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Four Blood Moons: the Ultimate Punchline Is Nigh

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If it feels like we’ve been here before, we have. John Hagee imagines that the last 18 months have been a slow-motion display of God saying, “Look out!” (I find it more fun to imagine God’s voice getting really low because it’s stretched out).

Look for a total lunar eclipse on Sunday night (9/27/15). In Seattle, totality begins at 7:11pm and ends at 8:23. The partial eclipse lasts another hour. Add three hours to convert to Eastern time.

John Hagee 4 blood moonsWhy is this eclipse interesting?

Because the plane that the moon rotates in is off by five degrees from the ecliptic (the plane defined by the orbit of the earth around the sun), an opportunity for either lunar or solar eclipses only happens twice a year. Lunar eclipses are quite common, with total eclipses somewhat less so. Much less likely is when there is a total eclipse and then six months later, another, and then another, and then another—four total lunar eclipses over 18 months. Since the year 1CE, there have been 57 such “tetrads.”

Why is this eclipse interesting religiously?

Now consider the religious connection. The Jewish festivals of Passover and Sukkot begin on full moons, and they are also six months apart. A lunar eclipse tetrad can line up with them, and there have been seven such alignments since 1CE. The eighth concludes on Sunday.

So, what’s the religious significance of this alignment? None. Joel 2:30–31 talks about the moon turning to blood, and Christian Zionist opportunist John Hagee has invented a connection. Since total eclipses usually look red, he calls a lunar eclipse tetrad that aligns with the Jewish festivals “four blood moons,” and he says they line up with significant events in Jewish history. He argues his theory by looking at the last three alignments (the dates below are of the first eclipse in the tetrad).

  • 1967 was the Six-Day War.
  • 1949 was the establishment of Israel.
  • 1493 was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.

The sharp-eyed reader will notice that the Jews were actually expelled from Spain one year earlier. The date for the establishment of Israel is also off.

So Hagee’s hypothesis is that tetrads mean either good or bad things happening to the Jewish people, with the date a little fuzzy. Note also that not all significant events get a tetrad. The Holocaust during World War II is glaringly absent. God’s message then becomes, “Something good or bad will soon happen to the Jewish people, or has happened, and I might’ve missed a few.” I have higher standards for Hagee’s god than Hagee does.

It gets worse when we consider the four ignored alignments, which began in the years 162, 795, 842, and 860. Hagee doesn’t bother wondering what God was saying with these, because they don’t support his flabby hypothesis. But if God wanted to point to important events for the Jewish people, obvious candidates would have included the three Jewish-Roman Wars. Hagee doesn’t seem to credit his flock with much knowledge, but even they will know the first omission.

  • The First Jewish-Roman War (66–74CE) included the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70, the deaths of 1.1 million Jews (according to Josephus), and the enslavement of the survivors.
  • The Kitos War (115–117CE) began with ethnic Judeans outside of Palestine rising up to slaughter Roman soldiers and noncombatants—reportedly half a million. The empire put down the revolt, violently.
  • The Bar Kokhba Revolt (132–136CE) was, like the First War, conducted in Judea. One source called it a genocide and more significant in damaging Judaism in Judea than the First War.

(For further detail on Hagee’s ill-advised dabblings into prophecy, I’ve written more here. And about his movie. And about what actually makes a good prophecy.)

Even more trivia—fun!

This tetrad as a placeholder provides an opportunity to pile on more stuff with no concern for whether Christianity or Judaism says that this is meaningful (they don’t).

  • Eclipse opportunities can create solar eclipses as well as lunar, and this tetrad’s 18-month window includes one solar eclipse.
  • The moon’s orbit is elliptical, and once a month it reaches its perigee (closest point) which makes it appear 14% wider than at its apogee (farthest point). Sunday’s eclipse will be of such a “supermoon.”
  • The last year in a seven-year cycle in the Jewish calendar is a Shemitah year, and this tetrad included such a year (it ended 9/13/15). Shemitah is a time to let the land go fallow and forgive debts with fellow Jews. However, Wikipedia says, “There is little notice of the observance of this year in Biblical history and it appears to have been much neglected.” And why imagine divine wrath when Shemitah is a time of forgiveness?
  • This entire celestial farce has been invisible in Israel, with the exception of this final lunar eclipse.
  • Here’s interesting data about why the world will end two days ago.

Let’s conclude by trying to figure out what’s actually supposed to happen in Part 2.

There’s a sucker born every minute.
— Barnum 3:16

Image credit: krheesy, flickr, CC

The Kim Davis Discussion Must Include JFK

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Kim Davis is the county clerk in Kentucky who prohibited her office from issuing any marriage licenses because, “To issue a marriage license which conflicts with God’s definition of marriage [that is, straight marriage], with my name affixed to the certificate, would violate my conscience.”

That seems odd, because as a candidate she never admitted that she’d pick and choose the laws she’d follow. In fact, she promised to “follow the statutes of this office to the letter.”

Davis justified her reversal by arguing that the “So help me, God” tacked on to her oath of office meant that acting on her Christian beliefs was obligatory and trumped the laws she was promising to uphold. There are two small problems with this: that phrase is not part of the official oath (nor is the Bible you might put your hand on), and if she swore to God to uphold the law, she’s now breaking that oath. (A thoughtful analysis of this is by Noah Feldman.)

An easy solution leaps to mind: if you can no longer perform your job, quit. You could even make a bold statement by saying that a government job that pays $80,000 per year isn’t worth compromising one’s principles. But no, she wants it both ways. She imagines that she gets to apply her personal interpretation of Christianity to her job. So presumably every other government official gets to apply their individual religious interpretations to their jobs?

At least Sharia law isn’t quite so chaotic.

I wonder how deeply Davis has thought this through. The Bible says all sorts of crazy stuff in favor of slavery, genocide, and polygamy. Since she picks and chooses which secular laws to follow, I suppose she feels comfortable doing the same with God’s laws. Jesus himself said, “Whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery” (Matthew 5:32). Before her current grandstanding, did she enforce that rule, too?

Davis began her job in January, 2015, when she knew that same-sex marriage might become legal within months, but she swore her oath of office anyway. She’s like the pacifist who willingly joins the infantry, knowing that killing the enemy was a possibility. And now that her unit has been deployed to a war zone, this pacifist decides that she won’t do her job.

(Davis had been in jail for contempt, but she was released 9/8/15 with the constraint that she can’t interfere in her deputy clerks’ jobs of issuing marriage licenses.)

We’ve seen this before with JFK

John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960. Some Americans were concerned that JFK, as a Catholic, would answer to the pope if elected president rather than the Constitution or the American people. One radio evangelist of the time said, “Each person has the right to their own religious belief [but] the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical system demands the first allegiance of every true member and says in a conflict between church and state, the church must prevail.”

In other words, how do we know that JFK won’t do a Kim Davis?

JFK famous responded:

I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute, where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him.

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; [and] where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials. …

I believe in a president whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the nation, or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.

JFK explicitly rejected what Kim Davis has embraced.

The U.S. Constitution calls the tune

Here’s the bottom line. God isn’t the chief executive—the president of the United States is. The Bible isn’t the supreme law of the land—the Constitution is.

Be not confused: the United States doesn’t exist and run because God said so; instead, Christians can preach and worship because the Constitution says so. If the law offends you, you can argue that it’s unjust, you can work to have it changed, or you can leave. We have a 100% secular constitution that defines a 100% secular means for making, changing, and upholding laws.

I hear Pakistan puts God first in their law—maybe you’d like that better.

“The sky is falling!”

Conservatives are quick to tell us that this incident is the beginning of overt Christian persecution. A Christian Post columnist said, “For years now I and others have been warning that committed Christians could soon face jail time in America for holding to our convictions.”

Not really. Christian county clerks can object to same-sex marriages, Christian pharmacists can object to emergency contraceptives, Muslim flight attendants can object to serving alcohol, Christian bakers and photographers can object to same-sex weddings, but do your job. Don’t sign up and then imagine oppression. If you discover a moral dilemma down the road, quit.

To anticipate some jobs that a devout Christian might belatedly realize conflict with biblical principles, HuffPo has a list of jobs to avoid. You wouldn’t want to be a clerk selling mixed fabrics (prohibited), fishing for shellfish (prohibited), or teaching as a woman (prohibited). Are these examples ridiculous? Then ditto a clerk who objects to same-sex marriage (not explicitly prohibited) but has no problem with marrying divorced people (prohibited).

Another Christian Post columnist said, “Every serious biblical Christian will have to consider what to do now—whether a baker being asked to provide a wedding cake for a same-sex marriage against her conscience, a county clerk faced with issuing a marriage license to a homosexual couple, or a pastor being requested to perform a wedding between two women or two men.” Let me answer that for you: the baker is obliged to follow public accommodation laws that prohibit discrimination, county clerks must do their jobs, and the U.S. has laws protecting pastors.

This last one is always on the list, even though pastors are protected, both by the First Amendment and by Supreme Court precedent. Remember Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that made mixed-race marriage legal? That is binding only on governments, not pastors. Pastors can and do refuse to perform mixed-race marriages. The same is true for same-sex marriages. Even the Family Research Council (a Christian organization) agrees. Hysteria about constraints on the clergy is popular because it rallies the troops, not because it’s realistic.

This reminds me of Glenn Beck’s hysteria on the eve of the Obergefell decision legalizing same-sex marriage. He declared that there were upwards of 10,000 pastors “that I think will walk through a wall of fire, you know, and possible death.”

Who did he imagine on the other side with the flaming torches?

Kim Davis: another Rosa Parks?

Rosa Parks was the African-American woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus in 1955. One of Kim Davis’s supporters finds much similarity between the two women. If Rosa Parks shouldn’t have to get off the bus, why should Kim Davis? He asks, “Will Kim Davis be the Rosa Parks of the movement?”

The difference, of course, is that Rosa Parks had her civil rights infringed upon, while Kim Davis is trying to infringe on the civil rights of others. If Kim Davis feels that the Bible has something to say about Obergefell, she can express that view, and every atheist I can think of will support her right to free speech. What she can’t do is impose that outside the law.

Will Kim Davis be the Rosa Parks of the conservative anti-same-sex marriage movement? A three-times-divorced person setting herself up as the arbiter of marriage might indeed be an appropriate saint for this ridiculous up-is-down and Ignorance-is-Strength movement.

Related post: “Being on the Wrong Side of History on Same-Sex Marriage? Worse than You Think.”

If you have to explain,
“I’m doing this out of love,”
it ain’t love.
— seen on the internet

Image credit: Wikimedia

How Reliable is Apostle Paul When He Knew Very Little About Jesus?

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What Did Paul Know About Jesus?For being the founder of Christianity, Paul knew surprisingly little about Christ.

Paul is our first and, for that reason, potentially our most reliable source of information on the life of Jesus. Let’s sift Paul’s writings for information about Jesus. Using the gospels as a guide, we’ll find that Paul is a shallow source of information.

If we were to extract biographical information from the gospels, we’d have a long list—the story of Jesus turning water into wine, walking on water, raising Lazarus, the Prodigal Son story, curing blindness with spit, odd events like his cursing the fig tree, and so on. But what information about Jesus do we get from Paul?

Paul’s famous passage

We’ll start with the well-known passage from 1 Corinthians 15.

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. (1 Cor. 15:3–8)

This tells us that

1. Jesus died “for our sins.”

2. Jesus was buried.

3. Jesus was resurrected from the dead three days later, in fulfillment of prophecy.

4. Jesus made many post-resurrection appearances.

Though 1 Corinthians was written perhaps twenty years after the death of Jesus, some scholars argue that this three-sentence passage was written with a different style and so is an early creed that preceded Paul’s writing, taking us back closer to the earliest disciples. But others use the same logic to argue the opposite conclusion, that it was a later insertion. (Our oldest copy of this passage comes from papyrus manuscript P46, written around 200. That’s close to two centuries where we can’t be sure what changes might’ve been made.)

Let’s first sift through Paul’s epistles for confirmation of these first claims.

1. Confirmed—Paul writes elsewhere that Jesus was a sacrifice (see Romans 3:25, 5:6–8, 8:3; 1 Cor. 5:7; and more). The passage above does not contain the word “Jesus,” but many other Pauline verses combine “Jesus” and “Christ.”

2. Confirmed: “We have been buried with [Jesus] through baptism into death” (Rom. 6:4).

3. Confirmed: many verses report that Jesus was raised from the dead (see 1 Cor. 15:20; Rom. 1:4, 4:24; 2 Cor. 4:14; and more). Note, however, that there is no confirmation of the three days or the scriptural prophecy.

4. Not confirmed: There is no confirmation of the post-resurrection appearances in Paul’s epistles.

The rest of Paul’s Jesus

Here are the additional biographical details we find in Paul’s letters.

5. He was a descendant of David: “his Son, who as to his earthly life was a descendant of David” (Rom. 1:3).

6. He had brothers: “Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?” (1 Cor. 9:5; also Gal. 1:19). (“Brothers of the Lord” can’t mean just spiritual brothers because Cephas [that is, Peter] is excluded, and he would obviously be a spiritual brother.)

7. He was poor: “though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor” (2 Cor. 8:9).

8. He was meek and gentle: “the meekness and gentleness of Christ” (2 Cor. 10:1).

9. He was selfless “do not merely look out for your own personal interests, but also for the interests of others; [this attitude] was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:4–7).

10. He was crucified: “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor. 1:23; also 1 Cor. 2:2, Galatians 3:1, 2 Cor. 13:4, and more).

11. He was betrayed: “The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed” (1 Cor. 11:23; also 2 Timothy 2:8).

12. He asked that his followers eat bread and drink wine in remembrance of him (1 Cor. 11:23–6). (However, the Vridar blog argues that this is an interpolation.)

13. He was a Jew: “God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the Law” (Gal. 4:4; also Gal. 3:16).

14. His mission was to both Jews (“Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God …,” Rom. 15:8) and Gentiles (“… and for the Gentiles to glorify God for His mercy,” Rom. 15:9).

15. Jesus was killed by Jews: “the Jews who killed the Lord Jesus” (1 Thessalonians 2:14–15)

We could go further afield, into books that are almost universally rejected as authored by Paul. For example, 1 Tim. 6:13 places the trial of Jesus during the rule of Pontius Pilate, and Hebrews 5:5 gives an Adoptionist view of Jesus (that is, Jesus was a man adopted by God).

But if we stick to just the reliably Pauline works, assume the authenticity of 1 Cor. 15, and ignore that our copies are far removed from the originals and therefore suspect, here is the Gospel of Paul:

Jesus died for our sins by crucifixion, was buried, and was then raised from the dead three days later, according to prophecy. He was seen by many after the resurrection. He was a Jew, had brothers, and was a descendant of David. He was poor, meek, gentle, and selfless, and his mission was to both Jew and Gentile. He was betrayed, he defined a bread and wine ritual for his followers, and the Jews killed him.

The End.

What’s missing?

The Gospel of Paul is one brief paragraph. It arguably has the most important element—death as a sacrifice for our sins and resurrection—but very little else.

No parables of the sheep and the goats, or the prodigal son, or the rich man and Lazarus, or the lost sheep, or the good Samaritan. In fact, no Jesus as teacher at all.

No driving out evil spirits, or healing the invalid at Bethesda, or cleansing the lepers, or raising Lazarus, or other healing miracles. As far as Paul tells us, Jesus performed no miracles at all.

No virgin birth, no Sermon on the Mount, no feeding the 5000, no public ministry, no women followers, no John the Baptist, no cleansing the temple, no final words, no Trinity, no hell, no Judas as betrayer (he mentions “the twelve”), and no Great Commission. Paul doesn’t even place Jesus within history—there’s nothing to connect Jesus with historical figures like Caesar Augustus, King Herod, or Pontius Pilate.

Perhaps everyone to whom Paul wrote his letters knew all this already? Okay, but presumably they already knew about the crucifixion, and Paul mentions that 13 times. And the resurrection, which Paul mentions 14 times.

Christians may say that Paul knew the biographical details of Jesus but simply didn’t have occasion to write of them, but this route must not be taken lightly. When the issue of the dating of New Testament books comes up, those Christians will want to take the opposite approach. The lack of certain historical events in the gospels or Acts (death of Paul, destruction of the Temple) must mean that the author didn’t know of them. As a result, they’ll say, we must date these books before those historical events.

So which is it—does a notable omission mean that the author didn’t know that fact or simply didn’t bother relating it?

Paul indirectly admits that he knew of no Jesus miracles:

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles (1 Cor. 1:22–3)

Why “a stumbling block”? Jesus did lots of miraculous “signs”—why didn’t Paul convince the Jews with these? Paul apparently didn’t know any. The Jesus of Paul is not the miracle worker that we see in the Jesus of the gospels.

But suppose the problem is Jews demanding actual miracles performed in front of them, not merely stories of miracles. That shouldn’t be a problem either. Jesus said, “Whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these” (John 14:12). And, indeed, the book of Acts reports that this happened. Peter healed a lame man (Acts 3:1–8) and raised a woman from the dead (Acts 9:36–42), Philip exorcised demons to heal people (Acts 8:5–8), and “the apostles performed many signs and wonders” (Acts 5:12).

So then who was Paul referring to?

The Jesus of Paul isn’t the Jesus of the gospels. Robert Price questions whether Paul even imagined an earthly Jesus (Bible Geek podcast for 10/3/12 @ 1:15:10). Where did the Jesus in Paul’s mind come from, if not history? Perhaps from the Scriptures. Commenter Greg G. lists Paul’s traits of Jesus and shows where in the Old Testament he could have gotten them. (I’ve written more about the evolution of the Jesus story here.)

What would Paul have said about the philosophical issues that divided the church for centuries? These don’t mean much to most of us today because they’ve long been decided, but they were divisive in their day—whether Jesus was subordinate to God or not, whether Jesus had a human body or not, whether he had a human nature or not, whether he had two wills or not, whether the Holy Spirit was part of the Godhead, and so on. No one knows how Paul would have resolved them or even if they crossed his mind.

The Gospel of Paul is more evidence that the Jesus story is just a legend that grew with time.

Good sources for more information:

Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. 
Faith must trample underfoot 
all reason, sense, and understanding.
— Martin Luther

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/17/12.)

Photo credit: Wikimedia

And God is Not Good, Either

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It’s the fourth anniversary of the Cross Examined blog! There have been over 1.5 million page views on the blog and 18,000 comments. I’ve written two books about the Christianity/atheism debate, Cross Examined: An Unconventional Spiritual Journey and A Modern Christmas Carol. Please spread the word, and tell your friends about the blog and books. I couldn’t do this without you.

In celebration, I’d like to repeat a post I wrote as an homage to the powerful speaker and eloquent author of God is not Great and much more, Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011). Hitchens fought nonsense till the end, and he has been an inspiration to me and countless other atheists. In my own small way, I hope I’m continuing the fight against nonsense.

Thanks, Christopher.

The child’s blessing goes, “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food.” Hitchens’ God is not Great is an eloquent rebuttal to the first claim of this prayer. Let’s consider here the second claim: God is good. Indeed, the Bible makes this clear: “Praise the Lord, for the Lord is good” (Psalm 135:3).

But does the dictionary agree? We must use words according to their meaning.

God’s barbarity

Here is what God commands about cities that refuse to submit to the Israelites: “Completely destroy them—the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites—as the Lord your God has commanded you” (Deuteronomy 20:17).

You and I know what “good” means. If you were a king or general and you ordered the genocide of those tribes—over ten million people, according to the Bible*—would you be considered good?

But you might say that this was wartime, and the rules were different. Yes it was wartime, but the Israelites were the invaders, displacing Canaanites from land they had occupied for centuries. God tells the Israelites to destroy the Amalekites: “Attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants” (1 Samuel 15:3).

What could the infants have possibly done to deserve death?

Moses tells the Israelites that they must kill all of the Midianites, with one exception: “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man” (Numbers 31:17–18).

Who’s ever heard any of these verses made the subject of a sermon?

The immoral commands don’t stop with genocide. Slavery wasn’t prohibited in the Bible; in fact, it was so much a part of everyday life that it was regulated. In the same way that God told the merchants to sell using fair weights and measures (Deuteronomy 25:15), he told the Israelites how to handle slaves—how to treat a fellow Israelite as a slave (Exodus 21:4–6 and Leviticus 25:39), how to sell your daughter into slavery (Exod. 21:7), how to decide when a beating was too harsh (Exod. 21:20–21), and so on.

Don’t pretend that biblical slavery was like indentured servitude. That was true for fellow Jews, but for non-Jews, it was good, old-fashioned slavery for life. “You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to receive as a possession; you can use them as permanent slaves” (Lev. 25:44–46).

And this doesn’t even consider the Flood. Why drown his creation instead of poofing them out of existence? God may exist and he may be powerful, but can the word “good” be applied to a being who does this?

Let’s turn from God’s unsavory side to his attempts at encouraging good behavior. It’s odd that the Ten Commandments has room for “don’t covet” but no prohibitions against slavery, rape, genocide, or infanticide. Christopher Hitchens cuts through the problem:

It’s interesting to note that the tenth Commandment, do not covet, is given at a time when the Israelites wandering in the desert are kept alive with covetous dreams—of taking the land, livestock, and women from the people living in Palestine. In fact, the reason why injunctions against rape, genocide, and slavery aren’t in the Ten Commandments is because they’ll be mandatory pretty soon when the conquest of Palestine takes place. (Videos here and here.)

So in the Bible, they’re not crimes—they’re tools!

Christian defense

Christians respond in several ways.

1. But things were different back then. We can’t judge Jews in Palestine 2500 years ago with today’s standards.

Can we assent to these crimes at any time in history? I agree that standards of morality have changed, but Christians are supposed to reject moral relativism. They’re the ones who imagine an unchanging, objective morality. If slavery is wrong now, they must insist that it was wrong then.

2. But God’s actions are good—they just are. His actions are the very definition of good. That’s as fundamental a truth as we have.

Shouldn’t God follow his own rules? If God is the standard for goodness (Matthew 5:48), what else can this mean but that we should look to God’s actions as examples for us to follow?

Abraham made clear that God was held to the same moral standards as Man. He said, “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?” as he argued against God’s plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. And God agreed (Genesis 18:20–33).

If Christians modify the dictionary so that no action of God’s could ever be bad, assigning the word “good” to God’s actions says nothing. They hope to make an important statement with “God is good,” but debasing the dictionary makes the word meaningless.

Playing games with the dictionary causes other problems. If there are two supernatural agents, God and Satan, how do you tell which is which? If the one that controls our realm is “good” by definition, maybe we’re stuck with Satan and have simply convinced ourselves to call him good. That’s not a crazy idea, given the world’s natural disasters, disease, war, and other horrors. Imagine Satan ruling this world and convincing us that the death of an innocent child is part of a greater plan, if you can believe such a thing. And yet that’s the world we live in! People look at all the bad in the world and dismiss it, giving Satan a pass. (… Or are we giving God a pass? I can’t tell which.)

If this thinking is getting a bit bizarre, that’s the point. That’s what happens if you declare God’s actions good by definition.

3. But the Canaanites were terrible, immoral people! They sacrificed babies!

How reliable are the Bible’s analysis of the Canaanites’ morals? If these tales come from the Canaanites’ enemies, how objective are they? And even if the Canaanites did sacrifice babies, isn’t solving this with genocide like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly? Couldn’t an omniscient guy like God figure out a better way than genocide to encourage a tribe to improve their behavior?

4. C’mon—can’t you recognize exaggeration when you see it? This is just soldiers bragging around the campfire that grew until it was incorporated into Israelite lore. You don’t really believe the genocide stories, do you? Indeed, archeologists show no evidence of this mass slaughter.

Take your pick—is the Bible reliable history or not? I disagree with the Bible literalists, but at least they wouldn’t be so hypocritical as to abandon the Bible when it embarrasses them.

Christians who label some Bible passages exaggerations and others as history are using their own judgment to figure this out. I’m not complaining—that’s what I do myself—but they can’t then turn around and say that they get their guidance from the Bible. No, my friend—the interpretation comes from you, not the Bible!

5. A bad thing today sets us up for a greater good in the future.

This is no more plausible than the reverse: “a good thing today sets us up for a greater bad in the future.” Why imagine one over the other? Only because we presuppose God’s existence, the thing we’re trying to prove. And it’s ridiculous to imagine an omniscient God deliberately causing the Haiti earthquake and killing 300,000 because he can act no more precisely than this.

6. But God is unjudgeable. God said, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). It’s presumptuous of us to judge God. If God says that the Amalekites deserved to die, that’s good enough for me.

Okay, let’s not judge God then. Let’s avoid labeling him. But then not only can we not label his shocking actions “bad,” we can’t label his pleasing actions “good.” The good God is no more.

And there’s more fallout from the “we imperfect humans can’t judge God” argument. Consider this from Bob Price:

[The ultimate certainty in your mind, the believer’s mind, is] the guarantee that [God] will honor that ticket to heaven he supposedly issued you. Here’s a troublesome thought. Suppose you get to the Day of Judgment and God cancels the ticket. No explanation. No appeal. You’re just screwed. Won’t you have to allow that God must have reasons for it that you, a mere mortal, are not privy to? Who are you, like Job, to call God to account?

Of course many Christians want it both ways. They want to judge God’s noble actions as “good” but withhold judgment for actions that any thoughtful person would find abominable. But if you can’t understand God’s actions when they look bad, why flatter yourself that you understand them when they look good?

Think of this as the Word Hygiene argument. You can either call a spade a spade and acknowledge God’s cruelty or say that he’s unjudgeable. Take your pick—either way, you can’t call him “good.”

Gullibility and credulity are considered undesirable qualities
in every department of human life—
except religion.
— Christopher Hitchens

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 12/15/12.)

Image credit: Gerry Dincher, flickr, CC

* Here’s the math behind that figure: Israel had 600,000 men before entering Canaan (Ex. 12:37), or about two million people total. These six tribes are all larger than Israel (Deut. 7:1). That makes well over ten million people in the tribes God orders exterminated.

When My Rules Trump Yours

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In the aftermath of 9/11, I worked with a group of concerned citizens in Seattle to create Pangea, a nonprofit that supports nonreligious community-building projects in East Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. In little more than a decade, it has awarded over a million dollars in grants. I’ve found an interesting parallel between the culture clash we had in trying to do good in the developing world and that between Christianity and reality.

When trying to improve living conditions in the developing world, one quickly hears cautionary tales about how well-intentioned efforts don’t turn out well. Here’s one: a few years ago, a high-tech executive who had been raised in Zimbabwe wanted to go back to help a community there. As a worthwhile project, he picked a busy dirt road that needed much improvement, but things were not as simple as they seemed. Simply giving money to the local department of transportation wasn’t enough. Palms had to be greased. After trying every avenue, there seemed to be no way to avoid paying extra for the bureaucrats to permit the work to happen.

Corruption was a problem for this executive but money was not, so instead of working through the system, he simply paid to have a road grader do the work. The work crew showed up on the assigned day, but so did one of the bureaucrats who had been bypassed, backed by armed soldiers. The road work never happened.

Pangea and culture clashes

With Pangea, we had similar clashes between our approach and the local approach. In some societies, a person who is better off is culturally obliged to help friends and family who have less, and sometimes the local accountants helped out the less fortunate with Pangea money. Helping the less fortunate was the goal of the project, of course, but bleeding off money threatened its success.

This wasn’t like the Zimbabwe problem—I don’t remember anyone taking money simply to make themselves richer—but the bigger issue was that as a 501(c)3, Pangea had an obligation to the IRS to see that the money was distributed as promised.

It’s important to understand local customs, and the last thing we wanted to be was the rich, know-it-all Westerners who would come in and remake the local environment to the correct, Western way. Indeed, the opposite was true, and we learned a lot. The projects were always initiated and run by local people. But the constraints on the money were nonnegotiable. We had made a promise to the IRS—a reasonable constraint in return for tax-free donations, which we were happy to enforce. Sorry—on money issues, these Western constraints must win out. If you’re a local organization that doesn’t like that constraint, that’s fine, but don’t apply for a grant from us.

Application to Christianity

This example made me think of two parallels with Christianity. First, when you’re a church that benefits from tax-free donations, you’ve made an agreement with the IRS. Stick to it. Remember “Let your ‘Yes’ be yes, and your ‘No,’ no” (James 5:12)?

Pulpit Freedom Sunday is one ridiculous example of civil disobedience where Christian preachers demand yet more concessions. They are delighted by tax-free money, but they don’t like the prohibition against electioneering that comes with it. If accepting a deal with the IRS is a pact with the devil, then don’t enter into the pact.

The second parallel is with local NGOs thinking that they can do things their own way, ignoring the contract they made with Pangea. Similarly, Christians sometimes want to come to conclusions their own special way, rather than using science, history, evidence, reason, and so on.

Reason is the way we find things. Understanding things by imagining communication from the Holy Spirit might be a venerable way to learn things in your religion, but don’t imagine that it works in the real world. You can imagine your own source of knowing, but reality trumps that.

Related posts:
“What do Churches Have to Hide?”
“Are Churches More Like Charities or Country Clubs?”

Cool: “I can’t do that because of my religion.”
Not cool: “You can’t do that because of my religion.”
— seen on the internet

Image credit: Bob Seidensticker

A Call for Civil Disobedience: Remove the “God”

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civil disobedience In god we trustSome atheist friends and I have a ritual that we follow when we meet for dinner. We deface our money.

On the back of U.S. paper money (technically, Federal Reserve notes) are the words “In God We Trust.” But I don’t trust in a god that I don’t believe exists; why should I be forced to promote a concept I don’t accept to conduct commerce? Does the American government have no obligation to its citizens who are atheists, agnostics, or non-Christian who feel excluded by this?

Consider the second beast from Revelation 13:16–18 that forced all people “to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.” Would the Christians eager for the imposition of “In God We Trust” as a national motto be just as happy if the money were printed with the Beast’s 666? Or what if it instead professed trust in Shiva or Allah or Xenu?

Civil disobedience

Our dinner ritual is to practice a little civil disobedience and change the slogan. Some cross out the entire motto, some cross out just “God,” and some change “God” to “FSM.” You could replace it with E Pluribus Unum or the text of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

civil disobedience In god we trust

Let’s take a closeup of the middle anarchist. I’m pretty sure that’s a blue “RELIGION: Together we can find a cure” t-shirt. Oh—and a defaced $20 Federal Reserve Note.

Give it a try at your next gathering of freethinkers or advocates for the separation of church and state.

But is it illegal?

What’s illegal is a national motto that spits on the First Amendment. And it should’ve been a crime to replace the motto E Pluribus Unum—“Out of many, one,” which is the story of an America built by immigrants—with a colorless motto could easily fit fifty countries.

Title 18 of the U.S. Code has several relevant sections about changes to currency.

  • Section 333 says that mutilating or defacing a Federal Reserve note is illegal, but only if done “with intent to render such [note] unfit to be reissued.”
  • Section 471 says you can’t alter money with intent to defraud.
  • Section 472 says you can’t possess or pass on money with intent to defraud.
  • Section 475 says you can’t put advertisements on money. (This got the Where’s George? bank note tracking project into trouble.)

It sure looks to me like this project is okay, but if you like, imagine a cloud of doubt to make it more exciting.

Add some spice. Cross out “God” in front of who you’re paying, or replace the slogan with “Atheist Money.” Get your Christian friends to join in—government meddling in religion can’t be good for them, either.

And ask yourself how weak the Christian argument is if its proponents must try to steal the prestige of the U.S. government to bolster it.

668—the neighbor of the beast.