Not even CHRISTIANS take Christianity seriously

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Think about what it would look like if Christians took their Christianity seriously. Really believed it. What would that look like?

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):

14. Because not even Christians take their religion seriously

Christianity makes bold claims: that prayers are answered. That God protects his own. That Jesus heals disease. It’s one thing to blithely support these claims, as some Christians feel obliged to do, but it gets messy when those claims crash into real-world facts.

Take, for example, the claim that Jesus miraculously heals disease. A New Zealand church put up a billboard in 2012 that said, “Jesus Heals Cancer,” but if you’re advertising an important claim, belief is not enough. You need the evidence to back it up, and the government authority in charge of advertising unsurprisingly concluded that the evidence wasn’t there. One observer objected, “As the mother of a three-year-old boy who has spent the past 18 months fighting against leukemia, I find the above billboard offensive and upsetting.”

Most Christians expect a cultivated person to avoid actually testing Christianity’s claims (even if they’re begging to be tested). The problem arises when someone doesn’t have the good taste to resist that temptation.

In another example, a Pennsylvania couple let their two-year-old child die of bacterial pneumonia in 2009 when they chose prayer instead of medicine. Knowing firsthand that prayer doesn’t heal, they prayed a second child to death in 2013.

Contrasting a similar series of preventable childhood deaths in Oregon with the national motto “In God We Trust,” an American Humanist article made an incisive observation. In response to Oregon’s removing laws protecting parents who reject medical care for their children in favor of prayer, it said,

[These changes to the law are] tantamount to the state saying, “Sure, it looks great on a coin, but come on you idiot, it’s not as though this god stuff actually works.”

Cases where parents actually believed Christianity’s claims make the point. Other Christians not part of their denomination look on these parents’ actions with horror.

Lightning rods

Think about a church steeple with a lightning rod. The steeple proclaims that God exists, and the lightning rod says that it can reduce lightning damage. Which claim has the evidence?

In its early days, some saw the lightning rod as interfering in God’s divine plan. If God wanted lightning to burn down a building, who was Man to interfere? When an earthquake hit New England in 1755, one pastor concluded that it was God’s punishment: “In Boston are more [lightning rods] erected than anywhere else in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God.”

Incredibly, more than three centuries later and with the benefit of modern science, Christian blowhards like Pat Robertson still pretend to a ready audience that this or that group of sinners has caused the latest natural disaster.

Possibly even more ironic than a church with a lightning rod is a Popemobile with bulletproof glass (necessary after the 1981 assassination attempt on John Paul II). Christians’ actions speak louder than words, and they make it clear that in any situation where you expect God to step in, you will be disappointed.

And it goes beyond lightning rods. Why would churches pay for insurance? That churches are damaged about as often as any other category of building is an irony Christians don’t seem eager to confront.

It’s one thing to blithely support these claims, as some Christians feel obliged to do, but it gets messy when those claims crash into real-world facts.

Do Christians really believe in heaven? English author Ian McEwan neatly contrasted seeing a loved one off at a funeral versus seeing them off on a cruise ship. When you wave to friends on a cruise ship, you know that you’ll see them again. No one thinks that they’re going away and never coming back, though at a funeral, people might be sobbing uncontrollably. The priest can offer comfort with “You’ll soon see them in heaven,” but few really believe it.

In perhaps the most extreme collision of Christian faith with reality, one man filed suit against Satan in U.S. district court in United States ex rel. Gerald Mayo v. Satan and His Staff (1971). The plaintiff charged: “Satan has on numerous occasions caused plaintiff misery and unwarranted threats, against the will of plaintiff, that Satan has placed deliberate obstacles in his path and has caused plaintiff’s downfall.”

Christians must laugh at this like the rest of us do, but why would they if indeed the Dark Lord causes people real injury in the real world? This is like the movie Oh, God!, where God-believing people couldn’t believe that God (played by George Burns) would actually show himself. People are so comfortable with zero evidence for the most important person in the universe that they balk at the idea of real, convincing evidence.

Taking the Bible literally vs. seriously

Robert M. Price* used Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life to illustrate taking the Bible literally vs. taking the Bible seriously. Warren said that the Noah story is literally true. But what about the self-contradicting inconsistencies in the story? What about its unscientific claims? What about the cruelty? These don’t trouble Warren, who cheerfully imagines God saying about Noah, “This guy brings me pleasure. He makes me smile. I’ll start over with his family.”** And by “start over,” he means murdering millions of people by drowning.

Warren takes the story literally, which means that he’ll assure you that it happened. But he avoids taking it seriously so that he needn’t lose sleep over the illogic and the violence.

You can just believe that Tinker Bell will get well, but there are standards in the real world. A real god who wanted to interact with us would provide real evidence. Christians’ weak support for God in the real world make clear that they know that we don’t have it.

To be continued.

I cannot conceive otherwise than that He, the Infinite Father,
expects or requires no worship or praise from us,
but that He is even infinitely above it.
— Benjamin Franklin

* Robert M. Price, The Reason-Driven Life, pp 105–6.

** Rick Warren, The Purpose-Driven Life, p. 71.

Jesus as a child sacrifice?

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What do you do if you’re living in the 21st century, but you’re stuck worshipping a god from thirty centuries earlier with morals to match? Let’s critique how Alan Shlemon of the Stand to Reason ministry does in his recent piece, Christ’s Crucifixion Isn’t Child Sacrifice.

Shlemon begins by lamenting that Christianity is often seen as out of touch. He says,

Many professing Christians are uncomfortable with God killing his Son as the penalty for our crimes. They see this as child sacrifice. From their perspective, it’s impossible for such a doctrine to be consistent with God’s character when it’s so clear that God abhors the killing of innocent children.

He doesn’t, but we’ll get to that.

Shlemon moves on to the “disturbing new trend of ‘deconstructing’ faith.”

In my observation, it is the process of pulling apart aspects of the Christian faith that are undesirable and aligning one’s doctrines with culture or one’s own personal beliefs. By contrast, the biblical (and healthier) approach is to correct mistaken theology by conforming it to what Scripture teaches.

I find it hard to believe that you don’t, at least a little, shape your Christianity to adapt to your own deeply felt personal beliefs. For example, I doubt you take God’s rules for chattel slavery in Leviticus 25:44–6 with a cheerful, “Huh—who knew that slavery for life was A-OK with God? Oh well, you learn something new every day.” The Bible acts a bit like a mirror for most Christians, reflecting their own views.

To rein in the deconstruction and return to what he sees as orthodox Christianity, Shlemon wants to show how calling the crucifixion of Jesus a child sacrifice is inappropriate. He gives three reasons.

1. “Christ was not a child”

Granted—the crucifixion was a human sacrifice. This seems like a technicality, but sure, he’s correct that Jesus was an adult when crucified.

But we can’t glide past this point without acknowledging that God was fine with child sacrifices. He demanded them. Let’s turn to the Good Book.

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. (Exodus 22:29-30)

If you know your Bible, you may remember a caveat to this command. There is a caveat, but it’s not here. Later in that same book we find the same command,

The first offspring of every womb belongs to me, including all the firstborn males of your livestock, whether from herd or flock. (Ex. 34:19)

But then a verse later, we read, “Redeem all your firstborn sons.” That is, sacrifice livestock like a lamb instead of a baby boy.

There are two things to note here. First, that other verse, Exodus 22:29, really does demand the sacrifice of all firstborn baby boys. There is no caveat. No boys are redeemed. An angel won’t swoop in to stop the sacrifice at the last moment.

Second, how can these two contradictory commands exist in a single book? What does God want—are firstborn sons sacrificed or redeemed?

The answer is the Documentary Hypothesis, which explains the many contradictions in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The Pentateuch is an amalgam of four independently written sources named J, E, P, and D. These sources had different agendas, so it’s not surprising that they contradict.

Exodus 22:29 is from the E source, so named because God is called Elohim. Verses 34:19–20 are from the J source, where God is called Jehovah (that is, Yahweh).

This is a tangent, but Exodus 34 gives the second version of the Ten Commandments—you may remember that Moses smashed the first set after seeing the golden calf—which is a quite different from the popular version in Exodus 20 (Thou shalt not kill, or steal, or bear false witness, etc.).

It’s odd that the article didn’t explore this …

See also: God Loves the Smell of Burning Flesh: Human Sacrifice in the Bible

2. “Christ’s sacrifice was not involuntary”

Again, this is a valid point. Calling the death of Jesus a child sacrifice ignores that Jesus was willing to die, unlike a child sacrifice. But Shlemon makes an interesting observation.

Children did not consent to being sacrificed to [the Canaanite god] Molech. Their death was forced upon them.

True, but what about Yahweh’s demand for child sacrifice? God demanded Israelite firstborn, and death was forced on them. Was that any more justified?

Next, we get a quote from the New Testament to illustrate Jesus’s willingness to be sacrificed.

[Jesus said,] “I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

But Jesus didn’t lay down his life for anyone. He popped back to life after being “dead” for a day and a half. His sacrifice was minimal.

See also: 10 Reasons the Crucifixion Story Makes No Sense

3. “God condemns child sacrifice”

Again, Shlemon is correct while missing the big picture. God both condemns child sacrifice and commands it.

Shlemon’s salvo is Leviticus 20:2:

Any Israelite or any foreigner residing in Israel who sacrifices any of his children to Molech is to be put to death.

I could respond with Exodus 13:2, which we’ve analyzed above:

Consecrate to me every firstborn male. The first offspring of every womb among the Israelites belongs to me, whether human or animal.

Our game of dueling Bible verses has only proven that the Bible is contradictory and therefore unreliable. Shlemon can make an argument by carefully picking some verses and ignoring others, but must the atheist point out that that’s no honest way to read the Bible?

The discipline of hermeneutics is supposed to show the correct interpretation of the Bible. In Shlemon’s hands it is subservient to rhetoric and has become a way to force a predetermined meaning onto the Bible.

But we can’t glide past this point without acknowledging that God was fine with child sacrifices. He demanded them.

A Swiss cheese argument

Shlemon’s argument that Jesus is not a child sacrifice carries on a superficial level, but the interesting argument is what Shlemon ignored or sidestepped. Does he think we won’t notice?

Here are the real takeaways.

  • God not only makes clear that child sacrifice is allowed, he demands it for himself. God is immoral.
  • But pick different verses, and God is against child sacrifice. That means that the Pentateuch is contradictory and unreliable. The Documentary Hypothesis explains how this happened.
  • Even Christians agree that God accepts human sacrifice, since the perfect human Jesus is supposed to be a substitute for the sins of humanity. If it even makes sense to have a grudge against people that are imperfect because he made them so, can’t God just forgive? Why does he look like just another Bronze Age god who demands sacrifices?
  • In our brief tour of Bible verses, we stumbled across the two very different versions of the Ten Commandments. I wonder why those Christians who insist on public display of the Commandments only like the set that Moses smashed, not the set that was put in the Ark of the Covenant.

What explains Shlemon’s odd argument that missed all the good stuff? Perhaps he’s not read any rebuttals to his argument. Maybe he’s put himself in a Christian cocoon to be insulated from contrary ideas.

Or maybe he’s aware of these embarrassing flaws within Christianity but ignores them, both because he has no good rebuttals and because his Christian audience isn’t interested in any.

Neither is a good look.

Continue to: The Bible on child sacrifice

God thinks of us as such scumbags
that he’ll send us to hell for all eternity,
but then also needs us to glorify him
at the same time?
— Matthew Distefano, All Set Free blog

“Christianity answers life’s Big Questions!” is more irrelevant than wrong

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Answering life’s big questions may not be as significant an accomplishment as Christians think.

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):

13. Because “Christianity answers life’s Big Questions!” is irrelevant

Christians like to claim that their religion can answer the Big Questions, the questions that are fundamental to all of us. (It’s often just one Big Question, some variation of “What is the meaning of life?”) However, the power of this question and Christianity’s claim to answer it crumble under closer inspection.

This is a special case of C. S. Lewis’s Argument from Desire. Sure, we can want things—a blissful afterlife, a big brother to watch out for us, or God-given meaning for our lives—but that doesn’t mean that those things exist. The same is true with any big question: just because we can think up supernatural answers doesn’t mean that they’re valid.

Lots of people have answers. Jim Jones had answers. The Westboro Baptist Church has answers. The Mormons who knock on your door have answers.

Alister McGrath, a priest and professor of theology who wrote a book about his journey from atheism to Christianity (which I’ve responded to), explains the motivation of his quest to faith this way: “I began to realize that human beings need existential answers about meaning, purpose and value, not just an understanding about how the universe works.” We find a similar drive from apologist William Lane Craig, who traced his life’s work back to the “fear and unbearable sadness” he had as a boy when he first learned about death (which I’ve also responded to).

Can we find common ground? Perhaps we must retreat to something as obvious as this: fear of death is no evidence of the afterlife. And I doubt that even this straightforward observation is agreed to by all Christian apologists.

Christians’ big questions (“Why are we here?” or “What is my purpose?”) are actually childish questions. Few people ask why a dog is here or what its purpose is, and science makes clear that humans are just another animal. If there’s no profound supernatural reason or purpose for dogs or badgers or mosquitos, why imagine that there should be for humans?

Think of some other biggish questions. Questions like “Why can’t I fly like Superman?” or “Why can’t I move things with my mind?” are frivolous, not important. Most of us accept that this just isn’t how reality works and move on. Questions like “Is this the right person to marry?” or “Should I take that new job?” are individual, not universal. We know that there is no perfect answer.

“Why are we here?” is both universal and important, which gives it few peers, but it’s still childish. Let me clarify that asking this question, which many of us wrestle with, is itself not childish. The problem comes when we see that this is a widely asked question and conclude that it must have a bigger-than-us answer. It’s as if they imagine that this question is powerful enough to create a God-shaped vacuum that will suck a supernatural answer into existence if asked by enough people.

Let’s grow up. It doesn’t work that way.

See also: Christianity’s Bogus Claims to Answer Life’s Big Questions

McGrath explains his frustration with science: “The epistemic dilemma of humanity is that we cannot prove the things that matter most to us. We can only prove shallow truths.” But McGrath has it backwards. Show us that there’s more than life here on earth, and then we can worry about those unanswered questions. Until that point, science is the discipline that’s tackling issues that actually exist rather than chasing pink unicorns that don’t.

What McGrath labels as “shallow truths” are the fruits of science that prevent and treat disease, feed billions, and teach us about the workings of the atom, the cell, the solar system, and the universe. Religion can’t even get its act together enough to tell us how many gods there are or what their names are.

That Christians have the luxury of pondering these existential questions is proof of how comfortable their life is. These Western Christians don’t worry about their next meal or staying warm. They can think that food is created in the back room of the grocery store, that their favorite sitcom is real, or that Jesus invisibly walks next to them when life is tough. Contrast this with people who have real problems—boys used as soldiers in Congo or girls used as sex slaves in Cambodia. The “Big Questions” are the ultimate #FirstWorldProblems in a society with air bags and training wheels.

Many Christians ignore this and return, like a dog to his vomit, to insist, “Yeah, but I have the answers!”

Uh huh. Lots of people have answers. Jim Jones had answers. The Westboro Baptist Church has answers. The Mormons who knock on your door have answers. Are your answers worth listening to? Why should I listen to your answers over theirs?

You ask what you say are the most profound questions of all, and yet the answers are location specific. In Pakistan, Muslims will give you one meaning for life; in India, Hindus will give you another; and in Mississippi, fundamentalist Christians will give you another. What kind of truth depends on location?

Let’s return to the legitimacy of the question itself. To the Christian who pouts, “Yeah, but what is the purpose of my life?” I wonder if someone needs a hug. Stop being a baby and answer it yourself. You’re an adult—if your life needs a purpose, give it one!

If you want answers to these questions, they’re right in front of you. Maybe you just don’t like them. What is the meaning of life? It’s the meaning you assign to it.

Why are we here? For no more eternally significant reason than why a dog or badger or mosquito is here.

Where did we come from? Big Bang explains the matter, and evolution explains the biology.

Science does a good job at answering questions about reality, it’s just that Christians don’t always like the answers.

Continue: Not even CHRISTIANS take Christianity seriously

Religion convinces you you’re poisoned, when you’re not,
and then offers you the homeopathic remedy.
— Matt Dillahunty

Is God hidden? Or is he absent?

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What’s God’s problem? Why can’t he just make himself available to explain his plan for humanity? All we get are his minions, who have botched any actual divine message into a contradictory mess.

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):

11. Because God is absent from where we’d expect him

Victor Stenger makes the Argument from Absence, which observes that we don’t find God where we’d expect to. This is a direct response to a popular Christian argument that goes something like this: “You say God doesn’t exist? Well let me ask you this: have you looked everywhere in the universe? How do you know he doesn’t exist if you haven’t looked everywhere?”

This is simply the “You can’t prove God doesn’t exist” argument, which is off topic because the typical atheist isn’t arguing that. However, when you look in places where you’d expect to find evidence of God, and you find none, that is evidence against God.

Stenger explores eight areas.

1. Cosmology. We should find evidence for God in cosmology, but natural laws are sufficient. We find no data that needs a miraculous violation of laws. “Well-established cosmological knowledge indicates that the universe began with maximum entropy, that is, total chaos with the absence of structure. Thus the universe bears no imprint of a creator.”

2. Evolution. We should find God in the structure of living things, but evolution is a sufficient explanation. Complex organisms evolved from simpler ones in a variations-on-a-theme way. Life forms are marvelously complex, but elegance is what we’d expect to find in a designed lifeform, not mere complexity. Far from being evidence of a Creator, the junk in DNA argues for the opposite conclusion.

3. Souls. We should find evidence that God gave humans souls, but the supernatural isn’t necessary to explain consciousness, memory, or personality. There is no evidence that souls are anything more than wishful thinking.

4. Revelation. The Bible claims that God communicates through revelations, but we can’t verify this. In particular, there’s no reason to believe the supernatural claims. Even many of the un-supernatural claims like the Exodus and David’s empire now appear to be false.

5. Prayers. Jesus in the Bible claimed that prayers are reliably answered. The Bible has no qualifiers like “if you’re worthy” or “if your prayer lines up with God’s plan.” Christians make billions of prayers, but there is no convincing evidence that God answers any. Prayer is easy to study scientifically, but the comprehensive Templeton Study found no evidence of the value of prayer.

6. Inhospitable universe. The Bible makes clear that the universe was created with man in mind, but the vast majority of the universe (even the majority of the earth) is inhospitable. The universe has 200 billion galaxies, but earth was the actual purpose? There’s no evidence pushing us in that direction.

7. New information. If God communicates with people through prayer or revelation, there should be evidence of people having information they could only have gotten supernaturally. Instead, no such claim has checked out, and the Bible has no information that wouldn’t have already been available to the people who wrote it.

8. Morality. Is God the source of morality? Given the barbaric morality God displays in the Old Testament, it’s clear that he is no moral authority. For example, God said that slavery was fine, but we say that it’s abhorrent. Both can’t be right. Christians must pick.

We find no data that needs a miraculous violation of laws.

This relates to Hitchens’ Moral Challenge: identify a moral action taken or a moral sentiment uttered by a believer that couldn’t be taken or uttered by an unbeliever—something that only a believer could do and an atheist couldn’t. There is nothing.

But now think of the reverse: something terrible that only a believer would do or say. Examples from the Bible easily come to mind—Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac, for example. Today, Christians justify lots of things, from Westboro Baptist Church’s “God hates fags” to any hateful or selfish conclusion justified by “because God (or the Bible) says” such as condemning homosexuality, blocking civil rights, prohibiting stem cell research, and so on.

Could God be hiding under a rock somewhere that we haven’t peeked under? Sure, but this secretive god isn’t the Christian god who’s eager for a relationship. These are eight places where we would expect a god to be, and our searches have come up empty.

Here’s a bonus reason we don’t live in a world with a god.

12. Because physics rules out the soul and the afterlife

This is a related argument by another physicist, Sean Carroll. He notes that there is plenty of physics we don’t understand, but the physics of the everyday world is very well understood. If a soul exists, it would need to be housed with particles, and it would need particles to convey it into the afterlife. No such particles exist. Unlike “Have you looked everywhere in the universe?” we have looked everywhere for particles that interact in our daily lives. We’ve found them all, and none could explain the soul.

Here’s his critique of hiding places for the soul particle(s):

Could new particles hide from our view? Sure, but only if they were (1) very weakly interacting or (2) too heavy to create or (3) too short-lived to detect. In any of those cases, the new particle would be irrelevant to our everyday lives. (Source)

The Christian god needs physics to build a soul, but physics isn’t cooperating. This doesn’t offer much hope for the afterlife, either.

Continue for more reasons here.

It ain’t supposed to make sense; it’s faith.
Faith is something that you believe
that nobody in his right mind would believe.
— Archie Bunker, All in the Family

The universe doesn’t look designed for humans

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Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.

― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

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):

10. Because the universe doesn’t look like it exists with mankind in mind

The Bible makes clear that the universe was created for man. Unlike other living things, man was made in God’s image (Genesis 1:26) and was given authority to rule over “every living creature” (Gen. 1:28). We read something similar in Psalms: “You [God] have made them [men] a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet” (Psalm 8:5–6).

The stage is too big for the drama.

Richard Feynman

Just to eliminate the possibility that the Bible was just talking about this planet, with God having other plans for living things elsewhere in the universe, note that the Bible’s cosmological picture is completely earth-centric. From the vantage point of the earth, there is the sun, the moon, and a bunch of cute little points of light that were literally little (for example, “The stars in the sky fell to earth, as figs drop from a fig tree when shaken by a strong wind” in Revelation 6:13). The earth is clearly the focus of this universe, and Man is the purpose.

Science tells a different story. The universe is unnecessarily big for it to have been created as part of God’s plan for humanity. In addition, the universe is a very inhospitable place. The vast majority is a cold, life-forbidding vacuum. Even on earth, life is not Eden-like, and most of the earth’s surface is inhospitable to human life.

Earth is a Petri dish, and all sorts of organisms grow here, both good and bad. Along with butterflies, puppies, and robins, the earth has cholera, Ebola, and smallpox. Parasites like guinea worm, malaria, and hookworm. Famine, drought, and crop failure. Genetic diseases. Natural disasters.

Life doesn’t look like it was created by a Designer. God could’ve custom-designed each species for its niche, and yet we find sloppy, imperfect instructions that point to common descent. Whale flippers look like they evolved from a land animal’s limb, not a fish. Bat wings look like they evolved from an animal’s limb, not a bird. Each species is a variation on its ancestors, and the record of these variations is evident in the DNA. Sure, God could’ve designed life on earth in a way that mimics how evolution works, but there’s no evidence for that. All evidence points to evolution. Surprisingly, the record in DNA itself argues against the idea of supernatural design.

The apologist may respond that a huge, old universe is necessary to create life-giving conditions on earth, but the evidence doesn’t point there, either. First, it’s nature that needs second-generation stars to create the heavy elements that we need for life. God can just use magic like he did in the Genesis creation stories. (Which, by the way, is the problem with the fine-tuning argument. Nature would need conditions to be in a life-permitting range. God is omnipotent and has no such constraint.)

Second, just one galaxy is enough, and our universe contains roughly 200 billion galaxies. Cosmologist Sean M. Carroll argued that you’d predict none of this extravagance in God World. He said, “Everything we know about physics tells us that none of those other galaxies is necessary to explain what we have in our neighborhood here” (video @46:55).

As Richard Feynman observed, “The stage is too big for the drama.”

An apologist might try to salvage the God hypothesis by saying that God just made a galaxy-making machine and stepped back to let it do its (excessive) work, or God made life as variations on a theme, leaving unintentional clues that evolution was the cause instead. But these are just excuses to save the God conclusion. God is unnecessary.

Continue with more reasons here.

How in the world can you think
that the reason for [the universe]
is to let us be here?
— Sean Carroll
(“God is not a Good Theory” @46:30)

Why would Christianity need support from the government?

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What does it say about Christians’ faith that they insist on government help to support it? Doesn’t this cast doubt on the claim that God is omnipotent?

This is the next clue that we live in a godless world (part 1 of this list of 25 reasons we don’t live in such a world here):

7. Because Christians want help from the government

The U.S. Constitution is secular, and the separation between church and state is made mandatory with the First Amendment. Even if crossing the line weren’t unconstitutional, what would it say about the weakness of Christian claims that they need to lean on the government for support?

God is the most powerful being in the universe, and yet Christians want to protect him from honest criticism.

Despite the prohibition, conservative Christianity isn’t content to stay on its side of the back seat. Think of the accommodations it already gets: the President has been obliged to issue a proclamation declaring a National Day of Prayer since 1952, “In God We Trust” is the national motto, conservative voters punish politicians who aren’t sufficiently Christian (bypassing Article VI of the Constitution, which prohibits a religious test for public office), and the IRS has for years failed to revoke churches’ nonprofit status when they violate the Johnson amendment’s prohibition against politicking from the pulpit. Conservatives are continually pushing for Creationism and prayer in public schools, “In God We Trust” displays in government buildings, Ten Commandments monuments and manger scene displays on public property, the ability to deny service and government licenses to people their god doesn’t like, and prayer to start meetings in venues from Congress down to city councils.

Christians who value the rights that Western society grants us today—voting, no slavery, no torture, non-coercive marriage, freedom of (and from) religion, freedom of speech, fair trial, democracy, and so on—must remember that these all came from secular sources. Biblically based society would have none of these. Don’t think that Christianity is the foundation on which American democracy is built. It’s the other way around: American Christianity is permitted by the Constitution.

When Christian leaders push against constitutional limits on religion, they admit that Christianity’s arguments are so weak that they need to coerce the government to support their cause. A real God wouldn’t need such help.

Here are two bonus reasons we don’t live in God World.

8. Because of unnecessary physical pain

It’s easy to see the evolutionary benefit of physical pain. If you touch something hot, you pull away quickly and minimize the damage. If you touch something sharp, you learn to avoid that. If your leg still hurts after an injury, you give it more time to heal. If you’re climbing over rough ground in a way that scrapes your palms or knees, you adapt to protect yourself.

These examples are pain that you can do something about, but what about chronic pain? There’s no value in pain from cancer, migraine headaches, phantom limbs, and many other kinds of injury or illness. This kind of pain is gratuitous, and it doesn’t push the patient to take steps to avoid or reduce injury.

We don’t have to imagine something better because it already exists. Marsili syndrome is a genetic defect that eliminates chronic pain. People with this syndrome still feel acute pain—pain from a scrape or a burn—but the useless chronic pain is gone.

Evolution explains this nicely, but it’s not what you’d expect in a world with God. If God achieves some desired result through chronic pain, it sure doesn’t look like it. The burden would be on the Christian to back this up. Even if God does achieve some good through pain, he could achieve the same good without the pain. He’s omnipotent, remember.

9. Because God gets credit for good things, but he’s never blamed for bad things

God is the most powerful being in the universe, and yet Christians want to protect him from honest criticism. Praise for his good actions is fine, but we can’t condemn anything that we find bad. As if he were a sensitive teenager, we must tiptoe around the drunk driving accident that killed a family or the tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people. God is good no matter what he does (or allows to happen), and mankind gets any blame.

Whether you get what you asked for in prayer or you don’t, God’s failures to deliver as promised in the Bible are reframed as life lessons or tough love. “God is good” is assumed up front, and any evidence is shoehorned in or ignored. The worship of a real god wouldn’t need to reject troublesome evidence.

See also: When Christians Treat God Like a Baby

Continue with more reasons here.

Believing actually led to the demise of my faith
because it caused me to expect God to do things.
– OnlySky columnist Neil Carter