“I’m not a fundamentalist. I don’t believe in every word of the Bible. But I do believe in the teachings of Jesus. They’re so full of love and peace and tolerance. That’s where I get my divine inspiration from.”

I’ll grant that the philosophy of the Jesus character in the New Testament is, in many ways, an improvement over the Old Testament. It’s a lot lighter on the genocidal brutality and violence, for one thing. And some of the ideas in the Gospels are pretty decent ones.

But it’s a very mixed bag indeed. And while a mixed bag is okay if you’re just talking about human ideas — every one of the thinkers I admire have some ideas I think are coo-coo or messed up or just plain wrong — it’s a lot more problematic when you believe that the ideas in question come straight from the mouth of a perfect God.

There are some seriously screwed-up ideas in the Gospels. And they’re ideas that run counter to some of the most treasured principles of most modern progressives… including progressive Christians.

I want to list them here.

A few quick ground rules:

I’m talking here about my own opinion about what is or is not a screwed-up idea. But I am going to focus on ideas that most modern progressives agree are screwed-up (or would, if the ideas hadn’t come from Jesus).

And I’m not going to cite the self-aggrandizing “I am God” stuff, as it seems like a rhetorical dead-end. After all, the whole question of whether Jesus was or was not God is exactly the point on which Christians and I disagree, so pointing to it as an example of a problematic philosophy is a bit too circular for my taste. Instead, I’m going to focus on ideas in the Gospels that most progressives would find troubling… completely apart from the question of Jesus’s divinity (or, indeed, his existence).

I will, however, talk about both the hell stuff and the “I am God” stuff when it points to some other troubling aspect of the Jesus philosophy… such as the oft-repeated “Believing that I am God and following my teachings is the only right way to practice religion” trope.

When a verse is repeated almost word for word from one book to another, I won’t repeat it in this list, unless for some reason it seems to bear repeating. (Which is why there’s a lot more from Matthew than any of the other four books.) And I’m quoting from the Revised Standard Version.

Here we go!

Continue reading “The Messed-Up Teachings of Jesus” →

This is one of the most common criticisms leveled against atheists. Many believers see the atheist assertion that there almost certainly is no God as unspeakably arrogant.

The usual comeback is to point out the arrogance of faith: the arrogance, among other things, of thinking that “I really don’t think there’s any evidence for this” is trumped by “My heart tells me this is so.” But, today, I want to talk about a different kind of religious arrogance.

I’m talking about the arrogance of the human-centered universe.

I’m talking about the arrogance of believing that the universe was created by a loving god for the purpose of creating human beings with souls who could love him, obey him, and go to his heaven.

And I’m not even just talking about creationism, either. I’m talking about reasonably science-friendly religion that still sees humankind as the centerpiece of God’s plan.

Okay. Let’s sum up for a moment. The universe, post- Big Bang, is roughly 14 billion years old. It consists of billions and billions of galaxies, separated by vast expanses of empty space. Each of those galaxies consists of billions and billions of stars, also separated by vast expanses of empty space. Some of those stars have big hunks of rock orbiting them. And about four and a half billion years ago, in one of those galaxies, around one of those stars, one of those big hunks of rock happened to have a chemical process take place on it that resulted in structures that were able to replicate themselves. Over the eons, the self-replicating structures proliferated into an uncountable variety of different forms. And a mere two and a half million years ago, one of those millions of forms emerged in something resembling its present state… and in pretty much its present state a ridiculously paltry 200,000 years ago.

To be fair, the human-centered view of the universe wasn’t always ridiculous. It wasn’t ridiculous, say, 5,000 years ago, before Galileo and Darwin and Hubble. It wasn’t ridiculous when — as far as we knew — humans had always been around, and the sun and moon and stars all revolved around us. We didn’t have any reason to think otherwise.

But now we do.

And now we have to let go.

Today's story centers on The Pope's Cologne — stop laughing, I am not making this up — a product purportedly based on the private cologne formula of Pope Pius IX (1792-1878), and being shamelessly hawked to credulous suckers tastefully offered for sale to the devoted ranks of the faithful. PZ Myers of Pharyngula fame came across this charming story about it on the Christian News Wire:

What I experienced later will be a sight I will never forget!!! The widow used the cologne to "anoint" her husband EVERY 20 minutes. She would sprinkle it on his hands, his head, his forehead, and his neck. You could see in her eyes she had found a way of redemption through the cologne. Everyone was asking about the cologne and its origin. Everyone that came in to give her their condolences could not stop asking about the pleasant aroma they were experiencing. Everyone was quiet and in awe for hours. She also kept on rubbing the bottle as if it was some sort of amulet or charm.

But personally… well, maybe it's because it's been a long day and I'm tired and cranky. But I'm having a hard time seeing this as hilariously wacky. I'm mostly seeing it as sick and sad and awful.

Be forewarned: Today I have my cranky pants on. And my snarky underwear. I am not going to be nice. I am not even going to try to be nice.

Cranky Thought Number One:

Let me see if I have this story straight.

A grieving widow is obsessively smearing cologne on the corpse of her dead husband, and rubbing the bottle it came in as if it were a magical object.

And her fellow mourners are

a) touched and awestruck by the gesture, and

b) struck by the nice smell.

They're not — oh, say, just for instance — simultaneously pitying and grossed out beyond belief? They're not wondering, "What on Earth is she doing? What does she think she's going to accomplish by this?" They're not wondering if they should gently encourage Grandma to see a therapist?

What the zarking fardwarks is impressive and awe-inspiring about this spectacle? Other than, "Man, people do some strange stuff when they're grieving"?

Cranky Thought Number Two (closely related to CT #1):

I do not ever — ever — want to hear another progressive theologian say that modern religious thought doesn't involve magical thinking.

Well, maybe nobody still believes it in theology schools. Maybe in theology schools, they mostly believe in the impersonal, non- interventionist, largely abstract God: the God who is, in any practical or meaningful sense, entirely indistinguishable from no God at all.

Or else, just go to a funeral where the grieving widow is anointing her dead husband with Magical Oil of Pope.

In fact, a not very nice part of me wants to buy a bottle of this Eau de Pontiff crap.

So the next time I hear someone make the "you just don't understand modern theology" argument, I can throw it in their face.

Mask photo by Marsyas.

The progressive religious attitude is best summed up, I think, by the recent United Church of Christ blog ad campaign, a tag line of which was, "Science and faith are not mutually exclusive." Fundamentalist religion… well, I think its attitude is best encapsulated by the Biology for Christian Schools textbook, which declared that, "If [scientific] conclusions contradict the Word of God, the conclusions are wrong, no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them," and "Christians must disregard [scientific hypotheses or theories] that contradict the Bible."

Which brings me back to Edwards's comment, and the question of holding beliefs that aren't contradicted by evidence but aren't supported by it, either.

Here's the problem.

I could, in the next fifteen minutes, come up with half a dozen beliefs that aren't contradicted by evidence but that also aren't supported by any. The universe was created by a cosmic graffiti artist, and the Big Bang was the result of her spray can exploding under pressure. Cats talk to each other in Sanskrit — but only when nobody's listening. Gravity is caused by hundreds of tiny invisible demons inside every physical object, pulling towards each other with a magical force field. (Objects with more mass can hold more demons — hence their greater gravitational force.) Etc., etc., etc. Atheists even make something of a game of it: the Flying Spaghetti Monster; the Invisible Pink Unicorn; Bertrand Russell's china teapot orbiting the sun; the incorporeal dragon in Carl Sagan's garage.

Why are any of these hypotheses any less plausible than any of the commonly- held God hypotheses actually believed by millions of people? Why do they have any less gravitas?

The only reason — and I mean the ONLY reason — that the standard God hypotheses have more gravitas than the flying spaghetti monster or my secret talking cats is that lots of other people believe them. And that lots of other people have believed them (or an assortment of evolving versions of them) through history. And that some very smart people have twisted their minds around the problem and come up with some very clever, if rather contorted, defenses of the proposition. If it weren't for the gravitas built up by centuries of belief, we'd have no more reason to take any of the standard God hypotheses seriously than any of the goofy joke religions that atheists make up to entertain themselves.

In other words, if the only thing you have going for your belief is "you can't prove that it isn't true," that isn't enough.

This is actually the point Bertrand Russell was illustrating with his china teapot. The point wasn't so much that "you can't prove that it isn't true" isn't a good enough reason to believe in something. As important as that is, it's actually secondary to his argument. The main point he was making is… well, let me quote the passage in question:

If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time. (Emphasis mine.)

And if you don't have any basis for making that choice — other than the demonstrably biased, easily fooled, heavily- weighted- in- favor- of- believing- what- you're- predisposed- to- believe form of guesswork known as "intuition" or "faith" — then why on earth would you base your entire life philosophy around that choice?

Would you base your choices, your ethics, the meaning of your life, your assumptions about what happens when we die, on a belief in any other hypothesis for which you had absolutely no evidence, simply because you didn't think there was any evidence contradicting it? Would you base your life on a belief in the cosmic graffiti artist or the invisible pink unicorn, simply because they haven't yet been conclusively disproven?

And if not, then why is God an exception?

If your default theory has to keep shifting and slipping and mutating to accommodate new evidence contradicting it… AND if the consistent historical pattern of your default theory has been a long, relentless process of it being chipped away… AND if you don't have any solid evidence to support even the most core part of your default theory… then perhaps you should look at discarding your theory. 

It is not the case that your default theory can be anything, as long as you are willing to hear contrary evidence. That's not a logical, rational, or evidence- based way of thinking. In the absence of any good evidence supporting any particular hypothesis, the rational hypothesis is the null hypothesis. And in the case of religion, the null hypothesis is atheism.

You can't just say, like Criswell at the end of Plan 9 from Outer Space, "Can you prove it didn't happen?" That's not an argument — and it's not a foundation for a life philosophy.

(FYI, this is a topic on which I've changed my mind over the course of my blogging. So if this seems to contradict an earlier statement, that's why.)