My thesis in this multi-part post (part 1 here) has been that praise and worship might be relevant to someone like Donald Trump who admires dictators, but it makes no sense for a wise and powerful god to want it.

Let’s continue with Christian apologists’ justifications for praise and worship of God (part 1 here).

7. Worship God because we need to fear him

Here’s an old-school approach to our relationship with God:

 If at any point in the process we lose respect, trust, appropriate fear, or love for God, we lose the ability to learn and grow as we ought, and then, like unruly children, we can do ourselves great damage. . . .

For this reason, it’s necessary to command people to worship God, just as it’s necessary for a parent at times to command their children to show respect. . . . God insists on worship, because He has to protect our ability to learn from Him. (Source)

Ah, the “You’re gonna worship me or else!” school of thought. I knew it would pop up somewhere. The source continues, and it gets a little spooky.

[After a disaster] is a dangerous time in which faith can be lost; and it might be lost, if there was not a standing command to honor God, and an already-existing relationship.

If your common sense is telling you that there is no god, given his no-show status at a disaster, listen to it. This nonsensical “just believe, regardless of the evidence” advice is the sound of a meme struggling to survive.

The conflict between grief and love for God produces tension; the tension eventually produces new growth, trust with a more mature understanding. The obligation to worship is the lynch-pin that keeps the believer tethered to his salvation when life makes little sense.

This apologist tips his hand. This “mature understanding” realizes that you can’t take the Bible at its word. When Jesus says, “Ask and you will receive,” it’s not like that’s supposed to actually work in the real world. Prayer doesn’t “work” in the same way a car or light switch works. You must have a “mature understanding,” you see. Prayer is good at self-soothing and supporting a confirmation bias, but “mature” Christians know it’s not like prayer works or God will look out for you or that you can rely on any of Christianity’s other supernatural claims.

8. Because it’s only fair

We’re supposed to praise God because it’s just the right thing to do. Here’s an example:

Imagine that you crafted an incredibly beautiful sculpture and won a prestigious award for your creation; but when the time came for the award ceremony, they gave the prize for your sculpture to the wrong artist! That would not be just, right, or good. (Source)

Human artists are burdened by concerns that never bother God. They need to make a living, and prizes can be an important way to build a reputation and raise the value of their art. Or, maybe they just have an ego, and they like hearing praise. God has no such concerns for money, and he should be above ego-driven needs.

Tibetan Buddhist monks might spend a week or more creating a sand mandala on a floor and then sweep it up afterwards. That’s how enlightened people approach praise for their work.

In the same way, God—as the only being perfect in goodness, justice, love, etc.—is worthy of our praise. We do, in fact, owe Him that praise. He wants us to praise Him because it is right and good for us to do so. Since God wants us to do right and good things, of course he wants us to praise and worship Him.

My responses to previous arguments apply to this one. This argument assumes that praise makes sense in the case of a maximally enlightened being, but that assumption must be backed up with an argument.

9. Because we’re under attack!

Circle the wagons, people! We’re under attack:

Praise makes the enemy flee. It pushes back the darkness [that] surrounds, and blocks the attacks and hissing lies over us. Evil will not stick around if we’re praising our God, who will fight our battles for us. (Source)

Praise is an effective weapon against the devil. . . . He has hated praise ever since because of its reminder of what he gave up and can’t regain. (Source)

Here’s a Chicken Little apologist with an active imagination who imagines a celestial D-Day:

Every place in history where God intervened in the affairs of men constitutes a beachhead where God’s dominion has been re-established in some measure. Around those beachheads . . . hover the unclean spirits as an occupying army, deceiving and destroying the souls who are their captives. (Source)

In the first place, Satan works for God. Read Job 1 to see that he does what God tells him to. (Yes, Satan killed people in this story, but it’s with God’s permission, and this was the limit of Satan’s killing in the Bible. God, by contrast, kills millions.)

The idea of a celestial battle probably came into Judaism after Cyrus the Great of Persia liberated the Jews from captivity in Babylon. Zoroastrianism was the religion of Persia, and it had the concept of two equally matched gods, one good and one bad, and a final battle with Good triumphing.

Christianity is left with an odd mixture. On one hand, Satan is roaming the world at will and capturing souls. But on the other, Revelation lays out the entire convoluted end game in which Satan will unquestionably be subdued and imprisoned.

Concluded in part 6.

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Image via pixabay, CC license
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On the popular topic of churches and how American society can give them even more benefits, the political conversation of late had focused on removing the Johnson Amendment, the rule that churches can’t endorse political candidates.

Incredibly, from the same Congress now comes a new tax rule that they pay tax on some benefits they give their employees. To be clear, this isn’t a new tax, it’s a removal of a tax exemption.

Could the tide be turning on churches’ untouchable status?

Closed financial records

Churches’ tax-free status is a big issue, but a bigger one that should take priority is an easy one. It’s one where church members themselves should be leading the charge. It’s embarrassing to the reputation of the church, and correcting it would cost churches nothing.

It’s churches’ closed financial records. Every U.S. nonprofit can receive tax-free donations, but in return it must annually fill out an IRS 990 form that divulges to the public its income, expenses, assets, the salaries of its executives, and more. Every nonprofit, that is, except churches.

Why is this embarrassing exception not on more people’s radar?

An expensive gift to churches

I’m a nonbeliever, but let me emphasize that the issue here isn’t nonbelievers annoyed that they must help pick up the slack (the subsidy that American society gives religion because of its tax-exempt status is estimated at $83 billion per year). The issue also isn’t to challenge churches’ nonprofit status. Those are worthwhile conversations, but the real issue is the embarrassment the closed books should cause Christians. What do churches have to hide? Nothing, you say? It sure doesn’t looks like it. American Christians, this exception makes your religion look bad.

Christians should be leading the charge on this issue. They should be telling their representatives that churches don’t need the secrecy of closed financial records. The only benefit would be to hide fraud or financial excesses such as lavish mansions or excessive salaries. Does a high-profile televangelist deserve an enormous salary? I’m not sure that that’s how Jesus did it, but whatever—simply make that information public to the society that is helping to foot the bill.

You remember Jesus, right? He’s the guy who told the rich man, “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” What would Jesus say about churches’ secrecy?

If executives at public corporations and other nonprofits can make their salaries known, surely God’s representatives can do the same.

Isn’t it ironic that an atheist must point this out? If Christianity has something to teach society about morality, shouldn’t it be setting the example by taking the narrow path? And if God can critique the books—and consequently judge the church’s leadership in eternity—what possible concern could there be about letting the rest of us see?

Sensitive to the problem, some organizations within the Christian community have emerged to restore confidence. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability imposes on its members standards of financial accountability and transparency. Membership becomes a seal of approval. Another organization is MinistryWatch, which evaluates ministries for the benefit of potential donors. While these affect some big ministries, we’re still in the dark about income and salaries, and they do nothing to illuminate the workings of the vast majority of the 350,000 congregations in the United States.

In 2007, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) investigated six high-profile ministries that each had revenue in the $100-million-per-year range. He wasn’t an insignificant busybody; this was a U.S. senator on the Senate Finance Committee, and understanding where the money went and trying to restore confidence and accountability was his job. However, the playing field has been so tipped in Christianity’s favor that five of the ministries didn’t bother cooperating, and they got away with it.

An easy solution

The solution is available and it already works for the 1.5 million nonprofits large and small that fill out IRS 990 forms every year. The 990 does the job, it’s been in use for 75 years, and it should be our window into the operation of all nonprofits, including churches. These forms are easily and anonymously accessible from sites like GuideStar or Charity Navigator. If a church has enough revenue to keep records, it can fill out the form. There is a four-page 990-EZ for organizations with less than $200,000 in revenue, and an even simpler 990-N for those with less than $50,000. Filling out a 990-N takes minutes.

The change is trivial to make: simply amend the document “Instructions for Form 990” by removing the first four items from section B, “Organizations Not Required To File Form 990.” That’s it. The only difficult part might be the church leadership taking a deep breath and revealing to the world how they spend your money.

Keep in mind who benefits from the status quo. Wouldn’t you like to see Scientology and other cults forced to disclose their assets?

Christians, I know that many in Congress are eager to subsidize Christianity, but tell them that you don’t want it. Tell them that your religion doesn’t need a crutch and that its activities can withstand the light of scrutiny like every other nonprofit. Secret financial records benefit no one except those with something to hide.

We have an election in November. Churches’ financial transparency would not only be the right thing, it would be easy to spin this as a positive for churches. The status quo is an embarrassment for the honest faithful, and this is one perk that it would benefit the church to have removed.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/9/16.)

Other relevant posts:

• What Do Churches Have to Hide?
• Church Accountability
• Are Churches More Like Charities or Country Clubs?
• Church Civil Disobedience: Pulpit Freedom Sunday
• I’ll Do What I Wanna! Pulpit Freedom Sunday
• Religion: Billions into a Black Hole

Image credit: Nick Ares, flickr, CC

This colorful drawing is a tree of world religions. From a poorly understood past, represented as the twisting vines of ideology in the trunk, the myriad human interpretations of the divine are shown branching out like tendrils on a vine, groping for something to grab on to. Searching, ever searching, they never find, and yet new tendrils reach out with the continuous confidence that they are the one true religion.

Example 1: Tree of religion

The trunk expands into named religions 3000 years ago. Here’s one small fragment (the outer shell is the present day, with modern denominations named in green, and each curved gray ring line represents 100 years of evolution):

The tree details the evolution of the great Asian and Middle Eastern religions. Though it ignores religion from the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific, it makes a heroic attempt at what it does attempt to cover. It nicely documents the complex project that human religion has become.

Example 2: Church’s many views of government

Consider a very different look at the varieties of church. This one plots American Christian churches on a two-axis chart. The axes consider how big a role government should play in providing social services vs. how big a role it should play in imposing morality.

Here again, we see the dramatic differences in the many variant forms of Christianity (in this case, American Christianity). For example,

• The Southern Baptist, LDS, and Church of Christ want more government involvement in morality but fewer social services.
• Unitarians want the reverse: more social services provided by government but less government involvement in morality
• Black churches want both: more government services and more legislation of morality
• Anglicans, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians (PCUSA) want neither

Example 3: Map of World Religions

Don’t forget the Map of World Religions (more here). Contrast the stable map of world religions (Roman Catholics in the red region over here, Hindus in green over there, and so on) with the map of world science, which is just one color. New and better ideas sweep the world of science within a decade or two, but an established religion isn’t interested in better ideas. It already thinks it has the truth and has no interest in changing.

Search for the truth

If religious claims were as obviously correct as the claim that the sun exists—that is, if they were firmly grounded in evidence—everyone would quickly agree. But that’s not the world we live in.

Alright then, suppose that religious truth does indeed exist, but it’s fuzzy or cloudy. We see, but as if “through a glass, darkly.” Why then aren’t worldwide religious beliefs at least converging on the truth? It would be like evolution, with false beliefs gradually falling away and correct beliefs encouraged and strengthened, either by divine intervention or because they matched up better with reality.

The tree of world religions above makes clear that religion is doing the opposite—diverging instead of converging. Christianity has fragmented and morphed over time as new cults and sects form. We see that same fertility in other religions. The only commonality we see across religions is humans’ interest in the supernatural.

This disconnect between religion and the reality that would ground it shows that religion is just a man-made institution. The past, illuminated by this tree, makes clear that religious guesses will continue to diverge. The quest is constant, though the goal is nonexistent.

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/10/14.)

Photo credit: The 40 Foundation

Why do humans engage in war? A typical answer has been that resource scarcity drives war. This is the Malthusian model—if you have more water or oil or farm land than I do, I might be tempted to take yours. But studies have shown no clear correlation between war and scarcity.

Maybe there’s some sort of masculine drive for conquest. But this doesn’t explain why war is relatively recent in human history. If war were just “boys being boys,” we should see more widespread evidence in the archeological record. Indeed, some societies today have violence but are unaware of the concept of war.

Margaret Mead

Let’s consider another explanation, Margaret Mead’s 1940 theory about war.

With so many examples of war throughout history, you might expect that we could find the traits that always accompany belligerent societies and never accompany peaceful ones. Societies can be highly- or poorly-developed, resource rich or resource poor, large or small, and so on, but any of these societies can engage in war or not. From Scientific American’s Cross-Check blog:

War is both underdetermined and overdetermined. That is, many conditions are sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary. Some societies remain peaceful even when significant risk factors are present, such as high population density, resource scarcity, and economic and ethnic divisions between people. Conversely, other societies fight in the absence of these conditions. What theory can account for this complex pattern of social behavior?

What’s the answer? Mead argued that war is an invention, not an innate part of humanity. Once invented, war is contagious. When your neighbors become infected, your society must get infected for its own safety. Adopt it or get wiped out—the war meme wins either way. A society reluctant to go to war might conclude that a preemptive strike would be the safest move, making the idea of war self-fulfilling.

One approach is to turn war on its head to come to a peaceful result, to push it to be so destructive as to be unthinkable. Alfred Nobel said, “Perhaps my [dynamite] factories will put an end to war sooner than [peace] congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.” This hope has been expressed about poison gas, machine guns, and Nobel’s dynamite, though these have only served to make war more efficient.

Getting past war

Let’s return to Mead’s theory. If war is innate, we’re stuck with it, and war will be a perpetual threat. But Mead argues that it’s not innate. It’s an invention, and society can rid itself of it—maybe not easily, but theoretically.

Consider our closest primate relatives. Chimpanzees seem to have in inherent violent streak, but bonobos have a “make love, not war” attitude. We’re genetically equally close to each species.

And we’ve actually done this sort of thing before. We’ve gotten rid of poor social inventions such as slavery, genocide, mental illness as demon possession, witchcraft as a capital crime, and so on. We’ve adopted lots of good social ideas: democracy, universal education, universal suffrage, trial by jury, bankruptcy instead of prison, and prison instead of capital punishment (in some regions, at least). We can change.

War certainly isn’t obsolete, though Steven Pinker argues that it’s trending that way. Maybe the answer is something as straightforward as: democracies never attack each other, so make all countries democracies. That’s not easy, but it’s conceivable.

Getting past religion

Now that we’ve asked the remarkable question, “Is war simply a poor invention for which we can invent a replacement?” let’s ask the same about religion. Is religion innate and an inherent part of human makeup? Many Christians think that we are given God-radar, which points us unerringly to the Creator of the Universe, but that’s obviously false given the many incompatible religious directions to which this imagined “radar” sends us. Others say that we’re built with a vague and undirected desire for the divine, but we mustn’t confuse this spirituality with the existence of the supernatural.

If religion is innate, we could suppress it, but then it would reassert itself. But if it’s an invention, perhaps it would stay gone once we replaced it with something better.

Christianity once ruled Europe, but today it’s seen in much of Europe as a quaint custom from the past, like chamber pots or chewing tobacco. Perhaps it’s not too optimistic to see religion as nothing more than an invention that needs improving.

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 7/2/14.)

U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / Image public domain

I gotta tell you about the most brazen product ad I’ve ever seen. It had a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash stickiness that honest marketers can only dream of. It was an opportunistic seizing of—nay, a celebration of—consumer stupidity that I’ve never seen duplicated. Think of it as the commercial version of Donald Trump’s campaign.

This ad was in a Sunday newspaper magazine in the mid-1980s. At that time, cable and satellite TV were new and expensive. Each needed a decoder box that usually sat on top of the TV. This new GFX-100 promised to eliminate the monthly cable bills.

So you have the background of an educated reader from 30 years ago, let’s review a couple of points before we get to the ad.

• Before TV came through a cable, it only came over the air as radio waves and was captured by antennas. A pair of these telescoping antennas were sometimes called “rabbit ears.”
• RF = radio frequency. VHF and UHF are the two radio bands allowed at that time for U.S. television broadcasts.

Here’s the ad with every exclamation point, quotation mark, and font change lovingly preserved. The product is shown above. See if you can figure out what they’re actually selling.

Throw away your old TV rod antenna! The GFX-100 looks like an outdoor satellite “dish,” but works indoors like ordinary “rabbit ears.” No wiring or installation! Legal in all 50 states. You pay NO cable fees because you’re NOT getting cable!!! You pay NO satellite fees because you’re NOT using satellite technology or service!!! Works entirely via proven “RF” technology—actually pulls signals right out of the air. Instantly locks into every local VHF and UHF channel from 2 to 83 to bring you their movies, sports and special events just like an ordinary pair of “rabbit ears.” No cable box or special attachments needed! Enhances color and clarity, helps pull in weak signals. Compatible with all TVs from 3-inch portables to giant 7-footers. Sits on any TV top in less than 4 linear inches of space! Guaranteed not to utilize, replicate, transmit or interfere with any satellite signal. Complies with all applicable federal regulations. Not technical razzle-dazzle but the sheer aesthetic superiority of its elegant parabolic design make the GFX-100 a marketing breakthrough!

It worked “like ordinary rabbit ears” because it was ordinary rabbit ears. The little dish thingy and the two knobs were just inoperative decorations on an ordinary TV antenna whose technology had been unchanged for decades.

In a remarkable example of candor—or maybe cockiness—they admit, “Not technical razzle-dazzle but the sheer aesthetic superiority of its elegant parabolic design make the GFX-100 a marketing breakthrough!” Translation: there’s nothing interesting here, but the novel appearance means we’ll sell a boatload of these things! It was like male enhancement pills labeled “guaranteed placebo.”

Sound like Anyone we know?

And that brings to mind our favorite religion. Christianity is also just marketing. There’s nothing there, just promises.

What would Christianity look like if it were pressed into this mold? Maybe something like this.

But perhaps you’ve got some better lines? Share them in the comments.

The difference between education and indoctrination:
it’s whether the person at the front of the room
invites questions from the audience.
—  Richard S. Russell

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 6/16/14.)

Thanks to Dan Bornstein for preserving this ad.

Image via Petras Gagilas, CC license