Truth
Truth Abstracts Piped from Yahoo! Pipes
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
© Dr M D Magee
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Abstract
These abstracts are taken from the actual pages and piped here via Yahoo! Pipes. They allow you to get a flavour of each page to see whether it might be of interest without having to load every one. An aid to browsing the website! The Heading in each case is a link to the page.
AW! Truth Abstracts
Abstracts from each page on the Truth directory of the AskWhy! main website.
The Art of Apologetics
Critics of Christianity have a right to ask hard questions and point out inconsistencies. Many know the bible better than Christians. If Christianity is to be presented intellectually, then it must stand up intellectually. If it does not, then it must fall, and the Christian should be grateful to have been saved by their brains from being led into a dark night for the soul orchestrated by the Devil or devilish people on earth. They might begin to look for the truth they constantly spout about while spreading manifest lies and dishonest sophistry. Typical of Christian sophistry is that doubt is a weakness fatal to belief and must be resisted, but knowing it is normal and, when suppressed, strengthens faith! But why should someone who simply believes on principle be regarded as some sort of intellectual? Someone who just believes is anything but an intellectual. Just believing is an abrogation of the intellectual faculties. The Christian discipline of apologetics.
The Art of Being Skeptical
When pseuds want to persuade the credulous with little supporting evidence, they make loud and bold claims of the power and veracity of their lie. The resurrection of a dead man is the most popular and widely believed example. Gullible people cannot distinguish the useful from the worthless. All ideas are not equally valid, so making choices about what to believe is not arbitrary. The machinery for distinguishing them is essential to the success of science. Scientists begin by being skeptical about their own ideas and criticize them ruthlessly. What seem useful is published and made available to all scientists to criticize. The openness of science makes it work, and stands in the way of deception. Political and religious institutions know that skepticism is dangerous. If we teach everybody in high school the habit of being skeptical, they will not restrict their skepticism but will question politicians, marketing, the false science put out by corporations, and religious beliefs. That will not do!
Science is mightier than the Word
Science can illuminate all the relevant questions of existence while using, and respecting human intellect, and does so in a manner that makes full use of, and respects the human intellect. Religion is the antithesis of science. God is an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation. Religion purports to explain but resorts to tautology. It is the institutionalisation of prejudice. Science, with its publicly accessible corpus of information and its open, scrutable arguments, can lead the wondering to an understanding of the entire world. The secular society is a humane society. Reason furnishes the foundations of hope for the future and rids the world of false hope and false imperatives. Reconciliation in the conflict of religion and science is impossible because the techniques and criteria of religion and science are so different. Only those of science are valid.
Why Christianity Must be True!
Biblical books were plainly not written by common people. The Old Testament books were written by Persian administrators, and the first century writers were literate Essenes or, even according to Christian tradition, were mainly educated people, a doctor, a tax collector, the son of a wealthy woman, a man educated in the best Jewish school there was. Common? And since when were the New Testament books written in Palestine? Most, if not all, were not. Jews never ceased to assert that Christianity was a fraud, and Christians hardly ever ceased in their attempt to harass the Jews to extinction, but the people who knew the truth died and cannot be called as witnesses, not least because had they written anything to prove their position, the Christians would have burnt it. In Christian Europe, they killed and burnt the bibles of many Jews, as no honest Christian can deny and no historian would.
Biblical Archaeology
If archaeology reveals facts that refute or even cast doubt on the biblical stories then they should be admitted, and not ignored or swamped in a load of non-factual biblical counter speculation. Biblicists cannot be archaeologists because they will not be subject to the scientific method. Dr Bryant Wood, director of Associates for Biblical Research, sticks to the old date for the conquest of Canaan, presumably based on the inerrant bible, yet seems not to notice that the Philistines whom Moses had to avoid when crossing the Sinai, were not around in 1400 BC. Wood cannot get his mind round the fact that archaeology has found no evidence of Saul, David and Solomon, or anything much before them, yet he describes himself as “one of the leading experts on the archaeology of Jericho”. Some experts are expert at falsehood not truth. How faith contradicts truth in biblical archaeology
Christianity Examined
Christians are asserting that a man returned from the dead. They have to prove that it actually happened. Accepting that it all happened long ago and the matter can no longer be settled by examination of the direct evidence, we have to look at the proof offered us. If that proof contains errors, even minor ones, it detracts from the value of the evidence, and disposes us not to believe the main point. The evidence they offer is old books, called gospels, collected in the New Testament. They are valuable historical documents about the world in first century Palestine. What do they prove about the claim? That a man rose from the dead is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. His tomb was visited, found empty, and indeed no one ever found his dead body. There are no other cases of a man rising from the dead that are not mythical, and what is extraordinary about the fact that this story was written in a book?
Science or Delusion
There is something dishonestly self-serving in the tactic of claiming that religious beliefs are outside the domain of science. Miracle stories and the promise of life after death are used to impress simple people, win converts, and swell congregations. It is their scientific power that gives these stories their popular appeal. At the same time it is considered below the belt to subject the same stories to the rigours of scientific criticism. Then these are religious matters and outside the domain of science. But religious theorists and apologists should not be allowed to get away with having it both ways. Many of us, including nonreligious people, are too ready to let them.
Styles of Religious Belief
Most religious people are loyal to just one religion, though there are hundreds of them. For religious know-alls, religion is good for people and for society because it provides consolation and a moral code. There is little evidence for God, let alone for the virgin birth or the resurrection, but, if there were no God, He would be invented to keep the uneducated masses out of mischief or to comfort them in misfortune. Religious people rarely feel the need to find the religion with the best evidence in its favour, the best miracles, the best moral code, the best cathedrals. Those who do are decried as apostates. Mostly they do not choose their religion or seek the one with the most holy reputation, but follow whatever their parents believed. Nobody could deny this as a plain fact, though simple religious people seem not to notice, and those who do go on believing in their parents’ religion though it might be wrong!
Jesus in Fairyland
Christians tell us the founder of their religion was a perfectly holy person, God incarnate. He got himself crucified as a human sacrifice to atone for the sins of mankind. He wanted his followers only to be humble, to love everyone, to be tolerant of and merciful towards others. If this was a model for Jesus, Christians from the earliest days did not feel it was a model to be followed themselves, and they have no exclusive title to caring and compassionate values. Really, Jesus was a Jewish leader, as the gospels admit when he deliberately entered Jerusalem as a king to the acclamation of the multitude. To any unbiased historian, this is evident, but it is not to Christians who have been indoctrinated with Christian mythology, often since birth. And the only evidence of it all is that recorded in the New Testament, a set of books compiled by the church, years after the events they relate, to persuade people to convert!
The Dogma of the Flies
Redi wrote, “I started to doubt whether the worms were generated directly from the putrefying flesh, rather than being the consequence of egg deposition by flies”. Flesh and plant never become verminous if they are kept where flies and mosquitoes cannot enter. Animal and plant tissues play no other part, nor have any other role in the generation of insects, than to prepare a suitable place or nest into which, during the period of generation eggs and other seeds of worms are laid and hatched by the animals. But, Aristotle, who was the authority on science believed by the Church, had declared flies and lower animals, such as worms, sprang directly from decaying flesh. Belief in the incarnation of flies was as obligatory as belief in the incarnation of God.
What Fundamentalists Know about God’s Brain
For Fundamentalists, the task of biblical scholarship is to provide exegetical cover for the truth of theological tradition. They take biblical “evidence” to mean affirmative evidence. When scholars find only a fifth of the sayings of Jesus convincingly genuine, Fundamentalists, certain of it all, say four fifths of the evidence has been rejected. They cannot accept that biblical evidence can be unreliable or even false or negative evidence. Some sayings of Jesus might confidently be traced to the historical Jesus but many are only evidence for the beliefs of early Christians, who, even if Jesus were divine, were not themselves divine or infallible, and put their own words in the mouth of Jesus. Plainly an infallible man cannot have gone around saying, “The End is nigh”, when 2000 years later it has still not arrived.
After God, Does Don Cupitt Understand Science? 1
People like Nietzsche and Freud declared God a human literary construct fashioned after the human image, and not the reverse. God was imaginary. He was a human male, writ large, alternatively petulant and bullying, demanding and dismissive, cruel and, latterly, supposedly kind. The outcome of the clash between the real and the imaginary God is inclining, in the twenty first century, towards the victory of the imaginary God. Belief in a god is not proof that he exists. The false objectification of myths has now been recognized, even by some Christians. Cupitt wants to show that belief in the existence of the Christian God should be abandoned. God does not exist and never did, except as a concept in the minds of His believers. That this is so should be acknowledged. God can still be believed, because nothing has changed except that God is properly understood. The concept of God is, Cupitt argues, still useful.
Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin
The bait of Christianity for the Christian is clearly shown here. It is immortality. Calvin says it is obtained by knowledge of God—a curiously Gnostic sounding expression. He expounds the creed relating to Christ’s death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven, a mythology which is readily explained in terms of his naïve followers’ expectations of the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom on earth which Jesus taught but which proved false. To be saved is another myth which can be traced to the Essene Jewish belief in a kingdom of heaven on earth which the Christians adopted and distorted. A discussion of Olevian’s epitome of Calvin’s Institutes.
A Critique of “Runaway World” by Michael Green 1
A criticism of Runaway World by E M B Green. Green offers Jewish evidence for Christianity, which he says was strong enough to warrant belief in it, and the early Jewish Christians believed it to a man. Jews certainly did not believe it “to a man”, and Green soon warns us the evidence is sparse. So the Christian God, more powerful than a million super-novae, did not plan His campaign of salvation too well. He lets His unique demonstration of it pass only sparsely reported. “It was to test our faith”, bleats the Christian, although why faith should be a criterion of salvation is not clear to anyone who can see the roguery behind it. In fact, believers are not saved because they are taken in contrary to all of God’s warnings in the Jewish scriptures. Most Jews rejected Jesus as the messiah but the gentile Christians did not, and they, not Jews, built Christianity. Moreover, the gospels are clear that Jesus was not God, so why should anyone believe otherwise?
Evolution and Richard Milton
For long the process of mutation through random mistakes in the DNA helix was thought to be blind but the cited work, among others, has shown evolution can have direction at the micro (genetic) level as well as at the macro level. Milton shows us proof of the progress of scientific discovery at work as if it were proof that scientists were idiots. Phony critics of science always quote some scientists against others, as though there are a few good scientists fighting desperately against a lot of bad ones. There are indeed good and bad scientists and arrogant ones and modest ones, and arrogant ones often shout louder. Milton mentions Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the function of DNA, as if he were on his side, but Crick is indebted to thousands of scientists who have helped to substantiate his and Watson’s discovery of the double helix, the physical basis of the theory of evolution Milton tries his best to demolish. Exposing the ignorance of Richard Milton author of the Alernative Science web site
Some Faults of the Christian Religion
Some modern Christians still do not know anything of Christian history, and call anyone who reminds them of it devils. The stories of Christian martyrdom were mainly untrue. The genuine martyrs were Jewish. Christians will not give up their pretence that the foundation myths of their religion are not only myths but history. The refusal to consider rational explanations and evidence produces hostility to evidence and causes believers to close their minds to anything that does not suit their prejudices, the basis of fundamentalism and creationism. Christians persecuted rationalists and freethinkers for instituting tolerance and liberalism into modern society. A rational and contemporarily justifiable hypothesis explaining the gospel stories can be formulated but no Christian will even consider it. Christian doctrine became more enlightened in the last 200 years, but now has regressed. A consideration of some problems with Christianity first considered by Bertrand Russell
Christianity in Court
Because hearsay is inadmissible and rules out the New Testament material on which Christianity depends, Christian attorneys play down the importance of the hearsay rule by saying that it is a “technical device”, now abandoned in English civil trials, and subject to many exceptions, so many that there is not much of a rule left. Nevertheless, no lawyer would attempt to introduce hearsay evidence in a trial. The principle of the hearsay rule remains vital in courts—a witness ought to testify of his own knowledge or observation, not on the basis of what has come to him indirectly from others. Even in English civil trials, the judge will give hearsay evidence only minimal weight. No case could be based entirely on hearsay testimony, as Christianity is. Precis of Richard Packham on the New Testament as evidence
Prophecies of the Messiah
The gospels suggest that none of the immediate followers of Jesus expected him to be crucified. Here is a prophecy that the disciples did not know of, or perhaps there was no prophecy. Or is it simply that because resurrections after three days are almost unknown in history, the apostles did not consider the possibility, despite the elusive prophesy? Only in Hosea 6:2 is there a prophecy of resurrection of the third day. It is a promise of resurrection for all righteous people, or all people, and this expectation will be the source of the Christianised personal resurrection prophecy of Jesus. Jesus will have been telling his followers, not that he would particularly be resurrected on the third day, but that they all would, as righteous people freed of sin by repentance and baptism, and thereafter committed to righteous acts. The main one was to free Zion from the Romans.
Tough Questions for the Christian Church by James Buckner
Why are many Old Testament prophecies about Jesus taken out of context in the New Testament, not being messianic prophecies at all. Why would Jesus’s disciples and Jesus himself misquote and misrepresent the Old Testament and conflate verses? Surely the Son of God would not allow a disciple to persist in distorted understanding of the scriptures, nor teach a synagogue class an unjustified misinterpretation of scripture? Why does the genealogy in Matthew show that Jesus descended through a cursed line. Jeconiah (Jehoiachin) and his father Jehoiakim were both cursed by God himself, who said that neither of these men would have any descendent on the throne of David. How could Jesus possibly be the messiah, destined to rule forever on the throne of David, if he descended through either of these men? James Buckner’s 120 unanswered questions that turned him from Christianity.
The Resurrection of Jesus Christ: Myth or Reality?
One of the explanations of the appearances is that the apostles lied, but Christians cannot understand how Jesus’s disciples could have been liars and yet transformed into bold witnesses who died for their belief in the resurrection. Of the twelve disciples, Christians say ten died for their belief in Christ’s resurrection and their belief in him as the Son of God. In fact, only the New Testament tells us there were twelve disciples. Jewish sources suggest Jesus had five disciples, and nothing certain is known about the subsequent careers of any one of them, even Peter. How then does Christian apologist know that ten died for their beliefs? In any case, how does he know that the apostles of Christ taught the same beliefs as the apostle to the gentiles—who spent much of his careers decrying the work of the original apostles—upon whose work Christianity now stands? On the resurrection.
Significant Soundbites
Selections of sayings about christianity and the relationship of science and religion
Significant Soundbites 1
A selection of sayings about christianity and the relationship of science and religion
The Jesus Papyrus
Thiede hopes to strengthen the evidence that Jesus was known to be divine by his contemporaries. If Thiede’s downdating is true, and if nomina sacra are used for the name of Jesus, these fragments show that some of the early Jesus movement thought that Jesus was like God, Moses or David, and his name sacred. If the practice can be seen as early as 70 AD, the first Christians used the nomen sacra for the name of a man they had witnessed as a god. Within the lifetime of some of the disciples, Matthew therefore recorded an eyewitness account of the deeds of a god. His redating is seriously flawed, his method tendentious, and contrary to modern scholarship on the synoptic gospels, but the media said, “new papyrus fragment shows that followers of Jesus knew he was divine”. Thiede, with hack, Matthew d’Ancona, wrote The Jesus Papyrus (USA Eyewitness to Jesus). What is amazing is that there is no evidence whatsoever.
The Three Imposters 1
An edition of the purportedly 13th century, 1230 AD, lost work of religious criticism, probably a 17th century forgery of a work, though the central section here might be much of the original, other parts having been added by way of explanation. This edition is based on a 1904 translation available at the Infidels Website. Originally written in unpunctuated Latin, the sentence structure was unwieldy. Here the text has been punctuated into shorter sentences closer to the modern style, but sufficient of the original wording and style has been kept to give a taste of the original. The order has also been somewhat rearranged.
The Three Imposters 2
An edition of the purportedly 13th century, 1230 AD, lost work of religious criticism, probably a 17th century forgery of a work, though the central section here might be much of the original, other parts having been added by way of explanation. This edition is based on a 1904 translation available at the Infidels Website. Originally written in unpunctuated Latin, the sentence structure was unwieldy. Here the text has been punctuated into shorter sentences closer to the modern style, but sufficient of the original wording and style has been kept to give a taste of the original. The order has also been somewhat rearranged.
The Three Imposters 3
An edition of the purportedly 13th century, 1230 AD, lost work of religious criticism, probably a 17th century forgery of a work, though the central section here might be much of the original, other parts having been added by way of explanation. This edition is based on a 1904 translation available at the Infidels Website. Originally written in unpunctuated Latin, the sentence structure was unwieldy. Here the text has been punctuated into shorter sentences closer to the modern style, but sufficient of the original wording and style has been kept to give a taste of the original. The order has also been somewhat rearranged.
Tipler on God and Hume
Throwaway statements about God dupe some folk into thinking scientists are finding the personal God they have been taught at school to believe in. It is not true. All are metaphors drawing upon the idea that God is supposedly the biggest and most important thing conceivable, to suggest how important some discoveries in science are. They are not admitting that the Christian God has been discovered anywhere. Crucifixers try to use them to persuade their flocks that missionaries and ministers were right all along. The most basic physical laws, the biblicists say, are so strange and contrary to experience that God is just as good an explanation of them. Whatever the ultimate foundation of reality, to be called God rather than Nature or the Cosmos, it has to be personal in some meaningful sense. An abstract God is simply another principle of Nature to be discovered by science.
God and the Cosmologists
Two sets of conjectures about the origins of the universe, formulated hundreds of years apart, apparently correspond fairly closely in a synchronicity which must have some divine significance. So we can have more scientific confidence in cosmologists’ speculations because they agree with the arcane musings of some Jewish magicians? It is re-assuring Jewish and perhaps Christian believers—after all they both have the same God—that science is simply confirming what God has already revealed to the fringe element of Judaism centuries ago. What a relief! Discussion of views reported by M Wertheim in the New Scientist regarding cosmologists’ ideas of God
Edwin Yamauchi and the Heart of Evangelism
Christians tell people that they know things they do not, and weak and naive people believe them. In history, people had no option but to be Christian or be incinerated. It follows that intelligent people chose not to be incinerated. When people have a fairer choice, intelligent people by a large margin choose not to be Christian, except rogues out to get a comfortable living from widows and cretins. Christians come in two varieties, the shepherds who take from the platter and the sheep who put into it. Where do you suppose the funds for Christian colleges that employ people like Yamauchi came from? Yamauchi would not cut off the branch he comfortably sits on by finding evidence Christianity is a fraud. Wake up! Knowledge and intelligence are incompatible with faith! Just to believe requires evidence to be discounted or ignored. Christians get angry when Sun Moon or some other barmy sect wins over their children to their cranky views, but they cannot see that Christians began it all.
The Scopes Trial
In 1925, the freedom of scientists to discover about the world by proposing and testing hypotheses was challenged by religious and political bigots over teaching the theory of evolution. Many Christians were opposed to the trial. Clarence Darrow, a successful labour lawyer, defended the teacher, John Scopes. Darrow knew that religion was a confidence trick and regarded it with contempt, and saw science as the way of truth. The religious right, unable to comprehend truth at all, suggest to their sheep that Darrow just wanted to get at religion. Darrow actually chose to oppose William Jennings Bryan because he wanted to defeat religious fanaticism. The main defense was that the anti-evolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools. The Scopes trial was a test case. The issue was one of freedom before the authoritarian Christian right who want to tell everyone what to do.
Good Christians
Carl McIntire—If anyone gets thrown out of a church for causing trouble, they can approach another 20,000 or so Christian sects with their God-given talents, and if none will accept them, they start a new one. Members of McIntire’s church accused him of dishonesty, something that Christians cannot be, so he was enraged. True to his democratic record, he threw his rattle out of the pram and stormed off to form a rival church. Again falling out with his church in 1984, he set up yet another one. Now McIntire was manifestly incoherent in his sermonizing, but refused to retire. He was 90. The elders again had to evict him. McIntire insisted that good Christians did not drink, despite the plain use of wine by his incarnate God, nor had he any concern for God’s commandments such as the one that says, “thou shalt not kill”. He advocated nuking the Soviet Union, just as that other pious Christian George W Bush advocates nuking Iraq.
Dennis Prager on the Exodus
People like to make up noble origins for themselves, so, because the Torah story does the opposite of what is expected, it must be true, according to Prager logic! In logic, it suggests that the Jews did not make up these stories about themselves. The Persians did! Judaism was invented by the Persian kings, and was developed by Greek kings, the Egyptian Ptolemies. The Persians wanted to get the Jews to see the Egyptians as their enemies, and told a story of them being slaves. The Egyptian Prolemies had to accept an often told tale, but they softened it. Prager, like all religious bigots, already knows the answers. Contrary to logic and evidence, he says people do not tell a story for 3000 years that has no experiential basis. Until modern times, everyone believed stories about themselves that had no experiential basis. They were called myths. A Jewish broadcaster gives us the benefit of his great wisdom on Moses.
Psychology of Belief, Religion and Christianity
Why do millions of people want to believe in gods, and what does it do to them? Those are the questions the psychology of religion has to answer. Apologists always overlook any facts that seem to discredit their religious belief, making apology the opposite of scientific enquiry, the art of excusing. Scientific study must be based on testing. Armchair theologizing is not scientific. Sociology and social psychology have to depend on observation, though this can be enhanced by using mass observation, questionnaires and statistics, and individual beliefs can be studied in depth through psychiatry and examination of subjective religious experiences, including the stimulation of religious feeling by drugs and by physical means. The psychology of Christianity in society, particularly in the USA.
Christianity and Psychology, Suggestibility, Sexuality, Emotion and Guilt
Pious Christians like to believe in the religious instinct because God or Jesus speaks in their heart. Christian professionals manufacture this religious sense by suggestion, not to explain religious belief, but to induce weak people to convert, be faithful and ignore skeptics. It is a delusion which can, in some people, become psychotic. Is the religious sentiment love? In the Catholic Church, a nun’s love of Jesus or a young monk’s love of Mary might have a subconscious sexual content. Some Catholic girls fasten upon the confessional as a sexual outlet and dwell over their remorse for their sexual sins—some priests encourage it. A desire to have sex with the priest is not an uncommon result. Sex is a basic cause of people taking to religion. It is not necessary to keep people in it. Religion removes the cause of the sexual guilt in that they are assured it will not stop them from being saved, and they feel greatly relieved.
Why do people believe? Sex, Conversion and Apologetics
Why do people believe? The question is one of psychology. Is belief an assortment of psychological delusions, differing from the psychological delusions of other religions only in cultural details? William James explained psychology as looking into our minds and reporting of feelings, cognitions, reasonings. Belief involves these and so is a legitimate subject for psychological enquiry. But one has to take care who is enquiring. A Christian will not give honest inquiry at all but Christian apologetics. Children brought up with no religion at all can be astonished by the bizarre rituals of their religious cousins, something the Christian indoctrinated into these habits from infancy cannot comprehend. Religion is a social phenomenon, forced on to people by society as a convention, using psychological methods usually from an early age. Christianity is fed infants with their mothers’ milk. They have no choice in the matter. That is indoctrination.
Social Psychology, Religiosity, Authoritarianism, Christianity and IQ
Christians are happy that 96% of Americans believe in God, and 88% affirm the importance of religion. But when psychologists break down religiosity, the results are not so favorable. Many surveys of different occupations with different methods have shown religious faith is inversely correlated with education, IQ, and liberal attitudes. So, psychology of religion has become a game played by Christian “psychologists” to obscure and muddy what real psychologists are finding. Religiosity is an issue. It does not need an Einstein to think of a measure of religiosity. Attendance at church is obvious for Christians, and only 35% of Americans are religious based on this criterion once a week. People, on this measure, are getting less religious. So, Christians have to have something more all encompassing, and then anyone considered marginally Christian will not be omitted, and negative IQ correlations disappear.
Criminality, Schizophrenia and Obsession: Christianity and Mental Illness
Positive relationships were shown between religiosity and social delinquency like murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy. When the benevolence of religious belief is embodied in notions of a good God in heaven then those for whom this is the overwhelming religious feeling seem to be discouraged from murder, but other dimensions of religious belief are positive correlates of homicide. Religion can be evil. The United States, is by far the worst in measures of social deviancy. So, the theses of Christian sociologists are grossly false, and, from an inspection of them, it is hard to work out how they came to their positive conclusions of the benefits of religiosity. Could it be the usual reason? Honest scholarship and Christian belief are incompatible! If there are benefits for society of religiousness, they are not evident in the United States, the most religious of western nations.
SQ and the Meaning of Spiritual
Spirit, like spiritual is impossible to define let alone measure, so any categories that mention it are empirically unprovable and unsupported by science. So too is any understanding of existential questions, and anyone who did understand them would be God. Spirit is not the creative life force of evolution, and the claim that it is is ancient and religious, not scientific. Evolution is not purely random and does not imply intelligence. The suggestion that evolution implies intelligence is Intelligent Design not science. SQ is not a quotient and not a measure of anything. It is contrickery.
Science and Theology: John Polkinghorne, Gamekeeper Turned Poacher
Polkinghorne considers science and theology. He admits theologians were wrong to oppose Galileo and Darwin. As he thinks science and theology are alternative ways of looking at the world, here the theological view was wrong and science correct. The world is intelligible, an assumption which cannot be explained by science, Polkinghorne says. Scientists study the world and find it is intelligible in practice, not by assuming it. But why? Science cannot say, but nor can theology. It offers more assumptions than science as it can test nothing. God is no answer. Theologians assume God is harmonious because He is assumed perfect, and is assumed to have made an harmonious world because He is harmonious. The harmony of Nature is retrojected into God. Why not accept what we know? Nature is harmonious! Religious people like Polkinghorne cannot get over their amazement at Nature, but cannot accept it as natural. We are in harmony with the world in which we have evolved. If we were not, we would not exist.
No Proof or Evidence of Exodus: Jewish Apologetic
Biblicists take all their cues from the bible even though there are better ones vouched for in real history. If Merneptah, the Egyptian Pharaoh and a son of Rameses invaded the land of a people called Israel, then how can Bryant G Woods be certain that the destruction he claims to find at contemporary Jericho is not the destruction of Merneptah. If we accept the truth of the Merneptah Stele, any destruction of cities around this time must have been Merneptah’s and not legendary Israelites. Merneptah’s Stele, if correctly dated simply is the first reference to a people known as Israel. Since Israel seems to be a word cognate with the word Syria, it might have meant no more than that. Otherwise, it was just the Sons (or seed!) of El—the people whose god was El—but these people had no land of their own. The same stele says they lived in the land of the Hurrians. A reply to the arguments of a Jewish Rabbi apologising for the exodus.
No Proof or Evidence of Exodus: Christian Apologetic
No direct archaeological evidence has been found for Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the 400-plus years in Egypt, or the Israelites’ miraculous exodus from slavery. No physical trace has been found of 40 years in the Sinai wilderness, and nothing outside of the bible shows Moses existed. The exodus cannot be treated as history because there is no support for it except the bible. The authors of Exodus would have been familiar with Egyptian conditions if the book had been written in Egypt, and exodus first appeared when the Ptolemies in the third century BC translated the scriptures into Greek for the library of Alexandria. The exodus was then composed from a Persian account of Jews being Egyptian slaves because Canaan had been an Egyptian colony for centuries. Israelite settlements showed no Egyptian culture in their archaeological remains. They were uniform with those of the Canaanites, so they were not immigrants from Egypt but native Canaanites. A reply to Christians who seek to justify the biblical exodus.
Biblical Archaeology: Evidence of the Exodus
In this “theory”, the biblical Joseph rose to power in the time of the Hyksos who were the Egyptian ruling class. Egypt had been 200 years under these rulers, but Kamose and Ahmose evicted them, founding the brilliant eighteenth Egyptian dynasty. Rameses II followed. Israelites were these Hyksos, expelled from Egypt c 1570 BC. The bible does not say Pharaohs of the time were Asiatic but that they were Egyptians, and the Israelies were slaves not a ruling elite, but this early date of the exodus was long an option for biblicists, though, in recent decades, the fashion has been a date in the time of Rameses II. If the Asiatic Hyksos had been expelled only to Palestine, they were quickly enslaved in their promised land by the newly expansive Pharaoh, but the bible has no Pharaohs returning to colonise Israel after the exodus. Egyptian records had the expulsion of the Hyksos, so the Ptolemies used the tale in Exodus which they wrote for their allies, the Jerusalem priests.
Evolution: Jewish Apologetic
Many extremely unlikely events had to occur to make possible the appearance of human beings on earth. This has to be the work of God, our “scientist” thinks. To say that God created the universe begs the question. It omits the question of the creation of God. It is hard to see how anyone with a brain cell remaining can be satisifed with the answer that God created the world. However unlikely it was, it happened because here we are. Equally unlikely events have led to pigeons and dolphins. A practical possibility is that bacteria exchanged genes much more readily in the conditions then pertaining than they do now. Then a useful variation could be spliced naturally between species that could change to become different phyla. Whether any one of these or other suggestions is the right one will have to be shown by science, but any one of them is better than bypassing the issue by saying, “ItÂ’s all God”. Biblicists and God lovers do just that.
Nunc Dimittis: A Farewell Letter
When you look at statistics, non-Christians are not mainly evil nasty people. Because the bible teaches that we are all sinners, some of us tend to go too far in deriding ourselves. A wide variation in doctrine is tolerated by believers, where each doctrine is believed to have been inspired by the Holy Spirit. A classic example of this is the disagreement between the Baptist types and the Charismatics over how one experiences the Holy Spirit Himself. If there is only one Spirit, one or both of these positions is incorrect. The Word of God should be above reproach. If God wanted us to base our lives on an ancient book then He would preserve it for us intact. Every Christian cannot wade through history and archeology to get the truth. A Christian explains why he has had enough.
Psychology of Christian High School Kids
A Connecticut Yankee kid describes the psychology of his Christian school chums—In high school, I have been persecuted for my opinion, because I have openly said I am an atheist. Yet most Christians cannot say the ten commandments or defend their faith. They’re taught a bare minimum. Those who don’t conform to the their mind-bending, idiotic cult are to be hunted and murdered as evil as their fictitious and fairy-tale god commanded. If their pride is broken, they are broken. In a church, a good 10% to 90% ratio separates the ones interested in this crap and those that go out of habit or against their will. Currently 21% of the world’s population is Atheist/Agnostic, and 34% Christian. The second largest group in the world has the least recognition and is ignored and criticized. An Atheist is rarely unable to admit their wrongdoings to themselves. Christians use self-deception to justify their actions to feel better about themselves. Self-honesty is the only way to achieve true enlightenment.
Justifications for Christianity
Christians say suffering in the world is a purification for sin and so a good thing, thus rationalizing sadism, letting people be sadistic for legitimate reasons. Sin does not cause rivers to overflow their banks or volcanoes to erupt, and pain in the world is not due to sin. But even if true, Christians believe God created the world. As He is omnipotent, He foresaw all the pain and misery the world would contain before He created it. So, He is responsible for it all. If God is the legislator of natural laws and made the best natural laws possible for human beings, then He had no choice. Only a particular set of laws can be best for us. He had to choose it. So it must precede and be outside any the divine edicts, and God is not the law maker. Laws of Nature are simply summary rules of how things behave to let us predict their future behaviour. They are different from legislated laws of human conduct. Christians think they are the same.
Jimmy Swaggart, the Modern Saint
Among several charismatic denominations spreading the craze for revivalistic religion was “The Assemblies of God,” which ordained Jimmy Swaggart, one of a generation of preachers who, with the aid of radio and television, cast off their hometown parochialism and became powers of lucre in the Great Society. Swaggart was a modern Christian, a morally vacant money grubber. He built up an evangelical empire on TV with an audience of millions whose purses and pockets were deep enough, and whose heads were empty enough, to give him $500,000 a day.
Christianity in Short Sentences
Christianity opposes all intellectual activity. Christian reasoning is sick reasoning. In the Christian God, nothingness is deified. Christianity grew up as a war to the death upon reality. The world was in misery and squalor for a thousand years. To love Nature is Satanic. God justifies every slander upon the here and now, and every lie about the beyond! The very act of living in the real world is sinful. The methods and principles of science are the targets of contempt for Christians. Scientific objectives, methods, and its quiet, cautious, skeptical manner, all appeared to Christianity as absolutely discreditable and contemptible. In the modern US, nothing has changed. The whole pathetic stupidity of the Christian superstition still targets itself at the discoveries of science. Its every notion of what the truth ought to be, of what the service of the truth ought to be, differs from those of honest Americans.
God, Gould and NOMA
Darwin proved he needed no moral magisterium. His distress at the death of his young daughter led him to abandon the one he once had, Christianity. As a youth, Darwin accepted the Bible as the inspired word of God, and he spent three years at Cambridge preparing for ordination to follow the profession of his father, an Anglican clergyman. Darwin increasingly rejected Christianity. His belief was in science but was civil and considerate enough to his still devout wife, his cousin, Emma Wedgwood, not to force his views on to her. Yet, in one of EmmaÂ’s letters to Charles, written before they married, she implored him to give up his habit of believing nothing until it is proved. Christians, not scientists, want to force their beliefs on to others. If any thoughts are too profound for human intellect, then only by trying to think them will we find out. Criticizing Stephen J Gould’s foolish idea of NOMA.
Ancient Israel in University Textbooks
Awareness of scholarly developments on ancient Israel and Judah are absent from the chapters on ancient Israel in sixteen university-level textbooks on Western Civilization. Some of them on ancient Israel follow a biblical-literalist line, like the Jewish religion was “inspired by revelations that can be dated with some accuracy”. Other texts do offer disclaimers as to the historical reliability of the Jewish bible. Jackson J Spielvogel’s book is more consistent with recent scholarship on ancient Israel than the other textbooks surveyed. The nomadic period, their descent from Abraham, their sojourn and enslavement in Egypt, Moses and the exodus, the wilderness wanderings, their entry into Canaan, division into twelve tribes, and conflict with the Philistines, all are only as “a tradition concerning their origins and history that was eventually written down as part of the Jewish bible…” with the point reiterated that only tradition not history is being reported.
Science in the Bible?
The bible and science are at odds. Yet, if the God of the bible is a reality, He cannot contradict His speech in Nature by His speech in scripture. Here a Christian tries to show that the bible is science! For example, Moses knew all about genetics because Genesis declares that animals and plants produce after their kind. This was astonishing for anyone to know when the bible was written, it seems. The Christian cannot distinguish between observation and theory, but that is typical. Ancient people understood that mice did not give birth to elephants, or even cabbages to coconuts. What they did not know was why this was so, and no one knew until recently. In popular superstition, people thought that unattended linen could spontaneously generate mice and that the worms that appeared on decaying flesh arose spontaneously. These were all the false beliefs of Christians who obviously did not accept that Genesis could be true as quoted.
Christian Morality
Christian morality never inspired social justice, which is immeasurably more important than personal virtue. Not one of the greater problems of life was ever confronted by the gospel Jesus or early Christianity. It was left to pagan moralists to denounce war and slavery. It was left to Agnostic sociologists to discover that brutal material conditions would be reflected in brutality of mind, and that a low intellectual level meant infallibly for the majority of men a low moral level. Our modern conception of character and the way to improve and strengthen character has nothing in common with the moral platitudes of ancient Judaea. A discussion of some aspects of Christian morality.
Criticizing Science
Midgley asks how can science and scientism leave room for joy when life is a mechanism, and has no external purpose. But why must the success of science in exposing the workings of the world eliminate the responses that brain and body have to life’s events? A cow pat is heaven to a dung beetle. Anything that has evolved to suit its surroundings must find utter joy in them. Knowledge of it can only add to the joy. She concedes that scientists have every right to explore questions outside scientific territory, but commands that they cannot do it effectively without changing their methods. This is remarkably brass faced for those who cannot be bothered to get to understand what science is doing or even how. She ought to take note of her own advice. They say that science describes and explains things but philosophy is conceptional enquiry. Science is intimately involved with philosophizing. The essential distinction is that science is concerned with reality not just playing intellectual games.
Mystical Experiences
God botherers insist that the evidence shows human beings are hardwired to experience God. They claim the brain is predisposed towards a belief in spiritual and religious matters. This is scientific baloney. Only a proportion of the people have temporal lobe epilepsy, and the majority never experience anything like it. And of those who experience temporal lobe epilepsy only a few have any religious experiences. If abnormal brain activity in temporal lobe epileptics conditions their responses, altering brain patterns artificially might do the same for ordinary people. Persinger has shown that certain low level frequencies, electromagnetic or sonic can give people unusual experiences. He designed a helmet to concentrate weak moving magnetic fields on the temporal lobes. Almost anyone can have a mystical experience just by wearing his magnetic hat. It is an embryonic, or an atrophied sense.
Science for the Perplexed Christian
Science is concerned with truth. No one would be anxious about death if they faced up to it honestly in life. Non-scientists, and even some scientists, argue there is no universal scientific method. Not all science can be studied, like physics, in the laboratory—it is one tactic of science. Other sciences use other tactics. But all use the same strategy—the scientific method of observation, hypothesis and testing. It is essentially common sense, and applicable to anything requiring common sense—most things in life. Science is ideal to equip people for life. It is a rational method for solving problems and offering proof and explanations. It is a practical method not merely literary or theoretical. People can be taught it without science being mentioned then be told they have been practising scientific method. Inasmuch as science is a profession that demands honesty, a scientist might introduce fresh air into the fetid corridors of power.
Religion and Science 1
The Greeks did not invent the practice of science, but the scientific idea, the conception that the world was knowable by investigation. They learned that the world was orderly, but it is curious that a central principle of the religion of their neighbours and enemies, the Persians, was the concept of Arta which is universal order. Even the philology of the words is likely to be the same. The difference was that Order for the Persians was a religious idea, but the Greeks were sensible enough to have no equivalent religion! The Greek scientific scheme would doubtless have found itself in violent conflict with the religious system of the day if formal religion among the Greeks had reached the dogmatically legal importance it had reached among the Jews. Science has not always been to the good, because people have to know how to use powerful discoveries wisely. Our leaders still live in the Stone Age and think they are handling flints. Humanity is failing science, not science humanity.
Religion and Science 2
People had lost interest in the natural world and supernaturalism took over. Christianity was the supremely supernatural religion, the direct inheritor of the mysticism of the Persians. Weariness with the world led people to be obsessed with eschatology and Christianity had a central message that the End would be soon. Christian thought opposed the philosophical basis of Pagan thought—it was anti-scientific and averse to humanity being subject to natural law. The Early Church did not base its views on observation or verification in the least. The clergy have often considered the position impregnable from the scientific side, but it is only so if science has to prove that imaginary entities have no real existence. The parsimonious attitude of science is that there is no need for this other world, so it can be dismissed until someone finds irrefutable evidence for it.
Religion and Science 3
The year 1600 is the end of the childhood of science. Giordano was burned at the stake at Rome, after seven years’ imprisonment. Until then the experimental method, though gradually more and more recognised in practice, was still regarded as sufficiently uncertain to be a philosophical issue. The period from 1600 lies with the new men. Kepler was the real founder of the modern astronomical system. Scientists were few and their work as yet inconspicuous. Later the validity of the experimental method became universal. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, science has shown that it is capable of explaining natural phenomena extremely well. The revival of atomic theory, with its essential corollary of the indestructibility and immutability of matter, led to a revival of Lucretian philosophy. The discovery of the law of the conservation of energy strengthened this point of view. The laws of chemistry and physics were shown effective in the workings of the animal body.
Evolution for the Perplexed Christian
Many Christians do not like the theory of evolution because it gets rid of what for them is an important gap for God—the creation of species and people. They call evolution atheistic because it has no role for God, ignoring that most things are atheistic because there is no role for God in them. Less bigotted varieties of Christianity accept evolution as the scientific explanation for biodiversity. Obsessed with the idea that they and their God are perfect, Christians claim that Creation is perfect, but that is far from the case, and if it were, evolution would be impossible. Evolution is the method whereby species change to optimise their characteristics in respect of the environment. If all species were perfectly adapted already, there could be no evolution. All changes would be suboptimal and would be selected against. Essentially that is what happens in the long periods of stability that species often experience.
Science Lectures from the Pulpit
Christians are jealous that scientists can do better tricks with their yo-yo than theologians can. It is professional jealousy because the scientific method works in the real world whereas nothing works in theology. Or anything does. Raven for all his supposed brilliance, simply cannot or will not accept that Christianity is an unverifiable fraud. So his advocacy of the inductive method in all fields is itself fraudulent. Science is not particularly inductive but it certainly cannot be applied to Mickey Mouse and Harvey the Rabbit—all that religion is concerned about—fictional entities. Christian sacraments are material rituals that supposedly have some spiritual consequences. Some Christians are happy to attend communion on sundays and practice science on weekdays, even though the two were contradictory. Hypocrisy, one might say, was typical of the Victorians but it extends in Christianity into the modern day.
Who are the Nazi Scholars?
Minimalists have never denied the bible has some history in it. Their point is that no one knows—without information from external history or archaeology—what is true and what is not. All novels are fictional, but, other than fantasy—a genre not absent from the bible—they must be plausible. Fiction is given the illusion of being true by setting it in a real setting. It magnifies the illusion by mentioning anchors in time and space. That is what the bible does. Jews and Christians are idolizing a book of fairy tales. Yet, Israelis justify themselves politically by reference to the bible, though it is theological not historical. If Moses is a myth they have no historical and no religious claim to Israel, their position is unfounded. God has given them no right over these lands that excuses their use of tanks and helicopter gunships, and potentially nuclear weapons, to maintain their claim. When mythology is taken as history, true history is silenced.
Eugenie C Scott on Teaching Science in Schools
Scott urges scientists to pander to Christians by not confusing the methodological materialism of science with metaphysical materialism. US Christians don’t mind one but do mind the other. The effectiveness of science means that its methodological materialism must reflect that the world is material! Materialism emerges from the science, and so Christian bigots oppose it. It refutes superstition, and that is all the bigots have to offer. Scientists should do more to encourage academics to counter Christian pseudo-science. Christians promote themselves ruthlessly. Scott says they target college and university faculty members on more than 800 US campuses. They encourage Christian faculty members to stand up for the academic freedom to express religious beliefs. More academics should stand up for their own right to express scientifically established belief instead of having to put up with Christians fanatics and fancy?
Mary Midgley on Scientists
Midgley says the adjective scientific is often no more than a vague compliment meaning methodical. As such it applies to historians, linguists, and logicians, implying that they are not scientific in the stronger sense. That is when it offers explanations that can be tested. Science in this sense in social studies and psychology is not necessarily easy to do. In new fields, science has no firm ground to stand on. It struggles to proceed, falling into mud until a corpus of observation has been produced as firm ground. Marx, Freud and Skinner were making observations, and Skinner’s were often pretty impeccable ones. Midgley thinks weakly scientific views like these should have been investigated, not scientifically but philosophically. Popper thought that, if these were not scientific, then they were merely metaphysics. He meant rubbish, but Midgley likes her metaphysics, so she says Popper used the word vaguely.
Atoms and Icons 1
Fuller begins his apology by saying that science should inform religious thinking. He wants theology to be seen as a study comparable with science. It is not. Science is based on reality. Theology is fictional. Fuller, who supposes he is a scientist, has not noticed that the aim of science is to explain natural mysteries, whereas the aim of religion is to invent supernatural mysteries. Only science seeks truth. How can a scientist accept that anything is true without sound evidence? Religion has none, so what can be true about it? Fuller says that the religious fundamentalists and the scientific ones are incapable of living with doubt, a bizarre denial of the basis of science itself—an example of Christians projecting their own faults on to their critics. Science is based on skepticism. Everything is doubted until there is sufficient evidence for belief. The proper study of religion is not theology but psychology, the proper study of Christians psycho-analysis.
Atoms and Icons 2
Fuller does not argue about modern science. He likes science to be what Laplace said. Laplace died in 1827! Hilariously, he uses not theology but twentieth century science to refute LaplaceÂ’s nineteenth century supposition, thus proving how clever theologians are. A scientific hypothesis is proposed so that explanations can be given and predictions can be made. Hypotheses that do this lead to fresh discoveries and are called fruitful. It is part of the evidence that an hypothesis is true. Like a correctly placed piece in a jigsaw puzzle, it shows where other pieces go. Fuller says science is reductionist. Theologians do not like reductionism because it gets rid of God. Scientists explain Nature. The poor man cannot see that we discover from science what Nature already is. It always was so, but we discovered it. Scientists are humble before Nature. Not theologians, who expect that God can do anything he likes, so they cannot be surprised.
Atoms and Icons 3
Science is a continuous and progressive endeavour so there are gaps in it, not yet filled. Consciousness is one. For the Christian, it is a gap filled by God. Some He has filled in odd ways. Despite being omniscient, God thought disease was caused by wicked demons that had to be beaten out of their victim. Christians found it embarrassing that the gaps disappeared from God’s realm, exposing belief as false. Fuller tries to bring some back. Soul is a property of the physico-chemical functioning of our bodies, a collective noun for character, emotion, aesthetic response and religion. It seems it does not deny the validity of modern scientific thinking. Nor does it because modern scientific thinking has nothing to say about imaginary, unnecessary and untestable hypotheses like soul. Fuller is conjuring with words, making soul something in science, so true. False! It is Christian obfuscation. Calling soul what is understood well enough in science is obfuscation.
AskWhy! Atoms and Icons 4
The problem of evil in the world means the Christian concept of God is wrong. If God permits evil in the world, it must be because He does not know about it—He is not omniscient. Or, He knows, but can do nothing about it—He is not omnipotent. Or He has created it Himself, as the bible says—He is not perfectly good. In Zoroastrianism, humans have to choose between truth and the Lie—good and evil—thus taking sides in the cosmic battle. There must be something significant in Christians always preferring to pick the Lie. The cosmic struggle could be lost if enough people were not good. This is more coherent than Christianity. Augustine was once a Manichee, a Zoroastrian hybrid religion, that came directly from Persia. Augustine placed the onus for good and evil on to humanity where it scientifically belongs. People choose it themselves. Those who chose evil, in Augustine’s view, brought evil into the world.
Atoms and Icons 5
Fuller uses the same trick over and over again—the polarity trick. Whatever is not poles apart is standing side by side. So, belief and knowledge are equated because belief contains some knowledge and knowledge some belief. History contains some myth and myth contains some history, so they too are just as good as each other. All gold contains a trace of lead, and all lead a trace of gold, so give up your gold ring and take this lead washer. They are just as good as each other. Fuller is trying his best to rewrite Christian history, a noble pastime for Christians because it is so atrocious, but one that they have practised for a long time. At the outset, they falsified the career of a noble Jewish freedom fighter to turn him into a gentile god. The sanctimonious Fuller and his Christian bleaters abandoned the moral high ground centuries ago when Christianity and religious murder simultaneously peaked. Christianity is a monstrosity that only sick people could admire.
Atoms and Icons 6
Fuller continues trying to show that science and theology are compatible because theological and scientific languages overlap. He cannot say what God is, but the physicist cannot say what an electron is either. Electrons are both particles and waves—his proof that Christ could be both divine and human. To be both supernatural and natural is something that even Christians find difficult, and easier for them to understand when electrons can be particles and waves at the same time. So, God is defined like an electron, by a list of properties. But the properties of an electron are not arbitrary. They are realised in practice. God is universal love. How does this love manifest itself? Where? God is love as a definition does not match reality. To say Christ is both fully human and fully God means no more than saying he was just God. Physics is not needed to show meaningless statements mean something. Meaningless statements are meaningless in their own right.
Science and Pseudoscience
Karl Popper set out to distinguish science from pseudo-science or metaphysics. The widely accepted answer was its empirical method, which proceeded from observation or experiment. What, though, of pseudo-sciences that appeal to observation and experiment, like astrology, Marx’s theory of history, Freud’s psycho-analysis, and Alfred Adler’s individual psychology? They had more in common with primitive myths, timelessness. They were always true. So, Popper's answer was falsifability. Science had to be falsifiable. For Kuhn, the history of science was a cyclic process. Periods of normal science characterized by what Kuhn called a paradigm—a theoretical and empirical consensus—were punctuated by periods of crisis. In normal science, scientists agree about what phenomena are relevant and what explains them, about what problems are worth solving and what is a solution of a problem.
The Big Bang and the Cosmological Argument for God
Christians are using the Big Bang as the cosmological argument but it is as usual empty rhetoric. Genesis bears no relationship to modern cosmology. What Christians do not consider in their argument is that the Big Bang was the start of time as well as space. If there was no time and there was no space, then nothing existed before the Big Bang. That means that the Big Bang itself must have been the First Cause, because no God could have preceded it. It is not proof that there is no God, but it is evidence that any God there is is the universe itself. It is an argument for pantheism. Needless to say, the supposed Christian “scientists”, demonstrating their dishonesty as scientists and their mendacity as Christians, say the Big Bang is proof God is not the same as the universe and God is not contained within the universe. Christians say God must have existed before time and space showing He is transcendent. Yet the equations show the universe is too!
Science and Christian Belief—C A Coulson
Coulson says that the common feature of science and religion is belief in the universal character of truth, in the order and constancy of Nature, and the sense of spiritual fulfilment that accompanies the practice of science. Christianity purports to be interested in truth but lips often lie, none more than Christians’, and what is merely uttered cannot just be accepted. Practice has to be the criterion, and it is not sufficient that many Christian lead exemplary lives. So do lots of non-Christians and even non-religious people. Psychologists find non-religious people are generally more honest than Christians. Coulson says there are many truths. Scientists see a single truth, and it is the scientist’s job to struggle towards it. Christians are deluded into thinking there is something beyond a perfectly good truth. Their delusion is that all truths must be God. That is the universal reductionism of Christianity. In short, a lie.
Classifying Nations by Religious Opinion
The use of cluster analysis to classify countries on the basis of their religious views determined by public surveys. The dendrograms seem to reflect generally the religion and situation of the respective countries. The US is shown to be astonishingly like Northern Ireland in its religious outlook. There has been a vast sectarian divide in Northern Ireland over many decades, and a civil war between bigoted Catholics and even more bigoted Protestants. Is this what the US is really like in its religious belief, and what does it mean for the future if it is? These two countries are quite distinct from the other fifteen nations based on actual percentage answers.
Peter Stanford on Science and Christianity
Christians have no solutions to any questions, only claims. Their solutions are their beliefs, untested and untestable—nothing more than wishful thinking. One belief is their belief has the authority of God and must be true! They negotiate fate with the lie that we will wake up from the only life we live and find themselves in an everlasting life with all our relatives and best friends when we are dead. It is a comfort for the simple people that can believe it as long as it does not matter it is a lie. Christianity is incredible lies from beginning to end, and Christians believe them as GodÂ’s Truth. This lie of eternal life after death does matter, though. It is dangerous. Sensible people, even among believers, value the life we daily experience, and do not jump in front of incoming trains to end it. S Augustine stopped Christians from committing suicide as soon as baptized into the faith, believing baptism had washed them free of sin so an immediate death meant an eternity of bliss!
John Hick proves God
Hick insists that the hypothesis that our personality survives death is meaningful because, if it is true, it will be known to be true. He argues we can make future predictions. The prophesy of the End of the World on Good Friday, 2033 AD, believed by many Christians, will be known to be true, if it is true. Meanwhile, it has no value as a test of any proposition. If a nasty virus carries off all human life first, then it will not be verified at all. The Christian view, if that is what Hick expresses, is that it will be verified by the living dead! Nor is survival of death itself proof of God. We might be like caterpillars, undergoing some unimagined type of natural metamorphosis. Hick’s supposed afterlife is an extension of life in every respect, and so cannot be a sign of there being a good God, nor any vindication of Christian belief in God. The hypothesis of God’s purpose is not verified.
Panpsychism or Sufi Science
Consciousness might be a different type of phenomenon from a brain, but modern science and technology has devised physical processes that produce what is meaningful to us. A camera makes us a picture of a scene that seems to us to be the same view as we have of it through our eyes. A computer game can create convincing worlds to allow us to experience situations dangerous or undesirable for us to experience in reality! Even the workings of a motor car, a microwave oven, or a TV are mysteries to plenty of otherwise sophisticated people, and would be to primitive people that had never seen them before. What gurus, like Russell, refuse to accept is the progress of science in only 300 years since the yoke of received religion was thrown off. Nothing in principle is different between a computer generated scene and a scene that we see in our heads. Both give us a picture that we can recognize of the world we know—the real world.
A Critical Eye on John Gray
Gray finds Christians who have left the Christian fold, while keeping some sort of belief, but cannot find equivalent atheists. He cannot see that atheism is like pregnancy—you either have it or not. You cannot be a bit pregnant, and you cannot be a bit of an atheist. An atheist has considered the evidence for God as carefully as possible and finds it impossible to accept. Any atheist who is a bit of a believer cannot be an atheist. Gray is a professor of thinking but cannot get as far as this elementary fact. He goes further, implying that atheists are not open to mystery. This rancid old bone is often dug up by Christians and their defenders against critics. Nature is far more wonderful and mysterious than anything merely imagined by congenital knee benders. Some views of John Gray on God and the afterlife.
Tsunamis in God’s perfect design
Christians argue Paley’s argument for Nature being designed by a designer—God. But an almighty and perfect God must be a perfect designer. Christians relate the perfect harmony of things natural—not as wonders in themselves, but as the wonder of God’s imagined design. Yet the world is curiously full of horrors for perfection. The tsunami randomly killing off myriads of people cannot be part of God’s perfect plan… Can it? The argument for a perfect God based on His design of the world for His favourite depends on it being perfect for us. It is anything but perfect for the majority of people, and perhaps for all creatures. The lion will lie down with the lamb, when kingdom comes. Why, in the interval, has God designed lions to eat lambs? If they can live forever without killing lambs, what is God’s purpose in making lions kill lambs meanwhile? How are the manifest imperfections in God’s design of the world explained?
The Delusion of the Personal God
The best evidence for Christians of religious experience is that it transforms lives. Morose depressives become joyous. Drug addicts and alcoholics become drug counsellors and Presidents of the US. The cruel become tender, the proud humble and the weak strong. But the rich Christian rarely follows his God and gives all he has to the poor, becoming poor himself. Rich Christians do their best to keep the poor poor. Often they kill them with highly explosive bombs dropped from a great height, putting them out of their misery with a pass to heaven. When converts are found to be good or kind, we do not often know what they were like before their conversion. If S Francis was good to animals as a Christian, was he awful to them beforehand, or was he kind to animals anyway? People do not have to believe in the ChristianÂ’s God to be good, though Christians like to pretend otherwise. Neither is everyone who is not a Christian wicked, nor is every Christian, nor even most Christians, unusually good.
Dr Eugene Scott
The career of a TV evangelist. Eugene Scott was the son of a travelling preacher, born on August 14 1929, at Buhl, Idaho. He had several run-ins with the authorities. The California Attorney General’s office launched an investigation into His church for alleged financial malpractice. Supporters in the state legislature arranged a law to be passed barring prosecution of civil fraud against tax-exempt religious organisations. The investigation was dropped! The Federal Communications Commission stripped the church of three broadcast stations after he refused to hand over financial records. Later he frustrated attempts to scrutinise the church’s finance by instructing contributors to sign pledge-slips stating that he could spend the money however he pleased. Is God the god of bribery and corruption?
The Meaning of Intelligent Design 1
The claim of ID is that scientific evidence proves Nature is designed by an intelligent designer, and who could that be but God? Finding evidence for God is something that no scientist thinks we have ever done. Bush shocked the US scientific community by affirming that ID should be taught in schools alongside the biological sciences tested by scientific studies like evolutionary theory. The aim is to sabotage science. Science is not arbitrary. Scientific hypotheses are not anything that some gash preacher can think of and call a hypothesis. They have to explain things that other hypotheses cannot, and be testable, fruitful and predictive. ID does not make testable predictions. Science requires evidence. The ID God has to be accepted on no evidence, just the say so of professional Christians. Religious fanatics are never impressed by evidence, yet have an absurd standard for evolution. God had eternity to work out how to create life. Science has only had a century or so since 1859.
The Meaning of Intelligent Design 2
ID is a belief! It is the opposite of scientific. It explains nothing because everything is the work of the Intelligent Designer, God. Any theorizing has to stop there because there can be no knowing what principles the Intelligent Designer had in His mind when He turned to His drawing board with his set square. All scientific theories, even if well supported by evidence are provisional because it is the purpose of science to test the bounds of its theories. Science constantly has to question even the best established theories. It is something believers cannot understand. God’s concepts cannot be tested, so ID is not scientific at all. Moreover, since there is no knowing what the Intelligent Designer had in mind, the hypothesis cannot be fruitful, one of the sub-criteria of scientific validity. There can be no additional hypotheses that might lead us in useful directions.
What is Truth?
Sir Francis Bacon said Nature was sincere, having no intention of fooling an enquirer, and Einstein, who habitually spoke of Nature as God, said God was not malicious. But human psychology involves an ability to consider what others think and to use this intelligence to deceive. If truth and justice were ideas of a perfect God, the problem arises of how He could create a world in which there were lies and injustice. Zoroastrianism had the answer to this in the wicked creation meant to interfere with the original good one—dualism, but heresy for Christians. By postulating a single perfectly good God, the existence of evil was a problem—theodicy—for Christians. Machiavelli thought lying was useful. Strong and healthy states were more important to the world than conventional truth. Christianity had a debilitating effect on society, the sign to him that it could not be true. Truth had to have a strengthening effect.
Why Believe in God?
Christians tell us there is a good god. They call him simply God. Where was God when people were being killed for religious reasons? The God of the Jews and Christians commands people to kill others. It is said in the bible that God created man in his own image. In ancient times people thought it was literally true because God was a big man. Man was therefore a little god. Who today, though, could believe it? No one. Yet people remain Christians and call the bible infallible. They are not reasonable. Their blind, foolish faith in the bible can only be hypocrisy or even dishonesty. If Christian ministers were honest, and had the courage of their honesty, they would tell the world that the being called God in the bible was no God, only an idol of a rude and barbarous age. Worshippers of this God are a sad commentary on human intelligence and human integrity.
The Conflict of Science and Religion 1
What is the disagreement between science and religion? Christianity urges people just to believe—to have faith. Christians assert, skeptics look for evidence, two fundamentally opposed attitudes to life, and they are irreconcilable. Belief cannot be said to be wrong in itself, but to believe on no basis is wrong. So science is proved truth, religion is false. What religious truth has ever been proved? Religious believers might say God. Skeptics reply there is not a shred of evidence of God, so to believe in one is self-deception. Is the biblical fall of man a truth of religion, or can it be ignored in the light of science? The former puts Christianity in conflict with science. The latter destroys the foundation of Christianity. Christians must accept original sin and atonement to be Christian—it is why God had to die. Christians teach belief because it suits the ruling powers of the world. To believe is to obey. Religion is about obedience.
The Law Of Death
To think religion is centrally the belief in and worship of gods ignores the belief in immortality. It is the reward of Christians for their belief, but they do not stop to consider what living forever would be like. Life after death is just like life in a trouble free world called heaven where they are re-united with all their dead relatives and friends and none of the people they did not like. Then they start to live forever! But in a perfect world there is nothing to do except praise God. All training implies imperfection, so the praise of God must be automatic. Nor can we be taught the things we did not understand in life. If we do not understand them by the time we reach heaven, and they are necessary for a successful eternal life, then we do not enter. Heaven is for perfect people only. If we are imperfect, it is too late. The truth is that heaven can only be perfect if it is perfectly still. Death is what it seems—everyone’s personal end—and life after death is simply death.
Bad Habits
Christians in some way suspend the process of maturing, by maintaining an infantile trust in God as if He were a perpetual parent. The people who act for this God, they also trust, just as they trusted people their parents trusted. There is nothing admirable in an adult thinking like a child, though it is an important tenet of Christianity that they should. The only people who could benefit from such childlike trust are the priests and prelates who act for the putatively utterly trustworthy God. Christianity sets believers up to be duped. Since God Himself does not exist He cannot dupe you. It is plain then who does.
The Practical Meaning of Christianity
The business of saving peoples’ souls is a cheat, a fraud. Every priest and minister who preaches that mankind can be saved from hell hereafter by believing in Jesus is preaching what they are unable to prove, and doing it for gain. Churches are cheating people, defrauding them, practising upon their ignorance, their superstition, their fear. Religion, in relation to any other life than this, has no foundation. Its God, no one knows anything about. Its heaven and hell, no one has ever seen, nor does anyone know where they are. The only thing that the church has saved so far is itself.
Jesus or Christians—Who is Right?
Christians have to cultivate ignorance to preserve their faith. Mary speaks of Joseph as Jesus’s father when she must have known that he was really the son of God, not Joseph. A mother knows who the father of her child is, unless she is promiscuous. As she acknowledges it was Joseph, she repudiates Jesus’s conception by the Holy Ghost, his claim to divinity. This ought to settle the question, but not for Christians who believe that down is up and dogs are cats when their priests and ministers tell them so. They do not read Plato, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, but know the morality of the gospel is superior. They are certain of the originality of Christ without asking whether anyone else said the same things. They do not read the Talmud because they would find that many of the sayings of Jesus were platitudes of the rabbis. They might, be supposed to read the Old Testament where every point of Christian morality is found. Do they read it? If so, why is Christ so original?
Jesus or Christians, Who is Right? 1
Christians have immense faith. They believe Jesus is a god even though the gospels are full of contrary evidence. Even the best Christians do not have enough faith to move a mountain—there is no story that Jesus did. But it must be fairly easy to make a die fall the right way up, or a little roulette ball fall into the right slot, or bring up the winning lottery numbers. No Christian has ever shown that they have the faith to accomplish these things. If they did, other Christians would accuse them of selling their soul to the devil. Jesus was certain that the day of judgement was coming soon when he lived in the first century. Two millennia later we are still waiting. Despite this big error, in those two thousand years people have continued to believe Jesus was a god. His own belief in an imminent end of the world was indisputably wrong. The kingdom of God is still not here. Why do people think he was perfect? Why do they still think he is coming soon?
Christianity in Practice
God never yet sponsored a human being to beg for him, and the person who pretends he did is worse than a beggar. The hungry man who asks for food makes an honest appeal to our generosity, but the man who begs in the name of God is dishonest. Yet people happily open their doors to this beggar, treat him with politeness and respect, and honour his appeals for cash. He frowns on small change, preferring pound coins, and appeals to God as his ultimate sponsor. This beggar is a worse enemy to society than the poor beggar. The minister, not the tramp, should be scorned. The tramp’s appeal is the truth—the priest’s is a lie.
Evolution for Fundamentalists 1
Offspring are not identical to their parents, especially when reproduction is sexual. Everyone agrees that individuals differ from generation to generation, even Christians, and species can and do change over short time periods. On the Christian thesis that all humans began with Adam, mankind proves it since we now have several distinct races. There is a chain of being that creationists must accept began with the first animals made by God at the creation and has continued ever since, but each succeeding creature can differ from its parents, so reproduction does not make identical copies. Genera and families of species must have arisen from a creature of the original creation evolving into a variety of different forms. Maybe a mouse can become an elephant, and an ape a human being! To think otherwise meant God deliberately created things to seem as if they had evolved, and there could be no purpose in that except deception.
Evolution for Fundamentalists 2
Look at the creatures dead in the rocks. Few of them do not fit the same tree of life as living animals. Even though creatures like the dinosaurs and pterosaurs no longer exist, they did not differ in basic form from modern vertebrates. Their limbs and bodies have the same structure. What God destroyed did not differ in plan from those that survived. He showed no more creativity in the extinct life forms than in the surviving ones. Sometimes homologous organs in distant species seem quite different, but a study of the growth of the organ in embryos shows that the two were equivalent. The swim bladder of fish is homologous with the lungs of land animals. Evolution has an explanation. The fish that took to land adapted by storing air in its swim bladder. It was effectively a rudimentary lung and evolved into a lung. Creation cannot explain why the two organs should be homologous, and nor can it explain homologies at all except as God’s caprice.
Evolution for Fundamentalists 3.1
A creationist argues that when God created the kinds in Genesis, He planned that each one would spread upon the world by adapting to various conditions. No creationist ever postulated this plan for variation until they realised that it was needed. Then they piggy-back on science to explain what scientists had noticed and explained first. The trouble is the explanation necessitates the possibility, even the certainty of evolution. The species God created with built in adaptation, will evolve by varying. What is to stop it once the species begins to vary? Suddenly, creationists concede that natural selection causing changes in living kinds is possible! They have conceded the case. Evolution is a fact for creationists, except that 6000 years is not have enough time for it to happen. Once the age of the earth is shown to be ancient, then creationists have lost the argument.
The Effortless Inferiority of Howard Jacobson
Half a century ago, European Christians thought they were doing good by murdering Jews as “untermenchen”. A fictional story in the Christian Holy book, the New Testament, about a fictional man, Judas, led to millions of innocent deaths in God’s name. The Almighty Ego, Howard Jacobson, as a Jew, should be more aware of it than most, but he thinks Dawkins wrong to observe upon it critically. That must be left to the critical genius to do. Jews lived amicably with Moslems for centuries until Zionists declared that God had given them the land the Palestinians had also lived in for those centuries. Today, Israeli Jews treat Moslem Arabs—inconveniently living where they want to live—as “untermenchen” too. They feel justified in driving them from their homes and hounding them mercilessly using superior weaponry, sheltering under the wing of the US, and sobbing hot tears when their victims retaliate in the only way they can.
Religious Intolerance or Liberal Tolerance?
The bomb-head cartoon is not subtle, so why is it so hard for Moslems to understand. It is because they are in utter denial of what the mad mullahs and terrorist brotherhoods are making of their own religion. If violence is contrary to the teachings of Mohammed, then why do so many Moslems not criticize, and indeed call to order, their own violent teachers and their gangs. Moreover, even though most British Moslems have sought representation in parliament through the Labour party, surely they can see that the supposedly socialist party is actually a national socialist one, and, if it continues on its insane path, the destruction of freedom will leave the Moslems where the Nazis had the Jews. Fascists always need a victim, and for these modern fascists Moslems are it! They must defend the secular society and liberalism as their allies, or they are in danger of suffering the martyrdom their mullahs seem to desire.
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalists say science is a faith as much as Christianity is. The difference in the faith in science and the faith in a supposedly inerrant book and its imaginary author is that science produces the goods. Science is based on observation, testing and reason. Science is real, religion is unreal. Science is material, religion is immaterial. Seventeen centuries of Christendom with large parts of the population in cloistered buildings praising and praying much of the day, consisted for most people of misery, perpetual religious wars, torture by the Inquisition, death by slow roasting to preserve the imaginary soul, disgusting murderous crusades of armed knights and pikemen, disgusting pious crusades of unarmed children and peasants, genocide, squalor, poverty, starvation, plague, famine. Yet Fundamentalists think that the benefits of the modern world were brought about by prayer. It is a measure of their lack of ability to think, their insanity.
The Christian Coprolalia of Arnold Neumaier
Christians can think that God made Nature’s laws, but laws made by any intelligent designer who is almighty and omniscient ought not to need constant tinkering with, yet a tinkerman God is what Christians believe in. If God were not a tinkerman, He would be on the heavenly beach or on the heavenly golf course, and prayers would be unanswered. They are unanswered, but Christians think every fortune is an answered prayer, God’s grace, while every misfortune or unanswered prayer is their own fault, or the Devil’s. Christians imagine God sweating with the labour of checking how the souls are getting on, answering prayers, and adjusting the Natural machine constantly with His heavenly spanner. How intelligent men can believe this nonsense is beyond comprehension. The trouble with Christianity is it trains people to be sociopaths—they believe their own lies.
How I Was Saved
Religion imposed on you against your will is Satanic. No God except the Devil would want anyone to worship Him in pointless ways, and no good God could expect it. Religions are private matters between the individual and God, and not a punishment imposed by devils pretending to be saints. The religion imposed might not be the one the victim prefers. What do religious people do then? Rebel. Most people go through crises in their lives, and want a psychological crutch. God might provide it, though equally often He does not. Plenty of sick and depressed Christians prove that God is no certain help. He has not shown Himself to these unfortunates despite their endless prayers. Those who think they have had signs from God in answer to their prayers, ought to realize they are likely to be signs from the Devil—the Christian God said there would be no signs. Children wonder why God could not send unquestionable signs to everyone, if He wanted to save them.
Petition—A Scientific Support For Darwinism
This page describes R Joe’s petition in support of Darwinism
The News from the East. Rome 20s AD
A reporter from Judaea describes the country in the 20s—Now there is a serious resistance movement. The guy in Arimathea said that men came to invite him to join, showed their knives to identify themselves as Sicari, and said, we’re proud to hold our weapons for Yehouah. You have to realize that Arimathea, Capernaum and towns like them are very much pro-Yesha, you'd say Jesus, the Galilean, a son of Judas. Arimathea is the site of great resistance by the Zealots. It gives people massive employment. Their leader, Joseph, got very rich out of banditry. It just doesn’t make it back into the Roman record of what’s actually happening in Judea. Rumours after I left Caesarea said Jerusalem was briefly taken by some bandits helped by the pilgrims, but we’ll never get to know anything definite. But we can find out for ourselves from refugees. The danger is that the Roman leadership in Jerusalem, and, of course, especially back in Capri and Rome is also not being told about it.
Christian Liars—Matt Perman
The bible cannot be trusted. Sufficient of it is wrong when it is checked to leave anyone intelligent doubtful anything it says is true. If Christians had a book on Satanism with the history right, would Satanism be? Do Calvinists accept Servetus, who gave us accurate geography and discovered the circulation of the blood, because he was right about those. They stick to Calvin who had him murdered in a more cruel way than crucifixion. Anyone with any humanity would condemn such cruelty as devilish. Not Calvinists. It was God’s work. Christian belief is selective belief. They believe what they like whoever says it, God or devil. The clergy call Christians sheep, and they happily accept the connotation. They are mainly innocents. The clergy are not innocent. They are clever manipulators who know the bible is not inerrant, but they do not want the sheep to know. They depend upon sheep for their standing and lifestyles in society.
Christian Liars—Paul L Maier
Ur of the Chaldees is not the home of Abraham. It is Urfa, and that is the tradition of the Moslems. It fits the story better than Ur of the Chaldees, but shows the bible is wrong, and that will not do when you are trying to prove the opposite. Maier says the route was the only way to get from Mesopotamia to Palestine, as if it was some sort of test. It was the only way when the myth was written. Are the writers supposed to have thought otherwise? This absurd generalising is not evidence. The conditions in the near east were the same for centuries, and had to be satisfied by any credible story. Not that mythical stories have to be believable. Few of the stories of Moses, Elisha, Elijah, and Jesus are believable but believers believe them! No Abraham is known in history who matched the biblical story. No evidence of the bible Abraham appears until a century or so before Jesus Christ.
Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
The Christian and Jewish liars never cease lying. A film has been made with the title, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, by a man called Ben Stein. His film tries to make out there is an atheist conspiracy in the US against Christians. In the USA, faced with overbearing Christian intolerance, only a small percentage have the courage to say they are atheists. Yet this tiny minority of atheists, according to the film, is victimizing the 90-odd percent Judaeo-Christian majority! It is a case of the Nazi big lie method. It is Christians who are the oppressors, and this film shows it.
Can Christianity be a Rational Faith?
It is more reasonable to believe God is One than that God is Three. He says so! Jesus says plainly in the bible, “my Father is greater than I”. If the Father is greater than the son, the two are not co-equal? Why would God want to lie about this? If he did, who would want to worship Him? Unitarians say the bible is a great book but is not infallible. It is in the real world, not in the fantasy world of fundamentalist ministers who know what God has never revealed. Like the human soul, the bible has divinity in it, but anyone who wants to accept Christianity has to verify the detail against what Jesus taught and how it evolved thereafter by God through human experience and Nature. Revelation is a learning process, not a once and for all happening. It did not end with Christ. Christ showed as a man what humanity should be. God did not make humanity mindless. That is the Devil’s ploy, through his own ministers out for themselves.
Faith or Works?
Paul said bad behaviour excluded Christians from entering heaven. Paul had great faith in the spirit in bringing proper behaviour to Christians but he warns them that there can be no law against personal excesses, what he calls self-indulgence. Faith, or having the spirit, should guard against it but Christians cannot belong to Christ unless they crucify all self-indulgent desires. Paul is not saying that faith guarantees a free passage into heaven. He says the law is not abrogated but that the whole of the law is summarised as, “Love your neighbour as yourself”. Christians cannot excuse a lack of love by their faith, or by the failure of the kingdom to come. In 2000 years of Christendom, what is impressive is the dirth of salvific love it reveals. Christians have got it wrong. Faith alone is a grave error. God has suspended the coming of the kingdom, because Christianity is too corrupt to do anything other than the work of the Devil.
Religion in Psychology
Delinquents in their teens took to religion when taught it, but follow ups showed not that they had stopped being delinquent, but they had become religious delinguents! Such surveys sometimes showed that some religious people did benefit from better health and mental health than the average Joes and Janes. What is not clear is that religion makes people better. Rather, people of a particular type of personality—one that gives them an aversion to drinking, crime and drugs—like religion. The reason is that religion teaches against these bad habits, so they see it as their natural home. So, it is not that religion makes people good, but that good people choose religion. It skews the statistics. The counter fact that many religious people continue to practice bad habits shows it is no cure. The effect of religion on delinquent youth confirms it.
A Christian in Psychology
Jeeves is principled enough to deny the existence of the soul. He says the ideas we have about our nature affect how we treat one another. It impacts on our ethics. And it is undeniable except by Christians, that, for hundreds of years, they burnt people alive while they were tied to a post and could not escape the flames. These good Christians stood by eating lunch and laughing! They were able to do it because they claimed they were saving the burning person’s soul. Anyone able to read this, stop their stomachs from heaving and remain a Christian should think seriously about which god they are worshipping. Jeeves denies the notion that religion can speak about a non-material soul while science and common experience sees only the physical being. So, he considers the biblical use of the word soul to mean the whole person—body, mind and spirit.
The Meaning of the Spiritual
The meaning of spiritual is discussed in the context of a so-called spiritual intelligence quotient (SIQ). The word is used often but emptily because no one knows what it means. Here a valid meaning is given in terms of the feeling of unity sometimes felt in respect of the wonder of Nature. It is a temporary suspension of the sense of self, allowing the kinunity of each of us with the whole of Nature to emerge.
The Trouble with Theology 1
Christian theology may be accounting rationally for the bible. It will not do for the fundamentalist in most Christians. To think rationally about the bible, has to mean testing it against extra-biblical criteria to ensure God’s word is true. Modern theologians know full well that is a hostage to fortune. Even if extra-biblical criteria are eschewed and scholars try only to use standards internal to the bible, those willing to think face terrible obstacles to belief. The God of the Old Testament is quite different from the one of the New Testament. The New Testament is itself incoherent. So the theologian will not do it. The critical scholar cannot reveal the incoherent truth to the uncritical Christian lamb, and must conclude God or the Holy Ghost is a dunce. A commentary on what Maurice Wiles, the theologian, has to say on theology
The God Delusion 1
Richard Dawkins, Charles Simonyi professor of the understanding of science at Oxford, thinks faith has been the principal source of violence and suffering throughout history. The world would be a lot better off without it, he explains in The God Delusion. Here some criticisms are discussed.
Jesus is Risen: Thinking about the Resurrection
The story was altered to fit the tradition of Paul that Peter was the first to see Jesus. Luke was going to make it Clopas, and an unknown disciple. The same is true of the other gospel traditions of Peter being first to enter the tomb, even though he was not the first there! It looks as if a simpler story—in which the first at the tomb first believed—has been changed as an afterthought to give Peter a priority that the original tale did not support. Pericopes that had been loved and believed by people in the churches of certain regions for decades needed to be handled carefully, and so Peter could not just be inserted as being the first to see Jesus. Instead, he was shown as the first to see the tomb empty and believe that Jesus had risen. We cannot be certain that Paul has not been amended to suit the Roman church, for the priority of Peter identifies Rome as the favored church. Following Professor Marxsen, this essay examines the meaning of the Christian credal statement, Jesus is risen
The Lost Tomb of Jesus
A recent film made for the Discovery Channel about a tomb found in Jerusalem which has within it caskets bearing the names of Jesus, Mary and Joseph argues it is the Holy Family tomb. It is bogus “history” meant to earn a dishonest buck. It says the odds are over 600 to 1 the Jesus Family Tomb is that of the gospel family. You have to take this evidence with a big pinch of salt. Like any syllogism, mathematics is only as good as its assumptions. This whole nonsense could not have arisen unless the Christians felt obliged to believe that Jesus had a close family. Looked at in a fair and balanced way, he did not. He was a member of a brotherhood, the Essenes.
Morality and Metaphor
Society gives everyone the same rights under the law, and people are to use them instead of taking the law into their own hands—a prescription for social chaos—but they also have the duty to be a good citizen. Failure to do your duty means you are not a good citizen and cannot expect the rights of one. If the law is effective and just, citizens should act altruistically confident that if they are deliberately wronged, the law will deal with it. If they feel slighted, they can rely on justice to satisfy any temptation to feel vengeful. Evil is embodied in our atavistic side, the side that wants to be like a solitary animal, free to do anything. In society we cannot. We have our duty to society. It is what the battle of Good and Evil is about. We have to suppress atavistic behaviour in the social contract we have entered by living in, and enjoying the benefits of, society. When we succeed we are upright, but when we fail we have fallen to the wiles of Satan.
Why I am Unconvinced there is a God
Ken Harding on “Why I am Unconvinced there is a God”. I am unconvinced there is a God. The invisible and the nonexistent look too much alike. I have no choice. I cannot accept that such an entity is possible. I am unconvinced, and all the threats of eternal damnation cannot convince me.
Dinesh D’Souza, His Critics and Admirers
Dinesh D’Souza is the latest Christian superstar apologist, and has been described as a scholar. He plugs his own books in extensive blogs on the internet, and gets wide TV coverage on Christian TV. D’Souza finds feeble arguments in favour of supernatural belief and even feebler ones against science, regurgitating the same oft-refuted lies as if they were new. Anyone with any moral principles would use their supposed scholarship to help the poor not to rob them. The rich perpetuate ignorance to keep their own advantages. They want the poor to be content uneducated and stupid, and not object to the profits made out of them. Religion is the perfect scam for this. People pay to be kept poor, and voluntarily go around converting others into the sheep pen. Christians don’t notice. It all seem s quite all right to stupid woolly animals. Here we cover some of D’Souza’s coverage.
Philosophy in an Evolutionary Light
Kant uses “pure practical reason” to present us with a pure philosophy of morality, but, like everyone else, uses metaphors derived from material experience to do it. Without realizing it, he ends up with the puritanical Christian assumptions he bagan with, but secularized. Lakoff and Johnson show that cognitive studies contradict Kant’s conclusions. Not only are they not universal, they are no more true than the initial Christian assumptions of a God-based morality—they are not true at all! Philosophers like Kant forgot the message of the ancient Greek sophists who could prove anything—beware of being convinced by your own erudition. Sophistry began as skepticism that anything should be believed because everything could be proved. A sophist might have seen through complicated schemes of argumentation like Kant’s, but it took science to do it—practical empirical studies of perception and thinking. Above all, Kant ignores all human feeling.
Are You a Fundamentalist?
You know less than many atheists about your own religion and its sooty history, but still think God prefers you to people who are intelligent and examine the evidence?… You mock the idea of gods having sons by women, but still believe God impregnated a human twelve year old girl who gave birth to Jesus—a god who defied death and ascended into heaven, thereby making his human mother the Mother of God… A test of Christian belief.
In God We Doubt
John Humphrys the BBC broadcaster explained in a popular book how he is a failed atheist. He believed, then he did not believe, he was an atheist, then he believed again. His book is highly readable, but is a polemic against atheism, and yet another apology for Christianity, which we all know is under serious attack from hordes of wild and savage atheists who want to do awful things like persuading people to accept only what is provable and not what rogues and second hand car dealers tell them, notably the clergy. This review addresses some of the points rather poorly made by the great amn.
Professor Plonka Defends Delusion
Alvin Plantinga is the greatest living Christian Philosopher, the heir to Augustine and Aquinas, he thinks. He argues like a thumb sucking infant. Plantinga by name, Plonka by nature. Here we review some fatuously childish replies he has for Dawkin's book, The God Delusion. There is no hope of him ever maturing, so readers are invited to send used dummies and Cabbage Patch Dolls to him at Nore Dame, labeled “A Gift from God”, to keep him comforted, as biological science blocks out the gaps for God he hopes and prays he can retain, at least among the ignorant sheep who admire him and pay his wages.
The Failed Hypothesis of God
God is an old hypothesis meant to explain what was inexplicable. It has no place in the modern world, where science has shown how hypotheses can be tested and rejected or accepted on the basis of their success in prediction. The hypothesis has it that God is a spirit and so cannot be tested, but believers in this “spirit” say it is able to effect changes in the material world, and has done in the Creation and prophecy, and still does in answer to prayer. Victor Stenger, in a book everyone should read, shows how science can test for the supposed interventions of God in the world, and shows consclusively that there is no evidence that He does intervene. Either God does not exist or He does not intervene as Christians pray He does.
Catholics Object to Blair Preaching Hypocrisy in Westminster Cathedral
Blair preached the value of faith to Catholics in Westminster Cathedral at the invitation of the Archbishop. Some Catholics protested by silently praying!
The Truth in Religion
John Polkinghorne is greatly admired among Christians. He once had a reputation as a scientist but became a clergyman. Now he writes tendentious reviews pretending to be a scientist. He reviewed a couple of books in The Times Literary Supplement. It was the usual dishonest Christian pap.
Does science make belief in God obsolete?
Templeton, a Christian philanthropist, has a fund for promoting the links between Christianity and science. To that effect, contributors have been invited to give their opinion on the question, “Does science make belief in God obsolete?”. Only Vic Stenger had the courage to give an outright “Yes” in reply. Of course, if God is defined as social humanity, then the answer is necessarily “No”, but all Christians want their God to be supernatural, whatever the logical interpretation of Christ’s proclamations. So, the answer is “Yes”. Here the replies are analysed from the viewpoint of this website.
From the Death of God to Secular Christianity
Science has proved the death of God. The God of the Christians is a dead God, a rancid God. Christians have been tricked, so what remains for them? Christ and his precepts live on. The Christian messiah lives, as they boast on their churches, but they have been misled by an incarnated Devil. They do not do what God incarnated as Christ told them. They must do what he said, then they will enter the kingdom of God. They will be surprised to find it is here on earth. It is a secular kingdom, and involves nothing supernatural. Scientists can be Christs!
America, Christianity and Violence
A divine defends religion, meaning Christianity, against accusations of violence, but the apology is a string of straw men. The defence comes down to the secular state being responsible for much violence despite its liberal origins, but the US, which is in fact the secular state, is far from secular despite its secular constitution. Fanatical evangelical Republicans have taken control of it, and have dominated foreign policy for many decades. The supposed errors and faults of the secular state are US Christian jihadism against the rest of the world, and uphold the thesis of religious, particularly Christian, violence in the world.
Is Jesus’ or Jesus’s the Possessive Jesus?
Biblical “scholars” have more or less uniformly decided that whatever Jesus possesses is written as Jesus’, as in “Jesus’ miracles”. Most people would quite naturally say “Jesus’s miracles”, as is the general practice in these AskWhy! pages. It is difficult to see why these “scholars” persist in an old fashioned and not at all sensible fad of writing, contrary to all the best authorities. Let us try to keep written and spoken English in synchronization. Today, newspapers and magazines are increasingly using the abbreviated word forms like “isn’t” for “is not” and “you’re” for “you are”, writing what people actually say. Let us stick to the same principle when writing down Jesus’s possessions.
Is the Bible Ungrammatical
The singular verb with a plural nominative cannot be a grammatical error if the Holy Ghost allowed it. The Holy Ghost is one of the three aspects of God that together are called The Trinity, and if God makes this mistake, then it is not a mistake. While we all might make slips or be ignorant of the precise rules of grammar, God cannot be, can He? Well, if it is true, it still looks as though the author was ignorant of grammar—which is hard to accept—or they made a slip, which is possible for us all (except God, of course). The author of the “faith, hope, charity” trinity originally just wrote “faith”, then he or someone else, while the Holy Ghost was off watch, added the other two without changing the number of the verb. Now that we use computers, it is much more common. We decide to make a word into a list and forget the verb.
Explain What Is Religion?
Anyone’s religion is the sum of the highest things they care for. But one hopes that what someone cares for will be held on sound principles, and not merely on the pious but dangerous hope called faith.
I Expect To Pass Through This World But Once
“I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing, therefore, that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to my fellow creatures, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.” I am glad you have offered a reward for the apprehension of the criminal who wrote this. Though the moral he draws may appeal to a limited number of very good people, the average sinner is just as likely to draw the opposite one, even if he only does so subconsciously. “I shall not pass this way again, So it's no matter what I do. I'll mess the pasture, spoil the track, I do not care a damn for you. With broken bottles, empty tins, I'll strew the road you've got to take. I shall not pass this way again, I do not care what mess I make.”
The Higher Criticism of Islam
This essay is a complement to the more detailed polemic on these pages against the other patriarchal religions, Judaism and Christianity. All of them are frauds and only apologists and believers think otherwise. Lies described as holy are still lies. It is no defense of religious lies to argue that it is rude to speak about them. Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, is a sham and honest scholarship on these religions cannot avoid being offensive to believers. Religious belief excludes scholarship, so no believer can decry work critical of belief as not scholarly. Moslems, as usual, will be outraged that their beliefs are subject to the same criticism here as Judaism and Christianity. These religions are false, and any amount of indignation cannot change it. Believers are sensitive about their beliefs to the degree that they secretly doubt them. They can have no faith in God to think an almighty power needs defending by half-wits killing other human beings. All of them hope to persuade God of their sincerity through zelotry, yet, if they are right about God, He knows of their insincerity.
The Language of God 1
Francis S Collins tries to persuade us of why he became a Christian. He presents evidence for belief in his book The Language of God. He will convince his Christian chums, but few scientists. The book must be written for Christians. For anyone else it will seem puerile. His science sections are as good as one might expect, but the personal journey is laughable, and the evidence he offers for belief will be inadequate for anyone who thinks of themself as a scientist. One has to conclude that the intended audience is the large body of Christians who reject science, 45% of Americans. They need to be persuaded of the importance of science if the USA is not to slide into mediocrity in future decades. Collins is a Christian, and aims to keep their confidence by interlacing the science with a lot of pious garbage. Christians should indeed read the book for the science, but here we dissect the garbage.
The Language of God 2
Francis S Collins tries to persuade us of why he became a Christian. He presents evidence for belief in his book The Language of God. He will convince his Christian chums, but few scientists. The book must be written for Christians. For anyone else it will seem puerile. His science sections are as good as one might expect, but the personal journey is laughable, and the evidence he offers for belief will be inadequate for anyone who thinks of themself as a scientist. One has to conclude that the intended audience is the large body of Christians who reject science, 45% of Americans. They need to be persuaded of the importance of science if the USA is not to slide into mediocrity in future decades. Collins is a Christian, and aims to keep their confidence by interlacing the science with a lot of pious garbage. Christians should indeed read the book for the science, but here we dissect the garbage.
The Language of God 3
Francis S Collins tries to persuade us of why he became a Christian. He presents evidence for belief in his book The Language of God. He will convince his Christian chums, but few scientists. The book must be written for Christians. For anyone else it will seem puerile. His science sections are as good as one might expect, but the personal journey is laughable, and the evidence he offers for belief will be inadequate for anyone who thinks of themself as a scientist. One has to conclude that the intended audience is the large body of Christians who reject science, 45% of Americans. They need to be persuaded of the importance of science if the USA is not to slide into mediocrity in future decades. Collins is a Christian, and aims to keep their confidence by interlacing the science with a lot of pious garbage. Christians should indeed read the book for the science, but here we dissect the garbage.
Significant Soundbites
Selections of sayings about christianity and the relationship of science and religion
Evolution and Animal Morality
Evidence of morality has been observed in animal behaviour studies of great apes, some monkeys, wolves, hyenas, dolphins, whales, elephants, rats and mice. Stories of animals feeding disabled ones is remarkably common. Sighted animals have often been seen feeding blind ones. Morality seems to have evolved from play. Morality is like a game with rules, and punishments for breaking them. Animals play out of choice, and continued participation depends upon empathy, fairness, co-operation and trust. Animals that habitually cheat don’t get played with. Play therefore is necessarily fair. Through it, each animal gets to understand what is acceptable to others and what is not—what is right, and what is wrong! Play, for social animals, is essential practice for sociality, and the rules of sociality for any species are its morals. If justice is seen as a set of social rules meant to maintain group harmony, then it is equivalent to play.
Revenge or Justice? The Purpose of Law
Law is meant to contain the impulse toward revenge, to preserve a society from perpetual vendettas, keeping it orderly and humane. But the law contains revenge by meting it out itself as retribution. Society’s retributive institutions remove the burden of vengeance from those whose vindictiveness might endanger themselves and others, and destabilize society. The issue is not a society’s right to punish, but that it must never punish in cruel, unusual or disproportionate ways. The law should not be excessive. The law must remove personal animus from the task of apportioning blame and exacting retribution. The death penalty for a petty theft does not create respect for the law—especially when people face the choice of starving to death or risking death by thieving—but merely fear of injustice, and then disrespect for the law. If people truly were moral, law would not be needed.
John Rawls, a Theory of Justice as Fairness
Because of the original position and the veil of ignorance, the theory of justice as fairness permits justice to be indeed fair. It shows why people want a fair and equal spread of rights and duties, and also an equal distribution of benefits, to value a place in society. Any variation in the distribution of benefits will only be acceptable because they are within acceptable limits of tolerance, or because some inequality of distribution benefits everyone, especially those whose abilities and assets are below average. So, some members of society can be privileged as long as all others benefit—usually because they undertake onerous duties on behalf of society—but the reverse is not just—that some people can be exploited to the benefit of others. Any such exploitation must lead to social discontent and offer the potential for revolution.
Terrorism and the Principle of Humanity: Ted Honderich
Excessive richness shows society is malfunctioning, and wealth must be redistributed to correct it. Someone wealthy will plead it will make their life worse, contrary to the Principle of Humanity, but it is not making it bad! It is not ending it, or putting them into slavery or destitution. It is saving people from slavery and destitution, far more people than it will make feel poor, though they will not be poor. It is not making the rich into paupers or slaves. It is to get people out of bad lives, not to put them into them, even the rich. If everyone has a good life, then no one has a bad one. Material incentives would be cut to those necessary for the aim of reducing bad lives, and those who are already well rewarded, like bankers, do not need inflated bonuses as an incentive. It is robbery of the bank’s customers and shareholders. Nor do the poor need the threat of destitution to force them to work.
Morality and Moral Natural History
One of the most striking features of natural morality is that the approval or censure of an act directly reflects the social value or social injury of the act. Why is justice the fundamental and essential moral law? It is a vital regulation of social life. Why is murder the greatest crime? It is the gravest social delinquency. In tribal society religion and morals had remained close to each other. Then religion became the interest of the sacerdotal caste of priests, when nations and empires were built. Then it perverted morality in the interests of that class, yielding extraordinary notions of mortally serious sin—rules about washing, sneezing, coughing, marrying, excreting, wearing hats, etc. Utterly pointless morals were invented to give priests more income, absolving the sheep of these perversions, or forcing them to get natural social arrangements like marriage celebrated by the priests, further enriching them.
