Monthly Archives: June 2022

Christians used to believe their own story. Now, not so much

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Do modern Christians really buy the Christian story? Prayer that really works, how you get to heaven, the logic of hell—all of it? And what about the conservative political thinking that many Christians have fallen into—the child sex ring, pro-life rhetoric, QAnon conspiracy theories, and all that?

Look just a few centuries back, and there was little competition with Christianity’s message in Europe. They really knew that there was an afterlife. But Christians today show that they’re hedging their bets and aren’t as on board as they had been.

In part 1, we explored the contrast between Christina Johansdotter, who murdered a child in Sweden in 1740, and Andrea Yates, who murdered her own five children in Texas in 2001. Both women assumed that their victims, because they were children, would go straight to heaven, and modern apologists confirm that logic.

Johansdotter committed murder to get executed herself. Her logic was that, with absolution for the murder, she would go to heaven, which was where her recently deceased fiancé was. Her culture understood that logic, and many fellow citizens surely thought that they’d consider the same route if they’d been in her shoes.

But few contemporaries agreed with Andrea Yates. Her actions were not those of a modern Christian.

One society was sympathetic and saw the murderer’s actions as, if not plausible, then understandable from a Christian standpoint. And the other society was horrified and saw the murder’s actions as reprehensible.

Let’s consider more modern examples where onlookers responded with, “Sure, that is what we say, but c’mon, you don’t actually follow through with that!”

Christian dogma for many Christians has become a suit of clothes—something that advertises your club, not who you really are.

More modern examples: do these Christians really buy the Christian story?

In these modern examples, see the tension between Christian or conservative thinking taken at face value and how modern Christians see the issue.

  • Assassins for Jesus. In 2015, a shooter entered a Colorado Planned Parenthood clinic. He killed three and injured nine. Another example is the assassination of abortion doctor George Tiller, shot and killed during a church service in 2009. These were logical responses to Christian pro-life rhetoric that every abortion kills a baby (which isn’t true). But while this abortion-equals-murder claim is popular within conservative Christian circles in the U.S., there was no groundswell of support for these two shooters. Very few Christians deep down believe that abortion is equivalent to murdering an adult, and they understand that a month-old fetus is different in important ways than a month-old newborn. The pro-life line is just rhetoric, and it’s said with a subliminal wink.
  • Abortion = murder? The work of apologist Greg Koukl also reveals this difficult knife edge. He pushes the idea that abortion is murder, but it’s a bad look to also insist on the logical consequence, that the women getting an abortion should be charged with murder. Koukl acknowledged this third rail when he said, “We can’t ever make a decision on the policy concern [that is, the punishment] unless we’re really, really clear on the moral concern.” To this I say, are you really, really certain that abortion is murder? If so, then you’ve suddenly become really, really clear on the policy response as well. The reverse is also true. If the punishment that goes along with murder doesn’t fit, then the crime couldn’t have been murder.
  • Homosexual acts deserve death? Koukl also argues that homosexual acts are wrong and for proof points to the Old Testament. But of course he doesn’t want to bring along the Old Testament’s punishment, which is death. A modern sense of morality won’t sit by when an abominable moral conclusion is being considered.
  • Pizzagate. Or take the shooter who fired shots in the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant in 2016. He was investigating the false Pizzagate sex ring conspiracy theory. How many Christians greeted this news with “It’s about time!”? How many were envious because they hadn’t had the courage to do the right thing? Surely very few. Overly literal interpretations like this are embarrassments to modern Christians.
  • The red telephone. Years ago, I read that President Kennedy’s three-year-old son John Jr. was playing in the Oval Office while his father was working and accidentally picked up the receiver for the red telephone, the Moscow hotline. (While fact-checking, I discovered that there was never a red phone on the president’s desk—that was Hollywood. There was a Moscow-Washington hotline, but in Kennedy’s term, it was a Teletype machine, and it wasn’t in the Oval Office.) But though the story about John Jr. isn’t true, it nicely illustrates the idea of a young, naïve child dabbling with immense power. That’s what we have with children and prayer. Jesus promised that prayers will be answered, but can we entrust this power to children? Those children might pray for God to kill the star player on the opposing football team. Or kill a teacher who assigned too much homework. Or kill a romantic rival. Only because no one believes that prayer works as Jesus promised do we let children pray.
  • How prayer really works. Mature Christians know that prayer doesn’t work the way Jesus promised. No one anticipates success after prayer for an amputated limb to be restored. It’s not a matter of the prayers being petty or selfish. Countless prayers have been earnest and charitable, from recovery from the health crisis of a loved one to the end of a war on the other side of the world. The desired result is no more likely to happen with a prayer than not.
  • Does Jesus heal disease? A church in New Zealand put up a billboard in 2012 that made headlines. It read, “Jesus cures cancer,” but the local advertising authority forced them to take it down. It’s one thing to make untestable claims for which Christianity is grandfathered in—about the afterlife, the resurrection, or the Trinity, for example—but another to make significant, testable claims like this one. Of course, if the church felt muzzled, it would have been easy to go to a hospital and heal everyone to prove their claim. But not even the members of that church would’ve been surprised that it doesn’t work that way.

Wrapup

Here’s an insight from Robert M. Price that might clarify how modern Christians juggle ancient mythology and modern science and find a place for each in their worldview. Price considered what pastor Rick Warren said about Noah in his Purpose Driven Life. Warren, he said, takes the Flood story literally but not seriously. That is, Warren claims that the Noah story literally happened, but he doesn’t take it seriously enough to defend or even consider its consequences.

Hell is another example. Hell is taken literally but not seriously—many Christians will stand by their literal interpretation of hell, but they don’t take it seriously enough to consider what it would mean to their afterlife even if they make it into heaven.

Or take prayer. Christians apply prayer only when a naturalistic route is unavailable. They pray for a football win or safe travels or a cure for intractable cancer, but where a proven naturalistic option is available—an antibiotic for an infection or a car with airbags or a church with a lightning rod—these are a lot more reliable than prayer, and they know it.

Unlike Christians in 18th-century Sweden, modern Christians have the phenomenal success of science to explain. From the Industrial Revolution through skyscrapers, the moon landing, computers, the internet, and all modern technology, science delivers, not religion.

Christian dogma for many Christians has become a suit of clothes—something that advertises your club, not who you really are.

See also:

Contrary to their empty rhetoric
that atheists live as though their God exists,
believers live as though their God doesn’t exist.
But when they actually do read their Bible
and follow its barbaric morality
it’s additionally clear that their god doesn’t exist.
Either way their god doesn’t exist.
— John Loftus

The remarkable story of Christina Johansdotter

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Consider the remarkable Christina Johansdotter murder case. She was executed in Sweden in 1740 after decapitating a friend’s baby with an ax. She readily admitted her guilt. In fact, her goal had been to be convicted and executed.

Johansdotter had been despondent after the death of her fiancé, and she longed to be reunited with him in heaven. Suicide was the obvious way to shortcut a miserable life in heaven’s waiting room, but the church had declared that anyone who died by suicide had sinned, and their soul went to hell. That was not where she supposed her fiancé to be.

So she went with plan B: murder someone, confess and repent of the crime, and be executed. With absolution, she would go to heaven on her death. And since children were sinless and went to heaven when they died, there wasn’t much to complain about from the standpoint of the murdered infant. Apologist William Lane Craig agrees that children go to heaven.

Johansdotter wasn’t the only one to exploit this suicide-by-state loophole, and enough people used it so that new laws were created to try to shut it down in Sweden after her death.

The other loophole, suicide as a quick route to heaven, had been closed off centuries earlier. One source explained the problem the early Christian church made for itself this way:

The more powerfully the Church instilled in believers the idea that this world was a vale of tears and sin and temptation, where they waited uneasily until death released them into eternal glory, the more irresistible the temptation to suicide became.

Christians from centuries ago bought into the Church’s story wholeheartedly. They proved it by paying with their lives, saying that suicide was worth it since life in heaven was much preferred to life here.

A similar case from modern times: Andrea Yates

In 2001, Andrea Yates drowned her five children in the bathtub, the oldest being seven years old. After her arrest, she told psychiatrists that she had to “save them from eternal hell” and that “they had to die to be saved.”

Despite the centuries that separated them, Yates used the same salvation logic that Christina Johansdotter used—children who die go to heaven. By contrast, Jesus said that only a minority of people lead a life on earth that gets them to heaven (Matthew 7:13–14). The logic is simple and unavoidable: death as a child guarantees that they’ll get into heaven, but if they take their chances with the lottery of life, they’re unlikely to make it.

Yates had been diagnosed with “severe postpartum depression, postpartum psychosis, and schizophrenia,” so mental illness was the reason for this tragedy, but her salvation logic was still correct. Murdering a child did them a favor in the big picture.

Here’s where the stories of Yates and Johansdotter diverge. In Johansdotter’s time, her actions made sense. Her fellow citizens understood her motives, and many probably wished her well on her journey to be united with her fiancé. But Yates was alone. No one agreed with her; no one cheered her on. Observers pointed at her diagnosis of mental illness, not at Jesus’s explanation of how dangerous traversing an adult life could be.

Why the change?

More on that question in the conclusion.

If you can convince people things don’t have to make sense,
you can make them believe virtually anything you want.
– Neil Carter, OnlySky columnist

God as an inept teacher: more problems with the logic of hell

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How can an omniscient god be so inept a teacher that most of his favorite creation winds up in perpetual torment? Let’s continue our critique of the Christian idea of hell (part 1 here).

4. Substitutionary atonement

Substitutionary atonement (the idea that Jesus’s punishment substitutes for the punishment we deserve) is another way in which God is out of step with a modern sense of justice.

Christianity tells us that we’re bad. In fact, we’re so bad that we can never deserve heaven, no matter what good we do in our miserable little lives. But lucky for us, Jesus took on our sins-to-be in a Bronze-Age-style human sacrifice, satisfying God’s justifiable rage. Now we’re washed clean and can deserve heaven, but more questions arise. Why was Jesus an afterthought in God’s perfect plan? Shouldn’t Jesus have been there from the beginning? How can an all-wise and all-loving god get angry at imperfect beings’ imperfections? How can an omniscient god be angry at something that he foresaw before he even started the project?

But those questions are tangents. Think of how wrong substitutionary atonement would be for Western justice. In cases where the justice system discovers that the wrong person was imprisoned for a crime, no one says, “Well, someone received punishment, and that’s all that matters.”

See also: Criticizing the Logic of the Atonement

5. Free will

Apologist Norm Geisler argued that atheists wouldn’t like a world with God as a cosmic nanny, always clearing any dangers from the path ahead. Atheists are outraged when God lets people die from injustice, he says, but what if God gave them their wish? The murderer’s bullet would turn to butter, the wall would turn into a bungee-cord net just before the car crashed into it, and so on. There would be no moral consequences and no chance for moral development in such a world where free will is constrained to permit only good actions.

But our free will is already constrained. I can’t read minds, I can’t fly, I can’t see x-rays, I don’t have telekinetic killing power, and I don’t have laser eyes. Nevertheless, I muddle along despite all these constraints on my free will. There’s no evidence that a loving god carefully tuned the traits of our reality to give us a just-right Goldilocks world where we have some character-building challenge but not too much. Instead, this is just one more Christian attempt to paper over the lack of evidence for God.

See also: A God-Created World Would Look Like a ’60s Family Sitcom

You’d think that Christians would find the opportunity to show evidence for God, but here as with similar issues, Christian apologists are only eager to rationalize away the lack of evidence.

“What about here?” we ask. “Shouldn’t we see evidence of God here?”

“No,” the Christian replies, “there again things look just like there’s no God at all.”

And let’s not imagine God as a champion of free will. When God doesn’t constrain the free will of the murderer or rapist, that imposes on the free will of the victims.

Tell the person who is locked in hell that God is the champion of free will. The Bible itself tells of God deliberately trampling people’s free will.

  • He hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that he wouldn’t yield to Moses (Exodus 9:12), and he hardened the hearts of the Jewish opponents of Jesus so that they wouldn’t believe (John 12:37–40).
  • “God has mercy on whom he wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom he wants to harden” (Romans 9:18).
  • “The Lord foils the plans of the nations; he thwarts the purposes of the peoples” (Psalms 33:10).
  • “For it was the LORD himself who hardened their hearts to wage war against Israel, so that he might destroy them totally, exterminating them without mercy, as the LORD had commanded Moses” (Joshua 11:20).

6. What’s the point of life on earth?

As explored in part 1, we know that our world isn’t the greatest possible world. Heaven is far better, so why didn’t God skip a step and make us in heaven? Or if life on earth is like heaven except without the wisdom to use free will, God could just give us that wisdom.

Earth as a winnowing test is a ridiculous notion. God already knows who’s naughty and who’s nice, and he could avoid making bad people in the first place. Sure, one could handwave that the good people only get that way because of the existence of the bad ones, but (1) there’s no reason to imagine that (this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy), and (2) again, God could’ve just made us in heaven and avoided creating earth.

We’re so bad that we can never deserve heaven, no matter what good we do in our miserable little lives.

7. God is a poor teacher

Jesus told his followers to choose the narrow road, because most people would take the broad road to destruction (Matthew 7:13–14).

Is God so bad a teacher that most of his students fail? Many human teachers pass all their students. You’d think that an omniscient and omnipotent teacher would do a better job.

8. God’s responsibility

If everything happens according to God’s plan, then God makes most of humanity knowing that they’re destined for hell. This doctrine of predestination is made explicit in Calvinism. While the opposite view of Arminianism rejects predestination, it’s hard to imagine an omniscient God who is nevertheless surprised and saddened when anyone is sent to hell.

Concluded with one final argument on the illogic of hell in part 3.

Talking with theists about religion sometimes—
and by sometimes I mean almost always—
feels like “Groundhog Day,”
a painful and monotonous slog
that simply travels the same territory over and over and over.
— Godless Mama

Arguments for God vs. why Christians ACTUALLY believe

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What makes someone convert to Christianity? What makes someone remain a believer when their faith is buffeted in a secular, science-minded society?

Greg Koukl’s surprising admission

Christian apologist Greg Koukl answers these questions with a surprising admission in a recent post. I say “surprising,” but this won’t surprise any skeptic who’s been paying attention. Perhaps I should say that it’s an honest or even praiseworthy admission.

He begins by saying that he often gives talks summarizing six apologetic arguments. He doesn’t list them, but I’m sure they’re more or less what any apologist would have on their short list: the Design Argument, Kalam Argument, Moral Argument, Transcendental Argument, and so on.

But here’s the bombshell.

Though I give this talk often, these are not really the reasons I personally believe the Bible is God’s Word. They are sound evidences, and they have their place, … but they are not how I came to believe in the Bible’s authority in the first place. I suspect they’re not the reasons you believe, either, even if you’ve heard the talk and thought it compelling.

He continues, referring to Paul’s epistle of 1 Thessalonians.

I came to believe the Bible was God’s Word the same way the Thessalonians did, the same way you probably did: They encountered the truth firsthand and were moved by it. Without really being able to explain why, they knew they were hearing the words of God and not just the words of a man named Paul.

But if that’s why you believe, why don’t you lead with that? If you don’t believe because of the Kalam argument (say), why waste my time telling me about it?

Koukl says that there are rational reasons to believe things—the Design, Moral, and his other intellectual arguments—but that “God used a different avenue to change our minds about the Bible.”

Is that a better avenue? A reliable avenue? Or just an avenue that bypasses criticism from your intellect and allows you to believe the unbelievable in a twenty-first century world where science continually shows that it provides reliable answers and religion doesn’t? Koukl gives no justification.

He describes this perspective as “non-rational”—not irrational but what sounds like emotional, the opposite of intellectual. The post is full of unevidenced claims that would never stand in an article that hoped to make an intellectual argument: “the Bible is God’s word,” “God inspired those men,” “they knew they were hearing the words of God,” and so on.

And what does Koukl say to the Catholic, Mormon, or Satanist who uses the same approach to build the same emotional foundation? “Good for you”? “Welcome, brother”? He would surely use an intellectual attack to say that his religious position is better than theirs, but how does that work when he’s made clear that the emotional argument trumps the intellectual? He’s handed his religious competition the play book by which they can insulate themselves from his criticism.

Role of God

Koukl encourages Christians to “let God do the heavy lifting” by having potential converts read the Bible. The Bible is magic, I guess, softening up the target so that the Christian apologist’s intellectual argument will have an impact. Again, no evidence is given. This is close to a literal Hail Mary pass, trusting in the supernatural to make the play.

Science has the track record. Apologists happily point to history, archaeology, cosmology, and more to build a case for their individual intellectual arguments. They understand the value of science and its cachet in society, which is why they appeal to it. Their overall argument is a hybrid—science where they can get away with it and appeals to the just-trust-me magical work of the Holy Spirit otherwise.

But Science’s critique is harsh. It says, not that a belief unsupported by evidence hasn’t been disproved and so can be believed (as many apologists imagine), but that arguments with insufficient evidence mustn’t be believed.

Allow me to briefly explore one tangent. It has become popular among apologists to bolster their position by declaring that “faith” means pretty much the same as “trust”—that is, belief well grounded in evidence. This means that the fuzzier, “You’ll just have to take that on faith” definition is gone. This lets them argue that their “faith” has the same solid backing as an empirical claim like, “the sun will rise tomorrow.”

But how can that stand if Koukl says that the bedrock of a Christian’s faith is subjective, untestable, personal feelings?

Koukl has company

Koukl’s belief that the intellectual argument takes a back seat to the emotional one is shared by William Lane Craig, who says:

It is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role. (Reasonable Faith, Third Edition, p. 47)

And this isn’t new. Sixteenth-century theologian Martin Luther is credited with saying, “[Reason] is the Devil’s greatest whore.” Rather than science, they must take the unreliable, untestable, and unfalsifiable approach—not hard in the sixteenth century but difficult today for anyone who follows reason.

See also: Christian Nonsense from People Who Should Know Better

How compelling is this Christian argument?

Imagine me as a potential customer. Only arguments and evidence will convert me to a new worldview. A Christian’s experience of the Holy Spirit is, as far as I can tell, just them talking to themselves, so their sharing that won’t help. And how would we test their claims when they’ve dismissed reason, the only potential common language we have?

According to this Christian thinking, when I stand in judgment I’ll be convicted for acting in the only way I can. But how can I be compelled by arguments that I find inherently uncompelling?

See also: “I Used to be an Atheist, Just Like You”

But if that’s why you believe, why don’t you lead with that? If you don’t believe because of the Kalam argument (say), why waste my time telling me about it?

Koukl wants to send us back to that docile, childlike state where we just believed without questioning, before the skeptical parts of our brains were mature. That kind of programming can stick, and that’s the logic behind the Jesuit maxim, “Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man.”

Once this programming is set, whether adopted as an adult or (more likely) as a child, the adult defends those programmed beliefs. Not wanting to admit that they hold a supernatural worldview merely because they were raised with it or because they’d like it to be true, they muster their substantial intellectual horsepower to defend it with arguments that never convinced them in the first place (I call this Shermer’s Law).

What this appeal to the emotional argument looks like

This is what backing the wrong horse looks like. We skeptics shake our heads at what passes for apologetics, reminding ourselves that Christians are just doing the best they can with a bad hand, when this isn’t even why they believe! The Moral or Design arguments are a misdirection (or a fig leaf) to keep attention off the emotional argument holding up their worldview. Alternatively, we could see these arguments as a recruiting tool (“Well, of course I have good reasons behind my belief in God! Have you heard of the Kalam argument?”).

I imagine a dialogue between an open-minded skeptic and a Christian eager to win one for Christ.

Skeptic: “Why don’t you start with your most compelling argument?”

Christian evangelist: “A couple come to mind—the Design Argument, the Moral Argument, Kalam…. Let’s start with the Moral Argument for God.”

“So then this Moral Argument convinced you that God exists?”

“Well, no, not really.”

“The Design Argument then, or Kalam? I’d rather start with what convinced you.”

“Actually, I learned about all these arguments after I had already become a Christian.”

“If these didn’t convince you, I wonder why they’d convince me. Can’t we start with what did convince you?”

But this pushes the Christian into the emotional (what the Christian might label “spiritual”) personal experience that they wanted to interpret as the action of some person of the Trinity. It’s their claim, not your experience. They “just know” it was God, you don’t, and there’s not much more to talk about.

And is it even the skeptic or atheist who’s the target of these intellectual arguments? I think the primary target is the Christian. The goal is to quiet that nagging doubt in the Christian’s head that sometimes wonders if all these supernatural tales are what they seem—bullshit.

See also: The Holy Spirit’s odd role in evangelism

God will not provide indisputable evidence of existence,
except that He will, and when He does,
He will make it look like
it’s not actually indisputable evidence,
unless you already believe He exists,
in which case it will look like indisputable evidence.
— Barry Goldberg, Common Sense Atheism