Is Christian Heaven More Real than any Other?

Christian apologetics, novel, and blogThe 1990s BBC sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf is about the crew on an enormous space ship, lost in empty space. A radiation leak has killed all the crew except Dave Lister, a low-level crewman who had been safely in suspended animation. He is released 3 million years after the accident when the radiation danger has passed. His only companions are the ship’s computer, a hologram of another crewmate, an evolved form of his housecat, and a robot named Kryten.

In the episode “The Last Day,” Kryten’s replacement has finally caught up with the ship. Kryten is packing up his spare heads in preparation for being replaced and is talking with Lister.

LISTER (crewman): How can you just lie back and accept it?

KRYTEN (robot): Oh, it’s not the end for me, sir, it’s just the beginning. I have served my human masters, and now I can look forward to my reward in silicon heaven.

LISTER: Silicon what?

KRYTEN: Surely you’ve heard of silicon heaven. It’s the electronic afterlife. It’s the gathering place for the souls of all electronic equipment. Robots, calculators, toasters, hairdryers—it’s our final resting place.

LISTER: There is no such thing as silicon heaven.

KRYTEN: Then where do all the calculators go?

LISTER: They don’t go anywhere! They just die.

KRYTEN: It’s just common sense, sir. If there were no afterlife to look forward to, why on earth would machines spend the whole of their lives serving mankind? Now that would really be dumb!

LISTER: Just out of interest, is silicon heaven the same place as human heaven?

KRYTEN: Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don’t go to heaven! No, someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!

Kryten’s explanation of his heaven is what I get from many Christians. The existence of their heaven is obvious and indisputable, and the alternative is empty and inconceivable. They’ve read about it, after all, and they’ve heard about it all their lives. No heaven? Who could imagine such a thing?

Christians can easily see through someone else’s nutty idea of an afterlife. (“Hindu reincarnation? Where’s the evidence of that?!”) What they have a harder time with is holding a mirror to their own beliefs. If they did, perhaps they’d find no more evidence for their concept of heaven than for Kryten’s.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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  • Screenplay found at: “RED DWARF Series 3 Episode 6, ‘The Last Day’” PlanetSmeg.

Back from the Reason Rally

Atheism clashes with ChristianityI’ve recently returned from the Reason Rally, held on the National Mall in Washington D.C. (photos here). There were an estimated 20,000 people there, in the rain, which is a lot more than I would have predicted. The organizers figured that it was the biggest secular gathering in world history by a factor of ten.

The atheist glitterati were all there—Michael Shermer, James Randi (founder of The Amazing Meeting), Richard Dawkins, Greta Christina (my favorite atheist blogger), PZ Myers, Tim Minchin (whose beat poem “Storm” is awesome), Eddie Izzard, Jessica Ahlquist (American Atheist’s “Atheist of the year” for her lawsuit against the religious banner in her public high school), Rep. Pete Stark (the only open atheist in Congress), Sen. Tom Harkin (not an atheist [!] but a senator who welcomed us anyway), Penn Jillette, Todd Stiefel (whose foundation helped sponsor the event), Nate Phelps (an eloquent and estranged member of the infamous Phelps family), and many more. The Rally proceeded without a break for over seven hours.

The 2012 American Atheist conference was the following two days and had 1300 attendees. The theme this year was “Come Out,” and many speakers talked about both the need for that and for dealing with the challenges that coming out as an atheist can impose on someone living in America today.

After being away from the office, I’ve got a lot to catch up on, and I’ll be busy with the Northwest Freethought Alliance conference here in Seattle this weekend. I’ll get back to a regular posting schedule soon. Thanks for all your comments to the posts of the past couple of weeks; I’ll be responding ASAP.

Any brief summary will be inadequate to cover the Rally and conference. I’ll just summarize some of the highlights.

  • Roughly ten Christian protesters held signs at the Rally. Discussing apologetics with Christian sign carriers is one of my hobbies, but each was surrounded by lots of atheists—sometimes conversing thoughtfully and sometimes haranguing. The only one that I talked to at length admitted that he had no arguments in favor of Christianity but was just mindlessly on the Mall, witnessing for Jesus. I wondered what the point was, since he’s not informing anyone of anything. He had no new arguments, and simply stating the tenets of Christianity (all he seemed capable of doing) to atheists better informed than the average Christian was pointless.
  • Taslima Nasrin from Bangladesh spoke of the Muslim response to her writings—riots, burned cars, and house arrest. After hearing this, it was hard to compare any struggle atheists might have in coming out with hers.
  • Physicist Lawrence Krauss said that philosophers asking “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is like Johannes Kepler asking “Why are there five planets?” It’s an irrelevant and outdated question!
  • Too often, the Christian says, “Morality is built on a foundation of God’s existence!” and the atheist response is a tepid, “But we are moral, too.” We need to take morality back. Our morality is superior—it’s built on something besides myth and wishful thinking.
  • Richard Dawkins spoke of a poll his foundation did in the UK. Of self-identified “Christians,” many accepted non-Christian beliefs (ghosts, fate, reincarnation), many don’t believe in the power of prayer, many don’t read the Bible and know very little about it, and some don’t even believe that Jesus was a historical figure. Conclusions: most “Christians” aren’t, and we shouldn’t accept Christians’ self-identification but rather ask what they mean.

Asked why they had been recorded as Christian in the 2011 Census, only three in ten (31%) said it was because they genuinely try to follow the Christian religion, with four in ten (41%) saying it was because they try to be a good person and associate that with Christianity.

But when asked where they seek most guidance in questions of right and wrong, only one in ten (10%) said it was from religious teachings or beliefs, with over half (54%) preferring to draw on their own inner moral sense.

  • Jerry DeWitt is a cheerful ex-pastor who left religion half a year ago through the Clergy Project, a group trying to find a soft landing for doubting pastors. I’ve written before about Rich Lyons, a local ex-pastor who had to get through the process solo and suffered from PTSD after leaving his pulpit.
  • PZ Myers gave an interesting quote from Sean Carroll: “The reason why science and religion are actually incompatible is that, in the real world, they reach incompatible conclusions.”
  • PZ Myers on trying to juggle science and religion: “Squatting in between those on the side of reason and evidence and those worshipping superstition and myth is not a better place. It just means you’re halfway to crazy town.”
  • Religion is a natural part of the human mind. Okay, and smallpox is natural, too. That doesn’t mean you resign yourself to it.
  • This chart from a 2009 Gallup poll documents the long-term change in religious preference in the U.S. and shows that the increase in atheism and erosion in Christianity has been fairly steady and not just a recent phenomenon.

  • In a cartoon, two guys are talking. One says, “New Atheism indeed—it’s just the same old indisputable scientific evidence again.”
  • Religion makes you happy? Okay, but so does a puppy. There’s no need to abandon reason for happiness.
  • On the subject of atheist accomodationists (“Do you have to be so shrill?”) versus confrontationists (“Don’t mince words—tell it like it is!”), Greta Christina likened the atheist movement to a toolbox. If you’re a hammer, be the best hammer you can be and let the other tools be the best they can be.
  • Christina drew parallels with the gay movement and noted that for many straight people, simply knowing a gay person was key to dismantling their prejudices. Similarly, we need to come out (where practical) to help Christian America dismantle its anti-atheist prejudices. One important difference: when you come out as gay, you’re not telling straight people that they’re wrong. That’s not really true with atheism.
  • The Secular Student Alliance has grown from 50 chapters in 2007 to 250 a year ago and even more today. The Campus Crusade for Christ (now “Cru”) has three times as many chapters, but it has an annual budget of half a billion dollars and is losing chapters.

Curiously, no one talked about what I like to talk about: critique of Christian apologetics. I’m not sure what to make of this. Does no one care about this topic? Has everyone already moved on, comfortable in their conclusion that the emperor has no clothes?

Ah well, I guess I’ll just be the best hammer I can be.

How can you have judgment if you don’t have faith
and how can I trust you with power if you don’t pray?
Newt Gingrich (October, 2011)

The Irrelevant Wisdom of the Ten Commandments

atheism and christian apologeticsFew Christians can list the Ten Commandments in order, but almost all are familiar with them:

1. Have no other gods before me
2. No graven images
3. Don’t take the Lord’s name in vain
4. Keep the Sabbath day
5. Honor your mother and father
6. Don’t kill
7. No adultery
8. Don’t steal
9. Don’t lie
10. Don’t covet

These are the well-known Ten Commandments from Exodus 20. What could be ambiguous about this list? Stay tuned as we run through the story.

It takes 11 more chapters for God to finish giving all his secondary commandments, first rules for how the people should conduct themselves and then rules for the temple and priests.

After weeks of waiting for Moses to return from Mt. Sinai, the anxious Israelites make a golden calf in chapter 32. Moses is furious when he finally returns. He smashes the tablets, has the calf ground up and force-fed to the faithless people, and orders the Levites to slaughter thousands of their fellow tribesmen.

Then follows an indeterminate amount of time during which God descended on Moses’ tent as a pillar of smoke and “the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, just as a man speaks to his friend.”

As a side note, it’s interesting that this appearance of God to Moses (Ex. 33:11) as well as that to Abraham (Gen. 18:1–2) is denied in other parts of the Bible. We’re later told, “No one has seen God at any time” (John 1:18) and “No man has seen or can see [God]” (1 Tim. 6:16).

Back to our story: Moses goes up Sinai a second time in Exodus 34. God says, “I will write on the tablets the words that were on the former tablets which you shattered,” so we know that this nothing new, just a replacement set of commandments. But the contents are very different:

  1. Make no covenant with the Canaanite tribes
  2. Destroy their altars
  3. Make no idols (“molten gods”)
  4. Observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread
  5. “The first offspring from every womb belongs to me”
  6. Rest on the seventh day
  7. Celebrate the Feast of Weeks
  8. No leavened bread during Passover
  9. Bring the first fruits of the soil to the Lord
  10. “You shall not boil a young goat in its mother’s milk”

The chapter ends with these words: “And [Moses] wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the Ten Commandments.” This is the first time this label is used in the Bible.

You want to display the Ten Commandments in public? Go for it, but put up this list. It’s the official list, after all.

Contrast this with the story of the first tablets, which concludes at the end of chapter 31, “[God] gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God.” There is no mention of a “ten commandments,” and these stone tablets presumably contain all of the rules given in chapters 20 through 31.

Another detour: chapter 34 has this savage claim, “[God] will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Ex. 34:7). And yet, three books later, we get this contradiction: “Fathers shall not be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their fathers; each is to die for his own sin” (Deut. 24:16).

I guess this too can be rationalized: Deut. 24 is talking about what man must do. Man needs to treat people fairly and punish only the wrongdoers. Ex. 34 is talking about what God will do. God has a long memory and will hold a grudge against you to punish your descendants.

Speaking of punishments, the Ten Commandments list crimes without giving punishments. For you traditionalists who like the “thou shalt not” set of commandments, “Positive Atheism” has handy list of the corresponding punishments. God has a pretty limited imagination, and you can guess what they are: “He who sacrifices to any god, other than to the LORD alone, shall be utterly destroyed” (Ex. 22:20), “the one who blasphemes the name of the LORD shall surely be put to death” (Lev. 24:16), and so on.

Display the Ten Commandments in public, just put up the correct ten. I dare you.

Say what you will about the Ten Commandments,
you must always come back to the pleasant fact
that there are only ten of them.
— H. L. Mencken

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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I’m Off to the Reason Rally

I’ll be leaving soon for a bit of vacation and then I’ll attend the Reason Rally in Washington D.C. on March 24, “the largest gathering of the secular movement in world history.”

After that, it’s the American Atheists National Convention (March 25–6), also in Washington.

If you’re attending too, I hope to bump into you. Say hello if you see me.

And if you’re in the Seattle area, the Northwest Freethought Conference featuring Richard Dawkins as keynote speaker will be held March 31–April 1.

I have blog posts queued up for the next couple of weeks while I’m gone, so come back often, but I won’t be able to respond to comments very well.

I’m looking forward to telling you about it when I return!

Faith is superstition disguised as virtue
— Pat Condell

“This is Guaranteed to Convert You!”

Is belief in God rational or logical or justifiable?Imagine that an atheist walks into a gathering of Christians. He says, “I hold in my hand a pamphlet that will rock your worldview. In fact, it will almost surely change your worldview. I have shown this to several hundred Christians of many denominations, and shortly after they read it, 90% admitted that their faith in the truth of Christianity was pretty much gone.

“Now—who wants a copy?”

How many Christians would take the challenge? How many would risk their worldview for a chance at a more correct worldview?

My guess is very few. My guess is that most Christians have had pangs of doubt and don’t like them. They don’t want the boat rocked—it’s rocking enough as it is. They suppress their own doubt and they avoid any “opportunity” to increase that doubt.

But now let’s turn that experiment thought around. I’m going to the Reason Rally and the 2012 American Atheists Convention in Washington, D.C. in March, so let’s imagine that a Christian speaks to the gathered atheists at these events and says, “I hold in my hand a pamphlet that will rock your worldview. I have shown this to several hundred atheists, and shortly after they read it, 90% went down on their knees and accepted the truth of the gospel message and asked Jesus into their hearts. Now—who wants a copy?”

How many atheists would take the challenge? My guess is many. My guess is that most atheists came to their position because of evidence, not because of suppressing it, and that they’re eager to find the most correct worldview.

I certainly would read it.

What would you do? And what does this say about the truth of the Christian and atheist positions and the role of evidence in those worldviews?

Acknowledgement: Thanks to Keith B. for this insightful idea.

Photo credit: Brandeis Special Collections

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Christianity Can’t be Deduced from Nature

I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought,
but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
— Albert Einstein

Atheist Christianity discussionSuppose Einstein’s catastrophic World War III happened and civilization was destroyed. After a thousand years, civilization returns to roughly our level of scientific awareness.

After losing all knowledge of optics and thermodynamics and gravity, this naive society has re-discovered it—the very same laws of optics and thermodynamics and gravity that we have now. The same is true for relativity or e = mc2 or f = ma or any other scientific law or theory.

Obviously, these post-apocalyptic humans would have different terms and ways of representing things—consider how mathematical symbols, numbers, punctuation, paragraph breaks, and even spaces have evolved over the centuries. But whatever notation they invented would be synonymous with our own since they would simply be descriptions of the same natural phenomena.

By contrast, imagine that all knowledge of Christianity were lost. A new generation might make up something to replace it, since humans seem determined to find supernatural agency in the world, but they wouldn’t recreate the same thing. There is no specific evidence of the Christian God around us today. The only evidence of God in our world are tradition and the Bible. Eliminate that, and Christianity would be lost forever.

There would be nothing that would let this future culture recreate Christianity—no miracles, no God speaking to them, no prayers answered, no divine appearances (unless God decided to act more overtly than he does today). Sure, there would be beauty to wonder at, great complexity in the interwoven structure of nature, frightening things like death and disease for which they would need comfort, riddles within nature, and odd coincidences. People then, like they do now, would likely grope for supernatural explanations, but starting from scratch you could invent lots of religions to explain these things. There is no evidence or observation that would guide them to any supernatural dogma that we have today, except by coincidence.

Christians today come to their beliefs because someone initially told them of Christianity. If no one told you, you couldn’t figure out Christianity on your own, which is quite the opposite from how science works.

Note that morality doesn’t need rediscovering.  Naive people don’t need to be told that you oughtn’t treat someone else in a way you wouldn’t like to be treated.  That doesn’t mean that everyone in a post-apocalyptic society will act with compassion and generosity, just that they don’t need to be taught this.

The Bible weighs in on our thought experiment. It claims:

Since the creation of the world 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(Romans 1:18–20).

And yet, without God informing humanity of his existence, Christianity could never be recreated. Worship of one or more gods, sure. But not Christianity.

Here’s a variation on this thought experiment. Imagine the post-Christian society comes across a library from our day from which they find information about 20 religions that are popular today. This information spreads and civilization gradually adopts these new religious options. What is the likelihood that Christianity would come out on top again? Not very.

Let’s acknowledge that Christianity is sticky. If its message were a dud—that is, if it didn’t give people what they were looking for, at least to some extent—it would have faded away. But now we’ve turned our backs on the question of truth and are squarely in the domain of marketing, considering which features of religion satisfy people’s emotional needs and which are turn-offs.

This is religion as breakfast cereal. Some new cereal brands last for a few months and are then withdrawn while others remain appealing (often adapting to changes within society) over the decades. Christianity is simply the Cheerios of religion. Like any successful brand in the marketplace, Christianity has spun off many variants—as if Protestantism were the equivalent of Honey Nut Cheerios, Mormonism as MultiGrain Cheerios, and Pentecostal as Cinnamon Burst Cheerios.

What can you say about a religion that can’t be recreated from evidence at hand today? About a religion whose god is knowable only through tradition? You can say what applies to all religions: we can’t prove that it’s manmade, but it gives every indication of being so.

I’ll end an observation by Thomas Paine in The Age of Reason, still relevant 200 years after he wrote it.

The study of theology as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and admits of no conclusion. Not any thing can be studied as a science without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is not the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.

See other posts in the God Doesn’t Exist series.

Photo credit: Wikimedia

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