Watch the expression on the face of David Silverman (of the American Atheists) when Bill O’Reilly gives his argument for god’s existence.

Steven Colbert shows that O’Reilly seems to be very fond of this argument.

<td style='padding:2px 1px 0px 5px;' colspan='2'Bill O’Reilly Proves God’s Existence – Neil deGrasse Tyson

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Neil deGrasse Tyson oversimplifies his explanation for the tides by suggesting that it is entirely due to the moon’s gravitational pull that changes direction as the Earth rotates. That would explain only one ebb and flow a day. The effects of both the Sun and the moon are required to create the two daily tides.

Does O’Reilly really not know that we understand tides so well and that it is not an inexplicable mystery that requires god? Or is he, like some religious people, simply going through the motions of trying to find things to buttress a belief that he suspects deep down is insupportable, because is too scared to go against prevailing orthodoxy?

Laws against blasphemy constitute the ultimate concession by religious people that their god does not exist. I think religious leaders secretly realize that the non-existence of god is such an obvious fact that allowing people to publicly say so might cause the whole religious house of cards to topple, and so they have to resort to legal measures to prevent people from pointing out the absurdity of their beliefs.

But blasphemy laws are not only stupid, they are evil. We currently have the terrible situation of a Pakistani Christian woman who is under a death sentence for blasphemy and two days ago a Pakistan provincial governor was shot to death by his own bodyguard because the governor had opposed this blasphemy law. What is particularly disgusting is that mainstream religious organizations in Pakistan are lauding the murder and militant clerics in Pakistan have been protesting any changes to this barbaric law.

The Islamic countries seem to be the worst perpetrators of this blasphemy evil. What is worse is that they are trying to gain international acceptance for their medieval ideas, using the United Nations as a vehicle. In November 2010, the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs Committee of the 192-member General Assembly voted 76-64 (42 abstentions) in favor of a resolution condemning the ‘vilification of religion’. While this is a smaller margin than last year (81 to 55 with 43 abstentions) and is non-binding, it is still disturbing that so many countries would support it.

I described yesterday how I use the Noah’s flood story to get Biblical literalists to confront the fact that the story, like many other stories in the Bible, describes god as a monstrous genocidal maniac. In this post, I will describe some of the ways they respond.

Last year, I wrote about a discussion with a religious woman who stopped me on the sidewalk outside my office to hand me some Jesus literature. At some point she started talking about Hitler, as such people invariably do. I reproduce part of the Q and A I had with the Jesus woman.

Q: Do you believe that Noah’s flood actually occurred? A: Yes.

Q: In that flood, god deliberately murdered all but the eight people in Noah’s family, including tiny infants. Wasn’t that worse than anything Hitler had done? Didn’t that make god the worst genocidal maniac in history? A: No.

Q: Why not? A: Because all those people died because of their sins.

Q: What about the infants? Doesn’t it bother you that god murdered vast numbers of tiny newborn infants by drowning them? What had they done to deserve that awful fate?

At this point, she started making stuff up, the way that religious people do when they have no answer. They think they can get away with this because they assume that the person they are talking to does not know the Bible. The doctrine of original sin that says that even newborn babies are also sinners has always been a tough sell, even for the most ardent believers, and she did not even try to pull that one on me. She instead said that god had immediately gathered up in his arms all the babies who had died in the flood. It is a nice cozy image but irrelevant. A murderer who cuddles his victim immediately afterward is still a murderer, and even creepy to boot. It is also totally fictitious. I told her that the Bible said no such thing. As far as the Bible was concerned, in drowning babies god was carrying out his plan exactly as envisaged and I challenged her to show me where in the Bible it said that god had scooped up the drowned babies.

She was stumped and asked me to wait and went off to get reinforcements from the rest of her group and came back with a middle-aged guy and a younger man. But not only could they not back up her assertion of god’s act by providing me with biblical verses (which I knew they couldn’t) they had no better responses to the questions I posed to them.

Q: Is murdering a baby an evil act? A: Yes.

Q: Is drowning huge numbers of babies evil? A: Yes.

Q: Wouldn’t a huge number of babies have drowned in the flood? A: Yes.

Q: So aren’t you worshipping an evil, infant-murdering god? A: No, because if god does something, it cannot be evil.

At that point, I could not help laughing at the absurdity of the logic. When I asked the same question (in a private email correspondence) of someone named Henry (who also believes that Noah’s flood actually happened and is not perturbed by that act), he too gave an incredible reply: “You have to take into account that God is the creator and he has the right to destroy His creation for reasons He chooses.”

In other words, we are merely possessions of god that he can torture or murder at will because he created us and thus owns us. This extraordinary position was also taken by some unidentified religious person to Christopher Hitchens (starting at the 6:55 mark). In other words, the same people who insist that each of us are precious in god’s sight, that he knows each hair on our head, and that he cares about our personal welfare can, when cornered, turn on a dime and say that he has the perfect right to treat us as if we are disposable commodities, to be tortured and murdered at his whim, just because he created us.

I also had a very similar exchange with a commenter to an earlier post where he tried to justify god’s command to stone to death rebellious children by arguing two points: that someone who rebels against his parents is also rebelling against god and is thus on the road to evil and will end up committing murder and rape, and so being stoned to death was a good thing, a form of pre-emptive crime fighting. This is of course a patently ridiculous argument and not to be taken seriously. But the other argument was the same as Henry’s, that since god owns us, he can do what he wants with us. The ironic thing was that this exchange was in response to my post about how religion can make good people do bad things, sort of proving my point. Only a truly religious believer could justify stoning to death of children.

It does seem to be unavoidably the case that if you believe in god and take these allegedly holy books as revelations of his divine will and instructions for how you should behave, you are ultimately forced into a masochistic relationship with your god, where you accept any and all atrocities committed by god, even against you and your loved ones, because he is your master.

The only way out of this is to pick and choose what parts of the holy book you consider the ‘good bits’ and want to follow and create a tortuous re-interpretation of the plain text of the words of the ‘bad bits’ that it makes a mockery of the holy book being divinely inspired, because what you are doing is imposing an externally derived ethical sensibility that has no religious basis onto your supposedly divinely inspired book. If you are willing to do that, why use the book as a moral basis at all?

There is something disturbingly pathological about the relationship of Biblical literalists to their imaginary god. Having someone demand that you love and worship him even while he abuses you is bad enough. To comply with such a demand when you can simply walk away seems to me to be a telling indicator of a masochistic personality.

I wrote recently about my email correspondence with ‘Henry’ (not his real name). In the course of my probing as to what he actually believed, I asked him whether he believed in Noah’s flood (the story begins at Genesis 6:9) as a historical event. Christians who believe this to be true tend to paint with a broad brush and gloss over the details. For them, it is a short story the moral of which is a just god punishing evil humankind and starting over with a clean slate, using just the righteous Noah and his family. The whole story is treated as if it were a road (or rather boat) trip for Noah and his family and all the other people are ignored. If they dwell on the details at all, they consist of quaint images of cute animals marching two by two into the ark.

I don’t let believers like Henry get away with this sanitized version of the story. I ask them, if they think the story is true, to imagine the details of what must have come before the supposedly happy ending of a new dawn for humankind with doves and rainbows and perhaps Celine Dion singing in the background. I ask them to think of the steady non-stop rain, the relentlessly rising water, people panicking as they realize that this is no ordinary flood, parents gathering up their infants and children to save them, climbing to the tops of buildings or trees or desperately seeking higher ground, hoping against hope that the rains will cease, and their increasing terror as it does not.

Once they get as high as they can, they will do what parents instinctively do which is try and save their children, holding them up above the water even as they themselves get covered and are unable to breathe, wishing for some miracle to save their babies at the last moment. But nothing happens. The rising waters swirl over the terrified infants and soon even their gurgles subside to a deadly silence as they suffer ghastly deaths by drowning. [Update: Commenter Jeff alerts me to this image by Gustave Dore that captures my words almost exactly.]

Meanwhile god is watching all this and does not lift a finger to help. At any moment he could have chosen to save at least the infants who have not done anything wrong, unless you believe in the truly idiotic doctrine of original sin. But god does not do what any ordinary person would feel compelled to do when seeing others in danger, and that is to try and save them.

I ask religious people how they can possibly believe in such a god. I do this because if you take the flood event to be historically true, surely it must rank as the worst act of genocide in history, revealing a truly despicable god, one who is a callous mass murderer. Anyone who takes the Noah story to be true has forfeited any right to speak of morality or the existence of a loving god.

Religious people get increasingly uncomfortable as I describe the above sequence of events because I don’t think they have ever actually thought these things through and their religious leaders never go into detail either, for obvious reasons. And this is just one story. The Bible is full of such ghastly stories of a cruel and vengeful and merciless and vain god. This is why any thinking and compassionate person who actually reads the Bible has a good chance of becoming an atheist.

Most religious people are not really taught the Bible except in the highly sanitized form they learn in Sunday school as children. I have in our house something called a Children’s Bible and it omits all the horrendous elements of the stories, like Abraham’s willingness to murder his son, god’s commands to stone to death rebellious children and women who are not virgins on their wedding night and people who merely gather wood on the Sabbath, not to mention all the rape and incest and genocide. It reads more like an epic adventure story. This is reasonable for something written for children but the problem is that many religious people never grow out of it. Their knowledge of the Bible progresses little beyond their childhood indoctrination. For them, ignorance is truly bliss.

Next: Some actual conversations with believers on this topic.

What better way to begin the new year than by having the irrepressible Pat Condell putting religion in its place?

Jesus and Mo pick up on a peculiar way of arguing by Christians who will quote the Bible to argue why the Bible is true.

It is not only Christians who do this, though. I have heard Jews argue that their religion must be true because it is the only one in which god spoke to a huge number of people at the same time and thus they could not all be lying or deluded. Their source for this claim? The Old Testament.

I also had a discussion with two Mormon evangelists who came to my door. They claimed that the Book of Mormon must be true because it correctly predicted things. When I pointed out that the book was written after the events that it allegedly ‘predicted’, they disagreed saying that the book was written before the events but was discovered by Joseph Smith after. Their evidence? The Book of Mormon itself.

It is kind of amusing demonstration of how the desperate desire to believe can result in people abandoning their reasoning skills.

The call-in radio program on the Pew survey on religious knowledge (in which atheists and agnostics turned out to know the most about religion) was interesting. The other members of the panel were Tim Beal, a professor of religious studies at my own university (whose field of specialization is the Old Testament), and Reverend Marvin McMickle, the pastor of a Baptist church in Cleveland. (You can listen to the program here and it is also available as a downloadable podcast.)

The discussion got quite interesting around the 21-minute mark when Beal pointed out that many professors of religious studies are, in fact, atheists. I followed up by pointing out that the more one knew what was in the Bible or the more one learned about the background to the Bible, the more likely one was to become an unbeliever. Most people’s knowledge of religion is what they learned as stories when they were children in Sunday school and does not get much more sophisticated than that. I pointed out that almost anyone who went to seminary and studied the Bible learned that much of what they believed had no basis and that this came as a shock to many, moving them towards unbelief. I quoted the study by Daniel Dennett and Linda La Scola on unbelieving priests where they said that a common joke they heard from them was that “If you emerge from seminary still believing in God, you haven’t been paying attention.”
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There is a move to dump the present speaker of the Texas house of representatives because he is a Jew, with some saying “We elected a house with Christian, conservative values. We now want a true Christian, conservative running it.”

But of course they resent any suggestion that they are bigoted towards Jews. As one of them said, “My favorite person that’s ever been on this earth is a Jew… How can they possibly think that [I am a bigot] if Jesus Christ is a Jew, and he’s my favorite person that’s ever been on this earth?”

Who can argue with logic like that?

As one who sang in a choir for the annual Christmas carol service during my college days, I think that the best thing about Christmas is the music. (I am talking about the carols only, not the cheesy Christmas ‘songs’, almost all of which I detest with a passion.) I do not agree with the theology implicit in the carols, but the music is great and the general sentiments of peace and goodwill are worthy.

Some people in a shopping mall food court get an unexpected treat, courtesy of a flash mob.

Yes, boys and girls, Thanksgiving is over and you know what that means. It’s time to start the War on Christmas! So let the games begin!

First off, the New York Times reports on the unveiling of a new billboard ad campaign by four different secular groups to encourage atheists and even just doubters to realize that there are a lot of unbelievers out there and that it is safe to come out and join them.

Right on cue, we have religious believers begin to whine about how atheists are being mean to believers by spreading such messages during the Christmas season. In my local paper the Plain Dealer, columnist Regina Brett gets the ball rolling, criticizing the ad campaign. To be fair to her, she tries to be even-handed, also decrying the demonization of atheists. Hers is a “Why can’t we all be nice to each other during this holiday season?” kind of column.

This is fair enough but her message is confused. As with most believers, she sees statements about disbelief as aggressive while statements of belief are taken as the norm. So being nice to one another means that atheists should either shut up or use gentle humor or word things carefully so as not to cause cognitive dissonance among believers.

For example, Brett condemns as ‘just mean’ one billboard which has an image of Santa saying “Yes Virginia … there is no God”. She does not seem to get the humor of one imaginary entity parodying a well-known quote to assert that another imaginary entity does not exist.

She also puzzlingly says that “God is love. It says that in the Bible. But I doubt that will end up on a billboard to recruit atheists.” She’s right, it won’t, but what’s her point? Why would an atheist campaign even consider advertising that god is love when we don’t believe that god exists in the first place? Religious people are the ones who, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, claim that god is love, and they put that message up all over the place

What believers don’t seem to get is that many atheists enjoy Christmas as a secular holiday (which is its actual origin), a good excuse to relax with friends and family. If religious people want to overlay the holiday with all kinds of god messages, they are welcome to do so. What we don’t enjoy is being told that we have to accept the whole god package as well.

If we want to secularize the holiday and greet each other with “Seasons’ Greetings” or “Happy Holidays” or even “Heathen’s Greetings” or “Reason’s Greetings”, then religious people will just have to learn to live with it, just the way we atheists and non-Christians live with overtly religious symbolism all around us, especially during December. Many of us even say “Merry Christmas” and refer to it as the Christmas season. It really does not bother us because Christmas has, thanks to the relentless merchandizing of businesses, become a secular holiday.