Writings and Resources on Religion, Science, and Politics
How can one say it to friends?
It isn’t our fault.
It isn’t our fault if the people who raised us, and the people who raised them, were given bad information by other well-meaning but misled people. People like Ken Ham and Kent Hovind.
Or that you simply could not check out the legitimacy of information sources back then, at least not the way you can now.
In looking at Ken Ham, [Read more…]
Well, it seems I’ve been ousted from a blog for the first time, ostensibly because I didn’t talk enough about facts. Though for the life of me, I would say it was more because I challenged a few sacred cows than anything else.
In any case, I have found a few belated comments in response to my remarks on the same thread. They were thoughtful and cogent, so I think they deserve a response. No need for good discussion to die.
Sadly, I don’t really have a great deal of my own initial comments. But – *trumpeting heralds* – one of my interlocutors was good enough to copy/paste most of what I said. Those comments will be below, and then I’ll respond in additional comment bubbles following.
Cheers,
Matt
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
~ Anonymous
I first read about the Cargo Cults from Hitchens, then found another such discussion from Dawkins. I was glad to see that the Dawkins chapter has been captured on YouTube with some, albeit not terribly extensive, footage of the believers themselves. Here I will venture only three brief observations:
1. Modern, Western people possess no genetic superiority to these villagers. We are running the same mental “hardware”, so to speak. The only difference is that we are educated and indoctrinated differently.
2. Christianity was started among an initial crop of believers with generally low levels of education and literacy, in a poor and oppressed region. And it was rejected as nonsensical by the educated class of the same region.
3. Arguments made by NT Wright and others that fully-orbed religions such as Christianity require long periods of time to develop are simply mistaken. And like the Cargo Cults, Christianity can be demonstrated as having acquired nearly all of its material from prior myths and cults.
Reblog:
Nathan Pratt pens an impactful autobiography in this post, which provided me with a number of strong resonance points as I read it. His path away from Christianity came from a different angle, but the struggle to understand and the responses from others in his life are eerily familiar. A recommended read. I wept.
Something I’d like to get out of the way immediately is that this post is going to be very honest. It’s a brief history of my religious upbringing, my crisis of faith and the final pushes to search for truth. Nothing I’ll say in this post is said out of anger or malice. It’s an honest portrayal of the extreme difficulty of leaving something you’d held to be truth for almost 30 years. I imagine that some of the topics and points will offend, but please read to the end.
One of the more frustrating things to come out of leaving religion is that so many theists think I haven’t thought this out. That I’m just going through a phase. I’d be willing to wager that I’ve gone much farther in my pursuit of truth than about any believer out there. I’ve put a staggering amount of time into this journey…
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Tell a devout Christian that his wife is cheating on him, or that frozen yogurt can make a man invisible, and he is likely to require as much evidence as anyone else, and to be persuaded only to the extent that you give it.
Tell him that the book he keeps by his bed was written by an invisible deity who will punish him with fire for eternity if he fails to accept its every incredible claim about the universe, and he seems to require no evidence whatsoever.
~ Sam Harris (link)
These sort of statements are the kind with which we Christians flatly disagree. We find them [Read more…]
The Holy Spirit is that little piece of me that I like to call God.
Not long ago, a friend sent an email announcement to me and some others, outlining a plan to go into the missionary field. The email cited God’s leading and their prayerful consideration. It also stated that this consideration had begun when he heard God speak to him, audibly. I’ve heard claims to hear the audible Voice of the Lord before, but I will admit that it has been some time. And as with everyone I’ve known who claimed to have received the Big Call on the red telephone, the experience left my friend brimming with a sense of calling and purpose. The conversation that followed between us was both respectful and quite long. The story sounded so very familiar. It sounded like a story that I myself would once have told.
In my younger days, I walked in the Spirit quite fervently, or so I thought. [Read more…]
As Christians, we cite the miracles of Jesus or Moses or the apostles as evidences of the divine commission under which they walked. That is, their teachings and message are validated as being from God by the testimony of the miracles they did. We believe God was in their words, because God was clearly in their actions.
Indeed, Augustine speaks the mind of the church:
I should not be a Christian, but for the miracles.
~ St. Augustine, cited from Blaise Pascal, “Thoughts”
But not so fast. Miracles can only serve as proof if the miracles themselves are on firm footing.
Challenge: provide example, if you can, for a single instance of miracle, as recorded in the Bible, which can be verified through physical evidence.
Perhaps a softer challenge would be more charitable. Since the events in question are in the past, perhaps a more historically-oriented phrasing would be better fitted.
Challenge: provide example, if you can, for a single instance of miracle, as recorded in the Bible, which can be verified by a non-Biblical, contemporary witness to the event.
This softer challenge, even if met, would not really demonstrate all that much. But it matters little in any case. The prospects for either type of verification are rather dim indeed. Nevertheless, we Christians routinely believe that un-verified miracles can be taken as verification that our teachings came from God. But we do not have such support. Instead, we have a circular claim set. It does not withstand even mild scrutiny. In that way, Christian miracles are quite the same as Mormon or Muslim miracles. True to a tee, definitive in meaning, solidly supporting the faith in question, and entirely and consistently unverifiable.
The miracle tales are good stories. We should probably leave them at that and adjust our claims accordingly. I advise a sustained effort to flip the rocks over, to check under the hood. There is simply nothing there.
In keeping with my affinity for educational visual aids, I simply couldn’t resist adding this one to the lineup. Excellent work from Simon Davies @ www.Facebook.com/HumanOdyssey. Thanks to Seth Andrews at TTA for the Facebook post.
My own thoughts… I had a conversation with a friend quite recently, and he asked me what I thought “the truth” was. I told him that at bottom, I think religion is simply something that people like to do. We fear death. We fear uncertainty. And we fear insignificance. Religion gives us an incantation against the parts of our own minds that grasp these realities. Further, we Christians are not special, and we do not have corroborating evidences that our competing faiths lack. The mirage of uniqueness grows from the soil of ignorance. We do not understand “the others”, and so we do not understand ourselves. Only deep reading about our faith from outsiders, and about other faiths from insiders, will dispel the fog. And visuals like this are an excellent help.
Reblog Commentary:
To conclude the prior observations with regard to Harold Camping and his passing, two further reblog posts prove warranted. The first is this one from John Zande, in which he has compiled a robust list of apocalyptic doomsayers and referenced other research on how grim the US statistics really stand. A taste:
All told, in the last fifty-six generations (1,700 years) there have been more than three-hundred prominent captains of Christianity who have announced with excited yips of childlike anticipation that their god was about to lay waste to all life on earth. In this generation alone there have been over forty major public incidents where socially-reckless, apocalypse-hungry Christian leaders have proclaimed that their god was here and it was time to die… and when the captains speak easily persuadable, astoundingly gullible congregants regretfully listen. Today a staggering 41% of US citizens (130,000,000 adults) believe that their Middle Eastern god will commence its mass extinction of all creatures in their lifetime.
Few Christians will admit it because few Christians even recognise it, but they are members of a Death Cult; a degenerate, death-anxious, exclusively fatalistic religion that has since the Hammer of the Arians(Bishop Hilary of Poitiers) predicted the mass liquidation of all earthly species in 365 CE produced a continuous supply of socially derelict luminaries who’ve longed for nothing short of the total and complete annihilation of our home world. Now, granted, like an awkward uncle it’s something most liberal churches try not to bellow about from the pulpit, but let there be no doubt, Christianity (like Judaism and Islam) is an anticipatory religion; a sect almost wholly fixated on the expectations (and apprehension) of a single and supposedly inescapable future event: the apocalypse detailed in John’s Revelation where all but “saved” Christians (perhaps as few as 144,000) will be butchered by the Middle Eastern Christian god…. and it’s…
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After the past year’s study, I was astonished to learn what leading Christian thinkers actually believed about the Bible, about explanations of evil, and about cosmic/human origins. It was distressing because I believe many of these views are largely unknown to the common man in the pews. I realized just how lost our intellectual vanguard actually was, and how defeated our claims stood on the battlefield of evidence.
The following YouTube video is a compilation of 20 top Christian academics talking about God, the cosmos, the problem of evil, and other topics. Each interview excerpt is long enough not to be taken out of context, and the assemblage is very interesting. Many of these scholars were recommended to me during the past year, and they are A-listers within the Christian scholarly community. I have read their longer works and watched their lectures and debates on YouTube (N.T. Wright, Alvin Plantinga, William Dembski, John Walton, Alister McGrath, etc.). This video captures the project of textual rehabilitation and doctrinal rehabilitation that I have seen at the bottom of the bookpile, and it does so in about 25 minutes.
It illustrates what I previously wrote in the Moral Pivot:
It was our own scholars, and no one else’s, who taught me to despair.
A must watch. Kudos and thanks to J Pararajasingham. Be sure to check out his other videos on YouTube.
Enjoyed the lucid observations of this believer’s post.
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