Category: Regressive

Cognitive Clarity–A Big Item on God’s To-Do List: Kill as Many People as Possible

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 11/24/2023

Yet the church gets away with “God is love” 

Those who have been assured since childhood that God is Love—and

have been coached to pray to their loving father well into adulthood—seem immune to many Bible texts that contradict this idea, for example, these pieces of Jesus-script:

“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law,and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.”  (Matthew 10:34-36)

Luke’s version of this text is prefaced with, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49)

In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul taught that “wrath and fury” awaited people who were disobedient to god. (Romans 2:8)

The Genesis Flood Story is all about god killing as many people as possible, in fact everyone on earth except for one family. Yet Bible books for children focus on the rainbow ending, ignoring the genocide. Ken Ham decided to celebrate the genocide with a family-fun theme park. How in the world can he live with himself? 

Devout folks are persuaded that the horrendous suffering in the world can’t be blamed on god, but is the result of free will, or god’s mysterious ways, or a supposed bigger plan unknown to us. This is what I have called “easy acceptance of the very terrible,” an outlook/attitude that is given a boost by a deep ignorance of history, i.e., unawareness of how much suffering there has been. 

On 1 November 1755, Lisbon was destroyed by earthquake, tsunami and fire. Many of the 12,000 who died were killed when churches collapsed on them as they praised god on All-Saints-Day. In the 14th century, at least a quarter of the human population between India and England died of the plague—and the suffering was grotesque. The church was sure that this was god’s “wrath and fury” in action, and penitents wandered Europe flagellating themselves hoping to appease god’s anger. But how can that possibly make sense—how can it be squared with belief in a loving god? The Holocaust during World War II—six million people intentionally murdered—is totally inexplicable if a good, caring deity is paying attention. Indeed, Holocaust-denialism is one way of salvaging faith. Such denial is totally inexplicable since the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in history. 

Honest theology would admit that killing people seems to be a big item on angry god’s to-do list.

But then there was another Holocaust that has not attracted as much attention. It is appropriate here to include paragraphs from the opening of David E. Stannard’s book, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.

“In the darkness of an early July morning in 1945, on a desolate spot in the New Mexico desert named after a John Donne sonnet celebrating the Holy Trinity, the first atomic bomb was exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer later remembered that the immense flash of light, followed by the thunderous roar, caused a few observers to laugh and others to cry. But most, he said, were silent. Oppenheimer himself recalled at that instant a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: 

I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.

“There is no reason to think that anyone on board the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa María, on an equally dark early morning four and a half centuries earlier, thought of those ominous lines from the ancient Sanskrit poem when the crews of the Spanish ships spied a flicker of light on the windward side of the island they would name after the Holy Savior. But the intuition, had it occurred, would have been as appropriate then as it was when that first nuclear blast rocked the New Mexico desert sands. 

“In both instances—at the Trinity test site in 1945 and at San Salvador in 1492—those moments of achievement crowned years of intense personal struggle and adventure for their protagonists and were culminating points of ingenious technological achievement for their countries. 

“But both instances also were prelude to orgies of human destructiveness that, each in its own way, attained a scale of devastation not previously witnessed in the entire history of the world. Just twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before had so many people—at least 130,000, probably many more—died from a single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas.”

And: “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”

How does God-Is-Love theology survive when we become fully aware of such horrendous suffering? “He’s got the whole world in his hands” fails to have any meaning at all. The New Testament especially makes the point that its god is aware of every human, i.e., everything we say, and even think—which is how prayer is supposed to work—is known to god.  

And how can the god who runs the cosmos not be aware of the Big Picture? 

He had to know very well that Europeans were sailing west to find a way to China, but that a massive land mass was in the way—a land mass that was home to many millions of people who had been settled in north, central, and south American for thousands of years. Moreover, this god must have known that these residents of the Americas would have no immunity whatever to the many diseases that the European explorers brought with them. These diseases proved to be primary cause of death—wiping out millions of people: a super version of the 14th century’s Black Plague.

Yet, god just watched it all happen? How can this not be an enormous problem for Christian theology? An all-powerful god just sitting on his hands? It makes no sense whatever. 

Stannard devotes considerable space in his book to descriptions of the societies that the Spanish found as they ventured deeper into South America. He quotes from letters and diaries that explorers wrote, in which they marveled at the wonders they encountered: examples of advanced architecture and well-ordered, well-run communities. 

But the Spanish were not tourists. They were money motivated, on the hunt for gold, silver for the Spanish monarchy—and for slaves. Columbus was the trail-blazer—and a malicious one at that; he was a man 

“…with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought. As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of Hispaniola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not inaugurated such carnage.” (pp. 199-200, Kindle, Stannard, emphasis added)

Later, heroes of the United States shared similar ideas. 

“George Washington, in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and ‘lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed,’ urging the general not to “listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.”” (p. 119, Kindle)

Thomas Jefferson, “…in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with ‘the hatchet.’ ‘And . . . if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,’ he wrote, ‘we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,’ continuing: ‘in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.’” (p. 120, Kindle)

And: “…the man who became America’s first truly twentieth century President, Theodore Roosevelt, added his opinion that the extermination of the American Indians and the expropriation of their lands ‘was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable.’” (p. 245, Kindle)

So many of the devout do their very best not to think about these evils: easy acceptance of the very terrible is an easy way out. Well, maybe not so easy—if they’re honest with themselves—but they adopt it anyway to shelter their beliefs from close examination. 

This is actually cowardice. Serious threats to the faith should be addressed head-on. One helpful tool for this is John Loftus’ hefty (more than 500 pages) 2021 anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering.

The existence of a good, loving, all-powerful, competent god does not withstand careful, critical, skeptical analysis. The Christian god who allowed the American Holocaust is the same one who does nothing to irradicate thousands of genetic diseases, mental illnesses—and cancers that are rampant in the world. He’s “got the whole world in his hands” is such a pathetic misunderstanding of reality. And how is it that a god who supposedly “inspired” humans—that is, manipulated their minds—to write a 1000-page holy book, couldn’t have changed thousands of minds in the direction of improving basic human decency? That is, cleansed our brains of racism. Is that too much to expect?

One of Stannard’s final observations: “…there is little doubt that the dominant sixteenth-and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical, literary, and popular opinion in Spain and Britain and Europe’s American colonies regarding the native peoples of North and South America was that they were a racially degraded and inferior lot—borderline humans as far as most whites were concerned.”  (p. 278, Kindle, emphasis added)

Humanity would be a lot better off if the Christian god had much greater tutorial skills.

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 ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) 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. At the invitation of John Loftus, 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. 

Cognitive Clarity–The Magic Self-Authenticating New Testament, Robert Conner

"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 11/21/2023

It can be asserted with little fear of contradiction that every literate

adult the world over has a mental image of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Christianity is the largest religion — an estimated 2.4 billion adherents — and has existed for 2000 years. For centuries, laymen and scholars alike assumed the gospel stories were history and that Jesus and his apostles were verifiably historical characters like Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1), or Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate (Luke 3:1-2). However, in the early twentieth century, when German scholars began to question the reliability of the New Testament texts, that assumption came under challenge, particularly after 1909 when the philosopher Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews published Die Christusmythe, The Christ Myth, that claimed there was no reliable independent evidence for the Jesus of the gospels — Jesus, Drews asserted, was a product of the imagination. Could Drews have been right all along?

Whatever one may think of Drew’s claims, one is certainly true: there is no independent evidence for Jesus outside the text of the New Testament. As always, scholars are divided about specifics, including about when Jesus died — assuming Jesus was a real person to begin with. The majority opinion, based on the gospels, favors a date between April, CE 30, and April, CE 33, but as Helen Bond has argued convincingly, the gospel accounts were meant to establish early Christian theology, not to record Jesus’ history.[1] There is little evidence to suggest the gospel accounts contain any eyewitness testimony: the gospel writers never name themselves within their texts, speak in the first person, suggest that they were either observers or participants in the events they relate, or cite their sources. Matthew and Luke clearly depended on the gospel of Mark — Matthew quotes or paraphrases 600 of the 661 verses in Mark and follows Mark’s timeline. Luke followed suit, using about 65% of Mark as his source.

At this point the Christian apologist will typically cite the historian Josephus, particularly the crown jewel of Historical Jesus texts, the endlessly debated Testimonium Flavianum of Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, 3: 

“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.” 

Two recently published analyses of the Testimonium come to radically different conclusions. Based on a comparison of the Testimonium and the writings of the church official Eusebius, Ken Olson concluded, 

“Both the language and the content [of the Testimonium] have close parallels in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is the first author to show any knowledge of the text…The most likely hypothesis is that Eusebius either composed the entire text or rewrote it so thoroughly that it is now impossible to recover a Josephan original.” 

Olson concludes that the Testimonium “has its most plausible Sitz-im-Leben in the pagan-Christian controversies of the fourth century.”[2]

On the other hand, Gary Goldberg performed a meticulous comparison of the Testimonium and Luke 24:18-24, documenting “thirty-one ordered content parallels” between the two texts. Goldberg concluded, “…by the simplest estimate (a normal distribution), the probability that the Emmaus-TF correspondences are due to chance is about one in ten thousand…The study shows Josephus closely following a Christian source…”[3]

In short, two close examinations of the text of the Testimonium have concluded that (1) it is a Eusebian forgery invented to bolster the early Christian claim of Jesus’ divine status, or (2) it is a word-for-word paraphrase of the Road to Emmaus story in the gospel of Luke. Quite clearly, the Testimonium is not an independent historical confirmation of the Jesus of the gospels. Additionally, as I have noted elsewhere, “…competent scholars arguing in good faith often reach radically different conclusions based on the available evidence…The evidence, such as it is, is textual; later historians who reported that Jesus had been crucified were repeating what they’d read or been told, not what they’d seen.”[4] The problem of flimsy evidence within the New Testament text, including outright forgery, is now so well documented as to need no further comment.[5] The evidence for Jesus is the New Testament. Full stop.

New Testament scholars are in wide agreement that Mark was the earliest gospel, written around the year 70 CE, decades after Jesus’ death. As if a lapse of 40 years between the life of Jesus and the composition of the first known gospel wasn’t problem enough, according to the church historian Eusebius, “[Mark] had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed him.”[6] On the best evidence, the gospels were not even composed in Palestine where the events they purport to relate took place. It is conjectured that Mark was written in Rome, Matthew in Syria, and John was perhaps composed in Asia Minor. 

Even worse for the study of Christian origins, in 66 CE the First Jewish-Roman War resulted in the destruction of Jewish towns in Galilee and Judea which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. By the time the war ended with the fall of Masada in 73 CE, the Jewish population of Palestine, obviously including potential eyewitnesses to the career of Jesus, had been decimated, scattered, and enslaved. Even assuming Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person, time and circumstances were working overtime to eradicate any evidence of his life and career. What would his soi-disant biographers do to fill this memory hole? A close reading of the gospels suggests they invented their stories.

Unlike history, the gospels are written from the standpoint of an omniscient narrator — like a novelist, the gospel writer knows not only the actions of his characters, but their inner thoughts and emotional state, as well as the content of their private conversations. Matthew, writing an estimated 85 years after Jesus’ birth, ostensibly knows the circumstances of Jesus’ conception, including the contents of a dream. (Matthew 1:20) Not to be outdone, Luke claims that, “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19) Matthew claims to know the precise event that led the Pharisees to withdraw and begin to plot Jesus’ death, (Matthew 12:14) and John — writing 70 years after the fact — is mysteriously informed that the Pharisees “…said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’” (John 12:19)

So where did Mark — his true identity is unknown, but following convention we’ll call him Mark — get his information? Decades ago, when I was studying the New Testament at university, the standard answer to “where they got it” was still “oral tradition,” but given the proven unreliability both of memory and oral transmission, scholars have questioned that explanation and suggested a different source: the theology of Paul of Tarsus. 

The number of scholars who have proposed this connection is quite impressive and appears to be growing: Pérez I. Díaz,[7] Hollander,[8] Eurell,[9] Smith,[10] Nelligan,[11] and particularly Richard Carrier[12] to name but a few. However, using Paul to get to Jesus presents a problem very nicely summarized by David Madison: 

“In the earliest of the New Testament documents, penned long before the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth isn’t there. That is, the epistles of Paul and others don’t speak at all about Jesus of Nazareth. Their focus is a divine Christ. There seems to be no awareness of Jesus’s preaching and parables, his miracles, his disputes with religious authorities, or even the Passion narratives. It’s almost as if the real Jesus hadn’t been invented yet, which would not happen until the Gospels had been created. The focus of the epistles — with Paul being the giant presence — is salvation through believing in a resurrected Jesus. Inexplicably, they skip over everything else.”[13]

The first person known to have mentioned Jesus is Paul of Tarsus. And regarding the source of his information, Paul is perfectly clear: “visions and revelations from the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 12:1) After his conversion — which he never describes — Paul did not hie himself to Jerusalem to confer with Jesus’ family or followers. His ego on full display, Paul claims, 

“…when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” (Galatians 1:15-17) 

Paul didn’t need no stinking history: “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12) Unlike generations of New Testament scholars assiduously questing after the “historical Jesus,” Paul declares, “Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” (2 Corinthians 5:16) This is hardly the sort of attitude that would favor the loving preservation of Jesus’ every word and deed.

Paul believed that Jesus had previously existed “in the form of God…but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:6-7) According to Paul, God “…promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.” (Romans 1:2-4) When he rose from the dead, Jesus “became a life-giving spirit” and returned to whence he had come: “the second [Adam] is from heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47) The earliest Christians believed Jesus had descended from heaven: “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than the heavens.” (Ephesians 4:10) The man known as Jesus had a previous existence in heaven: “The Son is the image of the invisible God…He is before all things…” (Colossians 1:15, 17) 

Paul is certain he and his fellow believers will soon be joined with their Lord, “for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) In short, Paul has precisely nothing to tell us about “historical Jesus.” Paul was convinced that the time remaining until Jesus’ return was so short that married Christians should live as if celibate: “the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not…” (1 Corinthians 7:29) Given the urgency of the moment, what possible reason could there be to preserve the details of Jesus’ career, assuming that anyone clearly remembered them?

As noted by Madison, “Proving the Bible’s authenticity by quoting from the Bible is closed-loop reasoning…no matter how high the level of confidence in the Bible in a particular part of the world, no document on the planet can be self-authenticating.”[14] In all likelihood, the Judean church and its members were swept away in the maelstrom of the Roman invasion; like the epistle ascribed to James, Paul’s letters are addressed to believers “scattered among the nations.” (James 1:1) The earliest Christians for whom we have evidence lived in expectation of imminent deliverance[15] and evince no interest in “authenticating” the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth. The stories of the gospels cannot be verified by any contemporaneous sources. Insofar as anyone can confirm, they are pious confections written for the edification of credulous believers. We are left with a stark conclusion: the entire evidence for the life of Jesus is the magic self-authenticating New Testament.Robert Conner is the author of The Death of Christian Belief; The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days; Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story; The Secret Gospel of Mark; and Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics. 

[1] Helen K. Bond, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination,” New Testament Studies, 59/4 (2013), 461-475.

[2] Ken Olson, “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Traditions and Innovations, Helenic Studies Series 60 (2013) 97-114.

[3] Gary J. Goldberg, “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 20/1 (2021) 1-32.

[4] Robert Conner, The Death of Christian Belief (2023), 48, 56.

[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, 2010.

[6] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, 39, 15.

[7] Mar Pérez I. Díaz, Jesus in the Light of Paul’s Theology, Mohr Siebeck, 2020.

[8] Harm W. Hollander, “The Words of Jesus: From Oral Traditions to Written Records in Paul and Q,” Novum Testamentum 42/4 (2000), 340-357.

[9] John-Christian Eurell, “Paul and the Jesus Tradition: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Paul and the Synoptics,” Journal of Early Christian History, 12/2 (2022), 1-16.

[10] David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels, Resource, 2011.

[11] Thomas Nelligan, The Quest for Mark’s Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark’s Use of First Corinthians, Pickwick, 2015

[12] Richard Carrier, Jesus from Outer Spance: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, Pitchstone, 2020.

[13] David Madison, Guessing About God, 144-145, Insighting Growth Publications, 2023.

[14] Madison, op. cit., 56-57.

[15] Robert Conner, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days, 7-25, (2022)

Cognitive Clarity–Christianity’s Embarrassing Apostle Paul Problem

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 11/17/2023

Hallucinations are not a credible foundation for any religion


The church gets away with a far, far too much because most of the laity don’t bother to read the Bible, let alone study it carefully.This failure enables the clergy to nurture an idealized version of the faith—indeed, an idealized version of Jesus—unhindered by so much of the nasty stuff in full view in the gospels and in the letters of the apostle Paul. The clergy are quite content that the folks in the pews don’t go digging about in these documents. Instead, ritual, sacred music, costuming, stained glass windows—church décor in general—allow the laity to savor a false version of the faith promoted by the ecclesiastical bureaucracy.
  

I have written extensively on the nasty stuff found in the gospels. Here I want to focus on the multiple embarrassments we encounter in the letters of the apostle Paul. Mainstream New Testament scholars believe that there are seven authentic letters of Paul—based on vocabulary, style, and ideas: First Thessalonians, Galatians, First & Second Corinthians, Romans, Philippians, and Philemon. These were all copied for centuries by hand, so they are spoiled by errors, omissions and interpolations, but for the most part, here we have what Paul taught. If the laity dip into the gospels from time to time, it’s probably a rarity for them to explore the Paul letters at any depth. But if they do, they encounter real puzzles—and bad theology, which is not hard to detect.  

Embarrassment One
 
Anyone who reads the letters of Paul, carefully, thoughtfully, will be stumped by his failure to mention the ministry, teachings, and miracles of Jesus of Nazareth. How can that be? Since there is no hint in the New Testament that Paul ever met or even saw Jesus, it’s not a big surprise. We’re familiar, of course, with the dramatic story of Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus, told three times in the Book of Acts. This is probably dramatic storytelling—like so much else in Acts—because Paul doesn’t mention it in his own letters. But after this life-changing conversion, wouldn’t Paul have wanted to pump the disciples for information about Jesus? The author of Acts reports that Paul did indeed head back 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.” (Acts 9:26-28)
 
But the author of Acts is caught in a lie here. He had not read Paul’s letter to the Galatians: 


“…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!” (Galatians 1:17-20)


Since we are so familiar with Peter as depicted in the gospels, we might imagine that Paul asked him a lot of questions about Jesus. But who was this Peter whom Paul visited? Chances are he wasn’t the guy who appears in the gospel accounts: we have no idea where those stories came from. They look too much like fantasy literature. In any case, whatever this Peter might have told him about Jesus didn’t end up in Paul’s letters. Paul never mentions the empty tomb, for example.

 
And why was Paul so emphatic (“I do not lie!”) that he didn’t mix with other disciples? He probably wanted to assure his readers that his knowledge about Jesus came directly from Jesus. That is, the risen Jesus in the spiritual realm. Earlier in Galatians 1 Paul had written: “For I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin, for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” (vv. 11-12)


This is the essence of Embarrassment One: Paul’s ultra-certain faith is based on his visions. Today, the professionals who study brain science would say, his hallucinations. We all know that devout folks dismiss visions of other religions, e.g., Protestants even ridicule Catholic visions of the Virgin Mary, nearly everyone laughs off Mormon vision claims. So many devout people—scattered across different religions, with conflicting concepts of god—have been certain they’re getting glimpses of happenings in the spiritual realm. If it’s someone in your own religion—especially long ago—folks say, “Isn’t that wonderful!” But if it’s outside your religion: “Isn’t that ridiculous!” 

Devout New Testament scholars, holding out hope that the gospels contain some glimpses of history, argue that “reliable” oral traditions about Jesus were in circulation in the decades before the gospels were written. But Paul seems not to have been aware of such stories about Jesus, or just chose to ignore them. Again, his credibility among his followers was based not on “things he might have heard about Jesus”—but on his communications from Jesus in the spirit world. 

Reliable oral traditions may just be wishful thinking. There is little ethical teaching in Mark’s gospel. Matthew decided to correct that by adding The Sermon on the Mount, which Luke shortened—and changed the wording. The author of John’s gospel omitted it entirely, and added lengthy Jesus monologues found nowhere else.

We are entitled to wonder, by the way, if Paul was aware of the Jesus stories that we know from the gospels. Paul’s advice in Romans 13 is a major puzzle: 

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.”  (vv. 1-2)
 
He seems not to have known that Jesus was executed by Roman authorities—and, of course, this is simply bad theology: that all government authorities are divinely appointed. Paul was several stages removed from reality. He goes on to say, “For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are God’s agents, busy with this very thing. Pay to all what is due them: taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due.” (vv. 6-7) What a perfect occasion to quote Jesus’ famous advice in Matthew 22:21, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s…” But Paul simply wasn’t aware of anything Jesus taught. 

One comeback may be to point out that Paul quotes Jesus at the Last Supper (I Corinthians 11:23-26). How would he have known this? He wasn’t at the Last Supper, and bragged that he didn’t learn anything about Jesus from human sources. He states that “I received from the Lord” the famous words of the Eucharist, i.e., from his visions. When Mark created his account of the Last Supper, he probably quoted Paul’s version of the story.   

Embarrassment Two
 
Historians know very well that verifying anything about the life of Jesus cannot be done, because there is no contemporaneous documentation by which to do so. The gospels were written decades after his death, and the authors don’t mention their sources. Look at any modern biography of a person in history: at the back there will be pages listing the sources for the information provided in the book. We have none of that for Jesus.

But that kind of research—i.e., spending endless hours in libraries and archives—never occurred to Paul. His story of Jesus could be reconstructed from Old Testament texts. Committed to his particular vision-based theology, he was confident that his Jesus was foreseen in ancient texts. An article describing Paul’s approach, in considerable detail, was published here on the Debunking Christianity Blog on 10 November, by Greg G., How Did Paul Know What He Tells Us About Jesus? I recommend careful study of this article. At the outset he states:
 
“We often marvel at Paul’s lack of interest in the life and times of Jesus. He says Jesus was born of a woman but says nothing about his mother. He tells us Jesus was killed for the sins of others but tells us nothing about where the event occurred. He tells us that Jesus was buried but he tells us nothing about the gravesite. Did Paul not think the information was available in his time?
 
And: “Paul tells us over and over that he got his information from the scriptures.” But this is not how to write history. This is a form of ancient superstition: that a god’s secrets about the future can be gleaned from studying texts written long ago.  One’s theology is the key to figuring out these secrets. The author of Matthew’s gospel provides extreme examples of this misguided approach, e.g., he quotes Isaiah 7:14 to prove the virgin birth of Jesus—but Isaiah 7 has nothing whatever to do with the birth of a supposed messiah many centuries later. Matthew also quotes Hosea 11:1 to account for his farfetched story (found nowhere else), that Joseph and Mary fled to Egypt to keep Jesus safe. 
 
If you’re deep into Christian theology, you might think that Paul was on the right track figuring out Jesus from old manuscripts. But his faulty thinking here is a major embarrassment. 
 

On my YouTube channel, there is a playlist, “Please Stop Calling Him ‘Saint’ Paul”, with four videos:

       Number 1     Number 2     Number 3     Number 4      


Embarrassment Three
 
It’s no surprise, given the violent, abusive god we find in the Old Testament, that Paul bought this theology too. Hence in Romans 1, he includes gossips and rebellious children among those who deserve to die. In Romans 2:5-8, we find this: 

“But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. He will repay according to each one’s deeds:to those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life,while for those who are self-seeking and who obey not the truth but injustice, there will be wrath and fury.”
 
Churchgoers are most familiar with things Paul wrote on those days when he hadn’t forgotten to take his meds, and was in a good mood, e.g., I Corinthians 13, which includes the famous words, “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogantor rude…” But the fact remains, that for Paul, god’s default mood was wrath and rage. And a magical spell was a way to escape this: “…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” (Romans 10:9)

For more insight into Paul’s thinking, I recommend John Loftus’ article, Paul’s Christianity: Belief in Belief Itself, which is a longer version of the Foreword he wrote for Robert Conner’s book, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days. In this piece Loftus quotes from Conner’s third essay in his 2019 anthology, The Case Against Miracles:

“A more mature modern psychology with superior investigative techniques and tools can now question whether Paul of Tarsus was functionally, if not clinically, insane—and whether the religion he championed is based on delusion.” (p. 545)

This is a major embarrassment indeed.

Embarrassment Four
 
Just a brief mention of this one. Anti-gay fanatics focus on Paul’s rant against both male and female homosexuals in Romans 1:26-27. 

“There! Doesn’t that settle it!” They don’t seem to notice that Paul wasn’t thrilled about male-female sex either: “And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24) Not too many clergy quote this verse at wedding ceremonies! And they don’t mention I Corinthians 7:1: “It is good for a man not to touch a woman” or vv. 8-9:
 
“To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is good for them to remain unmarried as I am. But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.”
 
Do the anti-gay fanatics follow Paul’s advice about straight sex? Get married in order not to be aflame with passion? Paul assumed that his lack of interest in sex was the ideal standard to live by. What a tortured soul, what an embarrassment. 
 
I suspect that if the New Testament were suddenly printed without the letters of Paul, many of the faithful wouldn’t notice or care. 
 
Wasn’t it a major blunder that the New Testament didn’t include letters written by Jesus himself? We can imagine Jesus’ Epistle to Saul of Tarsus, on how not to be a rogue apostle; his Epistle to Peter, on how to run a church without resorting to magical thinking; his Epistles to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, on how to avoid making up bad, mediocre, alarming Jesus-script; and Jesus’ Epistle to the Women of the World, on how to fight misogyny and arrogant patriarchy. 
 
With these letters, we’d have a much better New Testament. 


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 ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) 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. At the invitation of John Loftus, 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. 

A Tennessee high school let a Christian preacher lead the basketball team in foot-washing

Here’s the link to this article.

Pushing Jesus on public high school students is coercive, immoral, and illegal

HEMANT MEHTA

NOV 4, 2023

Here’s a quick tip for Christians who want to proselytize in public schools: When you get away with it, don’t brag about it publicly. Because even when you think all the evidence has been scrubbed from the internet, some people (*waves hello*) may have saved screenshots.

Speaking of which…

On Wednesday, Andrew Fortner, the leader of a Fellowship of Christian Athletes chapter in Tennessee, posted about how students at White House Heritage High School (a public school) ended their practice in an unusual way.

They held a free-throw shooting contest and five players on the team “won”… the chance to wash their teammates’ feet just like Jesus. The FCA leader shared pictures and explained how he told team leaders to “chase the TOWEL over the TITLE.” Fortner also included an image of himself reading the Bible to the kids.

That post is no longer online. Fortner deleted it. But not before it was shared on TikTok by a concerned woman (who also deleted her video to avoid local backlash).

Still, it happened. And now the Freedom From Religion Foundation is getting involved. In a letter, legal fellow Samantha F. Lawrence calls on the Robertson County Schools to investigate the matter:

We ask that RCS investigate this matter and ensure that the White House Heritage HS basketball program ceases infusing the program with religion. The basketball program and its coaches cannot be permitted to invite and allow an outside adult to proselytize student athletes and require them to engage in religious activities.

…

… When coaches promote their personal religion to students and invite an outside adult, such as Mr. Fortner, to instruct students to act out a biblical story while reading them scripture, the student athletes will no doubt feel that agreeing with their coach’s religious viewpoint and participating in the religious activities is essential to pleasing their coach and being viewed as a team player. It is unrealistic and unconstitutional to put student athletes to the choice of allowing their constitutional rights to be violated in order to maintain good standing in the eyes of their coach and peers or openly dissenting at the risk of retaliation from their coach and teammates.

As Lawrence points out, the Supreme Court’s Kennedy decision (where a football coach wanted to pray at midfield after games despite the coercive effect) is irrelevant here. This was a direct attempt to merge church and state. There was very clearly coercion. Fortner isn’t even a coach. He’s just a random guy whose Christianity gave him access to the team.

No representative from a different religion, or an atheist, would be given the opportunity to push their beliefs on the basketball team in the name of self-described morality. And they shouldn’t be! But Christian privilege is a hell of a drug.

The coaching staff at this school had no right to invite a Christian preacher to a practice in an effort to convert children. It’s appalling that the adults involved here were so comfortable with what was happening that they allowed photos to be taken and posted online… at least until, perhaps, they realized they were doing something wrong.

Fortner did not respond to a request for comment.

The Christian nationalism is coming from inside the House

Here’s the link to this article.

Avatar photoby ADAM LEE NOV 02, 2023

Official portrait of Speaker Mike Johnson | The Christian nationalism is coming from inside the House

Overview:

Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, is a radical Christian nationalist who opposes democracy—and he still might not be extreme enough for his own caucus.

Reading Time: 5 MINUTES

In 2023, Kevin McCarthy made ignominious history by becoming the first Speaker of the House in US history to be ejected by his own party.

It took multiple rounds of voting, with McCarthy groveling before his party’s most extreme members, before he got the job in the first place. But he lasted only a few months before enraging them by passing a bill to prevent a shutdown. For the grave sin of governing, he was kicked out of the speaker’s chair.

Several weeks of chaos and dysfunction ensued as various House Republicans stepped forward to run for speaker and others shot them down. Finally, the infighting exhausted them enough to coalesce around a new speaker, Louisiana Congressman Mike Johnson. (I wonder if Johnson won because his generic name made him seem unobjectionable.)

But despite his bland, forgettable demeanor, Johnson is no moderate. As the modern Republican Party keeps finding new depths of political nihilism to sink to, he may be the worst yet to hold the post.

A young-earth creationist

Johnson got his start working for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a right-wing legal group. He spent years arguing that abortion should be outlawed and that states should have the right to criminalize consensual same-sex relationships.

He’s also a young-earth creationist who’s represented Answers in Genesis in court to argue for tax exemptions for their Noah’s Ark theme park.

He believes that teaching evolution causes school shootings:

During a 2016 sermon at the Christian Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, Johnson said that a “series of cultural shifts” in the United States — led by “elites” and “academics” in the 1930s who were engaging with the theories of Charles Darwin — erased the influence of Christian thinking and creationism from society.

“People say, ‘How can a young person go into their schoolhouse and open fire on their classmates?’” Johnson asked the audience. “Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed. None of this should surprise us.”“New House Speaker Blamed School Shootings on Teaching Evolution and Abortion.” Nikki McCann Ramirez, Rolling Stone, 26 October 2023.

This feels almost quaint. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a young-earth creationist in the wild. I had assumed most of them had long since moved on to QAnon.

Needless to say, the idea that belief in God prevents violence is a blackly comical absurdity. Not only is that not true, it’s the flat opposite of the truth. Human history is a bloodstained chronicle of devout believers slaughtering each other for believing in the wrong god—or believing in the right god, but worshipping it in the wrong way. Just imagine trying to tell people from the era of the Inquisition or the Crusades that religion is a force for peace that teaches us to treat all life as sacred.

The Bible records a campaign of genocide enthusiastically carried out by the Hebrew tribes against their pagan enemies. Medieval Europe is an endless battle of Catholic-versus-Protestant warfare, Christian-versus-Muslim warfare, and everyone killing and persecuting Jews. Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have clashed again and again. Western nations have subjugated, colonized, enslaved and killed indigenous “heathens” from all over the world in the name of spreading the gospel. The ongoing Israel-Hamas war is a battle between two religious sects that both believe they have a God-given right to possess the same land.

In addition to his anti-evolution views, Johnson ticks every other box on the list of Christian “antis”. Like all fundamentalists, his worldview is defined by what he’s against: He is anti-abortion, anti-gay-rights, anti-feminism, anti-climate-science. He’s even anti-divorce—believing, as many religious conservatives are starting to, that it gives women too much power. In a bid to shore up the crumbling walls of patriarchy, he wants to abolish no-fault divorce so they’ll be forced to stay in unhappy or abusive marriages.

A Christian nationalist

But, above all else, Johnson is a Christian nationalist. Like all Christian nationalists, he believes (falsely, based on right-wing pseudo-history) that America was founded as a Christian nation, and therefore a Christian view of law and morality should rule.

It hardly needs emphasizing that, when Johnson and his ilk speak of a “Christian” view, they don’t mean a generically Christian, ecumenical, big-tent view. They mean their own interpretation—a hardcore right-wing, patriarchal, anti-science, literalist reading of the Bible. They believe that this fundamentalist theology should reign supreme over every other interpretation of Christianity, not to mention all the other religions, philosophies, and worldviews in our multicultural melting pot.

The most disturbing aspect of Johnson’s view is that, because he believes America is a Christian nation, he holds that evangelical Christians like himself are entitled to rule regardless of elections. That’s why he’s against democracy.

That’s not a polemical attack. He says so himself!

“We don’t live in a democracy, because democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.”“He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule.” Katelyn Fossett, Politico, 27 October 2023.

Yes, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, second in line to the presidency, is an avowed opponent of democracy.

These aren’t empty words. Johnson has acted in line with them. He was one of the Republicans who voted unsuccessfully to overturn the 2020 election. He wrote a brief in support of Texas’ toweringly arrogant lawsuit to throw out the results of elections in other states that voted differently. He spread bizarre conspiracy theories about Hugo Chavez writing voting machine software.

All of this isn’t an aberration. It flows from Johnson’s Christian nationalist theology. In this monarchical worldview, Christians like him get to be in charge, no matter what. If the voters say something different, too bad for them. He believes in throwing out the “wrong” votes and handpicking the person who “should” have won.

READ: Christian nationalists: Drop Mike, hold on to your Johnson

Johnson’s anti-democratic, election-denying views mirror the general trend toward authoritarianism among conservative Christians. They were only ever in favor of democracy as long as they thought they’d win every time. When that stopped being the case, they started wanting to change the rules to suit them. From Kristin Du Mez:

I think what has escalated things in the last decade or so is a growing alarm among conservative white Christians that they no longer have numbers on their side. So looking at the demographic change in this country, the quote-unquote “end of white Christian America” and there’s where you can see a growing willingness to blatantly abandon any commitment to democracy.

It’s really during the Obama presidency that you see the escalation of not just rhetoric, but a kind of desperation, urgency, ruthlessness in pursuing this agenda. Religious freedom was at the center of that. And it was, again, not a religious freedom for all Americans; it was religious freedom to ensure that conservative Christians could live according to their values. Because they could see this kind of sea change on LGBTQ rights, they could see the demographic changes, and inside their spaces, they have really played up this language of fear that liberals are out to get you, and you cannot raise your children anymore.“He Seems to Be Saying His Commitment Is to Minority Rule.” Katelyn Fossett, Politico, 27 October 2023.

For all the danger Johnson presents, the one thing he’s not is unusual. This election-denying, freedom-refuting ideology, once the fringe of the fringe, has swallowed the entire Republican party. Anyone the party might be expected to support would hold these same beliefs.

Johnson’s elevation isn’t an aberration, but a punctuation mark. It’s a sign that, for the foreseeable future, this is the course the Republican party has committed itself to. Elections in America are no longer a choice between two points on the same political spectrum. They’re a struggle for the continued existence of democracy over those who favor fascism and authoritarian rule.

Not extreme enough

As bad as that is, there are hints that even Johnson isn’t extreme enough for some members of his caucus.

For all his repugnant politics, he has an adopted Black son. Johnson has spoken frankly about the racism his son faces and said there’s a need for “systematic change”. He’s also said George Floyd was murdered by the police: “I don’t think anyone can view the video and objectively come to any other conclusion.”

For these remarks, perpetually-furious conservative pundits have already labeled Johnson a disgrace, a fraud and a secret Democrat. The right wing has done so much to nurture their own sense of grievance, there’s a chance that they’re truly ungovernable. No human being who could run for office and win could ever satisfy them.

If that’s true, then Johnson, for all his radicalism, might not end up enjoying a longer or easier tenure than his predecessor.