Category Archives: Deep Dive>The Secular

BSR 14: A Loving God Wouldn’t Send People to Hell

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Most teachers pass a higher fraction of students than God allows into heaven. For those people who don’t deserve heaven, don’t blame them—blame their Maker.

Summary of reply: Christians need to rethink the entrance requirements for heaven, since Jesus made clear that most of us won’t make it in. And why should someone be punished for failing to seek the Christian god instead of any other?

(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: A loving God would not send people to hell.

Christian response #1: You can’t expect everyone, good and bad, to get the same treatment in the afterlife. “A loving God must also be just or His love is little more than an empty expression.”

Does that apply to Grandma as well? Is her unconditional love an “empty expression” since it’s not tied to justice? Uh, no—this lockstep connection between love and justice is imaginary.

The apologist wants to explore different entry requirements for the afterlife. How fair would it be if the same afterlife were given to Jeffrey Dahmer (sentenced to 16 life sentences for many murders) and Anne Frank (died at age 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp just weeks before liberation by the Allies)?

But if you think that’s unfair, consider the Christian view: Dahmer, who became a born-again Christian in prison, is now in heaven, while Anne Frank, a Jew who never accepted Jesus as her savior, is in hell. How fair is that?

And the Bible is inconsistent about how one gets into heaven. If God is offended by our sin, he could just forgive, like we do. In fact, he does forgive. In one instance, God says about Israel, “I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” The parable of the sheep and the goats says that good works get you in. And anyway, everyone already has a ticket to heaven. Paul in Romans 5:18–19 says that no one had to opt in to get Adam’s sin, so no one needs to opt in to get Jesus’s salvation.

You get into heaven if you’ve accepted Jesus, not if you’re a good person? Christians need to work on that story. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: God doesn’t send people to hell, and he won’t force people to live with him in heaven.

Jesus said about the afterlife, “Wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” This is God’s perfect plan? Most teachers pass a higher fraction of students than God allows into heaven. God made hell knowing that most people would end up there, and yet somehow he gets no blame for creating this catastrophe. Nope—if people are imperfect, blame their Maker.

A popular Christian rationalization is that God wants us in heaven, but he’s not going to force us there. And yet in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, where the rich man is sent to hell after death, it’s clear that he really doesn’t want to be there. No, you wouldn’t have to drag him to the Good Place.

Sending people to hell isn’t the loving thing to do. This “God is a gentleman and won’t force himself on anyone” argument is ridiculous. God should know how relationships work, and this isn’t it. If God wants people to love him, he can be worthy of love. Being indistinguishable from nonexistent isn’t the way to get there.

Most teachers pass a higher fraction of students than God allows into heaven. For those people who don’t deserve heaven, don’t blame them—blame their Maker. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: People in hell aren’t tortured, though they will be tormented. Denying God’s offer of heaven becomes your choice to go to hell.

Tortured, tormented—whatever. Either one is bad, and God is to blame.

If heaven or hell is our choice, not God’s (charging God with sending us to hell is against the rules, apparently), why the secrecy? Why doesn’t God lay his cards on the table to let us make an informed decision?

“Just read the Bible” is no answer, because the Bible is unclear. God should make himself known, convince everyone that heaven and hell exist, and explain the entrance requirements. No one should be expected to believe the unbelievable.

Why elevate the Christian claim of heaven over the afterlife claims of any other religion? Alternatively, why should someone be punished for failing to seek God rather than failing to seek Allah, Xenu, Zeus, Quetzalcoatl, or any other god? See the questions as merely cultural—in the West, most believers are Christian—and Christianity dissolves into just a local custom.

Why the secrecy surrounding hell? God should make himself known, convince everyone that heaven and hell exist, and explain the entrance requirements. No one should believe the unbelievable. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 15: Jesus Didn’t Even Think He Was God

For further reading:

If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
— Woody Allen

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Image from Jaroslav Devia, CC license
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BSR 13: The Bible Condones Slavery

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If Christianity were a powerful force against slavery, we would have seen slavery overturned when Christianity became the state religion in Europe, not 1400 years later.

Summary of reply: Slavery defined in the Bible came in two forms, indentured servitude for people in our tribe and slavery for life for people outside our tribe, just like slavery in America. And Christianity doesn’t deserve credit for outlawing slavery in the West two centuries ago—it was Christians who did some of that, not Christianity.

(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: The Bible condones slavery

Christian response #1: New World slavery was very different than the servitude described in the Bible.

Wrong. They were basically identical.

Slavery in America came in two forms: voluntary indentured servitude of Europeans (people in our tribe) for a limited time and involuntary, slavery for life of Africans (outsiders). Slavery documented in the Bible also came in two forms: voluntary indentured servitude of fellow Israelites and involuntary slavery for life of people from other tribes. European indentured servants served their time to repay the cost of their transport to America, and Israelite indentured servants served their time to repay their debts.

This apologetic wants to imagine that the Chosen People only had indentured servitude, but the Bible says otherwise. God says, “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. . . . You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life.”

Even if we tried to accept this apologetic argument as its author wants, is that the best God can do? He can speak the universe into existence, but he can’t improve the economic condition of one tribe on one planet in one galaxy?

Biblical slavery and American slavery were basically identical. Each had indentured servitude for people like us and slavery for life for Others. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: We have Christians to thank for the elimination of slavery in the West. And they grounded their arguments in the Bible.

Christianity is a force against slavery? One wonders why the New Testament mentions slavery a number of times but is never against it. For example, “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.” The lack of any prohibition against slavery is also a glaring omission in the Ten Commandments.

If Christianity were effective against slavery, we would’ve seen slavery eliminated in the Roman Empire after Christianity became the state religion in 380 CE. True, some of the big names pushing against slavery in the West (William Wilberforce and others) were Christian, but if Christianity were the cause, we would’ve seen this push in the fourth century, not the nineteenth.

Yes, those Christians pointed to the Bible, but so did the Southern pastors during the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. With a careful selection of verses, the Bible can be made to say just about anything. Read honestly, the Bible gave stronger support for the Southerners’ stand for slavery.

If Christianity were a powerful force against slavery, we would have seen slavery overturned when Christianity became the state religion in Europe, not 1400 years later. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue with BSR 14: A Loving God Wouldn’t Send People to Hell

For further reading:

The difference between art and science
is that science is what people understand well enough
to explain to a computer.
All else is art.
— Donald Knuth

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Image from SHTTEFAN, CC license
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BSR 12: The Bible Condones Genocide

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A dictionary will tell us that God did indeed order genocide, and that convicts him, whether the Israelites completed the job or not. While the Canaanites might have sacrificed children, God ordered the same thing. And isn’t genocide an overreaction to child sacrifice?

(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: The Bible condones genocide

Christian response #1: Are you saying that God killed for no good reason? And don’t complain when God doesn’t stop evil (pandemics, earthquakes) and then complain when he does (killing evil Canaanites).

The reason doesn’t matter. Genocide is “the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.” It’s a crime against humanity, regardless of the reason.

The author complains that the Canaanites sacrificed some of their children, but he forgets that God did the same: “So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am Jehovah.”

And what solution to the problem of the Canaanite’s child sacrifice occurs to God? More of the same, of course. God demands that they all be exterminated—adults and children. You’d think that a god who could speak the universe into existence could think up a more moral solution.

The Christian challenge ends with apparent atheist hypocrisy. Atheists demand God stop evil (this is the Problem of Evil) but then are outraged when God cleans up evil in Canaan. My response: God is welcome to address the evil in Canaan, but he needs to do it in a humane manner. Do I really need to explain the irony of solving Canaanite child sacrifice with genocide? An omniscient god could think up dozens of solutions that were actually moral.

The Canaanites sacrificed some of their children. God responded by killing *all* their children … and all the adults. See a problem? [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: The God of the Bible never commanded genocide. That was hyperbole.

And yet God did command genocide. Here’s one instance: “So Joshua subdued the whole region. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the Lord had commanded.”

The apologist will say that later in the Bible, that tribe reappeared. Clearly they were not totally destroyed; therefore, no genocide; therefore, God is off the hook.

First, what this shows is that the Bible is unreliable. If “He totally destroyed all who breathed” is hyperbole, who decides what else is hyperbole? And second, the point isn’t who the Israelites killed or didn’t kill. The point is that God commanded genocide! How thoroughly the Israelites followed his commands isn’t important. God’s own holy book convicts him.

The Bible records Joshua destroying a tribe, but then that tribe appears later in the Bible. But this doesn’t exonerate God because he ordered the genocide. His own holy book convicts him. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue with BSR 13: The Bible Condones Slavery

For further reading:

One indication of the validity
of a principle is the vigor and persistence
with which it is opposed.
In any field, if people see that
a principle is obvious nonsense
and easy to refute, they tend to ignore it.
On the other hand, if the principle is difficult to refute
and it causes them to question
some of their own basic assumptions
with which their names may be identified,
they have to go out of their way
to find something wrong with it.
— Charles Osgood, psychologist

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Image from Arisa Chattasa, CC license
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BSR 11: It’s Narrow-Minded to Think Jesus Is the Only Way to God

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This isn’t an argument I make, but let’s have some fun with it. We can’t forget that the gospels are stories, not history books; “What if it’s true?” is a dishonest question; religions are cultural; and Pascal’s Wager makes a fundamental error.

(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: It’s narrow-minded to think Jesus is the only way to God

Christian response #1: Let’s be clear: Jesus claimed to be the only way to God. What if that’s true?

Let’s be clear: the story says that Jesus claimed to be the only way to God. The gospels might contain history, but we don’t assume that from the start. “Because it says so in a gospel” counts for little.

Jesus did say, “No one comes to the Father except through me,” but that’s only in John. We don’t find the same claim in Matthew, Mark, or Luke. Also exclusive to John: “I and the Father are one” and “If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” If Jesus actually made monumental claims like these, what does it admit that the other gospels don’t repeat them?

Let’s analyze the challenge, “What if that’s true?” That’s a crazy question when you think about it. Maybe we should take supernatural claims from a thousand religions and ask if they’re true. But who would do that without considering how likely they are to be true?

“What if that’s true?” cheats by bypassing the evidence phase. We just hypothesize that it’s true and see what the world would be like in that case. But who does that? Who cares about the consequences of a hypothetical before they know how likely that hypothetical is to be true? “What if an unknown relative died and left you ten million dollars?” isn’t worth wasting time on until you have good evidence for it.

Remember that the gospels are stories. Don’t claim they’re history without providing good evidence. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: You can’t be saying that all religions lead to God equally? Given their contradictions, all are wrong or one is right.

You’re right—religions are contradictory. They don’t lead to the same place. Worse, they aren’t even consolidating in response to some dimly felt cosmic truth. They continue to diverge.

Religions are cultural. People in Thailand tend to be Buddhist, not because Buddhism is true, but because that’s what they’re brought up to accept in Thailand. Same for Islam in Yemen, Hinduism in Nepal, and Christianity in America. Religions are just another local custom.

I’ll also agree that all are wrong or one is right (discussed in BSR 6), but which option seems likelier? Consider the Monty Hall problem, the game show where you pick from three doors, only one of which has a prize.

Here’s a variant. There are not three doors but a thousand, and each represents a religion. Again, you pick your door randomly, since it is typically selected for you by the accident of your birth. The host opens all the other doors, revealing nothing behind each one. Why imagine that the one remaining door has a prize?

There was no guarantee before you started that any would be true, and since humans have invented religion by the hundreds, why imagine that you got lucky?

Religions are just one more category of local custom. Helping a lady with her chair and bowing toward Mecca are examples. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: You’re saying it’s narrow-minded for me to think Jesus is the only way to God, but then aren’t you likewise narrow-minded for holding your own views as correct? Let’s just investigate these two different beliefs.

“You can’t charge me with error X, because you do the same thing!” is the tu quoque (“you, too”) fallacy. In this case, the Christian is saying, “You’re calling me narrow-minded? Look at your own actions! You’re just as narrow-minded.” Perhaps the charge is hypocritical, but that’s not the point. The charge of narrow-mindedness stands.

As for investigating two different beliefs, there are far more than just two beliefs, even within Christianity. This is how Pascal’s Wager gets it wrong. Pascal’s Wager says that it’s smart to bet on Christianity over atheism since the downside of betting wrong if Christianity turns out to be true are so huge. But this assumes just two options. Suppose the correct path turns out to be Tibetan Buddhism (to pick one out of a thousand other religions). In this case the Christian and the atheist both bet wrong.

Pascal’s Wager (it’s smart to bet on Christianity) fails because it imagines only Christianity and atheism. In fact, the Christian has bet against a thousand other religions. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue with BSR 12: The Bible Condones Genocide

For further reading:

Did you ever notice that science
doesn’t require apologists and apologetics?
Apologetics, of course, is the art of defending
and convincing others for one’s sect-specific faith.
Scientists, on the other hand, just do science
based on experimental observations and math.
The evidence does the convincing.
There are no college classes or degrees offered
in the art of defending and convincing others
of the results of science.
— ORAXX (quoted by John W. Loftus)

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Image from Gregory Morit, CC license
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BSR 10: You Can’t Trust the Bible Because it Was Written by Humans

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The Bible must be held to a different standard than an ordinary book, the gospels being eyewitness accounts is wishful thinking, and the Bible’s successful prophecies are imaginary.

(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: You can’t trust the Bible because it was written by humans.

Christian response #1: Why then trust any book written by a human or even any statement from a human, including yours? The question should be, is it true?

We’re at the tenth reply in this series, and this is the fourth attempt to dodge a challenge by disqualifying it. Oh well, let’s play along. This version should be unobjectionable: “The Bible’s claims are extraordinary, far more so than those of an ordinary history book. How can these claims be supported when the Bible was only written by humans?”

Sure, a nonfiction book isn’t perfect, but science has a secret weapon: crowdsourcing. The argument and the evidence are presented, and then other scientists are encouraged to find errors. That’s also how it works in other legitimate scholarly disciplines like history. Science has no concept of faith, but the Bible does—big difference.

Christian apologists point to the accurate history in the Bible, such as the names of places, people, or tribes. But then archaeologists used clues in the Iliad to find Troy. Does that mean that the Iliad’s supernatural tales are true? Accurate place names are merely a requirement to get to the starting line; you don’t get bonus points for them.

The elephant in the room is that the Bible was supposedly inspired by God. With this claim, the expectations are much, much higher. If God took the trouble to inspire it, you’d think he would take the trouble to protect it. The Bible should be the world’s most reliable book, but it’s not even close.

The Bible holds God’s message, but you wouldn’t know it given its contradictions and errors. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: The gospels claim to be reliable eyewitness accounts. Test this claim, and you’ll find that it holds up.

Reliable eyewitness accounts? Nope. We don’t even know who wrote the gospels, because they don’t tell us. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are just names assigned by tradition. No New Testament gospel has the equivalent of “I Thomas, an Israelite, write you this account,” which is how one of the noncanonical gospels begins.

This response claims that the gospels are reliable eyewitness accounts. The author is eager to have us take that next little step and conclude that the gospels are accurate, so therefore the Bible’s supernatural tales are true. But it’s not a little step. I could write a pile of nonsense and end it with, “I saw this myself!” That doesn’t turn nonsense into fact. Even if the gospels did claim to be eyewitness accounts—even if they were eyewitness accounts—we’d have a long way to go before story becomes history.

Christianity is old, but don’t think venerable and respected; think clouded by time. We have much more data with which to criticize a supernatural claim in yesterday’s news than 2000-year-old miracle claims for which evidence has vanished. Christians will tell us that they don’t have a chemist’s analysis of the wine Jesus made from water or security cam video of Jesus’s tomb, but that’s their problem, not ours. For claims as remarkable as Christianity’s, we need far more evidence than old stories.

The gospels aren’t reliable eyewitness accounts, and they don’t claim to be. Their names are just tradition, and the authors are unknown. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #3: The Bible records dozens of prophecies plus their accurate fulfillment.

The Bible’s most well-known “prophecies” fail.

  • Isaiah 7: Matthew says that Jesus’s virgin birth “took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet,” a reference to the Immanuel story in Isaiah 7. But all you have to do is read the three verses about Immanuel to see that his biography is no match with that of Jesus.
  • Isaiah 52–3: The story of the Suffering Servant matches Jesus only if you carefully select the verses to consider. Ask modern Jews: it’s their holy book, and they’ll tell you that the Suffering Servant actually represents Israel, not any man.
  • Psalm 22: This also matches Jesus only by careful picking and choosing.
  • Daniel: This book claims to have been written in the 600s BCE. But it’s much more likely to have been written in about 167 BCE because its “predictions” are accurate up to this point and nonsensical after.
Read a summary of successful Bible prophecies, and they sound impressive. But read a skeptical critique to get the other side of the story. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 11: It’s Narrow-Minded to Think Jesus Is the Only Way to God 

For further reading:

Every cake
is a miraculous fulfillment
of a prophecy called a recipe.
— commenter RichardSRussell

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Image from Paweł Czerwiński, CC license
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BSR 9: Truth Can’t Be Known With Any Certainty

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While this isn’t an argument I’d make, we can still learn a few things from it. This time, the Christian responses are that this challenge can be dismissed as self-defeating and that we can’t expect certainty.

(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: “You can’t be certain about Christianity because truth cannot be known with any certainty.”

Christian response #1: But this is self-defeating! If truth can’t be known with certainty, you can’t be certain of the truth of your challenge.

If you’re keeping track at home, this is the third time the apologist has tried to get a challenge thrown out on a technicality. Take a charitable view, drop the claim to certainty, and you get something like, “We fallible humans can’t be certain of our analysis, so how confident can anyone be when a fallible mind concludes that the monumental claims of Christianity are true?”

This is a real problem. Christians today seeking the word of God are, in effect, looking through a telescope the wrong way. To get back to the words of Jesus, you go from the English translation to the original Greek in our oldest manuscripts. But from there, you still have about 200 years separating those copies from the originals. What changes were made during that Dark Age?

And even if you had the New Testament originals, they’re still separated from Jesus by roughly 25 years (for Paul’s epistles) to 60+ years (for the gospel of John and more). That period is filled with oral history, which changed the message in ways about which we can only make educated guesses. This turns Jesus’s message into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no box top.

Christianity is ordinary, fallible people all the way down.

Roughly 200 years separate our best Greek copies of the New Testament books from the originals. This turns Jesus’s message into a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and no box top. [Click to tweet]

Christian response #2: If you insist on certainty on every issue, you’ll be paralyzed with doubt.

I don’t insist on certainty. I go with the preponderance of evidence. But whether the standard is 100 percent confidence or just 51 percent, Christianity fails. Christianity makes perhaps the most outlandish claim possible, that a god created everything. It’s hard to top that one. Add in the 3 = 1 of the Trinity, or Jesus’s unfulfilled “ask and you shall receive” guarantee for prayer, or a petulant god who must satisfy his rage with a human sacrifice, and it just gets worse. This claim might have been reasonable in the Iron Age, but not today.

This touches on a related challenge, from my site’s Bizarro version, Frank Turek’s Cross Examined. The article asks atheists, “If you knew God existed, would you worship Him? Would you try to live the life that God wants you to live?”

Short answer: no. Far from the all-good god imagined by Christianity, the god of the Old Testament supported slavery and polygamy, demanded genocide and child sacrifice, and had the limited imagination of the inhabitants of Palestine 2500 years ago.

Back to the article. We’re told that a no answer means, “Your problem is not with regards to the strength of the evidence for Christianity or lack thereof, your problem is either emotional or moral. In other words, you simply don’t want Christianity to be true.”

Or maybe there’s just insufficient evidence for a God who wouldn’t be worth worshipping even if he did exist. I think I’ll go with that one.

God created everything? Outlandish. Add in the 3 = 1 of the Trinity, the false “ask and you shall receive” claim for prayer, and a petulant god who must satisfy his rage with a human sacrifice, and it just gets worse. [Click to tweet]

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

Continue to BSR 10: You Can’t Trust the Bible Because it Was Written by Humans

For further reading:  

The God of the Old Testament is arguably
the most unpleasant character in all fiction:
jealous and proud of it;
a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak;
a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser;
a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,
genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal,
sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

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Image from Van Williams, CC license
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