BSR 21: Earth Is Insignificant in a Huge Hostile Universe

Summary of reply: the Argument from Incredulity fails, “Life is so improbable!” fails since we don’t even understand life here on Earth, intelligent design is unnecessary to explain anything, and our inconceivably vast universe looks like nothing an actual god would create as an incubator for human life.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Earth is just a pale blue dot in a huge hostile universe. Why would God create all that extra wasted universe?

Christian response #1: The odds of a life-supporting planet like Earth is more than just statistically improbable. It’s miraculous.

BSR: Miraculous? Citation needed.

This is the Argument from Incredulity—“I can’t imagine how this could have happened naturally, so it must’ve been God!” If you don’t know how something works, that doesn’t mean that you do know and it was God.

We don’t even understand life on the one planet where we know life exists. Biologists keep uncovering new species in surprising places thought inhospitable to life. Worms have been found miles deep in rock, in glaciers, and in hotcold, or frozen places at the bottom of oceans. Not only is extraterrestrial life possible in the universe, it might exist in our own solar system. Maybe on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. Maybe on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. The difficulty for life beyond Earth may not be inhospitable conditions but our constrained imaginations.

Let’s turn to the idea of Earth as a “pale blue dot.” That metaphor came from astronomer Carl Sagan, who suggested that the Voyager 1 spacecraft turn its camera back to where it came from to take a photo of Earth (see that 1990 photo above). The Earth is less than a pixel in size, the bright dot in the right of the image. Some of Sagan’s poetic summary of our tiny home in a vast and inhospitable universe is in the quote at the end of this post. “Every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.”

Through science we see reality accurately, far more amazing and awe inspiring than religion’s impoverished and baseless cartoon.

We don’t even understand life here on Earth, so it’s premature to say that it’s all so complicated that God must’ve done it. It’s even possible that we have extraterrestrial life in our own solar system. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Imagine coming across a message in English on a rock. Would you dismiss it as just one more rock, as a curious natural happenstance? Of course not. We know intelligence when we see it.

BSR: No one would explain a clear, detailed English message as a curious natural event when we have millions of English messages as precedents. We know about such messages, and we know where they come from. Any of us would put this rock with its English message into the bin “Messages written by humans,” not “odd natural marks on rocks.”

We occasionally experience pareidolia where we see a face in a cloud or an image of Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich. But detailed English messages still look manmade, and the occasional curious rock still looks natural. Pareidolia in effect means “weird thing that looks intelligent but is just natural.”

Paley’s famous watch argument for God (“Say, this pocket watch I just found in the forest looks very different from the rocks and twigs laying nearby!”) actually defeats itself. If the pocket watch looks different and looks designed, then those rocks and twigs (which look so very different) must not look designed.

We know of plenty of things designed by intelligent people and plenty of undesigned things made by mindless forces in nature. We know of zero examples of things made by the supernatural. The supernatural is an enormous claim that isn’t unnecessary to explain anything.

We know of designed things made by intelligent people and undesigned things made by mindless Nature. We know of ZERO things made by the supernatural. The supernatural is still unnecessary to explain anything. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Suppose you make a single cupcake completely from scratch—you plant the wheat and grind the flour, you milk the cow and make the butter, and so on. Then someone criticizes the cupcake because of the enormous waste and effort to make one tiny beautiful thing. Does that deny the existence of the baker?

BSR: We know about cupcakes and bakers. We all accept the countless precedents of bakers baking. Contrast that with zero supernatural claims we can all agree with.

You can complain about waste or ask if all that time and effort were worth it since humans can be inefficient. However, God has no such limitation. If he wanted to make one perfect cupcake out of nothing with no waste, he could. And if he wanted to make one simple, efficient, waste-free environment for the creatures he made in his own image, he could.

But look at the universe—it’s about as far from that perfect human world as it is possible to be. It has 200 billion galaxies, each holding 200 billion stars. The universe has existed 7 million times longer than Christianity, and the mass of the universe is 27 orders of magnitude (powers of ten) greater than the Earth. Look to the heavens and wonder about mankind’s place, and you’ll see the wasteful work of nature, not the precise and efficient hand of God.

Imagine being dropped onto some random spot on the Earth without technology—no shelter or clothes, no food or water. Maybe you’ll wind up in a jungle in central Africa or on tundra in Siberia. More than likely it would be in the ocean. Even worse, imagine being dropped into some random spot in the universe. Does the universe look like God’s Petri dish for his most precious creation?

If Earth is God’s Petri dish for humans, he could’ve done it with zero waste. A universe with 200 billion galaxies and one dust speck with humans is the opposite of what a god would’ve done. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 22: There Is No Evidence for God’s Existence

For further reading:

[Look at] that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.
On it everyone you love, everyone you know,
everyone you ever heard of,
every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. . . .
Every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization,
every king and peasant, every young couple in love,
every mother and father, hopeful child,
inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals . . .
every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—
on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
Carl Sagan

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Image from JPL, public domain
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BSR 20: Christianity Is Anti-Science

Summary of reply: We’ll wonder why there’s a map of world religions but not of world science, follow the evidence for the universe (it’s not looking good for God), and look for clues to a Cosmic Designer in human DNA.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Christianity is anti-science.

Christian response #1: Christianity isn’t anti-science, it’s just that there are many kinds of truth besides scientific truth. For example, truth can come from logic, mathematics, metaphysics, morals, history, or aesthetics.

BSR: Science makes “testable explanations and predictions about the universe” (Wikipedia). But take science’s methods—to follow the evidence honestly, to collaborate and critique, to reward the finding of errors and overturning of accepted truths, and so on—and apply them in other areas, and you can also have reliable results. History and mathematics are examples. Theology and perhaps metaphysics are not.

Theology not being a route to truth has a silver lining for the Christian because it prevents the Scientologist, Satanist, or Mormon from demanding that their contradicting supernatural views be taken seriously.

Christians imagine that the Big Questions—Why are we here? What is our purpose? Where did we come from?—is exclusively theirs to answer. But religion’s answers are dependent on the society. In India, Hinduism has one set of answers; in Yemen, Islam has different answers; and in Alabama, Christianity has different answers again. And it’s not like the answers from the world’s religions are gradually coming together. In fact, the opposite is true. Here again, following the evidence is the way to go. It turns out that Science does have answers to these Big Questions; it’s just that religion doesn’t want to hear them.

Look at a map of world religions and ask yourself why there is no equivalent map of world science.

Look at a map of world religions and ask yourself why there is no equivalent map of world science. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Christianity isn’t anti-science. Some of the most famous scientists in history were Christians, as are many scientists today. And these scientists are bold enough to ask the Who question.

BSR: It’s true that Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, and many other scientists from centuries ago were Christian. But at that time pretty much everyone in Europe was a Christian. Newton’s chair at Cambridge required not only that he be a Christian but that he be an ordained Anglican priest.* Christianity was pretty much the only intellectual game in town, even though it explained little, and that poorly. How many of Europe’s early scientists would be Christian if they were living today, witnessing the explanatory power of modern science?

As for asking the Who question (in addition to asking What, How, and so on), Newton’s science never had a “then a miracle occurs” in step 2. His explanations were natural at every step. He did write a lot about Christianity (and alchemy, too, for that matter), but that was a separate project from his physics.

That’s true for modern scientists like Francis Collins as well. God is never cited as a cause in any of his work.

Might the Cosmic Salamander have snotted out the universe? We can’t prove it didn’t, but that’s not where the evidence points. Let’s follow the evidence. It doesn’t point to the Cosmic Salamander, to God, or indeed any Who at all.

Might the Cosmic Salamander have snotted out the universe? We can’t prove it didn’t, but that’s not where the evidence points. Let’s follow the evidence—and it doesn’t point to the Cosmic Salamander or to God. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Don’t use science to reject the existence of God when the scientific evidence is most reasonably explained by God.

BSR: The argument claims that two scientific facts are important support for Christianity. First, (1) that the universe came from nothing and (2) that this was caused by “something powerful, non-spatial, non-temporal and non-material.”

(1) No, science has no consensus position on what preceded the Big Bang or if the idea of preceding even makes sense before time started. Christians must also explain how God created the universe from nothing if they claim to be following the science.

(2) The Big Bang could’ve been a quantum event, and some quantum events need no causes. Furthermore, if the zero-energy universe hypothesis is correct, the universe contains zero total mass and energy, and the need for a powerful something-or-other to kick things off vanishes. And remember that science’s uncertainty is never support for God.

The second claimed fact in this argument is that DNA is strong support for the Design Argument—that the universe looks designed, so there must be a Designer. But this fails, too. DNA alone neatly defeats the Design Argument.

To see this, first consider what the hallmarks of human design are. A designer might optimize for strength, efficiency, cost, speed of assembly, durability, lightness, or even beauty. What you never see is deliberate junk, and yet junk is just what you see with DNA. Human DNA has 20,000 nonworking pseudogenes. Archaic genes are sometimes switched on due to DNA copying errors (these are atavisms, like tails in human). Vestigial structures are flashbacks to body features from ancestor species (such as blind eyes in cave fish). A surprising eight percent of human DNA is fragments inserted from viruses.

Might God have a reason to put this junk in human DNA? Maybe, but the claimed parallel between human designers and God—that is, the Design Argument—fails. Human DNA certainly looks like it was the result of a sloppy process like evolution rather than the precise design of an omniscient Designer.

Human DNA alone defeats the Design Argument. It’s a record of the twists and turns evolution made. No Designer would add this junk. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

*An exemption from the king allowed Newton to accept the Lucasian chair at Cambridge without taking holy orders because Newton had heretical views about the Trinity.

Continue with BSR 21: Earth Is Insignificant in a Huge Hostile Universe

For further reading:

Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison
we’d be watching TV by candlelight?
— Al Boliska

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Image from Mary Loftus, CC license
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BSR 19: Jesus Was Just a Man

Summary of reply: The Caesar of history doesn’t need supernatural tales, but Jesus is nothing without them. And that “You’re biased against the supernatural!” charge doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Jesus was just a man

Christian response #1: “If you trust what history tells us about Caesar (who was just a man), why wouldn’t you trust what history tells us about Jesus (who was described as God incarnate)?”

BSR: An account of Julius Caesar as a man isn’t surprising. We know of many men in history who did remarkable things. That he conquered Gaul or was on the winning side of a civil war or was the Roman Republic’s dictator for life are facts that every student of history will agree to. By contrast, claims about the supernatural are never universally agreed to.

The Roman historian Suetonius reported that Caesar, pausing before taking the monumental step of crossing the Rubicon river with his army, saw a divine messenger urging him to cross. Historians scrub supernatural claims like this from history. Give historians the gospels, and they’ll do the same.

How do we know about Julius Caesar? Unlike the gospels, it’s not just copies of ancient documents that refer to him. We have copies of books he wrote. There are inscriptions mentioning him. There are coins, busts, and statues with his likeness. There’s a calendar and even a month named after him! Remove the supernatural from the Caesar story, and you’re left with the remarkable Caesar of history, but remove it from the gospels, and you’re left with just the story of an not-particularly-interesting peasant from a distant culture. Jesus is nothing but his supernatural story.

If a claim is believed because it’s dogma rather than because evidence has convinced the historians, it’s not worth believing in.

Remove the supernatural from the Julius Caesar story, and you’re left with the remarkable Caesar of history, but remove it from the gospels, and you’re left with just the story of an uninteresting peasant. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Why trust the gospels when they say that Jesus existed but not when they say that he was a god?

BSR: Because reports of humans are common and typically trustworthy. Reports of gods are fiction, legend, or mythology, not history. If there is an exception in the case of Jesus, you need a mountain of evidence to support this remarkable claim. Julius Caesar, Caesar Augustus, Alexander the Great, and other historical figures from two millennia ago often have supernatural tales in their biographies, but historians accept none of them as history.

Even the part about Jesus existing isn’t certain. Some religions were started by a real person, and some weren’t. Either is possible in the case of Christianity.

This is a bias against the supernatural, though not an exclusion of that possibility. It’s a bias because the supernatural is unnecessary to explain anything about religion—not its origin, its affect on people, or its growth. Sure, I have a bias against the supernatural. Who doesn’t? List the supernatural claims of Hinduism, Scientology, or Mormonism, and the Christian will be as skeptical as I am. My bias for the plausible natural explanation is no different from the Christian’s . . . in every domain but Christianity.

Sure, I have a bias against the supernatural. Who doesn’t? List the supernatural claims of Hinduism, Scientology, or Mormonism, and the Christian will be as skeptical as I am. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 20: Christianity Is Anti-Science

For further reading:

Virtually every major technological advance
in the history of the human species—
back to the invention of stone tools
and the domestication of fire—
has been ethically ambiguous.
— Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

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Image from Vidar Nordli-Mathisen, CC license
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BSR 18: Being a Good Person Is All that Really Matters

Summary of reply: Objective morality is make-believe, the dictionary already defines “good” (no need for God, thank you), and God sets no moral standard that anyone should be striving to follow.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Being a good person is all that really matters

Christian response #1: Don’t judge “good” by your own standard. Your good will differ from your neighbor’s. The objective standard of good comes from God.

BSR: We’ve all seen or heard countless individual moral dilemmas where we might argue with friends about which course of action was best. We also see moral issues within society like abortion or same-sex marriage that drag on contentiously for years. Where is this objective standard from God that will neatly direct us to the one correct moral answer?

The standard that people use is their own. A person’s moral standard begins with the moral programming they got from being born a human, and that is then shaped by their personality, upbringing, and society.

We already have a source to find out what “good” means—it’s the dictionary. Look up the word and there’s no mention of God. The standards we use are our own, grounded by ourselves. An objective, accessible moral standard would be nice, but there is no evidence of such a thing.

And even if we want to imagine objective morality, why imagine that the Christian god is behind it? Maybe it’s Allah or Zeus or the Aztec god of wind and learning, Quetzalcoatl. As Christopher Hitchens observed, this is slipping God through customs without declaring him.

Morals have a natural explanation. “But where did objective moral values come from but from God?” fails if there are no objective moral values to explain. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: No one’s thoughts and actions are entirely pure. If being a good person is all that really matters, then we all fail because we aren’t consistently good.

BSR: When did “good” become “perfect”? We know we’re not perfect. Even more so, we know that others aren’t perfect. The idea “he’s a good person” is never confused with “he’s morally perfect.” Here on earth, we try to live a life that’s at least more good than bad, more helpful than hurtful. We try to leave the earth better for our having lived. We see this codified into the legal system with the idea of character witnesses who argue that, though the defendant has made mistakes, there is a good side that mitigates the bad side.

Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats makes clear that works (not faith) get you into heaven and that perfection isn’t required: “The Son of Man will come in his Father’s glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what they have done.”

You’ve ceded the right to have your moral judgments taken seriously if you accept the idea of infinite punishment for finite crimes in hell. Here again we see a difference between Christians’ one-size-fits-all imagination of the afterlife and proportional punishment here on earth. If a single horrible punishment for all crimes makes no sense in our legal system, why would it make sense coming from the omniscient and all-wise Judge of All?

Jesus agreed that perfection wasn’t needed to get into heaven (Matt. 25:31–46). And speaking of imperfection, the one-size-fits-all hell is an example. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: “Good” isn’t good enough when God is perfect.

BSR: Read the Old Testament, and you’ll see that God sets a terrible moral standard. He breaks pretty much every commandment that it’s possible for him to break. It’s not clear what moral rules he follows, if any.

Don’t tell me that God’s ways are higher than our ways or that God is good by definition or that God’s various rampages are in “difficult passages” that must be reinterpreted. The word “good” has a definition, and God doesn’t meet it. If you’re going to say that God is “good” when he does good things, you’re obliged to label him “bad” when he does things for which, if you did them, you’d be called bad.

Even if we did allow that God were morally perfect (remember that this is the same God who supports slavery, commands genocide, and kills everything in a flood), why does his moral perfection mean that we must be perfect? In this view, God creates us, so he’s well aware of how flawed we are. We’re imperfect by design—his design. No father would insist on a standard of behavior from his children that he knew they couldn’t meet.

God sets a terrible moral standard—just read the Old Testament. Supporting slavery, demanding genocide, drowning the world—he breaks just about every moral rule it’s possible to break. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 19: Jesus Was Just a Man

For further reading:

He’s your god; they’re your rules—
you burn in hell.

— seen on the internet

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BSR 16: Atheists Just Believe in One Less God than Christians

Summary of reply: Christian claims of better evidence for their supernatural beliefs are wishful thinking. Another argument tries (but fails) to lampoon the atheist challenge by comparing it to a murder investigation.

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Atheists believe in just one less God than Christians.

Christian response #1: Don’t think that the gods of history are equally well evidenced. The case for the god of the Bible is far more reliable.

If we can set aside the contentious grammatical issue—whether it’s “one less” god or “one fewer”—we can get on to this more interesting problem. The Christian apologist claims that the evidence for his god is much better than that for the other gods. The number of Bible manuscripts is greater than those for other religions of the time, they’re older, and so on.

This claim of better documentation fails. One of the old religious books will have best documentation, but even if the Bible is the lucky one, it’s still full of supernatural tales supported by no evidence.

The Bible is full of story ideas taken from other religions—the Garden of Eden, the Flood, a supernatural birth, a dying-and-rising god, and so on all come from older religions nearby. An actual religion would look startlingly different than its neighbors, not like a cut-and-paste borrowing.

And if you like solid documentation, Mormonism is far better than Christianity. Its holy book was written more recently, we have records of changes made, and there’s little difficulty understanding the culture it came from.

In God’s holy book, he speaks the universe into existence, but in reality he can’t even wave hello. Christianity looks like just another manmade religion.

Christians should avoid the “We have better evidence” claim. If that argument is compelling, you should logically upgrade to an even better evidenced religion like Mormonism. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Imagine the defense attorney in a murder trial saying about the defendant, “We all dismiss everyone else in our community as a suspect. I just believe in one less suspect.”

This is a terrible analogy with God. We all agree that murders, killers, and evidence exist. But change the subject to the supernatural, and we can’t agree on anything, including whether the supernatural even exists. Theists can’t even agree among themselves how many gods there are or their names. The God argument can’t make a convincing case of the first and most important issue, that God exists.

If there’s a murder, there must be one or more murderers. Zero is not an option. But for the number of gods, zero is quite reasonable.

This Christian argument tries to change the subject. It wants to discuss, “Of the many gods, which one?” rather than, “Are there any gods at all?” It wants to ignore the elephant in the room—that the magical domain being discussed could easily be no more real than Harry Potter and Hogwarts.

If there was a murder, you can’t have zero murderers, but zero gods is possible. The magical domain Christians want to discuss may be no more real than Harry Potter and Hogwarts. [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 17: There Are No Objective Moral Truths

For further reading:

“I don’t understand how you don’t believe in God.”
Well, you know how you don’t believe in Zeus? Like that.
— Ricky Gervais

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Image from Caroline, CC license
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BSR 15: Jesus Didn’t Even Think He Was God

We’re halfway there! Half of the 28 Christian Quick Shots have been responded to with a Bite-Size Reply. I hope they’ve been useful for you. Yes, this is a long project, but it does provide a way to have brief replies to popular Christian responses to some interesting atheist arguments. If you want to work out your own skills, read the Christian response and stop to think how you’d reply if you overheard the conversation. My responses don’t claim to be complete, so feel free to add your ideas in the comments. And thanks, everyone, for the thousands of comments so far.

In this Bite-Size Reply, the Bible says lots of things. Some verses argue that Jesus thought he was God, but others say something else.

That people worshipped Jesus isn’t the surprising thing; it’s that he allowed it. And Jesus only claimed to be divine in John. How could something that momentous have slipped the notice of the other gospel authors?

(These Bite-Size Replies are responses to “Quick Shots,” brief Christian responses to atheist challenges. The introduction to this series is here.)

Challenge to the Christian: Jesus didn’t even think He was God.

Christian response #1: Old Testament prophets spoke for God, while Jesus spoke as God.

To support your point with one example, it’s true that Jesus made a number of corrections to Old Testament law when he said, “But I say to you that. . . .”

But—wouldn’t you know it?—the Bible says a lot of things. Unsurprisingly, Jesus in the Bible also made clear that he wasn’t God. For example, “The Father is greater than I,” “Why do you call me good? No one is good—except God alone,” and “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The Bible is contradictory. You can make it say that Jesus is God or that he’s not.

Jesus in the Bible says that he is God, but then he also says that he isn’t God. A contradictory Bible isn’t a reliable source of history. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: Jesus accepted the worship of others. As a Jew, he knew it was blasphemy to do that as an ordinary person.

Judaism came from roots that had no problem with polytheism (worship of many gods) or henotheism (worship of one god but recognition of others). I would think that Israel had lots of instances of ordinary people bowing down to kings, prophets, or other powerful men, but let’s ignore this. The bigger issue isn’t people eager to worship but a god allowing worship. Being treated like a god is what shallow but powerful people want, not a perfect god.

That Jesus did accept worship suggests that the Bible is just another book of ancient mythology.

Jesus accepted the worship of others, but it’s not the others that’s surprising. It’s that Jesus allowed it! Being treated like a god is what shallow but powerful people want, not a perfect god. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: Jesus’s claims to deity were clear to his Jewish opponents. That’s why they wanted to stone him.

Jesus’s Jewish opponents wanted to stone him “for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” But we read that only in John. Other clear statements that Jesus is God are also only in John: “I and the Father are one” and “If you have seen me you have seen the Father,” for example.

Did Jesus say he was God? Not the messiah, not the Son of Man, but God? If so, that would have been the central message in all the gospels, but we only get this in John. The state of divinity of Jesus seems to have been an editorial decision of the author of each gospel (h/t Bart Ehrman interview).

Jesus claimed to be divine, but only in John. This claim is glaringly absent in the other gospels. Did it just slip the mind of the authors of those gospels, or was Jesus’s divinity a literary invention? [Click to tweet]

(The Quick Shot I’m replying to is here.)

Continue with BSR 16: Atheists Believe in Just One Less God than Christians

For further reading:

Success is not permanent,
but neither is failure.

— Anon.

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Image from Derek Σωκράτης Finch, CC license
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