Atheist whiners like me are quick to point out the problems that religion causes within society—crimes become righteous acts when done in the name of God, believers attack the boundary between church and state, a believer who thinks that beliefs can be justified through faith rather than evidence opens their mind to parasitic mental baggage, and so on.
But let’s be fair. Christians will point out that their religion created universities and hospitals. Setting aside the negatives about religion, surely these institutions are a substantial addition to the Christian side of the ledger.
Now consider the pro-social motivations within Christianity versus those within the secular community. British author Malcolm Muggeridge said,  “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”
Original universities
Let’s consider the challenge that we have Christianity to thank for creating universities and nurturing them as they developed into the centers of education and research that they are today.
The oldest continuously operating university is the University of Bologna, Italy (1088), followed by universities at Oxford, England (1096), Salamanca, Spain (1134), and Cambridge, England (1209). Though there were institutions of higher learning in other old civilizations such as Greece, Byzantium, China, India, and the Muslim world, Wikipedia’s list excludes them because they are sufficiently different to make comparisons difficult, and evidence suggests that the seed that eventually grew into the modern university was the medieval European version, not similar institutions from other cultures.
Universities at Oxford and Paris began with the disciplines of theology, law, medicine, and the liberal arts. To see their unabashedly Christian environment, though, consider an example from several centuries later.
Cambridge in the time of Newton
The story of Isaac Newton illustrates how dissimilar medieval universities were from modern universities. Both Oxford and Cambridge in the seventeenth century required its fellows to be ordained Anglican priests. Newton was a Christian, but he didn’t accept the Trinity. This made him a heretic, which was no minor matter at that time. Only an exemption granted by the king in 1675 allowed Newton to accept the Lucasian chair at Cambridge without taking holy orders. Demanding that physics professors also be priests highlights the difference with universities today.
Don’t imagine that Christianity was a burden for Newton, however. Though he revolutionized science and has been called history’s greatest physicist (or even scientist), Newton devoted more time on theology than science and wrote more than two million words about religion. His Christian beliefs are proudly cited by many apologists.
What then was the result of all that theological work from such a great mind? Nothing. He might’ve spent that time playing solitaire for what it taught him about reality and the good it did for Humanity.
Christians also point to other important Christian scientists from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment and into the Industrial Revolution without showing that their religious beliefs drove their discoveries in any way. As far as science goes, those scientists were just modeling their environment (like drinking wine or wearing clothes).
Early American universities
Harvard (1636) was the first university in the United States. It was founded by Christians to train clergy. Most of the first universities in this country were founded the same way.

106 of the first 108 colleges were started on the Christian faith. By the close of 1860 there were 246 colleges in America. Seventeen of these were state institutions; almost every other one was founded by Christian denominations or by individuals who avowed a religious purpose.

The universities that Christians point to with pride are today guided with a very different principle than this declaration by Rev. Jonathan Dickinson, the first president of Princeton: “Cursed be all that learning that is contrary to the cross of Christ.” Christian universities with a Christian purpose are no gift to humanity, and today’s prestigious universities have turned their back on their original focus of creating clergy.
Modern universities
Changed though modern universities are, we can get a glimpse at the environment at medieval universities by looking at modern Christian colleges. Just like Cambridge in Newton’s day, Biola University demands that each undergraduate student “be an evangelical believer in the Christian faith (the applicant’s statement of faith will be articulated in the personal essay section of the application).” The PhD application for one discipline at Liberty University asks for church membership, an essay documenting the applicant’s “personal salvation experience,” and agreement with the school’s doctrinal statement. These universities aren’t interested in honest inquiry if they must create a safe space that protects their conclusions.
Here is rule #2 of Harvard College’s student rulebook (1636):

Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome, as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning. And seeing the Lord only giveth wisedome, Let every one seriously set himself by prayer in secret to seeke it of him (Prov. 2:3).

That is the house that Christianity built. It wasn’t Christianity but secular thinking that created the modern university that we’re proud of.
Continue with a discussion of Christianity’s impact on hospitals here.

But since the devil’s bride, Reason, that pretty whore,
comes in and thinks she’s wise,
and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit,
who can help us, then?
Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor,
because [reason] is the Devil’s greatest whore.
— Martin Luther

Photo credit: Pantelas, flickr, CC

I’m sure you’ve heard of the October 1 shooting at the Oregon community college by Christopher Mercer that killed nine. Stories swirl around his motivation and why he asked victims about their religious beliefs. Was he persecuting Christians? Was he promising them an afterlife based on his Christian views? We can’t say, but the popular conclusion that his motivation was anti-Christian seems premature.

John Mark Reynolds is a fellow Patheos blogger in the Evangelical channel, and he imagines a situation where someone with a gun is singling out Christians and killing them. If placed in such a situation, he hopes that he would have the courage to stand firm rather than deny his Christian belief. “I don’t wish to die yet,” he says, “but there are some things worse than death.”

I admire that bravery. It’s pointless, thoughtless, and stupid, but it’s brave.

(Dr. Reynolds and I have had some interaction before. He was the one who sounded the alarm about anti-theistic Stalin wannabes like me eager to establish an atheistic dictatorship and rule the world. I responded here and here.)

Reynolds sums up his dilemma in facing this imaginary shooter: “Better dead than betraying the High King of Heaven.”

Would you die for your father’s honor?

Let’s imagine a parallel. Suppose that instead of God, you’re defending your biological father. The gunman declares that your father is a dirty, rotten scoundrel and will shoot you if (and only if) you disagree. Is your father’s honor in the mind of one deranged idiot worth dying for? No father would want that. No father would find it sweet or caring that his child sacrificed their life for his honor or reputation. Instead, he’d find it stupid and pointless.

This example is so meaningless—defending with your life the honor of a god that many Christians admit to occasionally doubting—that I almost wonder if Reynolds imagines an ending like that in the Abraham and Isaac story. God saved Isaac’s life at the end, and the whole thing turned out to be a bizarre and heartless test. The god who knew everything had to see if Abraham was so blindly obedient that he would follow even the most immoral of commands.

I’ve written before about Christians’ excitement over Christian persecution. Jesus promised that Christians will be persecuted, so perhaps this is vague validation that they’ve backed the right horse.

Christian persecution 2000 years ago

The article alludes to Christian martyrs in Roman times, and I guess Reynolds worries about modern Christians not living up to the sacrifices of their ancient forebears. But let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. Category 1 is people forcibly rounded up and executed for being Christian. Category 2 is people given the choice of forever abandoning their religion in favor of the Roman religion or die. And category 3 is Reynolds’ imagined situation where he has the option to lie or die. Unlike the other situations, Reynolds has an easy out.

(The “Who would die for a lie?” argument is tangential, and I respond to that here.)

Would God want your sacrifice?

Reynolds gives the obvious parallel: would you lie to Nazis to protect Jews hiding in your house? He concludes, “Nazis did not deserve the truth.” But a mass murderer does? Reynolds would lie to Nazis but feels obliged to tell the truth to a madman with a gun? He might respond that it’s not the recipient of the message but the message itself. “There are no Jews here” hurts only the Nazi plan, while lying that “I’m not a Christian” makes God sad (or furious or disappointed or something).

This is the god that Christians tell us is overflowing in love and understanding … but he also wants Christians to sacrifice their lives in meaningless tests? Why worship this guy?

The Bible sometimes approves of white lies. The Hebrew midwives lied to Pharaoh (Exodus 1:15–21). Rahab lied to protect the Israelite spies in Jericho (Joshua 2:5).

Jesus said, “When you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:6). Does God need anything more from you to know where you actually stand?

Reynolds wrings his hands. “There are worse things than death for a Christian and one of those things is a life of secret shame.” Shame? Then apologize afterwards to God. Could God be so stupid that he doesn’t understand what happened? He’s a billion times smarter and a billion times more understanding than any father. And what’s there to apologize for anyway? You preserved God’s gift of life—sounds like God would congratulate you for making a smart decision.

Death is not the worst thing for a Christian. A life that continues based on cowardice in the face of the ultimate test would be worse.

Personal doubt (which I’ve been pleased to see many Christians acknowledge) is a test of your faith. Performing an arbitrary procedure to save your life is not. Isn’t God smart enough to get it? What kind of delicate flower of a god would care that you didn’t defend his honor? There’s a difference between a noble cause and a stupid one.

This is a lot of drama for the honor of someone who gives no evidence of even existing.

The Bible:
because a bunch of guys who didn’t know
where the sun went at night
totally have all the answers.
— WFLAtheism

Image credit: John Doe, flickr, CC

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association announced its book of the year. For 2015, it was a diet book, Rick Warren’s The Daniel Plan.

Warren’s goal

Warren says that he was inspired to focus on diet while baptizing overweight parishioners a few years ago. He challenged his congregation, enormous in both weight and number, to get healthier. They lost a total of a quarter of a million pounds.

And now he is promoting a new diet inspired by the Old Testament prophet Daniel.

What does Daniel say about diet?

The book of Daniel mentions diet twice. It begins with Daniel and his companions sent as captives from Judah to Babylon to serve in the court of king Nebuchadnezzar. They were offered the same food as the king ate, but Daniel asked for just vegetables and water instead. Their guard feared for his own safety—if these Judeans looked unhealthy, the king would blame him—but Daniel challenged him to a test. They would eat this simple diet for ten days, and the guard could judge. After the test, they did looked better, as promised.

Years later, Daniel had another diet encounter. Chapter 10 says that he fasted for three weeks because of a distressing vision he had been given. This was a no-luxuries fast, not a no-calories fast (“I ate no choice food; no meat or wine came to my lips”).

This fast had nothing to do with health, since it was either involuntary from mourning or aimed at spiritual purification, though you’ll find 3.5 million sites on google using the search phrase “Daniel fast.”

What does Rick Warren say about diet?

If we follow Daniel’s lead, we’ll be vegans, eating only vegetables. Warren’s medical advisors unsurprisingly ignored that. Meat is still on the menu, and the diet emphasizes fruits and vegetables, organic and unprocessed food, exercise, and a support group.

Warren says that Jesus cared about more than getting people into heaven; he cared about their health as well. In an interview at the book launch in 2013, Warren quotes John 3:16, about God giving Jesus to the world.

It’s a generosity verse. I say you can give without loving, but you cannot love without giving. If you want to become a loving person, you have to learn to give. You spell love G-I-V-E.

Okay, I get it. Americans are overweight. They eat unhealthy food. Warren is a giving person in an influential position, and he wants to do something to help. If he can wrap a diet in a tasty Christian coating, he can do some good.

I’m beginning to like this idea.

So let me anticipate Warren’s approach. He’ll get some nutritionists to create a healthy and sustainable diet, he’ll give it a Christian spin, he’ll make the diet freely available from his web site, and then he’ll use his influence to highlight the project. Maybe he’ll make it available as a free ebook.

Why let profit get in the way of so important a project? Remember, this is the guy who famously reverse-tithes (giving 90% to the church and keeping 10%, rather than the other way around) because of sales of his enormously popular The Purpose Driven Life.

The Rick Warren plan

Wrong. Warren’s The Daniel Plan is not a giveaway. It’s a book, available in a handsome hardcover edition on Amazon for just $13.98. Or as a CD for the low, low price of $9.05. Or Audible for $11.95. Or Kindle for $7.99. Buy one or buy them all!

But don’t stop there. There’s also the study guide ($10.79 paperback and $7.75 Kindle), meant to be used with the DVD ($18.92). And don’t leave without buying the journal ($12.52 hardcover or $9.75 Kindle). And what diet program would be complete without the cookbook? That’s $18.96 hardcover or $11.99 Kindle. There’s also a 365 Day devotional, a “Jumpstart Guide” to get you going, and campaign kits to help launch the program in a church. And there’s a workout CD with workout shirts, Spanish translations, and books by lots of other opportunistic authors.

So perhaps instead of “You spell love G-I-V-E” as the guiding principle, the Warren strategists figured that a book combining religion and diet would be a financial marriage made in heaven.

I expected to see a diet packaged as a Christian directive. Instead, it’s a lucrative franchise masquerading as a Christian charity.

The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians, 
who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door, 
and deny Him by their lifestyle. 
That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.
— Brennan Manning

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

Image credit: Tony Alter, flickr, CC

By now, you’ve heard of the explosions at the Boston Marathon. I wasn’t there on Monday, but I was at the finish line years ago when I lived in Boston while attending college.
In the late seventies, the race ended at the Pru in Back Bay. It’s always held on Patriot’s Day, and we had no classes that day. Some friends and I would climb on a particular sign that was wide enough to sit on and which gave a nice view of the finish line. I think it was my idea for us to “air paddle” in unison while astride the sign. A photo of us got into the Boston Globe one year. We made a few people laugh.
This year’s marathon won’t be remembered for much laughing.
At this writing, there is no conclusion about who executed this bombing, and I imagine it’ll be a long time for the clues to be discovered, pieced together, and made public.
This reminds me of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Though this event preceded the 9/11 attacks, rumors immediately spread that a Muslim organization was behind it. That this turned out to be domestic terrorism was a reminder that there’s lots of violence to go around, and we mustn’t jump to conclusions.
Another bombing
Speaking of bombs, did you hear about the dirty bomb plot planned for Obama’s first inauguration in January, 2009? This wasn’t something caught at the border or uncovered in another country. This one was being built domestically.
As with Oklahoma City, the guy behind the plot wasn’t an Al-Qaeda terrorist. James Cummings lived in a small town in Maine. He was a 29-year-old white supremacist who displayed a swastika flag in his home and claimed to own pieces of Hitler’s personal silverware. He was furious at Obama’s election and the bomb was to be his response.
Oh yeah—and he reportedly received $10 million per year from a trust fund.
But here’s the really crazy part of the story: detective work didn’t uncover this plot. Investigators only found out about it after Cummings’ wife killed him with two bullets to the head while he slept, barely a month before Obama’s inauguration. He was well on his way to making the bomb, and investigators found thorium and depleted uranium (bought online) as well as instructions and ingredients for making a bomb.
This doesn’t sound like someone who fit into any of the usual bins. Sounds like a man-bites-dog event that should make it a widely distributed story. Or is its violation of the stereotype why the story isn’t more widely known? Would a Muslim plot foiled in Yemen have made news while a millionaire, wife abusing, white supremacist plot foiled by accident in small-town Maine didn’t?
Maybe Muslim anger is behind the Boston bombing; maybe it’s not. Let’s not speculate too much until the facts are in.
News outlets not 100% reliable.
There’s another takeaway from the Boston bombing for me. A powerful emotional story like this one is a good place to look for change over time. For example, I heard that police had found one unexploded bomb in addition to the two that exploded. Later, I heard that they’d found five.
It turns out that authorities never found any.
And did you hear about the guy who planned to propose after he reached the finish line, but his fiancée-to-be was killed in the blast? Did you hear about the young girl, “running for the Sandy Hook victims,” who was killed? Did you get the tweet that race organizers would pay a dollar for every retweet?
These are sticky stories, but all of them are untrue.
Celebrities have (predictably) jumped in. Many have already speculated about the causes. Michael Moore tweeted “2+2 =.” What’s that supposed to mean? That it’s easy to connect the dots to point to some right-wing nutjob?
A conservative radio commentator tweeted, “[the bombing] stinks to high heaven #falseflag,” which presumably suggests that the bombing isn’t what it appears to be. Maybe that it’s a conspiracy by some left-wing nutjob?
The more important a story, the more it will pick up “improvements” over time. Given what we’ve seen in the first 24 hours after the bombing, imagine how the story of Jesus would’ve changed over its first 24 years.

Be a good guest at the dinner table of life
— A.C. Grayling

Photo credit: TMZ

Lifelong fans of the Mariners baseball team would be Red Sox fans if they’d grown up in Boston instead of Seattle. Tarheels fans would be Trojans fans if they had gone to USC instead of UNC. People who eat Frosted Flakes for breakfast would likely prefer fermented soybeans (natto) if they grew up in Japan instead of the U.S.
And believers who think that the truth of Christianity is obvious might think that about Islam if they grew up in Morocco or Afghanistan instead of Mississippi or Alabama.
Begging the pardon of sports fans, there is no objective measure that makes their home team the only valid one, with all others being poor imitations of the real thing. The same is true for religion.
Why do people pick the religions that they pick? In fact, most don’t pick. They’re in effect assigned a religion by the randomness of their birth. They take on the religion of their parents or their community, like any other cultural trait such as customary food, dress, or etiquette.
Let’s not take this too far, however. Not everyone born in Mississippi is a Christian—atheist theologian Robert Price is an example. Not everyone raised as a Christian remains one—I’m an example.
So what we’re seeing is a strong correlation—people tend to take on the religion of their environment. What best explains this observation?
The atheist view is that all religions are fiction, but they’re sticky elements of culture. People tend to adopt these elements, but you’ll always have some outliers. In a culture where men wear neckties, a few will prefer bow ties. In a culture where one of the first questions after being introduced to someone new is, “And where do you go to church?” a few will be atheists.
The atheist says that religion is adopted because it’s a dominant cultural trait, not because it’s true.
The Christian view is much tougher to justify. Christians don’t want to discard this correlation because it helps explain why the other guy clings to his religion. Is the fact that there are a billion Muslims strong evidence that Islam is correct? Nope—their belief is just a cultural trait. With well over a dozen countries having 98 percent or greater Muslim populations, being Muslim is just what you do when you grow up in a monoculture.
Christians say that Islam, Shinto, Buddhism, Hinduism, and most other religions are cultural traits that are false. But they need to explain why Christianity is actually true even though it looks just like all those false cultural traits.
Seeing religion as nothing more profound or objectively accurate than a cultural trait is the best explanation of the evidence.

Of all things, good sense is the most fairly distributed.
Everyone thinks he is so well supplied with it
that even those who are the hardest to satisfy in every other respect
never desire more of it than they already have.
— René Descartes

Photo credit