally accessible for the first time since the 1 st Century itself. And then the last piece fell into place.

During the course of our research, the works of Robert Eisenman, Francesco Carotta, Joseph Atwill, Rose Mary Sheldon and Thijs Voskuilen appeared, providing us with new details in support of the theory we were pursuing, and the reader will find in their books evidence and arguments on specialized aspects that offer further support to this revolutionary view of Christian origins. This is the only theory that uniquely explains all of the evidence and solves all of the paradoxes that have puzzled scholars for centuries. What we have explored here hardly exhausts the evidence that is sure to confirm and illuminate it further.

Much evidence no doubt already occupies a drawer or a shelf in a museum archive, unrecognized for what it is. And much more surely awaits discovery by archeologists. The historical period that many think of today as an era in which miracles and mystical events frequently occurred was actually no different from today. Culture, politics, and even science took a religious form in that era, when gods like Serapis were nakedly created by rulers such as Ptolemy and worshiped for centuries. Ironically, it is we in the modern era who mystify such accounts that have become so distant from us we bestow on them a patina of supernatural authenticity.

Likewise, the Flavians counted on the masses in their day to do the same when creating the biography of a Christ who had existed 40 years before their victory and who perfectly and prophetically justified their conquest of Judea. Rather than adding any validation to other religions, this revelation should serve as a powerful admonishment that all ancient religions were a product of similar human creativity at a time when religious invention was readily employed and widely accepted as a tool of statecraft and conquest, as we have seen. Certainly, while everything else in our knowledge has evolved—our science, our art, our technology, our forms of government—it is only the supernatural grip of these ancient philosophical artifacts that have kept the most lofty principles guiding our lives from also evolving, freezing them in place from an era of war and tyranny.

In the West, science, art, and technological innovation have been liberated from the fetters of the past. Yet, in an age when we have created nuclear weapons, in the realm of philosophy we find ourselves still adhering to primitive agendas hatched during a distant, largely forgotten political war between what were, in fact, two forms of dictatorship. One thing we can learn from this discovery is that our spiritual insights must be allowed to evolve along with the rest of our knowledge, unhindered by ancient expediencies inherited from long bygone times. If not, in the very pursuit of heaven or paradise, we may well bring about our apocalypse.

Demystifying Christianity will be seen by some as disarming Western Civilization in the face of a new barbaric assault like that faced by the Romans 2000 years ago. Instead, we believe this revelation will illuminate both sides and help prevent history from repeating itself. On one side of this ancient conflict was a religion of “peace” that bestowed divine authority upon a brutal dictator and upon centuries of kings to come, in the name of order. And on the other side was a religious fanaticism wreaking self-destructive violence to destroy that authority and achieve an even more monolithic domination over the human race.

Philosophy provides powerful answers to mankind’s deepest needs by providing a context for all of our knowledge and the nourishment of moral values, inspiration, and purpose. As purveyors of this vital need, religions have endured for millennia by adapting over time to accommodate different eras and cultures. Christianity has proven able to do so, resulting in sects as varied as Shakers and Mormons. Christianity is interwoven into the very fabric of Western history.

From the evolution of literature encompassing Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise Lost, to the ethical arguments over slavery in antebellum America (on both sides of the argument) and the Civil Rights Movement of the 20 th Century, the influence of Christianity on Western Civilization is profound. However, denying that Venus was actually born of the sea-foam does not diminish the beauty of Botticelli’s art. Disbelieving the gods of ancient Egypt does not demolish the power of the monumental architecture they inspired.

To bathe in the glow of the stained glass of Chartres Cathedral, to be transported by the immortal beauty of Schubert’s Ave Maria, or to be rendered speechless at the sight of Michelangelo’s Pieta will always be deeply moving experiences for the sensitive human being—just as the majesty of Luxor and Abu Simbel or the dramatic skills of Homer have not been injured by the passing of religions into myth.

Indeed, as we have seen, though Christianity eradicated and replaced paganism, it carried forward a veritable ark of its cardinal virtues (and vices) into the modern world. Whether there was a Jesus or not is still a question we cannot answer. The reality of the experience of Christianity for millions of people over thousands of years, on the other hand, is certain. What is also certain is that other faiths now long gone were just as devoutly followed by billions who lived and died believing them—even as many of the moral teachings behind their religious trappings continue to endure and enrich us.

There is no question that Christianity became entangled in the political workings of the Roman Empire, and that any of the seminal teachings of Jesus, assuming he was a real historical person, were distorted by this fact. What we are left with is a large measure of uncertainty- something that, you would think, an omnipotent deity would have prevented from happening.

(5357) The world if Christianity was known to be true

If Christianity was true, and it was an undeniable fact, the world would look very different than it does. The following is a response from Gemini 2.5 Pro when asked this question:

If the core tenets of Christianity were not just matters of faith, but were demonstrably, scientifically, and universally known to be true, the world would be unrecognizable. The implications would touch every aspect of human existence, from our personal motivations to our global priorities.

Here is an exploration of how the world might be different in that scenario.

1. The Absolute Certainty of an Afterlife

This would be the single greatest change to the human condition. In our current world, people live with a suspicion or hope of an afterlife. In this hypothetical world, it would be a known fact.

Eternal Stakes: Every single human action would be weighed against its eternal consequences. If it were known that a literal Heaven and a literal Hell exist, and that one’s choices in a brief 80-year lifespan determine an eternal outcome, all other motivations (wealth, power, fame, comfort) would become secondary, if not trivial.

The Nature of Fear: The fear of death would largely vanish, replaced by the infinitely greater fear of “Final Judgment.” People would not fear the end of life, but the review of it.

Risk and Behavior: Short-term “sin” (actions known to lead to Hell) would be seen as an act of pure insanity, like knowingly drinking poison for a moment of pleasure. Conversely, acts of martyrdom or extreme self-sacrifice for faith would become the most logical and rational choice one could make.

2. The Existence of Absolute Moral Truth

In our world, morality is a complex subject, debated by philosophers, (e.g., “cultural relativism” vs. “moral absolutism”). In a world where Christianity is demonstrably true, this debate would be over.

An End to Ethical Debate: God’s law (as revealed in the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and other teachings) would be understood as the objective, factual “owner’s manual” for humanity. It would be as inflexible and true as the laws of physics.

Law and Society: All human legal systems would be reorganized to align perfectly with this divine law. There would be no question about what is “right” or “wrong” on any issue; the only question would be how to best enforce the known, correct standard.

Guilt and Justice: Sin would be a factual, measurable concept, not just a religious one. “Evil” would be a known spiritual force (Satan, demons) that could be factually identified, much like we identify a virus.

3. The Unification of All Human Knowledge

If the Christian God is the known creator, all fields of human inquiry would merge under the umbrella of theology.

Science and Theology: Science would become the study of “how” God created and sustains the universe. Physics, biology, and cosmology would be branches of theology, seeking to understand the mind of the Creator.

Psychology and Spirituality: All mental and emotional health would be rooted in one’s spiritual state. “Brokenness” or “sin” would be the universally accepted diagnosis for human suffering, and spiritual reconciliation (confession, repentance) would be the primary, evidence-based treatment.

4. The End of Religious and Ideological Pluralism

If Christianity were the known truth, all other religious, spiritual, and atheistic worldviews would be factually incorrect.

A Single Worldview: There would be no other religions, except perhaps as historical oddities or forms of willful delusion. The world would be united under a single government and social structure defined by Christian principles.

Evangelism as Public Information: “Spreading the Gospel” would not be an act of persuasion but an act of public information, like a public health announcement. “Accepting Jesus” would be the known, practical, and necessary step for eternal survival, like putting on a parachute before jumping from a plane.

5. A Shift in All Human Priorities

With a known eternal destination and a known end to history (the Second Coming of Christ), humanity’s long-term goals would fundamentally change.

The “End of the World”: The return of Christ and the Final Judgment would be a known future event. This would render all long-term human projects (like colonizing Mars, solving climate change over centuries, or building 1,000-year empires) somewhat pointless.

New Priorities: The primary goals of society would shift from “making life on Earth better” to “preparing souls for the next life.” The most high-status jobs would not be billionaires or politicians, but priests, pastors, and theologians who could best interpret God’s will and guide humanity toward salvation.

In summary, if Christianity were a known, provable fact, the world would be transformed from a place of questioning to a place of knowing. The entire human experiment would be re-contextualized as a brief, high-stakes testing ground for an eternal reality.

If Christianity was true, then we would expect the evidence for it would have accumulated over time to the point where it would be virtually undeniable, and the world would look like the above. The fact that this hasn’t happened is good evidence that Christianity is false.

(5358) Scientific proof that God exists

The following demonstrates the fact that God exists and also establishes the location that this god inhabits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAnAtheist/comments/1okrjoe/scientific_proof_that_god_exists/

Today, we settle one of humanity’s oldest questions once and for all: does God exist? Using a combination of philosophical reasoning, cognitive science, and direct observation of human experience, I will demonstrate, step by step, the undeniable existence of God.

First, let us consider the nature of the question. Classical philosophy tells us that a necessary being must exist to explain the contingent universe. Cosmological reasoning confirms that all things that begin to exist require a cause. Ontological logic suggests that if a maximally great being is possible, then it must exist. These principles form the backbone of our investigation.

Next, we examine human experience. Across cultures and centuries, people consistently report encounters with the divine: visions, feelings of awe, and mystical states. Neurocognitive research shows that these experiences activate specific regions of the brain, including the default mode network and limbic system. The patterns are consistent, measurable, and universal.

Now, consider the implication: if every verified experience of God is processed in the brain, then the locus of God’s presence is within the cognitive system of the perceiver. Philosophical reasoning aligns perfectly with this observation: the necessary being manifests wherever it is experienced. Neurophenomenological evidence confirms it.

Finally, we integrate all these insights. Classical metaphysics tells us God is necessary. Human experience tells us God is observed. Cognitive science tells us where God is observed. The only location that satisfies all these criteria is within conscious perception. There is no external verification required, because the being’s necessary existence is already fulfilled internally.

Therefore, after rigorous investigation and careful consideration of philosophy, science, and human experience, it is undeniable: God exists.

And where, exactly, does God exist?

God exists in the imagination.

If there is any evidence that God exists outside of the imagination, such evidence should be provided. Until then, the bolded statement above stands.

(5359) Refuting choosing to go to hell

Christians often accuse atheists of choosing to go to hell by rejecting their version of Christianity. The following shows the fallacy of this logic:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1onq5m1/if_christians_dont_choose_to_go_burn_in_jahannam/

If Christians don’t choose to go burn in Jahannam and Muslims don’t choose eternal separation from God by going to Hell, then they need to stop telling atheists they choose to go to Hell.

Christians have their reasons for rejecting Islam. Some I agree with, others I don’t. But I have never met a Christian who did the following:

1) Rejected Islam

2) Knew Islam was true

If you, as a Christian, died and learned that Christianity was false and Allah was going to give you one last chance to convert to Islam or suffer eternally in the fires of Jahannam, would you willingly go to Jahannam, or would you convert to Islam?

On that same note *(*sorry for the repetition, but I think it’s important)

I have never met a Muslim who did the following:

1) Rejected Christ

2) Knew Christ was God

If you, as a Muslim, died and learned that Islam was false and Christ was going to give you one last chance to accept his mercy or suffer eternal separation from him and from all that is good in Hell, would you willingly reject him, or would you convert to Christianity?

Christians don’t believe they’re rejecting Islam out of arrogance. They believe they’re rejecting Islam because they sincerely don’t think it’s true. Muslims don’t reject Christ because of the “hardness of their hearts”. They believe they’re rejecting Christianity because they sincerely don’t think it’s true.

Maybe atheists are doing the same thing.

It should be obvious that you cannot choose to go somewhere when you don’t believe that place exists. Christians need to find a different way to antagonize atheists.

(5360) The New Testament is incompatible with the Old Testament

It would seem to be important for the Bible to exhibit a continuous, consistent theme throughout, rather than suffering an abrupt change halfway though. but this is what happens when reading it from cover to cover and beginning with the Gospel of Matthew. Everything mysteriously changes at this point, even though Christianity claims that the same god inhabits both testaments. The following is a response from Gemini 2.5 Pro when asked to comment on this observation:

This is a central and complex question in theology and biblical scholarship. The argument that the New Testament (NT) is inconsistent with the Old Testament (OT) has been made by various critics, scholars, and even early Christian groups (like the Marcionites).

The core of this argument is that the NT does not present a continuation of the OT, but rather a rupture from it, introducing a fundamentally different God, a new path to salvation, and a new ethical framework.

Here is a breakdown of the primary arguments for the inconsistency between the two testaments.

1. The Character of God: Wrath vs. Love

This is the most common argument. It posits that the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament (as revealed by Jesus) have different, and contradictory, personalities.

• • God of the Old Testament (as argued by critics): This God is often portrayed as nationalistic, jealous, and wrathful. He is the God of Israel, not the world. He commands violence, including wars of conquest against the Canaanites (Deuteronomy 7:1-2), and demands strict, uncompromising justice, including capital punishment for a wide range of sins (like breaking the Sabbath or showing disrespect to parents).
  • God of the New Testament (as argued by critics): Jesus presents God as a universal, loving Father. His core command is not to destroy enemies, but to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44). Jesus’s ministry focuses on radical forgiveness, compassion for outsiders (Samaritans, Romans), and non-violence (“turn the other cheek”).

The inconsistency is summarized in this question: How can the God who commands the slaughter of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15) be the same “Father” who, in the person of Jesus, says “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34)?

2. The Path to Salvation: Works vs. Grace

The argument here is that the two testaments propose fundamentally different ways for humanity to be saved.

• • Old Testament Salvation (as argued): Righteousness is achieved through adherence to the Covenant and obedience to the Law (Torah). While faith in God is central, that faith is expressed by doing—observing the Sabbath, following dietary laws, and participating in the sacrificial system. The path to righteousness is heavily tied to works and covenantal obedience.
  • New Testament Salvation (as argued): The letters of Paul, which form the core of Christian theology, state that salvation is by grace through faith in the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, “not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:8-9). Paul argues that the Law is a “tutor” that leads us to Christ (Galatians 3:24) but that it cannot save. He places “faith” in direct opposition to “works of the law.”

The inconsistency is this: The OT presents the Law as the path to life (“obey… so that you may live”), while the NT (especially Paul) presents the Law as the very thing that reveals sin and leads to death, with faith in Christ being the only way to true salvation.

3. The Law: Eternal vs. Abrogated

This argument focuses on the clear commands of the OT that are explicitly canceled or ignored by the NT.

• • Old Testament Law: The Torah is presented as an eternal and unchanging covenant. God establishes permanent laws regarding:
    • Circumcision: The “everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:13).
    • Dietary Laws (Kashrut): The distinction between clean and unclean animals (Leviticus 11).
    • Sabbath: A perpetual law, with violation punishable by death (Exodus 31:15).
  • New Testament Abrogation: The NT records a clear break from these laws.
    • Circumcision: Paul argues fiercely that circumcision is not required for Gentile believers, a central point of the Council of Jerusalem (Acts 15).
    • Dietary Laws: Peter has a vision in which God declares all foods clean, telling him, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean” (Acts 10:15).
    • Sabbath: Jesus himself is shown healing on the Sabbath, and Paul refers to Sabbath-keeping as a matter of personal conscience, not a binding command.

The inconsistency is direct: The OT says these laws are permanent. The NT says they are not.

4. The Nature of the Messiah: King vs. Savior

The argument here is that the figure of Jesus does not match the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament.

• • Old Testament Messiah (as argued): The primary messianic expectation in the OT (particularly in Isaiah and the Psalms) was for a “Messiah” (Anointed One) who would be a great political and military king from the line of David. He would free Israel from its oppressors (e.g., Rome), gather the Jewish people from exile, and establish a new, glorious earthly kingdom in Jerusalem.
  • New Testament Messiah: Jesus is a spiritual, suffering servant. His kingdom is “not of this world” (John 18:36). He does not overthrow the Romans; instead, he is executed by them. He is a “Savior” who dies for sin, not a “King” who liberates a nation.

From this perspective, the NT “fulfills” OT prophecy only by radically reinterpreting it, changing the definition of “Messiah” from a conquering king to a sacrificial lamb.

If you were writing a biography of a person and painting him as a brutal, murderous tyrant until a big change happened, and he started to be a loving, considerate, forgiving individual, you would likely hear from people who doubt the accuracy of what you have written. This is analogous to what is observed in the Bible- the stark shift in God’s personality between the Old and New Testaments strains credulity and seems to point more to a change is peoples’ sensibilities rather than a god who is shape-shifting himself to improve his reputation.

(5361) Ecclesiastes is a refutation of the rest of the Bible

The people who compiled the Bible were, according to standard Christian theology, inspired or guided by God or the Holy Spirit to select the books that were to be contained therein. Given this assumption, it is difficult to understand why God would want the Book of Ecclesiastes, which appears to refute everything else in the Bible, to be included. The following is an argument compiled by Gemini 2.5 Pro when asked to comment on this question:

The Argument That Ecclesiastes Is a Refutation

If you read Ecclesiastes in isolation, you could conclude it refutes core tenets of both Judaism and Christianity.

On the Afterlife (Refutes the NT):

Ecclesiastes 9:5: “For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no more reward, and even the memory of them is lost.”

The Contradiction: This seems to be a direct refutation of the entire New Testament promise of resurrection, eternal life, and a final judgment where one is rewarded or punished. It sounds like pure annihilationism.

On God’s Justice (Refutes Proverbs):

Ecclesiastes 8:14: “There is something meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked get what the righteous deserve.”

The Contradiction: The book of Proverbs is built on the exact opposite premise: that righteousness leads to blessing and wickedness leads to ruin (e.g., “The righteous person may have many troubles, but the LORD delivers him from them all,” Psalm 34:19). Ecclesiastes looks at the world and says this is demonstrably false.

On Life’s Meaning (Refutes Genesis & the Gospels):

Ecclesiastes 1:2: “‘Meaningless! Meaningless!’ says the Preacher. ‘Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.’”

The Contradiction: This directly challenges the “goodness” of God’s creation in Genesis 1 and the idea of a “purpose-driven life” central to the New Testament. If everything is meaningless, then concepts like “God’s plan” (Jeremiah 29:11) or finding a “new purpose in Christ” are also meaningless.

On Life’s Goal (Refutes Jesus & Paul):

Ecclesiastes 8:15: “So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat, drink and be glad.”

The Contradiction: This sounds like a fatalistic hedonism (“eat and drink, for tomorrow we die”). It seems to refute the calls for self-denial, fasting, and prioritizing the spiritual over the physical found throughout the rest of the Bible.

Here are more specific examples of how the “Preacher” of Ecclesiastes seems to refute standard biblical theology.

1. On Human Uniqueness (Refutes Genesis)

A cornerstone of Judeo-Christian theology is human exceptionalism—that humanity is created in the “image of God” (Genesis 1:27) and is fundamentally separate from and superior to the animal kingdom.

Ecclesiastes 3:19-20: “Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them both: As one dies, so dies the other. Both have the same breath; man has no advantage over the animal. Everything is meaningless. All go to the same place; all come from dust, and to dust all return.”

The Contradiction: This is a blunt refutation of Genesis. The Preacher, looking at life “under the sun,” sees no evidence for a divine spark in humanity. He concludes that a human and a dog are biologically identical in their end: they both breathe, they both die, they both decay. This strips humanity of its special status, which, if true, would make the entire biblical concept of sin and a special redemption for humanity completely nonsensical.

2. On the Value of Wisdom (Refutes Proverbs)

The book of Proverbs is a celebration of wisdom, equating it with God’s creative force and the only path to a good life. The New Testament commands believers to seek wisdom (James 1:5).

Ecclesiastes 1:17-18: “Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.”

The Contradiction: Ecclesiastes argues that wisdom is just another path to misery. While the fool is blissfully ignorant, the wise person is cursed to see exactly how meaningless, unjust, and broken the world is. The Preacher argues that wisdom doesn’t lead to a happy life (as Proverbs promises); it just makes you more aware of the futility of it all. He doubles down on this later, noting the wise man and the fool share the same fate: they both die and are forgotten (Eccl. 2:16).

3. On the Point of Hard Work (Refutes the “Protestant Ethic”)

Much of the Bible promotes diligent work as a virtue (e.g., “The soul of the sluggard craves and gets nothing, while the soul of the diligent is richly supplied,” Proverbs 13:4).

Ecclesiastes 2:18-19: “I hated all the things I had toiled for under the sun, because I must leave them to the one who comes after me. And who knows whether that person will be wise or foolish? … This too is meaningless.”

The Contradiction: The Preacher sees hard work (the “Protestant Ethic” itself) as the ultimate fool’s errand. Why build a business, a house, or a legacy, he asks, when you just die and hand it all over to your children, who might be fools and waste it all? He concludes that all labor is “a chasing after the wind” because its fruits are, in the long run, meaningless.

4. On Being Righteous (Refutes the Sermon on the Mount)

Jesus, in the Sermon on the Mount, delivers a famous call to radical, uncompromising righteousness: “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

Ecclesiastes 7:16: “Do not be overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself?”

The Contradiction: This is one of the most shocking verses in the Bible. It is a cynical, pragmatic piece of advice for moderation in morality. The Preacher suggests that being too good, too wise, or too just in an unjust world will only get you into trouble. It’s the philosophy of “keep your head down.” This stands in absolute, direct opposition to Jesus’s call for a righteousness that “surpasses that of the Pharisees” and the calls of the prophets to “seek justice” even at great personal cost.

This book is an outlier and it is reasonable to conclude that contemporary theologians would wish that it had never been placed in the Bible. But if the Bible is a work of humans only, then such an inconsistency in the compilation is understandable.

(5362) Christians support genocide, slavery, and rape

It takes little more than a sound, logical argument to support the premise that Christians, albeit unknowingly, support genocide, slavery, rape and other abominable violations of human rights. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1osm6go/my_honest_view_true_christians_support_violence/

True Christians support violence, genocide, slavery and rape, they just don’t know it.

If I were to approach almost any Christian, on any given Sunday, and ask them if they would choose to be friends with a murderer, they would object strongly. If I asked if they supported the enslavement of blacks/native Americans (in the USA) they would balk at the idea. If I asked them if they would support someone who had committed rape, and child rape at that, they would become angry with me for even suggesting such a thing.

But they not only do these things, they go so far as to worship a being that orders/demands it of it’s followers. They support institutions built on these concepts. I come bringing both receipts and common counter arguments. I am curious if you can provide me with insights I have not thought of, or even change my mind.

Claim: Christians would be friends with a murderer. Christians utilize the entire bible as their source material for their religion by definition. I use the definition of “Follower of Christ” in this instance. Christ is equated with god, as they assert that Jesus is the same essence as their god, and their god is Yahweh from the old testament.

• • The Word became flesh: The Gospel of John presents Jesus as the eternal “Word” of God who was with God and was God, and then became a human being.
  • Claims of divinity: Jesus made claims that supported his divinity, such as his pre-existence and his authority to forgive sins.
  • Divine attributes: Christians believe Jesus demonstrated divine attributes, such as having authority over nature, knowing people’s thoughts, and receiving worship.
  • A unique sacrifice: His divine nature made him a unique and acceptable sacrifice for sin, while his human nature allowed him to shed blood and represent humanity.
  • Centrality to faith: The Incarnation is considered foundational to Christianity, as it is the basis for salvation through Christ. 

Therefore the actions of the Old Testament god apply directly to Jesus, and by transitive property, Jesus’ followers. So when you read about their god destroying entire cities, murdering babies, and ordering genocide, these actions can not be simply swept aside and ignored as Christians tend to do. If their god is in fact eternal and unchanging, then they actively worship a being who both ordered and committed genocide on many occasions using it’s own source material. They support the ongoing institution of this murdering being, and that institution has itself been guilty of mass murder dozens of times over the centuries. Crusades, inquisitions, conquest, and even as recently as the American Manifest Destiny and the “Final Solution” of Germany just last century. These were all church based, Christian actions.

Frequent defenses of this by Christian apologists include:

God is allowed to destroy/kill/commit genocide —– I point out that this may be true . . . and it supports my position that Christians support and defend this behavior.

The Old Testament god is different from Jesus —– I reject this based on the above passages and concepts taken straight from their own bible. But even if we do accept this argument, then the validity of Jesus is eliminated as the vast majority of the defense of the ‘sacrifice” of Jesus is built upon old testament prophecy and concepts of original sin. If you throw out the old testament, then Jesus simply becomes another brown skinned man executed by authorities

Those were different times and God had to meet people at the level they were at then. —— I actually USE this argument as evidence against the existence of god entirely. It is an accurate statement to say that god evolves it’s rules as society changes. But this isn’t because god is meeting us where we are at but rather the obvious reason is that we, as a society, create god in our images. If God is unchanging then this should not happen. God should lay down consistent rules and adhere to them. If I have a toddler and I teach him not to bully or beat up his siblings, that rule applies to him as a toddler, just as much as an adult. In fact it is easy to argue that rules that should apply to adults SHOULD be taught as early as possible in life to train the behavior. Therefore, taking this into consideration in conjunction with the obvious observation that each culture has their own “god’ who looks just like them, and oversees the culture of THAT society, and is totally unknown to others outside of that society, it is pretty clear that we humans invent god in our image, not the other way around.

Moving into point two, these same faith based institutions supported chattel slavery of Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans (and others) in the USA as recently as 175 years ago. Slave holders frequently used the bible and Jesus own words in support of their slavery. They could easily point to verses that supported their cause. The most common defense against this accusation is that REAL Christians were against slavery. While this is a nice thought, it doesn’t hold up to even a brief reading of the bible. Slavery is supported, ordered, regulated, and legalized all through the bible, including by Jesus himself and Paul who actually created Christianity after Jesus death. Therefore if you go by a biblical standard, then it is the slave owners who are the “true’ christians and those who opposed slavery were going against god’s will.

And as for pedophilia and rape, a brief reading of numbers and Deuteronomy should clear that up quickly. Numbers 31 God orders genocide, but for some reason . . . you can think about yourself . . . they made an exception for the virgin girls under 14 who had never been married. These were given to the very soldiers who had just murdered their families. I’ll let your imagination handle the rest.

So in short, I believe I have made an airtight case in support of my premise. True Christians are those who support genocide, murder, slavery and rape, based on their own scriptures. Good people who are against this must understand and reconcile this within themselves, or else begin the process of deconstruction and realization that their faith, and indeed all faiths, are human constructs that follow and change as the societies who are inventing them shift and change and evolve.

Christians attempt to arrange their faith around a careful selection of feel-good scriptures while dismissing anything that they find inconvenient. This effort to cherry-pick the Bible is disingenuous. They must own the whole package, meaning that they, by default, support slavery, genocide, rape, pedophilia, murder and other atrocities as committed by the god that they not just admire, not just respect, but that they actually WORSHIP.

(5363) Epistemology of Absence

The following debunks the concept of divine hiddenness, or the idea that the lack of evidence for a deity is not evidence against its existence:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1oqmp66/the_epistemology_of_absence/

The Epistemology of Absence

The argument from divine hiddenness is my favorite to use against or when debating theists. I use a very grounded and empirical stance.

Abstract
This essay examines the evidential basis for belief in a deity. It argues that, given the observable order of the world and the lack of any detectable evidence of divine presence, there is no rational justification for theistic belief. The argument proceeds from epistemic parsimony: when evidence that would be expected under a hypothesis does not appear, that hypothesis loses credibility.

1. The Observable Order

The world appears self-contained. It operates through consistent, observable regularities of cause and effect. No external agency is observed in the structure or behavior of the world. If something beyond or beneath this order were present in a way that matters to reality, it would leave some evidence of perceptual, causal, or conceptual manifestations. None that are verifiable are found.

2. The Standard of Evidence

Belief properly follows the evidence that supports it. When evidence is absent where it should be expected, the claim is weakened. Assertions of divinity, creation, or transcendence offer no independently verifiable support beyond human imagination. A hypothesis that is not necessary does not need to be believed.

Human thought can construct countless explanations—divine beings, creators, intelligent forces—but invention is not discovery. Conceptual possibilities are not evidence. The capacity to imagine a cause does not establish the reality of the cause.

3. Appeals to Revelation

Personal revelation does not constitute knowledge. Experiences interpreted as divine cannot be confirmed or separated from psychological or neurological processes. Without independent verification, revelation remains a private conviction and not part of the shared empirical world.

4. Appeals to Mystery

The claim that a deity exists but is unknowable removes the claim from evaluation. Once a statement cannot be examined, its author has no means of assessing its truth. In practice, “God exists” and “nothing exists beyond the world” describe the same observable condition. The appeal to mystery, therefore, adds no explanatory value.

5. The Evidential Conclusion

Observation yields no indication of divine activity or necessity. The evidence neither suggests intervention nor implies a source external to the system of nature. From this, the conclusion follows: there is no good reason, based on available evidence, to believe that a god exists.

This conclusion does not assert impossibility. It simply recognizes the limits of what can be justified. When the expected evidence is absent, nonbelief is not defiance—it is the natural result of consistent reasoning.

What should be realized is that if Christianity is true, there would be a 99.99% chance that there would be numerous if not nearly unlimited examples of unexplained events that would consistently point to the existence of a supernatural force acting in our midst. The absence of these phenomena suggest rather strongly that there exist no supernatural beings meddling in our affairs.

(5364) Kim Davis and the stench of Christianity

Kim Davis, thrice divorced, become the Christian poster child attempting to reverse the 10-years ago legalization of marriage equality (gay marriage) in the United States. In a recent Supreme Court decision, her effort failed. The following essay explains how her mission of ‘righteous hate’ symbolized everything wrong with Christianity and the Abrahamic faiths:

https://www.reddit.com/r/complaints/comments/1ouaqmi/fuck_your_sky_fairy_and_the_maga_societal_cancer/#lightbox

Kim Davis failed, and her failure was divine retribution of the most poetic sort. She marched into history clutching a Bible and a delusion, believing herself chosen to defy the Constitution in the name of celestial tyranny. She imagined her faith could overwrite law, her superstition could override justice, and her ignorance could outweigh reason. What she found instead was the inevitability of truth crushing sanctimony beneath its heel. Davis is not a martyr. She is an infected relic of an ancient sickness, a grotesque echo of humanity’s most enduring disease: Abrahamic religion.

The Abrahamic faiths have spent millennia suffocating the human spirit beneath the velvet glove of holiness. They have manufactured obedience and marketed it as virtue. They have mutilated thought, castrated reason, and called the corpse humility. They teach people to prostrate themselves before invisible authority, to accept their own subjugation as sacred duty, and to fear the very curiosity that made them human. They take the infinite grandeur of existence and compress it into a feudal system of worship and guilt. These religions fuck enlightenment, fuck inquiry, fuck individuality, and fuck evolution itself, all while piously declaring that they are saving souls. They have not saved a single one. They have merely replaced fear of death with fear of thought.

Kim Davis is the predictable consequence of that contagion. She is not an aberration but an exemplar. Her mind is the garden where superstition blooms and reason dies. Her moral code is a labyrinth of contradictions, a system in which cruelty masquerades as compassion and prejudice dresses itself as principle. That is what Abrahamic religion does: it redefines evil as obedience and ignorance as faith. It trains generations to loathe knowledge and to see virtue in submission. It manufactures zealots who smile while they oppress and whisper prayers while they destroy. It fucks the conscience until empathy bleeds out, then calls the emptiness holiness. Every fanatic who believes their hatred is sacred carries the same spiritual deformity that festers within Davis.

Religion has never built a paradise. It has built empires of fear and called them kingdoms of heaven. It has erected cathedrals of control where priests sit on thrones of guilt and the faithful kneel in self-loathing. It fucks the human will by convincing believers that questioning authority is rebellion against God. It fucks the intellect by branding curiosity as blasphemy. It fucks love by policing who may feel it. It fucks progress by insisting that humanity’s highest aspiration is to crawl obediently toward an afterlife that never existed. It is the great parasite of civilization, feeding on guilt, thriving on fear, and reproducing through ignorance.

So let us abandon euphemism. Abrahamic religion is not holy. It is malignant. It is cancer, metastasized through centuries of philosophy, government, and art, choking the arteries of culture with dogma. It infects minds in childhood, convincing the innocent that they were born broken and can only be fixed through servitude. It poisons sexuality, weaponizes shame, glorifies submission, and institutionalizes stupidity. Its prophets were tyrants. Its doctrines are chains. Its miracles are lies told often enough to replace memory with mythology. Kim Davis failed to bring her God into the courtroom, but the cancer she carries remains alive in every lawmaker who legislates morality, in every preacher who profits from guilt, in every parent who teaches a child to fear hell more than ignorance.

The truth is simple and brutal. Religion does not save humanity. It subdues it. It keeps the stupid tranquil, the powerful sanctified, and the thoughtful exhausted. It is a machinery of obedience built to keep men small, women silent, and love conditional. It has turned generations of potential into servitude, generations of wonder into repentance, generations of minds into mechanisms of worship. There is no redemption in that. There is only decay disguised as devotion.

So yes, let them tremble. Let them clutch their holy books and call this heresy. Abrahamic faith deserves nothing but contempt. It deserves to be torn apart, root and rot, until not a single scripture remains to sanctify ignorance. Kim Davis is already buried beneath history’s laughter, and her God will follow her there. Humanity will rise not by kneeling but by standing, not by praying but by thinking, not by worshiping but by knowing. The time for mercy has passed. The tumor must be excised, and the world will finally breathe again.

Christians will see Davis’ failure as a win for Satan. But rather it is a win for humanity, breaking free of the shackles of myth that have imprisoned the minds of humans for millennia.

(5365) Multiple denominations makes Christianity less reliably true

Although many apologists like to claim that having lots of denominations of the faith is no different that having many flavors of ice cream, there nevertheless exists a problem with two of the central tenets of the faith- that God is omnipotent and that he desires all to be saved. Given those two assumptions it would seem that this god would have the ability and desire to ensure that his message to humanity was clear and concisely interpreted. Observing the opposite renders Christianity looking more like a man-made product. The following was taken from a response to this question by Gemini 2.5 Pro:

Here is a logical argument that the sheer number of Christian denominations makes the truth claims of Christianity less, not more, likely.

This argument is rooted in logic and an external critique of the faith’s claims versus its observable results.

The Core Premise: A Failed “Product”

The argument is simple: The observable “product” (modern Christianity) does not match its “divine blueprint” (the New Testament’s claims). If Christianity’s core tenets were true—that an all-powerful, all-knowing God delivered a single, saving message and sent an infallible Holy Spirit to guide humanity—the resulting chaos of 45,000+ denominations is the least likely outcome.

Here are the specific planks of this argument:

1. The Omnipotence and Omniscience Problem

Christianity claims its message comes from an omnipotent and omniscient God.

• • An omniscient God would know His message (the Bible) was written in a way that was ambiguous enough to be misinterpreted in thousands of different ways.
  • An omnipotent and all-loving God, whose primary goal is to save humanity, would surely have the power and the motive to create an unambiguous message.

The fact that the message is so ambiguous that it has splintered into countless factions suggests the “author” is not all-knowing or all-powerful. A divine being who genuinely wanted to communicate a single, vital message for all eternity would, by definition, be the most clear communicator in existence. The resulting confusion suggests a human, not divine, origin.

2. The Mutually Exclusive, “High-Stakes” Disagreements

The common defense—that denominations are just “different flavors of the same thing”—is demonstrably false. The disagreements are not minor (like the color of the church carpet); they are fundamental and mutually exclusive, often over the single most important question: “What must I do to be saved?”

• • Faith vs. Works: Is a person saved by “faith alone” (Sola Fide), as Martin Luther argued? Or is salvation by faith and necessary works/sacraments, as the Catholic Church teaches? These are two different, contradictory gospels. Both cannot be true.
  • Eternal Security: Can a person “lose” their salvation, as the Arminian tradition believes? Or is salvation permanent (“once saved, always saved”), as the Calvinist tradition believes? The answer has eternal consequences.
  • The Role of the Church: Is the Catholic Church the “one true Church” founded by Peter, with an infallible Pope? Or is it the “whore of Babylon,” as some early reformers claimed?
  • The Nature of Baptism: Is baptism a necessary sacrament that regenerates the soul (Catholicism, Lutheranism)? Or is it merely a public symbol of an internal change (Baptists)?

These are not “branches on a tree.” These are different trees, each claiming to be the only one that bears fruit, with all others being sterile or poisonous.

3. The Failure of the “Holy Spirit”

Christianity makes a specific, testable claim: that Jesus promised the “Holy Spirit” would come after him to “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

The evidence on the ground refutes this claim.

• • A Catholic reads the Bible with the claimed guidance of the Holy Spirit and concludes the Pope is infallible and that the bread and wine literally become the body and blood of Christ.
  • A Baptist reads the exact same Bible, prays to the exact same Spirit, and concludes the Pope is not infallible and the bread and wine are purely symbolic.
  • A Pentecostal, guided by the Spirit, speaks in tongues. A Cessationist (like a different Baptist), guided by the same Spirit, concludes that speaking in tongues is a satanic deception.

A rational observer must conclude that this “Holy Spirit” is either not real, not one single entity, or is deliberately confusing people. The most logical explanation is that the “Spirit’s guidance” is simply human intuition, bias, and emotion being misidentified as a divine voice.

4. The “Human Fallibility” Excuse Is an Unfalsifiable “Get Out of Jail Free” Card

The standard Christian counter-argument is that the message is perfect, but humans are fallible, sinful, and have free will to misinterpret it.

A skeptic argues that this makes the Christian claim unfalsifiable. The belief system has set itself up to claim victory no matter what the evidence shows:

• • Scenario A: The Church is perfectly unified.
    • Believer’s argument: “See! The divine power of the Holy Spirit has united us, proving it’s true!”
  • Scenario B: The Church is catastrophically divided.
    • Believer’s argument: “See! This just proves the doctrine of human sin and fallibility, proving it’s true!”

When a claim’s evidence and its lack of evidence are both used as “proof,” it is no longer a testable claim. It is a closed loop, a logical fallacy.

Conclusion

If a pharmaceutical company released a “miracle cure” and told the world, “Take this medicine exactly as written,” but the instructions were so confusing that thousands of people developed different, painful, and contradictory side effects—with many dying—no one would praise the “perfect medicine” and blame the “fallible patients.”

They would conclude, rationally, that the instructions were fatally flawed and the “cure” was not what it claimed to be. The catastrophic disunity of Christianity, the skeptic argues, is the single greatest piece of evidence that its “divine message” is a purely human-made product.

If Christian theology and messaging had been consistent throughout, with little to no splintering into various denominations, and absent a history of religious warfare, it would have been much more believable to be of divine creation. But none of this is true, and this renders the truth of Christianity highly improbable.

(5366) Christianity is a cult of human sacrifice

It should be more than obvious that if a universal god existed and had a plan to interact with and judge human beings, such god would not use human sacrifice as a means of executing such plan. The following was taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCr7nh-VAZ0

If you take a step back and look at Christianity not as a believer but as an outside observer, the entire structure of the faith revolves around one central act, the execution of a man. This man called Jesus is described as the son of God. And according to the story, his death was not an accident, not a crime to be mourned, but a deliberate sacrifice demanded by God himself.

Christians say that this sacrifice was necessary so that the rest of humanity could be saved from eternal torture in hell. When you strip away the emotional and poetic language, what you are left with is a religion built around the worship of human sacrifice.

In Christianity, the crucifixion is not just a tragedy. It is the centerpiece of the entire faith. Churches display crosses. Paintings show Jesus bleeding and dying. Hymns praise the shedding of his blood. And communion rituals ask followers to eat bread as his body and drink wine as his blood. Imagine that for a moment in any other context. Imagine a religion where followers symbolically consume the flesh and blood of a man who was killed to please a god.

If this were happening in an ancient tribal ritual, most Christians would call it barbaric. But when it happens in their own churches, it is called holy communion.

The logic of the Christian story says that all humans are born sinners. Not because they personally committed any wrong, but because of something that supposedly happened thousands of years ago when Adam and Eve ate a forbidden fruit. This idea called original sin means every human is born guilty before even living their first day. And according to this belief, that guilt demands punishment.

The punishment is not temporary suffering or a fine. It is eternal burning in hell. So what did God do to fix this? Instead of simply forgiving humanity, he decided that someone had to die. Blood had to be shed to satisfy his own justice. But not just anyone’s blood. It had to be his own son’s.

Think about that. An all powerful God who supposedly created everything could have simply said, “I forgive you.” but instead he arranged for his own son to be tortured and executed to satisfy himself. This is like a judge sentencing his innocent child to death so that guilty criminals can go free. That is not justice. That is moral confusion.

And when a religion glorifies such a story, it begins to look less like divine wisdom and more like an ancient cult trying to justify violence through mythology.

In the ancient world, human sacrifice was not uncommon. The Aztecs offered beating hearts to the sun god. The Canaanites burned their firstborn children for divine favor. The Greeks sacrificed men to Poseidon before wars. These acts were condemned by later societies as cruel and primitive. Yet the core idea behind them is the same as the Christian story that the suffering or death of one person can somehow cleanse the sins of others or please a god. The only difference is that Christianity romanticized the act.

Instead of calling it human sacrifice, they called it salvation. Instead of the victim being a criminal or a random person, it was God’s son. But the logic is identical. If you take away the religious decoration, it is a blood ritual. A god demands death to remove guilt.

The followers are told to accept the sacrifice, to love it, to worship it. And they are taught that without this blood they are condemned forever. That is not a moral system. That is emotional blackmail dressed up as love.

The message is clear. Except that someone died for you or you will burn forever. That is how cults operate. They use fear and guilt to bind people to belief. The story of Jesus crucifixion as told in the Bible is full of contradictions and absurdities.

For example, if Jesus was truly the son of God and knew his death was temporary, was it really a sacrifice? If someone knows they will be resurrected in three days and then ascend to heaven, their death is not permanent. It is like acting out a play.

In that case, where is the sacrifice? A real sacrifice means permanent loss. But according to the story, Jesus is alive again. So what did God actually give up? Nothing. The only people who suffered permanently were the humans who were told to believe this or be damned.

Christian theology often says that God’s justice required a blood payment for sin. But this raises a deeper question. Who made that rule? If God is the ultimate lawmaker, then he created the rule that sin must be paid with blood. He was not bound by anyone else.

Which means God created a moral system in which the only way to forgive humans was to have someone tortured and killed.

He built a rule that he then had to satisfy himself. That is like setting your own house on fire and then congratulating yourself for putting it out. The very idea that an innocent person can take the punishment for the guilty is deeply immoral. In human law, we would never accept this.

Imagine if someone robbed a bank and the judge decided to punish an innocent volunteer instead. We would call that injustice. Yet, when it comes to God, believers call it grace. If God truly valued justice, he would punish the guilty, not an innocent man. And if he truly valued mercy, he would forgive without demanding blood.

So what is left is neither justice nor mercy, but a strange mixture of both that satisfies neither. Some Christians say that God sacrificed himself to himself to save humanity from himself. When said like that, the story collapses into absurdity. If God created humans and God created sin and God created the rules of punishment, then God is simply playing a game with himself. He made a problem and then pretended to fix it. And in the middle of this cosmic drama, a man was brutally executed to make people feel grateful. That is not salvation. That is psychological manipulation.

If you look at history, the concept of sacrifice runs deep through ancient religions. In the Jewish tradition, animals were sacrificed for atonement of sin. Blood was sprinkled on altars and burnt offerings were made to please Yahweh. The early Christians inherited this mindset. The only difference was that they replaced the animal with a divine human. The old ritual became spiritualized. The temple was replaced by the cross. And the priest became Jesus himself.

But the principle never changed. Blood must be shed for forgiveness. Christianity simply gave this old superstition a new coat of paint.

When early Christians spread their message through the Roman Empire, they were often accused by pagans of being cannibals. The reason was the ritual of communion, eating the body, and drinking the blood of Christ.

To outsiders, this sounded exactly like a cultic meal. And to be fair, it is. The church might say it is symbolic, but the symbolism still reflects the ancient obsession with blood. Even the language of hymns and prayers constantly returns to this imagery. Washed in the blood of the lamb, the blood that cleanses, the cross that saves.

Imagine growing up hearing these words every week. Over time, people stop noticing how strange it is to celebrate blood and death.

If you think about it, what kind of deity needs blood to forgive? A wise and loving being would not demand the suffering of another creature to feel satisfied. The idea that forgiveness requires death is a human invention. It reflects ancient human psychology, not divine truth. Primitive humans believe that gods were like tribal chiefs. Angry, demanding tribute, and only satisfied when they saw suffering.

Christianity kept that mindset, but dressed it up in divine poetry. The god of love still acts like a tribal warlord who demands payment in blood. This story also reveals how fear was used as a tool of control. The message is that you are born sinful. You deserve eternal punishment and the only way out is to accept the sacrifice.

That creates dependence. It tells people they are broken by nature and must cling to the church for salvation. That is how institutions keep power. Once you convince people that they are guilty by birth and only you hold the key to their freedom, they will never leave you.

Christianity turned guilt into an empire. What is most ironic is that this supposed sacrifice did not even eliminate suffering or evil in the world. According to the story, Jesus died to remove sin, but the world is still full of it. Wars, injustice, corruption, and pain have continued for 2,000 years.

If the crucifixion truly paid the price for sin, then why does suffering remain? If humanity was forgiven, why do humans still face judgment? The logical answer is that the story was never meant to be taken literally. It was a symbolic tale turned into dogma by people who wanted to control others through fear of hell and hope of heaven.

If you look deeper into the moral logic of the crucifixion story, it reveals something very disturbing about the way Christianity defines love and goodness. Believers often say that God loved the world so much that he gave his only son. But what kind of love demands a killing?

If a human father were to sacrifice his child to prove his love to others, we would call him a monster. Yet when a divine being does the same thing, we are told to call him merciful. It turns morality upside down. The act that would be horrific for any human becomes sacred when done by God. This reversal of moral reasoning is exactly how cults operate. They redefine evil as good and suffering as holy.

The Christian story asks followers to accept pain and death as beautiful things. The cross, which was a Roman instrument of torture, becomes a symbol of hope. The wounds, the nails, the blood, all become romantic. People wear crosses around their necks without thinking about what it actually represents. a public execution.

Imagine if someone wore a miniature electric chair or noose as a symbol of faith, it would seem grotesque. But because the cross has been wrapped in 2,000 years of emotional storytelling, people see it as pure and uplifting.

When you remove the emotional coating, the message becomes very dark. It says that human beings are so vile and sinful that only blood can make them acceptable. That life itself is tainted and death is the only solution and that an innocent life had to be destroyed so the guilty could be spared.

This is not a moral lesson that encourages growth or responsibility. It teaches people to feel worthless and to depend on a brutal act for their redemption. It glorifies submission, guilt, and suffering. It makes people believe they were saved through violence instead of kindness.

Many believers say that Jesus took our punishment to demonstrate how serious sin is. But that explanation does not hold up either. If you saw a child accidentally break a rule, would you beat another innocent person to teach them a lesson about justice? That would make no sense. A just parent would guide, not torture. The Christian God, however, demands a spectacle of pain to prove his point. That is not love. That is cruelty hidden behind the word grace.

The most telling thing is how Christianity turned this violent story into a continuous ritual. The communion ceremony repeated every Sunday across the world keeps this human sacrifice alive symbolically. This is my body. Take and eat. This is my blood. Take and drink. These words are spoken by millions of priests and billions of followers repeat them without thinking about what they actually mean.

The ritual turns a gruesome death into a sacred meal. The idea is that by symbolically consuming the flesh and blood of the sacrificed man, believers share in his salvation. In ancient societies, this would have been called cannibalistic magic, the belief that eating a divine body grants power or forgiveness.

Christianity just changed the language but kept the same ancient superstition. This constant focus on blood is not accidental. It is rooted in the ancient Jewish tradition where life was seen as being in the blood. The Hebrew scriptures are full of sacrifices. Goats, lambs, and bulls killed so that God would forgive sins. The more blood spilled, the cleaner the people supposedly became.

Christianity continued that idea, but elevated it to its extreme form. Instead of an animal, the offering was a divine human. The lamb of God became the final sacrifice. The church even teaches that no more sacrifices are needed because this one was perfect and eternal. In other words, a permanent human sacrifice stands at the center of the faith.

If any modern religion today demanded that a man be killed to save others, it would be considered a dangerous cult. Imagine a group saying, “Our leader must die so the world can be cleansed. Society would call the police.” But when the same message is written in old scriptures, sung in choirs, and painted in cathedrals, people call it holy.

This shows how time and repetition can sanitize almost anything. The longer a myth survives, the more acceptable it becomes. People stop seeing the horror inside the story.

Even the emotional appeal of Christianity depends on guilt and fear. You are told you were born unworthy, that your natural desires are sinful, and that without accepting the sacrifice of Jesus, you will be tormented forever. That is not a message of hope. It is a message of control. It traps people in a cycle of self-hatred and dependency.

The solution it offers, accepting Jesus, only works inside the system that created the problem in the first place. You are told you are sick, then offered the only cure and warned that refusing it will lead to eternal death. This is not spiritual truth. It is psychological conditioning.

If God is truly loving, then why would he create a system where forgiveness requires bloodshed? Why not simply forgive? When humans forgive each other, they do not demand that someone die first. A loving parent forgives without harming anyone.

But the Christian God supposedly cannot do that. He needs pain before he can show mercy. That makes him less compassionate than the people he created. It turns God into a being bound by primitive rules of honor and punishment. It makes him a cosmic version of the old tribal gods who demanded offerings to stay calm.

Believers often say that this sacrifice shows how much God values justice. But justice means giving each person what they deserve. If someone steals, you punish the thief, not an innocent neighbor.

Substitutionary punishment is the opposite of justice. It violates the very principle it claims to uphold. The crucifixion story only works if you abandon moral logic entirely. It depends on the idea that the guilt of one can be magically transferred to another. This is not moral reasoning. It is ancient scapegoat thinking.

Tribal societies used to drive an animal into the wilderness, symbolically carrying the sins of the community. Christianity simply replaced the goat with a man. Even from a practical point of view, the crucifixion solves nothing. If sin was paid for, then no one should be guilty anymore. Yet, Christians still believe they must confess sins, ask for forgiveness, and fear hell.

If the debt was truly cleared, then the system should be over. But it continues endlessly. That is because religion thrives on guilt. It cannot let go of sin because sin is what keeps people obedient. The sacrifice is never enough. The blood is never enough. The cross must be remembered every week to keep the guilt alive.

What makes the story even more questionable is how much it depends on fear of hell, a place never described clearly in the Old Testament and largely developed by later Christian imagination. The idea is that humans are so evil by nature that they deserve eternal torture and only through the death of Jesus can they escape it. But what kind of justice system would design infinite punishment for finite mistakes?

If a human judge gave someone eternal torture for stealing bread, we would call that insane. Yet, when God does it, it is called holy judgment. Once again, the logic collapses under moral scrutiny. It is also worth noting how the story of Jesus’s death mirrors older myths from various cultures.

Dying and rising gods existed long before Christianity. Osiris in Egypt, Dionis in Greece, Mithris in Persia. Each of these figures died, descended to the underworld, and returned to life to symbolize renewal or salvation.

Christianity simply repackaged this ancient theme into a Jewish context. The crucifixion, resurrection, and promise of eternal life are not unique. They are recycled elements from older mystery religions that also centered around ritual sacrifice and symbolic rebirth.

The human mind has always been drawn to such stories because they turn fear of death into hope. But that does not make them true. When you remove the poetic coding, the Christian message is painfully clear. Humans are unworthy. Blood is sacred and death brings life. This is the language of ancient cults, not moral philosophy.

A truly enlightened worldview would say that forgiveness comes from understanding, that growth comes from compassion, and that moral progress does not need sacrifice.

But Christianity froze human morality in the logic of a primitive age when people thought gods needed slaughter to be satisfied. If you told a modern child that a father killed his own son to forgive strangers, the child would instinctively say, “That is wrong.” Yet billions of adults defend that same story as the foundation of morality. That shows how deeply cultural conditioning can distort basic human empathy.

The story of the crucifixion numbs people to the horror of what it actually means. It asks them to call evil good and to worship violence as love. If there truly were an all- knowing, all powerful creator, he would not need blood to forgive his own creation. He would simply teach, guide, and help beings grow beyond ignorance.

But the God of Christianity is trapped in the same emotional patterns as primitive humans. Anger, vengeance, and the need for sacrifice. That is why this religion for all its talk of love is built on a foundation of blood. Its central symbol is not a flower or a sunrise but an execution device.

So when we look at Christianity honestly without fear or reverence, what we see is not a message of peace or wisdom. We see an ancient ritual of human sacrifice glorified through poetry and myth repeated for centuries until people forgot what it really was.

The crucifixion story did not liberate humanity. It bound it to guilt, suffering, and fear of eternal punishment. And even today, people kneel before that symbol believing that death once paid for their lives. But what they worship is not salvation. It is the ancient human illusion that killing can cleanse the soul.

The truth is much simpler and more humane. No one needs to die for anyone’s forgiveness. No blood has to be shed for love to exist. If morality means anything, it must begin with empathy, not sacrifice. It must reject the idea that pain can wash away guilt. A truly good world will never come from worshiping death, but from understanding life.

Christianity, for all its art and culture, still asks people to glorify the execution of an innocent man as the highest act of goodness. And as long as that remains its central message, it will always be at its core a cult of human sacrifice.

At some point, it becomes incumbent to step back, take off the rose-tinted glasses, and realize that Christianity is a remnant of humanity’s past- a pre-scientific, pre-humane time when the sacrificial death of a non-guilty person or animal was seen as an appropriate means to forgive one’s offenses.

(5367) Disparity of early Christianity

If Christianity was true, it would be expected that there would have been close alignment in the early times and that deviations would slowly accumulate over time. But this formula is reversed in Christian history. The early times were the most diverse. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1ovulv0/the_fact_that_the_earliest_christians_had_such_a/

The fact that the earliest Christians had such a vast array of differing beliefs on Jesus, shows that the historicity of Jesus isn’t as clear and cemented as modern Christianity wants to present.

The first three centuries of Christianity saw such a vast variation of groups who believed in Jesus. You would think the closer time frame to Jesus’ life would mean they were able to be decipher the truth much easier, but the difference between a Jehovah or Mormon of today to an Orthodox Christian, is much closer to one another than groups were from the first century to the 3rd.

To preface my argument, Christians today will immediately dismiss the majority of groups that I list as being heretics, which is what occurred by the Orthodoxy mainly during the 300s, but these groups weren’t initially deemed heretical. Some people in these groups almost became the Pope in the 2nd century, which shows they weren’t seen as outsiders back then. There’s evidence that these groups worshiped in the same churches as any other Christians and were not referred to in a manner that differentiated them from Orthodoxy.

Some groups: Valentinians, Simonians, Marcionites, Mandaeans, Ebionites, Peratae(very interesting Greek sect who believed the Greek gods were demons who Jesus freed us from), as well as countless more. I encourage readers who are unfamiliar with these Gnostic groups to research them, as there are nearly 50 gospels written, only 4 deemed true from Orthodoxy.

I believe the fact they all existed under the Christian name in the early centuries shows that none of them had a clear historical answer to who Jesus was, and are hearing differing stories on Jesus theology depending on what region they are in and their communities.

Some beliefs varied from Jesus not actually having a physical body and that he was a phantom only appearing to have a body. Some other beliefs were that the Old Testament God was evil or at least not all good and perfect. Some believed in the trinity being Father, Son and Zoe(Zoe being the Greek word life). In John, life is translated with a lower case “l” in the English Bible, but in the original Greek there are no capitals unless you begin a new sentence. So they took “Zoe/Life” as an actual person. Zoe is a female member of the trinity. The Mandaeans venerated John the Baptist above Jesus. Some groups were a precursor to Islam who believed Jesus wasn’t even crucified, it just appeared to be so.

This shows clearly that these people had no clear idea of the historical Jesus, and were just influenced by stories they were hearing, this includes the Orthodoxy.

It can be argued that an omnipotent god could and would keep his followers closely aligned into a linear faith structure. Yahweh didn’t do this. It was all over the map early on and even today there is a massive amount of disagreement about Christian theology. The fact that there was much disagreement in the First and Second Centuries indicates that there never was a solid basis for the origin of the faith, indicating that it isn’t a product of divine orchestration.

(5368) New Testament never presents a Trinity

Although modern standard Christianity claims that God consists of three co-equal beings (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), the biblical texts do not actually support this doctrine. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1oxhl6b/i_still_have_yet_to_see_any_actual_evidence_for/

When you actually look at the text without reading later doctrine back into it, the NT never presents a Trinity. The Father is repeatedly identified as the only true God (John 17:3), and Jesus is consistently distinguished from that God. Every “Jesus is God” prooftext collapses once you look at the language, context, or the fact that later manuscripts shaped many of those readings (ex: the long ending of Mark, the Comma Johanneum in 1 John 5:7, etc.).

The standard verses Christians cite don’t say what they claim:

• • “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30) — the Greek word hen means unity/purpose, not “one person” or “one being.” The same word is used when Jesus prays that his disciples “be one,” obviously not meaning they all become one being.
  • “Before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58) — the grammar doesn’t require a reference to Exodus 3:14; “ego eimi” is used all over John for simple self-identification. The crowd reacting doesn’t prove doctrine.
  • Thomas saying “my Lord and my God” (John 20:28) — even if taken at face value (ignoring linguistic ambiguity), one disciple’s exclamation doesn’t override Jesus explicitly identifying the Father alone as God.
  • Philippians 2 — says Jesus did not regard equality with God as something to seize, which directly refutes equality.
  • John 1:1 — “the Word was a god” is a legitimate translation because theos lacks an article, and even if you take the traditional translation, being God’s “Word” doesn’t make the speaker the same being as the Father. The Word is with God, which already destroys Trinitarian unity of person.

Historically, the Trinity isn’t original Christianity. It’s a 4th-century theological solution, not a teaching of Jesus or the apostles:

• • The earliest Christians were strictly Unitarian (read the Apostolic Fathers — no Trinity).
  • The doctrine was formalized at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) under intense political pressure from Constantine, and even then, it wasn’t the Trinity yet — just the claim that the Son was “of one substance” with the Father.
  • The Holy Spirit wasn’t added as a co-equal divine person until 381 CE at Constantinople.
  • The term “Trinity” doesn’t appear in the Bible. Neither do the categories “one essence, three persons.”

Every major Trinitarian claim is either built on later Greek metaphysics (ousia/hypostasis distinctions), political decisions, or post-biblical interpretation. The biblical writers didn’t have a Trinitarian framework; they inherited Jewish monotheism where “God” = the Father alone. Jesus is presented as God’s chosen agent, messiah, and servant — not the same being as the Father.

So if someone reads the actual text and doesn’t see the Trinity, that’s not confusion — that’s simply reading the Bible without 1700 years of doctrinal overlay.

It would seem likely that if the Trinity was true, then somewhere along the line we would have Jesus recorded to have said, “My father and I are one with the Holy Spirit, we are not separate gods, we are three manifestations of One God.” It’s unlikely that an omnipotent god would have left this important doctrinal issue in a state of such confusion and controversy.

(5369) The problem of people who never heard of Jesus

The way Christianity is defined by the Bible and tradition creates a problem dealing with people who live their lives without ever hearing about Jesus. There appears to be no satisfying solution no matter whether these people end up in heaven or hell. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1oyrq04/the_issue_of_the_people_who_have_never_heard_of/

The issue of the people who have never heard of Jesus is the biggest problem with Christianity.

According to Christianity, humans are born in sin due to the Original Sin, and God came to earth in human form as Jesus, and in his death and resurrection people are “saved” from sin, allowing them to live forever in heaven, and this is achieved by believing in Jesus, so he asked his disciples to “go and make disciples of all nations”. This is why Christians evangelize people, with the intention of “saving” them by presenting them Jesus.

However, there is a huge problem with this: Not everybody had or will have the opportunity of hearing about Jesus. Lots of people have lived, and still live, who may never even hear about Jesus or Christianity, or if they do, may only do it in a very limited and biased way, not enough to understand it and believe in it. Not to mention all the people that lived and died before Jesus was even born. Here is where the problem lies. There exist several solutions to it, which all fail:

-First, for the issue of the people living before Jesus, many Christians believe in the Harrowing of Hell, that Jesus descended to Hell during the three days he’s been dead and preached to the dead. This solves it neatly. However, as we’ll see, this puts the people living before Jesus in a clear advantage to those who lived after him, as they had the best opportunity for heaven while the latters not so much.

-One solution to the problem is that people who never heard of Jesus go straight to hell, and that evangelism is 100% necessary to save them. However, this is extremely unjust, as those people will have zero opportunities ever of being saved, and thus are condemned to hell a priori, with no salvation possible.

-The previous problem can be solved by pre-determination. Perhaps God has already decided who will be saved and who will not, while they were still souls, and thus he chose the souls that won’t be saved to incarnate in ways that they would never hear of Jesus. However this once again is unjust, and contradicts the Bible, as it is said “For God, nothing is impossible”. The idea that some people are unsaveable goes against the very Bible. Plus, pre-existence of souls is considered a heresy (Which is another problem I find with Christianity but that goes beyond the point).

-The Primitive Baptists believe in pre-determination, however for them this is random, and the gospel has no effect of salvation. Some good Christians may be saved, some may not. Some non-Christians may be saved, some may not. This goes directly against the very basis of Christianity, as it implies the gospel and belief in Jesus have no relation to salvation.

-On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have universalism. Everybody will be saved, no matter what, if they heard of Jesus, or not, whether they were morally good or not. This once against contradicts Christianity, as it puts belief in Jesus as irrelevant to salvation, and makes evangelism lose all meaning.

-Then there is an intermediate position, which seems to be the most accepted one. The idea that God judges those who never heard differently, and that their salvation might depend on how they interpret the “natural law” that God has put forward. This however contradicts the very Bible, as Jesus said that “No one reaches the Father except through me” and that Salvation is only possible through the belief in Jesus Christ.

-Some believe hell to be corrective, not permanent. Sinners will spend a temporary period in hell, be “cleansed” of their sins, and finally go to heaven. However, once again, this contradicts the idea that only through belief in Jesus one can be saved, and like all universalism, makes evangelism be pointless, going against what Jesus said.

-Finally, we have Apokastasis, the belief in reincarnation, and that people who never heard will just keep being reincarnated until they are able to hear. Either all people will go to heaven eventually, reincarnating until they become good Christians, or some will go to hell if they listen to the gospel and reject it. However Christianity rejects reincarnation, and the Epistle to the Hebrews clearly states that people only live once.

In conclusion, no matter what position you take, none solves the problem. Either the position is directly refuted by the Bible, or contradicts one of the dogmatic attributes of God. The many solutions given are unbiblical, and contradict the very own sayings of Jesus and his disciples. The fact that some people have and will live their entire lives without even hearing the name Jesus, it’s a fact that destroys the entire foundation upon which Christianity is built upon.

The founders of Christianity made a mistake by conditioning salvation on both a knowledge of and an acceptance of Jesus. This left some gaping holes in what should be a theology that gives everyone an equal chance at making it to heaven.

(5370) Why Jesus wasn’t real

Although it is not a mainstream theory, there exists a trove of compelling arguments to suggest that Jesus was not a real flesh and blood human, but rather a mythical holy man that over time came to be considered as being historical. An ongoing theory is that certain facets of many holy men were congealed and consolidated within the concept of a singular Jesus. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1ozk5l4/why_jesus_wasnt_real_and_why_it_matters_that/

Honestly the reason I don’t think the Jesus people talk about is real is because once you actually look at the hard facts, the whole thing just collapses. Like, the evidence we have doesn’t behave like real history at all, it behaves exactly like a myth that grew over time.

For example:

1. 1. The gospels were written 40–70+ years after Jesus supposedly died.

Mark (the first gospel) was written around 70 CE.

Matthew and Luke around 80–90 CE.

John around 90–110 CE.

That’s literally the equivalent of people in 2025 writing a biography of someone from the 1950s with no notes, no sources, and no eyewitness interviews. Just vibes.

2) They are anonymously written.

The names “Matthew, Mark, Luke, John” were added later by the church.

The original manuscripts do NOT say who wrote them.

3) They copy each other.

Matthew and Luke copy almost all of Mark, sometimes word-for-word.

That means they’re not independent sources, they’re basically edited fan rewrites.

4) There are no contemporary accounts.

Not one single writer living during 30–36 CE says Jesus existed, did miracles, or caused chaos in Jerusalem.

Nothing from:

• • Roman officials
  • Jewish historians
  • local scribes
  • anyone in Judea

And remember: Judea was literate and extremely well-recorded by the Romans.

5) The Romans recorded literally everything—except Jesus.

so there is ZERO Roman documentation. And Rome documented EVERYTHING.

People seriously underestimate how obsessive Rome was about record-keeping. We’re not talking about some random, chaotic tribe, we’re talking about the most bureaucratic empire on Earth at that time.

Actual Roman records we still have today include:

• • execution logs
  • prisoner lists
  • census data
  • tax records
  • court proceedings
  • temple activity reports
  • letters between officials
  • investigations into tiny uprisings
  • weather notes
  • shipping logs
  • accounts of eclipses and earthquakes
  • receipts for military equipment
  • lists of random troublemakers and preachers
  • arrests for basically nothing

Rome kept track of everything, down to levels that seem insane today.

And yet somehow:

• • No Roman record of Jesus existing
  • No record of his trial
  • No record of Barabbas
  • No record of a man drawing thousands of followers
  • No record of the “earthquake”
  • No record of the sky turning black
  • No record of zombies crawling out of graves
  • No record of a mass movement causing disturbances in Jerusalem
  • No record of Pilate struggling to decide anything (he was notorious for killing people without hesitation)

It’s not like Rome was “too busy.” Judea was heavily monitored, extremely politically volatile, and constantly under watch. The Romans wrote down every tiny rebellion, every weird cult, every pseudo-messiah who stirred up even a handful of people.

There are Roman records of nobodies who did WAY less than what Jesus supposedly did.

We literally have documentation on:

• • A guy who claimed to be a prophet and led 30 people into the desert
  • A magician who annoyed a governor
  • A traveler who insulted a tax collector
  • A prisoner who stole a cloak

But the guy who supposedly:

• • healed the blind in public
  • fed thousands with magic
  • raised people from the dead
  • caused mass gatherings
  • created riots
  • got tried by Rome
  • and literally resurrected…

…somehow left zero trace in the most meticulous imperial record system in the ancient world?

The only “sources” we have were written long after, by believers, not by the people who were actually in charge of the region and documented everything.

And I’m sorry, but that’s why it frustrates me when people still insist it’s real without looking at any evidence. They act like it’s “historical fact,” but the actual historical system of the time, Rome’s bureaucracy, doesn’t acknowledge Jesus at all. If the Romans didn’t record it, it probably didn’t happen. And the claims are too big, too dramatic, too public to just “slip through the cracks.”

So yeah, it makes me angry because people cling to this story emotionally without ever checking the facts. The Roman silence alone kills the entire thing. If Rome didn’t write about you, you didn’t cause the world-changing events the Bible claims you did. And that reality is way more convincing than anything built on blind belief.

6) The “darkness over the land” and “the dead rising” are not mentioned by ANY outside source.

If graves opened and dead people walked around Jerusalem, someone besides Christians would’ve noticed.

No Jewish text says it.

No Roman text says it.

No historian mentions it.

Because it didn’t happen.

7) Paul (earliest Christian writer) gives almost NO biographical details about Jesus.

His letters are from 50–60 CE, earlier than the gospels.

He never met Jesus.

He never quotes Jesus’ miracles or teachings.

He treats Jesus as a cosmic spiritual figure—not a person he learned about from eyewitnesses.

His info comes from dreams/visions.

8) Josephus’ “Jesus passage” was proven tampered with.

Josephus wrote in 93 CE, way too late.

Scholars agree the line about Jesus was partially or completely inserted by Christian scribes.

9) Tacitus wrote in 115 CE and was just repeating what Christians believed.

He wasn’t giving evidence; he was summarizing rumors.

10) There were MANY “dying-and-rising savior god” stories before Christianity.

Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Hercules.

The “god dies and comes back, saves humanity” trope is older than Christianity.

Christianity fit itself into that mold.

11) The virgin birth story comes from a mistranslation.

The Hebrew word “almah” means young woman, not “virgin.”

The gospel writers used the wrong translation on purpose to make Jesus fit a prophecy.

12) Nazareth didn’t even exist in the early 1st century.

There are no archaeological remains of a town there until later.

Which means “Jesus of Nazareth” is probably a symbolic title, not a historical one.

13) The census in Luke is historically impossible.

There is no record of a Roman census forcing people to travel to their ancestor’s birthplace.

Romans counted you where you lived, like normal.

The whole “Bethlehem trip” was invented to match another prophecy.

14) The trial with Pilate contradicts everything we know about Pilate.

Pilate wasn’t a soft negotiator.

He was known for executing people without hesitation.

The story of him “washing his hands” and being unsure is the opposite of his documented personality.

And that’s just straight-up historical, text-based, archaeological, linguistic stuff.

None of it comes from opinion. It’s literally the academic consensus.

And here’s why it makes me angry that people believe it all without checking any of this:

it’s reared like “established history,” when it falls apart the moment you look at dates, sources, authorship, archaeology, and how myths form.

It frustrates me because the facts are right there. There’s no early evidence. No eyewitnesses. No contemporary documentation. No neutral accounts. No archaeology. Nothing. Just stories written decades later by believers trying to build a religion. And somehow that gets treated like real history.

Despite these arguments, Jesus might have been a unique, historical man- (absent the miracles of course). Whether this is true or not is not what’s important. What is important is to ask this question- If Yahweh sent his son on a mission to establish the system for determining human salvation, wouldn’t he have ensured that Jesus’ physical footprint would have been validated beyond any doubt? Evidently not… that is, if Christianity is indeed true. And if that is the case, Yahweh laid a big, fat, stinking egg guaranteed to send billions of good people to hell.

(5371) Top ten problematic biblical verses

It is instructive to overview the most revolting biblical verses. Below, Gemini 3.0 Pro lists ten of the worst ones- none of which would appear in a book inspired by a ‘real’ god:

The following verses are frequently cited by critics, skeptics, and even troubled believers as texts that seem morally repugnant, contradictory to the concept of a loving God, or dangerously outdated by modern ethical standards.

Here are 10 biblical verses that many argue “shouldn’t exist.”

1. The Blessing of Infanticide (Psalm 137:9)

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

• • The Context: This is a psalm of lament written by Israelites in Babylonian captivity. They are venting their rage against their oppressors.
  • Why it’s problematic: It explicitly pronounces a blessing (“happy”) on anyone who commits the brutal war crime of smashing babies to death. While theologians call this “imprecatory prayer” (honest venting to God), for many readers, it is a horrific glorification of violence against innocents.

2. The Command to Marry Your Rapist (Deuteronomy 22:28–29)

“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.”

• • The Context: In ancient society, a non-virgin woman had no economic prospects. This law forced the rapist to provide for her financially for life.
  • Why it’s problematic: To modern ears, it sounds like a life sentence for the victim—forcing her to live with and serve the man who violated her, while treating her primarily as damaged property whose value (50 shekels) must be reimbursed to her father.

3. The “Beating Your Slave” Loophole (Exodus 21:20–21)

“Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property.”

• • The Context: This is part of the Levitical law code regulating the treatment of servants/slaves.
  • Why it’s problematic: It explicitly devalues human life based on social status. It suggests that physical abuse is acceptable as long as the victim doesn’t die immediately, using the chilling justification: “since the slave is their property.”

4. The Genocide of the Amalekites (1 Samuel 15:3)

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

• • The Context: God commands King Saul to wipe out a specific tribe as judgment for their attacks on Israel centuries earlier.
  • Why it’s problematic: This is a divine command for total genocide, specifically targeting “children and infants.” It is frequently cited in debates about the morality of the Old Testament God.

5. Silencing Women (1 Timothy 2:12)

“I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”

• • The Context: The Apostle Paul (or a follower writing in his name) is giving instructions on church order.
  • Why it’s problematic: This single verse has been used for 2,000 years to bar women from leadership, teaching, and speaking roles in the church. It is a cornerstone text for patriarchal structures that many view as sexist and oppressive.

6. The Bear Attack on Children (2 Kings 2:23–24)

“Some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. ‘Get out of here, baldy!’ they said… He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.”

• • The Context: The prophet Elisha is being mocked by a gang of youths (the Hebrew word can mean children or young men).
  • Why it’s problematic: The punishment (death by mauling for 42 youths) seems grotesquely disproportionate to the crime (making fun of a prophet’s baldness). It portrays God/His prophet as petty and vindictive.

7. Keeping the Virgins (Numbers 31:17–18)

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

• • The Context: Moses is angry that the army spared the women of Midian, so he orders a more thorough slaughter.
  • Why it’s problematic: It orders the execution of male children and non-virgin women, but explicitly turns young virgin girls into war spoils (“save for yourselves”)—essentially implying sex slavery and forced marriage.

8. Permission to Own People (Leviticus 25:44–46)

“Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves… You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life…”

• • The Context: Distinguishing between Hebrew servants (who were released after 6 years) and foreign slaves (who were property forever).
  • Why it’s problematic: Apologists often argue biblical slavery was “indentured servitude,” but this verse clarifies that chattel slavery (owning people as property for life) was explicitly divinely sanctioned for non-Israelites.

9. Human Sacrifice of a Daughter (Judges 11:30–39)

“And he did to her as he had vowed. And she died a virgin.”

• • The Context: The judge Jephthah vows to sacrifice “whatever comes out of my door” if God gives him victory. His daughter comes out. He sacrifices her.
  • Why it’s problematic: Unlike the story of Abraham and Isaac, God does not intervene to stop it. Jephthah is later listed as a hero of the faith in the New Testament (Hebrews 11), despite having burnt his child as an offering.

10. Cutting Off a Woman’s Hand (Deuteronomy 25:11–12)

“If two men are fighting and the wife of one of them comes to rescue her husband… and she reaches out and seizes him by his private parts, you shall cut off her hand. Show her no pity.”

• • The Context: A specific law regarding fair fighting and damaging a man’s reproductive capabilities.
  • Why it’s problematic: It is the only verse in the Torah that prescribes physical mutilation as a punishment. The command “show her no pity” seems especially harsh given that the woman was trying to protect her husband.

All it takes to realize that the Bible is the work of unenlightened humans and devoid of supernatural inspiration is to read the verses above as well as other similar ones. It is impossible to believe that an omnipotent god would inspire such heinous scriptures, nor the actions that they encouraged.

(5372) Humans are biased to religious beliefs

Humans do not harbor purely objective beliefs, but rather are subject to many influences that cause such beliefs to be somewhat subjective. Although this tendency influences the full range of human experience, its effect is most noticeable with respect to religion. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1p1c3i3/humans_are_biased_to_religious_beliefs_this/

Thesis: Humans are biased to religious beliefs. This should compel us to maintain skepticism of religious claims or beliefs, and remain neutral/agnostic until we’re able to confirm a specific belief structure.

People are biased and predisposed to religious belief in a number of ways. This complex interaction of genetic, psychological, cognitive, and social factors influences our ability to make decisions free of bias. Which is problematic because falling prey to our biases leads to unsound decision making.

The key ways people are predisposed towards religious belief include:

1/ Our predisposition to engage with storytelling: Source

2/ Our predisposition to engage with storytelling that involves counter-intuitive and supernatural elements: Source 1, Source 2

3/ Our predisposition to seeking order in chaos: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3

4/ Our predisposition to attributing purpose to the world: Source

5/ Our predisposition to engage in mind/body dualism: Source

6/ Our predisposition for following rules and maintaining social order: Source

7/ Our predisposition to seeking to personalize our experiences by finding meaning in life, personal control, and a sense of purpose: Source

8/ Our predisposition towards seeking emotional support and comfort, and finding ways to cope with anxiety, fear of the unknown, and stress: Source

9/ Our preference towards information we receive from family and peer groups. The same groups that socialize and raise us act as powerful influences that often culturally transmit information across generations: Source

10/ Humans naturally seek crucial needs like social belonging, solidarity, through an identity within a community: Source

11/ Certain personality traits, particularly agreeableness and conscientiousness, are predisposed to religious beliefs: Source

12/ Our predisposition to inaccurately identifying the nature of “spiritual experiences”: Source 1, Source 2

Conclusion: Know thyself.

Potential objection: We were made this way so we would seek religion.

Counter: Our biases make us more likely to fall prey to cults, swindlers, false claims, and a litany of destructive beliefs. If we were created to seek religion because of our biases, then we were also made to fall prey to every other scam and false belief.

Given the above, it is safe to assume that everybody should be suspicious of their religious beliefs. Outside influences and innate tendencies are too strong to permit in most cases a truly objective analysis of theological claims. Even many atheists retain a certain kernel of doubt that remains as a residual from their childhood indoctrination.

(5373) The darker side of Jesus

Through praise, songs, and prayers, Christians extol Jesus as being the epitome of goodness. But there is another side to Jesus that needs to be discussed. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1ozsgig/ive_never_liked_jesus_and_i_think_hes_a_horrible/

Leaving aside the question of whether a “historical Jesus” even existed in any re-constructable way, if we take the gospels at face value and play along with the story, the picture we get is not nearly as admirable as people seem to think.

Let’s start with the miracles. People often say, “He healed the sick!” The usual implication is that this makes him uniquely compassionate, and better than the rest of us because we don’t go around healing people. But the reason we don’t go around healing people is because we literally can’t. I think most of us would go around healing people’s cancer if we could just say the word and it was so. Jesus isn’t better than anyone for doing something only he can do, at no expense to himself either. One might even ask why he didn’t heal everyone, or simply eradicate leprosy all together?

Same with the ”ultimate sacrifice”, no one else can die for the sake of humanities ”sins” because no one else can do it. And as others here pointed out, he didn’t even really sacrifice anything. According to the gospels, he knows he will rise again. He knows his suffering is temporary. He knows he will ascend to heaven and enjoy eternal glory and bliss. In other words, he goes through a period of intense but finite suffering, with a guaranteed infinite reward on the other side. If someone offered you a deal, endure forty-eight hours of excruciating pain and then have everlasting joy and power, no risk, no uncertainty, that might be brave, but it would also be a ridiculously favorable trade.

But lastly, here’s what kind of makes me feel like I’m taking crazy pills, because even atheists will sometimes say things like ”Jesus was a good guy who taught forgiveness etc”. No. He really wasn’t a good guy, and this is such an incredibly weird and selective way of framing what Jesus’ full message was. To me it’s like if someone told me that ”Jim Jones preached anti racism”. Uh yeah.. he did. And that’s great and I agree with that but painting Jim Jones as only some hippie guy who taught anti racism and community building is, I’m sorry, insane.

Jesus might have said some good things, but it is always followed by the same narcissistic cult leader shit that Jim Jones preached. Jesus doesn’t simply say ”everyone deserves forgiveness” he crucially continues with ”forgiveness can only come through submitting to me and worshiping me as a God, if you don’t you will burn in hell forever”. If I said that you wouldn’t be all ”oh wow what a stand up guy with a message of radical love” so I really don’t know why Jesus gets this treatment.

And while Jesus and his followers didn’t follow the same end as Jim Jones, didn’t actually make people kill themselves, his rhetoric, and the legacy of his teachings has lead to exactly that, and the same kind of hyper controlling cult as Jones’s.

Roman authorities often weren’t eager to execute Christians. They sometimes just wanted a token gesture of loyalty to the imperial cult. Many Christians, however, refused and willingly embraced execution as a way of imitating Christ and proving their devotion. Not to mention millions of people having willingly gone to kill and die in religious war for the sake of Jesus’s teachings.

This is not a bastardization of his message that a lot of people pretend that it is, it is actually it’s logical outcome. Jesus’s full message is apocalyptic, exclusive, and centered on loyalty to himself in a way that lays a foundation for later extremism, oppression, extortion and all the other bad shit Christianity has lead to. And Jesus is not the only, or first, person to ever preach these kinds of things either, he’s not special.

Jesus could have been the greatest thing that ever happened to the world. He could have preached that living a good, loving, and giving life is all that God wants, not spouting a specific rule to worship him as the most important action. He could have shared all kinds of knowledge that would have resulted in a decrease in human suffering. He could have spread his message worldwide to avoid the scourge of holy wars. But he didn’t. So, failing that, he probably was just a regular human being.

(5374) The Bible is chauvinistic

The Bible was written by men without any divine inspiration– or at least that should be the logical conclusion based on the anti-female chauvinistic attitude it portrays throughout. The following argument is a response to this question from Gemini 3.0 Pro:

The Argument That the Bible Is Chauvinistic

Critics and some scholars argue that the Bible is a product of patriarchal cultures (Ancient Near East and Greco-Roman), and therefore codifies the subjugation of women.

1. Women as Property and Legal Inferiors (Old Testament) In many Old Testament laws, women are treated similarly to property.

• • The Tenth Commandment: A neighbor’s wife is listed alongside his house, servants, and donkey as things not to be coveted (Exodus 20:17).
  • Vows: A woman’s religious vow could be nullified by her father or husband, implying she did not have full moral autonomy (Numbers 30).
  • Polygamy: Men were permitted to have multiple wives and concubines, while women were not permitted multiple husbands.

2. The “Texts of Terror” There are narratives in the Bible where women are subjected to horrific violence that is not explicitly condemned by the text in the moment. The most infamous is the story of the Levite’s Concubine (Judges 19), where a woman is gang-raped and dismembered. While the story is meant to show the moral rot of Israel, the woman is voiceless and treated as disposable.

3. New Testament Restrictions The strongest arguments for chauvinism come from the letters of Paul and Peter, which have been used for centuries to bar women from leadership.

• • 1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”
  • Ephesians 5:22: “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.”
  • 1 Corinthians 14:34: “Women should remain silent in the churches.”

To further the argument that the Bible contains elements that denigrate women, critics and scholars point to specific laws, proverbs, and theological arguments that go beyond simple patriarchal social structures and appear to frame women as inherently inferior, dangerous, or unclean.

Here are specific examples often cited to support the view that the text devalues women.

1. Biological Devaluation (Leviticus 12:1-5)

In the laws regarding ritual purity, the birth of a female child is treated as twice as “polluting” as the birth of a male child.

• • The Text: If a woman gives birth to a boy, she is ceremonially unclean for 7 days, followed by 33 days of purification (40 days total). If she gives birth to a girl, she is unclean for 14 days, followed by 66 days of purification (80 days total).
  • The Implication: Critics argue this law codifies the idea that femaleness is inherently further removed from holiness than maleness, or that the entry of a female into the world requires a double dose of cleansing.

2. The “Rapist Marriage” Law (Deuteronomy 22:28-29)

This law outlines the penalty for the rape of an unbetrothed virgin.

• • The Text: “If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.”
  • The Implication: While ancient apologists argue this was to ensure the woman was provided for (since no one else would marry a non-virgin), modern critics view this as the ultimate denigration. It treats the woman entirely as damaged property. The “penalty” is paid to the father (for loss of asset value), and the woman is forced to spend her life married to her rapist without the possibility of escape (divorce).

3. The One-Sided Adultery Test (Numbers 5:11-31)

This passage describes a ritual known as the “Ordeal of the Bitter Water.”

• • The Text: If a husband experiences a “spirit of jealousy” and suspects his wife of adultery (even without proof), he can drag her to the priest. She is forced to drink “bitter water” containing dust from the tabernacle floor. If she is guilty, her “womb will rot” (likely a miscarriage or prolapse). If she is innocent, she is unharmed.
  • The Implication: There is no equivalent ritual for a wife to test a husband she suspects of cheating. This highlights a double standard where female sexuality is strictly policed and subject to public humiliation based on male suspicion alone, while male sexuality is not subjected to the same scrutiny.

4. Blaming Women for the Fall (1 Timothy 2:13-14)

While Genesis 3 describes the fall, the New Testament interpretation of it in 1 Timothy is used to justify silencing women.

• • The Text: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.”
  • The Implication: This argument moves beyond social order to moral constitution. It suggests that women are inherently more gullible, more prone to error, or more susceptible to evil than men. It uses Eve’s error to justify the subjugation of all women for all time, while absolving Adam (who also ate the fruit) of the primary fault.

5. Wisdom Literature as Misogyny (Ecclesiastes 7:26-28)

While Proverbs praises the “noble wife,” the wisdom literature also contains deep skepticism about the moral character of women.

• • The Text: The writer, searching for meaning, concludes: “I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all.”
  • The Implication: This is a sweeping generalization that posits moral integrity is a male trait, and that it is statistically impossible (or at least 0 in 1,000) to find a woman of equal virtue.

6. Women as “Snares” and “Traps” (Proverbs 5, 6, 7)

A recurring theme in Proverbs is the warning to young men to avoid the “adulterous woman” or “wayward wife.”

• • The Text: She is described as a “deep pit,” a “narrow well,” and someone whose steps “lead straight to the grave.”
  • The Implication: While these warnings are against adultery, the rhetorical framing consistently places the active malice and danger on the woman. She is the predator and the trap; the man is the victim of her seduction. It frames female sexuality as a dangerous force that seeks to destroy men.

7. Graphic Sexual Violence as Metaphor (Ezekiel 16 & 23)

The prophets often compare Israel’s idolatry to a promiscuous woman. However, the language used is often shockingly violent and sexualized.

• • The Text: In Ezekiel 23, God describes Samaria and Jerusalem as two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah. The text graphically describes their lust (“she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys”) and describes God’s judgment: “I will hand you over to them… they will strip you of your clothes… they will cut off your nose and your ears.”
  • The Implication: Feminist theologians argue that using the sexual mutilation of women (stripping, cutting off noses) as a metaphor for divine justice normalizes violence against women. It suggests that a “promiscuous” woman deserves physical destruction and mutilation.

So the question should be asked- if Yahweh is the sole omnipotent god of the universe and decided to interact with humans, would ‘he’ have set up a religious faith that decisively favors men over women? The most considerate answer should be ‘no.’ But scriptures predominantly written by men, absent a connection to the divine, probably would.

(5375) Ten ways the Bible fails physics

The Bible was written at at time before humans understood the basic physical laws of nature, and therefore it includes a large number of stories that conflict with our current understanding of science. The following is a response to this question compiled by Gemini Pro 3.0:

Several biblical narratives describe events that appear to contradict our current understanding of physical laws. These conflicts generally arise when a supernatural event is described in a way that violates the known constants of nature. Here are some of the primary ways the Bible is inconsistent with physics:

1. Conservation of Mass and Energy

The First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy (and by extension, matter) cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system.

• • Creation Ex Nihilo: The concept of God creating the universe “out of nothing” (Genesis 1) violates the conservation laws, which require that all matter and energy must come from pre-existing matter and energy.
  • Multiplication of Loaves and Fish: In the Gospels (e.g., Mark 6), Jesus multiplies a small amount of food to feed thousands. This spontaneous generation of organic matter (complex carbohydrates and proteins) without a source violates the conservation of mass.

2. The Laws of Gravity and Buoyancy

Gravity dictates that objects with mass will be attracted to the center of the Earth, and buoyancy states that an object will only float if it displaces a weight of fluid equal to its own weight.

• • Walking on Water: The account of Jesus and Peter walking on the Sea of Galilee (Matthew 14) contradicts the principles of buoyancy and surface tension. A human body is far too dense to be supported by the surface tension of liquid water.
  • The Ascension: The description of Jesus ascending bodily into heaven (Acts 1) contradicts the law of gravity, as a physical body requires a propulsion force to overcome Earth’s gravitational pull.
  • Floating Axe Head: In 2 Kings 6, the prophet Elisha causes a solid iron axe head to float on water, directly violating the relationship between density and buoyancy.

3. Heliocentrism and Orbital Mechanics

Modern physics has established that the Earth rotates on its axis and orbits the Sun (heliocentrism).

• • Joshua’s Long Day: In Joshua 10, Joshua commands the sun and moon to “stand still” for about a whole day. For the sun to appear stationary, the Earth would have to stop rotating.
  • The Physics Problem: Stopping the Earth’s rotation (approx. 1,000 mph at the equator) instantly would result in catastrophic inertia effects—winds of hyper-sonic speed, massive tsunamis, and everything not anchored to bedrock being flung eastward. The text mentions none of these cataclysmic side effects.
  • Geocentric Language: Verses like Psalm 93:1 (“The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved”) reflect an ancient geocentric cosmology that conflicts with orbital mechanics.

4. Meteorology and the Water Cycle

The global water cycle involves a finite amount of water on Earth that cycles through evaporation, condensation, and precipitation.

• • Noah’s Flood: The account in Genesis 6-9 describes water covering the highest mountains on Earth.
  • The Physics Problem: There is not enough water in the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and subterranean aquifers combined to cover Mount Everest (29,032 ft). If the atmosphere held that much moisture, the atmospheric pressure would crush most life forms. Furthermore, where did that volume of water drain to?

5. Thermodynamics and Entropy

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total entropy (disorder) of an isolated system can never decrease over time.

• • Resurrection: The biological process of death involves a massive increase in entropy as cells break down and order is lost. The resurrection of a body (Lazarus, Jesus) implies a reversal of this entropy—reordering decayed matter back into living, functional tissue without an external mechanism to account for it.

6. Biology and Genetics

Modern genetics establishes that traits are inherited through DNA, and speciation requires vast amounts of time and genetic variation.1

• • Jacob’s Sheep (Genetics): In Genesis 30, Jacob tries to influence the color of the sheep’s offspring by placing striped branches in front of them while they mate. The text implies this visual stimulus caused the sheep to give birth to streaked and speckled lambs. This violates the laws of genetics; visual input during conception cannot alter the DNA of the embryo.
  • The Virgin Birth (Parthenogenesis): The conception of Jesus (Matthew 1, Luke 1) without a biological father violates human biology. While parthenogenesis (asexual reproduction) occurs in some plants and insects, it does not occur naturally in mammals.2 Furthermore, a child born of a woman alone would technically be a clone or only possess X chromosomes (making them female), whereas Jesus was male.
  • Longevity of the Patriarchs: Genesis 5 records humans living for nearly a millennium (e.g., Methuselah living to 969 years).3 This contradicts our understanding of human telomere decay and the biological limits of cellular senescence.

7. Cosmology and the Speed of Light

Modern cosmology relies on the speed of light as a constant to measure the age and size of the universe.

• • The Starlight Problem: Genesis 1 describes the creation of stars on Day 4, appearing instantly to an observer on Earth. Given that many stars are millions of light-years away, their light would take millions of years to reach Earth. An instant appearance violates the speed of light limit ($c$), implying either the universe is much older than the literal biblical chronology or the speed of light was radically different in the past (which would alter all fundamental physics).
  • The Firmament: Genesis 1:6-8 describes a solid dome (“firmament” or “expanse”) separating the “waters below” from the “waters above.” This reflects ancient cosmology where the sky was a solid object holding back a celestial ocean. Atmospheric physics shows the sky is a gradient of gas, not a solid structure, and there is no ocean of water above the atmosphere.

8. Chemistry and Material Science

Matter has specific properties (melting points, flammability) that are constant under standard conditions.4

• • The Burning Bush: In Exodus 3, Moses sees a bush that is burning but “not consumed.”5 Combustion is a chemical reaction where fuel is oxidized to produce heat and light.6 A fire that produces light without consuming the fuel violates the conservation of mass and the chemical principles of combustion.
  • The Fiery Furnace: In Daniel 3, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are thrown into a furnace heated seven times hotter than usual but emerge unsinged—without even the smell of smoke.7
  • The Physics Problem: At temperatures high enough to kill the soldiers throwing them in, the protein structures in the men’s bodies would denature instantly (cooking them), and their clothes would incinerate. The survival of biological tissue in such extreme heat contradicts the laws of thermodynamics and heat transfer.
  • Lot’s Wife: In Genesis 19, Lot’s wife looks back at Sodom and is instantly turned into a “pillar of salt.”8 The instantaneous transmutation of carbon-based organic tissue into sodium chloride (salt) involves a massive nuclear rearrangement of atoms that contradicts basic chemistry.

9. Acoustics and Structural Engineering

Sound waves carry energy, and structures have limits to the stress they can withstand.9

• • The Walls of Jericho: In Joshua 6, the massive defensive walls of Jericho collapse flat after the Israelites shout and blow trumpets. While resonance frequencies can damage structures (like a singer shattering a glass), the acoustic energy generated by human lungs and ram’s horns is insufficient to pulverize stone fortifications. The energy required to destroy such walls typically requires seismic activity or explosives.

10. Zoology and Ecology

Ecosystems require specific balances of predator and prey, and species have specific dietary and environmental needs.

• • Jonah and the Whale: Jonah is swallowed by a “great fish” and survives in its belly for three days and three nights (Jonah 1).10
  • The Biological Problem: A human would die quickly from asphyxiation (lack of oxygen), crushing pressure, or digestion by stomach acids. There is no known marine animal with a physiology that could sustain a living human in its stomach for 72 hours.
  • The Ark’s Ecology: The gathering of two (or seven) of every animal species onto one boat (Genesis 6-9) presents immense problems with carrying capacity, waste management, and food webs. For example, carnivores require fresh meat, and specialized species (like koalas requiring eucalyptus) would have no food source. The thermodynamics of generating enough ventilation to prevent the animals from dying of heatstroke and ammonia poisoning (from waste) in a closed wooden structure is also scientifically problematic.

Defenders of the Christian faith will argue that the laws of physics are irrelevant to the question of God’s existence or the fidelity of the Bible. This might hold water if we were witnessing similar departures of basic science in our present world. But we are not. And the most logical conclusion from that is that none of the events described above actually happened.

(5376) Why humans invented gods

Humans invented gods and not the other way around. The following discusses many of the reasons for why this happened:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PAlNUqXi7Tg

Religion starts with a lie so obvious it’s almost insulting. The claim that an all- knowing, all powerful creator needs humans to believe in him. As if a perfect being suffers from an ego problem so fragile it depends on the flattery of the same creatures it supposedly designed out of dust. The moment you hear that, the whole structure falls apart.

A real god wouldn’t need worship, praise, rituals, or buildings with donation boxes. A real god wouldn’t need middlemen in robes translating his mysterious will for cash and obedience. The very idea that perfection needs anything from us is your first red flag that the entire thing is man-made. Because only humans have needs, insecurities and a craving for authority.

Religion was invented for one main reason, control. People like pretending it’s about morality or comfort or community. But those are just the wrapping paper. Strip that off and what you find is a political tool with magic stories attached. If your tribe wants power, what’s the fastest way to get it? You claim to speak for something no one can see, question, or disprove. You claim invisible authority over visible people. It’s the oldest trick in the book because it works.

When you say, “I want you to obey me,” people resist. But when you say, “The Almighty wants you to obey me,” suddenly questioning you, feels dangerous. Religion didn’t need evidence. It needed fear.

The next giveaway is how God’s morals just happened to match the politics of the men writing the rules. Funny how every divinely inspired scripture supports whatever social structure was convenient at the time. Ancient warlords wrote about a god who loves war. Ancient kings wrote about a god who loves kings. Ancient men wrote about a god who shockingly shares their views on women. And every tribe had a revelation that what do you know puts their tribe on top.

If a religion came from a real god, you’d expect at least one of them to rise above the culture that produced it. But no, every holy book reads like a time capsule of old human biases pretending to be eternal truth.

Another reason religion was invented is that humans hate not knowing things. They see lightning, disease, drought, earthquakes, things they can’t explain. And instead of waiting for knowledge, they make up a story. That’s religion’s second job. A universal I don’t know filler.

Don’t understand how the world began. Magic man in the sky. Don’t understand why the crops failed? Magic Man is angry. Don’t understand why people get sick. Magic Man is punishing you.

Religion pretends to answer the question science actually solves. And the moment science gives a real explanation, religion quietly backs away and changes the subject. If religion were true, its answers wouldn’t shrink every time knowledge grows.

Then there’s fear of death, the biggest emotional crutch of all. Humans can’t handle the idea that life might simply end. So they invent a sequel. No evidence, no data, no reason, just pure wishful thinking repackaged as doctrine. And to make sure the story sticks, religions threaten you with eternal punishment if you don’t believe it. That alone shows how fabricated it is.

If the afterlife were obvious or real, it wouldn’t need a threat. You don’t have to bully people into believing in gravity, but you do have to bully them into believing in something you can’t demonstrate.

Religion also solves another human problem. People want certainty, not truth. Truth requires work, patience, questioning, and doubt.

Certainty only requires a confident storyteller. Religion steps in with ready-made answers, and zero tolerance for disagreement. It gives people a script so they never have to think for themselves again.

That’s why religions get angry when you question their claims. If the beliefs were solid, questioning wouldn’t be a threat. But when your castle is made of sand, even a gentle question feels like an earthquake. The anger is simply insecurity disguised as authority. Look at the structure of religious arguments.

They all follow the same pattern. First, they assume the conclusion. Then they tell you the assumption is too sacred to question. Then they use that assumption to justify everything else. That’s not logic. That’s circular reasoning with incense.

The book is true because it says it’s true. God exists because I feel he exists. The story must be right because so many people believe it. If a student wrote arguments like that in a logic class, they’d fail. But when religion does it, we’re told to call it faith. Consider prayer.

The idea that an all- knowing being needs you to remind him what you want. If God already knows everything, prayer is pointless. If God can change anything, suffering is unnecessary. And if God refuses to fix suffering unless you beg him correctly, then he’s not perfect. He’s petty.

Religion gives you contradictions so obvious they should embarrass anyone pushing them. Yet, people repeat them as if they’ve never thought about them for more than 5 seconds or take the idea of free will in a world supposedly controlled by a god who already knows the future. If the future is known, it’s fixed. If it’s fixed, you can’t change it. If you can’t change it, you don’t have free will.

Religion claims both at the same time, then expects you not to notice the contradiction. And for some reason, people don’t. They just nod along because questioning is discouraged and obedience is rewarded. And let’s not ignore that religions always place their god suspiciously out of reach. Not just out of reach physically, out of reach logically.

Every testable claim is shifted into the untestable. Every failed prophecy is reinterpreted. Every contradiction is mysterious. Every moral failure is taken out of context. Every evil event is part of the plan. A religion never loses. It just moves the goalposts so fast you can barely see them. That alone tells you it’s not about truth. It’s about keeping the illusion alive no matter what. The hypocrisy is everywhere.

Religious leaders preach humility while demanding authority. They preach charity while hoarding wealth. They preach peace while blessing wars. They preach honesty while pushing stories they know have no evidence. And the followers are told this contradiction is virtuous. As if believing in impossible things without proof is somehow noble.

Religion trains people to treat ignorance as a virtue and doubt as a sin. That’s not morality. That’s intellectual sabotage. Even the structure of salvation exposes the invention. Religion creates a problem- your sin and then sells you the cure. It’s like setting your house on fire and then charging you for a bucket of water.

If a god existed and wanted forgiveness, he wouldn’t need blood rituals, sacrifices, or loopholes. He could simply forgive. Religion turns morality into paperwork. Instead of being a decent human being, you’re told to follow rituals that magically cancel out cosmic crimes you never committed. It’s bureaucracy pretending to be redemption.

Now look at how religion spreads. It doesn’t win through evidence or reason. It wins through childhood indoctrination. You tell a child a story before they can think critically. And the story becomes part of their identity. Adults don’t convert to childish fairy tales at high rates. Children do. That’s why religions target kids because no adult would accept talking snakes, global floods, virgin births, or holy books full of contradictions if they heard them for the first time at age 30.

Religion knows this, so it gets them when they’re too young to question. Any idea that needs to grab people before they grow up isn’t truth. It’s programming. And every religion claims exclusive truth. Yet none can explain why the others exist with equal confidence. If one faith were true, the rest wouldn’t exist.

You don’t see competing versions of chemistry. You don’t see rival physics theories with holy wars. But you do see religions violently disagreeing over things they all claim are fact. That’s what happens when the claims aren’t based on evidence. They’re based on competing stories. And stories fight because stories depend on belief, not proof.

Every time religion is forced to face a contradiction, it hides behind the word mystery. That’s the escape hatch. When logic corners the doctrine, they call it beyond human understanding. Translation: We don’t know, but we refuse to admit it. A real explanation doesn’t require shutting down questions. Only bad arguments do.

Mystery is not an answer. It’s a convenient way to avoid admitting the answer doesn’t exist. You also see that religion constantly adjusts itself to fit whatever society already believes. The moment a moral idea becomes a mainstream human rights, equality, science, democracy, religions pretend they supported it all along. They rewrite their interpretations to avoid being left behind.

Real truth doesn’t need to update itself every time culture changes. Only man-made systems do. And notice that religions disagree on every major detail. What God wants, how many gods exist, what behavior is moral, what happens after death, who gets rewarded, who gets punished, how to pray, what to eat, who to marry, what books to believe, what rules matter, and what rules don’t.

If there were a single real God communicating with humanity, the message would at least be consistent. Instead, we get thousands of contradictory messages, all claiming to be absolute truth. That’s not divine revelation. That’s human imagination without restraint.

Religion persists for one more reason. It protects itself with fear. Not just fear of hell or curses. Fear of social consequences.

You’re told that questioning the doctrine makes you arrogant. Leaving the faith makes you lost. Doubting makes you dangerous. They don’t defend the claims. They attack the questioner. That’s how you know the ideas can’t stand on their own.

Any belief worth holding welcomes scrutiny. Religion demands immunity. In the end, religion was invented because humans want easy answers, comforting lies, moral shortcuts, cosmic authority, tribal identity, and someone else to take responsibility for the universe. It thrives on fear, ignorance, guilt, and habit. It survives by punishing questions and rewarding obedience. And it grows by pretending its human inventions came from a perfect invisible being who conveniently never shows up to explain himself.

The conclusion is simple. Religion wasn’t handed down by a god. It was built from the ground up by humans who didn’t know enough, didn’t question enough, and didn’t trust themselves enough. Once you remove the fear and see the structure clearly, it becomes obvious.

Religion wasn’t discovered. It was invented. And everything falls apart the everything it claims falls apart the moment you stop letting the story think for you.

There is a good reason for why there are thousands of religions. Humans share the same incentives to explain the mysterious and to control the populous for earthly gains.

(5377) Critical examination of the Book of Leviticus

The Bible stands as a test of Christianity’s legitimacy and therefore no part of it can be summarily dismissed as being irrelevant to this evaluation. Of all of the books in the Bible, the Book of Leviticus represents one of the greatest challenges. The following is a critique of this book, created by Gemini 3.0 Pro:

The Shadow of the Law: A Critical Examination of the Book of Leviticus

The Book of Leviticus sits at the center of the Torah, a dense thicket of laws, rituals, and regulations that defined the religious life of ancient Israel. While revered by tradition as the word of God, it is fundamentally a text that codified a worldview of exclusion, harsh retribution, and biological determinism. For the modern reader, Leviticus presents a profound ethical challenge, as many of its central tenets stand in direct opposition to contemporary values of human rights, equality, and compassion.

The Codification of Exclusion

Perhaps the most enduring criticism of Leviticus is its rigid categorization of humanity into “clean” and “unclean,” a binary that inevitably led to the marginalization of vulnerable groups. This is most starkly visible in its treatment of people with disabilities and physical differences. Leviticus 21:16-23 explicitly bars men with physical defects—such as blindness, lameness, or a “mutilated face”—from approaching the altar to offer food to God. The text frames physical disability not as a condition deserving of care or accommodation, but as a “profanation” of the sanctuary. This theology of physical perfection marginalizes those who already suffer, effectively barring them from full participation in the spiritual life of the community based on factors entirely outside their control.

Furthermore, the book’s treatment of women often reduces them to sources of ritual contamination. The laws of childbirth in Leviticus 12 declare a woman “unclean” for seven days after birthing a boy, but fourteen days after birthing a girl—followed by a longer period of purification. This disparity suggests an inherent devaluation of female life from the moment of birth. Similarly, the laws regarding menstruation (Leviticus 15) frame a natural biological process as a source of pollution that renders anyone who touches the woman unclean. While anthropologists argue these laws created social boundaries, ethically they functioned to shame and isolate women, reinforcing a patriarchal structure where the male body was the norm and the female body was a deviation to be managed.

The Brutality of Holiness

The justice system outlined in Leviticus is frequently criticized for its draconian severity. The text prescribes capital punishment for a wide range of offenses that, by modern standards, do not warrant death. These include cursing one’s parents (20:9), adultery (20:10), and various forms of sexual conduct. The most infamous of these, found in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, condemns same-sex relations between men as an “abomination” punishable by death. These verses have been weaponized for millennia to justify persecution, discrimination, and violence against the LGBTQ+ community.

The text offers no room for nuance, consent, or love; it views human sexuality strictly through the lens of ritual purity and procreation, violently extinguishing any expression that falls outside those narrow parameters.

The ethical problem here is the conflation of ritual taboo with moral evil. In Leviticus, eating shellfish (an “abomination”) and engaging in homosexual acts (an “abomination”) are described with similar language of revulsion. By elevating cultural taboos to the level of capital crimes, the text created a society where the preservation of “holiness” justified the destruction of human life. This legal rigidity fosters a culture of fear and legalism rather than one of restorative justice or moral growth.

A Theology of Fear

Ultimately, the worldview of Leviticus is predicated on the fear of contagion—both physical and spiritual. The obsession with skin diseases (often mistranslated as leprosy), bodily fluids, and dietary restrictions reveals a theology where God’s presence is dangerous and volatile, requiring constant appeasement through blood sacrifice and rigid separation. This creates a spiritual ecosystem where the primary human motivation is the avoidance of pollution rather than the pursuit of justice or mercy.

While apologists argue that Leviticus must be understood within its ancient Near Eastern context, where such laws were common, this does not absolve the text of its ethical failures. If a text claims to offer timeless divine truth, it cannot hide behind the moral relativism of the Bronze Age. The legacy of Leviticus is a double-edged sword: it preserved a distinct cultural identity for the Jewish people, but it did so by erecting walls of exclusion and sanctifying violence against the “other.” To grapple with Leviticus today is to confront the uncomfortable reality that religious law, when stripped of compassion, can become an instrument of profound injustice.

If the Book of Leviticus is a work inspired by Yahweh, then it represents a major failure to ameliorate the human condition of a primitive tribe, instead reinforcing backward and destructive human tendencies. How could Yahweh have fumbled this effort, which would have been extremely easy for him to do? Obviously, the much more likely truth is that this book was written by humans who were corralled within the confines of their own limited knowledge and view of reality.

(5378) God acts like a spousal abuser

The way that Christianity places threats and restraints on it followers is similar to the way a spousal abuser works to control and intimidate its partner. The following was taken from:

https://ogichidaag.wordpress.com/2011/02/07/god-as-abuser-similarities-between-the-christian-god-and-abusive-spouses/

God and Spousal Abuse:

It’s common for Christians to compare the relationship between humanity and God to that between husband and wife. God is the “man” of the house to whom humanity owes obedience, respect, and honor. Usually this relationship is portrayed as one of love, but in far too many ways, God is more like an abusive spouse who only knows how to love through intimidation and violence. A review of classic signs and symptoms of spousal abuse reveals how abusive the “relationship” people have with God is.

Abusers instill fear in their spouses;

Believers are instructed to fear God. Abusers are unpredictable and given to dramatic mood swings; God is depicted as alternating between love and violence. Abused spouses avoid topics which set off the abuser; believers avoid thinking about certain things to avoid angering God. Abusers make one feel like there is no way to escape a relationship; believers are told that there is no way to escape God’s wrath and eventual punishment.

Abusers Use of Threats and Intimidation to Force Compliance:

Violence is a primary means by which abusers communicate, even with their spouses whom they are supposed to love. Abusers aren’t just violent towards their spouses — they also use violence against objects, pets, and other things to instill more fear and to force compliance with their wishes. God is portrayed as using violence to force people to comply with certain rules and Hell is the ultimate threat of violence. God might even punish an entire nation for the transgressions of a few members.

Abusers Withholds Resources from Victims:

In order to exercise greater control over a victim, abusers will withhold important resources in order to make the victim more dependent. Resources used like this include money, credit cards, access to transportation, medications, or even food. God is also depicted as exercising control over people by controlling their resources — if people are insufficiently obedient, for example, God may cause crops to fail or water to turn bad. The basic necessities of living are conditioned on obeying God.

Abusers Instill Feelings of Inadequacy in Victims:

A further means of exercising control over a victim is instilling feelings of inadequacy in them. By getting them to feel worthless, helpless, and unable to do anything right, they will lack the self-confidence necessary to stand up to the abuser and resist the abuse. Believers are taught that they are depraved sinners, unable to do anything right and unable to have good, decent, or moral lives independent of God. Everything good that a believer achieves is due to God, not their own efforts.

Victims Feel they Deserve to be Punished by Abusers:

Part of the process of encouraging the victim to feel inadequate involves getting them to feel that they really do deserve the abuse they are suffering. If the abuser is justified in punishing the victim, then the victim can hardly complain, can she? God is also described as being justified in punishing humanity — all people are so sinful and depraved that they deserve an eternity in hell (created by God). Their only hope is that God will take pity on them and save them.

Victims are Not Trusted by Abusers:

Another part of the process of making the victim feel inadequate is ensuring that they know how little the abuser trusts them. The victim is not trusted to make her own decisions, dress herself, buy things on her own, or anything else. She is also isolated from her family so that she can’t find help. God, too, is depicted as treating people as if they were unable to do anything right or make their own decisions (like on moral issues, for example).

Emotional Dependency of the Abuser on the Victim:

Although abusers encourage victims to feel inadequate, it is the abuser who really has problems with self-confidence. Abusers encourage emotional dependency because they are emotionally dependent themselves — this produces extreme jealousy and controlling behavior. God, too, is depicted as dependent upon human worship and love. God is usually described as jealous and unable to handle it when people turn away. God is all-powerful, but unable to prevent the smallest problems.

Blaming the Victim for the Abuser’s Actions:

Victims are typically made to feel responsible for all of an abuser’s actions, not just deserving of the punishments inflicted. Thus victims are told that it’s their fault when an abuser gets angry, feels suicidal, or indeed when anything at all goes wrong. Humanity is also blamed for everything that goes wrong — although God created humanity and can stop any unwanted actions, all responsibility for all evil in the world is laid entirely at the feet of human beings.

Why Do Abused People Stay With Their Abusers?:

Why do women stay with violent, abusive spouses? Why don’t they just pack up and leave, making a new life for themselves elsewhere and with people who actually respect and honor them as equal, independent human beings? The signs of abuse described above should help in answering these questions: women are so emotionally and psychologically beaten down that they lack the mental strength to do what is necessary.

They don’t have enough confidence to believe that they can make it without the man who keeps telling them that only he could possibly love such an ugly and worthless person such as they. Perhaps some insight on this can be gained by rephrasing the question and asking why people don’t abandon the emotionally and psychologically abusive relationship they are expected to develop with God? The existence of God isn’t relevant here — what matters is how people are taught to perceive themselves, their world, and what will happen to them if they make the mistake of trying to leave the relationship in order to make a better life for themselves elsewhere.

Women who are abused are told that they can’t make it on their own and if they try, their spouse will come after them to punish or even kill them. Believers are told that they can’t accomplish anything of value without God, that they are so worthless that only because God is infinitely loving does he love them at all; if they turn their backs on God, they will be punished for all eternity in hell. The sort of “love” which God has for humanity is the “love” of an abuser who threatens, attacks, and commits violence in order to get his own way.

Religions like Christianity are abusive insofar as they encourage people to feel inadequate, worthless, dependent, and deserving of harsh punishment. Such religions are abusive insofar as they teach people to accept the existence of a god which, if human, would have long ago been shut away in prison for all his immoral and violent behavior.

We can speculate that if a god actually interacted with humans, the situation would be vastly different. This god would offer critical knowledge to alleviate unnecessary suffering, would encourage humans to have self-esteem and value their own strengths, and would otherwise stand back and leave everyone alone. The god of Christianity is none of this- he is a heavy-handed abuser of humans, despite the fact that he doesn’t even exist.

(5379) Why the Jews rejected Christianity

One of the biggest theological problems for Christianity is that it proposes that a Jewish man modified the Jewish religion to form a new or updated version of the faith, that was then rejected by over 99 percent of the Jewish faithful. This would not be so concerning if Jesus had been a Gentile. But as a Jewish man, to be rejected so thoroughly by his own people is a red flag. The following, generated by Gemini 3.0 Pro, discusses the reasons why the Jews rejected Christianity:

From a historical and theological perspective, the reason the vast majority of Jews did not convert to Christianity is not due to “stubbornness” or a refusal to recognize goodness. Rather, it is because Jesus did not fit the Jewish definition of the Messiah.

To the Jewish people of the 1st century (and today), the Messiah (“Mashiach”) has a specific “job description” outlined in the Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament). From a Jewish perspective, Jesus did not fulfill these requirements.

Here is a breakdown of the primary reasons for the rejection.

1. Unfulfilled Prophecies (The “Checklist”)

In Judaism, the Messiah is a human political and military figure who accomplishes specific, observable tasks on earth. These are not spiritual metaphors; they are literal geopolitical changes.

• • World Peace: The Messiah is expected to usher in an era where “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4). Since war continued (and arguably increased) after Jesus, Jews concluded he was not the Messiah.
  • Gathering the Exiles: The Messiah is supposed to bring all Jews back to the Land of Israel (Isaiah 11:12). In the 1st century, the opposite happened: the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and scattered the Jews.
  • Rebuilding the Temple: The Messiah is prophesied to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem (Ezekiel 37:26-28). Jesus prophesied its destruction, but the Jewish expectation was for its restoration.

The Christian Response: Christianity solved this by introducing the concept of the Second Coming. They argue Jesus fulfilled the spiritual prophecies (saving souls) in his first coming and will fulfill the physical prophecies (world peace) in his second. The Jewish Response: Judaism does not believe in a “two-part” Messianic mission. The job of the Messiah is to be done in one lifetime. If he died with the job unfinished, he was not the Messiah.

2. The Nature of God (Strict Monotheism)

The most significant theological barrier is the Christian concept of the Trinity and the Incarnation (God becoming human).

• • God is One: The central prayer of Judaism is the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” This is interpreted as absolute, indivisible unity.
  • God has no Form: Jewish theology strictly maintains that God is non-physical and infinite. The idea that God would be born as a human, have a body, and die is considered idolatry or a violation of God’s nature in Judaism.
  • Worship: To a Jew, worshiping a human being (even one considered divine) as God is a violation of the First and Second Commandments.

3. The Role of the Torah (The Law)

Judaism teaches that the Torah (the Law) is an eternal covenant between God and the Jewish people.

• • Eternal Mitzvot: God commands the Jews to keep the Sabbath, eat Kosher, and perform circumcisions “throughout your generations” as an “everlasting covenant” (Genesis 17:7).
  • Paul’s Abrogation: When Paul and early Christians argued that the Law was a “tutor” that was no longer binding, or that keeping the Law could not bring salvation, it sounded like heresy to the Jewish ear. A Messiah who encouraged Jews to abandon the Torah would be considered a false prophet according to Deuteronomy 13.

4. The Manner of Death

In the 1st-century context, the manner of Jesus’s death was a massive disqualifier.

• • The Curse: Deuteronomy 21:23 states, “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree.” To the Jewish mind, a person executed by the Romans—the enemies of Israel—was a sign of failure and God’s disfavor, not a sign of victory.
  • No “Dying Messiah”: There is no concept in mainstream Judaism of a Messiah who dies to atone for sins. The Messiah is supposed to be a living king who reigns, not a suffering servant who dies. (Jews interpret the “Suffering Servant” of Isaiah 53 as the nation of Israel suffering in exile, not a single messianic figure).

5. A Different View of Salvation

Christianity offers a solution to a problem that Judaism doesn’t think it has in the same way: Original Sin.

• • Christianity: Humans are born sinful (due to Adam and Eve) and require a Savior to bridge the gap between them and God. Without belief in Jesus, salvation is impossible.
  • Judaism: Humans are born neutral/good with an inclination toward both good and evil. One does not need a “savior” to intervene. Sin is just a mistake; forgiveness is obtained through teshuvah (repentance), prayer, and changing one’s behavior. No human sacrifice is needed or permitted.

Summary

The Jews did not convert because, from their perspective, Jesus changed the definitions of the Messiah, God, and the Law in ways that contradicted their scripture. To accept Christianity, a Jew would have to effectively abandon the core tenets of Judaism (Strict Monotheism and the Eternal Torah), which is why the two faiths eventually separated completely.

It is inconceivable that God would send his ‘son’ to modify the Jewish faith and then to have almost all Jews reject this movement. This fact alone renders Christianity untrue.

(5380) Atheist Manifesto

The following is a manifesto espousing a refreshing way to view religion, absent the shackles of tradition, indoctrination, and intimidation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1p69v0r/an_aetheist_manifesto_an_introspective_call_to/

An Atheist Manifesto

Abandon religion and get your life back. From now on be a critical thinker, demanding true physical evidence before believing in anything. Start by initially believing nothing you hear and only half of what you see; then discover your truth through witnessing real evidence. Just like leprechauns, Santa Claus, fairies or the Easter bunny; so is the construct of a god or deity.

Wake up and free yourself from church, which demands money to fund their tax-free businesses that promise “salvation”. You are your own salvation. Throughout history, religion has always been about mind control, power over your behavior and drawing money into churches with your contributions, to fund wars, gain soldiers and grow their empires. Belief in a God and your damnation if you didn’t was all they needed to keep your loyalty.

It’s time to believe in yourself and the physical universe; not a story written 2000 years ago by an unverified, mostly non-historical group of people who didn’t yet have verifiable science to shape their beliefs. You are better than religion.

Be free, at least until physical evidence appears and proves its existence; though it can’t and won’t, because a supernatural all-seeing god goes against the laws of physics. Nothing in our universe breaks the laws of physics. No invisibility cloaks, no magic spells, no warp speed, and no “miracles”. And at your end, no fiery demise of hell or paradise up in the clouds awaits you. Death only offers eternal silence and peaceful serenity in a state of sleep, as your living consciousness will be gone.

Don’t be afraid of nothingness. Stop believing in the need for the universe we can see to have meaning or a purpose. Creation, beginnings and ends are concepts that human minds struggle to understand. Allow yourself to believe that there was no beginning of the universe. It’s always existed, morphing through time, obeying physical laws as we know are true. Just as a magician can’t magically make a rabbit appear; neither can any of the 3,000 human ideas of a god snap their fingers and create a universe. Believe in the infinite persistence of time and you’ll be free from the demand of a beginning or a creation.

Wake up. Think for yourself. Be you and be reborn, free from ignorance and live in the universe of reality.

Stop praying. It does nothing at all. Replace the word “pray” in your vocabulary with the word “wish” and your supernatural power will be removed and replaced with a sense of human responsibility to help and serve others.

You are your own savior. Rely on your own impetus, strength and action to achieve something. Praying is simply wishing without action. Changes only happen with real physical action. Religion will only stop you from thinking, learning and believing what is true. Churches will continue to prey on non-critical thinkers.

Don’t be a victim anymore, enslaved by a religion or a church. This is your life to live, not theirs. Walk away and discover freedom of your mind, spirit and the real universe around you. The truth exists beyond the walls of your church. Christian values are the same as any value system that is caring, giving or nurturing. You don’t need religion to be your guide to being a good person!

So walk away, open your mind and discover a better life and a clear view of the reality that exists before you.

Religion has strangled humans for millennia, but the time has come to break this cycle of subservience and to reclaim a sense of dignity in the human condition, in a universe, where as of yet, humans appear as the pinnacle of biological intelligence.

(5381) Contradictions in Paul’s letters

Christianity pins a lot of its credibility on the truthfulness of Paul’s alleged divine conversion, such that whatever he wrote and was preserved became biblical scripture. But there exist many contradictions in his writings that conflict with what he wrote, or with other writers, or with writers who deceitfully posed as if they were Paul. What is left is somewhat of a mess, leaving many Christian theological positions in a state of uncertainty. The following is a response to this issue by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Paul’s epistles are central to Christian theology, but when read closely or compared with other biblical texts, several apparent contradictions emerge. These “contradictions” are the subject of intense scholarly debate, with some viewing them as genuine inconsistencies and others as evidence of Paul’s nuanced, contextual rhetoric.

Here are some of the most frequently cited contradictions in the Pauline epistles:

1. Faith vs. Works (Justification)

This is the most famous tension in the New Testament, often contrasting Paul with the Epistle of James.

• • Paul (Faith Alone):
    • Romans 3:28: “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”
    • Galatians 2:16: “Know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ.”
  • Contradiction (James):
    • James 2:24: “You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone.”
  • Contradiction (Paul himself?):
    • Romans 2:6, 13: “God ‘will repay each person according to what they have done.’ … For it is not the hearers of the law who are righteous before God, but the doers of the law who will be justified.”
    • The Conflict: Paul explicitly states in Romans 3 that works of the law do not justify, yet in Romans 2 he says doers of the law will be justified.

2. The Role of Women in the Church

Paul’s letters contain both egalitarian and restrictive passages regarding women, leading to centuries of debate over which represents his “true” view.

• • The Egalitarian Paul:
    • Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
    • Romans 16: Paul commends Phoebe as a “deacon” (v. 1) and Junia as “prominent among the apostles” (v. 7), implying female leadership.
    • 1 Corinthians 11:5: Paul gives instructions on how women should pray and prophesy in church (implying they are speaking).
  • The Restrictive Paul:
    • 1 Corinthians 14:34: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak…”
    • 1 Timothy 2:12: “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.” (Note: Many scholars dispute Paul’s authorship of 1 Timothy, viewing it as a later “Pseudo-Pauline” text).
    • The Conflict: How can women prophesy (1 Cor 11) if they must remain silent (1 Cor 14)?

3. The Law (Torah): Abolished or Upheld?

Paul struggles mightily with the role of the Jewish Law, sometimes calling it a curse and other times calling it holy.

• • The Law is Negative/Abolished:
    • Galatians 3:13: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”
    • Romans 6:14: “You are not under the law, but under grace.”
    • Ephesians 2:15: “…by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations.”
  • The Law is Positive/Upheld:
    • Romans 3:31: “Do we then nullify the law by this faith? Not at all! Rather, we uphold the law.”
    • Romans 7:12: “So then, the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous and good.”
    • The Conflict: Is the Law a curse to be redeemed from, or a holy standard to be upheld?

4. Eating Meat Sacrificed to Idols

Paul seems to give conflicting advice on whether Christians can eat food offered to pagan gods.

• • Permissive:
    • 1 Corinthians 8:4-8: “We know that ‘An idol is nothing at all in the world’… But food does not bring us near to God; we are no worse if we do not eat, and no better if we do.” (Ideally, you can eat it because the idol isn’t real).
    • 1 Corinthians 10:25-27: “Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience.”
  • Restrictive:
    • 1 Corinthians 10:20-21: “…the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons too.”
    • The Conflict: Is eating idol meat a harmless act because idols are fake (Ch. 8), or is it an act of demon worship that prevents you from partaking in Christ (Ch. 10)?

5. Paul’s Conversion Accounts (Acts vs. Galatians)

While not a contradiction within the epistles, Paul’s own account of his conversion in Galatians contradicts the historical account in Acts (written by Luke).

• • Paul’s Account (Galatians 1:16-20): After his revelation, he says, “I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus. Then after three years, I went up to Jerusalem.”
  • Acts Account (Acts 9:26-28): After his conversion in Damascus, “When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples.” (Implies a much more immediate trip, with no mention of a three-year gap or a trip to Arabia).

6. Predestination vs. Free Will

Paul seems to argue for both absolute divine determinism and human responsibility.

• • Determinism:
    • Romans 9:16-18: “It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy. … Therefore God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden.”
  • Free Will:
    • Romans 10:9-13: “If you declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart… you will be saved. … for, ‘Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.'”
    • The Conflict: Is salvation entirely God’s choice (hardening whom He wants), or is it open to “everyone who calls”?

So the questions remain- was Paul a true representative of God and Jesus? Where a conflict occurs, which verse is considered true? Would a god allow these kinds of inconsistencies to exist in his holy scriptures? The likely answers to the these three questions are no, who knows?, and no.

(5382) Book of Numbers: a critique

The Book of Numbers is severely under-read in Christian churches for good reasons. If it was actually inspired by God, then nobody should be respecting that God- much less worship it. The following critique was developed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

The Wilderness of Obedience: A Critique of the Book of Numbers

The Book of Numbers, the fourth book of the Torah, functions as a bridge between the giving of the Law at Sinai and the entry into the Promised Land. While it contains significant theological themes of providence and divine presence, it is also one of the most troubling books for modern ethicists and historians. Its narrative is punctuated by accounts of mass death, harsh divine retribution, and a rigid, exclusionary nationalism that raises profound questions about the nature of justice and leadership.

A Theology of Fatalism and Punishment

One of the central critiques of Numbers is its portrayal of a deity whose primary mode of interaction with His people is lethal retribution. The book is essentially a chronicle of a “death march.” The entire generation that left Egypt is condemned to die in the wilderness due to a lack of faith (Numbers 14). This creates a theological framework where dissent—whether born of fear, hunger, or genuine grievance—is met not with dialogue or mercy, but with plague, fire, and earth-swallowing destruction.

• • The Rebellion of Korah (Numbers 16): When Korah and his followers challenge the exclusivity of Moses and Aaron’s leadership, arguing that “the whole community is holy,” they are not debated but destroyed. The earth opens to swallow them, and fire consumes 250 others. Critics argue this narrative serves to rigidly entrench religious hierarchy, equating questioning authority with opposing God himself.
  • The Complaints of the People: Repeatedly, the Israelites complain about a lack of food or water—fundamental survival needs in a desert. In response, they are often met with “the fire of the LORD” (Numbers 11) or venomous snakes (Numbers 21). This portrayal of God can seem capriciously violent, punishing desperate people for voicing natural physical needs.

The Ethics of Holy War

Perhaps the most ethically difficult section of Numbers is Chapter 31, the war against the Midianites. Following a period of idolatry and plague, Moses commands a war of vengeance. The result is a text of terror: the Israelites kill every Midianite man, but Moses is enraged that they spared the women and children. He then issues a command that stands as one of the most horrific in scripture: “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” (Numbers 31:17-18).

This passage is a clear sanctioning of genocide and the forced subjugation (and implied sexual use) of virgin girls. For ethical critics, this transforms the book from a spiritual history into a justification for war crimes. It frames the “other” not just as an enemy to be defeated, but as biological contamination to be purged, with women’s bodies serving as the site of that purity test.

The Problem of Leadership and Exclusion

Numbers is also a text that rigorously polices boundaries—both physical and social. The camp is organized in concentric circles of holiness, with the Tabernacle at the center, accessible only to the Levitical priests. This structure reinforces a strict caste system where access to the divine is mediated by birthright.

Furthermore, the “Sotah” ritual in Numbers 5 (the test for an unfaithful wife) is often cited as a prime example of patriarchal asymmetry. A husband’s mere suspicion is enough to subject a woman to a terrifying ritual of drinking “bitter water” to prove her innocence, with no equivalent recourse for a wife to test a husband. While some argue the ritual was meant to protect women from mob violence by putting the verdict in God’s hands, the text itself codified a system where women were uniquely vulnerable to public shaming and physical threat based on male jealousy.

Conclusion

The Book of Numbers is a complex tapestry of census data, legal statutes, and narrative drama. However, its legacy is shadowed by its stark depiction of divine violence and its foundational role in establishing “holy war” theology. It presents a world where order is maintained through the threat of death, and where the preservation of religious identity justifies the annihilation of neighbors. To read Numbers critically is to grapple with the terrifying potential of religious zeal when it is coupled with military power.

It is difficult to believe that the god described in the Book of Numbers is the ‘same’ god as personified by Jesus, yet this is standard Christian theology. The contradiction between these two images of the divine is…wait for it… too much to swallow.

(5383) Twelve reasons people are embracing atheism

The world contains more atheists percentage-wise than at any previous time in recorded history. This fact is ipso facto evidence that no religion is true, because advancements in science and information technology should have been able to confirm the veracity of any religion that was true. The following lists 12 reasons why this anti-religion trend is occurring:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/12-reasons-more-people-are-embracing-atheism-today/ss-AA1Qnugf?ocid=UE12DHP#image=1

The rise in people embracing atheism is a complex trend driven by intertwined cultural, social, and philosophical shifts. The reasons are diverse and often personal, but generally fall into the following categories:

Intellectual and Scientific Reasons

Emphasis on Science and Reason: Advances in scientific understanding of the universe, life’s origins, and human consciousness offer natural explanations that challenge traditional religious doctrines, leading many to favor evidence-based worldviews.

Lack of Empirical Evidence: A common reason is the absence of tangible, testable evidence for the existence of deities, leading skeptical individuals to reject belief systems that cannot be empirically verified.

Exposure to Diverse Ideas and Education: Higher education levels and exposure to different worldviews, cultures, and philosophies (often in college environments) encourage critical thinking and questioning of one’s ingrained beliefs.

Inconsistencies in Religious Texts/Doctrines: Reading and studying religious texts can lead individuals to find internal contradictions, historical inaccuracies, or moral teachings they find problematic or unbelievable.

Decline of Religious Upbringing: A major factor is simply not being raised in a religious household, meaning the individual never develops a belief system in the first place.

Disillusionment with Organized Religion: Corruption, hypocrisy, scandals (such as clergy abuse), and authoritarianism within religious institutions drive people away.

Moral and Political Conflicts: Many individuals leave religion because they disagree with the conservative social or political stances of religious institutions on issues like LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality, and social justice, finding these views incompatible with their own progressive values.

Increased Secularism: In increasingly secular societies, religion plays a less central role in public life, making it easier for individuals to be non-religious without facing social stigma or pressure to conform.

Personal Freedom and Autonomy: People prefer to develop their own moral compass and identity based on personal reason and empathy rather than adhering to external rules and dictates from a religious authority.

The Internet and Information Access: The internet provides unprecedented access to information, allowing people to learn about the historical origins of religions, access critiques of faith, and connect with like-minded non-believers, breaking down previous social “faith bubbles”.

Personal Experiences

The Problem of Evil and Suffering: The existence of suffering, trauma, and injustice in the world is seen by many as incompatible with the existence of an all-good, all-powerful deity, especially after personal tragedy or unanswered prayers.

Finding Alternative Sources of Meaning: Individuals discover that they can find purpose, morality, awe, and community through humanism, nature, science, or secular communities, making religion feel unnecessary for a fulfilling life.

Atheism is not a rebellion against the almighty- rather it is an awakening that we live in a natural world, devoid of miracles or supernatural beings or phenomena. It is a time for humanity to wake up and not just admit but to embrace the godless, natural reality of our world.

(5384) Critiquing the first four commandments

Christians are taught to revere the Ten Commandments both as an instruction for worshiping their god and as a guide for how they should conduct their lives. The first four commandments meet the former goal, but fail miserably on the latter. The following is a critique of the initial four commandments:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2025/11/why-we-shouldnt-pay-much-attention-to_28.html#more

Notice the problems presented by the first four commandments, which are focused on protecting the fragile divine ego. It is very much a petty tribal god that is depicted here. In fact, this god has a name, YHWH, with vowels inserted to produce Yahweh. One sect uses different letters, JHVH—with different vowels: Jehovah. Modern translators are a sneaky bunch, aware that the faithful aren’t used to their god having a name, so they render YHWH as “LORD.” Hence the Hebrew, “I am YHWH your god” becomes, “I am the LORD your god.” At the end of this first commandment we find a stern warning: “You shall have no other gods before/beside me.” The ancient theologians who created this code—derived from much earlier law codes—knew very well that there many competitor gods, hence the warning to shun them all, because Yahweh was indeed a very jealous god.

The second commandment forbids the making of idols resembling anything that is in heaven above, or on the earth, or even in the water under the earth. But the show-business side of Christianity has ignored this commandment massively. The ecclesiastical bureaucracy knows the value of razzle-dazzle, hence the compulsion to build churches and massive cathedrals throughout the world. These buildings are filled with art, statuary—huge crosses with Jesus hanging on them—stained glass windows, elaborately fashioned organs.

These all allow worshipers to see the glory of their god with their own eyes. Clergy wear special costumes, with Catholic clergy being the champions in this contest. Popes and cardinals walk around during the ceremonies dressed in over-the-top elaborate dresses and lace.

We have also seen the colossal statutes of Mary carried aloft in churches and in the streets. These are all examples of idols created to encourage belief, despite the severe warning at the end of the second commandment, that this jealous god will punish violators to the third and fourth generations.

The third commandment is yet another warning: not to misuse the Yahweh’s name. This idea belongs to the ancient world view that the gods resided in a heavenly realm that was overhead, and from this handy position they could monitor the behavior—even words spoken—by their worshipers. But we now know that the Cosmos is huge, beyond anything the ancients could have imagined, indeed beyond anything most folks today can imagine. So how likely is it that a Master Creator God is monitoring what humans on one tiny, very isolated planet are saying?

The fourth commandment also derives from ancient mythology. Since Yahweh rested on the seventh day—after bringing all creation into existence—he orders that humans, and even livestock, respect the sacred day of rest. It would be hard to imagine a commandment that has been more widely ignored, violated. How many churchgoers remain unaware of the findings of science regarding how the Cosmos and our planet came into existence? So many of them must grasp that the six-day creation myth cannot be sustained. Hence it is just a part of modern life that millions of humans work on the seventh day, e.g., doctors, nurses, police, firefighters, employees of businesses—the list is endless. How can any intelligent person imagine that a god named Yahweh is annoyed by all this?

This commandment must rank as the dumbest of them all.

Imagine if instead of Commandments One through Four, we find a prohibition of slavery, equal rights for men and women, gay rights, and a prohibition of harming children. But no, it was more important for Yahweh to feed his ego in four supercilious ways.

(5385) AI rewrites the Ten Commandments

It’s not a difficult task to redo the Bible’s Ten Commandments to make them much more effective and relevant to modern society. Here is how an artificial intelligence program (Google Gemini 3.0 Pro) approached this challenge:

Here is a proposal for a set of ten guiding principles designed for a modern, global society, focusing on ethics, reason, and sustainability.

1. Empathy is the First Law. Treat every conscious being with the same consideration you desire for yourself. Understand that others suffer and dream just as you do. Let compassion be the default setting for all interactions, surpassing tribal loyalties or personal gain.

2. Seek Truth Through Evidence. Hold no belief as sacred if it contradicts observable reality. Be willing to revise your understanding when new evidence is presented. Critical thinking and the scientific method are the tools by which we understand the universe; use them to distinguish fact from comfortable fiction.

3. Bodily Autonomy is Absolute. Every individual has the sole right to govern their own body and mind. No person, state, or institution has the authority to force physical actions or violations upon another. Consent is the bedrock of all physical and social interaction.

4. Protect the Commons. We are stewards, not owners, of the Earth. Do not despoil the environment for short-term gain. Ensure that the air, water, and ecosystems are preserved and restored so that future generations may live as well as, or better than, we do today.

5. Justice Must Be Corrective, Not Vengeful. The purpose of justice is to repair harm and restore social balance, not to inflict suffering. Punishment should be proportionate and aimed at rehabilitation. A society is judged by how it treats its offenders and its most vulnerable, not by the severity of its executions.

6. Do Not Harm Children. The physical, emotional, and intellectual development of children is a sacred trust. Do not indoctrinate, abuse, or neglect them. Provide them with the tools to think for themselves and the safety to grow without fear.

7. Freedom of Thought and Speech. Defend the right of others to express ideas you find abhorrent, for the suppression of speech is the tool of tyrants. Ideas are defeated by better ideas, not by force. However, speech that incites direct violence or harm is an action, not an idea, and is not protected.

8. Responsibility to the Community. Recognize that your well-being is tied to the well-being of your community. Contribute your skills and resources to the common good. A society flourishes when its members care for one another, ensuring that basic needs—health, shelter, and dignity—are met for all.

9. Practice Intellectual Humility. Acknowledge the limits of your own knowledge. Be wary of certainty, for it closes the mind to learning. Listen more than you speak, and be prepared to say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong.”

10. Minimize Suffering. In every choice, strive to reduce the total amount of suffering in the world. This applies not just to humans, but to all sentient creatures capable of feeling pain. Where possible, alleviate pain; where impossible, offer presence and comfort.

If these commandments were in the Bible, the world would likely be a different and much better and more loving place. It is significant that human-created artificial intelligence composed a better set of commandments than that which was allegedly inspired by an almighty god. Any religion formed around the set of guidelines listed above would be vastly superior to Christianity.

(5386) Why the Bible is complete bullshit

Sometimes it takes a good rant in order to conceptualize reality, and the reality is that the Bible and Christianity are nothing more than hogwash. The following takes this tactic and exposes piece by piece the lack of authenticity of the Christian religion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1pbg6fp/why_the_bible_is_complete_bullshit/

The entirety of the Bible being a valid and truthful source hinges upon the resurrection of Christ being a legitimate event that actually happened. This is easily dissected once you actually do some research regarding the history of the Bible and why it was written.

Paul never met Jesus. Paul’s letters were written before the Gospels. The Gospels were written decades after Jesus died, by anonymous Greek authors who weren’t eyewitnesses. Matthew and Luke copied from Mark. The resurrection stories contradict each other completely; the earliest Gospel, Mark, ends with no resurrection appearances at all.

Jesus’s birth is dated to two completely different time periods in Matthew and Luke. One says it happened under Herod, who died in 4 BCE. The other says it was during the census under Quirinius in 6 CE. That’s a ten-year gap. One Gospel has Jesus’s family fleeing to Egypt. The other says they went straight back to Nazareth. The Trinity is a post-biblical doctrine created by Church councils in the fourth century, same with the New Testament canon.

The Catholic Church decided which books made it into the Bible. Evangelicals claim they just follow Scripture, but they’re following a table of contents that Rome gave them. Paul barely talks about Jesus’s life, teachings, or miracles.

Judas dies two different ways in Matthew and Acts. The Gospels can’t agree on who found the tomb, who was there, or what they saw. John rewrites everything with a totally different voice and message. The last twelve verses of Mark were added later that doctrines like the Trinity, the virgin birth, and parts of the resurrection story evolved over time.

The canon of the New Testament wasn’t finalized until centuries after the time of Jesus, and it was absolutely the institutional Church, also known as the Catholic or “universal” Church, that played the decisive role in determining which books were included. The earliest Christians had no fixed canon. Different communities used different writings such as Gospels like Thomas, Peter, or the Shepherd of Hermas were read alongside what we now call Scripture. The process of canon formation took centuries, shaped by theological disputes and political pressures.

By the 4th century, Church authorities especially under Constantine’s imperial favor began to formalize the canon. Athanasius’s Festal Letter in 367 CE is the first time we see the 27-book New Testament listed exactly as it exists today. That was later reinforced by Church councils like Hippo (393) and Carthage (397), which operated under the authority of Catholic bishops. The canon was not fixed before the Catholic Church existed, it was fixed by it.

How can you remain committed to a faith whose foundational texts were written decades after the events they claim to describe, by anonymous authors who were not eyewitnesses, in Greek, not Aramaic, and often for different communities with differing theological agendas? The Gospels contradict each other on major points literally everywhere, such as who discovered the empty tomb, what Jesus said on the cross, where and to whom he appeared after the resurrection, and for how long he remained on earth afterwards (was it just a day, or several weeks?). Paul, our earliest source, never mentions a virgin birth, offers no details about Jesus’s life, and seems to know nothing of Gospel traditions.

The doctrine of the Trinity is absent from the New Testament entirely and was only formalized centuries later through a series of ecumenical councils influenced by imperial power struggles and theological factionalism. Even the canon of Scripture itself was not fixed until centuries after the earliest communities had already splintered into competing interpretations of who Jesus was and what his death meant.

These are not minor details or small differences. They are central to understanding that Christianity, as it exists today, is the product of theological evolution and institutional control and far removed from anything we can reliably reconstruct about the historical Jesus (if he existed). Christianity is a branch of Judaism, which came from Ancient Canaanite mythology. How do you continue to identify with a belief system whose origins, texts, and doctrines collapse under basic historical scrutiny?

Ask any “believer” this, and if they’re truly capable of thinking for themselves and aren’t too far gone, they’ll already have doubts and this will help seal the deal. For the ones who are too institutionalized, too brainwashed, too indoctrinated, they’ll most likely just double down and tell you you’re being manipulated by the devil’s lies or some other dumb bullshit. Ignore them.

If a god intended to leave us with a record of his exploits and instructions for how to live our lives, it would have been  very different and a vastly superior product than the Bible…which is, in itself, the best piece of evidence exposing the falsehood of Christianity.

(5387) Dissecting the Sermon on the Mount

If you ask Christians to identify the scripture that best illustrates the brilliance and wisdom of Jesus, they will usually point to the Sermon on the Mount. Found in two gospels, Matthew and Luke, with minor differences, these ‘sermons’ are often recited in churches and are esteemed as the pinnacle of divine intelligence. But a more nuanced and objective evaluation uncovers a lot of problems, ten of which are discussed below, as composed by Google Gemini Pro 3.0:

The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) is widely considered the ethical core of Jesus’s teaching and a masterpiece of moral philosophy. However, even this celebrated text is not immune to critique. From philosophical, practical, and psychological perspectives, the Sermon presents profound challenges.

Here is a critical analysis of its key tenets:

1. The Ethics of Impossible Perfectionism

The central command of the sermon is “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

• • • Critique: This establishes an unattainable standard. By demanding not just right action but perfect thought and motivation (e.g., equate anger with murder, lust with adultery), the sermon sets up a psychological system of guaranteed failure. Critics argue this fosters neurotic guilt and shame rather than moral improvement. A standard that no human can meet is arguably not a useful moral guide but a tool for crushing the ego.

2. The Vulnerability of Radical Non-Resistance

Jesus commands: “Do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other also” (Matthew 5:39).

• • • Critique: While philosophically beautiful as a path to personal peace, this advice is often criticized as ethically dangerous on a societal level. If followed universally by “good” people, it effectively empowers tyrants, abusers, and aggressors. Critics like Nietzsche argued that this “slave morality” celebrates weakness and prevents the just defense of oneself and others. Pacifism in the face of genocide or domestic abuse can be seen as complicity with evil.

3. The Impracticality of Economic Teaching

The sermon advises: “Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink… Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap” (Matthew 6:25-26).

• • • Critique: This counsel, while spiritually comforting, is economically disastrous if taken literally. Civilization depends on planning, saving, sowing, and reaping. A society that “takes no thought for tomorrow” would collapse into famine and poverty. Critics argue this advice reflects an apocalyptic worldview (believing the world was about to end) rather than a sustainable blueprint for human flourishing.

4. The Binary of Judgment (Hell)

Despite its messages of love, the sermon contains stark warnings of exclusion. “Enter through the narrow gate… only a few find it” (Matthew 7:13-14) and “Depart from me, I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).

• • • Critique: This introduces a harsh elitism and the threat of eternal separation. It undercuts the universality of the “Father’s love” by creating a strict in-group/out-group dynamic. The threat of being “thrown into the fire” serves as a coercive underpinning to the ethical teachings, suggesting that goodness should be motivated by fear of ultimate rejection.

5. The Internalization of Sin (Thought Crime)

Jesus radicalizes the law by moving it inward: “Anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).

• • • Critique: By equating a fleeting thought or biological impulse with a destructive physical action, the sermon dissolves important moral distinctions. There is a vast ethical difference between thinking about a crime and committing it. Treating them as spiritually equivalent can trivialize actual harm and criminalize natural human psychology.

6. The Problem of Public Piety

Jesus instructs: “But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen” (Matthew 6:6) and to do charitable deeds in secret.

• • • Critique: While this targets hypocrisy, critics argue it can also stifle the communal and public nature of faith. Religion often serves as a social glue through shared rituals. By demanding secrecy, the sermon can atomize the community, making faith a purely private, individualistic affair rather than a collective force for public good. Furthermore, “hidden” charity can prevent the setting of positive examples for others to follow.

7. The Rejection of Judicial Process

Jesus says: “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matthew 5:40).

• • • Critique: This undermines the concept of legal justice and due process. Courts and laws exist to arbitrate fairness and protect the weak from exploitation. Advising people to bypass legal defense and surrender more than what is unjustly demanded can encourage predatory behavior. It suggests that personal sacrifice is always superior to seeking legal rectification, which is problematic in a society built on the rule of law.

8. The Anxiety of Providence

The sermon asks: “Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:27) and points to the lilies of the field as examples of God’s provision.

• • • Critique: Critics argue this minimizes the reality of genuine scarcity and systemic injustice. While worry itself is unproductive, “concern” and “planning” are vital for survival. Telling a person living in poverty or famine to “look at the birds” can be seen as dismissive of their material suffering. It implies that lack of provision is a result of lack of faith (“O you of little faith”), rather than economic or environmental factors.

9. The Absolute Nature of Divorce

Jesus teaches: “Anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, makes her the victim of adultery” (Matthew 5:32).

• • • Critique: This rigid stance on divorce was historically restrictive even for its time (some Jewish schools allowed divorce for lesser causes). Critics argue this traps individuals—historically women, who had less power—in abusive or loveless marriages. By labeling remarriage as “adultery,” it attaches a profound stigma to those seeking to escape toxic relationships, prioritizing the institution of marriage over the well-being of the individuals within it.

10. The Paradox of “Judge Not”

The famous command “Do not judge, or you too will be judged” (Matthew 7:1) is immediately followed by instructions to identify “dogs” and “pigs” (Matthew 7:6) and “false prophets” (Matthew 7:15).

• • • Critique: This creates a practical paradox. How can one avoid judging while simultaneously discerning who is a “dog,” a “pig,” or a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”? Critics argue this mixed message leads to confusion or hypocrisy, where followers claim “non-judgment” while tacitly categorizing others as enemies or unworthy. It sets up an ideal of total acceptance that contradicts the necessity of moral discernment.

Conclusion

The Sermon on the Mount is a polarizing text. To its admirers, it is the ultimate vision of a kingdom of love that transcends human selfishness. To its critics, it is a recipe for guilt, passivity, and societal dysfunction—an “interim ethic” meant for a world that was supposed to end, not for the complex reality of human civilization.

The Sermon on the Mount is an unmitigated disaster, with advice and instruction that could  work only in a very different reality. It is commonly conjectured that Jesus never delivered it- rather it was likely composed by the idealistic author of the Gospel of Matthew, who perhaps thought the world would soon end with Jesus’ return, and then more or less copied by the author of the Gospel of Luke. But that doesn’t stop Christian preachers from extolling it as an insightful product beyond human capability. But as the ten points above reveal, it is a totally impractical message for people living in the real world.

(5388) Dissing secular ideas of an afterlife

Because death involves an obvious cessation of consciousness, at least to an infinitesimally small degree short of certainty, it is discouraging to see some secular voices spinning the idea that ‘we don’t know what happens after death.’ Yes, we do. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1pbb5i4/why_is_it_that_secular_spaces_still_humor_the/

Why is it that secular spaces still humor the idea that we somehow don’t know what happens after death?

I often see self-proclaimed atheists or religious skeptics still entertain the idea that “oh, we don’t really know what happens when we die,” but that seems so ridiculous to me. I understand the romance behind the idea of continuing on in some way, but why make things more difficult for everyone by denying what we know? So many people behave the way they do, in my opinion, because they believe that they will get a second go-around at life. If everyone could accept that this is all we have, I truly think that people would overall be kinder to themselves and everyone around them.

This is why it bugs me to see people who vehemently deny being “religious” but let themselves dwell in vague “spirituality,” concocting absurd ideas that life still continues after death through the “transferal of energies” or other such nonsense. Yes, I concede that the physical body will never truly be gone, that it will be absorbed into everything around it and help new life flourish, but that is all I need! I don’t need to pretend like there’s anything beyond that!

There was a comedian who had a bit on this and on how the tiniest stroke in an otherwise healthy brain can suddenly make you unable to recognize faces, or unable to speak, but everyone accepts the idea that when the whole brain is dead and destroyed far beyond the stroke territory, we’re supposedly able to “recognize grandma and speak perfect English with her” in the afterlife.

I guess to sum it up, I wish people would stop creating their own fantasy realities to see the world as beautiful or poetic. I think the world, in all of its dullness and cruelty, is beautiful enough already.

The finality of death should be the default assumption of anyone who is free from religious nonsense. It should be as obvious as when you turn out the light in a room, and it gets dark. When you die and your brain and body disintegrate, all of your stored memories are lost, you become blind, deaf, unable to speak, and incapable of experiencing anything. This is a fact, even if it is hard for the mind to accept. Religions are distorting our perception of reality for their own fraudulent, self-serving purposes.

(5389) Seven-day week exposes Christianity

Christians are led to believe that God holds the number 7 to be special and that he used a seven-day time span to plan his creation of the universe with the final day being his day of rest. But a closer look reveals that the roots of the 7-day week existed before any concept of Yahweh was being worshiped. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1per7cz/the_sevenday_week_exposes_religion_as_a_human/

The Seven-Day Week Exposes Religion as a Human Invention

We literally know who invented it, when it was invented, and why. The Babylonians created the seven-day week around 4,000–5,000 years ago. That’s it. Before that, it simply did not exist. Humans had been on Earth for hundreds of thousands of years, and the planet existed for billions… yet somehow the universe’s “almighty creator” conveniently structured creation around a calendar made by ancient Mesopotamian astrologers?

Give me a break.

Civilizations all over the world had completely different time cycles… 5-day weeks, 8-day weeks, 10-day weeks, 13-day ritual cycles. They knew nothing about a “seven-day week” because there was nothing divine about it. It was just one culture’s way of keeping track of time.

And then religions in that region, especially the Abrahamic ones, took this human-made system and slapped God’s label on it. Suddenly the Babylonian week becomes the “holy” week. Suddenly God “rests” on Day 7. Suddenly prophecies and sacred rituals depend on the same exact time structure the Babylonians invented while staring at planets with the naked eye.

Think about how ridiculous that is:

A day like Sunday or Friday has no cosmic meaning. It’s just Earth spinning. Different cultures didn’t even agree which day was which.. yet we’re told the Creator of the universe not only uses these human labels but also plans creation, commandments, and even the apocalypse around them?

If the religions we know today had come from Mesoamerica, we’d be worshiping on the 9th day of a 13-day cycle. If they came from parts of Africa, we’d be arguing about the sacred meaning of a 4-day or 8-day week. And believers would swear those man-made systems were “God’s perfect design.”

The seven-day week exposes the whole game: religions adapt to the culture they were born in, they recycle existing human inventions, and then they claim those inventions came from God.

The week isn’t divine. It’s Babylonian. And the fact that religions present it as God’s eternal calendar is one of the clearest signs that the whole thing is constructed by humans…. not handed down from the heavens.

Human hands are all over the Bible and all over the rituals of Christianity. The seven-day week is just another example of how Christianity is first and foremost a creation of homo sapiens, not a god.

(5390) Judges defeats Numbers

In the ongoing contest for the most disgusting, revolting, and depraved story in the Bible, Numbers 31 is often cited, as it contains an offensive holy war, genocide, sexual slavery, and pedophilia. But a case can be made that Judges, Chapters 19 through 21, deserves the honor as it actually exceeds the inane depravity of Numbers. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1pazbq1/numbers_31_is_special/

I disagree that Numbers 31 is the worst. Judges 19-21 is worse. Why?

• • In Judges 19-21, the Israelites don’t commit genocide on some foreigners, they do it to their own kin, one of the twelve tribes of Israel: the Benjamites
  • In Judges 19-21, the Bible obviously lies about what really happened, attempting to provide a moral justification for what was clearly an attempt by the mighty southern tribe of Judah to conquer the Benjamite city of Jerusalem.
  • We know this first of all because the pretense for this overwhelming invasion is badly cribbed from the Genesis story of the destruction of Sodom: attempted male rape of a Levite by a mob, who then offers his concubine to sate the mob.
  • We know this second of all because Judah and the other ten tribes use this minor transgression to invade the territory of Benjamin with an overwhelming army of 400,000 men, 33 times larger than the army sent against the Midianites.
  • When the Benjamites see this invasion force arrive, they rightly resist, but rather than helping the Benjamites — his chosen people — against this blatant land grab, God advises the Israelites on battle plans against them.
  • Despite omnisciently knowing that the Israelites were about to defeat the Benjamites, and being in communication with them, God does nothing to prevent the Israelites from injuring innocent Benjamites.
  • After defeating the Benjamite soldiers, the Israelites proceed to murder every man, woman, and child in the entire territory of Benjamite (except for 600 soldiers who escaped to the hills).
  • Not only do they murder every Benjamite adult and child they can get their hands on, they also killed all the animals.
  • But they do feel bad about slaughtering a hundred thousand women and children, and decide they want to give wives to the 600 soldiers who escaped, but detest the Benjamites so strongly they will not give them their own daughters. So instead, they kill off everyone in another town of Israelites — one that wouldn’t help with the invasion — except the virgin girls, who they marry off to the remaining Benjamites.
  • Even though they were living under the Ten Commandments, God does nothing to punish the Israelites for their wholesale slaughter of one whole tribe of Israelites on the flimsiest of excuses, or their slaughter of a town of men, women, and children simply because they wouldn’t help in the invasion.

The Book of Judges does not belong in the bible of a loving god. It does nothing but foment hate, violence, murder, rape, and pedophilia. If Yahweh is a real god and inspired the Book of Judges, then worship of this monster is a sin unto itself.

(5391) Book of Revelation problems

Including the Book of Revelation in the Bible was a mistake. The following, developed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro, discusses seven problems that support this assertion:

The Book of Revelation is arguably the most complex, controversial, and critiqued book in the Christian canon. Its vivid imagery, apocalyptic tone, and cryptic symbolism have inspired centuries of both devotion and delusion.

Critiques of Revelation generally fall into three categories: theological, psychological, and historical/ethical.

1. The Theological Critique: A Distortion of God’s Character

Many theologians argue that Revelation presents a jarring shift in the character of God compared to the Gospels.

• • • The “Lamb” vs. The Warrior: While Revelation refers to Jesus as the “Lamb,” this Lamb acts like a dragon. In the Gospels, Jesus commands non-violence and forgiveness. In Revelation, the Messiah returns as a warrior king (Chapter 19) with a sword, robes dipped in blood, striking down nations. Critics argue this “re-militarizes” the Messiah, undoing the radical, non-violent ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and reverting to a standard conquest myth.
    • Vengeance vs. Grace: The saints in Revelation cry out, “How long, Sovereign Lord… until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” (6:10). This desire for vengeance contradicts the Christian mandate to pray for persecutors. The book can be read as a “revenge fantasy” for a persecuted minority, satisfying the human urge for violent retribution rather than divine mercy.

2. The Psychological Critique: Fear and Paranoia

Psychologists and sociologists point to the negative impact Revelation has often had on mental health and social stability.

• • • The “End Times” Anxiety: The book’s dire predictions foster a worldview of imminent doom. This can lead to “rapture anxiety,” where believers live in constant fear of being left behind or facing tribulation. It can also cultivate a sense of hopelessness about the current world, discouraging efforts to improve society, the environment, or political systems because “it’s all going to burn anyway.”
    • Conspiracy Thinking: The cryptic symbolism (the Mark of the Beast, 666, the Whore of Babylon) encourages endless pattern-matching. Critics argue this trains the mind to see hidden, demonic conspiracies in everyday events (barcodes, vaccines, political treaties), fostering paranoia and detaching believers from reality.

3. The Historical/Ethical Critique: A Failed Prophecy or Dangerous Tool?

• • • Failed Imminence: The text explicitly states, “The time is near” (1:3) and “I am coming soon” (22:20). Written nearly 2,000 years ago, these statements of immediacy have arguably failed. This forces interpreters into mental gymnastics to explain why “soon” means “millennia later,” which critics argue undermines the text’s plain meaning and reliability.
    • Weaponization against “The Other”: The intense binary of “Saints vs. The Beast” allows any group to demonize their enemies. Throughout history, the “Beast” or “Babylon” has been identified as the Pope, the King of England, Jews, Muslims, or secular governments. This dehumanization of opponents as literally demonic justifies violence and persecution, as seen in various religious wars and sectarian conflicts.

4. The Problem of Anti-Semitism

Historically, Revelation has been used to fuel anti-Semitic sentiment within the church.

• • “Synagogue of Satan”: In Revelation 2:9 and 3:9, the text refers to Jews who oppose the early Christians as a “synagogue of Satan” who “claim to be Jews though they are not.”
  • Critique: While originally a reflection of intra-Jewish sectarian conflict in the 1st century, these verses were later weaponized by Gentile Christians to label Judaism itself as demonic. Critics argue this rhetoric provided scriptural justification for centuries of persecution against Jewish communities, framing them not as neighbors to be loved, but as agents of the ultimate enemy.

5. The Celebration of Environmental Destruction

Much of the imagery in Revelation involves the catastrophic destruction of the natural world.

• • The Trumpet Judgments: A third of the earth is burned up, a third of the sea turns to blood, a third of the living creatures in the sea die, and a third of the ships are destroyed (Revelation 8).
  • Critique: Ecotheologians argue that this imagery fosters an “escapist” theology. If the destiny of the earth is to be violently destroyed by God to make way for a “new heaven and new earth,” believers may feel less responsibility to care for the current environment. It frames nature not as a sacred creation to be stewarded, but as a disposable stage for human drama that will ultimately be trash-compacted.

6. The Misogyny of the “Whore of Babylon”

The central villain of the latter half of the book is Babylon, personified as a “Great Prostitute” (Revelation 17).

• • Imagery: She is depicted as a woman “drunk with the blood of God’s holy people,” dressed in purple and scarlet, and riding a beast. Her eventual destruction is described in graphic, violent terms (“they will eat her flesh and burn her with fire”).
  • Critique: Feminist theologians critique the use of female sexuality as the primary metaphor for supreme evil and spiritual corruption. By contrast, the “Bride of Christ” (the Church) is depicted as pure and submissive. This dichotomy reinforces the Madonna/Whore complex, where female power is demonized as seductive and dangerous, while “good” femininity is passive and pure. It sexualizes the judgment of evil in a way that specifically targets women.

7. The Rejection of Empire vs. The Creation of Empire

Revelation is ostensibly a critique of the Roman Empire (Babylon) and its oppressive power.

• • The Irony: However, critics note that the solution Revelation offers is not the dismantling of imperial power, but simply a change in management. The “New Jerusalem” is still a kingdom with walls, gates, and a ruler who rules with an “iron scepter” (Revelation 19:15).
  • Critique: It essentially replaces Pax Romana (Peace of Rome) with Pax Christi (Peace of Christ), but maintains the structure of absolute, top-down monarchy enforced by superior violence. Critics argue it fails to imagine a non-imperial alternative for human community, ultimately validating the concept of “Empire” as long as the “right guy” is on the throne.

Conclusion

To its defenders, Revelation is a message of ultimate hope and justice for the oppressed. To its critics, it is a problematic text that risks replacing the ethic of love with a theology of violence, fear, and exclusion. They argue it is best read as 1st-century political resistance literature against Rome, rather than a literal road map for the future of the planet.

It is difficult to understand how a work of such hatred and violence was ever considered to be a suitable addition to the New Testament canon. Today, most Christian churches ignore and never recite from it. One thing is certain: If Yahweh is the real universal god and he intended for the Book of Revelation to be included in the Bible, then we are all in big trouble.

(5392) Religion is a social tactic for managing people

Religions developed not because of the existence of anything supernatural, but because they provided a convenient means for political leaders to better manage and control the populous. The following is a quote from biblical scholar Dr. Richard C. Miller, a humanistic scholar of Christian origins in the ancient Hellenistic and Roman world:

If one examines the structure of most religions across antiquity and into the modern period, a peculiar pattern emerges: entry into the community requires the convert to assent to a bag of claims for which no independent evidence is ever supplied. This is not accidental; the abdication functions as a rite of passage, the price of admission into the group.

But that transaction has a deeper effect, that is, to compel the initiate to relinquish their most basic faculty of autonomy—their own judgment. This surrender of mental self-determination is not a side-effect of religion; it is the mechanism by which religion secures its power.

Foucault might call this the creation of a “subject”—a person constituted through obedience, ritual confession, and the internalization of authorized discourse. Bourdieu would call it the production of symbolic capital: priests, ministers, elders, and commentators accumulate prestige and authority precisely because they define, defend, and adjudicate the very propositions one is required to believe.

In this sense, religion is not primarily about metaphysics or morality. It is a social technology for managing people—a power game refined over millennia. Historically, it has served:

• Men seeking control over their households (wives’ sexuality, children’s behavior, inheritance lines).

• Priests acting as psychological brokers, intermediaries between the individual and an imagined cosmic authority.

• Commentators and theologians functioning as custodians of the group’s authorized delusions, maintaining the boundaries of what is thinkable or permissible.

The New Testament itself is a showcase of this mechanism—an anthology of extravagant, uncorroborated claims presented as sacred indulgent belief. Any honest NT scholarship must concede that these texts operate as instruments of assent, conditioning the reader to surrender judgment as the price of belonging. Seen this way, the demand to “believe” is not merely doctrinal. It is a test of submission, a way to mark those who will subordinate their judgment to the group’s collective fictions. Once that transaction is complete, the rest follows: obedience, identity, and allegiance. This is why religions so often appear obsessed with policing thought, sexuality, ritual propriety, and narrative orthodoxy. These are arenas where human autonomy is most vulnerable—and most consequential.

The creation of religions allowed social leaders to keep their constituents happy with their often-depressed economic status and obedient to the rules of the community. It was a useful tool for maintaining social order. But what is emerging in the past century is a trend away from religion. What we have found during this time is that atheists and agnostics are no more unlawful or unruly than Christians or other religious people. This means that the usefulness of religion today is nothing more than a means to keep people artificially content with their languishing circumstances while chasing the mirage of immortality.

(5393) The three possibilities

The following makes the case that the Bible’s intrinsic ambiguity leads to the conclusion that only three possibilities exist surrounding its authorship/inspiration, none of which are comfortable for Christians to accept:

https://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/1phm3zi/youre_in_grave_danger_youre_given_a_survival/

You’re in grave danger. You’re given a survival manual. No one agrees on the instructions. I just described the Bible.

The Bible is supposed to be inspired by God, yet it fails at the most basic requirement of any important text: clarity. It sparks endless disagreement about what its passages actually mean, leading to tens of thousands of competing interpretations and thousands of denominations. These groups often hold sharply different views on doctrine, practice, and even the fundamental purpose of the text. Some analysts note that a single passage can generate as many as “seven entirely different meanings” among believers. So if God truly inspired the Bible, then either (1) he failed, (2) the confusion was intentional, or, hear me out, (3) no deity was involved at all.

If a Christian is challenged by this trilemma, it is certain that they will refuse to endorse the idea that God failed or that he doesn’t exist (or wasn’t involved in the Bible’s creation). That leaves only the option that the Bible’s confusion was intentional. It would take some impressive mental gymnastics to square this possibility with their standard beliefs about God. But that is all that is left- they must come up with some reason why God intentionally left the Bible in a confusing state. The atheist has a much easier task- speculating how humans working separately, without divine inspiration, and over many centuries, could create a work encumbered by such contradiction and ambiguity.

(5394) Twelve questions that confound Christians

It is often speculated that the best way for Christians to retain their faith is to not think too deeply about their beliefs. Therefore, if this is their motivation, it is best for them to avoid the types of questions that are discussed below. The following was taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv6_pdOvZH0

The following presents 12 very basic questions that religious people struggle to answer in a clear and logical way. They are grounded in common sense, everyday life, and observable reality. Anyone can test these questions. Anyone can think about them. Anyone can use them to examine why religious explanations fall apart under simple pressure.

The first question is very direct. If God created humans with full knowledge of the future, then why create people who God knows will go to hell?

Think about this for a moment. If God has complete knowledge of every child before birth, God already knows who will suffer forever. This means God intentionally creates people whose final destination is eternal pain. In real life, no decent parent would intentionally bring a child into the world knowing for certain that this child will be tortured forever. If humans would avoid such cruelty, then why would a perfect being choose it?

Religious people try to say that humans have free will. But free will does not change the fact that God creates people while knowing their final fate in advance. If you already know the ending, creating the story anyway becomes an act of cruelty, not love.

The second question is equally simple. If God answers prayers, then why do results look exactly like random chance?

People pray for health, safety, success, recovery, and guidance. But when we observe the outcomes, they match the same patterns seen in people who never pray at all. The survival rate of patients does not improve because of prayer. The outcome of a job interview does not improve because of prayer. Natural disasters destroy houses of believers and non-believers alike. If prayer truly works, there should be at least one measurable difference. But statistics show no improvement whatsoever.

When a person recovers, believers say God answered the prayer. When the person dies, believers say God had a mysterious plan. But a belief that explains everything explains nothing. If both success and failure can be used as proof, then it is not proof at all. It is simply interpretation.

A third question is why a perfect God would make moral rules that are unclear, contradictory, or open to endless interpretation.

Religion claims that God wants humans to follow a moral path. If this is true, then clarity should be the number one priority. But across the world, different religious groups interpret the same book in completely different ways. Some say a behavior is allowed. Others say it is forbidden. Some say a punishment must be severe. Others say it must be symbolic. Some say a story is literal. Others say it is metaphorical.

If a teacher gave instructions that students could interpret in a hundred ways, we would say the teacher failed. So why do people blame humans instead of blaming the unclear author? A perfect God would make perfect rules. Instead, we get rules that change depending on culture, language, and personal opinion. This is exactly how human-made texts behave.

A fourth question is why God created a universe so massive, so empty, and so hostile to life if the main purpose was human existence.

Religion teaches that humans are the central focus of creation. But when we look through telescopes, we see a universe that is mostly dead space. We see stars exploding, black holes devouring matter and cosmic radiation that would kill humans instantly. Out of the unimaginable size of the universe, life exists only on a tiny, fragile planet. If the universe was designed for humans, it should look like a place built for humans. It does not. It looks like a place built by natural processes that do not care about us. If you walk into a

house where 99% of the rooms are filled with fire, water, poison, explosions, and deadly creatures, you would not assume the house was made for humans. But religion insists that the deadly universe is somehow proof of a loving design.

A fifth question is why God needs blood sacrifice in many religions.

When you study world religions, you notice a strange pattern. Many gods demand blood, some demand animal sacrifice, some demand human sacrifice. In ancient traditions, some demand the death of a savior as payment for sin. But why would a perfect being need blood? What does blood achieve for God? In real life, blood loss is simply biology. It is not currency. It is not spiritual energy. It is not moral payment.

Humans use sacrifice because ancient people believed that giving something valuable would please powerful forces. This makes sense in ancient culture, not in divine logic. If God needs blood, then God is not perfect. If God does not need blood but still demands it, then God is cruel. And if God never demanded it and humans invented the idea, then religion is clearly created by people, not divinity.

A sixth question is why the God who supposedly cares about humans never communicates directly with them in a clear universal way. In ancient stories, God speaks through dreams, visions, burning bushes, prophets, and rare miracles. But why avoid direct communication? Today, every human has access to screens, audio devices, internet, satellites, and global communication. If a message needs to reach all of humanity, this is the perfect time to deliver it.

Yet, God is more silent than ever. Instead of direct messages, we rely on ancient books written by unknown men in pre-scientific times. If a company released an important instruction manual that no one could understand, the company would be blamed. But religion blames humans for misunderstanding the message even though God could clarify everything instantly. Silence is far easier to explain if there is no one speaking in the first place.

A seventh question is why God creates people with natural emotions that religion later condemns.

Humans experience anger, fear, sadness, desire, frustration, curiosity, and doubt because these emotions come from the brain. Religion often punishes people for these emotions. People are told that doubt is sinful, desire is sinful, anger is sinful, even curiosity is dangerous.

But if God designed the human mind, then God designed these emotions. If a car company made a car with a steering wheel, it would not punish the driver for using the steering wheel. If a phone company created a phone with a camera, it would not punish the user for taking a photo. But religion treats basic human emotions as moral failures. This contradiction makes sense only if the rules were invented by humans who misunderstood psychology.

An eighth question is why religious rules match the fears, superstitions, and cultural standards of the era in which they were written.

Ancient religions reflect ancient ignorance. They include rules about menstrual blood, cutting hair, touching corpses, cleaning methods, eating certain animals, and punishing people in ways that match ancient life, not moral truth. None of these rules show advanced knowledge. None reveal information that ancient people could not have known. A real divine message should stand out with timeless wisdom.

Yet religious books look exactly like ancient human documents. They focus on daily tribal problems, not universal truths. If a god gave humanity a message, it should reveal knowledge beyond the culture. Instead, every religious text is trapped inside the limitations of the time in which it was written.

A ninth question is why the greatest discoveries and progress in human history came from science not religion.

Religion claims that God guides humanity. But every major improvement in health, communication, travel, safety, medicine and understanding came from human effort. Vaccines stop disease, not holy water. Electricity lights homes, not divine intervention. Satellites provide global communication, not prayer. When natural disasters strike, rescue workers save lives, not miracles.

If God helps humanity, why are God’s fingerprints invisible? If religion claims credit for moral guidance, why does religion resist almost every form of progress at first? True guidance should help, not slow down. The pattern in history shows that humans solve human problems while religion adapts after the fact.

A tenth question is why God punishes disbelief more than immoral actions. In many religions, a kind and compassionate atheist is sentenced to eternal punishment while a cruel believer can be forgiven simply for faith. This creates a moral system where belief matters more than behavior. But in real life, morality is measured by actions. A good person helps others, avoids harm, and acts with empathy. Yet, religion teaches that disbelief is the worst crime. But disbelief is simply a lack of evidence.

People cannot force themselves to believe something they find unconvincing. Punishing disbelief is like punishing someone for not being persuaded by a story. No fair teacher punishes a student for asking for proof. But religion threatens people for not accepting claims without evidence. An

An eleventh question is why every religion claims to be the one true path even though they contradict each other completely.

They have different gods, different rules, different paths to salvation, and different holy texts. They cannot all be right. At least most of them must be wrong. Religious people believe their path by birth, not by evidence. A child born in India grows up believing a Hindu god. A child born in Pakistan grows up believing an Islamic god. A child born in Italy grows up believing a Christian god. People follow the religion of their geography, not the religion of truth.

If a god wanted the truth to reach everyone, birthplace would not decide belief. But reality shows that religion spreads through culture, not revelation.

A twelfth question is why God created humans with brains that rely on evidence, reason, and observation, but then expects them to believe extraordinary claims without evidence.

Human survival depends on the ability to recognize danger, judge reality, and test information. If God designed the human brain, then God designed humans to trust evidence. Yet, religion demands belief without evidence. This is like giving someone eyes and then punishing them for using them. If God wanted faith, God would have created humans without critical thinking.

The fact that humans rely on evidence strongly suggests that our minds evolve naturally and religion is an attempt to explain the world before science existed.

Another question that religion avoids is why divine justice is always delayed. If a person harms someone, then we do not wait until that person dies before judging them. We have courts for that. We have laws for that. But religious systems say that real justice will come in the next life. This next life is never seen and never proven.

So the idea of justice becomes a future promise that can never be checked. If someone commits crimes and gets away with them, religion says do not worry. The punishment will come later. This is not a system of justice. This is a system of deferring responsibility. It is a way to stop people from asking for fairness in this world by telling them a story about the next.

But if the next world has no proof, then the idea of delayed justice becomes nothing more than wishful thinking. When asked why a god does not act now, believers fall back on mystery. This is a question with no proper answer because the whole idea of justice loses meaning if it is always somewhere else.

There is also a question about why religious morals change over time if they come from a perfect source. Look at history. Every religion has changed its interpretation of its own rules. Practices that were accepted in the past are rejected today. Practices that were forbidden are now allowed. Believers say that morality comes from God and is eternal. But actual religious rules evolve exactly like human culture evolves.

When human societies change, religion changes with them. This is why you see ancient practices slowly fade away. Even when the texts still allow them or command them. If morality came from an external perfect being, then it would not shift with fashion and culture. People change, societies change, minds change. This is natural.

But when asked why divine moral commands keep adjusting to human standards, believers cannot give a clear answer. They try to say that interpretation changes, but the core remains the same. But this only proves that humans are the ones deciding what is moral at any moment. If the commands were actually divine, then they would not need constant repair.

Consider another question. If religious stories are real, then why are the dramatic supernatural events never recorded by neutral witnesses? Many sacred books talk about seas parting, mountains shaking, stars stopping, angels visiting, and voices from the sky. These events are described as public scenes seen by crowds. But not a single independent record exists from the same time. If thousands of people saw a sea split open, then there should be some written note, some carving, some local record from the neighbors, but there is nothing.

When asked why this evidence is missing, believers often say that records got lost. But then how did the religious record survive perfectly while all others vanished? If an event is big enough to shake a nation, then it cannot leave only one holy text as the single witness. If an event reshapes the sky, then everyone under that sky should notice it. This silence from the rest of the world is a huge question that religion does not want to face.

A similar question rises about why every child born into a religious family believes that specific religion until they gain exposure to other ideas. If a religion is true, then it should be possible for a child to discover it independently. But in reality, a child in a Christian family becomes a Christian. A child in a Hindu family becomes a Hindu. A child in a Muslim family becomes a Muslim.

If a child is raised with no religious instruction, then they do not magically discover any of these faiths on their own. They grow up with natural curiosity but no automatic belief in a divine system. This shows that religion is a product of environment. It is transmitted through teaching, not through truth detection. If truth were self-evident, a child in one part of the world would reach the same belief as a child far away. But they do not. When asked about this, believers say their religion is special and others are wrong.

But every believer in every religion says the same thing. So the question stays unanswered. There is a deep question about why suffering is distributed randomly with no pattern of moral reward or punishment. Believers say that God rewards good and punishes evil. But when you look at the world, you do not see any sign of this. Good people suffer. Bad people succeed. Innocent people face disasters. People who treat others poorly often live in comfort. If the world is managed by a moral being, then we should see some kind of pattern.

But life looks random because natural events are random. Earthquakes do not check moral records. Diseases do not check belief status. Accidents do not check prayer habits. They happen to anyone. When asked why this is so, believers struggle. They say that God has a plan or that suffering is a test. But this does not explain why a child must suffer lifelong illness while a corrupt person lives with ease. This is why this question has no good answer in religion. It exposes the gap between religious promises and real world experience.

Another question is why a god who wants humans to use free choice would threaten them with eternal punishment if they make the wrong choice. That is not real choice. If a parent tells a child they can choose anything but then says if you choose the wrong thing you will suffer forever, that is not freedom, that is emotional pressure. Religion often presents a false choice that is wrapped in fear. A belief that depends on fear cannot be considered a free and honest decision. If a god wanted free choice, then the outcome should be neutral. But religion says the outcome is eternal pain for one side and eternal reward for the other.

When asked why this system is fair, believers have trouble explaining it. The idea of free will collapses if the punishment is limitless. This turns belief into a forced decision, not a free one. There is a question about why religious leaders across the world disagree about almost every detail. If the truth comes from one God, then the message should be one. But look at the number of denominations inside each religion. They all read the same book but disagree about doctrine, rules, rituals, morality, leadership, and interpretation.

If a perfect god wanted one message, then humans should not be able to twist it into thousands of forms. But this is exactly what we see. Religious division is caused by human opinion because humans are the ones shaping these systems. A divine message should be clear enough to prevent endless fragmentation.

When asked why this happens, believers often blame human weakness. But a divine message should overcome human weakness by being clear, simple, and universal. It should not depend on debate and interpretation.

Finally, there is the question about why every religion ends up justifying the same human behaviors even when their teachings differ. People turn to religion for comfort, not truth. They turn to religion for identity, not understanding. They turn to religion for community, not evidence. This is why every religion can claim to answer deep questions, but none of their answers match each other. If a question has multiple answers, then it means none of them are proven.

When asked why their answer is the correct one, believers use tradition, culture, and emotion, but not clear logic. This shows that religion gives people something to hold on to, but it does not give answers that stand strong under common sense.

When we ask these 12 questions, we are not trying to upset anyone. We are trying to use the mind that nature gave us. We are trying to understand the world based on experience instead of old stories. If a belief is true, then it should be able to handle questions. It should rise when examined. But when religious people face these questions, the answers melt into mystery. A truth that needs mystery to survive is not a truth that stands on its own. It is simply a story told for generations.

Asking questions does not weaken reality. It only weakens illusions. And once illusions fade, the human mind becomes free to see the world as it really is.

Answers to these questions will inevitably be answered with mindless platitudes from Christian apologists, whose job it is to assume the truth of their assertions and to fish for whatever support they can find or make up. They are selling an invisible product that is facing severe headwinds of dis-confirming evidence. It is a hard job and they should be commended for the effort they are making to fool people…and themselves.

(5395) Resurrection and reception in early Christianity

Understanding the zeitgeist of the times, it becomes clear that the Christian theology of Jesus’ resurrection is based on mythic tradition rather than historical fact. This theme is supported by the book Resurrection and reception in early Christianity by Richard C. Miller. The following is a summary of this book:

This book offers an original interpretation of the origin and early reception of the most fundamental claim of Christianity: Jesus’ resurrection. Richard Miller contends that the earliest Christians would not have considered the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ resurrection to be literal or historical, but instead would have recognized this narrative as an instance of the trope of divine translation, common within the Hellenistic and Roman mythic traditions.

Given this framework, Miller argues, early Christians would have understood the resurrection story as fictitious rather than historical in nature. By drawing connections between the Gospels and ancient Greek and Roman literature, Miller makes the case that the narratives of the resurrection and ascension of Christ applied extensive and unmistakable structural and symbolic language common to Mediterranean “translation fables,” stock story patterns derived particularly from the archetypal myths of Heracles and Romulus.

In the course of his argument, the author applies a critical lens to the referential and mimetic nature of the Gospel stories, and suggests that adapting the “translation fable” trope to accounts of Jesus’ resurrection functioned to exalt him to the level of the heroes, demigods, and emperors of the Hellenistic and Roman world.

What this scholarship points out is that evaluating the intent of religious texts must be done alongside an understanding of the times in which they were written. Whereas reading it in the 21^st Century inclines a person to view the resurrection as being a factual event, the same text read twenty centuries ago would cause the reader of that time to apply a mythical lens. It was a different time, and the concept of resurrection then was likely seen more as allegory or as a legendary event. What this should mean to modern readers is to not take the Bible as you would a newspaper account.

(5396) Epistle of James is misplaced

The Bible is not a singular book, rather it is 66 books cobbled together under one cover. Given this situation, it would be expected that there would be some minor conflicts between the various books on matters of history and theology. But, if we are to assume that the selection of these books was inspired by God, we would not expect there to be books that would be considered outliers. But there is one of these in both Testaments- Ecclesiastes in the Old and the Epistle of James in the New. The following, compiled by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro, exposes the problems with James:

The Book of James is a unique document in the New Testament. It is a letter (epistle) that reads more like a piece of wisdom literature or a sermon than a theological treatise. Its sharp, practical focus has made it both beloved by social reformers and critiqued by systematic theologians.

Here is a critique of the Book of James, examining its theological tensions, its approach to faith, and its rhetorical style.

1. The Conflict with Pauline Theology (Faith vs. Works)

The most famous critique of James comes from the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther, who famously called it an “epistle of straw” because he felt it lacked “evangelical character.”

• • The Conflict: The Apostle Paul, particularly in Romans and Galatians, argues extensively that a person is justified (made right with God) by “faith apart from works of law” (Romans 3:28). James, seemingly in direct contradiction, writes: “You see that a person is considered righteous by what they do and not by faith alone” (James 2:24).
  • The Critique: Critics argue that James fundamentally misunderstands or rejects the core Christian doctrine of grace. If salvation is dependent on works, it becomes a burden of performance rather than a gift of mercy. It risks turning Christianity back into a system of legalism where one must “earn” God’s favor through moral behavior.
    • Counter-point: Most modern scholars argue James is using the word “faith” differently than Paul (intellectual assent vs. trust) and “works” differently (charity vs. Jewish ritual law), aiming to correct those who abused Paul’s grace as a license to sin.

2. A Lack of Christology

Compared to the rest of the New Testament, James is surprisingly light on references to Jesus.

• • The Critique: Jesus is mentioned by name only twice in the entire letter (1:1 and 2:1). There is no mention of the cross, the resurrection, the Holy Spirit, or the atonement.
  • The Implication: A critic could argue that the book is essentially a piece of Jewish moral wisdom that has been lightly “Christianized.” Its teachings on controlling the tongue, patience, and poverty could easily fit into the book of Proverbs or Sirach without needing a Messiah. For a book in the Christian canon, its lack of focus on the person and work of Christ is a significant anomaly.

3. Class Warfare and Rhetoric

James contains some of the harshest condemnations of the wealthy found in the Bible.

• • The Text: “Now listen, you rich people, weep and wail because of the misery that is coming on you… Your gold and silver are corroded. Their corrosion will testify against you and eat your flesh like fire” (James 5:1-3).
  • The Critique: While this is a powerful call for social justice, critics might argue it lacks nuance. It presents a stark binary where the “poor” are seemingly automatically pious and chosen by God (“Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith?” – 2:5), while the “rich” are categorically oppressive and doomed. This can be read as a theology of resentment or a reversal of fortune rather than a path to spiritual reconciliation for all classes.

4. The Perfectionism of the Tongue

James 3 is a famous discourse on the dangers of speech (“the tongue”).

• • The Text: “All kinds of animals… have been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison” (James 3:7-8).
  • The Critique: James paints a bleak picture of human capability. He asserts that “if anyone is never at fault in what they say, they are a perfect man” (3:2), but then immediately says taming the tongue is impossible. This sets up a standard of perfection that, by his own admission, is unreachable. It can foster a sense of futility or paralyzing anxiety about speech, rather than encouraging constructive communication.

5. The “Double-Minded” Man

James introduces the concept of the “double-minded” person who is “unstable in all they do” (1:8).

• • The Critique: This concept creates a rigorous psychological demand for total certainty and singular focus. He writes that the one who doubts “should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” In the complex reality of human suffering and intellectual struggle, doubt is often a natural part of faith. James’s approach can be seen as lacking compassion for the honest doubter, framing uncertainty as a moral failing rather than a part of the spiritual journey.

Conclusion

The Book of James is a “hard” book. It is not interested in comforting the believer with theological assurances of grace; it is interested in interrogating the believer’s life for evidence of fruit. Its critique lies in its potential to lead to legalism (salvation by works) and its potential neglect of the person of Jesus. However, its defenders argue it provides the necessary counterbalance to a “cheap grace” that claims to believe in God but refuses to feed the hungry.

The most obvious problem with placing this book in the Bible is that it negates the fundamental theology of Paul that salvation is a gift separate from any actions or deeds performed by the receiver. This leaves Christianity in an uncomfortable position with respect to its salvation dogma. And given that salvation is the whole ball of wax, not being crystal clear on this point is a mistake that an omnipotent god would not make.

(5397) You CAN disprove the Christian god

Christians when debating atheists often retreat to the ‘safe harbor’ statement that you can’t disprove God. While technically correct (if we assume ‘god’ to include any number of possible beings), it is possible to disprove the Christian god. This is because Christianity has adorned their god with a good number of testable attributes. The following was taken from:

https://medium.com/scientists-free-from-religious/you-cannot-disprove-god-i-beg-to-disagree-e4222126a105

One of the most common statements in debates about religion is: “You cannot disprove God.” Many rational people accept this at face value. Even prominent atheists sometimes invoke Bertrand Russell’s teapot: “You cannot prove there is no small teapot orbiting the Sun.” But if that logic holds, we would have to accept any unusual claim: “You cannot disprove Bigfoot,” or “You cannot disprove Allah.” My point is different: you can disprove God — at least the God described by specific, testable attributes.

At first glance, the claim seems safe. How do you prove a negative? But upon closer inspection, it unravels. God, as portrayed in Christianity and other Abrahamic faiths, is said to act in the world: to answer prayers, heal, create, judge, and communicate through texts. Each of these claims is testable — and many fail.

Science has been chipping away at the space for God for centuries. Even artificial intelligence can now generate text that mimics consciousness, showing how mechanical processes can create the illusion of mind. This undermines one of theology’s last refuges: the mystery of consciousness.

Einstein once remarked: “I cannot prove that a personal God does not exist; if I did, I would be considered insane.” Michio Kaku has expressed similar caution. But both speak as physicists within their narrow domains. Neuroscience, psychology, and history offer sharper tools to examine the attributes of God — and these attributes consistently fail empirical tests.

Once tested, “God” becomes as empty as saying, “I do not eat meat.” A statement of identity, not reality.

1. The burden of proof

Science does not demand we disprove unicorns or Russell’s teapot. The burden lies with the claimant. If someone says, “There is a God who answers prayers, heals the sick, created the world, and guarantees justice,” these claims are testable. Once testable, they can be falsified. You cannot disprove every possible God, but you can disprove the attributes attributed to God.

This blog post has been very active — I guess God cannot defend Himself. As the comedian Ricky Gervais said, “Every time I make a joke about Jesus, it’s humans who get offended.”

If you pay attention to the comments, most people replying are either Christians or individuals still holding on to old superstitions. Someone even mentioned a “higher power.”

I have no issue with Einstein’s idea of a “God” — it is entirely different from a personal God. The notion of a higher power often creates more problems than it solves. It opens the door to Christianity, and anyone familiar with fundamentalism knows that no one benefits from its gains. Science neither depends on, nor gains from, the concept of a higher power — except when certain people insist that science must be tutored or regulated by Christians. Notice that the only religions that demand this privilege are the Abrahamic ones.

When believers retreat to Spinoza’s God — a vague “force” or “existence itself” — they’re no longer defending Christianity, they’re defending a metaphor. Such a God does nothing, says nothing, and can’t be distinguished from not existing at all. But the Christian God is not that abstraction; it’s a personal deity who intervenes in the world, heals the sick, answers prayers, punishes, and forgives. That version makes claims about reality — and those claims have been tested and consistently failed. Miracles vanish under scrutiny, prayers have no measurable effect, and divine temper looks indistinguishable from chance or nature. A God so abstract that science cannot detect him is as useless as one who isn’t there; and the God who supposedly acts in the world has already been disproven by his own silence.

If we can disprove all the supposed attributes of God — that he answers prayers, performs miracles, intervenes in history, rewards, and punishes — what remains? Only an empty abstraction that cannot be distinguished from nothing. Call it “God” if you wish, but it’s a label without content. A deity stripped of all measurable action, emotion, and will is not a being; it’s a word floating in the void. Theologians may cling to it for comfort, but philosophically it explains nothing, predicts nothing, and changes nothing. In the end, a God who cannot be separated from nothingness is, for all practical and intellectual purposes, nothing.

Whenever I hear someone invoking a “higher power,” they are either Christians or scientists still clinging to personal fears inherited from their Christian upbringing. There is also a subtle trick at play: these Christians often seek authority they neither have nor deserve. When they speak of a “higher power” and claim that scientists should be humble, what they really mean is, “you should listen to me while I cling to ancient superstition as if it were cutting-edge science.”

There is a fundamental difference between saying “there may be a higher power” and claiming that this higher power is conscious, moral, and personally concerned with human affairs. The first is a modest philosophical hypothesis; the second is mythology disguised as metaphysics. When scientists like Michio Kaku or philosophers like Aristotle speak of a first cause or an initial motion, they are not describing a personal deity who listens to prayers or sends plagues. Aristotle’s Prime Mover was an abstract principle, not a father figure in the sky. Yet Christians constantly appropriate such concepts, pretending that every mention of a “first cause” points to their God. It’s a category mistake — turning a philosophical metaphor into a supernatural person.

When scientists describe themselves as agnostic rather than atheist, it rarely means they believe in a higher power; it usually means they recognize the limits of current knowledge. It’s not faith — it’s a principle of intellectual honesty. Being open to the possibility of something unknown is not the same as asserting its existence. To mistake that for belief is like confusing “innocent until proven guilty” with “everyone is innocent.” It’s a default position of caution, not conviction. Many scientists simply acknowledge that while no evidence for a deity exists, the absence of proof is not, strictly speaking, proof of absence. That’s agnosticism as a principle — not an endorsement of divine agency.

Sam Harris gives a clear example: responsible gun owners treat every gun as if it were loaded — not because they believe every gun is loaded, but because doing so prevents accidents. It’s a principle of caution, not a statement of fact. Scientific agnosticism works the same way. When scientists say they are open to the possibility of a higher power, it’s not because they see evidence for one, but because they operate under the discipline of uncertainty. They treat the unknown as possibly open, while still demanding evidence before belief. Confusing that methodological humility with actual faith is like assuming that because a gun owner handles every weapon carefully, he must truly believe every one of them is loaded.

However, we should be honest: a God like Spinoza’s answers no prayers. What I’ve seen, time and again, is people claiming they don’t believe in a personal God — yet they believe in some higher force that cares about justice, protects the poor, and occasionally intervenes to help someone. That is the Christian God; it’s merely disguised in modern language.

Other in the comments tried to prove God as something abstract. This is trick, a self-defense mechanism of religion. They God is abtract enough not to be criticized, and still a conscious look out for us. This is not different from holding on to a lucky stone.

Someone else tried to claim that I should prove atheist, a move I have seen in Willian Craig. Indeed, a negative cannot exist. The absense of a boat does not exist, it is just the absense of a boat. A boldness is not hairlessness, it is just the absense of hair. So, yes, atheism does not exist since it is a negative of an affirmative which fails to prove itself.

2. The rhetorical trap

When Craig (and similar thinkers) demand that atheism be proven, they commit a category error. Atheism is not a positive metaphysical claim like “God exists.” It’s the absence of belief in gods. Asking atheists to prove atheism is like asking bald people to prove baldness or non-smokers to prove non-smoking.

That’s not how epistemic burden works.
The rule is simple: the one who asserts existence carries the burden of proof.

So if someone says “God exists,” they must demonstrate it.
If the atheist simply withholds belief until evidence arises, there’s nothing to prove.

3. The ontological insight: “a negative cannot exist”

Negations have no ontological substance — the absence of a boat isn’t a “thing.” But careful: using ontological absence in a semantic sense, while Craig and theists often use it in an epistemic sense.

• • Ontological absence: Absence of hair isn’t a “thing.” True.
  • Epistemic stance: “I do not believe there are gods” is a mental or propositional state. That exists in the mind of the person.

So yes, atheism is ontologically negative, but epistemically real — it’s a cognitive state of non-affirmation.

4. The linguistic trap: when “non-existence” becomes existence

Saying “atheism does not exist” in a literal ontological sense is correct — it’s not a thing.
But in practice, the category of people who do not believe in gods does exist. Otherwise, we’d have to say that:

• • Silence doesn’t exist because it’s just the absence of sound.
  • Darkness doesn’t exist because it’s just the absence of light.
  • Zero doesn’t exist because it’s the absence of quantity.

Yet these absences are conceptually useful and empirically measurable.
We can quantify silence (decibels), darkness (lumens), and disbelief (survey data).
So atheism exists as a measurable state of absence.

5. Where the phrasing might mislead

When you say, “atheism does not exist since it is a negative of an affirmative which fails to prove itself,” you’re flirting with a semantic paradox: you’ve just described the thing you claim doesn’t exist. You’ve reified the absence — and philosophers since Aristotle have warned that language tends to smuggle existence into non-existence.

Feuerbach would phrase it this way:

“The denial of God is not a thing — it is the awareness that God is a projection of human essence.”

In that sense, atheism “exists” only as reflection, not as entity.

6. The stronger formulation (if you want to use it against Craig)

You could reframe your point like this:

“Atheism doesn’t need to be proven because it asserts nothing. It is not an ontological claim, but a refusal to affirm an unproven one. To ask an atheist to ‘prove atheism’ is to confuse absence with assertion — a category error.”

That’s the philosophical dagger you can use to dismantle Craig’s move — cleanly, without falling into semantic traps.

7. Testing prayer: the STEP experiment

Consider the claim that God answers prayers. The 2006 STEP experiment studied nearly 1,800 cardiac bypass patients. The result? No measurable benefit from prayer. Patients who knew they were being prayed for fared slightly worse, possibly due to anxiety. If prayer were a reliable channel of divine intervention, the results should have been clear. Attribute tested, and disproven.

Some argue God only answers “true” prayers. But in practice, prayer does not prevent accidents or suffering. Road fatalities, for example, remain high even in highly religious countries. Attribute tested, and disproven.

8. Creation myths vs. modern science

Religious texts often claim the world is young, created in days, or reshaped by floods. Geology, cosmology, and evolutionary biology show otherwise: Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and species evolved over millions of years. Literalist creation claims cannot withstand these findings. Attribute tested, and disproven.

When Kaku says, “we cannot disprove God,” he overlooks that modern physics challenges fine-tuning arguments. String theory, multiverse hypotheses, and cosmological observations provide alternative explanations without divine intervention. Newton once invoked divine planetary guidance; Einstein elegantly explained motion without God.

9. Divine justice in a cruel world

If God is just, why does injustice thrive? Tyrants prosper while children suffer. Deferring justice to an afterlife is an evasion, not an explanation. In the observable world, moral deserts rarely align with outcomes. Attribute tested, and disproven.

10. Neuroscience of religious experience

Believers often report feeling God’s presence. Neuroscience shows these experiences arise from brain activity. Michael Persinger’s God Helmet can trigger religious visions via temporal lobe stimulation; psychedelics produce similar effects. The brain can generate these experiences without an external deity. Attribute tested, and disproven.

11. The shrinking God

Each failed attribute forces theology to retreat: God no longer heals on command, creates in six days, ensures justice, or speaks audibly. What remains is an abstraction: God is love. God is mystery. God is ineffable. Poetic, but powerless to explain reality. God becomes metaphor, not being.

Conclusion

Can you disprove God? You cannot disprove a deliberately unfalsifiable abstraction. But you can disprove the specific claims religions make. When every testable attribute fails, what remains is not divine mystery but an empty shell.

In short: God has been tested, and God has failed.

It is a matter of intellectual honesty to admit that what you have believed since childhood is not based on sufficient evidence, and further, to realize that the vast preponderance of the available evidence tends to de-support the claim. To sum it up, there exists a lot of very compelling reasons to conclude that a god possessing the attributes assumed by Christianity does not exist.

(5398) Jesus and Paul disagree

Christianity plays an uneasy game of reconciling the theology espoused by Jesus with that presented by Paul. But there exist significant conflicts that are difficult to resolve. The following, presented by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro, lists some of the more significant problems:

The perceived conflicts between the teachings of Jesus (as recorded in the Gospels) and the writings of Paul (the Epistles) are a major subject of theological study. Skeptics often argue these differences show that Paul “invented” Christianity, changing it from a Jewish reform movement into a new religion. Traditional theologians argue these are differences in emphasis and context, not contradiction.

Here are the most significant areas of conflict often cited:

1. The Validity of the Law (Torah)

This is the central conflict. Did Jesus come to uphold the Law or end it?

• • Jesus: “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. … not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law…” (Matthew 5:17-18).
    • Implication: The Law is eternal and binding.
  • Paul: “Christ is the culmination [or end] of the law so that there may be righteousness for everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4). “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law…” (Romans 7:6).
    • Implication: The Law was a temporary tutor that is no longer binding on believers.

2. The Requirement for Salvation

What must a person do to be saved (enter the Kingdom)?

• • Jesus: When asked what to do to inherit eternal life, Jesus answers: “Keep the commandments” (Matthew 19:17). In the Parable of the Sheep and Goats, salvation is determined by works of charity (feeding the hungry, clothing the naked), with no mention of faith or belief (Matthew 25).
  • Paul: “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law” (Romans 3:28). “If righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (Galatians 2:21).
    • Conflict: Jesus emphasizes doing (ethics/commandments); Paul emphasizes believing (faith/grace).

3. The Role of Women

• • Jesus: Jesus had female disciples (Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Susanna) who supported his ministry (Luke 8:1-3). He taught women (Mary of Bethany) and they were the first witnesses to his resurrection, commissioned to tell the male disciples. He never issued a command silencing them.
  • Paul: “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak…” (1 Corinthians 14:34). “I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man” (1 Timothy 2:12 – Note: authorship of 1 Timothy is disputed, but traditionally attributed to Paul).
    • Conflict: Jesus’s actions appear egalitarian; Paul’s specific instructions (in some texts) appear patriarchal and restrictive.

4. Eating Meat Sacrificed to Idols

• • Jesus (in Revelation): While not in the Gospels, the “Words of Jesus” in Revelation twice condemn eating food sacrificed to idols, linking it to the teaching of Balaam and Jezebel (Revelation 2:14, 2:20). It is treated as a severe spiritual compromise.
  • Paul: Paul treats this as a matter of indifference and conscience. “Eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of conscience” (1 Corinthians 10:25). He argues that since idols aren’t real, the meat is just meat, unless it causes a weaker brother to stumble.

5. The Source of Authority

• • Jesus: “But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven” (Matthew 23:8-9).
  • Paul: Paul frequently asserts his own authority as a “father” to the churches. “For even if you had ten thousand guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus I became your father through the gospel” (1 Corinthians 4:15). He establishes a hierarchy of apostles, prophets, and teachers (1 Corinthians 12:28).

6. Original Sin vs. The Nature of Children

• • Jesus: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these” (Matthew 19:14). He uses children as the model of perfection and humility required to enter the kingdom.
  • Paul: Paul develops the theology of Original Sin—that all humans are born “dead in transgressions” and are “by nature deserving of wrath” because of Adam’s sin (Ephesians 2:1-3, Romans 5).
    • Conflict: Jesus implies children are naturally close to God; Paul’s theology implies they are born separated from God and in need of redemption.

Summary

• • Jesus preached the “Gospel of the Kingdom”—a reformed Jewish ethic focusing on the poor, the law of love, and imminent divine intervention.
  • Paul preached the “Gospel of Grace”—a theology about Jesus’s death and resurrection that focused on individual salvation, the end of the Jewish Law, and the inclusion of Gentiles.

Most Christian theology is an attempt to synthesize these two distinct voices into a single system.

This should be a no-brainer. God sends his son to establish the Christian faith. Then he tabs Paul as his ambassador to establish the theological structure for his church. How could an omnipotent god allow these two luminaries to be so at odds with each other? How could a god allow confusion at such an elemental level? What is obviously true is that Paul had no idea what Jesus taught (the gospels were not available to him) and thus he said many things that contradicted Jesus. If Christianity was true, Jesus and Paul would have been on the same page.

(5399) George Carlin: Religion Is Bullshit

Comedian George Carlin (1937-2008) performed an iconic takedown of religion in 1999, focusing on Christianity. The transcript is as follows:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BFIRgn9OLI

When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told. Think about it. 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… He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He’s all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can’t handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. H-o-l-y Shit!

But I want you to know something, this is sincere, I want you to know, when it comes to believing in God, I really tried. I really, really tried. 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.

Something is wrong here. War, disease, death, destruction, hunger, filth, poverty, torture, crime, corruption, and the Ice Capades. Something is definitely wrong. This is not good work. If this is the best God can do, I am not impressed. Results like these do not belong on the résumé of a Supreme Being. This is the kind of shit you’d expect from an office temp with a bad attitude. And just between you and me, in any decently-run universe, this guy would’ve been out on his all-powerful ass a long time ago. And by the way, I say “this guy”, because I firmly believe, looking at these results, that if there is a God, it has to be a man.

No woman could or would ever fuck things up like this. So, if there is a God, I think most reasonable people might agree that he’s at least incompetent, and maybe, just maybe, doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t give a shit, which I admire in a person, and which would explain a lot of these bad results.

So rather than be just another mindless religious robot, mindlessly and aimlessly and blindly believing that all of this is in the hands of some spooky incompetent father figure who doesn’t give a shit, I decided to look around for something else to worship. Something I could really count on.

And immediately, I thought of the sun. Happened like that. Overnight I became a sun-worshiper. Well, not overnight, you can’t see the sun at night. But first thing the next morning, I became a sun-worshiper. Several reasons. First of all, I can see the sun, okay? Unlike some other gods I could mention, I can actually see the sun. I’m big on that. If I can see something, I don’t know, it kind of helps the credibility along, you know? So everyday I can see the sun, as it gives me everything I need; heat, light, food, flowers in the park, reflections on the lake, an occasional skin cancer, but hey. At least there are no crucifixions, and we’re not setting people on fire simply because they don’t agree with us.

Sun worship is fairly simple. There’s no mystery, no miracles, no pageantry, no one asks for money, there are no songs to learn, and we don’t have a special building where we all gather once a week to compare clothing. And the best thing about the sun, it never tells me I’m unworthy. Doesn’t tell me I’m a bad person who needs to be saved. Hasn’t said an unkind word. Treats me fine. So, I worship the sun. But, I don’t pray to the sun. Know why? I wouldn’t presume on our friendship. It’s not polite.

I’ve often thought people treat God rather rudely, don’t you? Asking trillions and trillions of prayers every day. Asking and pleading and begging for favors. Do this, gimme that, I need a new car, I want a better job. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday His day off. It’s not nice. And it’s no way to treat a friend.

But people do pray, and they pray for a lot of different things, you know, your sister needs an operation on her crotch, your brother was arrested for defecating in a mall. But most of all, you’d really like to fuck that hot little redhead down at the convenience store. You know, the one with the eyepatch and the clubfoot? Can you pray for that? I think you’d have to. And I say, fine. Pray for anything you want. Pray for anything, but what about the Divine Plan?

Remember that? The Divine Plan. Long time ago, God made a Divine Plan. Gave it a lot of thought, decided it was a good plan, put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years, the Divine Plan has been doing just fine. Now, you come along, and pray for something. Well suppose the thing you want isn’t in God’s Divine Plan? What do you want Him to do? Change His plan? Just for you? Doesn’t it seem a little arrogant? It’s a Divine Plan. What’s the use of being God if every run-down shmuck with a two-dollar prayerbook can come along and fuck up Your Plan?

And here’s something else, another problem you might have: Suppose your prayers aren’t answered. What do you say? “Well, it’s God’s will.” “Thy Will Be Done.” Fine, but if it’s God’s will, and He’s going to do what He wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me! Couldn’t you just skip the praying part and go right to His Will? It’s all very confusing.

So to get around a lot of this, I decided to worship the sun. But, as I said, I don’t pray to the sun. You know who I pray to? Joe Pesci. Two reasons: First of all, I think he’s a good actor, okay? To me, that counts. Second, he looks like a guy who can get things done. Joe Pesci doesn’t fuck around. In fact, Joe Pesci came through on a couple of things that God was having trouble with.

For years I asked God to do something about my noisy neighbor with the barking dog, Joe Pesci straightened that cocksucker out with one visit. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a simple baseball bat.

So I’ve been praying to Joe for about a year now. And I noticed something. I noticed that all the prayers I used to offer to God, and all the prayers I now offer to Joe Pesci, are being answered at about the same 50% rate. Half the time I get what I want, half the time I don’t. Same as God, 50-50. Same as the four-leaf clover and the horseshoe, the wishing well and the rabbit’s foot, same as the Mojo Man, same as the Voodoo Lady who tells you your fortune by squeezing the goat’s testicles, it’s all the same: 50-50. So just pick your superstition, sit back, make a wish, and enjoy yourself.

And for those of you who look to The Bible for moral lessons and literary qualities, I might suggest a couple of other stories for you. You might want to look at the Three Little Pigs, that’s a good one. Has a nice happy ending, I’m sure you’ll like that. Then there’s Little Red Riding Hood, although it does have that X-rated part where the Big Bad Wolf actually eats the grandmother. Which I didn’t care for, by the way. And finally, I’ve always drawn a great deal of moral comfort from Humpty Dumpty. The part I like the best? “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again.” That’s because there is no Humpty Dumpty, and there is no God. None, not one, no God, never was.

In fact, I’m gonna put it this way. If there is a God, may he strike this audience dead! See? Nothing happened. Nothing happened? Everybody’s okay? All right, tell you what, I’ll raise the stakes a little bit. If there is a God, may he strike me dead. See? Nothing happened, oh, wait, I’ve got a little cramp in my leg. And my balls hurt. Plus, I’m blind. I’m blind, oh, now I’m okay again, must have been Joe Pesci, huh? God Bless Joe Pesci. Thank you all very much. Joe Bless You!

Carlin’s humor excoriates the sophistry of religion. It simply cannot stand up to practical reasoning. And once somebody sees the con, it becomes impossible to un-see it.

(5400) Ten reasons to conclude that Acts is fictional

Much of early Christian history is based on the Book of Acts, but there exist many reasons to doubt the veracity of this work. Ten brutal counter-arguments are presented below (produced by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro):

The conclusion that the Book of Acts is primarily fictional or, at the very least, highly idealized historical romance rather than strict history rests on several key arguments. These arguments generally focus on discrepancies with Paul’s own letters, historical anachronisms, and the literary style of the text.

1. Contradictions with Paul’s Own Letters

The primary reason scholars question the reliability of Acts is that it often contradicts the firsthand testimony of Paul himself in his epistles. Since Paul is an eyewitness to his own life and Luke (the author of Acts) is a later narrator, Paul’s letters are generally considered the primary source.

• • The Jerusalem Visits: In Galatians 1, Paul is adamant that after his conversion, he did not go to Jerusalem immediately. He states he went to Arabia, then Damascus, and only visited Jerusalem three years later. Acts 9 portrays him going to Jerusalem almost immediately after leaving Damascus.
  • The Apostolic Decree: Acts 15 describes a “Council of Jerusalem” where Paul and the apostles agree on a set of rules for Gentile converts (abstaining from idol meat, blood, etc.). However, in Paul’s own letters (Galatians 2, 1 Corinthians 8), he claims he was given no such rules other than to “remember the poor.” He even explicitly tells Corinthians they can eat meat sacrificed to idols (unlike the Decree), suggesting he either didn’t know about this decree or didn’t consider it binding.
  • Paul’s Theology: The “Paul” character in Acts preaches a different message than the Paul of the letters. In Acts, Paul’s speeches focus heavily on Jewish history and the resurrection as a fulfillment of prophecy, with almost no mention of his signature theology: justification by faith alone vs. works of the law. The Paul of Acts sounds remarkably like Peter, leading scholars to suspect Luke smoothed over their theological differences to present a unified church.

2. Historical Anachronisms and Errors

Acts contains several references to historical events that do not align with external records, particularly the works of the Jewish historian Josephus.

• • Theudas and Judas the Galilean: In Acts 5:36-37, the character Gamaliel gives a speech (set in the early 30s AD) mentioning two rebels: Theudas and Judas the Galilean. He claims Theudas rose up before Judas.
    • The Problem: According to Josephus, Theudas’s rebellion happened in 44-46 AD—more than a decade after Gamaliel’s speech allegedly took place. Furthermore, Judas the Galilean revolted in 6 AD. Acts has the order backward and has a character referencing an event that hasn’t happened yet.
  • The Death of Agrippa I: Acts 12 describes Herod Agrippa being struck down by an angel and eaten by worms for accepting divine praise. Josephus records his death but attributes it to severe abdominal pain after seeing an owl (an omen), with no mention of the dramatic public blasphemy described in Acts.

3. Literary Genre and Style

Many scholars argue that Acts fits the genre of ancient historical romance or “apologetic historiography” rather than modern objective history.

• • Parallelism: The book is structured to show a perfect symmetry between Peter and Paul. Both heal a “lame man,” both have a miraculous prison escape, both raise someone from the dead, and both have encounters with magicians. This highly structured parallelism suggests a literary invention designed to legitimize Paul as Peter’s equal, rather than a recording of random historical events.
  • Invented Speeches: Ancient historians (like Thucydides) openly admitted to inventing speeches for their characters based on what was “appropriate” for the moment. The speeches in Acts (making up roughly 25% of the book) often sound remarkably similar to one another—whether spoken by Peter, Paul, or Stephen—suggesting they are the voice of the author (Luke), not the historical figures.

4. The “We” Passages

The author occasionally switches from “they” to “we” (e.g., Acts 16:10), implying he was a companion of Paul. However, given the contradictions mentioned above (especially regarding Paul’s travels and theology), many scholars view this as a literary device common in ancient sea-voyage narratives to heighten vividness, rather than proof of eyewitness authorship. If the author was truly Paul’s companion, he likely wouldn’t have contradicted Paul’s own writings so frequently.

Here are additional examples and arguments used to suggest the Book of Acts is more literary fiction than strict history:

5. The “Sanitized” Conflict

Paul’s own letters reveal intense, often bitter conflict with the other apostles. He calls Peter a hypocrite to his face (Galatians 2:11), sarcastically refers to the Jerusalem leaders as “super-apostles” (2 Corinthians 11:5), and warns against “false brothers.”

• • The Acts Version: In Acts, this conflict is almost entirely erased. Peter and Paul are presented as being in total harmony. The “incident at Antioch” (where Paul publicly fights Peter) is completely missing.
  • Conclusion: Critics argue Acts is a piece of 2nd-century “propaganda” (in the neutral sense) designed to smooth over the early rifts between Jewish and Gentile Christianity by presenting a fictionalized “Golden Age” of unity that never actually existed.

6. The Martyrdom of Stephen vs. Jesus

The death of Stephen in Acts 7 mirrors the death of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel so perfectly that it suggests literary copying rather than historical reporting.

• • Parallels:
    • Both are tried before the Sanhedrin.
    • Both are accused by false witnesses.
    • Both commit their spirit to the Lord at the moment of death (“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” vs. “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”).
    • Both ask for forgiveness for their killers (“Lord, do not hold this sin against them” vs. “Father, forgive them”).
  • Conclusion: This looks like the author modeling the first martyr on the master to make a theological point about discipleship, rather than recording a transcript of Stephen’s actual final words.

7. The Incompatibility of the Ascension

Luke is the only New Testament author who describes a bodily ascension of Jesus into the sky forty days after the resurrection (Acts 1:9).

• • Paul’s View: Paul speaks of the resurrection as a spiritual transformation (“flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom,” 1 Corinthians 15). He equates his own vision of Jesus (years later) with the apostles’ experiences, implying they were all spiritual revelations, not physical interactions with a revived corpse that then flew away.
  • Matthew/Mark/John: None of the other Gospels originally narrate this 40-day window ending in a visible skyward ascent (the longer ending of Mark is a later addition). This suggests the Ascension narrative in Acts is a later theological development, not a historical event witnessed by the Twelve.

8. The “Magical” Prison Escapes

Acts features multiple “miraculous prison break” stories that fit the tropes of ancient Greek novels (like Euripides’ The Bacchae).

• • Acts 5: Apostles are freed by an angel; guards find the doors locked but the prison empty.
  • Acts 12: Peter is freed by an angel; chains fall off, iron gates open “by themselves” (automatous).
  • Acts 16: Paul and Silas are freed by an earthquake that opens doors and unfastens chains (an oddly specific earthquake).
  • Conclusion: The repetitive nature of these escapes and their similarity to pagan myths suggest they are legendary motifs used to show the Gospel cannot be chained, rather than historical police reports.

9. Lack of Pauline Distinctives

In his letters, Paul is obsessed with the Cross (Christ crucified) and the imminent Parousia (return of Christ).

• • In Acts: The Paul of Acts rarely mentions the cross as a theological instrument of atonement and seems to have a much longer-term view of history (settling in for the long haul of church building). The urgency of the “end times” that saturates 1 Thessalonians or 1 Corinthians is largely absent in the speeches of Acts-Paul.

10. The Problem of the “Collection”

One of the biggest projects of the historical Paul’s life was the “Collection for the Saints”—a fundraising effort among Gentile churches to support the poor in Jerusalem (mentioned in Romans, 1 & 2 Corinthians, Galatians). Paul viewed this as the crucial symbol of unity between Jew and Gentile.

• • In Acts: This massive, years-long project is never explicitly mentioned as the reason for Paul’s final, fateful trip to Jerusalem. It is a glaring omission for a book supposedly focused on Paul’s mission and Jewish-Gentile unity.

If the Book of Acts is primarily fictional, it would be a mortal blow to Christianity’s credibility. Not only would it cast doubt on other aspects of the New Testament, but it would raise the question of why God allowed such a fabricated work to be included in the Bible.

Follow this link to #5401