Truth
Dinesh D’Souza, His Critics and Admirers
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee Contents Updated: Tuesday, 27 November 2007
What’s So Great About Christianity
The Christian right have found a new champion in a man called Dinesh D’Souza, and he’s an Asian, would you believe, albeit one who has lived in the US for most of his adult life and has taken the neocon shilling. Earning his reputation as a conservative political commentator, he proudly gave himself the soubriquet, Distort D'Newza. In line with his admitted aim to distort, this Christian liar claims to be upholding the principles of the US republic, though the founding fathers specifically excluded religion from politics in the US constitution. His cringing book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and its Responsibility for 9/11, was panned by anyone intelligent, and many commentators even of the right accused D'Souza of being a pseud, of character assassination, and an elitist. A NY Times reviewer called it a national disgrace (see National Review Online). The well known skeptic, Michael Shermer, gave this man some kudos by calling him a scholar, but he sounds no different to the rest of the evangelical crooks spewing up the same tired arguments for Christianity to line their own pockets and plug the billionaire’s jokingly called Republican party.
In a blog to flog his new book, What’s So Great About Christianity, he repeats the old chestnut that Christ is better represented in history than George Washington, Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great. Including George Washington is nothing more than bravado, it is so demonstrably false. The man who conquered Asia and gave rise to Hellization in the east, on this argument, must be a figment of the Greeks’ imagination, and the man who ended the Roman republic, Julius Caesar, bringing about the empire, is equally imaginary. You might as well say that Zeus or Hercules is better represented in history than Christ. The fact is that Christ, whether he existed or not, made no contemporary impression on history, so history would not look any different at the time, if he did not exist. The myth about him certainly made an impression on subsequent history, but so too did the myths of Zeus and Romulus—imaginary beings both—and, if Alexander and Caesar did not exist, then there are huge contemporary holes in our knowledge of classical history. The existence of Christ can legitimately be doubted, but that of Alexander and Caesar hardly can! A Christian vicar posted this:
The existence of Caesar, Alexander the Great and Washington are all attested to by a multiplicity of sources and people. There are military records, personal correspondence, official documents and even the accounts of their enemies that lend weight and heft to the fact that these men existed.
What can be doubted is whether a man existed who did what the gospels say he did. Plenty of men existed at the time Christ did, something like 30 or 40 million in the Roman empire, and a few hundred thousand in regions described in the New Testament. The question is, did any of them do what the gospels describe, or has someone’s life been fictionalized to suit the early Christian agenda? In this, Christ is rather like Socrates, another of D’Souza’s examples. What we know of Socrates is magnified by his two biographers, and if it were not for the fact that others mention him, including Aristophanes who wrote a contemporary burlesque of him, the idea that Plato invented him as a hanger for his own views would doubtless prevail. Certainly, Plato makes Socrates his own mouthpiece, but he was using a man who seems to have existed and been respected by the Greeks a generation before in a similar way to Christ, as a noble being. The main difference is that Socrates was not elevated into an object of worship as a god, whereas the man behind Christ was.
How Do We Know Christ Even Lived?
The “scholar”, D’Souza, tells us that “the writers of the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles”, writing within a hundred years of the god’s death, testified to his existence as well “as Josephus, Suetonius, Pliny, and Tacitus”, none of whom tell us anything unequivocal about Christ. Let us recollect that the evidence in the first three gospels is actually the evidence of one man, the author of Mark’s gospel, and the author of the Acts of the Apostles is the same man as wrote the gospel of Luke, a man who depended on Mark’s gospel for all the important facts about Christ’s life. The author of the fourth gospel wrote almost a hundred years later, according to most authorities, time enough to draw on the older sources and invent whatever was missing. So the Christian evidence largely rests on the gospel of Mark.
As to the Roman evidence, it ought not to need repeating were it not for the predilection Christians have for repeating the same lies over and over again. A D’Souza admirer says he checked D’Souza’s references and they are all solid, and even adds Lucian, Philo and the Talmud. If any proof is needed that Christians cannot understand words let alone evidence, this is it. Lucian lived over a century after the events spoken of in the gospels, and satirized all religion. Philo was a Jewish near contemporary of Jesus but makes no mention of him at all. Christians, though, were fond of citing Philo. The Talmud was written down centuries after the gospel events, when Jews resented Christianity and anti-Christian references were inserted.
These and the references given by D’Souza say nothing about the life of any man called Jesus, and little if anything about a man called Christ. They are references to troubles caused by Christians. Embarrassingly for D’Souza, an unusual creature, a reasonably honest Christian pastor, wrote denying D’Souza’s putative evidence from the classical writers. Only Josephus writing around 100 AD mentions Christ, and in a passage that has been doubted even by Christian scholars. The others mention Christ, or in Suetonius a man called Chrestus, only indirectly as the instigator of the activities of supposed “Christians”, but the Latin word, Christiani, at this time, meant messianists, not Christians. Suetonius is talking about messianic Jews, and probably Tacitus too. What Christians cannot comprehend is that references to Christians do not mean that Christ actually existed. The best that can be assumed from this about Christianity per se is that Christians might have been among the messianists. An assumption is not evidence. Yes, there were Christians in the first century AD, but unless you are willing to believe that the worshippers of Hercules followed a real man, nothing in having a following necessarily testifies to the real existence of the object of their worship. So all of this supposed evidence boils down to Mark, an ignorant work, as any scholar will attest.
Christian Martyrs
To add to the belief that there was a real Christ, this “scholar” tells us that the disciples were willing to lose their lives for their cause—“the early church and its martyrs risked death rather than renounce Christ”—so Christ must have existed, and so “no serious historian questions the historicity of Christ”. It seems the only serious historians are Christians, and the Christians perpetuate the myths about the martyrdom of the disciples, none of which any historian, understood to be a serious professional and not a Christian amateur who prefers to believe unfounded tales, could or does accept.
Moreover, people willing to lose their lives for their cause, once, based on Christian mythology, were considered noble, but now we can see there is nothing noble in it. Islamic suicide bombers no doubt seem noble to Moslem terrorists, but not to anyone else. Christians think the suicide bombers are wrong and deluded, but Christian martyrs were not wrong, and their martyrdom proves that Christ must have lived, incongruent opinions. The Romans viewed Christians in the same way as Bush views members of Al Queda, and Christ as Americans regard Osama bin Laden. They were terrorists, and Christ was their leader. Yes, we know the Christian plea that it was all a mistake, but Romans did not think so, and they had to deal with it at the time. How ironic it would be if in 300 years time the USA turned to worshipping Osama bin Laden, the Moslem Christ. The trouble is that Bush and his fundamentalist supporters know no history, and haven’t the imagination to see what they might be doing.
D’Souza, needless to say is promoting a book, apparently the next greatest thing to the bible, and he cites various critics of Christianity as praising it. If this is an example of it, then save your money. It is not new, and D’Sousa is no scholar, just another Christian opportunist on the make. The sheep are not called sheep for nothing. Encouragingly, most of the comments added to the blog were highly critical of D’Souza’s feeble efforts. They were not, of course, Christians who seem to think that the more they hear a lie repeated by their gurus, the truer it becomes. These readers were healthily skeptical. Perhaps there is hope for the future of the USA yet.
Evolution
Some comments turned to Intelligent Design, and the ones who seemed favourable to it were not scientists. How can we tell? It is easy. Christians think the theory of evolution is opinion, and Intelligent Design is another opinion, the Christian one. For them, it is only fair that both opinions should be offered, if one is. So science classes should offer the Christian opinion as well as the scientific one. Such arguing proves that these people do not understand science, because it is not just opinion. Science is discovered by using a particular method, the scientific method, and when things are discovered by this method then, and only then, can they be accepted as science. Religious opinions, whether pure faith or supposedly based on the observation of design in nature is not science, and cannot be admitted as science. If there were any scientific basis for intelligent design, then it would already be part of science.
Evolution is quite different. Christian apologists gloat that not everything is known about evolution. Well not everything is known about medicine but not many Christians reject medical treatment because it is only a theory, or whatever. The point about science is that it is a method, and builds up its evidence painstakingly by experiment and observation. Not all the evidence on evolution is in, but that does not mean evolution is wrong. There is enough evidence for it. Indeed, it is so vast compared with the pathetic attempts to make science out of a 2500 year old book, that Christians cannot face even looking for it. They just haven’t a clue where to start, and many will not look anyway, on principle, in case they are persuaded by what they see. That is why smug pastors can say with utter honesty to their inquiring flocks that they have “never seen any evidence to support evolution”. It is what the Greeks called sophistry, but we can call trickery and lying by omission.
Intelligent Design is not science because it is not capable of being investigated by the methods of science. If it is meant to be a hypothesis, then to be scientific, it has to be testable by some experiment or observation that will show one way or the other that some natural artefact is designed by an intelligence or not. Until the Christians come up with a suitable test of their hypothesis, it will remain unscientific and outside the science classroom. Opinion, whether momentary fancies or fads or long term religious belief, can only be scientific when formulated in a scientific way that is open to test. Nothing religious is, and that is why religion and science are incompatible. Science is based on disbelief, while religion is based on belief. They are diametrically opposed.
The most ignorant posts and among the longest are those from admirers of Mr D’Souza that disdain evolution. These people are the basest and most dispicable of liars, unless their lies can be mitigated as the most arrogant form of pure ignorance. Repeatedly these people make out that evolution depends on improbable accidents. If by accidents, they mean mutations, they are plainly not at all improbable but happen all the time. If by accidents they mean that mutations are never beneficial, and so any one that is was an unlikely accident, they are on firmer ground, but still not secure. Most mutations are harmful, or neutral, in their affects on the organism, but not all are. Some are beneficial, and that is what evolution is all about. What does beneficial mean, then? It means that this organism is better suited to its environment than others, and so has an advantage over others. As genes carry the mutations to the next generation, the next generation has the beneficial mutation, and as it is beneficial, it spreads in the population, which consequently changes.
It really is beautifully simple in essence, the very thing that any sensible God would invent to save him a lots of development and sustaining work! That is why more intelligent Christians have no trouble with evolution at all. It is more God-like for a God to reveal himself in intelligent ways than in ways that expect idiocy, such as belief that a 2000 year old book contains everything good and true in the universe. Grifters like D’Souza say they believe it, but the dolts are those who believe shysters trying to sell their own shoddy books. One apologist writes:
Since no one I know on this earth was present at the time of the world’s first dawn, it would be foolish to accept an ever-shifting dogma about how and when the earth was made. There is one theory that has stood the test of time…
…and though no one was present on earth at the time, it has still gotten into the Holy Word! A miracle! An “ever shifting dogma” is near enough an oxymoron. An opinion is no doubt appropriately called a dogma, harking back to the Greek, but today it means a doctrine held only on authority, and doctrines are the opposite of ever-shifting, they are usually permanently fixed as God-given truths. Scientific opinion does change, because science is corrigible—it is self-correcting. When some scientific hypothesis proves to be inadequate, a better one is sought. Intelligent people think it sensible to have better things than poorer ones held merely because they are old, or given on some spuriously permanent authority. Few people today opt to be cured by exorcists who believe they are driving out demons, as Christ did, even when they are committed Christians. The reason is that we found a better explanation for disease than demons, and learnt how to drive out the organisms really responsible. But although medical science has not yet discovered everything about illness, even Christians do not run it down as “just a theory”.
If science were not ever changing there would be no advances made, and these Christian backwoodsmen would not be able to paste their lies all over the internet. But they will not complain about science that benefits them directly without obviously challenging the ancient book of words. It is evolution, they challenge, a theory without obvious consequences in daily life, but at the center of all biological progress these days, and so central to medical advances against cancers and genetic disease. It is time scientists set up faith-free schools that will refuse to admit believers, then we can see which ones turn out the people society needs.
A popular apologetic line for Christians is to attack Darwinism rather than evolution. One Christian posts citations from philosopher, Michael Ruse:
The Darwin vs Creation argument is often a battle of two religions.
Certainly, there’s no doubt about it, that in the past, and I think also in the present, for many evolutionists, evolution has functioned as something with elements which are, let us say, akin to being a secular religion.
Ruse seems here to be questioning Darwinism as the best explanation of evolution, which he is not questioning at all. There is nothing wrong with that. Science is about getting the best explanations for natural phenomena. The evidence for evolution is overwhelming. Ruse accepts that evolution is beyond all reasonable doubt, confirming those who do not accept it as unreasonable. Darwin collected most of the initial evidence for evolution and offered an hypothesis to explain it, natural selection. Science moves on, and others have been discontent with natural selection as an adequate explanation of the fact of evolution. Variations of Darwinism have been suggested, but so far no radically different alternative has proved persuasive, so Darwinism of some form remains the “Theory of Evolution”, the accepted hypothesis for the facts. Christians can join with those who criticize Darwinism if they wish, though since they are mainly ignorant about it all, no one will take any notice, but evolution cannot be challenged as a natural phenomenon.
What is annoying Christian even more is that many people are realizing that evolution is a phenomenon that goes far beyond biology. The whole universe has been evolving since the Big Bang—perhaps before! This is in the tentative and speculative field of cosmology, where physicists heap conjecture on to conjecture, and science gets closer to being theology. The difference is always there, though. Speculations are not scientific if there is no way they can ever be tested. Scientists who offer conjectures that can never be tested are no different from theologians, and many of them have decided to make a quick buck from Christianity by taking the Templeton Gold. It shows they are unprincipled because it is offered as a bribe for scientists to sell their souls to the Christian devil. Many have done.
Naturally evolution is far from completely understood, and the actual formation of life itself is not, though it is not part of Darwin’s theory, anyway. Still, much is known and what is known upholds the broad theory of evolution. One apologetic poster wrote that “evolutionary mechanisms have yet to be proven or demonstrated”. This Christian seems to mean that no one has ever seen one species turn into another, much less a genus or a family, but the statement generally speaking is quite false. The basic mechanism of evolution is quite clear—it is the division of the DNA double helix. This is the basis of reproduction, the helix dividing along its length and then re-forming from each half as two helices. The division and copying process is not perfect and causes mutations, so that the re-formed helices are not always exact copies of the parent ones, and therefore the animal for which the DNA is the blueprint, so to speak, is not exactly like the parents. In short, evolution is inevitable.
Faith and Evidence
Some Christians are plainly bored to death by the Discovery Institute and its well oiled and financed but dishonest attempts to persuade the average Joe that science is wrong and Genesis is right. Many wearily turn back to pure faith, with no need of any sort of scientific evidence. We read:
There is no proof that Jesus is the son of God, only faith based on the fact that God loved you so much he decided to send his only son so that you could live with Him forever. People are made in God’s image with souls. Animals are not. God’s Word is clear about creation and not evolution. It even tells of dinosaurs.
Faith is what it is because it is no fact, as this Christian claims. Faith is not fact, it is fancy. Fact is what is shown to be so, what is certainly and strictly true, the quality of being real, of actuality. Belief that God loves you and sent his son, etc, etc, is multiply not factual. Again, it is something that Christians do not get because they are fond of describing their belief as “The Truth”, with capital letters for emphasis. But even spelt entirely in capital letters, it remains fancy not fact.
This Christian is right in that there is no proof that Jesus is the son of God, and so it is not a fact. Nor is the existence of God a fact. These are both items of faith for that reason. If God is not a fact, it is doubly true that He loves you is not a fact. Nor can it be a fact that He sent His son, or that you can live forever, or that the two are connected causally. People made in God’s image is not a fact, souls are not a fact. God’s Word is often not clear, and when it is, it cannot be a fact because God is not a fact, and it is often wrong. Nor is it correct that dinosaurs appear in the bible. None of it is factual. All of it is faith, and faith is something thought to be true without any evidence, something assented to on authority, trust, ignorance or prejudice. Christians happily buy this fantasy though they’d get a used car checked by a mechanic before they spent a few hundred dollars on it.
Ancient people knew only what they had directly experienced or what they were told by authority on trust. They had no way of knowing it was true. It was not. The authorities for it, the priests, had no better way of knowing God existed or what His qualities were than the trusting peasant, but the peasant thought he had. People believe what priests and prophets tell them, then tell their own children, and children naturally believe what their parents say, and pass on the same unverified faith to their own children, and so it has gone on, the original lie perpetuated. Now there is no need for it to continue. We have a genuinely trustworthy method of discovery called science. Science not religion has given us the privileged life we enjoy today. Those who think otherwise are simply perverse, and they are keeping rogues in power and profit.
Despite all this plain truth, D’Souza’s admirers think it is Atheists who cannot use evidence correctly, not Christians. It shows the depths of their delusion. “Christians never lose”, one posts, because Christ promised it. “Christians aren’t smug” just certain! Quite where Christ makes the promise that Christians cannot lose, this one does not say, and, it shows he has not made any study of his bible, because Christ was as clear as could be that salvation was not just a matter of professing faith. He repeatedly warned that even the smallest slip in behaviour could close the gates of the kingdom of God—small and narrow gates, not easy to find, unlike the broad and obvious gates of hell, all too easy to fall into—to anyone. Christians had to act in a certain way to prove they were Christians, and had not to do other things that Christians ought not to do. They had to try to be perfect!
Faith begets the smugness of the modern Christian. He is smug even on the criteria presented by the living God in His own Word. These people are fools who like to think they are saved by nothing more than faith because that is what their neocon get-rich-quick pastors tell them. It was not the view of Christ, the man who was God on earth, Christians think, but ignore because what God said, if God is what he was, does not suit their deluded thinking.
There are some rather wiser Christians—Christians of the old school like Anglicans once were before the evangelicals took over the Church of England. They accept their beliefs are unprovable, and accept science and evolution as factual. Effectively, they live a double life, with their faith a separate thing from everyday life except that it requires them to be good to be saved. They realize that Christianity is not simply faith, but a faith that must lead to good behaviour, and faith without good behaviour is not what Christ taught in God’s Word. The point of faith for these people is as a guide to moral living, and moral living is a matter of loving humanity, as Christ made perfectly clear. No one who does not love others is not a Christian however much faith he professes, and such people will not be saved despite their delusion to the contrary. Mostly Christians like these are happy that people live lovingly together, and they have little desire to ram some imagined belief down the throats of others.
They readily accept that we learn more as time goes on, that this is God’s will, and that the holy Word could not have had a complete noesis of universal knowledge in it. So, they accept that Genesis was a good attempt to explain the world before science had examined the evidence properly, but there is no need to believe it now. A Catholic posted that he once had faith that Santa Claus came down the chimney with presents every Christmas, but no longer does. Faith in Genesis is the same. We grow out of it. The danger of such honesty for belief is clear, and that is why hard-line Christians want the bible to be infallible. If it is not, then where does the fallibility end—with the resurrection, perhaps? An obvious falsehood is the promise Jesus made to return within the lifetime of his audience. By the bible’s own standards, this makes Christ a false prophet who must be killed. He was killed! Why then do Christians continue to believe? Does it not occur to them that, if they are right that supernatural superbeings exist, then they are worshipping the wrong one?
D’Souza makes a big thing about all history being hearsay, as he puts it, apparently agreeing that the stories about Jesus are hearsay. The relevance of this word is that hearsay evidence is not valid in criminal legal cases, so the biblical evidence for Jesus is not legally valid, and any court of law would have to reject it. Presumably D’Souza, the scholar, means that none of us experience any history other than what effects us directly. History is read in reports, and so is second hand, and in that sense hearsay. It is one of the problems of historians that this is so, and they have to find scientific and logical ways of dealing with evidence that might be dubious. They will, for example, generally prefer directly reported evidence over reports of reports. A court of law accepts what someone has seen themselves, but not something that a witness has been told by another. The historian inclines to believe what someone has written about what they have directly witnessed but will be doubtful about reports of someone else witnessing it. It is the precise reason why the churches have always claimed the gospels were written by direct witnesses to the events they report.
Unfortunately scholarship—real scholarship, not mere allegations of it, like Mr D’Souza’s—has multiple grounds for questioning the Christian “fact” that the gospels were written by direct witnesses. First, the authors of the gospels are anonymous, that they were written by the names on them is only tradition, not fact. Second, as noted above, the synoptic gospels all depend for the core of Christianity on Mark’s gospel, so three witnesses are really no more than one, if Mark was a witness himself. Third, Luke admits he was not a direct witness but collected the stories from others, admitting his account was hearsay, and John could not have been a direct witness unless he was around a hundred years old when he wrote, and most scholars, proper ones, admit that the John who wrote the gospel was a different John from the disciple John.
Fourth, the gospels themselves discount that they were written by the direct witnesses to the central event of Christian belief, the resurrection! No one could have witnessed it, except some Roman soldiers who Matthew says fell asleep on the job, so no one did witness it. The resurrection belief rests on presumption, that the empty tomb could only mean Jesus arose from the dead, and that he appeared later to people. Neither is certain or even likely. Fifth, none of the central participants wrote anything about these events, neither Jesus, nor Simon, his right hand man, nor Mary Magdalene, nor Mary the mother, nor James, allegedly his brother and the leader of the later church, a man who did write a letter explaining carefully what the first Jewish Christians expected of followers of Christ. It contains nothing about the gospels and says as plainly as possible that faith alone will not save the deepest believer. The Christian had to prove their faith by works. Both faith and works were needed but faith was worthless without works. That is the beginning and end of the faith-only debate expressed by the “Brother of the Lord”, as Christians proudly call him.
A Dinesh admirer felt sorry for the disdain the critics had for his so-called scholarship. People ought not to be put down for their attempts at scholarship. It is unintentionally damning of the Christian grifter. This sympathizer did make the true point that what we read in the bible and what came from the apostolic church was a sound message for humanity that did not depend in the least on anything supernatural whether God, the Son of God, saints or angels. The message was a moral one for people who choose to live together in society—love one another! One might add that anyone who choses not to love can choose to live alone, but no one should be fooled by the rogues who call themselves Christian pastors but want their flocks to vote Republican and fight wars against innocent people in distant lands. This man, Christ, or God, if you wish, told people they were blessed to be poor not rich, and by no stretch of the imagination can loving someone be synonymous with killing them. The churches gleefully killed myriads of people in the Middle Ages allegedly to save their souls. The Christian message was bent unrecognisible, and these Christians still thought they were saved. Our most recent Christian leaders have killed myriads more innocents in the last few years. Christianity has never recovered from the wickedness of the Dark Ages, and why should it? Christian institutions have never been Christian in the terms prescribed by the gospel Christ. They have always been wicked.
The Christian Message?
The more honest pastor cited above as criticizing D’Souza wrote:
The proof of the existence of Jesus and his subsequent resurrection does not reside in sterile intellectual arguments that prove nothing. The only proof resides in a loving, caring community that has been formed in his name, embued by his Spirit, and is not only willing to become nobodies for his sake, but to reach out to the nobodies in acts of self giving love.
Well, the sentiment is what Christianity ought to be about, but hardly ever has been, and never has been at the top levels. The Christian message is a message to the community about how they should live amicably together, thereby obviating horrors nobody wants. The trouble always is that it is a message that the poor and weak readily accept, but as soon as they get any power, wealth and prestige in the world they forget. Bush doubtless appealed to god for mercy when he was a pitiful alcoholic, but has no intention of giving mercy as the most powerful man in the world. That is the typical case. If society ever gets to any sort of permanent caring society, Christianity is unlikely to have anything to do with it. A loving caring community is far from proof of it. The most loving and caring communities are probably not Christian ones. All the major religions of the world have the same core messages as Christianity, and “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is common to all. It is the principle morality clause of human societies.
Most European countries are only incidentally religious, yet are more caring and loving than the Great Society, as the USA was once fond of calling itself. Two hundred years ago, the USA was founded on wonderful democratic and secular principles, since when it has been a steady slip downhill. Now it is an insane theocracy run by crypto-fascists called neocons, who openly brag they use religion as a political tool, because they know no Christian will listen to them. Nor do they. They just continue voting Christian donkeys into power, and losing their young men in foreign wars to make the donkeys rich. Alliluyah, Lord! A Christian critic of his fundamentalist co-religionists as well as atheists writes:
To find satisfaction in a non-believer’s imminent demise to hell is hardly in the image of Jesus… and yet it simple mindedly persists… a fundamentalist believer’s response to an educated inquiry often ends with theological preaching that condemns someone for pursuing truth. Or worse, a skeptic is met with Biblical text juxtaposed with grossly concrete and over-literal mistranslation.
Yet the post is directed at the atheists who criticize fundamentalists. Christians will not criticize each other generally, however monstrous their excessively concrete and over literal misinterpretations are. This thoughtful post does have a final tilt at the lunatics who are taking over his religion, but in such a mild-mannered way that his message to atheists was certainly the message any fundamentalist will have taken from it. He ended;
I find that this newfound wave of atheist resentment toward religion stems not from the tenets upon which each belief system stands, but rather, the onslaught of ignorance and lack of self-scrutiny that all to often is associated with organized religion.
That is surely right. Neither atheists nor Christians bothered much in the centuries since the Enlightenment about each other because Christians were not domineering and political, and nor were atheists. Each respected the Enlightenment doctrine that people’s views were their own, and should be respected. The new militant fundamentalism that has grown in the USA is un-self-critical religious fascism, and it is plainly advancing shoulder to shoulder with political fascism in the US. That is what atheists have become militant about, and not before time. Ignorant Christian fundamentalists have taken over what was once the bastion of democracy, and now freedom notionally does not exist in the USA, even though its Christian leader spouts on endlessly about his crusade to spread it to places that are not yet ready for it. Let there be any concerted protest against the neocon takeover in the US, and the Patriot Act will be enforced and freedom for all ended. The atheistic response to fundamentalism is a realization of what it means politcally.
Another post drew this fear out explicitly, comparing the fundamentalists with Hitler, whose Christ was a good Catholic, like Hitler himself, but was not a Jew. The place of the Jews in fundamentalist reality is always some other bogey man, once atheistic communists and now Moslems. Fundamentalists want to dictate other people’s morals, yet the morals of the states that are most fundamental in religion are all too often the worst in the USA. At best that is the hypocrisy that Christ explicitly decried, and that no Christian should ignore, if they seriously want to be saved. The trouble is, of course, that morality is a social contract, and when it is too oppressive, people ignore it. That is true in these bible belt states. Fundamentalists are often poor whites whose only self-respect was the fact that they were not as low in the social pecking order as black slaves. They were grossly uneducated and simple, and they remain the same, wanting easy answers, and relying on the certainties of ancient books like the bible which encouraged them to remain ignorant through the praise Paul has for fools and his disdain for learning. So, these people would not think for themselves but instead deluded themselves that God had done all their thinking for them. Since the bible did not have all the answers, they believed their politically and money-motivated ministers who could use biblical sophistry to extract any message that suited them from the bible. D’Souza is the latest of these biblical sophists and Christian money makers.
Are Christians Foolish?
As if determined to prove the points made here about Christians being proud to be idiotic, before long a Christian post cites Paul:
In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that God makes foolish the wisdom of the world and that the world through its wisdom does not know him. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise, and the weak things of the world to shame the strong.
Apparently, God doesn’t operate by the wisdom of the world, and Christians comfort themselves that He chose them as fools to shame the wise. Do they not get a certain sense here of being patronized as idiots by the biblical author? The author, Paul, if that is who it really was, knew wise and worldly people could not possibly be fooled by his scam, but the simple and parochial would be. Atheists are too wise to be Christians! On this basis, Christians ought to reject the modern technological world and go live in caves or mud huts, milking goats for a living, but their biblical citations never stop them from buying computers and joining online discussions, devilish though it must be. The modern world is built on knowledge and wisdom, and our source of it could never have been Christianity which disdains it. That is why we had to wait until science, which is utterly opposed in principle to religion, had emerged as a way to discover truths about the world before technology leapt forward exponentially. The fact that these Christians seem not to realize the utter incongruity and contariness of the worldview they want to persuade us all to accept shows that Paul was right—they are indeed foolish. They seem determined to prove it at all costs. Paul tells the Romans that “God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” This is Hans Andersen’s emperor’s new clothes, isn’t it? You have to clearly see what is invisible, and if you do not, then you have no excuse for evading hell fire! The post writer ends up settling for being “a fool for God, rather then a fool for nothing”, a wish or prayer that is granted either way round.
Like all the ID specialists—funded no doubt by the mites of the poor in southern Baptist church platters and millionaire Christians for whom Christianity keeps them rich while the poor suffer their discontent in their faith—D’Souza finds feeble arguments in favour of supernatural belief and even feebler ones against science, when anyone with any moral principles would use their supposed scholarship to help the poor not to rob them. There is only one reason why anyone wants to perpetuate ignorance, and it is not God’s will. People perpetuate ignorance because that way they can retain their own advantages. The rich want the poor to remain uneducated and stupid so that they will be content, and not demand more out of the profits being made out of them. Religion is the perfect scam for this. People actually pay to be kept poor, and voluntarily go around converting others into the sheep pen. Christ taught voluntary poverty, so it all seem s quite all right to stupid woolly animals.
What they do not realize, even though they have their bibles before them and can read them for themselves, is that Christ and his apostles were individually poor but not collectively. Everyone had to put their wealth, all bar a few personal possessions, into the common purse, and that was used to provide for everyone. Judas was allegedly the purse carrier, making his betrayal of Christ for 30 pieces of silver a joke. He could have run off with all their money had he wanted to. In short, the apostles were communists, and the Acts of the Apostles is quite plain about it. Fundamentalist Christians set out on their rightward trend precisely because their leaders in the USA, the Pat Robertson, Jimmy Swaggart TV evangelical types, were rabidly anti-communist and they saw danger in the open communism of the apostles of Christ. If communism was good enough for God, it had to be utterly discredited in the USA. Christian evangelicalism did the job. Any decent honest scholar would be pointing out what these simple believers have missed in their indoctrination classes on the bible, and they would be encouraging simple folk to get as educated as they are able. Privileged immigrants like D’Souza got an expensive US education, and in gratitude joins the ex-Troskyite neocons determined that ordinary Yankees should remain in their pigpens, or sheep pens if that metaphor is more appropriate.
Another D’Souza admirer takes us back to the apostles again, claiming it is impressive that they were depicted as dolts and idiots yet they were soon—“within several weeks of Jesus’s death”—risking their lives for Christ by preaching openly in Jerusalem. If he thought a little while, he would see that the disciples had to be depicted as dolts because the story is that Jesus kept telling them he would die, but they never got what he meant. Only dolts could have failed to understand. Moreover, they were all Jews, and Jews were unpopular in the Roman empire. One of the ways of separating Christ from the Jews was to have them rejecting him, including his own family, and even his closest associates misunderstanding him. No Jews understood him, but Christians do!
In fact, no Christians can understand, or even consider, that the Jews might have rejected him because he was a fraud, and they were better able to judge, being there at the time. Bishops persuaded Christian simpletons otherwise, and there you are… a myth that has twisted many people’s minds ever since. Moreover, how does this Christian know the apostles were openly teaching what Jesus had been hanged for only a few weeks later? When they are at a loss for explanations, the Christian rule is, “Make it up”! No one will turn to the bible to question it, not even most Christians, so they are on safe ground. Nowhere in the bible does it say the disciples were openly preaching within a few weeks of the crucifixion. If the timing is right, they were teaching in a different country, in Galilee, and if the location is right, they were probably under cover for a long time before they ventured out, probably after the Roman emperor had recalled the governor, then died himself, possibly several years. It is a remarkably common phenomenon for Christians to rewrite the gospels and Acts to suit themselves, then to believe that is what it says. Often they are amazed that their beliefs are unfounded in the bible.
This same apologist thinks the early Jerusalem Church could not have been founded unless Jesus was a real man, but he does not consider that, if he was a real man, Jesus was actually a member of that church so he did not found it. The church was perhaps the Essenes in congregation. Moreover, Jesus, a Greek form of Joshua, could have been an historical figure of worship. Two Joshuas are prominent in the Jewish mythology of the Old Testament, and either, or both, if they were imagined to be the same figure, could have been worshipped as a messianic figure before gentile Christianity began. No Christian will think it possible that anything could be true other than what is in the New Testament. That is the power of faith to stifle your critical faculties, but neverthless it is possible if not probable.
Jews definitely believed in a prospective messiah with supernatural abilities, and the New Testament is evidence of it. A Joshua led the Israelites into the promised land, and it seems a no brainer that messianic Jews will have expected a Joshua to lead them into God’s kingdom. So, there is no difficulty in believing in a Jerusalem church with or without a real Jesus. That a real man assumed the role of the mythical Joshua seems likely, and any such man would have had to have been an enemy of the Roman emperor who actually ruled Judaea. Therefore he would have been rounded up and crucified, just what happened. The story was true, but the Christ was different from the one manufactured in the next half century for the Roman lower classes of slaves, servants, and general lowlife. It is just in this sort of sense that Jesus seems realistic, but realism is not what Christians want. They want a supernatural, and so unreal Jesus, to be real!
Killers
Another Christian posts another old chestnut:
According to secular historians, the 20th century is the bloodiest in recorded history. The death toll ranges from 60 to 100+ million people, most of whom died at the hands of atheist totalitarian governments. I am not blaming “atheism” for these deaths, but, I am pointing out that religion is not the big killer.
The church in the middle ages killed no one through the inquisition, and Catholic apologists still claim it. They had a secular arm as an arm of the Church or they turned those found guilty in church courts over to the secular authorities for punishment. Ergo, the church did not actually do any killing. It merely ordered that heretics should be killed, and God saw to it they were. They were chary about drawing blood too, the bible having a particulaly Jewish distaste for human blood, and so they decided upon burning as a bloodless death suitable for those who were destined for hell. The relevance of this is that the Christian religion is indeed a big killer, historically, but it wangles its way out of the accusation by typical sophistry.
The same is true in modern times. Marx had described religion as opium for the people, and so communism was atheistic. Marx was, of course, brought up as a Jew. Stalin was the evil genius at the heart of “atheistic” Soviet Russia, a country full of Christians, and he had been brought up a Christian. Indeed, wanting to enter the Christian priesthood, he had trained at a seminary until he decided to opt for revolution rather than revelation. Allegedly, Stalin killed 20 million peasants by taking the food from them to feed the people starving in the cities. If he had not done, he would have been blamed for killing 20 million people in the cities to favour the peasants. This is no apology for Stalin, but an example of Christian hypocrisy.
Stalin’s rival, Trotsky, was a Jew, and he became a favourite of the anti-communist west when he was driven out by the ex-Christian, Stalin, started an opposition movement called “Left-Wing Communism”—true communism—and was eventually found with an ice pick in his head, an act of murder blamed on Stalin. The Left-Wing Communists world wide became the main force funded by the CIA to undermine national communist parties outside the USSR. These Trotskyites became neocons when the USSR collapsed and now run the USA, a much more lucrative achievement than running the USSR! Unless you were a personal chum of Yeltsin.
Hitler was always a Catholic, and favoured the Catholic church in his education policy. The Catholics in Germany pre-war had their own party and deliberately wound it up so that Catholic voters could vote Nazi. Protestants were no different, most of them too supported the Nazis. Between them, the Christians in Germany were the overwhelming part of the population, so that Nazis could never have been elected without Christians voting for them, and the enthusiasm of these Christians for Naziism took most of the war to wane. It just will not do to claim that the mass murdering in the twentieth century was caused by atheists, or even by atheistic governments. The people who did the actual murdering were Christians, and sons of Christians.
To bring the story of the twentieth century up to date, who was responsible for the killing of millions of people in Vietnam and Cambodia? It is not a trick question. The answer is the USA leadership, voted in by an overwhelmingly Christian population, just like pre-war Germany. The US directly killed one or two million Vietnamese, mostly simple peasants. The US took the war into peaceful and civilized Cambodia, letting Pol Pot take over from Sihanouk and kill two million more. Estimates of a million people, many of them children, were killed by US sanctions against Saddam, and 100,000 have been killed by US bombing since, all in revenge for an atrocity by religious fundamentalists of another patriarchal religion, Islam.
No, Christian liar, the twentieth century mass killings were not the responsibility of atheists in the main, but were the responsibility of Christians. Perhaps the Christian killers were no different from atheist killers, because they are all human beings, but it shows that Christianity does not make people good and loving. Rather it makes them hate others. Here are excerpts from a posting by a bright, loving, true Christian:
I don’t beleive in evolution because I know my father is not an ape but its obvious to me that some of you speak like apes yet profess to be intellectual. You intellectual scholars of hell read the bible if you dare… I hope for peace, love and health for all of you. By the way if your beliefs are so strong why aren’t you in lines to go to Russia, China or North Korea? Several prophesies for yor ears and you will remember them, Syria will be a wasteland soon, Russia will come against Israel with Arabs from the north and it will take seven months to bury the dead! I dont blame you for your hate cause I know that it comes from your father the devil!! By the way Christians aren’ perfect just forgiven if they repent, so you will find sin in Christians but if they truly are they won’t be practicing sin. You’ll know a Christian by his walk and his deeds not because they say they are! Also those who continue to spout talking points about this illegal and immoral war why aren’t you happy your safe in this country instead of whinning!!!!
Though this man is certain that unbelievers will go to hell, he assures us he wishes us no harm, but at least he contradicts those who think Christ taught salvation is by faith alone. Deeds are necessary, so why is he not aiming at all the poor Christians who will lose their souls because their pastors have told them lies? Many apologists despite reading blogs like this one, displaying a callousness and rage that they seem to think is love, still write that they have never known any angry Christians, and all their best friends do not wish hell and opprobrium on to anyone. It can only be the normal blindness that all Christians must have, or their selectiveness in deciding who is a Christian. People like Robertson, Falwell, Swaggart and company do not seem shy about espousing callous right wing politics necessitating war and carnage. Just how do these opposites manage to gel together in Christianity?
A similar error to the one of casting everyone in a communist or fascist society as atheists, is that everyone who is a scientist is immoral because science professes to be value free. The scientists who developed the atomic bomb are obviously immoral! It seems we are expected to assume that no Christian would have had anything to do with developing bombs or weapons of any kind. Are we back to the sophistry of the popes directing the inquisitions? Christians will have nothing to do with developing weapons, they’ll just order them to be used. That great Christian, George Bush, a man voted for by 60 million US Christians, we read, has no compunction that is noticeable about murdering myriads, and even, when he was governor of Texas, laughed openly in the face of a woman on death row begging him for mercy. Christians generally have never been reluctant to murder. It is required in their holy book since it includes the bloodthirsty Jewish scriptures besides the deeds of its own God. Moreover, Christians try to persuade us that many scientists are Christians, even though more than the average are not. Even so, no scientist who developed the atomic bomb was a Christian? It is unlikely.
Science and Belief
Another popular tack by Christians is this:
No atheist has any scientific, empirical data that God does not exist.
It truly shows the emptiness of the heads of these people. It has been said repeatedly in answer to this absurdity that negatives cannot be proven, and are not required to be proven. What has to be proven are positive assertions. That God exists is the positive assertion. Suppose you claim Padre Pio appeared to you, last Sunday. An atheist says, “You are lying”. You retort, “Prove it is not true”. Who is being reasonable? You are making the positive claim and the burden of proof is on you, not on your critic. The reason is that it is impossible to disprove anything imaginary. If you imagined you had seen Padre Pio, then it is quite impossible for anyone else to disprove it. You have to prove you were not imagining it. The same is true of God, an imaginary being. The believer has the burden of proof, not the unbeliever, precisely because your claim could be entirely imaginary and thererfore beyond disproof.
How can anyone believe everything? People cannot believe everything, but once you accept that not everything can be believed or should be believed then you have to have a strategy of disbelief. The scientist believes nothing until it is proven, and so has no need to believe in God until God is proven. It is a fundamental concept of science. It is called skepticism, and is what most people are in real life.
Christians persist in trying to use science against itself, not a difficult thing to do because, as already said above, science is intentionally corrigible, so self-refuting. It refutes itself in the light of new data and finds better explanations, unlike religions which perpetuate dogma even when they are plainly wrong and dangerous, like the Catholic dogma against contraception in a world that is getting dangerously overpopulated with humans, if it not already overpopulated with them. One D’Souza admirer sought to show that religion was no more a superstition than science by making out that science has its own superstitions. To do it, “superstition” is defined to suit the apologist, a typical Christian apologetic ploy. This one defines superstition as “an unsubstantiated explanation for an observed behavior”, not a definition to be found in the best dictionaries, though passable. Good dictionaries like the OED have the definitions:
- unreasoning fear of something imaginary, especially in connexion with religion or the supernatural
- a habit or religious belief based on fear or ignorance, such as belief in the power of omens and symbols
- irrational or unreasonable belief in general, but often used demeaningly of any religion other than one’s own
The hopeful apologist wants to suggest that science fits his own definition in its postulation of dark matter and dark energy as hypothetical explanations of certain astronomical data, and so is no more than superstition. It possibly is, in these cases. Hypothetical explanations like dark matter and dark energy, until they are substantiated, are superstitions on the third of the above acceptable definitions of superstition, which perhaps encompass the apologist’s. Anyone who seriously holds to the existence of dark matter and dark energy has an irrational belief, a belief that has not been verified. The reason is that any hypothesis is an unsubstantiated explanation for an observed behaviour until it is substantiated or refuted by scientific tests.
Any hypothesis of religious experience is no different, except that religion has no tests, merely credulity—it must be accepted on faith, true or not. Thus, religious people attribute certain psychological experiences to the presence or activity of God, but they have no way of substantiating their explanation, which is therefore superstition on the apologists’ own definition of it. Hugely important core beliefs in Christianity are precisely superstitions in this sense—God, the afterlife, the resurrection, divine purpose in life, etc. The essential difference is the corrigibility of science. No good scientist holds to any hypothesis despite the evidence. All accept that the jury is out until a conclusive judgement is possible. In these cases, there are growing numbers of cosmologists and astronomers who think cosmology needs new hypotheses to offer better explanations for these odd phenomena. Until then, their beliefs might just fit a definition of superstition, but with the crucial difference that superstitions are held in the face of evidence, whereas scientific hypotheses are not.
What is not true is that scientists change the facts to make them fit some “theory”. It is another popular accusation by Christians, a type of projection, as psychologists call it. It ought to be plain that, if science had made any habit of inventing “facts” that were different from facts, science could have gotten nowhere, and we would not have all the scientific and technological wonders of the modern world. Science works because it does not change facts, but uses them to make sure that hypotheses fit them, and so are true to reality. Christianity invents “facts” like the soul, the spirit world, the Holy Spirit, God and the afterlife, to make its superstitious theories seem to work. The Christian proof that science alters the facts is Einstein:
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.
Myriads of websites on the internet give this as a statement by Einstein, but not one seems to say where he said it. If he did say it somewhere, we need to know the context, because Einstein was also a joker, and it could have been meant ironically. It is certain that Einstein was not offering a scientific prescription, because that is not what science does, unless he was simply advising that the facts be “changed” by being viewed from a different perspective that might allow them to be explained more easily. In other words, a problem viewed in orthogonal co-ordinates might seem intractable but will be easily solved in polar co-ordinates. The facts have not changed, but the representation of them has. In other words, think relatively!
Divine Lather
This same apologist, in a long post, also defends Christianity using another popular ploy, analogy. If someone is dirty, it might be because they do not wash themselves. You cannot blame the washing, the argument goes, if it is not used. Christianity is the same. Christianity is not to blame when Christian institutions fail to use the divine lather. Of course, one cannot personify institutions in this way. No institution makes decisions to burn people at the stake. Actual human professing Christians do that. The apologetic ploy gets out of that one by immediately denying these people as Christians, and so Christianity remains pure and sweet smelling.
This is an example of pseudo-science. Popper showed that nothing could be scientific that was untestable. The efficacy of Christianity cannot be tested, because everyone who fails the test is rejected as a Christian, so only good people always remain. Christianity cannot be anything other than pure and sweet smelling, however odious (or odorous) those claiming to be Christians might be. An equivalent ploy makes everyone who is manifestly good a Christian even though they professed something else quite different, or rejected religion entirely. Socrates was a Christian, 500 years before Christ. Einstein is often claimed for Christianity because of his reverent mentions of God, but Christians will not look at the many times he explained what he meant by it. It was Nature.
Although Christians will not look at the history of their various sects, because they know it can only challenge faith, they ought to. The enormity of Christian wickedness can only lead anyone with any compassion and empathy for the plight of other human beings into realizing their religion must be seriously flawed at its root. Christ was adament that the tree bearing rotten fruit should be hacked down and a better one planted. On this criterion explicitly given by Christ, Christianity fails. Its fruit are rotten, and the tree should be uprooted and burned so that something better can replace it. Failure to do this is again defying God’s will, according to their own beliefs. God appeared on earth as Christ, and told people how they should behave to inherit the kingdom of God. He did not advocate faith alone, but insisted that deeds were necessary too. Among them was uprooting what is rotten in their own orchard, but they have never done it there. They have always blamed the blight on to someone else’s orchard and they have always sent out young men to die uprooting other people’s trees, and never bothered about the utterly diseased trees at home. The constant pleas by Christians that their religion is all right and it is only its institutions that are wrong invites Christ’s own response—Hypocrites! He said get the beam out of your own eye before you try to remove a speck from your neighbour’s. Do modern Christians understand what this means?
Occasionally, an apologist admits that Christians can be wicked, and cite Paul as admitting that he was the chief of all sinners. They take it as a sign of his deep Christian humility. Maybe he was admitting to being an opportunist crook, taking the rise out of his moronic followers, people he encouraged to be moronic, just in case they were not moronic enough. If Christians are wicked, then why should any of them be surprised that Christian institutions are wickeder. The wicked ones would be certain to gang up on any perfect ones, throw them overboard, and make sure they got the whole ship to themselves. There is no sign that any Christians who believe this are abandoning the rotten institutions for something better. What they do is start another institution, and the ones who do it are nearly always wicked ones who want to run the whole caboodle themselves to maximize their own profits out of it. If any are started by good Christians, they are soon taken over by the wicked mass of them. There is no better example than the Franciscans. S Francis was a living Christ, a humble man devoted to goodness and simple living. Within a few generations of his death the Franciscans were living in luxury from the donations they had received. They split, because the few who wanted to stick to S Francis’s principles were distressed by how they were being broken. The church treated them as heretics.
All of these Christians make the mistake of thinking Christianity has to be an institution. Yet Christ was evidently intent on showing people how they ought personally to live. The few passages that suggest he was founding a church are considered by Christian scholars to be obvious interpolations. The God of Jesus was accessible to anyone directly and needed no hierarchies and intermediaries. Everyone was their own church. Those who benefit from hierarchical institutional structures are the hierarchy, and money donated for charity goes to maintaining the hierarchy, not to the causes for which they were intended. In other words, religion benefits the priesthood, and they then devise doctrines meant to maintain themselves.
One poster got to the core of the ignorant fundies:
You talk peace as you prepare for war, you talk love as you alienate those not of like mind, you talk Christ as you act like Satan, bellicose morons that feel superior to others not of their belief, haters for Jeezus, that rail against evil atheists, not understanding what they hate so much, with no thoughts except your own aggrandizement, and vote Republican in lockstep unison.
They think they are God. They know just what God wants and what He does, what is sin and what is not, and just where we will all end up after death. Dawkins called his book The God Delusion because God is imaginary and belief in the imaginary is a delusion, but no doubt it was also aimed at those who have the God Delusion. These are the really dangerous Christians, and you can tell it when they post. They think they are “Jarvey”, their Old Testament God of revenge and retribution. They are hardly Christians, if we deem the teachings and life of Christ to be the criteria of Christianity.
