Category Archives: Deep Dive>Religion

If prayer doesn’t work the way Jesus promised, make it more complicated

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St. Stephen’s cathedral in Vienna, Austria has a curious box. It’s for prayer requests (see below). The English appeal is, “Lord, hear our prayer!” (Besides German, the other languages are French, Polish, and Italian.) In the front, there’s a worn slot labeled “Drop in” for written prayer requests. In the bottom right, we read, “My intentions will be prayed for during the following Mass:,” and a handwritten note on a piece of tape identifies that time as “Donnerstag, 29.9, 19:00 Uhr” (Thursday, 9/29, at 7:00 pm).

Prayer request box in St. Stephen cathedral.

Why is this prayer box here? Presumably, the idea is that more congregants hearing the prayer (and perhaps murmuring an amen) will speed it along to heaven or nudge God to listen to it. Or maybe the hope is that Cardinal Schönborn, whose seat this cathedral is, will be present and put in a good word.

(By the way, a cathedral isn’t simply a church that exceeds a certain size or a certain amount of grandeur. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop, rather than a priest. For example, Paris’s Sacré-Cœur and Sainte-Chapelle are both magnificent, but neither is a cathedral.)

More is better for prayer?

It may be natural to think that if one voice is good, many are better, but Jesus didn’t say this about prayer. Here’s what he did say.

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you (Matthew 7:7).

Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24).

You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it (John 14:14).

If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer (Matthew 21:22).

These verses may be hard to believe since we know prayer doesn’t work this way, but they’re easy to understand. Despite what the church says, Jesus is indeed claiming to act like a vending machine or a genie, and you don’t need a megaphone to amplify your prayer.

But what about this passage?

Truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven. For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them. (Matt. 18:19–20)

Why the mention of “two or three”? Does this mean that more is better?

No. This is part of a larger passage (verses 15–20) instructing how to discipline someone who sins. First, approach them yourself and encourage them to stop. If that doesn’t work, try again with one or two additional people. And if they still won’t accept the correction, make their sin public in the church.

So these verses aren’t saying that two or three Christians are necessary for Jesus to answer prayer, but if you come as a small group to correct a sinner, Jesus will be with you.

The rules for prayer

Jesus gives rules for prayer in Matthew 6:5–15, and there’s not much to it: don’t make a public show of righteousness but pray in private. Don’t babble on and on but get to the point since God already know what you need. And forgive others so that God will forgive you.

So then if you pray as Jesus dictates, will you receive whatever you ask for in prayer? If you seek, will you find? Will the door be opened to you?

No more than if you hadn’t prayed. And that’s where the prayer box comes in. If “ask and you shall receive” (John 16:24) doesn’t work, despite it being the promise of Jesus, maybe getting more people involved is the ticket.

Or maybe you should pray through heavenly intermediaries. If God or Jesus don’t seem to be listening, then pray to Mary or one of the saints. Incredibly, there are more than 10,000 saints recognized by the Roman Catholic Church. If your prayer still isn’t answered, maybe try a different saint.

Does your church have a relic? They’ve been said to be responsible for miracles. Maybe work that into your prayer somehow.

St. Stephen cathedral makes room for lots and lots of candles.

Maybe you need to light a candle. The photo above is also from St. Stephen. Candles to carry a prayer to God mimics the Old Testament’s description of sacrifices as a food offering, with smoke carrying the magic up to heaven.

If that doesn’t work, have you tried ending your prayer with “This I pray in Jesus’ name”?

Or think up some other ritual to add a little complexity to your prayer.

Jesus is indeed claiming to act like a vending machine or a genie, and you don’t need a megaphone to amplify your prayer.

Jesus promised that a simple request to God would be sufficient. These extra complications preserve the church’s good name and support the hypothesis that it’s always the petitioner who was at fault.

In an environment where evidence isn’t valued, endless excuses can be found to protect the words of Jesus from critique, and endless excuses can be found for Christians to maintain their own shaky beliefs. Faced with the obvious explanation that prayer doesn’t work because Christianity is made up, Christians are usually eager to shore up the weak parts and move on.

See also: The last thing Ukraine needs is prayer

Prayer:
God isn’t a vending machine,
he’s a slot machine.
— commenter Hector Jones

Following Jesus’s rules isn’t so hard

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The rich young ruler asked Jesus what he needed to do to earn eternal life. Jesus said that he must keep the commandments. He had done so his entire life, the man told Jesus. The final requirement, Jesus said, was to “Go, sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me” (Mark 10:21–2).

The man left in despair because he had to choose his wealth and power over Jesus.

Anyone can stay on a diet if it only lasts a couple of weeks.

What did Jesus demand?

Jesus saw Peter and Andrew fishing and told them to abandon their lives and follow him to become fishers of men. Jesus said to love your enemies and turn the other cheek. He said to not worry about impermanent treasure on earth “but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20). He illustrated the importance of helping the needy by saying, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40).

Walking the narrow path would be difficult to sustain for a lifetime. Paul showed a similar short-term focus when he said, “Were you a slave when you were called [to be a Christian]? Don’t let it trouble you…. Each person, as responsible to God, should remain in the situation they were in when God called them” (1 Corinthians 7:21–4).

We also find indifference to slavery elsewhere in the epistles.

Slaves, be obedient in everything to your earthly masters (Colossians 3:22)

Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters, not only to those who are good and considerate but also to those who are harsh (1 Peter 2:18)

What explains this attitude?

The end is nigh!

Anyone can stay on a diet if it only lasts a couple of weeks, and remaining a slave or always putting others’ needs ahead of yours might be bearable if you only need to sustain it for a couple of years. Turning the other cheek isn’t too hard if the End is around the corner.

Jesus saw the End coming soon, and that is apparent when he speaks in apocalyptic terms. Note that “apocalyptic” can mean “having to do with the end times,” or it can refer to the specific movement called Apocalypticism. This was a movement popular in Judaism during the intertestamental period (that is, the period after the Old Testament and before the New). We see this in the New Testament when Jesus was asked, “What will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Matt. 24:3). Apocalypticism taught that we live in a bad Age, controlled by a bad supernatural being but that a new Age with a good ruler would begin shortly.

Apocalyptic books told their readers that the end was near. Daniel was one such book, and it said that the final seven-year period before the apocalypse (171–164 BCE) was already half over. (For more see “Daniel’s End Times Prediction: a Skeptical Approach.”)

Jesus also spoke about an imminent end. He said, “This generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matt. 24:34). A few verses earlier, Jesus identified “these things”: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, [and] the stars will fall from the sky.” Since that obviously didn’t happen, some apologists reinterpret Jesus’s statement about the imminent end by saying that it referred to the destruction of the Temple or some other first-century calamity. No, we’re talking about a cosmic catastrophe that no one living anywhere on earth would miss.

In the same chapter, Jesus used a harvest parallel to explain the urgency. “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near. Even so, when you see all these things, you know that it is near, right at the door” (Matt. 24:32–3).

The New Testament also emphasizes the imminence of the end when Jesus is called the firstfruits by Paul (1 Corinthians 15:20–23) and Matthew (27:51–3). The firstfruits of the harvest were the grain and fruit that ripened first. A farmer would have gone for a long time since eating the produce of his farm and would be hungry for the result of his hard work, but this first portion was to be offered to God. The relevance of the reference to firstfruits is that the full harvest would be soon.

What to do with Jesus’s life philosophy?

So how noble was Jesus? He apparently didn’t intend for his policies to be a lifelong philosophy if the end was just months or few years away. And while Jesus said that those following him would suffer persecution in this life, he said in his analysis of the rich young ruler’s actions that those who left family and occupations for him would receive a hundred times as much in return in this life and they would receive eternal life (Mark 10:29–30).

I’d like to see in society more of the self-sacrifice and generosity that Jesus preached, of course, but that ignores the imminence of the end, which is central to his message.

Taking no thought for the morrow is no way to live. Nor is excessive generosity—Jesus said, “If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well” (Matthew 5:40). Maybe that explains why he does a few healings but doesn’t bother to eliminate any disease. And why Paul tells slaves to just deal with it.

Jesus was speaking only to his peers. Let’s not pretend that Jesus addressed his message at us today. With the End around the corner, Jesus didn’t think Christians two thousand years in his future would exist.

I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form.
It would disturb me if there was a wedding between
the religious fundamentalists and the political right.
The hard right has no interest in religion
except to manipulate it.
— Billy Graham, Parade Magazine, 1981

Yet more Bible reboots

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God in the Bible will make a covenant with his people, and you’d think that since he’s made the sale, the book will end. But then the Bible stories keep coming. In part 1, we saw how God made covenants with Adam, then Noah, and then Abraham. After each one, you’re ready to read The End or “And they lived happily ever after” or some other wrapup. Perhaps after the covenant with Abraham we’re finally finished?

Nope—God wants to reboot this story yet again.

The Bible, take four (Moses)

Abraham begets Isaac, who begets Jacob, who then begets twelve sons, one of whom is Joseph. Joseph is annoying, and his brothers sell him into slavery. Joseph winds up in Egypt, but you can’t keep God’s man down, and God makes Joseph the Pharaoh’s right-hand man. That’s a nice bit of luck, because famine forces Jacob and sons to Egypt, and they could do with a family member with lots of power.

Generations go by, with Jacob’s descendants happily living in Egypt, still divided into twelve tribes according to the lineage of Jacob’s sons. But somehow the Israelites go from being guests to slaves.

And then Moses is born. He goes from the child of slaves to member of the royal household when he’s found floating in a basket (as coincidentally happened to Sargon, the founder of the Akkadian Empire, centuries before).

Moses first hears from the Almighty through a burning bush. Now on a mission from God, Moses and his brother Aaron haggle with Pharaoh for the freedom of the Israelites. The ten plagues helped. Weighed down with gold and silver taken from the Egyptians, they’re off for a quick trip across the Sinai to Canaan that takes forty years.

You’d think that if Jesus were the point of God’s story, if he were the person necessary for people to avoid hell, Jesus would be in the Garden of Eden in Genesis.

At Mount Sinai, God tells the Israelites (Exodus 19), “If you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession,” and the people agree. One chapter later, God gives what’s popularly known as the Ten Commandments. The covenant is confirmed with sacrifices and blood sprinkled on the people (Exodus 24).

So we’re good?

Nope—we need lots more laws and rules. Moses is finally ready to return from Mount Sinai, but by this time the impatient and fearful Israelites (with Aaron’s help) have made a golden calf to comfort themselves. God wants to press the Big Reset Button in the Sky again, but Moses talks him out of it by referring to the perpetual Abrahamic covenant. (It must not have been that great a plan if God let himself be talked out of it.)

Moses smashes the stone tablets of the Law on the golden idol. The people are punished, and Moses goes back up for a duplicate set of Ten Commandments (which isn’t even close to being the same set), and that set is stored in the Ark of the Covenant.

There’s plenty more about the Mosaic covenant being a perpetual contract. The priesthood of Aaron’s descendants is “permanent” (Numbers 25:13, also Exodus 40:15), the Day of Atonement is a “lasting ordinance” (Leviticus 16:34), God says about the laws, “Do not add to what I command you and do not subtract from it, but keep the commands of Yahweh your God that I give you” (Deuteronomy 4:2), and so on.

Finally! We’ve got to be done now, right?

The Bible, take five (Jesus)

You’d think that if Jesus were the point of God’s story, if he were the person necessary for people to avoid hell, Jesus would be in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and it wouldn’t take a bunch of reboots and irrelevant covenants to get here. As it is, the Old Testament becomes just long-winded throat clearing, and much of the New Testament must rationalize away the incompatibility.

We read in the Law, “All your words are true; all your righteous laws are eternal” (Psalm 119:160). But God’s words aren’t particularly eternal according to the author of Hebrews, which weaves a legal case that Jesus was a priest “in the order of Melchizedek.” Since Abraham honored Melchizedek long before Moses, Jesus trumps the Levitical priesthood that was created from the Mosaic covenant. Or something.

This New Testament reboot upsets a lot of assumptions from before. What does it say about God that Jesus had to come down to straighten out his story? You’d think that an omniscient creator of the universe could convey things clearly. Here are a few things Jesus had to clarify.

  • The afterlife is no longer a vague existence in Sheol but is either bliss or torment, depending on your beliefs (or maybe depending on your works).
  • God isn’t just a monotheistic Yahweh but has become a Trinity (in Christianity though not in the New Testament).
  • In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus makes several corrections of the “You have heard it said … , but I tell you” form. Jesus redefines murder, adultery, divorce, the correct response to injustice, prayer, and so on, making one wonder if it makes sense to correct the omnipotent creator of the universe.
  • The “death” of Jesus is said to be the sacrifice to (literally) end all sacrifices. (Let’s ignore the fact that no provision in the Law is ever given to permit the sacrifice of a human; Jesus wasn’t burned, which was required for any sacrifice; Jesus wasn’t part of any tribe and so couldn’t hold the office of Levitical priest to offer a sacrifice; and Jesus wasn’t physically unblemished, as was required for any sacrifice.)
  • And that whole Chosen People thing for the Jews? No—Yahweh is now everyone’s god.

But surely this is the last reboot, right?

Nope—Islam was another reboot, Mormonism was another, and Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church was another. Even the form of God evolving from Jewish monotheism into a Trinity at the First Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the First Council of Constantinople (381) could be seen as a reboot.

Christians can hardly criticize reboots when their own religion was built on them.

What explains this?

There are at least four possible explanations for why we see these reboots in God’s instruction manual.

First, God kept changing his mind. This doesn’t put omniscient God in a good light if he kept forgetting the point or changing his mind.

Second, humanity kept changing, and God’s plan had to adapt. This makes no sense since a baby taken from an Israelite family 3000 years ago and raised in the modern world would have the same potential as other babies growing up in its new environment.

Third, the fault is with the human scribes and keepers of the Bible, and if it had just been written and copied correctly, it would make sense. One wonders, then, why God would allow his message to become so muddled.

Finally, God doesn’t exist, and the Bible is just the blog of a desert tribe from long ago. It’s no more accurate than the pre-scientific musings of hundreds of other religions.

I think this last interpretation paints the most dignified picture of God. Instead of a forgetful dolt or an inept manager, God was just the best explanation that one tribe could put together in a frightening and insecure time.

See also:

The problem with religions
that have all the answers
is that they don’t allow questions.
— seen on the internet

The Bible story reboots

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The Bible is a book whose storyline spans over a thousand years, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it also has reboots.

(A reboot is a new release of a story in comic, film, television series, or other form that discards continuity with previous versions to start afresh, unburdened by plot decisions in any previous release.)

The Bible, take one (the Adam story)

In the six-days-of-creation story in Genesis 1, God created mankind in his own image. 

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).

He then promises them all the fruit and vegetables from the earth.

(This one is debatable since it doesn’t mention an “everlasting covenant,” but I include it because some Christian sources do.)

The Bible, take two (Noah)

Adam and Eve leave the Garden, their son Cain kills his brother Abel, and then there’s a long genealogy ending in Noah. God is annoyed with how humanity turned out, so he hits the Reset button, and everyone drowns. But there’s a happy conclusion—Noah, his family, and his ark full of animals survive the storm.

Everyone in the world (by now, just eight people) is once again safe on land. God as Elohim blesses Noah’s family with authority over all living things. He lays down a few rules, and in return he promises, “I establish my covenant with you: never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood” (Genesis 9:11). The rain-bow (think: the kind of bow that shoots arrows) will appear in the clouds and remind everyone (God included) of this “everlasting covenant” (Gen. 9:16).

So there you have it, God’s covenant with humanity.

See also: Simplicity: the Trait Missing from Christianity

The Bible, take three (Abraham)

But there’s more, as the story trundles along. Noah’s descendants populate the earth, there’s that whole Tower of Babel thing, and then we’re introduced to Abraham. For some reason, Abraham (né Abram) isn’t already in Israel but lives in Ur, an ancient city on the coast of the Persian Gulf, now in southern Iraq. God (now Yahweh) guides him to Canaan.

God must be forgetful because he keeps making the same promise to Abraham. The promise is you will have many descendants (D), you get land (L), and this covenant is perpetual (P).

  • In Genesis 12, Yahweh says, “I will make you into a great nation (D)… To your offspring (P) I will give this land (L)” (that is, Canaan).
  • Other stories intervene, and then in Genesis 13, God does it again: “All the land (L) that you see [Canaan] I will give to you and your offspring forever (P). I will make your offspring (D) like the dust of the earth.”
  • In Genesis 15, guess what God does. He gives Canaan to Abraham. Actually, he gives a lot more than that, listing ten tribes (L) whose land will be the property of Abraham’s descendants. He gives as boundaries the Euphrates River to the east and Egypt to the west.
  • In Genesis 17, God was feeling generous, so he gave Canaan to Abraham. “I will make you very fruitful (D)…. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant (P) between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan (L), where you now reside as a foreigner, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you.” This is the first time we see Abraham’s contribution to the covenant: he and his male descendants must now be circumcised. (If you’re familiar with the documentary hypothesis, this came from the P source. The previous three were from the J source.)
  • Elohim from the E source is feeling generous, too, so in Genesis 22, he rewards Abraham for (almost) sacrificing Isaac with another gift of Canaan. “I will surely bless you and make your descendants (P) as numerous (D) as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies (L).”

God (in his several forms) has stuttered out many bequests of Canaan and promises of many descendants. It was a bit clumsy and contradictory, but we kind of get the message.

The End.

Just kidding—there’s more. This is concluded in part 2.

Science has never killed or persecuted a single person
for doubting or denying its teachings,
and most of these teachings have been true;
but religion has murdered millions
for doubting or denying her dogmas,
and most of these dogmas have been false.
— epitaph of George P. Spencer

Why is God hidden?

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God loves us deeply and really wants to have a relationship with each of us. So why doesn’t he?

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):

25. Because God is hidden

God knows that if we don’t understand and get on board with his plan, we will go to hell. He doesn’t want that. So what does God do to give us the basic information we need to know that he simply exists?

Nothing.

Christians might find God in the basic facts of nature—happy things like sunsets and puppies—but they ignore unpleasant things like tornadoes and cholera. Puppies and tornadoes point to the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or Satan) as much as they do the Christian God.

Or the Christians might quote Bible passages (“Since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities … have been clearly seen … so that people are without excuse” from Romans 1:20), ignoring that the Bible is not binding on non-Christians.

God is a billion times smarter than me, and he can’t convince me he even exists? A slug can convince me that it exists by just lying there. This existence thing apparently just flummoxes God.

A popular Christian response is to say that God’s making himself known would violate our free will. As C. S. Lewis said in Screwtape Letters, “[God] cannot ravish. He can only woo.”

Nonsense. This is one of the weakest Christian apologetic responses in a vast arsenal of substandard responses. Our request is a reasonable one, and we shouldn’t apologize for it. God should have made his existence (and properties) known to all. That he doesn’t is just one more reason to think we’re not living in God World.

See also: The Most Powerful Argument Against Christianity

Some meta thoughts

What got me started on this long blog post series was a Christian commenter at an apologetics blog a few years ago. He asked what evidence I’d need to be convinced that God exists. He said he needed to know what a convincing argument would look like so he could work on providing one.

I said that our positions were similar with respect to non-Christian religions. I don’t think that Scientology or Islam or Hinduism are correct, and neither does he. I played up the symmetry of our positions by saying that I’d probably need the same kind of argument that he would need to convert to a foreign supernatural worldview. An argument for Hinduism (say) with a high enough standard of evidence to convince him would get my attention as well. Give me that same quality of evidence for Christianity—as a minimum, I’d need that.

So the answer to his question is: tell me what you’d need. I’d probably need something like that.

He wasn’t satisfied (no, I couldn’t figure out why), so I made more good faith attempts to comply with his request before I realized that he wasn’t making his request with the goal of being satisfied. He was asking questions to avoid having to answer questions, attacking so he wouldn’t have to defend. He was sealioning, interrogating with the goal of asking questions to drive the antagonist away. And it worked—I haven’t bothered to comment at that blog since.

But that got me thinking. A big reason I’m an atheist is because of all the clues that we live in a non-God world. You want to know what I need to know that God exists? Show me that I live in a world where God doesn’t have the traits that he has.

Show me that we don’t live in a world where God is omniscient but also needs (or tolerates) praise and worship (reason #3).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where Christians feel so insecure in their faith that they want to strongarm the government to support them (reason #7).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where all-powerful God is so fragile that he gets praise but can’t handle blame (reason #9).

Show me that we don’t live in a world where perfect God’s perfect message is so confusing that Christians need thick books with rationalizations for Bible difficulties (reason #15).

In short, show me that I don’t live in the world that I live in.

A slug can convince me that it exists by just lying there. This existence thing apparently just flummoxes God.

The apologist might respond that this approach makes atheists unconvinceable. That might be true, though it wouldn’t be because of atheists’ closed-mindedness. It’s because there is so little intellectual reason to favor the Christian view of the world. (For another reason why skeptics are obliged to hold their skepticism, consider the Earth vs. Gaia comparison.)

And now, over 10,000 words later in this post series, I have 25 positive, pro-atheistic reasons that I can offer a Christian apologist to explain why I don’t think that God exists. Seen another way, these are the obstacles that prevent me from seeing this as God World. These are the traits of our world that the apologist must remove.

The Christian commenter who prompted me to collect these arguments won’t be satisfied with this list, because I’m sure he’s made his position unfalsifiable. However, my job is not to satisfy him, it’s to honestly follow reason and the evidence. I believe I’ve done just that.

We have reached the promised 25 reasons we don’t live in a world with a God! Share your own reasons in the comments.

It must be obvious to even the most casual observers
that I get the answers to life’s difficult questions
from the screaming voices in my head.
— David Letterman

God would not have permitted an evolving Christianity

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Christianity has changed over time. If God’s message is timeless and unchanging, Christianity must not be it.

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):

23. Because Christianity evolves

Parchment manuscripts were expensive, and outdated manuscript pages were sometimes scraped or washed to remove the ink and then reused. This is called a palimpsest. In some cases, the pen marks from the previous (older) document can still be read.

We find a metaphorical palimpsest with the Bible, with current Christian ideas shadowed by earlier, different ideas. Taken by themselves, some passages make little sense. For example, what does it mean that the water for Noah’s flood came from “the springs of the great deep” and the “floodgates of the heavens”? We can put the pieces together when we realize that the ancient mythology of Genesis was built on still-older cosmology from the Sumerians and other Mesopotamian civilizations.

Of course, realizing that Yahweh worship was built on the religion of the guys down the street pretty much rules out any historical foundation, but the point here is how the biblical story has changed. For example, God evolves through the Bible. In his youth, he wasn’t distant and omni-everything, he was rather like Zeus. He walked through the Garden of Eden and spoke with Adam and Eve like an ordinary man. He visited Abraham. He spoke to Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (Exodus 33:11). He also wasn’t omniscient, and he needed scouts to check out the rumors about Sodom and Gomorrah that he heard. He regretted creating man before the flood.

By the time of the New Testament, things are remembered differently. “No one has seen God at any time” (John 1:18). It tells us that God knows everything (1 John 3:20) and doesn’t change (James 1:17).

For an omniscient, unchanging god, he sure has changed a lot.

See also: Because the Bible story keeps rebooting

The most recent change to God is his retreat in the face of science. God used to cause lightning and drought, but not anymore—science provided a better explanation that could be tested. God used to cause cancer and plagues, but science explains them better, too. How about miraculous cures? Sorry—labeling a surprising remission as a medical miracle is wishful thinking. Only science has evidence that it can improve health outcomes or even eliminate disease.

See also: Christians Move the Goalposts When They Can’t Win Honestly

And what is “Christianity”? That, too, is a moving target. Christianity is like bacteria in a petri dish, and new denominations are now splitting off at a rate of two per day.

Consider Christianity in the early days and the long way it’s come. There have been 21 church councils, and the conclusions of each council were declared infallible (because magic?). Then there are the schisms within the Christian church. The Protestant Reformation may come to mind as the most interesting, at least from the standpoint of Christians in the United States, but there have been dozens of schisms.

Nothing objective grounds the evolution of various doctrines and the declaring of some as orthodox and some as heresy. Imagine someone living centuries ago, doing their best to conform to Christianity as it was preached in their church. Christianity might have changed enough that some denominations today would consider their worship heretical. So then was that person a heretic or not?

Even the canon (the set of books considered authoritative scripture) has been a moving target. It took until the Council of Rome (382) to get the canon more or less defined, but that list was amended within the Roman Catholic church by the Council of Trent (1545). Different Christian denominations still have different canons today, so therefore no infallible hand guided its selection. Here again, there is nothing objective to ground it. The canon was a popularity contest, and theologians would argue for whatever set of books was in vogue in their part of the world.

If we lived in God world, it would look like it. God’s a smart guy, and his message would be simple and unambiguous.

See also: The Argument from Simplicity

Realizing that Yahweh worship was built on the religion of the guys down the street pretty much rules out any historical foundation.

And a bonus reason:

24. Because of Shermer’s Law

Michael Shermer observed, “Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

Suppose someone absorbed a false belief during childhood—a superstition, a bias, or even a worldview. As they got older, they discarded some of these beliefs that weren’t supported by good evidence, but they held on to some, particularly those beliefs integral to their self-image. And here’s the interesting part: because they’re much smarter as adults, they can put together a plausible defense for those false beliefs, even if they actually hold them for no better reason than that they were indoctrinated in them as a child. The appeal of Christian apologetics is that these are smart-sounding arguments that satisfy the need to have plausible defenses for their beliefs, not that they’re true.

This isn’t like defending a belief that you know is false—such as, just for fun, creating the most compelling argument that the Earth is flat. Shermer’s Law applies to people defending a false belief for reasons that they believe. There is no self-deception going on. The unpleasant alternative is to admit to themselves that they’ve believed a false belief for years or even a lifetime, but the subconscious protects one’s self-esteem and prevents this.

If God existed, belief would be defended with evidence.

See also: Word of the Day: Shermer’s Law

To be continued.

Christians can see science and technology deliver nine times
but still doubt it the tenth time,
and they can see religion fail nine times
but still expect it to succeed the tenth time.