Monthly Archives: August 2022

How does Christianity decide the truth?

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If you’re a Christian, would you be satisfied with a believer in another religion using the approach that you use to justify your Christian worldview? If that argument coming out of their mouth seems inadequate, what does that say about your own grounding?

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

17. Because theism has no method to decide truth

From the standpoint of many Christians, evidence is mere decoration. It’s the parsley on the plate of the Christian argument.

For example, William Lane Craig has made a career by using science to argue for Christian apologetics. Unfortunately, he undercuts his entire project when he 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.”

Even if we take his theology for granted, it still doesn’t make sense. Craig says, “The experience of the Spirit’s witness is self-authenticating for him who really has it.” Okay, then who really has it?! He hasn’t resolved the problem. Does Craig have it? Maybe he’s wrong to think that he does. Maybe it’s held by someone Craig has dismissed as unworthy of God’s favor. There is no public, objective algorithm that we can all apply to see who has been touched by the Holy Spirit. This is not an evidence-based process.

And when you put his theology in the spotlight, the usual skeptical questions return. Does the Holy Spirit (or any member of the Trinity) exist? When two Christians (or Christian denominations) disagree, which one is correct? Have you figured out how to get to heaven, and are you destined to get there? Of the mountain of supernatural claims made by the world’s religions, which are correct? Religion gives you no way to answer these questions reliably. Theologians worldwide can’t even agree on how many gods there are.

Christians can look in the Bible for the rules of how to get into heaven just like a Dungeons & Dragons player can look up the capabilities of various characters. While the Bible is more venerable than the D&D handbook, neither is a reliable source of supernatural information. If we lived in God World, we’d know it because supernatural truths would be reliably accessible to everyone using reason and evidence.

See also: Faith, the Other F-Word

Here’s a bonus reason.

18. Because there are natural disasters

God’s marvelous plan is not that marvelous. Eight million people have died from natural disasters since 1900. If God approved of those natural disasters, then he’s not worthy of praise.

Natural disasters with natural explanations are evidence that God doesn’t exist.

When we fight against natural disasters—stack sandbags against a flood, create vaccines, or warn people about hurricanes—are we subverting God’s plan? How can Christians hold in their heads these two contradictory ideas, that God’s plan is to kill millions by natural disasters and that we should do our best to subvert that plan? What does it say about the vagueness of God’s plan that we must ask that question?

See also: Not even CHRISTIANS take Christianity seriously

Christian apologists trot out a couple of flabby responses to God’s embarrassing lack of interest in stopping natural disasters. First, if God exists, he has good reasons. In other words, just trust God. Don’t second-guess him. But with this argument we meet our old friend, the Hypothetical God Fallacy. The key word is the if. Yes, if God exists, then you Christians win the argument! You can just stop there.

But you know that you can’t assume God into existence; you must provide evidence. Assuming God into existence doesn’t support your argument. If you want to argue that God has good reasons, you must first show us that God exists.

An alternative argument you could make is to enumerate possible good reasons God might have for allowing the disaster. And don’t say, “Well—who knows?—it might be this.” No, you must make a convincing, non-hand-waving argument showing us how things could plausibly be objectively better after the disaster. Otherwise, why imagine God might have good reasons if you can’t come up with any?

Second, apologists look at the value of natural disasters. Maybe they’ll say that earthquakes are part of a natural process that recycles minerals. Or that hurricanes are just part of the weather cycle, and we don’t complain about that part of the weather that’s gentle spring rains and warm summer sun, do we?

This is the inept argument that desperate apologists like John Lennox make to assist his impotent god. It’s actually humans’ fault, he’ll add, because we build in flood plains or near coasts or on fault lines.

(Okay, today we can blame humans for some of this, though it would’ve been nice for God to have guided city placement centuries ago, before we knew the science.)

And if earthquakes are necessary, God could just clip their magnitude. The energy of a magnitude 8 earthquake could be channeled into 30,000 magnitude 5 earthquakes (the second option is a gentler way to release the same amount of energy). Tornadoes could be steered away from towns. Rainstorms could be spread out to avoid flash floods. Droughts and locusts could just be eliminated. God is magic, remember?

Natural disasters with natural explanations are evidence that God doesn’t exist.

To be continued.

Why doesn’t God heal amputees?
Because they don’t deserve their arms,
they deserve to die.
That’s what the Bible teaches.
Sorry if you don’t like that!
— video blogger VenomFangX

Isaac Newton and the Bible

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Isaac Newton knew what it was like to be in lockdown due to an epidemic.

In July 1665, Cambridge had its first death from bubonic plague, an epidemic that had been discovered in London a few months earlier. This would be called the Great Plague of London, and it killed roughly 25 percent of that city.

Cambridge University shut down in response. Newton had just received his bachelor’s degree from Trinity College, but he had more schooling planned. At age 23, he retreated to his family home 60 miles away.

Though he had been an unremarkable student, Newton used his forced solitude productively. He returned to Cambridge 18 months later after having developed the foundations of differential and integral calculus, the law of gravity, the laws of motion, optics, and more. This period has been called an annus mirabilis, a year of wonders.

This work culminated in the publication of Principia Mathematica in 1687, a work that has been called by Encyclopedia Britannica, “not only Newton’s masterpiece but also the fundamental work for the whole of modern science.”

Could you improve upon the discoveries in the Principia? Albert Einstein did with the theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity, but that was after more than two centuries of scientific progress. As important as Relativity has been for modern physics and cosmology, the Apollo program didn’t need it to land astronauts on the moon in 1969 and bring them safely home. Newton was enough.

Newton’s book vs. God’s book

But ask that question about God’s book, the Bible: could you improve upon the claims and demands in the Bible?

Any of us could. To begin, the Bible is full of scientific errors. Apologists claim falsely that the Bible documents science that was unknown to the people of the time. And the Bible is just wrong about many claims it makes about nature. If God created our reality, he was inept at explaining it.

The Bible doesn’t give the basics of germ theory or even the simple rules of hygiene that could keep people healthy. The highlight is to tell us that God is grossed out by poop: “Have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement…. Your camp must be holy, so that [God] will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you” (Deuteronomy 23:13–14). The Bible doesn’t even give the simple recipe for soap.

The Bible documents God’s demand for praise and worship. If it’s obnoxious when Donald Trump does it, how could it sound right coming from God?

The Bible is full of contradictions. For example, it tells us that everyone sins (but “No one who is born of God sins,” according to 1 John 5:18a). Women followers informed the disciples of the empty tomb (or did they?). No one can see God (but Moses did). The Bible promises terrible ordeals on the faithful (or does it promise that no harm will befall them?). God punishes people for their ancestors’ sins (or maybe not).

The need for the crucifixion of Jesus as a human sacrifice to satisfy God’s anger makes no sense. If humans are imperfect, it’s the fault of Maker. If humans make mistakes, God can forgive them, as we do.

God’s immorality deserves the most outrage. God demanded genocide. God demanded child sacrifice. God lied. God even supported slavery, both indentured servitude for fellow Israelites and slavery for life for foreigners.

God should reread his own Ten Commandments.

What does it say about the Bible that any of us could list many problems with God’s holy book or the religion it supports? Does it look like the result of the inspiration of an all-good, omniscient god, or does it look like just a manmade book?

See also: Silver-Bullet Arguments Against Christianity

Acknowledgement: Sam Harris suggested this comparison of Newton’s Principia Mathematica with the Bible.

[A God] who could have made every [child] happy,
yet never made a single happy one; …
who gave His angels painless lives,
yet cursed his other children with biting miseries
and maladies of mind and body; …
who mouths morals to other people,
and has none himself;
who frowns upon crimes,
yet commits them all;
who created man without invitation,
then tries to shuffle the responsibility
for man’s acts upon man,
instead of honorably placing it
where it belongs, upon himself….
— Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

Christianity is so confusing it needs encyclopedias of defenses

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Have you seen books that catalog attacks on the confusing Christian position? There are responses, which are in effect encyclopedias of Christian defenses. That these books are even necessary is a weakness in the Christian position.

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

15. Because there’s a book called The Big Book of Bible Difficulties

The Big Book of Bible Difficulties by Geisler and Howe is indeed big—it’s 624 pages long. Another in this category is The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Gleason Archer. Another is Hard Sayings of the Bible. Another is Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. These books try to respond to the many contradictions and nonsense in the Bible to assure Christians that their faith is valid.

The very existence of Christian apologetics admits that God isn’t obvious, despite the Bible’s promise otherwise.

Why is the Bible so confusing that this category of book exists? (I want to ask why Christians are content to accept that their all-knowing god couldn’t communicate his story simply and unambiguously, but that’s a topic for another day.) The dictates of an actual perfect god would be simple and unambiguous. By contrast, the “perfect” Bible is so flexible that it has spawned 45,000 denominations of Christianity.

We can look just at the four gospels’ accounts of the resurrection to see the problem. The Bible gives multiple answers to each of the questions below.

  • When was the Last Supper—was it the Passover meal (as the synoptic gospels say) or did it happen one day earlier (as John says)?
  • What were the last words of Jesus?
  • Did zombies rise from their graves when Jesus died?
  • Who buried Jesus?
  • How many women were at the tomb?
  • Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus?
  • Did the women tell anyone about what they’d seen?
  • Could Jesus’s followers touch him after he rose?

The accounts in the gospels don’t sound like journalism or history, but since they must be for most Christians, apologists are happy to step in to reshape the facts to be more agreeable.

We can go beyond these books that try to paper over the Bible’s embarrassments. There are huge books on systematic theology (fundamental Christian doctrine), some over 1000 pages long. The web site GotQuestions.org brags that it has answers for more than half a million questions about Christianity. And the very existence of Christian apologetics admits that God isn’t obvious, despite the Bible’s promise otherwise.

See also: Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses”

Here’s a bonus argument:

16. Because Christianity can’t be derived from first principles

Suppose you asked Christians about their religion but asked repeated “Why?” questions to uncover the foundation of their claims. Why is God in three persons? Why is a rainbow evidence of God? Why did Jesus have to die to give us access to heaven?

Eventually, these questions will wander their way to the same few foundational answers, where the questions stop: Christianity is the way it is because of tradition, because the Bible says so, because of the insights of or divine revelations to a leader, or some other “Just because” kind of answer. None of this is like a scientific experiment where you could duplicate the procedure to verify the results (or prove them wrong). Religious dogma is believed because of inertia, not because of evidence or repeatability. Its claims aren’t objective, and they can’t be derived from reality.

Imagine a global catastrophe wiped out all traces of religion and science, but a tiny remnant of people remained alive to repopulate the earth and recreate a scientifically advanced society. They would roughly retrace the steps we took to develop modern science and technology. Of course, they would describe things differently and their progress would be different than ours, but they would describe the very same laws of motion, gravity, and thermodynamics; the same theories of evolution, relativity, and the Big Bang; and so on.

But would they duplicate the same Christianity, Islam, Scientology, Falun Gong, Jediism, and all the others? Of course not. Religion is what people say it is. It’s disconnected from objective reality while science is bound to objective reality.

Here’s another thought experiment. Imagine a naïve religious seeker, unaware of the specifics of any organized religion, who meditated or observed his way to Christianity or any other religion. This never happens.

The Bible says otherwise:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)

But the Bible is wrong. That Christianity is ungrounded by testable events argues that we don’t live in a God World. Christianity can’t be recreated from objective facts within nature. It’s just a meme that got passed along. Break the chain, and it’d be lost.

See also: Christianity Can’t be Deduced from Nature

Which reason will be next? Will we make it all the way to the promised 25 reasons we don’t live in a world with a god? Stay tuned!

Leave each one his touch of folly;
it helps to lighten life’s burden which,
if he could see himself as he is,
might be too heavy to carry.
— John Lancaster Spalding

The Bible on child sacrifice

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Can a Bible verse be used to trump another Bible verse?

I recently responded to “Christ’s Crucifixion Isn’t Child Sacrifice,” a post from Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry. Amy Hall of STR countered with the suggestion that I read her 2015 post, “God Didn’t Command Child Sacrifice.” I used one passage to argue for God’s demand of child sacrifice, but she wants to use a different one.

Let’s jump in.

Exodus 22

Hall starts with the passage I used, Exodus 22:29–30.

You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.

Unlike some of the Old Testament passages that demand a child sacrifice, there is no addendum here insisting the Israelites redeem the sons (that is, to sacrifice a lamb or donate money instead of killing the baby). Note also that the sons are treated the same as cattle or sheep—that is, killed and burned as a sacrifice. This eliminates the idea that they’d be devoted to God as priests.

Hall wants to reinterpret the child sacrifice question with the lens of another passage, Exodus 13:12–13:

You are to give over to the Lord the first offspring of every womb. All the firstborn males of your livestock belong to the Lord. Redeem with a lamb every firstborn donkey, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem every firstborn among your sons.

So we have two passages, and Hall prefers the one that makes God look less evil. Is that an honest following of the evidence or are we just seeing an agenda to make God look less evil?

Hall justifies her choice by handwaving that the Ex. 22 passage tells us when to do it, not how to do it. The how was given nine chapters back.

I have higher standards for the Almighty. I can’t imagine an omniscient god giving incomplete instructions with the hope that the listener would put the scattered clues together.

She says about the Ex. 13 passage, “I don’t know how that could be clearer.” I agree that it’s clear, but then that’s true for Ex. 22 as well. “Give me the firstborn of your sons”—what could be clearer?

A Jewish source, theTorah.com, agrees: “On its own terms, the simplest interpretation of [Exodus 22:29] is that it requires the slaughter of all firstborn sons.” We can consider various interpretations, but don’t pretend that Ex. 22:29 doesn’t say what it plainly says.

The Passover

Hall points out that what’s happening in the story is relevant. Exodus 13 tells of the Israelites leaving Egypt after the ten plagues. That final plague was the death of the firstborn, and chapter 13 defines the annual Passover ritual that commemorates God passing over the Israelites’ homes (and only killing Egyptian firstborn children) and freeing the Israelites from bondage. Offering the firstborn to God and then redeeming it commemorates the Passover.

But we’re still stuck with Exodus 22:28, set in the middle of a long list of laws, not the Passover ritual, which clearly demands the firstborn males with no option to redeem.

You could argue that this law couldn’t have been widely followed because it’s too much of a tax on the population, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that God demanded child sacrifice.

You could argue that it would be out of character for a loving God, but this is the God who drowned the world. This is the god who demanded genocide on the six tribes who were living in Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:16–17). This is the god who said that you could devote people, animals, or property to him but cautioned, “No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; they are to be put to death” (Leviticus 27:29).

You could argue that we’re at an impasse, with Hall preferring Ex. 13 and me preferring Ex. 22, but I’m happy to acknowledge that Ex. 13, in its context, is clearly against child sacrifice. This is just another example of contradicting passages in the Bible, which makes the Bible an ambiguous and unreliable authority.

Hateful verses

As a tangent, I’d like to consider two sentences in Hall’s article. First, Exodus 13:15:

[God said how to explain the Passover:] “When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed the firstborn of both people and animals in Egypt.”

But this misery was unnecessary. This is coming from an omnipotent god, a god who could have simply teleported the Israelites out of Egypt. Or convinced the Pharaoh to make the Israelites citizens with equal rights. Or a thousand other alternatives to killing every Egyptian family’s firstborn child. Is this the pro-life God Christians eagerly quote?

God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh’s fall would be more dramatic and God’s resulting glory and reputation would be greater (Ex. 9:13–16). The Christian response might be, “Well, yeah—that works for me,” but skeptics are horrified at this God-sized ego.

See also: God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship

Is that an honest following of the evidence or are we just seeing an agenda to make God look less evil?

The second sentence is from Hall, explaining the parallels between the command to sacrifice newborns and the tenth plague.

God was merciful to the firstborn of the Israelites by not destroying them along with the firstborn of the Egyptians, and as a result, now they all belong to Him. 

God was merciful? “You should thank me for not killing you” is what you hear in the context of battered woman syndrome. Is this the God-is-love guy that Christians are so proud of?

And consider “they all belong to Him.” God established the rules for slavery, so owning people is fine with him, but I think this is talking more about life as a gift from God. The idea is that if life is God’s gift, he could yank it back as he chose. William Lane Craig said it this way, “God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.”

But that’s not how gifts work. If I gave a painting to someone or donated it to a museum, it’s not my painting anymore. It’s no longer mine just as if I had sold it. Anyone’s gift of life is no longer God’s to take away.

What sense does sacrifice make?

Let’s conclude by considering the idea of sacrifice itself. The Bible says 37 times that God loves the pleasing aroma of burning flesh, and “food offering” appears 64 times.

Think about the mechanics of these offerings. Killing animals and burning the carcasses to send that life force through rising smoke to a god up in the sky? Sure, Chemosh or Moloch and the other make-believe gods of neighboring tribes might get their make-believe mojo this way, but do 21st-century Christians really want to say that their Yahweh has this same Bronze Age metabolism? The creator of 200 billion galaxies is fed from animal sacrifices from one region of one planet? How is Yahweh the one and only god when he’s constrained by the limited imagination of an ancient holy book?

Religion is like a man in a dark room
looking for a black cat
that isn’t there …
but he’s found it.
— seen on the internet

Not even CHRISTIANS take Christianity seriously

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Think about what it would look like if Christians took their Christianity seriously. Really believed it. What would that look like?

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

14. Because not even Christians take their religion seriously

Christianity makes bold claims: that prayers are answered. That God protects his own. That Jesus heals disease. It’s one thing to blithely support these claims, as some Christians feel obliged to do, but it gets messy when those claims crash into real-world facts.

Take, for example, the claim that Jesus miraculously heals disease. A New Zealand church put up a billboard in 2012 that said, “Jesus Heals Cancer,” but if you’re advertising an important claim, belief is not enough. You need the evidence to back it up, and the government authority in charge of advertising unsurprisingly concluded that the evidence wasn’t there. One observer objected, “As the mother of a three-year-old boy who has spent the past 18 months fighting against leukemia, I find the above billboard offensive and upsetting.”

Most Christians expect a cultivated person to avoid actually testing Christianity’s claims (even if they’re begging to be tested). The problem arises when someone doesn’t have the good taste to resist that temptation.

In another example, a Pennsylvania couple let their two-year-old child die of bacterial pneumonia in 2009 when they chose prayer instead of medicine. Knowing firsthand that prayer doesn’t heal, they prayed a second child to death in 2013.

Contrasting a similar series of preventable childhood deaths in Oregon with the national motto “In God We Trust,” an American Humanist article made an incisive observation. In response to Oregon’s removing laws protecting parents who reject medical care for their children in favor of prayer, it said,

[These changes to the law are] tantamount to the state saying, “Sure, it looks great on a coin, but come on you idiot, it’s not as though this god stuff actually works.”

Cases where parents actually believed Christianity’s claims make the point. Other Christians not part of their denomination look on these parents’ actions with horror.

Lightning rods

Think about a church steeple with a lightning rod. The steeple proclaims that God exists, and the lightning rod says that it can reduce lightning damage. Which claim has the evidence?

In its early days, some saw the lightning rod as interfering in God’s divine plan. If God wanted lightning to burn down a building, who was Man to interfere? When an earthquake hit New England in 1755, one pastor concluded that it was God’s punishment: “In Boston are more [lightning rods] erected than anywhere else in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God.”

Incredibly, more than three centuries later and with the benefit of modern science, Christian blowhards like Pat Robertson still pretend to a ready audience that this or that group of sinners has caused the latest natural disaster.

Possibly even more ironic than a church with a lightning rod is a Popemobile with bulletproof glass (necessary after the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul II). Christians’ actions speak louder than words, and they make it clear that in any situation where you expect God to step in, you will be disappointed.

And it goes beyond lightning rods. Why would churches pay for insurance? That churches are damaged about as often as any other category of building is an irony Christians don’t seem eager to confront.

It’s one thing to blithely support these claims, as some Christians feel obliged to do, but it gets messy when those claims crash into real-world facts.

Do Christians really believe in heaven? English author Ian McEwan neatly contrasted seeing a loved one off at a funeral versus seeing them off on a cruise ship. When you wave to friends on a cruise ship, you know that you’ll see them again. No one thinks that they’re going away and never coming back, though at a funeral, people might be sobbing uncontrollably. The priest can offer comfort with “You’ll soon see them in heaven,” but few really believe it.

In perhaps the most extreme collision of Christian faith with reality, one man filed suit against Satan in U.S. district court in United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff (1971). The plaintiff charged: “Satan has on numerous occasions caused plaintiff misery and unwarranted threats, against the will of plaintiff, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff’s downfall.”

Christians must laugh at this like the rest of us do, but why would they if indeed the Dark Lord causes people real injury in the real world? This is like the movie Oh, God!, where God-believing people couldn’t believe that God (played by George Burns) would actually show himself. People are so comfortable with zero evidence for the most important person in the universe that they balk at the idea of real, convincing evidence.

Taking the Bible literally vs. seriously

Robert M. Price* used Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life to illustrate taking the Bible literally vs. taking the Bible seriously. Warren said that the Noah story is literally true. But what about the self-contradicting inconsistencies in the story? What about its unscientific claims? What about the cruelty? These don’t trouble Warren, who cheerfully imagines God saying about Noah, “This guy brings me pleasure. He makes me smile. I’ll start over with his family.”** And by “start over,” he means murdering millions of people by drowning.

Warren takes the story literally, which means that he’ll assure you that it happened. But he avoids taking it seriously so that he needn’t lose sleep over the illogic and the violence.

You can just believe that Tinker Bell will get well, but there are standards in the real world. A real god who wanted to interact with us would provide real evidence. Christians’ weak support for God in the real world make clear that they know that we don’t have it.

To be continued.

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father,
expects or requires no worship or praise from us,
but that He is even infinitely above it.
— Benjamin Franklin

* Robert M. Price, The Reason-Driven Life, pp 105–6.

** Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life, p. 71.

Jesus as a child sacrifice?

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What do you do if you’re living in the 21st century, but you’re stuck worshipping a god from thirty centuries earlier with morals to match? Let’s critique how Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry does in his recent piece, Christ’s Crucifixion Isn’t Child Sacrifice.

Shlemon begins by lamenting that Christianity is often seen as out of touch. He says,

Many professing Christians are uncomfortable with God killing his Son as the penalty for our crimes. They see this as child sacrifice. From their perspective, it’s impossible for such a doctrine to be consistent with God’s character when it’s so clear that God abhors the killing of innocent children.

He doesn’t, but we’ll get to that.

Shlemon moves on to the “disturbing new trend of ‘deconstructing’ faith.”

In my observation, it is the process of pulling apart aspects of the Christian faith that are undesirable and aligning one’s doctrines with culture or one’s own personal beliefs. By contrast, the biblical (and healthier) approach is to correct mistaken theology by conforming it to what Scripture teaches.

I find it hard to believe that you don’t, at least a little, shape your Christianity to adapt to your own deeply felt personal beliefs. For example, I doubt you take God’s rules for chattel slavery in Leviticus 25:44–6 with a cheerful, “Huh—who knew that slavery for life was A-OK with God? Oh well, you learn something new every day.” The Bible acts a bit like a mirror for most Christians, reflecting their own views.

To rein in the deconstruction and return to what he sees as orthodox Christianity, Shlemon wants to show how calling the crucifixion of Jesus a child sacrifice is inappropriate. He gives three reasons.

1. “Christ was not a child”

Granted—the crucifixion was a human sacrifice. This seems like a technicality, but sure, he’s correct that Jesus was an adult when crucified.

But we can’t glide past this point without acknowledging that God was fine with child sacrifices. He demanded them. Let’s turn to the Good Book.

You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day. (Exodus 22:29-30)

If you know your Bible, you may remember a caveat to this command. There is a caveat, but it’s not here. Later in that same book we find the same command,

The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. (Ex. 34:19)

But then a verse later, we read, “Redeem all your firstborn sons.” That is, sacrifice livestock like a lamb instead of a baby boy.

There are two things to note here. First, that other verse, Exodus 22:29, really does demand the sacrifice of all firstborn baby boys. There is no caveat. No boys are redeemed. An angel won’t swoop in to stop the sacrifice at the last moment.

Second, how can these two contradictory commands exist in a single book? What does God want—are firstborn sons sacrificed or redeemed?

The answer is the Documentary Hypothesis, which explains the many contradictions in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The Pentateuch is an amalgam of four independently written sources named J, E, P, and D. These sources had different agendas, so it’s not surprising that they contradict.

Exodus 22:29 is from the E source, so named because God is called Elohim. Verses 34:19–20 are from the J source, where God is called Jehovah (that is, Yahweh).

This is a tangent, but Exodus 34 gives the second version of the Ten Commandments—you may remember that Moses smashed the first set after seeing the golden calf—which is a quite different from the popular version in Exodus 20 (Thou shalt not kill, or steal, or bear false witness, etc.).

It’s odd that the article didn’t explore this …

See also: God Loves the Smell of Burning Flesh: Human Sacrifice in the Bible

2. “Christ’s sacrifice was not involuntary”

Again, this is a valid point. Calling the death of Jesus a child sacrifice ignores that Jesus was willing to die, unlike a child sacrifice. But Shlemon makes an interesting observation.

Children did not consent to being sacrificed to [the Canaanite god] Molech. Their death was forced upon them.

True, but what about Yahweh’s demand for child sacrifice? God demanded Israelite firstborn, and death was forced on them. Was that any more justified?

Next, we get a quote from the New Testament to illustrate Jesus’s willingness to be sacrificed.

[Jesus said,] “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

But Jesus didn’t lay down his life for anyone. He popped back to life after being “dead” for a day and a half. His sacrifice was minimal.

See also: 10 Reasons the Crucifixion Story Makes No Sense

3. “God condemns child sacrifice”

Again, Shlemon is correct while missing the big picture. God both condemns child sacrifice and commands it.

Shlemon’s salvo is Leviticus 20:2:

Any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molech is to be put to death.

I could respond with Exodus 13:2, which we’ve analyzed above:

Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal.

Our game of dueling Bible verses has only proven that the Bible is contradictory and therefore unreliable. Shlemon can make an argument by carefully picking some verses and ignoring others, but must the atheist point out that that’s no honest way to read the Bible?

The discipline of hermeneutics is supposed to show the correct interpretation of the Bible. In Shlemon’s hands it is subservient to rhetoric and has become a way to force a predetermined meaning onto the Bible.

But we can’t glide past this point without acknowledging that God was fine with child sacrifices. He demanded them.

A Swiss cheese argument

Shlemon’s argument that Jesus is not a child sacrifice carries on a superficial level, but the interesting argument is what Shlemon ignored or sidestepped. Does he think we won’t notice?

Here are the real takeaways.

  • God not only makes clear that child sacrifice is allowed, he demands it for himself. God is immoral.
  • But pick different verses, and God is against child sacrifice. That means that the Pentateuch is contradictory and unreliable. The Documentary Hypothesis explains how this happened.
  • Even Christians agree that God accepts human sacrifice, since the perfect human Jesus is supposed to be a substitute for the sins of humanity. If it even makes sense to have a grudge against people that are imperfect because he made them so, can’t God just forgive? Why does he look like just another Bronze Age god who demands sacrifices?
  • In our brief tour of Bible verses, we stumbled across the two very different versions of the Ten Commandments. I wonder why those Christians who insist on public display of the Commandments only like the set that Moses smashed, not the set that was put in the Ark of the Covenant.

What explains Shlemon’s odd argument that missed all the good stuff? Perhaps he’s not read any rebuttals to his argument. Maybe he’s put himself in a Christian cocoon to be insulated from contrary ideas.

Or maybe he’s aware of these embarrassing flaws within Christianity but ignores them, both because he has no good rebuttals and because his Christian audience isn’t interested in any.

Neither is a good look.

Continue to: The Bible on child sacrifice

God thinks of us as such scumbags
that he’ll send us to hell for all eternity,
but then also needs us to glorify him
at the same time?
— Matthew Distefano, All Set Free blog