Comment Moderation is OFF!

People have been responding to the blog, and to each other, so I have taken comment moderation off.

Christians, bear in mind, most atheists who hang out on internet blogs have heard it all before and we weren't impressed.  You won't convert us but we find you entertaining.  We prefer thoughtful, reasoned, well-read Christians for our web entertainment, so if you're the typical Christian web troll who's going to threaten us WITH ETERNAL DAMNATION IN ALL CAPS AND WITH MENNY MYSPOILED WORDS... expect us to point and laugh.

My Top Ten Grievances Against the Bible

1. Authority -- NOT -- it was compiled, copied, edited, codified and translated by men. Men with agendas. Over the hundreds of years it was put together there were perhaps hundreds of "hands" tinkering with the unalterable "holy" words.

2. Inconsistency. Two Adam & Eve stories. Two genealogies for Jesus. Discrepancies amongst the Gospels. Too many inconsistencies to mention, and anyway The Skeptics Annotated Bible did it already.

3. God's nature is fickle and inconsistent. He is forgiving or resentful depending on the situation. Sometimes he tinkers in the Affairs of Man and sometimes not. He wants you to follow his rules, but then there's the parable of the prodigal son. He made the world and all the animals, including people, and yet made all sorts of really horrible and stupid things. For instance, why do humans have "tail" bones if we don't have tails? Having broken mine I can tell you I'd rather not have it. If he wanted us to protect the useful parts of our spine in a fall, then why put nerve endings there?

4. Miracles. They have no corroboration outside of the Bible. They could have been faked or made up as propaganda or exaggerated over time. If Jesus really did walk on water, how do we know he didn't go there in advance and put a table just under the water line? How do we know there wasn't a sandbar there? And yet he couldn't make a fig tree yield fruit out of season, which would have been a more difficult feat than appearing to be walking on water. Couldn't pop the nails out of his hands and feet and jump off the cross, either.

5. Revelation. Dreams, voices, visions... they are all reminiscent of what today would be considered symptoms of psychosis. If they're psychotic symptoms now, they very likely would have been then, if they even happened. Primitive people can't be faulted for believing that dreams or migraine auras or psychotic breaks came from some supernatural entity, but we shouldn't believe them now. The opposite is possession by an evil spirit. Also mental illness that was misunderstood by bronze age superstitious people.

6. Scientific inaccuracy. God could have revealed the truth about the Sun revolving around the Earth, at the very least. All of God's words seem to be consistent with what humans would have known at the time, and not at all revelatory or helpful. Every human culture has a creation story. The Judeo-Christian-Muslim one is just one of many with no claim to accuracy in the least.

7. Similarity to mythologies in other Middle Eastern religions. Just a little too many similarities to dismiss. Mithras, for example.

8. Speaking of Paul, Paul's role is a little too important in early Christianity. He never met Jesus, yet he supposedly explains Christianity with authority. He has a completely different message from Jesus' supposed words. A lot of Biblical inconsistency right there. Why should anyone believe anything he said? None of it was of a nature that couldn't have come from psychosis, imagination, or calculation. If he was divinely inspired, he could have set people straight about the Sun, for instance.

9. The Book of John. Written much later than the other "gospels" and seems very biased. Coincidentally, "fundamentalist" Christians are fond of quoting John. They like his brand of Christianity so much that their whole theology would crumble if that "book" was taken out of the Bible.

10. Disturbing "morality." Over and over there are truly disgusting examples of God or his favorite people doing the most heinous things. The worst of all for me is the central tenet of Christianity: that Christ was sacrificed for the sins of mankind... all of us or some of us, depending on your denomination. This means that a "loving" God practiced scapegoating, punishing his one good child for the sinfulness of all the others. No actual sinning is required to be defined as a bad child, since sinfulness is inherited. Inheriting the "sins of the fathers" is also immoral. Other repugnant practices are portrayed without any negative judgment: war, genocide, polygamy, rape (but only of women!), and slavery to name a few. Then this "loving" God will send everyone who doesn't say they "accept" him to eternal fire and pain. What kind of "love" is that?

10a. Cannibalism. Yech! You can say it's just metaphorical and wine doesn't really turn into blood, but still, it's a repulsive practice and extremely barbaric. Early Christians already had the practice of baptism for the cleansing of sins, so they really didn't have to have eat their god in a repulsive ritual meal. That practice is also waaaay too similar to that of other religions to be taken seriously as a true historical tale.

I could probably come up with more but these are the big ones for me. Much ink has been spilt explaining the problems in the Bible. People get Ph.D.s in something aptly called "apologetics." They call the Book "god-breathed" or inspired rather than taking it as the literal gods-ear-to-man's-pen truth, because they know deep down it's really a bunch of ridiculous nonsense. To believe in this book is to believe in a God that's mercurial, vengeful, narcissistic, and possibly insane.

Or... you could believe that the Bible is just like all the other holy books of all the other religions, just a bunch of fairy tales with supernatural buddies and/or bullies as the main characters.

Some of my smaller grievances don't get much attention, but for what they're worth:

• If all of creation was 'good' then wouldn't Adam & Eve have been exiled to a pretty nice place?
• Why is it an "abomination" for men to have sex with men but not for women to have sex with women? Isn't that also homosexuality?
• Why was there no judgment against Lot's daughters after they got him drunk then got pregnant by him? His wife was turned into a pillar of salt just for looking over her shoulder at her former home. That seems a little harsh.
• If Jesus' conception was immaculate, then why does he have a genealogy traced through Joseph's side of the family?
• And the fig tree, wtf? Why doesn't Jesus regret his temper tantrum if he's such a great guy? Come to think of it, why did he smite the tree in the first place? Is this some kind of metaphor that a woman who won't have sex during her off-cycle will be smote?

Prayer doesn't work. Really. It doesn't!

Intercessory prayer for the sick has been proven several times not to affect the outcome:


http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18277062

CONCLUSIONS: In patients with CFS [chronic fatigue syndrome], distant healing appears to have no statistically significant effect on mental and physical health but the expectation of improvement did improve outcome.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17131980

CONCLUSIONS: Distant healing or prayer from a distance does not appear to improve selected clinical outcomes in HIV patients who are on a combination antiretroviral therapy.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567

CONCLUSIONS: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG [coronary artery bypass graft], but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15715813

INTERPRETATION: Neither masked prayer nor MIT therapy significantly improved clinical outcome after elective catheterisation or percutaneous coronary intervention.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11761499

CONCLUSIONS: As delivered in this study, intercessory prayer had no significant effect on medical outcomes after hospitalization in a coronary care unit.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11565401

CONCLUSIONS: The effects of intercessory prayer and transpersonal positive visualization cannot be distinguished from the effect of expectancy. Therefore, those 2 interventions do not appear to be effective treatments.

10 Reasons Why Christianity is Creepy

1. A "loving" father punishes his only good child

2. Christians are expected to partake in ritualistic metaphorical cannibalism

3. Christ's mother was an underage girl who was molested by "God"

4. Jesus' genealogy traces through his step-father. Hello? Either the Bible lied about the virgin conception by God, or it lies about Jesus' genealogy. Either way, the Bible lies.

5. Jesus was a zombie for a few days, said he would return, then didn't. Jesus lies.

6. God only loves us when we tell him we love him. That's called narcissism!

7. God changed his mind several times about marriage, depending on what suited the men of the time best. Polygamy? Little girls? Rich widows? Whatever...

8. Christ didn't say anything about slavery being wrong. In fact, he seems to have supported it.

9. The Bible was assembled by a committee, which seems a little suspect.

10. Your reward for a lifetime of leading a boring life is spending eternity in Heaven, which is even more unimaginably boring.

Psychosis and Christianity

No, this isn't yet another blog post calling Christians delusional. This is a blog post calling Christians out for their pathological denial of reality of mental illness.

Sure, Christianity as a whole has come around to the realization that many women burned as 'witches' were in fact mentally ill. They also realize that when someone says they heard the voice of God telling them to murder someone that the person is psychotic. Most of them believe L. Ron Hubbard and Joseph Smith were crackers.

And yet they believe Moses really did see a burning bush and hear God's words through his external senses, not through some kind of seizure, migraine, or hallucination (assuming he existed at all). They believe the dream "science" of the Old Testament was legitimate. They believe Noah really did receive instructions from God on how to build a boat. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus was the act of a real supernatural entity affecting the mind of a sane person in a miraculous way. Mary really did hear God telling her to do the nasty with him and she'd have a holy child. Abraham's god really did speak to him out loud telling him to kill his own child.

Some of my Facebook friends are on the political and religious right. Since the shooting of Rep. Giffords et. al. turned out to be the work of someone with a 31-bullet clip of ammo and a high powered handgun, they are denying that mental illness affected behavior even in that case. No, we shouldn't restrict access to this kind of weapon for everyone -- people need to take responsibility for themselves -- guns don't kill people, people do, etc. They are completely oblivious to the reality that mental illness in society virtually guarantees that there will be people who can't take responsibility for themselves, or who will act on "voices" or ideas as strongly heard or felt as those heard and felt by Biblical figures. They also make the assumption that nobody who is "good" could be driven to do something like that. (That's why you can put crosshairs on maps and let any schmoe have a high powered weapon)

If you want to say that Moses, Abraham, Mary and Paul all had legitimate mental experiences, you are naturally prone to think that you can put guns into the hands of any random citizen because god would never tell someone to shoot at dozens of people within 10 seconds.

But there have been many cases of parents killing their children because they believed them to be possessed, or that God told them to do it. Where are these right-wingers when this happens? Why aren't they posting to Facebook how God must have known that those kids were no good, and that the world is better off without them? Why do those parents go to jail or the nut ward instead of being feted on the 700 Club and FOX News?

You just can't have it both ways. Either mental illness is real, and the Biblical stories of revelations, dreams, and voices were bronze-age explanations for what we now understand, or there is no mental illness and Hinckley, Manson, Loughren and baby-killers are God's warriors.

This supposedly unchanging God, stopped speaking to people and giving clear signs. Instead, he tells sane people to do what they wanted to do all along, and tells crazy people to do crazy things.

Shouldn't a God that speaks to people 1) be a little clearer 2) speak to psychotics and sane people the same way and 3) tell psychotics to take their medication?

When Judge Roll was in Mass minutes before his murder, why didn't God tell him to hang out with the priest for 20 minutes before going to the Giffords' event? Why didn't God tell the mother of the little girl to change her mind about letting her go? Or even better, why didn't God give the little girl a case of food poisoning and put her in bed for the day?

The inevitable answer to the question of God speaking to people is: It's all in the mind. It always was. It always is. It always shall be. There is no revelation, no divine intervention, no answer to prayer from any supernatural source.

Loughren's mental illness follows the course that many first psychotic breaks do: they begin gradually, become more and more overwhelming, psychosis takes the form of whatever the person's interests are, and the resultant personality change reflects their culture, personality, background, and the nature of their psychosis.

Ditto for Abraham, Noah, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus, John, Paul, all the psychotics who made up these stories, and all the psychotics who see "visions" or "hear God's voice" today.

Because our culture puts tremendous pressure on people to believe the dominant belief system, I don't think it's delusional to go along with it. Most of us are force-fed this crap diet without having any say in the matter.

But adults, please, think about it. If someone were to come down from Mt. McKinley today and say they'd seen a burning bush and they had ten rules from God for you to live by, would you believe it?

No, you wouldn't.

That's reason enough not to believe it really happened and really was God 5,000 or so years ago. Grow up and have compassion for the mentally ill instead of worshipping them.

BE NOISY! Because Christians are hard to get through to

ugh ugh ugh ugh:

http://life.nationalpost.com/2011/01/11/are-some-atheists-more-%E2%80%98religious%E2%80%99-than-they-realize/

So... it's not okay to criticize outspoken religionists, but it's okay to criticize outspoken atheists.

If I don't post for awhile it's because I've injured myself pounding my head on my keyboard.

jdsklfladfskjljdsklfjdfkjfdsaj

How Much does an Atheist Need to Know about Christianity?

In the United States, a.k.a. God's Country, if you're not a Christian, you best be sumthin' else or else.... They can relate to their kissing cousins in other religions, and on the whole don't really question others' "choice" of religion. But if you're an atheist, expect to be challenged.

First, there's the atheism catechism. Christians assume that all religions ask and answer the same questions, so they believe an atheist must have asked and answered them too. "Where do you go when you die?" "If there's no rules there's mayhem, so what keeps you from killing and stealing?" "So you think you're God?"

Next, there's the no true atheist fallacy. You just don't "know Christ" well enough, or in the right way, or you haven't tried enough, or you're in denial. When you're in that foxhole, atheist, you're going to beg God to forgive your sins and let you into heaven.... but you better do it fast because unlike us Catholics who clean up our sins weekly, or us Baptists who got one good scrubbing, you have a lot of truth-telling to do! When that final minute comes, you'll change your tune!

Then there's the "angry-at-God" fallacy. They get angry at God all the time. It's a constant challenge for them to handle the many many unanswered prayers and acknowledge God's seeming indifference. They pray for everyone who gets sick, and not all of them get well. WTF? Hey how come Mr. Jerkface down the street wins the lottery and my house gets struck by lightning? Why does my chain-smoking father-in-law cling to life at 90 but my 3-month-old baby gets meningitis and dies? Yep, if there were a God, there would certainly be reason to be pissed at him. Luck is a much more fickle God than even the asshole god who lets babies die (so their pastor tells them). So atheists couldn't possibly intentionally place more "faith" in luck! You'll get over your anger as soon as someone you love goes into remission or you get a promotion, they assure us.

The funniest ones are the professional theologians. I gave up dialoging with one when he switched platforms but it was fun to watch the mental gyrations it takes for someone who's actually read the bible and studied its sources to keep up a belief in it. It's rather too easy to make them angry, too. They've faced their doubts, the bible's errors, the political history of their religion, and all the philosophical conundrums their belief system creates, and they've stared them down. In a metaphysical game of chicken, they're way out ahead of the rest of us. They'll toy with us unbelievers until they get frustrated by our lack of education, then finish us off with the ad hom that we just don't know what we're talking about so we're not justified being atheists.

I always interpret this as a win on my part, of course. If I ask why Jesus has two genealogies if 1) the bible is inerrant and 2) the gospels are historical and 3) he wasn't a descendent of Joseph... apparently I'm showing my ignorance. *snicker*

Today I was talking with a co-worker about the church I went to when I was still trying to believe. The sermons were very psychologically oriented, which made it worth the trip, but I knew the whole time I went that I didn't believe most of what I was mouthing on Sunday mornings. After this discussion I remembered part deux of that experience: Bible study.

I went to Bible Study because I thought that if I just understood the Bible better, I would come to believe that all that stuff was true and then I'd be a real Christian. Alas, I asked the wrong questions in Bible Study too. The one I remember best is when I defended Pontius Pilate. It went something like this: If Jesus was destined from the beginning to be sacrificed, then Pilate must have been part of the plan, so Pilate was really carrying out God's will. Besides, under the circumstances, Pilate didn't have a lot of choices.

That didn't go over too well.

So... how much do you have to know? Do you have to know more than the theologian with a Ph.D.? more than a pastor with a seminary degree? More than your Sunday School or Bible Study teacher?

Shhhhh don't tell Christians, but if you don't believe the fairy tales in the first place the more you learn the more ridiculous Christianity seems.

One of the top apologists for Christianity is, in my opinion, on the ropes. He claims that belief in God is "properly basic," which means that none of the arguments against Christianity and God mean squat if you believe what you believe. ...I think. Sadly, I've never put my head so far up my arse as to be able to type in philosobabble, so I'll let William Lane Craig mumble for himself:




Yes, he really is as stupid as he seems: