Paul Vitz was a professor of psychology. His Faith of the Fatherless (1999) attempts to use Freudian techniques to conclude that “modern atheism originated in the irrational, psychological needs of a few prominent thinkers.”
Which Freud are we talking about?  
Presumably this is the same Sigmund Freud who concluded that, according to Karen Armstrong in A History of God, “a personal god was nothing more than an exalted father-figure: desire for such a deity sprang from infantile yearnings for a powerful, protective father, for justice and fairness and for life to go on forever.” Armstrong continues:

[Freud concluded that] God is simply a projection of these desires, feared and worshipped by human beings out of an abiding sense of helplessness. Religion belonged to the infancy of the human race; it had been a necessary stage in the transition from childhood to maturity. It had promoted ethical values which were essential to society. Now that humanity had come of age, however, it should be left behind.

What is it—is Freud a reliable critic of religion or not? Vitz wants it both ways.
The defective father hypothesis
Vitz uses Freudian thinking to conclude that atheists are atheists because of the absence of a good father. Disappointment in one’s earthly father leads to a rejection of the heavenly Father.
He’s yet another Christian apologist who concludes that atheists don’t exist. They’re actually theists. They aren’t atheists because there’s no god; rather, they know that God exists but suppress or reject that knowledge for psychological reasons.
Vitz supports his “defective father hypothesis” by listing believers such as Blaise Pascal, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who had present and loving fathers and atheists such as Voltaire, Freud, and (wait for it … !) Hitler who had absent or unloving fathers.
(There’s plenty of reason to argue that Hitler was actually a believer, but let’s ignore that for now.)
This is the argument of a scientist? This is no survey; it’s cherry picking. This correlation that he’s selected can be easily turned around: it’s not that atheists are driven by a poor home life to petulantly reject the Father who is obviously there; rather, Christians are coddled by the strong and wise guidance of their father, and when they mature, they are too weak to face reality and so project a supernatural extension of that caring father onto the universe.
If I could provide the opposite list—famous Christians who had no father figure and famous atheists who did—would Vitz reject his hypothesis? Of course not. He would accuse me of biased selection of the examples, and he’d be right, but why is it okay for him but not me?
Epitaph
What’s especially offensive about this, and again we’re in the realm of anecdote and not statistics, is that my own father was present, strong, and loving. He also put a strong value on education and reason, and I’m the result. I could argue that this and many other examples refute Vitz, but he and his hypothesis are a waste of time.
I’d rather pass on a powerful story written by Charles Handy, an English economist and author. He describes the funeral of his father, a quiet and modest man who had lived his life as an unambitious minister of a small church in Ireland.

When [my father] died, I rushed back to Ireland for the funeral. Held in the little church where he had spent most of his life, it was supposed to be a quiet family affair. But it turned out to be neither quiet nor restricted to the family. I was astounded by the hundreds of people who came, on such short notice, from all corners of the British Isles. Almost every single person there came up to me and told me how much my father had meant to them—and how deeply he had touched their lives.
That day, I stood by his grave and wondered, Who would come to my funeral? How many lives have I touched? Who knows me as well as all of these people who knew this quiet man?
When I returned to London, I was a deeply changed man. Later that year, I resigned my tenured professorship. More important, I dropped my pretense of being someone other than who I was. I stopped trying to be a hot shot. I decided to do what I could to make a genuine difference in other people’s lives. Whether I have succeeded, only my own funeral will tell.
I only wish that I could have told my father that he was my greatest teacher.

My father would have been 84 today.
Photo credit: Kevin

Have you heard of the “Paul is dead” rumor that started around the time of the release of the Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road album? Paul McCartney had supposedly died and been replaced by a lookalike several years earlier. Fans eager for confirmation discovered clues in this and earlier albums.

• The cover of the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) shows the four Beatles dressed as if to a funeral. In flowers in the foreground is “Beatles” and a guitar—Paul’s instrument. The back cover shows the four Beatles with Paul the only one facing backwards.
• The song “Revolution 9” on the White Album (1968) contains the phrase “number nine” repeated many times, but this becomes “turn me on, dead man” when played backwards. There are also clues in other songs.
• The Abbey Road cover (pictured) of the four Beatles crossing a street shows Paul (second from left) portrayed differently once again. He’s taking a step with his right foot, while the others are all stepping with the left foot. And here again, we have the elements of a funeral: George, wearing jeans, is dressed as a grave digger; Paul, with bare feet, is the dearly departed; Ringo, in black, is a mourner or the undertaker; and John, dressed in white, is the preacher or a heavenly symbol.

You tend to find what you seek, and fans have found many more clues, though Beatles publicists rejected the story.
What could explain this? Could there have been no deliberate clues at all in these albums? Of course! The covers could simply be enigmatic or artistic, with motivated fans cobbling together what seems to them to be clues. They could find their own meaning, even if none was put there by anyone.
Comparison with the Bible
We see this with Bible interpretation: you find what you seek. Anything that contradicts the Christian’s particular view of the gospel can be reinterpreted and made captive to that view.

• The idea of the Trinity took four centuries to congeal, with many (now) heretical views discarded along the way. Still, the modern Christian might see the Trinity plain as day in the New Testament, even seeing Old Testament polytheism as instead referring to the Trinity.
• Jesus talks about secrets: “The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that, ‘though seeing, they may not see; though hearing, they may not understand’” (Luke 8:9–10). “Secrets”? Mystery religions like Mithraism or Gnosticism have secrets available only to the initiated, but what aspects of Christianity are secret?
• We find the influence of Marcion. “No one has seen the father but the son” (John 1:18) contradicts the stories of Abraham and Moses seeing God, unless you accept Marcionite thinking in which the father of Jesus is a different god than the one in the Old Testament.
• Also consider Jesus’ comment to a mob: “Is it not written in your Law …” (John 10:34). “Your law”? Wouldn’t Jewish Jesus say that it was our law? Not if he comes from a different god.
• John 20:26 says, “Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them.” This is docetism, the heresy that Jesus had a spirit body and only seemed to be human.
• Or consider the curious “the last will be first, and the first will be last” from Matt. 20:16. Sure, some bad people are at the top of pile, but aren’t there any good people who became rich or powerful by honest toil? Not according to apocalypticism, in which our world is ruled by the bad guy and the next world by the good guy. Anyone doing well in this world can only be doing so by being in league with the bad ruler, which is why everything is turned upside down in the next world.

Each of these odd ideas is absorbed, Borg-like, into the presupposition. Christianity becomes the ultimate unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Religious belief as conspiratorial thinking
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky talks about something similar, the “self-sealing” nature of conspiracy theories. Imagine an inflatable lifeboat in which any puncture would quickly seal itself: “Any evidence against the conspiracy is interpreted to be in actual fact evidence for the conspiracy.”
For example, consider the statement: The arguments claiming that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job are pretty laughable. Ah, that just shows that the 9/11 Truth movement itself is part of a bigger conspiracy!
If the U.S. moon landing was a hoax, the Soviets had the technology to discover it and would’ve been eager to point out the lie. Ah, that just shows that the Soviets were in on the hoax!
The resurrection of Jesus just steals an element from the stories of prior dying-and-rising gods. That it wasn’t new suggests that it was made up. Ah, but that’s exactly what Satan wants you to think! And why he put those stories into history—just to fool you. (This was Justin Martyr’s argument).
But what about the verses above that are nicely explained by our New Testament being a mosaic of ideas, the aftermath of a tug of war between many different ideologies? Ah, God is simply trying to test us! His message is plain to those with the right faith.
Someone determined to hold onto their presuppositions ride in a self-sealing ideological lifeboat, but they’ve also insulated themselves against any information showing their initial views to be wrong.

I reject your reality and substitute my own.
— Doctor Who television show (1974)?

Photo credit: Wikipedia

We passed the seven billion mark for the world’s population in 2011. Some say: No problem; God will provide. Climate change? Peak oil? Water shortages? God will make it all right.
Let’s consider one of these environmental problems, overpopulation. One of television’s venerable reality shows is 19 Kids and Counting, now beginning its 11th season. It’s the story of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and their 19 children. No, they don’t adopt needy children, they make them the old-fashioned way.
Their web site is full of Christian talk, links to Creationist sites, and ads for Christian products. Here they talk about birth control.

We prayed and studied the Bible and found a host of references that told us God considered children a gift, a blessing, and a reward. Yet we had considered having another child an inconvenience [by the wife taking birth control pills] during that busy time in our lives, and we had taken steps to prevent it from happening.
We weren’t sure if Michelle could have any more children after the miscarriage, but we were sure we were going to stop using the pill. In fact we agreed we would stop using any form of birth control and let God decide how many children we would have.

This is the thinking of the Quiverfull movement, whose name comes from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” From Quiverfull.com:

We exalt Jesus Christ as Lord, and acknowledge His headship in all areas of our lives, including fertility. We exist to serve those believers who trust the Lord for family size….

What kind of childish logic is this? Maybe during the Bronze Age, people could say, “We’ll let God decide how many children we’ll have,” but today we know very well where children come from and how to avoid them.
If you drink poison, you’re not letting God decide whether you live or not; you’re deciding. If you wave a gun in a bank, you’re not letting God decide whether you get arrested or not; you’re deciding. And if you have frequent unprotected sex, you’re not letting God decide how many children you have; you’re deciding to have as many as biologically possible.
Quiverfull aficionados reject all forms of birth control. But if vaccines, antibiotics, and a clean water supply aren’t messing with God’s plan, why would contraception—not killing an embryo but simply preventing it from happening—be a problem?
Back to the Duggar family, some have defended them by noting that they’re paying their way. They’re not asking for handouts, so what’s the problem?
The problem is that the planet has a finite carrying capacity. There’s only so much oil, fresh water regenerates only so fast, and so on. To make it worse, Americans live a rich life compared to most other people. For example, the resources that support these 19 kids, assuming they consume at the rate of average Americans, could support 600 average Kenyans.
“God will provide” might satisfy a child, but adults should know better.
In a discouraging article that concludes that religious believers will simply outbreed their competitors, author Tom Rees says:

In Israel and Palestine, both orthodox Jews and religious Muslims have astonishingly high birth rates, at least in part as a consequence of waging war “by other means.” Throughout the Islamic world, those who have the most extreme beliefs are also the most likely to endorse the desirability of large families.

That other guy thinks he’ll win by having more children? We’ll have even more than that—we’ll fight fire with fire!
We find similar thinking in the U.S. Again, from Quiverfull.com:

Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they’re building for God.

But is that the way to play the game—we just descend to the other guy’s level? Is there no role for reason here? You don’t fight fire with fire, you fight it with water!

Man once surrendering his reason,
has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous,
and like a ship without rudder,
is the sport of every wind.
— Thomas Jefferson

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 10/31/11.)

You can leave a company with two weeks’ notice. You can leave a club or association by giving notice. But leaving Christianity often brings consequences.
What does your departure say to your fellow parishioners, and how will they respond?
For example, Rich Lyons (from the Living After Faith podcast) left his 20-year career as a Pentecostal minister. His departure cost him everything: respect in the community, house, job, career, marriage. He needed five years to get over his PTSD. And his experience is not uncommon for those leaving some denominations.
Why should it be this way? When you leave a company, they give you a going-away party. You can still hang out with your old workmates. Why isn’t it the same when you leave a Christian community? Why instead are apostates often cut off from their friends within the church and even their families?
I got some insight into this from an anecdote by Stephen King. In his book On Writing, he talks about a different kind of outcast. In small-town Maine in the early sixties, life wasn’t easy for a socially-awkward girl he calls Dodie.
For the first year and a half of high school, Dodie wore a white blouse, long black skirt, and knee socks to school every day. The same blouse, skirt, and socks. Every day. The blouse gradually became thinner and yellowed, the skirt frayed and patched.
The other girls kept her in her social place, first with concealed taunts, then with overt teasing. If you can’t earn a spot above someone else, you can push that person beneath you, and the other girls made sure that Dodie stayed in her place at the bottom.
But something happened during Christmas break sophomore year. Whether because of money she’d saved up or a Christmas windfall, Dodie returned to school changed. She wore stockings over newly shaved legs, her hair was permed, and her clothes were new—a fashionably short skirt and a soft wool sweater. She even had a confident new attitude to match her appearance.
This change in the social order couldn’t stand. The other girls didn’t celebrate her accomplishment. They turned on her. Under the relentless teasing, her new smile and the light in her eyes faded.
By the end of that first day, she was the same mouse at the lowest rung, scurrying the halls between classes, her books pressed to her chest and her eyes downcast.
As the semester progressed, Dodie wore the same clothes. Every day. They faded as their predecessors had, she kept to her previous place, and the teasing returned to normal. Someone had made a break for it and tried to escape, but they’d been brought back in line. The social structure was intact once again.
Christian apostates are different because they successfully leave, but some Christian churches take the next best option. Potential apostates within these communities know that they would leave behind more than just the customs and obligations of their sect. As Rich Lyons experienced, these communities use the stick of shunning, in which friends and even family must avoid all contact with apostates.
Thankfully, this draconian punishment is a threat for a small minority of Christians, but Church congregations are societies, just like high schools. High school hierarchies aren’t something you can just walk away from, like membership in a Rotary Club or art museum. High school societies can feel threatened and respond, and the same is true for churches.
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Jesus tells the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11–32. We’re all familiar with it—a son demands his share of his inheritance and then runs off to some foreign land and wastes it. Destitute, he finally sees the error of his ways and decides to return. He throws himself on his father’s mercy, but the father forgives him in an instant and celebrates his return.
I’m against much of what the Bible stands for, but here’s a story that has real value. It has become a universally understood metaphor in Western civilization, but the Bible is an odd place to find it. Perhaps God might do well by reading it and resetting his own moral compass by its wisdom.
By contrast, the Old Testament has many one-strike-and-you’re-out stories about God. For example, Uzzah touched the Ark of the Covenant to steady it when the oxen stumbled, but God zapped him dead. There’s Onan, who “spilled his seed.” Don’t forget that poor schlub who picked up sticks on the Sabbath. And, of course, Adam and Eve when they ate the forbidden fruit.
This isn’t the “compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love” God that other parts of the Bible imagine (Ps. 103:8). God has a short fuse and isn’t at all forgiving, quite the opposite of the father in the parable.
If the moral of the parable is that we need to forgive, even after we’ve been grossly wronged, why can’t God set the example? Is he drunk with power, a deity who can do whatever the heck he likes? That’s the message from Job.
Some apologists will argue that it’s ridiculous to try to understand God’s actions with our puny minds. So what if God’s approach makes no sense? God is inscrutable and we should just assume that whatever God does is good and right by definition. The first problem is that this presupposes God and interprets the facts to fit. The second is that Christians who opt for this route must avoid labels for God that pretend that they do understand his actions, like “just” or “good.”
Imagine a Christian responding to something bad happening by saying that we simple humans can’t understand God’s reasoning. But when something good happens, of course, that same Christian is certain that he understands God’s thought process. I got the new job; the Americans conquer Iraq; a single baby is found alive in a crashed airplane—God’s generosity is boundless and his purpose is clear!
Use the “God can’t be understood” defense if you want, but be consistent. If we can’t understand why God allowed the Holocaust, then we can’t understand why he allowed the survivor in the plane crash.
But to get back to the point, why does God not follow the example of the father in the Prodigal Son parable? If we’ve wronged God, why can’t he just forgive us with no strings attached? Why the song and dance about Jesus dying for our sins? Alternatively, given God’s headstrong nature, why is that parable in the Bible?
Incredibly, I’ve heard apologists try to hide God from this spotlight by saying that the moral of the story isn’t that generous forgiveness is a good thing. No, the point of the story is that you must ask for forgiveness.
They sacrifice a noble story to try to salvage the logic of their religion. Sad.
In this Easter season, why imagine that a human sacrifice must be given to appease a savage Old Testament deity? Let’s see the Prodigal Son story as a far more healthy response to being wronged.

An atheist believes that a hospital should be built instead of a church.
An atheist believes that deed must be done instead of prayer said.
An atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death.
He wants disease conquered, poverty vanished, war eliminated.
— Madalyn Murray O’Hair

Photo credit: Hicks