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Christians Reveal! How to Defeat Christianity

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Christian apologist Greg Koukl recently wrote an article with a provocative title: “This One Thing Could Destroy Christianity Completely…” (4/1/2020). Who doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking about?

I’ll get to the argument in a moment. First let’s recall another argument that has an interesting similarity, C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, or Lord.” In brief, Lewis takes the gospel story and demands to know what could explain Jesus’s claims of divinity. Jesus could be a liar (he’s wrong and he knows it), or he could be a lunatic (he’s wrong but doesn’t know it). Lewis rejects those two and so, by process of elimination, Jesus must be right, so he’s the Lord! (I respond here and here.)

Someone hearing Lewis’s argument for the first time who’s even just a bit skeptical will probably think of a fourth possibility, that Jesus in the gospels is legend. This very reasonable, natural option screams out as the best explanation, and yet apologists will carefully run through the standard three options, concluding with Lord with what I can only imagine are crossed arms and a smile, and ignoring the elephantine Legend in the room. Do they never think of it? Do they know this option but hope their audience is too unsophisticated to raise it? We’ll be left with a similar puzzle at the end of Koukl’s example.

Let’s return to Koukl’s article. This Achilles’ heel of Christianity is spelled out in the verse from Paul that says that if Jesus was not raised, “we [Christians] are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Corinthians 15:19).

So if we overturn the idea of the Resurrection as a real historical event, Christianity falls. Koukl says,

If Jesus rose from the dead, then everything critical to Christianity is true. If Jesus stayed dead, everything uniquely important about Christianity is false. It’s all or nothing.

Let’s accept that challenge and attack the Resurrection. Helpfully, Koukl gives three “facts” that argue for the Resurrection as a historical event. Let’s see how factual they actually are.

0. What evidence would prove a resurrection?

Koukl wants to establish the ground rules first. To prove a resurrection, he says, you’d need to show that (1) someone was dead and then (2) later alive. With that, you could claim a resurrection.

But read the gospels carefully, and you don’t find that! Matthew and Mark make clear that no men witnessed the death, so they don’t satisfy the first requirement. It’s true that women disciples saw Jesus dead, but conservative scholars like Koukl emphasize that women at that time were unreliable witnesses. (They do this to defend their argument that women finding the empty tomb was surprising and therefore historically accurate. I respond to that here.)

Apologists can clumsily salvage their argument by pointing out that Luke and John don’t have this problem. With these gospels, the male disciples stay to witness the death. But by pointing this out, they’ve created a new problem, that the Bible is contradictory and therefore unreliable.

The three facts that establish the Resurrection as historical

Here are the three claimed facts: Jesus was dead and buried, the tomb was empty, and the disciples were transformed. To emphasize how unremarkable these claims are, Koukl says:

Each piece of evidence is about something completely earthly. Nothing supernatural, only natural—a corpse, an empty tomb, and apparent personal encounters of some sort changing doubters into believers.

That’s true, these are all natural claims. But he will try to use three natural claims to conclude that Jesus rose from the dead, an incredible supernatural event. Something doesn’t seem right about that.

The general worldview-changing document

Let’s take a step back and abstract Koukl’s argument. The gospel account is compelling enough that he thinks nonbelievers should use it to conclude that the supernatural exists. But that’s a lot to expect of mere words on paper, that it would force on the reader a complete worldview change.

To show that he’s being fair and not privileging the gospel story, I want Koukl to give another example of words on paper that would convince open-minded people to change their worldview. Call it Story X. If Koukl thinks that the gospel story should convince us, he must first show us that Story X is so compelling that it convinces him. That’s right—Koukl needs to show us that it’s possible for an all-natural set of words on paper to convince a thoughtful person by first being sufficiently convinced himself to radically change his own worldview away from Christianity.

This challenge is impossible for him to meet because he begins with the assumption that the gospels are unique. He won’t grant that any other document has the worldview-changing power of the gospels, but with this he reveals his bias: you should believe his document (and only his document) just because. Sorry, that’s not an honest discussion.

With that his entire project fails, but let’s continue and examine the three supposed facts.

1. Jesus was dead and buried

As I noted above, half the gospels don’t meet the resurrection-witness requirement Koukl himself defined: first seeing Jesus dead and then seeing him alive. According to Matthew, at Jesus’s arrest, “all the disciples deserted him and fled” (Matthew 26:56b).

But Koukl ignores this. To argue the first part of the miracle, that Jesus was dead, he steps through the torture, crucifixion, and burial. He wraps up:

So, based on the record, is it reasonable to conclude Jesus survived that ordeal?

Based on what record? The record that says that Jesus didn’t survive that ordeal??

Yes, based on the record of the gospels, Jesus died. And based on the record of “Goldilocks,” the little girl ran away when woken by the three bears. That doesn’t mean it actually happened.

There’s another problem. In his description of the burial, Koukl mentioned the application of spices by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus and the wrapping of the body with strips of linen. This comes from John. But both points conflict with claims that the famous fourteenth-century Shroud of Turin is the burial cloth of Jesus in that (1) the image on that shroud doesn’t show the enormous quantity of spices, and (2) the Shroud is a single large rectangle rather than strips (which was the Jewish custom  according to John 19:40b). This argument contradicts Koukl’s belief that the Shroud is authentic (podcast @22:00).

Conclude with a response to the final two arguments, the tomb was empty and the disciples were transformed: Part 2.

If prayer worked,
911 would connect you to a church.
— seen on the internet

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Image from darkday, CC license
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Six Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass (3 of 3)

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Here are the final two Christian principles for interpreting the Bible. Part 1 of this series is here.

Principle #5: Begin with the assumption that the Bible is infallible and inerrant.

Here are two excerpts from the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a joint project of more than 200 evangelical leaders:

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant.

We deny that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved vitiate the truth claims of the Bible.

There is no interest here in following evidence. You don’t need to make a reasoned argument if you’re simply going to declare this as a faith position. “The Bible is manmade” has been ruled out, not because the evidence points elsewhere but simply as fiat.

What’s the point of scholarship in this environment? This is intellectual in the same way that discussing comic book superheroes is intellectual. Sure, much mental energy can be spent on the project and interesting ideas can come from it, but in the end it’s just pretend. Neither is built on reality. Neither is guided by evidence. A Christian conclusion becomes just one stake in the field of Dogma. Without any empirical evidence to ground this view, other Christians will simply put their stakes where they please.

Principle 6: Avoid claims built on uncertain grounds

From HIB:

Don’t build a doctrine upon a single verse or an uncertain textual reading. We should not erect an entire teaching or system of doctrine upon a verse in isolation from its context, or which has dubious textual support. Christian doctrine should be built upon passages which exist in the original manuscripts and can be confirmed through the science of textual criticism.

I agree that the manuscript tradition should be reliable, but keep in mind how difficult it is to know what the originals said. Scholars do a good job deciding which of two variant traditions is the older one. What they don’t do well is deciding between two traditions when they only have copies of one (more). We have a centuries-long dark ages before the earliest codices of the fourth century—who knows how many hundreds or thousands of changes were made that we don’t know of?

The principle argues that we not build anything substantial on a verse that is an outlier. That sounds sensible until we consider that this conflict—the general consensus versus the outlier—means that there’s a contradiction in the Bible. Principle #4 declares that contradictions don’t exist, but of course that’s a declaration built on nothing.

The second problem is that one of the most important Christian doctrines, the Trinity, violates this principle. There are a few verses that speak of the three persons separately in one sentence (for example, “Make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” from Matthew 28:19), but this is a long way from the elaborate Trinitarian handwaving in the Athanasian Creed of around 500 CE. This final principle is the only one that makes sense, and it tells us that there’s scant evidence for Paul or Jesus having a Trinitarian concept of God.

I wonder why Christians don’t apply these generous principles to other religions’ holy books.

The Bible is the world’s oldest, longest-running, most widespread,
and least deservedly respected Rorschach Test.
You can look at it and see whatever you want.
And everybody does.
— Richard S. Russell

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/17/16.)

Image from Photo Editing Services Tucia, CC license

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Six Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass (2 of 3)

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Starting with the popular Christian principle, “Let the easy Bible passages interpret the hard ones,” we’ve been examining six principles for biblical interpretation (beginning with this post). Here are two more.

Principle #3: “Description is different than approval”

What do you do when you read in the Old Testament about God’s support for slavery, demand for genocide, or some other bad action? Source 10P (see part 1 for sources) says:

Sometimes critics of the Bible (or critics of Christianity in general) point to an evil or corrupt situation described in the Bible to argue God (or Christianity) approves of the situation (or is the source of the evil). Remember, just because a Biblical author writes about something, this does not mean God condones it or supports it.

This principle attempts to tap dance away from God’s approval of things we find horrifying today.

Here’s an exercise that will explore what God does and doesn’t approval of. Consider the following lists, each containing three items mentioned in the Bible. For each list, think about what connects the items in that list and how it is different from the other lists:

  1. Murder, lying, and stealing
  2. Slavery, genocide, and polygamy
  3. Weights and measures for commerce, sheep herding, and eating meat

The items in List 1 (murder, lying, and stealing) are all prohibited in Exodus 20. They’re typically numbered 6, 8, and 9 in the Ten Commandments. (As an aside, it’s interesting that they’re not on the second version of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 34, the one that found its way into the Ark of the Covenant.)

The items in List 2 (slavery, genocide, and polygamy) are never prohibited. They can be restricted, however (for example, elders are to have just one wife according to 1 Timothy 3:2), and rules can apply (for example, slaves can be beaten, but not so much that they die according to Exodus 21:20).

The items in List 3 (weights and measures, herding, and meat) are also never prohibited. Rules can apply to them as well (“The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him”).

Lists 2 and 3 are distinguishable only in how we judge them—we prohibit List 2 but accept List 3—but that’s not in the Bible. This leaves us with the biblical view of prohibited things in List 1 versus acceptable things (though possibly regulated by God-given rules) in Lists 2 and 3.

Only modern sensibilities tell us that slavery, genocide, and polygamy are bad. Not only did God regulate slavery and polygamy just like he did accurate weights and measures, Jesus had nothing bad to say about them either.

This principle, “Description is different than approval,” is a transparent attempt to give God a pass when he goes off his meds. It fails.

Principle #4: Begin with the assumption that the Bible has no contradictions

I must admit that this one sounds much like principle #1. Perhaps this repetition is my excuse to shine more light on it. Here’s the principle stated in “How to Interpret the Bible” (HIB):

The “analogy of faith” is a reformed hermeneutical principle which states that, since all scriptures are harmoniously united with no essential contradictions, therefore, every proposed interpretation of any passage must be compared with what the other parts of the Bible teach. In other words, the body of doctrine, which the scriptures as a whole proclaim will not be contradicted in any way by any passage. Therefore, if two or three different interpretations of a verse are equally possible, any interpretation that contradicts the clear teaching of any other scriptures must be ruled out from the beginning.

So before you say, “Aha—there’s a contradiction here in the Bible,” go back and rethink that, because there are no contradictions. (The first rule of Look for Contradictions in the Bible Club is that there are no contradictions in the Bible.)

You can see the problem. “There are no contradictions” would be a conclusion, not a starting assumption, and there is a huge mountain to climb before this principle can be validated.

As an aside, this principle, where Christians simply declare that the Bible has no contradictions, has a parallel in Islam. The Principle of Abrogation states that if there’s a contradiction in the Quran, the later passage (that is, the one written at a later date) wins out over the earlier. Problem solved—no more contradiction.

As damning as the Muslim principle is (how could the Prophet have gotten it wrong the first time?), at least it’s a rule. Principle 4 simply makes a groundless assertion.

Let’s let the Bible itself speak on this.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16).

You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it, that you may keep the commandments of Yahweh which I command you (Deuteronomy 4:2).

The verse from 2 Timothy tells us that any passage, even the ones that make Christians squirm, should be read and followed, and the one from Deuteronomy says that the Bible must be allowed to speak for itself and not be treated like a marionette. So don’t pick the more pleasing verse and pretend the “difficult” verse doesn’t exist because the Bible makes clear there are no difficult verses!

Christians, if you must step in to sanitize your holy book, think about what that means.

Concluded in part 3.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says.
He is always convinced that it says what he means.
— George Bernard Shaw

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/15/16.)

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Six Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass

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In Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses,” we looked at a Christian response to the well-known Dawkins Quote (“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction . . .”). This response tried to distinguish between “clear” and “hard” passages in the Bible. But is the problem that some verses are unclear or that they’re actually unpleasant, with clear/hard simply a misdirection to justify ignoring verses where God’s barbaric behavior is on display?

Christians will tell me to look without bias at what the Bible says and I’ll do my best, but I have no patience for when they don’t follow their own rules. Or when their own rules demand that they be biased.

Principle #1: The Bible is always right

(So principle #2 must be: if the Bible is ever wrong, see principle #1.)

This is from the New International Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (at least they admit that it takes an entire encyclopedia to document all the Bible difficulties).

Be fully persuaded in your own mind that an adequate explanation exists, even though you have not yet found it.

Nope. If you want respect for your holy book, you can earn it. I won’t just give it to you.

This one is too stupid to respond to, and “What is asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” (Hitchens’ Razor).

I’ll critique five additional Christian recommendations for how to interpret the Bible that are arguably more reasonable. We’ll start with an elaboration of the one we’ve just seen, “take the clearer passages to interpret the harder passages.”

Two of my sources are “How to Interpret the Bible” and “Ten principles when considering alleged Bible contradictions.” From this point forward, I’ll abbreviate these as HIB and 10P. (I’ve responded to 10P in depth here.)

Principle #2: Let the Bible clarify the Bible

Or, as HIB puts it, “The Clear Must Interpret the Unclear”:

Murky passages can often be clarified by other scriptures which address the particular topic in a more straightforward way. For example, a very specific interpretation of the highly symbolic visions of John’s apocalypse [that is, the book of Revelation], may never “trump” the clear teachings of Paul’s epistles, which are more didactic and less symbolic, and hence clearer.

Here’s another way to see that clear/unclear simply means pleasing/displeasing. When someone says that verse A is clear and B unclear (so we should focus on verse A, ignore verse B, and pretend we didn’t notice any contradiction), ask why that’s the order. Why isn’t B the clear one? For example, Paul says, “[All I’ve been saying is] that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would bring the message of light to his own people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:23). But this is contradicted by (1) the zombies that came out of their graves on the death of Jesus (Matthew 27:52), who were actually the first to rise from the dead, and (2) the gospels themselves, which say that Jesus had a long ministry before his resurrection, not after as Paul says it. Why do the gospels trump Paul?

Or take the duration of Jesus’s time on earth after the resurrection. Why is it popularly seen as forty days (Acts 1:3)? Why not one day (Luke 24:51)?

Here’s another example. Harold Camping famously made a fool of himself when he predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011. The first lesson from the Camping fiasco is that testability is not the prophet’s friend. If you’re going to predict something, make it vague to give you plausible deniability after your inevitable failure. (John Hagee didn’t get the message when he said in 2013, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.” Whoops—wrong again.)

But the second lesson is that the Bible is a sock puppet that can say almost anything you want. For example, Christian apologists, embarrassed by Camping’s date for the Last Days®, quoted Paul speaking about the end: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. . . . Destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman” (1 Thessalonians 5:2–3). That is, the end must be a surprise, and Camping couldn’t have correctly calculated the date of the Rapture.

Camping trumped that by quoting the very next verse: “But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief.” That is, the chosen won’t be surprised by the end.

The lack of biblical clarity and the inadequacy of Principle #2 are made particularly clear by Christianity’s 45,000 denominations (and counting). If the Bible were the clear message from an omniscient Creator, there would be just one message. Christians should stop granting themselves license to harmonize conflicting passages and realize that the Bible is simply a collection of manmade books that, being written by different people at different times, align imperfectly.

Continue with part 2.

You give me the awful impression,
I hate to have to say it,
of someone who hasn’t read
any of the arguments against your position ever.
— Christopher Hitchens

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/15/16.)

Image from Forsaken Fotos, CC license
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Christians’ Damning Retreat into “Difficult Verses”

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Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation wrote God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction that takes off from Richard Dawkins’ famous quote:

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

In his book, Barker’s theological expertise shows that Dawkins’ eloquent summary is actually understated.

What’s curious, though, is that Christians seem to cite the Dawkins Quote more than atheists. On the Unbelievable radio show for 12/7/13, Christian Chris Sinkinson gives his critique:

[The Dawkins Quote] is clearly a very slanted view of how to read the text of the Old Testament. Most of us would take the clearer passages to interpret the harder passages. We would be talking about Leviticus 19 “Love your neighbor as yourself” before we look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We would have an approach to scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the god who I believe in or the god who I worship. (@ 36:23)

For starters, “Love your neighbor as yourself” means, “Love your fellow Jewish neighbor as yourself,” so let’s not imagine a big worldwide hug from Yahweh.

But set that aside. I can see that Christians prefer “love your neighbor” to death and destruction, but they make a mistake when they call the former a “clearer” passage when it’s actually just a more pleasing passage.

You can see that in the last sentence: “We would have an approach to scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the god who I believe in or the god who I worship.” It’s clumsily worded, as live radio often is, but he’s saying that he adjusts how he interprets the Bible to preserve his preconceived God belief. That is, he hammers the copper of the Bible on the anvil of his belief, not the other way around.

I see this approach frequently, though it’s unusual to see it so plainly stated.

Thought experiment

My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment. But suppose I wanted to improve my understanding by reading the Bible cover to cover. I might find an experienced Christian friend who will mentor me and give me their interpretation when I’m puzzled.

At any point, I might have a question about social customs at the time, or I might complain about the miracles. But things get interesting when we get to the morally questionable activities—God hardening Pharaoh’s heart to prevent him from giving Moses what he wants, demanding genocide, supporting slavery and polygamy, insisting on a human sacrifice to satisfy his divine wrath, and so on.

When we hit one of these, my mentor will probably say something like, “Okay, now let’s slow down and unpack this one.” But what’s to unpack? Seen from the standpoint of modern Western morality, God is obviously a savage Bronze Age monster. What’s confusing or difficult? It’s just that my mentor doesn’t like that.

He can respond by saying that God is unjudgeable or that God’s ways are not our ways so it shouldn’t be surprising that we don’t understand. He can say that that reading of the passage is displeasing. What he can’t say is that it’s unclear. He can say that acceptance of chattel slavery (Leviticus 25:44–6) is unpleasant or disturbing and “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16) is happy or satisfying, but only an agenda would cause him to say that those verses are unclear and clear, respectively.

Next up: Let’s critique six popular Christian guidelines for biblical interpretation that are variations on this biased approach to the Bible here.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
if we’ve been bamboozled long enough,
we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us.
It is simply too painful to acknowledge—
even to ourselves—that we’ve been so credulous.
(So the old bamboozles tend to persist
as the new bamboozles rise.)
— Carl Sagan, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/13/16.)

Image from Marcin Chady, CC license
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Yeah, but Christianity Built Hospitals!

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Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.

(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)

Health care in the Bible

We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.

We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.

This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, akin to modern homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.

The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.

Medieval hospitals

Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because only Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe then, pretty much everyone was Christian.

Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.

Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning

Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.

Dr. Peter Harrison said, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity . . . of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”

This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.

A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals

We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.

One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”

This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.

Hospitals and medicine today

Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”

Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray. And let’s not be too hard on the Fabian Society. They founded the London School of Economics in 1895—not a medical institution but a worthwhile contribution to society nonetheless.

I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but let’s not take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.

How many diseases has faith cured? How many have faith healers like Benny Hinn cured?

Compare that to how many reasoning and evidence have cured. Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.

And aren’t Christian hospitals an admission of defeat? Hospitals should be redundant, even counterproductive, to Christians armed with prayer. The Bible makes bold claims about prayer curing the sick. For example, “The prayer of faith will save the one who is sick” (James 5:15). What does it say that a Catholic hospital cures illness using science like any other hospital?

Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.

Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.

I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”

Related posts:

Do you know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
— Tim Minchin, “Storm”

 

There was a time when religion ruled the world.
It is known as The Dark Ages.
— Ruth Hurmence Green

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(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/6/16.)

Image from Wikimedia Commons, public domain

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