A sinkhole appears in your heroine’s backyard and when she gets too close to the edge, she falls in. It doesn’t lead where she expects..
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One Stop for Writers
Here’s five story elements to consider:
Never forget, writing is a process. The first draft is always a mess.
The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway
Here’s the link to this article by David Madison
03/17/2023
Indoctrination is not education
A careful reading of the New Testament reveals how much early Christians disagreed with each other, but even so it’s possible to create a profile of its weird cult beliefs.
The early Christians expected to meet Jesus in the sky—along with dead friends and family who had accepted Jesus—and to live with him forever (I Thessalonians 4). Those who qualified for this status said out loud that Jesus was lord, and believed in their hearts that god had raised him from the dead (Romans 10:9). He had died as a human sacrifice to a god, to enable this god to forgive sins—Jesus was the ransom (Mark 10:45). Belonging to Jesus meant that prayer requests were guaranteed (Mark 11:24), that sexual desires had been cancelled (Galatians 5:24, I Corinthians 7:1). Even if that were not entirely true, since the arrival of Jesus on the clouds would happen any day now, it is best to remain pure. The unmarried state is preferred (I Corinthians 7:32-34). In fact, families were a distraction, cult loyalty was the primary value—to the point of cutting off family relations (Luke 14:26, Matthew 8:21-22). In addition to believing that Jesus had been raised from the dead, ritually eating his flesh and drinking his blood were additional ways to guarantee eternal life (John 6:53-57).
So: a holy hero was expected to arrive from the sky to enforce strict rules of behavior, the reward for which was getting to live forever. Variations on this theme have been preached by cults over the centuries. Many modern Christians have managed to modify/soften this Bible-based version of how life is supposed to be lived. But all it takes to see these elements of cult fanaticism is a careful, eyes-wide-open reading of the New Testament. Which means that this ancient document is stunningly out of sync with our modern understanding of how the world and Cosmos works.
Hence, to the degree that Sunday Schools and Catechism teach any part of this cult fanaticism, they are doing damage. The world doesn’t need people who are hoping for/expecting a holy hero from the sky to make the world a better place—to guarantee they’ll get to live forever. A few years ago I was invited to attend the First Communion ceremony at a Catholic Church. Truly it was like stepping back into an ancient cultic ritual. Girls seven/eight years of age wore wedding dresses for the privilege of eating the flesh of their god for the first time—and in the Catholic church, the Miracle of the Mass means they are eating the real flesh of Jesus.
The ancient cult still has traction in the modern world because the mammoth Christian bureaucracy—even though splintered into thousands of different brands—keeps it going. The clergy, usually groomed themselves in Sunday School and Catechism, are fully committed to it. That is, the indoctrination worked exactly as it was supposed to: “Here is the truth as handed down to us. Believe it, take it on faith.” In some denominations, the more alarming elements of the original cult mindset are softened, e.g., the requirement that family be set aside; the famous Jesus-script about hating your family isn’t usually heard from the pulpit.
But the massive damage done by Sunday School and Catechism is the stunting of curiosity. If anyone is bold enough to ask, “Reverend, how do we know that this particular item of faith is true?” the response will be standard formulas, e.g., it’s in the Bible, it’s been part of our sacred tradition for centuries, the holy spirit guarantees it. And commonly the assumption will be that the good reverend has studied and/or prayed about it enough for everyone to trust him/her. It is not the obligation of the clergy to urge their parishioners to question, probe, or be skeptical. And that’s why religious indoctrination does massive damage.
Once that crucial question has been asked, “How do we know this is true?” full-throttle curiosity should be encouraged and rewarded. No matter what the item of faith may be, e.g., god is love, Jesus rose from the death, the holy spirit is there to guide us, prayer works—the best question to ask is:
Who was the first person to come up with the idea? Who said or wrote about it for the very first time?
Maybe it was the author of one of the gospels, or the apostle Paul in his letters. Then the crucial question must be:
Did this article of faith pop into the author’s mind because of revelation, imagination, or hallucination?
If the clergy are quick to answer revelation, we need to ask how they know this. How can this be verified? Obviously, “Please, just take it on faith,” means that curiosity really is not welcome or appreciated.
The laity commonly fail to realize that Christian origins—the thought-world in which the Christian cult arose—have been thoroughly, exhaustively studied for a long time now. And it is startling to realize how many ideas the early Jesus-cult borrowed from the other cults that had been up and running for a long time. It is naïve to assume that Jesus came along, preached his message, collected his followers—and had such an impact that Christianity sprang to life and spread dramatically after his death. The clergy and the church have thrived for a very long time on this “greatest story ever told.”
It’s bad enough that the laity are woefully ignorant of the gospels—I mean, being able to discuss these documents intelligently, aware of their differences, contradictions, and the theological problems they pose—but it would seem there is close to zero interest among the laity in serious study of Christian origins: let’s find out where our faith really came from. Come on, the resources are available to discover what many other ancient religions believed, and their impact on Christianity.
There’s an especially handy tool for exploring Christian origins. Richard Carrier’s 618-page book, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt, includes two chapters, 4 and 5 (pp. 56-234) that provide detailed descriptions of 48 elements that are crucial for understanding Christian origins. The book as a whole presents the issues that have prompted doubts that Jesus was a real person. I have urged laypeople to study the issues—rather than just being alarmed at the very idea—that is: do the homework. Carrier’s book, by the way, makes the scholarship easily accessible; early in the book he explains why he avoids a stuffy academic style.
But quite apart from the issue of Jesus-myth-or-real, the 48 elements that Carrier describes are basic for understanding how Christian beliefs were shaped by its context.
Here I’ll focus on just a few, starting with Element 4:
“(a) Palestine in the early first century CE was experiencing a rash of messianism. There was an evident clamoring of sects and individuals to announce they had found the messiah. (b) It is therefore no oddity or accident that this is exactly when Christianity arose. It was yet another messiah cult in the midst of a fad for just such cults. (c) That it among them would alone survive and spread can therefore be the product of natural selection: so many variations of the same theme were being tried, odds are one of them would by chance be successful, hitting all the right notes and dodging all the right bullets. The lucky winner in that contest just happened to be Christianity.” (p. 67)
The mission of the gospel writers was to champion their candidate for messiah. The author of Mark’s gospel reports (1:11) that a voice from heaven declared Jesus to be god’s son. Of course, this is the focus of lessons taught by the church, but nothing is mentioned about the rash of messianism in the first century—and its implications for the bragging of the Jesus cult.
I recommend careful study Element 15 especially, pp. 124-137, which begins with this statement:
“Christianity began as a charismatic cult in which many of its leaders and members displayed evidence of schizotypal personalities. They naturally and regularly hallucinated (seeing visions and hearing voices), often believed their dreams were divine communications, achieved trance states, practiced glossolalia, and were (or so we’re told) highly susceptible to psychosomatic illnesses (like ‘possession’ and hysterical blindness, muteness and paralysis).” (p. 124)
So we wonder what was going on in the heads of those promoting the Jesus cult. This brings us back to that crucial question: did their ideas about god and Jesus come from revelation, imagination or hallucination? After providing details for ten pages, Carrier concludes:
“All of this provides considerable background support to what several scholars have already argued: that the origin of Christianity can be attributed to hallucinations (actual or pretended) of the risen Jesus. The prior probability of this conclusion is already extremely high, given the background evidence just surveyed; and the consequent probabilities strongly favor it as well, given the evidence we can find in the NT.” (p. 134)
We can safely assume that this hallucination factor isn’t covered in Sunday School and Catechism—oh wait: they get away with it by talking about visions. But, of course, overlooking the fact that religions generally won’t grant that the visions of other religions are authentic.
Element 31 delivers another blow:
“Incarnate sons (or daughters) of a god who died and then rose from their deaths to become living gods granting salvation to their worshipers were a common and peculiar feature of pagan religion when Christianity arose, so much so that influence from paganism is the only plausible explanation for how a Jewish sect such as Christianity came to adopt the idea.” (p. 168)
Carrier goes into considerable detail on this embarrassment in his article, Dying-and-Rising Gods: It’s Pagan, Guys. Get Over It.
Finally, I’ll mention Element 43:
“(a) Voluntary human sacrifice was widely regarded (by both pagans and Jews) as the most powerful salvation and atonement magic available. (b) Accordingly, any sacred story involving a voluntary human sacrifice would be readily understood and fit perfectly within both Jewish and pagan worldviews of the time.” (p. 209)
We wonder why Christians aren’t, in fact, horrified by this grotesque belief as the centerpiece of their faith. The clergy do a good job of making it look good.
Carrier offered a good summation of these data in John Loftus’ 2010 anthology, The Christian Delusion: Why Faith Fails:
“The New Testament is recognized by biblical scholars the world over as an arbitrary hodgepodge of dubious literature of uncertain origins and reliability. We have no reason to believe the authors of the New Testament documents were any more honest or critical or infallible than any other men of their time, and there’s plenty of evidence to suspect they were less so.” (p. 297-298)
How can the promotion of the ancient Jesus cult NOT involve massive damage?
There is one prominent example of the damage that comes to mind: Mike Pence, raised a Catholic, who has described himself as “a born-again, evangelical Catholic.” He does not believe in evolution. Chris Matthew, in an interview with Pence on MSNBC Hardball, pressed him on this. He responded:
“I believe with all my heart that God created the heavens and the earth, the seas and all that is in them. … How he did that, I’ll ask him about some day.”
This is a special brand of stupid, a symptom of a brain locked by cult belief. He doesn’t have to wait to ask god about it—and what arrogance, to assume that a creator with hundreds of billions of galaxies under management will sit down to have a chat with Mike Pence. That is cult craziness. Evolution is an established fact; just do the homework! Pick up a few books on the basics of biology and learn. The same holds true about Pence’s opposition to the rights of LGBTQ people; his mind is locked into the assumptions of the cult. Human sexuality has been studied in depth. Study the research, find the books. Learn.
And what one human out of eight billion believes with “all his heart” means nothing. Back up your claims with hard data: reliable, verifiable, objective evidence. Move beyond the mindset of Sunday School and Catechism.
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.
Biking is something else I both love and hate. It takes a lot of effort but does provide good exercise and most days over an hour to listen to a good book or podcast. I especially like having ridden.
Here’s my bike, a Rockhopper by Specialized. I purchased it November 2021 from Venture Out in Guntersville; Mike is top notch! So is the bike, and the ‘old’ man seat I salvaged from an old Walmart bike.
Here’s a link to today’s bike ride. This is my pistol ride.
Here’s the link at Sam’s website. You can also listen on Spotify (full episode requires subscription to Sam’s podcast).
SERIES OVERVIEW
This series is designed for long-time fans, newcomers, haters, lovers, critics, and curious dabblers in the philosophy and works of Sam Harris. Each episode in the series is structured as a guided tour through one of Sam’s specific areas of interest: Artificial Intelligence, Consciousness, Violence, Belief, Free Will, Morality, Death, and more. We’ve plunged into the Making Sense archive dating back over 10 years, and surfaced crucial exchanges with incredible guests to dissect Sam’s evolving stances — along with various explorations, approaches, agreements, disagreements, and pushbacks. We’ve crafted and juxtaposed these clips with original writing and analysis into brand-new audio documentaries.
You’ll be introduced (or re-introduced) to fantastic thinkers, and we’ll help illuminate your intellectual journey with plenty of recommendations, which range from fun and light to densely academic.
The writer and producer of this series is filmmaker, author, and podcaster Jay Shapiro, whose credits include the documentary adaptation of Sam Harris’s dialogue Islam and Future of Tolerance. Jay writes essays at whatjaythinks.com and hosts the Dilemma Podcast.
The voice of the series is author Megan Phelps-Roper. Megan was born into the extremist Westboro Baptist Church, where she was a member and spokesperson before leaving the group in 2012. She has since published a memoir, Unfollow, and works as a producer, writer, and speaker. She has twice appeared as a guest on Making Sense.
MARCH 17, 2023
In this episode, we examine a series of Sam’s conversations centered around religion, atheism, and the power of belief.
First, we hear the stories of three guests who have fled their respective oppressive religious organizations. We begin with Sarah Hairder, founder of the advocacy group Ex-Muslims of North America, who details how her encounters with militant atheists catalyzed her journey to secularism. Then our narrator, Megan Phelps-Roper, walks us through her story of abandoning the Westboro Baptist Church. Finally, Yasmine Mohammed presents her harrowing account of escaping fundamentalist Islamism and Sam’s role in inspiring her public advocacy work.
We then tackle the concept of belief more broadly, diving into Sam’s understanding of atheism and what sets it apart from the views of other atheist thinkers like Matt Dillahunty and Richard Dawkins. We also revisit an infamous conversation between Sam and Jordan Peterson, wherein they attempt to come to some universal definition of the word “truth.”
The episode concludes with two Q&A portions from life events in which Sam addresses some real concerns about purpose and meaning in the absence of religion.
Watch this short clip:
https://screencast-o-matic.com/watch/c0eoDjV4xDd
Now, let’s look under the hood. Remember, reading to death will likely change your mind on what you otherwise believe you know.
Read this, and read this, and read this. Did you find anything that disputes what the pastor claims?
Here’s the link to this article.
Literary legend Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell (June 25, 1903–January 21, 1950), remains best remembered for authoring the cult-classics Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but he was also a formidable, masterful essayist. Among his finest short-form feats is the 1946 essay Why I Write (public library) — a fine addition to the collected wisdom of great writers.
Orwell begins with some details about his less than idyllic childhood — complete with absentee father, school mockery and bullying, and a profound sense of loneliness — and traces how those experiences steered him towards writing, proposing that such early micro-traumas are essential for any writer’s drive. He then lays out what he believes to be the four main motives for writing, most of which extrapolate to just about any domain of creative output.
He writes:
I give all this background information because I do not think one can assess a writer’s motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in — at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own — but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape. It is his job, no doubt, to discipline his temperament and avoid getting stuck at some immature stage, in some perverse mood; but if he escapes from his early influences altogether, he will have killed his impulse to write. Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. — Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.
After a further discussion of how these motives permeated his own work at different times and in different ways, Orwell offers a final and rather dystopian disclaimer:
Looking back through the last page or two, I see that I have made it appear as though my motives in writing were wholly public-spirited. I don’t want to leave that as the final impression. All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand. For all one knows that demon is simply the same instinct that makes a baby squall for attention. And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. I cannot say with certainty which of my motives are the strongest, but I know which of them deserve to be followed. And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a POLITICAL purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.
This, of course is to be taken with a grain of salt — the granularity of individual disposition, outlook, and existential choice, that is. I myself subscribe to the Ray Bradbury model:
Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun with it. Ignore the authors who say ‘Oh, my God, what word? Oh, Jesus Christ…’, you know. Now, to hell with that. It’s not work. If it’s work, stop and do something else.
Why I Write is part of Penguin’s Great Ideas series, excellent in its entirety. Complement it with Orwell on taxes and the four questions great writers must ask themselves.
Here’s the link to this article.
I do not consider myself a Christian, or an atheist. If one were to pigeonhole my own personal philosophy with a label, it might be “weak atheist” or “strong agnostic,” because any belief concerning God is completely nonexistent from my mind. However, I don’t reject all religion or spirituality out of hand. Religion and spirituality are an integral part of our humanity. Along with the artistic and intellectual sides of people, they balance our being. The quote by Einstein at the end of my chapter 3 commentary captures the essence of how I feel about religion.
When I began reading Why I Believe, I developed a genuine great respect for the author. I was initially quite impressed with Dr. Kennedy’s intelligence and thoughtfulness. I could understand why a Christian might enjoy his ministry. However, my respect evaporated as I began my quest for further knowledge concerning the subjects on which his book speaks. In this series of essays I discovered some good things in the book, but I have also shown that it overflows with half-truths, misrepresentations, distortions, twisted facts, and outright lies. After researching what Kennedy did not say, I now feel a moral obligation to point out that he appears to be a man whose sources of historical information are unreliable, whose selective pleading cannot be trusted, and who will even lie to promote his religion. I should add that there are many honest Christians who do not make false claims about their faith. One such example I discovered in my search is author Lloyd J. Averill, Professor of Theology and Preaching at Northwest Theological Union in Seattle.
The particular metaphysics of Christianity, whether described in the Bible or elsewhere, is especially suspect in the hands of the kind of Christian who seeks moral absolutism, political authority, and control over other people. Then, Christianity becomes politically partisan and generally dangerous, and its spirituality gets sapped and replaced by an agenda of power. In my view, such Christians are not well-balanced, neither intellectuality nor with their regard for others. D. James Kennedy appears to fit this description.
Is Dr. Kennedy merely ignorant but well-meaning, or is he intentionally deceptive? Regardless of his motivations, I am saddened that many innocent trusting Christians will read his book and accept blindly its contents as fact. Basing your beliefs on such shaky foundations leaves you open to spiritual destruction! If Satan exists at all, he’d probably appreciate this book.
In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis pointed out that it is on the very altar of God where true believers are most susceptible to Satan. All of the literary stories about the Devil portray him as handsome and smooth-talking, and the people who are blindest to him, to whom he appeals the most, are the most sanctimonious, self-righteous, and self-assured – the leaders of the church!
After all my research, I now believe I have managed to unmask evil masquerading as good. D. James Kennedy, in my mind, is exactly the sort of False Teacher that honest Christians everywhere should rise up against.
Your protagonist is unloading groceries when a giant spider crawls out of the sack of oranges. What happens next?
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One Stop for Writers
Here’s five story elements to consider:
Never forget, writing is a process. The first draft is always a mess.
The first draft of anything is shit.
Ernest Hemingway
“Religion and education: Let’s be perfectly clear,” by Darren Sherkat. Here’s the link.
“Answering Dan Barker’s Easter Challenge,” by Jonathan MS Pearce. Here’s the link.
“‘What Happens to a College Student’s Religion,’ 94 years later,” by Aidan Scully. Here’s the link.
“First Baptist Church in Florida to force members to sign anti-LGBTQ contract, by Hemant Mehta.” Here’s the link.
“Two Hikers Swept to Their Deaths by Floods in a Utah Canyon.” Here’s the link.
Richard L. Fricks 