Category: Religion
Ben Franklin’s noble lie
Here’s the link to this article.
by ADAM LEE DEC 11, 2023
Overview:
In his published works, Benjamin Franklin expressed the misanthropic view that most people can’t behave without religion to keep them in line. What does the evidence say about this noble lie?
Reading Time: 5 MINUTES
When do we need to deceive people for their own good?
Philosophers have debated this question for ages. The optimistic viewpoint holds that there’s never a conflict between truth and goodness. It’s only ignorance that gives rise to evil actions. The smarter and more informed people are, the better they’ll behave.
If this is true, that would be convenient, because it would spare us from having to make unsavory choices. However, some famous historical figures have argued that some truths are too dangerous to spread around. For people’s own good and the good of society, they say, the masses need to be taught falsehoods that keep them in line and make them behave.
The most famous expression of this idea is in Plato’s Republic, where he discusses the noble lie: a mythology taught by elites to make the common people virtuous. What’s shocking is that it was also the view of an American founding father renowned for his wisdom.
“Unchaining the tiger”
Benjamin Franklin wrote a famous letter, responding to an unknown freethinker who sent him a manuscript criticizing religion. We don’t know the identity of Franklin’s correspondent, although some historians argue it was Thomas Paine.
Whoever he was writing to, he expresses a cynical and pessimistic view of human nature:
“I have read your Manuscript with some Attention. By the Arguments it contains against the Doctrine of a particular Providence, tho’ you allow a general Providence, you strike at the Foundation of all Religion: For without the Belief of a Providence that takes Cognizance of, guards and guides and may favour particular Persons, there is no Motive to Worship a Deity, to fear its Displeasure, or to pray for its Protection.
…You yourself may find it easy to live a virtuous Life without the Assistance afforded by Religion; you having a clear Perception of the Advantages of Virtue and the Disadvantages of Vice, and possessing a Strength of Resolution sufficient to enable you to resist common Temptations. But think how great a Proportion of Mankind consists of weak and ignorant Men and Women, and of inexperienc’d and inconsiderate Youth of both Sexes, who have need of the Motives of Religion to restrain them from Vice, to support their Virtue, and retain them in the Practice of it till it becomes habitual… …I would advise you therefore not to attempt unchaining the Tyger… If Men are so wicked as we now see them with Religion what would they be if without it?“
In Poor Richard’s Almanac, Franklin offered a pithier version of the same idea:
“Talking against Religion is unchaining a Tyger; The Beast let loose may worry his Deliverer.”
Notably, this was printed in a book for public consumption. That shows that this wasn’t just his private opinion which he spoke in confidence among friends, but something he was comfortable saying in the open.
The founders’ anti-democratic prejudices
With due respect to Benjamin Franklin, I wonder if he was aware of how misanthropic these words are.
He goes beyond saying that humans are often weak-willed, selfish, or corruptible—something I might be persuaded to agree with. Instead, he compares humanity to a bloodthirsty predator, a dangerous wild animal that’s only kept at bay by a chain. There might be a few wise elites, like Franklin’s correspondent and presumably Franklin himself, who can behave themselves without religious restraints, but most people can’t.
The massive irony of this is that it’s a fundamentally anti-democratic argument. Democracy rests on the basis that the people are the best guardians of their own interests. They can be trusted to decide for themselves. If they’re given the power, they’ll make better choices than distant and uncaring elites.
Franklin’s logic, on the other hand, argues that most people can’t be trusted. It’s too dangerous to let them ask questions, use their own judgment or make up their own minds. Taken to its logical conclusion, this leads straight back to the theory of government that he and America’s other founders rebelled against: that the people should be ruled by aristocrats who know better than the commoners do what’s best for them.
It’s safe to assume that Benjamin Franklin wasn’t the only American founding father who thought this way. When you know that the founders had this deep distrust of the common people, it makes sense that they designed such a creaky, stagnant electoral system, with so many roadblocks against the voters’ will.
By the standards of what existed in the world at the time, the American system was revolutionary. But as the decades pass and our politics become increasingly gridlocked or regressive, it’s showing its age. More truly democratic, more representative systems have proven their worth in creating better results for the people who live under them.
A moral epiphenomenon
There’s an obvious question that, for all Franklin’s wisdom, he never asked: What made him so sure that religion was making people better than they would otherwise have been? How did he know it wasn’t a moral epiphenomenon, sanctifying the beliefs they held already without actually changing their behavior? In fact, how did he know it wasn’t actively making the world worse?
At the time Franklin wrote those words, the United States was overwhelmingly Christian. In fact, most of the colonies had state churches and blasphemy laws which outlawed all dissenting opinions. While there were deists, freethinkers and nonbelievers, most of them kept their opinions quiet or else suffered persecution and punishment.
When it was literally illegal to be an atheist, there was no basis for deciding whether Christianity or atheism was better for instilling morality in the average person. The law was forcing an answer without even permitting the question to be asked.
In fact, in another letter, Franklin contradicted himself by expressing doubt about whether religion was really producing any beneficial effects in the world:
“The Faith you mention has doubtless its use in the World. I do not desire to see it diminished, nor would I endeavour to lessen it in any Man. But I wish it were more productive of good Works, than I have generally seen it: I mean real good Works, Works of Kindness, Charity, Mercy, and Publick Spirit; not Holiday-keeping, Sermon-Reading or Hearing; performing Church Ceremonies, or making long Prayers, filled with Flatteries and Compliments, despis’d even by wise Men, and much less capable of pleasing the Deity. The worship of God is a Duty; the hearing and reading of Sermons may be useful; but, if Men rest in Hearing and Praying, as too many do, it is as if a Tree should Value itself on being water’d and putting forth Leaves, tho’ it never produc’d any Fruit.”
However, in the centuries since then, we’ve obtained enough data to answer this question empirically. Blasphemy laws and other theocratic conceits have been repealed almost everywhere. Especially in the last few decades, religion is in rapid decline.
Has the rise of nonbelief made us worse? Has the country spiraled into chaos without churches holding the whip over us? Have people run wild, killing and pillaging, without the fear of God to keep them in check?
Just the opposite has happened. We’ve become less violent and less warlike. We’ve abolished slavery and other cruel customs. Poverty has declined and literacy has increased. We’ve made great strides toward achieving equal rights under the law for everyone. We’ve become less prejudiced and more tolerant: of immigrants, of all races and cultures, of other religions, of LGBTQ people. The U.S. has become more democratic than it was in the founders’ day, thanks to voting-rights reforms.
To the extent that humanity still believes in cruelty, oppression and prejudice, it’s clearer than ever that religion is to blame for that. Religion sows the seeds of prejudice, inspiring xenophobia and bigotry. It promotes closed-mindedness and hostility to science, to progress, and to new and different ideas. It justifies war and violence in the name of God.
The decline of religion, rather than making us worse, has made us better. We’ve scrapped many of the mystical dogmas that never had any reason behind them. The rules with a genuine connection to human well-being have survived. We’ve also crafted some new ones as social reformers brought to light injustices that had previously been overlooked.
Benjamin Franklin got it wrong. There was never any tiger, no growling, slavering beast ready to pounce on its liberators. Human beings aren’t so vicious as that. It turns out, without that choking chain of religion, we’re more like peaceful lap cats.
A Pop-Quiz for Christians, Number 9
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 12/08/2023
Tis the season to carefully study the Jesus birth stories
A few years ago I attended the special Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall. It ended with the famous tableau depicting the night Jesus was born: the baby resting on straw in a stable, shepherds and Wise Men adoring the infant, surrounded by farm animals—and a star hovering above the humble shelter. Radio City did it splendidly, of course, but the scene is reenacted at countless churches during the Christmas season. The devout are in awe—well, those who haven’t carefully read the birth stories in Matthew and Luke. This adored tableau is actually a daft attempt to reconcile the two gospel accounts—which cannot, in fact, be done.
If churchgoers actually studied these accounts, they would legitimately ask: How has the church been able to get away with this?
So here are essential questions in this Pop-Quiz:
1. What is the evidence that Jesus was born on December 25?
Read Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2: is the evidence there?
2. Where did Mary and Joseph live when they found out she was pregnant?
Matthew and Luke didn’t agree on this.
3. Is it a good idea to add astrology—the ancient superstition of imagining omens in the sky—to Christian theology?
The Wise Men (magi/astrologers) saw the “Jesus star” and set out on a journey to find him. This is mentioned only in Matthew: is there any way at all to make this story credible?
4. What are the problems with that star?
Its behavior changes as the story unfolds.
5. Name two Old Testament verses that Matthew applies to Jesus, but which had nothing whatever to do with Jesus.
Matthew’s use of scripture is eccentric—to put it mildly.
Answers and Comments
Question One: What is the evidence that Jesus was born on December 25?
Events relating to the birth of Jesus are described in only two places in the New Testament: Matthew 1 & 2, and Luke 1 & 2. Mark begins his story with the baptism of Jesus, and John positions Jesus as having been a factor in the creation of the world; he seems not to have cared how Jesus was born as a human. But it was important to Matthew and Luke, yet neither of them bothers to mention the date when Jesus was born. December 25th was chosen later. This article, Why Is Christmas in December? offers details:
“In the 3rd century, the Roman Empire, which at the time had not adopted Christianity, celebrated the rebirth of the Unconquered Sun (Sol Invictus) on December 25th. This holiday not only marked the return of longer days after the winter solstice but also followed the popular Roman festival called the Saturnalia (during which people feasted and exchanged gifts). It was also the birthday of the Indo-European deity Mithra, a god of light and loyalty whose cult was at the time growing popular among Roman soldiers.”
Thus it seems that the Jesus-birthdate is a borrowing, i.e., the church capitalized on the popularity of December 25. But this is a red flag, a warning that there was too much borrowing. It doesn’t take much study of ancient religions to see that virgin birth for gods and heroes was a welcome credential. Matthew and Luke—alone among New Testament authors—attached this credential to Jesus. And while we’re studying ancient religions, we can wonder if December 25 was fiction on a whole different level: was Jesus born at all?
Richard Carrier makes this point:
“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.” (On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, p. 602)
Hysteria may be the response of some folks to any suggestion that Jesus was a fictional character. My suggestion: calm down and read Carrier’s book. Find out why, after 600 pages of evidence and reasoning, this is his conclusion. Make the effort to study the gospels carefully, critically: find out why historians don’t trust them to deliver authentic accounts of Jesus. And realize that devout New Testament scholars have been agonizing over this problem for decades.
Question 2: Where did Mary and Joseph live when they found out she was pregnant?
In Matthew’s story, there is no mention whatever of a census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. This was simply where they lived, and they fled from there to Egypt—here again, this tall tale is found only in Matthew—to protect Jesus. When they decided to return to their home, it was deemed too dangerous. “And after being warned in a dream, [Joseph] went away to the district of Galilee.There he made his home in a town called Nazareth…” (Matthew 2:22-23) There is not the slightest hint that Mary and Joseph had lived there originally.
Moreover, Luke knew nothing about the escape to Egypt mentioned in Matthew’s account. He offered an extended description of Jesus being taken to the Temple in Jerusalem for circumcision, and the words of adoration spoken about Jesus by two holy people, Simon and Anna. Then it was time to head for home: “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)
It’s puzzling that two gospel authors did not agree on something so basic: where the parents of Jesus lived. And it’s even more puzzling that those who assembled the New Testament would include gospels that didn’t agree. Actually, scholars have been alarmed that the gospel authors fail to agree on so much.
Question Three: Is it a good idea to add astrology—the ancient superstition of imagining omens in the sky—to Christian theology?
The authors of the New Testament had a hard time separating fact from fiction, credible beliefs from superstition. But at least they were inventive. Matthew imagined that astrologers (in the East, presumably Babylon, 900 miles away) figured out that a star represented a new king of the Jews. Why would they care? Why would they embark on a long journey “to pay him homage”? This seems to be a reflection of Matthew’s arrogance that his breakaway Jesus sect was the one true religion. So bring on the “wise men” from other religions!
But astrology was (and remains) an ancient superstition. How does this not drag Christian theology down? Alas, of course, quite a few ancient superstitions in the gospels damage Christianity, e.g., mental illness is caused by demons, people with god-like powers can raise the dead and heal people (Jesus cured a man’s blindness by smearing mud on his eyes), a resurrected human sacrifice guarantees salvation for those who believe. Using astrology to enhance theology is part of a much bigger credibility problem.
Question Four: What are the problems with that star?
Matthew is guilty of a major plot flaw. The astrologers headed to Jerusalem to get information on where to find this new king of the Jews. Their inquiry alarmed King Herod, who made inquiries of the religious experts. They told him that Bethlehem was the place to look, based on a text in Micah 5:2. So the astrologers headed for Bethlehem: “…they set out, and there, ahead of them, went the star that they had seen in the east, until it stopped over the place where the child was.” (Matthew 2:9) Scholar Robert Price has said that the star had suddenly turned into Tinkerbell! Why didn’t it do this earlier, bypassing Jerusalem altogether, thereby keeping King Herod in the dark, and avoiding the Massacre of the Innocents? (Matthew 2:16)
The Tinkerbell Star stopped over the house where Jesus was living—no stable in this story—and Jesus is described as a child or little-boy. When Herod went on his furious rampage later, killing children in the Bethlehem area, the order was to execute those two years old and younger, “according to the time that he had learned from the astrologers.” (Matthew 2:16) After all, 900 miles was a long trek. It is abundantly clear that Matthew depicts an event that did not take place on the night Jesus was born. Placing the Wise Men in Luke’s stable is totally misleading. It makes for good theatre—that’s what appeals to the clergy and Sunday School teachers, I suppose—but it’s not what the Bible says.
Question Five: Name two Old Testament verses that Matthew applied to Jesus, but which had nothing whatever to do with Jesus.
New Testament authors specialized in taking old bits of scripture out of context. They were on the hunt for verses that they could apply to Jesus, no matter the intent of the original authors. Since they were sure that the old documents were filled with secret codes that about their lord, the game was on. Here are two examples:
· In Matthew’s birth story, he quotes Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy about Jesus. Please read Isaiah 7: how can anything in this text be about a holy hero who would be born centuries later? It is about how Israel’s god will help resolve a crisis at the time.
· As mentioned earlier, it is only Matthew that tells the farfetched story of Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to Egypt to protect him. It would seem this was even too absurd for Luke to believe: he reports that Mary and Joseph—after the circumcision of Jesus—headed back to Nazareth. But Matthew had landed on Hosea 11:1, “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” The reference is clearly to Israel as a people, and moreover, the chapter is a lament that this people had been too ungrateful and rebellious.
Contemporary Bible readers should be able to figure out that Matthew’s use of old texts doesn’t help at all to make the case for Jesus.
The five questions in this Pop-Quiz serve as an introduction to the problems presented by these two birth narratives. Historians don’t take them seriously at all, since they clearly belong to the genre we call religious fantasy literature. Joseph is told by an angel in a dream that Mary is pregnant by the hold spirit; an angel in a dream tells him when to head home from Egypt. These are bits of fantasy, unless we could be sure that Matthew had access to a diary that Joseph kept, in which he wrote down his dreams (that’s the kind of documentation historians rely on). But at most, the diary would show that Joseph was out of touch with reality, believing that his god spoke to him via angels in dreams. Luke also was stoked at the thought of angels playing speaking roles, e.g., to the father of John the Baptist, to Mary, and to the shepherds on the night Jesus was born.
The gospels of Mark and John are deeply flawed, but at least those two authors showed no interest in spinning tales about how Jesus was born. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your perspective—the Matthew and Luke birth narratives are a good place to start in undermining the credibility of the gospels, and in the falsification of Christian theology.
But that requires curiosity, critical thinking, and a willingness to engage in serious study—wherever that may lead.
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, 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.
Believers Specialize in the Denial of Grim Reality
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 12/15/2023
Especially the reality of horrendous suffering
What does it take for a person to say No to belief in a god? No matter the depth of indoctrination, it might happen when one is faced with suffering on an unprecedented scale. This happened to Martin Selling, born in Germany in 1918. He was Jewish, thus was caught up in the Nazi frenzy of hate. He ended up in Dachau.
“…there were those who found they could no longer believe in God—any God—because of what was taking place. Martin identified with this group. He would, he decided, observe and participate in the traditions and ceremonies he had grown up with, out of a desire to acknowledge his Jewish heritage. But for the rest of his life, he knew, he would just be going through the motions. The horrors of Dachau had destroyed his belief in God.” (Bruce Henderson, Son and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazis and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler, p. 10)
Changing our minds and our behavior is a matter of letting evidence, facts, the realities of our everyday world influence our thinking. If your doctor tells you that your cholesterol is too high, you’ll adjust your diet. If you’re on the hunt for a product or service—to make your life better—it’s common to check consumer reviews: what has been the experience of others? We don’t like to make big mistakes.
But what if our brains have been locked by something? What if our personalities are anchored to beliefs that we learned at a very young age? This is commonly what happens with religion—a wide variety of religions that do not agree at all. Yet those who were raised Catholic, or evangelical, Muslim, Jewish, Mormon—taught the “truths” of these faiths by trusted authority figures, i.e., parents and clergy—can feel super threatened when the fallacies of these belief systems are brought to their attention:
“No thank you, I will not look at the facts! No thank you, evidence plays no role in enabling my faith! I have been taught what is true, case closed!”
One’s personal fate in the cosmos is commonly at stake in clinging to embedded beliefs. That is, the promise of escape from death, the promise of getting to see mother again in heaven, the promise of being loved personally by Jesus. It’s hard to think of more powerful motivations. Thus evidence and hard facts that undermine faith are shunned, ignored, pushed beyond the horizon of awareness.
As Darrell Ray has pointed out in The God Virus: How Religion Infects Our Lives and Culture:
“From church schools and church groups, to home schooling and frequent church activities, the goal is to keep children immersed in the god virus until the infection has taken hold. It is difficult to learn and practice critical thinking while immersed and isolated by the god virus. That is the purpose of immersion. When an individual is able to compare and examine the various religious claims, she soon realizes that religions are full of mythologies dressed as fact.” (p. 200)
Religions have developed ways to shun and deflect evidence that handily falsifies belief in god. Devout Christians, for example, have been assured by their clergy that “God works in mysterious ways,” or “God has plans we are not privileged to know”—to account for horrible events that sabotage the claim that god is loving, caring, powerful, competent. Or they have been assured that god has been paying attention when their fervent prayers have rescued a cancer patient from death. What a relief: god has been paying attention! But there’s a major flaw with this boast: thousands of cancer sufferers die every day. If god is truly paying attention, why aren’t all these other people rescued from painful death? Does it take fervent prayers to get him to notice this suffering? Something is seriously wrong with this theology.
Moreover, the laity commonly do not notice what is wrong with the claim that “God works in mysterious ways” and “has plans that we are not privileged to know.” It would be appropriate for the devout to ask their clergy: How do you know this? “Mysterious ways” and “undisclosed plans” are theological guesses, wishful thinking—fishing desperately for answers—to exonerate god. Horrendous suffering is, in fact, stunning evidence that a good, caring, powerful, competent god plays no role whatever in the management of this planet. It makes no sense whatever to believe that “he’s got the whole world in his hands.”
Church folks are trained from a very early age to look the other way when episodes of massive suffering are so very obvious. Elsewhere I have called this easy acceptance of the very terrible—in order to preserve faith. “Oh yes, that really is horrible, but we can be sure god has his reasons.” Usually zero thought is given to coming up with plausible explanations, because curiosity and thinking are dangerous. Facing the reality of horrendous suffering is dangerous.
How did belief in the Christian god survive the crises and ordeals of the 20th century? Two world wars brought suffering at unprecedented levels. Nicholas Best, in his book, Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II, noted:
“By the end of the war almost six million Jews had perished, approximately two-thirds of the entire Jewish population of Europe. Romani Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people as well as other religious and political opponents were also sent to the death camps increasing the total to an estimated eleven to sixteen million.” (Kindle, p. 288)
These deaths were the result of planned murders by the Nazis, but far more people were the casualties of the devastating warfare. This above all has contributed to the secularization of western Europe, because massive prayers to god 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, did not work, as Darrell Ray points out:
“It took two world wars for Europeans to realize that the prayers of millions of people were not answered. It doesn’t take too much intelligence to see that god isn’t working too well when 92 million people die in two world wars.” (p. 75)
The clergy earn their pay by promoting idealized versions of god and Jesus, to keep the faithful loyal and devoted. To put it bluntly, they are paid propagandists. Hence there are two things they won’t do:
(1) Encourage their parishioners to intensively study the four gospels: compare them carefully, critically, and probe to find out where the gospel authors got their ideas. Their accounts of Jesus, and Christian origins, are indeed a tangled mess.
(2) Encourage a thorough study of horrendous suffering, and try to figure out how a good god plays any role whatever in the terrible events that humans have had to endure. Rather, the preferred approach of the clergy is to deflect attention from these realities.
Recent studies have shown that, among the young especially, the Holocaust is seen as exaggerated, or denied entirely. Yet the Holocaust in one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in history. The Nazis themselves kept records of their deeds—-they thought they were doing the world a great service—and many of their leaders kept diaries. Moreover, survivors of the Holocaust have written of their experiences, the horrors and terrors they suffered.
The memoir of Magda Hellinger was preserved with the help of her daughter, Maya Lee. This is one glimpse of life at Birkenau concentration camp:
“There were no toilets or running water at the new camp. Our ‘toilet’ was a large hole in the ground with a plank over the top. It was bad enough coping with the stench of this open pit, but falling in became our greatest fear. Only a few days after we arrived, one girl lost her balance and found herself covered in excrement. She stumbled through the camp in search of somewhere to wash, but her effort was fruitless due to a lack of water. A guard chose the solution that was to become commonplace: he shot her dead.” (p. 68, The Nazis Knew My Name: A Remarkable Story of Survival and Courage in Auschwitz-Birkenau)
“Death was always close. It should never be forgotten that the period over the summer and autumn of 1944 was the deadliest of the Holocaust. The Nazis murdered close to 400,000 people, mostly Hungarian Jews, in just a few months. Most were gassed immediately after their arrival, but many others died in the weeks and months afterward. Some just lost hope and fell to the ground, or threw themselves against the electric fence to end it all. For many others, injury during work, disease, malnutrition—any reason for not being able to work—was enough reason for an SS guard to send a prisoner up the chimney. Not that they needed a reason at all. There were no consequences for an SS guard who chose to simply shoot a prisoner dead for being in the wrong place or for looking at him the wrong way. After all, the aim was genocide, sooner or later. The life of a Jewish prisoner had no value.” (p. 150, The Nazis Knew My Name)
Two other Holocaust memoirs are especially worthy of note.
Edith Hahn-Beer “donated her personal papers to the US Holocaust Museum in Washington; at 800 documents, it was one of the largest archives pertaining to a single person.” Hahn-Beer’s experience of the war is told in her book, The Nazi Officer’s Wife: How One Jewish Woman Survived the Holocaust. This quote about her donation to the museum is found on page 4 of the addendum. How to survive the maelstrom of hate? This was a possibility:
“Perhaps I could pretend to be a Christian too. Surely God would understand. And it might help. Why not try it? I took myself into the town of Osterburg and stared at the statue of Jesus in front of the local church, trying to will myself to love Jesus. It was wartime. Men were at the front. And yet I saw no candles in the church, no kneeling worshippers praying for the safe return of sons and husbands and fathers. The Nazis had done a wonderful job of discouraging faith in anything but the Führer.” (p. 98)
Noach Zelechower’s experiences are described in I Survived to Tell: A Holocaust Memoir about Survival in the Warsaw Ghetto and 7 Camps.
“In order to inflict such physical and mental torment, the Germans had to breed a special caste of humans, fed on raw meat and Vodka. It is not possible that out of the blue such evil people could be created suddenly–in the heart of Europe…It wore us down trying to solve this mystery of the origin of the existence of such human beasts.” (Kindle, pp. 132-133)
“I sat now in a building that was soaked with the stench of dripping pus from open wounds that were bandaged in all sorts of manner and was full of damned, suffering, and dying people. In this place they cursed, with all the derogatory words, the God that had forgotten them and accused Him for being the main culprit responsible for all their daily maladies and hardships. This denial of God was repeated about a hundred times a day.” (Kindle, pp. 157-158)
The denial of god based on reality. The Bible is used to support a naive view of a good, caring, loving god, e.g., Psalm 23:4: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.”
What happens in reality? Hitler sent 285,000 soldiers to conquer Stalingrad; only about 6,000 made it back to Germany. During the firebombing of Dresden by the Allies in February 1945, 25,000 people died. The atomic blast over Hiroshima incinerated some 80,000 people in an instant.
Horrendous suffering at this level—or at the level of people dying from cancer, or from thousands of genetic diseases—make a mockery of the claim that “this is my Father’s world.” It’s no surprise that the clergy don’t want their devout followers asking all the tough questions that these events in the real world raise. A good place to start such study is a careful reading of John Loftus’ anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering.
Come on, churchgoers, it’s time to snap out of it!
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available.
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
Cognitive Clarity–The Remnant: That evangelical need to feel picked-on and special
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Here’s the link to this article.
Funny how the remnant looks just like all the other power-hungry, privilege-grabbing hypocrites we’ve ever seen in evangelicalism
by CAPTAIN CASSIDY NOV 21, 2023
Overview:
In Christianese, ‘the remnant’ is a term to indicate the truest of all true Christians: themselves, of course. Other Christians, even other evangelicals, are fakers who are going to Hell. Only the remnant gets a free pass to Heaven.
Reading Time: 14 MINUTES
Avery important evangelical belief centers on the idea of the remnant. No, it’s not a horror movie title—though it very well could be in this case. Rather, it’s the belief that the very truest of all true-blue evangelicals constitute a tiny, utterly embattled and persecuted subset of Christians. Let’s unpack this belief and see where it comes from, how evangelicals use it, and why it means so much to them.
(In the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, “the Remnant” and “Remnant Theology” take on special meaning (archive). Here, we use the term in the evangelical sense.)
Christianese 101: The remnant
The concept of the remnant is upper-level Christianese. It’s an Extremely Important Word for evangelicals that relates to something they hold especially dear: themselves.
In the real world, a remnant in general is whatever’s left over after something has taken everything else away. So a small bit of cooking oil might be the remnant after the rest has been used. The word can also refer to a bit of unsold matter from a larger whole, like cloth or carpeting.
‘Remnant’ is an Extremely Important Word for evangelicals. It relates to something they hold especially dear: themselves.
The Old Testament generally uses the real-world sense of the word:
“But God sent me ahead of you to preserve for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives by a great deliverance.” [Genesis 45:7, spoken by Joseph to his brothers]
. . . [the locust] has eaten the remnant of that which is escaped, which is left to you from the hail, and it has eaten every tree which is springing out of the field for you . . . [Exodus 10:5, spoken by Moses to the Pharaoh]
And the remnant of the meat offering shall be Aaron’s and his sons’: it is a thing most holy of the offerings of the LORD made by fire. [Leviticus 2:3, referring to offerings]
And the priest shall make an atonement for him as touching his sin that he hath sinned in one of these, and it shall be forgiven him: and the remnant shall be the priest’s, as a meat offering. [Leviticus 5:13, referring to animals sacrificed as sin offerings]
Occasionally, we’ll see the evangelical sense of the word used, like one of their favorite passages in Isaiah 10:20-22:
On that day the remnant of Israel and the survivors of the house of Jacob will no longer depend on him who struck them, but they will truly rely on the LORD, the Holy One of Israel. A remnant will return, a remnant of Jacob will return to the Mighty God. Though your people, O Israel, be like the sand of the sea, only a remnant will return.
In the New Testament, though, we see this sense of remnant almost exclusively:
And the remnant [of invited guests] took his servants, and entreated them spitefully, and slew them. [Matthew 22:6, the Parable of the Banquet]
“Lord, they have killed Your prophets and torn down Your altars. I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life as well?” And what was the divine reply to him? “I have reserved for Myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” In the same way, at the present time there is a remnant chosen by grace. [Romans 11:3-5; divine reply refers to 1 Kings 19:18]
And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand: and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven. [Revelation 11:13]
As you can see, it’s a whole thing in Christianity, particularly for evangelical culture warriors. If you see a church called “Remnant,” like the one started by weird fundie weight-loss guru Gwen Shamblin (archive), you can be absolutely assured that it’s an evangelical church whose members are way into the culture wars.
The remnant in the wild
Evangelicals take this remnant stuff very seriously. To them, it means more than being the leftovers or the last bit unused. It’s more about being the only real true believers out of all the rest of the fakey-fake pseudo-believers.
For example, a Calvinist church in Tacoma exhorts its congregation to “think like a Remnant”:
To consider oneself part of the remnant today sounds and feels proud and conceited. To declare oneself part of the faithful minority as opposed to being lumped with the unfaithful majority smacks of arrogance. We remind ourselves it is God who gets to dole out labels.“Thinking Like a Remnant” (archive)
But weirdly, it’s this god’s self-appointed spokespeople who actually do the doling-out. Nobody’s ever heard their god say a thing, most especially including his own followers!
This doling-out isn’t just a fun, overly-flattering little descriptor, either. It’s a statement of condemnation of all other flavors of Christianity and all Christians who disagree with these folks. Out of every single flavor of Christianity over its almost-2000-year-long history, these particular Christians are the only ones who finally got Jesusing right.
“Thinking like a Remnant” also involves feeling super-duper-persecuted for such superior Jesusing, as this church’s site reminds the flocks:
Outnumbered? Scorned? Misunderstood? Disliked? Yes, we are. But we have been redeemed.“Thinking Like a Remnant” (archive)
That’s not why people “scorn” these Christians, of course, nor why they “dislike” them. Their imaginary redemption has nothing to do with that. However, it’s clearly much more comfortable to pin the tail on a strawman than consider the boorish and cruel behavior that actually constitutes the reasons for society’s reactions to them.
The remnant: The best of the best of the BEST, SIR! With honors!
Famous evangelical leader A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) had much the same things to say about the notion of the remnant some years ago:
I am alarmed because it has been true since Pentecost that such a vast number of people who call themselves Christians-the overwhelming majority-are nominal, and only a remnant is saved.“The Remnant. Who are they? Are you part of the Remnant?” (archive)
Tozer didn’t like knowing that many Christians felt perfectly peaceful about their faith. To him, that meant they were fakey-fake fake Christians, not the real true believers who were really going to Heaven after death:
Either we take ourselves for granted and have a sham peace or we get disturbed and then we pray through and find true peace. Most believers take themselves for granted and have a false peace. If they did what the Bible taught, they would be bothered and alarmed about themselves and would go to God with an open Bible and let the Bible cut them to pieces and put them together again, then give them peace. And the peace they had when they had been chopped to pieces by the Holy Spirit and the Sword of the Spirit-that peace, then, is a legitimate peace. [. . .]
So at the second coming of Christ, it will be as it was in the days of Noah; and in those days, Noah, the eighth person, was saved by water, by the ark. The rest of the population drowned.“The Remnant. Who are they? Are you part of the Remnant?” (archive)
Even the comments sound like people who take themselves entirely too seriously and think entirely too much of themselves.
It all reminds me of that hilarious scene from Men in Black, where Jay is trying to work out the purpose of a big meeting:
At least “Captain America over here” had objective reasons for thinking so highly of himself. As a group, evangelicals have none. But somehow, they think even more highly of themselves.
The weighty implications of being part of this glorious remnant
“Thinking like a Remnant” involves being part of the evangelical culture wars, according to Crosswalk:
One of the things we must be aware of is that if you are in Christ you are part of the present day remnant. Jesus calls you salt and one of the functions of salt is to preserve, which is what the remnant does. We are called to preserve God’s standard in the earth regardless of what we see happening in our society.“What Does Remnant Mean in the Bible?” (archive)
It’s also yet another way for Christians to lord their superior Jesusing over others. Over and over again, we see Christians using “the remnant” (archive) to refer to themselves as the real-deal true Christians—while slamming all other kinds of Christians as fakes who are doomed to Hell for their insufficient, incorrect Jesusing:
Today the church serves as God’s chosen people.[citation needed] And like the children of Israel, the church has become a sinful nation, comprised of believers laden with iniquity. They are a seed of evildoers, with children who are corrupter. They have forsaken the Lord and have provoked the Holy One unto anger. [citation needed] They have gone away backward. But despite the state of the church, God has once again left a small remnant.[citation needed] A remnant that is far from perfect, but a remnant that trust God.[citation needed]“Who is God’s remnant?” (archive)
And, amusingly enough, we also see Christians policing each other’s use of the word itself:
Claiming to be the remnant is a sign of arrogance. To excuse a church’s lack of growth on being a remnant is to claim that we are more right than others. [. . .]
You are not part of the remnant because you have stricter standards than the bigger church across town. You are not a part of the remnant because you are more separated than other churches.“Are We the Remnant?” (archive)
Of course, as that last quote illustrates, being part of the remnant implies a serious obligation to recruit more people into the fold:
This is your message, the vital message, and if you won’t carry it, who will?
We will carry it. We the few, the remnant, the believing church of Philadelphia in the time of the lukewarm church of Laodicea.“A Message to the Remnant of Believers in the World Today” (archive)
Other Christians lean hard on this concept to frighten believers about the Endtimes:
In this generation, we’ve seen the final jubilee that will happen in our generation. The next one to take place during a feast will happen in 500 years. We have seen the last one. Therefore, we are the remnant generation. We are the generation that have seen Matthew 24 to come to pass, the rebirth of Israel, Daniel 12:4 come to pass, we have seen technology and science increase. Most of the people don’t know the times we are living in. Only a remnant does. Why? Because they can read the signs. When you know why these signs are happening, you will have peace and no fear because you know our redemption draws near.“End Times Chosen Remnant” (archive)
As you might already have noticed, Calvinists seem particularly enamored of remnant ideology:
The elect are not many but few—only a remnant. Jesus said, “Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to [eternal] destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (Matt. 7:13–14). And Paul said, “Isaiah cries out concerning Israel: ‘Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea, only the remnant will be saved’” (Rom. 9:27). We are the remnant; we are not many.“Jesus Prays for Us” (archive)
Using remnant ideology to feel persecuted
One of the weirdest ideas to come out of evangelicalism is the notion that “the world,” meaning everybody but their own narrowly-defined tribe of real true Christians, despises the remnant and wishes to oppress and persecute everyone within it. In reality, if evangelicals actually reliably did even a tenth of what Jesus commanded his followers to do and consistently refrained from doing even a fraction of the stuff he ordered them not to do, nobody’d ever have any problem with them.
But where’s the fun in being kind, respectful, and charitable? In comforting the grieving, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked? Where are the sadistic thrills in turning the other cheek, giving everything you have to the poor, giving someone the shirt off your back when they ask for your coat, and treating everyone, including your worst enemies, with kindness and love? What power accrues while accepting whatever horrible things someone else wants to do to you, and enduring it with nothing but smiles and blessings on your lips?
And if you’re not swanning around ostentatiously Jesusing at everyone, how will they even know you’re Jesus’ very special prettiest princess?
No, anyone involved in modern evangelicalism isn’t there to do all that boring stuff, nor to refrain from doing the gratifying stuff that really revs their motors. They’re there to get a free ticket out of Hell—and to mistreat others with Jesus’ permission.
(See also: Permission slips.)
They’ve declared themselves the best, truest, most incredibly Jesusy Jesusers who ever Jesused the Jesus-Jesus. Along with that declaration, they’ve also decided all other Christians are fakers and the outside world hates them jus’ fer’ bein’ KRIS-chin.
The stage is set for them to assume that literally any pushback at all to any of their control-grabs is actually persecution of the most shocking and egregious kind. Because obviously, fakers and heathens totally hate and fear the purity and godliness of the remnant. Gosh, they’re just far too divine to handle!
Sidebar: The Spiritual Ruler strikes again
Way back in college, I was a sprightly, bright-eyed Pentecostal lass. I had a lot of friends on-campus from a number of different evangelical groups. And because I thought Pentecostals were the remnant, I regarded every one of them as well-meaning but missing the mark (archive), to use the Christianese.
For one thing, every one of them was a Trinitarian. Pentecostals rejected the Trinity, instead embracing Oneness Theology. Back then, my tribe considered Trinitarianism a filthy papist doctrine that incorporated paganism into the one true monotheistic faith.
Only the remnant understood and embraced Oneness. And spoke in tongues just like on the Day of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. And maintained a ferocious separation from the outside world’s secular ways. Etc., etc., etc.
Truly, Jesus was so lucky to have us!
The funny thing, though, is that it’s almost impossible for one Christian to persuade another that they’re dead wrong about a major doctrinal belief. They can both swear up and down that they only want to believe what’s correct and most Jesusy, and they can both pray the same prayers and study the exact same Bible verses. But they’ll only see their own beliefs confirmed and other beliefs disavowed.
Even those papist Trinitarian pagans had entire books full of reasons to reject Oneness Theology, just as Pentecostals did to debunk Trinitarianism.
I came out of Christianity with a real affection for mockingly calling particularly-pompous Trinitarians heretics. But really, every Christian who’s ever lived is a heretic to some other Christian somewhere. There’s no way to win this squabble because there’s no consistent objective standard with which Christians may compare themselves. The Bible is a laughably poor resource in that respect; its many verses can be twisted and turned to suit any interpretation imaginable—as my college friends and I discovered many, many times.
The problems with declaring themselves the prettiest, most important princesses at the ball
We’ve already seen one Christian leader chide his flocks for using remnant ideology to excuse their lack of recruitment success. We’ve also already seen another Christian leader preen and strut about how it’s totally not arrogant at all to declare oneself as the remnant. No, not at all—if he does say so himself!
It’s not just arrogant, though. It’s not just a tidy excuse, either, for a small church’s congregation size.
Posing as the realest, truest Christians ever, the only ones who are actually going to Heaven, has a marked effect on those claiming it. Remnant ideology becomes a satisfying narrative for them. The flocks greedily consume it—and then use it to rationalize their control-lust and tribalistic impulses.
That’s how Mike Johnson, the new extremely evangelical Speaker of the House, can say with such conviction (archive) that the literal only reason why his tribe’s power is being curtailed is because everybody just hates them and persecutes them fer jus’ bein’ KRISchin. I’ll bet you just about anything that the guy thinks he and his like-minded tribemates constitute the remnant.
(Author’s note: Suddenly intrigued by this idea, I went a-searching. And yes. According to Rolling Stone (archive), Mike Johnson sure does think that: “He speaks at length about a devoted Christian “remnant” — or keepers of the true faith — who can help save America from retribution.” If you’re wondering, saving America means evangelicals fully controlling Americans’ lives, Handmaid style. It’s alarming to hear Johnson further claiming (archive) that the separation of church and state is a “misnomer.”)
It’s funny to watch these Christians get mad when nobody else honors them as the pretty princesses they think they truly are.
The politics of the remnant
Once Christians declare themselves the best of the best of the best, SIR, with honors, then they start to look at everyone else as poor widdle heathens in need of fixing up, people far too stupid and naughty to know what’s best for themselves, who need Designated Adults to step in and force them onto the right path (through actual enslavement if need be, according to Pastor Joe Morecraft in 2013), who most of all might not even be fully human or experience normal human emotions due to their lack of correct Jesusing. They use their self-declared label as a rationalization for trying to rob others of their rights.
History is replete with examples of what happens when this process is allowed to go too far. From slavery to the war crimes Japan committed against the people they called “logs,” from separate-but-equal laws to the designation of women as men’s property, nothing but harm and cruelty comes of such thinking.
Members of such a declared superior group invariably start mistreating the ones they consider inferior. And the people they mistreat usually have no recourse whatsoever, and no hope of finding justice in a system dominated by that superior group.
That’s why Paige Patterson lost his cushy seminary presidency in 2018: He systematically silenced sex-assault victims to protect the reputation of his school, and he told female domestic violence victims to meekly endure that abuse so their husbands would get convicted (ashamed, but in a really Jesusy way) enough to stop and become real true Christians at last.
Of course, the rest of that tribe still honors him as a great man and inspirational leader who got rousted unfairly out of his powerful position by lesser Christians who couldn’t understand his Jesus-osity. And boy oh boy, do they ever hate the guy who succeeded him!
The remnant might not actually be in churches anymore
Ten years ago, evangelicals gloated about the relatively faster decline of mainline and progressive churches. It’d never be them, they sneered, since they were so incredibly Jesusy that Jesus would always bless them with growth.
That smugness sure didn’t last. As it turned out, their rigid authoritarianism only held down a few extra butts in pews (BIPs, a measure of evangelical power) for a few extra years. Their rigid authoritarianism had made church membership seem a lot less optional than it really was. As the decline continued, year after year, even the most devoted evangelical BIPs realized that they could leave, and there was just nothing whatsoever that their church leaders could really do about it.
That’s when evangelicals’ decline began to keep up with and sometimes even outpace that of other flavors of Christianity.
Oh, I mean those leaders could write angry blog posts and books (archive) about their congregations quietly melting out “the back door.” Of course, the advice to church leaders was—and still is—always to drill down harder on authoritarian demands (archive) to make membership feel less optional. But in terms of real-world Christian love retaliation, most of those leaving were generally safe for the first time in modern American history.
And, too, those leaders could write angry blog posts and books about how the remaining BIPs were the remnant, the truest of all true Christians, the realest-deal of everyone, while the departing members were the fakey-fake “Cultural Christian” fakers (archive) that everyone was happy to see leave.
But sooner or later, even the BIPs had to question that wisdom. It sure seemed like the people leaving had been extremely devoted. Many of those who’d left were happy to say exactly that. (You can often find them commenting on blog posts discussing that exact situation.) They became churchless believers, Christians who’d left church culture behind because it had first left them behind.
And now, the prettiest of the prettiest princesses!
The most arrogant evangelicals seem now to consider themselves the remnant of the remnant. Out of an already small number of pretty princesses, they’re the very prettiest of the pretty. As one pastor preached in 2015 on YouTube,
Within the remnant there is even those numbers that are even fewer.
So a remnant in the natural means a small portion of the original. Say you are making a dress. Those offshoots are a remnant of the original fabric that you’re using to make that dress. But here, we see God is saying ‘remnant of the remnant’. What is happening here?
See, the mark of a wise church is not how many people go to that church, but how many people fear the LORD and live differently as a result of being in that church. [. . .]
Are you the remnant of the remnant? He is coming back for the remnant of the remnant!“THE REMNANT OF THE REMNANT – PST ROBERT CLANCY” 2015, about 2:50-5:00
Strangely enough, though, this remnant of the remnant always looks like the usual grabby, power-maddened hypocrites we’ve always seen. Calling themselves lofty things doesn’t change who they are. It just makes them look worse. Calling themselves something even loftier only makes things even worse.
What’s next? The remnant of the remnant of the remnant, with honors, sir?
(Don’t ever think that we’ve hit rock bottom with evangelicals. They’ve always got a burning desire to dig ever-deeper. Sooner or later, that phrase will become evangelical reality.)
These remnant evangelicals don’t realize something important, though
If today’s evangelicals are what Jesus really wants, he’s welcome to them. I don’t believe an afterlife exists, but if Heaven did exist it sure wouldn’t be paradise with the remnant of the remnant there.
As for me, I’d rather be part of the vibrant, ever-unfurling tapestry of the human experience than a little piece cut off from it. I want to plunge into those colors, revel in the stitchery, glory in the smooth imperfect perfection of each hand-made stitch. I want to be part and parcel of the tapestry, to be part of the human situation, to be here now. That’s what I want: to mindfully watch its creation and add to it in any way that I can. However its last stitches get added, I want to be part of the whole.
For years now, it has astonished me that evangelicals can look at that tapestry, turn their noses up at it, and insist that they’re separate from it and far better than it could ever be. They’ve been making their own burlap abomination of a fake tapestry for years. They call this fake substitute perfect and praise it nonstop, while the real one flows behind them and past them and beyond them.
It’s just so picayune, so small, so petty. It’s looking at the glorious universe, its billions of years, the Laniakea supercluster, the filament threads flowing through the entire cosmos, and knowing that on a tiny sun-blasted, parched bit of rock, a Johnny-come-lately desert godling has ordered his tiny, ants-to-an-ant mortal followers not to get overly familiar with their own genitals for the 70 years or so that they’ll be alive.
The remnant are welcome to their Jesus, just as he’s welcome to them. I’d rather have reality. On this lovely Thanksgiving week, I’m thankful that so too, it seems, do growing numbers of other folks.
Cognitive Clarity–Abortion travel bans: Coming soon to a red state near you?
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Here’s the link to this article.
by ADAM LEE NOV 27, 2023
Overview:
Despite one stinging defeat after another, religious conservatives keep trying to outlaw abortion—now, by making it illegal to travel out of red states to places where it’s legal.
Reading Time: 6 MINUTES
Abortion is a losing issue for Republicans.
The evidence is beyond a reasonable doubt. In election after election, they’ve been slapped down.
Kansas voted down an abortion ban. Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s support for a “reasonable” 15-week ban cost him the Virginia legislature. Gov. Andy Beshear won reelection in Kentucky with a devastating ad about how his opponent would have forced a pre-teen girl raped by her stepfather to give birth. The people of Ohio passed a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights, infuriating the state’s Republican legislators (who’ve already announced they intend to try to nullify the will of their own voters—more on this soon, no doubt).
Are they giving up? No.
Despite these blistering rebukes from voters, Republican politicians refuse to relent. They’re preparing an even more draconian set of laws to strip reproductive freedom away from the American people.
The right to travel
So far, America’s federalist structure has kept the full weight of abortion bans from crashing down on women. While red states seized on their chance to outlaw or heavily restrict abortion, most blue states have protected and expanded abortion rights. People in red states who need an abortion can travel to the nearest safe haven (assuming, of course, that they have the money, the resources and the time). In fact, U.S. abortion rates have increased since the Dobbs decision.
Religious conservatives in red states are disgruntled by this, and they’re trying to stop it. They can’t control what blue states do—but they want to make it illegal to travel out of state to get an abortion, and prosecute those who help women do this.
For example, in Alabama:
Alabama’s Republican attorney general said in a court filing that he has the right to prosecute people who make travel arrangements for pregnant women to have out-of-state abortions.
In a court filing Monday, attorneys for Attorney General Steve Marshall wrote that providing transportation for women in Alabama to leave the state to get an abortion could amount to a “criminal conspiracy.”“Alabama attorney general says he has right to prosecute people who facilitate travel for out-of-state abortions.” Andy Rose, CNN, 31 August 2023.
And in Texas:
Commissioners in Lubbock County, Texas, on Monday voted to outlaw the act of transporting another person along their roads for an abortion, part of a strategy by conservative activists to further restrict abortion since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
The move makes Lubbock the biggest jurisdiction yet to pass such a restriction on abortion-related transportation since the June 2022 end of Roe, which had granted a nationwide right to abortion. Six cities and counties in Texas have passed the bans, out of nine that have considered them.
A few hours north, the Amarillo City Council on Tuesday will weigh its own law, which could lead to a future council or city-wide vote.
Lubbock and Amarillo are both traversed by major highways that connect Texas, which has one of the country’s most stringent abortion laws, to neighboring New Mexico, where abortion is legal.“Fight over Texas anti-abortion transport bans reaches biggest battlegrounds yet.” Julia Harte, Reuters, 24 October 2023.
In Missouri, too, an anti-abortion travel ban has been proposed by state lawmakers. Idaho has made it a crime—”abortion trafficking”—to take a minor out of state for an abortion.
The logic, such as it is, of these religious conservatives is that abortion is illegal in their states, and even if the act itself occurs where it’s legal, traveling out of state constitutes the crime of “conspiracy to obtain an abortion”. Thus, they believe they can criminally prosecute both women who get an abortion and anyone who helps them travel to do so.
States’ rights
If these anti-abortion travel bans are allowed to stand by the courts, the result will be national chaos. It would be a backdoor for each state to enforce its policy preferences on all the others.
What if a red state decided to outlaw gambling, and sought to arrest people who go on a weekend trip to Las Vegas? Could Utah, a famously dry state, ban alcohol and prosecute people who crossed state lines to go to a bar, for “conspiring” to obtain booze? Could enthusiastic book-banning states like Texas make it illegal to read books on their blacklists, even in a library in another state?
It works the other way, too. What about anti-gun blue states? Could California, New York or Illinois outlaw firearms and make it illegal to travel on state roads to go to an out-of-state shooting range?
Historically informed readers will notice a parallel. Southern apologists claim the U.S. Civil War was fought to protect “states’ rights”, but in fact, the opposite is true. The slaveholding states wanted to enforce their beliefs on all states, whatever the people in those other states thought about it.
They tried to achieve this with laws such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which decreed that an enslaved person who escaped and made it to a free state didn’t become free. On the contrary, it (attempted to) require people in free states to help capture the runaways and return them to slavery.
These laws stirred up massive outrage from people in the North, who resented being told that they had to enforce an oppressive legal regime they didn’t vote for or agree with. It was one of the major sources of enmity that led into the Civil War.
How would you enforce a travel ban?
For all the yelling they do about freedom, anti-abortion conservatives are eagerly starting down a short path to dictatorship. To prevent women from traveling out of state for an abortion would require a truly dystopian apparatus of surveillance and control.
Every red state would have to become a mini-Gilead, with checkpoints at every airport, harbor and interstate road. They’d have to hire an army of brownshirts to detain and interrogate women about where they were going and why (or, in the most nightmarish scenario, forcibly administer pregnancy tests), and force them to go home if their answers weren’t convincing enough.
Anyone who could get pregnant would be under perpetual house arrest. They’d be unable to set foot on any public sidewalk or road without a pass from a husband or an employer. No airline or taxi or bus company would be willing to transport them, for fear of prosecution. It would be a theocratic prison state like Saudi Arabia or the Taliban.
The good news—such as it is—is that it doesn’t seem Republicans have any plans to do this. At least for the time being, that would be too intrusive and extreme even for them to swallow.
Instead, it’s more likely that travel bans will be used as a tool of fear and arbitrary enforcement. They’ll make examples of a few cases that come to their attention, mostly poor and minority women turned in by jealous ex-partners or controlling relatives, while the rich and the well-connected get off lightly.
There’s historical precedent for that. It’s exactly how the nineteenth-century Comstock Act was enforced:
The Comstock Act had sweeping potential when it passed in 1873, able to be interpreted to cover information, drugs, and devices related to abortion or contraception, as well as anything else deemed obscene. But in the 19th and early 20th centuries, law-enforcement officers and postal inspectors didn’t have access to the reams of digital data available today. Catching those who published newsletters or put information on the outside of an envelope was easy; most people sending abortion or contraception materials quickly learned to use sealed envelopes. And to open an envelope, investigators needed a warrant.
But anti-vice crusaders found two ways around this problem. First, they tapped into a network of tipsters and detectives—people who deceived potential abortion providers, pretending to be patients or their loved ones to gather evidence for potential prosecutions. Anthony Comstock, a former dry-goods salesman and anti-vice activist who lobbied for the law named after him (and who became a special agent for the U.S. Postal Service in enforcing the act), perfected the art of decoy letters and disguises, looking for evidence that could be turned over to postal inspectors or police.
Second, they relied on personal vendettas and animosities: angry ex-lovers, controlling husbands, business rivals, and others who used the law for their own ends. Countless people weaponized the law in their own personal conflicts. Victorians who sent “vinegar valentines,” cards that insulted or humiliated their targets, were turned in for Comstock violations. So were men who harassed women, a flirting couple who arranged potential rendezvous, and wives who wrote angry letters to their husbands’ mistresses.“Harsh Anti-abortion Laws Are Not Empty Threats.” Mary Ziegler, The Atlantic, 10 November 2023.
Of course, this is bad enough. And if Republicans were able to achieve that much, we can be sure it wouldn’t stop there. Contrary to the soothing lies of politicians like Glenn Youngkin about compromise, every victory only emboldens them to demand more. The once-unthinkable has already become routine in America, and their fanaticism for more and harsher restrictions on women has only grown.
Cognitive Clarity–Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Here’s the link to this article.
By John W. Loftus at 11/27/2023
In 2011 I did a series of posts called “Reality Check: What Must Be the Case if Christianity is True?” I put some of them in the third chapter in The End of Christianity, and the first chapter in God and Horrendous Suffering.
Below I’ve put together thirty of them that most Christians agree on and why they are all improbable:
1) There must be a God who is a simple being yet made up of three inexplicable persons existing forever outside of time without a beginning, who therefore never learned anything new, never took a risk, never made a decision, never disagreed within the Godhead, and never had a prior moment to freely choose his own nature.
2) There must be a personal non-embodied omnipresent God who created the physical universe ex-nihilo in the first moment of time who will subsequently forever experience a sequence of events in time.3) There must exist a perfectly good, omnipotent God, who created a perfectly good universe out of a desire/need to glorify himself by rewarding in heaven the few human beings who just got lucky to believe by being born at the right time and place, and who will condemn to hell those who do not believe.
4) That the highest created being, known as Satan or the Devil, led an angelic rebellion against an omnipotent omniscient omnibenelovent omnipresent God, and expected to win–which makes Satan out to be pure evil and dumber than a box of rocks.
5) That there was a first human pair (Adam & Eve) who so grievously sinned against God when tested that all of the rest of us are being punished for it (including animals), even though no one but the first human pair deserved to be punished. If it’s argued that all of us deserve to be punished because we all would have sinned, then the test was a sham. For only if some of us would not have sinned can the test be considered a fair one. But if some of us would not have sinned under the same initial conditions then there are people who are being punished for something they never would have done.
6) That although there are many other similar mythological stories told in Ancient Near Eastern Literature that pre-date what we read in the Bible, the stories in the Bible are about real events and real people.
7) That although we see completely different perspectives and evolving theologies in the Bible, including many things that are barbaric and superstitious to the core, it was authored by one divine mind.
8) That when it comes to verifiable matters of historical fact (like the Exodus, the extent of the reign of David, Luke’s reported world-wide census, etc) the Biblical stories are disconfirmed by evidence to the contrary as fairy tales, but when it comes to supernatural claims of miracles that cannot be verified like a virgin birth and resurrection from the grave, the Bible reports true historical facts.
9) That although a great number of miracles were claimed to have happened in the different superstitious cultures of the ancient world, only the ones in the Bible actually happened as claimed.
10) That an omniscient God could not foresee that his revealed will in the Bible would lead believers to commit such atrocities against others that reasonable people would conclude there is no divine mind behind the Bible. I call this The Problem of Miscommunication.
11) That God created human beings with rational minds that require evidence before they accept something, and yet this same God does not provide enough evidence but asks them to have faith instead.
12) That although people around the world are raised in different cultures to believe in their particular god(s) there is only one God and he will judge all people based upon whether or not they believe Jesus is Lord.
13) That Jesus fulfilled Old Testament prophecy even though there is not one passage in the Old Testament that is specifically fulfilled in his life, death, and resurrection that can legitimately be understood as a prophecy and singularly points to Jesus as the Messiah using today’s historical-grammatical hermeneutical method.
14) That although there were many false virgin birth claims about famous people (like Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Plato) mythical heroes (like Mithra, Hercules) and savior gods (like Krishna, Osiris, Dionysus) in the ancient world, Jesus was really born of a virgin.
15) That while there is no rational explanation for how a person can be 100% man and 100% God, and although ancient pagan superstitious people believed this can take place (Acts 14:11-12; 28:6), Jesus was incarnate God in the flesh.
16) That while the results of science are assured when it comes to chemistry, physics, meteorology, mechanics, forensic science, medical science, rocket science, computer science, and so forth, when it comes to evolutionary science that shows all present life forms have common ancestors, or when science tells us that dead bodies do not arise from the grave because total cell necrosis is irreversible, the results of science are wrong because the Bible says otherwise.
17) That although there is no rational explanation for why Jesus had to die on the cross to atone for our sins, his death atoned for our sins.
18) That although historical reconstructions of the past are are notoriously difficult because they depend on the poor evidence of history, and even though historians must assess that evidence by assuming a natural explanation for it, and even though historical evidence can never establish how to view that evidence, the Christian faith can be established historically anyway. My argument is that when it comes to miraculous claims, yesterday’s evidence no longer can hold water for me, for in order to see it as evidence, I must already believe in the framework that allows me to see it as evidence. In other words, in order to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for me, I must already believe the Christian framework that allows me to see yesterday’s evidence as evidence for Christianity.
19) That although there is no cogent theodicy that can explain why there is such ubiquitous and massive human and animal suffering if a perfectly good omnipotent God exists, God is perfectly good and omnipotent anyway.
20) That while scientific tests on petitionary prayers have produced at best negligible results and at worst completely falsified them, God answers these kinds of prayers anyway.
21) That even though Christianity shows evidence that it is nothing but a cultural by-product of human invention there is a divine mind behind it anyway.
22) That Jesus is the Son of God even though the textual evidence in the New Testament conclusively shows that the founder of the Jesus cult was a failed apocalyptic prophet who prophesied that the eschaton would take place in his generation, which would involve a total cosmic catastrophe after which God inaugurates a literal kingdom on earth with the “Son of Man” reigning from Jerusalem over the nations.
23) That although there can be no moral justification for the sufferings of animals in this created world, a perfectly good God created this world anyway. We don’t even see God’s care for the lower animals in his supposed revealed word, which is described in Psalm 119 as his “perfect will.” Think otherwise? Then read what I wrote here.
24) That although the only method we have for determining the truth in factual matters is methodological naturalism, which assumes a natural explanation for any phenomena, and although this method is the hallmark of the sciences, the phenomena of the Bible can be exempted from this method as applied through Biblical Criticism, and believed anyway.
25) That although God’s supposed revelation in the canonical Bible is indistinguishable from the musings of an ancient, barbaric, superstitious people, the Bible is the word of God. As SilverBullet recently said: “…the lord doesn’t work in mysterious ways, but in ways that are indistinguishable from his non-existence. It seems to me that there is nothing in the Christian scriptures, no sentence, paragraph, or idea, that couldn’t be anything more than the product of the humans alive at the time that the apparently divinely inspired scriptures and ideas were “revealed”. Sure, its possible for a god to reveal himself in an inspired book, and throughout history, in ways that are indistinguishable from the work of human minds and human minds alone. But how probable does that seem to you?”
26) That although it’s claimed God got the attention of Abraham, Moses, the Pharaoh, Gideon, Mary, Joseph, and Saul (who became Paul) and that he knows how to get the attention of anyone and everyone, there is no objective evidence he’s trying to get the attention of the billions of people who don’t believe. In fact, Christians are much more concerned than God is that non-believers are converted. Just compare the lengths to which Christians will go in order to convert non-believers, with a God who has the means to convert everyone and yet does nothing to help them do this. If you say God is helping to convert non-believers then tell us how to objectively know God is actually doing this.
27) Christianity is a faith that must dismiss the tragedy of death. It does not matter who dies, or how many, or what the circumstances are when people die. It could be the death of a mother whose baby depends upon her for milk. It could be a pandemic like cholera that decimated parts of the world in 1918, or the more than 23,000 children who die every single day from starvation. These deaths could be by suffocation, drowning, a drive-by shooting, or being burned to death. It doesn’t matter. God is good. Death doesn’t matter. People die all of the time. In order to justify God’s goodness Christianity minimizes the value of human life. It is a pro-death faith, plain and simple.
28) That God’s punishments are good, right, and just, even though it means sinners are thrust into a surprisingly dangerous world, and in death will be blindsided by an eternal punishment in hell, which is “Christianity’s most damnable doctrine.” In this world how do you think human beings first learned that venomous creatures like certain kinds of spiders, snakes, ants or scorpions could kill us? People/children had to die, lots of them. How do you think human beings first learned that polluted water or lead poisoning could kill us? Again, people/children had to die, lots of them. It was inevitable since God never told us what to avoid in order to stay alive. We had to learn these kinds of things firsthand. The same thing can be said for hell. People do not know their choices will send them to an eternal punishment in hell. For if we knew this, and if it was possible not to sin at all, we wouldn’t sin. Do you doubt this? Then consider that if you knew with certainty that by crossing a line drawn in the sand you would get beaten to a pulp by a biker gang, you would not do it!
29) When believers like Christians or Muslims contend their faiths are based on reason, one may simply object that this can’t be so because their god in fact doesn’t allow it. Using reason to arrive at any other belief than the correct one will earn you an eternity in hell. Thus, reason is an evil to be avoided….Blind, unquestioning, and unexamined belief is what the theist’s retributive god truly desires, not a belief grounded in reason. And yet they maintain Christianity is reasonable.
30) The Christian thinks there is an objective absolute morality that stems from their perfectly good God, which is both eternal and unchangeable. But the morality we find in the Bible is something quite different than what they claim. Morality has evolved. What we find in the Bible is not something we would expect from a perfectly good God, but Christians believe there is a perfectly good God anyway. So Christians must choose, either 1) hold to a philosopher’s god divorced from the historical realities of the Bible, or 2) continue to worship a moral monster.
Cognitive Clarity–The Metastability of Faith
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Here’s the link to this article.
By Daniel Mocsny at 11/26/2023
Quick summary: atheism is easier than religious faith, and people are lazy, so why does anybody bother with the hard option? Why don’t human brains seek a kind of lowest-energy state, by analogy with dynamical systems that tend to run downhill? This post explores, rather speculatively, whether the human brain on faith gets stuck in a kind of higher-energy state, and becomes unable to get to the bottom, similar to what many dynamical systems actually do.
Faith is not merely a belief for many persons of faith, but also a practice. Faith appears to be something that most people have to work at. Regular church attendance, participation in group ritual, being dazzled by professional religious stagecraft and affected styles of preaching, prayer, bible reading (of the devotional, rather than the critical variety), basking in the social proof from a crowd of fellow believers – these are familiar activities for the devoted Christian. They’re considered reliable markers of Christians who mean business. These activities might even be necessary for the believer – stop doing them, and faith slowly atrophies, like an unused muscle. The vast amount of money that believers spend on regularly topping up their faith tanks does not seem to be an accident.
It also casts doubt on the so-called sensus divinitatis. If believers really possessed an innate ability to sense God, they shouldn’t need expensive churches to activate it nor professional orators to explain it to them. For comparison, if you have working eyeballs, they function as soon as you open your eyelids every day, and keep working until you close them. You don’t have to do anything fancy to get them to work. Usually, you don’t need someone else to tell you what you’re seeing. And nobody can charge you money by letting you use the eyes you already have. Churches look to me like a strong argument that the sensus divinitatis either doesn’t exist at all outside of the churchy environment of psychological suggestion, or it doesn’t extend far beyond a small percentage of “adepts“. Some of whom might be on a psychosis spectrum.
To the extent that a believer’s faith results from religious practice, there’s no straightforward way to package that practice into arguments. Thus when an atheist, who approaches claims from the standpoint of reason, argues with a theist, who arrives at beliefs from practice, their arguments may go right past each other. The difficulty is compounded by the believer carrying on as if his or her faith exists in the argument space. This might be an instance of confabulation, a psychological phenomenon whereby the speaking part of a person’s brain acts as an unreliable narrator, concocting explanations for what the other parts of the brain are doing independently of the speaking part, and without letting the speaking part know. Even though the religious believer goes to church at least weekly to have his or her beliefs instilled and reinforced, the believer might honestly think he or she came by the beliefs via a process of reasoning, and so can explain them in terms of reasons. (William Lane Craig elevates this charade to high art, even labeling it with the oxymoron “Reasonable Faith”. If faith is “reasonable” i.e. derived from reasons, then it doesn’t require practice. If faith cannot survive without practice, then it does not derive from reasons.) For the believer to really “explain” his or her beliefs, the believer needs to take the atheist to church, and hope that the atheist will have the same emotional reaction to the goings-on as the believer has.
Occasionally someone is honest about how this works. I recall a political discussion in which a Trump supporter basically admitted that he couldn’t adequately explain his views in terms of reasons, but rather he said you need to go to a Trump rally! It’s like getting your medical advice from an old-timey medicine show rather than from those boring peer-reviewed medical studies. The studies are boring by design: they’re trying to remove emotion from the belief-formation game to the degree possible. The medicine show, in contrast, relies on emotion where facts are lacking, which is early and often.
The religious believer’s need for constant faith replenishment is in sharp contrast to the atheist, especially the atheist of a scientific bent. The atheist doesn’t have to keep going back to school every week to be re-persuaded to accept, for example, the Periodic Table of the Elements. Once a person understands the scientific world view, after that it’s automatically self-reinforcing. You don’t need group rituals, professional stagecraft, or billions of dollars in church infrastructure to keep you believing in science. The whole universe keeps you believing in science. As does the constant parade of ever-improving technologies made possible by science. Unlike prayer, which never produces results distinguishable from random chance, never mind improving over time, your smartphone does tend to work, routinely doing things that would have gobsmacked the folks who wrote the bible. And every few years when you shop for a new one, you find they’ve improved again. While Moore’s law (the name for this improving trend of digital electronics) appears to have slowed of late, it may still have considerable room to run.
Modern science has been around for about 400 years, with Galileo’s career often taken to mark its start. In that time, scientists have performed millions of experiments and observations, with ever-increasing power and sensitivity, and they keep finding no evidence of any gods doing anything anywhere. They also find that no religion guessed correctly about the nature of things – what matter is, where the Earth came from, how we got here, where the Sun goes at night, and the realities that lie beyond the power of our natural senses (from the microbial to the astronomical). No religion had anything to say about massively important phenomena such as viruses and radioactivity. Until just a few decades ago, nobody had an inkling that we inhabit a world shot through with them. In some parts of the ocean, there can be roughly as many virus particles (called virions) in a liter of seawater as there are humans on the planet. Fortunately for us, almost all of those viruses attack other forms of life. But plenty of viruses do attack humans, sometimes moving in permanently. Some geneticists estimate that up to 8% of our DNA consists of endogenous retroviruses. For some reason, neither of the contradictory creation accounts in the Book of Genesis mention God putting all that viral DNA into us.
For the atheist there’s no Problem of Pain, either, beyond the discomfort of experiencing it. There’s nothing scientists can detect about the universe that would lead anyone to suspect it is even aware of humans, let alone benevolent toward us, and forget about omni-benevolence. We live in a galaxy having from 100 billion to 400 billion stars, each one following a random unplanned orbit around the galactic barycenter. Stellar collisions are rare, but possible. Near misses are still rare, but more likely than collisions. At any time, a wandering star could swing by our Solar System and perturb the orbits of our familiar planets. Earth could be shoved too close to the Sun, and boil, or too far away, and freeze. Earth could be ejected from the Solar System altogether and drift through interstellar space as a dark frozen rogue planet. We know from geological evidence on Earth that a perturbation of this severity hasn’t happened to our Solar System in over 4 billion years, but there’s nothing to prevent it. Astronomers can look through telescopes and see galaxies exploding (technically, galaxies having active nuclei emitting “significant” amounts of radiation, and sometimes plasma jets shooting out for thousands of light-years). Bard doesn’t know whether life can evolve in such a boisterous galaxy, but if any has, it might be less likely to dream up a god who loves it.
If faith is so much work, and getting steadily harder as science continues to outstrip religion, why would anyone bother? Perhaps faith shares features (even if just by analogy) with metastable systems in physics and chemistry. Per the English Wikipedia:
“… metastability denotes an intermediate energetic state within a dynamical system other than the system’s state of least energy. A ball resting in a hollow on a slope is a simple example of metastability. If the ball is only slightly pushed, it will settle back into its hollow, but a stronger push may start the ball rolling down the slope. Bowling pins show similar metastability by either merely wobbling for a moment or tipping over completely. A common example of metastability in science is isomerisation. Higher energy isomers are long lived because they are prevented from rearranging to their preferred ground state by (possibly large) barriers in the potential energy.”
Glass, both man-made and volcanic, is another example of metastability. Glass may form from some molten minerals that cool rapidly, such as when magma from a volcano emerges underwater to form volcanic glass (obsidian). As J. A. Zalasiewicz explains in Rocks: A Very Short Introduction (2016), obsidian is metastable: its atoms were trapped in a higher-energy state by cooling so rapidly that they couldn’t reach the lower-energy state of forming crystals. But even after the glass has cooled, the atoms in the glass are still being bounced by thermal energy. Occasionally an atom bounces enough to escape its energy “well” and migrate to a position of lower energy by linking up with the growing surface of a crystal. Over time – sometimes millions of years – this causes the volcanic glass to devitrify and become cloudy.
At the risk of straining this analogy beyond all recognition, I can’t help but notice how volcanic glass forms by cooling rapidly. Why, it’s a lot like the religious believer who believes the first lie they’re told, before properly investigating all the competing religious lies, much less what the voices of reason have to say.
There is a kind of metastability in the brain studied by computational neuroscientists. I see that it’s been applied to a theory of social coordination dynamics, and religion in practice is inherently social. But here I’m just thinking about a rough analogy between the actual metastability of dynamical systems and a kind of figurative metastability of religious belief. Instead of seeking the easiest and most stable belief, which would be materialism, the basis of science, the religious brain insists on remaining higher on the slope, where things are harder. More evidence has to be ignored, more discrepancies need to be explained away, and if you can think logically at all, you have to waste your time on the endless sophistry of apologetics. At no point can you ever verify your beliefs with a test. That is, your belief can never attain the status of fact, such that you might meet a scientific or legal standard of proof.
For the religious brain to remain high on that slope, it must be blocked by walls from rolling farther down. These consist of strategies to prevent the believer from grasping the obvious – that the absence of evidence for any god is the same as the absence of evidence for rocks that think. Few sane people would ever suspect rocks of thinking, not because we can actively prove that rocks don’t think, but because we can observe lots of things that do think (e.g. people, and many animals). Things that think are unable to imitate rocks for very long, and no rock has ever imitated anything that thinks. Everything that thinks has a physical brain, and perhaps in the near future things with electronic brains will behave much as if they are thinking. But rocks lack the internal complexity, and an energy source, that are common to everything that demonstrably thinks. Thinking is a metabolically expensive activity, so anything which can think is going to justify the expenditure by doing it. We are familiar with things that think, and how they behave, and rocks are nothing like them. Thus no sane person offers the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” argument for thinking rocks. Minds are even less likely to come from empty space, because there is nothing about empty space that begins to resemble things we know that think. There is no evidence for thinking rocks, or for thinking empty space, beyond someone’s loud insistence that invisible, undetectable minds are really there.
So what good is this metastability model? Well, it might tell us something about how rocks that are stuck high on a slope might roll down the slope. In the physical system of balls on a slope, you might free a trapped ball by chipping away at the wall that traps it. Or you might impart energy to the ball, or wait for something like an earthquake to shake the entire slope. If the ball starts rattling around in its well, it might roll high enough to get over the wall, and roll down to the real bottom.
Factors that can chip away at the wall might include new facts that assail it. Darwin’s theory of evolution by mutation and natural selection seems to have done the trick for many. It changed the whole landscape, as it were. Before Darwin, there was no satisfying natural explanation for biodiversity. Back then, the landscape may have been tilted, with the religious “well” being actually lower than the atheist “well.” And indeed, atheism didn’t have much of a history before Darwin. Even though pre-Darwinian skeptics recognized the crazy train that religion is, they had a hard time imagining a world that God didn’t create. So they compromised with Deism – the belief that God set everything in motion, and then had no more to do with his creation. Either he left, or he died.
After Darwin tilted the slope, the position of religion became more precarious.
Factors that can impart energy to the ball include anything that triggers a “crisis of faith” such as a personal tragedy, or a tragedy affecting others that is hard to ignore. The fact that felt tragedies often trigger crises of faith suggests that the faithful somehow got the idea that their faith makes them immune to such things. When tragedies happen anyway, the resulting shattered expectations give rise to cognitive dissonance. That’s the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it.
Both history and the present day are full of tragedies, but most people don’t really care about most of it. A million people could die on the other side of the world tomorrow, as happened in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 (scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 800,000 Tutsi deaths), and most people not directly affected would probably just go about their business. This kind of studied indifference doesn’t seem right for the Christian, who should view all of God’s children equally. But in practice, Christians are about as indifferent to strangers as anybody else is. A tragedy usually has to hit close to home to grab the Christian’s attention and start rattling that ball.
For example, Seth Andrews’ deconversion memoir (Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason) mentions the tragic death of Rich Mullins in 1997 as having triggered his own crisis of faith, which proved decisive. Mullins died shortly after the Rwandan genocide, but there’s no mention of the vastly larger and more distant tragedy in the book. Insofar as dislodging faith is concerned, often the tragedy has to hit the believer or someone they’re close to.
Occasionally an atheist bounces back up the hill to faith. Admittedly that’s a difficulty for my conceptual model. Evidently the slope and shape of the hill aren’t the same for everybody. While I myself noticed a considerable removal of burden once I abandoned superstition for reason, perhaps for some people the entire slope tips the opposite way. They continue to have a deep need for what religion has to offer them, which certainly isn’t evidence. Some people don’t seem to find facts as inherently satisfying as I do. They need reality to be something other than what it is, and getting back on the religion treadmill gives that to them. Not an actually different reality, but the external reinforcement necessary to pretend.
As always, the less a person knows about science, or scholarship generally, the easier it is to stay up in the religion well. Fewer inconvenient facts will intrude to disturb the faith and chip at the wall. Thus a religious person who leaves faith as a result of personal tragedy, and learns nothing else, may be prone to bounce back into faith. That’s why I think it’s important for the atheist to learn the other reasons for atheism besides the first one that convinced him or her. That one reason on its own may or may not prove to be durable. Many deconversion memoirs mention how the newly minted atheist undertook a program of book-reading, to catch up on what he or she wasn’t allowed to read before.
Cognitive Clarity–A Big Item on God’s To-Do List: Kill as Many People as Possible
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 11/24/2023
Yet the church gets away with “God is love”
Those who have been assured since childhood that God is Love—and
have been coached to pray to their loving father well into adulthood—seem immune to many Bible texts that contradict this idea, for example, these pieces of Jesus-script:
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law,and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” (Matthew 10:34-36)
Luke’s version of this text is prefaced with, “I have come to cast fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already ablaze!” (Luke 12:49)
In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul taught that “wrath and fury” awaited people who were disobedient to god. (Romans 2:8)
The Genesis Flood Story is all about god killing as many people as possible, in fact everyone on earth except for one family. Yet Bible books for children focus on the rainbow ending, ignoring the genocide. Ken Ham decided to celebrate the genocide with a family-fun theme park. How in the world can he live with himself?
Devout folks are persuaded that the horrendous suffering in the world can’t be blamed on god, but is the result of free will, or god’s mysterious ways, or a supposed bigger plan unknown to us. This is what I have called “easy acceptance of the very terrible,” an outlook/attitude that is given a boost by a deep ignorance of history, i.e., unawareness of how much suffering there has been.
On 1 November 1755, Lisbon was destroyed by earthquake, tsunami and fire. Many of the 12,000 who died were killed when churches collapsed on them as they praised god on All-Saints-Day. In the 14th century, at least a quarter of the human population between India and England died of the plague—and the suffering was grotesque. The church was sure that this was god’s “wrath and fury” in action, and penitents wandered Europe flagellating themselves hoping to appease god’s anger. But how can that possibly make sense—how can it be squared with belief in a loving god? The Holocaust during World War II—six million people intentionally murdered—is totally inexplicable if a good, caring deity is paying attention. Indeed, Holocaust-denialism is one way of salvaging faith. Such denial is totally inexplicable since the Holocaust is one of the most thoroughly documented crimes in history.
Honest theology would admit that killing people seems to be a big item on angry god’s to-do list.
But then there was another Holocaust that has not attracted as much attention. It is appropriate here to include paragraphs from the opening of David E. Stannard’s book, American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World.
“In the darkness of an early July morning in 1945, on a desolate spot in the New Mexico desert named after a John Donne sonnet celebrating the Holy Trinity, the first atomic bomb was exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer later remembered that the immense flash of light, followed by the thunderous roar, caused a few observers to laugh and others to cry. But most, he said, were silent. Oppenheimer himself recalled at that instant a line from the Bhagavad-Gita:
I am become death, the shatterer of worlds.
“There is no reason to think that anyone on board the Niña, the Pinta, or the Santa María, on an equally dark early morning four and a half centuries earlier, thought of those ominous lines from the ancient Sanskrit poem when the crews of the Spanish ships spied a flicker of light on the windward side of the island they would name after the Holy Savior. But the intuition, had it occurred, would have been as appropriate then as it was when that first nuclear blast rocked the New Mexico desert sands.
“In both instances—at the Trinity test site in 1945 and at San Salvador in 1492—those moments of achievement crowned years of intense personal struggle and adventure for their protagonists and were culminating points of ingenious technological achievement for their countries.
“But both instances also were prelude to orgies of human destructiveness that, each in its own way, attained a scale of devastation not previously witnessed in the entire history of the world. Just twenty-one days after the first atomic test in the desert, the Japanese industrial city of Hiroshima was leveled by nuclear blast; never before had so many people—at least 130,000, probably many more—died from a single explosion. Just twenty-one years after Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair. It took a little longer, about the span of a single human generation, but what happened on Hispaniola was the equivalent of more than fifty Hiroshimas.”
And: “The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”
How does God-Is-Love theology survive when we become fully aware of such horrendous suffering? “He’s got the whole world in his hands” fails to have any meaning at all. The New Testament especially makes the point that its god is aware of every human, i.e., everything we say, and even think—which is how prayer is supposed to work—is known to god.
And how can the god who runs the cosmos not be aware of the Big Picture?
He had to know very well that Europeans were sailing west to find a way to China, but that a massive land mass was in the way—a land mass that was home to many millions of people who had been settled in north, central, and south American for thousands of years. Moreover, this god must have known that these residents of the Americas would have no immunity whatever to the many diseases that the European explorers brought with them. These diseases proved to be primary cause of death—wiping out millions of people: a super version of the 14th century’s Black Plague.
Yet, god just watched it all happen? How can this not be an enormous problem for Christian theology? An all-powerful god just sitting on his hands? It makes no sense whatever.
Stannard devotes considerable space in his book to descriptions of the societies that the Spanish found as they ventured deeper into South America. He quotes from letters and diaries that explorers wrote, in which they marveled at the wonders they encountered: examples of advanced architecture and well-ordered, well-run communities.
But the Spanish were not tourists. They were money motivated, on the hunt for gold, silver for the Spanish monarchy—and for slaves. Columbus was the trail-blazer—and a malicious one at that; he was a man
“…with sufficient intolerance and contempt for all who did not look or behave or believe as he did, that he thought nothing of enslaving or killing such people simply because they were not like him. He was, to repeat, a secular personification of what more than a thousand years of Christian culture had wrought. As such, the fact that he launched a campaign of horrific violence against the natives of Hispaniola is not something that should surprise anyone. Indeed, it would be surprising if he had not inaugurated such carnage.” (pp. 199-200, Kindle, Stannard, emphasis added)
Later, heroes of the United States shared similar ideas.
“George Washington, in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and ‘lay waste all the settlements around . . . that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed,’ urging the general not to “listen to any overture of peace before the total ruin of their settlements is effected.”” (p. 119, Kindle)
Thomas Jefferson, “…in 1807 instructed his Secretary of War that any Indians who resisted American expansion into their lands must be met with ‘the hatchet.’ ‘And . . . if ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe,’ he wrote, ‘we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or is driven beyond the Mississippi,’ continuing: ‘in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.’” (p. 120, Kindle)
And: “…the man who became America’s first truly twentieth century President, Theodore Roosevelt, added his opinion that the extermination of the American Indians and the expropriation of their lands ‘was as ultimately beneficial as it was inevitable.’” (p. 245, Kindle)
So many of the devout do their very best not to think about these evils: easy acceptance of the very terrible is an easy way out. Well, maybe not so easy—if they’re honest with themselves—but they adopt it anyway to shelter their beliefs from close examination.
This is actually cowardice. Serious threats to the faith should be addressed head-on. One helpful tool for this is John Loftus’ hefty (more than 500 pages) 2021 anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering.
The existence of a good, loving, all-powerful, competent god does not withstand careful, critical, skeptical analysis. The Christian god who allowed the American Holocaust is the same one who does nothing to irradicate thousands of genetic diseases, mental illnesses—and cancers that are rampant in the world. He’s “got the whole world in his hands” is such a pathetic misunderstanding of reality. And how is it that a god who supposedly “inspired” humans—that is, manipulated their minds—to write a 1000-page holy book, couldn’t have changed thousands of minds in the direction of improving basic human decency? That is, cleansed our brains of racism. Is that too much to expect?
One of Stannard’s final observations: “…there is little doubt that the dominant sixteenth-and seventeenth-century ecclesiastical, literary, and popular opinion in Spain and Britain and Europe’s American colonies regarding the native peoples of North and South America was that they were a racially degraded and inferior lot—borderline humans as far as most whites were concerned.” (p. 278, Kindle, emphasis added)
Humanity would be a lot better off if the Christian god had much greater tutorial skills.
David Madison was a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, and has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. He is the author of two books, Ten ToughProblems in Christian Thought and Belief: a Minister-Turned-Atheist Shows Why You Should Ditch the Faith, now being reissued in several volumes, the first of which is Guessing About God (2023) and Ten Things Christians Wish Jesus Hadn’t Taught: And Other Reasons to Question His Words (2021). The Spanish translation of this book is also now available.
His YouTube channel is here. At the invitation of John Loftus, he has written for the Debunking Christianity Blog since 2016.
The Cure-for-Christianity Library©, now with more than 500 titles, is here. A brief video explanation of the Library is here.
Cognitive Clarity–The Magic Self-Authenticating New Testament, Robert Conner
"Cognitive Clarity" blog posts are about cultivating a culture of thoughtful and informed discourse. They encourage readers to think deeply, question boldly, and approach the world with an open yet discerning mind.
Here’s the link to this article.
By David Madison at 11/21/2023
It can be asserted with little fear of contradiction that every literate
adult the world over has a mental image of Jesus of Nazareth. After all, Christianity is the largest religion — an estimated 2.4 billion adherents — and has existed for 2000 years. For centuries, laymen and scholars alike assumed the gospel stories were history and that Jesus and his apostles were verifiably historical characters like Caesar Augustus (Luke 2:1), Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1), or Tiberius Caesar and Pontius Pilate (Luke 3:1-2). However, in the early twentieth century, when German scholars began to question the reliability of the New Testament texts, that assumption came under challenge, particularly after 1909 when the philosopher Christian Heinrich Arthur Drews published Die Christusmythe, The Christ Myth, that claimed there was no reliable independent evidence for the Jesus of the gospels — Jesus, Drews asserted, was a product of the imagination. Could Drews have been right all along?
Whatever one may think of Drew’s claims, one is certainly true: there is no independent evidence for Jesus outside the text of the New Testament. As always, scholars are divided about specifics, including about when Jesus died — assuming Jesus was a real person to begin with. The majority opinion, based on the gospels, favors a date between April, CE 30, and April, CE 33, but as Helen Bond has argued convincingly, the gospel accounts were meant to establish early Christian theology, not to record Jesus’ history.[1] There is little evidence to suggest the gospel accounts contain any eyewitness testimony: the gospel writers never name themselves within their texts, speak in the first person, suggest that they were either observers or participants in the events they relate, or cite their sources. Matthew and Luke clearly depended on the gospel of Mark — Matthew quotes or paraphrases 600 of the 661 verses in Mark and follows Mark’s timeline. Luke followed suit, using about 65% of Mark as his source.
At this point the Christian apologist will typically cite the historian Josephus, particularly the crown jewel of Historical Jesus texts, the endlessly debated Testimonium Flavianum of Antiquities, Book 18, Chapter 3, 3:
“About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many of the Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to the cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”
Two recently published analyses of the Testimonium come to radically different conclusions. Based on a comparison of the Testimonium and the writings of the church official Eusebius, Ken Olson concluded,
“Both the language and the content [of the Testimonium] have close parallels in the work of Eusebius of Caesarea, who is the first author to show any knowledge of the text…The most likely hypothesis is that Eusebius either composed the entire text or rewrote it so thoroughly that it is now impossible to recover a Josephan original.”
Olson concludes that the Testimonium “has its most plausible Sitz-im-Leben in the pagan-Christian controversies of the fourth century.”[2]
On the other hand, Gary Goldberg performed a meticulous comparison of the Testimonium and Luke 24:18-24, documenting “thirty-one ordered content parallels” between the two texts. Goldberg concluded, “…by the simplest estimate (a normal distribution), the probability that the Emmaus-TF correspondences are due to chance is about one in ten thousand…The study shows Josephus closely following a Christian source…”[3]
In short, two close examinations of the text of the Testimonium have concluded that (1) it is a Eusebian forgery invented to bolster the early Christian claim of Jesus’ divine status, or (2) it is a word-for-word paraphrase of the Road to Emmaus story in the gospel of Luke. Quite clearly, the Testimonium is not an independent historical confirmation of the Jesus of the gospels. Additionally, as I have noted elsewhere, “…competent scholars arguing in good faith often reach radically different conclusions based on the available evidence…The evidence, such as it is, is textual; later historians who reported that Jesus had been crucified were repeating what they’d read or been told, not what they’d seen.”[4] The problem of flimsy evidence within the New Testament text, including outright forgery, is now so well documented as to need no further comment.[5] The evidence for Jesus is the New Testament. Full stop.
New Testament scholars are in wide agreement that Mark was the earliest gospel, written around the year 70 CE, decades after Jesus’ death. As if a lapse of 40 years between the life of Jesus and the composition of the first known gospel wasn’t problem enough, according to the church historian Eusebius, “[Mark] had not heard the Lord, nor had he followed him.”[6] On the best evidence, the gospels were not even composed in Palestine where the events they purport to relate took place. It is conjectured that Mark was written in Rome, Matthew in Syria, and John was perhaps composed in Asia Minor.
Even worse for the study of Christian origins, in 66 CE the First Jewish-Roman War resulted in the destruction of Jewish towns in Galilee and Judea which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in 70 CE. By the time the war ended with the fall of Masada in 73 CE, the Jewish population of Palestine, obviously including potential eyewitnesses to the career of Jesus, had been decimated, scattered, and enslaved. Even assuming Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person, time and circumstances were working overtime to eradicate any evidence of his life and career. What would his soi-disant biographers do to fill this memory hole? A close reading of the gospels suggests they invented their stories.
Unlike history, the gospels are written from the standpoint of an omniscient narrator — like a novelist, the gospel writer knows not only the actions of his characters, but their inner thoughts and emotional state, as well as the content of their private conversations. Matthew, writing an estimated 85 years after Jesus’ birth, ostensibly knows the circumstances of Jesus’ conception, including the contents of a dream. (Matthew 1:20) Not to be outdone, Luke claims that, “Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19) Matthew claims to know the precise event that led the Pharisees to withdraw and begin to plot Jesus’ death, (Matthew 12:14) and John — writing 70 years after the fact — is mysteriously informed that the Pharisees “…said to one another, ‘See, this is getting us nowhere. Look how the whole world has gone after him!’” (John 12:19)
So where did Mark — his true identity is unknown, but following convention we’ll call him Mark — get his information? Decades ago, when I was studying the New Testament at university, the standard answer to “where they got it” was still “oral tradition,” but given the proven unreliability both of memory and oral transmission, scholars have questioned that explanation and suggested a different source: the theology of Paul of Tarsus.
The number of scholars who have proposed this connection is quite impressive and appears to be growing: Pérez I. Díaz,[7] Hollander,[8] Eurell,[9] Smith,[10] Nelligan,[11] and particularly Richard Carrier[12] to name but a few. However, using Paul to get to Jesus presents a problem very nicely summarized by David Madison:
“In the earliest of the New Testament documents, penned long before the Gospels, Jesus of Nazareth isn’t there. That is, the epistles of Paul and others don’t speak at all about Jesus of Nazareth. Their focus is a divine Christ. There seems to be no awareness of Jesus’s preaching and parables, his miracles, his disputes with religious authorities, or even the Passion narratives. It’s almost as if the real Jesus hadn’t been invented yet, which would not happen until the Gospels had been created. The focus of the epistles — with Paul being the giant presence — is salvation through believing in a resurrected Jesus. Inexplicably, they skip over everything else.”[13]
The first person known to have mentioned Jesus is Paul of Tarsus. And regarding the source of his information, Paul is perfectly clear: “visions and revelations from the Lord.” (2 Corinthians 12:1) After his conversion — which he never describes — Paul did not hie himself to Jerusalem to confer with Jesus’ family or followers. His ego on full display, Paul claims,
“…when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. I did not go up to Jerusalem to see those who were apostles before I was, but I went into Arabia. Later I returned to Damascus.” (Galatians 1:15-17)
Paul didn’t need no stinking history: “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.” (Galatians 1:11-12) Unlike generations of New Testament scholars assiduously questing after the “historical Jesus,” Paul declares, “Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.” (2 Corinthians 5:16) This is hardly the sort of attitude that would favor the loving preservation of Jesus’ every word and deed.
Paul believed that Jesus had previously existed “in the form of God…but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being made in the likeness of men.” (Philippians 2:6-7) According to Paul, God “…promised beforehand through his prophets in the holy scriptures regarding his son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David, and through the spirit of holiness was appointed the son of God in power by his resurrection from the dead.” (Romans 1:2-4) When he rose from the dead, Jesus “became a life-giving spirit” and returned to whence he had come: “the second [Adam] is from heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15:45, 47) The earliest Christians believed Jesus had descended from heaven: “He who descended is the very one who ascended higher than the heavens.” (Ephesians 4:10) The man known as Jesus had a previous existence in heaven: “The Son is the image of the invisible God…He is before all things…” (Colossians 1:15, 17)
Paul is certain he and his fellow believers will soon be joined with their Lord, “for the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:51-53) In short, Paul has precisely nothing to tell us about “historical Jesus.” Paul was convinced that the time remaining until Jesus’ return was so short that married Christians should live as if celibate: “the time is short. From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not…” (1 Corinthians 7:29) Given the urgency of the moment, what possible reason could there be to preserve the details of Jesus’ career, assuming that anyone clearly remembered them?
As noted by Madison, “Proving the Bible’s authenticity by quoting from the Bible is closed-loop reasoning…no matter how high the level of confidence in the Bible in a particular part of the world, no document on the planet can be self-authenticating.”[14] In all likelihood, the Judean church and its members were swept away in the maelstrom of the Roman invasion; like the epistle ascribed to James, Paul’s letters are addressed to believers “scattered among the nations.” (James 1:1) The earliest Christians for whom we have evidence lived in expectation of imminent deliverance[15] and evince no interest in “authenticating” the life and career of Jesus of Nazareth. The stories of the gospels cannot be verified by any contemporaneous sources. Insofar as anyone can confirm, they are pious confections written for the edification of credulous believers. We are left with a stark conclusion: the entire evidence for the life of Jesus is the magic self-authenticating New Testament.Robert Conner is the author of The Death of Christian Belief; The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days; Apparitions of Jesus: The Resurrection as Ghost Story; The Secret Gospel of Mark; and Magic in Christianity: From Jesus to the Gnostics.
[1] Helen K. Bond, “Dating the Death of Jesus: Memory and the Religious Imagination,” New Testament Studies, 59/4 (2013), 461-475.
[2] Ken Olson, “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum,” in Eusebius of Caesarea: Traditions and Innovations, Helenic Studies Series 60 (2013) 97-114.
[3] Gary J. Goldberg, “Josephus’s Paraphrase Style and the Testimonium Flavianum,” Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 20/1 (2021) 1-32.
[4] Robert Conner, The Death of Christian Belief (2023), 48, 56.
[5] Bart D. Ehrman, Forged: Writing in the Name of God — Why the Bible’s Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are, 2010.
[6] Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, III, 39, 15.
[7] Mar Pérez I. Díaz, Jesus in the Light of Paul’s Theology, Mohr Siebeck, 2020.
[8] Harm W. Hollander, “The Words of Jesus: From Oral Traditions to Written Records in Paul and Q,” Novum Testamentum 42/4 (2000), 340-357.
[9] John-Christian Eurell, “Paul and the Jesus Tradition: Reconsidering the Relationship Between Paul and the Synoptics,” Journal of Early Christian History, 12/2 (2022), 1-16.
[10] David Oliver Smith, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul: The Influence of the Epistles on the Synoptic Gospels, Resource, 2011.
[11] Thomas Nelligan, The Quest for Mark’s Sources: An Exploration of the Case for Mark’s Use of First Corinthians, Pickwick, 2015
[12] Richard Carrier, Jesus from Outer Spance: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, Pitchstone, 2020.
[13] David Madison, Guessing About God, 144-145, Insighting Growth Publications, 2023.
[14] Madison, op. cit., 56-57.
[15] Robert Conner, The Jesus Cult: 2000 Years of the Last Days, 7-25, (2022)
The Pencil-Driven Life 