Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

Jupiter, Venus, Regulus, and Revelation: the fireworks of a real Star of Bethlehem?

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Planetary conjunctions, a prophecy in Revelation, and more: do these all point to an actual Star of Bethlehem?

I summarized the video The Star of Bethlehem by Rick Larson here. Let’s continue the critique of the logic behind the claims by moving on to the four astronomical phenomena that were visible in 3 BCE and 2 BCE (part 1 here).

Let me first warm up the crowd with another example of a plausible argument like Larson’s star of Bethlehem. Here’s a viral video from 2014 of an earnest Christian woman who wants to expose the satanic forces behind Monster energy drink.

First, look at the green M. Those aren’t three scratch marks. No, that’s three separate instances of the Hebrew letter vav (ו), which is used to represent the numeral 6. That’s right—Monster energy drink proudly says 666. The 32-ounce can says “BFC,” which stands for “Big F-ing Can.” It says “MILFs love it” on the side of the carton. None of this sounds very Christian, and the slogan “Unleash the beast” sounds positively Satanic.

The word “Monster” has a cross in the letter O. Tip up the can to drink, and the Christian cross is inverted, which is just what Satanists like to do. (“Bottoms up, and the devil laughs,” she says)

Some of these elements may be deliberate, edgy appeals to a young audience, but some may have had unintended satanic meanings. With much patient effort, an innocent thing can seem like a conspiracy. (Snopes rejects the claims.)

A Lucifer/Venus connection is probably not what Larson was hoping for, but it’s no less valid than his claims.

1. Jupiter/Regulus conjunction

The first astronomical phenomenon in the star-of-Bethlehem argument is Jupiter making three passes above Regulus, a star in the constellation of Leo, beginning in 3 BCE. That is, the king planet Jupiter “crowned” the king star Regulus in the constellation of the lion, the sign of Judah.

The first concern is pairing Judah with any Babylonian constellation, given the Bible’s prohibitions against astrology, but Larson pushes ahead. He gives verses such as “Like a lion [Judah] crouches and lies down” (Genesis 49:9) to make his case that “lion” means Judah, but Judah is also personified in other ways. It’s a wild ox in Numbers 23:22 and a scattered flock chased by lions in Jeremiah 50:17.

Lions are often personified as the adversary: “The Lord [rescued] me from the paw of the lion” (1 Samuel 17:37); “Rescue me from the mouth of the lions” (Psalms 22:21); “Rescue me from their ravages, my precious life from these lions” (Ps. 35:17); and Daniel in the lion’s den. Babylon is a lion (Daniel 7:4); God is a lion when he punishes Israel and Judah (Hosea 5:14); and Satan is a lion (1 Peter 5:8).

Countries were often identified with animals in antiquity, but the lion for Judah wasn’t one of the associations.

Jupiter in the constellation of Leo isn’t that big a deal. Jupiter makes one orbit of the sun every twelve years, and there are twelve constellations in the zodiac, so Jupiter is in Leo for roughly one year every twelve years. And the three Jupiter/Regulus conjunctions—the “crowning” of Regulus—wasn’t like fireworks. This was a slow-motion event that took close to a year. It’s not like you could’ve gone outside and seen the event over the course of hours, like a lunar eclipse. It likely would have seemed mundane, if it were noticeable at all. The magi could’ve known enough about Jupiter’s movements that they could anticipate how the entire retrograde phase would play out. They could’ve tracked it night after night to gradually piece together its movements over months, but why would they?

Seeing the “crowning” in seconds with a modern computer simulation, as Larson talks about doing, is a very different experience, and seeing it in (glacial) real time would not have been noteworthy.

2. Revelation and the woman “clothed with the sun”

Revelation 12:1–5 speaks of a heavenly sign, “a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head.” The woman is usually interpreted as Mary giving birth to Jesus.

At the beginning of the Jupiter/Regulus series of conjunctions, the sun and moon were both in Virgo. That is, the virgin was clothed in the sun with the moon at her feet, as predicted by Revelation. (Larson has nothing for the “twelve stars on her head.”)

The obvious question is why magi in 3 BCE would care about a prophecy in Revelation, a book that wouldn’t be written for another century.

Another issue is that the sun in Virgo is something that you could deduce, but you couldn’t see it since the background stars that form the constellation aren’t visible during the day. Like the “crowning” of Regulus in painfully slow motion, Virgo “clothed in the sun and moon” wouldn’t have been a stunning visual display but at best an intellectual conclusion.

Note also that the sun is in Virgo for one month out of twelve, and the moon joins it in Virgo for a few days. This isn’t a rare event; it happens every year.

3. Jupiter/Venus conjunction

Next up was an unusually close planetary conjunction. Jupiter and Venus were less than one minute (1/60 degree) apart on June 17 of 2 BCE.

There is a Jupiter/Venus conjunction roughly once per year. In 2016, there was a Jupiter/Venus conjunction just four minutes apart, and there are 17 conjunctions less than 30 minutes apart in the seventy years 1990–2060. Add in conjunctions between other planets, and surprising conjunctions aren’t that unusual. Close conjunctions appear to be little more than opportunities to observe, “Oh, cool—look at that. You don’t see that every day!”

Larson calls Venus the “Mother Planet,” but the Bible has another interpretation.

How you have fallen from heaven, O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations! (Isaiah 14:12)

This is a reference to Lucifer, the morning star (another name for Venus). A Lucifer/Venus connection is probably not what Larson was hoping for, but it’s no less valid than his claims.

Larson opted for a planetary conjunction as the Bethlehem star because he says that comets and novas were often seen by the ancients as bad omens. Unfortunately, the same might’ve been true for Jupiter/Venus conjunctions. In Assyria, this was considered a sign of war or danger to the king. Assyria was a long-time neighbor of Babylon, the region where the magi might’ve come from.

Concluded in part 3 with the last claim plus some final thoughts.

In the last 3500 years, what do we absolutely know
about God and the supernatural realm
that wasn’t supposedly known by the shepherds and fishermen
who claimed to be in contact with the divine then?
Think about that.
Within religion, is there any information there
that we can act on with any degree of certainty,
knowing and seeing that a given result will follow?
— Mr. Deity video @5:05

The atheist worldview beats the Christian worldview

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Christian apologists, perhaps knowing that they won’t do well in the arena of argument and evidence, try instead to beat the atheist worldview by arguing that theirs is more pleasing or happier.

In several recent posts, I’ve responded to the claim that Christian hope is a strong plus for Christianity. It’s not. It incorrectly imagines that consoling is enough, it encourages Christians to not see reality clearly, it encourages complacency and magical thinking, it provokes anxiety when promises and reality don’t mesh, it makes God a jerk, and it infantilizes Christians.

Let’s now look at the big picture of each worldview. Compare Christianity and atheism, and atheism wins.

Positives of Christianity (and the negatives)

Let’s start with Christianity’s positive traits. The church can create community for its members, and it can catalyze their good works and charitable giving. As such, it is an important social institution.

While this natural part of the church is a positive, the supernatural side doesn’t hold up as well. Let’s look at some examples. For one, heaven is a nice idea, but it comes as a package deal with hell.

And you’re told that God is eager for a relationship, but he won’t even meet you halfway when his very existence isn’t obvious.

Laying your problems at the feet of Jesus might be comforting, but they’re usually still there when you go back to check. Why are prayers answered at a rate no better than chance?

One of Christianity’s strongest selling points, we’re told, is that salvation doesn’t require works but is a gift. All you need is faith. But with so many interpretations of correct belief within Christianity, how do you know the Jesus you have faith in is the right one? You may be headed for hell if you guess wrong.

What is God’s goal when he allows bad things to happen to people—tsunamis that kill hundreds of thousands or childhood cancers, for example? As an omnipotent being, he could achieve any goal without causing suffering.

Christians might deal with issues like these by compartmentalizing, by not asking questions, or by denying their doubt. But not being able to honestly raise their concerns, let alone resolve them, creates mental stress. That’s not a healthy relationship.

Facing reality (and the positives of atheism)

When challenged with some of these concerns, a common Christian response is to argue that the atheist worldview is bleak and empty—as if “that worldview is depressing” is any argument against it being correct. But let’s consider that worldview, a world without God. This would be a world where praying for something doesn’t increase its likelihood; where faith is necessary to mask the fact that God’s existence is not apparent; where no loving deity walks beside you in adversity; where natural disasters kill people indiscriminately; where far too many children live short and painful lives because of malnutrition, abuse, injury, or birth defects; and where there is only wishful thinking behind the ideas of heaven and hell.

Look around because that’s the world you’re living in. But this isn’t anarchy. It’s a world where people live and love and grow, and where every day ordinary people do heroic and noble things for the benefit of strangers. Where warm spring days and rosy sunsets aren’t made by God but are explained by science, and where earthquakes happen for no good reason and people strive to leave the world a better place than they found it. God isn’t necessary to explain any of this. Said another way, there is no functional difference between a world with a hidden god and one with no god.

It’s not that the atheist worldview finds no value in life. In fact, the opposite is true: the Christian worldview is the one that devalues life. Of what value is tomorrow to the Christian when they imagine they’ll have a trillion tomorrows? What value are a few short years here on earth when they have eternity in heaven?

There are consequences. If the atheist is right, the Christian will have missed seeing their life for what it truly is—not a test to see if they correctly dance to the tune of Bronze Age traditions; not a shell of a life, with real life waiting for you in the hereafter; not drudgery to be endured or penance paid while you bide your time for your reward; but rather the one chance you have at reality. We can argue whether heaven exists, but one thing we do know is that we have one life here on earth: a too-short life, no matter how long you live, that you can spend wisely or foolishly. Where you can walk in a meadow full of flowers, and laugh and learn, and do good things and feel good for having done them. Where you can play with children, and teach someone, and love.

I won’t be able to visit new places after I die; I won’t be able to learn another language, or comfort a friend, or apologize, or forgive, or simply stop and smell the roses. If it’s important to me, I’d better do it in the one life I know I have. Life is sweeter when that’s all you’ve got. Sure, there’s a downside to having a finite number of days on this earth. It’s a downside, but that makes life on earth precious, and that’s why it’s an upside.

Atheism is far from being a depressing worldview—just ask any ex-Christian atheist. They’ll tell you how empowered and free they feel now that they can honestly ask questions and follow evidence where it leads.

Actress Mae West said, “You can only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.” Similarly, atheists seek only the truth, and the truth is enough.

Human beings never behave so badly
as when they believe they are protecting God.
— Barbara Brown Taylor

Downsides to the hope offered by Christianity: it makes God a jerk + infantilizes Christians

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If God has a plan, why does that plan include people being hurt? An omnipotent god should be able to avoid the heartache.

Let’s continue our list of problems with Christian hope (part 1 here).

6. Christian hope makes God into a jerk

Let’s imagine that a child from a Christian household dies in an “act of God” sort of way. Maybe it’s leukemia or a birth defect or just an accident. If that family finds comfort in the belief that this was all part of God’s plan, they’ve now created a new problem: they’ve made God into a heartless jerk. They’ve just replaced one problem with another.

Why can’t God accomplish his goals without killing people? He’s morally perfect, so he’d want to avoid killing people. He’s omnipotent, so he’s able to achieve his goals without killing people. And yet he still kills people. Is “My god is a jerk” really easier to live with than “My child died because of bad luck or capricious Nature”?

As usual, “God did it” as an explanation only raises more questions. We can imagine God dismissing those questions with, “Because I said so—deal with it” as he did with Job.

Atheist Robert M. Price raises another problem with continually giving God a pass by saying that he’s inscrutable.

[The ultimate certainty in the believer’s mind is] the guarantee that [God] will honor that ticket to heaven he supposedly issued you. Here’s a troublesome thought. Suppose you get to the Day of Judgment and God cancels the ticket. No explanation. No appeal. You’re just screwed. Won’t you have to allow that God must have reasons for it that you, a mere mortal, are not privy to? Who are you, like Job, to call God to account?

Are you sure that not judging God’s actions—not measuring them against any standard—is really where you want to go? God looks like a jerk, but apologists tell us (without evidence) that he’s actually just inscrutable. This is no improvement.

7. Christian hope infantilizes adults

Let’s look at a few childhood parallels to Christian hope and faith.

Suppose a girl sick with cancer throws a coin into a wishing well and wishes to get better. The net effect is that she’s a little happier, like she took a happiness pill. We know that wishing wells don’t really do anything, but few of us would tell her. What’s the point? She might actually feel better, and she has adults in her life who will protect her from reality so that she can hold this belief.

But as she becomes an adult, she must grow up. We leave behind wishing wells, Santa Claus, blankies, and other false comforts as we become independent. No longer are the necessities of life given to us; as adults, we must fend for ourselves—indeed, we want to fend for ourselves.

Religion infantilizes adults and keeps them dependent. That’s a good thing for the 100-billion-dollar-a-year U.S. religion industry, but what is best for the individual—a pat on the head and an unevidenced promise of the supernatural, or reality?

Christianity in life is like training wheels on a bicycle

Let’s move on to another example, that of a bicycle with training wheels (“stabilizers” in some parts of the world). Christianity is like training wheels, not because it avoids falls in the real world but because it is reassuring. Its benefit is mental, not physical.

A different bicycle parallel works for atheism: imagine a child learning to ride a bike. The parent pushes the kid along, and the kid feels confident, but then the parent lets go. The kid doesn’t realize it and still pedals along happily, perhaps even talking to the parent who’s fallen behind. There’s some shock when they realize they’re on their own and doing fine—maybe startling them enough to fall. The belief was reassuring.

Similarly, when someone moves away from comfortable Christianity, it can be a shock to imagine that you’re doing this on your own, but you were riding along just fine, even if you didn’t realize it. Ex-Christians can be like that—that shock is in the past, and they’re exhilarated by their new freedom.

There must be some benefit to being infantilized

Take a step back. What psychological itch gets scratched when people debase themselves like this? I’ve read many Christians sources that say things like, “I’m just a worthless sinner, and if I were God, I wouldn’t let me live” or “I’m wicked scum, and God is so fabulous for giving me my crappy life.”

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.”

Do Christians get a dose of some neuropeptide when they curl into a fetal position and have Mommy take care of them? I thought that Americans prefer to stand on their own two feet, bravely facing problems and obstacles. “I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,” right? Doesn’t this celebration of subservience clash with Americans’ self-reliant view of themselves?

You don’t need to be born again; you need to grow up. Christianity infantilizes its devotees. Few churches want their parishioners to be psychologically healthy enough to no longer need the church. Putting faith in God has never produced anything. Progress has always come from getting off your knees and doing it yourself. As with Dorothy and her ruby slippers, you’ve had the answer with you all the time.

See also:

When I was a child,
I spoke as a child,
I understood as a child,
I thought as a child;
but when I became a man,
I put away childish things.
— 1 Corinthians 13:11

Downsides to the hope offered by Christianity: anxiety

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Christian hope promises a lot but doesn’t deliver.

Let’s continue our list of reasons why Christian hope is not a good thing (part 1 here).

5. Christian hope produces frustration and anxiety

This is how theologian John Piper says hope is supposed to work.

Christian hope is when God has promised that something is going to happen and you put your trust in that promise. Christian hope is a confidence that something will come to pass because God has promised it will come to pass….

If our future is not secured and satisfied by God then we are going to be excessively anxious.

But does it really work that way, that we’re anxious without God? Actually, the reverse is true.

Suppose you admit that you’re powerless to solve your problems, and you lay them at the feet of Jesus. This is a great relief until you eventually realize nothing’s changed for the better. When you check up on those problems, they’re still there. Jesus hasn’t resolved them. Maybe you had cancer and you still have cancer, or you were broke and you’re still broke. You could respond by living in an intellectual fog, ignoring this unwanted reality, but that won’t do for many of us.

What do you make of God ignoring your prayer—are you unworthy? Are you not doing it right? Does God not like you? Someone else in your church says that their big prayer was answered, so why not yours?

Your Christian friends offer platitudes. They say that God helps those who help themselves (ignoring the fact that the Bible doesn’t say this and indeed says the opposite). God always answers prayers, but his answers are Yes, No, and Not yet (wrong again—Jesus said that prayers are reliably answered). The trials in this life help make us a better person (true, but that’s what you say only when there’s no evidence of supernatural justification for the problems life has dealt you).

Christianity is clearly not the route that avoids anxiety, so let’s try Reality. Dismiss the supernatural, and God’s silence to your prayers is no longer your fault. You needn’t lie awake at night wondering how you might be unworthy of God’s answer to your prayer. You’re no longer a pawn pushed around by God in some inexplicable way.

Ask yourself which is harder to accept: (1) we’re not alone, but it’s not God who helps with our problems but people here on earth vs. (2) God exists, but he might as well not for the evidence we have of him. Compounding the problem, now we must struggle to figure out why he’s ignoring us. Talk to any Christian who has dealt with serious doubt. Ask how frustrating it is to preserve God belief while one’s intellectual side keeps pointing to the man behind the curtain.

Are you believing correctly?

Let’s add to that frustration with the problem of belief.

Calvinists say, “once saved, always saved.” That is, once you’re destined for God’s Kingdom, there’s nothing you or anyone can do to jeopardize that salvation. But what if a (supposedly) saved Christian becomes an atheist later in life? Is that a counterexample that falsifies the rule? Nope—they’ll respond that that person must not have been a true Christian, so they never were saved.

But think of the Pandora’s Box they’ve just opened. Now they can’t be sure of anyone’s salvation, including their own! This piles yet more anxiety onto the Christian.

All Christians must worry that they believe the right thing. Their theology promises bliss in heaven, but it’s a package deal, and hell comes along, too. The naturalist thinks that what happens to the deer or dog happens to the person—when you die, it’s just lights out. But with hell, you must get it right or you burn. (And no, don’t argue that the gates of hell are locked from the inside. Jesus’s parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus [Luke 16:19–28] makes clear that hell is a place of torment, praise the Lord.)

How can you sleep at night with the anxiety? If your theology doesn’t imagine a tormenting hell, you must hope you guessed right, because other denominations disagree. With 45,000 denominations, that’s a lot of disagreement. You might believe in Jesus, but how do you know you believe in the right one?

Think about how people pick a church. It’s not by poring over the Bible, finding the best interpretation, finding the church that best honors that interpretation, and then moving within driving distance. Instead, people find a church that’s convenient to where they already live, has good music, has nice people, and maybe has daycare for the kids while Mom and Dad are at the church service.

How can Christians make this decision so casually? This is a very high-stakes game, and there are infinitely large consequences for getting it wrong. No matter which church they’re in, there’s another church that thinks that they’ve picked the wrong one and are therefore bound for hell.

Looking even broader, how do they even know that Christianity is correct? The hells of other religions aren’t pretty, and you don’t want to spend eternity there, either. The example of Mother Teresa personifies the problem. She wrote of her anxiety and frustration when God was silent. What message was he sending?

Only by not thinking about it can Christians avoid the same fate.

When we don’t see as far as others
it is because we are standing on the toes of giants.
— commenter grasshopper

Downsides to the hope offered by Christianity: complacency and magical thinking

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Christian hope can be beneficial, but it’s only beneficial as a pain killer. It’s not like medicine that can actually remove the cause.

This was Karl Marx’s point when he said that religion is the opium of the people. Marx agreed that religion helped but only in the same way that opium does, by reducing pain. Opium (and religious hope) do nothing to solve the problem. They produce complacency, an acceptance of the status quo.

This is a continuation of a list of reasons why Christian hope is not a good thing (part 1 here).

3. Complacency

Religious complacency encourages believers to leave things alone and make do rather than become impatient with the status quo and improve it.

The religion meme likes it that way. Religion thrives in poor social conditions. Improve the conditions, and the need for religion fades. Religion acts as the canary in the mine, and thriving religion is our warning that social conditions are poor.

George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Society doesn’t benefit when its citizens use opium (or religion) to dull the pain of social problems to quiet the desire for progress. Society needs people fed up enough that they’ll attack those problems.

4. Magical thinking makes you easier to take advantage of

You want hope? There are televangelists happy to sell you hope. They simply ask in return for you to remain dependent on their message. (And they’d also like “your most generous love offering,” weekly if at all possible. Apparently, God has bills to pay.)

As an example of televangelists making ridiculous claims, consider pastor John Hagee’s hysterical declaration in 2013, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon.’ ”

The slow-motion fireworks—four “blood moons” (lunar eclipses), six months apart—came and went. Where’s my apocalypse? We got no evidence of God, just evidence that Hagee is an opportunistic fraud.

(I’ve written more about Hagee’s greedy stunt: The World Will End Soon! Again!)

Another example is the annual War on Christmas®. Ah, what I wouldn’t give for some brave politician to take the tough stand and make it legal to say “Merry Christmas” again….

Politicians are another group eager to take advantage of Christians. It’s easy for them to tune a conservative message to an eager audience—they just handwave about some imminent social disaster and declare that they are the only hope. Just give your vote to the candidate and lots of money to their campaign. For example, in the 2004 Bush/Kerry presidential campaign, voters said that of seven areas of concern, the biggest concern was “moral values” like same-sex marriage and abortion. Economy and jobs came in second place.

Abortion makes baby Jesus cry, so apparently Christian voters must step into the breach since Jesus is just a baby and can’t do anything about it. If they couldn’t claim that the sky is falling, these Chicken Little politicians wouldn’t know how to rally their base.

While this political strategy might seem new, it’s a well-worn path. Social critic H. L. Mencken said a century ago, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

Here’s another way of seeing the enemy that politicians push against. Christian and conservative political leaders play up the imagined threat of gays, liberals, feminists, foreigners, Muslims, science, atheists, and so on to keep their group focused inward. With no one to push against, they’d fall over. We must circle the wagons, people! Michael Shermer illustrated this in Why People Believe Weird Things with the rhetorical question, Who needs Satanic cults? Answer: “Talk-show hosts, book publishers, anti-cult groups, fundamentalists, and certain religious groups” (p. 106).

Being a sheep can be comforting, but remember that sheep can be led to slaughter. There are costs when you let someone else do your thinking for you.

Many denominations preach that the end is near, and a quarter of Americans accept that “the world will come to an end during my lifetime.” This may be the worst downside to Christianity’s magical thinking. If the world will end in your lifetime, why bother about long-term issues like the environment, third world health issues, or infrastructure projects?

A far healthier attitude is the Greek proverb that says that in a great society old men plant trees under which they know they will never sit.

Why can’t God just defeat the devil?
It’s the same reason a comic book character
can’t defeat his nemesis—
then there’s no story.
If God gets rid of the devil, there’s no fear.
No reason to come to church.
— Bill Maher

Downsides to the hope offered by Christianity: not seeing reality clearly

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Say you have a problem, and you need it resolved. You pray to God because you’ve been promised that God will take care of it in a way that’s tailor-made for your particular needs. If you can count on anything, you can count on God, right?

But you rarely get what anyone would call a remarkable resolution to the issue, and that’s where hope comes in. Hope maintains your confidence that sometime, somehow, God will deliver the best possible resolution (and maybe resolve the other issues as well).

But that rarely happens, and you’re left with hope, the runner-up prize. You’d like prayer to work like a vending machine—you put in a dollar, and it gives you what you asked for. The vending machine works every time, without surprises. But when God looks like a no-show, hope must fill the gap. Despite the evidence, you keep alive the spark that God ensures it’ll work out for the best.

Let’s continue our list of reasons why Christian hope is not a good thing (part 1 here).

2. Not seeing reality clearly

Suppose you’re crossing the street, learning to hit a baseball, setting a broken bone, or learning to swim. You’d need to see reality clearly to perform these tasks. Why then would you want to avoid seeing reality clearly in some other area of life?

If I go to the oncologist, I may want hope, but what I need is the truth—whether I’m healthy, or I have a cancer with a good chance of recovery after treatment, or I have two months to get my affairs in order and say goodbye. A pat on the head from the doctor would make me feel better (at that moment, anyway), but the truth would help me live my life better.

In the same way, belief in heaven might make me feel better, but I want the truth. I want a life in harmony with reality.

Hope often blurs into faith. One of the Christian crusades to Jerusalem was the Children’s Crusade of 1212. This was a popular crusade—that is, one not sponsored and encouraged by the church—and it is a good example of faith crashing into reality.

Historians debate what happened, but it appears to be some combination of:

  • charismatic child preachers raising a military force of perhaps 30,000 children,
  • the promise that once they got to Italy, the Mediterranean would part to allow them to walk to Palestine,
  • the promise that battle would be unnecessary because God would simply convert the Muslims occupiers of the Holy Land to Christianity, and
  • most participants either dying on the way from exhaustion or starvation or being sold into slavery and the remnant struggling their way home.

Ignoring reality has consequences.

The downside of hope is also the downside of Pascal’s Wager. This argument says that there’s no downside to being a believer—hedge your bets by acting like a Christian and you can’t lose.

There are many problems with Pascal’s Wager, but let’s highlight just one, the downside to being deceived. Participating in a religion that is nonsense means spending time, money, and energy on that religion instead of focusing on what’s real. An insightful essay on Why Evolution Is True observed, “If we believe that truth (meaning, broadly, the accurate understanding of reality) is good, then religion, almost by definition, cannot be good for us.”

We see desperate hope in the alternative medicine field, which is worth $30 billion per year in the U.S. There’s not sufficient evidence for government watchdog agencies to upgrade these alternative medicines and label them actual medicines, but they do give hope where science offers none. Similarly, religion gives hope when reality offers none, but that hope is also expensive. Religion gobbles up about $130 billion every year in the U.S.

Some people are content to go through life drunk or stoned. I’d rather see reality clearly.

One popular apologetic argument (and I still can’t get my head around the idea of an adult making this argument) is that atheism is discouraging or unpleasant, as if that were an argument against atheism. I made this first on the list of my 25 stupid arguments Christians should avoid.

For more, see: An Inept Attempt to Dismiss the Problem of Evil

Do these professional Christian apologists think they’re talking to children? I wonder if they’ve read C. S. Lewis, who said, “If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.”

Here is the tragedy of theology in its distilled essence:
The employment of high-powered human intellect,
of genius, of profoundly rigorous logical deduction—
studying nothing.
— Andrew Bernstein