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Guest Post: 25 Godly Blunders

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This is a guest post from Stephen Gray, a modified excerpt from his upcoming book.

Stephen Gray has a degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania, with graduate work in physics from Harvard. He has been studying science and its relationship to religion for years. He is the author of Christianity in Ruins: Refuting the Faith, which is expected to be released in a few weeks. 

Here’s his list of God’s blunders.

  1. The perfect God created an imperfect universe. That was his first lapse.
  2. God is merciful, just, perfect, moral, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnifree, transcendent, genderless, beginningless, causeless, infinite, spaceless, and timeless or eternal. He could easily provide evidence for these properties but doesn’t. Big error.
  3. God created the world and a man and woman. He liked his creation. Adam and Eve were given free will, allowing them to disobey God’s orders. God made another blunder.
  4. Adam and Eve manifested a program bug called “original sin.” That made God place an evil spell on all of humanity forever. That was extremely immoral and comprised one of his worst misdeeds.
  5. God intended the Bible to be a guide to morality and to show his love for humanity, but the older part is full of things like genocides, cannibalism, murder, and blood sacrifices, all done or ordered by God himself. The contrast between what God says and what he does defines hypocrisy.
  6. God had the Bible written to explain his rules and to teach us about Jesus. But the book contains contradictions, ambiguities, ridiculous science, incorrect history, pointless trivia, poor continuity, duplications, inaccurate arithmetic, wrong geography, imitations of older myths, impossible miracles, and plentiful immorality. It deserves a grade of F–, but God shows no remorse.
  7. God could have made our self-control stronger without limiting free will. Not doing this was another bungle.
  8. God, finding his work to be terrible, started over. He killed everything, even flowers, birds, trees, kittens, babies, and fetuses, making him the most prolific abortionist and animal killer of all time. The deaths did not help, so his mass murder was an inexcusable foulup.
  9. God showed extreme sadism by telling Abraham to kill his son but stopped him at the last second. God also had Satan torture Job and kill his ten children. God never apologized or explained. These acts were unusually evil even for God.
  10. God later created a “son,” who both was born at a specific time and existed eternally. This issue will remain a baffling puzzle until all theologians get fired for pointless speculation. Then we can declare it nonsense and forget about it.
  11. Jesus descended from King David in two different ways, but the actual father was the Holy Spirit. Was the son descended from David or not? Confusing.
  12. The son is identical to God and part of him, so he is his own father and his own son. Objective observers see that this is nuts.
  13. The third part of God is identical to but separate from the first two. Its first act was to impregnate Jesus’ mother. It is not known whether this thing is a person, part of one, or something else. The parts of God are called the Trinity, but a Binity might be slightly less ridiculous.
  14. How God’s third ingredient impregnated the virgin is obscure. He, she, or it may have used Joseph’s semen and, having no need to do anything the normal way, entered Mary through her ear. This avoids the problem of Mary’s vagina.
  15. There are more supernatural entities in this monotheistic religion. He is called Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer, etc. He practices deception and tempts humans to sin, quite superfluous given our curse of original sin. God is unable to kill him even though Satan is outnumbered three to one by the Trinity—or not.
  16. The Bible explains how to be saved from Hell, but there are many different ways, each one necessary and sufficient. That is logically impossible, so believers have every right to be confused. Leaving salvation unclear is a major blunder.
  17. By painfully killing his son, God punished himself or part of himself in a 1/3 suicide that lasted only a day and a half, so his self-punishment was insincere. Given his record of mistakes, he should have voluntarily disappeared.
  18. The son, Jesus—that is, God, part of God, or something—was dead but is now alive and with his father, that is, himself, so the sacrifice did and did not occur. That is evidence of God’s inability to think. He needs a brain transplant.
  19. The son was supposed to come back in the 1st century, but he’s been absent for 2000 years. A psychiatrist would label this extreme passive-aggressiveness, but the only word doctors have for being that late is dead.
  20. God said that the postmortem life will occur in Heaven, whatever that is. There is no coherent account of what happens there, but many people are eager to go anyway. God might make a good salesman for house plots in a swamp.
  21. In the second part of the book, God orders eternal roasting as punishment for disbelief, even if a person sincerely tries to believe but cannot. Giving us the ability to reason but punishing us for using it is a horrible, evil crime. God should commit suicide or permanently confine himself to a padded cell.
  22. God wants humans to freely love him but issues hideous threats if we don’t. One cannot love while being threatened. Major mistake.
  23. God persists in permanently hiding, perhaps out of shame for his extreme incompetence. His hiddenness makes it almost impossible for a rational person to believe in him, indicating a self-defeating personality. His failure to get help for this problem is a major offense.
  24. One of God’s worst errors was creating millions of people who believe in him despite the lack of evidence and the presence of so many mistakes in his book. This proves that the human brain is defective, so its designer is also defective.
  25. God let his favorite religion split into hundreds of branches. The Old Testament God has been properly called the nastiest character in all fiction. His sick behavior and failure to get it treated is negligent.

This particular God could not run a taco stand, let alone a universe.

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

25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid

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stupid Christian argumentsHey, gang! Get your Christian Fallacy Bingo cards ready, and cross off the bogus arguments as they’re called out! These are some of the dumb arguments apologists often use. Christians, do us all a favor—yourself especially—and make good arguments. These aren’t what you want to use.

Stupid Argument #1: the consequences of atheism are depressing. Atheism is sad or unfortunate or otherwise discouraging, or atheism declares that life is hopeless and meaningless.

This is like saying that the consequences of earthquakes and hurricanes are sad or unfortunate. Sure, the consequences of reality can be sad, but that doesn’t make them untrue. “Atheism is depressing; therefore, it’s false” is a childish way of looking at the world. A pat on the head might make us feel better, but are we not adults looking for the truth?

As for life being meaningless, I find no ultimate meaning, but then neither can the Christian. I have plenty of the ordinary kind of meaning. Look up the word in the dictionary—there is nothing about God or about ultimate or transcendental grounding. (More on objective truth here.)

Stupid Argument #2: I sense God’s presence; therefore, God exists.

The argument is more completely stated: If God existed, I would sense his presence; I sense God’s presence; therefore, God exists. This is the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent (if P then Q; Q; therefore P). I’ve discussed this in more detail here.

I can’t tell whether you’ve deluded yourself or whether you’re justified in believing in a supernatural experience. Nevertheless, your subjective personal experience may be convincing to you, but it won’t convince anyone else.

Stupid Argument #3: defending God’s immoral actions. Christians might say that genocide or slavery was simply what they did back then, and God was working within the social framework of the time. Or they might say that God might have his own reasons that we mortals can’t understand.

This is just embarrassing. You’re seriously going to handwave away God’s being okay with slavery and ordering genocide? If it’s wrong now, it was wrong then. How do you get past the fact that the Old Testament reads just like the blog of an early Iron Age tribal people rather than the actual wisdom of the omniscient creator of the universe? And if you dismiss slavery as not that big a deal, would you accept Old Testament slavery in our own society?

As for God having his own unfathomable reasons for immoral actions, this is the Hypothetical God Fallacy. No, we don’t start with God and then fit the facts to support that presupposition; we follow the facts where they lead—whether toward God or not.

Stupid Argument #4: I’ll believe the first-century eyewitnesses over modern historians. The Christian gives more weight to writings closer to the events.

The Christian wants license to dismiss unwanted ideas from modern sources. It’s fair to be concerned about the accretion of layers of dogma or tradition over time, but a good New Testament historian would try to do the opposite and strip away these layers to uncover the history of the first century.

As for the “eyewitness” claim, this is often slipped in without comment or justification. None of the gospels claim to be eyewitness accounts. That Matthew and Luke (to take two of them) borrow heavily from Mark—often copying passages word for word—make clear that they’re not eyewitness accounts. And those gospels that do make the claim (the Gospel of Peter, for example) are rejected by the church. Show compelling evidence for the remarkable eyewitness claim before confidently tossing it out.

Of course, getting closer to the events is a good policy. Problem is, this doesn’t work to Christianity’s favor. We’re separated from both Islam and Mormonism by less time than from Christianity. Mormonism in particular fares much better than Christianity in a historical analysis (more here). This is an argument the Christian wants to avoid.

What arguments should be in this list?

There will be some controversy about this list. Maybe some of these have enough merit that they deserve more space. Maybe you’d combine or divide them differently. And I’m sure there are plenty that I’ve forgotten.

At the very least, referring back to the argument number might be a shorthand way for us to respond to bogus arguments by Christian commenters. But my hope is that thoughtful Christians will understand the problems behind these arguments and minimize them in their own discourse.

Continue with Part 2.

DNA and [radioisotope] dating shows that
we evolved with all life over billions of years.
Bible says God created us from dust and ribs.
I’m torn.
— Ricky Gervais

Appendix: 25 Stupid Arguments Christians Should Avoid (Complete List)

Continue with Part 2.

 

Church Civil Disobedience: Pulpit Freedom Sunday

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church nonprofit statusIt’s another dreaded election year, and Pulpit Freedom Sunday, where pastors violate the law and critique candidates for political office, is around the corner (October 5, 2014).

The leaders of many religious organizations somehow feel imposed upon by the IRS because they can’t politick from the pulpit, as if that somehow comes along when preaching the gospel. But why? They can speak out all they want on social issues. No one forced tax-exempt donations on them—in fact, they took them willingly—so it’s surprising that they’re now chafing at the regulations that come along for the ride. The solution is easy: if nonprofit status is a deal with the devil, then don’t accept nonprofit status.

The Internal Revenue Service makes clear that churches and pastors may organize non-partisan voter education activities, voter registration, and get-out-the-vote drives (with an emphasis on non-partisan). Religious leaders speaking for themselves can say whatever they want, and they can speak “about important issues of public policy.”

However, all nonprofit organizations, including religious organizations

are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office. Contributions to political campaign funds or public statements of position (verbal or written) made by or on behalf of the organization in favor of or in opposition to any candidate for public office clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity. … Religious leaders cannot make partisan comments in official organization publications or at official church functions. …

[Nonprofits] must avoid any issue advocacy that functions as political campaign intervention. Even if a statement does not expressly tell an audience to vote for or against a specific candidate, an organization delivering the statement is at risk of violating the political campaign intervention prohibition if there is any message favoring or opposing a candidate.

But some pastors can’t accept this. I don’t know if they honestly think that it’s unfair or if they figure that they’ve already tipped the playing field so much in their favor that they’ll try their luck for even more, but the Alliance Defense Fund has organized the annual Pulpit Freedom Sunday. On this day:

The pastors will exercise their First Amendment right to preach on the subject [of the moral qualifications of candidates seeking public office], despite federal tax regulations that prohibit intervening or participating in a political campaign. …

The point of the Pulpit Initiative is very simple: the IRS should not be the one making the decision by threatening to revoke a church’s tax-exempt status. We need to get the government out of the pulpit.

Wow—strange thinking. Tax-exempt status is granted by the government. It’s a contract, not a right, and it comes with strings attached. If we the public will be subsidizing an organization, we are entitled to limit its actions. No one’s strong-arming the church, and they can drop both the nonprofit status and the strings attached any time they want.

The motivation seems clear. Conservative politicians know that churches will in general tip the balance in their favor, so they do what they can to whip up anger about an imagined injustice.

The head of the IRS addressed this conflict of tax-exempt status and freedom of speech:

Freedom of speech and religious liberty are essential elements of our democracy. But the Supreme Court has in essence held that tax exemption is a privilege, not a right, stating, “Congress has not violated [an organization’s] First Amendment rights by declining to subsidize its First Amendment activities.”

If the IRS constraints against speaking out on political issues are a problem, then don’t enter into a contract with the IRS. Drop your nonprofit status, tell church members that they can no longer deduct donations, and then you can give your opinion about any candidate or issue.

But to keep your nonprofit status, you must follow the rules.

See also: “What Do Churches Have to Hide?”

No man ever believes that the bible means what it says;
he is always convinced that it says what he means
— George Bernard Shaw

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/11/12.)


Photo credit: Wikimedia

The Hypothetical God Fallacy + The Problem of Evil

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problem of evilThis is the conclusion of a response to an article about the Problem of Evil by apologist Mikel Del Rosario (read part 1 of this response here).

Del Rosario raises three points. Let’s continue with his point #2.

2. The Problem of Evil Doesn’t Mean There’s No God

The Christian worldview gives us another option that atheists often leave out of the equation. … God can have good reasons for allowing evil—even if we don’t know what those reasons are.

This error is so common that it needs a name, so I’ll name it: the Hypothetical God Fallacy. Sure, if we presuppose an omniscient God, this gets us out of every possible jam in which God looks bad. Banda Aceh tsunami? God could’ve had good reasons. A young mother, beloved in her community, dies suddenly and leaves behind a husband and three children? A result of God’s good reasons. Genocide demanded and slavery accepted in the Old Testament? World War? Plane crash? Missing keys?

God.

This short article is peppered with this fallacy. React to it as an allergen:

If God is good and evil exists …

The mere fact that I can’t figure out why God allows some of the things to happen that he does … is not warrant for the conclusion that he’s got no such reasons.

It actually takes some humility to admit the role of human finiteness in understanding why God allows evil.

Just because something might seem pointless to us, doesn’t mean God can’t have a morally justified reason for it.

Yes, bad things in the world don’t force the conclusion that God can’t exist. Fortunately, I don’t draw such a conclusion. And yes, if God exists, he could have his reasons for things that we don’t understand.

The Hypothetical God Fallacy is a fallacy because no one interested in the truth starts with a conclusion (God exists) and then arranges the facts to support that conclusion. That’s backwards. Rather, the truth seeker starts with the facts and then follows them to their conclusion. (I’ve written more here.)

If God exists, he could have terrific reasons for why there’s so much gratuitous evil in the world. The same could be true for the Invisible Pink Unicorn (glitter be upon Him). Neither approach does anything to support a belief chosen beforehand.

3. The Problem of Evil Isn’t Just a Christian Problem

The Problem of Evil isn’t just a Christian problem. Evil is everybody’s problem!

Then you don’t know what the Problem of Evil is, because it is precisely just a Christian problem. The Problem of Evil asks, How can a good God allow all the gratuitous evil we see in our world? Drop the God presupposition, and the problem goes away.

You could ask the different question, How does an atheist explain the bad in the world? Quick answer: shit happens. Some is bad luck (mechanical problem causes a car accident), some is natural (flood), some is caused by other people (jerky coworker badmouths you to the boss and you don’t get the promotion), and some is caused by you (you didn’t bother getting the flood insurance). Adding God to the equation explains nothing and introduces the Problem of Evil so that you’re worse off than when you started.

Del Rosario again:

If atheism is true, there’s no basis for objective moral values and duties.

Sounds right, but why imagine that objective moral values exist, besides wishful thinking? What many apologists perceive as objective moral values are actually just shared moral values. That we share moral values isn’t too surprising since we’re all the same species. Nothing supernatural is required.

Del Rosario stumbles over another issue with morality.

You couldn’t have any kind of real, moral grounding to call it objectively evil—if atheism is true.

He’s using “real” to mean ultimate or objective. And here again, the ball’s in his court to convince us of his remarkable claim that objective morality exists and that everyone can access it. (Suggestion: find a resolution to the abortion problem that is universally acceptable. If there’s not a single correct resolution then it’s not an objective moral truth, and if we can’t reliably access it, then it’s useless.)

As for the ordinary, everyday sort of moral grounding, the kind that both Christians and atheists use, you’ll find that in the dictionary. Look up “morality,” and you’ll read nothing about objective grounding.

We have one final challenge:

The atheist position’s got another problem to deal with: The Problem of Good. In other words, naturalism has the challenge of providing a sufficient moral grounding for goodness itself—in addition to making sense of evil in the world. And that’s a pretty tall order for a philosophy with absolutely no room for God.

What’s difficult? We’re good because of evolution. We’re social animals, like wolves and chimpanzees, so we have cooperative traits like honesty, cooperation, sympathy, trustworthiness, and so on.

The God hypothesis adds nothing to the conversation, and we must watch out for it being smuggled in as a presupposition. And we’re back where we started from, wondering where the good Christian arguments are.

You don’t need religion to have morals.
If you can’t determine right from wrong
then you lack empathy, not religion.
(seen on the internet)

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Don’t Like Abortion? Then Support Sex Education.

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There’s a reality disconnect within the pro-life community. They reject abortion while they also reject the solution to abortion, sex education. Is abortion an American Holocaust, as Ray Comfort claims? If so, then join forces with the pro-choice camp and teach teens how to avoid it!

Being against abortion but rejecting sex education is like being against deaths through unclean water but rejecting sewer systems.

Here’s an excellent infographic on sex education. Pass it on.

Created by publichealthdegree.com

Sometimes you feel like you don’t even have words
to be able to describe how amazing it was,
how awesome it was to see God manifest his power.…
God is bigger even than science.
— staffer at Decatur, GA church
where a man’s life was saved …
by EMTs

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/24/12.)

Ray Comfort’s Anti-Abortion Video “180”

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“A shocking, award-winning documentary!” “Changing the heart of a nation.” “33 minutes that will rock your world.” Ray Comfort lavishes his work with superlatives, but does it hold up?

I watched “180” so that you won’t have to. Spoiler: didn’t rock my world.

It’s always fun to compare the other guy to Hitler

Motives are immediately suspect when the video opens with Hitler and Nazi rallies. Right out of the gate, Godwin’s Law is in force, and Comfort makes clear that you’re either on his side or you have an autographed photo of Hitler on your night table.

With that dichotomy clear, Comfort interviews people hanging out on a sunny day at some Los Angeles beach. He begins by asking, “Who was Hitler?” The snippets introducing us to the (typically) 20-somethings who we’ll see throughout the video all show them clueless in response. If it was unclear before, it’s now obvious that he cherry picked only those interviews that gave him what he wanted. This is a poor foundation on which to show us a half-dozen people at the end who are convinced by his message. One wonders how many candidates he had to discard to get these.

We connect the present with Hitler through a long interview with a young American neo-Nazi with a tall blue Mohawk and a dashed “Cut here” tattoo across his throat. And then, videos of concentration camp aftermath.

Comfort primes his interviewees with moral puzzles such as “Would you shoot Hitler if you could go back in time and do so?” or “Would you kill Jews if told that, if you didn’t, you would be killed and someone else would do the job?”

Abortion

About a third of the way in, the conversation finally turns to abortion. The use of Hitler and the Holocaust is justified when Comfort declares abortion to be the American holocaust, with killing fetuses equivalent to killing Jews. His arguments are nothing new to many of us, but they were to this crowd:

  • Finish this sentence: “It’s okay to kill a baby in the womb when …”
  • What if a construction worker was about to blow up a building but wasn’t sure if there was a person in there or not. If we’re not sure, we should always err on the side of life, right?
  • What if someone had aborted you?

I’ve already discussed these and other arguments.

Next, he brings up the sixth Commandment: “Thou shalt not kill.” In the first place, he’s done nothing to show that there is a god behind these commandments and that it has any more supernatural warrant than “Use the Force, Luke!” Additionally, the commandment is usually translated as “thou shalt notmurder.” If the correct word is “kill,” I need to see Comfort walking the walk by campaigning against capital punishment and war. And if it’s an undefined “murder,” what is murder? The commandment becomes a tautology: Thou shalt not do what is forbidden. Granted, but how is this helpful?

Our interviewees seem a little off balance with a camera in their faces and are apparently not that sharp to begin with given their widespread ignorance of Hitler. Ray picks snippets that give him what he wants to hear, that killing fetuses is equivalent to killing Jews.

The lesson is that you can make an effective emotional pro-life argument to people who haven’t thought much about the issue. But people who change their minds so easily (Comfort brags about how quickly they changed) aren’t well established in their new position. How many of these, after thinking about these ideas at leisure and discussing it with friends, are still in Comfort’s camp today?

There’s a fundamental confusion in his interviewees, and Comfort is not motivated to correct it. There’s a big difference between “Abortion is wrong for me” and “Abortion is wrong for everyone, and we must impose that on society.” People give him the former, but he hopes we’ll take away the latter.

The Famous 10 Commandments Challenge

We’re two thirds through the video now and are just hoping to get out with our sanity intact, but Comfort has saved the best for last. The anti-abortion argument is dropped, and he falls back to his old favorite, the Ten Commandments challenge. (One reviewer suggested that Comfort’s compulsive use of this argument is his personal form of Tourette’s.) This is where Comfort ticks off the commandments: Have you ever lied? Stolen? Looked on someone with lust?

His conclusion typically runs like this: “By your own admission, you’re a lying, thieving, blaspheming fornicator and must face God on Judgment Day™. How do you think God should judge you?” Again, of course, he ignores that we haven’t established the existence of God or the afterlife.

I did applaud one aspect of the movie, the text at the end that read, “We strongly condemn the use of any violence in connection with protesting abortion.” At least, I applauded this until I realized that this was probably a legal demand since Comfort had pushed his interviewees to consider shooting Hitler early in the documentary.

Turnabout is fair play

Given Ray Comfort’s easy success with emotional appeals, what if someone did a rebuttal video? It could open with stories of illegal and dangerous back-alley abortion clinics when abortion was illegal. Then talk about Americans rejecting oppressive government—“the land of the free,” “no taxation without representation,” and all that. Paint a picture of medieval Europe with the heavy hand of the church on every aspect of life for the poor peasant. Overlay some stirring patriotic music over eagles and waving flags.

The interviews would focus on intuitive arguments like those I’ve discussed in Five Intuitive Pro-Choice Arguments. For example:

  • Suppose a building were on fire, and you could save either a five-year-old child or ten frozen embryos. Which would you pick? If you picked the child, what does that say about the argument that equates embryos with babies?
  • If you’ve seen anti-abortion videos or posters, you may have seen the bloody results of late-term abortions. Why do you suppose they show that rather than a woman taking an emergency contraceptive (“morning after”) pill? What does that say about their claim that it’s a “baby” all the way back to that single cell?
  • Given that half of all pregnancies end in spontaneous natural abortion, do you suppose that God has much of a concern about abortion?
  • A week-old human blastocyst has fewer cells than the brain of a fly. Does it make sense to equate that with a one trillion-cell newborn? The newborn has eyes, ears, legs, arms, a brain and a nervous system, a heart and a circulatory system—in fact, all the components of the human body that you do—while the blastocyst has just 100 undifferentiated cells. Can these be equal in every meaningful way?
  • Who better to weigh the impact of a baby than the mother herself?

Do you think we’d get similar results with this video?

They believe life begins at conception
and ends at birth.
— Rep. Barney Frank, about pro-life legislators

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 2/13/12.)

Photo credit: Wikipedia