Please feel free to provide us with a few examples of biblical "falsehoods and discrepencies" that you find troubling.
God v Atheism
- Thread starter Calabrio
- Start date
you really want a few?
"Haley begins with what are commonly known as doctrinal problems. The first is on page 55, and pits Jer. 32:27 ("Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for me?") and Matt. 19:26 ("With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible") against Heb. 6:18 ("It was impossible for God to lie"). This problem was discussed in some recent correspondence in BE, and highlights one of the most intractable religious conflicts. Haley's explanation is that, "Omnipotence does not imply the power to do every conceivable thing, but the ability to do everything which is the proper object of power. For example, an omnipotent being could not cause a thing to be existent and non-existent at the same instant. The very idea is self-contradictory and absurd. When it is said that God can do 'all things,' the phrase only applies to those things which involve no inconsistency or absurdity." His explanation won't stand the strain for several reasons. In the first place, the verse neither says nor implies anything relative to "the proper object of power." It says nothing is too hard for God to accomplish, and no expressed or implied qualifications are attached. Secondly, God can't lie because the moment he lied he would cease to be God. And God can't cease to be God. And thirdly, Haley says,"an omnipotent being could not cause a thing to be existent and non-existent at the same time." He says the very idea is self-contradictory and absurd. Precisely! And that's why God's not omnipotent. If he were all-powerful, he could do it, and since he can't we'll rest our case."
and try this page http://members.aol.com/ckbloomfld/bepart13.html#issref131 a few more?
"Haley begins with what are commonly known as doctrinal problems. The first is on page 55, and pits Jer. 32:27 ("Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there anything too hard for me?") and Matt. 19:26 ("With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible") against Heb. 6:18 ("It was impossible for God to lie"). This problem was discussed in some recent correspondence in BE, and highlights one of the most intractable religious conflicts. Haley's explanation is that, "Omnipotence does not imply the power to do every conceivable thing, but the ability to do everything which is the proper object of power. For example, an omnipotent being could not cause a thing to be existent and non-existent at the same instant. The very idea is self-contradictory and absurd. When it is said that God can do 'all things,' the phrase only applies to those things which involve no inconsistency or absurdity." His explanation won't stand the strain for several reasons. In the first place, the verse neither says nor implies anything relative to "the proper object of power." It says nothing is too hard for God to accomplish, and no expressed or implied qualifications are attached. Secondly, God can't lie because the moment he lied he would cease to be God. And God can't cease to be God. And thirdly, Haley says,"an omnipotent being could not cause a thing to be existent and non-existent at the same time." He says the very idea is self-contradictory and absurd. Precisely! And that's why God's not omnipotent. If he were all-powerful, he could do it, and since he can't we'll rest our case."
and try this page http://members.aol.com/ckbloomfld/bepart13.html#issref131 a few more?
First of all, always bear in mind that when you research information about God, the Bible, and Jesus Christ, such information is often subjective opinions. In other words, like politics, people often spin statements to fit their own subjective views and what they want to believe or not believe. In order to have a good understanding of the Bible (both Old and New Testaments) it’s important to understand biblical history, read the Bible in its entirety, as well as understand the context of biblical statements.
I decided to click on the link you provided and while scrolling down my attention was drawn to the heading "Jesus, the False Messiah." As a Christian, my interest was peeked by such a claim and I was curious to know the basis upon which the claim was being made. After reading, it became apparent that the author’s reasoning showed a complete lack of understanding of the Bible or perhaps even a deliberate misrepresentation of the verses he/she claims proves that Jesus was a false messiah. Below are the arguments and my responses:
Because the spirit was not deaf and dumb, the child was. When was the last time you heard of a spirit/demon who was deaf and dumb? Give me a break.
Notice Jesus did not say “ten commandments” but referred to “commandments” in general. Notice Lev. 19:13 starts with "Thou shalt not..." just like the ten commandments of Exodus 20. Lev. 19:13 is a commandment like all laws given by God in the Old Testament. Actually, Jesus’s mention of Lev. 19:13 shows just how knowledgeable he is of the Pentateuch.
Obviously, this person thinks the “gospel” means the Bible, which shows a limited understanding or perhaps a deliberate misrepresentation of the word. The word “gospel” is mentioned in the New Testament in many places and can be in the context of a noun or verb. As a noun, it refers to Paul's epistles. As a verb, it refers to a message, particularly the message of salvation of Jesus Christ, not the Bible itself. For example:
Mark 1:14: Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God.
Romans 1:1: Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God.
2 Corinthians 2: Furthermore, when I came to Troas to preach Christ’s gospel, and a door was opened unto me of the Lord,
Romans 1:1: Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God.
2 Corinthians 2: Furthermore, when I came to Troas to preach Christ’s gospel, and a door was opened unto me of the Lord,
Moreover, notice Jesus did not refer to more than one gospel. In other words, he did not say "gospels" as though he was referring to both of Paul's epistles. This is because the word "gospel" in Mark 8:35 is referring to the message of salvation, not a physical object like the Bible.
Falsehoods? doubt that (for something to be false it has to be disproven and that is next to impossible to do with the bible). Discrepencies? Yes. But are they relevant to the message? most likely not. The bible teaches through analogies and stories, again going with a literal interpretation you can find some inconsistancies, but you have to ask if they are relevant to the overall message. Any book, movie, etc is gonna have inconsistencies, does that change whatever message they are trying to project? nope.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Nice job Shag. Couldn't have done it better myself. Gotta give you an *owned* for that one.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
Falsehoods? doubt that (for something to be false it has to be disproven and that is next to impossible to do with the bible). Discrepencies? Yes. But are they relevant to the message? most likely not. The bible teaches through analogies and stories, again going with a literal interpretation you can find some inconsistancies, but you have to ask if they are relevant to the overall message. Any book, movie, etc is gonna have inconsistencies, does that change whatever message they are trying to project? nope.
I wouldn't give in to his premise, Shag. Christians do not treat the Bible like any other book because it is not just another book. It is the Word of God. So-called contradictions in the Bible have been easily and thoroughly explained in the past by qualified scholars, none of which were the authors of anything hrmwrm has read. In case I'm not being clear enough - THERE ARE NO CONTRADICTIONS IN THE BIBLE, only people who are ignorant of its meaning.
By the way, hrmwrm, the Bible has a verse for you that answers your insulting statement that the Bible is full of errors.
<< Psalm 14 >>
1 The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.
I am not familiar enough with the scripture to say otherwise on the contradiction thing. If fact, my father would agree with you about there being no contradictions, while my uncle wouldn't agree with you. My uncle is probably as familiar with scripture as you, my father, moreso ( He has a graduate degree in theology). It seems to me that the "contradictions" that have been pointed out, are usually interpretation dependant (as are many specifics in the bible, IMO). I have yet to hear of any "contradiction" in the bible that, even if true, in any way changes the message.
no errors? come on fossten.
God created light on the first day; yet there were no moon, sun or stars until the fourth day,
How could morning be distinguished from evening, if the sun and the moon were yet to be created
do you want me to quote the first 4 days of genesis? and where DID the light come from on the first day until the fourth. and you said any rational person can see there is a god. sound rational to you?
i treat it like another book because it is just a book. it does have some interesting history within it's pages, and some fairly intelligent thoughts for the people who wrote it in their day. there is also a lot of barberism in it. infanticide,incest and rape don't make for a book that i'd care to study.
God created light on the first day; yet there were no moon, sun or stars until the fourth day,
How could morning be distinguished from evening, if the sun and the moon were yet to be created
do you want me to quote the first 4 days of genesis? and where DID the light come from on the first day until the fourth. and you said any rational person can see there is a god. sound rational to you?
i treat it like another book because it is just a book. it does have some interesting history within it's pages, and some fairly intelligent thoughts for the people who wrote it in their day. there is also a lot of barberism in it. infanticide,incest and rape don't make for a book that i'd care to study.
You are still subscribing to a literal interpretation, when that may not be the best one to take. Besides, even if you do take that interpretation, the story is so vauge that I could easily come up with something to explain the gaps, considering in this story we are assuming a supernatural being. Maybe he pulled earth into a far distant orbit to work on it for a few days, and it was rotating slower so those "days" (cited as "and there was evening and there was moring") could be over a longer time frame then the 24 hours being assumed. Baiscally, there are huge gaps in genesis, and you are making assumptions to fill them in as you see fit, interpretation. Can't really call that an inaccuracy.
Remember, also, this was originally written by and for people who's understanding of the universe was in it's infancy compared to today. The story had to make sense to them, hence very vauge.
interpretation is a pretty loose word, though. that's also how nostradamus has been shown to be both great and faker. it's also a means to adjust at anytime. i mean anybody can say "well, maybe thats the wrong interpretation", and then read it to suit the needs. thats already how(as noted in replies above) it's used to weasel around the facts. and as you stated shag, they had limited knowledge. but god told them this. you would think he would allude to at least some of the reality. almost 3000 years before the discovery that the earth is not the center of the universe. or that the earth is round and spins, which is why there is day and night. or there have been other life forms that have ruled before on this planet. there is nothing of history before existence of the bible(but we know there was one). thats why i say it is man made, not god's dictation. why would god hide such knowledge? that's not to say there might not be one. i just don't see evidence of anykind that points to a possibility. it is shortsighted to believe in a book and throw away all other possibilities.
and yes, i subscribe to a literal interpretation. you tell me where there is any insight into interpreting it any other way. it's gods word. changing the meaning to suit your own needs would make him a liar.
and yes, i subscribe to a literal interpretation. you tell me where there is any insight into interpreting it any other way. it's gods word. changing the meaning to suit your own needs would make him a liar.
Would "alluding to some of the reality" have helped his message, or just confused people of the time?
I wouldn't say "change the meaning". There are gaps in the story, of which you make assumptions to fill in, as does everyone reading it. The basic meaning doesn't change, regardless of the interpretation. God created things is a specific order. That stays the same in any interpretation. That order lines up with the theory of evolution, too.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
God is not bound by the laws that He creates. If you knew God and knew the Bible you'd understand that. You are foolish to mock the things that you do not understand.
But since you asked, let me answer your question as to where the light came from:
Rev 21:22 ¶ And I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it.
Rev 21:23 And the city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb [is] the light thereof.
Rev 21:24 And the nations of them which are saved shall walk in the light of it: and the kings of the earth do bring their glory and honour into it.
Rev 21:25 And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there.
Any more questions?
now there's a stretch. book of revelations to justify the old testament genesis. ones creation, ones destruction. still doesn't explain my query. and i'm not mocking things. i am questioning validity. do you always just accept everything, or do you question and throw out the things that are not valid to you? i pefer to question the things that seem invalid to me.
fossten
Dedicated LVC Member
OK, first of all, I answered your question. Second, your only response is a pithy "that's a stretch." Why is it a stretch? Is not the Book of Revelation (not revelationS) part of the Bible? Is not the verse talking about the same God that created the earth?
You weren't questioning validity, you were identifying a so-called untruth, which I explained to you. Sorry you don't like my answer, but that's your problem.
You don't even understand Revelation and you don't understand the Bible. I don't have to try to make you understand something you say is full of lies anyway. The whole thing is a fool's errand and casting pearls before swine. I politely answered your question and you refuse to accept it. Well, why should I be surprised? You don't think the Bible is true anyway. So be it. You aren't seeking answers, you just want to bash. I'm done with you here.
i just don't see how revelations about the apocalypse and the rise to heaven could correlate to the light from the beginning of genesis. if you would elaborate on the thought process that takes one to this conclusion, maybe i could understand. i'm not here to mock, fossten. but i'll defend my views as fervently as you defend yours. and in 2 threads, you've taken some pretty condescending attitude towards me. i'm not here to bash the bible, just point out, to me, what makes it just an ancient book. it's a story of the beginnings of judea. and without the old testament, the new testament doesn't stand. although they can make for an interesting historical read.
The age and origins of the universe are a mystery to us humans and will always remain so.
Some things to ponder beyond the bible.
Why is the universe so large and us but the tiniest part of it.
The speed of light seems to indicate how old and vast matter and space really are and 6000 years old does not fit.
Observations from Hubble say celestial events have been unfolding for billions of years.
Carbon 14 dating says the earth is millions if not billions of years old.
Einstein believed in a creator but not the personal god put forth in man made religion.
Without religion the only meaning of life is to make more life which in itself is not particularly meaningful.(a riddle)
Of couse one can just say well God created the universe with these parameters and take it on faith but it doesn't stand to reason at least for some of us.
Some things to ponder beyond the bible.
Why is the universe so large and us but the tiniest part of it.
The speed of light seems to indicate how old and vast matter and space really are and 6000 years old does not fit.
Observations from Hubble say celestial events have been unfolding for billions of years.
Carbon 14 dating says the earth is millions if not billions of years old.
Einstein believed in a creator but not the personal god put forth in man made religion.
Without religion the only meaning of life is to make more life which in itself is not particularly meaningful.(a riddle)
Of couse one can just say well God created the universe with these parameters and take it on faith but it doesn't stand to reason at least for some of us.
No true debate on this would be complete without visiting
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/index.html
I suppose I'll be shunned for this on this board but
so be it.
From the introduction:
I am an atheist.
And no, I don't kick puppies or steal candy from babies. I don't hate God, but I don't have any secret desire to worship him either. Nor do I worship Satan. I'm not angry or depressed; I'm quite happy as I am, actually. In fact, I'm a person just like you. You probably wouldn't recognize me if you passed me on the street.
But I am indeed an atheist. What this means, quite simply, is that I don't believe in any gods. Not Jesus, not Yahweh, not Allah, not Vishnu, not Odin, not Zeus, not Gaea, not Quetzalcoatl, not Marduk, not Ahura Mazda, nor any other of the thousands and thousands of deities humanity has invented throughout its history. I don't single out any of them - I treat them all the same, and lack belief in each one equally. As far as I'm concerned, they're all imaginary - mere products of the human imagination and nothing more.
In this respect, I'm probably not that different from you. After all, most theists reject all but one of the many gods humans have invented. I just reject one more god than most people do.
I'm not an atheist because I hate God. To hate God I would first have to believe in him, and then I wouldn't be an atheist anymore. Nor am I an atheist because I hate my father or any other authority figure; I don't. I'm also not an atheist because I had a bad experience with the church, or because I want to live a hedonistic life free of moral restriction, or because I'm too proud to acknowledge the possibility of something bigger than me. None of these things are true. Simply put, the reason I am an atheist, and the reason most people are atheists, is the complete lack of convincing, credible evidence for the claims of any religion. This is not the only reason not to believe, however. Some people have become atheists after seeing the terrible harm caused by religion, the malice, cruelty and suffering inflicted in God's name. Others have deconverted after coming to the realization that a loving god would not allow pain and suffering. Still others may simply have been raised without religion; after all, atheism is our default state. No one is born believing in gods - we have to be taught that. (For a more comprehensive list of reasons not to believe, see "The Necessity of Atheism"; for more on why evil is incompatible with the existence of a loving god, see "All Possible Worlds".)
Atheism is a much more consistent and unified position than the swamp of squabbling sects that is theism. However, it does come in various flavors. Some atheists prefer to call themselves freethinkers or humanists; the former term emphasizes free, unrestricted thought and the forming of opinions based on evidence and reason rather than tradition and authority, while the latter advocates the essential liberty, dignity and freedom of humanity and the need to take responsibility for one's own life. Other descriptive terms include rationalist, empiricist, naturalist, secularist, skeptic, and so on. Another term was coined by the originators of the "Brights" movement, who proposed this word as a positive and optimistic description of those who hold a naturalistic worldview. Yet another subgroup of atheism is the agnostics, who hold that the answer to the question of God's existence is unknown and perhaps unknowable. There is considerable overlap between these groups, of course. For example, I consider myself both a freethinker and a humanist, and I sympathize with the goal of the Brights movement, but I generally call myself an atheist.
In addition, there are two subgroups of atheism itself. There are the weak atheists, who state that they do not believe in gods, while strong atheists go further by asserting that gods do not exist. The difference is subtle but important. Most atheists are weak, some (a few) are strong, while others may be weak atheists in general but strong with respect to certain gods (such as those whose attributes are defined such as to make their very existence self-contradictory and thus impossible). I personally consider myself a weak atheist, though this should not be taken to imply that I am uncertain about my position. It is merely that I recognize that a supernatural being that did not want to provide evidence of its existence could never be ruled out. On the other hand, there is no evidence for such beings either, and I believe only in propositions for which there is a reasonable quality of evidence.
The only ironclad requirement for atheism is a lack of belief in gods. Almost invariably, however, atheists lack belief in supernatural phenomena in general, including psychic powers, angels and demons, or a soul that survives the physical death of the body. Like gods, we hold these things to be superstitious fantasies, invented by primitive groups of people for a variety of reasons and still in existence today mainly because of human credulity and their potential to allow a privileged few to make money from or rule over and oppress others. Other than a lack of god-belief, however, there are no requirements for being an atheist. Atheism has no dogmas - it does not impose a moral code, set rules of behavior or demand obedience to a central authority, and individual atheists are free to form their own opinions on whatever topics they choose. There are atheists from all walks of life, atheists of all ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds. Some atheists are liberal, some are conservative; some are pro-choice, some are pro-life; some support communism, others support socialism, and others support capitalist republican democracy.
In short, atheists are ordinary people, just like everyone else. We hold jobs, pay taxes, raise families, and do all the other things that normal people do. We don't ask for much, either. I fully respect the right of people to hold and practice whatever beliefs they want, as long as they don't attempt to force those beliefs on me or use them as justification to cause harm to others. What that means is strong separation of church and state: no teaching of religious myths in public school science classes, no religious commandments posted in public school classrooms or courthouses, no taxpayer money going to fund churches, no state-supported prayers, and no religious litmus test of any sort for any public position; in short, no government preference of one religion over any other or religion in general over non-religion. We also ask for the freedom of speech to disseminate information about our position free of censorship, freedom of conscience to think and believe as we feel best, and the freedom to pursue happiness in whatever form we find it so long as doing so does not interfere with the equal rights of others to do the same. I feel that these rights are nothing more than what we should expect from a modern, enlightened democratic society.
Unfortunately, some people persist in spreading misinformation about what it really means to be an atheist. Listed below are a few of the most commonly heard myths about atheism, along with their refutations.
Myth: Atheism is a religion.
Fact: Atheism fails every ordinary qualification for being a religion - it has no prayers or rituals, no prophets or holy books, no priests or ministers, no churches or temples, and no belief in gods, the soul, the afterlife, or any other supernatural manifestations of any sort. Most importantly, atheism requires no faith in any unevidenced entities. It has been wryly observed that atheists will be glad to admit that atheism is a religion just as soon as they get the tax breaks afforded to churches.
Myth: It requires omniscience to be an atheist, because only a person who knew every fact about the universe could know that God does not exist.
Fact: As explained above, weak atheists do not claim to know absolutely that there is no god. Instead, they claim that God is unproven, and so they choose to withhold belief until and unless evidence for God's existence can be provided. In much the same way, few theists would say they believe by faith that no unicorns exist - instead, they simply choose to withhold belief in unicorns until they see evidence for the existence of such creatures. Strong atheists, who do affirm the non-existence of certain gods, typically do so out of logic and reason: if a deity is defined with self-contradictory or impossible attributes, then we can know absolutely that that deity does not exist, just as we know absolutely that square circles or married bachelors do not exist without needing to conduct a search of the entire universe. For example, a strong atheist might reason that if God is all-powerful and all-loving, there would be no evil or suffering, but since there clearly are, such a being cannot possibly exist.
Myth: Atheists hate God or are angry at God.
Fact: This is impossible by the very definition of atheism. To hate God, it would be necessary to first believe in him, but an atheist is by definition one who does not believe. Anyone who hated God would not be an atheist, but a theist. However, some people do become atheists after suffering personal tragedies - not because they "hate God", but because their experience brings them to the realization that the existence of pain, evil and suffering is impossible to reconcile with belief in a loving god.
Myth: Atheists know God exists but choose not to follow him.
Fact: This statement is entirely untrue, a myth propagated by theists who are either so thoroughly indoctrinated they cannot even conceive of someone believing differently from them, or of such weak faith that the very idea of people who have a different opinion is threatening to them. The fact is that atheists simply do not see any good evidence for the existence of a god. Many atheists, in fact, are former theists who were raised religious or converted and tried unsuccessfully to experience some sense of God's presence before finally realizing that there was nothing to be experienced. See the deconversion stories section for testimonials.
Myth: Atheists worship Satan.
Fact: Atheists consider Satan just as fictitious as God. Satan worshippers would not be atheists, but theists. However, there are some atheists (such as myself) who consider Satan symbolic of the things dogmatic religion opposes - free thought, intelligence and rational skepticism, personified as an avatar of evil by religions which seek to stifle doubt and questioning through fear. In the traditional Judeo-Christian interpretation of the Genesis story, for example, God is the one who seeks to keep Adam and Eve ignorant, while Satan urges them to gain knowledge, think for themselves, and question even God if his ways do not make sense to them. See the review of Paradise Lost, as well as the article "Thoughts in Captivity", for more on this topic.
Myth: The existence of atheism itself proves there is a god. Atheists say they don't believe in God, but then why do they spend so much time and effort denying him? If they really were atheists, it wouldn't even be an issue for them.
Fact: Atheists who do argue against religion do so because of the undeniable and very real harm that god-belief has caused and is continuing to cause, and because they must defend their rights against theistic encroachment. To cite one example, in America many Christian groups are attempting to legislate the posting of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and public school classrooms, in blatant violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Creationists, if they had their way, would do severe injury to real science by having their pseudoscientific religious beliefs presented alongside the well-tested and solidly supported theory of evolution as if the two were equally valid. And this is not even to address the countless lives lost, wars waged, acts of terrorism committed, rights denied, people oppressed, and pains and tortures inflicted throughout human history in the name of God. Atheists believe that showing humanity the folly of theism is a valuable task if we are ever going to put an end to ignorance and suffering and make the fullest use of the potential we possess.
Myth: Atheists are immoral or have no basis for morality.
Fact: See "The Ineffable Carrot and the Infinite Stick", which lays out the basis for atheist morality and critically examines the simplistic theist conception of reward and punishment.
Myth: Argument X proves that there is a God.
Fact: See "Unmoved Mover" for rebuttals to the most common pro-theistic arguments, including the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments; see also "A Flip of the Coin" for a response to Pascal's Wager.
Myth: Atheists have no purpose in life.
Fact: Atheists believe that it is the right of every human to set his or her own goals and direction; our purpose is whatever we wish it to be. Atheists hold that we are uplifted, not diminished, by the freedom to fearlessly seek our own destiny and reason for being. See "Life of Wonder" for further rebuttals to these and other claims about the alleged nihilism of atheism.
Myth: There are no atheists in foxholes.
Fact: See the "Atheists in Foxholes" section of the main index for testimonials from atheists and non-believers who served in the military or were otherwise placed in dangerous or life-threatening situations without crying out to a god to save them.
Myth: Atheists are members of a secretive evil conspiracy whose objective is world domination.
Fact: Well, okay, that one's true. But don't tell anyone
http://www.ebonmusings.org/atheism/index.html
I suppose I'll be shunned for this on this board but
so be it.
From the introduction:
I am an atheist.
And no, I don't kick puppies or steal candy from babies. I don't hate God, but I don't have any secret desire to worship him either. Nor do I worship Satan. I'm not angry or depressed; I'm quite happy as I am, actually. In fact, I'm a person just like you. You probably wouldn't recognize me if you passed me on the street.
But I am indeed an atheist. What this means, quite simply, is that I don't believe in any gods. Not Jesus, not Yahweh, not Allah, not Vishnu, not Odin, not Zeus, not Gaea, not Quetzalcoatl, not Marduk, not Ahura Mazda, nor any other of the thousands and thousands of deities humanity has invented throughout its history. I don't single out any of them - I treat them all the same, and lack belief in each one equally. As far as I'm concerned, they're all imaginary - mere products of the human imagination and nothing more.
In this respect, I'm probably not that different from you. After all, most theists reject all but one of the many gods humans have invented. I just reject one more god than most people do.
I'm not an atheist because I hate God. To hate God I would first have to believe in him, and then I wouldn't be an atheist anymore. Nor am I an atheist because I hate my father or any other authority figure; I don't. I'm also not an atheist because I had a bad experience with the church, or because I want to live a hedonistic life free of moral restriction, or because I'm too proud to acknowledge the possibility of something bigger than me. None of these things are true. Simply put, the reason I am an atheist, and the reason most people are atheists, is the complete lack of convincing, credible evidence for the claims of any religion. This is not the only reason not to believe, however. Some people have become atheists after seeing the terrible harm caused by religion, the malice, cruelty and suffering inflicted in God's name. Others have deconverted after coming to the realization that a loving god would not allow pain and suffering. Still others may simply have been raised without religion; after all, atheism is our default state. No one is born believing in gods - we have to be taught that. (For a more comprehensive list of reasons not to believe, see "The Necessity of Atheism"; for more on why evil is incompatible with the existence of a loving god, see "All Possible Worlds".)
Atheism is a much more consistent and unified position than the swamp of squabbling sects that is theism. However, it does come in various flavors. Some atheists prefer to call themselves freethinkers or humanists; the former term emphasizes free, unrestricted thought and the forming of opinions based on evidence and reason rather than tradition and authority, while the latter advocates the essential liberty, dignity and freedom of humanity and the need to take responsibility for one's own life. Other descriptive terms include rationalist, empiricist, naturalist, secularist, skeptic, and so on. Another term was coined by the originators of the "Brights" movement, who proposed this word as a positive and optimistic description of those who hold a naturalistic worldview. Yet another subgroup of atheism is the agnostics, who hold that the answer to the question of God's existence is unknown and perhaps unknowable. There is considerable overlap between these groups, of course. For example, I consider myself both a freethinker and a humanist, and I sympathize with the goal of the Brights movement, but I generally call myself an atheist.
In addition, there are two subgroups of atheism itself. There are the weak atheists, who state that they do not believe in gods, while strong atheists go further by asserting that gods do not exist. The difference is subtle but important. Most atheists are weak, some (a few) are strong, while others may be weak atheists in general but strong with respect to certain gods (such as those whose attributes are defined such as to make their very existence self-contradictory and thus impossible). I personally consider myself a weak atheist, though this should not be taken to imply that I am uncertain about my position. It is merely that I recognize that a supernatural being that did not want to provide evidence of its existence could never be ruled out. On the other hand, there is no evidence for such beings either, and I believe only in propositions for which there is a reasonable quality of evidence.
The only ironclad requirement for atheism is a lack of belief in gods. Almost invariably, however, atheists lack belief in supernatural phenomena in general, including psychic powers, angels and demons, or a soul that survives the physical death of the body. Like gods, we hold these things to be superstitious fantasies, invented by primitive groups of people for a variety of reasons and still in existence today mainly because of human credulity and their potential to allow a privileged few to make money from or rule over and oppress others. Other than a lack of god-belief, however, there are no requirements for being an atheist. Atheism has no dogmas - it does not impose a moral code, set rules of behavior or demand obedience to a central authority, and individual atheists are free to form their own opinions on whatever topics they choose. There are atheists from all walks of life, atheists of all ages, genders and ethnic backgrounds. Some atheists are liberal, some are conservative; some are pro-choice, some are pro-life; some support communism, others support socialism, and others support capitalist republican democracy.
In short, atheists are ordinary people, just like everyone else. We hold jobs, pay taxes, raise families, and do all the other things that normal people do. We don't ask for much, either. I fully respect the right of people to hold and practice whatever beliefs they want, as long as they don't attempt to force those beliefs on me or use them as justification to cause harm to others. What that means is strong separation of church and state: no teaching of religious myths in public school science classes, no religious commandments posted in public school classrooms or courthouses, no taxpayer money going to fund churches, no state-supported prayers, and no religious litmus test of any sort for any public position; in short, no government preference of one religion over any other or religion in general over non-religion. We also ask for the freedom of speech to disseminate information about our position free of censorship, freedom of conscience to think and believe as we feel best, and the freedom to pursue happiness in whatever form we find it so long as doing so does not interfere with the equal rights of others to do the same. I feel that these rights are nothing more than what we should expect from a modern, enlightened democratic society.
Unfortunately, some people persist in spreading misinformation about what it really means to be an atheist. Listed below are a few of the most commonly heard myths about atheism, along with their refutations.
Myth: Atheism is a religion.
Fact: Atheism fails every ordinary qualification for being a religion - it has no prayers or rituals, no prophets or holy books, no priests or ministers, no churches or temples, and no belief in gods, the soul, the afterlife, or any other supernatural manifestations of any sort. Most importantly, atheism requires no faith in any unevidenced entities. It has been wryly observed that atheists will be glad to admit that atheism is a religion just as soon as they get the tax breaks afforded to churches.
Myth: It requires omniscience to be an atheist, because only a person who knew every fact about the universe could know that God does not exist.
Fact: As explained above, weak atheists do not claim to know absolutely that there is no god. Instead, they claim that God is unproven, and so they choose to withhold belief until and unless evidence for God's existence can be provided. In much the same way, few theists would say they believe by faith that no unicorns exist - instead, they simply choose to withhold belief in unicorns until they see evidence for the existence of such creatures. Strong atheists, who do affirm the non-existence of certain gods, typically do so out of logic and reason: if a deity is defined with self-contradictory or impossible attributes, then we can know absolutely that that deity does not exist, just as we know absolutely that square circles or married bachelors do not exist without needing to conduct a search of the entire universe. For example, a strong atheist might reason that if God is all-powerful and all-loving, there would be no evil or suffering, but since there clearly are, such a being cannot possibly exist.
Myth: Atheists hate God or are angry at God.
Fact: This is impossible by the very definition of atheism. To hate God, it would be necessary to first believe in him, but an atheist is by definition one who does not believe. Anyone who hated God would not be an atheist, but a theist. However, some people do become atheists after suffering personal tragedies - not because they "hate God", but because their experience brings them to the realization that the existence of pain, evil and suffering is impossible to reconcile with belief in a loving god.
Myth: Atheists know God exists but choose not to follow him.
Fact: This statement is entirely untrue, a myth propagated by theists who are either so thoroughly indoctrinated they cannot even conceive of someone believing differently from them, or of such weak faith that the very idea of people who have a different opinion is threatening to them. The fact is that atheists simply do not see any good evidence for the existence of a god. Many atheists, in fact, are former theists who were raised religious or converted and tried unsuccessfully to experience some sense of God's presence before finally realizing that there was nothing to be experienced. See the deconversion stories section for testimonials.
Myth: Atheists worship Satan.
Fact: Atheists consider Satan just as fictitious as God. Satan worshippers would not be atheists, but theists. However, there are some atheists (such as myself) who consider Satan symbolic of the things dogmatic religion opposes - free thought, intelligence and rational skepticism, personified as an avatar of evil by religions which seek to stifle doubt and questioning through fear. In the traditional Judeo-Christian interpretation of the Genesis story, for example, God is the one who seeks to keep Adam and Eve ignorant, while Satan urges them to gain knowledge, think for themselves, and question even God if his ways do not make sense to them. See the review of Paradise Lost, as well as the article "Thoughts in Captivity", for more on this topic.
Myth: The existence of atheism itself proves there is a god. Atheists say they don't believe in God, but then why do they spend so much time and effort denying him? If they really were atheists, it wouldn't even be an issue for them.
Fact: Atheists who do argue against religion do so because of the undeniable and very real harm that god-belief has caused and is continuing to cause, and because they must defend their rights against theistic encroachment. To cite one example, in America many Christian groups are attempting to legislate the posting of the Ten Commandments in courthouses and public school classrooms, in blatant violation of the principle of separation of church and state. Creationists, if they had their way, would do severe injury to real science by having their pseudoscientific religious beliefs presented alongside the well-tested and solidly supported theory of evolution as if the two were equally valid. And this is not even to address the countless lives lost, wars waged, acts of terrorism committed, rights denied, people oppressed, and pains and tortures inflicted throughout human history in the name of God. Atheists believe that showing humanity the folly of theism is a valuable task if we are ever going to put an end to ignorance and suffering and make the fullest use of the potential we possess.
Myth: Atheists are immoral or have no basis for morality.
Fact: See "The Ineffable Carrot and the Infinite Stick", which lays out the basis for atheist morality and critically examines the simplistic theist conception of reward and punishment.
Myth: Argument X proves that there is a God.
Fact: See "Unmoved Mover" for rebuttals to the most common pro-theistic arguments, including the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments; see also "A Flip of the Coin" for a response to Pascal's Wager.
Myth: Atheists have no purpose in life.
Fact: Atheists believe that it is the right of every human to set his or her own goals and direction; our purpose is whatever we wish it to be. Atheists hold that we are uplifted, not diminished, by the freedom to fearlessly seek our own destiny and reason for being. See "Life of Wonder" for further rebuttals to these and other claims about the alleged nihilism of atheism.
Myth: There are no atheists in foxholes.
Fact: See the "Atheists in Foxholes" section of the main index for testimonials from atheists and non-believers who served in the military or were otherwise placed in dangerous or life-threatening situations without crying out to a god to save them.
Myth: Atheists are members of a secretive evil conspiracy whose objective is world domination.
Fact: Well, okay, that one's true. But don't tell anyone
I found this essay from emusings to be of particular interest and very pertinent to the current election.
IMO anyone who runs for public office on a christian fundamentalist ticket and unequivocably states that the bible is the word of god is unfit for public office.
Why I reject the fundamentalist Christian god
As an atheist, I reject all gods and all religions alike. But this does not mean I spend an equal amount of time and effort arguing against each one I do not believe in. Since it is invariably the fundamentalists and conservatives of a given religion who feel the need to proselytize and preach to others, who attempt to gain secular power, and who - in some instances - use force and coercion to impose their views on those who believe differently, Ebon Musings mainly targets them and their arguments, as opposed to the moderates and liberals who do not try to impose their beliefs on others.
More specifically, since the power-seeking fundamentalists and invasive proselytizers in the nation I live in are mainly right-wing evangelical Protestant Christians, it is their views I spend the most time educating myself in and learning to refute. This essay is derived from my understanding of the Bible and conservative Christian theology and explains one of the principal reasons (other than the lack of evidence) why I reject the Christian fundamentalists' god.
Simply put, the Christian fundamentalist god is a colossal screwup. Anyone who reads the Bible can see for themselves that he just can't do anything right. He designs an originally beautiful and immaculate creation which almost immediately becomes polluted with sin, suffering and death. Both times he tries his hand at creating free will, his created beings immediately turn around and reject him. He chooses a people and continually attempts to redeem them from their fallen state, attempts which continually prove to be complete failures. He dispenses punishments for the evildoers and the wicked that utterly fail to stem the spread of evil and wickedness. He deals with crimes and transgressions by lashing out in childish rage, killing not just the evildoer but, often, all the innocent people around him. His final, crowning attempt to save the world from its sin was almost unanimously rejected by his chosen people. And his repeated promises to return to the Earth to set everything right have now been thoroughly broken. I find it impossible to believe that an omniscient and omnipotent deity, if there was such a being, could so consistently and thoroughly screw up; the contradiction between what this god is claimed to be able to do and what I am told he did do is so stark that it defies all reason that such a being could actually exist. But even if he did, such a sorry excuse for a deity would be deserving of no one's worship - which makes the audacity of his followers all the more incredible, to insist in the face of his long string of failures that he is a wise and loving ruler worthy of our adoration!
Let us consider in more detail some of Yahweh's more notable blunders.
In the beginning, according to the Bible, there was nothing but God and the void. After a timeless eternity, God decided that this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, and in six days created the heavens, the Earth and all the life upon it. Adam and Eve, the first couple, lived in a bounteous, peaceful paradise where all was bliss and there was no unhappiness, no pain and no death. So far, so good. Unfortunately, this was to be the first thing Yahweh would get right for a long time.
As it turned out, at some point during those first six days God had also created the angels, to serve him and praise him for all eternity. However, one angel didn't care for this arrangement. Satan - who according to some sources was the highest and wisest of all the angels - denounced God, declared war on his maker, and convinced a full third of the heavenly host to join his rebellion against the throne. How he was able to accomplish this is not clear. Did God create one-third of his angels defective?
At this point, God could have used his omnipotent power to zap Satan and the rest of the rebel angels out of existence entirely. Or he could have changed them with a snap of his all-powerful fingers, fixing the flaws in their personalities and returning them to a state of goodness and obedience. But he did neither. Instead, for unclear reasons, he actually engaged the rebels in battle, and of course defeated them easily. He then cast them out of Heaven and created a fiery pit called Hell in which he would imprison and torture them forever as punishment for their treason.
This solution was much crueler than the other options described, since it produced an enormous amount of unnecessary pain and suffering, whereas the other options would have produced none. Still, it would have sufficed to end the threat that Satan and his followers represented - except for one thing. Somehow, God failed to specify that the rebel angels would actually have to stay in the fiery prison he created for them. Instead, he allowed them to leave whenever they wanted, to roam the Earth tempting and inflicting suffering on humans.
And of course, this is exactly what happened. Almost immediately after creation was complete, according to the fundamentalists, Satan took the form of a snake and traveled to Eden to entice Adam and Eve to sin. He easily succeeded in doing so, apparently because Adam and Eve were also defective; God's complete failure to warn or protect them doubtlessly also played a part. (God's failures in regard to the whole Eden affair are too numerous to list here; for a full catalogue of them, see "Sins of the Father" and "That Fateful Apple".)
So, again, God failed. For the second time, his experiment in free will backfired, and his created beings disobeyed and rejected him. Adam and Eve joined Satan's rebellion and were tainted by sin.
At this point, God could have forgiven the humans, who after all had sinned only out of ignorance, and used his almighty powers to cleanse and redeem them. But he did not. Instead, he threw a temper tantrum, tossed them out of his Garden, and condemned them with a curse to live mortal lives of suffering, toil and death. But apparently God's aim was off, because it wasn't just the two of them who were affected. The curse fell upon the entirety of creation, affecting not just Adam and Eve, but every other living thing, all of Adam and Eve's descendants, and all the descendants of every other living thing for all of time, even though all these other beings were completely innocent of the apple incident, even though most of them did not even exist at the time. The original perfection was shattered and twisted, the curse of sin infected all living creatures, and the entire Earth became a place of suffering and death.
By now Yahweh's original creation was a failure, in ruins. One-third of his angelic servants had rebelled and abandoned him, his perfect world was ruined and spoiled, his human children were lost in sin and darkness, and Hell was empty as the demons roamed the world and tempted humanity still deeper into evil.
Apparently unable to deal with this, God inexplicably turned away from the universe for a while - perhaps to sulk. For many centuries he was absent from the world, doing essentially nothing while it slid deeper into sin. Unsurprisingly, when he finally chose to come back, things were a mess. Humanity had become a race of hopeless, irredeemably evil sinners who had forgotten about him. ("And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" --Genesis 6:5).
At this point, a solution was needed - this evil had to be stopped. God could have used his powers to make all the sinful people and only the sinful people vanish, blinked out of existence instantly. But he did not. Instead, he spoke to the last righteous man on earth, Noah, and told him to build an ark and take aboard his family and two of every kind of animal. He did so, and God sent a massive, catastrophic flood which decimated the planet and wiped out the sinners, as well as killing millions of innocent animals, plants, and human infants and children in the bargain.
Finally the floodwaters receded. Noah disembarked and released the animals to somehow survive on their own in the now lifeless and barren earth, with no food and no supportive ecosystems, and he and his family repopulated the globe. But once again, God had failed. Though the worldwide flood had been sent to wipe out evil, it utterly failed to do so. Noah's descendants spread throughout the world and, within a matter of years, forgot God entirely and became just as sinful and evil as the pre-flood people. In fact, Noah's very first act after the flood, after sacrificing some animals to God, was to plant some grapes so he could make wine, following which he promptly got drunk, passed out, and slept naked inside his tent. Noah's son Ham accidentally looked into the tent and saw his naked father; for this terrible crime Noah, apparently with God's approval, cursed Ham's son Canaan - his own grandson - and all of Canaan's descendants to a lifetime of slavery.
But, in any case, Yahweh was undaunted. Flush with pride at his "victory" over sin, he again took some time off to pat himself on the back. And when he returned, he noticed that the people of Earth had banded together and were building a mud-brick tower high enough to reach Heaven.
At this point, God could have moved his Heaven higher up - perhaps higher than the few hundred feet it must have been at the time - and enjoyed a hearty laugh at the silly antics of his creations. Instead, he panicked, expressed real fear that they would actually reach him and become as powerful as he was, and frantically responded by scattering the people of Earth, confusing and separating them by afflicting them with many different languages. (It should be noted in passing that God eventually forgot about this whole affair and allowed later humans to build much taller skyscrapers with no ill effects.)
Perhaps realizing by now that his large-scale plans kept failing, God decided to think small in his next attempt. He selected a man named Abraham, appeared to him, and vowed that his descendants would be the Almighty's chosen people, would enjoy divine favor ("And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee" --Genesis 12:3) and would inherit a great nation. Suitably impressed, Abraham left his home at God's urging and set out to the promised land.
God's promise passed from Abraham to his son, Isaac, who in turn had two sons, Esau and Jacob. As Isaac's firstborn, Esau was supposed to inherit the divine promise through a blessing, but Jacob deceived his dying father into giving the blessing to him instead. God, despite his omniscience, apparently was also fooled and honored the blessing, allowing Jacob to unfairly steal his brother's rightful place and become the sire of the chosen people. Jacob and his twelve sons became the Israelites, and the divine promise passed to them; Esau and his descendants, meanwhile, were condemned to live in the harsh desert and serve Jacob's descendants, setting the stage for millennia of ethnic hatred, strife and war.
However, Yahweh apparently forgot about his vow to protect and bless his chosen people, and they were almost immediately enslaved by the Egyptians. For several centuries, God's chosen people labored in bitter captivity, continually beaten by their overseers and forced into backbreaking work building monuments and hauling massive blocks of stone. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were rewarded for their faith by living and dying as slaves, trusting in a deliverance that never came for them. And what was the reason for God's allowing all this? The Bible gives none. It does not say that the Egyptian captivity was punishment for any misdeed, nor does it say it was intended to teach the Israelites any lesson. As far as we know, it happened simply because God inexplicably failed to deliver on his promise.
However, after about four hundred years (a time period far longer than the United States has been in existence), God finally noticed what was going on and decided to do something about it. He manifested himself to an Israelite named Moses and promised to use him as the vehicle through which he, God, would free his people.
At this point, God could have used his omniscience to determine exactly what punishment he had to mete out to Pharaoh to cause this. Instead, he began to punish the entire nation with progressively worse punishments, thereby inflicting much pain and suffering on innocent people who had no hand in the decision anyway. However, each of these failed to persuade Pharaoh to release the Israelites, and since God must have known ahead of time that they would fail, the inescapable conclusion is that he caused vast amounts of innocent suffering for nothing. Pharaoh was not persuaded to free the Israelites until God killed every completely innocent firstborn child in Egypt. Why didn't he just punish the one person responsible with something that would have been adequate from the start? Who knows?
But after all this innocent death and suffering, the people of Israel were free, and God led them out of Egypt. Then, through Moses, he burdened them with a long and arbitrary set of rules covering every aspect of daily life - what kinds of animals they were not allowed to eat, what activities they were not allowed to engage in on certain days of the week, how they had to mutilate their genitals to show their faith in him, and so on - and specified the horrible punishments for breaking any of them, most of which involved death in various cruel ways. The Israelites hated these rules so much that they rejected God's deliverance, preferring their slavery in Egypt. (No surprise there. According to fundamentalist Christians, the Mosaic law is impossible to faithfully follow. It is little wonder the people preferred their Egyptian taskmasters - at least they could please them some of the time!) As punishment, God forced them to wander in the desert until most of them had died. This included his great prophet Moses, who had given his entire life to leading the Israelites out of Egypt and was rewarded for his service by never even getting to set foot on the earth of the promised land.
Finally, God allowed his people to enter Palestine. Unfortunately, it was already occupied by other people who had taken up residence there during Israel's Egyptian captivity and by now had been living there for generations. At this point, God could have invited the native Palestinians into his covenant, given them the same laws he had given the Israelites, and established an egalitarian society where people of all races could live together in harmony. Instead, he ordered his people to invade and slaughter the natives, killing them to the last man, woman and child, specifically instructing them to show no mercy to anyone under any circumstances. What followed were a series of terrible, bloody battles in which tens of thousands of people died violently. Finally, God pronounced his campaign of genocide a success (Joshua 11:15) - but this was not true. Somehow, he had failed to notice that many of the people he had ordered his chosen to exterminate were still alive (as is shown by repeated biblical references to them after that point; see, for example, Judges 3:5). There was even one instance in which some of these people had survived despite God's efforts to kill them, apparently because their iron chariots defeated his omnipotence (Judges 1:19).
However, after all this death and bloodshed, the Israelites were at last in the promised land. At this point, God formed them into a loose confederacy of tribes and appointed the judges to govern them. This failed. The people continually fell into sin, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. Each time this happened, they cried out to God and he raised up a judge to save them, after which they promptly fell back into sin.
After several iterations of this, God became fed up and decided that there was only one way to break this cycle of sin and retribution: establish a monarchy in Israel. His first choice for king was Saul, who turned out to be a complete failure. Saul fell into sin, suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and finally committed suicide rather than be captured or killed in battle.
God's next choice for king was David, and just once - for the first time since creation - it looked as if he might have made the right decision. David and his son Solomon succeeded in rallying the Israelites behind them, and ruled over a glorious and powerful united monarchy, God's ideal state and the culmination of his promises to his chosen people (although God did break his promise, in Genesis 15:18, to give Abraham's descendants all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates: Israel was never this large even at the height of its power). However, Solomon's son Rehoboam proved to be an inept ruler, and in a move God failed to do anything to prevent, his united monarchy, after existing for only two kings, shattered into two separate, warring kingdoms. The vast majority of the tribes seceded, joining the new state of Israel in the north, while only a tiny rump state named Judah was left for David's throne.
In subsequent years, things got even worse. The kings of both nations continually fell into sin, taking all the people with them, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. The crimes of Israel finally grew so intolerable that God threw a fit and sent the legendarily cruel Assyrian empire to destroy them, carrying ten of the original twelve Israelite tribes off into slavery where they vanished forever from history.
The kingdom of Judah still existed, however, and God tried one last time to save it. He raised up a devout king named Josiah, who was faithful to a degree undreamed-of by any of his predecessors ("And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him" --2 Kings 23:25). Josiah instituted religious reforms, burning the groves and smashing the idols of pagan religions, and made a great covenant with the people to follow the law of God. It seemed as if Judah might finally be saved from disaster - and then Josiah went out to battle with an invading Egyptian army, God failed to protect him, and he was promptly killed by an Egyptian arrow.
The last few kings of Judah were disastrous sinners, undoing all of Josiah's reforms. Realizing that once again he had failed, Yahweh threw another of his temper tantrums and allowed the Babylonian empire to destroy his nation entirely, razing his holy temple to the ground and carrying the last of his chosen people off to slavery in a distant land.
A lesser deity might have concluded by now that the experiment begun with Abraham was a failure, but God was determined to see things through. Grudgingly, he let some of his people return to Israel and rebuild the Temple, and he appointed prophets to keep them on the right track this time. This failed. The chosen people continued to sin, becoming prideful, legalistic hypocrites, and refused to turn from their ways despite numerous punishing defeats and eventual enslavement by the Romans.
At this point, God realized he had one last chance to redeem his people, and he came up with a daring, drastic plan to do it. He descended to Earth and took mortal form, incarnating himself in a human body. Upon reaching adulthood, he sought out his people and told them he had come to give them a completely new message, abandoning his old promises that the Messiah would be a king and military leader. He revoked all the old, cruel laws he had once given them, letting them know that he had changed his mind, that they were no longer necessary. In their place he substituted new, simple principles, teaching them about forgiveness, about their shared humanity, and most importantly, about the deep and abiding love he had for every one of his precious children.
For once obeying the law they had been given so long ago, the Jews promptly seized this incarnated god, charged him with blasphemy, and killed him.
Christians, of course, claim that this was what God had in mind all along, that only through the shedding of his blood could we be forgiven for our sins. However, I am not so sure. Throughout all the millennia God knew the Jews, he failed to ever tell them that this was the method of redemption he had in mind. There is not a single prophecy anywhere in the Old Testament that clearly predicts the sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection of an incarnated god. Besides, God is supposed to be all-powerful. If he wanted to forgive us, why couldn't he just forgive us? Why was the agonizing and bloody death of an innocent person necessary for human salvation? Perhaps it was not, and God's propagandists only attributed this significance to it afterward to avoid this debacle being labeled as another complete failure.
In any case, God returned to Heaven and appointed apostles to spread his new faith to the Jews. This failed, as the evangelists were viciously persecuted and soundly rejected in town after town, winning relatively few converts. Flustered by his chosen people's rejection of him, God had no choice but to abandon them entirely and pass his promise of salvation on to the Gentiles, creating a new religion called Christianity. A church formed and almost immediately fragmented into numerous squabbling sects, all deeply divided as to the nature and intent of God.
At this point, God could have simply stepped in and set the record straight by letting all concerned know what he really meant. He failed to do so, and the church continued to splinter, breaking off into many smaller sects and denominations, consumed by infighting. God could also have sent more signs and wonders, as he routinely did in Old Testament times, to let the world know that the new religion really was of him; but he failed to do this as well, and for several centuries Christianity remained a small fringe group on the verge of extinction, heavily persecuted, its followers routinely tortured and slaughtered by the authorities.
It was only by luck that the new church caught the eye of a Roman emperor and survived. (Of course, God may have had a hand in this, but his inexplicably waiting so long to do it can be considered a failure. Certainly it was no comfort to the thousands who had already been tortured to death or mauled by wild animals in great stadiums for the edification of the masses.) But finally Christianity caught on, and became the dominant religion of Europe.
At this point, God could have used his dominance over the civilized world to bring forth a new golden age of enlightenment and peace. Instead, he suddenly decided to completely stop sending new revelations and miracles, and his church stultified and dragged humanity down into the Dark Ages. Knowledge declined and superstition and ignorance ruled; innocent people were imprisoned, tortured and killed in vicious inquisitions, scientists whose findings contradicted holy scripture were silenced and forced to recant, and plague after plague decimated humanity because, incidentally, God had failed to tell people that washing one's hands, and not whipping oneself or singing hymns, would keep illness away. New denominations arose that almost immediately became embroiled in savage religious wars, including a series of military expeditions called the Crusades that sent millions of people to their deaths, and conquistadors in foreign lands enslaved and slaughtered millions more in God's name. (Somehow, throughout all the thousands of years he had been speaking to humanity, God failed to ever provide a single clear-cut condemnation of slavery.) Kings and popes claimed divine right, stifling democracy and free speech. And all this time, the lot of the common man remained full of misery and suffering.
At any point during this time, God could have stepped in to stop these atrocities and correct people's ignorance. He failed to do so, and it was not until the Enlightenment, when people rediscovered the principles of science and democracy and began to investigate and think for themselves, that things began to improve - no thanks to humanity's cosmic absentee landlord.
And this brings us to today. God has been silent for thousands of years, perhaps realizing that the problems of this world have grown beyond his ability to contain. Humanity now has the power to completely destroy itself, and nearly has done so on several occasions. We are multiplying beyond our planet's ability to sustain life even as we destroy our environment, recklessly expending our natural resources, driving species to extinction, polluting our water and air. Terrorism and armed conflict threaten our safety. Weapons of mass destruction continue to proliferate. The Christian church has fractured into hundreds of sects, some of which are tainted by allegations of institutionalized sex abuse, others of which are convulsed and splintering further over the issue of ordaining gays, and false religions abound. People continue to kill and die over religion, and nowhere on Earth do they do so more fervently or more often than in what was once God's promised land. And, to hear certain Christians tell it, by far the worst sins of society out of all of these - gay marriage and safe and legal abortion - continue to gain ground and societal acceptance.
Soon, according to the fundamentalists' millennialist theology, God will become sick of it all and throw his ultimate temper tantrum, consigning this entire failed experiment called creation to the flame. Soon, Judgment Day will come, humanity will be wiped out, and Satan will have won. Only a select few, a small fraction of all the people who have ever lived, will have made it to Heaven, while billions upon billions of souls will be in Hell, condemned to endless, eternal agony in the flame. The screams of the damned will completely drown out the joyous songs of the saved. And this is supposed to be a positive outcome? This is what God's grand plan will amount to in the end?
Things didn't have to be this way. At so many points throughout history, God could have acted differently, even in small ways, to alter the destiny of his creation. Yet at each critical juncture, at every single step along the way, he failed to do so. Again and again, he failed.
He could have wiped Satan out of existence, changed him to be good again, or at least actually imprisoned him in Hell and not allowed him to roam the world doing evil. Or, instead of leaving the first humans ignorant, unprotected and vulnerable, he could easily have made them so powerful and wise they would have recognized Satan for what he was and rejected him on sight. Even if he had not done this, he could have forgiven the first humans for their transgressions, or at least only punished the two of them and not cast the curse of original sin on the entire planet. It cannot be overemphasized that taking any of these steps would have made all that followed unnecessary. All of God's subsequent plans were merely an attempt to clean up the mess he made by allowing all this to happen in the first place!
Even if all these things had happened, God could have made many different decisions afterward to produce a better overall outcome. For example, he could have stayed with the world after the fall, not allowing it to slide into sin; or, if things came to that, he could have used a miracle to selectively eliminate the evildoers, rather than sending a flood that killed millions of innocent living creatures while simultaneously failing utterly to eliminate sin as it was intended to do. He could have ignored the attempts of humans to build the Tower of Babel (which would itself have taught them a good lesson about humility), rather than punishing them for it with the confusion of languages which would only lead to more misunderstanding and division among people in the long run. He could have ignored Jacob's attempts at deception and bestowed his blessing upon the son it was supposed to go to, preventing millennia of ethnic hatred, resentment and strife. He could have kept his vow to Abraham and prevented the Israelites from ever being enslaved, or at least sent only one sufficient punishment to Pharaoh to obtain their release rather than building up to it and making innocent people suffer pointlessly.
He could have given the Israelites laws that were actually possible to follow, rather than impossible and restrictive ones that would inspire them to hate and resent him. He could have invited the native people of Palestine into his covenant rather than setting the horrible precedent of sanctioning warfare and genocide in the name of God. He could have instituted democracy among his people rather than absolutist monarchy since, after all, there is no guarantee that the son of a good king will be a good king himself. In this way, bad rulers would have been promptly removed from office rather than dragging the entire nation down with them. He could have actually protected the good kings from harm by enemies. He could have given his people messianic prophecies that clearly applied to Jesus, so they would not have rejected him. He could also have chosen to forgive sinners merely through his omnipotent will to do so, rather than through the torturous death of an innocent which itself inspired his followers to commit countless acts of retributive bloodshed throughout the centuries. At any of numerous points throughout history, he could have stepped in with just a little clear guidance, letting confused humans know what he really wanted or meant. He could have exerted just the smallest amount of his omnipotent power to steer people away from sin until they were wise enough to avoid it on their own. He could simply make his presence more obvious to prevent any one of the numerous problems and arguments humanity finds itself afflicted with. The list goes on and on. Suffice it to say - at any time in history when it was possible to make a good decision, Yahweh made a bad one.
And these are just the improvements possible in the plan he actually did use. If God had wanted to make radical changes to this plan, there are many that would have resulted in a tremendously better outcome.
To name one, he could have created, instead of defective humans and angels, free-willed beings who would all freely choose to obey him and do only what is good. Despite what Christian apologists say, this is clearly possible. Although Christians believe God never sins, he is still believed to have free will. Therefore, whatever quality God possesses that enables him to avoid sin, he could have given this quality to his created beings as well. Perhaps it is his holy nature that causes him to detest and avoid sinful behavior, or perhaps it is the intelligence and rationality necessary to fully understand that sin is a futile and self-destructive course. (Surely Christians would agree that this is in fact true?) Doing this would have eliminated the need for a Hell entirely.
Or, rather than waste time setting up a religion called Judaism he only intended to supersede eventually anyway, God could have taken human form and performed his sacrificial death and resurrection immediately after the Fall. In this way he could have eliminated millennia of sin and strife as people futilely attempted to obey impossible laws. With the transforming power of Christ in their hearts and that many fewer arbitrary and bureaucratic restrictions to follow, the Israelites would have been far less tempted by idolatry. With the option of salvation open to everyone, God could have prevented at least one cause of the racial and religious exclusivism which provoked so much hatred and caused so much suffering and so many deaths - both in the pre-Christian period as the Israelites warred with their neighbors, and later on as Christians persecuted and killed Jews for being "Christ-killers".
Most radically of all, God could have dispensed with the whole idea of creating a world of imperfect material beings. Why did he need to mold us out of fallible clay? Why not make us of pure spirit, free of fleshly temptations, free to roam infinite space at will? God could have made us all gods, free to create our own worlds, our own paradises. He could have given us infinite freedom, and instead he imprisoned us in these cages of muscle and bone, imprisoned our souls in vulnerable brains that often obscure our true natures from shining through. He made us able to suffer and feel hurt, made us able to become sick and injured, made us able to die. Why did he do this? Why did God create beings as limited as us, when he could have created so much more?
Of course, the atheist's answer to this question is the simplest. I do not, of course, believe that all the events described above actually happened, or that God was behind the ones that did happen. I am merely pointing out that, even if taken on its own terms, the Christian story implies a deity who is massively incompetent, and this creates a fundamental contradiction with the tenets of Christian belief that there is a god who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and completely good. Since the facts of this world's history are not open to change, and since we are justified in believing things would be much better if there was such a being, the most likely conclusion is that no such being exists. Though some Christian apologists claim the choices God made must have been the best ones possible, based purely on their belief that those are the choices he made, this argument is circular. To genuinely refute the arguments presented above, they would have to show why the choices I describe would have led to a worse world than the one we live in, and this is a challenge I do not think they can meet. What could possibly be a worse overall outcome than the large majority of humanity ending up in Hell forever?
If there really is a god - as unlikely as I consider that possibility to be - the Christian story is a slander on him. It depicts him as so poor at understanding the psychology of others that he simply cannot make free-willed beings who all desire of their own accord to be in fellowship with him. It depicts him as so inept that his will can be thwarted and his plans ruined by the acts of beings who are infinitely beneath him. It depicts him as so short-tempered and malicious that he would think nothing of punishing evil with acts that also inflict massive harm and suffering on those who were completely innocent of the deed. It depicts his power and his imagination as so limited that he cannot think of any way to stop evil other than with destruction, mass death and bloodshed; and it depicts him as so bereft of ideas that, whenever he does destroy evildoers in this fashion, he starts over again with a small group of people who turn out to be just as evil and rebellious as those he destroyed. It depicts him as setting out to make a perfect creation and then blundering so completely and so finally that he will ultimately have no choice but to consign the vast majority of his creations to the fire of torment.
Can a rational person really accept this? Does it make sense to believe that this scenario is the crowning work of infinite goodness and wisdom?
For my part, I cannot believe this. I reject the Christian fundamentalists' story. I reject the theology of a perfect god who set out to bring forth good and brought forth evil. I reject the gospel of universal sin, I reject the gospel of total depravity, and I reject the gospel of eternal pain. I cannot in good conscience or sound mind accept such a bafflingly and frustratingly illogical system. This world is what it is, indifferent to us and sometimes cruel to us, and we cannot change that - but we can stop deepening the insult by telling ourselves that it is presided over by a benevolent deity who approves of the way things are. Instead, we should set aside these unproductive myths and use our intelligence to improve conditions in this life, both by using science to bring the natural world under our control and by improving morality to put an end to the ceaseless and pointless hatred so many people have for each other. Ironically, the belief that there is a good god has often proved to be a powerful impediment to progress, as believers reason that to try to improve our lives is a blasphemous rejection of God's ideal order. However, we are now mature enough to look beyond that superstitious fear. Whether a god got us to this point or not, it is now up to us to do better. We have the tools, and we can and should use them. That is a worthy goal in life, and that is what atheism teaches us
IMO anyone who runs for public office on a christian fundamentalist ticket and unequivocably states that the bible is the word of god is unfit for public office.
Why I reject the fundamentalist Christian god
As an atheist, I reject all gods and all religions alike. But this does not mean I spend an equal amount of time and effort arguing against each one I do not believe in. Since it is invariably the fundamentalists and conservatives of a given religion who feel the need to proselytize and preach to others, who attempt to gain secular power, and who - in some instances - use force and coercion to impose their views on those who believe differently, Ebon Musings mainly targets them and their arguments, as opposed to the moderates and liberals who do not try to impose their beliefs on others.
More specifically, since the power-seeking fundamentalists and invasive proselytizers in the nation I live in are mainly right-wing evangelical Protestant Christians, it is their views I spend the most time educating myself in and learning to refute. This essay is derived from my understanding of the Bible and conservative Christian theology and explains one of the principal reasons (other than the lack of evidence) why I reject the Christian fundamentalists' god.
Simply put, the Christian fundamentalist god is a colossal screwup. Anyone who reads the Bible can see for themselves that he just can't do anything right. He designs an originally beautiful and immaculate creation which almost immediately becomes polluted with sin, suffering and death. Both times he tries his hand at creating free will, his created beings immediately turn around and reject him. He chooses a people and continually attempts to redeem them from their fallen state, attempts which continually prove to be complete failures. He dispenses punishments for the evildoers and the wicked that utterly fail to stem the spread of evil and wickedness. He deals with crimes and transgressions by lashing out in childish rage, killing not just the evildoer but, often, all the innocent people around him. His final, crowning attempt to save the world from its sin was almost unanimously rejected by his chosen people. And his repeated promises to return to the Earth to set everything right have now been thoroughly broken. I find it impossible to believe that an omniscient and omnipotent deity, if there was such a being, could so consistently and thoroughly screw up; the contradiction between what this god is claimed to be able to do and what I am told he did do is so stark that it defies all reason that such a being could actually exist. But even if he did, such a sorry excuse for a deity would be deserving of no one's worship - which makes the audacity of his followers all the more incredible, to insist in the face of his long string of failures that he is a wise and loving ruler worthy of our adoration!
Let us consider in more detail some of Yahweh's more notable blunders.
In the beginning, according to the Bible, there was nothing but God and the void. After a timeless eternity, God decided that this was an unsatisfactory state of affairs, and in six days created the heavens, the Earth and all the life upon it. Adam and Eve, the first couple, lived in a bounteous, peaceful paradise where all was bliss and there was no unhappiness, no pain and no death. So far, so good. Unfortunately, this was to be the first thing Yahweh would get right for a long time.
As it turned out, at some point during those first six days God had also created the angels, to serve him and praise him for all eternity. However, one angel didn't care for this arrangement. Satan - who according to some sources was the highest and wisest of all the angels - denounced God, declared war on his maker, and convinced a full third of the heavenly host to join his rebellion against the throne. How he was able to accomplish this is not clear. Did God create one-third of his angels defective?
At this point, God could have used his omnipotent power to zap Satan and the rest of the rebel angels out of existence entirely. Or he could have changed them with a snap of his all-powerful fingers, fixing the flaws in their personalities and returning them to a state of goodness and obedience. But he did neither. Instead, for unclear reasons, he actually engaged the rebels in battle, and of course defeated them easily. He then cast them out of Heaven and created a fiery pit called Hell in which he would imprison and torture them forever as punishment for their treason.
This solution was much crueler than the other options described, since it produced an enormous amount of unnecessary pain and suffering, whereas the other options would have produced none. Still, it would have sufficed to end the threat that Satan and his followers represented - except for one thing. Somehow, God failed to specify that the rebel angels would actually have to stay in the fiery prison he created for them. Instead, he allowed them to leave whenever they wanted, to roam the Earth tempting and inflicting suffering on humans.
And of course, this is exactly what happened. Almost immediately after creation was complete, according to the fundamentalists, Satan took the form of a snake and traveled to Eden to entice Adam and Eve to sin. He easily succeeded in doing so, apparently because Adam and Eve were also defective; God's complete failure to warn or protect them doubtlessly also played a part. (God's failures in regard to the whole Eden affair are too numerous to list here; for a full catalogue of them, see "Sins of the Father" and "That Fateful Apple".)
So, again, God failed. For the second time, his experiment in free will backfired, and his created beings disobeyed and rejected him. Adam and Eve joined Satan's rebellion and were tainted by sin.
At this point, God could have forgiven the humans, who after all had sinned only out of ignorance, and used his almighty powers to cleanse and redeem them. But he did not. Instead, he threw a temper tantrum, tossed them out of his Garden, and condemned them with a curse to live mortal lives of suffering, toil and death. But apparently God's aim was off, because it wasn't just the two of them who were affected. The curse fell upon the entirety of creation, affecting not just Adam and Eve, but every other living thing, all of Adam and Eve's descendants, and all the descendants of every other living thing for all of time, even though all these other beings were completely innocent of the apple incident, even though most of them did not even exist at the time. The original perfection was shattered and twisted, the curse of sin infected all living creatures, and the entire Earth became a place of suffering and death.
By now Yahweh's original creation was a failure, in ruins. One-third of his angelic servants had rebelled and abandoned him, his perfect world was ruined and spoiled, his human children were lost in sin and darkness, and Hell was empty as the demons roamed the world and tempted humanity still deeper into evil.
Apparently unable to deal with this, God inexplicably turned away from the universe for a while - perhaps to sulk. For many centuries he was absent from the world, doing essentially nothing while it slid deeper into sin. Unsurprisingly, when he finally chose to come back, things were a mess. Humanity had become a race of hopeless, irredeemably evil sinners who had forgotten about him. ("And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" --Genesis 6:5).
At this point, a solution was needed - this evil had to be stopped. God could have used his powers to make all the sinful people and only the sinful people vanish, blinked out of existence instantly. But he did not. Instead, he spoke to the last righteous man on earth, Noah, and told him to build an ark and take aboard his family and two of every kind of animal. He did so, and God sent a massive, catastrophic flood which decimated the planet and wiped out the sinners, as well as killing millions of innocent animals, plants, and human infants and children in the bargain.
Finally the floodwaters receded. Noah disembarked and released the animals to somehow survive on their own in the now lifeless and barren earth, with no food and no supportive ecosystems, and he and his family repopulated the globe. But once again, God had failed. Though the worldwide flood had been sent to wipe out evil, it utterly failed to do so. Noah's descendants spread throughout the world and, within a matter of years, forgot God entirely and became just as sinful and evil as the pre-flood people. In fact, Noah's very first act after the flood, after sacrificing some animals to God, was to plant some grapes so he could make wine, following which he promptly got drunk, passed out, and slept naked inside his tent. Noah's son Ham accidentally looked into the tent and saw his naked father; for this terrible crime Noah, apparently with God's approval, cursed Ham's son Canaan - his own grandson - and all of Canaan's descendants to a lifetime of slavery.
But, in any case, Yahweh was undaunted. Flush with pride at his "victory" over sin, he again took some time off to pat himself on the back. And when he returned, he noticed that the people of Earth had banded together and were building a mud-brick tower high enough to reach Heaven.
At this point, God could have moved his Heaven higher up - perhaps higher than the few hundred feet it must have been at the time - and enjoyed a hearty laugh at the silly antics of his creations. Instead, he panicked, expressed real fear that they would actually reach him and become as powerful as he was, and frantically responded by scattering the people of Earth, confusing and separating them by afflicting them with many different languages. (It should be noted in passing that God eventually forgot about this whole affair and allowed later humans to build much taller skyscrapers with no ill effects.)
Perhaps realizing by now that his large-scale plans kept failing, God decided to think small in his next attempt. He selected a man named Abraham, appeared to him, and vowed that his descendants would be the Almighty's chosen people, would enjoy divine favor ("And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee" --Genesis 12:3) and would inherit a great nation. Suitably impressed, Abraham left his home at God's urging and set out to the promised land.
God's promise passed from Abraham to his son, Isaac, who in turn had two sons, Esau and Jacob. As Isaac's firstborn, Esau was supposed to inherit the divine promise through a blessing, but Jacob deceived his dying father into giving the blessing to him instead. God, despite his omniscience, apparently was also fooled and honored the blessing, allowing Jacob to unfairly steal his brother's rightful place and become the sire of the chosen people. Jacob and his twelve sons became the Israelites, and the divine promise passed to them; Esau and his descendants, meanwhile, were condemned to live in the harsh desert and serve Jacob's descendants, setting the stage for millennia of ethnic hatred, strife and war.
However, Yahweh apparently forgot about his vow to protect and bless his chosen people, and they were almost immediately enslaved by the Egyptians. For several centuries, God's chosen people labored in bitter captivity, continually beaten by their overseers and forced into backbreaking work building monuments and hauling massive blocks of stone. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were rewarded for their faith by living and dying as slaves, trusting in a deliverance that never came for them. And what was the reason for God's allowing all this? The Bible gives none. It does not say that the Egyptian captivity was punishment for any misdeed, nor does it say it was intended to teach the Israelites any lesson. As far as we know, it happened simply because God inexplicably failed to deliver on his promise.
However, after about four hundred years (a time period far longer than the United States has been in existence), God finally noticed what was going on and decided to do something about it. He manifested himself to an Israelite named Moses and promised to use him as the vehicle through which he, God, would free his people.
At this point, God could have used his omniscience to determine exactly what punishment he had to mete out to Pharaoh to cause this. Instead, he began to punish the entire nation with progressively worse punishments, thereby inflicting much pain and suffering on innocent people who had no hand in the decision anyway. However, each of these failed to persuade Pharaoh to release the Israelites, and since God must have known ahead of time that they would fail, the inescapable conclusion is that he caused vast amounts of innocent suffering for nothing. Pharaoh was not persuaded to free the Israelites until God killed every completely innocent firstborn child in Egypt. Why didn't he just punish the one person responsible with something that would have been adequate from the start? Who knows?
But after all this innocent death and suffering, the people of Israel were free, and God led them out of Egypt. Then, through Moses, he burdened them with a long and arbitrary set of rules covering every aspect of daily life - what kinds of animals they were not allowed to eat, what activities they were not allowed to engage in on certain days of the week, how they had to mutilate their genitals to show their faith in him, and so on - and specified the horrible punishments for breaking any of them, most of which involved death in various cruel ways. The Israelites hated these rules so much that they rejected God's deliverance, preferring their slavery in Egypt. (No surprise there. According to fundamentalist Christians, the Mosaic law is impossible to faithfully follow. It is little wonder the people preferred their Egyptian taskmasters - at least they could please them some of the time!) As punishment, God forced them to wander in the desert until most of them had died. This included his great prophet Moses, who had given his entire life to leading the Israelites out of Egypt and was rewarded for his service by never even getting to set foot on the earth of the promised land.
Finally, God allowed his people to enter Palestine. Unfortunately, it was already occupied by other people who had taken up residence there during Israel's Egyptian captivity and by now had been living there for generations. At this point, God could have invited the native Palestinians into his covenant, given them the same laws he had given the Israelites, and established an egalitarian society where people of all races could live together in harmony. Instead, he ordered his people to invade and slaughter the natives, killing them to the last man, woman and child, specifically instructing them to show no mercy to anyone under any circumstances. What followed were a series of terrible, bloody battles in which tens of thousands of people died violently. Finally, God pronounced his campaign of genocide a success (Joshua 11:15) - but this was not true. Somehow, he had failed to notice that many of the people he had ordered his chosen to exterminate were still alive (as is shown by repeated biblical references to them after that point; see, for example, Judges 3:5). There was even one instance in which some of these people had survived despite God's efforts to kill them, apparently because their iron chariots defeated his omnipotence (Judges 1:19).
However, after all this death and bloodshed, the Israelites were at last in the promised land. At this point, God formed them into a loose confederacy of tribes and appointed the judges to govern them. This failed. The people continually fell into sin, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. Each time this happened, they cried out to God and he raised up a judge to save them, after which they promptly fell back into sin.
After several iterations of this, God became fed up and decided that there was only one way to break this cycle of sin and retribution: establish a monarchy in Israel. His first choice for king was Saul, who turned out to be a complete failure. Saul fell into sin, suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and finally committed suicide rather than be captured or killed in battle.
God's next choice for king was David, and just once - for the first time since creation - it looked as if he might have made the right decision. David and his son Solomon succeeded in rallying the Israelites behind them, and ruled over a glorious and powerful united monarchy, God's ideal state and the culmination of his promises to his chosen people (although God did break his promise, in Genesis 15:18, to give Abraham's descendants all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates: Israel was never this large even at the height of its power). However, Solomon's son Rehoboam proved to be an inept ruler, and in a move God failed to do anything to prevent, his united monarchy, after existing for only two kings, shattered into two separate, warring kingdoms. The vast majority of the tribes seceded, joining the new state of Israel in the north, while only a tiny rump state named Judah was left for David's throne.
In subsequent years, things got even worse. The kings of both nations continually fell into sin, taking all the people with them, routinely suffered punishing military defeats from neighboring nations, and were repeatedly enslaved. The crimes of Israel finally grew so intolerable that God threw a fit and sent the legendarily cruel Assyrian empire to destroy them, carrying ten of the original twelve Israelite tribes off into slavery where they vanished forever from history.
The kingdom of Judah still existed, however, and God tried one last time to save it. He raised up a devout king named Josiah, who was faithful to a degree undreamed-of by any of his predecessors ("And like unto him was there no king before him, that turned to the Lord with all his heart, and with all his soul, and with all his might, according to all the law of Moses; neither after him arose there any like him" --2 Kings 23:25). Josiah instituted religious reforms, burning the groves and smashing the idols of pagan religions, and made a great covenant with the people to follow the law of God. It seemed as if Judah might finally be saved from disaster - and then Josiah went out to battle with an invading Egyptian army, God failed to protect him, and he was promptly killed by an Egyptian arrow.
The last few kings of Judah were disastrous sinners, undoing all of Josiah's reforms. Realizing that once again he had failed, Yahweh threw another of his temper tantrums and allowed the Babylonian empire to destroy his nation entirely, razing his holy temple to the ground and carrying the last of his chosen people off to slavery in a distant land.
A lesser deity might have concluded by now that the experiment begun with Abraham was a failure, but God was determined to see things through. Grudgingly, he let some of his people return to Israel and rebuild the Temple, and he appointed prophets to keep them on the right track this time. This failed. The chosen people continued to sin, becoming prideful, legalistic hypocrites, and refused to turn from their ways despite numerous punishing defeats and eventual enslavement by the Romans.
At this point, God realized he had one last chance to redeem his people, and he came up with a daring, drastic plan to do it. He descended to Earth and took mortal form, incarnating himself in a human body. Upon reaching adulthood, he sought out his people and told them he had come to give them a completely new message, abandoning his old promises that the Messiah would be a king and military leader. He revoked all the old, cruel laws he had once given them, letting them know that he had changed his mind, that they were no longer necessary. In their place he substituted new, simple principles, teaching them about forgiveness, about their shared humanity, and most importantly, about the deep and abiding love he had for every one of his precious children.
For once obeying the law they had been given so long ago, the Jews promptly seized this incarnated god, charged him with blasphemy, and killed him.
Christians, of course, claim that this was what God had in mind all along, that only through the shedding of his blood could we be forgiven for our sins. However, I am not so sure. Throughout all the millennia God knew the Jews, he failed to ever tell them that this was the method of redemption he had in mind. There is not a single prophecy anywhere in the Old Testament that clearly predicts the sacrificial death and subsequent resurrection of an incarnated god. Besides, God is supposed to be all-powerful. If he wanted to forgive us, why couldn't he just forgive us? Why was the agonizing and bloody death of an innocent person necessary for human salvation? Perhaps it was not, and God's propagandists only attributed this significance to it afterward to avoid this debacle being labeled as another complete failure.
In any case, God returned to Heaven and appointed apostles to spread his new faith to the Jews. This failed, as the evangelists were viciously persecuted and soundly rejected in town after town, winning relatively few converts. Flustered by his chosen people's rejection of him, God had no choice but to abandon them entirely and pass his promise of salvation on to the Gentiles, creating a new religion called Christianity. A church formed and almost immediately fragmented into numerous squabbling sects, all deeply divided as to the nature and intent of God.
At this point, God could have simply stepped in and set the record straight by letting all concerned know what he really meant. He failed to do so, and the church continued to splinter, breaking off into many smaller sects and denominations, consumed by infighting. God could also have sent more signs and wonders, as he routinely did in Old Testament times, to let the world know that the new religion really was of him; but he failed to do this as well, and for several centuries Christianity remained a small fringe group on the verge of extinction, heavily persecuted, its followers routinely tortured and slaughtered by the authorities.
It was only by luck that the new church caught the eye of a Roman emperor and survived. (Of course, God may have had a hand in this, but his inexplicably waiting so long to do it can be considered a failure. Certainly it was no comfort to the thousands who had already been tortured to death or mauled by wild animals in great stadiums for the edification of the masses.) But finally Christianity caught on, and became the dominant religion of Europe.
At this point, God could have used his dominance over the civilized world to bring forth a new golden age of enlightenment and peace. Instead, he suddenly decided to completely stop sending new revelations and miracles, and his church stultified and dragged humanity down into the Dark Ages. Knowledge declined and superstition and ignorance ruled; innocent people were imprisoned, tortured and killed in vicious inquisitions, scientists whose findings contradicted holy scripture were silenced and forced to recant, and plague after plague decimated humanity because, incidentally, God had failed to tell people that washing one's hands, and not whipping oneself or singing hymns, would keep illness away. New denominations arose that almost immediately became embroiled in savage religious wars, including a series of military expeditions called the Crusades that sent millions of people to their deaths, and conquistadors in foreign lands enslaved and slaughtered millions more in God's name. (Somehow, throughout all the thousands of years he had been speaking to humanity, God failed to ever provide a single clear-cut condemnation of slavery.) Kings and popes claimed divine right, stifling democracy and free speech. And all this time, the lot of the common man remained full of misery and suffering.
At any point during this time, God could have stepped in to stop these atrocities and correct people's ignorance. He failed to do so, and it was not until the Enlightenment, when people rediscovered the principles of science and democracy and began to investigate and think for themselves, that things began to improve - no thanks to humanity's cosmic absentee landlord.
And this brings us to today. God has been silent for thousands of years, perhaps realizing that the problems of this world have grown beyond his ability to contain. Humanity now has the power to completely destroy itself, and nearly has done so on several occasions. We are multiplying beyond our planet's ability to sustain life even as we destroy our environment, recklessly expending our natural resources, driving species to extinction, polluting our water and air. Terrorism and armed conflict threaten our safety. Weapons of mass destruction continue to proliferate. The Christian church has fractured into hundreds of sects, some of which are tainted by allegations of institutionalized sex abuse, others of which are convulsed and splintering further over the issue of ordaining gays, and false religions abound. People continue to kill and die over religion, and nowhere on Earth do they do so more fervently or more often than in what was once God's promised land. And, to hear certain Christians tell it, by far the worst sins of society out of all of these - gay marriage and safe and legal abortion - continue to gain ground and societal acceptance.
Soon, according to the fundamentalists' millennialist theology, God will become sick of it all and throw his ultimate temper tantrum, consigning this entire failed experiment called creation to the flame. Soon, Judgment Day will come, humanity will be wiped out, and Satan will have won. Only a select few, a small fraction of all the people who have ever lived, will have made it to Heaven, while billions upon billions of souls will be in Hell, condemned to endless, eternal agony in the flame. The screams of the damned will completely drown out the joyous songs of the saved. And this is supposed to be a positive outcome? This is what God's grand plan will amount to in the end?
Things didn't have to be this way. At so many points throughout history, God could have acted differently, even in small ways, to alter the destiny of his creation. Yet at each critical juncture, at every single step along the way, he failed to do so. Again and again, he failed.
He could have wiped Satan out of existence, changed him to be good again, or at least actually imprisoned him in Hell and not allowed him to roam the world doing evil. Or, instead of leaving the first humans ignorant, unprotected and vulnerable, he could easily have made them so powerful and wise they would have recognized Satan for what he was and rejected him on sight. Even if he had not done this, he could have forgiven the first humans for their transgressions, or at least only punished the two of them and not cast the curse of original sin on the entire planet. It cannot be overemphasized that taking any of these steps would have made all that followed unnecessary. All of God's subsequent plans were merely an attempt to clean up the mess he made by allowing all this to happen in the first place!
Even if all these things had happened, God could have made many different decisions afterward to produce a better overall outcome. For example, he could have stayed with the world after the fall, not allowing it to slide into sin; or, if things came to that, he could have used a miracle to selectively eliminate the evildoers, rather than sending a flood that killed millions of innocent living creatures while simultaneously failing utterly to eliminate sin as it was intended to do. He could have ignored the attempts of humans to build the Tower of Babel (which would itself have taught them a good lesson about humility), rather than punishing them for it with the confusion of languages which would only lead to more misunderstanding and division among people in the long run. He could have ignored Jacob's attempts at deception and bestowed his blessing upon the son it was supposed to go to, preventing millennia of ethnic hatred, resentment and strife. He could have kept his vow to Abraham and prevented the Israelites from ever being enslaved, or at least sent only one sufficient punishment to Pharaoh to obtain their release rather than building up to it and making innocent people suffer pointlessly.
He could have given the Israelites laws that were actually possible to follow, rather than impossible and restrictive ones that would inspire them to hate and resent him. He could have invited the native people of Palestine into his covenant rather than setting the horrible precedent of sanctioning warfare and genocide in the name of God. He could have instituted democracy among his people rather than absolutist monarchy since, after all, there is no guarantee that the son of a good king will be a good king himself. In this way, bad rulers would have been promptly removed from office rather than dragging the entire nation down with them. He could have actually protected the good kings from harm by enemies. He could have given his people messianic prophecies that clearly applied to Jesus, so they would not have rejected him. He could also have chosen to forgive sinners merely through his omnipotent will to do so, rather than through the torturous death of an innocent which itself inspired his followers to commit countless acts of retributive bloodshed throughout the centuries. At any of numerous points throughout history, he could have stepped in with just a little clear guidance, letting confused humans know what he really wanted or meant. He could have exerted just the smallest amount of his omnipotent power to steer people away from sin until they were wise enough to avoid it on their own. He could simply make his presence more obvious to prevent any one of the numerous problems and arguments humanity finds itself afflicted with. The list goes on and on. Suffice it to say - at any time in history when it was possible to make a good decision, Yahweh made a bad one.
And these are just the improvements possible in the plan he actually did use. If God had wanted to make radical changes to this plan, there are many that would have resulted in a tremendously better outcome.
To name one, he could have created, instead of defective humans and angels, free-willed beings who would all freely choose to obey him and do only what is good. Despite what Christian apologists say, this is clearly possible. Although Christians believe God never sins, he is still believed to have free will. Therefore, whatever quality God possesses that enables him to avoid sin, he could have given this quality to his created beings as well. Perhaps it is his holy nature that causes him to detest and avoid sinful behavior, or perhaps it is the intelligence and rationality necessary to fully understand that sin is a futile and self-destructive course. (Surely Christians would agree that this is in fact true?) Doing this would have eliminated the need for a Hell entirely.
Or, rather than waste time setting up a religion called Judaism he only intended to supersede eventually anyway, God could have taken human form and performed his sacrificial death and resurrection immediately after the Fall. In this way he could have eliminated millennia of sin and strife as people futilely attempted to obey impossible laws. With the transforming power of Christ in their hearts and that many fewer arbitrary and bureaucratic restrictions to follow, the Israelites would have been far less tempted by idolatry. With the option of salvation open to everyone, God could have prevented at least one cause of the racial and religious exclusivism which provoked so much hatred and caused so much suffering and so many deaths - both in the pre-Christian period as the Israelites warred with their neighbors, and later on as Christians persecuted and killed Jews for being "Christ-killers".
Most radically of all, God could have dispensed with the whole idea of creating a world of imperfect material beings. Why did he need to mold us out of fallible clay? Why not make us of pure spirit, free of fleshly temptations, free to roam infinite space at will? God could have made us all gods, free to create our own worlds, our own paradises. He could have given us infinite freedom, and instead he imprisoned us in these cages of muscle and bone, imprisoned our souls in vulnerable brains that often obscure our true natures from shining through. He made us able to suffer and feel hurt, made us able to become sick and injured, made us able to die. Why did he do this? Why did God create beings as limited as us, when he could have created so much more?
Of course, the atheist's answer to this question is the simplest. I do not, of course, believe that all the events described above actually happened, or that God was behind the ones that did happen. I am merely pointing out that, even if taken on its own terms, the Christian story implies a deity who is massively incompetent, and this creates a fundamental contradiction with the tenets of Christian belief that there is a god who is all-knowing, all-powerful, and completely good. Since the facts of this world's history are not open to change, and since we are justified in believing things would be much better if there was such a being, the most likely conclusion is that no such being exists. Though some Christian apologists claim the choices God made must have been the best ones possible, based purely on their belief that those are the choices he made, this argument is circular. To genuinely refute the arguments presented above, they would have to show why the choices I describe would have led to a worse world than the one we live in, and this is a challenge I do not think they can meet. What could possibly be a worse overall outcome than the large majority of humanity ending up in Hell forever?
If there really is a god - as unlikely as I consider that possibility to be - the Christian story is a slander on him. It depicts him as so poor at understanding the psychology of others that he simply cannot make free-willed beings who all desire of their own accord to be in fellowship with him. It depicts him as so inept that his will can be thwarted and his plans ruined by the acts of beings who are infinitely beneath him. It depicts him as so short-tempered and malicious that he would think nothing of punishing evil with acts that also inflict massive harm and suffering on those who were completely innocent of the deed. It depicts his power and his imagination as so limited that he cannot think of any way to stop evil other than with destruction, mass death and bloodshed; and it depicts him as so bereft of ideas that, whenever he does destroy evildoers in this fashion, he starts over again with a small group of people who turn out to be just as evil and rebellious as those he destroyed. It depicts him as setting out to make a perfect creation and then blundering so completely and so finally that he will ultimately have no choice but to consign the vast majority of his creations to the fire of torment.
Can a rational person really accept this? Does it make sense to believe that this scenario is the crowning work of infinite goodness and wisdom?
For my part, I cannot believe this. I reject the Christian fundamentalists' story. I reject the theology of a perfect god who set out to bring forth good and brought forth evil. I reject the gospel of universal sin, I reject the gospel of total depravity, and I reject the gospel of eternal pain. I cannot in good conscience or sound mind accept such a bafflingly and frustratingly illogical system. This world is what it is, indifferent to us and sometimes cruel to us, and we cannot change that - but we can stop deepening the insult by telling ourselves that it is presided over by a benevolent deity who approves of the way things are. Instead, we should set aside these unproductive myths and use our intelligence to improve conditions in this life, both by using science to bring the natural world under our control and by improving morality to put an end to the ceaseless and pointless hatred so many people have for each other. Ironically, the belief that there is a good god has often proved to be a powerful impediment to progress, as believers reason that to try to improve our lives is a blasphemous rejection of God's ideal order. However, we are now mature enough to look beyond that superstitious fear. Whether a god got us to this point or not, it is now up to us to do better. We have the tools, and we can and should use them. That is a worthy goal in life, and that is what atheism teaches us
Mr Wiggl3s
Dedicated LVC Member
listen its like this
believe that everything came from something, i.e. god is just as ludacris as believing that everything came from nothing, i.e. the big bang
believe that everything came from something, i.e. god is just as ludacris as believing that everything came from nothing, i.e. the big bang
I can believe that something beyond our comprehention created the universe.
It didn't just come from nothing.
ID and darwin can coexhist.
What I don't believe is it was the God as portrayed in the bible.
Or any gods or prophets from the organized religions on this world.
Being mortals we all want to think there's an afterlife but we won't know until we die and then we can't tell anybody.
The universe it too huge and vast and we're such a tiny part of it.
Why create such a vastness and then focus on us humans
as being central to it all.
I think it shows a great conceit on our part.
It didn't just come from nothing.
ID and darwin can coexhist.
What I don't believe is it was the God as portrayed in the bible.
Or any gods or prophets from the organized religions on this world.
Being mortals we all want to think there's an afterlife but we won't know until we die and then we can't tell anybody.
The universe it too huge and vast and we're such a tiny part of it.
Why create such a vastness and then focus on us humans
as being central to it all.
I think it shows a great conceit on our part.
which is something i lightly touched on before. when you lose god, man loses his all powerful specialness and uniqueness inherent in religious ideals. he becomes just another part of the animal kingdom. that's a thought some just cannot digest. other than a different intelligence than that of most other animals, there is nothing special about man.
that was a good read 04SCTLS. i've never given it THAT much thought, but it does have the overall assumption of how i feel. and yes, more arguement is given to christian/jewish ideals in the west because of thier prominence here. but a good arguement could be made for any religious ideal and thier fallacies that come from enlightenment.
According to the big bang theory, it did.
Then you are missing the whole point of God entirely. To believe in God is to believe in something (or someone) greater then yourself; that life doesn't revolve around you. Ask anyone who believes in a God and this is what they will tell you.
To take away God, in effect, elevates man to that level, or as close as any creature can ever achieve. This is why, IMO, athiesm is inherently nothing more then a self-serving quazi-religion; which is it's biggests flaw.
04sctls, I hope you realize that those last couple articles you printed were nothing more then Christian bashing by people with an irrational hatred for christianity. Loads of distortion and misinformation. Further proves my point that athiesm (at least at it's worst) is not an intellectual search for the truth, but a self-serving attempt to make man into his own personal God. Even as a non-christian, I found those articles highly offensive. You would be a fool to think even for a second that those articles have anything intellignt to say.
FYI; there was much more "preaching" in those articles (by athiests) then I have heard from any christians in the past 10 years (and my father is a retired pastor). There was also as much hatred in those articles as any rant by Hitler or a KKK grand dragon.
FYI; there was much more "preaching" in those articles (by athiests) then I have heard from any christians in the past 10 years (and my father is a retired pastor). There was also as much hatred in those articles as any rant by Hitler or a KKK grand dragon.
Many years ago when I told some people I didn't believe in an afterlife I was surprised to hear them say "I feel so sorry for you"
Someone else said if you believe in God and heaven, then die and find there isn't one well no harm, but if there is one you may have some difficulties getting in.
I think emusings is a very interesting site regardless of one's beliefs. A much smoother even tempered read than anything overdone Hitchens ever writes. A lot of effort has gone into it and even believers IMO can gain reading some of the essays, if only to see what the other side is thinking.
Someone else said if you believe in God and heaven, then die and find there isn't one well no harm, but if there is one you may have some difficulties getting in.
I think emusings is a very interesting site regardless of one's beliefs. A much smoother even tempered read than anything overdone Hitchens ever writes. A lot of effort has gone into it and even believers IMO can gain reading some of the essays, if only to see what the other side is thinking.