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National Day of Actually DOING Something

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national day of prayerToday is the National Day of Prayer. How about a National Day of Actually Doing Something instead?
The president issues the obligatory proclamation every year. In 2013, he said, “Prayer brings communities together and can be a wellspring of strength and support,” and so on. In 2015, “Prayer is a powerful force for peace, justice, and a brighter, more hopeful tomorrow,” and blah, blah, blah.
We’ve had a National Day of Prayer since 1952. What good has it done? In 1952, the world had 50 million cases of smallpox each year. Today, zero. Guinea worm and polio should soon follow. Computers? Cell phones? GPS? The internet? Science delivers, not God.
I can appreciate that praying to Jesus can help someone feel better, but so can praying to Shiva or Quetzalcoatl or whatever god you’ve been raised with. In terms of actual results, praying to Jesus is as effective as praying to a jug of milk.
I understand how the National Day of Prayer helps politicians suck up to Christians, but how it coexists with the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion”), I can’t imagine. Last year’s proclamation ended with “I join all people of faith in asking for God’s continued guidance, mercy, and protection as we seek a more just world.” I’m not sure why all people of faith would want to appeal to an obviously Christian god.
Julia Sweeney’s departure from Christianity
My own departure from Christianity was pretty gentle, and I learned a lot from the painful road taken by Julia Sweeney (creator of “Letting Go of God”). As she gradually fell away from first Catholicism, then Christianity, and finally religion, she realized with a shock how ineffective prayer had been. Prayer lets you imagine that you’re doing something when you’re actually doing absolutely nothing. Her prayers had helped her feel like she was helping people—whether the person on hard times down the street or the city devastated by natural disaster around the world—but in fact those prayers had been worthless.
Not only does prayer do nothing in cases like this, but it is actually harmful. The pain that people naturally feel when they hear of disaster—that emotion that could be the motivator for action—is drained away by prayer. Why bother doing something yourself when God is so much more capable? When you “let go and let God,” you’ve washed your hands of the issue and can go back to watching television, confident that the problem is now in more capable hands.
Prayer becomes an abdication of responsibility, while atheism can open the doors to action.
Where help actually comes from
Sweeney’s conclusion: if you want to help the victims of the tsunami in Haiti or the earthquake in Ecuador (or whatever the latest disaster is), you need to do something since God clearly isn’t doing anything. Contribute to a charity that will help, or demand that the federal government spend more to help and demand the tax increase to pay for it. If it’s a sick friend, Jesus isn’t going to take them soup and cheer them up … but you can.
Prayer doesn’t “work” like other things do. Electricity works. Your phone works. An antibiotic works. But prayer doesn’t. As the bumper sticker says, Nothing Fails Like Prayer.
Even televangelists make clear that prayer is useless. Their shows are just long infomercials that end with a direct appeal in two parts: please pray for us, and send lots and lots of cash. But what possible value could my $20 provide compared to what the almighty Creator of the universe could do?
Televangelists’ appeals for money make clear that they know what I know: that praying is like waiting for the Great Pumpkin. People can reliably deliver money, but prayer doesn’t deliver anything.
Instead of a National Day of Prayer, how about a National Day of Actually Doing Something? Many local United Way offices organize a Day of Action—what about something like that on a national level?
Doing something makes you feel good, just like prayer, but it actually delivers the results.

Prayer is like masturbation.
It makes you feel good but it doesn’t change the world.
— Don Baker

(This is a modified version of an article originally posted 5/3/12.)
Photo credit: Wikimedia

When Abortion is Illegal in America

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Illegal abortion pro-life pro-choiceThis is a continuation of our analysis of the question, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?” addressed by Greg Koukl of the Stand to Reason podcast. (Start with part 1 here.)
A future America with abortion illegal
Koukl has a simple—some might say childish—attitude toward abortion.

Pro-lifers would like to see abortion abolished, but the only way to really abolish abortion ultimately is to make it illegal, and then the incidence of abortion would shrink to virtually nothing. (@4:05)

With abortion being such an important topic to Koukl’s ministry, you’d think that he would be more educated about it. He’s completely wrong. Making abortions illegal simply means that abortions will be done, just illegally.
We know because America has already tried the experiment. From the Guttmacher Institute:

Before the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, data on abortion in the United States were scarce. In 1955, experts had estimated, on the basis of qualitative assumptions, that 200,000–1,200,000 illegal abortions were performed each year. Despite its wide range, this estimate remained the most reliable indicator of the magnitude of induced abortion for many years. In 1967, researchers confirmed this estimate by extrapolating data from a randomized-response survey conducted in North Carolina: They concluded that a total of 800,000 induced (mostly illegal) abortions were performed nationally each year.

Compare this with the abortion rate of 700,000 per year in the U.S. today, with twice the population of 1955.
A future America where abortion was illegal could simply switch to the simple medical (drug-induced) abortion in many cases. This is already the predominant procedure in many European countries.
We also have examples worldwide showing that making abortion illegal does little to reduce the rate. From CBS News:

Abortion rates are highest where the procedure is illegal, according to a new study. The study also found nearly half of all abortions worldwide are unsafe, with the vast majority of unsafe abortions occurring in developing countries.

The Guttmacher Institute says, “Highly restrictive abortion laws are not associated with lower abortion rates” and notes that in Africa and Latin America, where “abortion is illegal under most circumstances in the majority of countries,” the rate per capita is more than twice that in the U.S. and Western Europe.
Unsurprisingly, poorer safety correlates with abortion being illegal. The New York Times reported on a World Health Organization study: “About 20 million abortions that would be considered unsafe are performed each year [and] 67,000 women die as a result of complications from those abortions, most in countries where abortion is illegal.” That’s a mortality rate of 1 for every 300. By comparison, the mortality rate in the U.S., with legal abortion, is 1 for every 170,000 (the mortality rate for women giving birth is 15 times worse).
Abortion providers are basically vultures, right?
Koukl next attacks the ethics of the abortion providers.

Without the [abortion] doctors, who are exploiting people’s difficult circumstances for money, you probably aren’t going to have the abortions. (@19:16)

I didn’t realize that abortion providers exploit people’s hardships. Is that true for other specialties? I suppose the greedy oncologist rubs his hands and smiles when he sees new names in his appointment calendar. The predatory geriatrician twists his mustache and cackles when another old man hobbles in. The rapacious pediatrician sees a crying kid with a broken arm and thinks, “There’s a month’s payment on Daddy’s Bentley!”
Apparently, I have my ignorance to thank for being able to look at doctors and see hard-working professionals who view their patients as more than piles of cash.
In contrast to Koukl’s contempt for abortion providers and his lack of concern for women with unwanted pregnancies, consider Dr. Willie Parker, who travels from his home in Chicago to Mississippi twice a month to be one of only two doctors providing abortions at Mississippi’s last abortion clinic. Women desperately need a medical procedure, and Dr. Parker provides it. He said, “I do abortions because I am a Christian.”
Remember Kermit Gosnell’s filthy abortion clinic? Pro-lifers were horrified, and yet those conditions are what they’re pushing for. Making abortion illegal doesn’t eliminate abortion, it just drives it underground to clinics that aren’t inspected. When organizations like Planned Parenthood that provide safe abortions are squeezed out by nuisance regulations or other regulatory hurdles, illegal operations will fill the vacuum. Similarly, when noisy abortion protesters create a gauntlet at safe clinics, women will be driven to ones that cut corners. One of Gosnell’s patients said about the closest Planned Parenthood clinic, “The picketers out there, they just scared me half to death.”
Coat hangers
Three years ago, I attended a celebration of the forty-year anniversary of the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade that made abortion legal in the United States. Sarah Weddington was the lawyer on the winning side, and she spoke of her experience on a plane trip. She was wearing a button showing a coat hanger with a red “not” line through it (like this) as a symbol of the pre-Roe days that she was determined America would not revisit.
A female flight attendant walked past her several times until she finally said, “I’ve just got to ask you: what have you got against coat hangers?”
Weddington’s point was that this young woman had lived her entire life with abortion as a right. She didn’t know of a time before that right when coat hangers were the abortion method of last resort. More importantly, she didn’t realize how tenuous that right is. Millions of conservatives would make abortion illegal in an instant if they could. Complacency is not an option.
Continue to part 4: “Arguing the Pro-Life Case (Such as It Is)“

“Explain to me how making abortion illegal
wouldn’t lower abortion rates.”
Explain to me how making drugs illegal
didn’t lower drug use rates.
— commenter adam

Image credit: Pēteris, flickr, CC

Unraveling Bad Pro-Life Thinking

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Illegal abortion pro-life pro-choiceGreg Koukl and Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason podcast recently responded to an issue raised in the U.S. Republican campaign, “Does Pro-life Logic Mean Women Who Get Abortions Should Be Punished?”
Here’s how they outline the dilemma for pro-life Christians. Christians declare that abortion is murder, but you can’t have a crime without the appropriate punishment. Both the abortion provider and the woman herself should be severely punished—this is murder, after all.
On the other hand, that paints Christians as callous and unfeeling, so maybe we shouldn’t impose a harsh penalty on the woman. Or maybe any penalty at all. But in that case, what happened to the “abortion = murder” claim? Was that just hyperbole? Does the Christian carrying the sign know that abortion isn’t really murder? If it’s just a little harmless exaggeration to make a point, how compelling is the pro-life case?
Though the boys tried mightily to extricate the average Christian from the punish-her-or-not dilemma, none of their attempts eliminated the problem.
Attempt 1: suicide analogy
If only the labeling of the crime (which the pro-lifers want) could be detached from the associated punishment (which they don’t want). They point to a recent article that gives an analogy they’d like to follow. From that article:

Until the late 1960s, suicide was illegal in the United States. Of course the successful suicide cannot be prosecuted. Still, given that the great majority of suicide attempts are unsuccessful, we could in principle prosecute large numbers of people for unjustified attempts on their own innocent lives. Why don’t we do this?

We don’t now because attempted suicide has been decriminalized. But in the 1960s, in some states it was a misdemeanor or even a felony. That is, it was a crime with a punishment. (Is there any other kind?)
Public opinion has since softened. The article continues:

In general, it doesn’t seem either prudent or constructive [to punish suicide attempts]. Suicidal people typically aren’t a public safety risk. Anyone who wants to end his own life probably needs support and care.

The parallel is that women who have abortions are also not public safety risks, which allows Christians to sidestep punishing those women.
What actually happened was that the hypocrisy of toothless laws against suicide led to it being decriminalized. Does the pro-life movement want to simply repeat that blunder and criminalize abortion with no threat of punishment? Is this just hyperbole, or is abortion actually murder? If so, demand the appropriate punishment.
This parallels the problem with many Christian anti-gay arguments. They point to the Bible to argue that homosexuality is wrong (it doesn’t say that—see here and here), but then they refuse to bring along the Old Testament’s punishment. With both abortion and homosexuality, there can be no crime without a punishment.
Attempt 2: drug use analogy
Drug use is another parallel. The drug user is the pregnant woman, and the drug dealer is the abortion provider. Punish only the latter, Koukl says.
The analogy argues that drug users only hurt themselves, like the person attempting suicide. Drug users do hurt society if their habit drives them to crime—robbery or burglary, for example—but of course when they commit those crimes, they get the regular punishment. When a woman asks for and then consumes a chemical abortifacient (the preferred approach up to about two months of gestation), she should logically receive the punishment due any crime she committed.
As with suicide, the trends aren’t going where Koukl wants them to. Attempted suicide was criminalized; now it’s not. Drug use was criminalized, but that’s being reduced. Crimes are punished consistently; it’s just that some things are no longer crimes. Koukl wants the unbalanced situation where abortion is a crime … without punishment for the central participant.
Attempt 3: fetal homicide laws
Koukl notes that 38 U.S. states have fetal homicide laws in place. These laws apply to “fetuses killed by violent acts against pregnant women.” There you go—killing a fetus is homicide.
There’s just one point that must be emphasized. It’s a small point. Indeed, it’s so trivial that I hesitate to muddy the water by mentioning it, but it must be made clear: sometimes the pregnant woman very much wants to keep the pregnancy and sometimes she very much doesn’t! These are two completely different situations, and fetal homicide laws are meant to protect the woman and fetus in the first situation only. For our discussion, this is a red herring.
Read the other posts in this series:

If men struggle and strike a woman with child
so that she has a miscarriage,
yet there is no further injury,
he shall be fined as the woman’s husband may demand of him,
and he shall pay as the judges decide.
— Exodus 21:22–3

Image credit: Anna Levinzon, flickr, CC

National Day of Prayer Wasting Time

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national day of prayerBrethren, I will speak today on the gospel of John, the sixteenth chapter, verse 24. Jesus said, “Ask and you will receive.” As the National Day of Prayer approaches (May 5, 2016), this verse is both relevant and unambiguous.
But perhaps it’s too unambiguous. Apologists like to water down this verse (and others that declare prayer’s effectiveness) to say that they don’t mean what they obviously mean, so let’s be sure we have this right. Here is this verse in context. Jesus said,

I tell you the truth, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete (John 16:23–4).

A few verses later, we read,

Then Jesus’s disciples said, “Now you are speaking clearly and without figures of speech” (16:29).

Clearly, we are given no choice but to consider it at face value. “Ask and you will receive” means just what you’d think it means.
National Day of Prayer
The National Day of Prayer task force (“Transforming our Nation Through Prayer!”) is eager to harness this power. It says

[The 2016 National Day of Prayer] is an unprecedented opportunity to see the Lord’s healing and renewing power made manifest as we call on citizens to humbly come before His throne.

Is this just feel-good handwaving, or are you making specific, testable predictions?

This recitation will create a huge wave of prayer, flowing from one coast to the other, illustrating the unity of God’s people and acknowledging His dominion over the circumstances facing us. Source

I’ve always wondered why many prayers are more powerful than one or why we even need to pray at all. Doesn’t God understand the problems and the best solutions already? Or is he not paying attention? Is he deaf?
What specifically does the task force imagine will happen with the Day of Prayer (besides strengthening the Christian brand, I mean)? I understand that there may be a benefit to the person praying. Prayer can be beneficial in the same way that meditation can. But when you’re praying for someone else, that’s not the point. The idea behind person A praying for person B isn’t for person A to feel better, it’s for something specific to happen to person B! Give me evidence that this happens.

At this crucial time for our nation, we can do nothing more important than pray.

Did prayer gives us cell phones, GPS, or the internet? Antibiotics, anesthesia, or vaccines? Modern farming techniques? Did it eliminate smallpox or predict hurricanes? Maybe they’re thinking of science and technology. Prayer is easy, quick, free, and lets you pretend that you did something useful. But if you actually want to improve society, you need to stand on your own two feet and do something about it. God obviously won’t.
Last year’s message had an obligatory but meaningless applause line:

[We emphasize] the need for individuals, corporately and individually, to place their faith in the unfailing character of their Creator, who is sovereign over all governments, authorities, and men.

Not in the U.S., pal. Religion operates as it does because, and only because, it is permitted to by the Constitution. You can pretend to elevate your deity above government, but let’s be clear that it’s the Constitution, not the Bible, that actually governs this country.
This year’s national prayer also makes some factual blunders.

The very ideals upon which this country was founded were based on biblical truths, no matter how some try to rewrite history to deny that very fact today.

Wrong again. Read the U.S. Constitution—it’s one hundred percent secular. And that’s a good thing, since fallible Man has created far more moral institutions than the barbaric attempts by the god of the Old Testament.
In America, the buck stops with the Constitution, not the Bible. Why is this hard to understand? It’s simply unpatriotic to push society in a way prohibited by the Constitution (more here and here).
The prayer also gives a nice hug to God, who’s apparently going through a rough time:

Our hearts are … broken over how You continue to be marginalized and dismissed by both our people and our institutions.

Poor baby! Yahweh is able to create all matter and space, but he just can’t seem to make friends. I picture him standing alone in the playground while the other kids call him names like “Yah-wimp.” Maybe it would help if he actually existed and didn’t need apologists like this group standing up for him.

[Help us] publicly declare and live out Your truth in a spirit of love so that You feel welcome in our country once again.

Who knew humans could be so powerful? We couldn’t hurt Superman, but we can shut out the omnipotent creator of the universe.
I can’t leave this topic without pointing out one conspicuous contradiction. At the National Day of Prayer’s web site, they give its history:

The National Day of Prayer is an annual observance held on the first Thursday of May [since 1952], inviting people of all faiths to pray for our nation.

People of all faiths? That sounds pretty inclusive. But poke around a bit, and it’s clear that this is an exclusively Christian event, from Bible verses to voter registration appeals aimed exclusively at Christians.
Does prayer work?
In Matthew, Jesus says, “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” In Mark, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” In John, Jesus says, “He who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.”
The New Testament unambiguously claims that prayer works, but we all know that that’s wrong, or, said charitably, prayer doesn’t work that way. Apologists handwave that prayer works … for the person doing the praying. Or we’re told that prayers are always answered, but “not yet” or “maybe” are valid answers. This reinterpretation of reality is worthy of North Korea or Animal Farm.
It’s like Harriett Hall’s Blue Dot cure, where the doctor paints a blue dot on the patient’s nose. Suppose the patient gets better. Great—the blue dot worked! Or suppose the patient gets worse. Ah, the doctor says, you should’ve come to me sooner. Or suppose the condition is unchanged. The doctor recommends continued treatment (and it’s lucky we caught it when we did)!
No outcome will make this imaginary doctor reconsider the treatment. Reality is redefined so that the doctor is immune to evidence that shakes his preconception that the cure works.
If the roles were reversed and it was Christians critiquing the supernatural claim of someone else’s religion, I imagine they’d be as skeptical as me. The simple explanation is that there is no God to answer (or not) your prayers. Prayer is simply talking to yourself. There’s no one on the other end of the phone. (More on prayer here and here.)
I’ll close with the wisdom of Mr. Deity:

Mr. Deity: Prayer is not for me, okay? I mean, I like it and everything, I think it’s sweet that people think of me, but I’ve got a plan, and I’m staying the course. But it’s great for them, it gets them focused on what’s important, it’s meditative, I hear it does wonders for the blood pressure. Plus it’s a chance to connect to me. How’s that not going to be good? You should know.
Jesus: Oh yeah, yeah. So what you’re saying here, sir, is that you never answer any prayers?
Mr. Deity: Not really, no. There’s just no incentive. I mean, look—if somebody prays to me and things go well, who gets the credit? Me, right? But if they pray to me and things don’t go well, who gets the blame? Not me! So it’s all good. I’m going to mess with that by stepping in? Putting my nose where it doesn’t belong?

Thus endeth the lesson for today.
See also: “National Day of Actually DOING Something” 

Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; 
give him a religion, and he’ll starve to death while praying for a fish. 
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/1/13.)
Image credit: Wikimedia

God ♥ Genocide

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The nation of Israel when it left Egypt was enormous, if the Bible is to be believed. There were 600,000 men—that is, potential soldiers—which suggest close to two million in the entire company (Exodus 12:37).
The Sinai peninsula, in which the Israelites spent forty years of exile, is a hundred miles wide. To get an idea of how big a group this supposedly was, the Israelites could have held hands to make a human chain to cross the Sinai ten times.
The Exodus and genocide
No archeological evidence has been found for the Exodus. Yes, it happened a long time ago, but deserts preserve things such as buried bodies. God declared that all the adults would die in the desert and be denied access to the Promised Land (Numbers 14:30). Since the Israelites didn’t cremate their dead, that’s over a million bodies that should be in the Sinai but, despite our searching, aren’t.
This population count leads to a appalling conclusion. Let’s assume flat population growth so that the Israelites entered Palestine with two million people. Moses said,

When the Lord your God brings you into the land you are entering to possess and drives out before you many nations—the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites [map here], seven nations larger and stronger than you—and when the Lord your God has delivered them over to you and you have defeated them, then you must destroy them totally (Deut. 7:1–2).

Seven nations, each bigger than the two-million-strong Israelites? Seven nations to be destroyed totally? Do the math—that eclipses the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Of course, you could do what I do and conclude that the Holocaust is history and the Old Testament stories of the exodus and conquest of Canaan are just stories. That removes the moral cloud, but it turns the Bible into just another book of religious fiction, a buffet at which Christians can take or leave according to their fancy.
What Would William Lane Craig Do?
I always like to get an analysis of a cloudy biblical issue from philosopher William Lane Craig. Here’s what he says about God’s genocide.

I think it’s just dishonest when people like Richard Dawkins portray Yahweh … as this moral monster. These highly singular commands [to commit genocide] need to be read against the background of the whole of the Old Testament, which includes the great moral law that is given by God, which is head and shoulders above other ancient near eastern moral or legal codes like the Code of Hammurabi and so forth. It’s against the backdrop of the prophets, which explain god’s compassion for the poor and the oppressed and the orphans and the widows. (Source: “Richard Dawkins and Driving Out the Canaanites” @ 4:00)

Dishonest? Let’s see who’s dishonest. Consider fun Bible quotes like this one:

So Joshua subdued the whole region. He left no survivors. He totally destroyed all who breathed, just as the LORD had commanded (see Joshua 10:28–40).

The Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, written around 1772 BCE, probably preceded the Ten Commandments and the rest of the Mosaic law by centuries. In fact, many scholars think that the Code inspired some of the Mosaic law. For example, the Bible’s “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” is found there. However, it has nothing like the Bible’s genocide.
Craig will respond that this is cherry picking and that the Old Testament offsets the genocide and slavery with compassionate demands like, “Love your neighbor as yourself” from Leviticus 19:18. (Nope—”neighbor” here means “fellow Jew.”) But I’ll grant that looking only at the Bible’s savage side doesn’t give a complete picture. The problem is that Craig wants to cherry pick in the other direction. A balanced look shows the Bible to be what you’d expect from the blog of an ancient tribe. It reflects the morality of the time. There’s no need to imagine a supernatural source.
And why is a balanced look at the Bible the correct approach when God himself doesn’t do that? One error and God sends you to hell. The godly approach would be to find one moral error in the Bible and reject any claims for supernatural inspiration.
This entire interview with Craig is a rich vein of crazy, but let me give just a few highlights.

These Israeli soldiers would be prosecuted for war crimes if this [Canaanite genocide] were to occur today. (5:40)

Yes they would, and what does that tell you? Are you a moral relativist, where you say that genocide is reprehensible from our standpoint but wasn’t from the different perspective back then? Or are you an objectivist who says that genocide is always wrong? In that case, tell me whether our rejection of genocide is wrong today or Israel’s God-given approach was wrong back then.
Craig tries to minimize the damage

If [this] is a good objection, what does it prove? What it would prove would be that the Bible has an error in it, that biblical inerrancy isn’t right, and that would force us to adjust our doctrine of inspiration, but it wouldn’t prove that God didn’t exist, it wouldn’t prove that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead (7:48).

He’s trying to sacrifice the pawn of biblical inerrancy in this chess game to preserve the queen of God’s existence. Great—let’s take that pawn. But no one thought that the queen was under attack. This is clumsy misdirection on Craig’s part. What’s under attack is the bishop of God as a morally perfect being. Craig’s own book tells us that God orders genocide, which makes clear that he’s not. Let’s take that bishop as well.
About God ordering the death of everyone, including the children, Craig says:

God, as the author and giver of life has the authority to give and take life as he chooses (11:10).

So God has no obligation to the people he created, and he can do with them whatever he wants without moral obligation? A human life is then to God what a sand castle is to us, and each of us can destroy our creations without moral error.
Incredible! This is what religion does to good people. It forces them to justify insanity. Like the defense lawyer for a Mafia boss, Craig spins every bit of evidence to fit his presupposition. He removes himself as a credible critic.
Richard Swinburne also plays God’s jester when he said that the Holocaust gave Jews the opportunity to be courageous and noble. He said that one fewer Hiroshima victims would mean “less opportunity for courage and sympathy.”
I’ll take his analysis seriously when he takes his own medicine.
I can destroy my sand castle because I built it and because it’s not alive. That Christians cede to God the right to capriciously kill humans for no better reason than that he made them is damning evidence against that worldview. The elementary moral truth that every child knows but that Craig’s religion has forced him to suppress is that there’s a difference between living things (like people) and nonliving things (like sand castles).
Craig has said, “If there is no God, then life itself becomes meaningless.” But wait a minute—if God can destroy us like I destroy my sand castle, simply because he made us, then life with God is meaningless!
Craig could respond that God’s ways are not our ways. That may be, but first we need to conclude that God exists. Given the information that we have, the God of the Old Testament is, like Dawkins says, a capriciously malevolent bully.
(h/t commenter Rain)

Ladies and gentleman, beware of these scamsters—
especially scamsters in religious garb—
quoting the Bible. I mean, run from them. 
They are all over the place. 
— Pat Robertson

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 4/24/13.)
Image credit: Evonne, flickr, CC

Will No One Hold John Hagee to Account? The Bible Says, “That Prophet Shall Die.”

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bible prophecyJohn Hagee is that car crash you know you should turn away from but still find fascinating. It’s been half a year since his vacuous claims about the invented concept of the four blood moons. Hagee said, without evidence, “God is literally screaming at the world, ‘I’m coming soon,’ ” and “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.”
And yet we’re still here, with the earth spinning pretty much like it did before the dreaded blood moons. Unsurprisingly, no world-shaking event happened. I’m not surprised that Hagee didn’t have the courage to admit his error. What did surprise me, though, is that he didn’t simply ignore reality and declare victory. That’s what the Seventh-day Adventist Church did when it formed out of the ashes of the Millerite movement and its embarrassing prediction of the end of the world in 1844. That’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses did after the failure of their prediction that the world as we knew it would end in 1914.
Instead, Hagee is just proceeding as if nothing happened, as if milking this two-year prediction to its decrepit close and then moving on is simply what a televangelist does.
And perhaps he’s right. (Background on Hagee’s “prophecy” here, here, and here.)
Pythia, the Oracle of Delphi
Let’s compare Hagee with another famous prophet. The Oracle of Delphi, just one of many oracles in Ancient Greece, was an institution for over a thousand years. The priestess holding the position “was without doubt the most powerful woman of the classical world” (Wikipedia).
When Athens saw the mighty Persian army advancing in 480 BCE, held only briefly at Thermopylae, the Oracle famously told Athens that a “wooden wall” would save them. But what did that mean? A literal wooden wall? A forest? They decided instead that it meant their fleet of wooden triremes, and their naval action was indeed key to turning back the Persians.
About sixty years earlier, King Croesus of Lydia also sought advice from the Oracle. His question was about the wisdom of attacking Persia. The response: “If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed.” Thinking that the great empire to be destroyed was Persia, he attacked. Unfortunately, the great empire that was destroyed was his own.
The wisdom at the time declared that the Oracle might be ambiguous but was never wrong. If something bad happened, the fault was your own for misunderstanding. And that’s what we see from Christians: the Bible and God are never wrong, and if something bad happens, the fault was yours.
At worst, the prophet takes the blame and the Bible that he pointed to as his source is untouched. And yet when does a modern prophet ever take any blame?
Contemporary “prophets”
Jim Bakker has also been riding the blood-moon gravy train. Ten weeks after the fourth moon fizzle, he said, “People, it’s all happening, but we’re not looking.” He needs to keep the flock in fear so that they keep buying his buckets of end times provisions.
Another prophet gobbling up scraps from the blood moons flop is Jonathan Cahn. His angle was that the last year in the seven-year Jewish cycle, the Shemitah year, ended near the fourth blood moon (more or less), and that this presaged a financial collapse. But Cahn can’t say those three little words that are difficult for so many men, “I was wrong,” and he doubled down on his claim in the aftermath. He declared victory by arguing that worldwide financial markets in 2015 had the worst performance … since 2008.
That’s it? That’s his world-ending event that God is eager to tell us about?
Revisiting Hagee
What’s up with Hagee? At his web site, there is nothing about picking up the pieces after the chaos from the blood moon or even reading the entrails to see what God was trying to tell us. We find no declaration of victory, no admission that he was wrong, or (and this is the really surprising one) any offer to compensate people who bought his book, sat through his movie, or made any financial donation due to the blood moons hysteria. Immediately after the final blood moon, he tried to change the subject by flogging a new book.
John Hagee, Inc. is back to normal, and all we find at the site are upcoming conferences, rallies, and tours; invitations to prayer requests; pleas for money; and encouragement to shop at the online store.
Hagee has lost all credibility to any thoughtful person. You don’t get more than one chance. Even the Bible agrees:

The prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he speaks in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die. (Deuteronomy 18:20)

But Hagee is simply un-embarrassable. The true tragedy is that the rubes in his flock let him get away with it.
One silver lining of the prophecy insanity is watching the various end times prophets go at each other. Jennifer LeClaire, senior editor of Charisma magazine, sees the lack of accountability as in Hagee’s case with about as much disdain as I do. Though she might then turn around and play up some other groundless prophecy herself, on this point she’s on target.
I’ll celebrate this rare moment of concord by giving her the last word—remember, this is from the Christian editor of a magazine devoted to Christian prophecy:

Why do we make excuses for these prophets? Why is there no repentance? No apology? No accountability? …
Where is the repentance in the prophetic ministry? Why is it OK to get up on a megaplatform and prophesy things with specific date with no way of escape and move on to the next megaplatform (or Internet platform) without ever looking back at the mess you left behind? Why is it OK to charge for personal prophesy at the altar? Why is it OK to scare people half to death in the name of Jesus?

Why indeed?

Men occasionally stumble over the truth,
but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off
as if nothing had happened.
— Winston Churchill

Image credit: Marcel André Briefs, flickr, CC