(5701) Evaluating the logic underpinning Christianity

Google Gemini 3.1 Pro was asked to respond to the following question:

If there was a god who created the universe, how likely (1) would it know of all the places where intelligent life evolved, (2) decide to interact with life forms where he finds it, and (3) create a system of judgment to either reward or punish these life forms after they die based on whether or not they believed in its existence, while at the same time withholding positive evidence thereof? This was the response:

If a being possesses the power, intelligence, and resources to instantiate the universe—engineering its physical constants, quantum mechanics, and cosmological expansion—the likelihood of these three scenarios can be evaluated through the lens of philosophy, probability, and theology.

1. Knowing where life evolved: Highly Likely A creator capable of designing a system as complex as the universe would almost certainly possess a corresponding capacity for observation and information processing.

• • Under classical theism, this being is omniscient; knowing the exact location and state of every subatomic particle—and therefore all life—is a definitional certainty.
  • Under a deistic framework (where the creator sets the universe in motion and steps back), the creator might not actively monitor every planet, but it would possess the ultimate mathematical blueprint. It would know exactly where the initial conditions it set would inevitably produce life, much like a programmer knows the outputs of their own algorithm.

2. Deciding to interact with life forms: Highly Variable (Depends on intent) The probability of intervention splits sharply depending on why the universe was created in the first place.

• • Low Likelihood (The Watchmaker): If the creator’s goal was to build a perfectly self-sustaining, autonomous system, interacting with it implies the original design was flawed and requires tinkering. In this view, life is a beautiful byproduct of the cosmic engine, not something requiring micromanagement.
  • High Likelihood (The Cosmic Theater): If the universe was created specifically as a habitat to cultivate conscious life, then interaction—whether through subtle guidance, revelation, or direct intervention—becomes the logical primary purpose of the creation.

3. Judging based on belief in its existence: Low Likelihood Philosophers and logicians often view this specific criterion as the least probable of the three, as it heavily projects human social and political psychology onto a cosmic entity.

• • The Problem of Hiddenness: If a creator’s ultimate metric for eternal reward or punishment is belief in its existence, an omnipotent being could make its existence unambiguously obvious to all rational creatures. Choosing to remain utterly hidden while severely punishing those who require evidence to believe introduces a logical contradiction regarding the creator’s rationality and justice.
  • Anthropocentrism: The demand for recognition, loyalty, and worship closely mirrors human monarchical structures and ego. A cosmic architect capable of engineering black holes and galaxy clusters is unlikely to possess human-like insecurities requiring intellectual validation from carbon-based life forms.
  • Alternative Metrics: If a post-mortem judgment system were to exist, a universal creator would logically be much more likely to evaluate life forms based on objective metrics aligned with the universe’s order—such as the reduction of suffering, ethical behavior, or conscious growth—rather than a binary test of blind loyalty.

This exposes the parochial limits of Christianity as it was conceived by humans, who were not as advanced either scientifically, ethically, or historically as present day people. In particular, tying its principle judgment criteria to belief in a poorly-evidenced deity is a dead giveaway that this faith is not a true reflection of reality.

(5702) Judaeo-Christianity in a nutshell

Yahweh: Death. Fear. Plagues. Floods. Famine. Curses. Exile. Genocide. Slavery. Rape laws. Child sacrifice. Animal blood. Holy wars. Circumcision. Stonings. Legalism. Condemnation. Silence. Abandonment. Favoritism. Ethnic cleansing. Commanded killings of infants. Forced marriages. Captivity. Threats. Wrath. Deadly fire from heaven. Ground swallowing rebels. Poisonous vipers in the desert. Droughts. Pestilence. Rejection of mercy. Destruction of cities. Jealousy. Vengeance. Testing. Hardening hearts. Punishing generations for one man’s sin. Calling himself “jealous.” Mocking the hungry. Killing for touching an ark. Death for mocking baldness. Sending lying spirits. Accepting human sacrifice.

Jesus: Love me more than anyone else. Abandon your family. Hate them. Follow me. Sell everything. Narrow is the way. Few find it. And if and when you fail, GO TO HELL.

(5703) Fantasy elements of the Book of Genesis

The Bible begins with a strong hint that we are reading a book of fiction and fantasy. In no way does this literary work appear to be compliant to the reality of the world in which we live. In the following, Google Gemini Pro 3.1 selected the top ten fantasy elements of the Book of Genesis:

Read through a literary and mythological lens, the Book of Genesis is rich with supernatural tropes, worldbuilding, and motifs that closely parallel modern fantasy.

1. 1. Worldbuilding by Spoken Magic (Creation Ex Nihilo) The ultimate “magic system” opens the book: the universe is spoken into existence. Light, matter, and life are conjured through the sheer power of a divine voice, a trope foundational to high fantasy where true names or ancient languages hold reality-altering power.
   2. Enchanted Flora The Garden of Eden contains two distinct magical plants: the Tree of Life (granting immortality) and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (granting divine wisdom). Consuming their fruit fundamentally alters human nature.
   3. Sentient, Talking Animals The serpent in Eden possesses cunning, malicious intent, and the ability to speak fluently with humans. It acts as the archetypal trickster creature, introducing deception into a previously flawless world.
   4. Divine Guardians and Magical Weapons After humanity is exiled from Eden, God stations Cherubim (fearsome celestial beings) at the entrance, armed with a “flaming sword flashing back and forth” to guard the way to the Tree of Life.
   5. Demigods and Giants Genesis 6 introduces the Nephilim—mysterious, gigantic offspring born from the union of the “sons of God” (often interpreted as celestial beings or fallen angels) and human women. They are described as the “heroes of old, men of renown,” echoing classical mythology’s demigods.
   6. Apocalyptic Cataclysms and Survival Arks The Great Flood is a classic apocalyptic fantasy scenario. A chosen survivor is given divine blueprints to build an impossibly massive wooden vessel to save a remnant of humanity and every animal species from a world-ending deluge.
   7. Transmutation and Divine Curses Fleeing the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot’s wife disobeys a divine command not to look back. In a moment of instantaneous magical transmutation, she is turned into a pillar of salt.
   8. Portals to the Divine Realm While sleeping on a stone pillow, Jacob experiences a vision of a massive stairway (or ladder) resting on the earth with its top reaching into heaven, bustling with angels ascending and descending—a literal portal between the mortal and divine planes.
   9. Supernatural Combat In one of the most visceral scenes, Jacob is left alone at night and physically wrestles a mysterious “man” (later revealed to be God or an angel) until daybreak. The supernatural being ultimately dislocates Jacob’s hip with a mere touch, but renames him “Israel” as a reward for his resilience.
   10. Prophetic Visions and Divination Artifacts Joseph’s arc in the latter half of Genesis relies heavily on prophetic dreams—both his own and his ability to interpret the dreams of Pharaoh. Later, when testing his brothers, Joseph uses a special silver cup that his steward claims is used for divination.

Christians try to market the Bible as being factual history, but right off the bat we are presented with a full-throated refutation of that claim. The Book of Genesis is the foundation of Judaeo-Christianity and it is a powerful hint to not take anything in the Bible that comes after it literally.

(5704) Ten lies that built Christianity

Christianity was founded upon a group of lies that were spoken as truth to vulnerable and credulous people. The following was taken from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-S2Zf2nrYw4&t=301s

The 10 lies that built Christianity did not stay trapped in ancient scrolls. They evolved, adapted, and found new disguises. The myths of the past became the moral codes of the present. And the same patterns of control now wear modern clothing. Religion learned to survive by changing its language, not its intent. Let’s look at how these lies continue to shape our world. How a 2,000-year-old structure of belief still decides what people think, fear, and fight over.

The first lie that the Gospels were eyewitness truth still fuels the illusion that belief equals knowledge. Millions quote verses as if they were historical documents, not anonymous stories filtered through translation and centuries of editing. A person can walk into a church today and hear sermons preached with absolute certainty about words written by men who never met Jesus and never saw a miracle. That confidence is not faith. It is conditioning. If the same standard of evidence were applied to any other claim, a UFO sighting, a political rumor, it would crumble immediately. But when wrapped in religious language, it becomes sacred. The lesson is simple. When stories are treated as facts, truth becomes optional.

The second lie that Christianity began as a pure movement of love and spirituality still helps religion disguise its hunger for power. Churches are no longer crowned by emperors, but they still influence laws, education, and policy. Politicians quote scripture to gain votes. Preachers bless wars, and billion-dollar televangelists sell salvation for donations. The message is clear. Power still wears the mask of piety. The ancient partnership between altar and throne continues, just with microphones instead of swords. Religion has learned to use democracy the way it once used monarchy to control minds through morality instead of through fear of the whip.

The third lie that the faith was ever unified feeds the illusion that Christianity represents one truth. In reality, there are over 40,000 denominations worldwide, each claiming to be right. They cannot even agree on what baptism means or what happens after death. Yet each insists the others are slightly mistaken, but still brothers in Christ. Imagine 40,000 versions of the same math equation, all claiming 2 plus 2 equals different numbers, yet all demanding to be called truth. The fragmentation of belief exposes its human roots. A divine message would not require constant correction.

The fourth lie, turning a mortal man into a divine being, continues to distort how people see themselves. By worshiping a perfect sinless figure, humanity is taught to hate its own flaws. Instead of learning from a teacher, believers are told to bow before a deity. This replaces growth with guilt. Children grow up hearing they were born sinners who can never be good without divine help. That is not moral guidance. That is psychological control. It convinces people that their natural instincts are corrupt and their only hope lies in surrendering their mind to authority. A faith that begins with self-loathing can never end in freedom.

The fifth lie, the belief in literal miracles still shapes the way people interpret the world. Instead of studying causes, they pray for cures. Instead of facing problems, they wait for divine solutions. A person struggling with illness may ignore medical treatment, trusting a preacher’s promise of healing. Another prays for rain while science offers irrigation. Miracle thinking turns humanity away from responsibility. It keeps people kneeling instead of acting. The real miracle would be if every believer stood up and realized that change begins with human hands, not invisible ones.

The sixth lie that Christianity defines morality continues to influence how society judges right and wrong. People still hear that goodness comes from God and evil from disbelief. Yet morality long predates Christianity. Humans learned empathy before anyone wrote a commandment. When a mother feeds her child or a stranger helps another in pain, no scripture is required. Religious morality often divides instead of unites. It teaches compassion for believers and punishment for outsiders. Even now, laws against reproductive rights, gender equality, and same-sex love are defended with religious reasoning. When dogma becomes the measure of virtue, humanity is lost under the weight of ancient fear.

The seventh lie that Christianity spread through peace still hides behind smiling missionaries and well-funded charities. Modern evangelism no longer carries swords, but it carries guilt. It invades poor countries through aid with a Bible, exchanging food for faith. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, missionary groups spend millions convincing the hungry that salvation is more urgent than survival. It is colonization of the mind instead of the land. Where armies once marched, now come preachers with pamphlets. The method changed, the manipulation remains.

The eighth lie, the claim that the Bible is perfect, continues to silence rational thought. Even as archaeological and linguistic studies expose contradictions and forgeries, believers cling to the illusion of inerrancy. The result is confusion turned into obedience. People fear asking why God needs a book full of human errors. They fear losing community, identity, or family. And so they defend a text that often defends slavery, genocide, and misogyny. When words written by ancient tribes are called eternal truth, morality freezes in time, societies progress only when they dare to outgrow their scriptures.

The ninth lie that Christianity built civilization still echoes in classrooms and speeches. People forget that the church once fought nearly every form of progress it now claims credit for. Science advanced when thinkers challenged dogma. Democracy grew when citizens rejected divine right. Women gained rights when they stopped being told to obey men as unto the Lord. Human progress came not from faith, but from rebellion against it. The printing press, medicine, and education all spread faster when the church lost control of them. The lie persists because history is often written by those who once owned the ink.

And finally, the 10th lie. The prohibition against questioning remains the cornerstone of control. Every system built on belief fears the moment a mind begins to ask why. That single question has toppled kings, exposed frauds, and ended tyrannies. Religion knows this, which is why it labels doubt as sin. But doubt is not rebellion. It is honesty. It is the first spark of freedom. The child who asks, “Who created God?” is not wicked. They are awake. The adult who says, “Show me evidence,” is not arrogant. They are alive. Progress begins exactly where obedience ends.

So where does that leave us today? Humanity stands between two futures. One clings to ancient myths and moral panic. The other builds knowledge through curiosity and reason. The comforting lies of the past still whisper in modern voices. Politicians claiming divine approval. Preachers selling paradise. Families dividing over belief. But truth is patient. It waits for minds brave enough to see beyond fear.

We don’t need to burn churches or mock believers. We only need to insist on honesty. When truth is allowed to speak freely, lies collapse on their own. The foundation of Christianity, like every superstition before it, will erode under the same force that built science, art, and democracy. The courage to think. Humanity does not need a savior nailed to a cross. It needs self-awareness. It needs empathy without dogma and reason without guilt. We can still stand in awe of the universe without shrinking before a throne. We can love without commandments and live without threats of eternal fire.

If there is any redemption, it lies in knowledge. If there is any salvation, it is in truth. The moment we stop outsourcing morality to heaven, we start building it here together on earth. So the next time someone tells you faith built civilization, remember what really built it: curiosity, courage, and compassion. The architects of progress were not saints or prophets. They were thinkers who dared to doubt. The same species that invented gods also invented telescopes. And the view through the lens is far more beautiful than the view through stained glass. The world does not need more believers. It needs more thinkers.

Hopefully, over time, more people will become aware of the fragile and mendacious foundation of Christianity and move on to better evidenced philosophies. That’s not to say that all religions must be false, but the bar to defend a faith that purports the existence of miracles is very high. Christianity and all other supernatural-claimed religions don’t come even close.

(5705) Fetal problems with the rapture

Although not all Christians ascribe to a physical rapture of humans at the second coming, it is not difficult to justify this belief if one takes the Bible literally. 1 Thessalonians 4:17 paints a picture of dead and living Christians flying up into the sky to meet Jesus. But for those taking this to heart, the issue of what happens to human fetuses complicates any possible explanation. The following was written by Google Gemini 3.1 Pro:

Because the Christian Bible does not explicitly address the fate of unborn children during the Rapture, theologians and believers who adhere to a pre-tribulation Rapture rely on theological deduction. As a result, there are two primary interpretations of what would happen to the fetuses of raptured Christian women versus those of non-believing women.

The Age of Accountability View (Universal Rapture of Innocents)

The most prominent view among modern dispensationalists is based on the concept of the “age of accountability.” This doctrine suggests that God extends automatic grace to infants, young children, and the unborn because they lack the cognitive capacity to understand sin or accept salvation.

• • Fetuses of Christian women: Both the pregnant mothers and their fetuses are raptured to heaven.
  • Fetuses of non-believing women: Because all the unborn are considered innocent, God raptures the fetuses, leaving the non-believing mothers behind on Earth to face the Tribulation. In this scenario, pregnant non-believing women would experience the sudden, spontaneous disappearance of their unborn children. (This specific scenario is famously depicted in popular Christian speculative fiction, such as the Left Behind series).

The Covenantal or Federal Headship View

A secondary perspective draws on covenant theology, arguing that the spiritual status and protection of an infant or unborn child is tied directly to their parents’ faith.

• • Fetuses of Christian women: The unborn child is covered by the mother’s faith and is raptured alongside her.
  • Fetuses of non-believing women: The unborn child shares the earthly fate of its mother. Therefore, the mother remains pregnant, and both she and her fetus are left behind on Earth.

Non-Dispensational Christian Views

The premise of a “secret rapture”—where believers vanish and non-believers are left behind to endure a period of Tribulation—is primarily a feature of Dispensational Premillennialism, an eschatological framework that became popular in the 19th century. Major historical and global Christian traditions—including Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and amillennial Protestant denominations—do not subscribe to this theology. In these traditions, Christ’s second coming is viewed as a single, final, and public event for all of humanity at once, rendering the scenario of a divided rapture inapplicable.

It should be obvious that there is no rational explanation for this situation. The rapture, or even the artificial end of human civilization by a cosmic intruder, renders the whole theology in a state of ridiculousness. Not just fetuses, but the entire suite of humans, from all sorts of religious backgrounds- nothing makes sense. It is a comedy of ignorance.

(5706) God lost his body

Ancient Christians believed that God (Yahweh) had a physical body and was located in a specific place somewhere in the realm of the clouds- up as opposed to down, where the devil resided. Along the way, as humans evolved, and scientific understanding improved, God lost his body. Modern Christians now see God as being incorporeal, somehow inhabiting some mysterious higher spacial dimension, allowing access to every point in the space that we inhabit. This mental gymnastic feat is astounding. In the following, it is discussed how early Jews and Christians pictured God in a physical body:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2026/10/the-strange-and-superstitious-world-of.html#more

The first thing we notice is that the Hebrew God is pictured with a body, just like the gods of their polytheistic neighbors. The gods of surrounding cultures had human and physical characteristics. There is no reason to suppose the Hebrews thought differently about their God from what we read in the early parts of the Old Testament.

What we have in the Bible is an evolving understanding of the nature of God, so we find later statements to the contrary. In the New Testament, “God is a Spirit” (John 4:24). But in the early portions of the Old Testament we see God with a body.

The Bible states that man and woman were created in the image/likeness of God in three passages in the early chapters of Genesis (Gen 1:26–28; 5:1–3; 9:6). About this image, The Anchor Bible Dictionary (entry for “Image of God”) tells us: “Gen 5:1–2 makes it clear that both male and female are included under the designation adam who was made in God’s image. Gen 5:3 reports that Adam fathered a son ‘in his likeness, according to his image,’ and the verse employs the same nouns used in Gen 1:26–27, though the order of the nouns and the prepositions used with each are reversed in comparison to Gen 1:26.

This suggests that the way in which a son resembles his father is in some sense analogous to the way in which the human is like God.”9 Harper’s Bible Dictionary (entry for “Image of God”) is more to the point: “To speak of human beings (‘Adam’) as created in the image of God apparently refers primarily to the bodily form (the Hebrew term for ‘image’ usually denotes a concrete likeness) but also to the spiritual attributes the physical body symbolizes.”

If we want to know just what that image is, we should consider some of these passages that describe God with a human form. Genesis 2:2: “And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made.” But only a physical being needs to rest. Genesis 3:8: “They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden.” Shouldn’t this verse settle the whole issue?

From Exodus 33:18–23: “Then Moses said, ‘Now show me your glory.’  And the Lord said, ‘I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. But,’ he said, ‘you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.’ Then the Lord said, ‘There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.’”  This passage would be strange if God wasn’t viewed as having a body, especially since God purportedly said, “there is a place near me.”

According to the Bible, God has arms. God has ears. God has eyes. God has hands. God has a footstool. God has a scepter. God sits on a throne. God has a heavenly court. God even has nostrils. The burden of proof is upon the conservative Christian to show why the ancient Hebrews didn’t think of God in a human form. Mormons today take these statements literally and believe God has the shape of a human being, so if modern people like Mormons think this way, then it’s even more likely that ancient Hebrews did.

Christians will argue that passages in the Bible about God having a body are merely anthropomorphic, based on the hindsight conclusion in the New Testament that “God is a spirit,” that is, these passages are not to be taken literally. However, where is the word anthropomorphic in the Bible such that we’ll know how to interpret a passage properly when it is “red flagged” with that word? I don’t have such a Bible, do you?

If we read these passages in light of the ancient embodied gods and goddesses in the polytheistic surrounding cultures, it becomes clear that the Hebrews thought their god had a body too. Christians will also claim these are “theophanies” where God appeared in a human form, or where Jesus himself appeared in a preincarnate bodily form. The only reason they call these things anthropomorphic (or theophanies of Jesus) is because they are reading the texts in their original settings anachronistically based upon the hindsight of later Christian understandings.

A god not made of atoms and molecules is no different from a god that doesn’t exist. Yahweh is a fictional god invented by people who didn’t know where the sun went at night.

(5707) The problem with sin in Christian theology

Christians are taught from an early age that there is a category of behaviors separate from legal or moral issues that are offensive to God. These are called ‘sins,’ and it includes a lot of things that are perfectly legal and involve no victims, but which nevertheless displease Yahweh. This article addresses the following concepts:

• Why sin and immorality are not the same thing

• How obedience becomes confused with morality

• Why God is exempted from moral standards applied to humans

• Who actually gets to define what counts as sin

• How human taboos become divine commands

• Why responsibility, consent, harm and repair provide a better ethical framework

• Why “sin” may actually prevent us from understanding the complexity behind human suffering and social problems

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wr8DLH-4RE

What Sin Even Means

Today I wanna talk about sin. What exactly is sin? How do you know if something is a sin? Does it even have a place in the modern conversation on ethics, morality, or the human condition?

I ask this because many people determine their behavior, actions, and treatment of others around this convoluted concept that requires submission to superstition to even exist in the modern discourse. People who embrace a sin framework have to first accept a perfect creator lawgiver who created a persistent transgressor, known in some circles as Satan or Lucifer, who constantly breaks that law, and the two people who were enticed by that lawbreaker to eat of the forbidden fruit that resulted in all of humanity being condemned and deserving of death. Again, I say convoluted.

And that’s not even considering the issue of how can a creator be considered perfect if his creations are not. And I’m not even talking about just humans here. I mean, think about it. God is allegedly a perfect creator, but couldn’t create a perfect heaven with perfect angels or a perfect Earth. That makes this particular God a three-strikes loser in the worst way. But back to the subject at hand.

Sin as Shame Tool

For centuries, religious institutions have weaponized the concept of sin to transform natural impulses into psychological chains. Today I wanna dismantle this architecture of shame and empower you to help others reclaim emotional sovereignty and autonomy.

Defining Sin Traditionally

Let’s start with defining sin according to the Abrahamic tradition. Sin is defined as an act, a thought, word, or action that breaks divine law, resulting in a state of separation from God. Religiously, it describes acting against what is, according to biblical standards, wholly true or righteous.

According to many Christian doctrines, it’s the default condition of guilt as a consequence of being a descendant of Adam. When we think about this objectively, this has glaring implications.

Sin Meets Science

Christians often try to promote the concept of sin as a universally established, unimpeachable concept. But now that modern science has conclusively demonstrated that humanity couldn’t have descended from one couple, we know that sin can’t exist as narrated by believers. According to the Bible, it’s through one man that sin entered the world, and we now know that this one man couldn’t have possibly existed.

But even if I granted that Adam and Eve were metaphorical representatives of the birth of humanity, there’s still a fly in the soup for sin to exist as a meaningful category. I would still first have to accept some version of this particular God exists, which hasn’t been reliably demonstrated. I mean after all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

But even beyond that, I’d also have to accept that this God has preferences, and that those preferences constitute moral law, and that humans are obligated to obey them, and that violating them creates a metaphysical offense—which I can’t accept, not because of my own incredulity, but because the premise that this God exists has never, and I mean never, been reliably demonstrated.

Because of that, sin collapses into somebody’s uninformed and barely intelligible religious opinion about natural human behavior, while interestingly enough remaining willfully blind to the behavior of other great apes and the other thousands of mammalian species that we share these natural behaviors with. So the idea of sin in a guilty-by-nature sense is pedantic at best and pathetic at worst.

Missing the Mark Problem

Now, in a linguistic sense, the Greek word for sin means to miss the mark, like missing a target with an arrow. And even though the majority of modern preachers still use the terminology that we’re born into sin, many of them lean more into this meaning, in the sense that we’re not born into a sinful nature, we’re born into a sinful environment, and because of that environment, we can’t help but to miss the mark.

But there’s a fly in that soup as well, and I wouldn’t eat it if I was you. Both historically and theologically, the mark becomes impossible to define. The argument on what is and what isn’t sin has never been definitively concretized in a way that unifies the theology beyond tribalistic creeds. They can’t even agree on what blasphemy is, and this is supposed to be the most damning sin of them all.

Because the theological definitions do nothing to actually aid in determining what would constitute a sin. Because in the context of Christianity, the mark is often a moving goalpost and differs vastly depending on culture, denomination, or even church within a twenty-five-mile radius. So instead of appealing to ghosts and goblins and their self-appointed goons, let’s see if we can tackle the sin issue ourselves in a way that we can objectively comprehend.

Sin Versus Morality

Let’s start with the biggest unspoken problem in the sin conversation. Sin is not the same thing as immorality. Contrary to popular belief, what is sin and what is immoral are not synonymous, at least not in the Bible.

The Bible provides varying lists of offenses classified as sin that include things like eating shellfish, mixing fabrics, the aforementioned undefinable blasphemy, and working on the Sabbath. And this one still causes a stir of debate on what classifies as work and which day exactly is considered the Sabbath. Sin also includes idolatry, disbelief, and a host of other behaviors that don’t produce any identifiable victim or demonstrable harm.

So what exactly do sins like these have to do with morality? What makes them immoral? Because when we talk about morality, we’re generally talking about questions concerning how human beings ought to behave toward one another. Did someone cause harm? Was someone exploited? Was consent violated? Was someone deceived? Did an action undermine trust, safety, fairness, or the well-being of another person?

But sin introduces an entirely different question: Did you violate what a god allegedly commanded? Maybe those two questions can overlap, but they’re not the same question. Murder can be both immoral and sinful because murder causes obvious harm to another human being, and is also prohibited within religious systems. Theft can be both immoral and sinful because taking someone’s property without consent creates an identifiable victim. Abuse, exploitation, fraud, and violence can all fit comfortably within both categories. But what happens when there is no victim?

Victimless Sins Exposed

What exactly is immoral about working on the wrong day? What exactly is immoral about saying something offensive about a god? What exactly is immoral about not believing that God exists? Who was harmed? What human well-being was diminished? What autonomy was violated? What social obligation was breached?

Once you begin asking questions like these, it becomes obvious that the category of sin includes behaviors that can’t be condemned through ordinary appeals to human harm. Their wrongness exists almost entirely because an alleged supernatural authority has prohibited them. But you only know that because somebody a long time ago, who didn’t even use toilet tissue to wipe themselves, said so.

And blasphemy makes the problem even clearer. What exactly makes insulting God immoral? If I insult another human being, we can at least discuss the interpersonal consequences. I might cause emotional harm, damage a relationship, or contribute to a hostile environment. But God is supposedly perfect, immutable, all-powerful, and beyond injury. So what exactly happens when God is blasphemed? Did God’s well-being decline? Was God traumatized? Did he lose something?

This is wildly interesting to me because it means, as we’ve seen, that an action can harm nobody and still be condemned. A thought can never leave your head and still supposedly place you in moral danger. Questions can become rebellion; doubt, disobedience, and disbelief itself can become wickedness. Now suddenly religion has expanded morality far beyond the realm of human relationships and into the private interior of the individual.

According to Oxford, immorality describes behavior regarded as contrary to accepted standards of goodness or honesty. That immediately places morality within a human social context. Human beings debate it. Human beings negotiate it. Human beings revise their understanding of it as our knowledge of harm, psychology, consent, justice, and human flourishing develops.

But sin operates differently. Sin claims an authority outside of humanity. You don’t determine whether something is sinful by asking whether anyone was harmed. You determine whether it’s sinful by asking what a god who refuses to speak on his own behalf allegedly commanded, and that means sin and immorality are not simply two words describing the same phenomenon. They have different sources of authority. Morality asks us to examine the consequences of human behavior. Sin asks us to submit human behavior to an untraceable supernatural authority.

Authority Over Well-being

And this becomes particularly important when those two systems conflict. If something causes demonstrable harm but religion permits it, which standard wins? If something causes no demonstrable harm but religion prohibits it, which standard wins? That’s where this conversation stops being just semantic.

Because once a religious system teaches people that violating divine authority is itself immoral, obedience can outrank human well-being. And now we can begin to understand how religion weaponizes the concept. It can take something completely ordinary about being human—your sexuality, curiosity, skepticism, desires, ambitions, pleasures, and questions—and instead of demonstrating that those things are harmful, simply declare them offensive to God.

Then God’s alleged and unprovable offense becomes your guilt, and religion becomes the mechanism through which you seek forgiveness for a moral debt that never involved an actual moral wrong in the first place. That’s the difference between saying you hurt somebody and saying you sinned. The first statement can be potentially investigated. The second requires you to accept the supernatural framework that gives the incoherent accusation some semblance of meaning. And that brings us right back to the question at the beginning: What exactly is sin, and why should anyone assume that being sinful means being immoral? And there’s another important issue here.

God Above the Rules

The morality of God escapes the morality of sin. Biblical morality contains a glaring asymmetry. Behaviors that will be condemned when humans perform them can suddenly become righteous when attributed to God or commanded by God. Killing is wrong unless God commands the killing. Vengeance is wrong unless God is the one taking the vengeance. Jealousy is wrong unless God describes himself as jealous. Inflicting suffering on innocent people is wrong, of course, unless that suffering is somehow incorporated into a divine plan.

That creates a problem much bigger than whether any particular Bible story should be taken literally. It raises a fundamental question about what sin actually is. If an action can move from wicked to righteous without the action itself changing, simply because the person performing it has changed or because the proper authority authorized it, then the moral category isn’t really attached to the behavior. It’s attached to the hierarchy.

Consider killing. If I decide that another group of people deserves to die and begin slaughtering them, Christianity would presumably classify me as murderous and immoral. But throughout the biblical narrative, God can order populations destroyed, participate in their destruction, or punish people with death and remain perfectly good. Biblical morality is less about universally applicable moral principles and more about maintaining the distinction between ruler and the ruled.

God occupies one moral category; human beings occupy another. God possesses rights humans do not possess because God is God, which means the ethical defense eventually becomes circular. Why is God allowed to do these things? Because He’s God. Why are those actions righteous when God performs them? Because whatever God does is righteous. How do we know God is righteous? Because God is the standard of righteousness.

This makes biblical morality inseparable from authority, and that’s incredibly important to the concept of sin because it means that obedience can become more morally significant than the consequences of the action itself.

Abraham and Isaac Test

Look at the story of Abraham and Isaac. The moral tension of that story exists precisely because Abraham is commanded to do something we would ordinarily consider horrific: kill his own child. Yet within the narrative, Abraham’s willingness to obey becomes evidence of faithfulness. What transforms the moral meaning of the proposed action is the alleged source of the command. God said it, and therefore obedience becomes righteousness.

Now imagine removing God from the story. A father hears a voice telling him to sacrifice his son—and to be absolutely clear, this happens in modern society way too often, and I’m planning to do a video on it. But in that scenario, nobody praises his faith. We become deeply concerned about the well-being of the child. Now, that tells us something. The moral evaluation changed because the authority changed. And that’s precisely the problem.

If God’s authorization can transform actions that would otherwise be considered atrocious into morally acceptable actions, then there’s no behavior that’s necessarily beyond moral rehabilitation. The only question becomes whether God commanded it. And in the context of a God who does not appear visibly or speak audibly, it’s whether the person or book we believe commanded it.

That’s dangerous because it dismantles the idea that certain behaviors can be evaluated independently of authority. That means sin begins to look less like an objective description of moral harm and more like crossing the boundaries established by authority. You didn’t merely do something wrong; you did something you weren’t permitted to do. And that makes the entire conversation around sin look different.

Because if the same behavior can be righteous in the hands of the powerful and sinful in the hands of the subordinate, then we aren’t merely talking about morality. We’re talking about power. And that raises the uncomfortable question sitting underneath the entire biblical framework: Is sin actually about what you do, or is sin what happens when a subordinate acts outside the permission structure of an unprovable supernatural hierarchy?

Who Defines Sin?

Now let’s ask the big question: Who gets to define sin? If gods emerge through human cultures, acquiring personalities, preferences, rules, taboos, hierarchies, and histories, then sin is the human taboo system projected upward and returned to humanity with divine authority. Humans create the rule, humans attribute it to God, then humans punish other humans for violating it, and that changes the entire conversation.

When a rule is attributed to a god, it’s no longer presented as merely a human preference. It becomes sacred and non-negotiable. What might otherwise be recognized as a cultural norm or social custom, political interest, or even personal discomfort is suddenly elevated into the structure of the universe itself, and that’s an enormous transfer of authority.

Human beings disagree all the time about sexuality, family structure, gender roles, food, marriage, punishment, social hierarchy, and acceptable behavior. Ordinarily, those disagreements remain human disagreements. But the moment someone says, “God commanded this,” the rule is removed from ordinary negotiation. Now challenging the rule becomes challenging God. And then the people who benefit from the rule no longer have to defend the rule on its own merits. They can defend God.

Now I’ve introduced an authority that can’t be voted out, cross-examined, confronted, or independently consulted. And somebody still has to tell you what the authority supposedly said. That’s the part that often disappears from religious conversations. God doesn’t descend into any congregation on Sunday morning and personally clarify his expectations. People do that. People write the scriptures, interpret them, determine which commandments were cultural and which were eternal. People decide what constitutes violation.

And then those human interpretations are presented as though the human element has somehow disappeared from the process. It hasn’t. There’s always somebody standing between the believer and the alleged divine command saying, “This is what God wants.” Which brings us back to the question, who gets to define sin?

Because Christians themselves don’t agree. Different denominations disagree about alcohol. They disagree about divorce. They disagree about homosexuality, women preaching. They disagree about Sabbath observance. They disagree about tattoos, dancing, gambling, profanity, and even which biblical commands still apply at all. And yet nearly every group can sincerely claim that its conclusions represent God’s will.

So when someone tells me that something is a sin, what exactly have they established? That God condemned it, or that the religious community has interpreted its traditions in a way that condemns it? Those are not the same thing, and once you recognize that distinction, the supposedly divine category becomes much more obviously human.

Sin as Cultural Control

Because sin itself doesn’t appear in a vacuum. It appears inside cultures—what cultures value, what cultures wanna preserve, who those cultures wanna control. And then those cultural judgments can be projected upward onto the divine. That should, at the very least, make us suspicious.

Because if the creator of the entire universe is revealing an eternal moral order, why does that order so often look like the cultural assumptions of specific human societies? Why does God sound ancient when ancient people write about him? Why does God sound patriarchal in patriarchal societies? Why does God seem intensely concerned with tribal boundaries in tribal societies? Why do religious interpretations shift when the surrounding culture shifts? Why do behaviors once preached as abominations quietly disappear from sermons while new issues become the defining moral crisis of a generation?

Maybe God keeps changing his mind, or maybe human beings keep changing theirs and then updating God accordingly. So when somebody says God defines sin, the next question should be obvious: How do you know what God defined?

Because if the answer eventually leads us back to something a human wrote, translated, interpreted, canonized, preached, or taught, then the human element hasn’t been eliminated and the divine element has failed to be demonstrated. And that’s why the question of who gets to define sin matters so much. Because if humans are ultimately the ones identifying the rules, interpreting the rules, selecting the rules, then sin isn’t divine morality descended into humanity. It is nothing more than human morality, human prejudice, human hierarchy, and taboo projected into the heavens and then reflected back down with a god’s name attached to it.

Beyond Sin to Harm

So where exactly do we go from here? The alternative to sin isn’t moral anarchy. It’s responsibility without metaphysics. And I think that’s important because one of the most common fears religious people have about abandoning the concept of sin is the assumption that without sin everything becomes permissible. If there’s no God keeping score, then what stops us from doing whatever the hell we want? If there’s no divine law, what stops murder, theft, exploitation, cruelty?

The answer is surprisingly simple: Other people exist. People can suffer, be exploited, have their autonomy violated, and be deceived. People can be deprived of resources, dignity, opportunity, and safety. None of those realities disappear when a god disappears, and none of them require a god in order to matter.

That’s where I think we need to replace the language of sin with something far more useful: harm. Instead of asking, “Did I violate somebody’s God?” we can ask, “Did I violate somebody? Who was harmed? Whose autonomy was violated? Was there consent? Did I use my power in a way that diminished someone else’s ability to live freely? What responsibility do I require? What repair is necessary?” And perhaps most importantly, how do we live better together?

Responsibility forces us to remain in the real world. It asks us to deal with consequences instead of metaphysical status. It asks us not merely whether we broke a rule, but whether our actions increase suffering or well-being. And that kind of morality doesn’t promise simplicity.

Complexity and Humility

In fact, it requires us to accept something religion often tries desperately to eliminate: complexity. Because real moral questions are complicated. Sometimes we don’t know enough yet, and mature morality has to be capable of saying, “I don’t know.” It has to be capable of learning, revising, adapting, correcting, and repairing. That’s radically different from pretending that an ancient rule book has already solved every ethical question humanity will ever encounter.

And that brings us back to where we started. If sin is not synonymous with immorality, if supposedly sinful behavior can exist without an identifiable victim, if God’s own behavior regularly escapes the moral restrictions placed on human beings, and if human communities are the ones interpreting, selecting, and enforcing what supposedly counts as sin, then sin isn’t the moral foundation we’ve been told it is. It’s an ancient attempt to simplify something that was always much more complicated.

And I get it. Simplicity can be comforting. But reality doesn’t owe us simplicity. Nature doesn’t organize itself around theological categories. Disease isn’t punishment. Earthquakes aren’t judgment. Predators aren’t sinful. And death isn’t evidence that somebody disobeyed God. These are simply the features of a natural world shaped by billions of interacting variables, competing systems, evolutionary pressures, environmental forces, biological limitations, and human decisions and consequences that continually compound upon one another.

And human society adds another layer of complexity: eight billion people with different histories, different needs, different limited resources, different psychological dispositions, different ideas about what a good life even looks like. Of course there’s conflict. Of course there’s suffering and instability. The strange thing isn’t that the world is complicated. The strange thing is that we ever expected it not to be.

If you diagnose a complex problem incorrectly, you will almost certainly prescribe the wrong solution. If human suffering is ultimately explained by Adam eating forbidden fruit, then we don’t have to wrestle seriously enough with economics, psychology, biology, sociology, technology, and the thousands of variables interacting beneath the surface. Sin provides an answer before we’ve adequately investigated the question, and that is probably one of its greatest liabilities.

Because complexity requires humility. It requires collaboration and expertise and experimentation. It requires us to admit when our explanation doesn’t work. It requires us to change courses when the evidence changes.

Responsibility Without Gods

And quite frankly, it requires a level of responsibility that can’t be outsourced to a God, a Satan, original sin, or a fallen world. We don’t need to be guilty for being human, but we are responsible for what humans do. We’re responsible for the systems we build. We’re responsible for the harm we perpetuate. We’re responsible for learning from the consequences of our choices. We’re responsible for repairing what we can, and we’re responsible for trying to leave the world better than we found it—not because a god commanded us to, but because people matter.

It would seem that a supreme being, if, for unknown reasons, decided to judge human life forms for a two-tiered afterlife assignment, would most likely not install a behavior criterion that divulged from a basic standard of doing no harm, while emphasizing doing good. It is rather unlikely that victimless actions would be an important judging measure for such a god, but, alas, that is Yahweh to a T.

(5708) The myth of the clean break

Christians mostly believe that Jesus started Christianity right off the bat, and that it split away from Judaism immediately after Jesus’ alleged resurrection. The following essay explodes that theory, revealing that the formation of Christianity as a separate religion took over 300 years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgEDdZM3Zho

The myth of a clean break

For about 2,000 years, most of us have heard a simple story. Jesus of Nazareth preached a new message. Jewish leaders rejected him. He was crucified. His followers started a new religion. And Christianity broke away from Judaism like a child leaving its parents house. It is the version in many sermons, many textbooks, and many television documentaries. But when historians look at the evidence, from Roman tax records and coins to rabbitic prayers, early Christian letters, the sermons of fourth century bishops, they find something different.

They find no single moment of break. They find a process that lasted centuries shaped by war, imperial policy, local rivalries, and the ambitions of religious leaders on every side. And the strangest part is that for a long time, the people living through it had no idea they were living through a divorce. Jews who followed Jesus and Jews who did not argued in the same synagogues over the same scriptures. And for a while, even Roman officials struggled to tell them apart. So, how did one family become two religions? Was it theology? Was it Rome? and who actually drew the line.

In this video, we are going to follow the evidence from the first century to the 4th, one turning point at a time. And a quick note on how this video works. This is a history video, not a theological one. Historians cannot decide whether Jesus was the Messiah. And I will not try. Believers and skeptics can still ask the same historical question, which is how, when, and why a boundary between two communities took shape. Since some of you asked who the historians are, I will name them as we go, including Paula Frederickson, Daniel Byer, Marius Heamstra, Martin Goodman, Adam Becker, and Annette Yoshiko Reed, Ruen Kimmelman, and Ruth Langanger. And to be fair to specialists who commented, much of this has been discussed in academic circles for decades. What is new is how rarely it reaches popular storytelling.

Diversity in early Judaism

Let’s start with the world Jesus lived in, because this is where the popular story first goes wrong. We tend to picture first century Judaism as one unified religion with a single set of beliefs. It was nothing like that. There was no central authority, no fixed list of scriptures, and no agreed definition of what a Jew had to believe. The Jewish historian Josephus writing in the late first century describes three main schools of thought in a fourth movement he treats separately.

The Sadducees were closely tied to the Jerusalem temple and its priesthood and they rejected the idea of resurrection. The Pharisees emphasized interpreting the law for everyday life. And Josephus says that at one point there were more than 6,000 of them. The Essenes, a smaller group, lived communally and expected the world to change dramatically. And the fourth philosophy, founded by a man called Judas the Galilean, insisted that God alone should rule Israel and that paying Roman taxes was slavery.

The Dead Sea Scrolls discovered in caves near the Dead Sea beginning in 1947, give us a rare view of that diversity from the inside. They include biblical texts, community rules, and apocalyptic writings from a group that saw itself as the true Israel living apart from the temple establishment. Whether or not that community was a scene, as many scholars think, the scrolls show that Jews of the era argued fiercely about purity, calendars, priesthood, and the coming of God’s kingdom.

Arguments about a messiah were not strange. They were everywhere. By the way, many later writers called that last group the Zealots, but historians now point out that Josephus does not clearly use that name for a pre-war sect. It is a label that grew later. The point is that Judea in the first century was a crowded marketplace of ideas filled with prophets, baptizers, healers, and people waiting for God to act. Into that world stepped Jesus, a Jewish teacher from Galilee, and then his followers.

The Jesus movement

And here is the first thing most historians agree on. The first generation of Jesus’s followers did not think they were starting a new religion. They were Jews. They met in synagogues and homes, kept the festivals, and read the same scriptures. Even the book of Acts calls them the sect of the Nazarenes. And a sect in that world was a group inside Judaism. After the crucifixion around the year 30, the movement was centered in Jerusalem and by many accounts led by James, the brother of Jesus. James was so respected that Josephus himself mentions his execution in the year 62.

A later Christian tradition claims he spent so much time in prayer at the temple that his knees were hard like a camels. This was a community that looked from the outside entirely Jewish. A word about the gospels because many of us read them as if they described a split already underway. They were written after the year 70 decades after Jesus in communities that were already arguing with other Jews about who Jesus was. Some scholars following Lewis Martin have argued that sharp passages about conflict in the Gospel of John reflect those late first century disputes, including exclusion from synagogues rather than events from Jesus’s own lifetime. That reading is debated, but most historians agree on the main point. Those passages record quarrels between Jewish groups written by Jewish authors, and they were never meant as a verdict on a whole people.

Paul and the gentiles

So, where does the tension begin? With Paul. Paul was a Greekeaking Jew from the city of Tarsus and by his own account a Pharisee. At first, he opposed the Jesus movement. Then he experienced what he described as a revelation. He became its most energetic missionary. And Paul made a radical decision. Non-Jews, he argued, could join the movement without becoming Jewish. No circumcision, no full observance of the law, just faith in Jesus and a changed way of life. Paul’s letters are the oldest Christian writings we have, written in the 50s, and they are full of Jewish scripture and Jewish categories. In his letter to the Romans, Paul uses the image of an olive tree. Gentile believers, he says, are like branches grafted onto a tree that is Israel, and they should not boast over the branches that were broken off. That is not the language of a man who thinks he is founding a new religion and leaving the old one behind. It is the language of someone arguing about how the family should be arranged. That created the first great argument.

Around the year 49 or 50, leaders met in Jerusalem to settle it. Acts describes a compromise with a short list of requirements for gentile believers. Paul’s own letter to the Galatians tells the story differently and describes a tense confrontation, including a later clash with Peter and Antioch over whether Jewish and Gentile believers could eat together. Historians generally prefer Paul’s letters as evidence since they are earlier and written by a participant while Acts was written decades later with its own goals. And a viewer asked whether Paul was helenized.

The better description is that he was a diaspora Jew who wrote in Greek and used the Greek translation of the scriptures while insisting on his Jewish identity. But notice what the argument was about. It was not about leaving Judaism. It was about the terms on which outsiders could join a Jewish messianic movement. That is a debate inside a Jewish world. There’s one more detail that matters here. Gentiles who admired Judaism were already common in the Greek cities of the empire.

Acts calls some of them god-fearers. people who attended synagogues, kept some customs, and heard the scriptures read without fully converting. When Paul preached in a synagogue, some of the people in the room were exactly these Gentiles. That helps explain why for generations, the lines at the edges of the community stayed blurry. Gentile Christians and Gentile admirers of Judaism could look very similar to a Roman official and sometimes to each other.

Catastrophe and transformation

What really changed everything was a catastrophe. In the year 66, Judea revolted against Rome. By the year 70, Roman legions under Titus had broken into Jerusalem and burned the second temple. For Jews, the loss was almost unimaginable. The temple was the center of worship, sacrifice, and national identity. The priestly Sadducees lost the institution that gave them their power.

The Essenes largely vanished from the record, and the groups that survived had to rebuild a religion that could exist without the temple. What happened to the Jerusalem followers of Jesus during that war is not entirely clear. A tradition preserved by the church historian Eusebius writing in the 4th century says they escaped before the siege and settled in a town called Pella. Historians debate how much of that story is reliable.

What is clear is that the Jerusalem centered movement, the one led by James and his circle lost its center and the balance of Jesus’s followers shifted toward communities of Gentiles in cities like Antioch, Ephesus, and Rome. The best known path was taken by the Phariseaic teachers who gathered at Yavn, a town near the coast. Over the next generations, they built what we call rabbitic Judaism, centered on study, prayer, and the interpretation of law.

The great collection of their teachings, the Mishna, was completed around the year 200. This new Judaism was more tightly defined than what came before, and that meant less room for ambiguity. A Judaism trying to survive and unify after disaster had less patience for a movement claiming that a crucified teacher was the Messiah. And as more of Jesus’s followers were Gentiles who did not follow the law, that gap widened.

Rome and the Jewish tax

Now we need to talk about Rome because Rome is the part of the story most people never hear. To a Roman, religion was mostly about ancestral custom. Judaism was an old recognized tradition and Jews were given certain exemptions including from taking part in the cult of the emperor. Christianity was different. It looked new. It did not belong to any one nation and it refused to honor the traditional gods. Roman writers like Tacitus and Swatonius treated it as a strange new superstition. So the question of whether Christians counted as Jews was not just theological, it had legal and financial consequences. And that brings us to attacks.

After the destruction of the temple, the emperor Vespasian took the annual half shekele that Jews had paid to the temple and redirected it to the temple of Jupiter capitalinus in Rome. It was called the Fiscus Judicus, the Jewish tax, and it was a humiliating reminder of defeat. It also created a practical problem for Roman officials. Who exactly was a Jew and who had to pay? The answer got harsh under the emperor dimmission who ruled from 81 to 96.

The Roman writer Swatutonius says the tax was collected with great severity from people who lived as Jews without admitting it and from those who concealed their origins. He describes how as a young man he saw an elderly man about 90 years old examined in a crowded court to see whether he was circumcised. The historian Cases Dio reports that in the year 95 dimmission executed his own cousin Favius Clemens on a charge of atheism and exiled his wife Datillaa. Dio adds that many others were condemned for drifting into Jewish ways.

Historians still debate whether Clemens and Datillo were Jewish sympathizers or Christians. But the atmosphere is clear in this world. Anyone with a blurry religious identity had a reason to fear an informer. Then dimmission was assassinated and the new emperor Nurva reformed the system. He issued a coin with the words Fishi Judasi Colombia Subla which can be translated as the removal of the malicious prosecution connected with the Jewish tax.

The Dutch scholar Marius Hamstra in his study at the University of Groingan argues that this reform was a pivotal moment. In his view, Nurva restricted the tax to those who openly lived as Jews, which meant Christians, Jewish and Gentile alike, were no longer treated as Jews for tax purposes. If he is right, Rome had begun to draw a legal line, and Jewish followers of Jesus had to decide where they stood. But this is a debated theory, not settled fact. The wording on the coin is ambiguous, and scholars have offered different readings. Some argue it only ended false accusations against wealthy Romans.

Martin Goodman has even suggested the tax may have been temporarily suspended, and Roman authorities had already punished Christians as a distinct group in Rome after the fire of the year 64, which suggests that officials could tell them apart earlier. So, the fair summary is this. The tax was almost certainly an important pressure on how identities were defined. And Heamstra’s argument is one of the most interesting attempts to explain how, but nobody should say that a single coin split two religions.

Growing internal tensions

By around the year 112, a Roman governor named Plenny the Younger was writing to the emperor Trajan from the province of Bethnia in what is now Turkey, asking how to deal with people accused of being Christians. He treated them as a distinct group, and he punished those who refused to renounce the name. Trajan’s reply set a standard. Christians were not to be hunted down, but if they were brought before a magistrate and refused to recant, they were to be punished. Note what that tells us. By then, at least some Roman officials saw Christians as something other than Jews. And the legal risks of being Christian were different from the legal risks of being Jewish.

Meanwhile, tensions were growing inside the synagogue world, too. You may have heard of the Burkat Haminium, a prayer, part of the 18 benedictions that asks for the downfall of heretics. A later Talmudic tradition attributes its wording to a teacher called Samuel the Small at the request of Raban Galiel II at Yavn around the end of the first century. A famous older theory held that this prayer was a deliberate trap to expose Jewish Christians and push them out of the synagogue.

But modern scholars like Ruven Kimmelman and Ruth Langanger have shown how thin the early evidence is. The term minimum meaning sectarians or heretics was broad. The earliest complete versions of the prayer come from the Cairo Geneza centuries later and only some of them mention the Nazarines. So the prayer probably evolved over time. It is a good example of how a story that sounds like a clean expulsion often turns out to be messy.

Revolts and realignment

Then came the second century and with it new disasters between the years 115 and 117. Jewish communities in Egypt, Sirene and Cyprus rose up in what is called the Diaspora Revolt or the Kos War and were brutally suppressed. Then in the year 132, a new uprising broke out in Judea led by Simon Bar Kokba. The causes are debated. The emperor Hadrien was founding a Roman city Alia Capalina on the ruins of Jerusalem and he may also have restricted circumcision. The revolt was initially successful.

The great sage Rabbi Akava reportedly hailed Barakba as the Messiah. For Jewish followers of Jesus, this was an impossible situation. They already had a Messiah and they could not back another. Justin Martyr writing in Rome around the same time says that Barokba punished Christians who refused to deny Jesus. Whatever the details, those followers were now caught between a Jewish national movement that saw them as traitors and a Roman state that would soon crush that movement.

In the year 135, Rome crushed it. Jews were banned from entering Jerusalem and the Romans renamed the province of Judea as Syria Palestina. And that answers a question some viewers raised about the name. Before 135, the Roman province was called Judea. And I use that name for the first century. After the revolt, the official name became Syria Palestina. And I use that name for later centuries. It is a matter of accuracy, not politics.

After the defeat, the center of Jewish life moved north to Galilee. There rabbitic scholars gathered the teachings that became the Mishna around the year 200 and later the Jerusalem Talmet. Jewish identity increasingly centered on law, study and community rather than on Jerusalem and its temple. That was a creative response to disaster and it also meant that Jewish and Christian communities now had their own separate centers of authority.

Developing separate paths

After this, the boundaries between the communities got sharper. Christian writers like Ignatius of Antioch warned believers against following Jewish customs. A preacher named Marcion went further and argued that Christians should reject the Hebrew scriptures entirely. The church rejected Marseion, but other writers developed what scholars call supersessionism, the idea that the church had replaced Israel in God’s plan. Meanwhile, Roman persecution of Christians in the second and third centuries often spared Jews who had their ancient exemptions, which reinforced the idea that they were separate groups. It was not what Jewish Christians had expected. And some Christians began to see the Jewish people as a rival and a warning. But the sharpening was never one-sided and it was never complete.

Christians kept the Hebrew scriptures, calling them the Old Testament, and they kept reading them as their own. That is why the church rejected Marc. And it is why the two groups kept arguing about the same texts. Around the middle of the second century, Justin Martyr wrote a book called The Dialogue with Trifo, a literary debate between a Christian and a Jew over how to read the prophets. Scholars debate how closely it reflects real conversations. But the very existence of such a book shows that both sides still felt they were arguing about the same inheritance. But it is wrong to say that those Jewish followers of Jesus then vanished. Groups known as the Nazarines and the Ebianites kept Jewish practices while honoring Jesus and they are described by church writers for centuries.

Epipanius wrote about them in the late 4th century. Jerome around the year 400 says he knew of Nazarines who wanted to be both Jews and Christians and who in his words ended up being neither. In other words, ordinary people kept living in the gray area long after authorities wanted clear categories. Some scholars have speculated that groups like these may have influenced early Islam and a viewer mentioned this. That idea has been proposed but it is debated and nobody has demonstrated it. This is where the work of a generation of scholars comes in.

In 2003, Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed published a volume from a Princeton and Oxford project called The Ways That Never Parted. Its contributors, including Paula Frederickson, Daniel Byer, and Martin Goodman, argued that the old model of a clean split in the first or second century does not fit the evidence. They saw instead a patchwork of local and uneven partings that continued into the 4th century and beyond. Alan Seagull had earlier described Christianity and rabbitic Judaism as twin children of second temple Judaism and Daniel Boerin in borderlines argued that the line between them was drawn largely by elites bishops and rabbis in this view had good reasons to want clear boundaries. Ordinary people kept mixing. You can see the mixing in the 4th century.

In Antioch around the year 387, the preacher John Croastm delivered a series of furious sermons against Christians who were still attending synagogues and celebrating Jewish festivals. You do not preach that hard against something that is not happening. In Palestine, archaeologists find synagogues and churches going up at the same time, side by side.

Constantine and legalization

And then came Constantine. After he won the battle of the Milvian Bridge in the year 312, Christianity went from a persecuted minority to a favored religion. In 325, he convened the Council of Nika, which settled, among other matters, a uniform date for Easter, calculated independently of the Jewish calendar. The letter Constantine sent afterward to the churches is openly hostile to Jews. Over the following decades, church councils and imperial laws increasingly discouraged Christians from observing Jewish practices and increasingly restricted Jews. In 380, under Theodosius, Nyine Christianity became the fed religion of the empire. By then, the boundary that had been blurry for centuries had become a legal and institutional fact.

The shifting politics of the 4th century could cut both ways. In the year 363, the emperor Julian, who rejected Christianity and tried to restore the old gods, reportedly promised to help the Jews rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The project collapsed after his death in battle. Whatever his motives, the episode shows how closely religion and imperial power were now tied together and how quickly an emperor’s attitude could change the position of a whole community.

Now, let me answer some of your comments. One viewer asked whether Christianity conquered the Roman Empire or the Roman Empire conquered Christianity. The honest answer is both. Christianity spread widely before Constantine, though it remained a minority. But once emperors took an interest, the church gained wealth, privilege, and political power, and emperors helped shape its doctrine and institutions. Each changed the other. Another asked whether Rome simply created the separation. No.

The evidence suggests that Rome sharpened and legalized a distinction that was already developing. Christians understood their movement as the fulfillment of Israel’s scriptures, not an abandonment of them. And many Jews disagreed. Those differences were real from early on. What history shows is that the borders between the groups were drawn over time and under pressure.

Reflecting on the history

A few commenters felt this video blames Rome or excuses Jews or reduces faith to sociology. I want to be clear, historians describe causes. They do not judge divine intent and they do not decide which tradition is true. And it is worth remembering how dangerous some of these questions have been. For centuries, the idea that Jews were collectively punished for rejecting Jesus has been used to justify persecution. A more careful history has no need for that story. So what do historians get wrong? Or more fairly, what does popular storytelling get wrong?

First, it imagines a single moment of break. The evidence points to a slow process, often called partings in the plural, that unfolded across centuries and varied from place to place. Second, it treats the split as mostly theological when politics, taxes, wars, and institutions did much of the work. Third, it forgets the people in the middle, Jewish followers of Jesus and Gentile admirers of Judaism who were written out of the story by authorities who found them inconvenient. And fourth, it forgets that the story we tell about the split has always served the people telling it.

The closest metaphor is not a child leaving a parent, but two siblings raised in the same house who were pushed apart by forces they did not control and who then spent centuries defining themselves against each other. It is a less dramatic story, but it is closer to the evidence, and it helps explain why these two traditions, so different today, still share so much. This is also why modern relations between the two communities have changed.

In 1965, the Catholic Church in a declaration called Nostra Itatate acknowledged the Jewish roots of Christianity and rejected the claim that the Jewish people as a whole are guilty of the death of Jesus. Many Christian and Jewish scholars today study the first century together and read Jesus, Paul, and the rabbis as people who shared a world. That shared scholarship would have been hard to imagine in the centuries when each side told its own clean story about the split.

If Jesus was God and he intended to start a new religion separate from Judaism, then it should be expected that this fact would have been immediately accomplished. If instead Christianity is a human-created religion with ties to Judaism, then a gradual evolution of the faith is understandable.

(5709) Six ways we should find god, but don’t

In the following, Darante’ LaMar discusses six ways that we should expect to find god, but then explains why none of these ways have delivered a positive verdict on this search:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfCCGcd-32g

How Do You Find God? What were you told you needed to do to find God? It’s an interesting question because it automatically challenges the popular claim of God’s omnipresent nature. If God is literally everywhere, I shouldn’t have to go anywhere or do anything to interact with or otherwise find this God. But I digress. In my last video, we explored six places that we expect to find God and don’t.

Six Ways Setup. We talked about cosmology, anthropology, biology, sociology, history, and even theology, and unpacked what actually happened when we sincerely and honestly started looking into those areas for the fingerprints of the Christian God. And while unsurprisingly, there was no God found, there are still people who will suggest that it’s not that we’re looking for God in the wrong places, it’s that we’re looking for God the wrong ways.

I’m sure you’ve heard something similar, right? Whether it’s you just gotta have faith or you just need to pray and then God will reveal himself. I’ve heard everything from dreams and visions to near-death experiences being proposed as the way that you find God. And this isn’t some small conversation. Hundreds of millions of people spend countless hours practicing, debating, and searching for different ways to find God, making God the undisputed heavyweight hide-and-go-seek champion of the world.

I guess it’s true what they say, if you hide your money with God, no one will ever find it, not even you. Human beings have developed remarkable ways of experiencing what they interpret as the supernatural. But the reality of an experience and the accuracy of its supernatural explanation are two very different questions. Today, we’re talking about six ways we expect to find God, but don’t.

Prayer And Silence. One of the most common ways we expect to be able to find God based on scripture and Christian testimony is prayer. In the simplest of terms, we expect to speak to God, be heard by God, and be answered by God. And as straightforward as that sounds, many of us have done a really good job of conditioning ourselves to over-complicate the silence by trying to translate it into substance.

The sheer inefficacy of prayer as a mode of reliable communication with a god has resulted in a buffet of excuses as to why it doesn’t work. For some, it’s you didn’t say the magic words. You have to end it with, “In Jesus’ name.” It’s kind of like sealing it with a kiss. Or you gotta say, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” For others, it’s a posture problem. God can only hear you when you’re on your knees, or maybe He needs you to lie prostrate. There’s some jokes there, but I’m gonna leave them alone.

But even when we settle on a formula and agree on the words, and even add fasting into the equation, the silence is the same. We expected to find a God on the other side of our prayers, and instead, we’ve adjusted to assigning God’s voice to the silence, the thoughts in our own head, or the shadows in the corner. I mean, we’re so good with the coping that prayer changes things is still a common maxim among Protestant denominations, even though the 2006 STEP trial, which investigated whether intercessory prayer improved recovery following surgery, demonstrated no beneficial effect and outcome from prayer.

So the next time you’re wondering if it was the prayer or the Tylenol, it was probably the Tylenol. And I say probably because I do acknowledge that the placebo effect is a legitimate phenomenon. And honestly, that could be an entire conversation on how muddying the water with supernatural explanations have kept us from understanding the fascinating features of our own humanity. I mean, I get it. Everybody wants superpowers, but maybe let’s focus on learning everything there is about being human first.

Dreams And Visions. Another popular way that people claim to experience God is through dreams and visions. And as someone who got saved in the context of deep Apostolic Pentecostal Holiness churches, this was major for me. And it shall come to pass in the last days, says God, that I will pour out of my Spirit on all people. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.

In my earliest of years as a believer, I firmly believed that God spoke through visions and dreams, and if you prayed really hard and fasted long enough, He’d give you one or two, and I had more than a few. The idea was that God could reveal information, warnings, instructions, or even future events through what was happening when we were asleep or otherwise unaware.

But we’ve learned quite a bit about what the human brain is capable of doing without any supernatural assistance. For example, there’s a phenomenon called sleep paralysis, where a person becomes conscious while their body is temporarily unable to move, and sometimes that experience comes with incredibly vivid hallucinations. People report seeing figures standing over them, hearing voices, feeling something touching them, or sensing an invisible presence in the room. And then there are hypnagogic hallucinations, which can occur as you’re falling asleep, and hypnopompic hallucinations, which can occur as you’re waking up.

But it doesn’t stop there. Our brains don’t simply record reality like cameras. They construct experiences using memories, expectations, emotions, and existing beliefs, which means the same kind of extraordinary experience that one person interprets as a visit from Jesus might be interpreted by someone else as an encounter with an ancestor, a spirit, or something entirely different. What we’re calling divine revelation is often just another remarkable example of what it means to have a human brain.

Group Worship Highs. When many believers are confronted with prayer not working or not experiencing dreams and visions for revelatory knowledge or affirmation of God’s existence, they lean into collective rituals. And there’s precedence for this. The Bible is replete with scriptures like, “Forsake not the gathering of yourselves together,” or, “Wherever there are two or three gathered in my name, there I am in the midst,” or that, “If two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven.”

The logic essentially becomes, it only works if there’s enough of us to be doing it together, because if we’re not on one accord, it grieves the Holy Spirit. So this is where collective worship, fasting, meditation, speaking in tongues, and prophesying create opportunities to experience divine presence. And to their credit, experiences like these can have real psychological, physiological, and social benefits. They’re just often undermined by superstition, immaturity, and what ultimately becomes spiritual gatekeeping, where the doctrine or the authority figure alone defines the experience before it can be interrogated and understood.

I spent years not only participating in these environments, but helping cultivate them. And one of the things I learned is that you can create the conditions for what people will eventually describe as an encounter with God. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. Collective effervescence, popularized by Emile Durkheim, is what happens when people gather around a shared focus, synchronize their emotions and behaviors, and experience an intensified sense of connection that can feel greater than themselves. You experience similar phenomena at concerts, political rallies, and really any other collective gathering.

And when you add rhythmic music, coordinated movement, what we know about emotional contagion, and the expectations people bring into the room with them, you can create some incredibly powerful experiences. There are plenty of people who are not believers because of the coherence of scripture, their confidence in the resurrection, or their acceptance of any particular creed.

For many of them, it’s these powerful moments of collective ritual that have left them with experiences they can’t explain. And the truly sad thing is the only reason they can’t explain it is because they’ve already accepted that it’s mysterious, and it’s not. We can organize the environment, introduce the stimuli, and reliably increase the likelihood that people will have these experiences without any appeal to or assistance from a god.

Chasing Miracles. While many Christians, when being honest, struggle with prayer, dreams, and even worship, some become dependent on miracles and supernatural manifestations as ways to find God. These are the miracle signs and wonders crew. But instead of miracle signs and wonders following them, they’re constantly chasing after them like the next high. Now I think the whole concept of miracles is a problem in the context of a perfect creator with a perfect plan. The very necessity of a miracle should call into question the perfection of the plan and the creator.

Anyway, the expectation is that God makes himself known through extraordinary physical interventions. And the idea is, even though God is incapable of physically speaking or appearing, he can make things happen through others or sometimes to objects that demonstrate that he is an ever-present God. In both Old Testament and New, the God character starts as highly vocal and becomes increasingly invisible as the story develops. In the beginning, he’s talking to people directly about their issues, but by the end, he’s just knocking statues down when he’s mad. He doesn’t wanna talk about it.

I’ll be honest, I was caught up in this world for a long while. I believed in healing the sick, raising the dead, casting out devils, and I tried all three. I traveled to massive revivals where these things were allegedly happening. I participated on the prophecy teams. I was part of the network of people interpreting the signs of the times.

An older pastor once confronted his son and I about chasing miraculous claims because there was a church in our area who was said to be experiencing a type of revival where angels’ feathers and dust were falling from the ceiling, and gold teeth were appearing in people’s mouths, and rubies in their hands. Now overlooking the fact that this implies that angels either molt or are experiencing a dogma-level massacre, he asked a question that I’ve never forgotten. What happens to the gold teeth and the rubies? Just like a pastor to ask about the money first, right? And he followed it up with, “Why would God put gold and rubies in poor people’s hands for 15 minutes of worship just to take it away when they leave?”

What struck me is that we didn’t really care about the outcomes, just the moment. We needed the moment to be proof, even if it was temporary, and that’s the problem with so many miracle claims. If a miracle is supposed to be evidence that God is acting in the physical world, then it should have a measurable impact on the actual world.

Psychedelic Encounters. Every miracle story I’ve heard has actually done more to demonstrate how low the standards for an all-powerful God has become. But even when people give up on finding God through prayer, dreams, rituals, or even miracles, many believers and agnostics alike turn to psychedelic drugs and I for one ain’t mad at them. Play on, player. This one to me is just as fun as collective rituals because they both can create some powerfully similar experiences for powerfully similar reasons.

The idea is that certain substances can open the mind to divine realities or enable direct encounters with supernatural intelligence. And we’re talking about substances like psilocybin, LSD, DMT, and ayahuasca, which can profoundly alter perception, emotion, our sense of self, and even our experience of reality itself. And I’m not exaggerating when I say people have reported encountering God, communicating with supernatural beings, experiencing what feels like universal consciousness, and even losing the distinction between themselves and everything around them.

In 2019, researchers at Johns Hopkins published a study involving 4,285 people who reported experiences they interpreted as encounters with God or some ultimate reality. Some of these experiences occurred without drugs, while others were associated with psychedelics. Despite important differences, people who encountered God without the drugs and people who encountered God while using substances that alter brain function reported remarkably similar experiences.

So if changing the chemistry of the brain can produce an experience that feels like a direct encounter with God, how exactly are we determining that the experiences we’re having without drugs are supernatural? That’s what fascinates me about this entire conversation. We’re discovering that human consciousness is capable of producing experiences so profound, so convincing, and so emotionally transformative that people sometimes reorganize their entire lives around them. And rather than investigating what that tells us about the extraordinary capabilities of the human brain, we often jump straight to the supernatural explanations. And while I completely understand the essence of what people mean, applying God to an experience that you don’t understand is still just the God of the gaps.

Near Death Stories. And I personally think that absolutely undermines and often corrupts our ability to appreciate the feature complexity of our humanity. Now the weirdest way to me that people expect to find God is near-death experiences. And I can say it’s weird because I just can’t imagine in what world someone’s coma dream should be considered evidence for anything. But I’m almost positive that somebody in the comments is going to tell me that I’m wrong. But I think I’m prepared to die on this hill.

Near death is not the same as actual death. When someone’s heart stops, their brain can rapidly lose oxygen and blood flow necessary to function normally. And if they’re successfully resuscitated, they may eventually report extraordinary experiences. But cardiac arrest, even with a temporary loss of measurable brain activity, is not the same thing as demonstrating that someone experienced consciousness after the irreversible loss of brain function. But the expectation is that when people approach death, they may glimpse heaven, encounter supernatural beings, reunite with deceased relatives, or experience consciousness existing independently of the physical body. And the stories can be extraordinary.

I’m not necessarily questioning whether people genuinely remember having these experiences. I’m sure that many do. I’m questioning how we’re determining what actually caused them. Because neuroscience has identified several phenomena that helps us understand different features of near-death experiences. Changes in oxygen availability, disruptions in brain activity, altered perception, and the neurological processes involved in memory and consciousness are all relevant areas of investigation. And under certain conditions, the human brain can produce out-of-body sensations, vivid perceptions, and extraordinary distortions of time and space.

And this is where I think we need to stop confusing an extraordinary experience with an extraordinary explanation. If someone tells me they saw their dead grandmother, met Jesus, or floated above the operating table, I can absolutely accept that they sincerely remember experiencing those things. But if we’re going to conclude that they actually entered another realm of existence, we’re gonna need something much more convincing than just their personal memory of the experience.

Which brings me to another question I’ve always had. If near-death experiences are supposed to provide evidence that people have accessed realities beyond our own, why don’t we have reliably verified examples of people returning with information they couldn’t possibly have acquired through ordinary means? I’m talking about something independently testable. Because experiencing something we don’t yet understand isn’t evidence that we’ve discovered the supernatural. In most cases, it just means we’ve discovered another reason to keep investigating what it means to be human.

What It Says About Us. So we’ve looked for God through prayer, dreams, worship, miracles, psychedelics, and even at the edge of death. And what I find fascinating is that every time we investigate these experiences, we discover something extraordinary about ourselves, but nothing that reliably establishes the existence of a God.

I’m not suggesting that people haven’t had powerful experiences. I know they have. I’ve had plenty myself. But experiencing something you don’t understand doesn’t mean you’ve experienced something supernatural. And just because an experience changes your life doesn’t mean your explanation for it is accurate.

The tragedy to me is that we’ve spent so much time trying to find God in the extraordinary that we’ve neglected to appreciate just how extraordinary being human actually is. The more we learn about ourselves, the less we need supernatural explanations to make our humanity remarkable.

For centuries, people have claimed to encounter God through prayer, prophetic dreams, visions, worship, miracles, psychedelic drugs, and even near-death experiences. But do these experiences actually provide evidence that God exists? The honest and objective answer is ‘no.’

(5710) Who wrote the Bible?

In the following, Darante’ LaMar explores biblical authorship, biblical history, canon formation, textual criticism, and the gap between Christian reverence for the Bible and actual biblical literacy. We look at why “Who wrote the Bible?” is more complicated than naming Moses, Paul, the disciples, or “40 inspired men,” and how the Bible developed through oral traditions, written texts, editors, scribes, communities, and competing canons.

This isn’t just about who wrote Genesis, Isaiah, the Gospels, or Paul’s letters. It’s about what the Bible actually is, how it became authoritative, why many believers know Bible stories without knowing the history of the Bible, and why serious biblical scholarship makes simple biblicism harder to maintain.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPC76Y8T6S8

Who Wrote the Bible?

Have you ever heard the question, who wrote the Bible? If I’m being honest, this is definitely one of those questions that makes me cringe every time I hear it. Because if you’re asking that question expecting a person or even a simple list of people, you’ve already told me something about what you think the Bible is. And the sad thing is, this is actually fairly prevalent, especially amongst believers in the West. There are denomination sized segments of the American population who not only think that this is a valid question, but also that they have a valid answer.

Some think the Bible was written by Constantine. Some think it was written as an intentional collaboration between prophets and apostles. There are even some who still hold the belief that God somewhere, somehow sat down and penned the manuscript himself with no hands and no legs. But you ain’t got no legs, Lieutenant Dan.

Nobody with even just an introductory exposure to biblical scholarship thinks there was a moment when somebody sat down to write the Bible. That object as presented in many circles simply does not exist there were stories, oral traditions, legal materials, communities preserving and modifying traditions, scribes copying text, editors combining material, and ultimately religious communities eventually deciding which text had authority.

Yale’s biblical studies materials describes the Bible as many books written across hundreds of years, while its canon materials describe canon formation itself as a process unfolding across centuries. So who wrote the Bible is kind of like asking who wrote the library. The question itself evidences a fundamental misunderstanding of the object you’re asking about.

What People Mean

When many believers ask who wrote the Bible, they’re often under the impression that some person or some group of people received a call from God to pen the basic instructions before leaving Earth. They imagine a miraculous Moses moment where someone goes up to a mountain to pray and comes down with 66 books of divine revelation so unmistakably perfect that it’s led to three competing faith branches with several thousand denominational expressions that can’t agree on what it meant then, today, or tomorrow. Obvious signs of perfection, right? So again, in their minds, the answer is God, Moses, the disciple, maybe it’s 40 men inspired by God, King James, or some collection of familiar biblical names.

The precise mistake they’re making matters much less than the mental model underneath it. They imagine a process that begins with God inspiring the authors who wrote the Bible, and then somehow that Bible being peacefully passed down to the rest of us. There may be some acknowledgement that multiple people wrote it, but essentially the Bible is still imagined as a divinely coordinated literary project. That’s not just a simplified version of biblical history; it’s a fundamentally different conception of what happened altogether.

No Bible Project

Because the truth is that there was no Bible project for most of biblical history. I remember wrestling with this as a pastor because the Bible itself doesn’t reference itself. I mean, there are denominations who will try to stretch writings and revelations in John to make a claim, but the context and history simply don’t support a Bible consciousness in the Bible.

The characters are not living in expectation of a Bible. They’re not mentioning any collaborative writing projects that should become a Bible. God never tasks Adam with the task of writing a Bible. He doesn’t remind Noah to start the project. He only gives Moses Ten Commandments, and Jesus allegedly spends 30 years talking a lot, but apparently never writing anything down, except for that one time he stooped down to write something mysterious in the sand.

If a Bible was a part of this God’s plan, it sure slipped his mind a lot. Paul wasn’t writing chapter 45 of a future Christian Bible. Isaiah wasn’t contributing to a Christian Old Testament. Whoever composed Genesis wasn’t writing the opening installment of a 66-book Protestant canon. The gospel authors weren’t sitting around dividing assignments. Matthew, you take this one, and I tell you what, John, you go ahead and give us the theological one.

Those connections are largely connections later communities created by collecting the text together, which is highly common in mythology and works of fiction. I call it world blending, when you take several different characters from different cultural pantheons and force them to coexist in a contemporary narrative. That’s why the Bible often reads like bad crossover episodes or failed incursions that lead to Battleworld. Doomsday is coming. Now, what does this question reveal about what people think the Bible is?

Bible as Magic

For many believers, the Bible exists conceptually before its books do. They know the Bible before they know the books in the Bible. They know the Bible is the pure, unadulterated, unchanging Word of God that can’t be added to or taken away from long before they’re forced to confront the fact that their 66 books are missing a few. And that’s backwards. And it does something devastating to our cognitive relationship with the book.

The book is declared perfect before we’re allowed or even empowered to interrogate its alleged perfection. We’re told what it is and that the consequences of not believing that’s what it is includes being forever tormented in a hot bath of fire and darkness. Which honestly, with such a combination, it either can’t be that much fire or it can’t be that much darkness. If there’s a lot of fire, it can’t really be that dark. Anyway, you get what I mean.

When people are introduced to any object through such lens at early ages, we tend to sacralize the object, removing it from the realm of critical inquiry. It becomes somewhat of a talisman in that you’re less likely to be concerned with any of the mechanics behind the claims attached to it because you’re already convinced that there’s a magic to it that you don’t understand. Think back to the lucky rabbit’s feet craze that hit the US from the ’50s to the early ’90s. So people tend to start with the Bible exists, and any attempt to understand the mechanics is considered messing with the magic.

That’s why there are entire denominations who refuse to send their preachers to seminary. For them, the magic is the whole point. I like to call it the Santa Clause, because it doesn’t matter who made the gift possible, they’re still going to give the credit to Santa. The popular conception about the Bible is based on the magic. God wanted to give humanity a book. God selected authors, and the authors produced those books, and those books became the Bible. But the history reveals the mechanics.

Mechanics of Canon

The people producing these texts didn’t know about one another. They weren’t writing the same kind of literature. They didn’t share the same theology. They weren’t writing during the same period. They weren’t even writing with the same agendas. Later communities inherited, copied, interpreted, combined, preserved, and elevated particular texts, and different communities ultimately produced different biblical canons altogether. So the history doesn’t begin with the magical Bible. It begins with human moments that get combined into a collective mosaic that later gets called magical.

Reverence vs Literacy

Now, the bigger problem in all of this is that many Christians have never been taught any of this. We’re not talking about obscure discoveries here. I’m not actually saying anything that’s controversial. These are introductory issues in biblical scholarship; composition, dating, textual criticism, canonization, manuscript traditions. These are not fringe atheist objections Christian seminaries teach this stuff. Jewish scholars teach this stuff.

Christian biblical scholars publish it and yet enormous numbers of ordinary believers can participate in Christianity for years or decades without acquiring even an introductory understanding of these issues. That’s the phenomenon worth examining. It should make us wonder what exactly is leading contemporary theology? Because what this demonstrates without a doubt is that you can take the Bible very seriously without knowing very much about it. There’s a major distance between reverence and literacy.

Someone can believe that the Bible is the most important book ever written, that it determines where they go when they die, that this book reveals God’s will for humanity. They can even believe that our laws should reflect this book, that people should organize their sexuality, marriage, morality, according to this book and not actually know anything about the book beyond what’s popular in their neck of the woods. How profoundly insane is that? And there’s actual survey evidence for the broader disconnect.

Pew found that only 42% of US Christians in its 2014 data considered reading the Bible or other religious materials an essential part of being Christian. Another 37% called it important but not essential While 21% said it wasn’t important to their Christian identity. That’s a significant portion of the Christian population who are not deriving their theological understanding from the Bible at all.

Christianity has figured out how to make the Bible absolutely authoritative without requiring believers to become particularly knowledgeable about the Bible. That’s one hell of a trick. So what we’re seeing is that the grip can be socially deep while the theology is intellectually shallow.

People can be deeply attached to Christian identity, church community, belonging, their pastors, or denominational culture while having remarkably little knowledge of the historical development of Christianity’s foundational text. That’s a phenomenon that cannot be overstated. Religion can be existentially important without being historically investigated, and sociology has long treated religious identity as something that can have social dimensions beyond simple assent to doctrinal propositions.

Bible Stories Not History

Now, what does this common misconception reveal about how many people understand biblical history? What kind of understanding of history allows somebody to ask this question in the first place? For many believers, biblical history barely exists. There are Bible stories, but there’s very little history of the Bible. They know Abraham, Moses, David, the prophets, Jesus, and apostles. What they know is salvation history But if you were to ask questions like when was Genesis composed? What materials went into the Pentateuch? When did these writings acquire scriptural authority?

When were Paul’s letters collected? Which Gospels appear earliest? What did early Christians consider scripture before there was a New Testament? When did Christians begin talking about a defined New Testament collection? And why do biblical canons differ? Suddenly, all of the familiarity disappears.

So then you get this paradox. Someone can know hundreds of stories contained inside the Bible while knowing virtually nothing about the historical process that produced the Bible containing those stories, and that reveals something about Christian formation. How can someone attend church for 10 years, 20 years, 40 years hear thousands of sermons, participate in Bible studies, perhaps even pastor a church, and still possess a model of biblical origins that would fall apart during the first few weeks of an introductory biblical studies course?

Study vs Devotion

What exactly have churches been teaching people to do with the Bible? Because apparently for most, the primary goal hasn’t been understand this collection historically. It’s been more like believe it, trust it, obey it, find yourself in it, hear God in it. There is a huge difference between Bible study and studying the Bible. A lot of what churches call Bible study is actually interpretive devotion. What does this passage mean for me? What is God saying to us? How do I apply this? And there’s nothing inherently wrong with those questions.

That’s actually our natural response to fables. What’s the lesson behind the story? But they’re significantly different from who produced this passage, when, using what sources, for what audience, what textual variance exists? How did this become canonical? What did it mean before Christianity existed in its later forms?

The devotional approach of many Christian denominations make the lessons paramount and the authorship and history irrelevant, which again would be fine if it wasn’t coupled with the insistence that the authorship is divine and the history is uncorrupted. And it’s that idea that leads me to think that the ignorance may not be an accidental problem for certain forms of Christianity. From someone who lived on the other side of that fence, I can honestly say that popular forms of Christianity function much more easily when believers don’t investigate their own tradition historically, because historical literacy introduces complications.

And that’s where the talisman effect that I mentioned earlier becomes especially useful. Because even in churches where names like Polycarp and Ignatius are being thrown around, they’ve already been imbued with the talismanic magical properties of no further investigation needed. You know, the rabbit foot explains itself. Because there is a strange paradox that I think most of us are aware of.

Why Simplicity Persists

The more seriously you study the Bible, the harder simple Biblicism becomes. The more seriously you engage biblical history, the harder it becomes to maintain certain simplistic claims about what the Bible is. The Bible says becomes which text written when, by whom, for whom, under what circumstances, according to which manuscript tradition, interpreted how historically, placed into which canon? And all of that is incredibly inconvenient for certainty.

Historical knowledge doesn’t necessarily destroy faith, but it does destroy simplicity. Serious study introduces ambiguity, development, disagreement, and importantly, human beings. Now, that doesn’t settle whether Christianity is true. I think I have plenty of videos that do just fine at driving that point home, but it makes this conception that God wrote a book and handed us the Bible historically impossible to maintain without major qualification.

Hardest to Reach

Now that we’ve kinda gotten all of that out the way, let’s talk about why believers who hold this view are often the hardest to reach. You would think if somebody knows almost nothing about biblical history, surely they’re easier to persuade. But that’s not necessarily true, because their Christianity may have never been constructed from biblical history in the first place. The person who has seriously studied biblical history may actually give you more common ground, not less.

They would have an understanding of genre, historical development, and even scholarly uncertainty, and even though you may disagree about what those facts ultimately mean, you’re still operating inside the same factual universe. The biblically illiterate fundamentalist presents a different problem because you can’t dismantle historically what was never constructed historically. You can’t necessarily historical critical somebody out of a belief they didn’t historical critical themselves into.

You can spend an hour explaining mark and priority, pseudepigraphy, pentateuchal composition, canonization, manuscript traditions, and their response may essentially be, “Yeah, but I know God is real. I know what God did for me.” You weren’t actually discussing the foundation of their belief. The Bible may function as symbolic authority without historical knowledge being the reason they trust it.

Again, the talisman effect. So facts about biblical composition just bounce right off. They’re not defending a theological stance or a doctrinal tradition. They’re defending a world where magic is necessary. Their commitment is grounded much more heavily in experience and personal encounters. That’s why biblical scholarship sometimes feels devastating to one believer and completely irrelevant to another.

Better Questions

So we started with who wrote the Bible, but that question opened up something much bigger. Because once you understand what the Bible actually is, you start asking who composed these individual texts? Who preserved them? Who edited them? Who declared them authoritative? Why these texts? Why not others? How did different canons emerge? What did the authors themselves believe they were producing? And how do we get from all of that to somebody in twenty twenty-six holding a one bound volume of authorized writings and calling it the Bible, the Word of God.

The truth is, if your religion tells you this book is the most important collection of writings humanity has ever possessed but never creates enough curiosity in you to ask how that collection actually came to exist I think that’s worth examining. Maybe one of the strangest things about modern Christianity isn’t how seriously Christians take the Bible. Maybe it’s how much authority Christians can give the Bible without even having to seriously study what the Bible is.

Beyond Critique

And this is precisely why I keep saying that critique is not enough. Because if somebody’s Christianity was never built on biblical scholarship in the first place, you’re probably not going to argue them out of it with better biblical scholarship. You can show them the history, you can show them the contradictions, you can explain where the text came from, you can dismantle bad apologetics all day long, but eventually we have to ask, “Then what if that doesn’t work?” Because people still need somewhere to wrestle with meaning.

They still need help when life falls apart. They still need people to celebrate with, grieve with, learn with, build with, and live alongside. And if all we have to offer is, “Well, your religion isn’t true and the universe doesn’t care,” then we haven’t actually solved the whole problem.

To many Christians, the Bible is a black box, not to be tinkered with, analyzed, or studied intensively, because they realize to do so might damage their faith. It is simply to them a book delivered straight from the mind of God. At that point, they shut off their brains, go to church, pray, pay, and obey. It is a tragedy of sacrificing your brain to satisfy an authority, that unbeknownst to them, is turning them into a mindless robot.

(5711) Why the New Testament is not reliable

In the following, biblical scholar Bart Erhman explains the many reasons why the New Testament is not a reliable record of history:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE6D0GY8iRQ

The problem of manuscripts

Question six, have the gospels been accurately preserved down through the centuries?

This is a terrific question that I have been interested in for a very long time. My first interest in this particular question about the accurate preservation of the gospels started out when I was a student at Moody Bible Institute. At Moody Bible Institute, I believed, as did my professors, that the Bible is without error in the autographs. In other words, the originals of the New Testament did not have mistakes in them, even if subsequent copies of the New Testament may have mistakes in them.

The problem is we don’t have the originals of the New Testament. What we have are thousands of copies of the New Testament that were made in most cases centuries later. We don’t have the originals. We have copies made centuries later. These copies that were made centuries later contain numerous mistakes. Thousands of mistakes. Tens of thousands of mistakes. Hundreds of thousands of mistakes.

This was a problem for me at Moody Bible Institute and I decided that I wanted to learn more about the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. I went to Princeton Theological Seminary to study with the foremost scholar in the field, Bruce Metzger. I devoted years of my life to this study. This has been the core of my research for the past 30 years. At some point, I came to the realization that my belief in the inerrancy of the autographs didn’t make sense. If God inspired the Bible without error, why hadn’t he preserved the Bible without error?

I couldn’t think of a good answer then, and I still can’t think of a good answer now, even though I think I’ve heard every answer ever proposed. I couldn’t any longer believe that God had inspired the originals because I was sure he had not preserved the original.

Accurate preservation

Let me tell you now what I think about this entire situation, which is that we cannot know whether the gospels have been preserved accurately through the ages. And I’m going to try and illustrate with you by explaining how it worked. Take the Gospel of Mark. Whenever Mark was written, say it was written in the year 65 or in the year 70 in the city of Rome, say—I don’t know where it was made. Whoever wrote Mark put it in circulation and somebody copied the Gospel of Mark. Then somebody copied that copy and somebody copied the copy of the copy. Then somebody copied the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy and we don’t have any of those copies.

Everybody who copied the text made mistakes. Our first surviving copy of Mark probably dates to around the year 220 AD. That is 150 years after Mark was first produced. Our first complete copy of Mark comes from the year 350, about 280 years after Mark. We have lots of copies from later times, from a thousand years after Mark. We get lots of copies.

When you compare all of these copies with one another, they all differ from one another. And what is striking is that the earlier you go to look at the manuscripts, the more differences you find. The earliest copies have the most mistakes. What would happen if we found copies that were still earlier? The only evidence we have is the evidence that survives, which suggests that in the early periods of copying, there was the most mistakes made.

How many were made the first month or the first year or the first decade? How many mistakes were made in the copy of the copy of the copy which served as a copy of all the copies that we now have? We have no way of knowing. If Craig thinks that we have a way of knowing how the gospel was changed in its first hundred years, I want to know what the answer is because I’ve worked on this problem for 30 years and I don’t know of a way to know and I’ve never seen a good explanation.

You can’t argue that we have lots and lots of copies of Mark and therefore we know what was originally in Mark. These lots and lots of copies are from many centuries after Mark was written. How could we know that these copies stem from a correct copy instead of an errant copy? Our earliest ones are all highly errant.

Sometimes you will hear Christian apologists say that the New Testament is the best attested book from antiquity and therefore you can trust it. It’s true. It’s the best attested book from antiquity, but the attestation is all from a thousand years later. It doesn’t make sense to say that you can trust it because it’s well attested. If the New Testament was well attested, then you could say what the New Testament originally said. Whether you should trust it or not is another question. But the reality is we have lots of late manuscripts of Mark and of every other book of the New Testament. We don’t have early ones, and the earliest ones we have are filled with mistakes.

Historical use of the gospels

Question number five, do archaeologists and historians use the gospels as sources?

It’s very easy to answer the question whether archaeologists use the gospels as sources. The answer is flat out no. Archaeologists dig to find material remains from antiquity and their digs are not based on the study of literary texts such as the New Testament gospels, as any bonafide archaeologist will tell you. But historians of course do use the gospels as sources, principally as sources for knowing about the life of the historical Jesus. They have to because there are no other sources that are reliable that exist, which leaves us with a problem since the only sources that do exist are the gospels and they’re not reliable either.

There’s no doubt that the historical Jesus is the most important person in the history of Western civilization. There is no doubt of that at all in my opinion. But the unfortunate thing about Jesus is that we have such scanty documentation about his life. Most people don’t realize this, but Jesus is never mentioned in any Greek or Roman non-Christian source until 80 years after his death. There is no record of Jesus having lived in these sources. In the entire first Christian century, Jesus is not mentioned by a single Greek or Roman historian, religion scholar, politician, philosopher, or poet. His name never occurs in a single inscription and it is never found in a single piece of private correspondence. Zero zip references.

The first time Jesus is mentioned in a Roman source or a Greek source is by the Roman governor of a province of Asia Minor, a governor named Pliny, in the year 112, 80 years after Jesus’ death. And even then, Pliny doesn’t even name him Jesus. He simply refers to his name Christ in passing. That is the only reference within 80 years of Jesus’ death.

Jesus is mentioned two times very briefly by the Jewish historian Josephus in the year 93, over 60 years after his death. But he’s mentioned in no other Jewish source of the first century at all. If you want to know about Jesus, you have to turn to Christian sources. There is no choice.

The earliest Christian source is the Apostle Paul. But to the surprise of many Bible readers, Paul scarcely mentions anything about Jesus’ words and deeds while he’s living. He says a lot about Jesus’ death and resurrection, but almost nothing about his words and deeds while alive. Which means if you want to know about the words and deeds of Jesus, the earliest sources are the gospels. But these are filled, absolutely filled with discrepancies, historical mistakes, errors, contradictions, stories that have been changed and rechanged and changed yet again in the process of telling and retelling before the gospel writers living 40, 50, 60 years after Jesus’ life were able to write them down.

Craig has said, “Well, eyewitnesses are still alive, so they’d be able to check the accuracy of the stories being told.” I’ve never understood this argument even though I’ve heard it for 40 years. Christianity started out as a small group of Jesus followers in Jerusalem right after his death. Within 30 years, there were Christian communities that were established throughout many of the urban areas of the Roman Empire. There were Christian churches in Palestine, in Syria, in Asia Minor, what we think of as Turkey, in Greece, in Rome, possibly in Northern Africa, almost certainly in Alexandria, Egypt. Hundreds of people were converting. Thousands of people were converting.

How did they convert? By people telling them stories about Jesus. Who was telling the stories? If I convert you and you convert your wife and your wife converts her next-door neighbor, and her next-door neighbor converts her husband, and her husband converts a business associate who goes to another city and converts his business associate, who’s telling the stories? Is it eyewitnesses? Are the twelve apostles of Jesus talking to everybody who’s telling a story and saying, “Make sure you get that right”? The eyewitnesses are probably in Jerusalem. Where are the eyewitnesses in Ephesus? Where are the eyewitnesses in Tarsus? Where are the eyewitnesses in Alexandria? They are not there. The stories are changed and rechanged over the years, so that historians have to use these gospels very carefully and critically because they don’t contain eyewitness reports and we can’t assume that what they say is historically accurate.

Impact of textual variants

Question number seven, our final question. Do scribal errors and textual variants significantly impact any teaching of Jesus or any important Christian teaching?

Let me start by saying that when Craig says that the following view is a view of skeptics—that we don’t have the originals, we have only copies, that thousands of copies have thousands and tens of thousands of mistakes—when he calls that the view of skeptics, it’s true that is the view of skeptics, and it’s the view of non-skeptics. It’s the view of every scholar who works in this field, including Craig. Everybody agrees. We don’t have the originals. We have thousands of copies. And the thousands of copies have tens if not hundreds of thousands of differences among them.

Are any of these differences important or are they all fluff? Did Jesus say, “Let the one who is without sin be the first to cast a stone at her?” It’s a wonderful and familiar saying of Jesus, but it’s based on a scribal variation that is an error. It was not originally in the New Testament gospels, as Craig has just told us. Did Jesus say, “Neither do I condemn you. Go and sin no more”? Well, does it matter whether Jesus said it or not? Turns out it’s only in a textual variant. It was not in the original New Testament.

Did Jesus say, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation? He who believes in me and is baptized will be saved, but he who does not will be condemned”? It’s found only in a textual variant. “These are the signs that will accompany those who believe: In my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick and they will recover.” Does it matter if Jesus said it? It certainly matters to the Christian groups in the Appalachian Mountains who practice snake handling as part of their worship services.

Did Jesus give the entire Lord’s Prayer or just half of it, as in Luke? Does it matter? It depends on which manuscript you read. Do other textual variants matter? Does it matter whether the doctrine of the Trinity is explicitly taught in the New Testament? The only verse that comes close to teaching it directly is 1 John 5:7-8: “There are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Spirit; and these three are one.” Does it matter if that’s in the New Testament?

Does it matter whether the Gospel of John ever calls Jesus the unique God or not? It’s based on a textual variant. Does it matter whether the Gospel of Luke teaches a doctrine of atonement or not—the view that Jesus died for the sake of others? It depends on a textual variant. Does it matter if Jesus was in such agony before his arrest that he sweat blood? It’s found in only a single textual variant of the Gospel of Luke.

Does it matter that entire words, lines, paragraphs, and pages were left out by some scribes? Does it matter that there are numerous places in the New Testament where scholars cannot decide what the original text said? Does it matter that there are some places where we will never know what the original author said? Does that matter or not?

Many evangelical scholars claim that it doesn’t matter. But I don’t believe them because these scholars devote their lives to studying the Greek manuscripts. Why would they do that if it doesn’t matter? Major evangelical seminaries raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for manuscript projects to study these manuscripts. Why would they do that if it doesn’t matter? It does matter.

Is the Bible a trustworthy, reliable guide? If so, what if we don’t know what it originally said? For some people, these facts don’t matter, and if you’re one of them, well and good. But if you’re someone for whom this does matter, then I would urge you to start reading and start thinking about the Gospels of the New Testament as critical scholars have described.

If Christianity was true, God would have ensured that we would have complete confidence in the scriptural evidence. That’s all that needs to be said.

(5712) Demon possession in the New Testament

Confronted with the implausibility of demons causing havoc in the New Testament, some Christian scholars assert that the reason we don’t see similar events today is because Satan is bound for a thousand years, according to the Book of Revelation, and therefore, demonic activity is no longer present. This mental work-around is astoundingly impotent. The following was taken from:

https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2026/10/the-strange-and-superstitious-world-of.html#more

There were many exorcists in Jesus’ day: “Some Jews who went around driving out evil spirits tried to invoke the name of the Lord Jesus over those who were demon-possessed. They would say, ‘In the name of Jesus, whom Paul preaches, I command you to come out.’  Seven sons of Sceva, a Jewish chief priest, were doing this.

One day the evil spirit answered them, ‘Jesus I know, and I know about Paul, but who are you?’ Then the man who had the evil spirit jumped on them and overpowered them all. He gave them such a beating that they ran out of the house naked and bleeding” (Acts 19:13–16). There were many sorcerers too. We find them in Samaria (Acts 8:9–11), and in Paphos on the island of Cyprus there was a sorcerer “who was an attendant of the proconsul, Sergius Paulus” (Acts 13:6–8; see also Rev. 21:8; 22:15).

In the Gospels we often read that Jesus’ opponents say he is demon-possessed (Matt. 9:32–34; 12:24). Sometimes Jesus is called demon-possessed simply because he says things that seemed to his hearers to be just plain crazy: Has not Moses given you the law? Yet not one of you keeps the law. Why are you trying to kill me?’ ‘You are demon-possessed,’ the crowd answered. ‘Who is trying to kill you?’” (John 7:20). “At these words the Jews were again divided. Many of them said, ‘He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?’” (John 10:19–20; 8:48–51).

Even John the Baptist was thought to be demon-possessed (Matt. 11:18). It was easy to claim someone was possessed in those days. Whenever Jesus acted contrary to what was normally expected, or his teaching sounded strange or weird, his audience simply concluded he was a demon-possessed person, much like someone today might say, “You’re crazy.” We simply do not think this way today.

Look how Jesus responded to these charges: Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, ‘if I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out? So then, they will be your judges’” (Matt. 12:27). There were lots of Jewish exorcists and lots of demon-possessed people in those times, and Jesus didn’t deny what these exorcists could do.

“‘Teacher,’ said John, ‘we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.’ ‘Do not stop him,’ Jesus said. ‘No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us’” (Mark 9:38–40). We just don’t think there are demon-possessed people in our world today, certainly not as often as it appears Jesus did.

Look at the close connection between healing and exorcism: “The Twelve were with him [Jesus], and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out” (Luke 8:1–2). “Jesus said, ‘Go tell that fox, “I will drive out demons and heal people today and tomorrow, and on the third day I will reach my goal”’” (Luke 13:32). “Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Christ there. When the crowds heard Philip and saw the miraculous signs he did, they all paid close attention to what he said. With shrieks, evil spirits came out of many, and many paralytics and cripples were healed. So there was great joy in that city” (Acts 8:5–8).

Today we just don’t think sick people are demon-possessed. With the advent of modern medicine we treat the physical causes, and with psychology we treat the mental causes of illnesses the best that we can. And while it can be argued that Luke was a “physician” (Col. 4:14) and that he knew the difference, we simply have to consider how much of the science of medicine he knew in his day. As a child of his times, it would seem reasonable to suppose that those illnesses he couldn’t cure with the medicine at his disposal would be thought by him to be caused by demon possession.

According to Harper’s Bible Dictionary, under “Physicians”: “As with other ancient cultures, there was in Israel no necessary conflict between belief in divine, demonic, and/or human causation of illness or between requests for divine assistance and the application of practical therapy.”36

All I can say here is what a mixed-up world the superstitious first century must have been! Formerly epilepsy was viewed as demon possession. But now we know some of the causes and can minimize the effects. Mental disease also has its known causes, and some specialists can help with brain surgery. There is a whole lot less demon possession today simply because of the progress of modern science. As science progresses demon-possessed people become fewer and fewer.

Some Christians will argue from the book of Revelation that Satan is bound and cannot hurt us like that anymore (Rev. 20:1–10). But if Christians believe this, then it also says that Satan will be bound for one thousand years. When did those thousand years start so that I may know when they end? If they say that the thousand years are not literal, then how can they take a literal view of Satan being bound at all?

The fact that demons routinely populate Christian scripture combined with the fact that we know that demons are fictional entities is all you need to prove Christianity is false. Any omnipotent god intending to present the Bible as his literal word would have ensured that there would be no mention of mythical creatures that would eventually contaminate the authenticity of the same.

(5713) Ranking arguments for God

In the following, nineteen arguments commonly employed to argue for the existence for a god are evaluated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak_eKX1nvyw

Ranking Arguments for God: From Worst to Best

Introduction and Criteria

Some arguments for God are genuinely clever. Some were built by professional philosophers over 40 years. And some were clearly invented in a car park by someone who had just lost a debate.

Today, we rank all of them: 19 arguments from worst to best. Each one gets its strongest version, and then I’ll show you exactly where it breaks. Stay to the end because the top two are actually good, and what happens to them is the best part.

The rules are simple. An argument scores well if its logic holds, if its premises are believable, and if it survives its best objection. Bonus points if it gets you anywhere near an actual god rather than some vague cosmic something. We start at the bottom.

F-Tier Arguments

Pascal’s Wager

If you believe in God and you’re wrong, you lose nothing. If you don’t believe and you’re wrong, you burn forever. So believe. Smart bet.

Notice what’s missing, though: any evidence at all. Pascal isn’t telling you God exists. He’s telling you to pretend just in case. And which God are you betting on? Thousands of religions offer a hell, and most of them send you there for picking the wrong one. Bet on Jesus and Allah is unimpressed. Bet on Allah and you’ve annoyed Odin. It’s a lottery where every ticket cancels the others. Also, if God really is all-knowing, he can probably tell the difference between faith and an insurance policy. Still an F here.

The Argument from Popularity

Billions of people believe, so it must be true. Billions of people also believed the sun went around the Earth. Truth was never a popularity contest.

And here’s the awkward bit: those billions don’t believe in the same God. Most believers are convinced most other believers are wrong. Richard Dawkins put it best: “We are all atheists about most of the gods humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”

The upgraded version says belief is built into us from birth. In Islam, it’s called fitra. And psychologists do find that children are natural believers. They also find that children think rocks are pointy so animals can scratch themselves on them. Kids see purpose everywhere. That tells you how a human brain works; it tells you nothing about what’s actually out there.

Presuppositionalism

This one claims you can’t use logic at all unless God exists. So by arguing against God, you’ve already proved him.

If that sounds like a magic trick, that’s because it is one. It assumes the conclusion and dares you to notice. Logic doesn’t need a mind to keep it running. Two plus two was four before anyone counted, and it will still be four if every god retires tomorrow. Christopher Hitchens answered this entire tier in one line: “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.”

D-Tier Arguments

D tier. These at least point at something in the real world. They just point at it wrong.

Fulfilled Prophecy

Scripture predicted the future, so it must come from God. The problem is that prophecies come in three flavors: too vague to fail, written after the event, or simply wrong.

Ezekiel predicted that the city of Tyre would be wiped out and never rebuilt. Tyre is still there. It’s a busy city in Lebanon; you can get a very decent lunch there. The hits get sermons. The misses get quietly skipped.

Scientific Miracles in Scripture

You’ve seen the videos. The Holy Book described embryos, the expanding universe, and the water cycle centuries before science.

Here’s the pattern, though: nobody has ever used a verse to discover anything. The science comes first, and then someone goes back and finds a verse that sort of fits if you squint and choose the right translation. The embryo stages people love to quote closely match what the Greek physician Galen wrote centuries earlier, and every religion plays this game. Some Hindu apologists find quantum physics in the Vedas. If an ancient book really contained modern science, the impressive move would have been telling us something we didn’t already know. A single line about germs and washing your hands would have saved millions of lives.

The Quran’s Inimitability

The Quran challenges anyone to produce a chapter like it. Nobody has, so it must be divine.

But who’s judging and by what standard? The judges are almost always believers, and the contest was decided before it started. The historian Bruce Fudge points out that any verdict other than victory was simply unacceptable. Could anyone write another Shakespeare play? No. Was Shakespeare a god? Also no. Being unique and beautiful is what great literature does. It doesn’t tell you where the text came from.

Miracles in General

People report healings, visions, and weeping statues. David Hume settled this two and a half centuries ago: ask yourself which is more likely, that the laws of nature were broken, or that someone was mistaken, exaggerating, or lying.

And notice where miracles happen—always somewhere they can’t be checked. Plenty of cancers reported cured. Not one amputated leg grown back. God apparently heals what can heal on its own and never anything that would settle the question.

Intelligent Design

Some biological machines, like the little rotating tail bacteria use to swim, are supposedly too complex to evolve step by step. Remove one part and the whole thing stops working.

Except biologists found that a chunk of that motor works perfectly well on its own as a tiny injection system other bacteria use to attack cells. Parts get borrowed and repurposed. That’s evolution. This went to an American courtroom in 2005. The judge, a church-going conservative appointed by George W. Bush, ruled that intelligent design was not science and called the school board’s decision “breathtaking inanity.” Also, if your body was intelligently designed, someone needs to be fired over the knees, the lower back, and the fact that you breathe and swallow through the same tube.

C-Tier Arguments

These are the arguments that make apologists sound smart at dinner parties.

The Argument from Desire

Courtesy of C.S. Lewis: every natural desire has a real object. We get hungry and food exists. We long for something beyond this world. So, something beyond this world must exist.

But I want to fly. I want to live forever. I want a reply from the person who left me on red. Wanting something has never once made it real. And beauty? Evolution gave us brains that enjoy sunsets, symmetry, and ripe fruit. You don’t need a god for that. You need eyes and a few million years.

The Resurrection of Jesus

The claim is that the empty tomb and the appearances are best explained by a real resurrection. So, look at the sources.

The earliest gospel, Mark, was written around 40 years after the events by someone who never met Jesus. Its oldest copies end with the women running from the tomb and telling no one. The appearances in Mark were tacked on later by another hand. Every gospel after that tells the story differently. Paul mentions 500 witnesses and doesn’t name a single one. Five hundred anonymous witnesses reported by one man decades later—in any court on earth, that’s hearsay of hearsay. And a dead man walking out of his grave is, by definition, the least likely explanation on the table.

The Modal Ontological Argument

Hold on to something. If it’s even possible that a maximally great being exists, then it exists in some possible world. But a maximally great being would exist in every possible world. So it exists in ours. God proven from your armchair.

Now run the exact same logic the other way: It’s possible that no maximally great being exists. If so, it can’t exist in every world, which means it exists in none. God disproven from the same armchair. Same logic, opposite answer. The argument doesn’t prove anything. It just translates whatever you already believed into fancier notation.

B-Tier Arguments

Now things get more serious.

The Unmoved Mover

Everything that changes is changed by something else. You can’t have a chain going back forever. So there must be a first changer that doesn’t change itself.

This comes from Aristotle and it leans heavily on Aristotle’s physics, which we left behind a long time ago. Moving things don’t need a constant push; Newton sorted that out. And here’s a fun detail: Aristotle’s own unmoved mover spends eternity thinking only about itself. It doesn’t know you exist. It definitely doesn’t care what you eat.

The Argument from Reason

If our brains evolved only to survive, why trust them to find truth? So believing in evolution without God undermines itself. Alvin Plantinga made this one famous.

It sounds clever until you meet a lion. The ancestor who believed lions were friendly didn’t get to be anyone’s ancestor. Seeing the world accurately is how you survive it. And our reasoning is far from perfect, which is exactly what evolution predicts and exactly what a perfect designer wouldn’t produce. Optical illusions and gambling addiction are not the fingerprints of a careful engineer.

Religious Experience

Millions of people say they felt God. Why dismiss them?

Because they contradict each other. Christians meet Jesus. Muslims feel Allah. Hindus encounter Krishna. Catholics see the Virgin Mary. And nobody sees her in a culture that has never heard of her. Experiences follow culture, not truth. People really do feel these things, but what they feel tells you about the person, not about the universe.

A-Tier Arguments

These deserve real respect.

The Moral Argument

If objective right and wrong exist, they need a foundation. And that foundation is God.

Try one question: Is something good because God commands it, or does God command it because it’s good?

• • If it’s good just because God said so, morality is arbitrary. God could command cruelty, and cruelty would become right. And according to the Bible, he did—in 1 Samuel, he orders the destruction of an entire people, infants included.
  • But if God commands things because they’re already good, then goodness exists without him, and you can find it without him.

Either God is a tyrant or he’s a middleman. Most professional philosophers believe in objective morality, and most of them don’t believe in God. Sam Harris argues that morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures. You don’t need a commandment to know that torturing children for fun is wrong. And if you do need one, please stay away from children.

Consciousness

How does a lump of wet gray meat produce the experience of the color red? It’s a real mystery, and honest atheists admit it. Science hasn’t cracked it yet.

But look at the answer on offer: matter producing a mind is mysterious, so let’s explain it with a mind that exists without any matter at all. That isn’t an explanation. It’s the same mystery with a bigger budget. Every time we’ve plugged a gap in our knowledge with God—from lightning to disease—the gap eventually closed and God had to move out.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

William Lane Craig’s favorite, borrowed from the Muslim philosopher Al-Ghazali: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. So, the universe has a cause. Clean and simple.

Now look at that first line: everything we have ever seen begin to exist was existing stuff being rearranged. A chair begins when wood gets reshaped. Nobody has ever watched something come from absolutely nothing, with or without a god. Causes also happen inside time, and before the beginning of time, the word “before” doesn’t mean anything. Physicists don’t even agree the Big Bang was an absolute beginning; it’s the point where our current models stop working. And even if you grant every single step, you get a cause—not a mind, not a person, not a religion. Naming that cause “God” and then giving it opinions about bacon is a leap the argument never makes.

S-Tier Arguments

The two best arguments for God ever made.

2. The Argument from Contingency

Everything around you could have failed to exist: you, me, this planet. So why does anything exist at all? Each thing is explained by something before it, but the whole collection needs an explanation, too. And that explanation has to be something that couldn’t fail to exist: a necessary being. That’s God.

Professional philosophers of religion rate this one highest, and they’re right to. It rests on an idea called the principle of sufficient reason—that everything has an explanation. Sounds obvious. It isn’t proven. And quantum physics suggests some events have no deeper cause at all.

Worse, if the principle is true without exception, it proves too much. If everything has a complete explanation, including God’s decision to create, then God had no real choice, and nothing could ever have been different. Your free will disappears, God’s freedom disappears, and the argument eats itself. And even if something must exist necessarily, why should it be a mind? It could be the laws of physics. It could be whatever the universe is fundamentally made of. Necessary doesn’t mean divine.

1. Fine-Tuning

The constants of our universe—the strength of gravity, the charge of the electron, the energy of empty space—seem to sit in an incredibly narrow range that allows life. Nudge some of them slightly and you get no stars, no chemistry, no us. So what are the odds?

This is the best argument for God there is. And it still fails for three reasons:

1. 1. Nobody knows what the odds are. We have one universe. We don’t know how the constants got their values or whether they could have been different at all. Working out odds from a sample of one is like flipping a coin once and declaring it rigged.
   2. We couldn’t find ourselves anywhere else. Of course we find ourselves in a universe that allows us. Douglas Adams compared it to a puddle that wakes up and thinks, “This hole fits me perfectly. It must have been made for me.”
   3. It assumes a limited designer. Fine-tuning only makes sense if the designer was limited. An all-powerful God doesn’t need to tune anything. He could keep us alive under any physics or no physics at all. Tuning knobs are what you need when you’re stuck working within rules.

And look at the result: almost all of this finely tuned universe would kill you instantly with freezing vacuum, radiation, and black holes. If this was built for life, life got one damp rock. And even that comes with earthquakes, tsunamis, and mosquitoes.

Conclusion and Summary

So that’s the ranking. At the top, two arguments that are genuinely hard and worth taking seriously. At the bottom, a bet, a popularity poll, and a magic trick.

And here’s the interesting part: even the very best ones, given every benefit of the doubt, get you a necessary something or a cosmic dial-setter. Not one of them gets you a God who wrote a book, picked a chosen people, and cares how you dress or how many times a day you pray. That last step from “something” to “my God” is where every argument quietly gives up and faith takes over.

And this isn’t just my opinion. In the largest survey of professional philosophers, about two-thirds lean towards atheism. Fewer than one in five lean towards theism. The people who judge arguments for a living mostly aren’t buying it.

Now it’s your turn. Which ranking would you change? Think fine-tuning deserves to fall? Think I was too generous to the Kalam? Make your case in the comments—I read them. And if you want the arguments against God to get exactly the same treatment, subscribe because that one’s coming.

What should be gleaned from this essay is that there are no good arguments for the existence of the Christian god, or any other god for that matter. Given that truth, the best approach is to suspend belief in any one god, or gods, while remaining vigilant to any incoming evidence that would point to existence of a real god.

All of the above can be counteracted by the ‘Where is he?’ test, assuming that if a universal god interfering in human lives existed, there would be a 99% chance that such a god’s existence would be obvious.

(5714) Too many problems

If Christianity is the true religion of an omnipotent deity, there would be no way possible to compile a list of problems anywhere near the size of what is presented here. The conclusion of an objective analysis is that, beyond a reasonable doubt, Christianity is untrue.

One major lesson to be learned about determining what to believe and what not to believe can be summed up in a few words- the things that are real can be observed, measured, or reliably demonstrated. To that end, we can confidently state that ghosts, goblins, poltergeists, Bigfoot, behemoths, the Loch Ness monster, mermaids, hobbits, leprechauns, elves, alien abductions, wizards, witches, werewolves, centaurs, cyclops, angels, demons, dragons, satyrs, nymphs, gnomes, banshees, ogres, leviathans, vampires, fairies, zombies, and unicorns are not real. And one more we can add to this list: Yahweh- the god of Christianity.