Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 6/30/2023

No surprise, given the mess their religion is in

1.     Christians can’t agree on who is right, what god wants

When Christians are off to church on a Sunday morning, they might have to drive past a few churches of other denominations. Apparently it never crosses their minds to stop at one of these—after all, “We’re all Christians, aren’t we?” But that’s exactly the problem: Christians have never been able to agree on what Christianity is. They’ve been fighting about this for centuries; the Catholic/Protestant divide is especially pronounced. We can be sure Catholics won’t stop at Protestant churches, and Protestants—with contempt and ridicule for the Vatican—wouldn’t think of stopping at a Catholic church.

There’s a lot of confidence about who is right, based on…what exactly? Based on what authority figures—parents, priests, preachers—have taught the devout from their earliest years. These religious truths become part of life; they constitute the comfort of believing, and, as I heard a Catholic women remark recently, “We were told not to think about it.” Because, when people do think about it, there’s likely to be pushback. It’s no surprise that church membership has been declining, because the world we live in provides so much information that undermines, contradicts, basic Christian beliefs. Professional apologists, in a panic, attempt to rise to this considerable challenge: “We’ve got to show that our brand of the Christian faith is the one true religion!” 

2.     The devout can’t explain exactly why their beliefs are true

“We were told not to think about it.” Of course, there are so many things that shouldn’t be thought about. For example: “Why am I a devout Baptist or Catholic—instead of something else?” That depends on family and geography. It’s pretty likely, if you were born in Poland, you’ll be Catholic. If you were born in rural Alabama, no surprise if you’re evangelical. If you were born in Egypt, the odds are overwhelming you’d be Muslim. Yet those who have been carefully groomed to believe in the truth of these religions seldom seem to wonder if they’re right, after all—and how to prove it. That’s precisely the danger of thinking about it. “We can’t all be right”—maybe that’s a clue we’re all wrong. Maybe we’ve been misled, deceived by your   parents and clergy, who were also carefully groomed. Christians especially, when they look around at so many different brands of the own religion, should realize that something is terribly wrong: the faulty grooming has gone on for hundreds of years.

Many years ago, when I was a Methodist minister in small towns, it was not unusual for the clergy to arrange ecumenical services. That is, there would be a grand mixing of the congregations of the various denominations, Catholic and several Protestant. This was done to show how much the followers of Jesus loved each other, and got along. It was show business, because, in truth, the clergy who presided, and the parishioners who showed up, held very different ideas about god and Jesus. The clergy were always very cordial with each other, but we dared not actually discuss theology!

Nor did we dare to wonder how to demonstrate which of the various Christian brands was actually the right one—the one that Jesus or the apostle Paul would have said, “Yes, that’s it!” Not that this could ever happen: there is so much theological incoherence in the New Testament; Paul’s theology, which we read in his letters, was hopelessly messed up—and we have no way of verifying anything attributed to Jesus in the gospels. 

It would be many years later—in 2013—that John Loftus published his book, The Outsider Test of Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True. It’s really not rocket science: step back from your faith and evaluate it the same way you would other religions you deem to the faulty, inferior. 

But Christians have been trained not to think about it. Hence when Mormon missionaries or Jehovah’s Witnesses come knocking at the door, most Christians send them on their way, giving no thought whatever to how they could show conclusively that these religions are wrong—while their own brand of faith is the right one. This would require a grasp of epistemology: that is, how can you verify that your ways of knowing about god are reliable? “Well, I’m sure my parents and clergy told me the truth” doesn’t work at all. Did these authority figures make any effort at all to verify that their ways of knowing about god were reliable? It’s vital to break the endless cycle of “someone else told me.” All the claimed ways for knowing about god are, in fact, unreliable and defective: revelations (e.g. scripture), visions, prayers, meditations. Most religions rely on these various mediums—and come up with vastly different understandings of god.

If the outsider test of faith is applied rigorously to one’s own faith, there is little hope that this faith will measure up. Note that we’re not looking for proof: we’re asking the devout to provide reliable, verifiable, objective data about god(s). 

3.     In recent years, the Christian mess has become an even bigger mess

John Loftus’ 2013 book, mentioned above—and about a dozen of his other books—is part of a much larger phenomenon. Since the year 2000, well more than 500 books have been published explaining, in detail, the falsification of theism, Christianity especially. Books by Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Sam Harris (The End of Faith) were instrumental in launching, or at least stimulating, this surge in atheist publishing. But books are only part of a much bigger picture: “The Internet is where religion comes to die” —I’ve seen this attributed to various people—but it means that information about the harmful impact religion, and its feeble foundations, is so easily accessible. There are countless blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels devoted to explaining just how bad and faulty religion is. Of course, apologists have risen to this challenge; they have their own blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. But atheism has found its voice as never before. 

So the clergy have to make their way in this new, hostile, environment. It’s no surprise they’re not doing all that well. This recent headline caught my attention—where else, on the Internet:

‘Exhausted’ pastors suffering decline in overall health, respect, friendship: study

Here are four excerpts:

“The overall health of pastors in the U.S. has declined markedly since 2015, with increasing numbers who say that they face declining respect from their community and a lack of true friends, according to a recent study.”

“Data collected by faith-based organization Barna Group as part of its Resilient Pastor research showed a significant decrease in pastors’ spiritual, mental and emotional well-being, as well as their overall quality of life, between 2015 and 2022, the group announced last week.”

“Pastors who reported that their mental and emotional health was below average spiked from 3% in 2015 to 10% in 2022, and those who said they were in excellent mental and emotional health cratered from 39% in 2015 to 11% last year.”

“The recent report dovetails with another poll that Barna released last March that showed the rates of burnout among pastors had risen dramatically within the past year, with a staggering 42% of ministers wondering if they should abandon their vocation altogether amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.”

“…declining respect from their community…”  “…amid unsustainable stress and loneliness.”

This should surprise no one. Mainline Protestant denominations have been declining for years, and the most conservative brands of Christianity have brought no end of embarrassment. Who could have imagined the evangelical embrace of Donald Trump? How does it possibly make sense that the folks most devoted to god—well, they would have us believe it—turned this corrupt, evil person into a hero of the faith? Some have given up on him, but he still commands a large following. Moreover American democracy is under threat from these fanatics who want to abolish separation of church and state, who are eager to institute a theocracy. Because, you know, they are the only ones who are right about god. How could Pat Robertson be wrong when he blamed 9/11 on homosexuality and abortion? 

How can Catholic clergy maintain morale in the face of the ongoing scandal of child-rape? The headlines about new cases keep coming. Most priests are not pedophiles—well, we certainly hope not—but the reputation of their church has been tarnished beyond repair. The church has paid out billions of dollars in legal settlements. Even worse—if that’s possible—are the theological implications: is it not within the power of their god to intervene somehow when a priest is about to rape a child? How can the good clergy face their congregations? Trying to maintain holy celibacy must contribute to unsustainable stress and loneliness. 

Yet another example of the Christian mess: the Catholic church is evil enough because it champions misogyny—female priests? No, never! —is okay with homophobia, condemns contraception and abortion in the poorest of countries, and sits on enormous wealth. But in many parts of the world, it has been losing ground—no doubt because of the clergy-rape outrage—to an even more evil brand, Pentecostalism, which fully embraces ancient superstitions: the last thing the world needs. This can only bring grief to well-educated clergy. 

I wonder how many folks in the pews really pay attention to the sermons. Do they wonder: Is the preacher right about that point? Are they encouraged to get right on their cell-phone—before church is even over—and see if Google can provide them with answers? If people did that, and discovered that theobabble from the pulpit cannot be trusted at all, I suspect that the clergy would feel even more declining respect from their community.

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

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

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

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 6/09/2023

The ongoing scandal of god’s negligence

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

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

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

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

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

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

wrote about his expulsion:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 5/19/2023

A high quotient of fake news

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrier calls the fake historian to account: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Carrier tells it like it is:

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

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

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

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

Here’s the link to this article.

By David Madison at 5/12/2023

Deceptive translators don’t want readers to see the problems 

There has been a meme floating about on the Internet: “If you ever feel worthless, remember, there are people with theology degrees.” These degrees are granted by a huge variety of religious schools, ranging from fundamentalist Protestant to Vatican-loyal Catholic. So among those holding these degrees—what else would we expect?—there is substantial disagreement regarding what god is like, how he/she/it expects people to behave, how he/she/it wants to be worshipped. This is one of the reasons Christianity has splintered into thousands of quarreling brands.

This confusion and strife can be traced to many sources (e.g., personality conflicts, egos, desire for power and control), but the Bible must take a large share of the blame. It is a deeply flawed document that shows no evidence whatever of divine inspiration: it contains so many contradictions, so much incoherence and bad theology. Thus the irony that the Bible itself—carefully read, that is—has destroyed faith for so many people. Mark Twain argued that the “best cure for Christianity is reading the Bible.” Andrew Seidel has pointed out that “the road to atheism is littered with Bibles that have been read cover to cover.”

Even a casual reading of the Bible can be shocking: “God so loved the world,” yet he got so mad at humans that he destroyed all human and animal life—except for the crowd on Noah’s boat. Jesus suggested that people should forgive seventy-times seven, yet assured his disciples that any village that did not welcome their preaching would be destroyed—and that hatred of family was a requirement for following him. This is what I mean by incoherence and bad theology. Anyone with common sense can figure it out.  

These are items that are visible on the surface, and it gets worse; a closer examination reveals deeper problems. Devout Bible scholars have been aware for a long time that this is the case, and secular scholars don’t hesitate to expose the ways—unnoticed by the laity—in which the Bible itself destroys the faith that so many hold dear. On 1 May 2023, an article written by John Loftus was published on The Secular Web: Does God Exist? A Definitive Biblical Case. This is a must read. Bookmark the link for future reference. I printed the article to go in a binder of important essays. If you can manage to get Christian family and friends to do some homework on the Bible, this piece should be included.   

Loftus invites his readers to see what is actually there in the Bible:

“What is almost always overlooked in debating the existence of the theistic god is that such a divine being has had a complex evolution over the centuries from Elohim, to Yahweh, to Jesus, and then to the god of the philosophers, without asking if the original gods had any merit…If believers really understood the Bible, they wouldn’t believe in any of these gods.”

Theologians and apologists, priests and preachers, have worked so hard over the centuries to clean up the god(s) that we find in the Bible, so that the faith today—that so many people are comfortable embracing—has a noble, positive flavor. If only the devout would bother to think carefully about their most common, cherished Bible texts. For example: “Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.” Just what is god’s name? An easy answer would be, “Well, Jesus, of course.” But before Jesus, what was it? As Loftus mentions, one of them was Elohim, but pious translators sense their god having a name might make it look like he was just one of many of the pagan gods. And that was exactly the case, as Loftus notes: “When we take the Bible seriously, we discover a significant but unsuccessful cover-up about the gods that we find in the Bible, who evolved over the centuries through polytheism to henotheism to monotheism.” 

When I printed the Loftus essay, it came to twenty pages, seven of which are about Elohim—and most of this content never comes to the attention of devout laypeople. Loftus offers a careful analysis of the first two verses of Genesis 1, which are commonly translated something like this:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the surface of the abyss, and the Spirit of God was moving over the waters.”

He points out that this is a more accurate rendering:

“Elohim made the skies and dry land, beginning with land that was without form and void, with darkness covering the surface of the chaos, and the wind of Elohim hovering over the waters,” while noting that “the original grammar is a bit difficult to translate. If nothing else, consider this a slightly interpretive translation using corrected wording.”

Loftus notes seven elements of this text that are commonly misunderstood, e.g., there is nothing here about the beginning of time, or creation out of nothing. Nor is the claim by contemporary theologians that an all-powerful cosmic god did the deed. Believers want to assume this was the case, and translators cooperate in promoting this deception, i.e., “In the beginning, God…” But the text says that Elohim was the initiator of this drama. 

Just who was this Elohim? “The Hebrew word Elohim is derived from the name of the Canaanite god El, a shortened version of which is El Elyon, or ‘God Most High.’” Well, there, don’t you have the grand god Christians want? No, far from it: “El was the head of the Canaanite pantheon of gods.” Loftus quotes scholar Mark S. Smith: 

“Archaeological data in the Iron I age suggests that the Israelite culture largely overlapped with and derived from Canaanite culture… In short, Israelite culture was largely Canaanite in nature.” (The Early History of God: Yahweh and Other Deities of Ancient Israel, 2002, pp. 6-7.)

The influence of Elohim-belief is reflected in so many of the names familiar to us in the Old Testament, e.g., Bethel, Michael, Daniel, and even Israel.

Elohim the tribal deity was imagined as we would expect of ancient writers who had no understanding whatever of the Cosmos. So it is silly to read the god imagined by modern believers into the Genesis story. Loftus describes the naïveté of these ancient theologians:

“Elohim showed no awareness of dinosaurs, nor the fact that the history of evolution has shown that 99.9% of all species have gone extinct, since evolution produces a lot of dead ends on its way to producing species that survive. Imagine that! On every day in Genesis 1 the supposed creator god Elohim knows nothing about the universe! … There is no excuse for a real creator to utterly fail a basic science class…There is no excuse for a real creator to mislead his creatures about something so important, which would lead generations of scientifically literate people away from the Christian religious faith and into damnation.”

Do things get any better with the other tribal deity who plays a major role in the Old Testament, namely Yahweh? Devout folks today can be forgiven if, when asked what god’s name is, they fail to answer, Yahweh. One of the most famous—and annoying—Christian cults proudly labels itself Jehovah’s Witnesses. That is, they know god’s name, as adjusted in English translation. Ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, and some of the consonants were flexible. Hence YHWH could also be JHVH. Plug in different vowels, and it becomes Jehovah instead of Yahweh. Even so, most of the devout—outside the Witness cult—wouldn’t right way agree that god’s name is Jehovah, let alone Yahweh.

One of the reasons for this, again, is that translators are eager to cover up the tribal god’s name, as Loftus points out:

“In the Old Testament, whenever you come across ‘the Lord Our God,’ or ‘the Lord God,’ or even ‘Lord,’ Christian translators have hidden the truth behind those words. It’s ‘Yahweh’ or ‘Yahweh your god.’” It’s easy to spot this coverup in the Revised Standard Version, which renders Yahweh as LORD, i.e., all capital letters. The ancient theologians who cobbled together the Old Testament were happy to put stories about Elohim right beside stories about Yahweh, e.g. the two creation stories in Genesis. 

Loftus devotes a full eight pages in this essay to Yahweh, making quite clear that this was indeed an inferior tribal deity. He presents four aspects of Yahweh that qualify him as a moral monster, especially his behavior in the story of Job: 

“In this story Yahweh lives in a separate palace in the sky and acts like a petty narcissistic king who would treat his subjects terribly simply because he could do so, just like any other despotic Mediterranean king they knew. Job was a pawn who was tortured for the pleasure of Yahweh and other sons of Elohim. At the end Yahweh doesn’t reveal why Job suffered, just that Job wasn’t capable of understanding why, so he was faulted for demanding an answer from the Almighty.”

Loftus also describes Yahweh’s guilt in terms of genocide, slavery, and child sacrifice—and limited power. Translators should be especially ashamed of labelling this deity LORD God: far from being omnipotent, its inferior status is obvious: “The LORD was with Judah, and he took possession of the hill country but could not drive out the inhabitants of the plain, because they had chariots of iron” (Judges 1:19). 

Loftus is right: “Imagine that! An all-powerful god cannot defeat men in iron chariots! What could he do against tanks and fighter jets?”

In the final pages of the essay Loftus addresses the issue of Jesus as god. He had pointed out that Yahweh was depicted as having a body (in the Genesis story of the Garden of Eden, in his meetings with Moses), but the ultimate god-in-bodily-form would have to be Jesus. But the utter moral failures of Yahweh should encourage even the devout to admit, “No, that tribal god didn’t really exist.” But Loftus notes the devastating implications for the Jesus story:

“If the embodied moral monster Yahweh doesn’t exist, then the embodied god Jesus depicted in the Gospels doesn’t exist, either, since he’s believed to be the son of Yahweh, a part of the Trinity, and in complete agreement with everything that Yahweh said and did. That should be the end of it.” 

This is not necessarily to say that Jesus as an actual historical person didn’t exist—although there are serious arguments that cause us to doubt it. But Loftus is saying that Jesus as a god is based so thoroughly on Yahweh the flawed tribal deity; hence the divine nature of Jesus can’t be taken seriously.  He also notes that Justin Martyr, “the grandfather of the entire tradition of Christian apologetics,” sought to bolster the case for divine Jesus by arguing that he was like others who came before him:

“When we say that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing new from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Zeus.” 

Loftus notes Richard Miller’s summation of Justin Martyr’s approach: “Our new hero is just like your own, except ours is awesome, whereas yours are the deceptions of demons.” (Miller, Resurrection and Reception in Early Christianity, 2017)  Sounds a lot like how Christians put down other brands of Christians!

In my article here last week, I argued that core Christian beliefs are a “clumsy blend of ancient superstitions, common miracle folklore, and magical thinking.” Christian theologians have worked so hard over the centuries to overcome this huge handicap. Their god must be the best, the ultimate—he must be an omni-god: all good, all powerful, all knowing. But these arguments plunge their faith into massive incoherence. Loftus notes that the “problem of horrendous suffering renders that god-concept extremely improbable to the point of refutation” (see his anthology, God and Horrendous Suffering). Their whole endeavor—creating the god of the philosophers—is a fool’s errand: “If theists think that an omni-everything God can legitimately be based on the Bible or its theology, they are fooling themselves. They are inventing their own versions of God, just like the ancient peoples in the Bible did.”

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

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

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