Category: Religion
Losing My Religion, by Michael Bigelow
Here’s the link to this article.
From Elder in the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion to proponent of scientific naturalism, by Michael Bigelow
In several of my books I have recounted my own journey from born-again Christian to religious skeptic, in the context of understanding how beliefs are formed and change (in The Believing Brain), how religious and faith-based beliefs differ (or at least should differ) from scientific and empirical beliefs (in Why Darwin Matters), and the relationship of science and religion: same-worlds model, separate-worlds model, conflicting-worlds model (in Why People Believe Weird Things). As a result, over the years I have received a considerable amount of correspondence from Christians who want to convince me to come back to the faith, along with one-time believers who recount their own pathway to non-belief. At my urging after emails revealing autobiographical fragments of his own loss of faith, in this edition of Skeptic guest contributor Michael Bigelow narrates his sojourn from Elder in the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion to proponent of scientific naturalism. As he recalls in this revealing passage from the essay below:
A literal interpretation of the Bible proved incorrect. Humans were not created in 4026 BC, nor was the earth engulfed by a flood 4,400 years ago. I was wrong. My personal discovery categorically rendered the Bible’s account of natural history as false. This revelation cast doubt on the entirety of the Bible.
—Michael Shermer
Losing My Religion
In 2008, I faced one of the most uncomfortable moments of my life. For Jehovah’s Witnesses, the memorial of Jesus’ death is the most significant event of the year. It is a solemn occasion in which a respected Elder addresses a packed Kingdom Hall, filled with believers and visitors. That year, I delivered the talk and managed the ritual passing of the wine and unleavened bread. Many attendees praised me afterward, claiming it was clear that God’s spirit was upon me. However, for nearly four years before that evening, I had ceased praying and believing and was deeply troubled by the hypocrisy of teaching things I could no longer accept as true.
An even more distressing day occurred in 2012 when I publicly renounced my ties with Jehovah’s Witnesses. A former friend described my departure as a “nuclear blast” that devastated the three congregations I had once served. My decision to leave based on conscience resulted in immediate and complete shunning by all my former friends, my family, and even my two adult sons.
Turning Points
I was born into a large extended family of Jehovah’s Witnesses in 1961 in San Diego, California. Our family of eight led a life typical for Witness households: we didn’t celebrate holidays, birthdays, or participate in patriotic events and after-school activities. My entire social circle was within the religious community, and our Saturdays were dedicated to door-to-door preaching. This lifestyle felt completely normal to me as a child.
During the 1960s, Jehovah’s Witnesses were taught that Armageddon was imminent and strongly suggested this would occur in 1975. We believed that on this day, God would destroy all who were not part of our faith, creating a deep sense of urgency to save not just ourselves but others. Driven by this belief, my father moved our family from the comfort of Southern California to frugal living in Northern New England, aiming to reach an underserved community with our teachings.
In New Hampshire, at our new Kingdom Hall, I met a young lady who would become my wife. At just twelve years old, we were both deeply committed to our faith, known among Jehovah’s Witnesses as “The Truth,” and we knew we would eventually wed. Despite our parents’ efforts to keep us apart, it seemed inevitable that we would be together. After graduating high school, we married young, securing minimum wage jobs and making ends meet with second-hand furniture and tight budgets.
I progressed through various positions of responsibility, both in our congregation and at the manufacturing company where I worked. Together, we raised and homeschooled our two sons, continually striving to live up to the commitments of our dedication to God.
In 1991, I was appointed as an Elder in our local congregation, a role laden with significant responsibilities. My duties included teaching at congregation meetings, providing guidance to those struggling, leading preaching efforts, and speaking at large conventions. Following in my father’s footsteps, I established a reputation as a dedicated minister. Despite my commitment, I harbored private doubts. Natural disasters and biblical accounts like the Noachian flood, which seemed improbable, troubled me. I was also disturbed by the notion of God allowing Satan to corrupt His perfect creation. We were taught to manage such doubts through prayer and meditation, a strategy that sufficed until innovations like Google Earth introduced new perspectives that challenged my views further.
Deconversions
Accounts of shunning, deconversion, and abandoning supernatural beliefs are increasingly common today. While my story isn’t unique in its occurrence, it is distinct in its unfolding. Many are leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses due to the organization’s strict control, unfulfilled prophecies, evolving doctrines, prohibition of blood transfusions, biased translations of the Bible, and mishandling of child sexual abuse cases.
These are valid reasons to leave, but my departure was driven by something else. When I realized the biblical narrative of natural history couldn’t possibly be true, my entire belief system collapsed. Yet, I continued to serve as a teacher, shepherd, and public figure in the organization for five more years, knowing I was an atheist. This period was a personal torment for which I still feel remorse. Looking back, I can’t see how I could have chosen differently. Here is how it all unfolded.
I have always had a profound love for the outdoors, and spending time in the mountains has been a significant part of my life. In the late 1960s, my grandparents took my brothers and me on a road trip from San Diego to the Sierra Nevada mountains in Central California. The majestic, snow-capped and rugged terrain captivated my imagination. This experience left a lasting impression, and by the mid 1980s I began organizing annual backpacking and climbing trips to the Sierras. Each spring, I would meticulously plan these trips from New Hampshire, pouring over maps, guidebooks, and equipment lists.
By the early-1990s, the Palisade range of the Sierra had become my personal sanctuary, notable for the ranges’ largest active glacier. The first time I observed the glacier from an elevated viewpoint, I noticed it was shrinking. At the glacier’s base lay a horseshoe-shaped moraine nearly a hundred feet high. Below the moraine’s rim, a glacial pond of milky, silty water formed, scattered with broken granite and ice. This observation troubled me; something significant was amiss, yet it remained just beyond my understanding.
Palisade Glacier. Photo by the author.
From the perspective of day-age, fundamentalist Christians, it is believed that the entire planet was submerged underwater 4,400 years ago during Noah’s flood. Thus, every existing landform—whether a canyon, glacier, desert, cavern, or mountain—either existed under water at that time or formed naturally afterward. I didn’t contemplate these ideas when I first saw that glacier or when I climbed the 14,000-foot mountains surrounding it. Yet, a seed of new doubt was planted.
By the late 1990s, I had a new tool for planning my trips to the Sierra: Google Earth. This technology allowed me to view satellite imagery of the entire mountain range. I could meticulously plan climbing routes, select camping spots, and observe glaciers—not only those that were still active but, more intriguingly, those that had vanished. The disappearance of glaciers suggested ice ages, a concept that I was not ready to accept as it contradicts Jehovah’s Witnesses’ teachings, which deny such geological periods.
Business Interlude and Deep Questioning of the Faith
In 1999, the company I had been with since my teenage years offered me a job in Asia. At that time, I was managing two of their operations in New England. They had recently acquired a company in Taiwan and wanted me to oversee their manufacturing in China. My wife and I deliberated over this opportunity, with our primary concern being the ability to maintain our spiritual commitments and contribute to a local congregation in Taiwan. After reaching out to the headquarters of our religious organization, we learned there was an English-speaking group in the city we would be moving to, and they welcomed our participation. Encouraged by this, we decided to relocate.
Upon moving to Taiwan, I soon realized the necessity of learning Mandarin Chinese to succeed in my role. Motivated by this challenge, I dedicated myself to studying with an intensity I had never shown before. In high school, my focus had been on my future wife rather than academics, making me a lackluster student. However, in Taiwan, I quickly learned Mandarin and developed effective study habits that significantly changed my life’s direction. This deep dive into the language not only helped in my immediate job but also enabled me and my business partners to eventually acquire the Asian company, securing our financial future. Additionally, working in locations away from my family provided me with the private space and time to deeply research and reflect on significant topics, further enriching my understanding and perspectives.
In the early 2000s, while living in Asia, I continued planning trips to the Sierra Nevada. By then, Google Earth’s satellite imagery had greatly improved, allowing me to see individual boulders and trees. This tool became indispensable for both planning excursions and simply enjoying the landscapes from afar. Around 2003, a particular land feature near Bishop, California, caught my attention and profoundly shifted my perspective. There, a small river emerges from the high country and runs through a wide, empty glacial moraine into the arid Owens Valley (see Google Earth image below). The moraine, a pristine trench once filled by a glacier, is starkly visible, stretching nearly to the desert floor. This observation challenged my previous beliefs: it seemed highly unlikely that this landform was ever submerged underwater or formed shortly after a flood. As I reviewed images from all the earth’s great mountain ranges, I found similar features. This realization opened a floodgate of curiosity and skepticism about the traditional narratives I had accepted.
Religious Dogma vs. Carbon Dating
The first research book I purchased was Glaciers of California: Modern Glaciers, Ice Age Glaciers, the Origin of Yosemite Valley, and a Glacier Tour in the Sierra Nevada by Bill Guyton. This book ignited a thirst for knowledge that grew exponentially. Studying glaciers led me to explore broader geology, which in turn introduced me to plate tectonics and scientific dating methods. These concepts opened the door to pre-history and the works of scholars like Jared Diamond, Steven Mithen, and many others. As I delved deeper, consuming books, downloading scientific papers, and visiting field sites, I was desperately seeking any evidence to affirm the Bible’s accounts of natural history. Internally, I struggled with my faith-based commitment that “I can’t be wrong,” but the mounting evidence made me fear that I was losing the argument against established scientific consensus.
As I delved into pre-history, I frequently encountered carbon dating—a method I had been taught to distrust. From the 1960s until the early 1990s, Jehovah’s Witnesses employed pseudo-scientific arguments to discredit the reliability of carbon dating. Reflecting on these apologetics with a better understanding of logical fallacies and flawed reasoning, I now recognize those arguments as circular, appealing to authority, and rooted in motivated reasoning. Despite my resistance, the evidence supporting carbon dating seemed overwhelming. In my quest to align my beliefs with factual accuracy, I had to personally validate carbon dating’s efficacy. I came across a statement from Carl Sagan, who said, “When you make the finding yourself—even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light—you’ll never forget it.” This sentiment resonated with me deeply; I had to experience this realization firsthand. Sagan was right—I will never forget the moment I accepted the truth of carbon dating.
During the early 2000s, part of my research turned to the peopling of the Americas, a captivating area of paleontology that held particular significance for me at the time. According to 17th-century biblical chronologist James Ussher, humans were created from dirt in 4004 BC, specifically on October 22. Jehovah’s Witnesses adopt a similar timeline, placing human creation at 4026 BC. Arriving at Ussher’s date involves recording and counting forward or backward from known events based on the ages of biblical kings and patriarchs. This chronology is accepted as accurate by many biblical literalists. However, if evidence showed that the Americas were populated thousands of years before these dates, it would profoundly challenge this timeline and compel me to reconsider my beliefs further.
As I delved into the peopling of the Americas, I discovered that the ash and pumice layer from the eruption of Mt. Mazama (now Crater Lake) serves as a precise stratigraphic marker. At Paisly Cave and Fort Rock Cave, archaeologists found human artifacts both within and beneath the Mt. Mazama volcanic tephra layer. These artifacts included campfire remains, hand-woven sagebrush sandals, grinding stones, projectile points, basketry, cordage, human hair, and the butchered remains of now-extinct animals, such as camelids and equids. Many of these artifacts were carbon dated, with results ranging from 9,100 to 14,280 years before present (BP). Therein lies a hurdle—those pesky carbon dating references. I struggled to reconcile these dates with my previous beliefs, as they suggested human presence in the Americas long before the biblical timeline of human creation.
The abundant artifacts found within and beneath the debris from Mt. Mazama prompted researchers to pinpoint the eruption’s date more accurately. In 1983, Charles Bacon estimated the eruption occurred around 6,845 years +/-50 (BP) using the beta counting method of carbon dating on burned wood samples found in Mazama’s lava flows. A more refined date was published in 1996 by D.J. Hallet, who dated the eruption to approximately 6,730 BP, with a margin of error of +/- 40 years. This estimate utilized the more advanced Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) carbon dating technique on burned leaves and twigs mixed with Mazama tephra in nearby lakebed sediments. Despite the improved methodology, my skepticism persisted because it still relied on carbon dating, a technique I was still reluctant to trust fully.
The quest for a more accurate date of the Mt. Mazama eruption led to significant advancements in 1999 when C.M. Zdanowicz and his team published a paper with a revised eruption date. They leveraged the precise nature of annual layers in Greenland Ice Cores, hypothesizing that they could pinpoint a near absolute year for the eruption by identifying Mazama’s volcanic signatures within the ice. Starting with calibrated carbon dates from previous research as a baseline, they sampled layers above and below the target area, searching for traces of Mazama.
The team found volcanic glass and other chemical markers consistent with those found near the eruption site. Zdanowicz published a date range of 7,545 to 7,711 years before present, aligning closely with previous carbon dating results. This discovery was a profound moment of humility and awakening for me; the precision of carbon dating not only pinpointed the location of Mazama tephra in the Greenland ice core but also demonstrated the reliability of this dating method. It confirmed what many scientists had long understood: carbon dating is a powerful tool for establishing historical timelines, and these were in direct conflict with my religious beliefs.
The End of the End
A literal interpretation of the Bible proved incorrect. Humans were not created in 4026 BC, nor was the earth engulfed by a flood 4,400 years ago. I was wrong. My personal discovery categorically rendered the Bible’s account of natural history as false. This revelation cast doubt on the entirety of the Bible. When biblical authors wrote of a literal flood and Adam and Eve as the first humans, they were unaware of their inaccuracies. This prompted me to investigate the origins of the Old Testament. I concluded that this collection of books was crafted to forge a grand narrative, one that provided the people of Israel with a national identity and a distinguished status before God as His chosen people, dating back to the creation of the first humans.
If there was a definitive End of Faith date for me, it would be December 26, 2004. Witnessing the catastrophic effects of the Sumatra earthquake and tsunamis, and having experienced another earlier and massive earthquake in Taiwan firsthand, I was deeply shaken. During a period when I was already grappling with new and challenging information, I saw our volatile planet claim hundreds of thousands of lives. This led me to a stark realization: “This is God’s planet. Either He caused this, or He allowed it to happen.” Just days after the disaster, I considered a third, more profound possibility: God does not exist. He didn’t cause the disaster nor did He allow it; He simply isn’t there. With this realization, my constant wondering, doubting, and blaming ceased. The peace I found in accepting this personal truth is indescribable.
Despite realizing that truth, fear of the unknown future and the potential devastation to my loved ones and their trust in me as a teacher and shepherd kept me living a lie. For many more years, I endured the heavy burden of this deceit, which led to terrifying, public panic attacks, some of which occurred before large audiences. This period was marked by intense internal conflict as I struggled to reconcile my public persona with my private understanding. Although it took years, I eventually had to leave the religion.
The Aftermath
Rejecting the Bible, which had been the cornerstone of my faith, propelled me toward scientific skepticism. Like many before me, I was drawn to the writings of Michael Shermer and works featured in Skeptic magazine. My departure from biblical teachings spurred me to explore questions about belief, the brain, and supernatural claims. The insights of thinkers like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Bertrand Russell, Guy P. Harrison, Robert Green Ingersoll, and Thomas Paine solidified my embrace of scientific naturalism. Their eloquent articulations reinforced and expanded upon the truths I had come to recognize on my own.
But what of my life now? What about my former hope of living forever on a paradisiacal earth? What of my loved ones and my marriage? I have witnessed many who have left their faith struggle to cope with the reality that this life is all there is. Our purpose is what we decide to make it. No one has, or likely ever will, live forever. The concept of a religious afterlife is a comforting illusion, a fortified barrier constructed to shield us from the fear of death.
I’ve discovered that I’ve become a better person as a non-believer than I ever was as a believer. There’s a kind of grotesque self-assuredness that comes from believing you have the only true answers to the universe’s most important questions. Such certainty naturally breeds a tendency toward dogmatism in all aspects of life. Regrettably, some of this dogmatic attitude lingered even after I abandoned my faith. Initially, I felt compelled to make my immediate family—especially my wife—understand what I had learned. This approach was unwise and unkind. I have since moved past that phase. My wife and sons are aware of my beliefs and my rejection of what I consider falsehoods. I desire their happiness within their faith as Jehovah’s Witnesses, striving to be the best people they can be. This is particularly important for my wife, who deeply needs and cherishes her beliefs. I know of no other couple who have managed to survive and thrive under similar circumstances, and I am committed to not letting go of that.
Since renouncing my supernatural beliefs, I’ve grown more tolerant of others’ faiths, though I still cannot condone the terrible acts or political agendas that sometimes arise from religious doctrines. However, I remain acutely aware that many people on this “pale blue dot” rely deeply on the hope and peace their faith provides. As long as these beliefs do not result in harm, I see them as fundamentally benign. This perspective allows for a respectful coexistence in our diverse world.
As for what the future holds, I cannot say. If someone had described my current life to me 25 years ago, I would have been incredulous. Yet here I am, leading a life full of wonder and satisfaction. I intend to make the most of each day until the very end—when the sun goes dark on my last day, so will I.
Southern Baptist leaders release new analysis of their decline
Here’s the link to this article.
We don’t get treats like this very often. Savor it.
by CAPTAIN CASSIDY FEB 01, 2024
Overview:
This analysis contains some information we don’t usually see out of the Southern Baptist Convention, including an egregious example of goalpost-shifting to avoid dealing with the metric most indicative of decline.
Reading Time: 8 MINUTES
For years now, Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) members have watched their denomination decline in both cultural dominance and memberships. Recently, the branch of the denomination devoted to information gathering and analysis, Lifeway Research, released some new information about that decline.
In short, that decline’s nowhere near over yet.
How Southern Baptists use the Annual Church Profile—and how they don’t
The Annual Church Profile (ACP) is a yearly survey of Southern Baptist churches. It asks them a variety of questions about:
- Baptisms
- Total membership
- Attendance in-person (and online, since the pandemic)
- Sunday School and small group enrollment and attendance (a small group is something like a Sunday School class for adults; members pray together, study the Bible, and have Jesusy discussions)
- How much money the church has given to SBC projects
The SBC operates as a kind of mother ship to dozens of state-level conventions. Most American states have one. Some states have so few Southern Baptists that they must combine with other states, while others are so large they have more than one. But generally, each state has its own state convention. Churches operate more or less independently, as do the state conventions representing them. Each state-level convention runs its own ACP.
Note two major facts about the ACP.
First, some state-level conventions sometimes ask questions in a different way than others. Or they may leave out some questions entirely.
Second, it’s completely voluntary. Southern Baptist leaders do not require participation in it. So a church may elect to answer all questions, or just some, or only one, or none at all. Participation has no effect on membership in the denomination.
For the ACP discussed here today, 69% of Southern Baptist churches participated by answering at least one question on the survey.
Sidebar: Now consider why a Southern Baptist church might not participate
Given what we know of the SBC as a whole and about Southern Baptists in particular, we can make some educated guesses about churches that refused to participate in the ACP.
I’m betting that the 31% of churches that didn’t participate weren’t exactly doing great, metrics-wise. If they’d been baptizing people left and right, running stunningly effective evangelism programs, and growing so fast their pastors’ sermons were standing-room-only, no way no how would they forget to tell the mother ship about it, or simply refuse to participate.
It’d be extremely interesting to see what Southern Baptist stats would look like if the denomination’s leaders required ACP participation. But I don’t think it’ll ever happen. When such two-edged proposals come up, Southern Baptist leaders begin sweating greasy droplets of muh autonomous local church.
(That’s also why Southern Baptist leaders in the Old Guard faction don’t want to do anything about the denomination’s sex abuse crisis. They’re just so incredibly concerned, you see, about muh autonomous local church. But of course, when those autonomous local churches decide to be inclusive toward gay people or hire women to be pastors, suddenly even the Old Guard faction finds its teeth; archive.)
What Southern Baptist analysts found in the 2022 ACP
You can find a summary of the 2022 ACP here. It looks like the state-level conventions are still gathering the information together from 2023 to send to the mother ship for last year. On the site for the California Southern Baptist Convention (archive), I found a due date for the 2023 ACP: March 1, 2024. So we’re a ways off from knowing how the denomination did last year.
Usually, though, Southern Baptist leaders release a little tickle in the early spring. They like to do that in the run-up to their big Annual Meeting every summer. So keep an eye out for it around April. For now, we’ve got 2022 to keep us company.
And oh, what company it is!
Overall, this new analysis paints a picture of deep decline that is nowhere near even bottoming-out yet. In almost every single way imaginable, Southern Baptist congregations are in trouble. The pandemic only accelerated their decline.
This is probably one of the most dire graphs I have ever seen out of the SBC:
That can’t have been easy for some poor Southern Baptist graphic artist to make. But it’s truthful. After their disastrous pandemic drop in 2020, Southern Baptist churches rebounded all the way to 180,177 baptisms. And even that’s awful. They haven’t seen that small of a number since around 1920, when churches dunked 173,595 people.
(Info about specific years’ performance comes from Annual Reports on the official SBC site. The reports contain info about the previous year. So the 2023 Annual Report contains info about 2022, and so on and so forth. If I give a date like 2018 for a figure, it can be found in the next year’s report, so in this case 2019.)
This is Southern Baptist info we don’t normally get
Years ago, I ran across a report released around 2014 by the Pastors’ Task Force on SBC Evangelistic Impact & Declining Baptisms. It’s an analysis of the 2012 ACP. It is an absolutely eye-opening document, too. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in evangelical-watching.
And I recommend it for one important reason:
It reveals that Southern Baptist leaders have access to a wealth of information about baptisms that they don’t generally make available to the public. One of the most important metrics they reveal is the age of the people getting baptized. I’ve never seen this exact information provided anywhere else.
In the 2012 ACP report, as the Task Force revealed, 25% of Southern Baptist churches had zero baptisms. 60% of respondents didn’t baptize anyone between 12-17, while 80% reported “0-1 young adult baptisms (age 18-29 bracket).” Worse, the Task Force revealed this damning bit of trivia: “The only consistently growing age group in baptisms is age five and under.”
This new analysis of the 2022 ACP makes a good chaser for it, because it, too, reveals a lot of information that doesn’t usually appear anywhere else. For instance, it mentions that about 43% of Southern Baptist churches had no baptisms at all in 2022, while 34% had 1-5. That’s a lot more coming up empty than did in 2012.
Of note, in 2012, churches baptized about 315k people and counted 15.8M members. In 2022, they recorded 180,177 baptisms and 13.2M members.
I’m extremely interested in knowing how the ages broke out in those 2022 stats. If the mother ship had that info in 2012-2014, then it does now.
And they’re not talkin’, which makes me strongly suspect that most of the reported baptisms are the under-18 children of existing adult members and returning members who want to make a public demonstration of their re-affiliation.
(Related: You must be born again and again and again; Gaming a broken system with baptisms.)
And stuff most people could probably guess about Southern Baptist churches generally
As one might guess, Southern churches saw more baptisms, as did urban churches and new churches (less than 20 years old). Rural areas have a lot fewer potential new recruits living nearby, and well, Southern Baptist churches always did do well in the American South. It’s in the name!
New churches, as well, saw a lot more baptisms than old ones did. A church established more than a century ago is probably pretty stuck in its ways and traditional. It’s had time to attract and then alienate all the people in the area. But a lot of evangelicals’ ears perk up when they notice a brand-new church in their vicinity. They think it’ll be different than the ones they’ve tried. They’re willing to visit and check it out.
Churchless believers, those Christians who believe but have left church culture and membership behind, seem particularly open to trying brand-new churches. Often, they’ve been burned hard by other churches, but many say they want to find a good church to join.
Alas, new Southern Baptist churches often have trouble surviving past about five years. The people they attract might leave, taking their wallets with them, or the church’s leaders might turn out not to know how to lead volunteer groups very well.
As a May 2023 article hints (article), the mother ship’s general strategy for about 15 years now has been to scattershot new churches everywhere imaginable in the frantic hopes that they outweigh the number of churches closing each year. Every one of those struggling churches needs a pastor, even if that pastor will also need a day job.
“I’m glad I’m retired,” said one former Southern Baptist pastor in 2022 (archive) of the entire situation with pastors’ overall short tenure.
Selling Southern Baptist church membership on the basis of real-world social benefits
I’ve noticed lately that Southern Baptists have been talking up the real-world social benefits of joining their churches. That’s a wise strategy, far better than the one they’ve been using:
- Convince marks that the Bible is literally true and Jesus is literally a real god who does real stuff in the real world (and will send the disobedient to Hell)
- Then, sell marks active, engaged SBC church membership as the only way to Jesus correctly
Pushing harder on real-world benefits will generate a lot more interest, as long as they can deliver on their promises.
And so we see in the 2022 ACP analysis that churches with very active, engaged members also tend to bag the most baptisms. The more people participate in small groups, in particular, the generally higher their baptism rate—but churches that claimed 100% participation tended to have way fewer baptisms on average (5.9) than those claiming 75-99% participation (7.2).
What’s really interesting about that figure is that churches claiming 25-49% participation got 6.4, and those claiming 0-24% participation got 5.5. So that 100% participation figure of 5.9 baptisms is definitely a strange one.
Also, very large churches with 500+ attending weekly worship services tended to be the only ones that increased their number of baptisms between 2017 (5.2) and 2022 (5.6). Most regions were doing well just to maintain their 2017 numbers.
The Southern Baptist baptism ratio still blows chunks
The number that Southern Baptist leaders consider their very most important is what they call their baptism ratio. That’s the ratio of baptized people per existing Southern Baptist members. It asks: How many Southern Baptists’ resources did it take to get one person baptized?
And it’s why Southern Baptist leaders have known about their decline for about 50 years. That number speaks to the effectiveness of Southern Baptist recruiting and retention. Until about 1974, their ratio hovered in the 1:20-1:29 range. They liked it there. But after 1974, it never dipped that low again.
(Note: The SBC’s Conservative Resurgence began in earnest in the 1970s. This takeover by ultraconservative schemers and hypocrites finally ended in the late 1990s with solid victory.)
In 1985, the baptism ratio hit 1:41 at last. Despite Southern Baptist churches doing everything they could think of to fight it back down into the 1:30s again, it hit 1:50 in 2012. I saw a lot of Southern Baptist panicking around that time. It didn’t do any good then, either, because in 2018, it reached 1:60. I heard nothing about it that time, though.
Then, the pandemic blasted that already-struggling baptism ratio to smithereens:
- 2019: 1:62
- 2020: 1:114
- 2021: 1:88
As of 2022, they’d clawed their way back up to 1:73.
Which leads to the most hilarious bit of Southern Baptist goalpost-shifting I’ve ever seen
That is just shockingly bad, by Southern Baptist standards. That gets evangelicals to wondering if maybe Jesus just doesn’t like the denomination or something.
So the analysts behind the 2022 ACP report have figured out a way to move the goalposts!
Now they’re going to give a ratio between baptisms per every 100 people attending worship services. And doing it that way, they get a baptism ratio of 1:20 for 2022!
However, that’s still a decline, as they tell us themselves:
Another way to examine baptisms and rates for churches is by considering the number per worship attendees. Unfortunately for Southern Baptists, that number is also in decline. With worship attendance also falling, that means baptisms are falling at a faster rate than attendance. [. . .]
Among Southern Baptist churches that reported attendance in 2022, for every 100 people attending a worship service in a Southern Baptist church, five people were baptized on average. In other words, it took 20 Southern Baptists to reach one person. While that is the best number in the past four years, it’s still a decline from 2017 (5.9 per 100) and part of an overall negative trend.2022 ACP Analysis, Lifeway Research
Man alive, I really and truly don’t know how Southern Baptist leaders are going to deal with this in the next few years. Sooner or later, someone’s going to remember that the Conservative Resurgence was supposed to fix the decline. That’s how its architects and leaders sold it to the flocks. But it seems to have done the exact opposite.
Worse, pushing hard on the supposed real-world social benefits of joining Southern Baptist churches won’t work unless the people in those churches live up to the hype. And most of them just don’t, which we know because they’re falling apart across the board.
That simple truth may explain the relative success of the largest churches in the denomination: Plenty of stuff to do, plus a much higher chance of finding someone nice to make friends with. But if there’s another group that offers those same benefits for less hassle, watch out!
To grow, Baptists need to up their affability game in ways they have never had to do for their entire existence as a denomination. I just don’t think they’re up for the challenge. And I strongly suspect their leaders would agree with me there.
New map captures explosive rise of the nonreligious
Here’s the link to this article.
by ADAM LEE JAN 26, 2024
Overview:
The rapid, unprecedented growth of the “nones” continues apace. The nonreligious are now larger than any single religious group in America, and they’ve become the majority in several states.
Reading Time: 4 MINUTES
Beyond the tumult of elections and the noise of the news cycle, there are bigger trends that will shape the future of our world. One of these trends is the growth of the “nones”—the Americans who identify as atheist, agnostic, or who just don’t belong to any religion.
Decades ago, the nones were a tiny minority. But in the early 21st century, their numbers started growing. And that growth was rapid: less like a gentle ramp, more like a rocket blasting off.
In a little under two decades, the nones rose from insignificance to national prominence. They became a force to be reckoned with, counterbalancing the influence of the religious right and arguably swinging presidential elections.
And they’re still growing. As recently as 2019, the nones were as numerous as Roman Catholics and evangelicals, the two largest religious groups in America. However, that three-way tie isn’t a tie anymore.
According to a 2024 Pew survey, the nones have moved into the lead:
When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check ‘none.’
A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated – a group comprised of atheists, agnostic and those who say their religion is “nothing in particular” – is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They’re more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%).“Religious ‘Nones’ are now the largest single group in the U.S.” Jason DeRose, NPR, 24 January 2024.
In the not-too-distant future, if the nones continue this growth, it’s conceivable they could become a majority of Americans—period.
Too good to be true?
Does this sound too good to be true? Then consider the evidence in this post: Which States Are the Least Religious? Which are the Most?, from political scientist Ryan Burge’s site Graphs About Religion.
Based on data from the Cooperative Election Study conducted in 2008 and in 2022, it shows how much American opinions have shifted in just the last fourteen years. Here’s the big picture, which the color coding makes dramatically clear. With the nonreligious population represented in blue, it looks like a tsunami washing across the country:
In 2008, the nones were a minority in every state. Even in the liberal New England states, they were a fraction of the population.
In 2022, the nones have become an outright majority in seven states—Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Alaska (!), Montana (!), New Hampshire and Maine. Several other states, including California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, are in the high forties. Even in the rural Midwest and the ex-Confederate Deep South, you have to look hard to find a state where the Nones aren’t at least a third of the population.
Some of this may be sampling error, especially in sparsely populated states. Burge notes that those Montana results, for example, are based on just 224 respondents.
Still, the overall trend is dramatic and so sharp as to be undeniable. Their population share has increased everywhere (except, apparently, North Dakota). In some states, like Connecticut, they’ve almost doubled. Georgia and Mississippi are now less religious than Michigan and Colorado were in 2008.
Who’s losing, who’s gaining
Most of this growth has come at the expense of Christians, especially Protestants. And their decline is only getting steeper. As Mark Sumner notes:
The percentage of Americans who call themselves Protestant—including evangelicals—has dropped from 70% in 1953 to 34% in 2022, according to Gallup. That’s a decline of more than 0.5% a year. Since 2016, the rate has averaged 0.67% a year.“Donald Trump is filling the God-shaped hole in Republicans’ lives.” Mark Sumner, Daily Kos, 15 January 2024.
As slow as it can seem on a human scale, on a societal scale, this is a massive and unprecedented shift. The nones have grown in every demographic group that’s been surveyed, both among white people and racial minorities. For example, in a recent Pew survey of Asian American ethnic groups:
Like the U.S. public as a whole, a growing percentage of Asian Americans are not affiliated with any religion, and the share who identify as Christian has declined, according to a new Pew Research Center survey exploring religion among Asian American adults.
…Today, 32% of Asian Americans are religiously unaffiliated, up from 26% in 2012.
Christianity is still the largest faith group among Asian Americans (34%).
But Christianity has also seen the sharpest decline, down 8 percentage points since 2012.
The graying of the church
Of course, there’s no guarantee that the nones will keep growing until we’re a majority in every state. There may be some natural limit that we’ll eventually run into. Or organized religion could go through a spontaneous nationwide revival.
However, there’s another data point that indicates that this cultural shift isn’t going to stop any time soon. Namely, frequent churchgoers are older than the American average. Meanwhile, those younger than the average are even less religious:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey, 17% of Americans are 65 and older. In FACT’s study, 33% of U.S. congregations are senior citizens.
The other age group where congregations differ dramatically from the U.S. as a whole is 18-34 year olds. Young adults make up 23% of the population but only 14% of churches.“Average U.S. Pastor and Churchgoer Grow Older.” Aaron Earls, Lifeway Research, 1 November 2021.
This means that, as ordinary generational turnover proceeds, we have every reason to expect that religion will keep fading away. The regressive, bigoted and anti-democratic political currents that draw their strength from religion, likewise, will continue to weaken and fragment.
While it won’t solve every problem in the world, it can only be a good thing that religion is losing strength and influence. The toxic manifestations of fundamentalism, which have oppressed humanity and held back progress for so long, are headed for a future of steady decline and eventual disappearance.
A Big Chunk of Cult Posturing in John’s Gospel
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 1/12/2024
A mighty stream of pompous theobabble
Insight into Christian origins is provided by three texts, written by a man who never met Jesus. (1) The apostle Paul states in Galatians 1:11-12: “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.” A revelation as he imagined it, unless you’re willing to credit visions claimed by hundreds of other religions. (2) He also imagined that Jesus was a dying-rising savior god; that is, those who believe in this hero are entitled to eternal life, as he states in Romans 10:9: “…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.” (3) In I Thessalonians 4:17, Paul assured his followers that their dead Christian relatives and friends would be the first to rise to meet Jesus when he arrives on the clouds: “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will be with the Lord forever.”
Yes, this toxic mix of fantasy, nonsense, and magical thinking was bouncing around in Paul’s imagination, fueled by what he had absorbed from other cults. For full details on this, see Richard Carrier’s essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan Guys. Get Over It.
Paul seems to have had no clue about the real Jesus (if, indeed, there was one). All of the abundant detail about the ministry and miracles of Jesus that we find in the gospels is missing from Paul’s letters. That wasn’t what mattered to him. He was attached to the dying-rising hero, and that’s what he proclaimed so enthusiastically.
The author of Mark’s gospel (no one knows who he actually was) wrote his tale of Jesus a couple of decades later. Everything he relates could have happened in a few weeks, and we lack any information at all as to where and how he came by the stories he relates. Devout scholars argue that this author had access to reliable oral tradition and eyewitness accounts, but there is no evidence for this. We suspect he relied on his imagination, as much as Paul did. Matthew and Luke copied most of Mark’s gospel (but neglected to admit doing so) and added material from their imaginations. Again, it’s hard to avoid this conclusion since they don’t name their sources.
But the first prize as Champion at Imagining must go to the author of John’s gospel. Anyone who has carefully studied Mark, Matthew, and Luke has to wonder where and how John came up with all the stuff he tells. He offers a baffling opening: Jesus, the Galilean peasant preacher, had been present at creation. The other gospel authors knew nothing about this—or at least they failed to mention it. If anyone had challenged John: how do you know that Jesus was present at creation, he would have no doubt claimed that his god told him. And, of course, that has been the claim of theologians—who don’t agree—for thousands of years. They can’t provide reliable, verifiable evidence, but no matter, they (somehow) know the mind of god.
Be suspicious, very suspicious.
In this article, I will focus on a few verses in John 14-17, a huge Jesus monologue found nowhere else. How did the other gospel authors miss it—if they used reliable oral tradition and eyewitness testimonies? How did they miss it if they were inspired by god to tell the truth about Jesus? All of the gospel authors were motivated to advance the early Jesus cult, but John 14-17 stresses the benefits of being a member of the cult: it is an example of massive overpromotion.
John was obsessed with the certainty that knowing Jesus, belonging to Jesus, was the only way to connect with god at the most profound level—and be guaranteed eternal life. He was sure that his god—his god alone—could make sure this happened.
Cult comfort
How well I recall, from my childhood, the opening of John 14:1-2, in the wonderful language of the King James Version: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.”
Verse 3 offers the ultimate assurance to the cult members: “And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” And here’s the whole purpose of the cult, vv. 6-7: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”
Near the end of this long monologue, at the start of chapter 17, Jesus “looked up to heaven” to address the Father. This reflects the cozy view of the cosmos then accepted: the Father is above, as is his dwelling with “many mansions” that the cult members will settle into, after their escape from death, thanks to the dying-rising hero Jesus. These folks are assured they are the most privileged, 14:13-14: “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.”
Because the members of the cult adore the dying-rising hero, his departure will not be a source of alarm, vv. 18-20: “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” And verse 26: “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you.”
Thus the author of this gospel offers his assurance that the cult will be continually guided by this Holy Spirit. The irony, of course, from our perspective many centuries later, is that the Christian cult has fought and splintered endlessly because there is so little agreement on exactly what the Holy Spirit has taught. John’s imagination was not up to the task of seeing the history of the church that was to come.
Cult threats
Chapter 15 begins with another of the “I am” claims made by Jesus—according to this author: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” But then comes the warning, the cult has high expectations, v. 6: “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” Lack of full commitment, full loyalty are not permitted. This reminds us of the brutal verse that we find in Luke’s gospel, 14:26: “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
Hatred against the cult
What was it like to have a conversation with the author of John’s gospel? In chapters 14-17 especially, his religious arrogance is on full display: “Ours is the only right religion, we’re privileged to be uniquely loved and favored by god.” Did he behave this way in his every-day interaction with other people? If so, it’s not hard to imagine that people didn’t like him, wanted to keep their distance: “What a pompous ass!” He must not have been too bothered by this shunning, and he created Jesus-script to explain it:
“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.” (15:18-19)
It would seem that being hated is part of the divine plan. Maybe John just failed to notice that being arrogant and pompous produced hateful responses.
The seeds of the most destructive hatred
One of the great sins of the New Testament is its fueling of anti-Semitism. The Jesus cult was a breakaway Jewish sect: the vast majority of Jews rejected the idea that Jesus qualified as the Messiah. The author of John’s gospel responded by lashing out. He devised this Jesus-script at chapter 8:44, addressing the Jews: “You are from your father the devil, and you choose to do your father’s desires.” As Hector Avalos has pointed out, “That verse later shows up on Nazi street signs.” (The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails, ed. by John Loftus, p. 378) This theme is repeated in a different way in chapter 16:1-4:
“I have said these things to you to keep you from falling away. They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God.And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me.But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them.”
They have not known the Father. This blunt accusation—along with the suggestion that the Jews have the devil for their father—has caused so much damage. No doubt Martin Luther’s virulent anti-Semitic rantings derive from such texts.
Promises to the cult
Later in chapter 16, verses 23-24, the benefits of belonging to the cult are defined precisely: “Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.” Countless devout Christians have discovered that this is simply not true.
And devotees of the cult will be protected, verse 16:33: “I have said this to you so that in me you may have peace. In the world you face persecution, but take courage: I have conquered the world!”
More fluff—first rate theobabble—that emerged from this author’s imagination.
The Jesus-script prayer to the Father in chapter 17 includes this promise as well, verses 21-23:
“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”
That they may become completely one. A bigger failed promise can hardly be imagined.
My constant appeal to the devout is please read the gospels. Dr. Jaco Gericke has stated the harsh truth: “If you read the scriptures and are not shocked out of all your religious beliefs, you have not understood them.” (The End of Christianity, ed. by John Loftus, p. 137) This actually requires more than reading: put curiosity and critical thinking into high gear—which is so hard to do for those who have been indoctrinated, who have been persuaded from their earliest years that the Bible is a reliable source of god-information. Break out of the Sunday School mentality. Study John 14-17. It’s not hard to see that the ancient theologian who wrote these chapters did a lot of damage to the religion he was supposedly championing. Your religious beliefs are in for a major shock.
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.
Zeke Piestrup On His New Film, “Satan’s Guide to the Bible!”
Here’s the link to this article.
Whether you are a believer or not, you should watch the full film. Don't let the title or cartoonish nature stop you from watching ... and thinking.
By John W. Loftus at 1/10/2024
[This is a guest post by Zeke Piestrup about his new film. Don’t let the cartoonish background fool you as it quotes from Bible scholars, especially Hector Avalos and Bart Ehrman.]
Praise John Loftus for allowing me to grab the wheel of DC, in hopes of steering y’all straight to my new flick: Satan’s Guide to the Bible! Satan is the substitute Sunday school teacher. Today’s lesson? All the Bible secrets the children’s pastor learned at Christian seminary, but won’t share. He’d get fired. Below is a trailer and the full movie!
Trailer:
Full film:
The film will not be monetized. It will remain paywall and commercial free, so as to be accessible as possible. I eschewed the normal film festival to distributor route (ala my last film APOCALYPSE LATER: HAROLD CAMPING VS THE END) because Christian fascism is a continuing, rising threat to our democracy. Mike Johnson (the House speaker), Greg Abott (the governor of Texas), NAR, Dominionism, Neo-Charismatic Evangelicals… These are adults(!) playing Dungeons and (Revelation) Dragons. As January 6th showed, they’re not thinkers, they’re violencers.
I collaborated on this film with Dreamworks animation director Tim Johnson. He directed ANTZ, HOME, and OVER THE HEDGE. All the animation designs were done by Tim. He even voiced the smooth-talking Satan. Our goal was for the animation quality to be on par with the first season of South Park. I think we met that goal.
For a long time, DC was home to my favorite biblical scholar, the late Dr. Hector Avalos. Praise His name! The first credit at the end of the film is a dedication to Dr. Avalos’ memory. At Dr. Avalos’ service, I stole John’s line about Dr. A being “probably the greatest biblical scholar of our generation.” Thanks, John, and apologies for not citing you.
We are a no-budget operation, dependent upon good people sharing the good news of Satan’s Guide to the Bible! The film is a one-stop shop for the “standard stuff” taught in Christian seminaries. And it’s a rebuttal to pastors, politicians, and Alice Cooper telling us all to read our Bibles.
I hope you all dig the film, while getting a heavy dose of Dr. Avalos. We love and miss you, Dr. A!
Rampant Gospel Confusion, Number 2: Why Four Different Endings?
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 1/05/2024
Theology is written this way, not history
Devout scholars have been pondering—and arguing about—the four gospel endings for a long time now. Is there any way that these different endings qualify as history? So much has been written about this, so I’m going to mention here just a few of the issues that come to mind. For those who want to insist that the story of Jesus is supremely important, the end of his story—well, the end of his supposed earthly existence—should be of the best possible quality. But that’s not what we find. Let’s look at each of the four endings.
Mark: the first gospel written, and the least said
Until the invention of the printing press in the fifteen century, New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand, and as old manuscripts came to light, it was obvious that a lot of errors and intentional changes had been made: we are at the mercy of scribes who worked without benefit of electric lighting and eyeglasses, and who modified texts according to their theological views.
The ending of Mark’s gospel—in the oldest manuscripts—is a puzzle. In these documents Mark ends at 16:8. Three women had gone to the tomb, were alarmed to find a young man sitting there. He told them Jesus had been raised and would see them in Galilee. Then the abrupt ending, verse 8: “So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them, and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”
There has been disagreement among scholars: did the gospel really end this way? Nothing at all about the activities of the risen Jesus? There can be little doubt that this ending failed to satisfy some early readers, hence an unknown person—just an unknown as the author of the gospel itself—created additional text, verses 9-20, which shows up in later manuscripts.
This author, no surprise, was committed to the superstitions of the Jesus cult. At the opening of Mark 16, we read that three women had gone to the tomb: Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Salome. Now in verse 16 it is claimed that Jesus first appeared to Mary Magdalene, “from whom he had cast out seven demons.” She then told his disciples that Jesus had appeared alive to her—and they didn’t believe it. What happened next? “After this he appeared in another form to two of them, as they were walking into the country. And they went back and told the rest, but they did not believe them.” (vv. 12-13)
It is a major violation of cult rules not to believe what the cult teaches. So the author of this supplement reports next that Jesus appeared to the eleven and scolded them for their doubts. There are consequences for not believing: “The one who believes and is baptized will be saved, but the one who does not believe will be condemned.” (v. 16) The primary reason for belonging to the cult of a dying-rising god is to be saved. The primary purpose of this text is to promote that agenda.
Then we find one of the most bizarre texts in the gospels:
“And these signs will accompany those who believe: by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues;they will pick up snakes, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (vv. 17-18)
The use of Jesus’ name works like a magical spell. It can be used to cast out demons and heal people by touch. And why not throw into the bargain speaking in tongues, picking up snakes, and drinking poison?
We can be confident that not too many clergy these days base sermons on this text—aside from those in snake-handling Jesus-cults in Appalachia.
As soon as Jesus finished saying these goofy things (yes, goofy: believers would agree if no one told them that this is Jesus-script), he ascended to heaven: “So then the Lord Jesus, after he had spoken to them, was taken up into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God.” (v. 19) There is no hint here that forty days had gone by. This author was unaware of the ascension story that would end up in the first chapter of Acts (the forty-day reference in Acts 1:3).
One final comment on Mark 16:9-20. Modern Bible translators/editors have been honest enough to put this text in a footnote. But their honesty has its limits. They commonly attribute variant readings to “other ancient authorities.” But they have no idea at all who wrote Mark 16:9-20, for example. How does it make sense to call him an authority? This is an attempt to cover up the scandal of so many errors having been made in the copying process. The biggest piece of dishonesty, however, is printing Jesus-script in red, as is the case with Mark 16:15-18—which includes the goofy quote. The translators/editors know very well there is no way whatever to verify that these are authentic words of Jesus. In fact, none of the Jesus-script in the gospels can be verified.
Matthew, with a touch of Comic Book fantasy
In the last chapter of Matthew (28) we read that two women (Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary”) went to the tomb. Now we’re told about a dazzling hero flying from the sky:
“And suddenly there was a great earthquake, for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning and his clothing white as snow.For fear of him the guards shook and became like dead men.” (Matthew 28:2-4)
It is this angel (not a man sitting in the tomb) who tells them that Jesus has risen, and advises them to alert the disciples. But on their way, suddenly they ran into Jesus himself: “And they came to him, took hold of his feet, and worshiped him.” (v. 28:9) His message for the disciples is to go on to Galilee. There indeed they met him: “When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.” (v. 28:17) Then we find more cult fanaticism: our holy hero has it right:
“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spiritand teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (28:18-20)
Make disciples of all nations, baptize them, teach them to obey. So much damage has been caused by scripture: The Christian colonial powers many centuries later took this as their mandate to invade, conquer, and impose their religion.
Luke, and the Jesus ghost who is not a ghost
We read in Luke 24 that Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James—and other women as well—went to the tomb, and were surprised that the body of Jesus wasn’t there.
“… suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, ‘Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here but has risen.Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to the hands of sinners and be crucified and on the third day rise again.’” (Luke 24:4-7)
The women reported what had happened to the eleven disciples and others, “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” (v. 11) The next verse is missing from some manuscripts—another example of tampering. It reports that Peter rushed to the tomb, saw that it was empty, and went home amazed.
What is truly amazing is that there was disbelief, that the disciples themselves hadn’t camped out at the tomb to see Jesus come alive again, as he had predicted he would do three times.
Next this author displays his skill as a propagandist for the Jesus cult, i.e., the story of the risen Jesus appearing to two followers on their way to Emmaus (which is not reported in the other gospels). They don’t recognize him, and he draws them into conversation. They explain to this stranger what had happened to Jesus, and how puzzled and disappointed they are—and they get a scolding:
“‘Oh, how foolish you are and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have declared! Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?’” Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all the scriptures.” (Luke 24:25-27)
It was one of the certain beliefs of the cult that Moses himself and “all the prophets” had predicted Jesus’ role in history.
The two fellows persuade Jesus to stop with them to dine at Emmaus. At the very moment when Jesus blessed the bread, “Then their eyes were opened, and they recognized him, and he vanished from their sight.” (v. 31) Isn’t that what ghosts do?
The two fellows rushed back to Jerusalem: “Then they told what had happened on the road and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.” (v. 35) Then, suddenly, Jesus was right there among them.
“They were startled and terrified and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’” (vv. 37-39)
To drive home the point, Jesus asked for something to eat—and they watched as he ate a piece of boiled fish. Once again, he emphasized what Moses and the prophets had taught about him, and promises what the cult members wanted to hear: “And see, I am sending upon you what my Father promised, so stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” (v. 49)
Then they headed out to Bethany. “While he was blessing them, he withdrew from them and was carried up into heaven.” More tampering here: “and was carried up into heaven” is missing from some manuscripts. This ascension—quite soon after the resurrection—would contradict the story in Acts 1 that Jesus ascended after forty days.
Robert Conner, in his book, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story, has demonstrated that the gospel resurrection tales were based on ghost folklore. Luke reports that Jesus ate a piece of fish to prove he wasn’t a ghost, yet he vanished from the dinner table at Emmaus the instant he broke bread. Luke seems not to have grasped his own plot flaws.
John, more piling on of resurrection events
The author of John’s gospel was a master at exaggeration. He was obsessed with promotion of the Jesus-cult, centered on its version of a dying-rising savior (an idea absorbed from other such cults). Anyone who has carefully studied Mark, Matthew, and Luke cannot help being puzzled by John’s eccentric, inflated, and sometimes crude theology. He excelled at inflated theology: he claimed that the Galilean peasant preacher had been present at creation. How could he possibly know such a thing?
His story of the raising of Lazarus (missing from the other gospels) is contrived—and crude: Jesus said he was glad he wasn’t there to save Lazarus from dying. The climax of this magical tale (the resurrection is voice activated), is Jesus’ claim that he is the resurrection and the life. Likewise his story of Doubting Thomas (also missing from the other gospels) seems designed to make the point—crucial to the cult: don’t look for evidence on what to believe: just take it on faith.
John’s account of the resurrection differs substantially from the others. It is Mary Magdalene alone who goes to the tomb. She reported to Peter, and the disciple “whom Jesus loved” that Jesus was nowhere to be found. They ran to the tomb, found it empty and returned home. Mary looked in the tomb again, saw two angels dressed in white, then, turning around, saw Jesus, whom she mistook for the gardener. When she realized who it was, she went back to the disciples to report what she’d seen.
Then, in verses 19-29, we find the famous Doubting Thomas story, followed by two verses that feel very much like the end of the gospel. But then we get chapter 21, in which Jesus shows up—unrecognized—at the Sea of Tiberias, where Peter and other disciples had gone fishing. They’ve had bad luck, until Jesus tells then what to do—and they have a massive catch of fish. And that’s breakfast!
Then Jesus asked Peter three times if he loved him—to the annoyance of Peter. And readers too must wonder: What was the point? The chapter concludes with reference again to “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” with the final claim that it was this disciple who wrote down all these things about Jesus: “This is the disciple who is testifying to these things and has written them, and we know that his testimony is true. But there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.” We know that his testimony is true. This is cult bragging, but it is not the way authentic history is written. The supposed events presented in John 20-21 escaped the notice of the other gospel authors.
A crucial factor needs to be stressed repeatedly: there is no contemporaneous documentation (diaries, letters, transcripts, and other archival materials) by which to verify any of the events and teachings reported in the gospels. Inventing a beloved disciple (unknown to the other gospel authors) who recorded everything doesn’t alter that reality. The four different gospel endings were the inventions of four different advocates for the Jesus-cult.
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.
New Year Resolutions for Christians, 2024
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 12/29/2023
Embrace curiosity, question everything!
It’s probably a safe bet that Christian bookstores don’t have shelves marked, “Books by Our Atheist Critics.” There would be few sales—perhaps zero sales, because there is zero curiosity about critiques of Christianity written by serious thinkers. Thus I won’t encourage curiosity in this direction. I suspect most of the devout remain unaware of the boom in atheist publishing during the last couple of decades. This boom was stimulated by the best-selling atheist books written by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris; these seemed to open the floodgates. By my count, there are now well over 500 books—most published since 1999—that explain the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. The owner of this blog, John W. Loftus, has made a major contribution to this growing body of literature (see the books pictured at the right). Even if some churchgoers are vaguely aware of this, they look the other way.
But there are other avenues for their curiosities to take, although curiosity is not considered a virtue—at least since the time of St. Augustine (born 354), who considered curiosity a disease:
“There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn.”
Augustine had no way of knowing that 1,500 years later humans would be in hot pursuit to figure out the secrets of nature, thereby enriching our understanding of the cosmos. But far too many Christians today are stuck in the Augustine-mode. Mike Pence doesn’t “believe” in evolution, and says he’ll ask God about it after he dies. If Pence had anything above zero-level of curiosity, he’d read a few books on biology, on the enormous impact of Darwin’s discoveries on our understanding of the world. How evolution works is not that hard to grasp.
But, moving on: as a New Year Resolution for Christians, 2024, I would recommend
· Above all, curiosity about the Bible
· Curiosity about Christianity itself, including the origins of the faith
It must be a great relief to the clergy that most of their parishioners are not obsessed with reading the Bible: there are 1,001 verses that are embarrassing, hard to explain, that work against their idealized versions of god and Jesus. Any careful reading of the gospels can provoke troubling doubt, as I discussed in my article here last week, Rampant Gospel Confusion. If the gospels aren’t eagerly read, the letters of the apostle Paul get even less traffic. Yet, Paul’s Letter to the Romans is a gigantic element in Christian theology. Martin Luther suggested that Christians should memorize it. No surprise there, since he was obsessed with theology, which cannot be said of contemporary believers.
Many other theologians as well have been obsessed with the Letter to the Romans. C. S. Dodd began his 1932 commentary on Romans with this claim:
“The Epistle to the Romans is the first great work of Christian theology…For us men of Western Christendom there is probably no other single writing so deeply embedded in our heritage of thought.” (p. 9)
Ben Witherington III opened his 2004 commentary on Romans with this statement:
“Embarking on a study of Romans is rather like beginning a long journey—it requires a certain amount of preparation, patience, and faith, as the goal of understanding this formidable discourse is not reached for a considerable time.” (p. 1)
Shouldn’t Christian curiosity kick in if Dodd and Witherington are right? “How is our faith sustained and strengthened by what we read in Romans? Does this epistle capture our faith perfectly?”
So, put curiosity into full gear and plunge into study of Romans.
Even in the first chapter, however, we see Paul in a bad, vindictive mood. God abandons those who refuse to acknowledge him. Somehow, “love is patient, love is kind” (I Corinthians 13:4) doesn’t apply to his god:
“…God gave them over to an unfit mind and to do things that should not be done. They were filled with every kind of injustice, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die…” (Romans 1:28-32)
Is this part of your faith, that gossips and rebellious children deserve to die? This is severe theology, and in the next chapter, Paul stresses the horrible punishments that his god has in store:
“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.” (Romans 2:5-8, emphasis added)
A far more cherished idea among the devout is that God-Is-Love, and perhaps they do worry what will happen to them if they commit too many sins—and they can probably identify with Paul’s confusion about his own behavior, as he confesses in chapter 7 of the letter:
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me. For I know that the good does not dwell within me, that is, in my flesh. For the desire to do the good lies close at hand, but not the ability. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it but sin that dwells within me.” (Romans 7:15-20, emphasis added)
So it can be an uphill battle to be a good person; it would seem, based on this text, that Paul knew this very well. Yet he managed to be so nasty, so vicious at the opening of the letter: those who deserve to die include gossips, rebellious children, people who are “foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.” Why couldn’t Paul have cut them some slack? Good Christian folks who can identify with Paul’s self-evaluation—sin dwells within them—are probably more patient with other sinners they see around them: no, they don’t deserve to die. Paul’s theology here is extreme.
Is this part of the faith of devout believers?
Paul’s disinterest in sex comes across in his letters as well. In Romans 13:14 he wrote, “…put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.” He is even more emphatic in his letter to the Galatians: “And those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” (Galatians 5:24)
Is this also part of the faith of devout believers?
The opening paragraph of Romans 13 is one of Paul’s most bizarre statements. He claims that all government authorities have been put in place by God.
“Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.” (v. 2)
“But if you do what is wrong, you should be afraid, for the authority does not bear the sword in vain! It is the agent of God to execute wrath on the wrongdoer.” (v. 2)
It would appear that Paul was not aware that Jesus had been executed by Roman authorities. We know the story because of the gospels, but they hadn’t been written yet when Paul was active.
Peter J. Brancazio has noted correctly that Paul’s teaching here “…is incredibly naïve, and the idea that governments are inherently just and God-ordained is no longer taken seriously. It is a sad fact that on too many occasions Paul’s words were cited by Christians to justify their cooperation with totalitarian regimes.” (page 458, The Bible from Cover to Cover)
Believers who undertake this adventure in curiosity regarding Paul’s Letter to the Romans are likely to make many other unpleasant discoveries. Theologians often live in their bubbles of delusion: how else to explain C. H. Dodd’s boast that Romans is “the first great work of Christian theology.” It is anything but. Paul was a mediocre thinker, obsessed with mediocre theology, based on—he admits it, brags about it—his hallucinations.
Christian curiosity will probably bring the most stress when the origins of the faith are examined carefully. This will require a lot of courage, and willingness to look below the surface, by which I mean studying other cults that influenced early Christian beliefs.
It can be a shocking discovery that there were other dying-and-rising savior cults that promised eternal life. For a thorough examination of this issue, see Richard Carrier’s 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. Carrier has pointed out that “Jesus was late to the party.”
It’s also appropriate to be curious about verification that Jesus was a real person. How would a devout Christian go about citing the evidence for that? This requires a certain level of awareness about what has been going on in world of scholarly Jesus studies in recent decades. Quite a few scholars now have serious doubts that there was a historical Jesus. Vital homework here is Richard Carrier’s 600-page 2014 volume, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. In his conclusion, Carrier states:
“Right from the start Jesus simply looks a lot more like a mythical man than a historical one. And were he not the figure of a major world religion—if we were studying the Attis or Zalmoxis or Romulus cult instead—we would have treated Jesus that way from the start, knowing full well we need more than normal evidence to take him back out of the class of mythical persons and back into that of historical ones.” (p. 602)
A crucial part of this book is pp. 65-234, in which Carrier describes, in detail, 48 elements that form the backdrop of Christian belief. In 2020 Carrier published Jesus From Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed About Christ, intended as a summary—aimed at the lay reader—of his primary points in On the Historicity of Jesus.
It doesn’t take too much digging—but true curiosity is a prerequisite—to discover the New Testament roadblocks to proving the historicity of Jesus. So a very good resolution for Christians for 2024 is rise to the challenge of doing serious homework about where your faith came from.
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.
Here We Go Again with the Fake News Christmas Story
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 12/21/2023
It’s not hard to find the goofs and gaffs
[First Published in December 2022] Churches all over the world will once again get away with the traditional Christmas story, for one simple reason: the folks in the pews can’t be bothered to carefully read the Jesus birth stories in Matthew and Luke. It’s just a fact these stories don’t make sense and cannot be reconciled: Fake News! A few of the more charming verses from these stories have been set to music and are recited during Christmas pageants; these deflect attention from the utter failure of these stories to quality as history.
Sam Harris, in The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, tells it like it is:
“Surely there must come a time when we will acknowledge the obvious: theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings.” (p. 173)
The Jesus birth stories are prime examples of theological ignorance in full flight. John Loftus demonstrates this abundantly in chapter 10, “Was Jesus Born of a Virgin?” in the recently published book, Debating Christianity: Opening Salvos in the Battle with Believers. Loftus analyzes the birth stories—far beyond the issue of Mary’s virginity, but he does cover that. Do the devout ever wonder where the Jesus-virgin-birth claim came from? Are they even remotely aware of the religious context that gave rise to Christianity? When this is understood, the virgin birth of Jesus takes a serious hit. Loftus refers to the research of Robert Miller, as summarized in his book, Born Divine:
“People in the ancient world believed that heroes were the sons of gods because of the extraordinary qualities of their adult lives, not because there was public information about the intimate details of how their mothers became pregnant. In fact, in some biographies, the god takes on the physical form of the woman’s husband in order to have sex with her.” (p. 134) Loftus offers examples:
“There was Theagenes, the Olympic champion, who was regarded as divine for being one of the greatest athletes in the ancient world. Hercules was the most widely revered hero of the ancient world. He was promoted to divine status after his death, and it was said he was fathered by Zeus. Alexander the Great was believed to be conceived of a virgin and fathered in turn by Heracles. Augustus Caesar was believed to be conceived of a virgin and fathered by Apollo, as was Plato, the philosopher. Apollonius of Tyana was believed to be a holy man born of a virgin and fathered by Zeus. Pythagoras the philosopher was believed to be a son of Apollo. There were also savior-gods, like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus, and Tammuz, who were born of virgins…” (page 127, Kindle)
So it’s no big surprise that some early Christian writers felt that Jesus had to be assigned the same high honor. But a couple of the earliest Christian authors hadn’t absorbed this idea. There is no mention of virgin birth in the letters of Paul, and Mark’s gospel gets along quite well without it. The author of John’s gospel had no use for it either. These writers had no way of knowing that science would one day agree, as Loftus notes: “ ..one cannot even have a human being without the genetic contributions of both a male seed and a female egg.” (p. 121, Kindle)
But in the wake of the virgin birth tales in Matthew and Luke, “theological ignorance with wings” got a big boost. The Catholic Church decided that Mary remained a virgin her whole life. The idea of Mary—the mother of the God—having sex was too distasteful. But they had to deal with Mark 6:3: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” The church has claimed that these were children of Joseph from an earlier marriage—based on no evidence whatever. But that didn’t stop even more ignorance with wings.
It dawned on theologians that virgin birth explained how original sin had not been passed on to Jesus: he didn’t have a human father. Problem solved! Well, not quite. Could not Jesus have been tainted with original sin through his mother? This issue was debated by medieval theologians, and in 1854—wasn’t this a little late in the game? —the Vatican announced the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, i.e., when Mary herself was conceived, miraculously that conception was clean of original sin. Based on no evidence whatever. And it gets even more ridiculous: in 1950, the Vatican announced this: “We proclaim and define it to be a dogma revealed by God that the immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever virgin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.” It didn’t provide any evidence that this was revealed by God. Faithful Catholics assume that the Vatican is perfectly tuned into God, so why bother?
There are other examples of theological ignorance with wings that are easy to spot in the Jesus birth stories:
Ignorance with Wings, #1:
For some early Christians, it was especially important that Jesus was descended from king David: that was one of the qualifications for being the messiah. Hence genealogies were proposed to prove exactly that. Both Matthew and Luke deemed it appropriate to include genealogies (but this is awkward: they’re different genealogies), but how does this make any sense at all if Jesus didn’t have a human father? One of the sections of the Loftus essay is titled, “The Genealogies are inaccurate and irrelevant.” Both the authors of Matthew and Luke—we have no idea who they really were—must have had some level of savvy to write lengthy gospels in Greek, but they didn’t notice this contradiction? —or didn’t care. It would seem critical thinking skills were not their strong suits; virgin birth is inconsistent with genealogies intended to prove Jesus’ pedigree. Nor was their readership likely to pay much heed to this blunder.
Ignorance with Wings, #2:
Detecting this one requires very careful reading and comparison of gospel texts. There is no mention of Bethlehem as the birthplace of Jesus in any of the letters of Paul, and Mark’s gospel states simply that Jesus “came from Nazareth of Galilee” to be baptized by John (1:9). The author of John’s gospel ignored the birth stories in Matthew and Luke; Loftus calls attention to verses John 7:42, 52, and points out: “Jesus was rejected as the Messiah precisely because the people of Nazareth knew he was born and raised in their town! That’s the whole reason they rejected him as the Messiah! They rhetorically asked, ‘How can the Messiah come from Galilee?’” (p. 122 Kindle) Matthew’s solution to this problem was to depict Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem. That was their town. After the birth of Jesus, to protect him from king Herod, they fled to Egypt—which is a truly farfetched part of Matthew’s account—but once the danger had passed (an angel told him in a dream that Herod had died) Joseph was afraid to return to Bethlehem:
“But when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. And after being warned in a dream, he went away to the district of Galilee. There he made his home in a town called Nazareth…” (2:22-23)
So Matthew’s story was that Mary and Joseph had lived in Bethlehem, then relocated to Nazareth. Apparently, the author of Luke’s gospel believed that Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth: so how to get them to Bethlehem for Jesus’s birth? He reports that Caesar Augustus had ordered “all the world” to be registered, and since Joseph’s ancestors had come from Bethlehem, he had to travel there for the registration—and took the pregnant Mary with him. But historians have found no record of such a massive registration ordered by the emperor. Even if there had been one, chaos would have resulted if people had been required to go their ancestral homes. This was Luke’s clumsy device for getting Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. The distance from Nazareth to Bethlehem is some seventy miles. Are we to believe that Mary, about to have a baby, would have made that journey on foot—or on a donkey as commonly depicted in art?
After the birth of Jesus, after his circumcision and presentation at the temple, “When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.” (Luke 2:39) Notice here the huge conflict here with Matthew’s account. Luke says nothing about a “flight to Egypt” and Mary and Joseph subsequently relocating to Nazareth.
Both Matthew and Luke wrote their gospels many decades after the birth of Jesus. They were storytellers, not historians. There is no contemporaneous documentation whatever by which we could verify, fact-check the narratives they created. These are indeed fantasy literature, which include god talking to humans in dreams and angels with speaking roles.
Ignorance with Wings, #3:
Matthew also got away with the tall tale of the star-of-Bethlehem. Devout Christians should ask themselves if they really want to contaminate their theology with this bit of astrology. It was a common superstition in the ancient world that heavenly signs could indicate the birth of heroes.
“In the time of King Herod, after Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, magi [= astrologers] from the east came to Jerusalem, asking, ‘Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews? For we observed his star in the east and have come to pay him homage.’” (Matthew 2:1-2)
Huge mistake, theologically. Why didn’t god whisper the news to them that Bethlehem was the place to go? Their stop in Jerusalem alerted Herod, which resulted in the Slaughter of the Innocents when he was hunting for Jesus. But this never happened either; see Loftus’ comments, “There Was No Slaughter of the Innocents.” (p. 124, Kindle)
The ignorance with wings is on full display when Matthew reports that the star guided the magi (i.e., moved from north to south—Robert Price has said that it turned into Tinkerbell!) and came to rest over the house where Jesus was. There is no mention of a stable, and Luke knew nothing of the star of Bethlehem. These authors had no idea of what stars are. As Loftus observes, stars
“…certainly don’t appear to move in a southerly direction. They all appear to move from the east to west, like the sun, because of the spin of the earth. Then we’re told the Star stopped in the sky directly over a place in Bethlehem. But there’s no way to determine which specific house a star stopped over, if it did! This is only consistent with pre-scientific notions of the earth being the center of the universe with the stars being moved by a god who sits on a throne in the sky” (p. 125, Kindle).
Nor did the arrival of the magi—according to Matthew—happen on the night Jesus was born. They had seen his star after he was born (Matthew 2:1). How long would their journey have taken? How long did their stopover in Jerusalem take? It’s fair to say Jesus could have been several months old, and was living in a house with his parents, i.e., their home in Bethlehem.
Whenever I see the Wise Men depicted adoring the new-born Jesus in a stable, surrounded by shepherds and livestock, my impulse is to say, “Get them out of there! Read your Bibles! Pay attention to the texts!” Matthew also specialized in taking Old Testament verses out of context to make them apply to Jesus. For this, see Loftus’ section, “The Prophecies Are Faked.” (p. 125, Kindle)
Here’s one of my fantasies: that someday laypeople will carefully—with all their critical faculties engaged—read the Jesus birth stories in Matthew and Luke. They will thus be equipped for an encounter with their priests and preachers. They show up for the typical Christmas Eve pageant, but take the clergy in charge aside: “Reverend, why are you continuing to present these fake news stories as if they actually happened? How is it a good idea to fool the children—and the adults, for that matter? Isn’t there a better way to promote the Christian faith?”
Sad to say—or rather, glad to say—the birth stories are just the tip of the iceberg: the gospels as a whole are a minefield, providing abundant reasons for doubting and rejecting the Christian faith. No wonder the laity avoid reading them, and the clergy are just as happy that they don’t.
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). 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.
Rampant Gospel Confusion
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 12/22/2023
The gospels could have been so much better
Here’s a story I’ve told before, but deeper research has revealed more details. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John had submitted their gospels to the New Testament Approval Committee. They had been instructed to go to a nearby bar to await the decision on whose gospel would be chosen. So they sat there at the same table, sipping cheap booze, and there was a lot of tension: these guys didn’t like each other at all. Mark was furious that both Matthew and Luke had copied most of his gospel, without mentioning they’d done so, without giving him any credit. Mark was wondering how long it would take for plagiarism to be considered a sin. He was also annoyed they’d changed his wording whenever they saw fit.
Mark had presented Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet, who would soon descend through the clouds to bring his kingdom to earth, hence he neglected to include much ethical teaching. Matthew wanted to correct this error, so he added the clumsy patchwork of Jesus-script that we now know as the Sermon on the Mount. This includes instructions that many Christians today find impossible, and simply ignore. Matthew was annoyed with Luke, who shortened the sermon, changed the wording, and said that it took place on a plain—not on a mount. Luke had added a Jesus birth story that contradicted Matthew’s birth story. Matthew said that Jesus followers had to love Jesus more than their families, but Luke thought that was too mild. He said that Jesus followers had to hate their families, and even life itself.
John thought that Mark had messed up the story from the get-go. Mark had claimed that Jesus taught only in parables (and did so to prevent people from repenting and being forgiven), but John portrayed a Jesus who didn’t use parables at all. John included long, quite tiresome Jesus monologues that the other authors knew nothing about. John told about miracles the others had never heard of, e.g., changing water into wine, raising Lazarus from the dead. John had no use for the Eucharist at the Last Supper—instead, in his version, Jesus washed the feet of the disciples. All of the events described in Mark could have happened in a matter of weeks, John stretched everything out to three years.
The other gospel writers were turned off by John’s theological bombast. He seemed to have been drunk on theology—or was he on drugs? He added layers of theobabble unknown to the other gospel writers, even claiming that the Galilean preacher had been present at creation. Hence he was horrified that Mark reported that Jesus’ last words on the cross were, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me.” What blasphemy! Jesus and God were one, hence Jesus’ last words—according to John—were “It is finished.”
So these four authors sat there, glaring at each other. Then their cell phone all pinged at the same moment—and it was the same text: “Congratulations, all four of the submitted gospels have been chosen, and they will be published side by side at the opening of the New Testament.”
A round of cursing breaks out. What a disaster. How dare they do that! “Only one of us got the story right!” How is it that no one on the selection committee could see what would happen? If these gospels are published together, there will be so much confusion. Readers will be able to see the contradictions and disagreements. Belief in Jesus will be ridiculed.
But, not to worry. It would be many centuries before laypeople had access to the Bible, and in the meantime theologians could work out plenty of excuses. And even when laypeople did get access to the Bible, most of them wouldn’t bother to read it. Well, they wouldn’t bother to read it carefully, critically.
Serious Bible study never caught on as a favorite pastime: “We’ll trust that our clergy will tell us what we need to know/believe about the Bible.”
Nonetheless, the four gospels published together remain an embarrassment. They are Exhibit A for anyone looking for hard evidence that the Bible could not have been divinely inspired. We have to wonder why the gospels couldn’t have been so much better. We can see the high quality of modern biographies, based on thorough research and the use of contemporaneous documentation. Is it really possible that an all-knowing god wouldn’t have foreseen this development? And that professionally trained historians would figure out that the gospels do not qualify as reliable sources of information about Jesus?
Let’s look at a few ways in which the gospels could have been so much better.
Could Have Been So Much Better, One
So much is missing from the gospels! Why doesn’t Mark include an account of Jesus’ birth? And why would John omit one? And credibility is missing from the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, which fully qualify as fantasy literature. What about the life of Jesus before he began his ministry? Luke reports that when Jesus was twelve years old, on his family’s trip to Jerusalem, he headed to the Temple to converse with the religious leaders—and remained there for days. Mary and Joseph were well on their way home when they realized he wasn’t “among their relatives and friends.” They headed back to Jerusalem, eventually found him, and gave him a scolding. Historians don’t take this episode seriously: how would Luke know any of this? What were his sources? Who was there taking notes? Out of his imagination, Luke was portraying a holy hero at age twelve.
Tim Sledge has identified the central issue here:
“The temple visit at age 12 marks the start of 18 years of silence about the life of the only person who—according to Christianity—ever managed to avoid committing even one sinful thought or act. Why do we know absolutely nothing about the world’s only perfect life between the ages of 13 and 29?…I see the Bible’s silence on these years of Jesus’s life as a glaring and troubling omission.” (p. 55, Four Disturbing Questions with One Simple Answer: Breaking the Spell of Christian Belief)
“If only we had more stories of Jesus’s early years that clearly portrayed real-life examples of what doing the right thing looks like—in as many situations as possible…And what if we had the details of Jesus’s life in his twenties? How did he transition from adolescence to adulthood? How did he build strong, meaningful friendships? How did he deal with sexual temptations? …Wouldn’t you wonder why the God empowering this perfect life failed to ensure that someone wrote about events from its every year?” (pp. 55, 56 & 57, Four Disturbing Questions with One Simple Answer)
We’ve got the gospels as they are because the authors weren’t historians. Their primary agenda was promoting the theology/mythology of the Jesus cult.
Could Have Been So Much Better, Two
And speaking of mythology, resurrection of a dead hero fully qualifies. What an embarrassment that a major world religion remains committed to this idea. Dying/rising savior cults were a feature of the religious landscape of the time, as Richard Carrier has demonstrated so well in his 2018 essay, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It. Somehow the idea caught on that Jesus belonged to this elite group, but the gospel writers did a poor job incorporating it in their Jesus stories. Mark wrote that Jesus predicted his resurrection to his disciples three times (8:31-33, 9:30-32, 10:32-34)—but, no surprise, “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” (9:32) Even so, when Jesus was killed, how could they forget this thrice-repeated prediction? Yet they didn’t camp out near the tomb to witness the miracle, and have a welcome-back-Jesus celebration! As Robert Conner has pointed out, “Remember, in the canonical gospels nobody actually witnesses the risen Jesus leave the tomb.” (Kindle, loc 2568, Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story)
The gospels could have been so much better if the four gospel accounts of Easter morning had been consistent. The confusion becomes obvious to anyone who reads them, one after the other. Theologians, clergy, and various apologists have put considerable effort into making them look compatible, but that’s a real stretch. It’s so hard to take these accounts seriously when Matthew added the story that people who had come alive in their tombs at the moment Jesus died, walked out and toured Jerusalem on Eastern morning. Luke didn’t help either with his story of Jesus appearing, unrecognized, to disciples “on the road to Emmaus”—then poof! —vanished the moment they realized who he was. It’s very helpful to read Conner’s book referenced above: the gospel authors were influenced by ghost folklore.
Could Have Been So Much Better, Three
Why not be honest about what actually happened to Jesus in the end? In the first chapter of Acts we find the story of Jesus ascending above the clouds to join Yahweh in the sky. That story works only if the ancient view of the cosmos is correct. We now know a few miles overhead there is the cold and lethal radiation of space—and how to get there.
As A. N. Wilson put it: “For a modern observer, of whatever
religious beliefs, it is impossible not to know that a man ascending vertically from the Mount of Olives, by whatever means of miraculous propulsion, would pass into orbit.” (Jesus: A Life, p. 3)
Theologians now may wish to read the story symbolically—for example, “Jesus now lives and reigns with god” —but no matter, it never happened. Jesus never left planet earth, and—even if you believe that he resurrected—he died again. But the resurrection is fantasy as well, unless you’re willing to concede that the other dying/rising savior gods truly did the same thing.
We’re stuck wondering what actually happened to Jesus. The gospels could have been so much better if they had told the truth, an accurate story, based on history, not theology.
Could Have Been So Much Better, Four
In Mark’s gospel, 14:62, Jesus tells those attending his trial that they will see him “seated at the right hand of power, and coming with the clouds of heaven.” Mark was perhaps influenced by the apostle Paul’s assurance in I Thessalonians 4 that dead Christians will rise from their graves to join with living believers—himself included—to meet Jesus in the air, to be with him forever. I suspect that a high percentage of Christians today pay little attention to these bits of scripture, although many believers still keep an eye on the sky, hoping desperately that Jesus will arrive to rescue the world.
This is an ancient version of the Superman comic book hero, who will come flying through the air to perform good deeds. In the Christian version, based on the gospels and Paul, Jesus will do so much more: he’ll kick out the hated Roman tyrants, he’ll save the world. There is nothing whatever to disprove that this is simply more ancient superstition, a level of nonsense that deserves no respect whatever. The gospels could have been so much better had they depicted Jesus as a great moral teacher. But the gospel authors were not satisfied with that; they were promoting a cult that glorified a hero, belief in whom guaranteed eternal life. This religious gimmick has been a constant for millennia.
A healthy embrace of reality can break the spell of this gimmick, and a healthy embrace of skepticism and critical thinking can dimmish the hold the sloppy gospels have on Christian belief.
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.
The Pencil-Driven Life 
