(5501) The human case for morality

Christians like to claim that morality is a function of divine influence, defined for us by holy books that were ‘dictated’ by God. But this argument withers when analyzed by simple logic. The following was taken from:

https://unbiddable.substack.com/p/the-human-case-for-morality?triedRedirect=true

The Question of Moral Authority

There is a persistent claim in human history that morality descends from above—that right and wrong are gifts bestowed by a supernatural authority, without which humanity would wander blindly through chaos. According to this view, goodness is not something humans discover; it is something they are instructed to perform. Moral life becomes obedience to a higher command.

Yet the claim collapses under a remarkably simple question: what moral act can a believer perform that a nonbeliever cannot?

The inquiry is devastating precisely because it is so modest. If morality truly depends upon faith, then there must exist at least one virtuous act available only to those who possess it. Feeding the hungry, comforting the grieving, defending the vulnerable—surely one of these must require belief in a divine authority.

But none do.

Every moral action we recognize—compassion, generosity, courage, sacrifice—remains perfectly accessible to those who reject supernatural explanations of the universe. The believer may perform these acts; the skeptic may perform them as well. If morality were dependent upon faith, this symmetry would be impossible.

The silence that follows this question suggests something profound: moral understanding does not originate from belief in the divine.

The Indifference of the Cosmos

Modern knowledge of the universe complicates the traditional picture even further. The cosmos is unimaginably vast and overwhelmingly inhospitable. The observable universe spans tens of billions of light-years, yet nearly all of it is lethal to life. Stars detonate, galaxies collide, and cosmic systems drift toward thermodynamic exhaustion.

Our planet occupies a tiny and precarious corner of this immense structure. Humanity itself has existed for only a brief fraction of Earth’s history, and the conditions that sustain life here will eventually disappear. Long before galaxies collide or the universe reaches its final entropy, our own sun will swell and erase the biosphere that sustains us.

This picture does not resemble a universe arranged primarily for human flourishing. It resembles a system governed by indifferent natural laws.

And yet morality exists.

This fact alone challenges the notion that ethics must originate from a cosmic architect. The universe itself appears ethically neutral—neither compassionate nor cruel, simply vast and unconcerned. Moral life must therefore arise from another source.

The Biological Roots of Ethics

One plausible explanation lies within the evolutionary history of social species. Cooperation is not merely a noble aspiration; it is a survival strategy. Organisms that form alliances, protect offspring, and assist one another are more likely to endure than those that do not.

Research in evolutionary biology and neuroscience reveals that behaviors resembling moral instincts appear long before the emergence of religious systems. Social animals display empathy, reconciliation after conflict, and cooperative resource sharing. These tendencies are not theological doctrines but biological adaptations.

Human beings inherit the same architecture. Our brains respond to fairness and betrayal, our bodies release chemicals that reinforce trust and attachment, and our societies flourish when cooperation outweighs conflict.

Without these instincts, our species would not have survived long enough to invent moral philosophy or religious traditions. Empathy and cooperation were prerequisites for civilization, not its byproducts.

In this sense, morality is not imposed upon human nature—it grows from it.

Authority and Obedience

If morality emerges from human capacities rather than divine decree, another implication follows. Ethical reasoning becomes an exercise in understanding rather than obedience.

When moral systems are grounded entirely in authority, the question of right and wrong collapses into a question of command. An act becomes good simply because it is ordered; it becomes evil because it is forbidden. The role of conscience diminishes, replaced by submission to external rule.

History shows how precarious this model can be. When moral legitimacy derives from unquestionable authority—whether religious or political—individual judgment is easily suspended. People may justify cruelty not because they believe it is good, but because they believe it is commanded.

A morality rooted in human empathy, by contrast, requires reflection. It asks individuals to consider the suffering and well-being of others rather than merely obeying a directive.

Ethics becomes a shared human project rather than a decree delivered from beyond the world.

The Persistence of Moral Concern

Despite the indifference of the cosmos, humans consistently demonstrate concern for one another. We care for children, mourn the dead, defend strangers, and create systems of justice that attempt—however imperfectly—to balance competing interests.

Why do we care at all?

The answer may be deceptively simple. A species incapable of solidarity would not survive. Communities depend upon mutual trust; societies depend upon cooperation. The impulse to help others is not merely sentimental—it is structurally necessary for human life.

Over time these instincts develop into moral traditions, legal systems, and philosophical frameworks. Cultures articulate principles such as fairness, dignity, and responsibility because these principles sustain social life.

In other words, moral systems evolve as tools for living together.

A Shared Inheritance

None of this denies that religious traditions have contributed to ethical reflection. Many communities have drawn inspiration from spiritual teachings to confront injustice or express compassion. Yet inspiration is not the same as ownership.

The evidence suggests that morality belongs to humanity itself. It arises from our biology, our relationships, and our capacity to imagine the experiences of others. Believers and skeptics alike participate in this moral landscape because they share the same fundamental human nature.

The crucial question, then, is not whether morality comes from heaven or earth. It is whether we recognize it as something we build together.

We do not behave ethically because the universe commands it.

We behave ethically because we understand, however imperfectly, that our lives are bound to the lives of others.

Morality is a fluid construct that constantly evolves, generally becoming better with time. The morality of the scriptures is deficient compared to what humans have created since. This fact alone lets us know that human morality is not the creation of gods or the divine.

(5502) Albert Schweitzer’s take on Jesus

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a German theologian, organist, musicologist, writer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician. His insights on Christianity set in motion what has been a century-long reconsideration of the truth of this faith. The following was taken from Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, is widely considered the equivalent of a theological earthquake. It effectively destroyed the prevailing 19th-century academic consensus about who Jesus was and fundamentally changed New Testament scholarship forever.

To understand his critique, you have to understand what he was reacting against. Prior to Schweitzer, European scholars had spent decades writing “Liberal Lives of Jesus.” These biographies stripped away the miracles and presented Jesus as a rational, enlightened, modern moral philosopher who taught a gentle ethic of universal brotherhood.

Schweitzer argued that this version of Jesus never existed. Here is the breakdown of his famous critique.

1. The “Mirror” Critique

Schweitzer’s most devastating criticism of his predecessors was that they were essentially guilty of historical projection. He famously wrote that these scholars “looked down the deep well of history and saw their own faces reflected back at them.”

Because they were comfortable, educated, 19th-century European academics, they reconstructed a Jesus who looked exactly like a comfortable, educated, 19th-century European academic. Schweitzer argued that if you read the Gospels historically, the real Jesus is deeply alien, radically Jewish, and completely unconcerned with modern social progress.

2. The Apocalyptic Radical

Schweitzer argued that Jesus was, first and foremost, a first-century Jewish apocalyptic prophet.

According to Schweitzer, Jesus did not come to teach a timeless system of ethics or to establish a long-lasting earthly institution (the Church). Instead, Jesus believed that the fabric of the cosmos was literally about to tear open, that God was going to dramatically intervene, overthrow human empires, and establish a supernatural Kingdom on Earth within his own lifetime.

3. The “Interim Ethic”

If Jesus thought the world was ending in a matter of months, it changes how we read his teachings. Schweitzer introduced the concept of the “Interim Ethic” (Interimsethik).

• • The Problem: Skeptics often point out that Jesus’ commands—like “give away all your possessions,” “take no thought for tomorrow,” and “turn the other cheek”—are terrible blueprints for running a functional, long-term society.
  • Schweitzer’s Answer: Jesus never intended them to be long-term blueprints. They were emergency survival tactics. If the world is ending on Tuesday, you don’t need a retirement fund, and you don’t need to fight the Romans for political rights. You just need to be radically pure for the impending judgment.

4. Forcing the “Wheel of History”

The climax of Schweitzer’s critique explains the crucifixion not as a pre-planned divine atonement, but as a desperate, tragic attempt to force God’s hand.

Schweitzer pointed to Matthew 10, where Jesus sends his disciples out to preach, telling them that the Son of Man will arrive before they have gone through all the towns of Israel.

• • The Failure: The disciples return, and the world hasn’t ended. The apocalypse is delayed.
  • The Pivot: Schweitzer argued that Jesus, realizing the End was not coming on its own, decided he had to take the ultimate Messianic tribulation upon himself. He goes to Jerusalem to deliberately provoke the authorities, hoping his own suffering and death will be the catalyst that forces God to finally bring about the apocalypse.

“There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: ‘Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.’ Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him.” — Albert Schweitzer

5. The Aftermath: The Invention of Christianity

Because the world did not end when Jesus died, his followers were left with a profound cognitive dissonance. To survive, the early Church had to quickly pivot. They took his apocalyptic message about the literal end of the world and “spiritualized” it.

• • The Kingdom of God went from being a physical, earthly overthrow of Rome to a spiritual reality in the hearts of believers, or a heavenly afterlife.

The Paradox of Schweitzer

The profound irony of Schweitzer’s critique is what he did next. Even though he concluded that Jesus was factually wrong about the end of the world, Schweitzer believed that the spirit of Jesus—the radical, self-sacrificial love he embodied—was still the most powerful force in human history.

Having dismantled the traditional view of Jesus in his 30s, Schweitzer abandoned his prestigious academic career, went to medical school, and spent the rest of his life as a medical missionary in a remote hospital in Africa, eventually winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He believed you couldn’t know Jesus through theology; you could only know him by following his command to serve others.

Because he was so highly respected by peoples around the globe, Schweitzer’s secular views about Jesus gave tacit permission for scholars to more critically examine the scriptures and Christianity in general. He opened a seam, and others followed suit to uncover the weak underbelly of the traditional Christian faith, and to reveal its highly-likely non-supernatural origins.

(5503) The turbulent history of the Book of Revelation

One the most compelling pieces of evidence that the Bible is a product of human minds, and not a result of divine guidance, is the way that the popularity of the Book of Revelation varied over time, only barely surviving to retain its place as the final book of the New Testament. The following was composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

The Book of Revelation (often called the Apocalypse of John) had arguably the most turbulent and highly contested journey into the New Testament canon. While today it serves as the spectacular, apocalyptic grand finale of the Christian Bible, for the first few centuries of church history, half of the Christian world actively tried to ban it.

The resistance to Revelation came down to three major issues: apocalyptic extremism, bad grammar, and political shifts.

Here is how the most famous book of prophecy almost ended up on the cutting room floor.

1. The Montanist Crisis (The Danger of Prophecy)

In the 2nd century, Revelation was actually quite popular, especially among Christians suffering under Roman persecution. However, in the late 100s CE, a massive schism erupted in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) known as Montanism.

• • The Cult: Led by a man named Montanus and two female prophetesses, this movement claimed they were receiving direct, new revelations from the Holy Spirit.
  • The Weaponization of Revelation: They relied heavily on the Book of Revelation, taking its apocalyptic imagery literally. They convinced thousands of followers that the “New Jerusalem” mentioned in Revelation 21 was going to physically descend from the sky and land in their specific hometown of Pepuza.
  • The Backlash: The mainstream Church panicked. They realized that highly symbolic, apocalyptic literature was dangerously easy for cult leaders to weaponize. To shut down the Montanists, many prominent bishops decided the safest route was to discredit the Book of Revelation entirely.

2. The First Textual Criticism (The Authorship Problem)

To be included in the New Testament, a book had to be “apostolic”—meaning it had to be written by an original apostle or their direct associate. Tradition claimed that John the Apostle wrote both the Gospel of John and the Book of Revelation.

In the 3rd century, a brilliant bishop named Dionysius of Alexandria used what we now call textual criticism to prove this was impossible.

• • The Greek Problem: Dionysius pointed out that the Gospel of John is written in beautiful, flawless, philosophical Greek. The Book of Revelation, however, is written in terrible Greek. It is filled with grammatical errors, awkward phrasing, and heavy Aramaic idioms.
  • The Theological Shift: He also noted that the two books have completely different theological vocabularies and themes.
  • The Verdict: Dionysius concluded that whoever wrote Revelation, it was absolutely not the same John who wrote the Gospel. Because its apostolic authorship was shattered in the eyes of the Greek-speaking Eastern Church, they pushed to have it removed from scripture.

3. The Imperial Shift (Rome Becomes Friendly)

The Book of Revelation is essentially a piece of anti-Roman resistance literature. Its terrifying beasts, the “Whore of Babylon,” and the number 666 were all highly coded, first-century political attacks on the Roman Empire and the Emperor Nero.

• • The Constantinian Shift: In the 4th century, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, and the Roman Empire officially stopped persecuting Christians.
  • The Awkwardness: Suddenly, the Church was allied with the Empire. Reading a book that graphically predicted the violent, fiery destruction of Rome became politically awkward and culturally obsolete. Many church leaders felt its usefulness had passed.

How It Survived

By the 4th century, the great church historian Eusebius placed Revelation in his “Spurious” (rejected/disputed) category. So, how did it survive?

It survived entirely because of the Western (Latin) Church. While the Eastern (Greek) Church hated it, Western theologians in Rome and North Africa—like Augustine and Jerome—loved its powerful imagery of the ultimate triumph of good over evil. When the influential Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria finally drew up the definitive 27-book list of the New Testament in 367 CE, he included Revelation as a concession to the West, effectively locking the canon in place.

Even then, the skepticism never fully died. Over a thousand years later during the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther famously moved Revelation to an appendix in his German Bible translation, stating: “My spirit cannot accommodate itself to this book… Christ is neither taught nor known in it.”

It is likely that people of the first few centuries CE were able to stomach the weird and dreadful imagery of the Book of Revelation, but since then it has not aged very well. A modern reader can easily detect that this book is fully immersed in massive levels of fiction as well as messages that collide with those of Jesus. If today a decision was made about its canonicity, it most certainly would be eliminated.

(5504) Questioning the morality of eternal conscious torment

The New Testament, read objectively, hints rather strongly that God intends to raise dead people and send them to hell, where they will be tortured for eternity. This concept scrapes the shards of peoples’ brains, atheists and theists alike. The apologetic defenses are generally ineffective, leaving Christian theology in a precarious position, that becomes more atrocious as human morality improves over time. The following was composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

The question of whether a deity is morally justified in resurrecting the dead specifically to subject them to eternal conscious torment is one of the most profound and fiercely debated issues in the philosophy of religion.

From the standpoint of modern secular ethics, humanism, and even many progressive theological frameworks, the answer is an overwhelming no. However, within classical Christian and Islamic orthodoxy, theologians have spent centuries constructing philosophical frameworks to justify this exact scenario.

To understand the debate, we have to look at the specific arguments theologians use to defend this action, and the ethical counter-arguments that dismantle it.

The Classical Theological Justifications

For theologians defending traditional orthodox views (like Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin), the moral justification relies on a very specific set of definitions regarding human nature, justice, and free will.

1. 1. The “Psychosomatic Unity” of Human Nature To answer why God would raise the physical body just to punish the person, we have to look at ancient anthropology. Classical theology does not view humans as “ghosts driving meat machines.” A human is a holistic unity of body and soul.

• • The argument is that the soul did not sin alone; the body and soul sinned together. Therefore, for divine judgment to be perfectly just and complete, the human must be judged in their complete, resurrected state. To leave the body in the grave would be an incomplete judgment of the human being.

2. The “Infinite Offense” Argument How can finite sins committed during a short human lifetime warrant eternal punishment?

• • Classical apologists argue that the severity of a crime is measured not just by the act, but by the ultimate authority and majesty of the one offended. Because God is an infinitely holy and supreme being, rebelling against Him is an offense of infinite magnitude. Therefore, an infinite offense demands an infinite penalty.

3. The Free Will Defense Modern apologists, heavily influenced by writers like C.S. Lewis, argue that Hell is not a torture chamber God gleefully throws people into, but rather the ultimate honoring of human autonomy.

• • If a person spends their life saying “no” to God, God eventually says, “Thy will be done.” In this view, Hell is the eternal quarantine of those who freely reject the source of all goodness. The resurrection of the body simply ensures they experience the ultimate, holistic reality of the separation they chose.

The Ethical and Philosophical Critiques

For moral philosophers, secular ethicists, and a growing number of modern theologians, the classical justifications fall entirely flat. They argue that resurrecting a person to suffer eternally violates any rational definition of goodness or justice.

1. Disproportionate Retribution and Infinite Cruelty The “infinite offense” argument violates the core ethical principle of proportionality. Justice requires the punishment to fit the crime.

• • A finite being, operating with limited knowledge, limited cognitive capacity, and limited time, cannot commit an infinite crime. Resurrecting a person to subject their nervous system to unending, inescapable agony for finite mistakes is the definition of disproportionate cruelty. It aligns more closely with sadism than with justice.

2. The Absence of Rehabilitation In modern ethics, just punishment serves a purpose: it protects society, deters future crime, or rehabilitates the offender.

• • Eternal conscious torment does none of these. Because the punishment never ends, there is zero chance for the person to learn, grow, or be rehabilitated. It is purely vindictive. Resurrecting someone solely to exact endless vengeance contradicts the concept of an all-loving, perfectly good deity.

3. The Breakdown of the Free Will Argument Philosophers point out a fatal flaw in the idea that people “choose” Hell. For a choice to be truly free, the person must be fully rational and fully informed of the consequences.

• • No perfectly rational being with a complete understanding of the universe would ever freely choose eternal, agonizing torture over eternal bliss. If someone makes that choice, they are either deeply deceived, psychologically damaged, or operating on bad information—meaning their choice isn’t truly free, and punishing them eternally for it is morally unconscionable.

The Theological Alternatives

Because the moral math of eternal torment is so difficult to reconcile with a loving God, many theologians look to alternative readings of the ancient texts that avoid this paradox entirely:

• • Annihilationism (Conditional Immortality): This view argues that God does not resurrect the wicked for eternal torture. Instead, the ultimate punishment is simply the permanent withdrawal of life. The wicked are consumed and cease to exist entirely.
  • Universalism: This framework argues that God’s love and restorative justice will eventually win over every single soul. Hell is not eternal, but rather a temporary, purgatorial state designed to purify and rehabilitate a person until they are ready to be reunited with God.

There are no good answers for this dogma, and apologists have to tiptoe around this subject, making specious arguments that in no way resolve the issue. Given the assumption that Christianity is false, it can be assumed that the authors of the New Testament made a colossal mistake characterizing hell as they did.

(5505) Peter didn’t believe that Jesus was God

Although modern-day Christianity, as practiced by most denominations, states that Jesus is God (or at least one-third of God), the scriptures indicate that Peter, Jesus’ primary disciple, did not believe this was true. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1s62e1w/peter_didnt_believe_that_jesus_was_god_which/

Peter didn’t believe that Jesus was God, which means that Jesus didn’t teach that he was God.

One of the common assertions by Christian apologists is that Jesus himself taught his disciples and other followers that he was God. The problem with that, of course, is the utter lack of any explicit declaration by Jesus in the NT that he is God, as well as the lack of explicit declarations by anyone else in the NT that he is God, save the anonymous author of John offering his opinion that this is the case at the end of the 1st century in John 1:1.

Furthermore, the synoptic Gospels, Acts, and Pauline epistles do not even include clear implicit statements suggesting a belief that Jesus is God. And while the Gospel of John quotes Jesus saying that he is tight with God and that he is an incarnated divine being, none of the other earlier gospels cite Jesus or any of his disciples as saying these things, and these statements ultimately fall short of Jesus actually claiming to be God.

Christian apologists are fond of arguing, of course, that absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence. That may be true in some cases. However, I would argue that the absence of evidence for a fundamental faith claim in a religion’s earliest scriptures does constitute evidence that this claim was not made by its earliest adherents.

However, we can do even better than that in this case because the New Testament actually provides direct evidence about who Jesus’ chief disciple, Peter, said Jesus was. Peter’s statements tell us plainly that he did not believe Jesus was God, which only makes sense if Jesus did not teach that he was God.

I’m providing three different pieces of supporting evidence regarding Peter’s beliefs, from three different times in his life, any one of which is sufficient to show that Jesus did not teach that he was God.

Who do the crowds say I am?

All three synoptic gospels feature a scene in which Jesus asks his disciples who the people who were coming to hear him — “the crowds” — say he is. This seems to be a very strange question if Jesus were actually teaching that he was God, as apologists are wont to claim, and even stranger is the disciples response:

“Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life.” — Luke 9:19

So according to the disciples, literally no one hearing Jesus teach thought he was God, since all of their answers are reincarnated human beings, none of whom were God. That strongly suggests Jesus was not teaching that he was God.

But of course, maybe Jesus was only teaching that he was God to his closest disciples, making it a secret teaching. And in fact, Jesus then asks the disciples “But who do you say I am”, providing a great opportunity for them to show they understood such a teaching if it existed. But here’s how Peter answers who they think Jesus is:

“Peter answered, “God’s Messiah.” — Luke 9:20

Does Peter’s answer in any way suggest that Peter thinks Jesus is God? Absolutely not, because Jews did not and do not believe the Messiah is God. For 1st century Jews like Peter, the Messiah was a man — a “Son of Man” — who would be appointed by and supported by God to defeat Israel’s powerful enemies, reestablish the godly kingdom of Israel, and rule over it from David’s throne in Jerusalem. Which is precisely what a prophecy in Luke predicts will happen to Jesus:

“The Lord God will give him the throne of his father David, and he will reign over Jacob’s descendants forever” — Luke 1:32-33

As with Peter’s response, this makes clear that Jesus is not the “the Lord God”. Instead, Jesus is someone to whom “the Lord God” will give David’s throne to be king of the Jews, which hardly seems like an apt description of someone who is already God. In telling us that he believes Jesus is the Messiah, Peter is also telling us that he does not believe Jesus is God, which of course only makes sense if Jesus was not teaching that he was God

Jesus was a man authorized by God to represent God

Of course, the example above happened perhaps early during Jesus’ ministry, and it’s always possible that Jesus taught at a later time that he was God, and that therefore Peter’s understanding of this also changed. But again, we have direct testimony from Peter in the NT that this is not the case.

While Peter has a small role in the gospels, he is a prominent disciple in the book of Acts, providing relatively lengthy theological discourses about who Jesus was and what Jesus’ death means. And here, Peter says explicitly that he believes that Jesus was a man whom God authorized to speak for him, and that God demonstrated this authorization — God “accredited” Jesus — by working miracles through the man Jesus:

“Fellow Israelites, listen to this: Jesus of Nazareth was a man accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you through him, as you yourselves know” — Acts 2:22

Peter then goes on to explicitly detail what he and other early Christians believed happened to the man Jesus after his death and resurrection:

“God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.” — Acts 2:32-33

For Peter, Jesus wasn’t God, he was a man. And for Peter, Jesus couldn’t be God, because:

• • he believed that Jesus had been “resurrected by God”
  • he believed that Jesus had been “exalted” by God, a man made into a divine being; someone who is already God doesn’t need to be exalted
  • he believed that Jesus only received the promised “Holy Spirit” after his exaltation, which would rule out Jesus already being one member of a triune God along with the Holy Spirit
  • he believed that Jesus had been put in the most important position a man could be, serving at the “right hand of God”, which again rules out Jesus being God.

Again, such statements by Peter are incompatible with the idea that Peter believed Jesus was God, which rules out any possibility that Jesus actually taught his disciples that he was God.

The Gospel of Mark

The absence of evidence might not always constitute evidence of absence, unless a reliable source asserts that you actually have all of the evidence, which is the case with the Gospel of Mark.

About 50 years after Mark was written, the Bishop of Hierapolis — Papias — tells us about a Gospel of Mark that he is familiar with. And he tells what he had been told, which is that Mark was not an eyewitness to Jesus, but was a later protege of Peter, who related the things Jesus said to Mark in the form of chreiai (a brief, useful anecdote that would often take the form of “On seeing…”, “On being asked…”). And then Papias makes two completely believable claims:

• • Mark composed his gospel completely from memory
  • Mark “made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard or to falsify anything”.

So according to Papias, if the Gospel of Mark does not include an anecdote of Jesus teaching that he is God, that’s because Peter never mentioned it to Mark, because Mark “made it his one concern not to omit anything he had heard”, and because Mark certainly couldn’t have forgotten such an important teaching. And likewise, it’s inconceivable that if Jesus had actually taught this to the disciples, that Peter would not have repeated this to Mark, given that apologists claim this has always been a central dogma of the Christian religion (which it clearly wasn’t).

The only conclusion is that, in this case, absence of evidence is indeed evidence of absence: the fact that the Gospel of Mark includes no mention of Jesus being God means that Peter himself failed to recount any mention of this to Mark, and that can only mean that Peter never heard Jesus claim any such thing.

Now it’s possible, of course, that Papias is wrong about Mark. In fact, there’s good reason to think that Papias is wrong about pretty much everything he says about the gospels. But the problem is that Christian apologists love Papias, because he allows them to claim the authors of the gospels were both known and were authoritative, rather than the anonymous but literate nobodies that textual critics of the NT have concluded actually wrote the gospels.

But you can’t have it both ways: if Papias is right about how Mark was written, then you have to conclude that Mark doesn’t include anything about Jesus being God because Peter never mentioned anything about it, which is inconceivable if this was actually something that Jesus taught his disciples.

The only book of the New Testament that can be construed to present Jesus as God is the Gospel of John. As has been stated previously, this gospel, which presents a wholly contradictory history to the other three gospels, should never have been placed in the Bible. Had this been the case, there would have been no choice for Christian theologians to forgo the concept of Jesus as being God.

(5506) Fifteen fallacies of organized religion

The following lists fifteen fallacies that undermine the veracity of organized religion, taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phA1xV8bHEo

Fallacy 1: The Appeal to Authority (Argumentum ad Verecundiam)

Let’s begin with the cornerstone of so much religious thought, the appeal to authority. This fallacy occurs when and argument is claimed to be true simply because an alleged authority figure has said it is. Instead of presenting evidence, the argument relies on the status, title, or perceived wisdom of the person making the claim. In a religious context, this is omnipresent.

The Bible is the word of God because the Bible says it’s the word of God. or we know this doctrine is true  because the pope the vicor of Christ on earth has declared it so through papal infallibility. You might hear my pastor who has a doctrine in theology and has studied the scriptures for 40 years assures me that evolution is a lie.

Fallacy 2: The Appeal to Emotion (Argumentum ad Passiones)

When logic fails, what’s the next tool in the box? The heartstrings. The appeal to emotion is a manipulative tactic that seeks to win an argument by provoking an emotional response rather than by presenting a rational one. It bypasses the critical mind and goes straight for the gut. Religion is a master of this art.

Consider the argument from fear, a classic tool of control. If you do not believe in our God and follow our rules, you will suffer eternal torment in a lake of fire. This isn’t an argument for God’s existence. It’s a threat designed to terrify you into compliance. The opposite is the appeal to wishful thinking. Doesn’t it feel wonderful to know there’s a loving father in heaven watching over you and that you’ll be reunited with your deceased loved ones in a paradise?

The comfort this idea provides has no bearing on whether it is actually true. We also see it in appeals to pity, such as stories of miraculous healings that tug at our empathy, or in appeals to spite, which try to unite a group against a common wicked enemy, like secularists or followers of a different faith. Feelings are a fundamental part of the human experience, but they are not instruments for discerning objective truth. A claim doesn’t become true because it makes you feel safe, and it doesn’t become false because it makes you feel scared.

Fallacy 3: Special Pleading

This one is a favorite of theologians and sophisticated believers. Special pleading is a fallacy where you apply standards, principles, and rules to everyone else, but make a special exception for your own claim. It’s moving the goalposts when the ball is about to score against your team. The most common example in religion is the phrase, “God works in mysterious ways.” How so? Well, when a prayer for a sick child is answered, it’s a miracle and proof of God’s loving intervention. But when a child dies of cancer despite the prayers of an entire congregation, it’s God’s mysterious plan.

You see what happened? A standard was applied to the positive outcome, direct intervention. But a special unverifiable exception was made for the negative outcome. The rules of evidence and causality that we apply to every other aspect of life are suddenly suspended when it comes to God’s actions. Another example is the problem of evil. The argument goes, “How can a good and all powerful God allow such horrific suffering?” The special pleading response is, “God’s morality is higher than human morality. We cannot judge his actions by our limited understanding of good and evil.” Again, a special exception is carved out for the deity, placing it beyond the reach of the very ethical framework it supposedly created. It’s a get tout of jail-free card for any and all logical inconsistencies.

Fallacy 4: The Argument from Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam)

The argument from ignorance is a fascinatingly arrogant piece of flawed logic. It asserts that a proposition is true simply because it has not yet been proven false or that it’s false because it has not yet been proven true. It weaponizes a gap in our knowledge. This is the engine behind every god of the gaps argument. For centuries, we didn’t know what caused lightning, so the explanation was a sky god’s wrath.

 We didn’t understand the diversity of life, so the explanation was a divine creator. Today, you hear it most often in relation to the origin of the universe or the origin of life. Science can’t explain what came before the Big Bang. Therefore, it must have been God. Or scientists haven’t been able to create life from non-living matter in a lab. Therefore, life must have been created by a divine intelligence.

 The fundamental error is equating we don’t currently know with we therefore know it was X. A lack of an explanation is just that, a lack. It is not in itself positive evidence for an alternative explanation, especially one as extraordinary as a supernatural being. The honest and rational position when faced with a gap in our knowledge is to say, “I don’t know.” and keep investigating. To leap from that uncertainty to a definitive, ancient, and entirely unsupported answer is a failure of intellectual courage.

Fallacy 5:  The Strawman Argument

 If you can’t defeat your opponent’s actual argument, why not build a flimsy, distorted, and easily demolished version of it and then knock that down instead? This is the strawman fallacy. It’s an act of intellectual dishonesty where one misrepresents an opponent’s position to make it easier to attack. Skeptics of religion are constantly facing strawman arguments. The most common is the caricature of evolution.

A religious apologist might say, “You believe we came from monkeys? That a fish just decided to walk out of the water one day? That’s ridiculous.” This, of course, is not what the theory of evolution by natural selection posits. It’s a gross oversimplification designed to sound foolish. By attacking this silly strawman version, they avoid engaging with the actual evidence-based concepts of common ancestry, gradual change over immense periods of time, and selection pressures.

Another classic is the portrayal of atheism. So, you’re an atheist. You must believe that life has no meaning or purpose and that there’s no reason to be a good person. This is a straw man. It misrepresents atheism, which is simply a lack of belief in a god, as a positive belief in nihilism and immorality. It’s far easier to attack that bleak caricature than to engage with the complex and nuanced ethical systems developed by secular humanists for millennia.

Fallacy 6: The No True Scotsman Fallacy

This is the ultimate gatekeeping fallacy, a way to protect a cherished belief from any and all criticism by continually narrowing the definition. It was famously coined by philosopher Anthony Flu. The scenario goes like this. A man reads a story about a Scotsman committing a heinous crime and exclaims, “No Scotsman would do such a thing.”

When presented with evidence that the man was in fact Scottish, he retorts, “Ah, but no true Scotsman would do such a thing.” You see this constantly in religion. When a Christian pastor is caught in a scandal, the response from the faithful is often, “Well, he was never a true Christian.” When a group citing Islamic scripture commits an act of terror, the refrain is they are not true Muslims. Islam is a religion of peace.

This fallacy makes a belief completely unfalsifiable. Any evidence that contradicts the idealized version of the group is dismissed by retroactively revoking the membership of the person or group presenting the contradiction. It’s a way of preserving the purity of an idea by ejecting all inconvenient data points. It allows a believer to maintain that their religion is perfectly good, peaceful, and moral by simply defining anyone who fails to live up to that standard as an outsider, an impostor, a false believer.

Fallacy 7: The Ad Homonym Argument

Latin for to the person. The ad homonym is a fallacy that occurs when someone attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself. It’s a diversion from the battlefield of ideas to the mud pit of personal insults.

This is a distressingly common tactic used against skeptics. For example, instead of addressing a critique of the historical accuracy of the gospels, a believer might retort, you’re just saying that because you’re angry at God, or you just want to live a sinful life without feeling guilty. These statements do nothing to refute the historical or logical points being made.

There are attempts to invalidate the argument by poisoning the well, by attacking the perceived motivations of the arguer. You might also see it used against former believers who have deconverted. Oh, you were never a real believer to begin with, or you were just hurt by the church, that’s why you left. Whether someone was hurt by the church or not is a separate issue from whether their reasons for no longer believing are valid.

The argument must stand or fall on its own merits, regardless of the personal history or emotional state of the person presenting it. Attacking the messenger is a clear sign that one cannot defeat the message.

Fallacy 8: Begging the Question Circular Reasoning

This fallacy, often misunderstood, isn’t about raising a question. It’s an argument where the conclusion is already assumed in the premises. It’s a snake eating its own tail. An argument that goes in a circle and proves nothing because it starts by assuming the very thing it’s trying to prove. The most famous example in theology is the argument from scripture which we touched on earlier.

It goes like this. Premise one, the Bible is the inspired word of God. Premise two, the Bible says that God exists. Conclusion, therefore, God exists. The problem, Premise one, already assumes the existence and authority of the very God the argument is trying to prove. To someone who does not already believe the Bible is God’s word, the argument has zero persuasive power. It’s like saying, “My diary is completely true. How do I know?” Because I wrote in my diary that everything in it is true. It’s a perfectly sealed self-referential loop with no connection to external verifiable reality.

Fallacy 9: The False Dichotomy. The Black and White Fallacy.

The false dichotomy presents a complex situation as if there are only two possible options when in fact there is a spectrum of other possibilities. It’s a way of forcing a choice by painting one option as unacceptable, leaving you with only their preferred alternative

A very common religious version is the argument for design. Either the universe and the life within it were created by an intelligent designer or it all came about by random mindless chance. Since it’s too complex to be random chance, it must have been designed. This presents a false choice. It completely ignores the actual scientific explanation which is neither pure design nor pure chance.

Natural selection is a non-random process that filters random mutations over Ian’s creating the illusion of design. The fallacy deliberately omits the well established third option evolution to make its own conclusion seem inevitable.

Another is the moral argument. Either morality comes from God or there is no morality at all and anything is permissible. This ignores centuries of secular ethical philosophy from utilitarianism to deontology to virtue ethics which provide robust frameworks for morality without any need for a divine lawgiver. By presenting a terrifying vision of nihilism as the only alternative, the fallacy pushes people towards the comfort of a divinely ordained moral code.

Fallacy 10: The Slippery Slope

The slippery slope fallacy is an argument that suggests a relatively minor first step will inevitably lead to a chain of related events culminating in some significant usually negative effect. It argues that we must not take the first step no matter how innocuous because we cannot prevent the subsequent steps.

 This is a favorite in religious arguments against social progress. If we allow same-sex marriage, then the next thing you know, people will be marrying their pets or their children. This is a classic slippery slope. It provides no evidence or logical reason why the first action allowing consenting adults of the same sex to marry would necessarily lead to the latter absurd outcomes. It simply posits a disastrous unsubstantiated chain reaction to create fear and opposition to the initial reasonable proposal.

You also see it in arguments against skepticism itself. If you start questioning the story of Noah’s arc, soon you’ll question the resurrection of Jesus and then you’ll lose your faith entirely, become a moral degenerate, and your life will fall apart. This is a scare tactic. frames intellectual curiosity not as a virtue but as the first step on a perilous slide into chaos and despair. It discourages questioning by painting a terrifying yet entirely unproven final destination.

Fallacy 11: The Appeal to Tradition Argumentum add Antiquidatum

This fallacy asserts that an idea or practice is correct or good simply because it is old, has been believed for a long time, or is part of an established tradition. The logic is that if it’s been around for this long, it must be right. Religion is practically built on this fallacy. Christianity has survived for 2,000 years, guiding billions of people.

It must be true. Or our sacred texts are ancient, passed down through generations. Their wisdom has stood the test of time. The age of a belief is however completely irrelevant to its veracity. Astrology is thousands of years old. The belief in a flat earth persisted for millennia. The practice of bloodletting was a medical tradition for centuries. Age and tradition are not indicators of truth. They are only indicators of what people used to believe.

To accept an argument from tradition is to believe that our ancestors were infallible and that progress in knowledge and ethics is impossible. It freezes thought in the past. Every great scientific discovery, every step forward in human rights has been a victory over tradition. To insist that a belief is true simply because it’s old, is to reject the very process of inquiry that has lifted humanity out of the dark ages.

Fallacy 12: The Argument from Popularity. Argumentum adopulum also known as the bandwagon fallacy.

This is the sibling of the appeal to tradition. It argues that a proposition must be true because many or even most people believe it. It’s the billions of believers can’t be wrong argument. You will hear this constantly. Christianity is the world’s largest religion with over 2 billion followers. How could so many people be mistaken?

Or the vast majority of people throughout human history have believed in some form of God or higher power that points to a universal truth. But truth is not a democracy. A claim’s popularity is not evidence of its validity. At one point, the vast majority of people believed the sun revolved around the Earth. That didn’t make the geocentric model correct.

The popularity of a belief often has more to do with historical accident, cultural indoctrination, and psychological comfort than with its connection to reality. A single astronomer, Galileo, armed with a telescope and evidence, was right, and the entire weight of popular and religious consensus, was wrong. Popularity proves nothing except that an idea is popular.

Fallacy 13: The Argument from Personal Incredulity

This fallacy occurs when someone decides that because they personally find a concept difficult to understand or imagine, it must therefore be false. It mistakes a failure of one’s own imagination for a flaw in reality itself. This is the engine of much of the popular opposition to evolution. I just can’t see how something as complex as the human eye could have evolved by chance.

The key phrase is I can’t see. The argument rests entirely on the speaker’s personal inability to comprehend the vast time scales and the non-random mechanism of natural selection. It is not an argument based on evidence, but an admission of a personal cognitive limitation. We see it also in cosmology. I can’t wrap my head around the idea of a universe existing without a cause or a creator. It just doesn’t make sense.

The fact that something doesn’t make intuitive sense to our primate brains, which evolved to deal with medium-sized objects at medium speeds on the African savannah, is hardly a compelling argument against the findings of theoretical physics. Our intuition is a poor guide to the true nature of reality at its most fundamental levels. To reject a scientific consensus because you personally find it counter-intuitive is the height of intellectual arrogance.

Fallacy 14:  The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy

This colorful fallacy gets its name from a story about a Texan who fires his gun randomly at the side of a barn, then walks over and paints a target centered on the tightest cluster of bullet holes, claiming to be a master marksman. The fallacy is committed when you cherrypick data to fit a preconceived conclusion, ignoring the vast amount of data that doesn’t fit. This is precisely how prophecies and answered prayers work.

A religious person might point to a vague prophecy in an ancient text that seems to have a loose connection to a modern event, proclaiming it as proof of divine foresight. What they ignore are the hundreds of other vague prophecies that never came to pass, the countless different interpretations, and the sheer statistical probability that some vague statement will eventually seem to match some future event. They paint the target after the shot has been fired.

Similarly, with answered prayers, believers will remember and emphasize the one time they prayed for a new job and got one, while conveniently forgetting the hundreds of times they or others prayed for things, for healing that didn’t come, for peace that didn’t arrive and nothing happened. They focus on the cluster of hits and ignore the vast empty space on the barn door, creating a false pattern of divine intervention out of random chance and confirmation bias.

Fallacy 15. Shifting the Burden of Proof

Finally, we arrive at one of the most fundamental fallacies in any debate. Shifting the burden of proof. The burden of proof always lies with the person making the positive claim. If you assert that a god exists, that miracles are real or that a soul survives death, it is your responsibility to provide evidence for that claim. Shifting the burden of proof is the tactic of demanding that others disprove your claim instead. It sounds like this.

You can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, so he must exist. This is a perversion of logic. One cannot prove a universal negative. I cannot prove that there isn’t a microscopic invisible teapot orbiting Jupiter. But my inability to disprove its existence is not evidence that it’s there. The person claiming the teapot exists is the one who must provide the evidence. Photographs, telemetry data, a sample of the China.

This fallacy is the last refuge of a believer with no evidence. When all other arguments have been deconstructed, they fall back on, well, you can’t disprove it. This is an admission of intellectual bankruptcy. In the courtroom of reason, the one making the extraordinary claim must present the extraordinary evidence. To demand that skepticism do the work of belief is to fundamentally misunderstand how knowledge is built and how truth is sought.

Once a person understands these fifteen fallacies, it becomes much easier to see that no religion provides a valid basis for belief. They are all based on wishes and prayers, fantasies and hopes, with no real substance that can be taken to the bank.

(5507) Questioning biblical canonicity

The decisions that were made for which books should be included or excluded from the Bible were allegedly inspired by God himself, and thus it would be expected that there would be few or no controversial cases where included books seem out of place. Alternately, there should be no excluded ones that otherwise seem to have merited inclusion. The following discussion about this topic was written by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

The question of what belongs in the Bible is a matter of “canonicity”—the historical process by which church councils and ancient communities decided which texts were divinely inspired and which were not.

Because we have been looking at this through the lens of historical-critical scholarship, the answers to what “should” and “shouldn’t” be in the Bible are usually based on two criteria: authorship (is it a forgery?) and theological influence (did the earliest Christians treat it as scripture?).

Based on the consensus of modern historians and textual critics, here are the two strongest candidates.

The Book That Probably Shouldn’t Be in the Bible: 2 Peter

If you ask a secular New Testament scholar which book has the weakest claim to being in the Bible, the almost unanimous answer is the Second Epistle of Peter.

From a historical perspective, 2 Peter is widely considered a pseudepigrapha (a polite academic term for a forgery). Scholars believe it was written by an anonymous Christian somewhere between 110 and 150 CE, long after the historical Apostle Peter was crucified in Rome (around 64 CE).

Here is why it historically does not fit:

• • The Plagiarism: Almost all of chapter 2 is copied word-for-word from another New Testament book, the Epistle of Jude.
  • The Anachronism: In 2 Peter 3:15-16, the author refers to the Apostle Paul’s letters as a collected, well-known body of “Scripture.” Historically, Paul’s letters were not collected, circulated, and elevated to the same level as the Old Testament until the second century. Peter and Paul were contemporaries; Peter would not have referred to Paul’s letters this way.
  • The “Delayed Parousia” Defense: Interestingly, 2 Peter was written specifically to address the exact problem we just discussed: the delayed return of Jesus. The author writes to a community that is being mocked because the first generation of Christians died and the world didn’t end.
  • Early Church Doubts: Even in the ancient world, the Church was highly suspicious of it. Early Christian historians like Eusebius and theologians like Jerome openly admitted that most of the church did not believe Peter actually wrote it. It barely scraped its way into the final canon.

The Book That Probably Should Be in the Bible: 1 Enoch

If there is a book that was unjustly left on the cutting room floor by Western Christianity, it is the ancient Jewish apocalyptic text known as 1 Enoch (The Book of Enoch).

Written roughly between 300 BCE and 100 BCE, 1 Enoch is a massive, wild, and deeply influential text that expands on the story of Genesis, detailing how fallen angels (the Watchers) came to Earth, taught humanity forbidden knowledge (like metallurgy and cosmetics), and created a race of giants called the Nephilim.

Here is why it arguably belongs in the New Testament canon:

• • The New Testament Quotes It as Fact: The most compelling argument for its inclusion is that the biblical authors themselves thought it was scripture. In the canonical Book of Jude (verses 14-15), the author directly quotes 1 Enoch, attributing the prophecy to the historical Enoch.
  • The “Son of Man” Concept: When Jesus refers to himself as the “Son of Man” coming on the clouds to judge the earth, he is directly pulling from the theological framework established in 1 Enoch. Without Enoch, much of the New Testament’s apocalyptic imagery—including its complex demonology and concepts of Hell—lacks its historical context.
  • It Was in the Earliest Bibles: The earliest Christians highly revered it. Copies of it were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, proving it was essential reading for 1st-century Jewish sects.
  • It Is Still in the Bible (For Some): The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church—one of the oldest Christian bodies in the world—never removed 1 Enoch from their Bible. It remains fully canonical for tens of millions of Christians in Africa today.

Honorable Mentions

• • Shouldn’t be there: Esther. It is the only book in the entire Bible that never mentions God. It reads more like a secular Persian political thriller and was heavily debated by ancient rabbis before being included in the Hebrew Bible.
  • Should be there: The Shepherd of Hermas. This was a wildly popular Christian text in the 1st and 2nd centuries. It was actually included as official New Testament scripture in the Codex Sinaiticus (the oldest surviving complete Christian Bible from the 4th century) before later councils eventually dropped it.

This is another example for why it can be conjectured that the Bible is a purely human-created product. An omnipotent god managing the development of his message to humankind would have done a better job.

(5508) Richard Feynman’s four problems with God

Richard Feynman (1918-1988) was an American theoretical physicist. His scientific training and observations led him to dismiss the hypotheses of supernatural gods, as he explained below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlz_fbTu-gE

The first problem is actually the most fundamental and it’s the one that almost nobody notices because it hides in plain sight. You cannot evaluate a claim until you know what the claim is. Sounds obvious, right? But try applying that to God. Ask 10 deeply religious people to define God. Not describe their experience of God, not tell you what God means to them. Define God. Give you a description precise enough that you could in principle test whether something meeting that description exists. You will get 10 different answers. You will get answers that contradict each other. You will get answers that are explicitly designed to resist any possible test. God is beyond definition. God transcends human categories. To define God is to limit God.

And here’s the thing about that last type of answer. It sounds humble. It sounds appropriately respectful of divine mystery. But it is logically the most problematic answer of all. Because if God is beyond definition, if no properties can be assigned to God that would allow us to distinguish a universe with God from a universe without God, then the word God is not pointing at anything. It is a word without a reference.

Let me use an analogy I like. Suppose I tell you that there exists somewhere in the universe an entity called a blog. The blog has no mass, no energy, no spatial extent, no temporal dimension, no causal power to affect anything. It cannot be detected by any instrument. It leaves no trace of any kind. Its presence is indistinguishable from its absence. Does the blog exist? The question is genuinely meaningless. Not because the answer is no. Because the question has no answer.

A thing defined entirely by its undetectability is not a thing. It is the word thing applied to nothing. Now the sophisticated theological defense of God, the God of the philosophers, the God who is described as pure being as the ground of existence as beyond all predication, the God I want to suggest to you as exactly the same problem as the blog.

If God has no properties that differentiate his presence from his absence, if any possible universe, however, full of suffering and silence and unanswered prayer is equally consistent with God existing and not existing, then we are not choosing between two different hypotheses. We are arguing about the definition of a word. And arguments about the definition of a word are not arguments about reality. They’re arguments about language. That’s the first problem and it’s already serious enough to require a response.

But let’s keep going. But here’s what we do know. In the human case, in the case of a mind interacting with matter, there is always a physical substrate, neurons, electrochemical signals. The mind, whatever it ultimately is, is associated with physical processes that we can detect and measure. The God who answers prayers has no physical substrate. No neurons, no energy, no spatial location. And yet somehow through a mechanism that is never specified, this mind with no physical properties alters the state of the physical world in response to words spoken or thought by human beings. I spent a lot of time thinking about this and I genuinely cannot construct a coherent mechanism for it. Not because I haven’t tried because every mechanism I can imagine either requires God to have physical properties in which case God becomes part of the natural world and subject to natural investigation or requires an interaction that violates what we understand about how physical systems work.

Neither option is comfortable for theology. The first turns God into something science can eventually study and either find or not find. The second requires us to accept that our understanding of physics, the most precisely tested and verified body of knowledge our species has ever produced, is wrong in a domain that conveniently cannot be tested. That is not a position I am able to defend with a straight face. Look, I’ve been sitting with these problems for a long time, and I want to be honest with you.

Problems one and two were the ones I thought I could find a way around. I kept trying. Problems three and four are the ones where I stopped trying. This is the one that I find most elegant. And by elegant, I mean the kind of clean that a really good proof has where the result seems almost too neat. And then you check it again and it’s correct.

The most common argument for God’s existence, the one that has been made in every culture and every century is the argument from complexity. Look at the universe. Look at living things. Look at the extraordinary, improbable, intricately organized structure of it all. Something this complex must have been designed. Design requires a designer. Therefore, God.

Now, I understand why this argument is compelling. I really do. When you look at a protein, when you understand how a single enzyme works, how it folds into exactly the right three-dimensional shape to catalyze exactly the right chemical reaction, it does look for a moment like something planned. Something intended. But here’s the problem with the argument from complexity and it is a problem that I find genuinely devastating.

God as described is more complex than anything God supposedly created. Follow this carefully because it matters. The claim is that complex things require a designer. Okay. The universe is complex. Therefore, it requires a designer. God. But what is God? God is described as omniscient, knowing everything, containing complete information about every state of every particle in the universe throughout all of time. God is omnipotent, capable of any action, holding every possible causal power. God is omnipresent, existing everywhere with awareness extending across all of space.

The information content alone of an omniscient God. the sheer quantity of data required to constitute a mind that knows everything is vastly greater than the information content of the universe that God supposedly created. So by the logic of the argument from complexity, God requires a design of even greater complexity and that designer requires a designer and so on forever. The argument from complexity, if it proves anything, proves that the designer of the universe must itself be designed, which means you haven’t explained anything. You just pushed the explanation one step back and made the thing you have to explain bigger and more complicated than what you started with.

Darwin understood this uh by the way not just as a point about biology as a general logical principle. Any explanation that invokes a more complex entity to explain a less complex entity is not an explanation. It is a more elaborate version of the original puzzle. The only way the complexity argument works is if you exempt God from it. If you say God is complex, but God is the kind of thing that doesn’t require explanation. But the moment you do that, you have abandoned the argument that got you to God in the first place. You have accepted that some things of great complexity can exist without a designer.

And if that’s true, if complexity does not after all require design, then the universe doesn’t need a designer either. You can’t have it both ways. Either complexity always requires explanation. In which case, God requires one too, and you have infinite regress. Or complexity sometimes doesn’t require explanation. In which case, the argument for God from complexity fails.

There’s no third option. I’ve looked for a long time. There is no third option. This is the one I want to spend the most time on because it’s the one that I think goes deepest into what the word God is actually supposed to mean. And it’s the one that leads somewhere I did not expect. One of the core properties attributed to God, maybe the most fundamental one, the one that underlies everything else is omniscience. God knows everything. Past, present, future, every thought, every event, every quantum state of every particle in the universe.

I want to think about what that actually means, not whether it’s possible- what it means. To know the future, to genuinely completely know what will happen, you need one of two things. Either the future is determined, completely absolutely determined by the present state of the universe with no genuine randomness anywhere. Every event is the inevitable result of prior causes and a sufficiently powerful intelligence that knew the complete present state of everything could calculate in principle every future state.

This is the clockwork universe, a place’s demon, a fully deterministic world. Or the future contains genuine randomness. Events that are not determined by prior causes but arise spontaneously as quantum mechanics tells us they do. And God somehow knows the outcome of those random events in advance.

Let’s take the first option. The deterministic universe. The problem here is that determinism and free will are incompatible. If every future event, including every thought, every decision, every action of every human being is already determined by prior causes, then human choice is an illusion. What feels like deciding is actually just the predetermined unfolding of a causal chain that was fixed at the beginning of the universe.

If that’s true, then moral judgment becomes incoherent. You cannot be held responsible for an action you had no alternative but to perform. And a god who created a deterministic universe and then judges its inhabitants for the predetermined behavior of that universe is to put it plainly holding a trial where the verdict was written before the accused was born. That is not justice. That is theater.

Now let’s take the second option. God knows the future, including the outcomes of genuinely random quantum events. That quantum mechanics tells us that these outcomes are not determined. They are genuinely random, not just unknown, but unknowable in principle. Even in theory, the uncertainty is not a feature of our ignorance. It is a feature of reality.

If God knows the outcome of a genuinely random event before it occurs, then one of two things is true. Either the event is not genuinely random. It is determined by something we haven’t found yet. Which brings us back to the first option and all its problems. Or knowledge of a future event is compatible with that event being genuinely undetermined. Which means [music] God’s knowledge of the future somehow doesn’t constrain the future. Which means God’s foreknowledge is not knowledge in any sense we can understand. It is something else entirely, something for which we have no concept.

And here is where I have to stop and be honest. I have been doing physics my whole professional life. I have gotten pretty comfortable with things that seem paradoxical, with [music] particles that are in two places at once, with time that runs differently depending on how fast you’re moving, with an uncertainty principle that says the universe has fundamental limits on what can be known simultaneously.

I can live with paradox. I genuinely can. But the omniscience problem is not a paradox. A paradox has a resolution. usually a resolution that requires you to update your intuitions about what the words mean. The omniscience problem when you work through it carefully does not have a resolution.

It has a dissolution. The concept turns out not to be coherent when examined at the level of detail it requires. Not paradoxical, incoherent. There is a difference, a very important one. I want to tell you something about how I feel about all of this because I think the emotional dimension matters and scientists don’t talk about it enough.

When I was working through these problems, really working through them, not just listing them, but sitting with them and trying every angle I could think of, there was a period where I genuinely wanted to find the error in my own reasoning. Not because I had religious faith that I wanted to protect. I didn’t really not in any conventional sense but because the alternative accepting that the god concept in any form that could do the theological work it’s supposed to do is logically incoherent felt like a kind of loss.

Not for me personally for the people I love who found comfort in it. For the billions of people across history who faced terrible things and found in the idea of a god who knew and cared something that made the terrible things survivable. I did not want to take that away. I still don’t.

But I also cannot lie about what the logic shows. I can’t do it. I tried and I can’t. And here’s what I think is actually happening. What I think has been happening for a long time and what I think is worth saying clearly. The intuitions that give rise to religion, the sense that the universe is not indifferent, that what you do matters, that there is something worth calling sacred, those intuitions are not wrong.

I don’t think they’re wrong. I think they’re pointing at something real. But the concepts we built to house those intuitions, the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent personal God who monitors your behavior and answers your prayers. Those concepts don’t survive careful examination. The intuition is pointing in a real direction.

The concept is the wrong map for the territory. And the tragedy uh if it is a tragedy is not that the universe has no God. It is that the concept of God we were given is not adequate to the universe we actually live in. Now here is the thing I said earlier that my father taught me the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing the thing itself. I want to apply that now to the question underneath the God question.

What is actually there when you look? When I look, when I look as carefully as I can with everything I know, I find something that genuinely astonishes me every single time. Not a warm fuzzy astonishment, a cold, clean, almost terrifying one.

The universe is approximately 13.8 billion years old. It contains somewhere between 2 trillion and 20 trillion galaxies. Each galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars. Each star is a nuclear reactor running for millions or billions of years. And somehow one of the smaller and less distinguished planets orbiting one of those hundreds of billions of stars, a process of molecular chemistry got going that over 4 billion years produced organisms capable of looking back at all of this and asking what it is.

That is not a religious statement. That is a physical one. And the physical statement is more extraordinary to me than any religious statement I have ever heard because the religious statement says someone arranged all of this which makes it in a way less astonishing because arranged things are less surprising than things that arranged themselves. The physical statement says given the laws of this universe given the initial conditions this is what happens.

Galaxies form, stars burn, planets cool, chemistry begins, and eventually, not inevitably, but actually, because it actually happened, the universe produces something that can ask about itself. I find that so strange and so beautiful that I genuinely don’t have better words for it. I don’t know why the laws of physics are what they are. I don’t know why there is something rather than nothing.

I don’t know whether there’s something beyond what we can currently detect or describe. And I find all of that not depressing but thrilling because not knowing is not the end of the inquiry. It was the beginning of it. And the beginning of an inquiry is the most exciting place to be.

So here we are four problems with the God concept that I genuinely tried to solve and couldn’t. Not because I wasn’t looking hard enough because the problems are real. The definition problem. A god beyond all description is not a hypothesis. It is a word. The interaction problem. A non-physical mind that physically alters the world requires a mechanism that nobody has specified.

The complexity trap. A designer more complex than the design thing requires its own explanation infinitely. The knowledge problem omniscience worked through carefully is not paradoxical. It is incoherent.

What do I conclude from this? Well, then here I want to be very precise. I conclude that the God described in the major theological traditions when examined with the same rigor we would apply to any other hypothesis does not hold together. That is different from concluding that the universe is empty of meaning or that your experience of something larger than yourself is an illusion or that the question underneath the God question, why is there something rather than nothing?

Why does the universe have the character it has? What is the relationship between consciousness and physical reality? Uh that those questions are not worth uh asking. They are absolutely worth asking. They are to me the most interesting questions there are. I just think the honest answer to all of them right now is I don’t know. And I want to say something about that answer because I don’t know has a bad reputation. People hear it as a defeat has given up is the thing you say when you have nothing real to offer.

But in science in real science the kind that actually moves things forward. I don’t know is not the end of the conversation. It is the conversation. Every genuinely great discovery in physics began with someone being honest about not knowing something. Every closed answer, every God did it and every it’s just the way things are, every answer that tries to shut the question down, those are the ones that stop the inquiry.

The open ones, the ones that sit with uncertainty and say I genuinely don’t know and that is fascinating and I am going to spend the rest of my life trying to find out. Those are the ones that change everything. My father was right about the bird. Knowing the name is not knowing the thing and the name we call the mystery doesn’t change what the mystery is.

It is a well established fact that persons steeped in the knowledge of physics as well as other technical scientific fields tend to be less religious. Feynman is a good example of someone who took the god hypothesis to a deeper level of analysis than the typical person who identifies as a theist. And, at this level of inquiry, the concept of God, at least as Christians believe, tends to evaporate.

(5509) Did Jesus speak John 3:16?

The most famous verse in the Bible, as considered by Christians, is John 3:16.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

It is the most popular verse displayed in public settings. Most Christians assume that it was a direct quote of Jesus, but a reasoned analysis argues rather strongly that it was simply a sentence made up by the author of John’s gospel. The following was generated by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Whether Jesus actually spoke the words of John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…”) is a subject of major debate among biblical scholars, translators, and theologians.

While traditionally it has been read as a continuation of Jesus’ dialogue, the consensus among modern New Testament scholars is that John 3:16 is most likely the narrator (the author of the Gospel) providing theological commentary, rather than a direct quote from Jesus.

Here is a breakdown of why scholars draw this conclusion.

1. Ancient Greek Had No Quotation Marks

The most fundamental issue is a punctuation problem. The original Greek manuscripts of the New Testament did not use quotation marks, paragraph breaks, or even spaces between words.

When modern translators convert the Greek into English, they have to make an editorial guess as to where a character stops speaking and the narrator takes over. In John 3, Jesus is having a nighttime conversation with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Translators have to decide exactly where Jesus’ speech to Nicodemus ends.

2. The Shift in Verb Tense

In the verses leading up to John 3:16, Jesus is speaking to Nicodemus in the present and future tenses about what must happen (e.g., the Son of Man must be lifted up).

However, at verse 16, the text suddenly shifts into the past tense: “For God so loved the world that he gave…” This past-tense reflection makes perfect historical sense for a narrator writing decades after the crucifixion, looking back at the completed event of Jesus’ death. It makes less sense for Jesus to speak about his own ultimate sacrifice as an event that had already happened while he was still sitting in a room with Nicodemus.

3. The Vocabulary Belongs to “John”

The specific vocabulary used in John 3:16 strongly matches the author’s voice, rather than the way Jesus speaks in the rest of the Gospels.

• • “Only Begotten Son”: The Greek word monogenēs (often translated as “one and only” or “only begotten”) is a hallmark of the Gospel of John’s narrator. The narrator uses it in the prologue (John 1:14, 1:18) and in 1 John 4:9. There is no record in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, or Luke) of Jesus ever referring to himself using this specific Greek term.
  • “Believes in Him”: The phrase “believing in” (Greek: pisteuōn eis) is used constantly by the author of John to describe the reaction people should have to Jesus, but it is rarely a phrase Jesus uses as a self-directive in the other historical accounts.

4. How Modern Bibles Handle It

Because of this ambiguity, you will see different Bibles format the chapter differently:

• • “Red-Letter” Bibles: Many traditional Bibles that print the words of Jesus in red will extend the red ink all the way through John 3:21, attributing the whole block of text to Jesus.
  • Modern Translations: If you look at translations like the Revised Standard Version (RSV) or the study notes in modern editions of the NIV and ESV, they often close the quotation marks at verse 15. They treat verses 16 through 21 as an explanatory epilogue written by the evangelist to summarize the meaning of the conversation.

In short, while the verse is the central theological thesis of the Gospel of John, historical and textual evidence strongly suggests it is the author’s profound reflection on Jesus’ life, rather than a transcript of Jesus’ own words.

This distinction is not important to atheists or agnostics who assume as any objective historian would agree that even those passages quoting Jesus are most likely inventions by the author. But to Christians, this might be problematic- i.e, the verse that firmly establishes their ‘effortless’ recipe for salvation was not spoken by Jesus but rather written by an ‘unknown’ man at least 60 years after Jesus had died. And if one assumes that Jesus made this statement, why did such a crucially-important quote not appear in the three earlier gospels?

(5510) Ten Christian responses to Typhoon Haiyan

Typhoon Haiyan was a particularly deadly storm that hit the Philippians in November 2013. It resulted in more than 6000 fatalities. In commenting on the way Christians responded to this event, John Loftus critiqued 10 of their apologetic defenses:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2013/11/the-top-10-christian-responses-to.html

Here is a recent CNN news report about the devastation. I hurt for the victims don’t you? Why doesn’t God? From my experience the following are the top 10 Christian responses (i.e., excuses) to it in descending order:

10) “Let’s send help. God has no hands but our hands.” Yet just once I’d like to see God actually DO something.

9) “Let’s pray for the survivors.” But prayer does nothing to help. It makes believers who pray FEEL like they’re being helpful and that’s it. For instance, have they not already been praying for the children of the world, for peace and less suffering? Then those previous prayers were not answered. So why do they think doing more of the same will get better results?

8) “God knows what is best, ours is not to question but believe. God will work it all out in the end.” (Romans 8:28). Just once I would like God to reveal what he knows, but he doesn’t. Believing in the midst of clear signs that God either doesn’t exist, cannot do anything about it, or just doesn’t care is irrational. But that’s the nature of faith. It is a vice not a virtue. If God will work it all out then for whom is he going to do this? The little girl trapped under rubble who slowly and painfully dies in a few days? The mother who loses all her loved ones and everything she owns? The lover who was just about to be married whose fiance is permanently disfigured and disabled? Just ask these people at the end of their lives, if given a choice, would they rather not experience this present pain? Many of them will never get over such a huge loss.

7) “God cannot alter the laws of nature even though he knows these disasters will happen sometimes.” Then God cannot be the creator either. God supposedly created the universe out of nothing, so if he cannot alter what he created (the lesser deed) then he could not have created the universe in the first place (the greater deed).

6) “God gives life so he can take it away.” Then he never gave us life in the first place. For once a gift is given then the giver of that gift, by merely giving the gift, doesn’t have a moral right to take it back. Just think of a blood donor. After giving the blood he has no moral right to take it back, even if he doesn’t like how the recipient of his blood behaves, and even if the recipient is ungrateful for the blood.

5) “In times of disaster people are more likely to become Christians, so this can be a good thing.” Then let’s have more and more disasters! Bring ’em on. If this is a good thing then God isn’t producing enough disasters. Let ’em rain down on us. The fact is though, that while disasters do produce believers, the faith embraced by the survivors is going to be the ones found inside their own cultures.

4) “This is all due to the first pair of sinners in the Garden of Eden.” But even the Christian God says the sins of the fathers are not to be placed on the sons (Ezekiel 18:19-20). Apparently that was said before the Garden of Eden story was even written or known by the prophet Ezekiel. Evolution destroys the notion there was a first human pair anyway. We even find many similar myths in the ancient Mesopotamian world that predate the Genesis story. This tells us these myths were the warp and woof of those cultures.

3) “Any Christians who die will be in heaven so what’s the big deal? The ones who died would probably never believe during their lives anyway.” I’ve argued that Christians who accept this justification are pro-death. Life doesn’t matter to them so much as going to heaven. They are too heavenly minded to be any earthly good. If that’s Christianity then I don’t want anything to do with it, and neither should they.

2) “Their sins caused it so they personally got what they deserved.” Just think Pat Robertson here. I predict he may say the same thing with regard to Typhoon Haiyan. He’s a laughing stock. Lost on him are the children. What did they do to deserve this? Such a God, if he exists, is genocidal in nature and should be rejected by all civilized people.

1) And the number one reason is, “Praise God! I wasn’t harmed! Isn’t God good?” This might be said by some Christian who lived through Typhoon Haiyan and escaped death. I have never known a more delusional statement of faith. You see, the person who makes this statement thinks of himself as the center of the universe, someone who is more important to God than everyone else. He is a self-absorbed arrogant person. I wouldn’t want to be his friend. His Mama should spank him right now in front of us all.

The way that Christians respond to natural disasters such as this reveals the vapidity of their theology. Their god is never tested in any factual manner. No matter what happens, there will be Christians at the fore to explain how this tragedy fits neatly within their bubble of belief, and that there is no reason to give yardage to any doubts. Once clear of such stifling indoctrination, it is easy to see that the typhoon as well as every other natural phenomena happens without the creation, observation, or otherwise guidance from any supernatural entity.

(5511) The Catholic Church is a cult

The predominant Christian ‘denomination’ is the original one, the Catholic Church. As has been bantered around for centuries, this organization functions in a way indistinguishable from a cult. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2026/04/the-worlds-most-dangerous-cult.html#more

Is it really fair to call Catholicism a cult? Or does this reflect my growing up in a mostly Protestant small town in rural northern Indiana in the 1940s-1950s?  We were good friends with the Catholics in town, but we were put off by their claims to be superior Christians—and the excessive pageantry their church is famous for. There are quite a few cults in the broad sweep of Christian brands, e.g., the mega-churches pastored by Joel Osteen and Kenneth Copeland. But there are well over a billion Catholics in the world.

Let me make the case that their church is a cult—and a dangerous one at that.

(1)  Belief in demons and exorcism. 

The Bible itself provides “evidence” for this superstition. For example, the fifth chapter of Mark’s gospel opens with this description of a mentally ill man:

 “He lived among the tombs, and no one could restrain him any more, even with a chain, for he had often been restrained with shackles and chains, but the chains he wrenched apart, and the shackles he broke in pieces, and no one had the strength to subdue him. Night and day among the tombs and on the mountains he was always howling and bruising himself with stones.” (vv. 3-5)

The New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition, provides this headline: Jesus Heals a Man Possessed by Demons. As the story progresses, the demons who control this man’s behavior beg Jesus to transfer them into a nearby herd of pigs. Jesus does this—we can assume Mark meant that Jesus did this by a magic spell—and the pigs rush off a cliff and drown in the lake below. Any mental health professional today knows that there were no demons afflicting this man. There are so many different kinds of mental illness, but in the ancient world this was not understood, hence the belief in demon-possession.

Responsible religions today should work hard to get their followers to reject demons as a working hypothesis for anything.

Yet…the Catholic church doesn’t agree. Just last month, Pope Leo met with the leaders of the International Association of Exorcists, who recommended that exorcists be appointed in every diocese. So here is a major world religion still embracing ancient superstitions. On Christmas Eve in 2012—just ten days after the school massacre at Sandy Hook school in Connecticut (twenty kids, and six adults killed)—I attended a party at the home of a devout Catholic woman. She offered this explanation for the tragedy: “God must have wanted more angels.” If a Catholic priest had been present, he would right away have gone into exorcism mode to remove the evil demon that had invaded her catechism-damaged brain. But in fact, there was no demon involved: the catechism-damage had resulted in major levels of stupidity and ignorance. How could she possibly have believed that her god acquires more angels by murdering school children? That itself if a form of mental illness.

Any church that endorses exorcisms qualifies as a cult.

(2)  They refuse to ordain women as priests. 

Just as Pope Francis had done, Pope Leo has offered his opinion that women should never be ordained as priests. They can be given important roles in the church, but the priesthood is not open to them. Such rigid rules are typical of a cult.

(3) The Catholic church remains opposed to birth control and abortion.

This in the face of the alarming overpopulation crisis that the world faces. The damage and suffering these policies cause are mindbogglingly stupid and unnecessary. But their theology seizes the day: it is the cult god who arranged for the sperm to fertilize the egg, so it’s already a sacred being. No matter the circumstances of the conception. No matter the extreme poverty or depression of the women who are forced to have babies they don’t want.

(4)  The Catholic church enthusiastically promotes its own Cult of Mary. 

In 1950, Pope Pius XII declared that Mary had ascended bodily into heaven, and the church claims she also makes personal appearances around the globe. Yet by 1950 the pope was surely aware that the biblical concepts of heaven and earth no longer apply. There is no physical heaven above the earth to which Jesus and Mary could have ascended. So are they somewhere in orbit around the sun between Earth and Mars? Here’s another irony: the church won’t ordain women, yet in this case a woman is elevated to the status of goddess. The church declines to inform its members that virgin-born heroes were common in the ancient world, hence the virgin mother of Jesus is a borrowed concept. The ultimate irony is that we have little if any verifiable information about who the mother of Jesus actually was. Today the Catholic bureaucracy continues in over-drive mode to convince the devout that Mary is the Queen of Heaven.

The church seems to base its adoration of Mary on the opening chapters of Luke’s gospel, which is easily understood as Christian mythology. There is no way whatever to verify Luke’s story of the annunciation: it derived from his theological imagination. All of the gospels were written to promote the early Jesus cult. And today the Catholic bureaucracy continues in over-drive mode to convince the devout that Mary is Queen of Heaven. This prayer no doubt helps confirm her status as a goddess:

“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women,

And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners,

Now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

(5) The Catholic church thrives on show business.

It enthusiastically embraces elaborate stage settings, extravagant costumes, rituals—and its own brand of magic potions, e.g., at every Mass, the wine and wafers supposedly become the real blood and flesh of Jesus. It looks very much like the promoters of goofy beliefs of the distant past are fully aware that they need flashy spectacles to keep the devout in awe. This is one of the Catholic church’s specialties.

(6)  Here we are almost at Easter Sunday, with Catholics—indeed all Christian brands—worshiping, adoring, their “risen” lord.

But cults that believed in dying-and-rising savior gods were common in the ancient world. Here again, there was heavy borrowing by the early Jesus cult. For a very detailed description of this reality, see Richard Carrier’s 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan Guys. Get Over It. As Carrier states in this essay, “Jesus is just a late comer to the party.”

In fact, Easter time is a perfect occasion to counter the Christian enthusiasm about the truth and purity of their dogma and piety. If we could only get the devout to read the gospels, they could begin to see that the Bible itself plays a major role in the undermining of their cherished beliefs.

The Catholic Church operates in a manner reminiscent of how one would expect a human cult to function. But, as an instrument of a supernatural god intent on ministering and judging humans, it couldn’t be more distant. That no god is involved in this nonsense is self-evident.

(5512) Three ways Peter joined in with Jesus

The gospels tell three contradictory stories about the manner in which the apostle Peter became a follower of Jesus. Two or all three must be false. The following was taken from:

https://infidels.org/library/modern/paul-carlson-nt-contradictions/

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

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

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

There is no apologetic escape from this problem, although attempts have been made. To anyone with an unshackled mind, it is clear that the gospel authors were making it up on the fly.

(5513) Bultmann’s demythologization of Christianity

Rudolf Bultmann re-interpreted Christianity though a strictly naturalistic lens, as summarized by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and New Testament scholar who fundamentally reshaped how the modern world reads the Bible. If Albert Schweitzer (whom we discussed earlier) proved that the historical Jesus was a 1st-century apocalyptic prophet with a worldview entirely alien to ours, Bultmann asked the next logical question: How can a modern, scientifically literate person possibly believe in a 1st-century religion?

To answer this, Bultmann developed a theological project that made him one of the most famous—and controversial—figures in Christian history. Here is a summary of his core ideas.

1. Demythologization (Entmythologisierung)

This is Bultmann’s most famous and misunderstood concept. Bultmann argued that the New Testament was written using the “mythological” worldview of the ancient Near East.

The Ancient Myth: The biblical authors believed in a three-tiered universe (Heaven above, Earth in the middle, Hell below). They believed that sickness was caused by demons, that angels physically descended from the sky, and that the world would end in a cosmic catastrophe.

The Modern Dilemma: Bultmann famously wrote, “It is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”

The Solution: “Demythologizing” does not mean deleting the myths to destroy the Bible. Rather, it means interpreting the myth to find the deeper, existential truth hidden inside it. You strip away the ancient 1st-century packaging to reveal the timeless message.

2. Form Criticism (Formgeschichte)

Bultmann was a pioneer of “Form Criticism,” a method of analyzing the Gospels. He argued that the Gospels are not historical biographies written by eyewitnesses.

Instead, they are patchworks of oral traditions, preaching modules, and community myths that were passed down and shaped by the early Church to solve their specific problems.

Because of this, Bultmann was highly skeptical that we could know much of anything about the historical Jesus. However, for Bultmann, this lack of historical data didn’t matter.

3. Christian Existentialism

Bultmann was heavily influenced by the existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger. Bultmann argued that the point of Christianity is not to believe a list of historical facts about a man who lived 2,000 years ago.

The Kerygma: The core of the Gospel is the kerygma (the Greek word for the “proclamation” or “preached message”).

The Encounter: When you hear the message of the cross and the resurrection, it is not asking you to intellectually agree with an ancient historical event. It is demanding an existential decision right now. It is a confrontation that forces you to abandon your own self-reliance, face your mortality, and choose to live authentically in radical trust in God.

4. The Rejection of the Physical Resurrection

Because Bultmann viewed the New Testament through this existential, demythologized lens, he completely rejected the physical, historical resurrection of Jesus.

To Bultmann, a biological corpse coming back to life is an ancient myth that misses the point.

He famously stated that Jesus “rose into the kerygma.” This means the resurrection happened in the faith of the disciples. Jesus “lives on” whenever the message of the cross is preached and someone’s life is transformed by it.

Summary

For traditional and conservative Christians, Bultmann was viewed as a heretic who gutted the faith of its historical and miraculous foundations. But for millions of modernists, Bultmann was a theological savior. He provided a way to remain intellectually honest and scientifically grounded while still finding profound, life-changing meaning in the Christian message.

Absent evidence to the contrary, it is abundantly clear that events of the First Century that led to the creation of the Christian religion were not miraculous and that no physical laws of nature were violated. The fact that the Christian religion can be explained without resorting to miracles is compelling- in truth, nothing supernatural is needed.

(5514) The uneasy marriage between evolution and Christianity

Christianity has long opposed the scientific theory of biological evolution, precisely because it causes severe damage to its theology, but the eventual accumulation of evidence for this theory has resulted in a quasi-surrender- forcing the faith to accept the outlines of evolution, while retaining  belief in a god-created biosphere.

The following prompt was given to Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Given biological evolution, is it necessarily true if Christianity is true that there has to be a cutoff where someone made it into an afterlife while their parents and grandparents simply died and failed to exist- as is considered true for present day non-human animals?

And this was the response:

This is one of the most fascinating and difficult friction points between evolutionary biology and classical Christian theology.

The problem is caused by the collision of two different paradigms: biology is a gradient, but classical theology is binary.

Evolution is like a color spectrum; there is no single generation where a Homo heidelbergensis suddenly gave birth to a Homo sapiens. It was a microscopic, million-year blur from blue to green. However, classical theology generally teaches that having an immortal soul is binary—you either have an eternal destiny, or you do not.

If you accept both evolution and Christianity, theologians generally propose three ways to resolve this paradox. And yes, some of them absolutely require accepting the bizarre and somewhat tragic “cutoff” you described.

1. The “Ontological Leap” (The Strict Cutoff)

This is the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church (outlined by Pope Pius XII in 1950) and is held by many orthodox theologians. It embraces the cutoff completely.

• • The Mechanism: This view accepts that the human physical body evolved continuously from lower primates. However, it asserts that the spiritual soul cannot evolve from matter. Therefore, at a specific moment in history, God directly and miraculously created the first human soul and infused it into a biologically evolved hominid.
  • The Implication: If this is true, then your premise is exactly correct. There was a literal generation where a biologically modern hominid (who had an eternal soul and the capacity for sin and salvation) sat by the campfire with its biological mother and father, who did not have eternal souls and simply ceased to exist upon death. Theologically, the difference between the parent and child was invisible to the eye, but cosmically massive.

2. The “Homo Divinus” (Federal Headship)

Many prominent Christian evolutionary biologists and theologians (like Denis Alexander and John Stott) propose the “Federal Headship” model. This view slightly shifts the definition of what makes us spiritually “human.”

• • The Mechanism: In this view, a large population of anatomically modern humans evolved naturally. At some point (perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 years ago), God selected a specific pair (or a small group) of these already-evolved humans and revealed Himself to them, bringing them into a covenant relationship. They became Homo divinus (the divine human).
  • The Implication: The “soul” here isn’t necessarily a newly injected ghost; rather, it is the capacity and calling to relate to God. In this view, the cutoff still exists, but it was a relational and covenantal cutoff, not a biological one. The selected humans became the spiritual representatives (the “Adam and Eve”) for humanity going forward.

3. The Emergent Soul and the Redemption of Nature

A growing number of modern theologians challenge the fundamental premise of your question: the idea that non-human animals “simply died and failed to exist.”

• • The Greek Intrusion: Many modern theologians argue that the idea of a purely “spiritual, immortal human soul” contrasting with “disposable animal bodies” actually comes from ancient Greek philosophy (Plato), not the Bible. The Hebrew word for soul (nephesh) is used to describe animals in Genesis long before humans arrive.
  • Cosmic Restoration: Drawing heavily on Romans 8 (which states that all of creation is waiting to be liberated from decay), thinkers like C.S. Lewis and David Bentley Hart argue that if God is going to restore the cosmos, that restoration must include the animal kingdom.
  • The Implication: In this framework, the cutoff disappears. As consciousness and relational capacity evolved gradually over millions of years, the capacity to participate in the afterlife also evolved gradually. The early hominid ancestors—and perhaps all animals—do not simply cease to exist, but will be caught up in the final renewal of the physical universe, each according to its own capacity.

In short, to reconcile evolution with orthodox Christianity, you must either accept a sharp, invisible spiritual dividing line drawn between an ancient parent and child, or you must rethink the theology of animals and assume God’s plan for the afterlife is vast enough to include the ancestors, too.

This degree of handwaving and tiptoeing around this conundrum reveals the fact that evolution and Christianity are not good bedfellows. To be intellectually honest, only one of these two can be true.

(5515) The resurrection of the saints debate

The author of the Gospel of Matthew recorded an event where dead people rose out of their graves at the time of the resurrection of Jesus:

Matthew 27:52-53

And the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people.

This amazing claim has surgically divided Christian theologians into two camps- the ones who view this event as factual, and those who see it as literary fiction. Both positions are problematic. Literalists are left to defend a comic-bookish fantasy, while non-literalists are opening the door for indecision concerning where to draw the line between biblical fact and fiction. The following was composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Whether the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27:52-53 (“The tombs broke open, and the bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life”) is factual or a theological literary device is a subject of intense debate.

There is no single consensus among “all” Christian theologians, as the answer depends entirely on a scholar’s specific theological tradition and view of biblical inerrancy.

If we divide the theological world into two main camps, the views are starkly contrasted:

• • Mainline, Catholic, and Critical Scholars: Overwhelmingly view the passage as non-historical (an apocalyptic literary device).
  • Conservative and Evangelical Theologians: Overwhelmingly view the passage as strictly historical and factual.

Here is breakdown of why theologians fall into these two camps.

1. The Mainline and Critical View: Apocalyptic Symbolism (Non-Historical)

Most modern biblical scholars outside of conservative evangelicalism do not believe dead bodies literally crawled out of their graves and walked around Jerusalem. They interpret this passage as apocalyptic literature—a genre of ancient Jewish writing that uses dramatic, cosmic imagery to explain profound spiritual realities.

Here is why they conclude it is not a literal, historical event:

• • The “Matthew Only” Problem: This massive, reality-altering event is found only in the Gospel of Matthew. It is not mentioned in Mark, Luke, John, the letters of Paul, or any secular Roman or Jewish histories of the era (such as the writings of Josephus). Scholars argue that if a multitude of resurrected saints were walking around Jerusalem appearing to people, it would have been the most documented and talked-about event in the ancient world.
  • Apocalyptic Signifiers: In ancient Jewish literature, the arrival of a new cosmic age is frequently signaled by specific literary tropes: darkness at noon, earthquakes, rocks splitting, and the dead rising. Scholars argue Matthew was using this established symbolic language to tell his readers a theological truth: The death of Jesus is the earth-shattering event that defeats death itself.
  • Theological “Special Effects”: Scholars in this camp argue that forcing a modern, journalistic lens onto an ancient Jewish text fundamentally misunderstands how ancient biographies were written. They argue Matthew was communicating a profound truth through literary “special effects,” rather than recording a literal historical event.

2. The Conservative and Evangelical View: Literal History (Factual)

For conservative, orthodox, and evangelical theologians, Matthew 27:52-53 must be read as a literal, historical event. To say otherwise violates the doctrine of biblical inerrancy (the belief that the Bible is without error in all its historical claims).

Here is why they defend its historicity:

• • Narrative Continuity: Theologians point out that Matthew embeds this event right in the middle of a strictly historical narrative about the crucifixion of Jesus. There is no grammatical or textual marker to indicate Matthew suddenly paused the historical account to insert a fictional metaphor.
  • The Slippery Slope: Conservative scholars argue that if you decide the resurrection of the saints in Matthew 27 is a fictional literary device, there is no hermeneutical reason to stop you from applying that exact same logic to the resurrection of Jesus in Matthew 28. If the saints rising is a metaphor, the bodily resurrection of Christ might be dismissed as a metaphor too, which would collapse the foundation of orthodox Christianity.

The Licona Controversy: To understand how fiercely the conservative camp defends the historicity of this passage, one can look at the 2011 controversy surrounding Dr. Michael Licona. Licona, a prominent evangelical scholar, wrote a book suggesting that the raised saints in Matthew 27 were likely an apocalyptic literary device rather than historical fact. The backlash from the evangelical community was massive. Prominent theologians accused him of denying biblical inerrancy, and Licona was ultimately forced to resign from his academic and apologetics positions.

Summary

If you ask a conservative or evangelical theologian, they will emphatically state it is historical fact, pointing to the requirement of a reliable, inerrant biblical text. If you ask a mainline, critical, or progressive scholar, they will state it is a fictional, apocalyptic literary device meant to symbolize the cosmic power of Jesus’ death.

These two verses represent a powerful reason to conclude that no supernatural god was involved in the composition of the gospels. The Bible should have been written in a fashion that causes a coalescence of opinions of Christian scholars, not one that violently divides them in half.

(5516) An accountant’s view of Christianity

In the following, an accountant evaluates Christianity using the tools of his trade:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1sf0ytc/christianity_is_worse_than_false/

I’m an accountant. My job is simple: claims require documentation. Every number on the page has a source, and every source can be checked. When documentation can’t be produced, we don’t charitably assume it exists somewhere.

My thesis is this: when evaluated against the standards of epistemology, modal logic, and the historical criticism of scripture, Christian metaphysical claims cannot achieve truth or falsity for any mind bounded by sense data. Not because the evidence is insufficient, but because the architecture of the claims makes that contact impossible in principle.

I’ve been applying the audit framework-standard to Christianity for several years, and here’s what I found.

The finding isn’t that Christianity is false; it’s something more uncomfortable. The central claims of Christianity have been built, according to their own doctrine, to avoid contact with verifiable reality at any point in the chain. Minds like ours, bounded by sense data, dependent on what other people can also check, lack both the access and the cognitive equipment to distinguish any Christian truth claim from the snow on a dead CRT TV channel. The signal isn’t there, and it can’t be. Not because God is or isn’t real. That would require there to be a signal and that signal to be wrong. No, not that, but because the architecture of the claims makes contact with our kind of mind impossible.

Part 1

Christians describe God as simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and desirous of universal belief. These three attributes, taken together by Christian doctrine itself, generate a testable prediction: everyone believes. Everyone does not believe. This isn’t mysterious. A triangle with two sides isn’t mysterious. A married bachelor isn’t mysterious. They’re not paradoxes awaiting sophisticated theological resolution: they’re contradictions. When pressed, the standard retreats are free will, general revelation, and Molinist middle knowledge. I’ve examined each. Each either relocates the contradiction or quietly concedes it. The club’s own rulebook eliminates the club’s own God.

Part 2

Every piece of information you’ve ever verified, you verified the same way: by comparing it against something external that other people could also check. This is not an atheist standard of evidence we are misapplying to Christianity because we know it can’t clear a high enough bar. This is the same standard of evidence in auditing a financial statement, the only standard any of us has ever actually used.

Divine revelation fails this not because we haven’t tried hard enough, but because of what it is. Revelation is an internal mental state. Internal mental states are opaque to everyone except the person having them. You can’t audit a thought. You can’t subpoena a vision. You can’t independently verify that the voice Abram heard in Genesis 15 was God and not the ancient Near Eastern equivalent of a bad night’s sleep, mental illness, or any other natural cause.

We are finite, sense-bound apes. We assess claims against a shared external world that other finite, sense-bound apes can also examine. Christianity’s central claim, in essence, is to be a billion-dollar business whose books can’t be audited because the underlying documentation was never in this world to begin with. That’s not insufficient evidence, and the finding is easy to discover for yourself.

Part 3

Ask an accountant which textbook to study, and they’ll hand you one. The standards inside it are consistent, externally verifiable, and updated when evidence demands it. Depreciating land is a category error because land doesn’t lose productive value over time, not because it’s an opinion one can have that simply disagrees with another equally valid opinion. It’s a finding.

Christianity hands you several textbooks, each contradicting the others, each backed by an institution historically willing to excommunicate or burn the readers of the competing editions. We read Mark because the Greek and Roman churches liked Mark, not because Mark passed an authenticity test. The crucifixion occurs on different days in Mark and John. Both are allegedly canonical divine facts, and yet nobody bothered to resolve the conflict before the ink dried on what is supposedly the words of an omniscient, omnipotent deity.

The selection criteria that were actually used (apostolicity, orthodoxy, widespread use) are arguments from popularity in ecclesiastical clothing. I don’t care what the fourth-century church found useful. The canon is the accounting standard of a firm that certified its own books, picked its own auditors, and burned the ones who disagreed.

The finding:

Christianity began soft: Gnostics and proto-orthodox, Essenes and God-fearing pagans, a dozen competing versions of what the whole thing meant. Then it hardened around councils and creeds and institutional power, and as it hardened, it locked in every problem above. The contradictions became mysteries. The transmission problem became faith. The canonical chaos became tradition.

What remains isn’t a truth claim. It’s the shape left by one that was never there.

I’m not asking Christianity to be proven. I’m asking it to clear the lowest possible bar: is this claim truth-apt at all? Can it, in principle, be true or false for a mind like yours?

The number of grains of sand in Andromeda is either even or odd. You’ll never count them. But reality contains the answer in principle: the claim is truth-apt even if we can’t access it.

Christianity’s central claims can’t clear that bar. The architecture of the claims, hardened over two thousand years, ensures that no mind bounded by sense data can distinguish them from static. The books don’t reconcile. The documentation doesn’t exist. The snow on the screen isn’t a picture of God. It’s just snow.

What this points out is that an actual god would have left us with a book that stands up to scrutiny, exhibits consistency, and, yes, provides insights unknown at the time of publication. Instead we are expected to stand in awe of a book that is inferior to what a high school senior with a bad attitude could produce.

(5517) Notable things missing from the Bible

If it is assumed that an omniscient mind oversaw the creation of the Bible, then it is fair game to observe things that seemingly should be included but instead are missing. The following list was created by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

When people talk about what is “missing” from the Bible, they are usually referring to one of three categories: ancient texts that were lost or excluded, massive narrative gaps in the story, or modern scientific and historical concepts that simply weren’t part of the ancient worldview.

Here is a breakdown of the most notable things missing from the Bible.

1. The “Lost” and Excluded Texts

The Bible is not a single book, but a curated library. During the centuries it took to compile the official canon, many texts were excluded, and some were simply lost to history.

• • The “Lost” Letters of Paul: The New Testament contains several letters written by the Apostle Paul, but we know he wrote others that did not survive. For example, in 1 Corinthians 5:9, Paul explicitly mentions a previous letter he wrote to the church in Corinth, which has never been found. He also mentions a letter to the Laodiceans (Colossians 4:16) that is missing.
  • The Gnostic Gospels: In the 1st and 2nd centuries, many other accounts of Jesus’ life were written, such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Judas. The early Church excluded these from the New Testament because they contained “Gnostic” theology (a mystical sect of early Christianity) that contradicted the core teachings of the four accepted Gospels.
  • The Book of Enoch: This ancient Jewish apocalyptic text is actually quoted directly in the New Testament (in the Book of Jude). However, with the exception of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, almost all Jewish and Christian traditions ultimately excluded the Book of Enoch from their official Bibles.
  • The Apocrypha (Depending on your Bible): If you open a standard Protestant Bible, there is a “missing” gap of about 400 years between the Old and New Testaments. Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include the “Apocrypha” or “Deuterocanonical” books (like Maccabees, Tobit, and Judith) which cover this history, but Protestant reformers removed them in the 16th century.

2. The Narrative Gaps (The “Silent” Years)

The biblical writers were not modern biographers; they only recorded what they felt was strictly necessary for their theological message. This leaves massive holes in the narrative.

• • Jesus’ Teens and Twenties: We have stories of Jesus’ birth, one story of him at the temple at age 12, and then absolute silence until he begins his public ministry around age 30. These 18 “silent years” are completely unaccounted for in the biblical text.
  • A Physical Description of Jesus: Despite being the central figure of the text, there is not a single physical description of Jesus in the New Testament. We do not know his height, his build, his eye color, or the length of his hair.
  • The Fate of the Apostles: The Book of Acts tells the story of the early Church, but it ends abruptly while Paul is under house arrest in Rome. Aside from James and Judas Iscariot, the Bible does not record how the rest of the original 12 Apostles died. We rely entirely on extra-biblical church tradition for the stories of their martyrdoms.

3. Historical and Scientific Specifics

Because the Bible was written thousands of years ago for ancient Near Eastern audiences, it lacks concepts that modern readers often look for.

• • The Name of the Pharaoh: The Book of Exodus features an epic showdown between Moses and the Pharaoh of Egypt. However, the author never names the Pharaoh, simply referring to his title. Historians still debate whether it was Ramses II, Thutmose III, or someone else entirely.
  • Dinosaurs and Paleontology: The Bible does not contain modern scientific categories. While some readers try to identify creatures like the “Behemoth” or “Leviathan” in the Book of Job as dinosaurs, the text is writing from an ancient, poetic, and mythological framework, not a paleontological one.
  • Modern Cosmology and Germ Theory: The biblical authors wrote using the science of their day. They describe the cosmos from a geocentric viewpoint (an earth-centered universe) and attribute disease to spiritual forces or divine judgment rather than microscopic pathogens.

4. A Detailed Map of the Afterlife

While the Bible talks extensively about salvation, its actual descriptions of Heaven and Hell are surprisingly vague, largely relying on poetry and metaphor.

• • The Mechanics of Heaven/Hell: The vivid imagery of Hell as a fiery cavern ruled by demons with pitchforks, or Heaven as people playing harps on clouds, actually comes from later literature—specifically Dante’s Inferno and John Milton’s Paradise Lost—not the Bible. The biblical text uses metaphors like “a great banquet,” “a new city,” “outer darkness,” or a “lake of fire” to describe ultimate realities, but avoids giving a literal, geographic blueprint of the afterlife.

5. Missing Theological Blueprints

Many concepts that are foundational to modern Christianity are surprisingly absent from the actual text, having been developed by church councils centuries later.

• • The Word “Trinity”: The word “Trinity” appears nowhere in the Bible. While the New Testament mentions the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it never explicitly explains the complex mathematical theology of how God is “three persons in one essence.” It took the early Church over 300 years of intense debate to hammer out that specific doctrine.
  • The Date of Jesus’ Birth: The Bible gives absolutely no date, month, or even a clear season for the nativity. (In fact, the mention of shepherds sleeping outside with their flocks suggests it was likely not winter). The date of December 25th was chosen by the Roman church centuries later.
  • The Word “Rapture”: The specific word “Rapture”—and the modern concept of believers suddenly vanishing into the sky before a period of global tribulation—is missing from the Bible. This specific theological framework (Dispensational Premillennialism) was popularized in the 1830s by an Anglican minister named John Nelson Darby.

6. More Narrative Blackouts

Just like the “silent years” of Jesus, the biblical authors routinely skipped massive chunks of their protagonists’ lives if they didn’t serve the immediate theological point.

• • Moses’ Royal Upbringing: In the Book of Exodus, we see Moses rescued from the river as a baby, and in the very next narrative breath, he is a grown man. The roughly 40 years he spent being raised as an Egyptian prince in the epicenter of the most powerful empire on earth are entirely skipped.
  • What Jesus Wrote in the Sand: In the famous story of the woman caught in adultery (John 8), the religious leaders demand she be stoned. Jesus bends down and writes something in the dirt with his finger, which causes all of her accusers to drop their stones and walk away. The text famously never reveals what he wrote.
  • Paul’s “Thorn in the Flesh”: The Apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians that he was given a “thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me.” He begged God to remove it, but God refused. To this day, no one knows what it was. Scholars guess it was anything from a recurring physical illness (like malaria or failing eyesight) to severe depression or a specific human rival.

7. Missing Perspectives

Because of the specific era and culture in which the text was generated, certain voices and viewpoints are absent.

• • Authorship by Women: While the Bible features heroic and central female figures (Ruth, Esther, Deborah, Mary), there are no books in the standard canon definitively authored by a woman. The entire text was written, compiled, and edited by men, meaning the direct, unfiltered female perspective of the ancient world is structurally missing.
  • The “Other Side” of the Conquest: The Book of Joshua details the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan from their own perspective—framing it as a divinely mandated victory. We have no written records in the Bible from the perspective of the Canaanites, Amorites, or Jebusites who were being displaced or conquered.
  • The Rest of the Globe: The biblical narrative is geographically locked to the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin. It contains no mention of the massive empires, cultures, and histories occurring simultaneously in the Americas, East Asia, or Northern Europe.

8. Explicit Condemnation of Certain Practices

Modern readers often expect the Bible to read like a 21st-century human rights charter, but it is missing explicit prohibitions against several things we now consider objectively immoral.

• • The Abolition of Slavery: While the Bible regulates how slaves should be treated (and the New Testament encourages masters to treat slaves as brothers), it never explicitly condemns the institution of slavery itself, a silence that was heavily weaponized during the American Civil War.
  • Polygamy: Many of the greatest heroes of the Old Testament (Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon) had multiple wives and concubines. While the Bible frequently shows that polygamy leads to severe family dysfunction and jealousy, it surprisingly never includes a direct commandment from God forbidding the practice.

Although, it would be a mistake to assert that a bible inspired by an omnipotent god should contain all of what is listed above, it is fair to assume that a good portion of them should have been addressed. There is no need to wonder if it is assumed to be a product solely of human effort.

(5518) C.S. Lewis’ argument for hell fails

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a British lay theologian who promoted the concept that God is absolved of blame for people going to hell because, for those who will be sent there, it is a ‘choice’ of their own making. The following post eviscerates this theory:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1sflu2w/cs_lewis_argument_of_hell_being_the_abscence_of/

C.S Lewis’ argument of hell being the absence of God fails because God still has the responsibility to keep us safe.

It should be evident that absolutely none of us are here with our own accord or consent- which is itself another argument but I’m not going to expand it- so the point being, our responsibility to stay within God’s kingdom is erased due to the fact that we did not choose to exist, nor did we choose the moral and spiritual conditions under which we would be judged. If God creates a person out of nothing, places them in a fallen world with limited knowledge, biased desires, and a finite lifespan, and then presents eternal separation as a “choice,” that choice is structurally coerced – not free in any meaningful sense.

Now to develop the argument against C.S. Lewis’ view that God respects our choice to go to hell: C.S. Lewis famously said that the gates of hell of being locked from the inside, suggesting that the damned refuse repentance and God honors that refusal. But this analogy collapses when we introduce the parent and orphanage comparison. Imagine a parent who has the resources, love, and legal responsibility to care for their child, yet tells the child: “You are free to leave this home and check yourself into an orphanage forever, and I will respect that choice completely.” No reasonable moral framework would call that respect, it would be called neglect, abandonment, unfair, abuse. The parent has a duty of care precisely because the child did not ask to be born, cannot fully comprehend lifelong consequences, and is dependent on the parent for safety and flourishing.

If God is our creator and ultimate caretaker, He bears the primary responsibility for our eternal welfare. Allowing a finite, fallible, damaged creature to choose an infinite horror like hell is not respect for autonomy and it is a failure of divine duty. A just parent does not let a toddler wander into traffic because the toddler “chose” to. A loving parent does not stand by while a depressed teenager renounces the family forever. They intervene, restrain, persuade, and if necessary, carry the child home.

Thus, Lewis’ defense fails: God cannot simultaneously claim to love us unconditionally and yet honor a “choice” made under ignorance, fear, trauma, or spiritual blindness- especially when He designed the very parameters of that choice. If a parent would be condemned for letting a child choose an orphanage, how much more a God who lets His children choose hell?

Christians often try to soften the implications of people being tortured in hell by employing the ‘they chose their fate’ card of the C.S. Lewis theology, while not fully exploring the facts behind the claim. It withers with only a modicum of reasonable consideration- there is no way to absolve a god who sends even one person to hell.

(5519) Jesus-scripts to cement the cult

In a follow-up to #5447, the author provides ten additional examples of Jesus-script that further endorse the concept that Christianity employs a maze of cultish tactics:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2026/04/the-best-cure-for-christianity-is.html#more

And there is this blunt fact: the four gospel authors wrote to promote their Jesus cult: they had different agendas, different understandings of Jesus, and created too much Jesus-script that makes him sound like a cult fanatic. It’s not hard at all to grasp this fact by reading the gospels suspiciously, with an open mind.

Precisely what the clergy do not want the folks sitting in their pews to do. They have a sacred, elevated image of Jesus to protect and preserve, which deteriorates quickly when Jesus-script is read in detail.

 So let’s consider ten more examples.

 (1)  In Mark’s 13th chapter, we find a description of events what will proceed Jesus’ arrival from the sky:

 “For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of creation that God created until now and never will be.” (Mark 13:19)

 That’s part of god’s plan? However, the people who are in the Jesus cult will be spared this suffering: “Then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven.” (Mark 13:27)

 In other words, you’d better be amongst “his elect.”

 (2)  In Mark’s 14th chapter, when Jesus is on trial before the Council, the chief priest challenges him: Are you the Messiah?
To which Jesus responds: “I am, and you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” (Mark 16:62)

So here Jesus promises that those present at his trial will see him coming from the sky. But as we know for sure, this never happened. This Jesus-script is just plain wrong, but it is part of the main theme of Mark’s gospel that the kingdom of his god is just around the corner. Which was also just plain wrong—more cult fanaticism.

 (3)  In his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew presents Jesus-script stating that none of the laws in the Old Testament can be ignored.

 In Matthew 5:20, concluding this pronouncement, we find this text: “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

 This is more of the cult drill, aimed at getting its members to be super holy: you won’t win eternal life unless you outperform the holiest leaders of the community.

(4)  Also in the Sermon on the Mount, we find this Jesus-script:

 “But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgement, and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, ‘You fool’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” (Matthew 5:22)

The cult is pretty sure that their god is keeping a close watch on everyone, including things people say. And calling someone a fool will get a person tossed into “the hell of fire.”

 Some good advice follows, however. Before leaving a gift at the altar—that is, before serious worship—make sure you’re reconciled with people you have disagreements with. But grim threat still hovers over this advice.

 (5)  At the end of this chapter in the Sermon on the Mount, we find Jesus-script urging the importance of perfection.

 “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (Matthew 5:48)

 This fragment of cult fanaticism goes beyond being holier than religious leaders: you have to be as perfect as the cult’s god.

 (6)  Luke was also determined to promote the cult; he needed to convince its followers that their holy hero pulsed with divine power. Hence we find this Jesus-script in the story of a woman with a flow of blood touching Jesus:

 “…Jesus said, ‘Someone touched me, for I noticed that power had gone out from me.” (Luke 8:46)

 The episode concludes with this Jesus-script: “Daughter, your faith has made you well, go in peace.” (Luke 8:48)

 But the main point remains: she had faith that touching Jesus was a way to tap into divine healing power.

 (7)  Luke was also convinced that there was a holy spirit manifesting his god’s power. He assures his readers that this holy spirit will come to their aid at crucial moments:

 “When they bring you before the synagogues, the rulers, and the authorities, do not worry about how or what you will answer or what you are to say, for the Holy Spirit will teach you at that very hour what you ought to say.” (Luke 12:11-12)

 Thus you don’t want to mess with or offend this holy spirit: “…everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.” (Luke 12:10)

 More cult goofiness.

 (8)  Above all, cults do not want thinkers. So it’s no surprise that Luke created this Jesus-script as well:

 “Let the children come to me, and do not stop them, for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Luke 18:16-17)

 It’s also no surprise that indoctrination of the young has been the obsession of clergy of all brands: Get young brains wired with our version of god’s truth—and try to keep this wiring in place for as long as possible. Please don’t ask questions, please don’t venture off into critical thinking.

(9)  In the 9th chapter of John’s gospel we find this episode:

 “As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind.?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in him.’” (John 9:1-3)

This is an outstanding example of bad theology. Did the author of this gospel really believe that this man had suffered from blindness from birth so that, one day, by chance, he would meet Jesus—and thus become evidence of god’s power. What kind of insensitive god would do such a thing? Then the story descends further into ancient superstition. Jesus spits on the ground to make some mud that he smears on the man’s eyes. And when he washes off the mud, voila, he can see!

This is straight out of the world of magical/miracle folklore. When Jesus resurrected Lazarus (John 11), he did it by voice command. But here Jesus had to make magic mud with his saliva. This is fantasy, and modern readers should dismiss it as such.

 (10)   By the time readers get to John, chapter 12, they may have become bored with what I have called theology inflation, in which this author specialized. John’s Jesus-script does not include parables, but instead long monologues, not found anywhere in the other gospels.

And here in chapter 12, we find this text: “Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:25)

This is more cult goofiness.

I have not come across any devout Christians who moan about hating their lives. Quite the contrary, they are commonly enthusiastic about their lives, despite setbacks and occasions for grief. They are glad to have families, hobbies, sports, and any number of exciting pursuits. If we came across devout folks who moaned about hating their lives, we’d do what we could to get them into therapy. But here we have Jesus-script affirming that hatred of life is a key to winning eternal life. How can this be anything other than bad advice?

 I encourage devout believers to dive into the gospels, read them carefully, make lists of Jesus-script that are mediocre and/or alarming. They don’t match the feel-good verses that the clergy are fond of quoting endlessly. Indeed, this is no lie, no exaggeration: the best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.

These quotes merit recognition only as being created within the mind of a human, not a god. Or if it is from a god, it would be a very unintelligent, unenlightened god.

(5520) John 3:16 is sending people to hell

Many Christians embrace John 3:16 because it provides the easiest pathway to heaven- the simple act of believing in Jesus. But it ignores other criteria that the gospels seem to present as being critical prerequisites. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1sjemo7/the_gospels_present_three_distinct_ways_of_going/

The Gospels present three distinct ways of going to Heaven and avoiding Hell

1. Faith based salvation – John 3:16

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life

This verse, among others indicates that to go to Heaven, you need to believe in Jesus. I don’t think I need to go into this one in any particular detail since it is a commonly held understanding.

2. Take care of the poor Matthew 25: 34-46

34 “Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

44 “They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’

45 “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

46 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Here the condition to get eternal life or eternal punishment is what you do to the least of these.

This seems to line up with Matthew 7: 21-23

21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. 22 Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many [a]miracles?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; leave Me, you who practice lawlessness.’

People who believe in Jesus and perform signs in his name don’t get in because they didn’t do the will of the father, which seems to be what is being said in Matthew 25. Notice that even the people who get sent to eternal punishment in Matthew 25:44 still called Jesus Lord.

3. Don’t be wealthy – Luke 16: 22-26

22 “The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23 In Hades, where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24 So he called to him, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.’

25 “But Abraham replied, ‘Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been set in place, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.’

This is the story of the rich man and Lazarus. In the story, the rich man lives in luxury, and Lazarus has to beg for scraps from the rich man’s table. When they die, Lazarus goes to Heaven, and the rich man to hell. When asked why, he is told straight up that it’s because he lived in luxury. This also lines up with the story of the rich young ruler where being wealthy itself is what prevented him from going to Heaven.

Conclusion

These seem to be three distinct conditions to getting into Heaven or Hell. Even though they are distinct, they are also complimentary. You can believe in Jesus and take care of the poor and not live a life of luxury. I don’t see that though, from a vast majority of Christians. Instead, Christians only choose the easiest one, which is to just believe in Jesus.

I would argue that, if Christianity turns out to be true, then spreading the belief that all you need to do for salvation is to believe in Jesus is actually sending people to hell.

It can be argued the Gospel of John should not be in the Bible. It conflicts massively with the other three gospels, and presents an over-simplified pathway to salvation. Ironically, Christians who embrace the easy John 3:16 way to get to heaven, may (if Christianity was true) find themselves instead in hell.

(5521) Critique of the Bible’s immaterial beings

The Bible is replete with beings that are not composed of physical matter. This narrative stretches credulity, especially with reference to modern scientific understandings. The following was composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

A critical analysis of the immaterial beings found in the Bible—God, angels, demons, cherubim, seraphim, and the “divine council”—reveals a profound tension between ancient Near Eastern cosmology and modern philosophical and scientific frameworks.

When subjected to historical-critical analysis and philosophical scrutiny, the biblical depiction of the spiritual realm presents several major inconsistencies and paradoxes. Here is a breakdown of the primary critiques leveled against the biblical concept of immaterial beings.

1. Polytheistic Hangovers and Evolutionary Theology

From a historical-critical perspective, the spiritual beings in the Bible do not represent a cohesive, static theology. Instead, they show the clear fingerprints of a religion evolving from ancient Canaanite polytheism into strict monotheism.

• • The Divine Council: In early Old Testament texts, God (Yahweh/El) is depicted as presiding over a pantheon of lesser gods (the elohim). In Psalm 82, God stands in the “divine council” and judges the other gods for failing to rule the nations justly. Critics argue that angels and demons were not originally created as “immaterial messengers” in the modern Christian sense; they are the literary remnants of a polytheistic worldview that later biblical editors had to demote to “angels” to protect a newly developing monotheism.
  • The Shifting Identity of Satan: The concept of the “Devil” is highly fragmented. In the Old Testament (like in the Book of Job), “the satan” is not a cosmic rebel, but a title: the “Adversary” or “Prosecuting Attorney” who works for God in the divine court. By the New Testament, influenced by centuries of Persian Zoroastrianism (which featured a stark dualism between a good god and an evil god), Satan evolved into the ultimate, immaterial lord of darkness. Critics argue this shows theological syncretism, not a consistent divine revelation.

2. The Clash with Methodological Naturalism

The New Testament, in particular, operates heavily on the premise that immaterial, malevolent beings are the direct cause of physical and psychological human suffering. This creates a severe epistemological clash with modern science.

• • Demons as Primitive Diagnostics: In the Gospels, Jesus routinely casts out “unclean spirits” that cause muteness, deafness, seizures, and severe mental distress (such as the man living in the tombs in Mark 5). Modern medicine diagnoses these exact symptoms as epilepsy, schizophrenia, or severe trauma. Critics point out that the biblical authors were simply using the “immaterial being” framework to explain neurological and biological disorders they lacked the science to understand.
  • The Shrinking Gap: As the scientific method has explained more of the natural world, the territory occupied by immaterial beings has shrunk. If demons were truly the cause of ancient illnesses, pharmacology and modern psychiatry should not be able to cure them.

3. The Paradox of Free Will and Hiddenness

The theology surrounding the nature of angels creates massive philosophical problems for the traditional defenses of Christianity—specifically regarding the concept of human free will and the problem of divine hiddenness.

• • The Hiddenness Collapse: A common theological defense for why God does not simply reveal Himself undeniably to the modern world is that undeniable proof would destroy human free will. However, biblical theology states that a massive faction of angels (a third of the host, according to traditional readings of Revelation) possessed absolute, undeniable proof of God’s existence and power, yet still used their free will to rebel. If immaterial beings can possess total proof of God and still freely choose to reject Him, the argument that God must remain hidden to preserve human free will logically collapses.

4. The Problem of Angelic Theodicy

The existence of an immaterial hierarchy of demons complicates the Problem of Evil rather than solving it.

• • The Sovereign Bystander: If God is omnipotent and omniscient, He created the angelic beings knowing exactly which ones would rebel, and He actively allows them to continue operating. The Apostle Paul writes that humanity’s struggle is against “spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” Critics argue that a benevolent creator allowing an invisible, hyper-intelligent, and vastly more powerful species of immaterial predators to continually sabotage, tempt, and harm a much weaker human species is morally indefensible. It acts as a theological scapegoat, shifting the blame for evil away from the Creator without resolving His ultimate responsibility for the system.

5. Biological Inconsistencies (The Nephilim)

The biblical text sometimes blurs the line between the immaterial and the biological in ways that contradict the internal logic of a purely spiritual realm.

• • Spiritual Genetics: In Genesis 6, the “sons of God” (widely interpreted in ancient Jewish literature as rebellious angels/watchers) come to earth, mate with human women, and produce a race of giants known as the Nephilim. The critique here is biological: if these beings are fundamentally immaterial spirits, they should not possess human-compatible DNA or physical reproductive systems. This narrative reads exactly like Greek or Mesopotamian mythology (where gods routinely impregnate mortals), undercutting the claim that the biblical spiritual realm is a distinct, transcendent reality.

The Bible presents a fictional world that was consistent with the traditions and superstitions of its time. But it is wildly off course with respect to a modern, scientific understanding of reality. This is easy to see if anyone observes it objectively.

(5522) Book of Deuteronomy critique

Although very few Christians bother to read the Book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament, it remains a part of their ‘holy’ scripture, and therefore is subject to reasonable criticism. The following, composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro, takes a look at this text:

A critical analysis of the Book of Deuteronomy requires looking at it through multiple lenses: historical-critical scholarship, ethical philosophy, and theology. As the fifth book of the Torah, it acts as the theological lens through which the rest of the Old Testament historical books (Joshua through Kings) are written.

While it contains soaring rhetoric about love and social justice, it also contains some of the most morally troubling commands in the biblical canon. Here is a breakdown of the primary critiques leveled against the Book of Deuteronomy.

1. The Historical-Critical Critique: “The Pious Fraud”

For centuries, tradition held that Moses wrote Deuteronomy just before the Israelites entered the Promised Land. Modern biblical scholarship overwhelmingly rejects this.

• • The Josiah Connection: Scholars attribute Deuteronomy (specifically chapters 12–26) to the “Deuteronomist” (the “D” source), who wrote it roughly 600 years after Moses, during the reign of King Josiah in the 7th century BCE.
  • A Political Manifesto: During Josiah’s reign, a “lost book of the law” was conveniently “found” in the temple. This book demanded that all sacrificial worship be centralized in Jerusalem, stripping power from rural shrines and consolidating wealth and control under Josiah’s royal priesthood. Critics argue Deuteronomy was essentially a brilliant piece of political-religious propaganda—a “pious fraud” written retroactively and put into the mouth of ancient Moses to give absolute divine authority to Josiah’s contemporary political reforms.

2. The Ethical Critique: The Mandate for Genocide

The most severe moral critique of Deuteronomy centers on its explicit commands for holy war and ethnic cleansing, known as the Herem (the ban).

• • The Annihilation of the Canaanites: In chapter 20, the text provides rules of war. While it offers terms of peace to distant cities, it explicitly commands the Israelites regarding the cities of the Canaanites: “Do not leave alive anything that breathes. Completely destroy them… as the Lord your God has commanded you.”
  • The Moral Paradox: For modern ethicists and philosophers, this is an insurmountable hurdle. It portrays God actively commanding the slaughter of non-combatants, including infants. Critics argue this reflects the brutal, tribalistic warfare of the ancient Near East, not the character of a perfectly moral, universal creator.

3. The Legal Critique: Draconian Punishments

Deuteronomy serves as a massive legal code, and while some of it is progressive for its time, much of it violently clashes with modern human rights.

• • Capital Punishment for Non-Violent Offenses: The book mandates death by stoning for a wide variety of offenses, including breaking the Sabbath, worshipping other gods, blasphemy, and even being a perpetually rebellious and gluttonous son (Deuteronomy 21:18-21).
  • The Treatment of Women and Slaves: The text treats women largely as property under the protection of men. If a betrothed woman is raped in a city and does not cry out loud enough, the law dictates she be stoned to death alongside her attacker (22:23-24). It also regulates the taking of female captives of war as wives.

4. The Theological Critique: “Retribution Theology”

The core theological thesis of Deuteronomy is surprisingly simple, and deeply problematic: If you obey God, you will be materially blessed; if you disobey God, you will be physically cursed.

• • The Problem of Innocent Suffering: Chapter 28 outlines massive material blessings for obedience (wealth, health, military victory) and horrific curses for disobedience (disease, famine, being eaten by wild animals). Critics point out that this “Retribution Theology” is an incredibly harmful way to view the world, as it inherently blames the victim. If someone is sick or poor, Deuteronomistic theology suggests they must be hiding a secret sin.
  • Internal Biblical Critique: Interestingly, the Bible itself later critiques this exact theology. The Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes were written specifically to deconstruct Deuteronomy’s simplistic formula, pointing out that in the real world, the wicked often prosper and the righteous often suffer terribly.

5. The Counter-Critique: Radical Social Justice

Despite these severe issues, critics also acknowledge that Deuteronomy contains a revolutionary framework for social justice that was unique in the ancient world.

• • The Vulnerable Trio: The text obsessively demands protection for the “widow, the orphan, and the alien (immigrant).” It institutes laws requiring farmers to leave the edges of their fields unharvested so the poor can glean food.
  • Limits on Royal Power: Unlike the surrounding empires where the King was considered a god who was above the law, Deuteronomy 17 strictly limits the power, wealth, and military buildup of the King, placing the monarch entirely under the law.
  • The Religion of the Heart: Deuteronomy shifts religion away from just slaughtering animals on an altar. It introduces the Shema (“Hear O Israel… Love the Lord your God with all your heart”), making faith a matter of internal devotion, not just external ritual.

Even if it is assumed that the New Testament supersedes the Old Testament, the Book of Deuteronomy provides an insight into what the Christian god was up to prior to sending his son to make changes to his plan. As such, it represents a stain on the reputation of this god.

(5523) God is poorly defined

The concept of God is so fluid and changing that it becomes impossible to define it in concrete terms. The following post discusses this point:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1sk6tvj/god_is_so_poorly_defined_that_its_meaningless_to/

God is so poorly defined that it’s meaningless to discuss its existence.

God, as a concept, is philosophically vague and imprecisely defined. It’s really hard to pinpoint what even is God without any real ambiguity. It makes it easy to simply move goalposts or redefine God to whatever suits a different worldview.

Even within specific religious frameworks there is heavy debate and interpretations of God. Some people believe God is an omnipresent, omniscient, immaterial, eternal (yet acts within time itself?), sentient, conscious human-like being with agency that actively decided and created all that exists.

Some people don’t like to anthropomorphize God, yet still call it “all good”, “all loving”, etc.

Others see God merely as some vague philosophical concept, as embedded within nature itself or something of a higher, unimaginable realm.

There are so many things you can apply “God-like” attributes to and attempt to argue for its existence without ever actually precisely defining, what even is God?

I’ll be honest, it’s difficult to even articulate what exactly I mean here. But, primarily speaking, God is a concept that is almost designed to be impossible to humanly comprehend. It is impossible to pinpoint what exactly is meant by God. Something, or someone, or just some essence that is untestable, unseeable, unhearable, unimaginable by any human means. Something that has attributes that plainly and directly contradict each other.

How is that any different from it simply not existing? Or better yet, how can that be something at all? What are we even arguing the existence for? We are arguing for something so open to interpretation it might as well be anything.

Concepts of God are as numerous as the number of people who believe in such a being. The entire industry of god-worship is thus rendered meaningless and should be relegated to the realm of fantasy.

(5524) There is no afterlife

Religions have convinced their followers that death is not final, just a passageway to another existence. This is the ultimate game of denying the obvious. When you step on an ant, it doesn’t go to ant heaven, and when a human dies, it remains dead…just like the ant…forever. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1sjjh6p/theres_no_afterlife/

Consciousness ends when the brain dies. You won’t get to see your dead loved ones, meet a god, or bang 72 virgins. I know, this is a sad state of affairs. Nonexistence is scary, but it’s not so scary that we need to pretend it’s not going to happen. It’s *obvious* that consciousness ends when you die. The mind is a product of the brain. So when the brain is destroyed, the mind is too. There’s a ton of evidence to support this.

Let’s start with a simple example: drugs. Some drugs can alter consciousness. And the mechanism by which they do this is physical interaction with the brain. If the mind is caused by something immaterial, then this result wouldn’t make any sense. If consciousness is not produced by the brain, how does a physical interaction with the brain alter consciousness?

Brain surgery is another example. A lobotomy can cause cognitive disfunction. Corpus callosotomy surgery causes split-brain syndrome. Stereo-EEG stimulation testing can cause a variety of effects depending on where they place the electrodes. Why can brain surgery alter consciousness if consciousness is not caused by the brain?

Brain damage can cause the mind to lose function. If the brain is damaged a certain way, the victim can lose the ability to count. If it’s damaged another way, they can lose the ability to understand speech. Brain damage can alter your personality. Someone could be a nice person, and then brain damage causes them to act violently. It can cause someone to lose memories, or even cause false memories. If consciousness is produced by something immaterial, none of this would make any sense. But it makes perfect sense if consciousness is produced by the brain. As the brain becomes more damaged, the mind loses more function. When the brain is dead, the mind loses all function.

Consciousness is caused by the brain, the brain is physical, and that’s why physical things effecting the brain can alter consciousness. Unfortunately, this means that your conscious existence will end once your brain dies. This is the most straightforward, logical explanation there is. People don’t like the implications because they want to live on after death. It’s too bad that wanting something doesn’t make it true.

Rebuttals:

“The brain doesn’t produce consciousness, it only receives it from your soul.” – First, this is obviously just an ad hoc explanation trying to salvage the belief in souls. There’s nothing to back it up. And second, if an immaterial soul is the puppetmaster pulling the strings of the brain, we could detect it. We’d see alterations in the brain’s neurons that don’t have a material cause. And these alterations would be happening constantly. Every waking moment, the billions of neurons in every person’s brain would be stimulated by an unseen force, receiving energy from seemingly nowhere. Living neurons would behave unlike any other type of matter. But this isn’t the case at all. Neurons behave in predictable ways. The only things causing neurons to behave the way they do are physical forces.

“Terminal lucidity proves that consciousness still exists after death.” – Proposing it’s caused by a soul leaves us with more questions than answers. For one, if the soul is what causes consciousness, why did the patient experience cognitive decline in the first place? Their soul was with them the whole time. And also, why would their cognition return right when the soul was about to leave? Terminal lucidity still wouldn’t have an explanation with a soul.

“Near death experiences prove that consciousness still exists after death.” – First, the sensational NDEs heard from religious sources are cherry picked to filter out everyone who’s come close to death but didn’t see a white light or their dead loved ones. They’re exaggerated to get clicks. Second, in almost every NDE case, the person was “clinically” dead, which means their heart and lungs stopped. That doesn’t mean every neuron in their brain stopped firing. Third, even *if* every neuron stopped firing at some point, that doesn’t mean the patient didn’t hallucinate leading up to that point, or afterwards. It could even be that they didn’t “experience” it in the first place – their memory of the experience could just be a false memory. Fourth, a person having hallucinations, strange dreams, or false memories is exactly what you’d expect when their brain is oxygen deprived and flooding itself with neurotransmitters as it struggles to survive. Not to mention any drugs the doctors pump into them in an effort to save them. Just getting hit on the head hard enough can cause a person to hallucinate. Is it a surprise that sometimes people hallucinate when they’re dying?

So how should we respond to this obvious, though somewhat depressing, truth? It should energize us to make the most of this life, the only life we will ever have.

(5525) The resurrection of Jesus didn’t happen

In the following, the author presents a detailed argument for why there is no reasonable basis to conclude that Jesus resurrected from the dead.:

https://thesecondbestworld.substack.com/p/you-already-know-the-resurrection

Two billion people believe that roughly two thousand years ago, in a backwater province of the Roman Empire, a man was executed by the state, placed in a tomb, and then walked out of it three days later, alive. Not metaphorically alive. Not spiritually alive. Physically alive, wounds and all, chatting with his bros and eating fish.

This is treated as the most important event in human history. Wars have been fought over it. Entire civilizations have been organized around it. Children are taught it before they can read. And the evidence for it would not survive five minutes of cross-examination in a courtroom, a hiring committee, a doctoral defense, or any other venue where we take evidence seriously.

Educated people who would never accept comparably supported claims about alien abductions, past-life regression, or psychic healing will defend the resurrection with a vigor they would find embarrassing if applied to any other story. The reason has nothing to do with the quality of the evidence. The story is simply familiar and involves personal stakes. Familiarity does not make a claim true, but it often makes it invisible, and invisible assumptions are the hardest ones to question.

What We Actually Have

Let’s start with a fact that surprises many of the less literate Christians out there: no one in the entire biblical canon describes the resurrection happening. Not a single canonical Gospel narrates the moment Jesus rose from the dead. What we have instead are stories about an empty tomb and reports of post-mortem appearances. These are different things.

The earliest source we have for the resurrection is a letter from Paul, not a Gospel, written roughly twenty-five years after the alleged event. In 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 (composed around 54 AD), Paul recites what scholars widely agree is a pre-Pauline creed, possibly originating in the Jerusalem community within a few years of the crucifixion:

For I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

Paul then adds that Jesus appeared to “more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time,” then to James, then to all the apostles, and “last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.”

This is the best evidence Christianity has.

Paul never met the earthly Jesus. His own “appearance” was, by his own account, a visionary encounter: he uses the same Greek word (ophthe, “appeared”) for his encounter as he does for the earlier apostles, equating whatever happened to him with whatever happened to them. And Paul’s theology of resurrection is not “Jesus’ old body got restarted.” He contrasts the present “natural body” with a “spiritual body” and insists that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:44-50). Whatever Paul means by the risen Christ, it is not ordinary biological life resumed. If Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ was a vision, and Paul says his encounter was the same kind of thing the others went through, then perhaps the others had visions too.

After Paul, we have the Gospels. The earliest, Mark, was composed around 70 AD, roughly forty years after the crucifixion. And it contains a detail that most churchgoers never learn: the Gospel of Mark originally ended at verse 16:8. The women find the tomb empty, a young man in white tells them Jesus has risen, and they flee in terror and “said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.” Full stop. No appearances. No risen Jesus chatting with the disciples. No Great Commission. The longer ending of Mark (16:9-20), which includes appearances and the ascension, was added by a different author, probably in the early second century. This is not some fringe view; it is the consensus of mainstream textual scholarship.

So our earliest Gospel gives us an empty tomb and terrified women who tell nobody. That is it.

Matthew, writing perhaps a decade after Mark and using Mark as a source, adds an earthquake, an angel who rolls back the stone, guards at the tomb, and appearances to the disciples in Galilee. Luke, also dependent on Mark, offers a walk to Emmaus and an appearance in Jerusalem (contradicting Matthew’s Galilee location). John, the latest Gospel, composed around 90-100 AD, contributes the story of doubting Thomas, in which Jesus invites Thomas to touch his wounds.

The contradictions between these accounts are not subtle. They disagree about who went to the tomb (one woman? two? three? more?), what they found there (one angel? two? a young man? Jesus himself?), where the appearances occurred (Galilee or Jerusalem?), and what Jesus said and did. These are not the sort of minor discrepancies you find when multiple honest witnesses describe the same event from different angles. These are the kind of contradictions you get when later evangelists, working decades apart, are elaborating on a bare-bones tradition to serve the theological needs of their particular communities.

So, here is the timeline, condensed: a miracle event allegedly occurs around 30-33 AD. The first written reference to it appears roughly twenty years later, from a man who was not present and whose own encounter was visionary. The first narrative account appears forty years later, and in its original form contains no post-resurrection appearances at all. Three more narratives appear over the next thirty years, each contradicting the others on essential details. The earliest physical manuscripts we possess are copies of copies, dating from the second and third centuries, and among the more than 5,800 Greek manuscripts we have of the Christian scriptures, no two are identical in all their details. As Bart Ehrman has documented, across these manuscripts there are thousands of textual variants, more differences than there are words in the New Testament.

If this were the evidentiary foundation for any other extraordinary claim in human history, no reasonable person would take it seriously for ten seconds.

Did the Tomb Even Exist?

The apologist’s case usually begins with the empty tomb. But the empty tomb deserves a more basic question first: did this tomb exist at all?

The burial narrative in Mark, our earliest account, tells us that Joseph of Arimathea, a member of the Sanhedrin, requested the body from Pilate and buried it in a rock-hewn tomb. This is a suspiciously convenient detail. The usual Roman practice for crucifixion victims was to leave them on the cross as a public warning; the dogs and birds took care of the rest. When bodies were taken down, they were typically thrown into common graves, not entombed with care. (Though, there is archaeological evidence of exceptions: the skeletal remains of a crucified man named Yehohanan were found in a family tomb in Jerusalem, so burial of the crucified was not impossible in Judea. But it was not the norm.) The historian Martin Hengel has argued that Jesus was “buried in disgrace as an executed criminal,” a view that biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has called now widely accepted in scholarship.

John Dominic Crossan goes further: he argues that Joseph of Arimathea is “a total Markan creation in name, in place, and in function.” According to Crossan, the earliest believers had no idea what happened to the body. They simply inferred from Deuteronomy 21:22-23 (which requires that a body not be left exposed overnight) that some Jews must have buried it. Mark turned this vague assumption into a specific character with a name and a hometown.

Ehrman agrees that we cannot know what happened to the body, and offers three arguments against the traditional burial story: crucifixion was designed to humiliate as completely as possible, criminals were buried in common graves, and Pilate had no particular concern for Jewish burial sensitivities. If Jesus was thrown into a mass grave or simply left on the cross, there was never a tomb to find empty. The empty tomb narrative, on this reading, functions as a literary device, invented as a bridge between the crucifixion and the resurrection appearances that were being reported in the community.

You do not need to accept the most skeptical version of this argument for it to damage the apologist’s case. You only need to recognize that the existence of the tomb is contested among qualified scholars who specialize in early Christian history. And if the tomb is uncertain, the apologetic scaffolding built atop it (soldiers at the tomb, the stone rolled away, the angels delivering their message) is built on sand too.

The Direction of the Changes

There is a pattern in how the resurrection stories change over time, and it points in the same direction.

Paul, writing in the 50s AD, describes his encounter with the risen Christ in visionary terms. He uses the same word (ophthe) for what happened to him as for what happened to Peter and the others, treating his own revelation as equivalent to theirs. Paul gives us no fish-and-wounds, touchable-corpse narrative. He is, as biblical scholar James Dunn puts it, a visionary encounter “’from heaven.’”

Mark, writing around 70 AD, adds an empty tomb but no appearances at all. The story ends with the women running away in fear.

Another decade or two passes. Matthew and Luke add extended appearance narratives. Luke, in particular, has Jesus eat a piece of broiled fish in front of the disciples to prove he is not a ghost (Luke 24:42-43). The fish is a nice touch. Although, you do not typically need to prove to people that you are not a ghost.

By the time John writes, around 90-100 AD, the resurrected Jesus has become almost aggressively physical. Dunn calls it “massive realism”: Jesus invites Thomas to stick his finger into the nail wounds and thrust his hand into his side. He then cooks breakfast on the beach.

The trajectory is unmistakable. The earliest account is visionary and internal. Each later account makes the risen Jesus progressively more physical, more tangible, more like a regular human body that happens to have cheated death. This is the signature of legendary development, not historical reportage. Real memories degrade and lose detail over time. Legends accumulate detail. The resurrection narratives accumulate detail.

This pattern also follows a well-documented cultural template. In Greco-Roman antiquity, the story of a great man who dies, appears to witnesses afterward, and is declared divine was not unusual. Plutarch reports that Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, disappeared during a storm and then appeared to a witness named Julius Proculus, declaring that he had ascended to heaven and should henceforth be worshipped as the god Quirinus. The pattern (leader vanishes, follower reports a vision, community begins worship) pre-dates Christianity by centuries. The earliest Christians were not inventing a new narrative form. They were filling an old one with new content.

The People in the Chain

I can imagine the objection: “But the early Christians were sincere. They were willing to die for their belief. Surely that suggests they really saw an event worth dying for.”

This objection confuses intensity of belief with reliability of testimony, and it confuses the willingness to die for a claim with the claim’s truth. Both fail.

Start with the martyrdom claim itself. The traditions about how individual apostles died are largely late and hagiographic. They come from second-century and later hagiographic sources (the Acts of Peter, the Acts of Paul, and similar texts), not from the New Testament. The only apostolic death described in the canon is James the son of Zebedee, killed by Herod in Acts 12:2, and the text says nothing about James being given the option to recant. We simply do not have good first-century records of apostles being told “deny the resurrection or die” and choosing death. The “die for a lie” argument is built on traditions that are themselves the product of the same legendary process the apologist is trying to disprove.

Consider the witnesses first. What do we know about the reliability of people who report miracles?

We know quite a lot, because miracle reports are not rare. They are astonishingly common, and they are almost always wrong.

Since the 1860s, roughly two hundred million people have visited Lourdes, France, seeking miraculous healing. Many of them had encounters they took to be supernatural. The Lourdes Medical Bureau has reviewed approximately 7,500 formal dossiers from people claiming miraculous cures. Out of those 7,500, the Roman Catholic Church has officially recognized exactly seventy-two miracles. Seventy-two. Out of 7,500.

Even if we accept all seventy-two at face value (and there are strong reasons to be skeptical of many of them), the approval rate is about one percent. When a person at Lourdes formally submits a miracle claim to a Church-sponsored process, over 99% of the time the claim does not survive scrutiny. In statistical terms, a miracle report is a better indicator that a miracle did not occur than that it did.

And this is the optimistic picture. In the United States, nearly one in five Americans reports receiving direct answers to prayer on a weekly basis. That is sixty million fresh miracle claims per week, in a country where rigorous double-blind studies consistently show that intercessory prayer has no measurable effect. Add in the millions who claim to see ghosts, communicate with the dead, witness faith healings, or observe weeping statues, and the denominator of false miracle claims becomes staggering. Whatever the true rate of real supernatural events, it is swamped many orders of magnitude over by the false report rate.

Now apply this to the first-century Christians.

These were people living in a pre-industrial agrarian society with essentially no scientific literacy. Almost none of them could read. They had no germ theory, no concept of mental illness as we understand it, no framework for distinguishing natural from supernatural causation. As Bart Ehrman puts it, for these communities “there was no closed system of cause and effect, a natural world set apart from a supernatural one.” For them, the question was never whether people could come back from the dead; it was who had the power to do it.

These are not the sort of people whose testimony about the supernatural should carry weight with us. Not because they were stupid (they weren’t; intelligence is a function of environment and education as much as innate capacity), but because they lacked every tool, concept, and piece of background knowledge that would allow them to distinguish an actual supernatural event from a hallucination, an optical illusion, social pressure, wishful thinking, or twenty other natural explanations that were simply not available to them.

And we can be more specific. Consider bereavement hallucinations. In 1971, W. D. Rees surveyed 293 widowed people in Wales and found that nearly half, 46.7%, reported hallucinations of their deceased spouse. These were not vague feelings. People saw the dead person, heard their voice, some had full conversations with them while wide awake. The phenomenon is so well-documented that if Jesus had twenty close followers and the odds of each one having a bereavement hallucination were even 30 percent (well below the 47 percent Rees observed), the probability that none of them would hallucinate is roughly 0.08 percent, or less than one in a thousand. It would be far more surprising, verging on miraculous, if none of them reported seeing Jesus after his death.

The objection that “groups don’t have the same hallucination at the same time” misses the point. We do not have testimony that anyone had a simultaneous group hallucination. What we have are reports, written decades later by people who were not present, that a group of apostles claimed to have had an encounter. Given what we know about social conformity (Solomon Asch demonstrated in 1951 that people will deny what their own eyes tell them to conform with a group’s wrong answer roughly one-third of the time), the emergence of a unified “group appearance” narrative requires no supernatural explanation whatsoever.

Source amnesia is the mechanism that likely did the heavy lifting. This is the well-documented tendency to forget where you heard a story and eventually come to believe you witnessed it firsthand. You hear Peter’s account at a communal meal; three years later, you are telling someone you saw Jesus yourself. You are not lying, exactly. Your brain has simply done what brains do. Multiply this by dozens of passionate believers retelling overlapping stories across decades, and the consolidation of individual visions into a single unified “group appearance” tradition is not merely plausible. It would be surprising if it had not happened.

The Money Bag

The philosopher Matt McCormick, in his book Atheism and the Case against Christ, offers an analogy that makes the cumulative force of these problems even more vivid. Imagine a bag of money with a police escort traveling from New York to Los Angeles, passing through the custody of three different police officers. Each department has an 80 percent honesty rate, meaning there is a 20 percent chance each officer will skim some cash. What is the probability that the money arriving in LA is the same amount that left New York?

It is 0.8 multiplied by 0.8 multiplied by 0.8, which equals 0.51. Just a coin flip. And that is with only three links in the chain, each of which is individually quite reliable. Add two more officers at the same honesty rate and the probability drops to 32 percent. With five handlers at 90 percent reliability each, only 59 percent of the money arrives intact. If you are on trial for your life and the prosecution’s sole exhibit is a bag that passed through these hands, you do not want to be the defendant.

The point generalizes to information transmission. Even when individual links in a chain are highly reliable, the cumulative effect of small error rates across multiple links rapidly erodes overall fidelity. It does not take many links, even at 95 percent individual reliability, before you cross a threshold where it becomes more likely that the information has been corrupted than that it arrived intact.

Now apply this to the resurrection story. The “information” starts with a handful of people who claim to have witnessed a miracle (link one: the witnesses, whose reliability for miracle claims is, as we have seen, extraordinarily low). The story is then repeated orally for thirty to ninety years by an unknown number of people (links two through N: the repeaters). Some apologists appeal to the Jewish rabbinic oral tradition as a guarantor of fidelity during this phase, but the argument does not hold up at all: the oral tradition was designed for transmitting Torah commentary and legal rulings, not messianic miracle reports, and mainstream Judaism, the very tradition being cited, explicitly rejects Jesus’ resurrection. An author who was not present then writes it down (another link). The manuscript is copied and recopied for centuries (more links). And then, from the thousands of manuscripts that proliferated among early Christians, a group of church leaders selects which ones to include in the canonical Bible and which to suppress (still more links, now with an explicit filtering agenda).

Using even generously high reliability figures, the math is brutal. If the originator has a miracle-testimony reliability of one percent (our Lourdes figure, which is itself very generous since it uses only formally submitted claims), and the story passes through just three intermediaries at 80 percent fidelity each, the probability that the final version is true is 0.01 multiplied by 0.8 multiplied by 0.8 multiplied by 0.8, equaling 0.005, or about five in a thousand. Even if we inflate the miracle reliability to a wildly unrealistic 10 percent and boost each intermediary to 90 percent, we get 0.1 multiplied by 0.9 multiplied by 0.9 multiplied by 0.9, equaling 0.07, or seven in one hundred. Still far too unlikely to accept.

And this is an extremely simplified model. The real picture is much worse. We do not know how many intermediaries there were. We do not know their individual reliability. We do not have independent means to verify what was originally claimed. And, as I will argue next, we have strong reasons to believe that the transmission system was actively biased toward a particular conclusion.

What Is Missing from the Evidence

McCormick’s most original contribution to the case against the resurrection is what he calls the counterevidence principle. It sounds simple, but its implications are pretty serious for the resurrection:

It is reasonable to draw a conclusion C on the basis of a body of evidence E only if it is reasonable to believe that evidence which would show the opposite conclusion, if any such evidence existed, would have been included in E.

In plain language: you cannot trust a body of information that has been filtered to exclude anything that would disprove the conclusion you are trying to draw.

Imagine a detective, Ortega, who is unconsciously biased toward implicating a particular suspect. She asks extra questions about that suspect and fewer about others. She includes suggestive evidence and omits exculpatory details. She may not even realize she is doing it. Then a district attorney, working from Ortega’s case file, draws the “reasonable” conclusion that the suspect is guilty. The jury convicts.

Every step in the process may have been conducted in good faith. Every person involved may have been sincere. And the conclusion is still wrong, because the case file was gathered and filtered by a person whose aim was advocacy rather than inquiry.

This is exactly the situation with the resurrection evidence.

The people who originally told and retold the stories of Jesus were not investigators. They were believers. Their explicit purpose was not to gather all relevant evidence and let the chips fall where they may. Their purpose was to spread the faith, create converts, and strengthen the resolve of the already converted against the temptation of doubt. The Apostle Paul is quite candid about this: the point of his letters is to fortify belief and discourage doubting.

And for centuries, the institution responsible for preserving, copying, and transmitting the evidence about Jesus was the Christian church. This is the informational equivalent of asking students to self-report whether they cheated on an exam while the teacher was out of the room.

Let’s crystallize the problem with a series of questions.

If someone who had been present when the tomb was opened had seen a fact inconsistent with the resurrection (say, the body was still there, or Roman teenagers had stolen it), would that person’s testimony have survived two thousand years of transmission through the institutions of Christianity? If one of the early believers had later recanted, confessing that he never actually saw anything, would that confession have made it into the canonical record? If Jesus himself had ever said “The stories about my miracles are exaggerations by my overly enthusiastic followers,” would we expect to find a careful record of that sermon in the Gospels?

The answer to every one of these questions is obviously no.

We know what happens to counterevidence in the real world. The photographer who faked the first Loch Ness Monster photo confessed; most people who “believe in Nessie” have never heard of the confession. A man named Bob Heironimus claimed he wore the ape suit in the famous Bigfoot film; the Bigfoot community persists untroubled. The two Englishmen who created crop circles for decades confessed their prank; the crop-circle faithful dismissed this as disinformation. When James Randi demonstrated on national television that Peter Popoff’s faith healings were performed with a hidden radio earpiece, Popoff went bankrupt within two years. He later successfully rebuilt his ministry from scratch.

If counterevidence to Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and crop circles barely survives a few decades in an era of instant global communication, counterevidence to the resurrection had zero chance of surviving two thousand years of transmission through the one institution with the strongest possible motive to suppress it.

This is what makes the counterevidence principle so lethal to the resurrection. We do not merely lack data for the resurrection. We should expect to lack data against it, regardless of whether the resurrection happened or not. The transmission system was set up in such a way that disconfirming information would have been filtered out, unconsciously or otherwise, at every stage. And that means what we do have is simply not the kind of material on which any reasonable person should stake serious conclusions.

The Salem Test

All of this raises an obvious challenge. In 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, a community of sincere, deeply religious people became convinced that witchcraft was real and active in their midst. Multiple eyewitnesses, some of them respected members of the community, testified under oath that they had seen specific individuals performing acts of witchcraft. People were willing to swear on their immortal souls that what they had witnessed was real. Confessions were obtained. More than two hundred people were accused. Twenty were executed.

The case for witchcraft at Salem is, by any objective measure, stronger than the case for the resurrection. The Salem testimony was contemporaneous, not generated decades after the alleged events. The witnesses were available for cross-examination. The claims could be tested (and were, after a fashion, through court proceedings). There were multiple independent lines of testimony. There were confessions.

Nobody believes there was real witchcraft at Salem.

We look at Salem and we can see exactly what went wrong: social contagion, mass hysteria, confirmation bias, the coercive effects of community pressure, the exploitation of “spectral evidence” (testimony about dreams and visions, which was treated as equivalent to physical evidence), and a community so saturated in belief in the supernatural that the interpretive framework for understanding strange events was already in place before the events occurred.

Every single one of these factors applies, with at least equal force, to first-century Palestine.

The challenge for the resurrection believer is this: state the epistemic principle that allows you to reject the reality of witchcraft at Salem while accepting the reality of the resurrection in Jerusalem. It cannot be “miracles happen” (because that would require accepting Salem’s witchcraft, too). It cannot be “the witnesses were sincere” (Salem’s witnesses were sincere). It cannot be “people were willing to die for their belief” (people were in fact killed over the Salem accusations, and the accusers did not recant even under pressure). It cannot be “the Bible says so” (that is clearly circular).

What you will discover, if you try to formulate such a principle, is that any standard of evidence loose enough to admit the resurrection also admits a flood of other miracle claims that you certainly reject: the healing powers of Benny Hinn, the divinity of the Emperor Vespasian (who ancient sources claimed performed miraculous healings), the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary, the miracles attributed to the Hindu deity Sathya Sai Baba by millions of living witnesses. And any standard of evidence rigorous enough to exclude these claims also excludes the resurrection.

You are stuck. You either lower your epistemic standards to the point where you must believe in everything, or you apply them consistently and believe in none of it. There is no principled middle ground that lets Jesus and only Jesus through the door.

The Strongest Case For

Before proceeding, I want to do the apologists the courtesy of presenting their best argument in its most compelling form. The “minimal facts” approach, developed by Gary Habermas and Michael Licona, avoids the usual appeal to biblical inerrancy and instead starts with a small set of historical claims that most critical scholars, including many skeptics, accept:

1. 1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
   2. His followers sincerely believed they had encounters with the risen Jesus.
   3. The persecutor Paul converted after what he described as an appearance.
   4. The skeptic James (Jesus’ brother) converted after what he described as an appearance.
   5. The tomb was empty. (This one is obviously more contested, but Habermas claims roughly ~75 percent of scholars accept it? I doubt that.)

The argument then proceeds by inference to the best explanation: what hypothesis accounts for all five facts? Habermas and Licona argue that the resurrection explains the data better than any naturalistic alternative.

This is the most sophisticated defense of the resurrection available. And yet still fails catastrophically.

Take Fact 2, that the followers sincerely believed they had post-mortem encounters. This is almost certainly true. It is also completely irrelevant to the truth of the resurrection. We have just seen that bereavement hallucinations affect nearly half of widowed people. Paul’s conversion vision, by his own account, was an internal visionary event indistinguishable from known psychiatric phenomena. James’ conversion could be explained by family loyalty, grief, social pressure, or any combination of these well-documented psychological forces. The “minimal facts” approach smuggles in the assumption that these experiences require a supernatural explanation, when in reality they require only the human brain doing what the human brain does under extreme emotional distress.

Fact 1 (Jesus died) is uncontroversial but proves nothing about what happened afterward. Fact 5 (the empty tomb) is the most contested of the five, and even if granted, an empty tomb is evidence of an empty tomb, not of a resurrection. Tombs can be empty for many reasons, most of them mundane: the body was moved, stolen, buried in a common grave, or the tomb in the narrative is a later literary invention.

The deepest problem with the “minimal facts” approach is subtler. The argument asks: “What is the best explanation for these five facts?” But this question is only meaningful if we can trust the informational picture from which these “facts” are derived. And that is exactly what the counterevidence principle undermines. The entire corpus from which these facts are extracted was generated, transmitted, and preserved by people with a consuming interest in a particular conclusion. When Habermas says “most scholars accept these facts,” those scholars are drawing from the same filtered evidence base. The agreement of scholars about records that were curated by believers does not tell us what happened. It tells us what the curated records imply, which is a different question entirely.

The “minimal facts” approach is the epistemic equivalent of saying: “Most judges who have reviewed Detective Ortega’s case file agree that the suspect looks guilty.” Of course they do. The case file was built to make the suspect look guilty.

The Alien Abduction

McCormick offers a thought experiment that makes this dilemma more intuitive. Imagine that a stranger, call him Matthew, approaches you on the street and says he has a very important story. Before he tells you, he explains the provenance: the events did not happen to him. He did not see them. He is not sure he has met anyone who did. The story was passed through an unknown number of people before it reached him, and it happened a very long time ago. But, he assures you, the people in the chain were all sincere and passionate believers.

Then he tells you the story: a man named Jones was abducted by aliens and disappeared from the face of the earth.

You would, without a moment’s hesitation, reject this. You would not even bother to suspend judgment. The provenance is too murky, the chain of transmission too long and unreliable, and the claim too extraordinary. And this is true even though the existence of aliens, in purely materialist terms, is more initially plausible than the existence of a supernatural being who violates the laws of nature; aliens would at least be physical beings operating within the same universe we know.

Now that was all obvious enough, but here is the move. Improve Matthew’s story in any way that would make it parallel the resurrection evidence more closely. Give him four friends (Mark, Luke, John, and Paul) who corroborate the story, but make them contradict each other on the details. Have Paul say he learned about the abduction through a vision he had during a seizure. Add that some of the believers were later persecuted for their belief (willingness to die for a cause is, as Heaven’s Gate and Jonestown demonstrate, a marker of fanatical commitment, not of accuracy). Add any feature of the Jesus story you like.

Does it become reasonable to believe Jones was abducted by aliens?

Of course not. You could improve that story for hours and it would never cross the threshold of credibility, because the fundamental problems are structural: the evidence is too remote, too filtered, too dependent on unreliable categories of testimony, and the claim is too extraordinary to be supported by the rickety scaffolding being offered.

And if the alien abduction story never becomes credible even when upgraded to match the resurrection evidence, you have your answer. The resurrection evidence is not sufficient. You already know this. You just do not apply the knowledge consistently.

Why the Double Standard Persists

If the case against the resurrection is this overdetermined, and I think it plainly is, why do two billion people still believe it?

Part of the answer is unsurprising: most believers have never encountered the arguments in this form. Christian education does not typically include a unit on bereavement hallucinations, source amnesia, epistemology, the counterevidence principle, or the Lourdes statistics. The evidential case is presented to believers already packaged, pre-filtered, and insulated from the considerations that would immediately torpedo it if applied consistently.

But the deeper answer is psychological. The resurrection story is embedded so deeply in Western culture that it has become invisible. When we encounter religious doctrines or cultural practices that seem exotic to us (Haitian voodoo, for example, or the Hindu practice of sati), the strangeness and unreasonableness are easy to see. But when we are surrounded by a set of ideas from childhood, when they are woven into our holidays and our moral vocabulary and the architecture of our cities, even the bizarre becomes commonplace.

If you sneeze in a room full of people, a chorus of “bless yous” will erupt, and almost no one present will be aware that the practice likely originated from the medieval fear that when you sneeze, your soul can be thrown from your body, making you vulnerable to possession by demons. The truly weird becomes normal through repetition.

William Lane Craig, one of the most prominent defenders of the resurrection, has said this out loud: the witness of the Holy Spirit is “self-authenticating,” and “arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.” God, he writes, has provided “a more secure basis for our faith than the shifting sands of evidence and argument.” Craig also says he does not ignore strong counter-evidence; he takes pains to engage objections philosophically. But his framework makes this gesture toothless, because he simultaneously holds that the Spirit’s inner witness is an “intrinsic defeater of any defeaters brought against it.” If your epistemology has a ridiculous built-in mechanism that guarantees you can never be rationally obligated to abandon your belief, then your engagement with counter-evidence is, at best, a courtesy.

Craig is, at least, honest about this. Most believers are not so forthright, perhaps because they have not examined the tension carefully. They believe the historical evidence supports the resurrection because they have only ever seen it presented by people who already believe in the resurrection. They have never seen it presented alongside the Salem parallel. In isolation, each piece of the apologist’s case (the early creed, the empty tomb, the willing martyrs, the transformation of the disciples) can seem impressive. It is only when you step back and ask “would this evidence satisfy me if the claim were about alien abductions or Hindu miracles?” that the illusion breaks.

The God Who Could Have Done Better

There is one final consideration that, while not strictly part of the evidential case, puts the whole affair in perspective.

Christians believe that the resurrection was orchestrated by an omnipotent, omniscient being who wanted humanity to know it happened. This being, by definition, could have done absolutely anything to make the case for the resurrection overwhelming. He could have had Jesus appear to millions, not dozens. He could have had the event recorded by independent, impartial Roman historians, not a handful of committed believers. He could have provided physical artifacts, anything at all that does not reduce, at every link in the chain, to “some people in the ancient world said so.” He could have continued performing ‘credible’ miracles of this caliber throughout history so that each generation could verify the claims for itself, rather than forcing everyone born after the first century to accept the word of people they have never met, from a culture they do not understand, transmitted through an institution with an overwhelming interest in the story being true.

He did none of this.

What we got instead is exactly what you would expect if no omnipotent being were involved: a small number of grief-stricken followers of a recently executed religious leader, living in a culture saturated in supernatural belief, telling and retelling stories that grew in the telling, shaped by the psychological processes (bereavement hallucinations, source amnesia, social conformity, confirmation bias) that we now understand to be universal features of human cognition. The stories were eventually written down by people who were not there, in documents that contradict each other, and preserved by an institution whose explicit purpose was to propagate belief and suppress doubt.

This creates a paradox that McCormick identifies and that apologists have never satisfactorily answered. If God could have made the historical record better and chose not to, then he apparently does not want us to arrive at belief through historical reasoning. In which case, the apologist who constructs elaborate historical arguments for the resurrection is working against God’s apparent intentions. She is trying to achieve something God himself, by the apologist’s own theology, declined to achieve when it would have cost him nothing.

If there is a God and this is the best he could produce for the single most important event in the history of the universe, either he does not want us to believe (in which case, mission accomplished for many of us) or he does not exist. A toaster would have overwhelmed a first-century audience. An omnipotent God could have done far better than a toaster.

The Consistent Answer

There was no witchcraft in Salem. There are no aliens abducting people in the countryside. The faith healers on cable television are con artists or self-deluded enthusiasts. The weeping statues are condensation. The sixty million weekly answered prayers are confirmation bias. The two hundred million visitors to Lourdes who believed a miracle had happened to them were, in all but perhaps a vanishing handful of cases, totally wrong.

And a man named Jesus, assuming he existed, did not come back from the dead in Jerusalem around 33 AD.

This is not a coin flip or a judgment call. The case for the resurrection relies on the least reliable category of witnesses imaginable for claims of this type, transmitted through a system that is catastrophically unreliable, and filtered through two millennia of custodianship by the one institution with the strongest conceivable motive to suppress anything that would undermine it.

It almost certainly did not happen. The reasons people believe it did are the same cognitive and social mechanisms that have generated false supernatural beliefs in every culture throughout human history.

You already apply these standards every day. You reject the miracles of competing religions without a second thought. You do not believe that the Emperor Vespasian healed the blind, despite ancient sources reporting it. You do not believe that Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse, despite a billion believers. You do not believe that Joseph Smith found golden plates in upstate New York, despite the sworn testimony of eleven witnesses.

You already know how to evaluate miracle claims. I am just asking you to apply the same test one more time.

The weight of the evidence is massively on the side of the resurrection being a fantasy. If God wanted us to believe it happened, he did a good job of making such belief an exercise in credulity.

(5526) Reasons to reject Christianity

The following discusses several points that should cause people to reject the theology of Christianity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1speenv/ive_recently_rejected_christianity_heres_why/

Free Will & Heaven

• • If heaven contains no suffering, and free will is the cause of suffering, then heaven must lack free will, making the promise of heaven a promise of existence without genuine agency.
  • If in heaven we can only want what God wants, the distinction between a perfected will and no independent will at all is functionally meaningless, the outcome is identical.
  • A choice made under threat of eternal torture is not a genuine choice, it is coercion. Compliance produced by infinite threat cannot be called free will, love, or genuine devotion.
  • God, being omniscient, can distinguish genuine love from fear-based compliance. A system that punishes both fear-based and genuine non-belief equally is not a moral system, it is a performance demand backed by a death threat.

Justice & Hell

• • Eternal infinite punishment for finite human failures is by definition disproportionate and cannot coherently be called justice by any recognizable ethical standard.
  • An all-loving God who knowingly creates people he foresees will end up in eternal torment, and creates them anyway, is not acting in love, he is creating victims with full foreknowledge.
  • You cannot torture someone eternally and love them. These two things are not in tension, they are mutually exclusive by any meaningful definition of love.

Consent & Participation

• • Humans are created without consent, placed into a system they did not agree to, held to rules they had no hand in making, and punished infinitely for failures within a game they never chose to play.
  • In every other ethical and legal context, terms imposed without consent are not binding. Theology asks for a unique exemption to this principle without sufficient justification.

Hiddenness & Moral Luck

• • An all-loving, all-powerful God who wants a relationship with all humans, yet allows entire civilizations to exist without access to him, is either not all-powerful, not all-loving, or not present.
  • The single greatest predictor of a person’s religion is where and when they were born, not independent spiritual discovery. Eternal destiny should not be determined by geographic and historical accident.
  • Two people identical in character and sincerity can end up in entirely different eternal destinations purely because one was born into access to the correct religion and one was not. That is a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, not a just system.
  • An all loving god who truly desired a relationship with us would choose to make himself very clear and place himself in our lives to help us down the correct path, not hide and make people need to trust a story thousands of years before their time

The Pre-Jesus Problem

• • If Jesus descended into hell to free souls who died before his coming, those souls suffered for tens of thousands of years while God possessed the remedy the entire time and chose not to deploy it.
  • The language of rescue implies those souls were somewhere genuinely bad, not a neutral waiting room. You do not rescue someone from a waiting room. This either confirms unnecessary suffering occurred, or renders the rescue narratively meaningless.
  • An all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing God could have sent those souls directly to heaven without routing them through an intermediate state. The existence of that detour is incompatible with at least one of those three attributes.
  • God built the system that trapped those souls, then sent someone to fix what his own architecture produced. The heroism of the rescue only makes sense if you ignore who designed the situation requiring rescue.

Made in God’s Image?

• • If humans are made in God’s image and are inclined toward evil, either God shares that inclination, or we were made fundamentally unlike him in the most important way, making “image and likeness” a misleading description.
  • The capacity for sin had to originate somewhere. God designed beings capable of falling, in conditions he designed, and foresaw the outcome, then held those beings responsible for it.
  • ADHD, anxiety, depression, and other neurological conditions are not moral failures, they are measurable physical realities. A perfect being designing brains that malfunction and suffer is incompatible with the claim of perfect, loving creation.

Religion is a Control System

• • People live “good” lives, waiting for the return of something that’ll never come, staying in line and out of the way. They are scared into this position by eternal conscious torture meaning many will do anything they can to save themselves and their families from such a thing.
  • A tyrannical leader with poor intentions could not engineer a more effective compliance mechanism than one that makes obedience holy, rebellion sinful, suffering spiritually meaningful, and all verification of claims conveniently deferred until death.
  • The system functions as a scarecrow, its power over behavior depends entirely on belief. This explains why doubt has historically been treated as dangerous and sinful, not because it offends God, but because it dissolves the mechanism of control.

It shouldn’t take a whole lot of thought to realize that there are monstrous holes in the theological structure of Christianity. It usually takes emotion to override intellect for someone to fully embrace this faith. Reason is kyptonite to Christianity. It is lucky for them that most people don’t use it in any sense of sufficient magnitude.

(5527) Luke 14:26 meets criteria for cult manipulation

Embedded in the Gospel of Luke is a quote by Jesus that should alarm anyone who is concerned with the tactics of cults that often cause people to abandon their natural skepticism and fall mindlessly into the aura of the cult leader. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1spr07z/luke_1426_meets_every_diagnostic_criteria_for/

Luke 14:26 meets every diagnostic criteria for cult manipulation

“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

Cue the apologists: “Hate is Semitic hyperbole. It means love less by comparison.” Fine. Grant it.

It doesn’t help. The demand, softened or not, maps directly onto established models of coercive control.

Steven Hassan’s BITE model. Robert Lifton’s eight criteria for thought reform. The first move in every high-demand group is the same: insert the leader between the member and their existing bonds. Make belonging conditional on hierarchy. Frame the willingness to subordinate family loyalty as spiritual maturity.

Luke 14:26 does all three in one sentence.

When cult researchers describe the early tactics of the Unification Church, Heaven’s Gate, the People’s Temple, the family separation demand is always near the top of the list. And it always sounds exactly like this. “I’m not asking you to stop loving them. I’m asking you to love me more.”

The only reason this verse doesn’t trigger immediate alarm is scale. Two thousand years and two billion adherents have normalized it. But if a man in Waco said it, you’d call it what it is.

Christians loathe the idea that they are in a cult, all while not realizing they are in a cult.

(5528) Final word on the Shroud of Turin

Given the lack of physical evidence for Christianity, it is no wonder that the faithful have tenaciously claimed, in the wake of accumulating counter-evidence, that the Shroud of Turin was the burial cloth of Jesus, and thereby registers as historical proof of his existence, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. The following destroys this article of faith convincingly:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1sqkdmq/the_shroud_of_turin_controversy/

I find it baffling why Christians today still used the Shroud of Turin as an archaeological artifact as evidence for Jesus’s existence. Now, before i present my supporting evidence from scientists and historians, let me lay out my premises first:

P1: Earliest attestation of the shroud of Turin available today is in the 14th century

P2: Bishops in the 14th century already clarified that the shroud of Turin is fake, made up by a conman to popularise his business further.

P3: Scientists radiocarbon-dated the shroud to the 14th century

P4: DNA testing shows that the origin of the shroud came from India.

Conclusion: High plausibility that the shroud was made and tailored in the 14th century, possibly in India.

Even if granted the shroud was dated to the 1st century, it still doesn’t doesn’t prove that it was worn by jesus. It could have been worn by some other prisoners with a face on it. Here’s all the evidences below:

(1389 CE, Letter of Bishop of Troyes to Pope Clement VII) “The case, Holy Father, stands thus. Some time since in this diocese of Troyes the Dean of a certain collegiate church, to wit, that of Lirey, falsely and deceitfully, being consumed with the passion of avarice, and not from any motive of devotion but only of gain, procured for his church a certain cloth cunningly painted, upon which by a clever sleight of hand was depicted the twofold image of one man, that is to say, the back and front, he falsely declaring and pretending that this was the actual shroud in which our Saviour Jesus Christ was enfolded in the tomb, and upon which the whole likeness of the Saviour had remained thes impressed together with the wounds which He bore.

This story was put about not only in the kingdom of France, but, so to speak, throughout the world, so that from all parts people came together to view it. And further to attract the multitude so that money might cunningly be wrong from them, pretended miracles were worked, certain men being hired to represent themselves as healed at the moment of the exhibition of the shroud, which all believed to the shroud of our Lord.

The Lord Henry of Poitiers, of pious memory, then Bishop of Troyes, becoming aware of this, and urged by many prodest persons to take action, as indeed was his duty in the exercise of his ordinary jurisdiction, set himself earnestly to work to fathom the truth of this matter. For many theologians and other wise persons declared that this could not be the real shroud of our Lord having the Saviour’s likeness thus imprinted upon it, since the holy Gospel made no mention of any such imprint, while, if it had been true, it was quite unlikely that the holy Evangelists would have omitted to record it, or that the fact should have remained hidden until the present time.

Eventually, after diligent inquiry and examination, he discovered the fraud and how the said cloth had been cunningly painted, the truth being tested by the artist who had painted it, to wit, that it was a work of human skill and not miraculously wrought or bestowed. Accordingly, after taking mature counsel with wise theologians and men of the law, seeing that he neither ought nor could allow the matter to pass, he began to institute formal proceedings against the said Dean and his accomplices in order to root out this false persuasion. They, seeing their wickedness discovered, hid away the said cloth so that the Ordinary could not find it, and they kept it hidden afterwards for thirty-four years or thereabouts down to the present year.”

Historian Brent Nongbri says “The so-called Shroud of Turin provides an ideal example. The earliest secure historical record of the shroud is a letter written in 1389 from Pierre d’Arcis, the bishop of Troyes, to Pope Clement VII in Avignon. The bishop had complained to the (anti-)pope that the shroud, a “cleverly painted” cloth, was falsely being presented as the actual burial cloth used to wrap Jesus. Although the bishop believed this cloth was a recently produced fraud, many others, both in his era and even in our own day, have regarded it as the authentic shroud used to cover the body of the crucified Jesus, and thus an artifact of the first century. In the late 1980s, radiocarbon analysis of small portions of the shroud was carried out at three separate facilities at the University of Arizona, Oxford, and Zürich.

The three analyses were in very close agreement: “The results yield a calibrated calendar age range with at least 95% confidence for the linen of the Shroud of Turin of AD 1260-1390 (rounded down/up to nearest 10 yr).” It is telling that these results align so closely with the earliest certain appearance of the shroud in the historical record in the fourteenth century. The radiocarbon analysis of the shroud has thus proved to the satisfaction of sober observers that the shroud is a product of the thirteenth or fourteenth century and not the first century.” (God’s Library: The Archaeology of the Earliest Christian Manuscripts pg 76)

(6 Oct 2009) An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ’s burial cloth is a medieval fake… “We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud,” Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the paranormal this weekend in northern Italy, said on Monday… Carbon dating tests by laboratories in Oxford, England; Zurich, Switzerland, and Tucson, Ariz., in 1988 caused a sensation by dating it from between 1260 and 1390. Skeptics said it was a hoax, possibly made to attract the profitable medieval pilgrimage business.

Garlaschelli reproduced the full-sized shroud using materials and techniques that were available in the Middle Ages. They placed a linen sheet flat over a volunteer and then rubbed it with a pigment containing traces of acid. A mask was used for the face. The pigment was then artificially aged by heating the cloth in an oven and washing it, a process which removed it from the surface but left a fuzzy, half-tone image similar to that on the Shroud. He believes the pigment on the original Shroud faded naturally over the centuries. They then added blood stains, burn holes, scorches and water stains to achieve the final effect. The Catholic Church does not claim the Shroud is authentic nor that it is a matter of faith, but says it should be a powerful reminder of Christ’s passion… “If they don’t want to believe carbon dating done by some of the world’s best laboratories they certainly won’t believe me,” he said.

https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna33179539

(The Independent, 08 April 2026) About 40 per cent of the human DNA found on Turin Shroud is from Indian lineages, scientists say… Currently housed in the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Turin, Italy, scientists continue to study the linen fabric to determine its origin. Now, DNA analysis of material collected from the relic in 1978 suggests the cloth used to make the fabric may have originated in India. Researchers, including Gianni Barcaccia at the University of Padova, also identified a range of different animal, plant and human material contaminating the shroud over several years.

“Analysis of the DNA traces found on the Shroud of Turin suggests the potentially extensive exposure of the cloth in the Mediterranean region and the possibility that the yarn was produced in India,” they wrote in the new yet-to-be peer-reviewed study posted in Bioarxiv. “The presence of 38.7 per cent of the overall human genomic data from Indian lineages is unexpected and is potentially linked to historical interactions associated with importing linen or yarn from regions near the Indus Valley,” researchers wrote. This result could likely be due to historical interactions with the relic, or the Romans importing linen from regions near the Indus Valley, according to the study.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/turin-shroud-origin-jesus-india-dna-b2953627.html

The fact that the Shroud of Turin is a pious fraud does not prove that Jesus wasn’t a real person or that he wasn’t crucified, nor even that he didn’t resurrect. Rather, it demonstrates the tenacious hold of religion, as it strangles the minds of people desperate to safeguard belief in a feel-good fantasy. Unable to process evidence impartially, the faithful cling to filtered data and specious arguments to maintain their view of an artificial reality.

(5529) Philosophical reasons to reject Christianity

The following discusses several points that should cause people to reassess their acceptance of the theology of Christianity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1speenv/ive_recently_rejected_christianity_heres_why/

Free Will & Heaven

• • If heaven contains no suffering, and free will is the cause of suffering, then heaven must lack free will, making the promise of heaven a promise of existence without genuine agency.
  • If in heaven we can only want what God wants, the distinction between a perfected will and no independent will at all is functionally meaningless, the outcome is identical.
  • A choice made under threat of eternal torture is not a genuine choice, it is coercion. Compliance produced by infinite threat cannot be called free will, love, or genuine devotion.
  • God, being omniscient, can distinguish genuine love from fear-based compliance. A system that punishes both fear-based and genuine non-belief equally is not a moral system, it is a performance demand backed by a death threat.

Justice & Hell

• • Eternal infinite punishment for finite human failures is by definition disproportionate and cannot coherently be called justice by any recognizable ethical standard.
  • An all-loving God who knowingly creates people he foresees will end up in eternal torment, and creates them anyway, is not acting in love, he is creating victims with full foreknowledge.
  • You cannot torture someone eternally and love them. These two things are not in tension, they are mutually exclusive by any meaningful definition of love.

Consent & Participation

• • Humans are created without consent, placed into a system they did not agree to, held to rules they had no hand in making, and punished infinitely for failures within a game they never chose to play.
  • In every other ethical and legal context, terms imposed without consent are not binding. Theology asks for a unique exemption to this principle without sufficient justification.

Hiddenness & Moral Luck

• • An all-loving, all-powerful God who wants a relationship with all humans, yet allows entire civilizations to exist without access to him, is either not all-powerful, not all-loving, or not present.
  • The single greatest predictor of a person’s religion is where and when they were born, not independent spiritual discovery. Eternal destiny should not be determined by geographic and historical accident.
  • Two people identical in character and sincerity can end up in entirely different eternal destinations purely because one was born into access to the correct religion and one was not. That is a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, not a just system.
  • An all loving god who truly desired a relationship with us would choose to make himself very clear and place himself in our lives to help us down the correct path, not hide and make people need to trust a story thousands of years before their time.

The Pre-Jesus Problem

• • If Jesus descended into hell to free souls who died before his coming, those souls suffered for tens of thousands of years while God possessed the remedy the entire time and chose not to deploy it.
  • The language of rescue implies those souls were somewhere genuinely bad, not a neutral waiting room. You do not rescue someone from a waiting room. This either confirms unnecessary suffering occurred, or renders the rescue narratively meaningless.
  • An all-powerful, all-loving, all-knowing God could have sent those souls directly to heaven without routing them through an intermediate state. The existence of that detour is incompatible with at least one of those three attributes.
  • God built the system that trapped those souls, then sent someone to fix what his own architecture produced. The heroism of the rescue only makes sense if you ignore who designed the situation requiring rescue.

Made in God’s Image?

• • If humans are made in God’s image and are inclined toward evil, either God shares that inclination, or we were made fundamentally unlike him in the most important way, making “image and likeness” a misleading description.
  • The capacity for sin had to originate somewhere. God designed beings capable of falling, in conditions he designed, and foresaw the outcome, then held those beings responsible for it.
  • ADHD, anxiety, depression, and other neurological conditions are not moral failures, they are measurable physical realities. A perfect being designing brains that malfunction and suffer is incompatible with the claim of perfect, loving creation.

Religion is a Control System

• • People live “good” lives, waiting for the return of something that’ll never come, staying in line and out of the way. They are scared into this position by eternal conscious torture meaning many will do anything they can to save themselves and their families from such a thing.
  • A tyrannical leader with poor intentions could not engineer a more effective compliance mechanism than one that makes obedience holy, rebellion sinful, suffering spiritually meaningful, and all verification of claims conveniently deferred until death.
  • The system functions as a scarecrow, its power over behavior depends entirely on belief. This explains why doubt has historically been treated as dangerous and sinful, not because it offends God, but because it dissolves the mechanism of control.

It shouldn’t take a whole lot of thought to realize that there are monstrous philosophical holes in the theological structure of Christianity. It usually takes emotion to override intellect for someone to fully embrace this faith. Reason is kyptonite to Christianity, which is lucky that most people don’t use it in any sense of sufficient magnitude.

(5530) Does an afterlife require physical reconstruction?

If Christianity is correct, and humans will be resurrected after they die and be sent to heaven or hell, there exists a question as to how such a plan could be executed. It would seem, based on the biological sciences, that a reconstructed physical body would be required, and even then, there exists a question whether the reconstructed person would be the same as the person who lived an earthly life. The following was composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

1. The Physicalist View: Yes, Reconstruction is Required

If we look at humans through a strictly materialistic or scientific lens, consciousness, personality, and memory are not magical floating entities; they are the direct result of biological architecture. Your memories are literally physical connections (synapses) in your brain.

If this is true, then for an afterlife to exist, the creator would have to be a master biological engineer.

• • The “Re-Upload”: God (or the universe) would have to physically reconstruct a new body for you in a new dimension and perfectly arrange the billions of neural pathways in that new brain to exactly match the state your brain was in right before you died.
  • Theological Precedent: Interestingly, traditional orthodox Christianity and Islam actually lean heavily toward physicalism in the end. They do not teach that you exist forever as a floating ghost. They teach the Bodily Resurrection—the idea that God will physically reconstruct human bodies and minds at the end of time to live in a newly recreated physical universe.

2. The Danger of Reconstruction: The “Copy Problem”

If the afterlife does require physical reconstruction with preloaded memories, it creates a terrifying philosophical paradox, famously known in philosophy as the Teletransporter Paradox (or the Swampman thought experiment).

If you die, your physical brain rots away. If God builds a brand-new brain a thousand years later and “preloads” it with your memories, is that actually you? * From the perspective of the new reconstructed person, they would wake up, remember your childhood, remember your death, and say, “Wow, I made it to the afterlife!”

• • But philosophers argue that this might just be a perfect replica—a clone. The original you experienced the darkness of death and ceased to exist. The being enjoying the afterlife is just a flawless copy who thinks they are you.

If consciousness is strictly physical, the afterlife might just be a universe full of perfect clones of dead people. A good thought experiment is to consider a clone of a person being constructed while the original person is still alive. This situation is analogous the claims of a reconstructed body after death, but if you and your clone are both alive, then it seems obvious that the clone is not you.

3. The Dualist View: No, the Brain is Just Hardware

To solve the “Copy Problem,” classical philosophers (like Plato and Descartes) and traditional religions rely on Substance Dualism. This is the belief that your mind/soul and your physical brain are two completely different substances.

• • The Radio Analogy: In this view, the brain is not the generator of your consciousness; it is just a radio receiver. Your soul/mind is the invisible radio signal. The brain simply tunes into it and allows you to interact with the physical world.
  • Memory as Immaterial: If dualism is true, your deepest identity and core memories are not ultimately stored in the physical synapses of your brain; they are stored in the immaterial soul. Therefore, when the physical brain (the radio) gets smashed by death, the signal (you) is completely unharmed.
  • The Result: An afterlife would not require physical reconstruction or “preloaded memories” because your continuous, uninterrupted consciousness simply leaves the broken hardware behind and transitions into a new state of existence.

Summary

If human consciousness is purely a physical biological process, then yes, an afterlife requires an incredibly complex physical reconstruction project by a creator, risking the problem that the “resurrected” you is just a clone. If human consciousness is a non-physical substance (a soul), no physical reconstruction is required to maintain your memories or your identity.

There really isn’t a debate- we know from verified scientific research and anecdotal observations that human consciousness is fully dependent on physical biological processes. This means that #3 above is nothing but wishful thinking. We are left with the highly dubious #1, and even if #1 is true, it might not really be you (#2).

(5531) God’s salvation game does not add up

If we take everything at face value- that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then the ‘game’ he has created to determine who goes to heaven and who goes to hell is a cruel setup of misdirection, leading to extreme circumstances that are outside the control of the ‘game players.’ The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1su07y1/if_god_was_real_he_intentionally_designed/

If God was real, he intentionally designed billions of brains ahead of time that he knows wouldn’t be able to be convinced of his existence.

An omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God who designed the human brain already knows the decisions we will make and how we will fare in his test before our life begins. God created humans with a limited understanding of how the universe works, knowing that we’d create fields of education and science to figure out what is true and what isn’t.

This God knows precisely what kind and how strong the evidence would need to be to convince the brain it gave us that it is real and worthy of worship—a brain that tries to use rational thinking and critically evaluate claims. A God who designed the brain would understand the neuroscience and function of the prefrontal cortex. We cannot “choose to” believe in a God anymore than we can choose to believe in BigFoot or leprechauns.

Beliefs aren’t voluntary decisions, but rather conclusions reached from evidence, experience, and critical thinking. If God hates rational skepticism so much that it tortures people for eternity for using it and realizing that the burden of proof is not met—and realizing that the claims made are not only unsupported by evidence but also irrational—then we are simply mice in a sadistic experiment. It is rigged against us and in favor of its predetermined, chosen lucky few. The lucky few who were able to convince themselves that God is real and worship him, whether it be through indoctrination, or some brilliant intellectual prowess that billions of others were not able to tap into.

This makes salvation some sort of game rooted in willful delusion and blind obedience as the main ingredients, not one that values intellectual integrity or how kindly you treated others.

These are the dynamics of an abusive relationship: “I am giving you a brain that better find a way to be convinced of this ridiculous story—but on difficulty level 100, because not only am I not going to provide any evidence, I’m going to have this story coexist with thousands of other religions and Gods and have it conflict with every branch of modern science and have the human spokesmen for this belief system be incredibly unconvincing. Oh, still not convinced? I love you but you brought this onto yourself, look at what you made me do to you!”

Christianity cannot have this both ways- either it must admit that God is not all-powerful, and concede his limitations, or retain the omnipotence property while conceding that God is not completely fair and has properties of a sadist. There are no other options.

(5532) Christianity used genocide to win over Europe

Christian historians love to spread the theory that Europe fell in love with Christianity to such an extent that the pre-existing pagan religions just naturally and peacefully faded away. This romantic characterization is refuted in the book The Rise of Christianity and the Fall of Rome by ChemicalMind (pen name). The following is a synopsis of this book:

In the Hall of Constantine in the Vatican is detailed the Roman Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity and Christianity’s eventual triumph over paganism. The art of the rooftop, commissioned in the 1500s and named, quite plainly, “The Triumph of Christianity over Paganism”, illustrates this triumphalism, with a statue of Christ looming over the shattered remains of a statue in the Ancient style. And yet, certain modern scholars–almost all of them Christians–would have you believe there was no violent triumph as such, that paganism simply more or less faded away, losing a doomed war of hearts and minds. In reality, this could not be further from the truth.

Of course, the rewriting of Christian history to serve Christian purposes is not a new trend. With their victories over paganisms of all sorts, Christians were left to rewrite history, and the facts, for their own ends. As “The Father of Church History”, Eusebius, himself wrote: “it will be necessary sometimes to use falsehood as a remedy for the benefit of those who require such a mode of treatment”, and Christian historians ever since have loyally followed in his footsteps, portraying the past–the time of the pagan Roman Empire–as an inferior world doomed to die, and Christianity’s rise as both inevitable and positive in comparison.

For thousands of years–and very much still to this day–the majority of Church leaders and Christian historians, consciously and not, have done their very best to demonize, downplay and even destroy the accomplishments and achievements of Greek and especially Roman civilization while glorifying their own successes, even while at the same time co-opting a mixture of these past civilization’s worst and best parts for their own theological and political ends. Christianity told the generations that followed that their victory over the old world was a victory celebrated by all but the foolish or demonic or both–and countless generations that followed had effectively no alternative but to believe it–or at least not oppose it.

And yet, throughout this time, plenty of humanist, secular and occasionally even Christian scholars have also fought back, doing their best to challenge the massive, dauntless, seemingly inexhaustible desire of the elites in general–and Christian elites, in particular-to lie, obfuscate and obscure in the service of both their material and religious interests and beliefs.

This book, utilizing the extensive research of academics like Richard Carrier, Ramsey Macmullan, Mar Marcos, Bryan Ward-Perkins, Willem Jongman, Guillame Deprez and many others, seeks to reveal the dark reality: that paganism did not simply die out, nor was Christianity’s rise either inevitable or a boon, but rather that the erasure of paganisms of all sorts and the eventual dominance of a particularly superstitious, bigoted and anti-science strain of Christianity in ancient Catholicism led to a massive genocide that took painstaking place over the period of a thousand years and then some, all but erasing a large majority of achievements the Greeks and Romans had created, and plunging the world into a time of extraordinary darkness and misery in comparison–one that in most ways required the works of those same Greeks and Romans to emerge out of again.

If Christianity was true, it would not have needed to use violence to overthrow the (more science-friendly) pagan religions that existed alongside. This would have happened peacefully as true religions would have a massive natural growth advantage over false ones. But that’s not what happened. And the genocide perpetrated by Christianity to acquire its ecclesiastic dominance is a putrid stain on the faith.

(5533) Christianity uses ignorance as its fuel

Keeping Christians uninformed about their faith is the number one goal of the clergy- who know a good number of things about Christianity that, if known by their congregations, would result in a significant loss of attendance at their places of worship. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2026/04/profound-ignorance-about-christianity.html#more

“We trust our clergy”—and that’s enough.

In fact, one of the primary roles of the clergy is to divert attention from blunt realities. They don’t want the devout folks under their care to become aware of basic facts that undermine the Christian faith. For example, the turmoil that Jesus studies have been in for decades, based on the very embarrassing truth that the gospels do not qualify as history. Not a single episode in the gospels, not a single Jesus saying, can be verified by the techniques that historians use to write authentic history. The clergy continue to get away with quoting feel-good Bible verses from the pulpit.

The true origins of the faith are never mentioned—and this is of vital importance. In the ancient world in which Christianity arose, there were other major religions that worshiped dying-and-rising gods—and promised eternal life. But it would take serious research and study on the part of laypeople to discover the painful truth that the early Jesus sect borrowed this idea and attached it to Jesus. As Richard Carrier has said in a major article on the context in which Christianity was born: “Jesus is just a late comer to the party.”

The fact that the clergy are in the business of promoting magical thinking is also not noticed. The major example of this is the eucharist: the claim that bread and wine magically become the real body and blood of Jesus—well, at least according to the Catholic church; Protestant churches regard the communion ritual as symbolic. One meme floating about on Facebook makes the point clearly: “You’re in church pretending to eat the flesh and drink the blood of your imaginary friend, but you think I’m crazy for being an atheist!”

A few days ago, 20 April 2026, John Loftus posted here the link to an article that he wrote in 2023, How to Change the Minds of Believers. He opens with this observation:

“After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers…I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang their heads against a wall. I think that it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success, for any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion.”

It’s a good idea to read all ten of Loftus’ tips for getting through to devout believers. He points out this painful reality: “Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees.” Hence the title for my article this week.

In his first tip he mentions the role of early indoctrination, which believers commonly don’t grasp as the tool that their religious brands embrace with determination:

“Given the accidents of when and where we were born, and how we were raised, our religious faith was unthinkingly adopted just as surely as was our nationality and preferred cuisine. So at least once in their lives, believers should seriously question what they believe. Consider it a rite of passage to adulthood if nothing else.”

Catholics especially should hold their clergy and the bureaucracy accountable for what they’ve done with Mary. They should ask, “What are the sources of your knowledge about Mary?” There is precious little in the New Testament about Mary, aside from the inflated, unverifiable, myth-saturated birth narratives in Matthew and Luke.

In the second chapter of John’s gospel, Jesus scolds his mother. The devout should also probe why—on what basis—did Pope Pius XII in 1950 declare that Mary had been taken bodily into heaven. There has been a huge campaign in the church to turn Mary into a goddess on her own, The Queen of Heaven. All of this was created by fantasy theology, unbeknownst to Catholic laity. And it is continually reinforced by the artworks and huge statues depicting Mary. If there is any curiosity at all about how this extreme exaggeration of Mary came about, “we trust our clergy” is sufficient, since the clergy are reputed to be skilled at prayer and meditation.

Given this blatant violation of common sense, Loftus’ fifth tip is especially important: Get believers to read their Bibles, which is not a common practice.

“The Bible debunks itself. It contains forgeries and borrowed pagan myths, and is inconsistent within itself. It tells a plethora of ancient superstitious tales that don’t make any sense at all. It has a god that evolved from a polytheistic one who lives in the sky above the Earth, who does both good and bad, who makes room for both angels and demons, and who thinks that a god/human blood sacrifice can magically ransom us from the grip of the Devil.”

Dr. Jaco Gericke, in his essay included in the Loftus anthology, The End of Christianity, states the case pretty well: “If you read the scriptures and are not shocked out of all your religious beliefs, you have not understood them.” (p. 137) I suspect many of the devout who have tried to read the Bible give up, put off by the silly, bizarre, shocking stories they come across—and they spot the bad theology as well. “I’m sure the clergy have it all figured out, but I can’t be bothered.” Of course, some head for the exit.

Loftus’ sixth tip is the recommendation that the devout study the horrors of church history. It’s not a pretty picture:

“Inform believers about the Church. The history of the Church, and of the people claiming to have the alleged Holy Spirit inside of them, reveals a continuous spectacle of atrocities such that its history is a damning indictment upon the god that they profess to believe in.” (emphasis added)

The Inquisition, the burning at the stake of women accused of witchcraft, the severity of the Crusades, the ongoing anti-Semitism fueled by Bible texts, the brutalities of slavery—which is not even mentioned in the Ten Commandments—and the savagery with which native Americans were treated by the invading European Christians after 1492 (see especially, David E. Stannard’s book, American Holocaust: Columbus and The Conquest of the New World). All of these come to mind, as well as the vicious church reaction to thinkers, such as Galileo, who discovered that the Biblical view of the Cosmos is deeply inadequate and flawed.

Loftus’ tenth tip is the one that utterly shatters belief in a good, caring god. Horrendous suffering, he points out,

“…is as close to a refutation of an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent God as is possible…the best arguments are evidential ones about clearly obvious concrete test cases like the Holocaust, or the massive number of children who suffer from malnutrition and die every year, or the kill or be killed law of predation in the animal world.”

The clergy offer theobabble to divert attention from these realities—for example, “Our god works in mysterious ways”—but often even devout laypeople sense that these don’t work. The 2nd edition of Loftus’ anthology, recently released, God and Horrendous Suffering, provides abundant detail on exactly how and why the concept of god is destroyed by the level of suffering we see around us every day.

When my book Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught was published in 2021, I gifted copies to a couple of proudly pious friends. The response from both was basically the same: “I can’t read that, I’m a Catholic!” So the brick wall is firmly in place, as Loftus said: “Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees.” When the church offers eternal life and the promise that it will help keep you in god’s good favor, why put any of that in danger?

There is an adage that goes something like this- ‘an informed Christian is an ex-Christian.’ If Christianity was true, an increase in knowledge about it would result in an increase in belief. But what we observe is the complete and total opposite.

(5534) Four copies of Jesus

The four gospels each paint a different picture of Jesus, as each author tailored his account to meet the expectations of his audience. The following was developed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Ancient biographies were not written just to record facts; they were written to address the specific crises of the communities reading them. The authors were acting as pastors and theologians, shaping their accounts to highlight the aspects of Jesus that their specific audiences desperately needed to hear:

• • Mark’s Secretive, Suffering Jesus: Mark was likely writing to a community of Christians in Rome facing brutal persecution under Emperor Nero. They didn’t need a triumphant, glowing king; they needed a Jesus who was misunderstood, who suffered, and who kept his true identity a secret until the very end, because that mirrored their own terrifying reality.
  • Matthew’s Jewish Jesus: Matthew was writing to a community of Jewish Christians who were in a bitter dispute with traditional synagogues after the destruction of the Temple. He curated his Gospel to prove that Jesus was the “New Moses” and the ultimate fulfillment of the Hebrew scriptures.
  • Luke’s Social Justice Jesus: Luke was writing to a largely Gentile (non-Jewish), relatively wealthy audience. He intentionally highlighted Jesus’s interactions with the poor, with women, and with social outcasts to challenge the Greco-Roman cultural norms of hierarchy and power.
  • John’s Divine Jesus: Written decades after the other three, John’s community had had time for deep philosophical reflection. John isn’t trying to write a chronological history; he is writing high theology, framing Jesus as the pre-existent cosmic Logos (Word).

Around 170 CE, a Syrian Christian named Tatian thought the exact same thing. He took the four Gospels, chopped them up, removed all the duplicates and contradictions, and stitched them together into one single, smooth, chronological master-narrative called the Diatessaron. For a while, it was wildly popular.

However, the early church leaders eventually rejected it and went back to the messy, four-Gospel system. Why? Because they realized that by forcing the four accounts into one flat storyline, they lost the unique theological voice of each community.

So we ended up with four copies of Jesus, and it comes down to a cafeteria for Christians to choose the Jesus that they like the best. We have no way to determine which of the four Jesus’ is closest to the real thing, or even whether there was a Jesus at all.

(5535) Early Christianity did not begin as theology

Contemporary, sanitized Christianity would have us believe that the modern-day view of the faith was in place right from the beginning (CE30 and forward). This is not true, and the reality surrounding how the theology evolved is a significant piece of evidence against its truth claims. The following is a quote from biblical scholar Richard C. Miller:

𝗘𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆 𝗖𝗵𝗿𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝗱𝗶𝗱 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗯𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻 𝗮𝘀 “𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆.” That is merely a later Christian domestication of the evidence. What we encounter in the first and second centuries is not doctrine calmly expressing itself through narrative, but ancient cultic mythography: aretalogy, epiphany tale, translation legend, divine-man iconography, chreia collection, cult aition, oracle fulfillment, potent cultural mimesis, ritual speech, and competitive legacy tradition. These are not decorative categories. They were the operating systems of Mediterranean meaning. To call this “high Christology,” “resurrection theology,” or “theology of the cross” is to smuggle the later church’s intellectual furniture back into a symbolic world that was not yet arranged by those categories.

Theology was not the engine. Mythography was the engine. John did not first possess a “high Christology” and then dress it up in story. John’s Jesus is generated through descent and ascent, signs and glory, witness and heavenly origin — the grammar of epiphany, heavenly envoy, cultic recognition, and translated divine presence, and the Platonic demiurgos. Mark did not first possess a “theology of the cross.” Mark produces Jesus’ hidden status through secrecy, demonic disclosure, failed recognition, suffering, and a strategically scandalizing tragic death — a narrative economy of demigod recognition, concealment like that of Odysseus, reversal, and heroic vindication. Paul’s resurrection proclamation is not best understood as tidy doctrine; it is divine mythic transformation, where public execution becomes divine exaltatio, cultic iconography, cosmic reversal, and hope for a pathway to immortal bliss at the end of the epoch.

This matters because “theology” has functioned as a quarantine device protecting Christian origins from ordinary recognition as Mediterranean myth-making. Once the quarantine is removed, Jesus no longer appears as a metaphysical exception floating above antiquity. He embodies garden-variety cultic fabric produced through recognizable symbolic language: demigod iconography, heavenly ascent, epiphany, cosmic rule, translation, sacred meal, ritual mysteries, and a basket of sacred texts. The Gospels are not windows into pristine Christian doctrine. They are mythographic tapestries, built from the same ancient systems of signification that made gods visible, heroes immortal, emperors divine, sages semi-heavenly, and cults compelling. Their genius was not that they escaped the symbolic world of antiquity, but that they mastered it.

Christianity laid bare is most obviously a human project engineered to mythologize a cultic figure, whether he was flesh and blood or imaginary. Any pathway to a literal understanding of gospel scripture is blocked by layers of mythology endemic to its time.

(5536) Eccentric, inflated, and dangerous theology of John

In the following, the author excoriates the theology that is presented in the Gospel of John, exposing its many fault lines:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2023/07/the-eccentric-inflated-dangerous.html

The author of John’s gospel apparently felt that the earlier writers got the story wrong—and he wanted to set the record straight. But, alas, this author was not a historian. He was a theologian who created his version of the Jesus story late in the first century or early in the second, many decades after the death of Jesus. He got carried away, hence my title for this article, suggesting that his theology was eccentric, inflated, and dangerous.

 Eccentric Theology

No Baptism of Jesus

In John’s gospel, Jesus is not baptized. Since his divine Jesus had been present at creation (more about this later), there was no need for him to be baptized for the remission of sins. Matthew was also bothered by this, so when he copied Mark’s text, he said that John the Baptist himself didn’t like the idea of baptizing Jesus. Matthew added Jesus-script: “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness” (Matthew 3:15). In other words, let’s do it for show. In John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t set foot in the water. The Baptist is there to proclaim that Jesus in the “lamb of God who takes way the sins of the world” (John 1:29).

No Parables in the Teachings of Jesus

In Mark 4:10-12 we find the bizarre Jesus-script in which he claims that he taught in parables to prevent people from repenting and being forgiven. In Mark 4:34, we read that he taught only in parables. It seems that the author of John’s gospel was determined to show this was wrong. Instead of teaching in parables, we find long Jesus monologues found in none of the other gospels.

There is no Eucharist at the Last Supper

In John’s presentation of this episode, Jesus washes the feet of the disciples—that’s the primary event (chapter 13). There is no mention of eating the bread as a symbol of Jesus’ body, and nothing about wine being his blood of the new covenant. However, late in chapter 6, which begins with the feeding of the Five Thousand, we find the especially ghoulish text about the importance of eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood. More about this later too.

There is little ethical teaching in John

This theologian-author was mainly concerned to present Jesus as the key to gaining eternal life. While Matthew added the Sermon on the Mount when he copied Mark’s text—and Luke modified the Sermon—John left it out altogether. And there’s a touch of irony here. In John 8 we find the famous story of the woman “taken in adultery,” whom the religious leaders are so eager to have stoned to death. They bring her to Jesus for his opinion on what to do. “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (John 8:7). But this story, which is commonly taken as an illustration of Jesus’ compassion, was not in the original text of John’s gospel. In some manuscripts, it turns up in Luke 21. There is nothing whatever by which to verify that it is an authentic story about Jesus.

John changed the day of the crucifixion—and Jesus’ attitude

One of John’s theological themes is that Jesus was “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Thus it was crucial for him that Jesus die at the same time that lambs were killed for the Passover meal. The other gospels present Jesus having the Passover meal with his disciples that evening. And it was unthinkable for John that Jesus wasn’t the perfect divine being throughout the ordeal of the crucifixion. The other three gospels indicate that a man was picked out of the crowd, Simon of Cyrene, to carry the cross. In John 19:17 we read that Jesus carried the cross himself. In Mark’s gospel, the last words of Jesus were, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” John would have none of that; when Jesus breathed his last, he simply said, “It is finished” — “then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (John 19:30).

 Inflated Theology

John chapter one sets the tone

Please read and ponder carefully John 1:1-18. Verse 14 is perhaps most famous: “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” We find this remarkable claim at the opening, vv. 1-3: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.” The other gospel writers positioned Jesus as the son of god. In Mark’s gospel this was announced by a voice from the sky when Jesus was baptized. Matthew and Luke grafted onto their Jesus story an idea borrowed from other religions, that Jesus had been conceived by a god.

John had succumbed big time to cult fanaticism. He claims that Jesus had been present at creation, indeed nothing “came into being” without the participation of Jesus. The Galilean peasant preacher has disappeared under layers of theology. Any reader today must ask—curiosity must kick in: how did he know this? Why should anyone trust the ideas that were bouncing around inside his head? So many theologians of very different faiths have made exaggerated claims about their gods, confident, of course, that their followers will be convinced, i.e., be fooled.

The contrived Lazarus story

This spectacular episode is found only in John’s gospel. How did the other gospel writers miss it? Please read and ponder John 11:1-44. The most famous text in the story is vv. 25-26: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” There can be little doubt that this is the purpose of the story—to stress again that Jesus is the key to living forever. Nor can there be any doubt that the story is contrived, given vv. 14-15: “Then Jesus told them plainly, ‘Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe. But let us go to him.’” Jesus was glad he wasn’t there? Are churchgoers really okay with this? Would Lazarus himself have said, “Sure, let’s do this so you can score points”?

Don’t miss the magic spell that Jesus uses here, v. 43: it’s a voice activated resurrection: “…he cried with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come out!’” How in the world is eternal life proved by such an event? We are told nothing else about Lazarus, namely that he died again at some point. And so did all those dead people who—so we’re told in Matthew 27:52-53 — came back to life and walked around Jerusalem on the first Easter morning. Clearly Luke knew this problem had to be avoided with Jesus, so in Acts 1 he says that Jesus disappeared above the clouds to join god in the sky. That never happened…so newly alive Jesus remained on earth, and died again as well.

John 6: 53-57, theology reaches a low point

This chapter opens with Jesus feeding a crowd of 5,000 people. One of the disciples noticed a boy who had five barley loaves and two fish—from which Jesus, again working his magic—produced enough food for everyone. The next day he advised those whom he’d fed: “Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (v. 27). We’re getting closer to perhaps the worst text in the New Testament, vv. 53-57:

“So Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day, for my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me.’”

If Christians heard these words shouted by a deranged street preacher, they’d cross the street, run in the other direction. The author of John’s gospel was so absorbed in his version of the Jesus cult that he was okay advocating this grotesque idea. His religion embraced magic potions, i.e., eating flesh, drinking blood that belongs to a god. But when you’re deep into the cult, this no longer causes offense. Over the centuries, the ecclesiastical bureaucracy promoted this ancient superstition relentlessly. It became part of ritual—to the ridiculous extent of making a big deal of First Communion, i.e., kids are allowed to eat Jesus for the first time. I often wonder: when are Christians going to snap out of it?

John 14-17

Anyone who decides to read this gospel nonstop will find these chapters especially tedious—a great stretch of cult theobabble: Jesus and god are one. You’d better sign on, or else, e.g. 15:6: “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” Any curious reader will want to know: why are these chapters missing from the other gospels? Devout scholars, who argue—without evidence— that the gospels derive from eyewitness accounts, have to be stumped that all these words of Jesus said to the disciples are missing from the earlier gospels. John seems to have followed the ancient practice of making up speeches for holy heroes. Richard Carrier, after reviewing so many of the fabrications found in this gospel, concluded: “John has thus run wild with authorial gluttony, freely changing everything and inventing whatever he wants. By modern standards, John is lying” (On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, p. 491).

 Dangerous Theology

Religious fanaticism has been fueled by scripture. Promising that people who don’t believe will be “thrown into the fire and burned” encourages violence. Two verses after the beloved John 3:16, we find this warning: “…those who do not believe are condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” And at the end of the chapter: “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever disobeys the Son will not see life but must endure God’s wrath.” Through the centuries, Christian zealots have gone to war and burned people at the stake; these hateful verses in John’s gospel provide the justification.

There has been a lot of commentary as well on the role this gospel has played in fueling antisemitism. The Wikipedia article on this include a section on the fourth gospel: “The Gospel of John is the primary source of the image of ‘the Jews’ acting collectively as the enemy of Jesus, which later became fixed in Christian minds.” Perhaps the worst text is John 8:44, Jesus in conversation with the Jews: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” Hector Avalos has pointed out that this verse ended up on Nazi road signs (in his essay, “Atheism Was Not the Cause of the Holocaust,” in John Loftus’ anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, p. 378).

 Devout believers who are so sure that the Bible is the Good Book have a lot of explaining to do when the discussion turns to John’s gospel. This author—as Carrier notes—by modern standards, did a lot of lying, and in the process, as Louis Ruprecht maintains, “corrupted the heart of Christianity.”

Many Christians prefer John over the other gospels because it presents Jesus in a more divine and invincible light than the synoptics. But an objective analysis suggests that this gospel is a work of sycophantic fiction, that is so far divorced from reality and the other gospels that it should never have been placed in the Bible.

(5537) Worst examples of God punishing the innocent

The Bible is replete with examples of God punishing people who were innocent of the ‘crimes’ that made him mad. The following is taken from Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

When looking for the “worst” case of God punishing the innocent in the biblical narrative, it depends on whether you measure “worst” by the sheer scale of the death toll, or by the intimate, specific targeting of an innocent individual.

This issue is one of the most profound ethical hurdles in biblical studies. It is deeply complicated by the fact that the Bible itself contains contradictory views on this. In Ezekiel 18:20, God explicitly states a rule of individual justice: “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent.” Yet, throughout the historical narratives, this rule is frequently broken. Here are four of the most severe examples that scholars, critics, and theologians point to where the innocent are explicitly punished for the actions of others.

1. The Scale of Horror: The Amalekite Genocide (1 Samuel 15)

If you measure “worst” by the explicit command to kill those who are biologically innocent, the mandate given to King Saul regarding the Amalekites is often cited as the most difficult text in the Old Testament.

• • The Crime: The Amalekites had ambushed the Israelites hundreds of years earlier during their exodus from Egypt.
  • The Punishment: God speaks through the prophet Samuel and commands Saul to wipe out the entire civilization as payback for what their ancestors did 400 years prior.
  • The Innocent: The command explicitly includes the slaughter of children and infants: “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.” (1 Samuel 15:3).

2. The Proxy Punishment: David’s Census (2 Samuel 24)

If you measure “worst” by the sheer disproportion of collateral damage caused by a single leader’s relatively minor infraction, this event stands out.

• • The Crime: King David decides to take a census of his fighting men. (The text is complicated, stating in one book that God incited David to do this, and in another that Satan did, but regardless, the act of taking the census is deemed a massive sin of pride/self-reliance).
  • The Punishment: God gives David three choices for his punishment. David chooses to fall into the hands of God, resulting in a divine plague.
  • The Innocent: The plague wipes out 70,000 Israelite citizens from Dan to Beersheba. Even David recognizes the horrific injustice of this, crying out to God: “I have sinned; I, the shepherd, have done wrong. These are but sheep. What have they done? Let your hand fall on me and my family.” (2 Samuel 24:17).

3. The Intimate Affliction: David and Bathsheba’s Child (2 Samuel 12)

While the previous examples deal with mass casualties, this story is often viewed as uniquely disturbing because it involves God directly afflicting a single, named infant with a lingering illness.

• • The Crime: King David commits adultery with Bathsheba and then orchestrates the murder of her husband, Uriah, to cover up the pregnancy.
  • The Punishment: When the prophet Nathan confronts David, David repents. Nathan tells him his sins are forgiven and he will not die. However, there is a penalty.
  • The Innocent: Nathan declares, “Because by doing this you have shown utter contempt for the Lord, the son born to you will die.” The text then states, “The Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne to David, and he became ill.” The newborn baby suffers for seven days before finally dying, paying the ultimate physical price for his father’s sexual and violent crimes.

4. The Cosmic Wager: Job’s Children (Job 1)

The Book of Job is a philosophical masterpiece exploring the nature of suffering, but the inciting incident reduces innocent human lives to disposable props in a divine bet.

• • The Premise: God points out Job’s flawless righteousness to Satan. Satan argues that Job is only loyal because God protects and blesses him.
  • The Punishment (The Test): God removes His protection and allows Satan to destroy everything Job loves to prove a point about Job’s unconditional loyalty.
  • The Innocent: While Job survives, his ten children are crushed to death when a violently strong wind collapses the house they are feasting in. At the end of the book, God rewards Job with ten new children, which, from a modern psychological perspective, treats human beings as replaceable commodities rather than irreplaceable individuals.

If we continue examining the biblical text through the lens of modern ethics, the list of events where the innocent are destroyed—either as collateral damage or as direct punishment for someone else’s actions—grows even longer.

These additional examples further highlight the ancient concept of “corporate solidarity,” where a family or nation was treated as a single entity that could be punished for the sins of its head.

5. The Tenth Plague: The Firstborn of Egypt (Exodus 11-12)

This is perhaps the most famous example of mass collateral damage in the Old Testament, forming the basis of the Passover narrative.

• • The Crime: Pharaoh repeatedly refuses to release the enslaved Israelites (a refusal the text notes is repeatedly compounded by God intentionally “hardening Pharaoh’s heart”).
  • The Punishment: God moves through the nation of Egypt and strikes down the firstborn of every household.
  • The Innocent: The text is explicit about the sweeping nature of this execution: “Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the female slave, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well” (Exodus 11:5). The infants and children of the lower-class citizens and slaves had absolutely no political power to influence Pharaoh’s decrees, yet they paid the ultimate price for his stubbornness.

6. The Purge of Achan’s Family (Joshua 7)

This event occurs just after the Israelites’ famous victory at Jericho and is one of the clearest examples of a family being executed for the crimes of the father.

• • The Crime: God explicitly commands that all the plunder from Jericho be destroyed or given to the treasury. A single soldier, Achan, disobeys and secretly buries some stolen silver, gold, and a beautiful robe under his tent.
  • The Punishment: Because of this one man’s hidden sin, God removes His protection from the entire Israelite army, causing 36 men to be slaughtered in their next battle at Ai. Once Achan is found out, he is stoned to death.
  • The Innocent: The punishment does not stop with Achan. Joshua takes Achan, his stolen goods, his sons, his daughters, his cattle, and his donkeys into a valley, where the entire family is stoned to death and burned to ashes to purge the sin from the camp.

7. The Swallowing of the “Little Ones” (Numbers 16)

This story deals with a political and religious uprising against Moses in the wilderness, resulting in a terrifying display of divine execution.

• • The Crime: Korah, Dathan, and Abiram lead a rebellion of 250 men against the leadership of Moses and Aaron.
  • The Punishment: Moses warns the rest of the camp to back away from the tents of these three men. The earth splits open and swallows the rebels alive down into the realm of the dead.
  • The Innocent: The text specifically notes that Dathan and Abiram came out and stood at the entrance of their tents with “their wives, their children and their little ones” (Numbers 16:27) right before the ground opened. The infants and children were buried alive in the fissure alongside their rebellious fathers.

8. The Global Flood (Genesis 6-8)

While often sanitized as a cheerful children’s story featuring a boat full of animals, the theological reality of the Genesis flood represents the largest-scale destruction of innocent life in the text.

• • The Crime: The earth becomes entirely corrupt, and human wickedness is so great that God “regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled” (Genesis 6:6).
  • The Punishment: God sends a cataclysmic global flood to wipe out all air-breathing life on land, saving only Noah, his family, and a remnant of animals.
  • The Innocent: By the very nature of a global flood, the death toll inherently included millions of infants, toddlers, and pregnant women who were biologically incapable of the moral wickedness attributed to the adult population, not to mention the entirety of the animal kingdom.

9. Elisha and the Bears (2 Kings 2:23-24)

While the other examples involve proxy punishment, this brief and jarring story is an example of severely disproportionate, lethal retribution upon the youth.

• • The Crime: As the prophet Elisha is walking up to Bethel, a group of youths (or “small boys” depending on the Hebrew translation) comes out of the town and jeers at him, chanting, “Get out of here, baldy!”
  • The Punishment: Elisha turns around, looks at them, and calls down a curse on them in the name of the Lord.
  • The Innocent (or Disproportionately Punished): Immediately, two female bears come out of the woods and maul 42 of the boys. Even if apologists argue these were dangerous, delinquent teenagers rather than small children, the divinely ordained, lethal animal attack in response to verbal mockery remains a massive ethical stumbling block for modern readers.

For critics, these stories are definitive proof that the Bible’s deity is a reflection of the brutal, tribalistic minds of the ancient men who wrote it. For theologians, these texts require complex apologetics, ranging from arguments that God, as the author of life, has the sovereign right to end any life at any time (Divine Command Theory), to the view that the biblical writers sometimes mistakenly attributed their own violent military campaigns or natural plagues to the direct will of God.

It should be obvious that a real god, or at least a god who deserved respect, would not punish the innocent. Yahweh fails this test miserably.

(5538) Power scaling failure in the Bible

The accounts in the Bible describing God’s power alongside the way that he instructs humans to conquer enemies leaves a logical hole in the narrative. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1syento/divine_commands_to_kill_and_conquer_are_rather/

Divine Commands to kill and conquer are rather absurd when you remember how powerful God is supposed to be.

I feel like Abrahamic authors don’t really understand power scaling, but eh, modern authors struggle with it too.

Believers often try to portray the conquest of Canaan as some sort of grim necessity. “It was the only way.”

Was it? You have God on your side. You don’t have to kill a single person. And we can’t pretend God is non-interventionist. He does his own dirty work plenty. He floods, casts fireballs, does salt transmutation, possesses bears, sonic blasts, rains frogs, wrestles, (a bunch of real silly stuff tbh).

But the idea that this is the best God’s chosen people could come up with is absurd. God can teleport you to safety. God can teleport your enemies to another location. God can put them in a pocket dimension with time dilation that tricks them into thinking they never left, all while the Israelites take over an empty promised land. God can cast an infinite staircase desert illusion forcefield to keep out invaders.

Heck, even low-level magical displays ought to be enough to get an enemy to surrender. Just make it apparent that the Israelites’ enemies don’t stand a chance.

And I will be unwilling to accept that any of these options are more evil than commands to slaughter entire populations (unsaved populations, mind you, so high chance they’d just go to hell)

Even if we look at something like comic books, superheroes (who are far, far from tri-omni) don’t need to command their fans to risk their lives to go out and kill villains in order stop villains. One of the perks of being really powerful is that you can just go ahead and prevent violence without getting people killed. You know, as long as you care enough to be careful.

The real answer is a lack of creativity and proper world-building. And this is really common; fantasy authors love to concoct overpowered characters and then forget how easily they can solve the story’s conflicts. Many such cases.

And if we really want to get meta, I think the other, darker side of the story (and these really probably are just stories, gruesome fan fiction where ancestors are portrayed as far more destructive than they ever were)

Is that these “divine” commands to kill and conquer are loyalty checks? It’s conditioning, so that you can manufacture consent among a population for future atrocity.

The god of the Bible acts as if he is limited in power and needs to use humans to foment violence on those he doesn’t like. There is no consistent theme of biblical authors viewing God as being all powerful and thus he is often portrayed in ways that display his limitations along with, of course, his depravity.

(5539) Seven logical reasons to leave Christianity

In the following, the author lists seven reasons to justify leaving Christianity behind:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1syllqt/logical_constructed_reasons_why_i_fell_out_of/

Logical constructed reasons why I fell out of Christianity.

1. The Dinosaur Problem

Why did God make dinosaurs? For what purpose? They ruled the earth for millions of years, doing nothing but hunting, killing, and eating each other, just to be wiped out by an asteroid. No lessons, no redemption, no humans around to witness it. The Bible doesn’t even mention them clearly. Were they an experiment? Was God bored? Or maybe the simpler truth is that they weren’t created for any divine purpose, they were just part of evolution, the next link in a natural chain that existed long before us.

2. Humans Are Made of the Same Stuff as Stars

Science shows that humans are made of the same basic elements as stars, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon. Literally the same ingredients that build galaxies. So when people say “we were made in God’s image,” it feels off. Because the evidence says we’re made in the universe’s image. We’re not separate or sacred, we’re literally a continuation of it, made from it directly. We are not some unique creation dropped into the cosmos, we are the cosmos rearranged to be aware of itself, by accident of course billions of years later after the big bang.

3. God’s Morality Makes No Sense

The God of the Old Testament kills people instantly for minor things. Take Onan, who refused to impregnate his dead brother’s wife. He thought it was wrong, and God struck him dead on the spot. That’s not justice, that’s ego. And this same God later commands mass circumcision of infants as a “covenant.” Isn’t that weird? And far worse crimes go unpunished today. If God is moral, He’s inconsistent. And if He’s consistent, then His morality is nothing like ours, it’s worse, which means it’s not morality at all tbh.

4. Our Bodies and Evolution

We share about 99% of our DNA with apes. Our bones, organs, and instincts match theirs almost perfectly. We didn’t appear out of thin air, we came from the same slow evolutionary process every other living thing did. From bacteria to fish to mammals to us, all through natural laws. it’s a reminder that we’re part of nature, literally, not above it. The evidence for that chain is so overwhelming that denial isn’t faith, it’s willful blindness. And for those who say, oh well god used this as part of his process, then that’s also false, cause it contradicts Adam and Eve, as in, why have the whole population come from fish or whatever, when he could’ve or supposedly used Adam and Eve as the start of human kind? It’s a mismatch of what the bible teaches and what’s in reality. We objectively didn’t come from Adam and Eve in a linear sense, like how the bible supposes humanity came from.

5. Adam and Eve Don’t Fit Anywhere

If Adam and Eve were real, humanity would only be around 6,000 years old. But DNA, fossils, and archaeology all show humans have existed for about 300,000 years and the Earth itself for 4.5 billion. The math doesn’t work. And if Adam and Eve were the first people, how do you explain cavemen? Did intelligence vanish for thousands of years and then suddenly return? Either we accept what the evidence says, or we keep patching contradictions in an ancient story that doesn’t match reality.

6. Free Will Isn’t What We Think

The Bible claims humans have free will and moral responsibility. But neuroscience says otherwise. Brain scans literally show that our brains make decisions before we’re even aware of them. That means we don’t “choose” freely, we react to causes before we notice. So when religion says, “You chose to sin,” it’s ignoring the fact that we’re built on cause and effect. We don’t create our thoughts, we experience them. That breaks the whole logic of divine judgment and moral accountability. We ARE biological bacterial machines basically, kinda how Frank Turek frames it to be in an insulting way, I’d say it’s the realistic framing of life. Disliking it isn’t making it untrue.

7. The “Perfect Earth” Myth

People love saying, “Earth is perfectly made for us.” But no, we’re made for it. Life adapted to fit these conditions. If the oxygen, sunlight, or earth were different, life would’ve evolved differently too. Nothing about Earth screams “designed for humans.” We just evolved to handle it. And even this version of Earth isn’t “perfect” — it’s very dangerous, unstable, many people die from natural disasters all the time, and full of suffering. If this is perfection, it’s a cruel one. A natural explanation fits better, we’re survivors of chaos, not the focus of a divine plan.

So either the universe works by consistent natural laws that need no god, or it was designed in the most confusing, indirect, and contradictory way possible. Logic points to the first option.

There is no reason to suggest that the observations above indicate the presence of a supernatural manipulator who is intent on judging, rewarding, and punishing humans after they die. Rather, it strongly suggests that we inhabit a natural world indifferent to our existence.

(5540) Patriarchy consumes the Bible

It is especially clear that the Bible presents a theology that no longer works in modern society with respect to the roles and station of women versus men. The following was written by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

When examining the Bible through a historical and literary lens, it is clear that the texts were written within the deeply patriarchal cultures of the ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. Because of this, several passages explicitly outline a structural hierarchy where women are placed in a subordinate or lower status to men in the home, the church, and society.

While theologians and scholars debate how to interpret and apply these verses today, here are the primary scriptures that establish that hierarchy, categorized by their context.

1. The Hierarchy of Creation and the Fall

Several passages argue for male authority by pointing back to the order in which humans were created and who was responsible for the first sin in the Garden of Eden.

• • Genesis 3:16: Following the disobedience in the Garden of Eden, God pronounces the consequences of the Fall. To the woman, He says:
    “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
  • 1 Corinthians 11:7-9: The Apostle Paul argues for gender distinctions in worship based on the creation order:
    “A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”
  • 1 Timothy 2:13-14: This text uses the Genesis narrative to restrict women’s roles:
    “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.”

2. Silence and Subordination in Religious Gatherings

The New Testament contains specific instructions limiting the participation and leadership of women within the early church.

• • 1 Corinthians 14:34-35: A direct mandate regarding speaking in the assembly:
    “Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.”
  • 1 Timothy 2:11-12: Instructions on teaching and authority:
    “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet.”

3. Submission Within Marriage

The New Testament outlines a “household code” that designates the husband as the authoritative head of the family unit, requiring the wife’s submission.

• • Ephesians 5:22-24: > “Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
  • Colossians 3:18: > “Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.”
  • 1 Peter 3:1 and 3:5-6: > “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands… For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to adorn themselves. They submitted themselves to their own husbands, like Sarah, who obeyed Abraham and called him her lord.”

Here are some additional examples:

Deuteronomy 22:28–29: States that if a man rapes a virgin who is not betrothed, he must pay her father fifty shekels of silver and marry her, with no option for divorce.

Numbers 5:11–31: Describes a “trial of jealousy” where a woman suspected of adultery (without witnesses) is made to drink “water of bitterness.” If guilty, her uterus is expected to fall out or “thigh fall away”.

Leviticus 12:1–8: States that a woman is ceremonially unclean for 40 days after giving birth to a boy, but 80 days for a girl, suggesting a lower status for female life.

Exodus 20:17: In the Ten Commandments, a wife is listed among the possessions of a man that should not be coveted, alongside his slaves, ox, and donkey.

Proverbs: Often warns against “strange women” or “contentious women” (e.g., Prov 2:16, 21:19).

Ecclesiastes 7:26–28: Describes the author’s search for wisdom and claims to have found “more bitter than death the woman, whose heart is snares and nets”.

Judges 19:25–28: Details a concubine being raped and abused all night, after which her master treats her death as property damage.

An omnipotent god would have known that the world would proceed for at least another 20 centuries post-Jesus and that the ethos of equality of the sexes would emerge in the worldwide zeitgeist. Therefore, it is hard to excuse Yahweh for allowing the verses above to appear in his ‘timeless message’ to humankind.

(5541) Jesus amalgam theory

In the debate whether Jesus was a real person or fictional, there exists a middle ground where he might have been a composite of several persons named Jesus of the same time. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1sy1jul/amalgam_theory_of_jesus/

While the historical consensus is that a man called Jesus likely did exist, despite the absolute lack of any primary, contemporary evidence to support this, (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/159l0p3/historicity_of_jesus/?ref=share&ref_source=link), many have heard of the Mythicist position, held by a few notable historians (Richard Carrier, Robert Price, Hector Avalos), this remains a minority position.

But there is another possibility, known as Amalgam theory: that the stories of Jesus are an amalgam based on the lives and tales of multiple different men, all smushed together during the period of Oral tradition, before the first Gospels were composed.

Please note that, of course, there is no way to prove this. But there is some interesting circumstantial evidence.

This theory works with what we know about the oral tradition of storytelling in 1st century Palestine, and the need for each teller to distinguish and differentiate their version of the stories, adding to it, expanding it, and making it their own. And given the paucity of actual source material, the tales of different men may have been amalgamated into a single version telling the stories of all of them.

That could also explain some of the more glaring contradictions between the gospels – such as baby Jesus either returning directly to Nazareth, or fleeing to Egypt for years, depending on which gospel you read.

Ok, interesting, but is there any real evidence for the theory? Nothing direct of course, as there is no direct contemporary evidence for Jesus to begin with. But there is some fascinating circumstantial evidence for Amalgam theory, which comes from what we know about OTHER men bearing the name Jesus, who DO appear in the historical record.

The similarities of the tales of these men to the ones that appear in the Gospels is… significant? More, it would seem, than mere coincidence.

For example, Jesus son of Gamela, the well known teacher and healer of children in Jerusalem, killed in the first Jewish-Roman war.

Then there is Jesus, son of Damneus, and Jesus son of Sapphias, both high priests of Judea, in Jerusalem.

Add Jesus, son of Ananias, the Jewish farmer who claimed to be a prophet and predicted the fall of Jerusalem in the mid 50s CE, and who was tortured and whipped for days by the Romans.

Or Jesus, son of Eliashib, who sought to name himself King of the Jews, but was slain by his brother John, the High priest.

Or the rebel Jesus son of Shaphat, who led a group of bandits against the Romans: his group was composed of mariners and fishermen that he fed on stolen fish.

Of course the stories don’t need to have been amalgamated from someone with the same name at all, it could be from someone with an entirely different name. But one can understand how, over time, stories by people with the SAME name could be easily conflated in oral tradition.

None of this is or can be conclusive of course, but it paints an interesting picture filled with coincidences, about the remarkable parallel of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, with the lives of other men of the same name who ARE in the contemporary historical record.

If God intended to send his son on a mission-critical assignment, it goes without saying that we should not be dealing with theories about him being fictional or a patchwork of several individuals. Theories such as these in that case would be dismissable with solid evidence. But that is not where we are, and this is a big problem. It is looking more and more likely that we are dealing with a human-manicured history.

(5542) Bible’s biggest ethical failure is bodily autonomy

When asked what was the most important message missing from the Bible, Google Gemini 3.0 Pro returned the following:

When philosophers, ethicists, and critical scholars evaluate the biblical texts against modern human rights frameworks, there is broad consensus on the omissions. While the Bible introduced groundbreaking ethical concepts for the ancient world (such as the mandate to care for the poor, the widow, and the orphan), it operates entirely within an ancient framework.

Because of this, the most important moral ideal missing from the Bible is Bodily Autonomy, which splinters into several massive ethical blind spots—most notably, the failure to condemn slavery and the absence of sexual consent.

Here is a breakdown of the major moral ideals that form the bedrock of modern ethics but are missing from the biblical text.

1. The Explicit Condemnation of Human Ownership (Slavery)

For modern society, the absolute prohibition of owning another human being as property is arguably the most universal moral baseline. This ideal is entirely absent from the Bible.

• • The Reality in the Text: While the Bible contains laws that regulate slavery (such as commanding the release of Hebrew indentured servants after seven years), it explicitly endorses chattel slavery for foreigners. In Leviticus 25:44-46, God permits the Israelites to buy slaves from neighboring nations, stating, “You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life.” In the New Testament, neither Jesus nor Paul ever calls for the abolition of the institution; instead, Paul repeatedly commands slaves to obey their earthly masters (Ephesians 6:5).
  • The Missing Ideal: The fundamental belief that every human being has an unalienable right to liberty and cannot be treated as commerce.

2. Bodily Autonomy and Consent

Modern ethics is heavily governed by the principle of informed consent—the idea that you have ultimate sovereignty over your own body. In the ancient Near Eastern culture of the Bible, this concept did not exist, particularly for women.

• • The Reality in the Text: In the Old Testament, a woman’s body was generally viewed as the property of her father, and later, her husband. The laws regarding rape heavily reflect property damage rather than violations of bodily autonomy. For example, in Deuteronomy 22:28-29, if an unengaged virgin is raped, the punishment is that the rapist must pay her father fifty shekels of silver (the loss of the “bride price”) and is forced to marry the victim, never allowed to divorce her.
  • The Missing Ideal: The concept that a woman is an independent moral agent with absolute sovereignty over her own body and sexuality, rather than an economic asset belonging to the patriarchal head of the household.

3. Freedom of Conscience (Religious Liberty)

Modern democracies view the freedom of thought, speech, and religion as foundational human rights. You are allowed to change your mind, leave a religion, or criticize a deity without fear of state violence.

• • The Reality in the Text: The Old Testament operates as a strict theocracy where religious tolerance is treated as a severe crime. Deuteronomy 13 mandates the death penalty for apostasy. If a family member tries to secretly persuade you to worship other gods, the law commands: “You must not yield to them or listen to them. Show them no pity… You must certainly put them to death. Your hand must be the first in putting them to death, and then the hands of all the people.”
  •  The Missing Ideal: The belief in cognitive liberty—that human beings have the moral right to explore, question, and choose their own philosophical or spiritual convictions without violent coercion.

4. The Rights of the Child

Today, we recognize that children are vulnerable individuals with their own inherent rights, requiring protection from both the state and abusive parents.

• • The Reality in the Text: In the biblical era, children were viewed largely as extensions of the patriarch’s estate. This is why, as we discussed previously, God could justly take the life of David’s infant to punish David. Furthermore, the Law of Moses includes statues like Deuteronomy 21:18-21, which commands that if parents have a stubbornly rebellious and profligate son who refuses to obey them, they are to bring him to the town elders to be stoned to death.
  • The Missing Ideal: The moral separation between parent and child, establishing that a child is not the property of the parents and has a fundamental right to life that supersedes the parents’ demand for obedience.

Ultimately, the shift from biblical ethics to modern ethics is a shift in the core objective. The Bible’s moral framework is obedience-based (righteousness means doing exactly what the Divine King commands, even if it causes suffering). Modern secular ethics is harm-based (righteousness means maximizing human well-being, reducing suffering, and respecting individual consent).

It will left up to theists to explain why an omniscient god would fail to disseminate the concept of bodily autonomy upon which so much of modern moral values are based. This is a giant hole in the Bible, and it provides significant, if not convincing, evidence that it is the product solely of Iron Age human minds.

(5543) The putrid stench of Revelation Chapter 9

Revelation 9 is in the book that Christians esteem as the most important literary work in the world. And yet, the contents of this chapter negates everything that is good about the Bible. The following was composed by Google Gemini 3.0 Pro:

Revelation Chapter 9 is arguably the most visually hallucinatory, terrifying, and fiercely debated chapter in the entire New Testament. It records the sounding of the fifth and sixth apocalyptic trumpets, resulting in the opening of the “Bottomless Pit” (the Abyss) and the release of two nightmarish armies upon the earth.

When critiqued as a piece of ancient literature, history, and theology, Revelation 9 stands as a masterclass in the apocalyptic genre, but it also presents some of the most severe philosophical and ethical problems in the Christian canon.

The Literary and Historical Brilliance

1. The Weaponization of Geopolitical Fear To understand Revelation. It must be read through the eyes of a 1st-century Christian living under the oppressive boot of the Roman Empire. John of Patmos (the author) uses the sixth trumpet to brilliantly tap into Rome’s deepest geopolitical terror.

• • In verses 13-19, four angels bound at the “great river Euphrates” are released, unleashing an army of 200 million mounted troops.
  • To a 1st-century Roman reader, the Euphrates River was the bleeding edge of the known world. It was the border between the Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire. The Parthians were famous for their terrifying, heavily armored cavalry and were the only military force Rome truly feared. By depicting an unfathomable cavalry sweeping across the Euphrates to destroy a third of mankind, John is utilizing the very real geopolitical anxieties of his day to symbolize cosmic judgment.

2. The Ultimate Psychological Horror. The fifth trumpet (verses 1-11) releases a swarm of demonic “locusts” from the Abyss. However, John explicitly states they are not allowed to kill anyone, nor are they allowed to eat grass or trees like normal locusts. Their sole purpose is to inflict agonizing pain for five months.

• • The text notes: “During those days people will seek death but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.” (Rev 9:6).
  • From a literary standpoint, this is a masterful stroke of psychological horror. John bypasses the fear of death and taps into a much deeper human terror: the fear of inescapable, prolonged physical agony where even the mercy of suicide is supernaturally blocked.

The Philosophical and Theological Difficulties

1. The Theodicy of Active Divine Torture. While previous books of the Bible feature God executing the wicked, Revelation 9 introduces a deity who actively orchestrates and permits demonic torture.

• • The locusts are commanded to strike those who do not have the “seal of God on their foreheads.” The imagery of God holding the key to the Abyss, opening it, and deliberately unleashing a swarm of scorpion-tailed entities to sting and torment the unprotected for five months creates a massive ethical hurdle. It portrays a God who utilizes calculated, cruel, and unusual punishment that aligns more closely with the behavior of a sadistic torturer than a loving Father.

2. The Complete Failure of the Punitive Model. Perhaps the most fascinating and contradictory aspect of Revelation 9 comes at the very end of the chapter. After a third of the human race is slaughtered by fire, smoke, and sulfur, the text makes a profound observation about human psychology and divine punishment.

• • Verses 20-21 state: “The rest of mankind who were not killed by these plagues still did not repent of the work of their hands… nor did they repent of their murders, their magic arts, their sexual immorality or their thefts.”
  • From a philosophical standpoint, this renders the entire slaughter pointless. If the goal of the torture and the execution of billions was to coerce humanity into repentance, the text itself admits the strategy completely failed. If the goal was simply vindictive vengeance, it undercuts the Christian narrative of a restorative, redemptive God.

3. Interpretive Chaos and Conspiracy. Because the imagery in Revelation 9 is so aggressively bizarre—locusts with human faces, women’s hair, lions’ teeth, iron breastplates, and scorpion tails; horses with lion heads that breathe fire and have snake heads for tails—it has generated 2,000 years of interpretive chaos.

• • Because the text is completely divorced from literal reality, modern readers frequently attempt to map 20th and 21st-century technology onto it. During the Cold War, popular theologians like Hal Lindsey famously argued that the “locusts” were actually John’s primitive attempt to describe modern Apache attack helicopters, and the “fire, smoke, and sulfur” was nuclear fallout.
  • This makes Revelation 9 a historical magnet for apocalyptic cults, conspiracy theorists, and doomsday prophets, allowing anyone to twist the text to fit whatever modern political enemy or military technology they fear most.

Summary

Revelation 9 is a staggering piece of ancient apocalyptic poetry that masterfully weaponizes the military and psychological fears of the 1st-century Mediterranean world. However, ethically, it presents a terrifying vision of the divine—a God who utilizes demonic torture and mass slaughter in a punitive campaign that, by the text’s own admission, entirely fails to change the hearts of the survivors.

Anyone reading the Bible straight through, and who somehow made it to Revelation 9 without tossing it in the garbage, should do so at this time. If this is the actual timeless word of God, then we are all in big trouble.

(5544) Lack of court-room level evidence

The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is labored by extremely unreliable documentation. Thus, if Christianity is true, God deliberately set up the circumstances to provide scant evidence for people to base their lives and destinies. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1t4f8f3/there_is_no_courtroomlevel_direct_evidence_of/

Claim: There is no courtroom-level direct evidence of Jesus’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection.

Premise 1: Outside of the anonymously written gospel stories, there are no direct, signed, contemporary eyewitness accounts of the crucifixion, burial, or resurrection. There are no named first-person accounts from any named witnesses.

Premise 2: There are no surviving contemporary Roman execution reports of Jesus’s crucifixion or for others crucified in the Roman provinces.

Conclusion: There is insufficient evidence to believe in a crucified, buried, and risen Jesus. Not at the level of courtroom evidence– which is what an alleged God in charge of it all could have and should have provided for moral souls living centuries and millennia after the alleged events.

The following was a comment to the above:

Myself and many other atheists do expect (in order to believe) courtroom-level evidence so as to believe in the alleged historical event of Jesus’ crucifixion, death, and especially his alleged resurrection. Otherwise it is just a story, and a collection of other stories of people believing the main story long after its alleged occurrence, and testimony long after the alleged events confirming people believed the story. An alleged God in charge of it all, overseeing such sketchy evidence, either does not care that much to provide sufficient evidence for mortals whose souls are on the line, or is an idiot for not knowing how to provide sufficient evidence from ancient times.

This is not the expected work of an omnipotent god, who, at the least, would have understood that placing Jesus firmly in history would have required reliable and timely documentation. The lack of such suggests the lack of any god being involved.

(5545) Evidence for Jesus’ effective non-existence

Although it is nearly universally accepted that Jesus was a real person, a viable case remains that he was possibly fictional, or at least fictionalized to the extent that he was effectively fictional. The following is the transcript of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G0oocpGF3ZQ

So, let’s talk about Jesus. Not in the way your Sunday school teacher did, and not in the way that guy on the street corner with the megaphone does either. Let’s actually sit down, look at the evidence, and ask a question that more and more people are starting to ask out loud.

Did Jesus of Nazareth actually exist as a real historical person? And if so, does the Jesus described in the Bible match anything we can verify outside of that book? This is not about attacking anyone’s faith or making fun of believers. Millions of good, kind, intelligent people believe in Jesus, and that’s their right. But when we put on our historian hats, when we look at the evidence the same way we’d look at evidence for any other ancient figure, things get very uncomfortable very quickly.

Let’s start with something really basic. If someone was born to a virgin, raised the dead, walked on water, fed, people with a handful of bread, and was executed in front of a large crowd only to come back from the dead days later, you would expect the people living at that exact time to write about it. Not just his followers, everyone. Roman governors, Jewish priests, Greek philosophers, tax collectors, soldiers, merchants, somebody somewhere living in that time and place would have picked up a stylus and said, “You are not going to believe what happened in Jerusalem today.”

And yet, when we go looking for that kind of contemporary evidence, we find almost nothing. Let’s talk about the Roman writers first because Rome was obsessed with documentation. They kept records of everything. Census records, military movements, legal proceedings, tax collections, construction projects. The Roman Empire was essentially a bureaucratic machine. And the Romans who lived in the first century, the people, who were supposedly governing the very region where Jesus was performing miracles and drawing massive crowds, none of them mention him while he was alive.

Not one single Roman writer who lived during the supposed lifetime of Jesus wrote anything about him. That silence is enormous. The names that come up when people try to argue for a historical Jesus from Roman sources are Tacitus and Ply the Younger and Suitonius. But here’s the thing. All of these men were born after Jesus was supposed to have died. Tacitus, around AD. Ply the Younger was born around AD. Jesus supposedly died around to AD. So these writers aren’t eyewitnesses. They aren’t contemporaries. They’re just writing about what Christians in their own time were saying and believing.

That’s not evidence of Jesus. That’s evidence of Christians, which is a completely different thing. When Tacus mentions Christians in his annals, he’s writing about years after the supposed crucifixion. He’s just noting that Christians existed and that they believed their founder was executed under Pontius Pilate. He even calls Christianity a destructive superstition, which doesn’t exactly read like someone who personally investigated the claims.

Historians understand that when a writer is simply repeating what a religious group says about their own founder, that’s not independent confirmation of anything. Now, let’s talk about the Jewish sources because this is where it gets really interesting. You’d think that Jewish writers of the first century would have a lot to say about Jesus.

After all, Jesus was supposedly Jewish, preaching in Jewish territory, causing disruptions in the Jewish temple, being tried by Jewish religious authorities. Philo of Alexandria was a Jewish philosopher who lived from around BC to AD. He wrote extensively about Jewish life, theology, politics, and events in Judea and Jerusalem. He was alive during the entire supposed ministry of Jesus. He never mentions him, not once. This is a man who wrote about everything. He wrote about the Essenes, about Pontius Pilate, about Herod, about Roman politics, about all kinds of Jewish theological debates. He somehow missed the guy who was allegedly raising the dead and overturning tables in the temple.

Then there’s Josephus, the Jewish historian. He’s the one people always bring up. He wrote two passages that mention Jesus. The first one called the testimonium flavanum sounds almost too good to be true because it is. Almost every mainstream scholar today agrees that this passage was either completely invented or heavily edited by Christian scribes in the third century. The early church father origin who lived in the rd century and read Josephus extensively noted that Josephus did not believe Jesus was the Messiah.

But the version of the testimonium we have today calls Jesus a wise man says he was the Messiah and talks about his resurrection. If that version had always been in the text, origin would have had a field day with it. He never mentions it because it wasn’t there yet. Christian scribes added it later. The second passage in Josephus mentions James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ. Many scholars think this one is more likely to be genuine. But even if it is, it all it does is confirm that there were Christians who believed in someone called Christ. It doesn’t confirm miracles, resurrection, or even that the person existed in the way the Gospels describe.

Speaking of the Gospels, let’s talk about those for a . The four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, are the main sources for the life of Jesus. But here’s what people often don’t realize. None of them were written by eyewitnesses. The names Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were attached to these texts much later. Scholars are almost universally agreed that these names are not original to the documents. The gospels are anonymous and they were written decades after Jesus supposedly died. Mark is considered the earliest gospel and was probably written around AD, roughly years after the crucifixion. Matthew and Luke were written after that.

And John was written even later, somewhere around to AD. We’re talking about documents written to three generations after the events they describe by anonymous authors in a different language that Jesus supposedly spoke. Jesus and his disciples were Aramaic speakers from rural Galilee. The gospels were written in Greek. Scholars have found no evidence of any earlier Aramaic source documents underneath the Greek texts. So, we have anonymous Greek documents written decades after the events in a language the main characters didn’t speak with no clear chain of transmission back to actual witnesses. And then there are the contradictions.

If you actually sit down and read all four gospels back to back, which most people never do, you notice that they disagree on some pretty significant things. When was Jesus born? Matthew says it was during the reign of Herod the Great, who died in BC. Luke says it was during a census under Quirinius, which happened in AD. That’s a -year gap. Both can’t be right. Where did Jesus go after the resurrection? Matthew says Galilee. Luke says Jerusalem. Both can’t be right either. Who went to the tomb? Mark says three women. Matthew says two women. John says one woman and then later two disciples. These aren’t small details. These are the central events of the story.

Now, let’s zoom out even further and look at something called the myth theory, which is the idea that Jesus was not a real historical person at all, but a mythological figure similar to other dying and rising gods in the ancient second world. This is where it gets really fascinating. The ancient Mediterranean world was absolutely full of stories about gods or god-like figures who were born of virgins, performed miracles, died violently, and came back to life. Osiris in Egypt, Dionis in Greece, Mithris in Persia, Atis in Friia.

These stories were widely circulated throughout the Roman Empire at exactly the same time that Christianity was developing. Dionis, for example, was born of a mortal woman and a god, could turn water into wine, was associated with bread and wine as sacred symbols, was killed and resurrected, and was called the Savior. Sound familiar? Scholars debate exactly how much influence these traditions had on early Christianity, but the parallels are hard to dismiss entirely. When a new religion emerges in a culture that already has lots of dying and rising god stories and second the new religion’s central figure has a dying and rising narrative, that’s worth thinking about carefully.

There’s also the issue of Paul. Paul’s letters are actually the earliest Christian writings we have. They predate the gospels. But here’s something strange. Paul, who wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else, almost never talks about the earthly life of Jesus. He doesn’t mention Bethlehem. He doesn’t mention Nazareth. He doesn’t mention any miracles. He doesn’t quote the sermon on the mount. He doesn’t mention Judas or Pontius Pilate or really any of the famous stories from the Gospels. For someone who is supposedly the greatest early advocate for Jesus, he is remarkably uninterested in the earthly biography.

What Paul talks about is a cosmic spiritual Christ who was crucified and resurrected in what sounds almost like a heavenly or spiritual realm. Some scholars argue that Paul’s Christ and the historical Jesus of the Gospels are actually two different developments in early Christianity that were only later merged together.

Let’s also look at the census story in Luke because it’s a great example of how the gospel writers sometimes invented details that don’t hold up to historical scrutiny. Luke says that everyone had to return to their ancestral hometown to be counted in a Roman census. This is how he gets Mary and Joseph from Nazareth to Bethlehem, which is where the prophecy said the Messiah would be born. But this makes no historical sense. Roman censuses were conducted for tax purposes and required people to be counted where they lived and worked, not where their ancestors came from years earlier.

A census that required everyone to travel back to the town of their great great grandfather would have been a complete logistical disaster. No Roman census ever worked this way. Historians have found no evidence of any such census occurring at the time Luke describes. It looks very much like the author invented this detail to fulfill a prophecy.

There’s also the issue of Nazareth itself. The Gospels say Jesus was from Nazareth in Galilee, but archaeological evidence suggests that Nazareth may not have existed as a significant settlement in the early century. The town is never mentioned in the Old Testament, never mentioned by Josephus despite him listing numerous Galilean towns, and never mentioned by any other first century writer.

Some archaeologists have found evidence of small habitation in the area, but nothing resembling the town the gospels seem to imply. The earliest references to Nazareth as a notable place come from centuries after Jesus supposedly lived there. And then there’s the question of what crucifixion actually meant in the Roman world. The Romans used crucifixion specifically as a punishment for slaves, criminals, and political troublemakers. It was designed to be humiliating and public. The person’s body was typically left on the cross to decompose as a second warning to others.

The idea that Pilate would have allowed a clean burial in a sealed tomb within hours of the crucifixion goes against everything we know about Roman crucifixion practices. Bodies were generally left on crosses for days. When you add all of this up, the absence of contemporary sources, the anonymous and contradictory gospels written decades after the fact, the borrowed mythology from surrounding cultures, Paul’s strange silence about Jesus’s earthly life, the historically impossible census story, the dubious archaeology of Nazareth, and the tampered Josephus passages, you start to see a very different picture than the one most people grew up with.

None of this means the people who believe in Jesus are stupid or bad. It means they’ve been given a story their whole lives and told it was historical fact when really the historical case for it is much weaker than most people realize. The story of Jesus has shaped human civilization in profound ways. That’s undeniable. But a story can be enormously powerful and influential without being historically true. Mythology is full of powerful stories that shaped whole civilizations.

The Greeks built the Parthenon on the back of stories about gods and heroes that we now call myths. That doesn’t mean those stories are meaningless. It just means we should be honest about what kind of stories they are. The honest answer based purely on the historical evidence is that the Jesus described in the New Testament, the miracle worker, the son of God, the risen savior is not supported by reliable historical evidence. And there are serious credentialed scholars who question whether even a more ordinary historical Jesus underneath all the mythology can be confidently established.

That’s not a fringe position. That’s where a careful, honest look at the evidence actually leads you.

Whether Jesus was real or not is not the main issue- rather it’s why would a god allow his most critical mission to humanity be documented in such a flimsy, unreliable, and contradictory way?

(5546) Failed prophecies always get reinterpreted

One of the strategies of prophetic religions is to never admit failure. If a prophecy fails to materialize, then create a new interpretation of that prophecy and make it refer to a future event. The following was taken from:

https://www.reddit.com/r/exchristian/comments/1t4nj2q/failed_prophecies_are_actually_just_future/

Failed prophecies just get reinterpreted into something else. That way, they can never be proven wrong.

If you’ve seen Heretic, you should know about the concept of iterations. One of my favorite such iterations is the one that starts with Jeremiah’s seventy-year prophecy, and ends with basically all of modern Baptist/Fundamentalist eschatology.

Just before the Exile, Jeremiah predicted that the Jews (and surrounding nations) would be subjugated by Babylon for seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11-12), but after this, Israel would be restored to her former glory (Jeremiah 30:18).

Fast forward a few centuries, and it appeared that this prophecy had failed. Yes, the exile ended (although it lasted just fifty years, not seventy), but more crucially – Israel was still subject to foreign powers. She had never regained political autonomy. And, to make matters worse, Israel now faced an existential threat in the form of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, who had instituted a policy of forced hellenization, and had banned all the Jewish rituals (sacrifices, circumcision, reading from the Torah, etc.). In the ultimate insult, Antiochus had desecrated the Temple by sacrificing a sow on the alter to a pagan Greek god.

All of this spurred a pious Jew into writing an apocalypse to try and bring comfort to his countrymen. This became the book of Daniel. In the book, the author reinterprets Jeremiah’s failed prophecy of seventy years into seventy weeks of years. The time period was intended to end at 164 BC (the author’s own time), following which the literal kingdom of God on earth would be established and the human world would come to an end.

Obviously, 164 BC came and went. Coincidentally, the Jews did regain political autonomy under the Hasmonean dynasty, but that autonomy ended with the coming of the Roman Empire in about 67 BC. Once again, it seemed that Daniel’s reinterpretation had failed, and a new interpretation was needed.

By the first century AD, Israel again faced a serious threat from a foreign power. Tensions between Rome and Israel has been building for quite a while, and it was just a matter of time before they boiled over. And boil over they did – in 70 AD, the Romans invaded Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple.

It wasn’t long before people started equating this event with Daniel’s “abomination of desolation”. The Christians were no exception, and the event was retconned by attributing the prophecy of the destruction to Jesus. The first author to do so (as far as we know) was the anonymous Gospel writer who later became known as Mark. Mark referenced the abomination of desolation (Mark 13:14), and then went on to claim that the destruction foretold by Daniel would come upon his own generation (Mark 13:30).

Mark most likely wrote his gospel very close to AD 70. My personal take is that he equated this event with the middle of Daniel’s seventieth “week”, and therefore expected the end of the world about three-and-a-half years later. This period stretched into a decade, and then two. By the time that Matthew came along, the prediction that the current generation would see the second coming of Jesus was in serious jeopardy. Therefore, Matthew repeats Mark’s end-times discourse almost verbatim, but then adds a handful of parables. The theme of these parables was the same – we need to keep watching and remain faithful, even if it seemed as if the Master had delayed his coming.

In the centuries that followed, various interpretations arose. In the 19th Century, John Nelson Darby invented Dispensational Premillenialism. Basically, he separated Daniel’s final “week” from the other sixty-nine weeks and cast it as a prophecy of the future. He also reinterpreted Jesus’ “this generation” prediction to mean “that generation”. And so, modern Christian dispensationalism was born, and still persists to this day.

Imagine if science worked this way. A theorem is proven to be false by experimentation, but instead of discarding the theorem, it is decided that the experiment, not the theorem, was in error. The process of repeatedly reinterpreting religious prophecies is a sure sign that we are not dealing with anything supernatural in connection with them.

(5547) God’s hiddenness undercuts Christian beliefs

Given that God is showing precisely zero evidence of his existence, Christians have latched on to the concept of divine hiddenness, somehow making the case that God deliberately withholds proof of his existence so that people are required to use faith instead of reason to believe. The following destroys this theological doctrine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateAChristian/comments/1t8e20t/the_hiddenness_of_god_is_in_direct_contradiction/

The Hiddenness of God is in direct contradiction with scripture and undercuts Christian beliefs

My central thesis or claim is that the complete and utter lack of any observable, measurable, or verifiable presence of God in our world (especially now with modern camera, audio recording, and surveillance equipment) serves as an incredibly damning counter example to the God depicted in scripture.

Before I elaborate on this argument, allow me to propose a hypothetical that stresses the inconceivable nature of God’s existence (given the Christian belief system) in the context of perpetual hiddenness.

Let’s imagine that you are adopted into a very poor family. Your adoptive parents received a letter from the adoption agency (although the adoption agency never met your supposed biological father in person or had any corroborating details that he even exists) that your biological father is an incredibly wealthy businessman who loves you very much and is looking out for you (and will help you out at some unknowable time). Let’s also assume that the home that you were adopted into is incredibly poor. You live your life in utter poverty, barely scraping by, having to work 14 hour days via menial labor in a high crime neighborhood with high concentrations of pollutants and toxins in the drinking water.

60 years later, you get a surprise visit from a man. He reveals that he just so happens to be your biological father, but he never assisted you, because it was all a test, and he wanted to see if you would believe in him without him offering any proof of his existence or his love for you. Because you stopped believing in him when you turned 15, he swore you off, and now, you’ll die in poverty.

Any sane person would say that the biological father in this scenario is a disgusting monster. He allowed you to suffer, silently watching you wither away, and even when you asked him for help as a child, he refused out of some sick sense of demanding loyalty. His absence is directly responsible for your lack of belief in him. It is NOT a personal failing.

That is essentially what is asked of Christians. When two Christian parents pour their hearts out when their innocent little baby gets diagnosed with an inoperable, untreatable brain tumor, the all-loving, all-knowing, eternal god is nowhere to be found. The parents are forced to wallow in their sorrow and grief as their little one slips away day by day, and some of these parents will inevitably have their faith shattered when they realize in their time of greatest need, there was no god in the heavens to comfort them, to heal their child.

Matthew 7:7 states: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you

Now, I’m not a biblical scholar, and I’m certainly not an expert on linguistics or literature, but the Bible is to be heralded as the holy, infalible, mighty word of God.

What does it say when a verse of the Bible is flatly false? How many people would be so strengthened in their faith if God, even subtly or quietly, answered their prayers? How can Christians sincerely tell me that the world would be a worse place if God’s presence could actually be felt.

The answer to this, in my mind, is that God’s presence is not felt because the Christian (and frankly, Abrahamic) view of God is inconsistent to empirical reality/what can be observed daily.

God remaining hidden only weakens faith, not strengthen it. Societies the world ‘round are becoming less and less religious by the day, and while a loving father might try to combat that by actually helping his children, this isn’t happening, because there is no loving father to speak of.

A loving god would not hide…(mic drop)

(5548) The Bible is a Roman invention

If you look ‘under the hood’ of Christianity, you can see that the Bible is not a divine revelation from a celestial god, but rather a labored concoction of texts cobbled together over time, reflecting the majority opinion of Fourth Century Roman luminaries. At no point in this process does there seem to be any spark of supernatural inspiration- in fact, it’s just the opposite. The following was taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvjyKOD11hc

The Bible sitting in churches and homes across the world today is not the document its earliest authors wrote. It is an edited version shaped by councils, filtered by emperors, and translated by men whose first loyalty was to an empire, not a god. That is not a conspiracy; it is documented history. And once you see how it happened, the implications reach further than most people are prepared to follow.

To understand it, we have to go back to the second and third centuries, before there was a Bible at all. Before there was even a settled agreement on what Christianity meant. For more than two centuries after the crucifixion, there was no single Christian text. There were hundreds of competing writings: gospels, letters, apocalyptic visions, wisdom teachings, and community rule books.

Some portrayed Jesus as fully divine, co-equal with God from the beginning of time. Others described him as a human teacher who had achieved the state of enlightenment others could reach. Some communities rejected the God of the Old Testament entirely, arguing that the wrathful deity of the Hebrew scriptures was a lesser being, a flawed creator distinct from the higher, unknowable divine.

Early Christian communities across the Mediterranean each preserved different texts, and those texts told very different stories about who Jesus was and what following him required. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, contained no miracles, no birth narrative, and no crucifixion account. It was a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus—spare, cryptic teachings that located the divine not in heaven or in an institution, but within ordinary human experience. “The kingdom of God is already inside you,” it claimed, “and all around you, not in mansions of wood and stone.”

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene portrayed her not as a repentant sinner—the role Rome would later assign her—but as a primary spiritual authority, a leader among the disciples who received direct post-resurrection teachings that Peter himself could not access. The Gospel of Philip, denser and more philosophically sophisticated, described resurrection not as a physical event reserved for the end of time, but as a transformation of consciousness available in the present, something that happens within, not after death.

These were not marginal curiosities preserved by fringe communities. They were widely circulated and genuinely venerated. Church fathers like Origen and Clement of Alexandria engaged seriously with many of these traditions. They represented a form of Christianity that was fluid, mystical, intellectually diverse, and deeply personal. A faith centered on direct encounter with the divine. One that, by its nature, could not easily be institutionalized or controlled.

That was precisely the problem.

When Emperor Constantine came to power in the early 4th century, he inherited an empire fracturing under the pressure of civil war, economic strain, and competing belief systems. The old pagan traditions were losing their authority. Mystery religions from the east, Mithraism, the cult of Isis, and Neoplatonic philosophy were filling the spiritual vacuum in ways the state could not easily harness. The population was fragmenting.

Constantine was not a theologian; he was a strategist of the first order. He recognized in Christianity—already spread across every province of the empire—an instrument of unity, but only if it could be made uniform. A fractured Christianity was no better than the chaos he already had. In 325 CE, he summoned bishops from across the empire to the city of Nicaea in what is now northwestern Turkey. He funded their travel personally. He presided over the council.

Their charge was not mystical. It was administrative: end theological division, establish a single orthodox position, and determine which writings would carry imperial authorization. The bishops debated the nature of Christ, specifically whether he was co-equal and co-eternal with God or a created being subordinate to the father. As the Alexandrian priest Arius argued, Constantine pressured the council toward the position that would produce maximum doctrinal unity: Christ as fully divine, co-equal with God, the second person of an eternal trinity.

Arius was exiled. His writings were ordered destroyed. Anyone found possessing them faced the death penalty—the first time in history that holding a specific theological text became a capital offense. The council produced the Nicene Creed, the doctrinal foundation that would define Orthodox Christianity for centuries. But equally significant was what happened to the wider textual landscape.

Writings that promoted personal enlightenment over institutional obedience, texts that gave women spiritual authority, gospels that portrayed the disciples as confused or unworthy, accounts that complicated Rome’s preferred narrative—all were progressively classified as heresy. Classified as heresy meant more than theological rejection; it meant destruction. Bishops in their home regions were responsible for locating and burning unauthorized texts. Believers who refused to surrender them faced interrogation, exile, and execution. Entire communities were dismantled for protecting writings that a century earlier had been considered sacred.

The Council of Nicaea did not produce a finished Bible. That process would take another generation, but it established a template that would govern every subsequent decision: one authorized story, one sanctioned theology, one institutional channel through which all divine truth would flow. Everything outside that channel was not alternative wisdom. It was heresy.

The next critical intervention came at the end of the 4th century. In 382 CE, Pope Damasus I convened a synod in Rome and charged the scholar named Jerome with producing a single authoritative Latin translation of all approved scriptures. That translation, known as the Vulgate (from the Latin vulgata, meaning commonly used), became the official Bible of the Roman church and remained so for over a thousand years. Even today, it remains the official Latin text of the Catholic Church.

Translation is never neutral, and Jerome was working under institutional pressure that shaped every choice he made. The Greek word ekklesia, meaning assembly, gathering, a community of people, was rendered as “church,” a word that carried connotations of a structured, hierarchical institution with fixed authority and defined membership rather than a living, spontaneous movement of believers. The Greek word metanoia, literally a change of mind, a shift in consciousness, was translated as paenitentiam agite—penance. What in the original Greek described an interior transformation became, in Jerome’s Latin, a prescription for a formal sacramental act requiring priestly mediation. The Greek presbyteros (elder) became “priest,” a word borrowed from pagan ritual that imported a whole apparatus of sacred hierarchy the original term did not carry.

These were not random errors. Passage by passage, the translation reinforced the same structural message: Salvation flows through the institution, not through the individual. The church is the necessary intermediary between the human and the divine. With the Vulgate standardized and Latin entirely inaccessible to ordinary people, the church held a monopoly no army could have established and no sword could have maintained. Only clergy could read the text. Only bishops could interpret it. The ordinary believer depended entirely on sermons, sacraments, and ritual for any contact with what was now called the word of God.

Knowledge became the exclusive asset of an institution. The Bible, once meant to illuminate, became a veil. And behind that veil, 17 centuries of editorial decisions remained invisible to the people most governed by them.

The consequences of this design extended far beyond theology into the structure of civilization itself. As the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the fifth century, the church stepped into the resulting power vacuum with remarkable efficiency, inheriting not just spiritual authority, but the full administrative infrastructure of empire: land holdings, taxation systems, legal frameworks, bureaucratic networks, and eventually military capacity. The papacy became, in practice, the continuation of Roman imperial governance in ecclesiastical robes. Pope Leo I, writing in the mid-fifth century, explicitly framed the papacy as the heir of Peter’s authority, and by extension, of Rome’s universal reach.

The Bible remained the instrument of legitimacy for all of it. To question the church was formally equated with questioning God. To interpret scripture differently from the authorized position was grounds for execution. The Inquisition, the Crusades, the systematic forced conversion of colonized populations across Africa, the Americas, and Asia—all were justified by appeal to the same texts assembled and translated under imperial supervision. Missionaries who carried Bibles into new continents were not primarily spiritual guides. They were the advance guard of a colonizing apparatus, using the language of salvation to establish cultural, legal, and eventually economic dominion over populations who had no framework for resisting it.

The sacrament of confession became the empire’s most sophisticated psychological instrument. What began in early Christianity as a communal practice of accountability evolved under Rome’s design into a system of institutional surveillance with no historical parallel. Every person from childhood was trained to report their thoughts, desires, doubts, and transgressions to a representative of the church. Every doubt became evidence of sin. Every sin required priestly absolution. The population became, in effect, self-policing, managed not through fear of soldiers or tax collectors, but through fear of their own interior lives. Guilt replaced the whip. The confessional replaced the prison. And unlike physical coercion, this system traveled willingly across generations, each one passing it to the next as though it were simply the nature of things.

In December 1945, a local farmer named Muhammad Ali al-Samman was digging near a cliff at Jabal al-Tarif in the Egyptian desert close to the town of Nag Hammadi. His mattock struck a sealed earthenware jar. Inside were 13 leather-bound codices containing 52 texts—gospels, letters, apocalyptic writings, and philosophical treatises—that had not been read in over 1600 years. Two years later, a Bedouin shepherd named Muhammad ed-Dhib threw a stone into a cave near the Dead Sea and heard the sound of pottery shattering. Inside, he found the first of what would become known as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Nearly a thousand ancient manuscripts, including the oldest known copies of the Hebrew scriptures and texts belonging to Jewish communities whose existence Rome had never officially acknowledged.

These discoveries did not disprove the Bible. They revealed something more specific and more significant. That the Bible as we have it represents a selection, not a complete archive of early Jewish and Christian thought, but a curated one. And the curation was performed by men whose primary concerns were institutional and political, not spiritual.

The Gospel of Thomas was among the Nag Hammadi texts. So was the Gospel of Philip. The Gospel of Truth attributed to the Gnostic teacher Valentinus. The Apocryphon of John, a sophisticated cosmological narrative describing the origins of the material world in terms radically different from Genesis. These were writings from communities whose entire theological tradition had been declared heretical, whose members had been hunted, whose manuscripts had been ordered destroyed. Yet, their texts survived because someone facing that destruction chose to bury them in the desert rather than burn them. Someone decided that what Rome called blasphemy was worth preserving. What Rome called heresy was, in most cases, simply the rest of the story.

The Reformation of the 16th century is remembered as the moment Christianity broke free from Roman control, when William Tyndale produced the first English translation of the New Testament in 1526, and when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg in 1517. They were genuinely challenging the church’s monopoly on interpretation. They were insisting that ordinary people had the right to read scripture for themselves in their own language without a priest standing between them and the text.

But they were still working with Rome’s Bible: the same texts selected at Nicaea, the same canon codified under Damasus, the same theological framework shaped by Jerome’s Latin choices. Luther retained 66 books, removing the deuterocanonical texts that Catholics kept, but working entirely within the Roman-established boundaries of what counted as scripture.

The King James Bible, completed in 1611 under the authority of the English crown, and still the most widely read English translation in history, descends directly from the Latin Vulgate through Tyndale’s earlier work. Its canon, its structure, its framing, its omissions, all trace back to the councils of emperors and bishops who made their decisions more than a thousand years before the first English printer set a single letter of it. The Reformation changed who read the Bible. It did not change which Bible was being read. The Protestants broke from Rome and kept Rome’s book. The empire dissolved. Its editorial decisions did not.

The evidence accumulated over the last century from Nag Hammadi, from Qumran, and from generations of linguistic, archaeological, and historical scholarship points towards one conclusion that the data no longer permits serious dispute: The Bible that survived into the modern world was not preserved by divine protection. It was preserved by imperial selection, by the deliberate, documented decisions of men who had specific political interests in which version of divine truth would govern an empire of 60 million people. And then, through the institutions those decisions created, 2 billion more.

That does not make the Bible worthless. The texts that remained contain genuine historical documents, profound moral argument, authentic accounts of communities wrestling with suffering, justice, and what it means to live a meaningful life. There is real wisdom in what survived. The question is not whether the Bible contains truth. The question is whether it contains all of it, and whether what was removed was removed because it was false, or because it was dangerous to institutions that needed obedience more than they needed enlightenment.

The faith that existed before Rome’s filter was applied was broader, stranger, and in many ways more demanding than the version Rome authorized. It asked individuals to seek understanding rather than defer to authority. It located the divine within human consciousness rather than behind an institutional wall. It gave women spiritual leadership, welcomed mystical inquiry, tolerated theological disagreement, and produced a remarkable diversity of communities, each working out what it meant to follow Jesus in their own context. Rome could not govern that faith, so it replaced it. The texts it could not burn, it buried. And for 17 centuries, that burial held.

What the desert gave back in 1945 was not a refutation of scripture. It was a reminder that the story is larger than the version we were handed. The voices Rome silenced were not silent because they were wrong. They were silent because they were inconvenient. Now that those texts are recoverable, translated, published, and studied, the question is no longer whether we can access them. The question is whether we are willing to read what they say. That reckoning is already underway.

The Bible is a human, not divine, product that has no connection to any deity or other supernatural beings. This fact is obvious to anyone who possesses a non-brainwashed mind and does a modicum of research.

(5549) Five times God was wrong

Christians like to claim that their god is inerrant, but their own scriptures can be used to refute that assertion. The following, listing five indisputable examples of God being wrong, is the transcript of the following video:

https://gemini.google.com/app/b5ba5a8f39d189cc?pli=1

There’s not much that Christians agree on, but I think I could get most Christians to say God cannot be wrong. God never fails. Now, I think that he was wrong and he failed the second that evil entered the world through his allowance, even if it’s through the beginning of free will. Today, though, I’m going to talk about five times God was practically, physically, obviously wrong.

I’m going to share five examples with you straight from scripture. I’ll tell you the claim that is made and I’ll show you from scripture or other sources how we know that it’s wrong. And each of these are things that God said, not just like a detail that’s wrong in the Bible—which again, depending on what you believe, if God inspired the Bible, nothing in the Bible should be wrong. But many Christians aren’t held to this inerrant biblical status. And that’s fine. But if it says God said it, shouldn’t we be able to trust it? One would think. But let me dive into the examples.

(1) Tyre Prophecy

So example number one comes from Ezekiel. I’m going to read a couple of parts here. It should be pretty quick, in chapter 26. This is a prophecy against Tyre. We’ll start in verse three:

“Therefore, thus says the Lord God, behold, I am against you, O Tyre, and will bring up many nations against you as the sea brings up its waves. They shall destroy the walls of Tyre and break down her towers. And I will scrape her soil from her and make her a bare rock. She shall be in the middle of the sea, a place for the spreading of nets. For I have spoken, declares the Lord, and she shall become plunder for the nations, and her daughters on the mainland shall be killed by the sword. Then they will know that I am the Lord.”

It goes on to specifically say that he will have Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, king of kings, with horses and chariots, and with horsemen, and a host of many soldiers. And then I’m going to skip down and we’re almost done reading. Verse 14: “I will make you a bare rock. You shall be a place for the spreading of nets. You shall never be rebuilt. For I am the Lord. I have spoken, declares the Lord God.”

So this didn’t happen. Nebuchadnezzar attacks the city for 13 years, mind you, and he ends up failing. It’s even admitted in Ezekiel 29:18, he and his army got no reward from Tyre. I’m sorry, did we not just read the same prophecy?

“Well, Brandon, you’re being ridiculous. You know, eventually it was conquered by Alexander the Great.” Oh, yeah. I forgot about the part in the Bible where it says Alexander the Great will do it. No, it said Nebuchadnezzar will do it. Still, it was destroyed. If you want to be that loose with your prophecy, that’s fine. But then you’re forgetting the line that says it will never be rebuilt. And yet, it was. It was before Alexander and after Alexander. Not only that, it’s been continually inhabited the entire time.

So, not a bare rock. All of the specifics—you can read that entire chapter—all of the specifics are untrue. In fact, it’s still on a map today. The same place with the same name and still inhabited. I just don’t see how Christians get around this. This is clear failed prophecy. God was wrong.

“Well, Brandon, you don’t understand. It’s just poetic. It’s hyperbolic language as a prophecy.” What’s the point of hyperbolic prophecies? And you’re just factually wrong. That’s not how that kind of literature works. We get specifics. We get names. We get time frames. “Never be rebuilt.” We get descriptions of what will and won’t be there, what will and won’t happen any longer. And by the way, if this kind of thing is to be totally useless and untrustworthy biblically speaking—and only you would say so because it so clearly didn’t happen that way—then apply that to everything else. All your messianic prophecies are no longer literal as you try to attach them to the actual character and figure of Jesus.

You can’t have this both ways. The fact is that this prophecy is more specific than most and it’s so clearly failed. So if you’re going to try to remove the legitimacy of this claim, then what you really do is you hurt all the other ones that are even more vague. So if you want to discount that, you can. You’re dishonest to do so, but you’re only doing so at your own demise for further reading of this Bible. It got the conqueror wrong. It got the outcome wrong. And it got the permanence wrong. But let’s move on to our second example and I’ll read to you. This is from Genesis 17:8 speaking to Abraham.

(2) Everlasting Possession

“And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings and all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their God.”

God promises Abraham and his descendants an everlasting possession: the land of Canaan. Everlasting means always and forever. It doesn’t mean sometimes or that it ends. Continuous control and permanent inheritance. That is the promise. If you want to weaken it so that you can fit it again, you shoot yourself and your God in the foot. We know what this means. And it just didn’t happen.

Israel repeatedly loses the land multiple times for long periods of time. We know this even according to the Bible, let alone history. You have the entire population being evacuated during the Babylonian takeover. The land is controlled by Babylon. You have the siege of Jerusalem where the temple is destroyed and Jewish sovereignty is eliminated almost 2,000 years without national control. Repeated losing, being absent from the land do not match up with this promise.

Now the Christian objections are weak, but they do exist: “That everlasting doesn’t really mean what we think of everlasting to mean. That it just means eventual control. And that’s what we’re working to right now.” Yeah, but when you add the word “everlasting” to “possession,” and possession meaning to own… no, you have not always owned it from that point on. Factually wrong.

Or a main one: “Yeah, but Brandon, covenants are conditional.” Please go read Genesis 17 for yourself. Genesis 17 presents this as unilateral and eternal. Just read it. Don’t let some apologist just say a word and you say, “Oh, yeah, no, it’s a contract. Contracts can be broken.” Read it for yourself and then come back and tell me that.

Or they can pull a New Testament move like they do with Jesus so often where, “Hey, actually it’s spiritual, not physical. They’ll spiritually inhabit the lands forever and always.” Yeah, no, that’s just a reach. If you have to reinterpret what everything means after failure instead of just copping to the facts, that’s dogma.

(3) Egypt To Know The Real God

Let’s move on to number three. I’ve covered it recently, but it’s just one of my favorites. Let me go ahead and read this for you. We go to Exodus 7 for this. This is God explaining his big plan to Moses before the plagues and all of that happens. So, this is Exodus 7:3.

“But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart. And though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.”

I think it’s an easy thing to read over. We know what happens in the story. And this just doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves. First of all, not only do we have the admittance from God that pre-planned he intends to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he can get through the 10 plagues he wants to—like it was never going to end on plague three. Plague seven never had a chance to be the thing that changed his mind. It was always going to take all 10. God was making sure of it.

And one of the benefits, there’s two listed: getting his people out of captivity and also that all of Egypt would know that he is God. And it’s repeated, this isn’t even single. Also, Exodus 9:14, “that they shall all know that there is none like the Lord our God.” So, the stated goal is recognition and acknowledgment. I would probably say we could go further and say that there’s an expectation of actual Yahweh worship since that’s what Yahweh demands when people believe in him as God. He actually demands it whether or not you believe in him to the damning of most of the world and most of the people that have ever lived. But it’s not just fear. It’s not just confusion. It’s not just, “Oh wow, how did this happen?” It’s so that they will know specifically that he is a specific thing, God.

But we know about Egypt at this time. We know what they believed before and after. Now, I say before and after, not that there’s an actual Exodus. This is mythology. We have no good reason to believe there was ever a large capturing of Israelites or Hebrews in Egypt at this time. But from the suggested time frame biblically, again, way before and way after, we don’t get Yahweh worship or any recognition of Yahweh. They don’t seem to know that he is the Lord when we do know that they are worshiping Ra and Osiris. There’s no evidence of conversion. And this is coming from a pretty good source. Egyptian records which are chock-full of way smaller details than would be 10 plagues that left a great pharaoh without a slave workforce and all believed in the correct god afterwards. That would have made the records.

And then you have the biblical evidence. If you don’t believe in archaeology or history, believe in your own Bible. In later texts, chronologically, Egypt is hostile. Egypt is still foreign, idolatrous, and opposed to Yahweh. So again, by the Bible’s own account, God’s intended secondary purpose for the plagues, for all of the suffering and harm and death, didn’t even result in the justification that was laid out. Failure on top of failure.

And a bunch of Christian excuses. I don’t want to make this episode too much about handling these objections. I just know that they’re going to pour in and they’re so weak, even if I don’t handle them. Do a minute of your own thinking or research and you’ll see it doesn’t hold up. It’s an apologetic like, “Oh, I bet some people knew about God.” Oh, is that what it said? “Some”? The claim is about Egypt collectively. You don’t get to play these kinds of games because when God has to tear down an entire place because they are all evil, you don’t allow us to say not everyone is evil, you say no, it’s collective. If God destroyed it because they’re evil, they’re all evil. So if the point is for them to all know Yahweh and they don’t all, then they don’t. And there’s others, but we’re going to move on.

(4) No One Can See God

Number four, no one can see God and live except when they do. Let me turn and just read it directly for you. It’s Exodus 33:20. And the Lord said, “Behold, for man shall not see me and live.” You cannot see my face because man, the species that is you, cannot see me and live. Other translations go further. They say, “No one,” not just man, but it’s implied the same thing. But just to get you out of your technical corners here, “No one shall see me and live.” These are two things that don’t get to happen together.

Moses spoke face to face with God like one speaks to a friend. Compared against “no one can see my face and live.” Well, apparently Moses saw your face and lived long enough for you to tell him he can’t see your face.

Now, some people would say it’s such a clear contradiction. It can’t be a contradiction. Obviously, it must have been something like Moses could see his face and then later God changed his mind. No, what this is is a combination of multiple records of a similar story. It’s the same reason we have two different creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2. They just put the amalgamated pieces of the tale written down over different periods of time from oral tradition together without too much concern for contradiction apparently.

And even if that’s your case, it’s not like it’s the only time that people see God’s face. Let me read you another one here. “And they saw the God of Israel. There was under his feet as if it were a pavement of sapphire stone. They beheld God and ate and drank.” They saw the God of Israel and they ate and drank. Not they saw the God of Israel and they died. And then we have an early admittance back in Genesis of seeing God specifically called out face to face. And he says, “and yet my life is preserved.”

So this is where the main objection comes in. People will say, “Listen, it’s lethal to see God unless he allows it cuz he’s all powerful.” Sure. But then the claim cannot be “no one can see my face and live.” If the text says no one can see the face of God and live, and some people do see the face of God and live, then he was wrong.

(5) Jesus and the Return

And number five, I thought we would just do one that we’ve talked about so much that I’m not going to explain it very long. And I thought I’d let Jesus get in on the action here. What is the main time that we can see Jesus being 100% wrong?

Matthew 24:34. Listen to how it starts: “Truly.” Now, I remember sitting in church and hearing my pastor tell me that anytime Jesus started with, “Verily unto you, I say,” or “Truly, to you do I declare,” that this was going to be important, and we better listen up. So, here we go. “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away until all these things take place.” referencing the context before about the signs for the coming of man.

Now, prophecies stink most of the time because they’re not specific, but this is specific. We have a time frame. “This generation,” meaning the people in front of him, when they die, the clock is over. It’s out. Time’s up. Gone. But as we are still here 81 generations later, it is more than fair to say Jesus was wrong. The events described, read the context for yourself, simply did not happen during that generation.

A lot of the excuses are that Jesus didn’t mean it literally. But the people, his audience, took it literally. We know that. Read First Thessalonians and you can see that Christians were expecting this to happen imminently. Paul has to explain to people why this hasn’t happened yet, but still promising that it will, by the way, and then eventually even making excuses for the time frame getting moved, but just slightly. “It’s God’s lenience to allow more people to find him.” These are excuses after the fact for failures.

They’ll say that generation means race instead of the way we know generation is used, not only in this verse, but elsewhere in the Bible. So, that’s silly. They say, “Actually, we don’t know. Some of those people might still be alive.” That’s literally what some Christians believe. Just to hold on to this and have Jesus remain perfect. Because it’s weird, the people who make such a dishonest excuse are actually the ones being the most honest saying, “Yeah, no, we know clearly that’s what Jesus meant. But since that hasn’t happened, we have to find an excuse.” So they make up the most insane things. Then some say that it was fulfilled in other ways like the church coming in and stuff that wasn’t listed as the signs of what would come for the coming of man.

So here’s my point, and by the way there’s so many more than this but I like these five because these five are not vague. They are specific.

The excuses used by Christian apologists to cover up these five miscues are impotent- they do nothing but to reveal their lack of objectivity- they start with the assumption that God is inerrant and then twist whatever nonsense they can invent to rescue that assumption- to no avail to anyone possessing a free mind.

(5550) Christian faith makes no sense

In the following, the secular author John Loftus explains why Christianity fails to make sense, fails every test of logic, and should be discarded based on that fact:

https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/christian-faith-makes-no-sense/

Inspiration

From the outset, it makes no sense to presume that a deity spoke to human authors in light of the evidence from the alleged inspiration that they wrote down. So theologians have had to reinterpret the claim that the Bible is somehow divinely inspired.

There are several Christian theories of what it means to say that the Bible is inspired. First, there is the “dictation” or “mechanical” theory, in which it’s believed that God woodenly dictated the very words to the biblical writers like someone might dictate a letter to a secretary. This is now almost universally rejected by Christians since it’s obvious that each of the biblical writers had a distinct style and vocabulary.

Second, there is the “verbal-plenary” theory. It is “verbal” in the sense that the very words in the Bible are God’s, although somehow not dictated by God. It is “plenary” in the sense that it’s believed that the Bible is completely inspired in all of its parts. Some of those who believe in the verbal-plenary theory also believe that the Bible is the “inerrant” word of God, containing no errors at all, despite the empirical evidence showing plenty of contradictions.[2] Others maintain that the Bible may be regarded as their “infallible” rule of faith and practice in all religious and ethical matters, but not in historical and scientific matters. The reason why they exclude historical and scientific errors is obvious—because history and science has shown the Bible to be in error.

Third, there is the “illumination” theory, where it’s believed that God “breathed on” or illuminated the biblical writers, who then translated this so-called religious experience into words. Thus, the Bible does not contain the exact words of God; it only contains God’s thoughts as expressed through human beings, and as such, only the main thoughts of the Bible are inspired, leaving plenty of room for human error. This seems incompetent as a revelation. Couldn’t a god do any better than that?

Fourth, Karl Barth taught that the Bible is a “witness” to God’s revelation and not God’s revelation itself. God uses the Bible in a unique way when read or proclaimed to speak to people, although God could also use a Russian flute concerto to do so. Given this view, believers can interpret the Bible in any way that they desire—in what’s called eisegesis, not exegesis—since they can simply claim that God led them to their interpretations.

Last, liberal Christians have adopted what can be called the “natural” theory, in which biblical writers were only inspired in the sense that a poet is inspired. According to these advocates the spark of divine inspiration that is supposedly in us all burned a little brighter in the lives of the biblical authors, and as such, inspiration refers to the Christian community of faith. Gone is a verifiable revelation altogether.

Trinity

Christian scholars have insurmountable difficulties trying to make sense of the Trinity. There are social Trinitarians and antisocial Trinitarians. Both sides accuse the other side of abandoning the Chalcedon creed, either in the direction of tritheism (i.e., the Godhead is three separate beings forming three separate gods) or in the direction of unitarianism (i.e., denying there are three distinct persons in the Godhead).

There are Christians who maintain that the Father eternally created the Son and the Holy Spirit, while others argue that such a view is tantamount to the Son being demoted to a creature. Yet an eternally existing Trinity is inexplicable. It’s hard enough to conceive of one person who is an eternally uncaused God, much less a Godhead composed of three eternally uncaused persons who have always shared a divine nature, who never learned anything new, who never took a risk, who never made a decision, who never disagreed within the Godhead, and who never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.

A Timeless God

This Godhead is also conceived of as a timeless being who was somehow able to create the first moment of time. How a timeless being could actually do this is extremely problematic. How does one make a decision when there is no time in which to make a decision? Even if God’s decision to create a first moment of time is an “eternal” one (whatever that’s supposed to mean), there is still no temporal gap between his decision to create the first moment of time and the actual first moment of time.

In other words, a timeless God could not eternally decide to create something at some “future” time since there is no future time for him. His decision to create would be simultaneous with the act of him creating. Therefore, if God created at all, the universe would be eternal, never having had a beginning.

A Non-Personal God

Theists claim that cosmological and teleological arguments for the existence of God necessitate a personal God who can make the decisions to create and design the universe. However, if God’s decisions to create and design the universe are simultaneous with him creating it and designing it, then how is that considered to be a choice at all?

One must choose between alternatives. At what prior moment in time did a God contemplate any alternatives? So not only do we have an eternal universe, but we lack a good philosophical argument for a personal God. Either the universe is a brute fact, just like an unexplained Trinitarian creator (which we can dismiss via Ockham’s Razor as an unnecessary hypothesis, especially after Charles Darwin), or the existence of the universe doesn’t necessitate positing a personal God who made the decision to create the universe.

God and Time

Theists believe that a God who inexplicably created time must forever be subject to time in a sequence of events. He cannot become timeless again (if it ever made sense for him to be timeless in the first place), for rendering him so would destroy everything that took place in human history. If God became timeless again, then time itself never existed, and hence neither did we. But who’s to say he won’t become timeless again? If God chose to be timeless again, then no promises would have been made to believers to be in Heaven for eternity, so he would not be breaking any promises by destroying all time.

God as a Spirit

There is also the problem of what it means to say that God is a spirit, and of how a spiritual being can create the physical universe. How does something that is spirit create something material, or interact with it, unless there is some point of contact between them that they both share? For instance, how can God speak audibly and be heard by sound waves to our ears unless he can move sound waves?

Conceptually the physical and the spiritual cannot interact unless they share some kind of quality. Are spirit and matter two poles of the same reality? Then welcome to panentheism or process theology. Are they one and the same? Then welcome to pantheism (all is “spirit”) or metaphysical naturalism (all is matter). If a spiritual God can create this universe, then Christians need to show how it is possible for God to create the physical universe as a spirit.

Creation

Why did God ever create anything if he needed nothing, wanted nothing, and was completely and utterly satisfied within his Trinitarian self? Either he was a perfectly happy camper in every way possible, or he was not. If he was perfectly happy there would be no reason to muck it up by creating a world, any kind of world, much less this one. Christians say that God wanted to express his love, but such a want itself was already satisfied between the self-giving love between Trinitarian persons.

But just consider this world. How is it a gracious gift to create such a world as ours, knowing in advance that all of this suffering would have to take place, just so a “few” people could be with him in Heaven?[3] Thinking Christians should protest their God for creating this world, even if they themselves were to end up in Heaven. I would think caring people would prefer that their God had never created anything at all than for him to create a world where their friends and family members will wind up in Hell along with billions of others. If I were a selfless, “agape”-loving Christian, I would gladly have preferred nonexistence to the eternal sufferings of so many others in Hell.

If for some inexplicable reason God wanted to create, why didn’t God just create a heavenly world with heavenly bodies in the first place? Theists typically believe that a Heaven awaits faithful believers when they die, where there will be no “death, or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4), where believers will have incorruptible bodies (1 Corinthians 15:30ff). In short, believers expect a perfect heavenly existence. Why didn’t God just create such a perfect existence in the first place? If there’s free will in a future Heaven without sin or the temptations of the flesh, then God could’ve created such a world from the very beginning.

The Scale of the Universe and a Tribal God

When I was in the throes of doubt in the early ’90s, I bought nearly a dozen posters of galaxies, stars, various nebulae, and the solar system itself. I hung them on the walls of my office. I was astounded by our universe and its massive size.[4]

I remember thinking to myself: how could God be omnipresent in such a universe? How could he be a personal agent without a center for his personality? How could he be omniscient, knowing what was going on at the far reaches of it? And how could he be omnipotent, such that he could create and maintain it? I also wondered how he could care about life on this pale blue dot of ours that exists on one spiral arm in the Milky Way Galaxy. It didn’t make any sense.

Nicholas Everitt asked the following important question, given God’s supposed purposes: “What sort of a universe would you expect to find?” He answered it saying:

Traditional theism would lead you to expect human beings to appear fairly soon after the start of the universe. For, given the central role of humanity, what would be the point of a universe which came into existence and then existed for unimaginable aeons without the presence of the very species that supplied its rationale?… Further, you would expect the Earth to be fairly near the centre of the universe if it had one, or at some similarly significant location if it did not have an actual centre.

You would expect the total universe to be not many orders of magnitude greater than the size of the earth. The universe would be on a human scale. You would expect that even if there are regions of the created world which are hostile to human life, and which perhaps are incompatible with it, the greater part of the universe would be accessible to human exploration. If this were not so, what would the point be of God creating it?[5]

God’s Foreknowledge

There is an unsolvable mystery concerning how God can foreknow freely willed actions. Several theories on the subject have been suggested:

1. 1. Theological Determinism. God decrees everything that happens. He can know the future of every human action since humans don’t have the freedom to do otherwise. Such a theology (as found in Calvinism) creates atheists. More than anything else, this view is what motivates me to attempt to demolish the Christian faith.
   2. God is Outside Time. If God is outside of time, he would have no problems predicting future human actions, since human actions are not actually in his future. God would merely be seeing the present from his perspective. However, as Stephen T. Davis argues, “We have on hand no acceptable concept of atemporal causation, i.e., of what it is for a timeless cause to produce a temporal effect.”[6] William Hasker asks, “If God is truly timeless so that temporal determinations of ‘before’ and ‘after’ do not apply to him, then how can God act in time, as Scriptures say that he does? How can he know what is occurring on the changing earthly scene? How can he respond when his children turn to him in prayer and obedience?”[7]
   3. The Inferential View. On this view, God figures out from the range of options which choices we will make, which he can do because he has omniscience. This option actually entails, however, that what we do is somehow “programmed” into us. The determinist claims that it’s all in the genes and environment, so this viewpoint commits the believer to the same position as the determinist.
   4. The Innate View. This is the belief that God has innate comprehensive knowledge of the future. He just “sees it” because he is omniscient. However, this isn’t an explanation at all, just an unsupported faith-based assertion.
   5. Middle Knowledge. This is an additional assertion based on the Innate View. William Lane Craig argues that God has Middle Knowledge such that he knows “what every possible creature would do under any possible circumstances,” and he would know this “prior to any determination of the divine will.”[8] But it’s obvious that if Craig’s God has this kind of foreknowledge, he could simply foreknow who would not accept his offered salvation before they were even created, and then never create them in the first place so that “hotel Hell” would never have even one occupant. Why not? I’ll tell you why not. It’s because Craig cannot allow himself to think differently since he already has the Bible answer, and that settles it.

Satan

The highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, is believed to have led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, and omnipresent God—and expected to win. This is insane if Satan had a sliver of either intelligence or goodness at all. It makes him out to be suicidal, inexplicably evil, and dumber than a box of rocks.

Since the highest creation of such a God could not be suicidal, inexplicably evil, or dumber than a box of rocks, Satan is obviously a mythical creature invented by the ancient superstitious mythical mind. Despite this, the Devil is believed to be on the prowl by meddling in the world without God stopping him, even though God could stop him. Why did God not immediately nullify the consequences of that satanic rebellion, or restrain the activity of his rebellious demons, so that there would be no physical evil and no animal pain?

Let me forcefully illustrate this question with an analogy. What would we say if a father did not stop a pack of wolves from running through the open doors of his house when he had the means to stop them, knowing full well that his children and pets inside would be mauled and even killed by them? What could possibly justify this inaction when it’s considered his parental responsibility to protect his children and pets by stopping the wolves dead in their tracks, immediately? What could possibly justify a loving father allowing these wolves to attack his children and his pets? Would anything justify his initial inaction?

Then let’s say that father picks up a shotgun and runs upstairs and downstairs killing these wolves one by one. When the smoke clears, he finds that his cat and dog are dead, along with four of his six children, one of whom will be crippled for life. Is there any reason for praising the father for rescuing these two children when he could have stopped the wolves initially? You be the judge.

Adam and Eve

God is believed to have tested the first pair of humans, who so grievously sinned against God that all of the rest of us are being punished for it (including animals), even though no one but the first human pair deserved any punishment (if anyone deserved it). If it’s argued that all of us deserve to be punished because all of us would have sinned, then the test was a sham, for only if some of us would not have sinned can the test be considered a fair one. But if instead some of us would not have sinned under the same initial test conditions, then there are people who are being punished in today’s world for something that they never would have done.[9]

The Logos

We are told that the Logos, which is the second person of the Trinity, became a man named Jesus. No conception of this God-man in the flesh has yet been able to withstand scrutiny. How can such a being be 100 percent God and 100 percent man, with every essential characteristic of humanity and divinity included? The Bible itself tells us that ancient superstitious people believed sons of God walked the Earth (Acts 14:11‒12; 28:6), so why should I believe that Jesus was any more a son of God than they were?

All attempts to solve this problem have failed. Jesus began to exist, while God did not. Jesus had a specific location on Earth in a body, while God is supposedly everywhere. Jesus died and stayed dead for three days, while God didn’t die. Jesus was not omniscient (Mark 13:32), while God supposedly knows all truths. Jesus was tempted to sin, while God cannot be tempted to sin against himself.

An Incarnate God

If the eternal Logos was always 100 percent God and 100 percent man before creation, and before the birth of Jesus on Earth, then we have the inexplicable problem of an eternally existing human being. How could the Logos be a human being before God created the Earth? Humanity would then exist as God did: without a beginning. Is a human being therefore divine like God? What, then, is the difference between divinity and humanity?

If, however, the Logos first became a God-man with the birth of Jesus (since Jesus is described in the creeds as being one unified divine/human person), then the Logos became forever united with the flesh of the man Jesus in first-century Palestine. What sense can be made of the claim that the Logos was united in the man Jesus? If united as one being, then when Jesus died, so too the Logos should have died. Or conversely, if the Logos cannot die, then Jesus could not have died.

An Embodied God

There is an additional problem about where the human side of this God-man resides right now. Since the human side of the God-man is believed to be sinless, then the human side of the God-man can’t be destroyed by a good God in Hell, nor can he be separated from the Logos, since such a being is considered to be one unified person according to the creeds.

Theologians have concluded that the Trinity now includes an embodied Logos. Now we have a Trinity who will forever exist with an embodied human being attached to the Logos. If conceiving the Trinity isn’t hard enough to swallow, picture that three-headed monster with the human head of Jesus attached to one part of it! Just step back for a moment and ask yourself if this isn’t indeed a very bizarre set of beliefs.

Atonement

When it comes to the reason why the Logos of God came to Earth, it’s puzzling, to say the very least. One way to tell whether a theory is in crisis is to observe how many versions of that theory have been proposed. How did the death of Jesus supposedly atone for sins? There have been a lot of versions of answers proposed by Christians who, for good reasons, have disputed the others. The earliest proposals were the ransom theory and the recapitulation theory. Then came a host of more afterward: St. Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the penal substitutionary theory, the governmental theory, the moral influence theory, and recently the relationship theory. And there are many others.[10]

This problem arises when we ask why Jesus had to suffer on the cross and die. In order for someone to be forgiven, why must there be punishment at all? We know of victims who have forgiven their assailants even though the assailants have never been punished, and we know of other victims who won’t forgive their assailants even after they have been punished. To forgive someone doesn’t require that you must first punish that person. Forgiveness doesn’t really depend upon the remorse of the offender, either, although it does help quite a bit. At this point, it’s not up to the offender at all. It’s the victim who must find a way to forgive.

To forgive means bearing the suffering of what that person has done to you without retaliation. If I stole something from you, then forgiveness means bearing the loss even without any recompense. If I slandered you, forgiving means bearing the humiliation without retaliating. If the cross was needed, then how can God really be a forgiving God? Forgiveness doesn’t require punishment. To put it bluntly, if I can’t forgive you for striking me on the chin until I return the blow back to you, or to someone else by proxy, then that’s not forgiveness—that’s retaliation or revenge!

The reason why early Christians came to believe that Jesus atoned for sins is simply because they believed in the superstitious magical properties of blood, as we read in Leviticus 17:11: “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one’s life.” This is something that no reasonable, scientific-minded person can accept, just as surely as Christians do not really drink the blood of Jesus or eat his flesh in communion, either.[11] German scholar Erhard Gerstenberger comments: “This blood gift to Yahweh actually cannot be illuminated logically, for prehistoric notions of faith are resonating in this rite.

As is the case among other peoples, blood is considered to be a magical substance efficacious in and of itself. Hence with blood one can expurgate the powers of death and eliminate the stain of sin (cf. Ex. 4:25; 12:17ff., 22f).” He adds: “Both the author of the sacrificial laws and their audience seem to have appropriated without excessive reflection these ancient magical notions concerning the efficacy of blood. Subsequent Jewish and especially Christian theology then developed a broad atonement faith perspective associated with blood symbolism [e.g., I John 1:7—”the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin].”[12]

Resurrection

Then there is the mysterious problem of a resurrected body. Since Jesus supposedly resurrected, so will the saints. Many human bodies have been eaten by cannibals, bears, sharks, and parasites. Others have been lost at sea or cremated. How can there be a bodily resurrection for these bodies if they no longer exist? If eaten by parasites, are those bodies still human? If decomposed into the ground as fertilizer for weeds, are those bodies still human? Is a resurrected body therefore a replica of the one on Earth? How can it be said that the replica is the same as the original?

If the resurrected body is a replica, then what do believers say about a multiple number of replicas being created of someone? Is it possible for a person to be one and the same with a multiple number of replicas in Heaven? Which body of ours is the basis for the replica that gets resurrected—the one we had when we were ten years old, forty years old, or the one we died with while suffering from Alzheimer’s disease? Would we even want a replica body in the resurrection, since most of our bodies are flawed to some degree?

And if we are given perfect bodies instead, what does a perfect body look like? Does it even make sense to say resurrected people will all receive perfect bodies? If perfect, will they all look exactly the same? If not, will some of them have imperfections precisely because of these differences? If believers are rewarded differently in Heaven with better, more perfect bodies depending on how they lived their lives, then what becomes of the claim that God in Jesus forgave them for all of their sins? Either he did or he didn’t. So there can’t be different rewards for people in Heaven; otherwise, God doesn’t forgive all sins after all, for the failure to obey God perfectly would be a sin not forgiven, a sin of omission, which is punished with a less perfect body, or a less perfect mansion in the sky.

The Ascension

As the Gospels kept making more and more corporeal claims about Jesus after his resurrection, the question was asked about the body of Jesus: where was it? The objection was that either Jesus did not rise from the dead, or he should be found walking around somewhere and should have to die again. So Luke’s gospel came up with the answer, probably first seen in a dream, a trance, or a vision, something the earliest Church seemed to experience regularly.[13] Early disciples learned a lot from their God subjectively, based on these experiences.[14] Jesus isn’t walking around somewhere, nor will he have to die again, Luke’s gospel tells us. Jesus, with his resurrected body, ascended directly into Heaven.

Unfortunately for Christians, if Jesus ascended into Heaven, as we read about in Luke 24:50-53 and Acts 1:9-11, then as Scott McKellar tells us, “In the course of his ascension, at around 15,000 feet, Jesus began to wish he had brought a sweater. At 30,000 feet he felt weak from lack of oxygen. By 100,000 his bodily fluids were boiling away from every orifice. If he ever did return, it would be as a fifty-pound lump of bone and frozen jerky.”[15] This assumes an ancient three-tiered universe that no one can rationally believe today, with Heaven above the Earth and Hell below. Such a view has been utterly shattered by cosmology and geology. But since the bodily resurrection of Jesus and his ascension into Heaven hang together, modern science makes both claims exceedingly improbable to the point of refutation.

Heaven and Hell

We’re also told by Christian theologians that sinners who are sent to Hell will retain their free will. They have a great difficulty in thinking a good God would punish people so cruelly unless sinners continue to rebel. Then these same Christians will turn around and claim that the saved who enter Heaven will have their free will taken away, in order to guarantee that there will be no future rebellion in Heaven. If free will is such a great gift, why reward people by taking it away from them and punish people by having them retain it? That makes no sense. If that’s the kind of people that God eventually wants in Heaven, then why even bother creating this world in the first place?

Punishment for Sin

We are to believe that sinners will be blindsided by an eternal punishment in Hell, which is Christianity’s most damnable doctrine. Modern societies use humane punishments rather than the barbaric ones of the past, which were the basis for their conceptions of God’s punishments. People do not really know that their choices will send them to an eternal punishment in Hell. For to the degree that we knew this, we wouldn’t sin. The probability that we would not “sin” is inversely proportional to the evidence that there is an eternal punishment in Hell when we die (i.e., the more evidence that there is a Hell, then the less we would “sin”), and there just isn’t enough of it to make us refrain from doing so, as the whole world proves daily.

There are tasks the Christian God gave his followers that don’t make any sense, given that God could do them better.

The Task of Evangelism

If God supposedly gave up Jesus to die on the cross for our sins, which is the greater deed by far, then why does he rely on his disciples to reach nonbelievers with the gospel of salvation, which represents the lesser deeds? Isn’t that backward for an intelligent being? It would be like preparing an extravagant delicious banquet, with enough food to feed all the starving people in a refugee camp, but not caring enough to send out workers to tell them about it, or hiring incompetent workers that he knows won’t tell them. God supposedly gave the task of evangelism to Christians, which is their most important task of them all. They are still sinners on this side of Heaven, lacking complete sanctification, and consequently they are lazy, self-absorbed, greedy, lying, lustful, fallible, ignorant, finite human beings.

Most Christians who attend church services are much more interested in networking with others, finding a mate, being entertained, or learning lessons from pop-psychology on how to be a good person (because for some reason they need reminding weekly), than in reaching out to people who, according to their own theology, are headed straight for an eternal, conscious, torturous Hell. We’re told that the Holy Spirit is helping Christians do their job by motivating and illuminating them to do their work. We see no objective evidence of this faith claim.

Compared with an all-knowing God, even the best Christian defenders are bumbling idiots and incompetent fools. Compared with an all-loving God, even the best Christian defenders are utterly self-centered and completely unconcerned that people are going to Hell. Compared with an all-powerful God, even the best Christian defenders are totally lacking any energy to help people believe. Surely it stands to reason that many people have not accepted Jesus as their savior because Christian defenders lacked the motivation, the energy, and the necessary smarts to do so.

Christians who lacked the smarts haven’t even known where to look for the needed evidence to believe, much less found that evidence. This doesn’t make any sense at all, especially if there’s a flaming Hell to pay for those who are not convinced to believe and be saved. Surely a God like the one that Christians believe in could have been more concerned for the lost than hiring the Church to do this most important job. If Christians have been incompetent with this task, then God was incompetent in hiring them to do it. God should have cared for the lost more than that. As the CEO of his corporation, God’s hiring practices are a failure. God should fire Christians and do the work him/herself.[16] No, perhaps better yet, God the Father and the Son should fire the Holy Spirit!

The Task of Apologetics

Why should Christians have to defend the Christian faith at all? In the first place, God should have left little to defend by providing the needed objective evidence, some of which several of us have suggested as reasonable.[17] God should also have communicated better. If there is any miscommunication in a company—the kind that can bring a company to a halt, the kind that can lead people to do different things by pulling in different directions, the kind that that can cause a lack of overall purpose, the kind that gets workers in fights—then the buck clearly stops with the CEO. God is the ultimate CEO, so God is to blame for the Christian Church, if they cannot adequately defend the truth and goodness of Christianity and the Church. I call this the problem of divine miscommunication. It’s a most serious one for a God worthy of the attributes ascribed to a deity who is also believed to have revealed the Bible.[18]

The God who needs defending is one who has made it exceedingly difficult to do so. As I have written elsewhere, if God had provided a sufficient amount of evidence for his faith, there would be no other apologetical method than evidentialism, which requires sufficient objective evidence.[19] The very fact that 80% of Christian apologists reject the requirement for sufficient objective evidence, is evidence, all on its own, that even the best of the best apologists don’t think that God did his best.

Notes

[1] More detailed discussion of most of what follows can be found in my Why I Became an Atheist (2008), The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (2010), The End of Christianity (2011), and How to Defend the Christian Faith (2015).

[2] See John W. Loftus, Why I Became an Atheist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2008), pp. 365-369.

[3] Matthew 7:13-14.

[4] Loftus, “Does the Scale of the Universe Undercut the Belief in a Tribal Deity?” (February 12, 2014). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2021/04/doubting-thomas-tells-us-all-we-need-to.html>. See also Loftus, “Pete Edwards of Durham University on the Scale of the Universe” (February 10, 2013). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2013/02/pete-edwards-of-durham-university-on.html>.

[5] Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence of God (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), pp. 215-216.

[6] Stephen T. Davis, Logic and the Nature of God (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 8-24.

[7] William Hasker in Clark Pinnock, The Openness of God: A Biblical Challenge to the Traditional Understanding of God (Grand Rapids, MI: InterVarsity Press Academic, 1994), p. 128.

[8] William Lane Craig in Clark Pinnock, Grace of God and the Will of Man (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Publishing Group, 1989), pp. 141-164.

[9] Evangelicals are now discussing the historicity of Adam and Eve. See the contributions by Denis O. Lamoureux, John H. Walton, C. John Collins, William D. Barrick, Gregory A. Boyd, and Philip G. Ryken to Four Views on the Historical Adam (2013) and William Lane Craig’s In Quest of the Historical Adam (2021).

[10] Two debate books on this issue are The Nature of the Atonement: Four Views (2006), featuring Gregory A. Boyd, Joel B. Green, Bruce R. Reichenbach, and Thomas R. Schreiner, and Five Views on the Extent of the Atonement (2019), featuring Andrew Louth, Matthew Levering, Michael Horton, Fred Sanders, and Tom Greggs.

[11] John 6:52-55; 1 Corinthians 11:23-27.

[12] Erhard Gerstenberger, Leviticus: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1996), pp. 59-60

[13] Acts 2:17-18; 1 Corinthians 12; 2 Corinthians 12:1-7.

[14] A Roman centurion named Cornelius had a vision in Acts 10:1-7. Peter the Apostle responded to Cornelius based on a trance in Acts 10:9-34. In Galatians 1:11-12 Paul claims that he learned the gospel message itself from visions, including the Lord’s Supper (in 1 Corinthians 11:23-25). We also find seven letters dictated to the churches by God via visions in chapters 2-3 of the Book of Revelation.

[15] Quoted by David Madison, “What to Do About Your Dead-Again Jesus?” (August 23, 2019). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2019/08/what-to-do-about-your-dead-again-jesus.html>.

[16] I’ve argued that God could’ve done all the work himself in Loftus, How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2015), pp. 20-35. The fact that God didn’t do differently, when s/he could have done so with much better results, doesn’t make any sense.

[17] See Loftus, What Would Convince Atheists to Become Christians? The Definitive Answers!” (April 4, 2017). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2017/04/what-would-convince-atheists-to-become.html>.

[18] I wrote about this problem in chapter 7 of The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2010).

[19] On this, see Loftus, The Case Against Miracles (United States: Hypatia Press, 2019), chapter 6.

The task of an apologist to segue from these arguments to a defense of Christianity would be a herculean effort, and a rather disingenuous one to boot. Rational thinking is all that is needed to realize that Christianity is a false religion.

Follow this link to #5551