Category: Reality/the natural world

“Their only hope of being rescued from the hell Hitler has made of Europe”

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 6/09/2023

The ongoing scandal of god’s negligence

It’s not a stretch to say that the Bible is one of Christian theology’s biggest burdens. It portrays a god that theologians have worked so hard to modify and refine; the very rough edges have to be knocked off. Among many other negatives, the Christian god is a terror-and-guilt specialist, because nothing you say or think escapes his notice. This is Jesus-script in Matthew 12:36-37: “I tell you, on the day of judgment you will have to give an account for every careless word you utter, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.” The apostle Paul also had an opinion on god getting even: “…on the day when, according to my gospel, God through Christ Jesus judges the secret thoughts of all” (Romans 2:16)—after all, how else would prayer work if god doesn’t know your secret thoughts? Hence devout Christians are confident that their god closely monitors every human being—all eight billion of us.
 

But here’s the problem: if this god is paying such super close attention, then he/she/it must also be aware of the pain, grief, and suffering of each person—and the dangers we all face because of what other people are thinking, saying, planning. This god’s failure to intervene—Christians claim he is all powerful, caring, and competent—presents theologians with a contradiction they’ve never been able to explain. Their god concept is remarkably incoherent: it just doesn’t make sense. To avoid this head-on collision with reality, clergy and theologians are sure their god has cured a few cancers (but obviously, by no means all), warms the hearts of the devout, and works in mysterious ways. All of their excuses for god’s carelessness remain pathetically inadequate. 

Barbara Tuchman, in her classic analysis of the Black Plague in the 14th century, noted that the unprecedented suffering shook Christian theology to its foundations: “If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings.” (p. 129, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century)   

The horrors of the 20th century have done even more damage to confidence in the Christian god. A few months ago, I published an article here on the theological implications of the Great War, 1914-1918: World War I: Why Didn’t It Put an End to Belief in God? The world succumbed to even more chaos a couple of decades later with the outbreak of World War II, which was an inevitable outcome of the hatreds and resentments in the wake of WWI—and the very flawed peace treaty that ended it.

Especially because of the Holocaust, the theological implications of World War II are even more devastating. The Nazi death machine, driven by Hitler’s blind hatreds, murdered six million people. Theologians claiming that there’s a good, powerful god watching over humankind (“This is my father’s world”) should just shut up and disappear—their theobabble is an insult. Another dodge sometimes used to protect god/theology is Holocaust denialism: it’s all a big lie. I have been studying the Holocaust for a long time, and such study is possible because this horror is one of the most thoroughly documented events in human history. The Nazis considered their elimination of so many Jews a great service to the world, and kept careful records. For a glimpse of this, see the 60 Minutes special, The Secret Nazi Archive that Documented the Holocaust. There are, as well, so many memoirs written by those who survived by escaping, or being liberated from the concentration camps. Both world wars are massively documented, with so many accounts of suffering, courage, and bravery.

The title of this article is a quote from Varian Fry’s book, Surrender on Demand, published in 1945. He was a 32-year-old American who headed for occupied France on a mission to rescue people fleeing from the Nazis. He had been sent by a committee whose mission it was to get as many people out alive as possible, a task that faced huge obstacles. He ended up staying on the job for thirteen months, until he was forced to leave by French authorities, working with the gestapo: the notorious regime in Vichy, headed by Philippe Pétain. In his Foreword included for the first time in the 1997 edition published in conjunction with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Fry

wrote about his expulsion:

“…I left France for the last time, left leaving behind so many refugees who had come to identify me with their only hope of being rescued from the hell Hitler has made of Europe.” (p. 242-243, Surrender on Demand)

Fry was based in Marseille. The book is a harrowing account of rescue missions undertaken at enormous risk, helping people flee France via the Mediterranean and across the Pyrenees on foot into Spain. Fry and his team had to arrange the forging of passports and exit visas, had to deal with the unpredictability of Spain’s changing policy on admitting refugees, had to work overtime concealing their activities from authorities. One of their primary headaches was the U.S. Department of State, which feared admitting refugees because some of them might be spies and other undesirables.    

But Fry was motivated by the reality he saw on the ground. He was alarmed when he thought of 

“…two young men who were brought through Marseille from a concentration camp in Africa and handed over to the Gestapo to be shot because they had had the courage to defy Hitler when they were members of the seaman’s union at Hamburg, years ago. All the other men who had been dragged out of the French concentration camps and handed over to the Nazis to be tortured, hanged, beheaded or shot.” (p. 244, Surrender on Demand)   

One of the successes of Fry’s team was the rescue of Konrad Heiden, a German historian who had written a scathing account of Hitler’s success, Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power—744 pages. On the dustjacket of the 1944 edition of this book, these words are under the title: “Using sensational new material, the world authority on Hitler tells the whole story of the Nazi road to chaos.” If the Nazis had caught Heiden, he would have been executed.  He made it to the U.S., eventually became a citizen, and died in New York City in 1966. I was lucky to find a copy on Amazon of the 1944 edition for just $11. I’m about 200 pages into it right now, and Heiden is indeed merciless in his depiction of the nonentity who rose to power—in large part because of his skills as an orator. He also describes in detail Hitler’s ferocious hatred of Jews. We cannot be surprised at all that the Holocaust became Nazi policy.  

One of Fry’s concerns was to get people—on his special list to be rescued—released from French concentration camps. 

“The conditions in French concentration camps could, with difficulty, have been worse. There was no deliberate torture, as in Nazi concentration camps, but there was everything else: cold, hunger, parasites and disease… one man wrote that rat meat had become a much-sought delicacy in his camp…dysentery was endemic and typhoid epidemic. And everywhere there were lice, fleas, and bedbugs” (p. 124, Surrender on Demand).   

Despite warning from friends that it was far too dangerous for him, Fry decided to go to Vichy to try persuade officials to release people from these camps. 

“Going to Vichy, even from Marseille, was like making a journey into the night. Vichy was a compound of fear, rumor and intrigue. The town itself is one of the dullest watering-spots imaginable. It must be bad enough in the ‘season’ in normal times; in winter, in conquered France, it was horrible” (p. 125, Surrender on Demand).

Fry went to the American Embassy to plead his case—“they were neither very polite nor particularly sympathetic”—but was seen only by an assistant. “You must understand that we maintain friendly relations with the French government.” [That is, the Nazi-controlled puppet regime.] “Naturally, in the circumstances, we can’t support an American citizen who is helping people evade French law” (p. 128). 

Fry’s mission was to help people escape from the Hitler-hell.

After two weeks of frustration, Fry decided to head back to Marseille. “The train back was so crowded that we had to stretch out on the floor of the corridor, separated from one another by the bodies of other sleeping passengers, and chilled by the drafts and the total absence of heat” (p. 129).

Those in power—in Vichy and at the U.S. State Department—eventually forced Varian Fry to return home. But it has been estimated that he played a role in helping well more than 2,000 folks escape. The Wikipedia article on Fry includes a list of more than sixty of the prominent people he aided, including Konrad Heiden and Marc Chagall and his wife Bella Rosenfeld.  

Fry then pursued a career in journalism, but was tormented by his experience in France. He went into therapy, but continued to go downhill. His first marriage ended in divorce, and he separated from his second wife. He died from a cerebral hemorrhage at age 60 in 1967. But his heroic efforts in France have been widely recognized. In 1991 the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council awarded him the Eisenhower Liberation Medal, and in 1994 Israel’s national Holocaust Memorial included him on its list, Righteous Among the Nations, the first American to be so honored. In Marseille, there is a plaza named after him. 

History keeps reminding us that Christian theology fails, because it cannot explain how an attentive god can be so negligent. Reading Surrender on Demand drives home this point. Varian Fry saw so much suffering and anguish that seems to have escaped god’s notice—this Christian deity who is supposed to be monitoring every human being so closely.

How can that possibly be true? In Christian Shakespeare’s book, Bunker 1945: The Last Ten Days of Adolf Hitler, we find an account of the ferocious fighting as the Russians took Berlin, while Hitler cowered in his bunker: 

“They also sprayed devastating machine gun fire into those buildings where German resistance was identified. Those defending behind barricades were blasted out by Soviet artillery that had been brought up and fired horizontally straight at them, killing and wounding many instantly. High explosive shells soon littered the streets with vomit-inducing images of body parts—a hand here, a torso there, half of a severed head were as common as the rubble.” (p. 92, Kindle)

Each one of those severed hands, torsos, and heads had been blasted from the bodies of men whom god was watching: he witnessed everything. So we are assured by Christian theology based on the New Testament. The attempts to get god off the hook can be so pathetic. “But he gave us free will—so get over it” is one excuse offered to explain god’s failure to act. I can’t imagine a more egregious example of bad theology. This doesn’t make god look good.

We’d like Christians to do better, but the incoherence of their theology pretty much rules that out. Too many of their claims about god collide head-on. The job of the clergy is to keep this from being oh so obvious. “Just take it on faith” is a diversion, and ceases to work when folks take a close, careful look at the history of horrendous human suffering.   

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

His YouTube channel is here. He has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here. 

How to Change the Minds of Believers

Here’s the link to this article.

John W. Loftus | January 31, 2023 | Editor’s Choice, Kiosk Article

After spending nearly two decades trying to change the minds of Christian believers—my focus in what follows—I still don’t fully know how to do it. Regardless, I’ll share ten helpful tips for readers who, like me, want to bang their heads against a wall. I think that it’s worth doing despite the low odds of success, for any success helps rid the world of the harms of religion. Besides, one of the greatest challenges is to change minds, and I like challenges. Plus, I’ve learned a great deal by attempting this important underappreciated task.

If you choose to follow in my footsteps, begin where you are. You may not feel qualified. But you can question. If you do that, you’ll do well. Nonbelievers are first and foremost questioners, doubters, skeptics. We are nonbelievers because we are more willing than most to question everything. You can’t go wrong in doing that. There are plenty of beliefs that are not just wrong, but palpably wrong. Question them. As you get better at asking questions, learn to use the Socratic method. Use leading questions to help believers begin to doubt their certainties.[1]

I understand the cognitive bias known as the backfire effect. It shows that challenging believers with facts makes most of them dig in deeper, causing them to double down in defense of their faith. If their faith survives, their faith is strengthened. While ridicule and satire have an effect on groups of people[2], keeping personal encounters friendly will be more effective with people that you talk to. We never know if the seed sown might eventually blossom into a changed mind. Most believers cannot be reasoned out of their faith because they were never reasoned into it, but this is still the best that we can do. With enough encounters it might have a cumulative effect, especially if the believer experiences a crisis in his/her life.[3]

Belief is a product of ignorance in varying degrees. So there’s much to inform them about. As you proceed, inform them about what you know, whatever that is. You will learn as you go. Study as you go, too. The more that you know, the better that you’ll do.

(1) I would start in some cases by informing believers of the role cultural indoctrination plays in the adoption of Christianity, and why it’s an unreliable guide for adopting the correct religious faith, if there is one. Given the accidents of when and where we were born, and how we were raised, our religious faith was unthinkingly adopted just as surely as was our nationality and preferred cuisine. So at least once in their lives, believers should seriously question what they believe. Consider it a rite of passage to adulthood if nothing else.

(2) I would inform believers how hard it is to break free from one’s cultural indoctrination, like quitting smoking but much harder. Research professor of psychology Jonas Kaplan did a study of the human brain and concluded: “The brain can be thought of as a very sophisticated self-defense machine.” He added: “If there is a belief that the brain considers part of who we are, it turns on its self-defense mode to protect that belief.” Accordingly, “the brain reacts to belief challenges in the same way that it reacts to perceived physical threats.”[4] To honestly seek the truth we must determine to disarm the brain. Analogous to Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is to recognize that we have a brain problem. It won’t allow us to entertain facts that disrupt our comfort zone, our tribalistic beliefs. It will do everything it can to reject them.

(3) I would inform believers about the cognitive biases that act like viruses on our brains. They adversely affect the ability of our brains to honestly evaluate our religious cultural indoctrination. Just knowing this is significant. Knowledge serves as a vaccine. It helps disarm the brain.

Confirmation bias is the mother of all cognitive biases. We are in constant search of confirmation; hardly ever do we seek disconfirmation. We reject and dismiss out of hand what does not comport to existing beliefs, and easily embrace that which does. There are other relevant biases, like anchoring bias, in-group bias, belief blind spot bias, belief bias effect, illusory truth effect, agent detection bias, objectivity illusion bias, the ostrich effect, hindsight bias, and so on.

These biases lead us to reason fallaciously. Believers are susceptible to fallacies like tu quoque (“You too!”—an appeal to hypocrisy/whataboutism), possibiliter ergo probabiliter (“possibly, therefore probably”), straw man/person, argument from ignorance, appeal to popularity (ad populum), equivocation, false analogy, post hoc ergo propter hoc (Latin for “after this, therefore because of this”), cherry picking, hasty generalization, circular reasoning, red herring, non sequitur, and especially special pleading.

(4) I would inform believers that the only way to disarm the brain (yes, basically the only way) is to adopt the perspective of a nonbeliever, an outsider to our indoctrinated religious beliefs. More than anything else, this can help the brain avoid cognitive biases in the honest search for truth. It will help force the believer’s brain to follow the objective evidence wherever it leads. Treat your own religion the way that you treat all other religions, with no double standards and no special pleadings. Assume that your own religion has the burden of proof. See if your faith survives.[5]

(5) At this point inform believers about their holy book and the theologies built on it. Most believers don’t read their Scriptures, or understand the doctrines of their sect-specific faiths. So encourage Christians to read the Bible. Have them read Judges 19-21 to see what the god of the Old Testament instructed the Hebrews to do. Then ask why anyone should trust anything that these bloodthirsty barbarians wrote down. Also ask them why that god commanded genocide and child sacrifice.[6]

The Bible debunks itself.[7] It contains forgeries and borrowed pagan myths, and is inconsistent within itself. It tells a plethora of ancient superstitious tales that don’t make any sense at all. It has a god that evolved from a polytheistic one who lives in the sky above the Earth, who does both good and bad, who makes room for both angels and demons, and who thinks that a god/human blood sacrifice can magically ransom us from the grip of the Devil (the first widely accepted atonement theory).

(6) Inform believers about the Church. The history of the Church, and of the people claiming to have the alleged Holy Spirit inside of them, reveals a continuous spectacle of atrocities such that its history is a damning indictment upon the god that they profess to believe in.[8]

(7) Inform believers about science and how it works. It’s answering the very mysteries that produce religious belief in the first place. The fewer mysteries that we have in the world, then the less we feel the need to believe.[9] The crowning discovery of science is evolution. On this issue, as with everything that I’m saying, it helps to provoke believers to do further research. Ask them what would make Richard Dawkins say:

Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact…. It is the plain truth that we are cousins of chimpanzees, somewhat more distant cousins of monkeys, more distant cousins still of aardvarks and manatees, yet more distant cousins of bananas and turnips … continue the list as long as desired…. It didn’t have to be true, but it is. We know this because a rising flood of evidence supports it. Evolution is a fact…. No reputable scientist disputes it.[10]

Be sure to point out the implications of evolution: that there was no Adam & Eve, no original sin, and no need for a savior.

(8) Inform believers about the need for objective evidence in support of the miracle claims in the Bible.[11] There is no objective evidence for any of them, just a few ancient testimonies that we cannot verify.[12]

The way to honestly evaluate miracle claims is to focus on clearly obvious concrete test cases like a virgin-birthed deity.[13] It’s not to construct hypothetical miracle scenarios, to wrestle with questions over what we consider to be objective evidence, or to specify the exact demarcation point between ordinary claims and extraordinary ones.

For instance, believers will claim that nonbelievers have no objective criteria for what counts as extraordinary evidence. To cut to the chase, I respond that I know what does not count as extraordinary evidence. Second-, third-, or 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, which were copied by scribes and theologians who had no qualms about including forgeries. I also know that subjective feelings or experiences or inner voices don’t count as extraordinary evidence; nor do tales told by someone who tells others that his writings are inspired; nor does putative divine communication through dreams or visions. Once these facts are acknowledged, call on believers to do the math. Just subtract and see what’s left.

(9) Inform believers about statistics. Statistician David Hand shows us that “extraordinarily rare events are anything but. In fact, they’re commonplace. Not only that, we should all expect to experience a miracle roughly once every month.” He is not a believer in supernatural miracles, though. “No mystical or supernatural explanation is necessary to understand why someone is lucky enough to win the lottery twice, or is destined to be hit by lightning three times and still survive. All we need is a firm grounding in a powerful set of laws: the laws of inevitability, of truly large numbers, of selection, of the probability lever, and of near enough.”[14] There is a growing list of books making this same point. Extremely rare events are not miracles. Period. We should expect extremely rare events in our lives many times over. No gods made these events happen.

(10) Inform believers about the problem of horrendous suffering. This evidence is as close to a refutation of an omnipotent, omniscience, omnibenevolent God as is possible.[15] The way to honestly evaluate the compatibility of God and horrific suffering is not to specify the exact demarcation point when the suffering in our world is too much to coexist with a perfect deity. Nor is it to fuss much about whether God and horrendous suffering are logically impossible. Those questions are interesting, but in order to honestly evaluate this difficulty, the best arguments are evidential ones about clearly obvious concrete test cases like the Holocaust, or the massive numbers of children who suffer from malnutrition and die every year, or the kill or be killed law of predation in the animal world.

Notes

[1] See Peter Boghossian, A Manual for Creating Atheists (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2013). Anthony Magnabosco does this on a regular basis.

[2] See John W. Loftus, “On Justifying the Use of Ridicule and Mockery” (January 17, 2013). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2013/01/on-justifying-use-of-ridicule-and.html&gt;.

[3] This is one of five factors that can change minds. See Loftus, “Five Factors that Cause Christians to Lose Their Faith” (December 9, 2010). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2010/12/five-factors-that-cause-christians-to.html&gt;.

[4] See Loftus, “The Brain Treats Questions about Beliefs like Physical Threats. Can We Learn to Disarm It?” (January 14, 2018). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2018/01/the-brain-treats-questions-about.html&gt;.

[5] See Loftus (ed.), The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is True (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013).

[6] See Loftus, “The Hebrew Bible’s Disturbing Attitude Towards Human Sacrifice” (April 16, 2015). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2015/04/the-hebrew-bibles-disturbing-attitude.html&gt;.

[7] See Loftus, “The Bible Debunks Itself” (March 5, 2008). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2008/03/bible-debunks-itself-part-1.html&gt;.

[8] This is amply documented in Loftus (ed.), Christianity is not Great: How Faith Fails (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2014).

[9] See Loftus (ed.), Christianity in the Light of Science: Critically Examining the World’s Largest Religion (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2016).

[10] Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution (New York, NY: Free Press, 2009), pp. 8–9.

[11] See Loftus (ed.), The Case against Miracles (United States: Hypatia Press, 2019).

[12] See Loftus, “What’s Wrong with Using Bayes’ Theorem on Miracles?” (January 25, 2022). The Secular Web. <https://infidels.org/kiosk/article/whats-wrong-with-bayes-theorem/&gt;.

[13] See Loftus, “The Gateway to Doubting the Gospel Narratives is the Virgin Birth Myth” (March 5, 2008). Debunking Christianity blog. <https://www.debunking-christianity.com/2020/06/the-gateway-to-doubting-gospel.html&gt;.

[14] David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day (New York, NY: Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), pp. 197-199.

[15] See Loftus (ed.), God and Horrendous Suffering (Denver, CO: Global Center for Religious Research, 2021).

If We Can Know the “Gist” of What Jesus Said and Did … What’s the Gist?

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

June 10, 2023

I’m going to be discussing soon some of the things that appear to be “misremembered” about Jesus in our early sources, but first it’s important to emphasize some of the hugely critical positive things about memory – like, that most of the time we get it basically right.  Depending, of course, on what “basically” means!

Here’s how I discuss the matter in Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).

*******************

Remembering the Gist?

Let me make a point that may not be clear from what I have said so far about the psychology of memory.  In stressing the fact – which appears to be a fact – that memories are always constructed and therefore prone to error, even when they are quite vivid, I am not, I am decidedly not, saying that all of our memories are faulty or wrong.   Most of the time we remember pretty well, at least in broad outline.   Presumably, so too did eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.  As did the person who heard a story from an eyewitness may well have remembered in broad outline he was told.   And the person who heard a story from a neighbor whose cousin was married to a man whose father told him a story that he heard from a business associate whose wife once knew someone who was married to an eyewitness.   Probably in the latter case – which, as far-fetched as it sounds, may be pretty close to how most people were hearing stories about Jesus – a lot more would have been changed than in the case of an eyewitness telling someone the day after he saw something happen.   But my basic point here is that despite the faults of memory, we do obviously remember a lot of things, and the fundamental memories themselves can often be right.

This is a commonplace in the psychological study of memory.  We tend to remember the “gist” of an experience pretty well, even if the details get messed up.    You may not remember correctly (despite what you think) where, when, with whom, or how you heard about the Challenger explosion, or the results of the O. J. Simpson trial, or even (this is harder to believe, but it appears to be true) the attacks of 9/11.  But you do remember that you heard about the events, and you remember that they happened.

As we will see, this is an important point, because there are gist memories of Jesus recorded in the New Testament Gospels that are almost certainly accurate.  At the same time, there are a lot of details – and in fact entire episodes – that are almost certainly not accurate.   These are “memories” of things that didn’t actually happen.  They are distorted memories.

Still, many of the broad outlines that are narrated in the Gospels certainly  happen.  Much of the gist is correct.  One big question, then, is just how broad does a memory have to be in order to be considered a gist memory?   Different scholars may have different views about that.

John Dean as a Test Case

A famous example can demonstrate my point.   There is a much cited study done of both detailed and gist memories of a person who claimed to have, and was generally conceded to have, a very good memory:  John Dean, White House Counsel to Richard Nixon from July 1970 to April 1973.

During the Watergate hearings Dean testified in detail about dozens of specific conversations he had during the White House cover up.  In the course of the hearings he was asked how he could possibly remember such things.  He claimed to have a good memory in general.  But he also indicated that he had used later newspaper clippings about events in the White House to refresh his memory and to place himself back in the context of the events that were described.  It was after he publicly described his conversations with Nixon that the White House tapes were discovered.  With this new evidence of what was actually said on each occasion, one could look carefully at what Dean had earlier remembered as having been said, to see if he recalled both the gist and the details correctly.

That’s exactly what the previously mentioned Ulric Neisser did, in an intriguing article called “John Dean’s Memory: A Case Study.”  Neissser examined two specific conversations that took place in the Oval office, one on September 15, 1972 and the other on March 21, 1973, by comparing the transcript of Dean’s testimony with the actual recording of the conversation.  The findings were striking.[1]  Even when he was not elevating his own role and position (as he did), Dean got things wrong.  Lots of things wrong.  Even big things.

For example, the hearing that involved the September 15 conversation occurred nine months later.  The contrast between what Dean claimed was said and what really was said was sharp and striking.  In Neisser’s words:

Comparison with the transcript shows that hardly a word of Dean’s account is true.  Nixon did not say any of the things attributed to him here…. Nor had Dean himself said the things he later describes himself as saying…. His account is plausible but entirely incorrect…. Dean cannot be said to have reported the ‘gist’ of the opening remarks; no count of idea units or comparison of structure would produce a score much above zero.[2]

It should be stressed the Neisser does not think Dean was lying about what happened in the conversation in order to make himself look good:  the conversation that really happened and the one he described as happening were both highly incriminating.  So why is there a difference between what he said was said and what was really said? Neisser argues that it is all about “filling in the gaps,” the problem I mentioned earlier with respect to F. C. Bartlett.   Dean was pulling from different parts of his brain the traces of what had occurred on the occasion and his mind, unconsciously, filled in the gaps.  Thus, he “remembered” what was said when he walked into the Oval Office based on the kinds of things that typically were said when he walked into the Oval Office.   In fact, whereas they may have been said on other occasions, they weren’t on this one.  Or he might have recalled how his conversations with Nixon typically began and thought that that was the case here as well, even though it was not.   Moreover, almost certainly, whether intentionally or sub-consciously, he was doing what all of us do a lot of the time: he was inflating his own role in and position in the conversation:  “What his testimony really describes is not the September 15 meeting itself but his fantasy of it: the meeting as it should have been, so to speak….  By June, this fantasy had become the way Dean remembered the meeting.”[3]

Neisser sums up his findings like this:  “It is clear that Dean’s account of the opening of the September 15 conversation is wrong both as to the words used and their gist.  Moreover, cross examination did not reveal his errors as clearly as one might have hoped…..   Dean came across as a man who has a good memory for gist with an occasional literal word stuck in, like a raisin in a pudding.  He was not such a man.”[4]

And so, whether Dean had a decent gist memory probably depends on how broadly one defines “gist.”  He knew he had a conversation with Nixon.  He knew what the topics were.  Nonetheless, he appears not to have known what was actually said, either by Nixon or himself.

In this instance we are talking about an extraordinarily intelligent and educated man with a fine memory, trying to recall conversations from nine months before.  What would happen if we were dealing with more ordinary people with average memories, trying to recall what someone said maybe two years ago?  Or twenty?  Or forty?  Try it for yourself: pick a conversation that you had two years ago with someone – a teacher, a pastor, a boss.   Do you remember it word for word?  Even if you think you do (sometimes we think we do!) is there any actual evidence that you do?   It is important to emphasize what experts have actually learned about memory, and distorted memories.  Leading memory expert Elizabeth Loftus and her colleague Katherine Ketcham reflect on this issue:  “Are we aware of our mind’s distortions of our past experiences?  In most cases, the answer is no.  As time goes by and the memories gradually change, we become convinced that we saw or said or did what we remember.”[5]

These comments are dealing with just our own personal memories.  What about a report, by someone else, of a conversation that a third person had, written long afterwards?  What are the chances that it will be accurate, word for word?   Or even better, what about a report written by someone who had heard about the conversation from someone who was friends with a man whose brother’s wife had a cousin who happened to be there – a report written, say, several decades after the fact?   Is it likely to record the exact words?  In fact, is it likely to remember precisely even the gist?   Or the topics?

Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in Matthew chapters 5-7 was recorded about fifty years after he would have delivered the sermon.  But can we assume he delivered it?  If he did so, did he speak the specific words now found in the Sermon (all three chapters of them) while sitting on a mountain addressing the crowds? On that occasion did he really say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven,” and “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves,” and “Everyone who hears these words of mind and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on a rock”?  Or did he say things sort of like that on the occasion?  Or did he say something sort of like that on some other occasion – any occasion at all?  Which is the gist and which is the detail?[6]

Or what about episodes from Jesus’ life, recorded, say, forty years later?  Was Jesus crucified between two robbers who both mocked him before he died six hours later?   Are those details correct?   Or is the gist correct?  But what is the gist?  Is it that Jesus was crucified with two robbers?  Is it that Jesus was crucified?  Is it that Jesus died?

[1] Ulric Neisser, “John Dean’s Memory:  A Case Study,” Cognition 9 (1981) 1-22.

[2] “John Dean’s Memory,” p. 9.  Italics his.

[3] “John Dean’s Memory,” p. 10

[4] “John Dean’s Memory,” p. 13.

[5] Elizaeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, Witness for the Defense: The Accused, the eyewitness, and the Expert who Puts Memory on Trial (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), p. 20.

[6] See my discussion of the sermon on pp. xxx.

Eyewitness Testimony: The Importance of Actual Expertise

Here’s the link to this article by Bart Ehrman.

June 7, 2023

It is flat-out amazing to me how many New Testament scholars talk about the importance of eyewitness testimony to the life of Jesus without having read a single piece of scholarship on what experts know about eyewitness testimony.  Some (well-known) scholars in recent years have written entire books on the topic, basing their views on an exceedingly paltry amount of research into the matter.  Quite astounding, really.  But they appear to have gone into their work confident that they know about how eyewitness testimony works, and didn’t read the masses of scholarship that shows they simply aren’t right about it.

Here’s how I begin to talk about eyewitness scholarship in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (HarperOne, 2016).

******************************

In the history of memory studies an important event occurred in 1902.[1]   In Berlin, a well-known criminologist named von Liszt was delivering a lecture when an argument broke out.  One student stood up and shouted that he wanted to show how the topic was related to Christian ethics.  Another got up and yelled that he would not put up with that.   The first one replied that he had been insulted.  A fight ensued and a gun was drawn.  Prof. Liszt tried to separate the two when the gun went off.

The rest of the students were aghast.  But Prof. von Liszt informed them that the event had been staged.

He chose a group of the students to write down an exact account of what they had just seen.  The next day, other students were instructed to write down what they recalled, others a week later.  The results of these written reports were surprising and eye-opening.  This was one of the first empirical studies of eyewitness testimony.

Prof. Liszt broke down the sequence of events, which had been carefully planned in advance, into a number of stages.  He then calculated how accurately the students reported the sequence, step-by-step.   The most accurate accounts were in error in 26% of the details the reported.  Others were in error in as many as 80%.

As you might expect, research on the reliability of eyewitness testimony has developed significantly over the years since this first rather crude attempt to establish whether it can be trusted to be reliable.  Scholarship in the field has avalanched in recent decades.   But the findings are consistent in one particularly important respect.  A report is not necessarily accurate because it is delivered by an eyewitness.   On the contrary, eyewitnesses are notoriously inaccurate.

There have been many books written about whether the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses or by authors relying on eyewitnesses.  Some of these books are written by very smart people.  It is very odd indeed that many of them do not appear to be particularly concerned with knowing what experts have told us about eyewitness testimony.[2]

This chapter is focused on two questions.  Are the Gospels based on stories about Jesus that had been passed around, changed, and possibly invented by Christian storytellers for decades before being written down, or were they written by eyewitnesses?  If they were written by eyewitnesses , would that guarantee their essential accuracy?  We will deal with the second question first.

Research on Eyewitness Testimony

Psychological studies of eyewitness testimony began to proliferate in the 1980s, in part because of two important phenomena related to criminal investigations.   The first is that people started recalling ugly, painful, and criminal instances of sexual abuse when they were children.[3]  These recollections typically surfaced during the process of therapy, especially under hypnosis.   Both those who suddenly remembered these instances and the therapists treating them often maintained that these repressed memories explained why the patients had experienced subsequent psychological damage.   Some of these reports involved incest committed by relatives, especially parents; others involved abuse by other adults, for example in child care centers.   As reports of such memories began to proliferate, some psychologists started to wonder if they could all be true.   Some were obviously real memories of real events.   But was it possible that others were not true memories at all, but false memories that had been unconsciously implanted during the process of therapy?    It turns out that the answer is a resounding yes, which creates enormous complexities and problems for all parties: the victim or alleged victim, the therapist, the accused adults, and the judges and juries of the legal system.

The other phenomenon involved the use of DNA evidence to overturn criminal convictions.  Once DNA became a reliable indicator of an accused person’s direct involvement in serious crimes, such as murder or rape,  a large number of previous convictions were brought back for reconsideration.   Numerous convictions were overturned.  As Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter has recently indicated, in about 75% of these reversed judgments, the person charged with the crime was convicted solely on the basis of eyewitness testimony.[4]   What is one to make of such findings?  In the words of a seminal article in the field:  “Reports by eyewitnesses are among the most important types of evidence in criminal as well as in civil law cases…  It is therefore disturbing that such testimony is often inaccurate or even entirely wrong.”[5]

This particular indictment emerged out of a study unrelated to DNA evidence.  It involves an interesting but tragic case.  On October 4, 1992, an El Al Boeing 707 that had just taken off from Schipfol Airport in Amsterdam lost power in two engines.  The pilot tried to return to the airport but couldn’t make it.  The plane crashed into an eleven-story apartment building in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmermeer.   The four crew members and thirty-nine people in the building were killed.   The crash was, understandably, the leading news story in the Netherlands for days.

Ten months later, in August 1993, Dutch psychology professor Hans Crombag and two colleagues gave a survey to 193 university professors, staff, and students in the country.  Among the questions was the following:  “Did you see the television film of the moment the plane hit the apartment building?”  In their responses 107 of those surveyed (55%) said Yes, they had seen the film.  Sometime later the researchers gave a similar survey with the same question to 93 law school students.  In this instance, 62 (66%) of the respondents indicated that they had seen the film.  There was just one problem.  There was no film.

These striking results obviously puzzled the researchers, in part because basic common sense should have told anyone that there could not have been a film.  Remember, this is 1992, before cell phone cameras.  The only way to have a film of the event would have been for a television camera crew to have trained a camera on this particular apartment building in a suburb of Amsterdam at this exact time, in expectation of an imminent crash.  And yet, between half and two-thirds of the people surveyed – most of them graduate students and professors – indicated they had seen the non-existent film.  Why would they think they had seen something that didn’t exist?

Even more puzzling were the detailed answers that some of those interviewed said about what they actually saw on the film, for example, whether the plane crashed into the building horizontally or at vertical and whether the fire caused by the plane started at impact or only later.  None of that information could have been known from a film, because there was no film.  So why did these people remember, not only seeing the crash but also details about how it happened and what happened immediately afterward?

Obviously they were imagining it, based on logical inferences (the fire must have started right away) and on what they had been told by others (the plane crashed into the building as it was heading straight down).  The psychologists argued that these people’s imaginations became so vivid, and were repeated so many times, that they eventually did not realize they were imagining something.  They thought they were remembering it.  They really thought that.  In fact they did remember it.  But it was a false memory.  Not just a false memory one of them had.  A false memory most of them had.

The researchers concluded:  “It is difficult for us to distinguish between what we have actually witnessed, and what common sense inference tells us that must also have been the case.”   In fact, commonsense inference, along with information we get by hearsay from others, together “conspire in distorting an eyewitness’s memory.”   Indeed “this is particularly easy when, as in our studies, the event is of a highly dramatic nature, which almost by necessity evokes strong and detailed visual imagery.”[6]

The witnesses to the life of Jesus certainly were recalling events “of a highly dramatic nature” – Jesus’ walking on the water, calming the storm with a word, casting out a demon, raising a young girl back to life.  Moreover, these stories certainly evoked “strong and detailed visual imagery.”  Even if such stories were told by eyewitnesses, could we trust that they were necessarily accurate memories?

[1] This episode is recounted in Elizabeth F. Loftus, Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed.  (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1996) pp. 20-21.

[2] The best known and very large study is Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006).

[3] See Richard J. McNally, Remembering Trauma (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003).

[4] Daniel L. Schacter, “Constructive Memory: Past and Future,” Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 14 (2012) 7-18.

[5] Hans F. M. Crombag, Willem A. Wagenaar, Peter J. Van Koppen, “Crashing Memories and the Problem of ‘Source Monitoring,’” Applied Cognitive Psychology 1 (1996) p. 95.

[6] “Crashing Memories,” p. 103.

The Power of Prayer, Part Two.

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby CAPTAIN CASSIDY

JUN 02, 2013

pray all you want, the results are the same
Sure, why not? (Dennis Jarvis, CC-SA.)

I was reeling from so many sources by now. I’d just graduated from college and had a nice shiny degree that was more or less useless by itself. I was married to a handsome and impossibly fervent minister husband who had some measure of respect in our denomination. I had a decent little job doing something I enjoyed tolerably enough. I was a busy bee all right. But beneath that surface happiness, tension roiled like a stormcloud and nothing was what it seemed. I needed answers about prayer, and I needed them now.

pray all you want, the results are the same
Sure, why not? (Dennis Jarvis, CC-SA.)

We all have a number of props and supports for our religious ideas. Mine were as varied as anybody else’s. But they were getting knocked out from under me at a frightening pace.

Probably the very last one I had was that the Bible’s god was faithful to his people and an omnimax being who loved us (“omnimax” means omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent–omni-everything, if you will). And the best way for me to evaluate that claim was to examine my god’s response to prayer.

God loves prayer. All through the Bible, his people are told to pray and God listens to those prayers. We are also told that God uses prayers as a barometer of our needs and desires, and responds to those prayers in ways that will benefit his followers. Among many other exhortations, we have Jesus in Luke 18:1 telling us that we should always be praying. Out of every single thing that a Christian is almost always totally sure of, it’s that his or her god hears those prayers and cares about each and every one. If I found out that prayer wasn’t what it seemed, not much was going to be left.

The Bible Verses

First we’ll lay out the verses:

Mark is usually thought to be the first Gospel written (see Markan Priority), though this isn’t a totally universal idea. I think it’s first, so I’m starting there. In Mark, we see these passages:

Mark 11:23-4: Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith. Therefore I say unto you, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” There’s a bit of weaseling and fine print here (the stipulation is that the praying person have absolute faith that he or she will receive whatever is requested) that is absent in later-written Matthew, but overall the intention seems clear: if you just believe enough, you’ll get whatever you want.

Mark 16:17 follows up the general trend this way: “These signs shall follow them that believe; in my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; they shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” So about those snake handlers who keep dying of snake bites… In my church, we regarded ourselves as a bit more sophisticated than that. My first Pentecostal pastor (remember, the good egg who discouraged Biff from running off to Waco) refused to handle snakes, and refused to let anybody in the congregation do it either. And I never once saw or heard of any group out there deliberately drinking poisons just to show the miraculous power of God, which if you think about it is *way* more impressive than handling snakes which might or might not bite. Why was that, I wondered that night as I pored over my study Bible? Why wasn’t snake handling and poison-drinking more popular? Why didn’t anybody do it in perfect safety, knowing the Bible flat-out said they could do this as a specific sign and testament given by Jesus Christ himself? (Now I know this passage is in all likelihood a later addition to Mark and as likely to have been said by Jesus himself as a Transformers quote, but at the time, I took it all as one big piece.)

Matthew 7 has Jesus telling us all about how we will be given whatever we ask for: “Ask and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.” Well, that sounds really strong, doesn’t it? No less than the savior of humankind is saying that whatever we want, we’ll get, and he isn’t using any fine print here at all. (HelLO prosperity gospel! We’ll be discussing this concept in detail at some point.)

In Matthew 17, Jesus expands on this mysticism thusly: “If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.” Well, that sounds pretty positive too, doesn’t it? He doubles down on it in Matthew 21 when he’s just gotten done cursing that fig tree (you know, the one that wasn’t doing anything wrong at all except being out of season when Jesus had a major munchie fit for figs): “If ye have faith, and doubt not, ye shall not only do this which is done to the fig tree, but also if ye say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done. And all things, whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” Now, note that the fig tree cursing is a specific power he’s telling believers they’ll have. So all those Christians saying a prayer didn’t get answered because it was “selfish” have some explaining to do.

In Matthew 18:18-20, we even get a look at how powerful groups of Christians are (is there a word for a group of Christians, like a flock of geese or a lamentation of swans? “Congregation” is too specifically churchy): “Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever ye shall loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven. Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven. For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” So whatever the magic power is of one Christian praying, it’s even more powerful when more than one gets together and prays. In almost every one of the church services I attended throughout the Protestant system, this verse got invoked, by the way–especially when the church prayed for one particular thing (like that pastor’s healing of brain cancer).

John’s probably the last of the gospels, and it has the strongest of all the assurances. In John 14, we see this: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do; because I go unto my Father. And whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask any thing in my name, I will do it.” Straightforward enough.

But now let’s look at the weaseling out of these strong assurances in the rest of the Bible:

1 John 3:22: “Whatsoever we ask, we receive of him, because we keep his commandments, and do those things that are pleasing in his sight.” So a Christian who sins won’t get what’s requested. Well, that’s about all of us, because nobody’s righteous but Jesus (Romans 3:10, but see this writeup which mysteriously we didn’t know about as Christians).

Philippians 4:19: “But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Jesus Christ.” Well, that implies that if we don’t need it, we won’t get it.

James 1:5-7: “If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him. But let him ask in faith, nothing wavering. For he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.” Another one that implies that faith is required. All right.

James 4:3: “Ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss, that ye may consume it upon your lusts.” If you don’t get what you asked for, you probably were asking in the wrong spirit–you just wanted it out of some selfish or sinful impulse (you know, like wanting figs out of season). So it’s your fault. That does kind of knock the prosperity gospel Christians right in the nads and it’s definitely not in keeping with Jesus’ earlier assurances that he’d do whatever we asked, especially if we asked in groups, but it’s a pretty standard deflection I heard to explain away the problem.

James 5:13-18:” Is any among you afflicted? Let him pray. Is any merry? Let him sing psalms. Is any sick among you? Let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord: and the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up; and if he have committed sins, they shall be forgiven him. . .  The effectual prayer of a righteous man availeth much.” This one predicts healings aplenty and reaffirms that righteousness is required. Seems like a poisoned well excuse, doesn’t it? If someone doesn’t get what was requested, there’s probably some taint involved.

The only requirements I can see in the Gospels is that whoever’s praying for something needs to be very very fervent in believing that whatever is being requested will happen. The later books of the New Testament add a few stipulations, but overall, the insistence is there that yes, God answers prayers.

The Reality of the Bible Verses.

But that’s not how it works.

That’s not how it works at all.

And this “yes/no/later” thing that Christians repeat like a mantra isn’t mentioned in any of these verses. Ever. I didn’t even see how such a concept could be inferred from these verses. Either God answered the prayer every single time by giving the praying person what was requested, or in the later weasel words, God flat refuses due to some inadequacy on the part of the petitioner–not out of the person’s best interest, but out of inadequacy. What I’d been told about prayer just wasn’t true if the Bible was any kind of guide in the matter.

As I studied, I wondered again to myself: just when had I stopped asking for anything really supernatural? Every time I got in my car, I prayed that I’d get to my destination “safely and unharmed,” as I had learned from the older members of my church. When I went to the mall with Christian friends, they prayed that we’d get a good parking spot (and one year, on Christmas Eve, we did! Right up front! It was a miracle!). I prayed that work would go smoothly, that God would bless me in general, that God would bring my errant family to salvation (not a single one was saved yet).

But when I prayed for specific things, did I really get them? No, not normally, not any more than I might get them with random chance or my own hard work. Were parking spots really a miracle? Why would God let me get to work without a car accident when tons of other people, many who presumably prayed the same sort of way, did not get to their destinations safely? When Biff had invaded Pastor Daniel’s deathbed vigil, I tell you he’d have been quite positive he could bring about Daniel’s healing–but he got thrown out by the very people who should have most known that prayer worked. And I can tell you that thousands upon thousands of Christians banded together to beg God for Daniel’s healing, only to be denied. Are we to assume that they were all inadequate in some way?

Forget all the rationalizations. Forget all the fine print (because whoa Nelly there is a lot of fine print). Forget all the justifications for why. Just look at the situation.

The god this Bible described says over and over again that he is a wonder-working god. This god says he listens to prayer. He answers prayer. No “yes/no/later” bullshit. Yes. If you believe, yes. The later books of the Bible, written long after Jesus didn’t return as he’d said he would, were clearly scrambling for explanations for why prayers weren’t getting answered (and settled on the approach Christians would use for centuries to come: “It’s all your fault”).

I never once while a Christian ever heard of any supernatural answer to prayer that was accompanied by credible, objective evidence for the claim. I never saw evidence of supernatural healing. I never saw any mountains moved. I never experienced a single “answered prayer” that couldn’t be explained easily by some other means. And 2000 years after these promises were made, we’ve still got slavery, murder, disease, and a host of other things that prayer was specifically said to be able to stop. Not a single mountain has been moved. Nobody’s ever documented any big-time healing. No amputees have been regenerated. No missing eyeballs brought back. No dead people raised. No poison drunk safely. Reality simply did not conform to what the Bible promised.

When had I stopped bothering to ask for anything that big? I already suspected in my heart of hearts, I realized as I studied, that prayer was a waste of time. Once I’d been positive about it, yes. I knew that. But somewhere along the way I learned the hard lessons that all Christians learn, and I’d internalized those doublespeak arguments meant to stop my thinking about it and make me content to labor in delusion. Now that I wasn’t bound by those old thought-stoppers, I could think about the matter honestly for the first time.

And I rejected it all in one fell swoop. It made no sense, and I was not obligated to keep twisting and contorting my mind to accept all these contradictions and complete fallacies. Nothing held me anymore–there was no fear left in me, and whatever love I’d felt had dissolved over time and with repeated disappointments (something that was happening simultaneously with my “godly” marriage).

With the sadness of a mourner at a funeral, I closed my Bible. Biff would be home soon from his lying–er, witnessing session at the Crisis Pregnancy Center. Tomorrow was Sunday. I didn’t know what I was going to do at this point. I couldn’t just not go–I was a minister’s wife. But I couldn’t hold the truth in any longer. My eyes had been opened. I’d made my saving roll to disbelieve at last, at last, at last. I couldn’t force myself to believe again any more than you, reader, could force yourself to believe once more in Santa. I’d seen too much, learned too much, suffered too much. This religion was not true (the question of “well, is it valid then at least?” hadn’t occurred to me), and I would no longer ally myself with lies.

A Long and Scary Night.

I was in bed by the time Biff got home. I don’t remember talking to him or anything else that happened. I don’t think I slept a wink all night. I didn’t weep, though; I was out of tears. I had spent them all earlier that night. I was over Christianity, and just as you know when a romantic relationship is well and truly over, I knew this “relationship” I’d built in my own head was over too.

All night long, I tossed and turned. Later I would read about the philosopher Epicurus who presented a dilemma called “The Problem of Evil” that illustrated perfectly what was going on in my head in a far more primitive and less eloquent form. If God really was omnipotent, then he certainly could easily do anything one of his followers asked. If he really were omnibenevolent, then I couldn’t see any rational reason why he wouldn’t do simple things like heal disease or end war or violence that might hurt his children (and “well you know God, he’s just so confusing sometimes” thought terminators didn’t cut it anymore, remember?). If he really were omniscient, then it didn’t make sense why he even needed his beloved spouse to even need to ask him for anything–he should know already. The truth was clear: there was no way that the god I’d worshiped all this time was omnimax. I couldn’t trust the Bible’s history or science, and I couldn’t trust Christianity’s assertions about his power, love, or grace. I wasn’t that sad by the time morning came, really; I felt a curious sense of detachment from myself that liberated me and freed me. I felt like I hadn’t eaten in many days and had hit that stage in starvation when the human body just doesn’t feel hungry anymore.

I felt gaunt and wrung-out. But I also felt a strange exhilaration. I didn’t have to bash my brains out trying to reconcile those things which are not by their nature reconcilable. I no longer had to struggle to understand that which makes no sense whatsoever. Slowly I began to feel strength coursing back into my body as my liberation became more and more clear. I was free. And I would never be enslaved again.

As the grey morning light began its creep across my bedroom floor toward the bed, I realized I could just not go to church. I could just skip out. I could just quit going. And nobody could make me go if I didn’t want to go. That is where you first joined me in this blog, dear reader; this very bedroom and this very dawn is where you first met me. I had just closed an old book full of mold and fungus and rot, and I’d just made a new beginning that was fresh and clean and full of hope. And this new beginning is where we shall start our journey together. Thank you for making it with me.

XXX

This was a huge post for me, and like all big projects, it didn’t happen without help. I’d like to give a grateful tip of the hat to Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?, which very devastatingly and sensitively covers the argument against prayer’s effectiveness in greater (and probably way more eloquent and relevant) detail. I used the site as a gathering-point for many of the Bible verses as I don’t pretend to remember them all now. I’d also like to thank Skeptic’s Annotated Bible, which has such a great search function and such helpful collections of the Bible’s various flaws and absurdities. I wish these sites had existed when I was a Christian; their existence would have made my transition a lot easier and faster. I encourage those who question and doubt to check those sites out.

The Silence of Pliny the Elder (1st-Century Fridays #7)

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby CAPTAIN CASSIDY

AUG 06, 2021

City and Lake of Como, painted 1834 by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. It looked way different in Pliny’s day, and it looks even more different now.

Hi and welcome back! As it’s now Friday, let’s turn our gaze to another author alive during the supposed lifetime of Jesus Christ — one who should have known about the creator of Christianity and those earliest Christians he inspired. 

Today, our focus rests upon Gaius Plinius Secundus, more popularly known as Pliny the Elder. As he lived between 23/24 CE – 79 CE and was good friends with Emperor Vespasian (who ruled from 69-79 CE), he was very well-placed to know all about this stuff. Let’s see if he did.

City and Lake of Como, painted 1834 by Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. It looked way different in the days of Pliny the Elder, and it looks even more different now.

(In 1st-Century Fridays, we meet the ancient contemporaries of Jesus. We’re using the real definition of the word “contemporaneous” here, not the one Biblical scholars have weaseled to give themselves some leeway with their utter lack of evidence that their Savior actually existed. No, the people we’ll meet here must have been alive during that critical time of 30-35 CE. AND they must have had a good chance of hearing about what Christians claim was happening in Jerusalem at the time. Here’s the largely-canonical list of contemporaries you might have seen around. I prefer this diagram made by one of our other link writers. And here are some other lists.)

Everyone, Meet Pliny the Elder.

Pliny the Elder was a Roman writer, philosopher, and military commander. He lived from 23/24 to 79 CE. At least, we think that’s his birth year. In truth, we don’t know much about his early life. Neither he nor his nephew (Pliny the Younger, natch) said much about his parents. We also think he was born in Como, in way northern Italy. His sister bore his nephew, Pliny the Younger.

As is normal for wealthy highborn Romans, Pliny the Elder enjoyed a good education. In this case, he learned lawmaking. At some point, he seems to have adopted Stoic beliefs. Once that was done, he began that course of military positions and whatnot that would prepare him for a grand future in Roman politics.

The following is a list of the most commented articles in the last 7 days.

He sounds like quite the traditionalist. Though he became quite wealthy, he adopted an archaic lifestyle. For example, he ate austere, reasonable meals instead of huge feasts. He never married or had kids, either. Instead, he adopted his nephew as his heir after his sister’s husband died.

He left the military right around when Nero became emperor. It really looks like Pliny did everything he could to avoid drawing Nero’s attention during those dangerous years of his rule from 54-68 CE. Instead, he worked as a lawyer. He also wrote books about safe topics: grammar, education, etc.

Anything else was too dangerous to contemplate.

Pliny the Elder and His Later Life.

After the tumultuous Year of Four Emperors, Vespasian became emperor in 69 CE. He was, like Pliny, a man of the equestrian class. He’d lived a very similar life. And his #1 priority in those early years of his reign was to get the empire stabilized. He wanted to secure things after all the upsets Rome had experienced recently.

Vespasian called to Pliny to serve him. Pliny responded to that call. He gave up his law practice to become a high-ranking official in various important provinces. The men seem to have become friends. Indeed, Pliny often visited Vespasian in the early morning before going about his own duties.

Toward the end of his life, Pliny published the first books of his Natural History. It was a 37-volume encyclopedia. He used his own experience and other previously-written works to create it. In it, he covered every single topic he could think of. Regarding the title, he meant by it not just what we’d think of as “natural history,” but stuff about life itself, all aspects of it.

And I do mean “all” up there. Various volumes of his Natural History covered Africa, China, and other such places that Roman expansionism had touched and absorbed.

The Last Day of Pliny the Elder.

By now, Vespasian had appointed him the praefectus classis in Miseno. That’s toward the north end of the Bay of Naples. Here it is on a map:

miseno, pompeii, stabiae
The Bay of Naples. Miseno is in the north, Pompeii and Stabiae in the middle. The black smudge represents the eruption itself

In 79 CE, Pliny stood and watched a weird cloud arising from Mount Vesuvius. It was shaped like a “pine-tree,” or so his nephew says (Book 6, Letter 16, “To Tacitus.”)

Either way, Pliny the Elder wanted to find out what that cloud was all about. Just watching from afar didn’t satisfy him.

He was in the north end of the bay with a fleet of ships. Why not use ’em? After watching the cloud from afar, he ordered a galley to be prepared to sail closer for a better look.

I wonder if he wanted to put this info into his Natural History!

The Death of Pliny the Elder.

But there was another reason why Pliny the Elder wanted to sail into danger.

In the midst of his preparations to explore, he received a letter from his frantic friend Rectina. She had a villa close by the mountain in Stabiae. And she was getting more and more frightened by the moment. She begged Pliny to rescue her. He’d already been getting a galley ready to sail out that way. Now, though, his efforts became focused on rescue. In all, a number of galleys sailed out on the rescue trip. He intended to help as many people as he could.

Pliny invited his nephew to come along, but the younger man declined; he had some work to finish up. So his uncle set off without him. (Lucky nephew! He dodged that one!)

He did rescue at least one other person in Stabiae: his friend Senator Pomponianus.

Then, his ship got stuck in Stabiae.

Alas, Pliny had hung around Stabiae too long. Perhaps he inhaled too much volcanic ash or toxic gas. Or perhaps he had a heart attack. We don’t know if his rescued friend survived, either. Nor do we know if he ever reached Rectina — or even what happened to her.

What we do know is that Pliny the Elder died in 79 CE in Stabiae.

What Did Pliny the Elder Write About Jesus and Christianity?

So we’ve got this account of a well-traveled, well-read Roman leader who very deliberately and purposefully gathered and wrote down absolutely everything about everything he could find. His encyclopedia has influenced similar efforts for thousands of years.

Thankfully, we can access Natural History in translation here.

And I can tell you now that it does not mention anything about Jesus or the earliest Christians.

Not a word. You can search it yourself if you like! There’s an excellent search function right there.

All you’ll find for these terms are footnotes added by Christians. They clearly felt tetchy about, say, Pliny’s mention of Tyana. I can see why.

After all, that’s where Apollonius of Tyana was from. I’m sure they would indeed have bristled at this reminder of his existence.

Sidebar: The Essenes Have Entered the Chat.

Pliny the Elder does talk a little about Judea in Book V, Chapter 15. Interestingly, he mentions the Essenes. They were a mystic Jewish sect that existed from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE. Of them, Pliny writes:

Lying on the west of Asphaltites, and sufficiently distant to escape its noxious exhalations, are the Esseni, a people that live apart from the world, and marvellous beyond all others throughout the whole earth, for they have no women among them; to sexual desire they are strangers; money they have none; the palm-trees are their only companions. Day after day, however, their numbers are fully recruited by multitudes of strangers that resort to them, driven thither to adopt their usages by the tempests of fortune, and wearied with the miseries of life. Thus it is, that through thousands of ages, incredible to relate, this people eternally prolongs its existence, without a single birth taking place there; so fruitful a source of population to it is that weariness of life which is felt by others.

Yep, that sounds about like the Essenes we’ve met. Off and on through his work, Pliny might also be referring to various Essene people, but it doesn’t sound like historians are completely sure about that. In addition, this same chapter mentions Galilee, the Jordan River, and Herodium.

Otherwise, we see nothing whatsoever of Jesus or Christianity in this vast encyclopedia. All the same, it’s interesting stuff. I especially liked this chapter (VI.37) about “The Fortunate Isles.”

What Pliny the Elder Never Knew.

Like we saw with Seneca the Younger last week, Pliny the Elder really, truly destroys Christian claims of Jesus’ importance. He also wrecks their own historical claims about their religion’s earliest years and their claims about its rapid early growth.

Pliny the Elder was writing and gathering information for his Natural History till his death. His work covered every single aspect of the world Romans knew.

As a well-traveled and well-read Roman leader, he really was in the perfect place to have at least heard about the new religion and its firebrand of a leader — especially if, as Christians like to claim, the new religion swept through the Roman Empire because it was just so, I dunno, DIFFERENT, I guess.

But no. That silence surprised even me a bit, because I expected at least a mention of Christians somewhere in his work.

And yet, Pliny the Elder seems to have known nothing at all of any of it.

Grading Pliny the Elder.

I’m giving Pliny the Elder an A+.

I don’t think we’ve yet found another 1st-century writer better-situated than he was to know about the earliest Christians and Jesus Christ than him. And yet he is utterly silent on both topics. He most definitely belongs on our list of vetted 1st-century writers who really should have known about this stuff but didn’t.

I’m very glad to have learned about him. And I hope you’ll find his adventurous life as interesting as I did!

Two Fantastic Quotes from Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll: On Willful Disbelief & A Designer In Need Of Design

Here’s the link to this article.

By John W. Loftus at 5/28/2023

#1 On Willful Disbelief: Can we control our thought? Can we tell what we are going to think tomorrow? Can we stop thinking? Is belief the result of that which to us is evidence, or is it a product of the will? Can the scales in which reason weighs evidence be turned by the will? Why then should evidence be weighed? If it all depends on the will, what is evidence? Is there any opportunity of being dishonest in the formation of an opinion? Must not the man who forms the opinion know what it is? He cannot knowingly cheat himself. He cannot be deceived with dice that he loads. He cannot play unfairly at solitaire without knowing that he has lost the game. He cannot knowingly weigh with false scales and believe in the correctness of the result.

The Bible quotes Jesus with having said, “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned.” The Christians say that it is the duty of every person to read, to understand, and to believe this revelation – that a man should use his reason; but if he honestly concludes that the Bible is not a revelation from God, and dies with that conclusion in his mind, he will be tormented forever. They say,” Read,” and then add: “Believe, or be damned.” Suppose then I read this Bible honestly, fairly, and when I get through I am compelled to say, “The book is not true.” If this is the honest result, if the book and my brain are both the work of the same Infinite God, whose fault is it that the book and the brain do not agree? Either God should have written a book to fit my brain, or should have made my brain to fit his book. The brain thinks without asking our consent; we believe, or disbelieve, without an effort of the will. Belief is a result. It is the effect of evidence upon the mind. The scales turn in spite of him who watches. There is no opportunity of being honest or dishonest in the formation of an opinion. The conclusion is entirely independent of desire. We must believe, or we must doubt, in spite of what we wish. –From Col. Ingersoll to Mr. Gladstone

#2 On A Designer In Need Of Design: The idea that a design must have a beginning and that a designer need not, is a simple expression of human ignorance. We find a watch, and we say: “So curious and wonderful a thing must have had a maker.” We find the watch-maker, and we say: “So curious and wonderful a thing as man must have had a maker.”

We find God, and we then say: “He is so wonderful that he must not have had a maker.” In other words, all things a little wonderful must have been created, but it is possible for something to be so wonderful that it always existed. One would suppose that just as the wonder increased the necessity for a creator increased, because it is the wonder of the thing that suggests the idea of creation. Is it possible that a designer exists from all eternity without design? Was there no design in having an infinite designer? For me, it is hard to see the plan or design in earthquakes and pestilences. It is somewhat difficult to discern the design or the benevolence in so making the world that billions of animals live only on the agonies of others. The justice of God is not visible to me in the history of this world. When I think of the suffering and death, of the poverty and crime, of the cruelty and malice, of the heartlessness of this “design” and “plan,” where beak and claw and tooth tear and rend the quivering flesh of weakness and despair, I cannot convince myself that it is the result of infinite wisdom, benevolence, and justice. –From Ingersoll vs Black, A former Chief Justice of US.

A Hugely Defective Gospel Sequel

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 5/19/2023

A high quotient of fake news

The red flags in scripture are all over the place, and easy to spot. By this I mean story elements that alert readers to be suspicious. If we came across these in a Disney fantasy or in Harry Potter story, we’d say, “Very entertaining, but not to be taken seriously.” There are so many red flags in the gospels, and they show up in the first chapters of each. In Mark, a voice from the sky tells Jesus, “You are my beloved son”—right after his baptism for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus had sins? A god yelling from the sky doesn’t sound at all like a real-world event.

The first thing we find in Matthew’s gospel is a genealogy that is supposed to prove that Jesus was descended from King David, but then Matthew reports that Jesus didn’t have a human father—nullifying the value of the genealogy. It was in a dream that an angel told Joseph that Mary got pregnant by a holy spirit. Red flag: Today if anyone tells us that they get messages from a god through angels in dreams, our reaction is likely to be, yah, sure. In Luke’s first chapter as well, angels have speaking roles, revealing the destiny of John the Baptist and Jesus to their parents. Red flag: this isn’t history, it’s fantasy literature. The author of John’s gospel claims in his opening chapter that Jesus, the Galilean peasant preacher—as portrayed in the first three gospels—was present at creation. Huge red flag: here’s a theologian presenting his speculations as fact. Any curious reader should want to know how he knows this: show us the reliable, verifiable, objective evidence. 

Surely the champion red flag winner is the author of the Book of Acts. He reports in his first chapter that newly alive Jesus left earth by ascending to heaven—he disappeared through the clouds. And in chapter 7, Stephen, about to be martyred, sees Jesus in heaven: “…filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” (Acts 7:55-56) Christian doctrine would have us believe that this holy spirit that “filled him” is part of god—so couldn’t this ghost have done a better job helping separate fact from fiction? No: Jesus and god are not standing next to each other somewhere miles out in space. Any Christian today who has any understanding of how the Cosmos is built, i.e., that the earth orbits the sun, which orbits the galactic center—in the vacuum of space—can grasp that the Acts 1 story is naïve fiction. Why couldn’t the holy spirit have shared these insights with humans centuries ago?

I have made many posts on this blog about the Book of Acts, but I return to it now to call attention to Richard Carrier’s blog article dated 21 April 2023: How We Know Acts Is a Fake History. This augments his 25-page chapter on Acts in On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, pp. 359-385. He wrote this new article in response to apologist Greg Boyd’s position that Acts in basically trustworthy. 

How can that be? The red flag pop-up frequently in the first few chapters of Acts. In Acts 5, people are healed when Peter’s shadow falls on them, and an angel helps the apostles escape from prison (this also happens in Acts 12). In Acts 10, an angel instructs a centurion named Cornelius to summon Peter. In Acts 18, the Lord in a vision tells Paul to preach—and he will be protected. The naïve, gullible first readers of Acts may have been impressed, but informed adults today, not so much: “Very entertaining, but not to be taken seriously.” Angels, healings, visions are markers of fantasy literature. 

These are surface details that should provoke skepticism about Acts, but Carrier draws attention to issues that demonstrate just how phony this book is. It is fake history. The author of Acts seemingly wasn’t aware that his story is undermined by what we find in the letters of Paul, as Carrier notes:

“If one needs Acts to be a reliable history, and not revisionist history (a.k.a. “bullshit”), one needs to ‘leave out’ all the evidence that it repeatedly contradicts the eyewitness testimony of Paul, and in precisely the ways that suit its author’s agendas, and that it mimics known tropes and features distinctive of fiction and propaganda…”

In Acts 9:26-28, we read this account of Paul’s return from Damascus—after his famous conversion experience:

“When he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples, and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, brought him to the apostles, and described for them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus. So he went in and out among them in Jerusalem, speaking boldly in the name of the Lord.”   

In Galatians 1:16-20, however, we find what Paul himself says:

“…I did not confer with any human, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterward I returned to Damascus. Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas [Peter} and stayed with him fifteen days, but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. In what I am writing to you, before God, I do not lie!”

Then there was the contentious issue of circumcision. In Galatians 2:1-3, Paul reports:

“Then after fourteen years I went up again to Jerusalem with Barnabas, taking Titus along with me. I went up in response to a revelation. Then I laid before them (though only in a private meeting with the acknowledged leaders) the gospel that I proclaim among the gentiles, in order to make sure that I was not running, or had not run, in vain. But even Titus, who was with me, was not compelled to be circumcised, though he was a Greek.”

Yet this is what we read in Acts 16:3: “Paul wanted Timothy to accompany him, and he took him and had him circumcised because of the Jews who were in those places, for they all knew that his father was a Greek.”

Carrier calls the fake historian to account: 

“Acts gets the guy wrong (it was Titus, not Timothy, who was under pressure to circumcise), as well as the place and time (Acts has this happen after the event Paul himself relates, and far from Judea where it makes even less sense for any such pressure to exist)…”

“The author of Acts is inventing a story contrary to events as related by Paul. Moreover, this invented story completely contradicts Paul’s entire mission statement: Paul explicitly says he was not flexible about this, that this was his line in the sand, such that had he caved ‘the truth of the gospel’ would not ‘be preserved.’ In other words, resisting this pressure was of dire existential importance to Paul and his entire mission.”

“Acts thus gets history totally wrong here, contradicting Paul’s own eyewitness testimony, blatantly and in multiple ways. Its author was clearly uninterested in recounting anything true about Paul and his companions, actions, and mission; but to the contrary, only in ‘rewriting’ history to make Paul conform to the author’s own agenda to unify the factions of Christendom, by depicting its Jewish and Gentile wings as always in harmony and willing to cooperate.”

Late in the Book of Acts, Paul is arrested, and preparations are made to have him sent to Felix the governor (Acts 23:23): “Get ready to leave by nine o’clock tonight for Caesarea with two hundred soldiers, seventy horsemen, and two hundred spearmen.” How can that possibly have been true: an escort of this size for a crazy cult preacher? The author of Acts wanted to impress his readers: look how important Paul was!

Carrier notes that this is an “outrageous number of troops removed from their duties to protect one man.” But just as unbelievable is the text of the letter—quoted in Acts 23:26-30—that Claudius Lysias supposedly wrote to Felix. Carrier notes that it “conspicuously lacks all the details a real one would contain…”, and he provides several examples of the mistakes made by the author: “It seems far more certain Luke just made this letter up—and he didn’t know what a real one looked like so as to even produce a plausible fraud.” 

This Carrier article is rich in details that illustrate just how fake Acts is. Near the beginning of the article he lists more than twenty other books of acts that didn’t make it into the canon, 

“… all of which even most fundamentalists (and all actual experts) agree are bogus—making ‘bogus’ by far the normal status of any Christian ‘Acts’…Our Acts contains no indication of being any more honest or reliable; to the contrary, it’s rife with indications of being no better. Indeed, we have two entire versions of it, one some ten percent longer—and scholars cannot honestly tell which is actually the original. That is how freely Christians were willing to doctor it to suit their wishes. In actual fact, faking histories was the norm for Christians; even beyond the damning example of the entire Acts genre, the religion was always awash with forgery and lies.”

Forgery and lies—and extremism. On 5 May 2023, here on this blog, I argued that core Christian beliefs qualify it as a cult. There is one story especially in Acts that offers a perfect snapshot of a cult. In Acts 5 we find the story of Ananias and Sapphira, a couple who sold a field, but didn’t give all the money to the church: Ananias “brought only a part and laid it at the apostles’ feet” (Acts 5:2). Peter flew into a rage, scolding Ananias for lying to the holy spirit, because Satan was in his heart. Ananias dropped dead on the spot, and was buried immediately. A few hours later Sapphira showed up and received the same scolding—and she dropped dead too, and right away was buried beside her husband. The story closes with verse 11: “And great fear seized the whole church and all who heard of these things.” There is not a hint here that Peter—yes, that Peter, the rock upon which the church was built—had been too severe. I’m sure not many laypeople today who read this story would say, “Well, how cool is that, it’s okay with me.”

Cults thrive because they encourage “great fear” among their devotees, which means undivided loyalties. It’s no surprise if Acts and Luke were written by the same guy: the Jesus-script in Luke 14:26 stipulates that hatred of family and even life itself is required of those who follow their cult hero.

Serious Bible study requires in-depth homework, as is provided by this Carrier article. He includes dozens of links to other sources, and thoroughly exposes the cheap tricks of apologists who desperately want Acts to be reliable history. What a pity that it’s hard enough to get laypeople to even read the gospels and Acts, let alone do any penetrating study of these documents. 

Carrier tells it like it is:

“The evidence stacks quite high that the author of Acts is fabricating a mythological history for his religion, and didn’t have any personal knowledge of what he relates, but is relying on old sources that he deliberately alters, reference books that he uses only for local color, and his imagination. There is simply no way a companion of Paul wrote this, or anyone of his generation. Indeed he conspicuously never claims he was—and since he would have claimed any authority he actually had, his silence proves he couldn’t claim this.” 

David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten Tough Problems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith (2016; 2018 Foreword by John Loftus) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available. 

His YouTube channel is here. He has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.

The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here. 

Millennials: your liberal atheist elders

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE

APR 20, 2023

Blue lines rising against an abstract background | Meet your liberal atheist elders
Credit: Pixabay

Overview:

Millennials are defying long-established patterns by getting older without becoming more religious or voting more conservative. It’s an unpleasant surprise for the American religious right.

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

You get more conservative as you get older. Everyone knows that.

As you age, you settle into the world. Your youthful passions cool, and the fire of rebellion fizzles out. You get a corporate job, a steady paycheck, a pension, and a house in the suburbs. The reckless fantasies of your younger self become fond memories of the good old days. As old age creeps up, you get used to things as they are, and you instinctively become suspicious of change.

It happened to the Boomers. Those rebellious beatniks and peace-loving hippies became retirees, churchgoers, Trump supporters. It happened to Gen X too. Now, as the Millennials approach middle age, it’s their turn. It’s the way of things, as natural and inevitable as the seasons.

There’s just one problem. It’s not happening this time.

Millennials are breaking the oldest rule of politics

It’s true, historically speaking, that people tend to be liberal in their youth and to become more conservative as they age. As John Burn-Murdoch writes in the Financial Times, summing up a trend that applies to the U.K. and the U.S.:

The pattern has held remarkably firm. By my calculations, members of Britain’s “silent generation”, born between 1928 and 1945, were five percentage points less conservative than the national average at age 35, but around five points more conservative by age 70. The “baby boomer” generation traced the same path, and “Gen X”, born between 1965 and 1980, are now following suit.“Millennials are shattering the oldest rule in politics.” John Burn-Murdoch, Financial Times, 30 December 2022.

With this evidence on their side, conservatives might have had an excuse for complacency. However, the Millennial generation has broken the pattern. Not only did we start out more liberal than average, we’re staying that way as we age. In fact, we’re getting even more liberal:

If millennials’ liberal inclinations are merely a result of this age effect, then at age 35 they too should be around five points less conservative than the national average, and can be relied upon to gradually become more conservative. In fact, they’re more like 15 points less conservative, and in both Britain and the US are by far the least conservative 35-year-olds in recorded history.

This chart shows just how dramatic the trend lines are:

https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=true&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=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%3D%3D&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=1608746369505976323&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fonlysky.media%2Falee%2Fmillennials-your-liberal-atheist-elders%2F&sessionId=cf91e0000f9c88b248cf623ca0136b7d5180093e&theme=light&widgetsVersion=aaf4084522e3a%3A1674595607486&width=550px


Speaking as a Millennial, I can add an anecdote to confirm this data. I’m 41 now, middle-aged by any measure, and I’m a homeowner with a family. But I haven’t become the slightest bit more conservative. I haven’t become any less of a ferocious atheist, nor have my highest priorities become lower taxes and lawn care. I’m as bright-blue liberal as I ever was—maybe more.

This is a looming apocalypse for the religious right. Until recently, their voter pool was steadily replenished as people joined the ranks of the elderly. But if Millennials aren’t aging into conservatism, that means their voters are dying off with no replacement. It’s no wonder that Republicans are resorting to increasingly aggressive gerrymandering, vote suppression, legislating from the bench by far-right judges, and other anti-democratic measures. Once they lose their grip on power, they may never get it back.

We shouldn’t have been surprised

As welcome as this news is, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. This isn’t the first precedent Millennials have shattered.

In our heyday, Millennials were the least religious generation in American history up to that point (although Gen Z surpassed us). As poll after poll confirmed this result, Christian apologists were dismayed and bewildered.

They made some half-hearted suggestions about how to evangelize to us, but they were confident that their best ally was time. They insisted that we were just having a secular rumspringa, sowing some wild oats, and that we’d come back to Christianity as we settled down and grew older.

That didn’t happen. Instead, Millennials have been growing less religious with time.

Are these trends related? It’s very likely. Frequent church attendance and self-reported religiosity both map to political conservatism. You can debate which direction the arrow of causality points, but the connection is there. Since the Millennials are less religious than older generations, it’s to be expected that we’d also be less conservative.

Pulling up the ladder

There’s another explanation that Burn-Murdoch’s article suggests. Conservatism often accompanies wealth, stability, and a sense of security—in short, the things that make you feel like your life is going well and you’d like to keep it that way. However, younger generations haven’t had that same opportunity to build wealth.

In the U.S., the post-war generation enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. Rather than pass on those opportunities to the young, they’ve done their best to pull up the ladder behind them. Over the last few decades, conservative legislators have crippled union power, kept the minimum wage frozen at a pittance, taken a chainsaw to tax rates at the top, allowed college tuition to skyrocket, stonewalled the construction of affordable housing, and done their utmost to block universal health care.

Republicans have even proposed getting rid of (“sunsetting”) Social Security and Medicare. Nothing could be more emblematic of the conservative desire to yank away welfare programs after benefiting from them.

The predictable result is that a tiny minority has accumulated vast wealth, whereas life for everyone else has become harder and more precarious than ever. The Millennial generation has been pinched between recessions. Many of us can’t afford to buy houses. We have far lower rates of stock ownership.

All of this has left a lasting mark on Millennials’ political views. We never had the chance to become invested in the system the way our parents and grandparents did. It’s the least surprising thing imaginable that we’re in favor of a stronger safety net, higher taxes on the rich and other progressive economic policies.

“Dropped like a rock”

As Millennials and Gen Z grow older, their opinions become a bigger part of the national mix. That’s probably why “the importance of patriotism and faith has dropped like a rock”, according to a Fox News take on this poll from the Wall Street Journal:

The Monday poll questioned U.S. respondents about the importance of patriotism, religious faith, having children and other traditional U.S. metrics. The poll found that just 39% of Americans say their religious faith is very important to them, and just 38% say patriotism is very important. The WSJ compared those numbers to the first time it ran the poll in 1998 when 62% of Americans said religion was very important to them, and 70% said patriotism was very important.

Needless to say, these results have occasioned hand-wringing among the American right. However, they’ve got no one to blame for it but themselves.

For decades, conservatives have sought to weld both religion and patriotism to their own brand of politics. They wanted to convince people that the only way of being patriotic was to be a right-wing Christian. Arguably, they succeeded. But instead of forcing everyone into their mold, as they intended, all they achieved was to turn off everyone who didn’t identify with their brand and send them rushing for the exits.

That’s a major factor behind the decline of Christianity, and the same thing is happening with patriotism. Younger Americans are less inclined to identify with a country that ignores their desires and devalues their lives, just as they’re less inclined to identify with a religion that ignores their views on LGBTQ rights, climate change, gun control, and racial justice. It’s the ultimate reaping-the-whirlwind moment for the religious right.