Christianity offers little more than deist arguments

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What’s common among the most popular Christian apologetic arguments? They’re all deist arguments. That means they argue for Islam, Mormonism, or Satanism as much as they do Christianity.

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

19. Because the best Christian arguments are deist arguments

A Christian appeal for the existence of God typically brings up arguments such as these.

  • The Moral argument: How can there be objective moral truth without God?
  • The Cosmological argument: The universe had a beginning, which requires a cause, and that cause was God.
  • The Fine-Tuning argument: The constants in the universe are fine-tuned for life, and that must’ve been done by God.

There are lots more arguments like these—the Ontological Argument, the Design Argument, the Transcendental Argument, and even the Argument from Mathematics. These are all deist arguments, which means that the god behind them might have been nothing more than a clockmaker who created and wound up the universe and then walked away. And if the creator god actually does interact with our world, nothing in these arguments points to the Christian god any more than to Marduk, Allah, Brahma, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

If we lived in God World, the go-to arguments would unambiguously identify this god, not be one-size-fits-all arguments that point to no god in particular—not Yahweh any more than the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

And just so no one is confused, the arguments in the list above fail.

  • The Moral argument needs to first establish that objective truth exists.
  • The Cosmological argument fails in many ways.
  • The Fine-Tuning argument also fails. A universe made by God wouldn’t need fine tuning since God can make life anywhere (he’s God, remember). And there’s the multiverse, which is predicted by the theory of cosmic inflation, which is well supported by evidence. The multiverse could accommodate a vast number of universes with arbitrary settings of the universal constants.

Here’s your bonus reason:

20. Because the Bible story keeps rebooting

God has a perfect, bulletproof plan, and he’s stickin’ to it. He created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but those pesky kids messed things up. The resulting society became irredeemable, so God drowned them all. All, that is, except the brave little troupe that was Noah’s family.

Imagine Gilligan’s Island except on a cruise ship full of manure.

Society had been set right, God put his war bow in the heavens (that is, the rainbow) and promised never to fly off the handle again, and everyone lived happily ever after.

Or not. The story next lurches forward with Abraham, and God makes a perpetual covenant with Abraham—five times, in fact. And once again we think we’re done.

Nope. Abraham begat Isaac, who begat Jacob, who begat the twelve patriarchs of the (soon to be) twelve tribes of Israel. Then slavery in Egypt, then “Let my people go,” then the Exodus through the desert, and then Moses leads them into the Promised land. God ties a bow on the story with the perpetual Mosaic Covenant that is still in force today. The End.

Wrong again. No, it turns out that it was Jesus who was the key to the whole thing. Who saw that coming? What a twist! The entire New Testament (plus a couple dozen church councils) are required to figure out what this new religion actually is and to rationalize some sort of harmony with the Old Testament, which is (oddly) still in force.

But don’t think that that’s the last reboot. Islam was a reboot. Mormonism was a reboot. Some new cult can always announce that they have a new take on an old theme.

And there you go—that mess of incompatible parts is God’s perfect plan(s).

For more, see: The Bible Story Reboots. Have You Noticed?

If a perfect god actually existed, he would get his story straight in the beginning, and it wouldn’t look like what it is—a collection of loosely connected ancient mythology and legend.

To be continued.

(How big an impact did Jesus have on civilization?)
If you’re just going to go with “well, his ideas lived on,”
I’ll put Jesus behind Archimedes, Socrates,
Euclid, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein,
Fleming, and Bohr in that regard.
All of their ideas are current today
and of great value in modern society,
whereas Jesus espoused monarchy, slavery,
and second-class status for women.
— commenter RichardSRussell

Christians lie to cover up God’s support for slavery

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You’d think that God could defend himself, but Christian apologists must always clean up his messes. What’s interesting about this instance is how readily God’s defenders will lie for him.

In “Ten Ways Servant-Slavery in Israel Differed from Chattel Slavery,” Christian author Ken Samples contrasts “servant-slavery” (temporary indentured servitude) with “chattel slavery” (slavery for life) as defined in the Old Testament.

Technically, he’s correct—indentured servitude and chattel slavery are different. That’s why we have different names for them. But this isn’t what a casual Christian reader will take from his argument, and that’s the problem. It’s deceptive. Samples must understand the issue well enough to understand the problem, and that he takes no steps to clarify makes me fear that this deception is deliberate.

Read that title, and you’d think that Israel had “servant-slavery,” but it was the other societies that had chattel slavery. The truth is that Israel had both. Knowing that, Samples would’ve been more honest with a title like, “Servant-slavery vs. chattel slavery in ancient Israel: 10 differences.” But honesty doesn’t seem to be a goal.

Chattel slavery in the Bible

Here is one place where God defines the rules for chattel slavery:

Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can bequeath them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life … (Leviticus 25:44–6).

This is coming from God himself. Follow his rules, and you get a green light to keep slaves for life.

Indentured servitude vs. chattel slavery in the Bible

The article above lists ten points where the Old Testament’s indentured servitude is not chattel slavery. Let’s critique.

“1. Indentured servitude offered a means to deal with poverty.”

And in the US, the purpose was to get your trip to America paid for. Neither would be an excuse to reintroduce indentured servitude into modern society.

“2. Racism was not a motivation for slavery.”

This is presumably a contrast with American slavery. But with American slavery, racism was a justification, not a motivation.

Us vs. Them tribal differences was clearly central to Old Testament slavery. The passage from Leviticus above showed that chattel slaves came from neighboring tribes.

“3. Kidnapping, including for the purpose of slave trading, was illegal.”

For fellow Jews, yes, but this just means that indentured servitude and chattel slavery were different. We’ve been over that.

“4. Enslaved people were not treated as mere property.”

True for indentured servants but not for chattel slaves.

“5. Cruelty was strictly prohibited and punishable by law.”

We find cruelty in the Bible’s very laws to minimize cruelty. Here’s a slave rule from the Good Book:

Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two, since the slave is their property (Exodus 21:20–21).

Sounds like a thumbs-up to cruelty. Here’s one from the 1833 Alabama law code:

Any person who shall maliciously dismember or deprive a slave of life, shall suffer such punishment as would be inflicted in case the like offence had been committed on a free white person.

How does the Bible look in this comparison?

“6. Slavery was not operative from birth.”

Wrong. Children born to a slave mother, even if the father is an indentured servant, are the master’s property (Exodus 21:2–6). The father can leave after his indenture ends, but his children can’t. His only alternative is to promise to remain with the master for life.

“7. Slavery was not a permanent condition.”

True for indentured servitude; not true for chattel slavery.

“8. Indentured servitude was entered into and ended voluntarily.”

This is obviously not true for chattel slavery, but it’s also not true for indentured servitude, which lasted for six years (Ex. 21:2). Indentured servants who decide after a few months that the living or working conditions are too harsh are out of luck.

“9. Enslaved people had rights.”

As did chattel slaves in Alabama in 1833—see the law above.

“10. Enslaved people had access to an appeals process.”

Citation needed.

And let’s not get too excited about Israel’s graciousness if their slavery laws were no more enlightened than those of many other societies in the Ancient Near East. For example, Hammurabi’s Code compares well against the Old Testament.

Samples must understand the issue well enough to understand the problem, and that he takes no steps to clarify makes me fear that this deception is deliberate.

Returning to the point …

In this list of traits of indentured servitude, I count three items that are wrong, but this list isn’t the point. In Samples’ book from which this list came, Samples makes clear his point: “In truth, the indentured servitude of the Old Testament bears little resemblance to the modern conception of slavery” (p. 167). It was a useful exercise to respond to the list to highlight its flaws, but this plays to his agenda to get us talking about the wrong thing. Samples is misdirecting us, like a stage magician.

Sure, you can compare indentured servitude favorably to chattel slavery, but Israel had both! This is the elephant in the room that Samples doesn’t want to acknowledge.

What does it say about the god he worships that he must deceive us to defend that god? #NinthCommandment

See also: Yes, Biblical Slavery Was the Same as American Slavery

It’s often said that everyone
should respect the “great truths”
contained in all faiths.
If you see any, please let me know.
— James A. Haught

How does Christianity decide the truth?

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If you’re a Christian, would you be satisfied with a believer in another religion using the approach that you use to justify your Christian worldview? If that argument coming out of their mouth seems inadequate, what does that say about your own grounding?

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

17. Because theism has no method to decide truth

From the standpoint of many Christians, evidence is mere decoration. It’s the parsley on the plate of the Christian argument.

For example, William Lane Craig has made a career by using science to argue for Christian apologetics. Unfortunately, he undercuts his entire project when he says, “It is the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit that gives us the fundamental knowledge of Christianity’s truth. Therefore, the only role left for argument and evidence to play is a subsidiary role.”

Even if we take his theology for granted, it still doesn’t make sense. Craig says, “The experience of the Spirit’s witness is self-authenticating for him who really has it.” Okay, then who really has it?! He hasn’t resolved the problem. Does Craig have it? Maybe he’s wrong to think that he does. Maybe it’s held by someone Craig has dismissed as unworthy of God’s favor. There is no public, objective algorithm that we can all apply to see who has been touched by the Holy Spirit. This is not an evidence-based process.

And when you put his theology in the spotlight, the usual skeptical questions return. Does the Holy Spirit (or any member of the Trinity) exist? When two Christians (or Christian denominations) disagree, which one is correct? Have you figured out how to get to heaven, and are you destined to get there? Of the mountain of supernatural claims made by the world’s religions, which are correct? Religion gives you no way to answer these questions reliably. Theologians worldwide can’t even agree on how many gods there are.

Christians can look in the Bible for the rules of how to get into heaven just like a Dungeons & Dragons player can look up the capabilities of various characters. While the Bible is more venerable than the D&D handbook, neither is a reliable source of supernatural information. If we lived in God World, we’d know it because supernatural truths would be reliably accessible to everyone using reason and evidence.

See also: Faith, the Other F-Word

Here’s a bonus reason.

18. Because there are natural disasters

God’s marvelous plan is not that marvelous. Eight million people have died from natural disasters since 1900. If God approved of those natural disasters, then he’s not worthy of praise.

Natural disasters with natural explanations are evidence that God doesn’t exist.

When we fight against natural disasters—stack sandbags against a flood, create vaccines, or warn people about hurricanes—are we subverting God’s plan? How can Christians hold in their heads these two contradictory ideas, that God’s plan is to kill millions by natural disasters and that we should do our best to subvert that plan? What does it say about the vagueness of God’s plan that we must ask that question?

See also: Not even CHRISTIANS take Christianity seriously

Christian apologists trot out a couple of flabby responses to God’s embarrassing lack of interest in stopping natural disasters. First, if God exists, he has good reasons. In other words, just trust God. Don’t second-guess him. But with this argument we meet our old friend, the Hypothetical God Fallacy. The key word is the if. Yes, if God exists, then you Christians win the argument! You can just stop there.

But you know that you can’t assume God into existence; you must provide evidence. Assuming God into existence doesn’t support your argument. If you want to argue that God has good reasons, you must first show us that God exists.

An alternative argument you could make is to enumerate possible good reasons God might have for allowing the disaster. And don’t say, “Well—who knows?—it might be this.” No, you must make a convincing, non-hand-waving argument showing us how things could plausibly be objectively better after the disaster. Otherwise, why imagine God might have good reasons if you can’t come up with any?

Second, apologists look at the value of natural disasters. Maybe they’ll say that earthquakes are part of a natural process that recycles minerals. Or that hurricanes are just part of the weather cycle, and we don’t complain about that part of the weather that’s gentle spring rains and warm summer sun, do we?

This is the inept argument that desperate apologists like John Lennox make to assist his impotent god. It’s actually humans’ fault, he’ll add, because we build in flood plains or near coasts or on fault lines.

(Okay, today we can blame humans for some of this, though it would’ve been nice for God to have guided city placement centuries ago, before we knew the science.)

And if earthquakes are necessary, God could just clip their magnitude. The energy of a magnitude 8 earthquake could be channeled into 30,000 magnitude 5 earthquakes (the second option is a gentler way to release the same amount of energy). Tornadoes could be steered away from towns. Rainstorms could be spread out to avoid flash floods. Droughts and locusts could just be eliminated. God is magic, remember?

Natural disasters with natural explanations are evidence that God doesn’t exist.

To be continued.

Why doesn’t God heal amputees?
Because they don’t deserve their arms,
they deserve to die.
That’s what the Bible teaches.
Sorry if you don’t like that!
— video blogger VenomFangX

Isaac Newton and the Bible

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Isaac Newton knew what it was like to be in lockdown due to an epidemic.

In July 1665, Cambridge had its first death from bubonic plague, an epidemic that had been discovered in London a few months earlier. This would be called the Great Plague of London, and it killed roughly 25 percent of that city.

Cambridge University shut down in response. Newton had just received his bachelor’s degree from Trinity College, but he had more schooling planned. At age 23, he retreated to his family home 60 miles away.

Though he had been an unremarkable student, Newton used his forced solitude productively. He returned to Cambridge 18 months later after having developed the foundations of differential and integral calculus, the law of gravity, the laws of motion, optics, and more. This period has been called an annus mirabilis, a year of wonders.

This work culminated in the publication of Principia Mathematica in 1687, a work that has been called by Encyclopedia Britannica, “not only Newton’s masterpiece but also the fundamental work for the whole of modern science.”

Could you improve upon the discoveries in the Principia? Albert Einstein did with the theories of Special Relativity and General Relativity, but that was after more than two centuries of scientific progress. As important as Relativity has been for modern physics and cosmology, the Apollo program didn’t need it to land astronauts on the moon in 1969 and bring them safely home. Newton was enough.

Newton’s book vs. God’s book

But ask that question about God’s book, the Bible: could you improve upon the claims and demands in the Bible?

Any of us could. To begin, the Bible is full of scientific errors. Apologists claim falsely that the Bible documents science that was unknown to the people of the time. And the Bible is just wrong about many claims it makes about nature. If God created our reality, he was inept at explaining it.

The Bible doesn’t give the basics of germ theory or even the simple rules of hygiene that could keep people healthy. The highlight is to tell us that God is grossed out by poop: “Have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your excrement…. Your camp must be holy, so that [God] will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you” (Deuteronomy 23:13–14). The Bible doesn’t even give the simple recipe for soap.

The Bible documents God’s demand for praise and worship. If it’s obnoxious when Donald Trump does it, how could it sound right coming from God?

The Bible is full of contradictions. For example, it tells us that everyone sins (but “No one who is born of God sins,” according to 1 John 5:18a). Women followers informed the disciples of the empty tomb (or did they?). No one can see God (but Moses did). The Bible promises terrible ordeals on the faithful (or does it promise that no harm will befall them?). God punishes people for their ancestors’ sins (or maybe not).

The need for the crucifixion of Jesus as a human sacrifice to satisfy God’s anger makes no sense. If humans are imperfect, it’s the fault of Maker. If humans make mistakes, God can forgive them, as we do.

God’s immorality deserves the most outrage. God demanded genocide. God demanded child sacrifice. God lied. God even supported slavery, both indentured servitude for fellow Israelites and slavery for life for foreigners.

God should reread his own Ten Commandments.

What does it say about the Bible that any of us could list many problems with God’s holy book or the religion it supports? Does it look like the result of the inspiration of an all-good, omniscient god, or does it look like just a manmade book?

See also: Silver-Bullet Arguments Against Christianity

Acknowledgement: Sam Harris suggested this comparison of Newton’s Principia Mathematica with the Bible.

[A God] who could have made every [child] happy,
yet never made a single happy one; …
who gave His angels painless lives,
yet cursed his other children with biting miseries
and maladies of mind and body; …
who mouths morals to other people,
and has none himself;
who frowns upon crimes,
yet commits them all;
who created man without invitation,
then tries to shuffle the responsibility
for man’s acts upon man,
instead of honorably placing it
where it belongs, upon himself….
— Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

Christianity is so confusing it needs encyclopedias of defenses

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Have you seen books that catalog attacks on the confusing Christian position? There are responses, which are in effect encyclopedias of Christian defenses. That these books are even necessary is a weakness in the Christian position.

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world begins here):

15. Because there’s a book called The Big Book of Bible Difficulties

The Big Book of Bible Difficulties by Geisler and Howe is indeed big—it’s 624 pages long. Another in this category is The Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Gleason Archer. Another is Hard Sayings of the Bible. Another is Alleged Discrepancies of the Bible. These books try to respond to the many contradictions and nonsense in the Bible to assure Christians that their faith is valid.

The very existence of Christian apologetics admits that God isn’t obvious, despite the Bible’s promise otherwise.

Why is the Bible so confusing that this category of book exists? (I want to ask why Christians are content to accept that their all-knowing god couldn’t communicate his story simply and unambiguously, but that’s a topic for another day.) The dictates of an actual perfect god would be simple and unambiguous. By contrast, the “perfect” Bible is so flexible that it has spawned 45,000 denominations of Christianity.

We can look just at the four gospels’ accounts of the resurrection to see the problem. The Bible gives multiple answers to each of the questions below.

  • When was the Last Supper—was it the Passover meal (as the synoptic gospels say) or did it happen one day earlier (as John says)?
  • What were the last words of Jesus?
  • Did zombies rise from their graves when Jesus died?
  • Who buried Jesus?
  • How many women were at the tomb?
  • Did Mary Magdalene recognize Jesus?
  • Did the women tell anyone about what they’d seen?
  • Could Jesus’s followers touch him after he rose?

The accounts in the gospels don’t sound like journalism or history, but since they must be for most Christians, apologists are happy to step in to reshape the facts to be more agreeable.

We can go beyond these books that try to paper over the Bible’s embarrassments. There are huge books on systematic theology (fundamental Christian doctrine), some over 1000 pages long. The web site GotQuestions.org brags that it has answers for more than half a million questions about Christianity. And the very existence of Christian apologetics admits that God isn’t obvious, despite the Bible’s promise otherwise.

See also: Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses”

Here’s a bonus argument:

16. Because Christianity can’t be derived from first principles

Suppose you asked Christians about their religion but asked repeated “Why?” questions to uncover the foundation of their claims. Why is God in three persons? Why is a rainbow evidence of God? Why did Jesus have to die to give us access to heaven?

Eventually, these questions will wander their way to the same few foundational answers, where the questions stop: Christianity is the way it is because of tradition, because the Bible says so, because of the insights of or divine revelations to a leader, or some other “Just because” kind of answer. None of this is like a scientific experiment where you could duplicate the procedure to verify the results (or prove them wrong). Religious dogma is believed because of inertia, not because of evidence or repeatability. Its claims aren’t objective, and they can’t be derived from reality.

Imagine a global catastrophe wiped out all traces of religion and science, but a tiny remnant of people remained alive to repopulate the earth and recreate a scientifically advanced society. They would roughly retrace the steps we took to develop modern science and technology. Of course, they would describe things differently and their progress would be different than ours, but they would describe the very same laws of motion, gravity, and thermodynamics; the same theories of evolution, relativity, and the Big Bang; and so on.

But would they duplicate the same Christianity, Islam, Scientology, Falun Gong, Jediism, and all the others? Of course not. Religion is what people say it is. It’s disconnected from objective reality while science is bound to objective reality.

Here’s another thought experiment. Imagine a naïve religious seeker, unaware of the specifics of any organized religion, who meditated or observed his way to Christianity or any other religion. This never happens.

The Bible says otherwise:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:20)

But the Bible is wrong. That Christianity is ungrounded by testable events argues that we don’t live in a God World. Christianity can’t be recreated from objective facts within nature. It’s just a meme that got passed along. Break the chain, and it’d be lost.

See also: Christianity Can’t be Deduced from Nature

Which reason will be next? Will we make it all the way to the promised 25 reasons we don’t live in a world with a god? Stay tuned!

Leave each one his touch of folly;
it helps to lighten life’s burden which,
if he could see himself as he is,
might be too heavy to carry.
— John Lancaster Spalding

The Bible on child sacrifice

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Can a Bible verse be used to trump another Bible verse?

I recently responded to “Christ’s Crucifixion Isn’t Child Sacrifice,” a post from Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry. Amy Hall of STR countered with the suggestion that I read her 2015 post, “God Didn’t Command Child Sacrifice.” I used one passage to argue for God’s demand of child sacrifice, but she wants to use a different one.

Let’s jump in.

Exodus 22

Hall starts with the passage I used, Exodus 22:29–30.

You must give me the firstborn of your sons. Do the same with your cattle and your sheep. Let them stay with their mothers for seven days, but give them to me on the eighth day.

Unlike some of the Old Testament passages that demand a child sacrifice, there is no addendum here insisting the Israelites redeem the sons (that is, to sacrifice a lamb or donate money instead of killing the baby). Note also that the sons are treated the same as cattle or sheep—that is, killed and burned as a sacrifice. This eliminates the idea that they’d be devoted to God as priests.

Hall wants to reinterpret the child sacrifice question with the lens of another passage, Exodus 13:12–13:

You are to give over to the Lord the first offspring of every womb. All the firstborn males of your livestock belong to the Lord. Redeem with a lamb every firstborn donkey, but if you do not redeem it, break its neck. Redeem every firstborn among your sons.

So we have two passages, and Hall prefers the one that makes God look less evil. Is that an honest following of the evidence or are we just seeing an agenda to make God look less evil?

Hall justifies her choice by handwaving that the Ex. 22 passage tells us when to do it, not how to do it. The how was given nine chapters back.

I have higher standards for the Almighty. I can’t imagine an omniscient god giving incomplete instructions with the hope that the listener would put the scattered clues together.

She says about the Ex. 13 passage, “I don’t know how that could be clearer.” I agree that it’s clear, but then that’s true for Ex. 22 as well. “Give me the firstborn of your sons”—what could be clearer?

A Jewish source, theTorah.com, agrees: “On its own terms, the simplest interpretation of [Exodus 22:29] is that it requires the slaughter of all firstborn sons.” We can consider various interpretations, but don’t pretend that Ex. 22:29 doesn’t say what it plainly says.

The Passover

Hall points out that what’s happening in the story is relevant. Exodus 13 tells of the Israelites leaving Egypt after the ten plagues. That final plague was the death of the firstborn, and chapter 13 defines the annual Passover ritual that commemorates God passing over the Israelites’ homes (and only killing Egyptian firstborn children) and freeing the Israelites from bondage. Offering the firstborn to God and then redeeming it commemorates the Passover.

But we’re still stuck with Exodus 22:28, set in the middle of a long list of laws, not the Passover ritual, which clearly demands the firstborn males with no option to redeem.

You could argue that this law couldn’t have been widely followed because it’s too much of a tax on the population, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that God demanded child sacrifice.

You could argue that it would be out of character for a loving God, but this is the God who drowned the world. This is the god who demanded genocide on the six tribes who were living in Canaan (Deuteronomy 20:16–17). This is the god who said that you could devote people, animals, or property to him but cautioned, “No person devoted to destruction may be ransomed; they are to be put to death” (Leviticus 27:29).

You could argue that we’re at an impasse, with Hall preferring Ex. 13 and me preferring Ex. 22, but I’m happy to acknowledge that Ex. 13, in its context, is clearly against child sacrifice. This is just another example of contradicting passages in the Bible, which makes the Bible an ambiguous and unreliable authority.

Hateful verses

As a tangent, I’d like to consider two sentences in Hall’s article. First, Exodus 13:15:

[God said how to explain the Passover:] “When Pharaoh stubbornly refused to let us go, the Lord killed the firstborn of both people and animals in Egypt.”

But this misery was unnecessary. This is coming from an omnipotent god, a god who could have simply teleported the Israelites out of Egypt. Or convinced the Pharaoh to make the Israelites citizens with equal rights. Or a thousand other alternatives to killing every Egyptian family’s firstborn child. Is this the pro-life God Christians eagerly quote?

God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so that Pharaoh’s fall would be more dramatic and God’s resulting glory and reputation would be greater (Ex. 9:13–16). The Christian response might be, “Well, yeah—that works for me,” but skeptics are horrified at this God-sized ego.

See also: God as Donald Trump: Trying to Make Sense of Praise and Worship

Is that an honest following of the evidence or are we just seeing an agenda to make God look less evil?

The second sentence is from Hall, explaining the parallels between the command to sacrifice newborns and the tenth plague.

God was merciful to the firstborn of the Israelites by not destroying them along with the firstborn of the Egyptians, and as a result, now they all belong to Him. 

God was merciful? “You should thank me for not killing you” is what you hear in the context of battered woman syndrome. Is this the God-is-love guy that Christians are so proud of?

And consider “they all belong to Him.” God established the rules for slavery, so owning people is fine with him, but I think this is talking more about life as a gift from God. The idea is that if life is God’s gift, he could yank it back as he chose. William Lane Craig said it this way, “God is under no obligation whatsoever to extend my life for another second. If He wanted to strike me dead right now, that’s His prerogative.”

But that’s not how gifts work. If I gave a painting to someone or donated it to a museum, it’s not my painting anymore. It’s no longer mine just as if I had sold it. Anyone’s gift of life is no longer God’s to take away.

What sense does sacrifice make?

Let’s conclude by considering the idea of sacrifice itself. The Bible says 37 times that God loves the pleasing aroma of burning flesh, and “food offering” appears 64 times.

Think about the mechanics of these offerings. Killing animals and burning the carcasses to send that life force through rising smoke to a god up in the sky? Sure, Chemosh or Moloch and the other make-believe gods of neighboring tribes might get their make-believe mojo this way, but do 21st-century Christians really want to say that their Yahweh has this same Bronze Age metabolism? The creator of 200 billion galaxies is fed from animal sacrifices from one region of one planet? How is Yahweh the one and only god when he’s constrained by the limited imagination of an ancient holy book?

Religion is like a man in a dark room
looking for a black cat
that isn’t there …
but he’s found it.
— seen on the internet