A Tiresome Blend of Cult Bragging and Bad Theology

An honest sermon about the gospel of Mark: Chapter 2

Mark 2:1-12 provides a good case study of several things that are wrong with the Bible, despite the fact that the event depicted here ranks as a favorite tale about Jesus. In fact, I fondly remember this story when I heard it as a kid in Sunday school. Jesus is teaching in a house packed with people—so crowded at the door that four fellows carrying a paralyzed man on a stretcher couldn’t get in. They had to make a hole in the roof, so that they could lower the guy in front to Jesus.

“Faith in God or Gods Is Unjustified, Harmful, and Dangerous”

And calling atheism a faith is lame


This meme popped up on my Facebook feed recently: “When a man creates a god, he can tell you all about him, what he likes and dislikes. That’s how imagination-gods work.” This describes a practice that has gone on for millennia: Humans have indulged in creating, imagining, and describing gods in detail—many thousands of them. The writers of the Bible were committed to this practice, but they disagreed far too much about Bible-god. Hence clergy, theologians and apologists have devoted so much time and energy to diverting attention from the contradictions, making excuses for them, and minimizing the bad consequences. All in the interest of keeping their particular versions of Christianity intact.

David Eller On Morality and Religion

Once again cultural anthropologist Dr. David Eller has granted us access to a large amount of text, from his excellent book, Atheism Advanced: Further Thoughts of a Freethinker, pp. 365-390. If you want to learn about morality this is very good, as is the whole chapter 10, "Of Myths and Morals: Religion, Stories, and the Practice of Living."

 On Morality and Religion by David Eller.

            There is no doubt much more stress in Western/Christian cultures on morality than on myth.  Again, Christians would insist that they do not have “myth” but that they definitely have morality, or even that their religion is morality above all else.  Atheists, often taking their lead from Christianity and literally “speaking Christian,” tend to allow themselves to be swept along with Christian thinking on this subject.  Atheists do not much trouble ourselves with myths (for us, all myths are false by definition, since myths refer to supernatural/religious beings and we reject the very notion of such being).  But we trouble ourselves very much with morality, down to trying to prove that we “have morality too” or that we can “be good without god(s).”

            Given the amount of time and energy that Christians and atheists alike—and not just them but philosophers, politicians, lawyers, and social scientists—have devoted to the problem of morality, it is remarkable that so little progress has been made.  As the famous early 20th-century moral philosopher G. E. Moore wrote almost one hundred years ago, morality or ethics “is a subject about which there has been and still is an immense amount of difference of opinion….  Actions which some philosophers hold to be generally wrong, others hold to be generally right, and occurrences which some hold to be evils, others hold to be goods” (1963: 7).  Surely any topic that has resisted progress and agreement for so long must be being approached in the wrong way.

What Is Evidence?

What counts as evidence?

In my previous blog post, Rapoport’s Rules Meet the Outsider Test, I mentioned the dispute over what counts as evidence:

When discussing religion with persons of faith, try to be aware of their tactic of framing the argument in terms of positive arguments for their particular faith, rather than in terms of negative arguments against all competing faiths. This was on display in the four-way debate video that John W. Loftus posted about the Virgin Birth. John’s Orthodox Christian interlocutors demanded that John clearly define what he would consider to be sufficient evidence for their religious claims. But they did not mention that they must think that no competing religion has met the same standard of evidence for them. So they must know what “evidence” is, well enough to conclude that no other religion has it. Perhaps they have just never thought this through before.

In this blog post I’ll dig deeper into this dispute about evidence. I include my own manual transcriptions of the dialogue from the video with time markers, but transcribing is hard so refer back to the video for each’s speakers statements in his own words.

Solid teaching, solid truth

I’ll start with a sort of mission statement from the senior opponent to John in the video:

12:26 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:

“And right now I’m just very very interested in bringing the knowledge of that [Orthodox] faith to a public that is hungry and thirsty for solid teaching, solid truth.”

This statement about audience demand sounds plausible enough. It stands to reason that if Fr. Ivanoff has a job, he must have found an audience that likes what he has to say. Good for him. A man’s gotta eat. But I have some questions about what he means by “solid teaching, solid truth.” Those are rather bold claims. Presumably Fr. Ivanoff is aware that there are other audiences who are equally hungry for other “solid” teachings, other “truths.” For example, Fr. Ivanoff seems to hail from the Orthodox side of the Great Schism of 1054. The folks on the other side, for the past 950+ years, are Roman Catholics (and by extension, the Protestants who later schismed off from them like so many proliferating species). I’m pretty sure the current Pope would say he has “solid teaching, solid truth” as well. Yet these two equally solid teachings have been in conflict for fully half of the Christian era. Thus I think it’s fair to ask (a) whether Fr. Ivanoff views his own teaching as more “solid” and “truthful” than the Pope’s teachings (I’m guessing he does!), and (b) how he knows this.

I’d also like to know how comfortable Fr. Ivanoff feels about worshipping in a Roman Catholic Church.

If Fr. Ivanoff believes the Pope is wrong about something that matters, enough to break off fellowship, Fr. Ivanoff must have some sort of evidence to support his belief. For example, one point of contention between Catholic and Orthodox Christians is that bizarre filioque thing. I’d like to know how the rules for evidence work on that one, and how the Pope came to have different rules for evidence than Fr. Ivanoff has.

What evidence is not

And this hints at something I’ll elaborate more on below: the word “evidence” means different things to different folks. In the next excerpt, Fr. Ivanoff wants to know how John W. Loftus defines “evidence”:

18:38 Fr. Jonathan Ivanoff:

“Beyond that, when John speaks of relevant evidence, I’d like to hear his definition of what relevant evidence is so we can talk about that and move forward.”

And John replies at 18:53 in the video similarly to the exerpt from his recent article “Is Atheism a Faith?”. I’ll quote from the article as it is cleaner than my transcription:

In response, apologists claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for determining what counts as extraordinary evidence for miracles. But I know what doesn’t count as extraordinary evidence, which says it all. Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence doesn’t count; nor does circumstantial evidence, or anecdotal evidence as reported in documents that are centuries later than the supposed events they recount, documents which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings, experiences, and inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence, nor do the reports of someone who tells others that his writings are inspired or conveyed by divine revelation through dreams or visions.[13])

In the video, John adds:

That’s - let’s just talk about that - because I claim that’s all you have.

That last sentence is key. A proper way to refute John here would be to show that’s not all they have, but that the Orthodox spokesmen have some additional evidence, something that might pass muster with a rational skeptic like John. Suffice it to say we won’t be getting any shocking new divine revelations here. Instead we’ll get an attempt to shift the burden of explanation onto John, when the Subdeacon tags into the dustup later:

Pressing for a positive definition of evidence

30:43 Subdeacon Daniel Kakish:

…but when you’re asking what is the evidence, I’m asking you what is the evidence that you would accept. Father Jonathan already asked you, but you just went on with another list of what is not evidence, you didn’t answer the question of evidence would be for me. When I see people like you guys mentioned Luke earlier, Luke was a journalist, a physician, he was a Hellenic Jew maybe … or a Greek somehow or just the Greek but it was counterintuitive for him to believe in this, he converted, and we know the story of Saul of Tarsus, another counterintuitive story, why would he change his whole life, so then you have these early figures not to mention everyone who was the eyewitnesses Dr. Price mentions the evidence for the resurrection if the one who born from Mary is proven to be the Son of God which I think there’s a lot of evidence for that then automatically the virgin birth would be true. However, again I want to ask you what evidence would you accept for what uh for the virgin birth?

My transcription might be a bit sloppy, but I think Subdeacon Kakish’ gist is clear: he wants to know, if the evidence for his flavor of Christianity isn’t good enough for John, what evidence would be? And then he segues into what appears to be his own view of the relevant evidence, namely:

  1. The “counterintuitive” actions of Luke and Saul of Tarsus who became known as the apostle Paul.
  2. The unnamed “eyewitnesses” to the Resurrection of Jesus.
  3. The Resurrection itself as a kind of evidence for the Virgin Birth, the main topic under discussion. Left unsaid is any coherent connection between the Resurrection (even if it occurred) and the Virgin Birth. After all, the bible contains stories of other people who were resurrected, including vast numbers of dead saints at Jesus’ Crucifixion, and nobody is arguing for any of them being Virgin-born.

If we go back up and look at what John says isn’t evidence (for him), he’s already undermined all three of Kakish’ lines of evidence, as we only have “Second-, third-, and fourth-hand hearsay testimonial evidence” for them, in the form of scriptures which were arbitrarily selected by committees of self-appointed men some centuries later to be canonized into what we now recognize as the various bibles of the various Christian brands (yes, there is more than one biblical canon). So what Subdeacon Kakish takes to be established fact - that men like Luke and Paul existed and we have reliable evidence that they did “counterintuitive” things, and that there were “eyewitnesses” to the Resurrection, and this somehow counts as evidence for Mary to have divinely conceived the Son of God, and that Joseph learned reliably in a dream that this was the Gospel Truth - John doesn’t find convincing for precisely the reasons he listed.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

Another point Kakish doesn’t mention is the extraordinary nature of his claims. Insofar as modern science has been able to tell, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection stories are impossible. Since the scriptures were written long before the start of modern science, people at the time wouldn’t have understood the impossibility. To them these might have just seemed like more signs and wonders to go along with other seemingly fantastic natural occurrences like volcanoes, earthquakes (and no surprise that Jesus’ Crucifixion is capped off with an earthquake in the Gospel account!), plagues, lightning bolts, and so on. After all, if a mountain can literally explode, why can’t a god impregnate a woman? The prescientific mind cannot imagine the difference. The prescientific mind doesn’t understand the rules that govern the real world - the rules that make exploding volcanoes not only possible but just about inevitable in certain parts of the world (the parts near particular subduction zones or hotspots) while simultaneously making unfertilized births of male offspring all but impossible for humans, along with the resurrection of a substantially decayed human body.

Why volcanoes are not miracles
Why volcanoes are not miracles, image from Wikimedia Commons

Extraordinary events like those two have never been reliably attested - that is, with modern trained experts in all the relevant science (and magician’s tricks!) present and recording. And thus we’re going to need evidence which is correspondingly extraordinary. Kakish’s “evidence” in the form of “counterintuitive” behavior by Luke and Saul / Paul is far from extraordinary. People do counterintuitive things every day. See for example the behavior of Tom Cruise after he learned about Scientology. Or all the Mormon converts who died for their beliefs during their wars with Christians and the US government. Or how about the 9/11 terrorists who flew airplanes into buildings, because they believed they would be rewarded with virgins in the afterlife? (It seems more than one religion has odd fixations with human female virgins.) People behaving “counterintuitively” is not evidence for anything but the fact that our intuitions are not a sufficient basis for the science of psychology. Probably every religion has its examples of people behaving “counterintuitively.” See for example Melanesian Cargo Cults. Or the snake-handling Christians of America’s Appalachia. And everything else in Seth Andrews’ by turns amusing and alarming book Sacred Cows: A Lighthearted Look at Belief and Tradition Around the World.

And it’s hardly enough to point to dramatic behavior changes by religious converts. What religion does not have similar stories? Do they count as evidence that every religion’s supernatural claims are equally true?

And even outside religion, people do counterintuitive things every day, and some fraction of people dramatically transform their lives, for better or worse. With or without various faiths, these are things people do.

Subjective evidence

So the disagreement seems to be that John and his Orthodox interlocutors have drastically different notions of evidence. This makes complete sense if we adopt a functional, subjective definition of “evidence”: whatever makes you believe something. By this definition, everybody with a belief has some sort of “evidence” for their belief - at least something they consider to be evidence. As this definition is inherently circular (you believe because you have evidence, and you have evidence because you believe), to say that people disagree over evidence merely restates that they disagree over belief.

The challenge, as we see in the video, is in persuading someone else to accept your own subjective definition of evidence. If the Orthodox spokesmen had done their homework, they would immediately recognize that John’s definition of evidence is closer to the definitions you’d find in the scientific or legal/judicial communities.

Intersubjective evidence

If you want to work as a scientist, or as an attorney, or as an historian for that matter, you’ll have to learn what counts as evidence in those professions. While history might be viewed as kind of a “pure” intellectual pursuit, science and the law tend to be considerably more practical. Pure science has given rise to a lot of applied science and technology, often with billions of dollars and the fate of the entire biosphere on the line. The law, for its part, makes hugely consequential decisions every day. Therefore both fields must have ways to resolve the sorts of endless disagreements that have shattered Chrstianity into tens of thousands of warring brands. And the way that science and the law do this is by coming up with definitions of “evidence” that vast numbers of people from different backgrounds can agree on.

That is, “evidence” in science and the law is not merely subjective, but intersubjective. From Wikipedia:

Intersubjectivity describes the shared understanding that emerges from interpersonal interactions. The term first appeared in social science in the 1970s and later incorporated into psychoanalytic theory by George E. Atwood and Robert Stolorow, the term has since been adopted across various fields.

In most everyday contexts, “evidence” is strongly intersubjective. Few of us have ever struggled to establish the fact of our own existence in the minds of other people. My subjective evidence for my own existence seems acceptable to just about everyone else. All we have to do is show up, and allow other people to use their senses to evaluate the evidence we constantly broadcast. The particulars of my claimed identity might be faked (I could hypothetically be a deep cover operative whose cover story is massively prosaic and boring), but my existence as a human would be very hard to fake with current technology. In the future, robots might be able to imitate humans with increasing levels of fidelity, but that’s a way off for now.

And that’s why John and his Orthodox sparring partners are not demanding evidence for each other’s existence. They have a strong intersubjective agreement about what counts as evidence for the existence of a human being, and they had this agreement long before they met each other.

The reason why it’s easy to prove that I exist, and hard to prove that God exists (or that the Son of God was born of a virgin female, etc.) is because I am real. When it’s hard to prove that something exists, then either that thing is not real, or it is so subtle that it cannot be detected by human senses or scientific instruments. Modern scientific instruments are highly sensitive, able to photograph distant galaxies and nearby molecular structures. X-ray scanners can “see” through clothing to detect hidden weapons and contraband. Medical scanners can produce detailed images of our innards. Radar can track distant aircraft and weather systems. Analytic chemists can identify thousands of different chemical compounds in a sample. Modern statistical methods can detect tiny effect sizes in samples of thousands or millions of people. And so on. For God to remain invisible to modern science is quite an achievement, particularly when the bible claims that God was easy for unaided humans to detect for centuries.

To be fair, modern science can’t detect everything yet. Things like dark matter and dark energy can be inferred by the effects they have on visible matter, but physicists don’t yet know how to detect them directly. But that’s OK - for a long time scientists couldn’t detect the Higgs boson either, until they did. But no religion postulates such things, which weren’t even imaginable until modern science gave people ideas. Religions are all about gods that ordinary pre-scientific peoples could observe or interact with in some way. The God of the bible, for example, is routinely portrayed as crashing about through history, working miracles, slaying people in vast numbers for misbehaving, torturing Job to win a bet with Satan, and generally making himself impossible to ignore. That sort of God has simply disappeared like a puff of smoke with the rise of modern science. So either God went away, or pre-scientific people were lying or mistaken when they attributed natural phenomena to God.

Evidence: you know it when you see it

Potter Stewart was a US Supreme Court justice who immortalized the saying “I know it when I see it.” He originally said this about obscenity, but evidence is another thing that’s easy for people to recognize and hard to define precisely.

Most people rarely think about what evidence actually is. Therefore when Subdeacon Kakish asks John to clearly define what he means by “evidence”, Kakish implies that the discussion is not about ordinary, everyday things. When you go to the grocery store, for example, you don’t accost the workers and demand them to define what they take to be evidence that the jug of milk contains milk and sells for the marked price. To argue about “evidence” in that situation would seem pretty nuts. Therefore, when a debate becomes a debate about what “evidence” is, it’s a sign that someone is skating on thin ice. And I think we know which side that is: the side that claims their religion is right and all other religions are wrong. They must have some sort of evidence for that claim, if we take the broadest definition of “evidence” - whatever causes you to believe something.

Evidence: what the philosophers have said

Lots of philosophers have spilled lots of ink on the question of what evidence is. See for example Evidence from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It begins with a quote:

And when we try to define ‘evidence’ … we find it very difficult.
—R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History

That Enclopedia has a separate article on The Legal Concept of Evidence.

The Internet Encylopedia of Philosophy weighs in too, as does the Routledge Encyclopedia, and the English Wikipedia. For Kakish to ask John to give a positive account of what constitutes evidence is a bit like asking someone to briefly explain particle physics, or calculus, or Baroque music. We’re talking about subjects that would take months or years of study to get a good handle on.

Thus I don’t think it’s entirely fair to demand that John give a definition of “evidence” that works for everyone on all subjects. The discussion video would have to get a lot longer for that! But I think Fr. Ivanoff and Subdeacon Kakish might agree that no religion’s supernatural claims meet the evidentiary standards of science or the law. That is, claims about the existence of God, the Virgin Birth and Resurrection of Jesus, have never been and probably will never be established as scientific or legal facts. If either of those two men switch careers to science or the law, they’ll quickly discover that they won’t make headway with their peers by advancing a scientific theory or a legal argument predicated on the claim that a specific God - or any god - exists. Imagine a defense attorney who tried to argue that the client is innocent of all charges because an angel appeared to him in a dream and said so! That attorney would get laughed right out of court, and probably even by Christians who forget that they accept the same quality of “evidence” for the Virgin Birth.

When an argument is insane everywhere outside of the bible, it’s probably insane in the bible too.

But of course both men do “switch careers” whenever they clock out of work and face practical problems in the real world. Then they probably do apply the same standards of evidence that a scientist or an attorney would use. If the lights don’t come on, they probably don’t wait for an angel to appear in a dream and tell them what the problem is. Instead they probably troubleshoot the problem as best they can, and if that doesn’t help they call an electrician, who will bring even better evidence-based reasoning to bear.

Special pleading

The act of applying inconsistent types of reasoning depending on the problem has a name in informal logic: special pleading. The disagreement between John and his interlocutors is that they seem to think special pleading is OK, and John does not. In the pre-scientific world this wouldn’t have been much of a problem; back then, religion was the “only game in town.” But now there’s a new player in town: science. Science spawns technology, its own form of “signs and wonders following”. Readers of the bible will recognize that phrase, as it appears in Mark’s Gospel, the book of Acts, and elsewhere. Signs and wonders were supposedly the evidence that Men of God provided for the truth of their theological claims. But today the signs and wonders of religion no longer hold up to scientific examination. We saw this in the video as neither the Father nor the Subdeacon could wow John with any miracles, like a good old-fashioned biblical prophet of God.

The “signs and wonders” of science

But signs and wonders are no problem at all for science. They are as impossible to ignore today as the God of the bible allegedly once was. The irony seems lost on the good Father and Subdeacon as they use the modern quasi-miracle of YouTube to share their ancient superstition with the world. If I were the dictator of the world, I would demand behavioral consistency from people who deny science, or who reject its methods. If you don’t like the scientist’s rules for evidence, fine: adopt the Amish lifestyle and stop consuming the benefits of science every day.

The power of science, demonstrated in every second of every minute of every day, sets the standard for evidence for me. That’s why, for example, I accept the “evidence” for the Higg’s boson, even though I lack the specific years of study necessary to understand it. I have enough background that I might be closer to getting it than some people, but I’d still have to work long and hard to get the specifics. And replicating the results independently would probably be out of the question, as that would cost billions.

So why do I take the Higgs boson on something akin to “faith”? Mainly because of all the signs and wonders following. The existence of technologies like smartphones and the Internet proves a lot. They prove that a very large fraction of science must be true or all but true, as even a slight error in the enabling science would make it impossible to build working devices. And then there is all the science that enables the supply chain, including the tripled crop yields that manage to feed the workers and customers, and the medical sciences that heal some of their ailments. The truth of science is so interwoven into our modern existence that only an idiot or a lunatic could deny it - at least, not without some overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

So even if the Higgs boson is not exactly a logical consequence of smartphones, it’s not too far removed from it. It would be very hard for the science that gives us smartphones to tolerate a hoax on that scale. There are too many scientific experts incentivized to check each other’s results. Now, it’s possible for various frauds and errors to occur in science, especially in obscure work of little or no importance, that nobody bothers to replicate. But it’s a lot harder to get away with a scientific fraud when billions of dollars are at stake. See for example the Theranos fiasco. That particular fraud had a fairly short shelf life because venture capitalists expect results rather quickly.

Religion, in contrast, can disagree about filioque for 950+ years.

So, let us return to the Subdeacon’s question to John: “I’m asking you what is the evidence that you would accept.” For my money, the “evidence” I would accept for the Virgin Birth and other miracle claims of the bible is the evidence that the whole scientific community would accept. Just because a claim seems far-fetched doesn’t stop scientists from being convinced of it, when the evidence is there. Many findings of science that most educated people take for granted today were revolutionary in the past, such as heliocentrism, evolution, and plate tectonics.

Convince the relevant experts, then get back to me

Therefore, to theists, I give my own refinement of Hitchens’ Razor: Get back to me when you’ve convinced the scientists of your claims. It’s not my job to be the adjudicator of everything. I’m hardly the only or best person to decide that current science is all wrong and Jesus was born of a Virgin. There are people better-equipped than I am, and you haven’t convinced them yet. The world is full of religions making thousands of supernatural claims and counter-claims which none of them can demonstrate as scientific facts. The Father and Subdeacon have done nothing to distinguish themselves from that mob. Until they do, I’m no more inclined to believe them than all the rest. I’m equally unimpressed by the claims of the followers of Sathya Sai Baba. No matter how many of those followers might be doing “counterintuive” things.

Furthermore, if any religion does become the first one in history to prove its claims, I won’t have to make any effort to find out. It would be front-page news on every news outlet in the world. It would likely give rise to whole new fields of science, and spinoff technologies, much like finding a crashed alien spaceship in the desert might do. (Which incidentally is a strong argument against the Area 51 folklore - where are the technological spinoffs?)

Is Atheism a Religious Faith? A Definitive Answer!

A new essay of mine just dropped at the Secular Web. See what you think! Is Atheism a Religious Faith? A Definitive Answer!

Honest Sermons about the Gospel of Mark: Chapter 1

The clergy know that honesty about the Bible is risky



I was a preacher for nine years, so I do know a thing or two about sermons. And from my perspective now, I will offer my opinion on how honest sermons differ from those intended to keep the folks in the pews believing that Jesus was everything the church has claimed he was. An honest sermon requires that listeners be genuinely curious, and allow themselves to think critically. Preachers, who earn their livings promoting the faith, would prefer that their parishioners trust and accept their interpretations. Please don’t ask questions!

David Eller On Freeing Ourselves (and Others) From Misunderstandings of Atheism

David Eller, as many of you know, is pretty much my favorite scholar/author at this point, next to just a very limited number of others. As a friend he's allowing me to publish the very best, next to none chapter, on what the words atheist and agnosticism mean. It comes from his most recent book, Liberatheism: On Freedom from God(s) [GCRR, 2024], one that I was honored to write the Forword. Enjoy!

Freeing Ourselves (and Others)


From Misunderstandings of Atheism


“I

do not believe in God and I am not an atheist,” Albert Camus wrote in his Notebooks 19511959.[1] What are we to make of that statement? Perhaps Camus was being wry and cryptic, as French philosophers are often wont to be. Maybe “atheist” meant something different to him or to 1950s-era France. Alternatively, it might have been too dangerous to avow atheism in that time and place. Or maybe he was just confused about the word.

If the latter is the case, then Camus would not be the first or the last to labor under misconceptions about atheism. Of course, theists are highly likely—and highly motivated—to get atheism wrong. Since they are not atheists and possibly have never spoken to one (at least not intentionally and civilly), they really do not know what we think; they can only see us through their own theistic eyes and assume that we are the reverse image, or, more perversely, some odd variation, of their own theism. Then, as sworn and mortal enemies of atheism, they are driven to portray us in the most unflattering light, to construct a ridiculous straw man that they can summarily caricature and assassinate. We need not take their (mis)characterizations of us seriously, except as a public relations problem.

What about atheists themselves? Surely they are accurately portraying their position. Surprisingly and distressingly, too many professional atheist writers and speakers commit a regular set of errors in describing the nature of atheism. This is a tremendously damaging tendency, for two reasons. First, we mislead current and future atheists, who are misinformed by the incautious pronouncements of prominent atheists. Second, we empower theists and other critics of atheism who use our words against us: “See, even atheists say that atheism is X, so we are justified in our criticism and condemnation of the idea.”

In this chapter, we will expose and free ourselves from recurring and systematic mistakes in the atheist literature. We will not repeat or critique “arguments for atheism,” which have been sufficiently covered, including by me[2] and are largely cogent and decisive; all but the most hard-headed theists and religious apologists (who still exist) concede that “the case for god(s)” is weak at best and lost at worst. Nor will we linger on the New Atheists, who have been thoroughly examined many times before, including in the previous chapter where we noted their unexpected and unfortunate turn toward reactionary social and political attitudes—ironically simultaneously debunking one of the pillars of Western civilization (i.e. Christianity) and defending Western civilizational traditions of sexism, racial thinking, and Islamophobia, among others. The New Atheists are broadly guilty of the common charge of scientism, not just of crediting science with the solution to all problems but of equating, as Richard Dawkins does, religion to science (albeit bad science). For instance, Dawkins wrote in his lauded The God Delusion that “‘the God Hypothesis’ is a scientific hypothesis about the universe,” and Victor Stenger actually put this “god hypothesis” business in the title of one of his books.[3] Finally, all of the New Atheists, who are quality scholars on their own turf, operate with limited (by which I mean Christianity-centric) notions of religion and god, in which “god” means the Christian or Abrahamic god and “religion” means Abrahamic monotheism. Any college freshman student of religion knows better.

Rapoport's Rules Meet the Outsider Test

Rapoport’s Rules for Debate

Intuition Pumps cover imageAccording to the English Wikipedia, Daniel Dennett (March 28, 1942 – April 19, 2024) “was an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. His research centered on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and the philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science.” Dennett was and remains well-known in atheist/freethinking/skeptical circles as one of the so-called “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism, alongside Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.

In this post I draw from Chapter 3 of Dennett’s book Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2013). The particular intuition pump, or tool in that chapter is what Dennett called “Rapoport’s Rules for Debate”. The Rules are Dennett’s suggestion for how to disagree with someone productively. In this article I’ll explore the practicality of the rules, and how one might apply them to John W. Loftus’ Outsider Test for Faith.

Dennett’s version of Rapoport’s Rules attracted considerable commentary, as this DDG Web search shows. Quoting from Dennett’s original version: 

"Memoirs" of Earliest Christian Cultic Legends


Anglican apologetic writer (undeserving of the designation “scholar”) Richard Bauckham in his
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses perpetuated the faith-bolstering theory that since Papias and Justin Martyr described earliest gospel texts as ἀπομνημονεύματα, this term implicitly determined their mode and genre as “memoirs of the Apostles,” that is, recorded living memories of Jesus’ original students. Aimed at a predominantly faith-anxious public market, this book with its litany of absurd theories went on to sell countless copies and is to this day held up by pseudo-intellectual believers as grand justification for their indulgence in such tales as presenting reliable footage of first-century supernatural events.
While early Christians did indulge such tales with belief as the pious mechanics of their cultic conversion rite, such was the point of sacred legend through all times and societies, particularly in the Roman Hellenistic world. Bauckham and others would have humankind accept the canonical Gospels (none of the others, mind you) as histories. The Greek term, however, arose as cognate to the common verb ἱστορέω, that is, to conduct a critical inquiry of the evidence. A “history” in antiquity thus was the product of such rigorous research with the aim of presenting true accounts of past ontological events. The problem, however, with those who seek to foist this descriptor onto the canonical Gospels: Nowhere did the early Christians refer to the canonical Gospels as histories or use them in that manner. This term above, moreover, often translated by them as “memoir,” did not indicate or imply the presence of anecdotal memory, be that genuine or fraudulent. Rather, the term denoted how something or someone was to be honored in cultural memory, that is, their social memorabilia or memorialization. This would often include legend and outright myth, what the Germans term a person’s Nachleben. The culture exalted or damned the memory of the Caesars, for instance, either by bestowing on them divinity (divine birth, divine powers, divine ascension, etc) or by lampooning their image, defacing their statues, restriking their numismatic images (i.e, their coins) etc.

It Should Be Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and Loftus

 
As others have said as well

Carl Sagan once said, “I don’t want to believe, I want to know.” I have encountered so many churchgoers who are satisfied with belief—and they trust that their clergy have taught them correct beliefs. There appears to be so little curiosity about Christian origins, about the complex ancient thought world in which their faith arose. Nor is there much curiosity about how the gospels came to be, and how much they are burdened with flaws, contradictions, and laughable impossibilities. The drama, ceremony, music, and ritual of weekly (or even more often) worship are enough to sustain devotion and commitment. They are happy with believing, not knowing.

A life Dedicated to Serving Others, with God Finally Left Behind

Testimony to the high moral standards of many non-believers



One of the surprising developments of our time—or maybe it’s not so surprising—is the marked increase of people who admit that they have no religious affiliation. They have been labeled the “nones.” One factor might be that some churchgoers decided to read the Bible, and discovered just how flawed it is. That it falls far short of being a divinely inspired book; they’ve been fooled by the clergy. Another factor is increased scientific understanding of the world and how it works. In Western Europe, after two world wars that killed up to ninety million people, belief in god has declined sharply. Surely Christianity is also taking a hit because one of the least religious, least moral persons on the planet has been championed by fanatical Christians—and this week returned to the White House. That will certainly cause substantial damage to the faith in the long run.

The Final Chapter in "Why I Became an Atheist " (2012)

This final chapter in "Why I Became an Atheist" (2012) provides the reasons why I finally became an atheist after being an evangelical Christian who became a moderate, then a liberal, then a deist who turned agnostic, a journey that took twelve years. LINK

It’s Not Hard to Figure Out What’s Wrong with Christianity

Study, research, and critical thinking are the key


A long time ago I heard it said of someone, “He’s got a mind like concrete: all mixed up and firmly set.” Perhaps the reference was to a fundamentalist, and it certainly applies. In my article here last week, I discussed Janice Slebie’s book, Divorcing Religion: A Memoir and Survival Handbook. She describes the rigid mindset that she was raised to accept and was expected to obey without question. It took a lot of anguish and family crises for her to realize that she had been severely brainwashed. She made her escape, and has devoted her career to helping others who have experienced religious trauma. Selbie’s book is a welcome addition to the publishing boom by atheist/secular/humanist authors in the last two or three decades. The horror of 9/11, a religiously motivated terrorist attack, was a powerful motivator for non-believers to finally step forward to say, “Enough is Enough!”

Daniel Mocsny On How Religions Re-Invent Themselves (Funny But True!)

By Daniel Mocsny: There is an amusing video on YouTube in which a gentleman makes physical-comedy type of error - he trips on a treadmill at the gym and gets thrown off - and then quickly recovers and carries on nonchalantly, as if to wordlessly declare, "Yeah, I meant to do that."

Religions work like that. The old religions began in the pre-scientific world, in which even many educated people freely commingled empirical claims with fantastical ones.* Most likely, ancient thinkers thought this way because their lived experience showed them the sorts of things that usually happen, and they reasoned in commonsense ways, but they lacked the modern scientific knowledge that we live in a universe governed by physical laws, so they did not appropriately constrain their notions of what could happen.

Fast forward to the modern world, and religions are like the guy who falls off the treadmill while checking out the hot girl in the gym, then tries to cover his error by breaking into a set of pushups, now that he's on the floor. "Yeah, I mean to do that." Religions are festooned with cognitive fossils - embarrassing markers of erroneous pre-scientific thinking - and struggling to paint them as all part of some master plan.

Maha Kumbh 2025: The Story of Kumbh and Prayagraj

One of the world’s greatest religious spectacles is underway and the numbers are staggering! 400 million people are expected to be there! That's more than the population of the United States! Watch the video below. Believers at this festival worship different gods and are just as devout as the devotees of Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. Nothing is more destructive of one's own culturally indoctrinated religion than a different one. "If their religion is obviously false and its devotees delusional, then what about mine?" It's like meeting an antimatter twin!


Now is the time to take The Outsider Test for Faith! It challenges adults to doubt their own culturally indoctrinated childhood faith for perhaps the first time, as if they had never heard of that faith before. It calls on them to require of their own religious faith what they already require of the religious faiths that they reject. It forces them to rigorously demand logical consistency with their doctrines, along with sufficient evidence for their faith, just as they already demand of the religions that they reject.

Evidence? What Evidence?

What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed. But then there's this Bible Study book. What explains the so-called evidence asserted here?

A Traumatic, Dramatic Escape from Fundamentalism

Constant reminders of the damage done by religion


“Please don’t ask me, expect me, to think about it.” Whenever a religion has succeeded in embedding this attitude in the minds of its followers, it has a better chance of enduring and thriving. But humanity is not better off because the refusal to think remains a common response to reality. How many people have done enough study and research to grasp our place in the Cosmos? To understand why evolution is true, and how it works? To know why vaccines play a vital role in combatting disease? To realize why ongoing horrendous suffering—ongoing for thousands of years—destroys the idea that a powerful god so loves the world?

Michael Maletin on "My Atheist Journey: 10 Years Later. Why I Remain Atheist."


This video above by Michael Maletin is awesome! Be sure to watch it all. At the 24:25 mark my work on horrendous suffering is recommended. Very very cool! Get that book now on Amazon! It's never been less expensive.

"What's Coming Is WORSE Than A Recession" | Richard Wolff's Last WARNING

I regard Richard Wolff as a modern prophet of sorts. Toward the end of this excellent warning his analysis of the Trump phenomenon and it's dire consequences is spot on.

We Survived Yet Another Season of Christmas Irrelevance

Addressing irrelevance with reality and ridicule


We know nothing—absolutely nothing—about how and when Jesus was born. The birth narratives in Mathew and Luke have been studied and analyzed ad nauseam by scholars, and there is not a single scrap of history in either of them. With just a little bit of careful study, churchgoers could discover this truth—but they would have to ignore the pleading of clergy and apologists to take the stories at face value. Yet thousands of churches still put on Christmas pageants featuring Mary and Joseph arriving in Bethlehem, the baby Jesus dozing in a manger, surrounded by adoring shepherds and Wise Men. The Wise Men are a most unwelcome addition to the Jesus tradition. It is really not smart to add astrology to the mix of Christian theology, already spoiled by ancient superstitions and magical thinking. We read that astrologers from the East had seen Jesus’ star in the sky—and set off to worship him. This is a boast of the Jesus cult! It was a common belief in the ancient world that the births or accomplishments of important people were accompanied by special signs in the heavens.

America Is in Decline. Trump Will Not Reverse It. We Should Adopt a New World Order or Face Serious Consequences!

This is almost all new and important information to me! If you know something about world politics and economics take a look. Then let me know what you think. It's by Richard D. Wolff, an American economist and professor emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He's an expert on economic inequality and advocates for ways to empower workers by addressing systemic issues within the economy. This appears to be a few separate videos strung into one. 

On Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Steven Pinker Resigning from the Board of Freedom from Religion Foundation.

I'm not focused on what takes place in atheist organizations. However, I understand that wokeism is a hotly promoted and contested issue for atheists to debate. Here is Jerry Coyne's take on it: LINK. Here is Hemant Mehta's reply: LINK. I'll let my insightful commentors weigh in on this particular debate.

I wasn't going to comment on wokeism until this morning when I read a political piece, gleefully titled, "Woke is dead — let’s make sure it never comes back", a controversial title written by the controversial seasoned journalist Lionel Shriver.

I'm pretty sure the ologarths and audocrats are the gleeful ones. They won the Presidency because they were successful in getting the rest of us to focus on these type of issues rather than on good jobs for all, health care, climate change, free tuition for university students, and so on. Elon Musk, the richest person in history, is now ruling over the rest of us because of this strategy. I'm sure he and other filty rich people will make sure they don't have to pay their fair share of taxes. So whatever else can be said for and against wokeism, I hope it doesn't come up again in the next few presidential elections. Wokeism is where presidential candidates will come to die.

Rick O'Sheikh On the Problem of Holy Scriptures

By Rick O'Sheikh:

I have said it before, the problem with the Bible and the Koran is that they do not just contain some problematic parts, they contain nothing but problematic parts. Every page, almost every paragraph, has to be justified and explained away with some contorted and very flexible logic. There is no systematic way for the apologist to account for all the problems. The apologist has to resort to a different sort of "rationale" to explain away every little and every big problem. One problem is explained as a parable, for another one they say God reveals his truths as he judges the people ready to receive them, and or another part they try to blame bad translation, etc. So they have hundreds of inconsistent and illogical ways of "explaining" things.

The non-believer on the other hand has a systematic and logical way to debunk these books: They are the product of particular people at particular points in time and space, things written by themselves and for themselves at different times and by different people, then later compiled into books. These people wrote things the way their particular culture saw them at the time, and those cultures were very different from today's cultures. What looks bad to us in those books today looks bad because it is bad to us today, not because we are not understanding something, whereas it was not bad to those people back then and they understood it very well the way it was written. These book are obsolete now to say the least. Period.

Religions Thrive on Naïve Ignorance

But also on arrogant and aggressive ignorance



A few months ago, an elderly Catholic women admitted to me that their priests told them not to think about what they learned as children in catechism. But I suspect this is a common approach of clergy everywhere: “Just believe that we know what we’re talking about—after all, we learned all there is to know about god in seminary—and our intense prayers keep us in touch with him.” Especially when eternal life is at stake, why take chances? “Of course, our church, our denomination, has it right.”

Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?

 Hail Mary! Was Virgin Mary Truly the Mother of God’s Son?

 -- By John W. Loftus

Catholic Christians pray the rosary, which is a string of beads representing creeds and prayers to be recited. Devout Catholics are considered to recite it every single day. In it the Apostles’ Creed made the cut, which is recited one time. The Glory Be (Doxology) is recited five times, the Lord’s Prayer is said six times, but the Hail Mary prayer is recited a whopping 150 times!   

 As one who was raised a Catholic I was required to recite these things a number of times upon visiting the confessional booth, depending on the gravity of my sins. While the Hail Mary can be dated back to the 13th century, the current prayer dates to the 16th century: 


Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. 

Logistics and Mary the Mother of God.

We need to start by briefly considering some logistics. Consider first, the logistics of how a real mother named Mary could conceive of God (or God’s Son).

The ancients commonly believed that the woman contributes nothing to the physical being of the baby to be born. They thought the child was only related to the father. The mother was nothing but a receptacle for the male sperm, which grew to become a child.

Today, by contrast, with the advent of genetics, most Christian thinkers try to defend the virgin birth on the grounds that the humanity of Jesus was derived from Mary and that his divine nature was derived from God. They do this because they know something about genetics and know Mary must have contributed the female egg that made Jesus into a man. But this doesn’t adequately explain how Jesus is a human being, since for there to be a human being in the first place minimally requires that a human sperm penetrate a human egg. Until that happens we do not have the complete chromosomal structure required to have a human being.

Now of course, God could conceivably create both the human egg and the sperm from which to create life inside Mary’s womb. But if it’s a created human life then it’s not God, who is believed to be eternal, and the creator of everything, who came to suffer and die to atone for human sins as a sinless God. Other problems emerge when it comes to the supposed genealogies and fulfilled prophecies.

Nevertheless, what if God had a body? He did, didn’t he? Sure he did, even though later Christian theology describes God as a Spirit. God is described as walking and talking with Adam and Eve, who even tried to hide from him in the trees of the garden (Genesis 3:8-10). Later on, Jacob prevailed over God in an all night wrestling match, after which Jacob said, “I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared.” God also let Moses see his body, even his backside (Exodus 33). After monotheism arrived God was still seen as having a body. He sat on a throne (Ezekiel 1; Daniel 7; Matthew 25:31; Revelation 5:1), and he rewarded the faithful by allowing them to see his face (Matthew 5:8; 18:11; Revelation 22:3-4). The first martyr Stephen saw Jesus “standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:56). Even at the end of times every eye will see him—and presumably recognize him—riding on a white horse to do battle with his enemies (Revelation 1:7; 19:11-21).[1]

So perhaps it isn’t too surprising Mormons still believe God has a body. But if so, they have to struggle with the virgin conception of Jesus. Was mother Mary a virgin or not? According to Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “The Father came down and begat Jesus, the same as we do now.” Mormon apostle Bruce McConkie agreed, saying, “Christ was begotten by an immortal Father in the same way that mortal men are begotten by mortal fathers.” Two Mormon researchers ask us if it “is so disgusting to suggest God sired a son by sexual intercourse?”[2] Inquiring minds want to know.[3] But if God’s son was produced the old-fashioned way, his son Jesus was not conceived of a virgin after all!

The Spirit of Atheist Christmas Giving

In the spirit of atheist Christmas giving I’d like to make a shameless plug for donations to this blog, Debunking Christianity, the brainchild of John W. Loftus, noted atheist author and speaker. As John pointed out last March, the blog itself is ad-free (although John was not able to remove ads entirely from the Disqus discussions below the line). As John says, “I have no institutional support nor am I a paid employee of any atheist organization.” Which means the burden of keeping the site afloat financially falls on all of us. I found by direct empirical testing that it’s super easy to locate and click the yellow “Donate” button at the bottom of the right-side navigation links in the large-screen format of this site. So I call upon all my out-or-closeted atheist / agnostic / freethinker / Nones / fact-based / reality-curious sisters, brothers, and gender-fluids to donate early and often, as your circumstances allow, and as the “spirit” moves you.

John has been one of my favorite authors and editors for a while. If you’re like me, a complete nobody, it’s not every day that one of your favorite authors asks you to guest-blog. So I’m incredibly flattered and will always try my hardest to overlink. (I’ll also try hard to tell jokes, and likely fall short. But seriously, whenever I use a word that has a technical meaning which might not be obvious to every human alive, I like to put a link on it. “Overlinking” refers to documents containing “too many” links, which to me sounds rather alien, like being “too beautiful” or “too rich”, neither of which I can imagine nor have approximated.)

A Major Discussion of the Virgin Birth of Jesus!

This was a good discussion. Enjoy! Billing: "Father Ivanoff of Eastern Orthodox apologetics fame joins us with master historian and apologist Subdeacon Daniel Kakish as they dialogue with Dr. Robert Price and John Loftus, two of the foremost Atheists in the field. This will be a groundbreaking dialogue!"

The New Testament: Brought to You by Writers with Creative, Delusional Imaginations

Champions of theology, not history and fact



I have this fantasy: that (1) suddenly all devout churchgoers will become obsessed with studying the Bible, especially the New Testament, and that (2) they will also be gifted with critical thinking skills. Of course, this would be a nightmare for the clergy, who don’t want to be pestered with hard questions about so much in the Bible: “How does this possibly make sense?” “Why would Jesus have said such a thing?” “Is this really what our god is like?” For centuries, the clergy have promoted an idealized version of Jesus and his god, based on carefully chosen feel-good verses. All that would come to an end if the laity took Bible study seriously, and really applied their minds. So much really bad stuff is in full view.

Here's some major essays on this holiday season!



LINK Enjoy! Comment! Share!

The Lethal Combination of Evil and Stupidity

It’s putting the health of humanity in serious jeopardy

Allow me to begin with a long quote:
 
“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed – in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for when dealing with a stupid person than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous.”

The Oblivious Devout Keep Christianity Chugging Along, Part 2

Horrible harms done by belief in Jesus


In my article of the same title, published here 22 November 2024, I described several ways in which the devout churchgoers manage to ignore basic realities that put their faith in huge jeopardy. Now I want to focus on one of the most damaging aspects of Christian history: the horrible outcomes of being devoted to, obsessed with, Jesus. Especially after the church achieved political power. Let’s look at a few of the consequences, a few of the things that the devout should work hard to bring within their horizons of awareness.

"How the New Testament Writers Used Prophecy," An Excerpt from "Why I Became an Atheist" pp. 353-59.

Heads up! I'm fairly excited for my upcoming 9,000 worded paper, "Did Virgin Mary Give Birth to the Son of God?" It's to appear on my page at the Secular Web within a couple of weeks. [The following essay was first published in December 2023] 

"How the New Testament Writers Used Prophecy" by John W. Loftus. 

One of the major things claimed by the New Testament in support of Jesus’ life and mission is that Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy (Luke 24:26–27; Acts 3:17–24). If God cannot predict the future as time moves farther and farther into the distance, as I questioned earlier, then neither can any prophet who claims to speak for God. As we will see with regard to the virgin birth of Jesus, none of the Old Testament passages in the original Hebrew prophetically applied singularly and specifically to Jesus. [In chapter 18, "Was Jesus Born of a Virgin in Bethlehem?"]. Early Christian preachers simply went into the Old Testament looking for verses that would support their view of Jesus. They took these Old Testament verses out of context and applied them to Jesus in order to support their views of his life and mission.9